MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-11 22:49:13+00:00
Oh speaking of gaslighting, what is this horseshit?

"Not physically assaulted in a way which might cause a stroke" - you're right, I can imagine no way in which hitting someone in the head multiple times with a fire extinguisher might cause a hemorrhagic stroke, a literal bleed in the brain. Versus a spontaneous stroke, which at his age would affect 0.03% of the population to even occur, let alone be actively fatal, especially when the person was already in the hospital being monitored for the injuries TO THEIR HEAD.

That's the absolute risk for a 42-year-old individual having a stroke in the US in that year, a 1 in 1.2M risk that it happened in the 24 hours following that.

Poor Officer Sicknick, had the shit beat out of him and then suffered a 1 in a million "unrelated" stroke in the same 24 hours!

> His autopsy found that his death was due to "natural causes".

I love that you leave out the next fucking sentence, that even if you are playing pedant, still says this: "that the events that transpired on January 6 played a role in his death".

Piss off with the gaslighting bullshit. Yes, the Capitol Police issued a statement... as little more than damage control.
by mjg59 | 2025-06-11 22:49:57+00:00
The situation you're protecting against is one where someone who compromises the OS can make that compromise persistent by replacing the bootloader. That means you can't place any trust in any component after the bootloader, since an attacker could just fake whatever mechanism you're enforcing.

> The point isn't which device has the keys, it's that it shouldn't contain any from the factory. Nothing good can come of it.

TPMs have private keys, and are not involved in enforcing secure boot. The firmware validating the signatures only has public keys.
by daedrdev | 2025-06-11 22:51:59+00:00
The Bullshit Jobs jobs theory has been widely discredited by researchers, but you probably won't believe them. Consider that most business is B2B so it makes sense that the casual observer would not know what it's for. Additionally, the Bullshit Jobs book relies on a magazine survey, actual studies shows that the percent of people who consider their jobs meaningless is very low and also decreasing over time
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 22:51:59+00:00
It's complicated because it's both, with varying levels of influence.

Obviously, it cannot be 100% on the individual. Because then, how did we get an obesity epidemic? Did people somehow, magically, become more lazy since 1970? That doesn't sound plausible to me.

It's systemic in nature. Consider tobacco use, a problem we've largely solved in the US. We went from something like 50% of people smoking in 1960 to about 10% now. In young people, the results are even more drastic. It's sort of magic - a reverse obesity epidemic.

How did we do this? A combination of things. Of course people worked very hard to quit, but they also got PSAs and their doctor's helped them. And then we made it much, much harder to smoke.

The thing is, people are creatures of influence and habit. Much of what we do is because it's low resistance. We've allowed obesity to become a systemic problem because of our food available, our culture, and our lifestyles.

It's not that some place like, say, Paris is healthy. But it's a lot easier to be accidentally not-obese in Paris, France than in Paris, Texas.
by robomartin | 2025-06-11 22:52:45+00:00
I'll add another point and I am done.

Just in case you misinterpreted my story, I think it was 100% correct and proper for the US to ask my family to leave, apply for permission to come back legally and finally do so. My parents did not do the right thing by overstaying their visa and working. In other words, I do not agree that they should have been allowed to stay.

When they did obtain authorization they had to agree to not be a burden to US taxpayers for five years. I also agree with this.

Legal and orderly immigration is essential for societies to function. This is true everywhere on this planet.
by CMay | 2025-06-11 22:52:46+00:00
He says crazy things to expand people's possibility space, increasing their tolerance for a less bad version of it that might have otherwise been harder for people to accept. This is in Art of the Deal.

Same thing with Gaza becoming some kind of glorious lavish supermall. Same thing with the Ukraine and Russia peace deals. This is just how he is.

It has extra upsides and downsides when used in politics at this level, to be fair.
by Aachen | 2025-06-11 22:53:06+00:00
Makes me wonder how many repositories exist in general, from all the local Forgejo and Gitlab servers. Heck, include Subversion and Mercurial and git's other friends (and foes!)

Did anyone make a search engine for these yet, so we'd be able to get an estimate by searching for the word "a" or so?

(This always seemed like the big upside of centralised GitHub to me: people can actually find your code. I've been thinking of making a search since MS bought GH but didn't think I could do the marketing aspects and so it would be a waste of effort and I never did it. Recently I was considering whether this would be worth revisiting, with the various projects I'm putting on Codeberg, but maybe someone beat me to the punch)
by achamian | 2025-06-11 22:54:04+00:00
I've been exploring decomposition patterns where different perspectives operate within the same session, sharing context.

Key discovery: Treat perspectives like team members. I told a friend: "Think of Waver/Maker/Checker as three intelligent interns on your team." His first reaction: "I don't like Checker - too many objections." That's when it clicked - it's Checker's JOB to object, like QA finding bugs.

This is NOT anthropomorphizing - it's lens selection. The labels activate specific response patterns, not personalities. Like switching between grep, awk, and sed for different text processing.

Once I started debating with Checker about which objections mattered (rather than dismissing them), output quality jumped dramatically. The interaction pattern matters more than the prompt structure.

Try this: Copy the prompt from [0], then engage with genuine collaboration - thank good insights, push back on weak objections, ask for clarification.

Just a reminder - talking politely helps.

[0]: https://github.com/achamian/think-center-why-maybe/blob/main...
by parliament32 | 2025-06-11 22:54:41+00:00
IMO it's less about having an archive; more about being able to receive mail at that address. After all, email address is the root of your identity for basically everything on the web -- what's the plan if every account you have is @gmail.com and Google banishes you? Running it through your own domain means you just re-point it at a different provider and keep trucking.
by andy99 | 2025-06-11 22:56:11+00:00
While I agree, it won't be a purely "AI" disaster the way a plane crash is a direct consequence of the kinetic and potential energy associated with flying.

s/AI/automation/ it's always bad to hook an unchecked algorithm up to something dangerous, it doesn't matter if it's an if statement or a neural net. It will be the hooking up that's responsible more than the AI which will just be what fools someone into thinking it's safe.
by bwest87 | 2025-06-11 22:57:16+00:00
This video was fascinating. I didn't know about "open endedness" as a concept but now that I see it, of course it's an approach.

One thought... in the video, Ken makes the observation that it takes way more complexity and steps to find a given shape with SGD vs. open-endedness. Which is certainly fascinating. However...

Intuitively, this feels like a similar dynamic is at play with the "birthday paradox". That's where if you take a room of just 23 people, there is a greater than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday. This is very surprising to most people. It seems like you should need way more people (365 in fact!). The paradox is resolved when you realize that your intuition is asking how many people it takes to have your birthday. But the situation with a room of 23 people is implicitly asking for just one connection among any two people. Thus you don't have 23 chances, you have 23 ^ 2 = 529 chances.

I think the same thing is at work here. With the open-ended approach, humans can find any pattern at any generation. With the SGD approach, you can only look for one pattern. So it's just not an apples to apples comparison and sort of misleading / unfair to say that open-endedness is way more "efficient", because you aren't asking it to do the same task.

Said another way, I think with the open-endedness, it seems like you are looking for thousands (or even millions) of shapes simultaneously. With SGD, you're kinda flipping that around, and looking for exactly 1 shape, but giving it thousands of generations to achieve it.
by protocolture | 2025-06-11 22:57:17+00:00
>Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.

I really do just bail out whenever anyone uses the word slop.

>As one example, Philip Shapira reports that ChatGPT (OpenAI's popular brand of generative language model circa 2024) is obsessed with the word "delve" in a way that people never have been, and caused its overall frequency to increase by an order of magnitude.

Should run the same analysis against the word slop.
by encom | 2025-06-11 22:58:17+00:00
The YouTube algorithm has seen fit to serve me a bunch of American police bodycam videos lately. I find it super bizarre that a policeman will address everyone as sir. Including some deranged crackhead, without pants, charging at him with a sword. Decidedly not a "sir".

In Denmark nobody adresses each other formally, unless you're royalty. Parliament also does it during debates, but that's pretty much it. It's weird when it happens, and it's usually some store clerk that does it out of a misguided attempt at politeness, but to me at least it has the opposite effect. I am not a Hr. (sir), I'm just some dickhead buying cigarettes at 1 AM.

I Denmark we at least pretend everyone is equal. The CEO of the company is just John. We eat lunch in the same break room at the same time.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-11 22:59:56+00:00
Paranoia & insanity. The behavior in comments on that linked issue is even more wild than this absurd README.

All over a bunch of chaotic wild rewriting code, with no stated gains, just for a different style, that broke basic functionality.

And then almost immediately getting mean and nasty about it! And then getting further into madness, waving at someone whose out in civil service to the world like Peter Hutterer and declaring them some BigTech enemy is completely unhinged decoupled behavior.

The conspiratorial wing of modern society is so hard to live with.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-06-11 23:00:10+00:00
I wasn't there - I won't politically nitpick about the innocence of the period - and to do so would also be wildly inappropriate to the very sad topic.

But positively, and optimistically, I do think things are passed on, even if we don't quite understand how.

From Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

'''

"I saw [Buddy Holly] only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.

"He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing.

I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two.

Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction.

Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something.

Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down."

'''

Though Dylan loves to self-mythologize, if I'm going to believe anybody alive about how a baton, or muse, or torch, or access to transcendent beauty might be passed on, I'd choose to believe him. Especially given the context in which he implied this unusually (for him) sincere thing: "take this and run with it."

Even reduced to something as material and measurable as 'influence', I think that's worth a great deal of optimism. We won't get another Brian Wilson. That's very, very sad. But his work remains - even if his time doesn't. Bob was of another time to Buddy. There will always be young people.
by user9999999999 | 2025-06-11 23:03:31+00:00
the first 'ai disaster' will be a corp shirking responsibility by blaming their unchecked automatic bureaucratic processes on ai. Look no further at what HERTZ did sending out automated arrest warrants for erroneous causes, leading to dangerous confrontations with armed police. Luckily no one was killed, but innocent law abiding people were very traumatized.

This was without 'ai' but the blame was nearly close, "oops automated process did it!"

The 'artificial intelligence' has been here (starts with B). Kafka wrote about it comically.
by Aachen | 2025-06-11 23:03:35+00:00
Reminds me of the 100 millionth OpenStreetMap changeset (commit). A few people, myself included, were casually trying for it but in the end it went to someone who wasn't trying and just busy mapping Africa! Much more wholesome, seeing it with hindsight. This person was also previously nominated for an OSM award. I guess it helps that openstreetmap doesn't really allow for creating crap, because it's all live in production, and that's how the Nth commit is way more likely to be someone's random whim? Either way, a fun achievement for Github :)

In case anyone cares to read more about the OSM milestone, the official blog entry: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2021/02/25/100-million-edits-... My write-up of changeset activity around the event: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/LucGommans/diary/395954
by leereeves | 2025-06-11 23:03:45+00:00
Most people involved like hiring more people.

Workers generally like jobs where the workload is low. Managers gain status by having bigger teams, whether they need the extra people or not. Even investors often prefer hiring (a sign of growth) to layoffs, and executives are mostly concerned with pleasing investors.

Even well run tech companies with money to burn hired more people than they needed.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-06-11 23:03:46+00:00
Sorry to go off on what may seem to be a tangent (equivocating only bcos i struggle to get the pt across succinctly?)

This too could form the basis of a productive skepticism towards the usefulness of coding agents, unlike what has caught attention here. (Referring specifically to the post by tptacek)

For example, we could look at feedback from the lisp community (beyond anecdata) on the usefulness of LLMs? Since it's what one might call "syntax-lite", a lack of true generalization ability ("no possible world model for an unavoidably idiosyncratic DSL-friendly metalanguage") could show up as a lack of ability to not just generate code, but even to fix it..

Beyond that, the issue how much the purported world-shattering usefulness of proof assistants based on say, Lean4, must depend on interpolating say, mathlib..

In short, please link the papers :)

>There are two follow up papers showing the representations are "entangled", a euphemism for statistical garbage, but I can't be bothered at the moment to find them.
by wereHamster | 2025-06-11 23:04:09+00:00
securityscorecard is easy to integrate (it's a cli tool or you run it as a github action), one of the checks it performs is "Pinned-Dependencies": https://github.com/ossf/scorecard/blob/main/docs/checks.md#p.... Checks that fail generate an security alert under Security -> Code scanning.
by michaelt | 2025-06-11 23:04:39+00:00
> Chatbot sites like character.ai and Chai AI have been linked to user suicides, for understandable reasons: if you allow users near-unlimited control over chatbots, over time you’ll eventually end up with some chatbots who get into an “encouraging the user to self-harm” state.

If cooking hadn't been invented 2.5 million years ago and instead you tried to invent it today, I wonder how many thousands of articles would be written decrying the irresponsible proposal to put stoves and knives in every home, risking cuts and burned fingers.
by ModernMech | 2025-06-11 23:04:48+00:00
> That entire building could have been nuked and the country would still go on just fine, with presidential elections and new presidents.

I don't understand how. You're saying the President could literally murder the entire Congress, and things would just go on fine? Who would ever run for Congress after that, knowing that if they ever defied the President he could murder them without repercussions?

> If I looked around me and saw lots of people wanting some kind of one-party one-leader system for decades then I might be concerned,

Are you saying there can only be a constitutional crisis if it's popular and endemic to disagree with the constitution? If that's the case, how can we ever stop a constitutional crisis from happening if you can only recognize it after it's set in?
by bartread | 2025-06-11 23:05:56+00:00
The company where I did my stint as CTO I turned up, noticed they were using 32-bit integers as primary keys on one of their key tables that already had 1.3 billion rows and, at the rate they were adding them, would overflow on primary key values within months… so we ran a fairly urgent project to upgrade the IDs to 64-bit to avoid the total meltdown that would have ensued otherwise.
by aew2120 | 2025-06-11 23:06:15+00:00
Interestingly, a small company called Ogma already did something very similar back in 2021 (on an embedded system, no less). This (https://ogma.ai/2021/07/unsupervised-behavioral-learning-ubl...) is a description/video of how they got a small RC car to predict the next frame of its video feed given the action it was about to take, and thereby made the car navigate to a given location when fed with a still frame of that location (all this with online learning, and no backprop).

Instead of vicreg, they induced their latent state with sparse auto-encoding. Also they predicted in pixel, as opposed to latent, space. The white paper describing their tech is a little bit of a mess, but schematically, at least, the hierarchical architecture they describe bears a strong resemblance to the hierarchical JEPA models LeCunn outlined in his big paper from a few years ago. A notable difference, though, is that their thing is essentially a reflex agent, as opposed to possessing a planning/optimization loop.
by virissimo | 2025-06-11 23:06:21+00:00
While it's true that CNN ran an article like that, the underlying claim has been formally rebutted by the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Association, who clarified that:

> Women who experience miscarriage are not required to notify law enforcement and should not fear prosecution…recent public statements do not reflect the consensus of West Virginia prosecutors.

https://wchstv.com/news/local/wva-prosecuting-attorneys-deno...
by api | 2025-06-11 23:08:23+00:00
A large code base with modules with clear interfaces accomplishes most of this and is more efficient. Often vastly more efficient. Compare the cost of a function call or an in process message queue with a network API call over http.

Cloud providers make more money the more they can get people to use inefficient designs with more moving parts to rack up more charges. Bonus if it also locks you into managed services. Double bonus if those are proprietary. Complexity benefits cloud hosts.

Microservices, like all patterns, sometimes make sense. Like all patterns they often get overused.
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 23:09:09+00:00
There's multiple problems here:

1. We used known safe and effective vaccines as placebos. Keyword KNOWN. We're not gonna debate the efficacy of the fucking polio vaccine, just be for real.

2. The reason we do this is because it's very unethical to deny medication that we currently administer and know works to human subjects. That would be treating people worse than we treat the general population. That's unethical.

3. We don't just do this vaccines, but ALL medication. When we make new drugs to treat cancer, we don't compare them against saline. Because that's evil. We compare them against known effective chemotherapy regimes.

4. All of this is besides the point, because using an inert placebo wouldn't help anything. How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe? It doesn't.

5. We DO use inert placebos all the time - just not in human trials. Because we want to give humans real medicine so they don't fucking die.
by bityard | 2025-06-11 23:09:17+00:00
I could be off-base here because I've been in tech too long but my understanding was that addressing people formally as Mr/Mrs/Ms has been outmoded in business virtually everywhere except in legal matters and (sometimes) when you work for a company and are speaking directly to one of your customers.

Everywhere I've been and observed, it's always been, "Good Morning, <firstname>" or similar regardless of who is talking to who on the org chart. (This doesn't mean you should talk like a surfer dude, of course.)
by ineedasername | 2025-06-11 23:11:10+00:00
The emotional exaggeration is interesting, though I don't think I've come across anything quite so versatile and easy to "sculpt" as Elevenlabs and it's ability to generate a voice on the basis of a description of how you want the voice to sound. SparkTTS allows some additional parameters, and it's project on GitHub has placeholders in its code that indicate the model might be refined for more fine grained emotional control. As it is, I've had some success with it and other models by trying to influence prosody and tonality with some heavy handed queues in the text, which can then be used with VC to get closer to desired results, but it's a much more cumbersome process than Eleven.
by ruuda | 2025-06-11 23:11:11+00:00
The problem with AI is that we might get an artificial general superintelligence before we get the first big disaster, and when a big disaster happens at that point, it could be so big that it’s catastrophic for humanity.

Lots has been written about this topic, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-annou... is one of the more pessimistic takes. I wrote a more neutral introduction a while back at https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2024/ai-alignment-starter-pack.
by Ray20 | 2025-06-11 23:11:24+00:00
>Can anyone tell me why this would be as much of a problem for safety as they are saying?

The size of the problem is directly correlated with their level of funding. What else can they say?

>The only thing I can see happening is easier selling of pads and tampons during a certain phase of the moon.

No, with that attitude you definitely won't get a research grants.
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-11 23:11:30+00:00
It's not a straw man, I'm not trying to defuse liability. Of course a developer running malicious code they wrote is responsible for the outcomes.

I am pointing out that if every unique binary never before run/approved is blocked, then no developer will be able to build and then run the software they are paid to write, since them developing it modifies said software into a new and never before seen sequence of bits.

OP may not have meant to say that "it's good to have an absolute allowlist of executable signatures and block everything else", but that is how I interpreted the initial claim and I am merely pointing out that such a system would be more than inconvenient, it'd make the workflow of editing and then running software nearly impossible.