MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by intended | 2025-06-01 18:11:08+00:00
>Verification does not stop harassment or bullying.

I can say this from experience moderating, as well as research. I'll take the easy case of real world bullying first - people know their bullies here. It does not stop bullying. Attackers tend to target groups/individuals that cannot fight back.

Now you asked for evidence that either statement was true, but then spoke about reducing harassment. These are not the same things. This 2013 paper studied incivility in anonymous and non-anoymous forums [1] . Incivility was lower in the case where identities were exposed, however this did not stop incivility.

The Australian ESafety commisioner has this to say as well: > owever, it is important to note that preventing or limiting anonymity and identity shielding online would not put a stop to all online abuse, and that online abuse and hate speech are not always committed by anonymous or fake account holders. [2]

Now to bring GenAI into the mix - the cost of spoofing a selfie has now gone down quite a bit, if not made it very cheap. Verification of ID will require being able to manually inspect an individual. This means the costs of verification are VERY labor intensive. India has a biometric ID program, and we are talking about efforts on those scales. And even then, it doesn't stop false IDs from being created.

Combining these various points, ditching anonymity would necessitate a large effort in verifying all users, killing off the ability for people to connect on anonymous forums (LGBTQ communities for example) for some reduction in harassment.

This also assumes that people rigorously check your ID when its being used, becuase if there is any gap or loophole, it will be used to create fake IDs to spam, harass or target people.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263729295_Virtuous_...

[2] https://www.esafety.gov.au/industry/tech-trends-and-challeng...

> On the whole, I think anonymity has been a net negative for online community, but I understand that others may disagree.

I would like to agree with you, but having moderated content myself - people do not give a shit and will say whatever they want, because they damned well want you to know it.

Take misinformation; I used to think the volume of misinformation was the issue. It turns out that misinformation amplificaiton is more driven by partisan or momentar political needs, than our improved ability to churn out quantities of it.
by ijk | 2025-06-01 18:11:48+00:00
Depends on the definition of "knowledge"; there's a lot of factors that go into it. Some of the common approaches are continued/continual pretraining and model editing (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12598).

* Models are bad at learning that A=B implies B=A, let alone more complicated relations; augmenting the dataset with multiple examples with different phrasing/perspectives is important (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00213). The frequency that a relation occurs in the dataset affects the results (https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09597v2).

* You have to be able to balance preserving existing knowledge against the new knowledge (https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14502). There are techniques like making sure your data mix corresponds to the original training data, but new data is primed by existing data so it gets complicated (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09522).

* Curriculum training (a la Phi) can be quite effective for training knowledge into base models at the very least.

* Continued pretraining is much more difficult than most finetuning, though it is possible (https://unsloth.ai/blog/contpretraining).

* Model editing of individual facts is possible but tricky because everything is interconnected but the model isn't great at figuring out reciprocal relationships (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16218). There's been some slow progress, though I find that few people are aware that it is even possible, despite the progress that has been made (https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowledgeEditingPapers).

The keywords you want are knowledge injection, domain adaptation, continual pretraining, model editing.
by joshuajooste05 | 2025-06-01 18:11:49+00:00
Prompting, especially for code, is not too difficult of a skill to pick up, but the ability to A understand syntax and B develop the way of thinking is much harder.

I think the only way to learn to code is to really limit the use of AI (obvs can speed up some things, but never let him copy and paste from it)

I don't really think there is a substitute for encouraging him to push through without AI tbh.

When he eventually start's vibe coding, it will be like putting a v8 in a Ferrari instead of a VW golf.
by brudgers | 2025-06-01 18:12:18+00:00
Not really.

MIDI is a serial protocol.

At any given time only one message can be sent down the wire. [1]

So on the beat, an implementation can send either the clock pulse or note on or something else. [2]

If you send the clock everything else has to wait. If you send something else, the clock has to wait.

Now with modern computers, you are also dealing with USB which is a low priority parallel protocol and has to coordinate with everything else a modern kernel does.

Music is hard.

[1] premium hardware sequencers sometimes have two or more Midi Out to reduce contention.

[2] Midi Time Code solves this by encoding monotonic time into Midi and is how serious sync is done over Midi, e.g. in Hollywoood
by manmal | 2025-06-01 18:12:34+00:00
The security droids were also quite something. I found them super scary, with their eyes that seemed to understand, in a calculating way. And with a posture like giant primates, and the ability to easily tear people apart. Definitely not the watered down versions of „battle droids“ we‘ve seen so far, who were easily tricked and fell apart when you kicked them.
by _wire_ | 2025-06-01 18:12:45+00:00
Consider the situation of Covid-19 as a formal problem of ascertaining responsibility and liability. How would you approach reasoning about the problem?

For example, in commerce is there any reason to expect that events of broad liability will analyzed with a focus on a preference to causes rather than their effects?

If the cause was judged to be a lab leak, enormous investments would be jeopardized, and livelihoods disrupted, especially among the intelligentsia most qualified to ascertain that cause. Those living in the domains close to the cause would suffer the effects of liability even if they were not judged to be directly responsible.

If the cause is zoonotic (a contrived but useful distinction) then investments and intelligentsia become more secure as they are needed.

The fact that such investments and intelligence are possible causes must be defended against, even if they are not the cause.

In the case of the industry landscape immediately prior to Covid-19, there was an internal warning from researchers about GoF risks which politically went to the top of the U.S. and EU administrative branches. This warning was abided and used to rearrange a bunch of language about criteria for funding, and along the way risky work was outsourced to China.

It was understood in the society of research that they were playing with fire.

These points do illustrate any cause, but they do illustrate how we may expect a reaction about causes to unfold.

To put it more simply, if the policy and programs rationalized to mitigate such a hazard as Covid-19 were ever perceived to be the cause of such hazard, that would be a disaster. No one needs to be indoctrinated to know to avoid this perception, and doctrine will evolve to suppress any such perception.

And looking back we see the President of the U.S. was on point with the spin of the "China" virus, while China did everything in its power to keep quiet.

To repeat, the provenance of the explanation is in effects rather than cause.

This can be seen in the reaction to other catastrophes with high social profiles (two popular examples being 9/11 and JFK): explanations of cause are radically simplified and then dismissed to control liability, to the point of controlled disinterest in causes.

In some cases, such as the NATO attack on Bosnia, the order of causes and effects are rearranged contrary to science to produce the desired political perception; in that case events were rearranged to show how violent intervention had prevented a catastrophe when in fact it had caused a catastrophe.
by tough | 2025-06-01 18:15:07+00:00
Awesome, thanks! I do keep running on the issues, but the levers as you say make it harder to implement.

As of right now, I could only replace the JSON tool calling on LLM's on something I fully control like vLLM, and the big labs probably are happy to over-charge a 20-30% tokens for each tool call, so they wouldn't really be interested on replacing json any time soon)

also it feels like battling against a giant which is already an standard, maybe there's a place for it on really specialized workflows where those savings make the difference (not only money, but you also gain a 20-30% extra token window, if you don't waste it on quotes and braces and what not

Thanks for replying!
by amiga386 | 2025-06-01 18:15:21+00:00
Recall the classic essay, Ontology is Overrated - https://web.archive.org/web/20191117161738/http://shirky.com...

Book classification systems take on the the shape of the books being collected, and the books collected have the shape of the curator, who typically has the shape of the society they live in.

It's quite conciveable that any one classification system, designed for one person's idea of "all knowledge", massively biased to knowledge they and their society hold dear, is terrible for cataloguing another society's or sub-group's knowledge. The classic examples given in the essay include the first top-level category in the Soviet library system:

A: Marxism-Leninism A1: Classic works of Marxism-Leninism A3: Life and work of C.Marx, F.Engels, V.I.Lenin A5: Marxism-Leninism Philosophy A6: Marxist-Leninist Political Economics A7/8: Scientific Communism

and the Religion classification in the Dewey Decimal System:

200 Religion 210 Natural theology 220 Bible 230 Christian theology 240 Christian moral & devotional theology 250 Christian orders & local church 260 Christian social theology 270 Christian church history 280 Christian sects & denominations 290 Other religions

See the issue? Christianity has 220, 221, 222, 223 ... up to 289. Judaism has 296 alone. Islam has to share 297 with Bábism and the Baháʼí Faith. Buddhism doesn't even get a fucking category.

GUESS THE PREDOMINANT FAITH IN THE SOCIETY WHERE THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM WAS INVENTED.

Ultimately, the essay rejects singular classification altogether. The only reason it exists is because bookshelves are linear, and you want to put like books with like. That's it, that's all. And you have to squint a lot, because many books don't kindly stick to a single topic.

So, whatever classification system these Kiwi libraries make up, don't worry about it, it'll be just as bullshit as the Dewey Decimal System, but it'll be better-shaped for the books it's classifying, and it'll be useful as an overview of the collection, and a way to discover and explore it. A more helpful index would use tagging, and an even more helpful index would be a full-text search engine.
by LlamaTrauma | 2025-06-01 18:15:30+00:00
The theory I've developed is that the brain circuitry passes much of the information it processes through a "seat of consciousness", which then processes that data and sends signals back to the unconscious parts of the brain to control motor function, etc. Instinctive action bypasses the seat of consciousness step, but most "important" decisions go through it.

If the unconscious brain is damaged it can impact the data the seat of consciousness receives or reduce how much control consciousness has on the body, depending on if the damage is on the input or output side.

I'm pretty convinced there's something special about the seat of consciousness. An AI processing the world will do a lot of math and produce a coherent result (much like the unconscious brain will), but it has no seat of consciousness to allow it to "experience" rather than just manipulate the data it's receiving. We can artificially produce rainbows, but don't know if we can create a system that can experience the world in the same way we do.

This theory's pretty hand-wavy and probably easy to contradict, but as long as we don't understand most of the brain I'm happy to let what we don't know fill in the gaps. The seat of consciousness is a nice fixion [1] which allows for a non-deterministic universe, religion, emotion, etc. and I'm happy to be optimistic about it.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1621/
by deng | 2025-06-01 18:16:13+00:00
How do you think any professional works nowadays with MIDI? A good, modern USB interface (from Focusrite or similar) has a jitter well below 1ms, usually in the range of 200µs. If that is too much, simply sync your DAW with an external, dedicated clock, which will usually give you a jitter in the single µs range.
by mpweiher | 2025-06-01 18:16:42+00:00
Amiga Exec completely spoiled me when it came to elegance of operating systems.

Everything I learned about after it was a huge disappointment, including Mach. Particularly because it demystified the OS. Just a bunch of of lists, and due to the OO nature, they were the same kinds of lists.

Here's what a node looks like: next, previous, a type, a priority, a name.

A task? A node. With a bunch of extra state.

An interrupt? A node. With a lot less extra state.

A message? A node. With an optional reply port if the message requires a reply.

Reply port? Oh, that's just a port.

A port? Yeah, a node, a pointer to a task that gets signaled and a list of messages.

How do you do I/O? Send special messages to device ports.

No "write() system call", it's queues at the lowest levels and at the API layer.
by themgt | 2025-06-01 18:17:31+00:00
There's a lot to love, but e.g. the whole S2 arc where the Empire is provoking and covertly encouraging a rebellion on the planet they want to gut for resources - our protagonist gets a bad feeling about helping the amateur hour rebels but the amoral leader actually wants to encourage them knowing they'll likely fail.

"Think about a planet like Ghorman in rebellion. A planet of wealth and status."

"And if it goes up in flames?"

"It will burn... very brightly."

There's barely any recent popular TV or movies I can think of with the level of subtle, complex, morally grey themes Andor explored.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAJ3dUm_r2A
by daxfohl | 2025-06-01 18:18:06+00:00
That's true for now, and of course will be possible in the future too, but I think there's a potential future where AIs just own the whole stack: client, server, some inscrutable protocol between them, some ML model on both ends that interpret requests and responses, etc. All updated in real time, no manual version bumping or dependency pinning, etc. Will all that make things better? IDK, but it fits into a long line of "what hardware giveth, software taketh away".
by TimTheTinker | 2025-06-01 18:19:16+00:00
A "mechanical turk" grandmaster playing chess from inside a cabinet is qualitatively different from a robot with a chess program, even if they play identically.

To reduce a system to its inputs and outputs is fine if those are all that matter in a given context, but in doing so you may fail to understand its internal mechanics. Those matter if you're trying to really understand the system, no?
by ijk | 2025-06-01 18:19:33+00:00
I find that people generally vastly underestimate the degree to which LLMs specifically are just mirroring your input back at you. Any time you get your verbatim words back, for example, you should be skeptical. Repeating something word for word is a sign that the model might not have understood the input well enough to paraphrase it. Our expectations with humans go in the opposite direction, so it's easy to fool ourselves.
by mrandish | 2025-06-01 18:19:56+00:00
While it's true the Amiga never got the breadth of serious music sequencing software that was on the ST, I never experienced any issues with MIDI jitter or timing.

While the Amiga could do multi-tasking, applications could also optionally take over the entire machine, which many games obviously did but so did real-time video applications like the Video Toaster, animation, audio and music apps. Lots of Amiga games and video apps "raced the beam" in real-time without ever dropping a field of 60 fps video. So, at least in principle, the Amiga hardware was as capable as the Atari ST in terms of ability to respond to interrupts at MIDI rates. The Amiga also had video editing software, which back then, involved controlling three professional VTRs in real-time over that single serial port to do A/B roll editing on precise timecodes 29.97 times a second.

So, yeah, I agree that the Atari totally won the MIDI production music market because it had much better software applications. If you were primarily a music producer or studio, there was certainly no reason to pay more for an Amiga's custom graphics capabilities - and if you were serious, the Amiga's more limited music app selection made the choice for you. My only quibble is that, IMHO, the claims of 'MIDI jitter' somehow being endemic to the Amiga were more Atari marketing FUD than reality. I don't doubt that some user at some point did something on an Amiga that caused MIDI timing issues, but it wasn't because of some fundamental hardware limit. It was due to configuration, some app incompatibility, bug or some other solvable issue - because similar timing issues could occasionally happen on the ST too - and then would be solved.
by jlokier | 2025-06-01 18:21:10+00:00
2ms to generate, 1 second for basic text to appear and 20 more seconds to receive the whole page on my phone in the centre of town, due to poor service.

Compared with waiting on a blank page for ages, sometimes it's nice to see text content if it's useful, and to be able to click navigation links early. It's much better than pages which look like they have finished loading but important buttons and drop-downs are broken without any visible indication because there's JS still loading in the background. I'm also not fond of pages where you can select options and enter data, and then a few seconds after you've entered data, all the fields reset as background loading completes.

All the above are things I've experienced in the last week.
by stephencoyle | 2025-06-01 18:22:40+00:00
Thanks!

> Are there openings at certain positions in the reel

Yes, that's exactly it! The spool has holes, and there's an IR emitter/detector on either side. You can view the STLs on the GitHub repo or Printables and see for yourself.

It's better than the rotary encoder [for this project specifically] because it's cheaper and doesn't require the sensor to be a load-bearing part.
by stevesimmons | 2025-06-01 18:23:51+00:00
Why would I want to listen or watch a presentation (even sped up), when I can read a transcript many times faster, can scan through for the bits that are most relevant, and can quickly jump back to review something if I want to?

It's only when you read the transcript of pretty much any presentation or podcast that you realise how superficial most are and how low the information density actually is.
by duxup | 2025-06-01 18:24:46+00:00
>Zonghua is Cantonese and prefers not to give her real name. Tired of traveling and the pressures of the financial world, she resigned from her position in the spring of 2024, she tells this newspaper via a local social media platform. “I was looking for a more stable life,” she writes. But she doesn’t dare tell her family the truth. At first, she went to libraries, but for the past few months, she has been paying a monthly fee of 400 yuan ($55) for a comfortable space to spend the day; it’s much cheaper than spending hours in a cafe. Zonghua doesn’t know how much longer this situation will last, as, for now, she’s not having any “success” with her applications.

Is this largely about dealing with social pressures to get a job / appearing unemployed?

The scale of theater here seems high, but I've certainly heard of folks in the US hiding from social pressures when they've lost a job in similar, although less elaborate ways.

It is interesting that these occur in working offices, I would assume most companies in the US would consider that a distraction or even security issues.
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-01 18:24:47+00:00
yeah but the real GOAT here is elisp. True enlightenment comes when LISP ceases to be a language and instead becomes a turing-complete configuration file wherein you routinely spend 4+ hours coaxing a text editor into doing things that would have been trivial if you had just used a well-known single-purpose program that came with your gnu/linux distro anyways. It's a thing of beauty when it finally works, so much so that it's almost worth getting yelled at by your boss for taking way too long to complete simple tasks.

To paraphrase the late, great President John F Kennedy, "We choose to use emacs not because it is easy but because it is hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win!"
by ashoeafoot | 2025-06-01 18:24:49+00:00
Thats just how moscows classicism/ racism looks to outsiders. The provincials they could never accomplish this, it must be outsiders, real, civilized, people, whos region has not a THE before the name.

Suprise, without the mismanaged by the swampies, even kohol may burn down your little datchas balcony. Get out of Ukraine !
by ghurtado | 2025-06-01 18:25:45+00:00
> The fact that our consciousness is so mysterious as for us to be unable to begin to truly understand it is the biggest clue to why our software isn't getting close to it.

You offer a pretty big statement without any backing whatsoever.

Lots of things are imitable without understanding how they work

Mankind was making fire for hundreds of thousands of years before knowing that it was the rapid oxidation of combustible materials.

Claiming that it wasn't fire because it was complicated to understand would be ridiculous.
by StrauXX | 2025-06-01 18:25:59+00:00
Not my son, but I did teach my younger brother programming. From when he was about 10 to when he was about 14. I started out when he was showing interest in my programming work. I ended up gifting him a book on programming for kids. Then nudging him into working on it every now and again and helping him out when he had issues. Mostly my goal was to make him motivated to learn (showing him interesting projects I had been working on, etc.). From my experience with motivation and time the skills will come themselves, without motivation, every attempt is pointless.

It was a slow burner but over the course of four years he ended up learning quite a lot. Now being one of the best programmers in his college.
by intended | 2025-06-01 18:26:41+00:00
Much less bullying is a matter of degrees. It implcitly acknowledges that harassment occurs without anonymiity.

>If a verified actor can be permanently banned from a platform, then of course that will reduce misinformation on that platform by systematically excluding the originators.

Eh. Yes, in a simplified producer/consumer model of this. I'm personally all for removing people who are not engaging in good faith.

Thing is that misinformation is now firmly linked to political power.

Compared to facts? Misinfo is faster and cheaper to produce, yet perfectly suited to maximize engage amongst the target audience. A key moment in that process, is when a fringe narrative is picked up by a key player in the media ecosystem.

Removing such a node, is to take up arms against the political forces using misinformation to fuel their narratives.

Not saying it shouldn't be done if it can. Just that we need a better set of understandings and tools before we can make this case.