MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nathan_compton | 2025-06-11 21:52:42+00:00
On the other hand, there are a lot of stars and different cultures might give them different names and yet there really are many of them.

Furthermore, assume God doesn't exist. Lots of cultures might invent god for various reasons and they'd naturally have different names and attributes for them, which in fact seems to be the current state of affairs.

In fact, if we assume God exists and is actively in communication with humans, its actually a bit weird that different human cultures would have different conceptions and names for that being. Why didn't it just give everyone the same name and information?
by GodelNumbering | 2025-06-11 21:54:07+00:00
This brings to mind something I keep thinking about for years (mostly from watching too many physics videos).

- Gravity "slows" the time down, gravitational singularity should bring the time to a halt

- Suppose there is a quantum process that makes the true singularity impossible, so all black holes immediately expand right back

- Looking at it from our time scales, even if the singularity existed for a moment, it would appear that "infinite" time has passed while from the black hole's perspective, the expansion was instantaneous.

- From earth's perspective, if the singularity ever existed in a black hole, it stands to reason that when the time "resumes" from a black hole expansion, it won't fall into any of our known timelines since infinite time would have passed.
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-06-11 21:54:27+00:00
Using structured generation (i.e., supplying a regex/json schema/etc.) for outputs of models and tools, in addition to doing sanity checking on the values returned in struct models sent/received from tools, you are able to provide a nearly identical level of protection as SQL injection mitigations. Obviously, not in the worst case where such techniques are barely employed at all, but with the most stringent use of such techniques, it is identical.

I'd probably pick Cross-site-scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities over SQL Injection for the most analogous common vulnerability type, when talking about Prompt injection. Still not perfect, but it brings the complexity, number of layers, and length of the content involved further into the picture compared to SQL Injection.

I suppose the real question is how to go about constructing standards around proper structured generation, sanitization, etc. for systems using LLMs.
by maccard | 2025-06-11 21:54:39+00:00
> I'll take a look at the OSS stuff you linked: thank you!

Hope it fares out! I didn't message on your behalf because I didn't know if you had agreements already with them. But $20 or $70/mo saved on outgoings for a few emails certainly worth a shot :)

> The pre-allocation means some kind of commitment: every time I've looked I've baulked at dropping many thousands of dollars in one go (and it screws up my terrible book-keeping :D ). I should probably revisit it. It's really nice to know I'm not paying for things I don't "need", but it's unlikely CE usage will drop _that much_ in the next year or two (say).

There's quite a few ways to do this, and if you do manage to get some info from AWS they'd almost certainly be happy to help you out. Sticking with AWS, you're already using Spot Instances but you mentioned you have:

GPU Production: 2-4x g4dn.xlarge/g4dn.2xlarge with 1 on-demand base + spot instances

Assuming you've got 1 g4dn.xlarge running for 730 hours, that's ~$380. If you purchased a RI with no upfront for that machine, you'd save $140/mo, the only thing you're comitting to is running that instance 24/7/365 for a year (not paying the full annual cost up front) . You could almost certainly do the same for some of the extra cheap instances (and move them all to g style) for another $20/mo, but it's really picking at hairs there
by gabriel666smith | 2025-06-11 21:55:16+00:00
I understand that point of view.

Perhaps this is contextually useful - when writing prose fiction, one technique I've played with recently which I found interesting is generating a really broad spectrum of 'next tokens' halfway through a sentence, via multiple calls to different models on different temp. settings, etc.

It's fascinating to see the expected route for a sentence, and (this is much harder to get LLMs to output!) the unexpected route for a sentence.

But seeing some expected routes, per the LLM, can make the unexpected, surprising, or interesting routes much more clear in the mind's eye. It makes sentences feel closer to music theory.

You are right that this does create a more 'editorial' relationship between yourself and the work.

I'd stress that this isn't a negative thing, and has heavy literary precedence - an example that comes to mind is Gordon Lish's "intuitive structuring" principle, in which you just write the best-sounding next word, and see what the story becomes by itself, then edit from there - a totally sonic approach.

My example here with "arrays of next tokens" is a super granular, paintbrush-type example, but I want to be clear that I'm not at all advocating for the workflow of 'write a prompt, get a piece of art'.

I do however think that there's a vast middleground between "write me a whole book" and "show me the expected next token", and that this middleground is absolutely fascinating.

Not least because it makes literature (an artform previously more resistant to mathematics than say, music, or painting) more in touch with its own mathematics, which were previously very hidden, and are only currently being discovered.
by giardini | 2025-06-11 21:55:35+00:00
"bated breath", dammit!

- an old fisherman and aficionado of William Shakespeare.

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/ba...

FTFA: "Unless you've devoured several cans of sardines in the hopes that your fishy breath will lure a nice big trout out of the river, baited breath is incorrect."*
by saulpw | 2025-06-11 21:55:49+00:00
Perhaps you should use 'sentience' or something more precise to mean 'qualia-experiencing'. The word 'consciousness' is quite overloaded and thus trips people up who haven't thought about this as extensively as you have. In particular many people take it to mean "self-awareness" (whether correctly or not), but it seems obvious to me that there are many sentient beings which lack self-awareness but still have an internal experience.
by Kranar | 2025-06-11 21:55:53+00:00
Of course you could perceive it, measure it and record it. The entropy of your body or your brain is not necessarily increasing, nor is the entropy of your computer or other information storage systems.

Entropy only statistically tends towards an increase in closed systems and neither your computer or your brain are closed systems. They are both constantly getting energy from an external source of power and in turn dispersing previously consumed energy out into their environment.

And yet you still manage to perceive things just fine... in fact your perception of the world is unlikely to change whether or not the entropy in your brain increases or decreases by some bounded amount (of course too much of either an increase or decrease will destroy your brain).

Your claim about remembering an event, which likely alludes to Laplace's demon [1], requires an overall increase in entropy in the system as a whole, but does not require an increase in entropy in the specific part of the system that is recording the event.

Every time your computer calls a function like memset(dst, 0), or sorts a list, or arranges data into some kind of structured binary tree, your computer is decreasing its own internal entropy by taking a statistically likely arrangement of bits and transforming it into a very unlikely arrangement of bits. The decrease in the internal entropy of your computer is more than offset by an increase in global entropy but that global entropy is radiating way out into the cosmos and has no impact on your computer's ability to register information.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
by dmarcos | 2025-06-11 21:56:43+00:00
Thanks! Notice 12MB steak sandwich is the biggest of them all. Rest are < 10MB and several of those very compelling in the 1-3MB range (e.g: Iberico Sandwich 1MB, Clams and Caviar 1.8MB).

Fancier compression methods are coming (e.g SOGS). This is 30MB!

https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/
by avmich | 2025-06-11 21:57:06+00:00
> But how come Penrose’s theorems forbid out such outcomes? It’s all down to a rule called the quantum exclusion principle, which states that no two identical particles known as fermions can occupy the same quantum state (such as angular momentum, or “spin”).

> And we show that this rule prevents the particles in the collapsing matter from being squeezed indefinitely. As a result, the collapse halts and reverses. The bounce is not only possible – it’s inevitable under the right conditions.

Then how comes the neutron stars collapse into black holes despite obeying the exclusion principle?
by HocusLocus | 2025-06-11 21:57:36+00:00
Houseplants need our help. They are in need of emotional support people and you should adopt one today and just love it, try not to judge it.

Potted plants got a big rush from movies like Silent Running, that a tightly woven biosphere could engage in complete symbiosis with people, bunnies and Joan Baez.

Then as NASA gave plants the cold shoulder, the idea that plants were collectively 'the lungs of the world' took hold completely and gave them solace. House plants stood a little taller and dreamed themselves into a crucial role in keeping their critter-buddies alive, with help from their distant friends in the Amazon through open doors and windows.

Then cruel scientists popped that dream bubble, and awarded the 'lungs of the world' role to bluegreen algae in the oceans. The plants who must struggle to put out every leaf were eclipsed by little things that multiplied all day long.

So houseplants have become neurotic and anxious.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-11 21:57:37+00:00
It's a amazing to me what can be made / sold for so cheap. A friend recently got one of these

https://www.surenoo.com/products/23280116

(note: the picture with the hand is way off scale. Thing is slightly larger than a MagSafe phone charging ring (since one way to power it is to put it over such a ring)

$25

Unfortunately I have no experience on how to mod it and after searching for 10-15 mins it seemed like more work than I wanted to deal with. Seems like you need to build your own firmware and re-flash it. I found someone had used it to build a nest like control for Home Assistant

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guition-1-8-360x360-es...

If I'd found an easier way to just write some python or JavaScript I might have spent a few hours/days making some round games or demos.
by gassi | 2025-06-11 21:58:02+00:00
This is incredibly relevant to projects in this space, and we continue to hold discussions about what is and isn't tolerated in our community, and what features we should avoid building, in order to protect ourselves from legal attacks. One thing you'll never see integrated into the RomM is a way to pull/download ROMs from cloud services or website; you'll always need to provide the games to RomM directly, after sourcing them legally of course.
by chfritz | 2025-06-11 21:58:16+00:00
"California safety regulations currently require operators to be "stationed" at the controls."

This is NOT a huge burden. Any robotics company operating a fleet today will have someone watching almost all the time in one form or another anyways. So this really just becomes a matter of interpreting what "the controls" means. The regulation seem to omit any mention of "on the device/vehicle" so these controls can clearly be remote. It also doesn't seem to specify a 1:1 ratio of operators to devices. So if there is one operator, e.g., at the air-conditioned HQ of the robotics vendor, at the "controls" of twenty tractors that are operating in the field which the operator can see remotely using low-latency video-streaming and which he can stop instantly with the press of a button, then that might already be all that is required. It certainly is logically.
by anthk | 2025-06-11 21:58:41+00:00
>Roman carriages

That's an urban legend.

>Stuck in the past

So are pencils, erasers, and pens. And they just work.

Win 95 was propietary, yes, but the design had top UI/UX.

Add virtual desktops on top of that among an 'always on top' toggle button and you'll have everything.
by fidotron | 2025-06-11 21:59:56+00:00
> the infrastructure is apparently terrible

This is unsurprising. LED displays/arrays/strips involve using enough power that a software specialist is unlikely to manage it safely without getting decent at electronics. Conversely, the hardware people can throw just enough software together to make the happy path work, but not scale it up let alone reliably.

There are some people genuinely superb at both domains, but at some point they sucked at one or the other. The trick is to be ready to absorb information from both sides, but many will simply go "hey, it works on the happy path" and move on. My personal cutoff is whenever it goes over 12v or 500mA I know I'll be getting a second opinion.
by wrs | 2025-06-11 22:00:16+00:00
I guess I don't really understand the goal of "one-shot" parser generation, since I can't even do that as a human using a parser generator! There's always an iterative process, as I find out how the language I wanted isn't quite the language I defined. Having somebody or something else write tests actually helps with that problem, as it'll exercise grammar cases outside my mental happy path.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-11 22:00:24+00:00
I mean, yeah, he's a rapist, but I dunno if you're paying attention however this century #metoo is about women generally being of the opinion that yeah, lots of men are what you're calling "sexual predators" and getting away with it.

A rapist is currently President of the United States of America. You likely work with and admire "sexual predators". Works like this diary serve the same purpose as SF shorts, they're holding up a mirror to our world, Sam has wasted days because telephones don't exist and so it's impossible for him to reach a person quickly if they're not where he expected - but "I'm a powerful man so I decided to have sex with a less powerful woman and she couldn't stop me" is one of the top stories in the news site I was just looking at.

Plus ça change
by jaccarmac | 2025-06-11 22:00:51+00:00
Over the past several years I have slowly patched the .NET version of Shen to run on Linux and modern .NET releases. I also learned about Higher-Order Perl the other year and have a dream of going through the book and implementing the exercises in Shen while tuning the compiler.

But while I have had a broad interest in compilers for years and years, it feels difficult-to-impossible to actually complete any of it. Part of it's general depression and time management, part is looking at the long story of these projects and the lack of progression: Stuck in a rut of mediocrity.

https://github.com/rkoeninger/ShenSharp https://github.com/jaccarmac/junkcode/tree/79ea647d4ddbe41cf...
by codethief | 2025-06-11 22:01:07+00:00
> Combined with the other observation that our universe has uniform density at large scales

s/has/had at the time of recombination

It is largely an assumption of LCDM that we can treat the universe as practically homogeneous throughout its entire evolution but potentially not a very well-founded at that [0, 1].

> I always felt uncomfortable with that characterization. It seems more reasonable to me to think of dark energy as _negative energy_ - i.e. a loss of overall energy.

Your intuition is correct. If the Lambda term in the Einstein field equations is moved over to the side of the energy momentum tensor, it takes on the role of a negative contribution (provided Lambda > 0, as observations seem to indicate).

> In a classical system, two things moving away from each other stores potential energy that can be recouped at some later time. Dark energy doesn't work this way - things accelerate away from each other the further apart they are. From a global perspective, it's an energy loss.

Note that there is no global energy conservation in General Relativity[2], only at a local scale[3]. Heck, you'll already struggle to define what the energy is of a given piece of spacetime in a meaningful and generic manner[4, 5]. In other words, violations of energy conservation due to spacetime expanding or contracting (a strictly non-local phenomenon), like in the case of the cosmic redshift, are expected and our intuition from classical mechanics only takes you so far.

> It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark energy as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some form never to return.

Dark energy aka the cosmological constant term in the Einstein field equations is a constant term, as the name suggests. Yes, there can be energy loss due to spacetime expanding (see above) but that doesn't change the gravitational constant.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_web

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93energy_tensor

[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02931

[5]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_general_relativity
by rco8786 | 2025-06-11 22:01:10+00:00
What’s not clear to me is how agents/AI written code solves the “half hearted review” problem.

People don’t like to do code reviews because it sucks. It’s tedious and boring.

I genuinely hope that we’re not giving up the fun parts of software, writing code, and in exchange getting a mountain of code to read and review instead.
by pdabbadabba | 2025-06-11 22:01:32+00:00
I'm not here to debate which country works harder. Among other things, I'm not at all convinced that it's good for a society for people to be so devoted to their jobs.

But it's worth pointing out that the U.S.'s famous 9-to-5 is completely inapplicable to any sort of high-demand job. For many people in a demanding profession like tech, a 9-to-5 job would be an absolute (and often unattainable) dream. Where I live (Washington, D.C.) people who want a 9-to-5 will generally leave industry altogether and work for the government. (And even there, a true 9-to-5 can be elusive.)
by throw0101d | 2025-06-11 22:03:28+00:00
> Intel's Omni-Path was very similar but a little different from Infiniband.

While Intel may have had the 'IB-adjacent' Omni-Path, they also had plain-old IB as well. I ran these/similar switches for an Isilon back-end network (starting when Isilon was still an independent company, pre-EMC buyout, pre-Dell buyout, in the OneFS 6.x days):

* https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000019215/install-a...
by hshshshshsh | 2025-06-11 22:04:33+00:00
Why do you think God will have a name? Name is used by humans to identity a person among a lot of other persons. Why will God have a name if it is the only thing in existence?

To answer the question of why humans give name to God. It's to make god more relatable so that they can workshop it. And use devotion to come closer with it. Look up Bhakti Yoga.
by kulahan | 2025-06-11 22:04:47+00:00
> I already addressed this with my comments on

No, you didn’t lol. You showed how American soldiers could shoot at some other military members who were in a tank. I gotta say, if you think I care even half as much about any random Brit more than any American, you’re crazy.

Also, are you under the impression that a random soldier going on a killing spree against innocent Americans would be treated the same as the President playing legal games, albeit ones with very serious consequences?
by 2c2c2c | 2025-06-11 22:04:48+00:00
I love that the only example of inconvenience presented in this thread is that a person might open the wrong game while on a steam deck while possibly not having internet while on a plane. The agony!

I was right there with you with this opinion back in the day. Distribution was terrible, people didn't have near 24-7 access to internet. The times have changed. You're also not 11 years old anymore. You can afford to pay your peers in your industry.
by leakycap | 2025-06-11 22:04:50+00:00
All things have to start somewhere. My insurance paid the extreme prices that this rare treatment required at the time, and my treatment meant they had more data (and now a decade of follow up) to verify if the treatment works.

I didn't have a job with insurance because of luck, in fact I was aware enough of medical costs I chose which job I accepted based on the medical benefits.

I was lucky to be alive at a time treatment was available and within reach of a modern working person, not lucky like the Queen's nephew being promoted.

I think saying I was single and working my first job out of college should put it in perspective here. I didn't drive a Cadillac to my chemos. Stuff costs money, especially medical R&D, production, and care delivery.
by ogou | 2025-06-11 22:04:57+00:00
A research paper makes use of multiple sources of known provenance and various degrees of authority and relevance. It tries to establish a consensus of knowledge, as close to fact as possible. The phrase "research suggests" is an appeal to authority that implies some kind of academic rigor. A theory paper, which is still useful and important, can be published without any kind of authority. You can just make things up.
Show HN: Guardient – An API to block fake users (temp emails, VPNs, burner phone
by mhzn | 2025-06-11 22:05:18+00:00
I built Guardient, a simple API to help developers stop fake, abusive, and risky users before they get into your app.

It checks things like:

Temporary/disposable emails

VPN and proxy IPs

Temporary/burner phone numbers

You send a request from your backend, and it returns a trust score with reasons. You decide what to do with that info—block, flag, or allow.

No cookies, no client-side scripts—just a clean, server-side API.

I’m 18 and built this out of personal need after getting hit with fake signups and spam in my own projects. Would really appreciate any feedback or thoughts!
by BrenBarn | 2025-06-11 22:06:44+00:00
> Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process.

Sure, maybe so. But now with hindsight we can see what happened and we should realize that it's going to happen again unless we do something.

> The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.

I think both bad and good are part of humanity. In a sense this "toxic" part is not that different from the part that leads us to, say, descend into drug addiction, steal when we think no one is looking, leave a mess for other people to clean up, etc. We can do these negative things on various scales, but when we do them on a large scale we can screw one another over quite egregiously. The unique thing about humans is our ability to intentionally leverage the good aspects of our nature to hold the bad aspects in check. We've had various ways of doing this throughout history. We just need to accept that setting rules and expectations and enforcing them to prevent bad outcomes is no less "natural" for humans than giving free rein to our more harmful urges.
by Jabrov | 2025-06-11 22:06:59+00:00
"... so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them"

This sounds like a really wild take. Just because something has been evolving for millions of years doesn't necessarily mean it's evolving information processing capabilities. It's patently obvious to me that the information processing capabilities of animals (eg. just vision alone) are far beyond those of plants.