MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jorvi | 2025-06-17 17:12:16+00:00
> will make up for any lack of precision the same way we work around human flaws to help us succeed in most tasks.

A human won't flip-flop from "You're right! That doesn't exist" and then straight back to "You're right, that does exist!" based on how a question is asked.

People really hold LLMs their capabilities in way, waaaay too high esteem. You have to walk a tightrope with them, and you always will unless they can fix the hallucination problem, which is quite unlikely due to how LLMs work.
by crescit_eundo | 2025-06-17 17:12:30+00:00
From the project’s introduction:

"Anyone can do post-publication peer review. Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature. Anyone can do forensic metascience. Anyone can sleuth. However, investigating the integrity of the published scientific literature often requires domain-specific knowledge that not everyone will have. This open source project is a collection of guides written and maintained by publication integrity experts to distribute this domain-specific knowledge so that others can participate in post-publication peer review."
by adultSwim | 2025-06-17 17:12:33+00:00
For medical applications, across several generations of models, we see fine-tuned models outperform base models of similar size. However, newer/bigger general base models outperform smaller fine-tuned models.

Also, as others have pointed out, supervised fine-tuning can be quite useful for teaching how to perform specific tasks. I agree with the author that RAG generally is more suited for injecting additional knowledge.
by sudobash1 | 2025-06-17 17:12:40+00:00
Actually there is. You just have to schedule it. I keep meaning to do this with my home VOIP phone.

> Test calls confirm that your local 911 service can receive your 911 call and has the correct location information. Test calls can be scheduled by contacting your local 911 call center via its non-emergency phone number.

https://www.911.gov/calling-911/frequently-asked-questions/
by maujun | 2025-06-17 17:13:02+00:00
Agreed.

StackOverflow makes it easier not think and copy-paste. Autocomplete makes it easier to not think and make typos (Hopefully you have static typing). Package management makes it easier to not think and introduce heavy dependencies. C makes it easier to not think and forget to initialize variables. I make it easier to not think and read without considering evil (What if every word I say has evil intention and effect?)
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-17 17:13:37+00:00
This is through providers such as Cursor, but the consistency of this experience has put me off from directly subscribing to Anthropic since I'm already subscribed up to my eyeballs in various AI services.

Last I'd checked, Anthropic would not admit that they were degrading models for obvious scummy business reasons, but they are probably quantizing them, reducing beam search, lowering precision/sampling), etc. because the model goes from being superpowered to completely unusable, constantly dropping code and mangling files, getting caught in loops, doing the weirdest detours, and sometimes completely ignoring my instructions from just one message prior.

t first I wondered if Cursor was mishandling the context, and while they indeed aren't doing the best with context stuffing, the rest of the issues are not context-related.
by zppln | 2025-06-17 17:14:10+00:00
> out of their system

I spent some time last year digging around in Wayland and I've got to admit that I was surprised to learn that there really isn't anything really there. Like, there is no "system". I had read that "it's a protocol" but I hadn't fully internalized it. I'm honestly a bit surprised anyone has adopted it. It almost feels like a scam. :) When I checked you couldn't even get your window decorated without an extension (that Gnome decided to not support so you have to bring your own decorator there?).
by Eisenstein | 2025-06-17 17:14:16+00:00
> It's far easier to be humane when operating in an efficient system than an inefficient one.

Why no reverse it though? First, look out for people, then figure out efficiency.

> If unstable market prices result in temporary, unacceptably inhumane conditions for other people, then the most efficient solution is certainly going to be to work within the market-based system to help those people

Why are you so obsessed with efficiency? What is wrong with being a little inefficient if it means that people aren't even 'temporarily' in inhumane conditions. And if they were 'unacceptable' you wouldn't accept them.

> People are freely choosing to exchange their money in return for a service.

As stated in the wikipedia entry for Congestion pricing in New York City:

"This Pigovian tax, intended to cut down on traffic congestion and pollution, was first proposed in 2007 and included in the 2019 New York State government budget by the New York State Legislature."

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

> Markets are based on the collective decisions of millions of people taking billions of factors into account to create the most efficient outcome for everyone.

So what?
Show HN: Solon – Track business expenses made on personal cards
by Solon_App | 2025-06-17 17:14:30+00:00
Hey HN – I’m a founder building Solon, a tool to help people track business expenses that end up on their personal credit cards.

This started as a personal pain: I bought a laptop for a team member, but my business card hit it's limit. Amazon defaulted to my personal card, and it took me a while to notice. I had to manually journal it into QuickBooks. It wasn’t the first time.

Solon connects personal cards to your QuickBooks account, so you can tag business expenses that sneak into your personal spend—without creating journal entries, spreadsheets, or chasing statements at tax time.

It’s especially useful for:

Founders without a business card yet

People optimizing points on personal cards

Anyone who forgets to carry their business card

We’re launching soon. If you’ve dealt with this before, I’d love feedback on the landing page, or how you handle this today: getsolon.io

Happy to answer any questions or explain more!
by int_19h | 2025-06-17 17:15:42+00:00
We've circled back to the point where pirating content one way or another is more convenient than streaming it legally.

I use StreamFab + Plex for most providers these days precisely because it offers a better experience than their own native apps. Just the other day, I tried to watch a show on Amazon only to discover that subtitles were skewed because someone messed up cutting out the ad breaks - it'd shift the subtitles by ~10s for each cut. Plex not only has the ability to adjust offsets, but it can actually analyze the audio and perform autocorrection (which works flawlessly, I must add). Of course, this also means that this show is now permanently in my video library, even if I drop my Amazon subscription. And no, I don't feel bad about that.
by bitpush | 2025-06-17 17:15:44+00:00
Bravo. This is the exact sentiment I have, but you expressed in a way that I could never have.

Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before.

When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.

And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-17 17:16:00+00:00
My experience with Honda has not been great. Both Hondas I have owned had complete transmission failures. Full disclosure, I bought them used (as I do all my cars) with unknown maintenance history and I did get a few years out of each of them so it still worked out "ok" in an economic sense. The engines do seem pretty bulletproof. But I would not buy another, at least not one with an automatic transmission.
by morganherlocker | 2025-06-17 17:16:22+00:00
> so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.

While cool and all, this type of sim is a tiny, tiny slice of the software stack, and not the most difficult by a long shot. For one, you need software to control the actual hardware, that runs on said hardware's specific CPU(s) stack AND in sim (making an off the shelf sim a lot less useful). Orbital/newtonian physics are not trivial to implement, but they are relatively simple compared to the software that handles integration with physical components, telemetry, command, alerting, path optimization, etc. etc. The phrase "reality has a surprising amount of detail" applies here - it takes a lot of software to model complex hardware correctly, and even more to control it safely.
by steveklabnik | 2025-06-17 17:17:23+00:00
These tools can search the web to find this kind of data, and show you what they searched. Double checking is essential because hallucinations are still possible, but it's not like in the past where it would just try to make up the data from its training set. That said, it also may find bad data and give you a summary of that, which isn't a direct hallucination, but can still be inaccurate. This is why checking the sources is helpful too.
by aanet | 2025-06-17 17:17:24+00:00
Link to the original Oxford's Reuters Institute for Journalism "2025 Digital News Report" here [1]

A few interesting (maybe obvious) findings:

1. For the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”

2. Pivot to video is happening. “We find striking generational differences. Younger groups, especially those aged 18-24, are much more likely than older ones to prefer watching — or listening to — the news. This suggests that over time publishers may need to adjust resources in the newsroom to produce less text and more audio-visual content.” In the U.S. between 2021 and 2025, the share of population consuming news video at least weekly increased from 55% to 72%, with most of the news video being viewed on social platforms.

3. Fragmentation of news source (channels). "Social media — and news consumption on it — continues to splinter, according to the report. There are now six platforms with weekly news reaches of 10% or more: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, X, and TikTok. A decade ago, there were just two with double-digit reach: Facebook and YouTube."

[1] https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...
by 999900000999 | 2025-06-17 17:18:23+00:00
My thoughts exactly.

This is a bizarre article. The elephant in the room is on the lower end most mid-range phones will beat a digital camera under 300$.

I wouldn't give a kid an expensive camera. Kids drop things. If you give Junior an 850$ camera and he loses it that's on you.

Then again, this is HN. Maybe he makes 700k TC per year and money is no object. Even then he admits for a few hundred more you can get a much more capable Fuji camera.

I purchased a used Fujifilm Fuji X-A5 for around 250$ off eBay, and a new XC 15-45 for 120$. It's not the best camera by any means, but I'm relatively stress free when using it compared to more expensive options.

Truth be told when your starting out you don't really need amazing gear. This goes for every hobby.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-17 17:18:35+00:00
I found Gemini now terrible for coding. I gave it my code blocks and told it what to change and it added tonnes and tonnes of needles extra code plus endless comments. It turned a tight code into a Papyrus.

ChatGPT is better but tends to be too agreeable, never trying to disagree with what you say even if it's stupid so you end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Claude seems like the best compromise.

Just my two kopecks.
by int_19h | 2025-06-17 17:18:39+00:00
Signal has its own limitations. It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't use it on tablets at all, and Android tablets are still unsupported (even as linked devices). There are other weird limits on linking, too - e.g. why can't I have a secondary phone as a linked device? Why can't I have more than 5 linked devices in total?
by Lammy | 2025-06-17 17:19:14+00:00
> for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(

I agree with you in principle, but this is only half-true. You're right that Facebook's XMPP was always just a gateway into their proprietary messaging system, but Google did support XMPP federation. What Google did not support was server-to-server TLS, and thus it was “us” who killed Google XMPP federation.

In late 2013 there was an XMPP community manifesto calling for mandatory TLS (even STARTTLS) for XMPP server-to-server communication by a drop-dead date in mid 2014: https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...

"The schedule we agree to is:

- January 4, 2014: first test day requiring encryption

- February 22, 2014: second test day

- March 22, 2014: third test day

- April 19, 2014: fourth test day

- May 19, 2014: permanent upgrade to encrypted network, coinciding with Open Discussion Day <http://opendiscussionday.org/>"

Well-intentioned for sure, but the one XMPP provider with an actual critical mass of users (Google Talk) remained non-TLS-only, all Google Talk users dropped off the federated XMPP network after May 2014, and so XMPP effectively ceased to matter. I'm sure Google were very happy to let us do this.
by rich_sasha | 2025-06-17 17:19:21+00:00
I guess the theory, really, is that it's funded by corporate taxes. The triad of key taxes is income, sales/VAT and corporate. Income, as you say, is out, so is sales (since it's paid by end consumers) so you're left with corporate. And I guess that's kind of what would happen if one day AI takes over. There will be masses of unemployable people, farms and mines and factories ran by computers, and we will all be funded by this.

Until that utopia comes around, I don't see any way to fund UBI, as you say.
by keybored | 2025-06-17 17:20:10+00:00
> It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.

Can this corporate propaganda stop? Premises:

1. That we (the corporation) offer a free service is because people don’t wanna pay

2. Those freeloaders are costing us money

3. Eventually we have to introduce ads, shrugs we hate to do it but the freeloaders force our hands

Instead:

1. The strategy IS to be free to use

2. INVEST money in building the network effect

3. When a critical mass has been reached: MONETIZE

Where is the user’s preference in this? Nowhere. Why assume anything else? Why?

It is patently irrational for all parties to spend money (“pay for what you use”) on a buergoning social media platform:

- Business: why add any friction at all to a social media platform that you are supposed to grow?

- ... and why concede any talking points to the naive people who think that paid service equals no ads or monetized “attention” if you do both?

- Just monetize people instead

- User: why would anyone on God’s Green Earth pay to use a social media platform that was pay-to-use on day zero when there are no users?
by guzik | 2025-06-17 17:20:14+00:00
I might be missing something, but is there any _practical_ value in this line of research beyond academic curiosity? I've stumbled across this article a few times already, and still can't quite find the real-world application where you'd want to identify someone just by their breathing pattern (especially considering that from the article that "you need to be equipped with a nasal cannula"). Maybe I'm being dense?
by rootnod3 | 2025-06-17 17:20:27+00:00
I said a majority. Say stack overflow, medium articles, online newspapers, they live off of click conversion. The internet is more than people just posting for fun. Of course everyone only posting for fun would be ideal.

But even if you only post for fun, if most people only find your content by seeing it re-hashed by a LLM that hallucinates some other stuff in the middle, I'd probably also lose the fun in posting for posting sake.
by caycep | 2025-06-17 17:20:45+00:00
This is true assuming it is just a matter of abnormal vs default state. Sometimes I wonder, especially as people are doing more studies using these implants for conditions like major depressive disorder...there are also concerns re even for motor symptoms like Parkinson's, there may be subtle cognitive/psychiatric changes - we have accidentally induced noticeable mania in some patients at least temporarily, until we were able to correct the settings on the device...
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-06-17 17:21:41+00:00
"Right behind the camera is the guy who designed this part and the entire jig".

This really important to understand! Engineers can't design good hardware products entirely from a cozy cubicle. It's necessary to intimately understand how the parts are made and assembled. The notion of putting design and manufacturing an ocean apart is madness. It's probably why my "Designed by Kitchenaid, St. Joseph Michigan USA" electric kettle keeps breaking under warranty.
by Someone1234 | 2025-06-17 17:22:22+00:00
That's what we did.

Most "kids cameras" sold today just use cheap webcam sensors (e.g. 1 MP, low dynamic range) that are sold for excessively high prices. They have few physical controls, no viewfinder, and are bulky.

Instead, why not grab a used iPhone SE, the camera sensor is still fantastic, and it will likely cost you less than most kids cameras. Remove everything except the Camera App, leave it in Airplane mode, and it will last roughly two days on a single charge (over a week idle).

PS - You can find deals on used cellphones by looking for "network locked" ones, since you won't be putting a SIM in it anyway.
by geor9e | 2025-06-17 17:22:29+00:00
I once lost years of Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, etc., etc., because I posted a meme to their Google Plus social media site. It was a JPEG screenshot of a credit card form, and it said, "This post is only viewable by Google Plus Gold members; sign up now." It just took one click from some apathetic call center moderator, who looked at the post for 0.5 seconds total, to get everything connected with the company insta-wiped. I bought a Synology NAS since then, and now I treat my relationship with any company as very fragile.
by caycep | 2025-06-17 17:22:44+00:00
I sometimes wonder - if the sensation of a "spiritual state" can be defined as a quantitative amount of some neurotransmitter in some circuit. That might be a sad day, though, for something that sounds so profound, to be reduced to numbers and probability....

The "out of body experience" ppl describe in near death always seemed to me to be a glitch of the brain's 3D perceptual space, i.e. a forced linear transform of 3D coordinates or something.
by hosh | 2025-06-17 17:23:16+00:00
There is a (perverse?) incentive to have an always-on network connected to services that can be metered and billed -- that is how we get monthjly recurring revenue. Even hardware companies want in on that -- think HP printers and authorized toner cartridges.

A different perspective on this shows up in a recent HN submission, "Start your own Internet Resiliency Club" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287395). The author of the article talks about what it would take to have working internet in a warzone where internet communications are targeted.

While we can frame this as whether we should design our digital products to accommodate people with iffy internet, I think seeing this as a resiliency problem that affects our whole civilization is a better perspective. It is no longer about accomodating people who are underserved, but rather, should we really be building for a future where the network is assumed to be always-connected? Do we really want our technologies to be concentrated in the hands of the few?
by Isamu | 2025-06-17 17:23:26+00:00
> Those who crit­i­cize so-called “AI doomers” often over­look that there is a broader, intel­lec­tu­ally serious tradi­tion of tech­no­log­ical doomerism that goes back decades.

Not wanting to be snarky but the “intellectually serious” is the issue here probably. For instance as you look into the mathematical model used by “The limits of Growth” you see the curves are chosen arbitrarily to fit what the authors expect, and are not empirically grounded except in the most vague sense.

Even the word “collapse” is used everywhere in vague and hyperbolic ways, it makes it difficult to have discussion.
by officeplant | 2025-06-17 17:23:28+00:00
I find the common problem with automatics is their service time scale. Bad car owners often forget to do oil changes often enough and those are only 3.5-10k miles apart depending on climate/oil type/etc. Which means services that happen every 50-75k miles or greater get left to people that actually maintain service histories and timely maintenance.

Personal example buying a used car with 60k miles that had some idle/start issues at times but generally ran well. Everything seemed to be serviced in a timely manner but the spark plugs were still the originals. Those spark plugs have a generous "100,000 mile" service interval. I pulled the originals and sure enough they weren't in the greatest shape. $40 later I never had start/idle issues again for the remaining time I owned the car.
by fibers | 2025-06-17 17:23:38+00:00
Microsoft makes me laugh. When I clicked your link to the docs file it looks like M$ added an AI bot attached to the Microsoft Learn platform so I decided to register with my work account.

> does Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 have access to WSL2 Sorry, I can’t help with this. Please make a new request or share your feedback.

What is the point of adding an LLM to docs if it can't even produce anything correct?
by btilly | 2025-06-17 17:24:29+00:00
I consider this an extremely important project.

One of the most reliable cognitive biases that we have is that cognitive dissonance prevents us from taking feedback on that which is important to us. Instead we convince ourselves that we've become good at that which we care about, and reject all evidence that we need to improve. The more we care about it, the more we fall into this trap.

There are ways to reduce how often we fall into this trap. For example https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoles... is a set of rules that many good programmers follow to avoid developing an ego about being a good programmer. This allows them to accept feedback from reality, and become better programmers over time. By contrast, programmers who think that they are good usually top out pretty quickly, and are usually pretty bad.

Unfortunately we always have a pull to believing that what we've done is valuable, and then falling into this trap. This causes entire fields of study, including scientific fields, to frequently fall into a self-reinforcing overconfidence in what they believe that they have shown. Which consistently results in missing their own errors, and rejecting contrary evidence.

Post-publication peer review by itself does not fix the problem. But it is a necessary feedback loop that is required for any meaningful fix. And the existence of post-publication peer review helps those not in the field to learn which fields should be trusted, and which not.

Therefore there is a lot of value in having more, and more effective, post-publication peer review. Even though we'll still have entire fields of science who are overconfident of their bad research.