MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ianbicking | 2025-06-05 19:38:04+00:00
I've been using OpenAI's new models a lot lately (https://www.openai.fm/)... separating instructions from the spoken word is an interesting choice, and I'm assuming also has a lot to do with OpenAI/GPT using "instructions" across their products, and maybe they are just more comfortable and familiar generating the data and do the training for that style.

Separate instructions is a bit awkward, but does allow mixing general instructions with specific instructions. Like I can concatenate output-specific instructions like "voice lowers to a whisper after 'but actually', and a touch of fear" with a general instruction like "a deep voice with a hint of an English accent" and it mostly figures it out.

The result with OpenAI feels much less predictable and of lower production quality than Eleven Labs. But the range of prosidy is much larger, almost overengaged. The range of _voices_ is much smaller with OpenAI... you can instruct the voices to sound different, but it feels a little like the same person doing different voices.

But in the end OpenAI's biggest feature is that it's 10x cheaper and completely pay-as-you-go. (Why are all these TTS services doing subscriptions on top of limits and credits? Blech!)
by cyberax | 2025-06-05 19:38:15+00:00
> Also, Mac Minis are a one time $500 purchase, and will be good enough to use for more than one year.

The cheapest Mac Minis ($600, btw) are barely usable for serious development, a more reasonable one is $1000. You also need at least a couple of iOS devices for testing, which works out to ~$200 a year.

And if you want a laptop, then it's even worse.
by knowaveragejoe | 2025-06-05 19:38:51+00:00
I love examples of LLM utility outside of normal tasks people associate it with.

A recent example I had was fixing a toilet that broke. I don't know the name of the components within the tank, but I can understand what they do. I took a picture of the broken component and asked what it was - chatGPT was able to tell me, I was able to get a replacement, and that was that.

I have to remember I'm relatively spoiled in the sense that I know how to get that information out of Google. But for a less technically inclined person, I don't know how they'd even to do this themselves. Best I can think of is take a picture an ask a plumber(if you know one) or someone at a hardware store(if they themselves are even knowledgeable about this).
Ask HN: Do I Ride the Titanic down?
by Python3267 | 2025-06-05 19:38:55+00:00
Basically our CTO just left and engineers are leaving left and right. The startup is going down in flames and no one on the business side has realized it. Do I ride the ship down knowing that they cannot afford to lose me and take the 6-12 months of being employed until private equity buys the remains, or do I leave now?
by xtracto | 2025-06-05 19:39:28+00:00
I have a very clear example of Gemini getting it wrong:

For a code like this, it keeps changing processing_class=tokenizer to "tokenizer=tokenizer", even though the parameter was renamed and even after adding the all caps comment.

#Set up the SFTTrainer print("Setting up SFTTrainer...") trainer = SFTTrainer( model=model, train_dataset=train_dataset, args=sft_config, processing_class=tokenizer, # DO NOT CHANGE. THIS IS NOW THE CORRECT PROPERTY NAME ) print("SFTTrainer ready.")

I haven't tried with this latest version, but the 05-06 pro still did it wrong.
by tryasimight | 2025-06-05 19:39:47+00:00
The two big ones are high fructose corn syrup and alcohol.

I feel the hfcs is the bigger issue here because it is put in everything in the US, but moderating both of these will help.

Look at labels and put back anything with hfcs.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-hig...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6549781/
by tptacek | 2025-06-05 19:39:52+00:00
But that's exactly what people were saying about fuzzer farms in the mid-2000s, in the belief that artisanal audits would always be the dominant means of uncovering bugs. The truth was somewhere in between (it's still humans, but working at a higher layer of abstraction than they were before) but the fuzzer people were hugely right.

If you can reliably get x% lucky finding vulnerabilities for Y$ cost, then you simply scale that up to find more vulnerabilities.
by npteljes | 2025-06-05 19:40:38+00:00
I fail to see the issue with that as well.

The sentiment I often see online is that "fewer rules = more freedom". And as I grew more experienced, I find that the opposite is true. In a lot of cases, freedom is upheld by the rules themselves. And this is not an orwellian "war is peace" kind of thing, but rather a GNU Free Software kind of thing, where the perpetuity of the freedom is guaranteed with the rules of participation.

I think that this discussion went in the same direction with the unions. But, of course, freedom in itself can have different interpretations for different people.
by mrweasel | 2025-06-05 19:41:06+00:00
> It is indeed closing the skill gap and it does so by elevating the lower side of it.

That's my "criticism", it's not closing the skill gap. Your skills haven't change, your output has. If you're using AI conservatively I'd say you're right, it can remove all the tedious work, which is great, but you'll still need to check that it's correct.

I'm more and more coming to the idea that for e.g. some coding jobs, CoPilot, Claude, whatever can be pretty helpful. I don't need to write a generic API call, handle all the error codes and hook up messages to the user, the robot can do that. I'll check and validate the code anyway.

Where I'm still not convinced is for communicating with other humans. Writing is hard, communication is worse. If you still have basic spelling errors, after decades of using a spellchecker, I doubt that your ability to communicate clearly will change even with an LLM helping you.

Same with arts. If you can't draw, no amount of prompting is going to change that. Which is fine, if you only care about the output, but you still don't have the skills.

My concern is the uncritical application of LLMs to all aspects of peoples daily life. If you can use an LLM to do your job faster, fine. If you can't do it without an LLM, you shouldn't be doing it with one.
by gyrovagueGeist | 2025-06-05 19:41:18+00:00
I am not sure why HN has mostly LANL posts. Otherwise though it is a combination of things. Machine learning applications for NATSec & fundamental research have become more important (see FASST, proposed last year), the current political environment makes AI funding and applications more secure and easier to chase, and some of this is work that has already been going on but getting greater publicity for both of those reasons.
by kokanee | 2025-06-05 19:41:19+00:00
Philosophical thought: if the aim of this field is to create an artificial human brain, then it would be fair to say that the more advanced the field becomes, the less difference there is between the artificial brain and a real brain. This begs two questions:

1) Is the ultimate form of this technology ethically distinguishable from a slave?

2) Is there an ethical difference between bioengineering an actual human brain for computing purposes, versus constructing a digital version that is functionally identical?
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-05 19:41:28+00:00
1.0116^10000 ≈ 100000

Journalists tend to just think of it as "a lot more", but since they didn't specify the base of the exponential we can at least find a way to make the article technically correct. There are fun classes that admit incomparable values, such as the Surreal games. If they'd said "the game {1 | -1} is exponentially more than { | }" then it'd be impossible to find a base to make the statement true. There's lots of fun to be had with this sort of math, as you know.
by jtbayly | 2025-06-05 19:41:54+00:00
It turns out that I don’t know Elixir at all, but I’m vibe coding an app in it.

I didn’t ask what language or framework to use. I “heard of Elixir on a blog post, or they saw this article topping the hacker news charts.”

I even asked an LLM what else I should consider besides Phoenix, but after considering, I stuck with it.

Gemini gets stuck sometimes, but I just ask ChatGPT to help and bust through.

It kind of reminds me of when I wrote code and couldn’t easily see the errors. Another pair of eyes can really help. Another LLM that didn’t write the code can really help, too.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-05 19:42:11+00:00
I can at least say why offering a "theory of AI" in the dective sense is very difficult: AI development is an anti-inductive process.

Anti-inductive processes are those, like e.g., fraud, which change because you have measured them. Once a certain sort of fraud is made illegal and difficult, most move on to a different kind.

AI models are at-base memorisers, with a little structured generalisation around the region of memory. They are not structure learners who happen to memorize. This makes creating a theory of an AI model kinda impossible because the "representations" they learn are so-called "entangled", another way of saying: garbage. The AI model's representation of language does not match language structure, rather each representation is a mixture of what we can evidently see as several competing structural features. But the model has no access to this structure, because its literally not a property of the data but of the data generating process.

Now this seems like "a good theory" of AI in the monkish sense, but a problem arises: for each fragile boundary that benchmarking and testing shows, the AI companies collect data on these failures and retrain the model. This is, in a sense, anti-inductive fraud: companies seek to find out how they are found out, and extend the model to cover those regions.

But models never actually gain the structural capabilities their behaviour is taken to imply. So, of course, this would drive any theorist insane. By the time you've figured out gpt3.5's fakery, all the openai chatbot data theyve collected has made gpt4 -- and all paper has been covered over all the edges. Until your fingers are cut next time on the now dark fragile boundary of openai's deception.

I can give very good reasons, independent of any particular AI model why: the manifold hypothesis is wrong, AI models are memorizers + structure, why they dont find latent structure but combine statistical heurstics, why their representations are not "entangled" such that they can be "disentangled" but necessarily model-unknowable blends of expert-known scientific joints -- and so on.

But none of this knowledge can become useful in the face of a billion-dollar training company competing against me, anti-inductively, to apply any of this to any given model.

Perhaps then, I suppose, we can look at the behaviour these systems induce in their users and its downstream effects. This is what OP here does, throws hands up at a theory and says only: however this is working, it cannot be good.

This is, of course, what we do with fraud, cults, and many other systems of deception. We say: we're not going to argue with the conspiracy theoriest, they are specialists at coming up with ever more elbobate adaptions to the self-deception. Instead, we observe by proxy, that they behave pathological;y -- that they are broken in otehr ways.

I think that's a fair approach, and at least one that allows the author to proceed without a theory.
by ivape | 2025-06-05 19:42:53+00:00
This one’s interesting because Trump mentioned getting rid of the EV tax credit even before the White House used car show. Trump is really sticking to his base that, well, hates green initiatives like EVs and green initiatives in general. I can’t believe a $150 million dollar donation didn’t buy Elon this, so either our government is not corrupt or just totally unpredictable.

As in, wtf? You sell a meme coin and can’t pay it forward for your top donor? Where’s the consistency in the corruption? I give up.

It’s almost like Trump truly has a consistent crazy platform that includes his crazy ass beliefs that he’s beeen espousing this whole time (implying he’s not a demagogue? Someone break this down).
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-05 19:42:53+00:00
Uh, yeah, which is why "democracies are certainly more stable than monarchy" doesn't make any sense.

> modern democracies which haven’t existed long enough to compare with monarachy in terms of resilience.

lol, dude. Western democracy has been been on the wane for a long time now, and it's unironically just about over. The West is either going to continue down its path towards less democracy and plutocrat/oligarch/jurist rule with politics as bread and circuses (very bad, an intensification of what we have right now) -- or make a hard break towards more democracy and prole/populist mob rule (not necessarily a bad thing, unless you're a political extremist like, perhaps ironically, Yarvin himself.)

Polybius saw it all, in his day.

<-- Ochlocracy <--> Democracy <--> Oligarchy -->
by grafelic | 2025-06-05 19:43:00+00:00
For me the problem with GenAI is that it erodes away what I enjoy in my job and in my free time. I enjoy learning and eventually understanding methods to solve problems. I enjoy applying these methods in my mind, before trying them on the computer. I am not interested in getting the solutions to problems served to me without understanding why it works. I feel, yes it is an emotion, that GenAI is unhealthy for the progress of mankind, since it encourages a lazy mind, stifles curiosity and will lead to inbred information filling our digital spaces.

I am looking forward to my future career as a gardener (although with a smidge of sadness) when AI has sucked out all creativity, ingeniuity and enjoyment from my field of work.
by giarc | 2025-06-05 19:43:02+00:00
I've always wondered if customer service reps have a "customer score" on their screen when evaluating whether to accept a return or not. I hardly ever return things, and on the rare occasion that I do, if I need to chat with an Amazon rep they are always very willing to bend some rules. I'm not sure if that's the case for everyone, or if they can see I hardly return things (and buy a lot) and therefore have the green light to let some things slide.
by skwee357 | 2025-06-05 19:43:02+00:00
In the ancient times before SPA era, we used to generate sessions in the server and return them in the cookie. Upon every request you would check the cookie value against the db table and if a match found, you have an authenticated user.

But then came an era of SPA and we needed another way to authenticate users, since XHR did not (and still not?) supported cookies, so we created the signed JWT token.

I’m a bit confused as to why one would want to store JWT access and refresh token in a cookie? Axum provided both signed (temper proof but not secret) and private (allows you to save sensitive information) cookies. Why wouldn’t you use these instead of saving JWT in cookies?
by mfuzzey | 2025-06-05 19:43:14+00:00
Will this affect alternative app stores like F-droid or is it only about downloading and installing an APK with a web browser?

An example of "normal" users that side load (through F-droid or direct APK) is most Ingress players. While Ingress itself is in the playstore most people use the "companion" intel app called IITC which isn't in the playstore as it's technically against the ToS.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-05 19:43:35+00:00
Where are Dems supposed to make this noise? They don't have 120 million subscribers like Joe Rogan does.

Where is the bullhorn the democrats are supposed to be using that isn't literally owned by a rich guy who benefits from lower taxes when the democrats are not in power?

Twitter is owned by Elon. Facebook by Zuck.
by keyringlight | 2025-06-05 19:43:54+00:00
Something I know from a past role is that teaching is demanding, and for any broad audience you've got to consider the range of different thought processes that you may need to provide your knowledge in different ways. As someone trying to increase my linux skills (and assess the best one for potentially migrating/supporting my parents) it doesn't help that a lot of linux documentation comes across as barebones, or very concise about the one way it's meant to be done with a certain distro (plus potentially outdated on an earlier version), and a general lack of explanations.

As example toy projects I'm trying to test out dnf-automatic because I'd prefer not to have the admin work of manually keeping on top of routine updates, but there's little feedback (although so far that's better than pacman on Arch which specifically expects atdmin), or learning why a distro has set up swap/zram/zswap the way they have, what the limits are on that config, how to measure what my system uses and if/how to adjust it. There's little guidance within the system to get you up to that level, and to open another can of worms the terminal-first approach in linux's DNA usually doesn't present anything but the bare essentials for whatever tool you're running, but any extra/wasteful information shown could nudge you where the next step is.
by npteljes | 2025-06-05 19:44:06+00:00
I kinda agree with you, more boots is not really an ideal way to achieve this. Worker protections should come from the government itself, so much so that there is no need to form unions, like how it is at many places in Europe. I don't see how that could be created in the US though. I think trade unions are more their vibe - or not even that, of course, like in case with you. And of course, in US history we can see how some organization grow and get a life on their own, like the NRA. Not necessarily remaining on the path to protect past principles, or the welfare of the people.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-05 19:44:07+00:00
I'd note this is hardly surprising; they were friends for years, and pictured/filmed together.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-epstein-...

> Flight logs released in 2021 as part of Maxwell’s trial, however, indicated Trump flew on the plane seven times.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tape-shows-donald-trump...

> The November 1992 tape in the NBC archives shows Donald Trump partying with Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, now a private club, more than a decade before Epstein pleaded guilty to felony prostitution charges in Florida. At one point in the video, Trump is seen grabbing a woman toward him and patting her behind.

I've never quite understood why Trump's orbit put so much into "we're gonna release the files!"
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-05 19:44:08+00:00
The release blog post is here[1], model code released under MIT license here[2], along with weights on Huggingface, and some documentation here[3].

As a layman I've been following deep neural nets being used to solve quantum physics problems, where they do quite well for certain classes of hard problems, so perhaps not terribly surprising they do well with weather prediction as well I suppose.

[1]: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/microsofts-aur...

[2]: https://github.com/microsoft/aurora

[3]: https://microsoft.github.io/aurora/intro.html
by yencabulator | 2025-06-05 19:44:15+00:00
My understanding, from some interviews earlier that I can't point at right now, was that the plan is: 1. Stay quiet for a while to avoid being the boy who cried wolf. Let Trump's actions speak for themselves. 2. Prepare behind the scenes. 3. Start campaigning closer to next election.

No clue who they'll run with. Americans have been pretty clear that women are still second-class citizens and should not attempt to reach too high, but hopefully it'll at least be someone a few decades younger.
by kiba | 2025-06-05 19:44:43+00:00
Semaglutide is an absolute game changer drug, but it doesn't save you from poor nutrition.

I found that I can work on building a healthy diet independent of semaglutide doing its thing, regardless of how much weight I lost.

I bet people making the same mistake as I did, saying to myself that I will get better at building a healthy diet and then taking semaglutide because I want to see myself as "strong". Or maybe it means that I don't need help.

Better to just do it for your health and figure out the rest. There's no shame in asking for help.
by Qem | 2025-06-05 19:45:31+00:00
> What I am getting at is that most people are not able to initially grasp this nuance, and the fundamental fact is that there IS a threshold of calories where you WILL lose weight no matter what.

Once you cross this threshold, the organism activates every failsafe evolution devised since the first metazoan arised, to ensure you stop and come back.
by shotvu | 2025-06-05 19:45:53+00:00
Hey,

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It's still early, but feedback is gold. We'd love to hear what you think or what you'd want added!

– Team ShotVu
by Balgair | 2025-06-05 19:46:09+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY

Veritasium had a good primer on IQ scores and what they actually mean for your life

TLDW: IQ score seems to really only correlates to being too dumb to be conscripted and effective in war.

Going on Derek's work there, even if other countries do somehow manage to genetically engineer their children for higher IQ scores, and even if they manage to get all the environmental hazards (lead paint, nutrition, quality sleep, etc) out of the way for those children, and even if they don't then do some other draconian nonsense to those kids in the ~19 years until they become productive, then, even then, there seems to be absolutely no guarantee that those kids will go on to do any dominating of other countries in social, political, or military contexts.

Outside of being too dumb to be trusted with a firearm, IQ seems to have no real bearing on measurable life outcomes. As the current science stands, from my understanding of it, it would be incredibly foolish to pursue genetic engineering/breeding as a method of international relations.
by cmrx64 | 2025-06-05 19:46:19+00:00
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45260-9

this is the main thing I could find.

https://prolonlife.com/ sells a prepackaged fasting-mimicking diet. plenty of reviews online about the subjective effects on energy levels and soforth during the fast.

I didn’t like it. day 2.5-3 will put me back into the headspace of food scarcity and even knowing that the next meal was sitting in the box and that this is temporary … it was a mental challenge for me. if you’ve never experienced food scarcity, it can be all-consuming and seriously warp your cognition and emotional baseline.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-06-05 19:46:26+00:00
That feels like the incorrect framing, the burden of proof is on the initial claim. That'd be like saying "I've heard online that leprechauns live on the moon. I haven't found published research on it, but I think science in this field is lagging behind personal telescopic experience. If there's evidence to the contrary let me know, but I've read it online a lot." and treating that like it's proof of moon leprechauns.
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-05 19:47:27+00:00
"yet those same people are unable to put less food in their mouths"

And you think that addiction is a moral/spiritual problem? Nope, it is an endocrinological problem. And precisely drugs like Ozempic have made it very clear, because it doesn't just treat obesity, but many other addictive behaviors like compulsive shopping or gambling. By "merely" altering hormonal balance in the target organism.

People once thought that smallpox was divine punishment for sins. It is 2025, we are on Hacker News, and yet the very same pattern of thinking emerges here, against all the scientific knowledge.