MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by K0balt | 2025-06-14 15:52:14+00:00
I’d be careful about your modeling of LLM “hallucination”. Hallucination is not a malfunction. The LLM is correctly predicting the most probable symantic sequence to extend the context, based on its internal representation of the training process it was coded with.

The fact that this fails to produce a useful result is at least partially determined by our definition of “useful” in the relevant context. In one context, the output might be useful, in another, it is not. People often have things to say that are false, the product of magical thinking, or irrelevant.

This is not an attempt at LLM apologism, but rather a check on the way we think about useless or misleading outcomes. It’s important to realize that hallucinations are not a feature, nor a bug, but merely the normative operating condition. That the outputs of LLMs are frequently useful is the surprising thing that is worth investigating.

If I may, my take on why they are useful diverges a bit into light information theory. We know that data and computation are interchangeable. A logic gate which has an algorithmic function is interchangeable with a lookup table. The data is the computation, the computation is the data. They are fully equivalent on a continuum from one pure extreme to the other.

Transformer architecture engines are algorithmic interpreters for LLM weights. Without the weights, they are empty calculators, interfaces without data on which to calculate.

With LLMs, The weights are a lookup table that contains an algorithmic representation of a significant fraction of human culture.

Symbolic representation of meaning in human language is a highly compressed format. There is much more implied meaning than the meaning which is written on the outer surface of the knowledge. When we say something, anything beyond an intentionally closed and self referential system, it carries implications that ultimately end up describing the known universe and all known phenomenon if traced out to its logical conclusion.

LLM training is significant not so much for the knowledge it directly encodes, but rather for implications that get encoded in the process. That’s why you need so much of it to arrive at “emergent behavior”. Each statement is a CT beam sensed through the entirety of human cultural knowledge as a one dimensional sample. You need a lot of point data to make a slice, and a lot of slices to get close to an image…. But in the end you capture a facsimile of the human cultural information space, which encodes a great deal of human experience.

The resulting lookup table is an algorithmic representation of human culture, capable of tracing a facsimile of “human” output for each input.

This understanding has helped me a great deal to understand and accurately model the strengths and weaknesses of the technology, and to understand where its application will be effective and where it will have poor utility.

Maybe it will be similarly useful to others, at least as an interim way of modeling LLM applicability until a better scaffolding comes along.
by nrds | 2025-06-14 15:52:48+00:00
The claims in this article, such as those suggesting recursion has something to do with the infinite, are all relative to the set-theoretic foundation. This is not essential.

In contrast, in the type theories behind proof assistants like Coq, Lean, and Agda, recursion is intimately tied to _finite_ structures. Instead of the vague "intersection of all sets such that" which we see in the article here, recursion is a well-defined computational process, and defined in a rather obvious way once you're familiar with the background.
by CaptainFever | 2025-06-14 15:53:21+00:00
Sometimes, doing something is worse than doing nothing at all.

> For that matter, using licensing to restrict government abuse obviously isn’t going to work, because licensing relies on state enforcement of rights anyway. If the state itself is compromised, having a clever little license isn’t the failsafe the OES thinks it is. It’s really just asking the police to arrest ICE with extra steps. This isn’t hypothetical, this is already codified in the law: even the international treaties that govern copyright have explicit exemptions for government action related to security interests. A license like this one can only ever possibly do harm.

https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2021/10/29/ethical-source-is-a...

And if you want something more old-school:

> It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-14 15:54:52+00:00
Upgraded from a 2080 Ti to a 5070 Ti. I admit I was hoping for a much greater framerate boost compared to the reviews I saw. Possibly a bit CPU limited with a 5900X, but AM5 doesn't look that interesting to me, few PCIe lanes and expensive.

That said, it made a nice upgrade for running local LLMs, more memory and noticably faster.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-06-14 15:55:19+00:00
It's occasionally helped me with the NP-hard problem of "finding a regular language consistent with a set of samples that also satisfies some structural constraints". But more often, the minimal DFA (when it exists) has a few dozen too many states, and the solver gets trapped in the exponential pit of despair, which hasn't really endeared me to the approach. I've yet to actually run into a class of problems where things like SAT or ILP are wildly successful while all other approaches fail.
by geocar | 2025-06-14 15:55:55+00:00
Nonsense. There is no definition of "relatively recently" that has anything to do with humans where that is true. Bees were probably one of the first things we humans ever made farms for:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34749846

We have been doing it before we had written language and even perhaps before our spoken language had evolved past the imperative.

So yeah, the romans absolutely kept bees, and they made "manmade beehives" like this:

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

The hives ought to have an aspect due east, but never looking towards the north-east or the west. The best hives are those made of bark, the next best those of fennel-giant, and the next of osier: many persons, too, have them made of mirror-stone, for the purpose of watching the bees at work within. It is the best plan to anoint the hives all over with cow-dung. The lid of the hive should be made to slide from behind, so as to admit of being shut to within, in case the hive should prove too large or their labours unproductive; for, if this is not done, the bees are apt to become discouraged and abandon their work. The slide may then be gradually withdrawn, the increase of space being imperceptible to the bees as the work progresses. In winter, too, the hives should be covered with straw, and subjected to repeated fumigations, with burnt cow- dung more particularly. As this is of kindred origin with the bees, the smoke produced by it is particularly beneficial in killing all such insects as may happen to breed there, such as spiders, for instance, moths, and wood-worms; while, at the same time, it stimulates the bees themselves to increased activity. In fact, there is little difficulty in getting rid of the spiders, but to destroy the moths, which are a much greater plague, a night must be chosen in spring, just when the mallow is ripening, there being no moon, but a clear sky: flam- beaux are then lighted before the hives, upon which the moths precipitate themselves in swarms into the flame.
by irthomasthomas | 2025-06-14 15:57:07+00:00
"very convincingly dressed as a police officer... driving what looked like a police SUV with emergency lights activated."

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/speaker-emerita-melissa-...

Edit - they have the SUV but the not the shooter. Police found him at the second address and exchanged gun fire with him before he escaped on foot.

Edit2 - SUV contains a list of targets, a manifesto, and many pieces of paper with 'No kings' printed on them. https://x.com/MnDPS_MSP/status/1933918239504929129
by MongooseStudios | 2025-06-14 15:59:08+00:00
The premise is interesting, but there are some things that I dislike on the surface.

1. I don't want AI matching, I don't want AI anything.

2. Rep/skills based on Github contents? Firstly isn't that a form of the gatekeeping you called out as a problem? Secondly, most of the code I have ever written lives in proprietary repositories. Because I was paid to write it.

3. How does this not become another mess where there are two camps. The people shouting advertisements into the void and the people shouting "I need a job" into the same void?
by tanvach | 2025-06-14 15:59:49+00:00
Having explored Twillio for text messaging recently, turns out it’s getting very hard to be able to send them programmatically in the US due to lengthy A2P registration process. I understand in spirit this aims to reduce text spam, but my feeling is this becoming another money making opportunity for carriers.

https://www.twilio.com/docs/flex/admin-guide/setup/conversat...
by 112233 | 2025-06-14 16:00:19+00:00
I like to think about it like this: while real numbers in general are impossible to compute, write down or do anything else with them, many statements about real numbers can be expressed in a useful, computable form.

It all gets mind-bendingly mind-bending really fast, especially with people like Harvey Friedman ( https://u.osu.edu/friedman.8/foundational-adventures/fom-ema... ) or the author of this post trying to break the math by constructing an untractably large values with the simplest means possible (thus showing that you can encounter problems that do not fit in the universe even when working in a "simple" theory)

(i saw the username and went to check audiomulch website, but it did not resolve :( )
by tracerbulletx | 2025-06-14 16:00:37+00:00
Time is sequential. The inputs and outputs are sequential. The processing is not sequential. In fact it can be spatial, binaural hearing works because of the precise length of the neuronal path between the ears and a processing area. We know a lot about the brain, many neural networks are based on well described brain regions. It is both true that our existing neural networks are no where near as complex as the brain, and ALSO that they share many similarities and are functionally doing basically the same type of thing.
by doodlebugging | 2025-06-14 16:02:47+00:00
After putting on my boots and wading through all of that I think that you have one edit to make.

In the "Why Lisp?" section there is a bit of basic logic defined. The first of those functions appears to have unbalanced parentheses.

>(defun not (x) > (if x > false > true)

I have a compulsion that I can't control when someone starts using parentheses. I have to scan to see who does what with who.

You later say in the same section

>But it is really easy to program a computer to look for balanced parentheses

Okay. This is pretty funny. Thanks for the laugh. I realize that you weren't doing that but it still is funny that you pointed out being able to do it.

This later comment in the "Basic Number Theory" section was also funny.

>; After a while, you stop noticing that stack of closing parens.

I really enjoyed reading this post. Great job. Though it has been a long time since I did anything with Lisp I was able to walk through and get the gist again.
by jarcoal | 2025-06-14 16:03:50+00:00
I set my son (8) up with a ChatGPT account and he loves it. He uses it to generate scripts for Roblox Studio, recipes to cook, etc.

I used the "Instructions" field to indicate he is only a child and to interact with him appropriately, and overall it does a decent job keeping the language somewhat simple when chatting with him.
by bubblyworld | 2025-06-14 16:04:00+00:00
Unfortunately not, and apparently no other purely universally quantified formulas will do either (so this is a more general thing, not specific to Con(PA)): https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/5003237/can-goodste...

On the first question, how do you encode omega-consistency as a formula of PA? Just curious, it's not at all obvious to me.
by ashvardanian | 2025-06-14 16:04:05+00:00
Hi Austin! Was just checking your blog and the vowels detection post (< https://austinhenley.com/blog/vowels.html>).

What exactly do you mean by “use SIMD directly without calling out to another language”?

In some way Assembly will probably anyways be another language… but that’s a technicality.

I guess the spectrum of SIMD-related work in relation to Python is quite broad. There are projects like PeachPy, to help one write x86 Asm in Python, new Python’esque languages like Mojo, or SIMD libraries with thin CPython bindings. Do you mean one of those?

PS: I’m in the last camp. And in case you are focused on ASCII, for vowel search, have you tried StringZilla’s `find_first_of` (< https://github.com/ashvardanian/StringZilla/blob/960967d78c7...>)? I think it should perform well ;)
by mter | 2025-06-14 16:04:28+00:00
Officers are management, a lt col is similar to a director at a tech company.

If they're trying to modernize the strategy and direction of the organization before bringing in additional SMEs, this makes a lot of sense. Good leadership and a good direction really does matter.

After the overall direction and vision is in place, then they can bring in technical SMEs who are hopefully also direct commissioned in and not just contractors hired for a year or 2.
by thfuran | 2025-06-14 16:05:56+00:00
The rest of the spitballing aside, your last point didn't hold up. Perhaps unsurprisingly, organizations like the CDC spend a lot of effort trying to get good estimates of mortality of various causes and have thought about this sort of thing before: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
by noisy_boy | 2025-06-14 16:06:49+00:00
This is ancient reference but I used to have HP's nx6320[0] laptop. The thing was built solid, fantastic keyboard, excellent screen - basically an all round solid business laptop. I remember dual-booting Windows XP with Ubuntu Dapper Drake on it - worked perfectly.

[0]: https://support.hp.com/in-en/product/product-specs/hp-compaq...
by cpard | 2025-06-14 16:07:14+00:00
Reminds me of the work done at Uber with Dragon

https://www.uber.com/blog/dragon-schema-integration-at-uber-...

Unfortunately it never got open sourced but Joshua left for LinkedIn and started working on the LambdaGraph project and the Hydra language that are open sourced.

You can find more information on this fascinating work here:

https://github.com/CategoricalData/hydra

I think these approaches, including all the semantic web stuff from 10+ years ago, suffered from the added overhead of agreeing and formalising semantics and then of course maintaining them.

I wonder if LLMs can help with that part today.
by Rendello | 2025-06-14 16:08:32+00:00
Aphex Twin's Avril 14th [1] reminds me a bit of Satie. A bunch of songs in the same album, Drukqs, use John Cage's prepared piano technique [2]. A lot of Aphex Twin's music is ambient like Satie's, but I prefer his more in-your-face stuff.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxTdTaNIUxo

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc2HCxUQ12s
Show HN: Jobschat.ai – AI Chat for Job Search, CV Feedback and Career Advice
by mabdine | 2025-06-14 16:08:53+00:00
We built JobsChat.ai, an AI‐powered chat interface that helps you find and land your next role. Features include:

Natural chat for job search instead of fiddling with filters

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Try it out globally at https://jobschat.ai/chat and let us know what you think—feedback welcome!
by iggldiggl | 2025-06-14 16:11:11+00:00
> Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track

Side digression: For regular albums, where the pregap is just two seconds of silence I can absolutely understand that and prefer to put the pregap at the end of the previous song myself.

However for live albums my feelings are a bit more torn – on the one hand there is something to the music starting immediately when playing a random track, but on the other hand any stage patter that might be present in the pregap usually refers to the upcoming track, and having that incongruously stuck at the end of the preceding track is at least to me somewhat annoying during random playback, too.
by teleforce | 2025-06-14 16:12:36+00:00
I have 2080 Ti mainly for development and I'm now thinking of buying another PC with RTX 5060 Ti for running local LLMs. Comparing the 5060 Ti (16GB) vs 5070 Ti apart from half the price, the former GPU only has half memory bus width of 128 instead of 256 bit for the latter. For running local LLMs is it really worth paying double the price of the 5070 Ti?
by renewiltord | 2025-06-14 16:13:00+00:00
Amusingly this is why people say LLMs will beat doctors. It’s because the 90% of cases is so easy that a motivated guy with Google can get there and a smart NP can get there too.

It isn’t that it’s easy to do all a doctor does. But their training and knowledge shines in the 99th percentile case except they never exercise it there so you can usually get there with Google.

“Oh but an LLM will guess the common case and never think of the rare!”

Yeah but so will a doctor given 10 minutes on it. They’re not exactly going to House MD you. You’re gonna die.
by larrled | 2025-06-14 16:13:05+00:00
For sure. But if you read some of that wacky stuff from way back, you can start to see how parts rhyme with aspects of contemporary psychiatry. They too had much better standards and data than their predecessors. The hype around LSD back then, and a bit of the kookiness, was similar to the current emphasis on trauma, ketamine therapy, etc… Stuff that works and is new gets overhyped.
by geocar | 2025-06-14 16:13:24+00:00
I think so.

A single hive with 50,000 bees can make 100lbs of honey, but you need maybe 1,000 lbs of grapes to make that much wine in roughly the same amount of time (a single vine might give you 10lbs of grapes)

Honey is also easier to transport than grapes.
by dhruvrajvanshi | 2025-06-14 16:13:29+00:00
That hasn't been my experience at all outside the opinion section, which is precisely what you described.

The main section feels pretty anti Trump, actually. Not by choice but reality has an anti Trump bias ;)

They are also quite good at labeling their opinion sections clearly, which I think a lot of other papers aren't doing. Their news section is basically Reuter's.
by blantonl | 2025-06-14 16:14:30+00:00
CEOs are more like high ranking general officers, not O-6 level (Navy Captain, Army/Air force full bird colonel)

O-5 (Lt Col, Navy Commander) would be VP / GM level stuff, GS-13 through GS-14 in the federal government

O-6 equivalent in the civilian world equates to a GS-15 in the federal government, and a senior VP in the corporate world

O-7 (brigadier general) would be an EVP level position, C-level large org

O-8 (general) would be CEO
by scott_w | 2025-06-14 16:15:43+00:00
I’m going to stick up for him on this point. It’s likely there’s no way to get the right person in the room to argue on his behalf. Much as I think it’s not a good organisational structure, it’s very likely that the CTO title was the only thing that got him into conversations with the board or C-suite, they wouldn’t speak to a VP at all, even if he asked them to.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-14 16:16:01+00:00
Put it this way Carlson. If you were building LLMs if you understood machine learning if you were one of these engineers who work at open ai, you would agree with me.

The fact that you don’t agree indicates you literally don’t get it. It also indicates you aren’t in any way an engineer who works on AI, because what I am talking about here is an unequivocal and universally held viewpoint held by literally the people who build these things.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-06-14 16:17:39+00:00
But I don't understand why it creates it.

You are *not* the customer, you are the product.

Their primary, overriding concern is data collection, not usability.

Removing incentives (aka profit) from software development does not lead to more or better software. It leads to mediocre software just good enough to support some other profitable objective --- like data collection and advertising.

The developer just left you a subtle hint to this effect.
by somenameforme | 2025-06-14 16:19:14+00:00
Depends on who you mean by we. The universe is weird and it's entirely possible for you or I to travel essentially arbitrarily far in a single human lifetime, easily billions of light years. Relativity doesn't simply work as a speed limit; instead when things approach velocities anywhere near the speed of light, the universe starts contorting itself in really weird ways to maintain the perceived consistency of the speed of light.

From the perspective of somebody in a ship moving at relativistic rates, distances would begin to physically contract, and time itself would begin to speed up relative to an at rest observer. Here [1] is a calculator to see what this all mathematically works out to. For instance, you could travel to Andromeda, some 2 million light years away, in about 28 years in a ship that was capable of sustaining acceleration at 1g for 28 years. Of course for everybody back home 2 million years would pass. So if we ever achieve ships capable of this sort of acceleration, life is going to get really weird and non-linear, so far as time is concerned.

And this isn't some just some weird fringe theoretical/mathematical thing. For instance GPS satellites have to compensate for time dilation because relativistic effects, though small in this case, would otherwise have a substantial effect. Another example is at things like the large hadron collider. As a convenient effect of relativistic effects, emergent unstable particles exist far longer than they 'normally' would before decaying due to the fact they're moving at relativistic rates.

In other words, this is all very real. The only questionable issue is whether we can discover some sort of an energy source capable of accelerating a ship at 1g for tens of years, and develop sufficient shielding for such a vessel. That's still very much in the domain of sci-fi, but simultaneously seems like something that one wouldn't be entirely surprised to see was discovered just a century from now. This was the most tantalizing possibility behind the EMDrive stuff. [2] Well that or infinite energy, but it seems that universe won't be broken quite so easily just yet.

[1] - http://www.convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
by Multicomp | 2025-06-14 16:19:33+00:00
It's been so long since the Semantic web and RDF and OWL and SKOS. I'm so glad they stuck with W3C and didn't reinvent those wheels. Will this UDA approach catch on? I don't know, but I hope so. It seems like it is trying to move the frontier of the difficulties of applying Domain Driven Design and semantic concepts to an enterprise company of significant scale.

If we can get compound interest across development teams by giving them a common toolset and skillset that covers different applications but the same data semantics, maybe not every data contract will have to be reduced to DTOs that can be POSTed or otherwise forced to be a least common denominator just so it can fit past a network or other IPC barrier.

For that, I'm grateful Netflix is working on this and publicizing the interesting work.