MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saberience | 2025-06-16 15:48:32+00:00
Are you trying to misunderstand me purposefully?

I'm talking about a precise, technical, scientific definition, that scientists all agree on, and which doesn't rely on the definitions of other words, and can also be reliably tested.

There has been constant debate about what consciousness means among scientists, philosophers, psychologists for as long as the word has existed. And there has never been any consistent and agreed upon test for consciousness.

The Google definition of consciousness is: "the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings."

By that definition, a Tesla self driving car is conscious, it is aware of and responsive to its surroundings...
by abetusk | 2025-06-16 15:48:43+00:00
Entropic gravity is like the "brazil nut effect" [0] [1]. The idea is that if you shake a glass full of different sized nuts, the large ones will rise to the top.

From what I understand, this is because larger objects have more mass, moving slower when shaked, so as the larger (brazil nuts) don't move as much relative to the smaller ones (peanuts), and because of gravity, there's a cavity left under the brazil nut which gets filled in with peanuts.

For entropic gravity, the idea is that there's a base density of something (particles? sub-atomic particles?) hitting objects in random ways from all directions. When two large massive objects get near each other, their middle region will have lower density thus being attracted to each other from particles hit with less frequency from the lower density region. They sort of cast a "shadow".

I'm no physicist but last time I looked into it there were assumptions about the density of whatever particle was "hitting" larger massive objects and that density was hard to justify. Would love to hear about someone more knowledgeable than myself that can correct or enlighten me.

As an aside, the brazil nut effect is a very real effect. To get the raisins, you shake the raisin bran. To get gifts left from your cat, you shake the kitty litter. It works surprisingly well.

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

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Incnv2CfGGM
by themanmaran | 2025-06-16 15:48:59+00:00
This is a big problem when it comes to conversational agents. Sometimes users ask questions that are really prying, potentially misleading, or just annoying repeats (like asking for a cheaper price 50 times).

In these situations a real person would just ignore them. But most LLMs will cheerfully continue the conversation, and potentially make false promises or give away information they shouldn't.
by mindcrime | 2025-06-16 15:49:02+00:00
Oh man. There's way too many to pick. But... if I just go with the one historical figure that I'm most fan-boy'ish about and have always sort of idolized: Nikola Tesla.

Why? It's hard to put in words, but I've just always found his story and his ideas fascinating, and he seems like a really interesting character. I would love to have a chance to sit down and talk with him.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-16 15:49:19+00:00
> For myself, I'm fine with Github Copilot auto-completions (up to ~10 lines max) and I review every line it wrote

This is what I would like to use it for, but I have been struggling quite a bit with it

If I have a rough idea of what a 10-line function might look like and Cursor does the Autocomplete suggestion, it is nice when it is basically what I had in mind and I can just accept the suggestion. This happens very rarely for me though

More often I find the suggestion is just wrong enough that I want to change it, so I don't accept it. But this also shoves the idea I had in my head right out of my brain and now I'm in a worse position, having to reconstruct the idea I already had

This happened to me enough that I wound up entirely turning off these suggestions. It was ruining my ability to achieve any kind of flow

> Because of this I mainly use these tools for one-off, POC, or just screwing around.

Yeah... My company is making these tools mandatory and I suspect they are collecting metrics to see who is using them and how much

It's been very stressful and overall an extremely negative experience for me, which is made worse when I read the constant cheerleading online, and the "You're just using it wrong" criticisms of my negative experience
by theamk | 2025-06-16 15:49:24+00:00
Looks like there is a glaring omission: on Linux, the best way to sandbox program is via systemd service file, which is only a few lines of ini file, no matter what your source code is written as.

This is especially bad for the second part - if you are comparing existing open-source sandbox solution, you should not ignore the most common method on Linux!
by cometapi | 2025-06-16 15:49:37+00:00
Claude 3.7 Sonnet represents a milestone in AI reasoning and coding capabilities, offering developers unprecedented control over how an AI “thinks” through complex tasks. Released in February 2025, Claude 3.7 Sonnet introduces a hybrid reasoning model that seamlessly toggles between rapid responses and detailed, step-by-step reflection, making it ideal for both straightforward queries and multi-stage workflows. API users can fine-tune the model’s thinking behavior via configurable “thinking budgets,” allowing precise trade‑offs between speed, cost, and depth of reasoning.
by lazide | 2025-06-16 15:49:56+00:00
‘Demand’ in this sense is driven by economics + politics.

Nothing is going to beat fossil fuels on pure economics, so then we’re left with what political pressure will be applied and how much to make other options economic enough.

Biofuels are so marginal, it’s unlikely they’re going to ‘win’ as they would require exceptional political pressure and excluding a lot of other options.
by rfrey | 2025-06-16 15:51:02+00:00
It's actually a mid-elite idea, I'd say - that novice/mid/elite programmer meme springs to mind. For sure profanity is used a ton by those some would consider the rabble. Then there's medi-elite who are very pure in their language.

And then there's the academics, surgeons, and nuclear physicists who use quite a bit of profanity (especially the surgeons!) and teach their kids that profanity is a linguistic tool that is often super effective.
by tristan957 | 2025-06-16 15:51:11+00:00
If we pay people 40 cents an hour just to say they aren't slaves, they they are slaves for all intents and purposes. They are put in poor working conditions working for for-profit companies, making much less than minimum wage. How is it legal for the State to not provide sunscreen or shade for inmates doing outdoor manual labor?

https://theappeal.org/louisiana-prisoners-demand-an-end-to-m...
by BryantD | 2025-06-16 15:51:22+00:00
Sincere thanks!

Some notes: in Connecticut, restraining orders can be granted for a variety of reasons, not restricted to domestic violence alone. Fairly close correlation but it does include, for example, stalking.

It seems unwise to assume that restraining orders alone represent the entire count of domestic violence complaints that reach the legal system. For example, surely domestic violence arrests should be counted? Which seem to be a much higher count than restraining order applications -- 24,850 DV arrests in 2011 vs. 9033 DV applications. I'm not sure how to count the 32,111 "Family Violence Protective Orders" in 2011; are they the result of arrests? Are they yet another possible outcome of law enforcement involvement, separate from either a requested restraining order or an arrest?

There are way more reasons a restraining order might not make it to a final order besides "the requestor was proven wrong." I'd want more detailed data here before reaching a conclusion. Otherwise, this assumes that failure to grant a restraining order proves lack of DV. I am not sure that it would change the percentages you've shown significantly -- we're all aware of cases where restraining orders weren't granted with very bad results, but there's always a tendency to report on the most clickbaity outcomes. Still, worth digging into that one a bit more.

Again, appreciate the cite.
by nradov | 2025-06-16 15:51:28+00:00
Most criminals aren't in a financial position to pay compensation. And even if you get a judgment, good luck ever collecting. When a drunk driver damaged some of my property I didn't bother sueing him because he was obviously a worthless deadbeat.

In most US jurisdictions the victim of a crime is allowed to make a statement during the sentencing phase of the trial. So the victim can certainly request release if they want it although the judge isn't obligated to adhere.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-16 15:51:50+00:00
Appreciate the engagement. But your reply mostly recenters a pro-capitalist narrative by redefining the products of "emergence" as inherently good. My argument isn't about stacking pros and cons and calculating the combined sum. It’s about a structural blind spot: capitalism systematically collapses higher-order questions about what kind of world were building into first-order value propositions like "growth," "utility," and "innovation."

That's the core problem. Capitalism resists second-order critique from within because it translates every possible value: justice, meaning, even critique itself, into terms it can price or optimize. Your response is a perfect example: you defend capitalism by listing its outputs, but that;s another first-order move. If you were engaging at the second-order level, you'd interrogate not what the system produces, but what it refuses to ask, and who gets to decide. That silence is precisely my point.
by korse | 2025-06-16 15:52:29+00:00
>What I find lazy is when stories try to make me guess about "what" happens in the story, flex about technological details, or use surprise as a narrative device.

This is interesting to hear. I might not be interpreting your comments correctly but some of my favorite 'fiction' seems to contain all of this laziness. Significant technical detail that resists attempts at mental dismantling, a purposely ambiguous ending and a type of unreliable narrator.
by AlexandrB | 2025-06-16 15:52:48+00:00
I think context is important. In a large corporate context, NIH kills you because everything you implement needs to be documented, debugged, and understood by 10s or 100s of other people. In a small or one-man project, a lot of the NIH downsides go away and it makes (some) sense to reinvent the wheel if there are performance or simplicity benefits to be had. Consider Roller Coaster Tycoon as an example of the latter - where the author wrote everything in asm out of personal preference and for performance reason instead of using C and its libraries.

I'm surprised by how many people on HN are yelling at the author to code as if he's working at a company like Adobe, when objectively Adobe's PDF reader is dogshit (especially performance wise) for most people and is probably built on best practices like using standard libraries.
by xp84 | 2025-06-16 15:52:56+00:00
Don’t underestimate how expensive ads are and thus how much money they can bring in. Marco Arment, the developer of Overcast podcast player, has made remarks in the past about how the ad-supported version is completely viable and may actually make him more money per user than the price of his paid option. In his case, he runs his own contextual ad system. Obviously Meta is in a completely different league in terms of sophistication, meaning they are probably able to sell more targeted ads which means more money, and they also have the luxury of not having to pay any middlemen since they own their own ad infrastructure as well.

Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.

Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly. This means that the price it would be it would cost would need to be 42% above than its ad ARPU just to break even.
by mcv | 2025-06-16 15:53:04+00:00
The best argument I've heard for why LLMs aren't there yet, is that they don't have a real world model. They only interact with text and images, and not with the real world. They have no concept of the real world, and therefore also no real concept of truth. They learn by interacting with text, not with the world.

I don't know if that argument is true, but it does make some sense.

In fact, I think you might argue that modern chess engines might have more of a world model (although an extremely limited one): they interact with the chess game. They learn not merely by studying the rules, but by playing the game millions of times. Of course that's only the "world" of the chess game, but it's something, and as a result, they know what works in chess. They have a concept of truth within the chess rules. Which is super limited of course, but it might be more than what LLMs have.
by helij | 2025-06-16 15:53:53+00:00
It's perfectly fine to ignore 99.999% of those. Whip out a script or an app that does exactly what you need without the bloat if viable.

I subscribe to many newsletters and get loads of offers. I pretty much ignore all of them. Most of those $10/month tools are just clones of something or not useful at all in the trenches so to speak.
by sea-gold | 2025-06-16 15:53:56+00:00
This sounds fascinating. Too bad the paper is not freely available.

Side note: Be sure to check out Unpaywall[1][2] which allows you to (legally!!!) read research papers for free.

[1]: https://unpaywall.org/products/extension

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31271101
by atleastoptimal | 2025-06-16 15:54:40+00:00
All those things could be done by humanoid robots. AI models aren’t limited to words, as we’ve seen with video models. Gpt 4o, which has been out for over a year, is natively multimodal. Robotics companies are training robots to take in all the data they have avaliable, video, audio, and interpret them all together in context. There is the core substrate of tokens, yes, but largely it is just a standard “bit” level of information for AI brains, not some essential limiter that will keep AI from understanding all the soft, abstract stuff that humans can. If you look at o3 now, just feeding it images, it clearly now can reason in a way closer to humans than a calculator is to it.
by nlitened | 2025-06-16 15:54:48+00:00
I think there's also a fourth "end" to prison punishment, but I don't know the proper name for it.

It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime.

Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-06-16 15:55:20+00:00
These numbers are actually kinda interesting, in that they're based on user location, not advertiser. So basically all global companies target the US first because it's a big market with consistent regulations and mostly one language (compare to the EU where you'd need English/German/French/Spanish/Polish and still would miss a lot).

So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users.

Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US (because they'd acquired basically everyone).
by alganet | 2025-06-16 15:55:23+00:00
The point is that I can make them hallucinate quite easily. And they don't demonstrate knowing their own limitations.

For example, 2.5 Flash fails to explain the difference between the short ternary operator (null coalescing) and the Elvis operator.

https://imgur.com/a/xKjuoqV

Even when I specify a language (therefore clearing the confusion, supposedly), it still fails to even recognize the Elvis operator by its toupe, and mixes it up the explanation (it doesn't even understand what I asked).

https://imgur.com/a/itr87hM

So, the point I'm trying to make is that they're not any better for programming than they're for chemistry.
by tempodox | 2025-06-16 15:55:55+00:00
> The core of this new system is an "Inertia-driven Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG)" that converts vibrations (with amplitudes ranging from 20-4000 ㎛ and frequencies from 0-300 Hz) generated by industrial equipment or pipelines into electricity. This enables periodic CO2 concentration measurements and wireless transmission without the need for batteries.

Ingenious, I love it.
by cAtte_ | 2025-06-16 15:56:38+00:00
the pdfkit from the first google result doesn't seem to be related to apple's. what happened here is that "pdfkit" is a very generic name (that will tend to show up because people love writing pdf-related software) that also happens to coincide with apple's convention of naming their frameworks something-kit (uikit, appkit, avkit, ...)
by kmicinski | 2025-06-16 15:56:59+00:00
I completely agree with you, but this event was held in October, 2024--Trump's horrendous behavior wasn't an effect on that. There are other reasons folks internationally probably don't want to travel to Texas aside from Trump--but in this specific case I think it might have more to do with the fact that LPMNR is a traditionally European conference randomly held in the US.
by qingcharles | 2025-06-16 15:57:07+00:00
DV is a very complex legal minefield. I have years of working with defendants. I would say that a majority of DV complaints are valid in some way, and that many times the DV goes both ways (but it's rarer for the woman to get charged, even if the instigator).

The biggest issue is that once the perpetrator is removed and/or charged the victim often petitions the prosecutor and police to drop the charges. The prosecutors I know will generally not do this and will push for a guilty plea or trial. It's hard for the prosecutor to know whether the victim is being manipulated into asking for the charges to be dropped, and regardless, a crime has probably been committed, and in the justice system the plaintiff is the state, not the person who was battered. This can lead to a stand-off where the victim refuses to come to trial to testify, and where the prosecutor has a Hobson's Choice of whether to arrest the victim and jail them until trial to get them on the stand or let the case drop.

DV cases are hard.
by gspencley | 2025-06-16 15:57:12+00:00
> Surely you are aware that there are actually people with religious beliefs?

Yes. What's your point? It doesn't make those beliefs rational. Faith is belief in something despite the absence of evidence. I am using the term "religious belief" interchangeably with "faith based belief system."

> belief that there are people with religious beliefs is anything but irrational.

I have no idea what you are trying to say in this sentence.

- I don't "believe" that there are people with religious beliefs. I observe that to be the case.

- I never described "belief that there are people with religious beliefs" as irrational.

I think your point might be that, because there are people with irrational beliefs out there we must appease them? Or something?

I really don't know what you're trying to say here. There are people out there who believe in crazy things. We agree on that. How we should treat those people, or react to their existence, is entirely outside of the scope of conversation. It is perfectly acceptable to call an irrational belief irrational.

We were talking about language and communication and the absurdity that there is a such thing as an arbitrary sequence of phones or characters that would cause anyone exposed to that to be offended. All I was saying is that such a belief is unfounded. I honestly don't know what you are trying to say.
by sumtechguy | 2025-06-16 15:57:18+00:00
Exactly. However, that would mean the boss thought the same, as he was hired specifically for that team. By the time it had happened the boss had not even noticed. Despite the team basically telling him every day in 50 different nice ways. In this case I did not realize it was controlling and manipulative behavior. But I learned and can spot it off pretty quickly now and will make sure it does not happen again.
by jerf | 2025-06-16 15:57:22+00:00
One of the major challenges with "Big Bounce" that media coverage of it tends to overlook is that it is not entirely clear how the previous universe, which is presumably high entropy if it's supposed to be like ours, becomes the low entropy feedstock for the next universe. There's still a "And Here There Be Magic" step there.

I'm not saying there's no solution; indeed, this is the sort of thing where the problem is that the profusion of proposed solutions is exactly the thing that shows there's a problem there. I think people tend to intuitively think that "lots and lots of possible solutions" is somehow better than "no solutions at all" but they're actually nearly the same thing.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-16 15:57:27+00:00
25mph is 36 feet per second, about the length of a school bus. The stopping distance at 25mph is 30 feet, assuming perfect reaction time and dry pavement. Human reaction time is about 750ms, so stopping distance is about 2 school bus lengths. You don't have seconds.

25mph is too fast for any street where kids may jump out behind parked cars. Not just school zones, but all residential streets. There's a knee at about 20mph in the traffic fatality stats where below that speed pedestrian collisions are unlikely to be fatal. Above 20mph fatalities become more common quite quickly.
by ghc | 2025-06-16 15:57:55+00:00
At least in my area, cassettes were still popular 30 years ago during the transition to CDs, but by 20 years ago we were in the midst of the transition from CD to iPod. I don't remember seeing new tapes for sale anywhere after about 2000, and we were definitely burning CDs full of MP3s before then instead of making mixtapes. Personally, I bought my last cassette around 1995. Your point still stands, however...I think cutting 10-15y off the estimate would be reasonable.
by djtango | 2025-06-16 15:58:02+00:00
As a native speaker, you probably scratched your head and worked out what could fit in that gap and eventually worked it out. Then you'll grumble because the other speaker didn't choose your preferred diction.

As a non native speaker you'll probably just feel upset/hopeless/angry.

From my experience, "non-native" here includes people who are "fluent".

So we arrive at the situation where my OH-SO beloved wife is fluent in English and is definitely better than me at writing clearly constructed English essays but when it comes to usage of random idioms/slang or understanding local (and foreign!) English accents I have a very clear advantage.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-16 15:58:54+00:00
Update:

``` Based on the Claude Code documentation, it appears that command restrictions are handled internally by Claude Code's security system. However, I can help you understand how to work with this limitation:

Current Claude Code Security: - Claude Code already has built-in protections against dangerous commands - Commands like find / -exec rm would likely be blocked by the existing security measures - The system sanitizes inputs to prevent command injection

```

Seems that they already thought of that.
by j45 | 2025-06-16 15:59:05+00:00
On one hand if responses were concise and perfectly clear (more than the human interacting with it), could it be unnerving?

Prompting with clarity seems to help alleviate any accumulated response pressure where it's having to reach beyond what it has readily available.

When it comes up short, it seems to dig deeper and come up with more than intended, or over respond.

Jumping to solutions remains one of the biggest challenges.