MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rompic | 2025-06-16 07:44:29+00:00
To ensure that the monkey of a monkey test (an emulated user doing random taps) cannot do all possible actions.

https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA... "Bruce grew the lab over the years from an initial set of seven devices to more

than 400. He said there were some unanticipated problems to resolve over that time. "One day I walked into the monkey lab to hear a voice say, '911-What's your emergency?" That situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API, isUserAMonkey(), which is used to gate actions that monkeys shouldn't take during tests (including dialing the phone and resetting the device)."
by anal_reactor | 2025-06-16 07:44:33+00:00
I've noticed that modern life is in general less fun than it was 10 years ago. It might be me getting older, but I'm sure there are bigger societal changes too. BTW I used to browse tcrf.net and it was so interesting that video game developers would leave pieces of themselves in their work. Love letters, old memes, angry letters, random shit, whatever. Meanwhile modern programming is all about pRoFeSsIoAnALisM and MaXiMiZiNg PrOdUcTiViTy at all costs.
by deosjr | 2025-06-16 07:44:55+00:00
Thank you for the feedback! I agree with all of the above.

Should've probably been a bit more clear on the dl-find syntax; I find it just as unacceptable as you do. It is the result of laziness: my intended use of this minimal Datalog does not include any querying whatsoever but abuses fixpoint analysis for side-effects (see https://github.com/deosjr/deosjr.github.io/blob/master/dynam... which I intend to go over in a future post). I initially had it working like you described but butchered it for the above and haven't repaired it yet (see https://github.com/deosjr/whistle?tab=readme-ov-file#datalog). This version relied on some monstrous eval-hacking using a homebrew Lisp, which I've mostly cleaned up now in this version (https://github.com/deosjr/whistle/blob/main/datalog/datalog.... is a crime, for example).

The semantics are indeed limited to binary relations atm, which I agree is the main thing that disqualifies this as a proper Datalog. iirc the tutorial on Datalog that I based this implementation on only handled triples as well so I stopped there, but extending to N-ary relations is on my list to look into for sure.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-06-16 07:45:36+00:00
Entropic gravity is a compelling framework. I think that most Physicists admit that it would be nice to believe that the yet unknown theory of everything is microscopic and quantum mechanical, and that the global and exquisitly weak force of gravity emerges from that theory as a sort of accounting error.

But there are so many potential assumptions baked into these theories that it's hard to believe when they claim, "look, Einstein's field equations."
by bilekas | 2025-06-16 07:46:12+00:00
> "proposed consent decree would prevent the merged company from boycotting platforms because of their political content by refusing to place their clients' advertisements on them, according to two people briefed on the matter."

Isn't this literally covered by the first amendment ?

> "If advertisers get into a back room and agree, 'We aren't going to put our stuff next to this guy or woman or his or her ideas,' that is a form of concerted refusal to deal,"

This is an incredible stretch to claim, first you would have to prove that if the other company changed their political views that you would still refuse to deal.

Even from the FTC itself its explained that this "Refusal to deal" is centered to prevent monotpolizations.

> the focus is on how the refusal to deal helps the monopolist maintain its monopoly, or allows the monopolist to use its monopoly in one market to attempt to monopolize another market.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

What this WILL do will give the administration another tool to harass companies who vote with their wallet.
by Retric | 2025-06-16 07:47:14+00:00
> What about the small difference between 10 and 200?

So wait now you want a justification for low millions vs high millions? Trying to move the goalpost isn’t an argument. You wanted justification for why not thousands or billions and I provided it.

That said, 200 is ~10% of daily calorie needs directly plus all the cellular machinery to produce sperm, that’s a big deal especially with some reserves for multiple ejaculations. Isn’t it interesting how science actually provides understanding here.

> you actually need to prove

IVF studies have proven this stuff, I’m referring to actual research here. There’s a ton of studies trying to recreate this kind of filtering. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7365522/

PS: That’s exactly the kind of thing I would have brought out sooner if I realized you where so emotionally invested.
by raincole | 2025-06-16 07:47:20+00:00
> one of those tricky semantic arguments we have yet to settle when it comes to LLMs

Sure. But imagine this: In a hypothetical world where LLMs never ever exist, I tell you that I can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book. What would you assume I can do?

It's definitely not "this guy can predict next 10 characters with 50% accuracy."

Of course the semantic of 'recall' isn't the point of this article. The point is that Harry Potter was in the training set. But I still think it's a nothing burger. It would be very weird to assume Llama was trained on copyright-free materials only. And afaik there isn't a legal precedent saying training on copyrighted materials is illegal.
by the_gipsy | 2025-06-16 07:48:23+00:00
I'm interested in this "simultaneous awareness of facts".

How simultaneous is it really? A 100% as in, the whole chain of thoughts is condensed into one "symbol"? Or simply less elements or "atoms"? Or is it equally long but just connects faster than words? Or something else entirely?

And a second question, how do you expect the inner monologue to be like? An audible hallucination? A different person talking in your head? Something else?
Show HN: I made SEO backlink exchange platform using vector embeddings
by overpower | 2025-06-16 07:48:33+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a solopreneur and have been in the SaaS space for the past 3 years. My last three startups failed, and a common challenge in all of them was figuring out how to reach my audience. SEO always seemed like the answer, but I didn’t know where to start. It felt overwhelming...Soo many technical terms like keyword research, clustering, SERP, semantics, topical authority… I could go on.

That’s where my idea for my next startup came from -> building SEO tool which runs on auto-pilot. The complexity of SEO is hidden behind a simple UI and everything happens automatically behind the scene, even publishing and backlink exchange! I have been working on it for the past 8 months and already have 500+ registered users (not all paying ofc) (mainly got them through reddit)

My biggest bet (and competitor differentiator) is the ABC backlink exchange platform we just launched. With it, we are getting our customers 4-7 backlinks per month, naturally placed within articles. No more paying for backlinks, no more manual outreach.

Here is how it works:

1. We analyze your website, target audience, niche, traffic and DR. 2. We scrape your entire sitemap and store it in vector database (using openai small embeddings model) 3. When article is being written, we use function that uses cosine vector distance to measure the similarity between an article topic and all other stored sites in the DB. If match is found, we integrate it as extrernal do-folow link and engaging anchor text. 4. We keep track how many backlinks each customer gave and receive. So its fair for all contributing websites.

First customer feedback is great! There’s still a lot to do, but I’m excited about where this is going. I’ve learned so much in the past three weeks.

Would greatly appreciate if you guys could try it out and provide feedback on it! Or maybe even spread the word for all people still paying for backlinks :)

https://babylovegrowth.ai/backlinks
by magospietato | 2025-06-16 07:49:38+00:00
There's a middle ground for sure. I've left a few witty comments and loglines in my time.

But I've also had to debug a Delphi unit which returned error codes inspired by the magical supercomputer Hex from the Discworld novels.

"Divide by cucumber error" is not a decent enough representation of a module's internal state, no matter how funny you think you are.
by neobrain | 2025-06-16 07:49:50+00:00
> If there was a way to name lambdas for debug purposes then all other downsides would be irrelevant (for most usual use cases of using callbacks).

Instead of fully avoiding lambdas, you can use inheritance to give them a name: https://godbolt.org/z/YTMo6ed8T

Sadly that'll only work for captureless lambdas, however.
by uncircle | 2025-06-16 07:50:41+00:00
Your question fascinated me. Googling "where did the Sun got its low entropy" I also came across these explanations:

"Solar energy at Earth is low-entropy because all of it comes from a region of the sky with a diameter of half a degree of arc."

also, from another reply:

"Sunlight is low entropy because the sun is very hot. Entropy is essentially a measure of how spread out energy is. If you consider two systems with the same amount of thermal energy, then the one where that energy is more concentrated (low entropy) will be hotter."

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/796434/why-does-...

Probably it's a bit of both. I'm not sure I understand your hypothesis about the Sun scooping up empty, low-entropy space. Wasn't it formed from dusts and gases created by previous stellar explosions, i.e. the polar opposite of low entropy?
by satisfice | 2025-06-16 07:50:58+00:00
I wonder what business these big consultants are really in. I can’t believe anyone takes them seriously. So what is it? Money laundering? Kickbacks? Maybe they are a massive excuse manufacturing and blame displacement engine?

Now they use AI to produce even sloppier slop than the slop they slopped non-stop in elder days. The bullshit industry is really getting efficient.
by closewith | 2025-06-16 07:53:22+00:00
> Most regular participants on HN are employees, not wannabe billionaires.

You can be both and it would be interesting to see the breakdown of aspirations.

Certainly as the tide of public opinion has turned hard against tech and tech billionaires in the last 5 years, the dominant demographic on HN seems less and less aware of how out-of-touch they are with public opinion at large.
by nomilk | 2025-06-16 07:54:23+00:00
It cites inability to compile to machine code as a reason for preferring lisp to R and Python.

What are the benefits of an ability to compile to machine code? Does it mean you can make stand alone binaries (I.e. programs that can run without the language - lisp|R|python - installed), or is there some other advantage, eg performance?
by phh | 2025-06-16 07:54:40+00:00
What's even crazier is that we get the negative of DRM but none of the upside. I have a 4k hdmi 2.0 TV without hdcp 2, so no 4k content without the "splitter". Also any interoperability issue is a "catastrophic" failure (as in at best no content, at worst no hdmi output at all). And yes they do happen, either because of broken software implementation (some TV don't reset their hdcp state machine when switching hdmi source), or just dumb electrical issue (i2c - and cec - have a habit of dying because of leaking charges, and one needs to unplug everything for 10 min to fix it)
by kortilla | 2025-06-16 07:54:55+00:00
No public source, just talking to old coworkers at Google asking why the rollout was so incredibly slow in the Phoenix location. It’s almost all one big county and the driving conditions are the same across that whole valley.

So why not open up the entire service area? The answer was cost. At the time they were still losing money per ride to help get ML training feedback.
by rendx | 2025-06-16 07:57:38+00:00
When a company repeatedly demonstrates a pattern of embracing, extending, and extinguishing standards (see: Java, Kerberos, HTML), it’s fair to view any technical move with suspicion - even if the particular proposal seems technically sound. It’s easy to retroactively view Netscape’s resistance as petty, but the power imbalance was real, and the fear of Microsoft co-opting the standard wasn’t paranoia.

Some companies make abuse a business model. I don't see how anyone can defend a position where they only look at isolated actions of a company and not their overall strategic positioning. There are boundaries. Ethical boundaries. If you never experience the consequences of your actions, if nobody ever objects to your behavior, you will not stop. Especially not a distributed organism of a company, which has no inherent ethical boundaries; its boundaries are those that affect business, so you need to teach them in business. If your business model is based on treating your own employees like slaves, it is you who is cancer, not the other.

Calling that “kid-like behavior” is misguided on two levels. First, as noted, Netscape’s actions were arguably rational in context - pushing back against a powerful incumbent trying to steer an open standard toward a proprietary implementation.

Second, the phrase itself leans on a dismissive and inaccurate stereotype. Kids aren’t inherently irrational or overly emotional; in fact, there’s substantial research showing that young people behave quite logically given their environment. Framing behavior this way isn’t just lazy; it reinforces the kind of condescension that later gets labeled as “adverse childhood experiences” in therapy, assuming someone even gets the chance to unpack and not replicate it.

On both levels, it is DARVO.
by concats | 2025-06-16 07:58:49+00:00
That's a clickbait title.

What they are actually saying: Given one correct quoted sentence, the model has 42% chance of predicting the next sentence correctly.

So, assuming you start with the first sentence and tell it to keep going, it has a 0.42^n odds of staying on track, where n is the n-th sentence.

It seems to me, that if they didn't keep correcting it over and over again with real quotes, it wouldn't even get to the end of the first page without descending into wild fanfiction territory, with errors accumulating and growing as the length of the text progressed.

EDIT: As the article states, for an entire 50 token excerpt to be correct the probability of each output has to be fairly high. So perhaps it would be more accurate to view it as 0.985^n where n is the n-th token. Still the same result long term. Unless every token is correct, it will stray further and further from the correct source.
by cowbolt | 2025-06-16 07:59:12+00:00
Imagine the literary possibilities when it can write 100%! Rowling's original work was an amusing, if rather derivative children's book. But Llama's version of the Philosophers stone will be something else entirely. Just think of the rather heavy-handed Cerberus reference in the original work. Instead of a rote reference to Greek mythology used as a simple trope, it will be filled with a subtext that only an LLM can produce.

Right now they're working on recreating the famous sequence with the troll in the dungeon. It might cost them another few billion in training, but the end results will speak for themselves.
by t0bia_s | 2025-06-16 08:02:26+00:00
I like fishes. Fishes are healthy and main source of Omega-3 fatty acid for many.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid

Be aware of pharma propaganda that for sure support any narrations that would make benefit for them, like making any kind of natural sources good for humans as threat, like sunshine or.. Fishes?
by eesmith | 2025-06-16 08:04:34+00:00
I think you are reading "carriage" too specifically, when I suspect it's meant as a wider term for any horse-drawn wheeled vehicle.

Your [0] says "Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry.", just after "the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven."

That suggests the evidence is stronger for cart use before riding.

If you follow your [1] link to "bullock cart" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullock_cart you'll see: "The first indications of the use of a wagon (cart tracks, incisions, model wheels) are dated to around 4400 BC[citation needed]. The oldest wooden wheels usable for transport were found in southern Russia and dated to 3325 ± 125 BC.[1]"

That is older than 3000 BC.

I tried but failed to find something more definite. I did learn from "Wheeled Vehicles and Their Development in Ancient Egypt – Technical Innovations and Their (Non-) Acceptance in Pharaonic Times" (2021) that:

> The earliest depiction of a rider on horseback in Egypt belongs to the reign of Thutmose III.80 Therefore, in ancient Egypt the horse is attested for pulling chariots81 before it was used as a riding animal, which is only rarely shown throughout Pharaonic times.

I also found "The prehistoric origins of the domestic horse and horseback riding" (2023) referring to this as the "cart before the horse" vs. "horse before the cart" debate, with the position that there's "strong support for the “horse before the cart” view by finding diagnostic traits associated with habitual horseback riding in human skeletons that considerably pre-date the earliest wheeled vehicles pulled by horses." https://journals.openedition.org/bmsap/11881

On the other hand, "Tracing horseback riding and transport in the human skeleton" (2024) points out "the methodological hurdles and analytical risks of using this approach in the absence of valid comparative datasets", and also mentions how "the expansion of biomolecular tools over the past two decades has undercut many of the core assumptions of the kurgan hypothesis and has destabilized consensus belief in the Botai model." https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.ado9774

Quite a fascinating topic. It's no wonder that Wikipedia can't give a definite answer!
Founders: How do you audit code quality, infra costs, and dev team efficiency?
by satya9099 | 2025-06-16 08:04:37+00:00
I’m a technical founder building a tool to help non-technical startup founders understand how well their tech team is performing without needing a CTO.

After working with multiple early-stage startups, I’ve seen that many founders:

Struggle to assess whether their developers are writing clean, scalable code

Have no visibility into where cloud infra costs are going (or why they're growing)

Can’t tell if their team is productive or just “busy”

Don’t catch critical security or architecture issues early enough

I’m working on a simple AI-powered audit tool that gives founders:

A code quality and maintainability report (in plain English)

Infra cost leak alerts and optimization suggestions

A snapshot of dev team productivity (based on GitHub data)

Security risks and best practices overview

I’d love your thoughts on:

Have you faced these issues personally?

Would a monthly/quarterly “CTO audit” like this help you make better decisions?

What would you want to see in such a report?

Thanks in advance — trying to validate this before I build too much!
by nottorp | 2025-06-16 08:04:39+00:00
> Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.

Compared to sitting on your butt in a car or public transport.

Perhaps not compared to walking everywhere and chasing the antelope you want to cook for lunch.

I think what he meant is that both bicycles and LLMs are a force multiplier and you still provide the core of the work, but not all of the work any more.
by ben_w | 2025-06-16 08:04:55+00:00
With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say that impression is more because every series is very different. TOS and TAS may have been similar to TNG seasons 1 and 2, but TNG got more thoughtful as it went on; DS9 was a very different show to both TOS and TNG, with long-term continuity and changes (beyond casting) that stuck, and far more shades of grey and where outright evil came with a smile and a charismatic speech rather than being a puddle of psychic oil; VOY had almost no continuity, making it the polar opposite of DS9, but most of the characters were interesting enough for a space soap opera; ENT was derided by many when it came out, because all the main plot arcs made no sense and they kept introducing old fan favourites that didn't make sense contextually because series set in the show's future had yet to meet the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. And while I've never seen Prodigy, I'm aware that was trying for a very different approach to exploring the cannon and had its own story to tell.

And famously, only the even-numbered films are any good (which doesn't mean all even films are good, e.g. Nemesis).

In this light: DIS throwing away an interesting premise and then going nuts; PIC being three seasons of "why did the scriptwriters put the Borg everywhere, when the main story is androids vs. Romulans, Q, and warcrimes(*?) against changelings leading to changeling terrorism?"; and the very much more pew-pew-lasers action films of Kelvin**… none of this is particularly shocking.

What's nice (for people like me) is that SNW and LD are both well-written and thoughtful — but again, very different shows.

SNW feels like it is trying to be the best of TOS, TNG, and DS9, even if it does have a bit of fan service with insufficiently justified presence of Kirk (James, the other one is fine).

LD is very very silly, but it works for me — not as a canonical set of events (Mariner is even less suitable a personality for a ship officer than is Burnham, and in the same way I can head-cannon all Q episodes as "Q is actually Barclay on the holodeck having a power fantasy", most of the main four cast feel to me like students LARPing trek on a holodeck), but rather I like it because the tries to "yes, and…" the show's existing cannon in ways that mostly work and the characters are fundamentally decent to each other 95% of the time (and when not, justified).

* Perhaps "crimes against humanity" would be a closer take, or whatever the term should be in a not-just-humans universe

** and Section 31 whose critical response is so low that I forgot it existed rather than watch it, and only remembered the existence of when looking at Wikipedia to check if Nemesis was even or odd
by pyman | 2025-06-16 08:05:36+00:00
I think you may have misunderstood my point. I was calling out a possible conspiracy theory.

Going back to your comment about AI, teachers have seen a huge increase in the use of em dashes over the past year, so they have been forced to become computer language forensics experts (unfortunately).

Just to clarify, I'm not against AI or people using it, I'm against conspiracy theories.
by bheadmaster | 2025-06-16 08:05:57+00:00
In my view, the biggest advantages of ahead-of-time compilation is lower binary size, higher performance, and binary portability (in a sense of being able to copy the binary and run it on another system with same architecture and OS, not in the usual sense of being easy to run to a different system architecture or OS).

It is IMO not known widely enough that Python itself can be compiled, using Nuitka [0] compiler. It still runs Python code, so the performance increase is not as extreme as one would get from rewriting in a fully statically typed code, but the AOT compiled C code is still faster than the interpreter.

[0] https://nuitka.net/