MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by astrange | 2025-06-14 21:02:03+00:00
Gary Marcus always, always says AI doesn't actually work - it's his whole thing. If he's posted a correct argument it's a coincidence. I remember seeing him claim real long-time AI researchers like David Chapman (who's a critic himself) were wrong anytime they say anything positive.

(em-dash avoided to look less AI)

Of course, the main issue with the field is the critics /should/ be correct. Like, LLMs shouldn't work and nobody knows why they work. But they do anyway.

So you end up with critics complaining it's "just a parrot" and then patting themselves on the back, as if inventing a parrot isn't supposed to be impressive somehow.
by baobun | 2025-06-14 21:02:16+00:00
Yes, there is censorship. That much is not a secret and IMO not controversial in itself. Not all censorship is bad. Most of users appreciate some amount of censorship (aka moderation).

As for your observations, it's a mixed bag of factors:

Some sources are by default flagged and need vouching (so penalized). For example 404 Media is penalized because of paywall practices. Meanwhile other apparently worse sites are not flagged. So you could argue there is bias from moderators there. I haven't seen evidence of any algorithmic bias beyond that and promotion of YC-affiliated ads and posts.

Supposedly political rallying is frowned upon and talk about industry role in murdering of civilians gets flagged as off-topic or inflammatory while dang descends from the mountain asking everyone to call their politicians about killing some tax bill stuck, top post on the front page...

Aside from that it seems most of the effective censoring you are seeing are from HN users. For example, there's a well-known anti-blockchain bias in the audience so anything perceived as "pro crypto" easily gets buried. Other certain themes get upvoted hard and fast. It's not hard to see the bias on Israel-Palestine and where it comes from. So some of it is genuine user bias of an echo chamber. Then we have astroturfing: People/organizations/bots actively flagging/downvoting/upvoting certain actors or views for political or anticompetitive purposes. No doubt this happens from all directions (individuals,corps,govt agencies,ngos) and the discrepancies are a difference in numbers and strength. Someone seems to be driving LLM FOMO beyond the organic. Certain moguls in particular seem to have an army of puppets to obstruct and cast smoke to prevent certain things from trending.

I believe at the end of the day while there is certainly at least indirect govt involvement via astroturfing and there are subversive forces manipulating the front page and comments, more than anything else we censor each other and ourselves. The real war is in and of our minds.
by jakewins | 2025-06-14 21:03:07+00:00
We use solvers throughout the stack at work: solvers to schedule home batteries and EVs in peoples homes optimally, solvers to schedule hundreds of thousands of those homes optimally as portfolios, solvers to trade that portfolio optimally.

The EU electricity spot price is set each day in a single giant solver run, look up Euphemia for some write ups of how that works.

Most any field where there is a clear goal to optimise and real money on the line will be riddled with solvers
by kubectl_h | 2025-06-14 21:04:11+00:00
I dislike tipping culture too but the idea that you would pay more so you don't have to tip doesn't make any sense. Additionally you are paying more so you don't have to tip and the thing that enables that is the literal job a human would otherwise have is destroyed.

So bizarre. The levels people will go not to deal with any conflict, no matter how trivial it is...
by noorik | 2025-06-14 21:04:20+00:00
Product Designer, UX/UI Designer, Graphic Designer, Marketing

Location:US

Remote: Yes but Not needed

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: [Proficient] Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign [Basic] Python, Blender, 3DS Max

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MRTh2RvaZJBXTbkesd14StVf27r...

Email: noorikarle@gmail.com

Website: https://noorikarle.wixsite.com/portfolio

Graduated college last year in Econ + Visual Art. I've done freelance work for the past 4 years, my experience spans product design, branding, user research, marketing campaigns, and even data analysis. I’ve conducted independent economic research projects using Excel and Python, designed onboarding flows to reduce friction for startups, led the marketing team for an international student club with thousands of attendees, and recently contributed to UI and brand asset development at an AI startup. I'm willing to wear many hats, work on many things in the realms of design, social, branding.

Honestly, I want to be surrounded by passionate, creative, and challenging people who believe strongly in what they’re building. Looking to gain a lot of experience, solve problems, and work hard. I’m constantly working on expanding my skill set and learning new tools, I’m currently teaching myself 3D modeling! I’m not afraid to experiment, ask questions, and whatever I don’t know, I fight to learn.
by barrkel | 2025-06-14 21:04:36+00:00
You need to read everything that Gary writes with the particular axe to grind he has in mind: neurosymbolic AI. That's his specialism, and he essentially has a chip in his shoulder about the attention probabilistic approaches like LLMs are getting, and their relative success.

You can see this in this article too.

The real question you should be asking is if there is a practical limitation in LLMs and LRMs revealed by the Hanoi Towers problem or not, given that any SOTA model can write code to solve the problem and thereby solve it with tool use. Gary frames this as neurosymbolic, but I think it's a bit of a fudge.
by abilafredkb | 2025-06-14 21:04:39+00:00
You're absolutely right, and I appreciate the honesty. The tool hasn't actually worked for me yet - I've been so focused on building features and trying to help others that I haven't spent nearly enough time learning to use it myself properly. That's probably the real problem. I'm asking people to trust a marketing tool when I'm clearly still figuring out marketing myself. I think I need to step back, actually use my own product consistently for a few months, and get good at this before expecting anyone else to believe in it. Thanks for calling that out - sometimes you need someone to state the obvious thing you're avoiding.
by kelnos | 2025-06-14 21:05:15+00:00
For Japan I expect it's also a matter of population/crowd density in the cities. There are tons of staffed convenience stores (7-Eleven, Family Mart, Lawson), but even with a high density of stores, they're often fairly crowded.

Having lots of vending machines even for simple things like bottled water and soft drinks reduces the pressure on the convenience stores quite a bit. More advanced vending machines with other products helps even more.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-14 21:06:26+00:00
Related, these tables: The lowest temps each year for US cities.

https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/extreme-an...

Our lowest winter temps are up about 10°F over the last 30 years. 2021 saw our highest ever yearly low; it broke the old record by 2°F.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-14 21:07:12+00:00
Well, how about this: there is a lot of knowledge that if it were publicly available in a useful form, could do incredible amounts of damage. From viral DNA/RNA sequences to the exact procedure to get a fission cascade. The exact chemical formula to a lot of different nasty concoctions, or in some cases just the fact that particular things even exist (e.g. you don't need radioactive material to create radiation poisoning ... even mass radiation poisoning)

Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.

These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.
by madaxe_again | 2025-06-14 21:07:13+00:00
The US wanted to change. PNAC spelled out almost all of what happened after 9/11, before 9/11, and it was a gift to the security industrial complex hawks. They literally said in their report that a Pearl Harbor type event would likely be necessary:

“Further, the process of transformation… is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
by abilafredkb | 2025-06-14 21:07:39+00:00
Fair point about expectations.I definitely thought this would be easier than it is. On the GPT wrapper comment though, I built this because existing tools weren't solving my actual problem. Maybe I'm wrong about the market need, but it's not just repackaged ChatGPT. Either way, you're right that good product execution is just the starting line, not the finish line.
by kelnos | 2025-06-14 21:08:11+00:00
> I have had some really perplexing Uber drivers, either driving in a confused and circuitous way, distracted by YouTube, or just driving dangerously.

A weird route is generally fine with me (as long as it doesn't increase travel time by much; remedy for that case is to decrease the tip), but driving distracted/dangerously is an automatic low rating from me. I am pretty much an "always 5 stars" kinda person, but safety issues are serious.
by serbuvlad | 2025-06-14 21:09:01+00:00
What's up with the US tipping culture?

I live in Romania and I only tip restaurants a standard of 10% (not fast food, not coffee, just restaurants). Also delivery people when they help bring heavy stuff into my appartment (theoretically they are only paid to bring it to the block entrance).

Back when I used taxis we would tip those. But I have never tipped an Uber. Or a Glovo (our Door Dash) deliveryman.
by evanelias | 2025-06-14 21:09:45+00:00
No, I read it correctly, did you? They didn't say they ultimately had to pay any of those fees, just that the violation fees were dangled as a threat. They explicitly said "there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs" which strongly implies they did not actually pay any of those extra violation fees, because they rooted out those license violations before being charged!

So $0 contribution to Oracle's revenue from fees in that anecdote, was my point. (The key word there in my comment was "actually", as in actually paying the fees, whereas you focused on the word "extra" instead. I don't debate that if the fees were actually paid, then yes that is quite obviously an extra fee.)
by thethimble | 2025-06-14 21:10:51+00:00
They’re not pushing a single canonical schema.

Each team still owns its local RDF graph for concepts like actor or movie. What UDA adds is a shared graph of mappings that translate between those local models whenever another team needs them.

Traditionally such translations live in scattered adapter code, which hides lineage and adds opacity - particularly as systems proliferate. By expressing the mappings as RDF triples inside UDA’s knowledge graph, they become versioned, queryable, and reusable. No more spelunking through layers of service code to understand how one team’s actor becomes another’s.

As a result, discrete teams/domains remain independent while the interconnections/relationships become first-class and introspectable. This enables coordination without centralization.
by kelnos | 2025-06-14 21:11:21+00:00
The problem with that kind of thinking is that "superior" is in the eye of the beholder.

An AI manager might be "superior" in the view of the executives of the company, but that AI manager's reports might feel very differently. From a societal perspective, the employees' feelings are what should matter most, but from a capitalist perspective, the executives won't care if workers are treated poorly, as long as the work gets done and profits go up.

And I think we already see the shit experience customers get when customer service jobs are replaced by AI. I doubt that will ever improve, by design.

Remember, also, that computers only deal with situations and problems that they are programmed to deal with. AI is a little different, but still suffers the same limitations in that they can only deal with things they're trained on. Humans can make exceptions and adapt to new situations. If we get to AGI, perhaps that problem will go away, but I expect we'll be granted many new problems to deal with instead.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-06-14 21:12:32+00:00
I'm not sure I see why. If hailing a publicly-operated waymo equivalent is as convenient as going to the DMV or making a withdrawal from a treasury direct account, I don't think anyone is ever going to use it. From my perspective, waymo is the private sector solving a problem that was largely created by the government (zoning → lack of density → needing to drive everywhere).
by bowsamic | 2025-06-14 21:13:06+00:00
This doesn’t address the primary issue: that they had no methodology for choosing puzzles that weren’t in the training set and indeed while they claimed to have chosen puzzles that aren’t they didn’t explain why they think that. The whole point of the paper was to test LLM reasoning in untrained cases but there’s no reason to expect such puzzles to not part of the training set, and if you don’t have any way of telling if it is not or then your paper is not going to work out
by edwardbernays | 2025-06-14 21:13:08+00:00
"Robert F Kennedy Jr And The Dark Side Of The Dream" by Jerry Oppenheimer, page 54:

> Back at the Kennedy compound before summer's end, away from Billings for the time being, he continued his bad behavior, feeding LSD to his parakeet, and forcing his brother David to trip on the psychedelic mescaline. Hallucinating, looking wide- eyed at his brother, he imagined the worst, screaming, "You're dying just like Daddy!"

Jerry Oppenheimer is generally considered to be a credible biographer and journalist.

That takes care of the charge of "leftist piddle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations." It is not piffle, it is written by a serious reported in a serious biographical piece. It is not a conspiracy theory, for it does not posit any particular conspiracy because typically those require more than one conspirator, and it is about as substantiated as many of the claims RFK Jr himself makes.

Having now established the substance of the claim I made, I shall proceed to establish its relevance. RFK Jr has a long history with drugs, as do many politicians. RFK Jr is the head of the HHS. The secretary of the HHS can initiate proceedings to deschedule drugs. It is hypocritical, given his own admitted history with drugs, to continue to imprison people for it.

For that matter, we have recently had Elon Musk (a notorious drug enthusiast) involved in the highest levels of government while actively doing copious amounts of illegal drugs. He should be in jail, like everyone else of lesser means who have been victimized by this senseless war on drugs. He won't be imprisoned, because he has money. It is the best evidence we have that the war on drugs is actually a war on the poor.

They don't care about drugs, or they'd enforce drug law evenly. Joe Rogan, a self-admitted fan of many schedule 1 hallucinogens, remains a free man in the proto-christian-nationalist state of Texas. It is hypocrisy.

It is time to end this war on drugs and move towards a sensible drug policy that is fair for all people and respects our basic freedoms.

So, yes, it is for HN, thank you.
by pron | 2025-06-14 21:14:16+00:00
> And if it failed to do that, I am confident that the problem is a mistake in the logic theory proof.

You can axiomatically add oracles without introducing logical inconsistencies. It is commonly done in complexity theory. The "mistake" is in interpreting such results as directly corresponding to the real world (same as interpreting 2 + 1 = 0 in modular arithmetic as if it were saying something about natural numbers). That is Hilbert's point: we need to be clear about how we map certain mathematical statements to the real world, and "to make it a universal requirement that each individual formula then be interpretable by itself is by no means reasonable", i.e. even when we're clear about such a mapping, it is not a requirement that every forumla had such a mapping. Or, perhaps more clear, Hilbert's point is that if in a logical theory not every formula can be assigned a "real meaning", that does not invalidate assigning real meaning to some formulas.

> Basically he's just saying, "Math is a formal game. People got interested in this game because part of the game corresponds to things we experience in reality." But that doesn't mean that the game itself depends in any way upon physical reality - it exists in its own terms.

He is very explicit that he is not saying that about the "real" propositions. He calls them "contentual", as in carrying content beyond the symbols. From the same talk:

If we now begin to construct mathematics, we shall first set our sights upon elementary number theory; we recognize that we can obtain and prove its truths through contentual intuitive considerations. The formulas that we encounter when we take this approach are used only to impart information.

He is very clear that the justification for the use of formulas that are "just a symbols game" is that they are consistent with formulas that are contentual and are not just a symbols game. That is the debate between Hilbert and Brouwer, or formalism and intuitionism: whether or not all formulas must have an intuitive meaning ("content"). In formalism, not all of them must.

It is precisely because Hilbert's justification was based on consistency, as without it, "real" propositions could be wrong, that the incompleteness results made that justification unprovable.
by djohnston | 2025-06-14 21:14:42+00:00
No... the pre-determined bias in this story is obviously that all subgroups of people behave identically w.r.t. welfare applications, which the data itself did not support and a momentary consideration of socioeconomics would debunk. When they tried to cludge the weights to fit their predetermined bias, the model did so poorly on a pilot run that the city shut it down.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-06-14 21:16:10+00:00
Why are you representing that these people were your clients, when, by all indications, they are not. It would be a tremendous coincidence if all of your clients also happen to be models for stock photos in their spare time of also being employed in unrelated jobs in tech.

You have been caught trying to pass fake images as real on your site, and now you are trying to get off on a technicality (These aren't AI!).

This isn't a good look for a project that needs authenticity and trust at the core. Why would I put one of the most consequential professional interactions in a my career (finding the next job) into the hands of people that deride fair criticism (see what you said when someone asked for your "about" page) and that are willing to actively deceive when called out.
by devoutsalsa | 2025-06-14 21:16:24+00:00
Options are a great way to make money until they’re not. Selling covered calls will limit your upside and you’ll miss out on big gains when the stock takes off. Selling covered puts can make you buy a stock as it’s cratering on bad news. I can see the appeal, but it’s too risky for me. I think the typical investor will end up with less in the long run, and there’s a reason covered calls ETFs don’t keep up with the gains of the market, even with dividends reinvested.

Another things that’s easy to over look is being forced to sell your stock when the covered call you sold ends up in the money means you may have to pay taxes on the gains, which also eat into potential upside.
by MegaButts | 2025-06-14 21:16:40+00:00
Self-driving cars are cool but I'd rather have good public transit. These vehicles clearly have utility beyond just public transit, but I'd rather they be an edge case rather than considered a main solution. So yeah, from my perspective the problem is being focused on profits instead of trying to solve the real problem with solutions that have already existed for decades.

If you zoom out a bit, your argument would be more-or-less the same when regular automobiles were replacing the functioning transit systems in the USA, specifically in LA.
by harmmonica | 2025-06-14 21:16:59+00:00
Oh man, hope it's ok to poke a little fun. I think we just violently agreed with me praising automation from one company and deriding automation from another. So I'll update your "seems like": Riding with Waymo (IME) -> Good Automation, Lyft customer support when they "stole" $3 from me and didn't provide me with a way to fix it -> Bad Automation.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-14 21:17:15+00:00
> if you get into an accident in NYC, you’re pretty much screwed. Uber will not cover you and you have to rely on “bankrupt” commercial insurance

What is your source on TLC commercial insurance not paying out for medical expenses sustained in an accident?

And going back to Waymo, wouldn’t having one of the world’s wealthiest companies as the beneficial counterparty solve the problem you’re raising?
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-06-14 21:17:27+00:00
I don't disagree, and I appreciate your keeping the conversation on-topic, but that's very much an incomplete picture. I think our modern app ecosystem as a whole conditions users to click "OK" reflexively. A hypothetical app wants permissions for your camera, location, and file storage. If you click OK, you can use the app. If you don't, some functions may not work. I think the average user gets caught in the desire to use an app for its intended purpose and the need to tinker with settings - which they may or may not understand - if they want to use that app securely. So, they just say OK to everything.

Of course, that's not the only situation with these push notifications. MFA fatigue attacks are a real thing, hammering the user with as many notifications as they can in a short time. Maybe the user assumes it's a bug, maybe they try to deny the push notification but eventually hit the wrong button, maybe they just want it to stop; it's not so much about exploiting user conditioning as it is assuming that if you force people into an unfamiliar situations, that some of them will eventually slip up.
by tomduncalf | 2025-06-14 21:17:39+00:00
This doesn’t surprise me and I’m not sure it’s about people not wanting to interact with people or whatever - many of the Ubers I’ve got while in SF have been pretty grim (unclean, weird odors, ancient badly serviced car etc) and badly driven. I’ve not noticed this being such an issue in the UK/Europe but that might just be because I take Ubers much more rarely there (with more prevalent public transit etc).

I’d definitely pay more for a Waymo, which is a much more reliably pleasant (and very cool!) experience.
by zodexid | 2025-06-14 21:18:49+00:00
This is the blueprint for the People’s Subscription Network (PSN) — a nonprofit, smart-contract-based system that lets anyone reroute monthly payments (insurance, charity, aid) into a transparent global aid structure.

- Fully public, trackable money flow - Verified human needs (health, food, education) - No tokens, no investors, no profit - Privacy tiering, panic switch, AI fraud flags - Governance by contributors, not capital

Designed to be uncorruptable, forkable, and open by default. Looking for feedback, critique, or help building it. I’m not selling anything — I want this to exist.

Let me know what breaks, or help fix it.