MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kergonath | 2025-06-16 22:53:54+00:00
> Why should anyone trust science? Skepticism should always be the default position.

Skepticism is not anti-scientific. Hell, distrusting results and theories is not anti-scientific. Distrusting the scientific method is. There is a difference.

> Putting it on a pedestal to be worshipped is what led us all into this mess.

Scientists did not ask for this. Amongst all high profile politicians, those who whine about science becoming political are those who made it so, by taking contrarian positions to rile up their voter base. Most people who make this point are not being honest. If you are, you should make specific arguments rather than rehash propaganda.
by bionhoward | 2025-06-16 22:53:58+00:00
Assuming attention to detail is one of the best signs people give a fuck about craftsmanship, isn’t the fact the Anthropic legal terms are logically impossible to satisfy a bad sign for their ability to be trusted as careful stewards of ASI?

Not exactly “three laws safe” if we can’t use the thing for work without violating their competitive use prohibition
by bobthepanda | 2025-06-16 22:54:16+00:00
at least for some of it what's nice is that you are getting exactly what you paid for on the tin, and most importantly you are not getting locked into some god-awful subscription with a cancellation process akin to pulling teeth.

the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.
by homefree | 2025-06-16 22:55:11+00:00
I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down - there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot.

I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base.

Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore.

Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.
by lossolo | 2025-06-16 22:55:19+00:00
There is sample space (choices) so for example 100 different status labels and event space (how the system grades your choice), so right and wrong.

My statement is true no matter how many choices are there, or how skewed the probabilities are. Your count of 99 incorrect labels is perfectly fine but it lives in sample space.

Arguing that there are 99 incorrect answers doesn't refute that evaluation is binary.

So counting 99 wrong labels tells us how many ways you can miss, but probability is assigned, not counted. Once a choice is made the system collapses everything to the two outcomes "correct" or "incorrect", and if the right label happens to have 50 % probability then the situation is mathematically identical to a coin flip, regardless of how many other labels sit on the die.

Example with a weighted die and 99 incorrect answers:

Die Faces: 100

Weights: Right status face = 0.50, the other 99 faces share the other 0.50

P(correct) = 0.50 -> exactly the coin-flip

The 1/N rule only applies when all faces are equally likely, once you introduce weights, the number of faces no longer tells you the probability.
Show HN: AI Custom Interviewer replaces the need for screening calls
by griesmey | 2025-06-16 22:55:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I own a recruitment agency for placing devs. I've done hundreds of these screening interviews and it took a lot of my time. I wrote this tool in React/Next.js/Typescript over the last month or so. If you go to https://app.screenz.ai/signup You can signup for an account with 3 free credits. There is a "tour" in the beginning explaining how it works. You create a role, copy the link to the screening in the card for that role in the roles tab, then paste it in the browser, navigate to that link and take your own interview.

Feedback I'm looking for: I'm interested to learn what more technical people think of the tool and whether it emulates a real 1-1 screening interview or not. I know people will say "I would never take a screening interview with a computer!". Yes, very senior devs who are hot on the job market may not want to take it. The aim for this tool for me is really large companies who hire low-medium skill-set people. Hope you like it. Thanks

If you have questions or complaints you can reach me here: rob@screenz.ai

I'd love to hear from you.

P.S. If you want to read more about what the tool does you can visit https://screenz.ai
by Uehreka | 2025-06-16 22:56:03+00:00
> Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.

Judging from the tone of the article, they’re using the term AGI in a jokey way and not taking themselves too seriously, which is refreshing.

I mean like, it wouldn’t be refreshing if the article didn’t also have useful information, but I do actually think a slide deck could be a useful way to understand a codebase. It’s exactly the kind of nice-to-have that I’d never want a junior wasting time on, but if it costs like $5 and gets me something minorly useful, that’s pretty cool.

Part of the mind-expanding transition to using LLMs involves recognizing that there are some things we used to dislike because of how much effort they took relative to their worth. But if you don’t need to do the thing yourself or burn through a team member’s time/sanity doing it, it can make you start to go “yeah fuck it, trawl the codebase and try to write a markdown document describing all of the features and requirements in a tabular format. Maybe it’ll go better than I expect, and if it doesn’t then on to something else.”
by peterbecich | 2025-06-16 22:57:03+00:00
The tail of gasoline cars will be long. "Beater" gas cars will be around for decades. I will opine just on the USA: it has to be solved from the top-down with 0 inconvenience to average people. If you synthesize gasoline with abundant nuclear or solar power, I think it could be cost-competitive with old-fashioned crude oil.
by kergonath | 2025-06-16 22:58:39+00:00
> That, but also people who take the blanket view that none of the work produced by the scientific establishment is trustworthy.

That’s a red herring. No scientist actually says that. What we say is that on some subjects the evidence is overwhelming and to overcome the current understanding you need compelling evidence and theories, not screeches about bias and liberal elites.

No. We are not going to take seriously someone’s pet theory about a new perpetual motion machine, or cold fusion, or lack of global warming, or the ineffectiveness of vaccines, or anything that is contrary to massive amounts of accumulated evidence.
by spyrja | 2025-06-16 22:59:37+00:00
You can safely replace the terms "order" and "disorder" with "unlikely" and "likely". Simply put, entropy is a measure of how closely a system resembles its "most likely configuration". Consider the discrete entropy of a series of coin flips. Three tosses could result in the following 8 states: HHH, HHT, HTH, HTT, THH, THT, TTH, and TTT. From that we can gather that there is a 1/8 chance of getting either zero or three heads and a 3/8 chance of getting one or two heads. That latter two cases are clearly more likely (and hence associated with a higher entropy). In physics of course entropy is generally the continuous kind, not simple set of binary microstates. But the principle is essentially the same.
by QuercusMax | 2025-06-16 23:01:44+00:00
Damn, that sucks. My experience has been the exact opposite; maybe you need to adjust your approach and set expectations up-front, or get management involved? (I've had a similar experience to you with my teenage kids, but that's a whole other situation.)

My M.S. advisor gave me this advice on when I should ask for help, which I've passed on to lots of junior engineers: It's good to spend type struggling to understand something, and depending on the project it's probably good to exert yourself on your own somewhere between an hour and a day. If you give up after 5 minutes, you won't learn, but if you spend a week with no progress, that's also not good.
by CityOfThrowaway | 2025-06-16 23:02:11+00:00
I agree with this, in general. And I think having the base models improve their performance on being resilient against these types of attacks is a very good idea.

That said, my primary point was that the claims made in the paper are at best using the wrong terminology (called base models "agents") and at worst, drawing massively over-generalized conclusions on the basis of their own idiosyncratic engineering decisions.
by Flux159 | 2025-06-16 23:03:15+00:00
This is pretty interesting - how has your experience been with R3F? I've built a small game level with it before and I'm wondering if I want to go all the way and build something larger.

Also, are you planning on making this open source at some point? Fabric is nice in that it manages 2D canvas objects for you & you can build things like an editor on top, in this case as a library what would you consider the primitives on top of Three objects are? Could it be used to make an editor for a 3d level?
by nk_mit | 2025-06-16 23:03:22+00:00
Search Engine is a tool, similar to the one we have now, LLM. It seemed unfair to compare a purely no-tools approach (Brain-only) with a tool (LLM), thus the first motivation of including it. The second one is that we had already seen several studies exploring the Search Engine and its effects on one’s brain. This allows us to ground the research a bit and have a solid base. Finally, I think you had just responded to your own question in your own statement - indeed, to get a user exposed to other opinions. Echo chambers are present in both cases, but it is also important to understand what was the training dataset for ChatGPT and what is the current trend in Google keyword planner (see the example on homeless and giving in the Discussion of the paper). Hope it is more clear now.
by kbelder | 2025-06-16 23:04:16+00:00
It reminds me about the logic puzzle of the criminal sentenced to death, where the judge says "you will be executed on or before Sunday, and you won't know what day it will be until we come for you."

The criminal knows it can't be Sunday, because he would wake up on Sunday and know he was going to be executed that day. But if Sunday isn't possible, on Saturday he would know he was being executed that day; so Saturday wasn't possible either. The same reasoning can be repeatedly applied to every day between now and Sunday.

It's obviously flawed reasoning (Surprise! they execute you on Thursday), but the flaw is difficult to articulate.
by fallinditch | 2025-06-16 23:05:12+00:00
Maybe it's the senior devs who should be the ones to worry?

Seniors' attitudes on HN are often quick to dismiss AI assisted coding as something that can't replace the hard-earned experience and skill they've built up during their careers. Well maybe, maybe not. Senior devs can get a bit myopic in their specializations. Whereas a junior Dev doesn't have so much baggage, maybe the fertile brains of youth are better in times of rapid disruption where extreme flexibility of thought is the killer skill.

Or maybe the whole senior/junior thing is a red herring and pure coding and tech skills are being deflated all across the board. Perhaps what is needed now is an entirely new skill set that we're only just starting to grasp.
by kergonath | 2025-06-16 23:06:35+00:00
> The real problem is that peer reviewers can’t possibly replicate the study, and so are forced to look for inconsistencies in the papers.

This is a misunderstanding of the role of peer review. The point is not to prove that a paper is correct, the point is to ensure a minimum level of quality. You are entirely right that most reviewers cannot hope to reproduce the results presented, and very often for very good reasons. If I write 3 proposals over the course of a year to get some beam line on a neutron source, it is completely unrealistic to expect a referee to have the same level of commitment.

I think this hints at a more profound problem, which is that a lot of studies are not replicated. This is where the robustness of a scientific result comes from: anybody can make the same observation and reach the same conclusions under the same conditions. This is the real test, not whether you convinced 3 or 5 referees.

The real value of an article is not in whether it was peer reviewed (though the absence of peer review is a red flag). Instead, it is in whether different people confirmed its main results over the years that follow publication.
by toast0 | 2025-06-16 23:06:41+00:00
IIRC, user count / population was very high and users were likely to have payment methods we could accept, and $1/year is not a significant amount for most residents of Spain. I don't remember if maybe Spain had a high voluntary payment rate too?

The US never had a high user count, but it was chosen because US tech journalism sets the narrative. If you want people to pay around the world, convince US tech journalists that payment enforcement is on, and the knowledge that you need to pay filters through the world in a way that it doesn't by just enforcing payment in Spain.

See also: the invisibility of Nokia phones when they pissed off US carriers with SIP clients and left the US market; despite being the top selling phone manufacture of both feature phones and smart phones, there were no media stories about them.
by sagarm | 2025-06-16 23:07:27+00:00
Sounds like you might enjoy a recumbent bicycle.

For a "bike" to balance you need a certain level of physical/mental engagement. How much value are you really getting from the self driving aspect, even if it were feasible, at that point?

At some point smart-car esque self driving vehicles will likely be possible, but self-driving unenclosed two wheelers? Pointless IMO.
by shiomiru | 2025-06-16 23:08:41+00:00
cha-config(5) or about:chawan. The former also has an online version: https://chawan.net/doc/cha/config.html#pager-actions

For navigation in particular you'd use capital D to discard the current buffer and return to the previous page. There's also , (comma, back) and . (period, forward), which non-destructively cycle through the stack.

(Well, it's really a tree, but the UI mostly treats it as a stack.)
by Zak | 2025-06-16 23:09:47+00:00
Now Brian Acton has a huge pile of money to help fund Signal, so I don't think he has to feel too terrible about selling out.

> Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat.

Google also had the opportunity to do this. Around the same time iMessage launched, Google made Hangouts the default SMS app on Android with a similar capability to upgrade to Internet-based messaging when all parties to a conversation had it. Hangouts was cross-platform. Rumor has it carriers whined and Google caved.

I'm kind of glad Google doesn't have a dominant messaging service, but it's only true due to their own lack of commitment.
by bigiain | 2025-06-16 23:10:35+00:00
For this use case - internet resiliency - I suspect the availability of un-flashed LoRa boards will be approximately zero in situations where it's needed. I agree that building an offline capable tool chain would be a good idea (perhaps all you'd need would be RasPi sd cards already flashed with everything needed to flash and configure common LoRa boards, and an archive of android apks?) But if I were allocating internet resiliency club resources, that'd be fairly low down my list.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-16 23:10:49+00:00
At some point, somebody will set up long range wireless communications and then the reward for running a message would likely drop to so small that it wasn't worth it... but yeah that's exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind. That way if something happens to the internet, prices for running a message go up, and suddenly running messages is worth it again.

The tricky part there would be working out a partition tolerant payments system. It's one thing to go offline in the middle of delivering a message, its another thing entirely to orchestrate payment across a smattering of disconnected networks (blockchains are not partition tolerant). I think it could be done, but that's an application layer concern... gotta get the peer finding and web-of-trust stuff working first.
by kergonath | 2025-06-16 23:10:50+00:00
> I'm not the person you replied to, but I think that in the lay world, people do indeed think that peer review is as you've described. If it's not, then maybe it should be?

It is not, and it cannot be. It is unrealistic to expect a referee working in their free time to confirm studies that often cost millions of dollars. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what peer review is and why it is useful in popular or heavy vulgarised science.

Politicians, journalists, and university press offices are guilty of this, and they are those abusing peer review to give some studies more weight than they deserve.
by Anarch157a | 2025-06-16 23:10:57+00:00
That's good for small rewinds, but with a Bic pen, you can rewind the whole tape as fast (maybe even faster than some) ad a tape deck. Just slide the pen in the spool and start spinning the cassete.

Like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yk8v9Ijp1So
by imiric | 2025-06-16 23:11:36+00:00
> Most non-technical people have an inaccurate mental model of how LLMs work, based mostly on sci-fi movies like 2001 or Terminator, where they anthromorphise the model

That's a twisted perspective. The fact non-technical people misunderstand this technology can only be blamed on AI companies who are the first to anthropomorphize their products. Phrases like "thinking", "reasoning", "chain-of-thought", the term "AI" itself for that matter, let alone "AGI", are precisely what leads people to believe that these tools are far more capable than they actually are. We can't blame the general public for being misled by companies.
by cherryteastain | 2025-06-16 23:12:10+00:00
> 500M users paying $500M dollars

There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.
by pesus | 2025-06-16 23:13:20+00:00
Is there any data that shows people in the US are switching to WhatsApp? The only people I've ever seen use it are people with family in other countries. The statistics I've seen indicate that iPhone usage amongst American teenagers is high and still increasing(1), which almost certainly would lead to higher iMessage usage.

(1) https://www.pipersandler.com/teens
by yieldcrv | 2025-06-16 23:13:52+00:00
> I really would not want to be a junior dev right now... Very unfair and undesirable situation they've landed in.

I don't really get this, at the beginning of my career I masquaraded as a senior dev with experience as fast as I could until it was laundered into actual experience

Form the LLC and that's your prior professional experience, working for it

I felt I needed to do that and that was way before generative AI, like at least a decade
by toephu2 | 2025-06-16 23:14:40+00:00
Trading options is akin to gambling. This is why there are no day-traders anymore (or at least none that are still around after doing it for 10+ years). The profession died out in 90s and early 2000s.

All those billionaires on Wall St? You think they make money day-trading their own accounts? No, they made money trading other people's money and charging them huge fees for it.
by ultimafan | 2025-06-16 23:14:50+00:00
I see a lot of people on HN claiming to be more productive at home and honestly think they are the exception rather than the norm. Maybe there is a bias here because the kind of person who is "locked-in" enough to their career field to browse and discuss work-related articles and threads outside of work hours happens to be the same kind of person who cares enough about what they do at their job to be productive even at home.

I suspect for the majority of people though, working from home lacks the mixture of accountability and shame that comes from having to work side by side alongside your coworkers/managers/bosses and at least have to do some level of work to appear minimally productive. If no one is watching you and you feel that work is just a means to an end you might be tempted to goof off or drag your feet.

I personally noticed that my productivity plummeted during work from home and skyrocketed when return to office was mandated. Probably it is at least somewhat related to the above. If I'm at home I might be tempted to go on a walk / do some chores / read a few chapters of a book / go workout / take a nap because I don't feel shame for it and no one can tell me otherwise. I would feel significantly more uncomfortable doing any of those things in the office and will more likely than not actually be forced to get some work done out of boredom and with no other options or distractions.
by tnel77 | 2025-06-16 23:15:52+00:00
>>Learning comes from grinding

Says who? While “grinding” is one way to learn something, asking AI for a detailed explanation and actually consuming that knowledge with the intent to learn (rather than just copy and pasting) is another way.

Yes, you should be on guard since a lot of what it says can be false, but it’s still a great tool to help you learn something. It doesn’t completely replace technical blogs, books, and hard earned experience, but let’s not pretend that LLMs, when used appropriately, don’t provide an educational benefit.
by adrianmonk | 2025-06-16 23:16:30+00:00
> having the index as part of the file. Sadly, gzip doesn’t have the concept of a skippable frame

Looking at the file format RFC (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1952.txt), the compressed frames are called "members" and each member's header has some optional fields: "extra", "name", and "comment".

The comment is meant to be displayed to users (and shouldn't affect compression) so assuming common decoder software is at least able to properly skip over it, it seems like you could put the index data there.

One way to do it would be to compress everything except the last byte of the input data, then create a separate member just for that last byte. That way you can look at the end of the file and pretty easily find the header because the compressed data that follows it will be very tiny.
by toephu2 | 2025-06-16 23:16:32+00:00
I doubt you can beat the returns of S&P 500 over the next 10 years by day-trading every single day or almost every day.

Have you heard of Warren Buffet's 1 million dollar bet? Even professionals on Wall Street can't beat the S&P 500. You think you can?

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...