MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matt-attack | 2025-06-16 05:55:57+00:00
I believe that consciousness has to be closed tied to our senses. I’ve always assumed that if you had none of the five senses (plus some of the other less talked about ones) you really wouldn’t be conscious. All thoughts are tied to some image or sound or sensory impact. A human who never had a single sensory input, due to let’s say a nerve damage or something, I don’t think it could ever actually have internal thoughts.
by anilgulecha | 2025-06-16 05:55:59+00:00
My personal insight on this: toy projects are fun not because they're small in scope, but because there's no downside to failure.

Production/professional software has significant downsides when they fail (customer unhappiness, professional performance and incentives, etc).

It's also why toy projects open up very innovative pathways. You tend to not be conservative with them, and once in a while something amazing ends up working. Bringing this non-conservativeness to professional software is a skill once developed makes your growth shoot up.
by everforward | 2025-06-16 05:56:37+00:00
I don’t think this paper proves that, and I don’t think it is in a traditional sense.

It can produce the next sentence or two, but I suspect it can’t reproduce anything like the whole text. If you were to recursively ask for the next 50 tokens, the first time it’s wrong the output would probably cease matching because you fed it not-Harry-Potter.

It seems like chopping Harry Potter up into 2 sentences at a time on post it’s and tossing those in the air. It does contain Harry Potter, in a way, but without the structure is it actually Harry Potter?
by vidarh | 2025-06-16 05:57:12+00:00
In practice it is not. And no, you don't have to run it, but it makes things a lot easier to do so.

And no, you don't need to do what you suggest, you just need to load all the code into a running Ruby REPL.

It is one consequence of Ruby being as dynamic as it is, but another is that the codebases tends to be far smaller. Anywhere from half to 1/10th of the size of codebases in statically typed languages is my experience, including with direct translations.
by foobar1962 | 2025-06-16 05:57:41+00:00
> In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god.

Many atheists find a verdict of "not guilty" on the charge "that god exists". It's the equivalent of saying "I don't believe you." That's about it.

Saying "god does not exist" is a claim that itself has a burden of proof. Most people agree there is no need to provide proof that fairies and unicorns don't exist. If you think they do: show your evidence. The default position is to think they don't exist.
by sameerds | 2025-06-16 05:58:14+00:00
Opening a pdf inside a browser feels to me like an application inside an application. My brain can't handle that load. I would rather have the browser to browse the internet and a pdf reader to display pdfs. If I clicked on a link to a pdf, it is _not_ part of the web, and I want the browser to stay out of it. Same goes for Office 360 wanting to documents inside my browser. I don't want it to do that. I have the necessary apps installed for it.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-16 05:58:29+00:00
Capitalism is allergic to second-order cybernetics.

First-order systems drive outcomes. "Did it make money?" "Did it increase engagement?" "Did it scale?" These are tight, local feedback loops. They work because they close quickly and map directly to incentives. But they also hide a deeper danger: they optimize without questioning what optimization does to the world that contains it.

Second-order cybernetics reason about systems. It doesn’t ask, "Did I succeed?" It asks, "What does it mean to define success this way?" "Is the goal worthy?"

That’s where capital breaks.

Capitalism is not simply incapable of reflection. In fact, it's structured to ignore it. It has no native interest in what emerges from its aggregated behaviors unless those emergent properties threaten the throughput of capital itself. It isn't designed to ask, "What kind of society results from a thousand locally rational decisions?" It asks, "Is this change going to make more or less money?"

It's like driving by watching only the fuel gauge. Not speed, not trajectory, or whether the destination is the right one. Just how efficiently you’re burning gas. The system is blind to everything but its goal. What looks like success in the short term can be, and often is, a long-term act of self-destruction.

Take copyright. Every individual rule, term length, exclusivity, royalty, can be justified. Each sounds fair on its own. But collectively, they produce extreme wealth concentration, barriers to creative participation, and a cultural hellscape. Not because anyone intended that, but because the emergent structure rewards enclosure over openness, hoarding over sharing, monopoly over multiplicity.

That’s not a bug. That's what systems do when you optimize only at the first-order level. And because capital evaluates systems solely by their extractive capacity, it treats this emergent behavior not as misalignment but as a feature. It canonizes the consequences.

A second-order system would account for the result by asking, "Is this the kind of world we want to live in?" It would recognize that wealth generated without regard to distribution warps everything it touches: art, technology, ecology, and relationships.

Capitalism, as it currently exists, is not wise. It does not grow in understanding. It does not self-correct toward justice. It self-replicates. Cleverly, efficiently, with brutal resilience. It's emergently misaligned and no one is powerful enough to stop it.
by eesmith | 2025-06-16 05:58:31+00:00
How so?

To me it looks like the paper was submitted last year but the peer reviewers identified issues with the paper which required revision before the final acceptance in March.

We can see the paper was updated since the 1 April 2024 version as it includes o1-preview (released September 2024, I believe), and GPT‑3.5 Turbo from August. I think a couple of other tested versions also post-date 1 April.

Thus, one possible criticism might have been (and I stress that I am making this up) that the original paper evaluated only 3 systems, and didn't reflect the fully diversity of available tools.

In any case, the main point of the paper was not the specific results of AI models available by the end of last year, but the development of a benchmark which can be used to evaluated models in general.

How has that work been made obsolete?
by oporquinho94 | 2025-06-16 05:59:44+00:00
Sounds like something you just made up. Kind of moot to argue what is natural and what isn’t.

Unfairness or billionaires might be natural or not - that doesn’t mean we have to accept their existence.

You know what else is natural? To die at 30 from dysentery or a broken leg.

Natural is a nonsense category
by strogonoff | 2025-06-16 06:01:08+00:00
This was what I meant primarily.

Camera sensor can get <1% of what we can see, any display media (whether paper or screen, SDR or HDR, etc.) can show <1% of what camera sensor can get.

(That 1% figure is very rough, it will vary by scene conditions, but it is not very off.)

Add to that, what each of us sees is always subjective and depends on our preceding experience as well as shared cultural baggage.

As a result, it is a creative task. We selectively amplify and suppress aspects of raw data according to what the display space fits, what we think should be seen, what our audience would be expecting to see.

People in this thread claiming there to be some objective standard reference process for compressing/discarding extra data for display space completely miss the fundamental aspect of perception. There is no reference process for even a basic task of determining what counts as neutral grey.

(As a bonus point, think how as more and more of our visual input from the youngest ages comes from looking at bland JPEGs on shining rectangles with tiny dynamic ranges this shapes our common perception of reality, makes it less subjective and more universal. Compare with how before photography we really did not have any equivalent of some “standard”—not really, but we mistake it for such—representation of reality we must all adhere to.)
by alevsk | 2025-06-16 06:01:39+00:00
TL;DR: I’m working on a Kubernetes project that could be useful for security teams and auditors, feedback is welcome!

I've built an RBAC policy analyzer for popular Kubernetes open-source projects (the code will soon be in a shareable state on GitHub), it inspects the API groups, resources, and verbs accessible by service account identities in a cluster. With that I put together an static website using hugo to visualize the findings, track policy changes, and document potential abuse scenarios, etc.

Why is RBAC important? RBAC is the final layer of defense in Kubernetes security. If workloads are compromised and an identity is stolen, a misconfigured or overly permissive RBAC policy (common with Operators) can enable attackers to move laterally within your cluster, potentially leading to a complete Kubernetes cluster takeover.

If this sounds interesting, please check out the site (no Ads or SPAM in there I promise) and let me know what I’m missing, what you like, dislike, or any other constructive feedback you may have.
by josephg | 2025-06-16 06:03:33+00:00
> It wouldn't have been insane to rename https to httpt or something after TLS 1.2 and screw backwards compatibility

That would have been at least little bit insane, since then web links would be embedding the protocol version number. As a result, we'd need to keep old versions of TLS around indefinitely to make sure old URLs still work.

I wish we could go the other way - and make http:// implicitly use TLS when TLS is available. Having http://.../x and https://.../x be able to resolve to different resources was a huge mistake.
by roenxi | 2025-06-16 06:03:50+00:00
This article could do with a good edit to cut out the middle section, which appears to be a list of mostly meaningless platitudes. Although I can't argue with great managers "organise ... a free team lunch" - managers of the world take note; deficiencies on the free lunch front could be what is holding you back from greatness.

The basic idea of greatness being small optimisations in a large number of areas is worth repeating a few times though. The majority of greatness comes from avoiding making any well known basic mistakes and a strategy of working through all the details and checking for small problems can do a lot to enable that. Big dramatic gestures generally do not.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-06-16 06:05:08+00:00
This is very "theory X" - the theory that people only work or do anything if someone in authority forces them to.

The other theory, "Theory Y" says that people work because that's what people do, and the function of authority is more about guidance and removal of blockages.

I'm a Theory Y believer, and believe that people work together to improve their lives without needing an authority or any compulsion. I believe that the incentive for people to work together for the common good, is the common good. That alone is enough incentive. I believe that authority tends to enrich itself and work against the common good. Less authority is better.
by barrenko | 2025-06-16 06:05:16+00:00
My nickel - we are in the primary stages of being given something like the famed "bicycle for the mind", an exoskeleton for the brain. At first when someone gives you a mech, you're like "woah, cool", let's see what it can do. And then you zip around, smash rocks, buildings, go try to lift the Eiffel.

After a while you get bored of it (duh), and go back to doing what you usually do, utilizing the "bicycle" for the kind of stuff you actually like doing, if it's needed, because while exploration is fun, work is deeply personal and meaningful and does not sustain too much exploration for too long.

(highly personal perspective)
by gf000 | 2025-06-16 06:08:19+00:00
Well, maybe search for the keyword "long COVID" and see how it has caused a lot of suffering even among young and otherwise healthy individuals.

Also, people seem to forget that exponentials go up very fast, so an "average person of average health" would be very selfish to not make the necessary precautions to limit the spread of the virus as much as feasible.
by kouteiheika | 2025-06-16 06:08:34+00:00
No, assuming that just because it was in the training data it must be memorized is hare brained.

LLMs have limited capacity to memorize, under ~4 bits per parameter[1][2], and are trained on terabytes of data. It's physically impossible for them to memorize everything they're trained on. The model memorized chunks of Harry Potter not just because it was directly trained on the whole book, which the article also alludes to:

> For example, the researchers found that Llama 3.1 70B only memorized 0.13 percent of Sandman Slim, a 2009 novel by author Richard Kadrey. That’s a tiny fraction of the 42 percent figure for Harry Potter.

In case it isn't obvious, both Harry Potter and Sandman Slim are parts of books3 dataset.

[1] -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24832 [2] -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05405
by adrian_b | 2025-06-16 06:09:25+00:00
Orange juice is not a good source of vitamin C. Neither is any other popular fruit juice. Most fruits are rather poor sources of vitamins, so they should be eaten for enjoyment, not for the hope that they cover your necessities in essential nutrients.

Eating one raw red bell pepper daily would provide an adequate intake of vitamin C. Kiwi fruits are also much better sources of vitamin C than oranges, eating a few provides the recommended daily intake. There are only a few other good choices, which do not require eating great quantities daily, e.g. black currants, broccoli, cauliflower.

However, adding to food pure ascorbic acid powder is about ten times cheaper than ensuring your vitamin C necessities with fruits or vegetables, so based on cost it can be the better choice.

The vitamin C supplements in pills or capsules are typically very overpriced in comparison with pure ascorbic acid powder and they mix the useful vitamin C with garbage excipients. Using ascorbic acid powder like table salt (but in very small quantities, according to the recommended daily intake), to enhance some of your food, is cheaper and healthier.
Show HN: I built a Chrome extension that makes bug reporting dead simple
by baursha | 2025-06-16 06:09:29+00:00
I built a Chrome extension that makes web testing dead simple. Just hover over any element, click, and boom - you've got a bug report with a screenshot!

Perfect for QA teams, developers, and designers who want to speed up their testing workflow.

Tech: React 18, Node.js, PostgreSQL

Would love your feedback! What features would make this even better?
by pera | 2025-06-16 06:10:51+00:00
> let's not pretend that an LLM that autocompletes a couple lines from harry potter with 50% accuracy is some massive new avenue to piracy

No one is claiming this.

The corporations developing LLMs are doing so by sampling media without their owners' permission and arguing this is protected by US fair use laws, which is incorrect - as the late AI researcher Suchir Balaji explained in this other article:

https://suchir.net/fair_use.html
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-06-16 06:13:10+00:00
I think NFTs have no credibility in the eyes of the public. Something akin to NFTs tracking real world ownership of physical things could work, but we already have that in the form of registries and deeds. Provenance is a solved problem, from a technical and social perspective.

The idea of “owning” a purely digital asset that anyone else can just make copies of (but not “own” according to some blockchain) just seems silly.
by larodi | 2025-06-16 06:13:18+00:00
The impact of writing is immensely undervalued. Even writing with a keyboard or screen is a lot more than non writing. Exercising writing on any topic is still beneficial, and you can find many psychologists recommend having a daily blog of some sort to help people observe themselves from a side. The same goes for speaking, public speech if u want, and therapeutic daily acting-playing which is also overlooked.

I’d love to see some sort of study on people who actively particulate writing their stuff on social media and those who don’t.

If u want to spare your mind from GPT numbness - write or copy what it tells you to do by hand, do not abandon this process.

Or just write code, programs, essays, poems for fun. Trust me - it is and you’ll get smarter and more confident. GPT is a very dangerous convenience gadget, is not going away like sugar or Netflix, or obesity or long commutes … but similarly dosage and counter measures are essential to cope with the side-effects.
by const_cast | 2025-06-16 06:13:31+00:00
Are you aware you've sent a link of side-effects, including interactions with medicine? That doesn't mean a substance is unsafe, all substances, including water, have side-effects. I've never known anyone to have any side effects from aspartame. I've never known anyone who has known anyone who has had side-effects from aspartame.

> "cigarettes are probably good for you"

The difference is Tobacco is a Group 1 Carcinogen - definitely carcinogenic. Along with processed red meat and alcohol.

Red meat is group 2B, possibly carcinogenic. This is also where Aspartame resides. Which means there are SOME studies showing carcinogenic effects, and other's which do not. Please note that the studies which showed carcinogenic effects in Aspartame used many hundreds or thousands of times the dose found in human food and beverage. The great thing about Aspartame is that it's not actually zero calorie - it's just very potent, so we put next to nothing in our food and beverage.

For all intents and purposes, Aspartame is completely safe. When compared to sugar, Aspartame is much, much safer. I mean, it's not even close.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-06-16 06:13:51+00:00
If LLMs are good at summarizing/compressing, what does this say about the underlying text? Why are some passages more easily recalled? Sure, some sections have probably been quoted more times than others, so there's bias in training data, which might explain why the Llama 1 and 3.1 images have similar peaks. Would this happen to LLMs even with no training bias?

Edit: seems the first part is about a memory about being bullied by Duddley. The second is where he's been elected to the quidditch team. Possibly they are just boring passages, compared to the surrounding ones. So probably just training bias.
What is your experience with AI code review tools?
by anjit6 | 2025-06-16 06:14:38+00:00
I am looking for personal suggestions on using AI code reviews. Did any of the tools actually help you with the code review process? If yes, what exactly did it help you with? Did you come up with any special workflow to ensure it works for you?

Also, I am curious about AI code review tools. How does it have an impact on who is reviewing? For example, can a mid-level dev manage the quality of a senior dev with the help of these tools?
by PixelPanda | 2025-06-16 06:14:56+00:00
Full disclaimer: I work at Nanonets

Excited to share Nanonets-OCR-s, a powerful and lightweight (3B) VLM model that converts documents into clean, structured Markdown. This model is trained to understand document structure and content context (like tables, equations, images, plots, watermarks, checkboxes, etc.). Key Features:

LaTeX Equation Recognition Converts inline and block-level math into properly formatted LaTeX, distinguishing between $...$ and $$...$$.

Image Descriptions for LLMs Describes embedded images using structured <img> tags. Handles logos, charts, plots, and so on.

Signature Detection & Isolation Finds and tags signatures in scanned documents, outputting them in <signature> blocks.

Watermark Extraction Extracts watermark text and stores it within <watermark> tag for traceability.

Smart Checkbox & Radio Button Handling Converts checkboxes to Unicode symbols like , , and for reliable parsing in downstream apps.

Complex Table Extraction Handles multi-row/column tables, preserving structure and outputting both Markdown and HTML formats.

Huggingface / GitHub / Try it out: https://huggingface.co/nanonets/Nanonets-OCR-s

Try it with Docext in Colab: https://github.com/NanoNets/docext/blob/main/PDF2MD_README.m...
by eru | 2025-06-16 06:15:32+00:00
> Plato's sock puppet Socrates?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem

> Socrates was the main character in most of Plato's dialogues and was a genuine historical figure. It is widely understood that in later dialogues, Plato used the character Socrates to give voice to views that were his own.

However, have a look at the Wikipedia article itself for a more nuanced view. We also have some other writers with accounts of Socrates.
by edanm | 2025-06-16 06:15:53+00:00
Thanks! I read through a bunch of that textbook when I first decided to learn more maths a few years ago, but I relatively quickly started dual-reading a different textbook ("Introduction to Set Theory" by Hrbacek and Jeck), which is a more in-depth, non-naive introduction. That's the book I'm continuing to work through now.
by eviks | 2025-06-16 06:16:08+00:00
> Sperm which successfully fertilize an egg are more likely to have specific characteristics, that’s all that matters here as that alone results in survival of the fittest.

This is way too generic. Which specific characteristics? How are those "favorable"? How are "injurious" filtered out?

> Producing even more so fertilized eggs have a marginally higher probability of live birth is a winning strategy.

So why not billions? Now try it with the eggs. Why have a few instead of millions? Again, nothing you say here helps you get to 50mil because it's all too generic "the higher the better; not that expensive" argument quality. And you won't have a higher probability of live birth if your meteor discarding filter don't filter out the defects that decrease this probability

> but they quite literally don’t matter because of the Trillions of sperm being produced

No, they don't matter for this conversation because it's about the meaning in differences in the ability to reach the egg. If every cell has a 0% chance, there is nothing to discuss.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-06-16 06:18:00+00:00
Yeah, but how do the other patricians react to that?

The Industrial Revolution changed British society, moving power from the feudal aristocracy to the new merchant class. It could only happen in a time where the feudal aristocracy were weakened (this is relatively shortly after the English Civil War). And also when the working class was not so powerful - the Luddites also resented the changes created in British society.

I think you could work with this, though - have the Forum discussing the changes, some backstabbing and politics about who gets licenses to use the new technology, who profits from it, who gets their traditional livelihoods destroyed. And introduce the Roman version of the Luddites - peasants deprived of their ancestral livelihoods by the new technologies.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-16 06:19:00+00:00
> I've taken my child to the doctor at least once where they correctly diagnosed the issue by listening to me describe symptoms and then glance at the child's hands, which weren't causing any issues and didn't look abnormal to me at the time.

Sure but how did you know to take your child to the doctor? You can't take them every single time they get a little bit ill. That's infeasible. (Unless you're super rich I guess.)

Normal people have to use their judgement, and you can slightly improve that judgement with things like AI and WebMD. Nobody is saying people get it right 100% of the time. Not even doctors do that.

> I think placing trust in a system that has no cognition of any kind and a very detailed track record of making shit up at random is foolish to the point of negligence.

Well that's why I said you have to verify it by checking reputable sources afterwards. I specifically said you shouldn't blindly trust it.