MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by staticman2 | 2025-06-16 15:11:52+00:00
>That's an extremely uncharitable and aggressive take, especially after not bothering to understand at all what I said.

To be clear, my intent wasn't to say you were the one being performative and disingenuous. I was referring to the sort of person you were debating against, the one who thinks every legal issue involving A.I. can be settled by typing "humans are allowed to do it."

Since I replied to you, I can see how what I wrote was confusing. My apologies.

The parent you replied to claimed LLMs are using "mechanism similar enough to what humans do and what humans do is fine."

Parent probably doesn't want his or her brain shredded like an old hard drive despite claiming similar mechanisms whenever it is convinient.

I'm arguing nobody actually believes there are "similar mechanisms" between machines and humans in their revealed preferences in day to day life.

>There's no law limiting a human's top (running) speed but you have speed limits for cars. Maybe you're legally allowed to own a semi-automatic weapon but not an automatic one.

I don't believe this analogy works. If we're talking about transmitting the text of Harry Potter, I believe it would already be illegal for a single human to type it on demand as a service.

If we are talking about remembering the text of Harry Potter but not reciting it on demand, that's not illegal for a human because copyright doesn't govern human memories.

I don't see what copyright law you think needs updating.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-06-16 15:12:11+00:00
The most common reason violent offenders escape charges or conviction or domestic abuse is that the victim(s) are too afraid to press charges, and/or they feel guilty about it happening or even the feeling that they brought it on themselves and deserved it.

This then combined with the fact that the abuser is going to jail for on unrelated convictions. This is a huge relief to any abuse survivor. The person is going away, and I will be safe.

The other component is all the steps involved with filing charges which will often feel invasive and have to bring it all up again.

I have seen this up close and personal on a few occasions, I have begged the victim to go to the police but they would not do it.

The worst outcome of this is when the abuser is let out, the abuser may seek out the victim again, or the abuser will find new victims.

In this case the police had a call from a close family member accusing the person of domestic abuse. They had suspicious behavior from the accused person. They also witnessed that the possible victim had multiple injuries consistent with domestic abuse. As well as the arm injury the call from the family member had initially reported. But probably no charges or at least no convictions.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-16 15:12:16+00:00
Apple do have those things! People just like bypassing it :) For the AI use case that you're interested in, there are ways to do this that go with Apple's flow, but UNIX hackers tend to be attracted to sandbox-exec because it looks simple even though it's not, and because doing it Apple's way requires learning a lot of Apple specific tech. Whereas the SBPL is deceptively UNIXy and simple looking.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-16 15:12:44+00:00
When I had a <3 year old demanding child I often thought about how relaxing prison would be, with relatively normal set sleeping, work patterns, and in some prisons guaranteed personal space at night with at worst an adult roomate.

Just the thought of maybe being able to peacefully read a book for 30 minutes, at times I almost wished to be imprisoned...
by hackinthebochs | 2025-06-16 15:12:51+00:00
This is getting tedious. The point about mathematics was simply that it carries and objectivity that natural language does not carry. But the point about natural language was always a red-herring; not sure why you introduced it.

>You can’t make the whole class simplified at once

Yes, this is literally my point. The further point is that the relative complexities of two systems will not switch orders regardless of basis, except perhaps in degenerate cases. There is no "absolute" complexity, so your other points aren't relevant.
by ac29 | 2025-06-16 15:12:52+00:00
> I've always been skeptical of probiotic supplements in general mostly because they are stored/shipped in unrefrigerated environments. I believe in most cases the bacteria would end up dead before you even ingested it. However, some companies have developed strains that can withstand some amount of heat. But you never know where they've been stored/for how long/etc.

Probiotics in pill/capsule form are generally freeze dried, so they are much less temperature sensitive than live bacteria.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-16 15:12:52+00:00
Kernels don't understand TLS or HTTP level concepts and can't sandbox them indeed, it's a weakness for sure.

MSIX is integrated with the (new) Win32 sandboxing mechanism, yes. You can activate an app container by requesting one in the manifest. But that only works on the very latest Win11 and you'll definitely encounter bugs.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-16 15:13:01+00:00
> "LLMs are good at reducing text, not expanding it"

You put it in quote marks, but the only search results are from you writing it here on HN. Obviously LLMs are extremely good at expanding text, which is essentially what they do whenever they continue a prompt. Or did you mean that in a prescriptive way - that it would be better for us to use it more for summarizing rather than expanding?
by kps | 2025-06-16 15:13:04+00:00
> do better

I find that expression far more offensive than ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’. Similarly (and non-exhaustively): ‘bad take’; ‘not a good look’; ‘this ain't it’; ‘… not the … you think it is’; ‘…, actually’. They're all personal insults. “This code is crap” is fine; “You're crap” is not.
by gspencley | 2025-06-16 15:13:31+00:00
> So "dicks 01" or "fuck me 01" instead of a bland "check 01" or whatever. For some reason, that seems much more unprofessional than a comment like "this code is shitty but works, need to clean up."

Agreed.

Context matters a lot. People say "shitty code" all the time. I don't see that as unprofessional. But "dicks01" I would probably change if I came across it in code. Not because I would find it offensive, but because it serves no purpose other than to be juvenile... and that can easily be counter-productive if the goal is easy to read and maintain code.

With respects to "shitty code", I'm not even sure that I would personally even consider the word "shit" to be a swear word in 2025. I'm reminded of the TV show on Showtime called Bullshit (by Penn & Teller). They wanted to name the show "Humbug", which was considered profane in the early 20th century when Houdini was alive and famous. But Showtime didn't like it because they figured it wouldn't land with a modern audience. "Bullshit" it was.

That said, the article even includes the word "crap" (though perhaps they are making the point that it is replacing other, "more profane" words). That one strikes me as odd. If that is considered rude and offensive, then surely "humbug" ought to be as well. Probably very culture-specific.
by davexunit | 2025-06-16 15:14:17+00:00
I'm glad you felt inspired! This Dynamicland implementation looks awesome. I look forward to this being shared to a wider audience. :)

Regarding your question, as of Hoot 0.6.1 we now have a psyntax-based macro expander integrated with eval so you can use syntax-rules and syntax-case. There are still rough edges, though. I'm currently focused on some non-Hoot tasks but the next Hoot priority is to implement a Guile-like REPL and really kick the tires on the interpreter before the 0.7.0 release.
by simianwords | 2025-06-16 15:16:10+00:00
I don't like many things about this post, its a bit snobbish and uses esoteric language in order to sound more intricate than it really is.

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

Capitalism and free market has lot of useful and emergent properties that occur not at the first order but second order.

> In the case of the global economic system, under capitalism, growth, accumulation and innovation can be considered emergent processes where not only does technological processes sustain growth, but growth becomes the source of further innovations in a recursive, self-expanding spiral. In this sense, the exponential trend of the growth curve reveals the presence of a long-term positive feedback among growth, accumulation, and innovation; and the emergence of new structures and institutions connected to the multi-scale process of growth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

In fact free market is an extremely good example of emergence or second order systems where each individual works selfishly but produces a second order effect of driving growth for everyone - something that is definitely preferable.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-16 15:16:29+00:00
If by "cognitive debt", you mean "you don't really understand the code of the application that we're trying to extend/maintain", then yes, it's almost certainly going to apply to programming.

If I write the application, I have an internal map that corresponds (more or less) to what's going on in the code. I built that map as I was writing it, and I use that map as I debug, maintain, and extend the application.

But if I use AI, I have much less clear of a map. I become dependent on AI to help me understand the code well enough to debug it. Given AI's current limitations of actually understanding, that should give you pause...
by miningape | 2025-06-16 15:17:00+00:00
Not sure what the technical terms are but there's 2 phases -

1. Placing the queens, this is a pretty basic DFS over all possible queen positions. You can visualise it by going across the board row by row and placing the queen in a random available column, then moving to the next row and placing a queen in a random available column. So for an 8x8 board with 8 queens, the 1st row has 8 possible columns, the second row has 5 possible columns, the third has 4, and so on until all the queens have been placed or there are no available cells to place the next queen on.

2. Generating the colours - This is a bit more complicated but it is essentially a flood fill with each queen as a source block. I keep an adjacency list for each colour containing the uncoloured cells it borders. At each iteration I pick a random queen/colour and a random cell from the adjacency list, then fill that cell and update the adjacency list (and remove the cell from other adjacency lists).

I'm planning on updating my colour generation algorithm to support 2 things: 1. Generating boards with unique solutions only (not sure how I'll do this without finding all the solutions). And 2. including known shapes in the generation process so there is a random chance colours takes on specific shapes (e.g. +) and the other colours will generate around them.
by rwmj | 2025-06-16 15:17:06+00:00
It's true, using some rather non-obvious trickery: https://github.com/madler/zlib/blob/develop/examples/zran.c

I also wrote a tool to make a randomly modifiable gzipped disk image: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2022/12/01/creating-a-modifiable-...
by CityOfThrowaway | 2025-06-16 15:17:19+00:00
This paper doesn't make any sense. They are claiming LLMs are bad at this set of tasks, but the reality is that they built a bad agent.

I bet it's possible to nearly ace this using existing LLMs by designing a better agent. Better tool structure, better scaffolding, better prompting.

LLMs are not gods, they are tools that require good engineering to achieve good outcomes.
by JadeNB | 2025-06-16 15:18:57+00:00
Bill Casselman is an amazing mathematician with a diversity of interests. As this makes clear, he's been embracing computation and computational mathematics "since before it was cool." He also has an interest in mathematical history, and travelled to India to see the oldest-known occurrence of 0 (https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-indi...). I'm sure he has tons of other interests about which I don't know.
by ac29 | 2025-06-16 15:19:52+00:00
> Whether or not the effect in the paper turns out to be true and reproducible, the supplements you've seen almost certainly don't do anything unless you're wiping out your established gut microbiota with antibiotics first. Your existing microbiota are entrenched and in a very good position to defend themselves from any weakened intruders you might intentionally introduce.

There is an ton of probiotic research that shows probiotics can survive transit to the gut and reproduce there.

Even without probiotic supplmentaion, you microbiome absolutely can and will change over time.
by JadeNB | 2025-06-16 15:20:15+00:00
Probably mostly the fact that this was started (according to the website) in 1996 and essentially frozen in 2004, which I believe predates the public announcement of Asymptote.

Does Asymptote get much use these days? I thought it was pretty cool, though a bit hard to wrap my mind around, when I first tried it, but nowadays it seems that attention has moved on to TikZ.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-16 15:20:32+00:00
As I see it, there's nothing offensive about "do better" - it's just asking the person to not repeat the same (ostensibly misguided) thing they did before.

On the other hand, there's Kratos's “Don't be sorry, be better”, which did hit me hard when I reached that part in God of War 2018. That one hit me on a very personal level.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-16 15:20:38+00:00
There's huge diversity out there in coding styles as well, but I'd be rightfully derided or ignored if I suggested that meant that Linux shouldn't have a style guide.

For some reason, "tabs are banned" and "curly braces must be on their own line" are acceptable rules, but "no curse words" is Oppressive Corporate Soullessness.
by sixo | 2025-06-16 15:21:10+00:00
This comment thread is exhibit N-thousand that "nobody really understands entropy". My basic understanding goes like this:

In thermodynamics, you describe a system with a massive number of microstates/dynamical variable according to 2-3 measurable macrostate variables. (E.g. `N, V, E` for an ideal gas.)

If you work out the dynamics of those macrostate variables, you will find that (to first order, i.e. in the thermodynamic limit) they depend only on the form of the entropy function of the system `S(E, N, V)`, e.g. Maxwell relations.

If you measured a few more macrostate variables, e.g. the variance in energy `sigma^2(E)` and the center of mass `m`, or anything else, you would be able to write new dynamical relations that depend on a new "entropy" `S(E, N, V, sigma^2(E), m)`. You could add 1000 more variables, or a million—e.g every pixel of an image—basically up until the point where the thermodynamic limit assumptions cease to hold.

The `S` function you'd get will capture the contribution of every-variable-you're-marginalizing-over to the relationships between the remaining variables. This is the sense in which it represents "imperfect knowledge". Entropy dependence arises mathematically in the relationships between macrostate variables—they can only couple to each by way of this function which summarizes all the variables you don't know/aren't measuring/aren't specifying.

That this works is rather surprising! It depends on some assumptions which I cannot remember (on convexity and factorizeabiltiy and things like that), but which apply to most or maybe all equilibrium thermodynamic-scale systems.

For the ideal gas, say, the classical-mechanics, classical-probability, and quantum-mechanic descriptions of the system all reduce to the same `S(N, V, E)` function under this enormous marginalization—the most "zoomed-out" view of their underlying manifold structures turns out to be identical, which is why they all describe the same thing. (It is surprising that seemingly obvious things like the size of the particles would not matter. It turns out that the asymptotic dynamics depend only on the information theory of the available "slots" that energy can go into.)

All of this appears as an artifact of the limiting procedure in the thermodynamic limit, but it may be the case that it's more "real" than this—some hard-to-characterize quantum decoherence may lead to this being not only true in an extraordinarily sharp first-order limit, but actually physically true. I haven't kept up with the field.

No idea how to apply this to gravity though.
by kelipso | 2025-06-16 15:22:10+00:00
Almost the entire book is in there. From the paper, if you give it a 100 token prompt, it will produce the next 50 tokens with more than 1% probability so that the produced tokens cover 91% of the book. And as the title says, it also produces next 50 tokens with more than 50% probability, so produced tokens cover 42% of the book. Bet it gets close to 100% as you reduce the probability.

Also they went through the book at 10 token strides. Like..a bit tortured way to reproduce the book (basically impossible to actually reproduce the book) but it shows that the content is in there.

Now whether this is derivative work, copyright violation or whatever is debatable. Probably gets similar numbers for a bunch of other books too. They should have done the Bible and probably get way higher numbers, but that won’t go viral.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-16 15:22:43+00:00
> Its peculiar behaviour, such as its surprising stability despite being highly unsaturated, hinted at a deeper mystery that would not be fully resolved until the mid-19th century with the proposal of its cyclic structure.

How were chemists in the early 19th century able to determine benzene must be highly unsaturated without knowing its structure? Did they simply combust it and measure the amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide produced?
by BurningFrog | 2025-06-16 15:23:26+00:00
Sure, "random" isn't the right term for what I mean.

There were reasons, but neither side understood them!

From their perspective, it just so happened that 80-90% of the population on one side died within weeks of contact. Often the disease travelled faster than the invaders, so as the went inland they found mostly empty settlements they could just take over.

It's easy to see how both sides could think that the god(s), in their inscrutable ways, had decided to give the land to the Europeans.

This also played out in the opposite direction in Africa. There the Europeans just couldn't survive for long until Malaria treatments became available in the mid 1800s, and so Africa was colonized last. Since Africa is where humanity originated, it has the most diseases and parasites that specialize in feeding on us.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-06-16 15:23:26+00:00
> never drive faster than brakes can stop in visible areas

Here in the UK, that's phrased in the Highway Code as "Drive at a speed that will allow you to stop well within the distance you can see to be clear". It's such a basic tenet of safety as you never know if there's a fallen tree just round the next blind corner etc. However, it doesn't strictly apply to peds running out from behind an obstruction as your way ahead can be clear, until suddenly it isn't - sometimes you have to slow just for a possible hazard.
by WillAdams | 2025-06-16 15:23:27+00:00
A quick search shows a paper on it just a couple of years back:

https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-2/tb137hefferon-asymptote.pdf

I found Asymptote interesting, but I'm trying to wrap my mind around METAPOST (and by extension METAFONT) as an easier thing to implement/use.
by replwoacause | 2025-06-16 15:23:33+00:00
I hear this often and am curious about it, as someone with an ADHD-PI diagnosis who has taken nearly every med, ranging from Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, Dexedrine, to Strattera and possibly others I can't recall over the past 20 years. I've never felt like any of them had any lasting effect on my anxiety or depression. They all give a temporary relief of some of these symptoms while the drug is in my system, but I always return to baseline, which results in a roller coaster effect. Strattera may have been the exception because its not a stimulant like the others but ultimately it didn't address issues with motivation so I stopped it. I would love something that successfully addressed ADHD+anxiety+depression. And yes, I exercise, get 8 hours of sleep on average, eat pretty good, and don't live a stressful live.
by lysace | 2025-06-16 15:23:54+00:00
To pick one sport:

https://www.si.com/nba/whats-average-nba-salary-for-2024-25-...

> Given the contracts signed so far, the average annual salary for NBA players during the 2024-25 season will be $11,910,649, according to Basketball Reference. That's up from the $9.7 million from the 2023-24 season.

There's about 500 of them, so that's about $6B per year.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-16 15:24:47+00:00
Nice! Such a great gotcha if you've never read the Constitution or spent 30 seconds thinking about how freedom of speech works.

You're free to have an opinion and be free from state-sanctioned consequences.

You are not guaranteed to be free from private parties choosing not to affiliate with you, calling you mean names, or banning you from their platforms... for the obvious reason that protecting that right would require that the state compel specific speech from private parties, which... See Step 1!

All of this should have been covered by about 8th grade. Were you paying attention?
by namaria | 2025-06-16 15:25:12+00:00
I did not say it was unfit and I don't see how discussing writing styles and the influence of LLMs on it is off topic on a thread about the effects of LLMs on cognition.

I don't believe I was impolite or making a personal attack. I had a relevant point and I made it clearly and in a civil manner. I strongly disagree with your assessment.
by mancerayder | 2025-06-16 15:25:48+00:00
>There are a growing number of places that get lock-in contracts where the SA related services they offer are being done by helpdesk staff manning LLM based chatbots without disclosure, blindly.

>This obviously works right up until it doesn't, and by the time people notice the fundamental issue, the competent people the company needs won't be around anymore with a vicious race to the bottom.

Future contracting opportunities for us?
by thomastjeffery | 2025-06-16 15:25:49+00:00
An LLM is not a database. There is no significant amount of information in a model that can be accessed 100% of the time. This is because it's a mystery to the user what collection of tokens will lead to a specific output. To get a predictable result from an LLM 50% of the time is very significant.

This doesn't tell us for certain whether or not the model was trained on a full copy of the book. It's possible that 50-token long passages from 42% of the book were, incidentally, quoted verbatim in various parts of the training data. Considering the popularity of both the book itself, and derivative fan-fiction, I would not be surprised. I would be less surprised to learn that it was indeed trained on a full copy of the book, if not several.

The more meaningful point here is that the ability to reproduce half a book is the same sort of overt derivative work that is definitely considered copyright infringement in other circumstances. A lossy copy is still a copy. If we are to hold LLMs to the same standard as other content, this isn't very easy to defend.

Personally, I see this as a good opportunity to reevaluate copyright on the whole. I think we would be better off without it.