MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgt101 | 2025-06-11 14:59:50+00:00
>The diversity is itself indicative, though, that intelligence isn't bound to the particularities of the human nervous system. Across different animal species, nervous systems show a radical diversity. Different architectures; different or reversed neurotransmitters; entirely different neural cell biologies. It's quite possible that "neurons" evolved twice, independently. There's nothing magic about the human brain.

I agree - for example Octopus's are clearly somewhat intelligent, maybe very intelligent, and they have a very different brain architecture. Bees have a form of collective intelligence that seems to be emergent from many brains working together. Human cognition could arguably be identified as having a socially emergent component as well.

>Most of your critique is surface level: you can add all kinds of different structural diversity to an ML model and still find learning. Transformers themselves are formally equivalent to "fast weights" (suppression and control signals). Continuous learning is an entire field of study in ML. Or, for injury, you can randomly mask out half the weights of a model, still get reasonable performance, and retrain the unmasked weights to recover much of your loss.

I think we can only reasonably talk about the technology as it exists. I agree that there is no justifiable reason (that I know of) to claim that biology is unique as a substrate for intelligence or agency or consciousness or cognition or minds in general. But the history of AI is littered with stories of communities believing that a few minor problems just needed to be tidied up before everything works.
by stevenbedrick | 2025-06-11 15:00:21+00:00
Excellent point; the administration has a serious and well-publicized antipathy to mRNA vaccine technologies in particular, and has begun to suppress research in that direction. Given that mRNA vaccines are one of the biggest advances in vaccine technology in decades, and that mRNA-related techniques are key to many of the most promising methods for treating a whole host of rare diseases etc., it seems absurd that we would intentionally be seeking out agnotology in this space, but here we are.
by jesse_portal | 2025-06-11 15:00:53+00:00
Have been implementing MCP resource support in my app.

Took the approach of letting users add resources directly to their current message which adds a snapshot of the resource to the message history.

Also added the ability to 'pin' a resource to a chat which adds it automatically to the top of the chat history (experimented with adding it to the bottom but then the agent would comment on it directly).

I'm hoping it enables some cool use cases.
by duxup | 2025-06-11 15:01:12+00:00
The article doesn't define what exactly they mean by "risks women safety".

I don't buy into the idea that all or any advertising is a "safety" issue if that is where they're going. I think there's a very weird type of patronizing that goes on where suddenly we fear for everyone's ability to deal with advertising as if they've got no self control or agency ...
by ZacWil | 2025-06-11 15:01:45+00:00
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the point of fine-tuning was to get precise returns. We make it hyper specific to the task at hand. Sure, we can get 90% of the way there without fine-tuning, but most of these models are vast. I would argue that it potentially MAY be a waste of time right out the gate.
by jmward01 | 2025-06-11 15:01:50+00:00
I really wonder about this study. I'm not great at reading these things but the 'Design, Setting, and Participants' implies two groups, one that got it and one that didn't, but it doesn't say it was randomized meaning the ones that didn't get it had reasons for not getting it compared to the ones that did get it having reasons for getting it. This screams selection bias between the two groups. Maybe this is just pointing out that it is more likely to get the drug if you are more progressed in the disease. I'd really like to see how they controlled for something like this.
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-11 15:02:02+00:00
Two things and they are both grinds more than anything else and hard to squeeze time in with work, travel, exercise and just spending time with my wife.

The first is traditional machine learning - not “AI”. I know what I don’t know and I can fake it well enough to talk to a subject matter expert when leading projects and I have a dual math/cs major from three decades ago. But it would take years to be good enough to be at the same level of seniority I am in my existing niche.

The second is more important for my life is learn Spanish well enough to be conversationally fluent. I know some. But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.
by greenavocado | 2025-06-11 15:02:10+00:00
I regret to inform you that the inmates run the asylum, so your proposal will go nowhere. Banning ads? Making Google confess 'We were paid to say this'? Forcing Burger King to admit they're tricking you into midnight cravings? Politicians funded by ads would outlaw that idea faster than you can say 'campaign donation'. Your felony-for-persuasion is bold. It's also delusional.
by auggierose | 2025-06-11 15:02:35+00:00
I don't think the US is responsible for providing free healthcare for other countries. It should start doing that for its own people, though. That would be a big step towards being a functional country. Or maybe just not have legislation called "One Big Beautiful Bill". The US is a joke.

You are getting a lot of free stuff, because you own the dollar. That keeps you afloat so far, but I don't think it will last for much longer.
Show HN: Make Traceable PDFs from Any Picture for Your Kindle Scribe
by codazoda | 2025-06-11 15:02:52+00:00
I made this tool to scratch my own itch.

It's a very simple web app that turns my Kindle Scribe into a Lightbox for tracing. It's made with pure HTML and JavaScript; no framework and no "splash". I haven't bothered to make it look nice.

I use it to snap pictures and upload them to my Kindle Scribe for tracing into my digital notebook and to create pen outlines for painting projects.

I made a free version available for this Show HN post.
Ask HN: Will ChatGPT Kill Google Search?
by tolarewaju3 | 2025-06-11 15:03:10+00:00
For the past 20 years, whenever I have a question, I do one thing without a thought.

Google it.

But over the past year, I've slowly started migrating to going to ChatGPT first. Of course, I know that I need to fact check. But getting comprehensive answers beats scrolling through.

I feel like this is a big shift that isn't going away. And now I see Google getting rid of people in search. So is this the beginning of the end? Or will Google just morph into something else.
by marcosdumay | 2025-06-11 15:03:17+00:00
Yes, the question everybody awake is asking is how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die? Because as useful as those things can be, they just can't do enough to justify that cost.

But there are free (to copy) ones, and smaller ones. And while those were built from the large, expensive models, it's not clear if people won't find a way to keep them sustainable. We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowledge on "how to talk like people" that will stay there forever for researchers to use.
by komali2 | 2025-06-11 15:04:08+00:00
Which neighborhood? This is the first time I've heard of that level of deep scale damage, and I was at protests at least once a week that entire period.

I've also heard of not a single instance of protestors breaking into private homes to harm people there.

Sorry to be so skeptical but your experience is apparently singularly novel.

As for police keeping protests peaceful, my experience is the complete opposite - protests are peaceful, and then the cops show up and start pushing people around, or their undercover officers try to kick things off by throwing things or shoving people. American cops escalate.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-06-11 15:04:10+00:00
I am beginning to love working like this. Plan a design for code. Explain to the LLM the steps to arrive to a solution. Work on reading, understanding, fixing, planing, ect. while the LLM is working on the next section of code. We are working in parallel.

Think of it like being a cook in a restaurant. The order comes in. The cook plans the steps to complete the task of preparing all the elements for a dish. The cook sears the steak and puts it in the broiler. The cook doesn't stop and wait for the steak to finish before continuing. Rather the cook works on other problems and tasks before returning to observe the steak. If the steak isn't finished the cook will return it to the broiler for more cooking. Otherwise the cook will finish the process of plating the steak with sides and garnishes.

The LLM is like the oven, a tool. Maybe grating cheese with a food processor is a better analogy. You could grate the cheese by hand or put the cheese into the food processor port in order to clean up, grab other items from the refrigerator, plan the steps for the next food item to prepare. This is the better analogy because grating cheese could be done by hand and maybe does have a better quality but if it is going into a sauce the grain quality doesn't matter so several minutes are saved by using a food processor which frees up the cook's time while working.

Professional cooks multitask using tools in parallel. Maybe coding will move away from being a linear task writing one line of code at a time.
by freejazz | 2025-06-11 15:04:11+00:00
>Probably the best one-liner fix in law I can think of, is to make it a imprisonable felony to give money to someone or an organization for the purpose of speaking a particular message as their own, and accepting money in exchange for speaking a message as your own.

You think you can make a law like this work with one line? I do not get the code-as-law people, or whatever it is you are coming from that has left you with this impression. No surprise you are also advocating people become "self-sufficient economic agents" too. It's gotta be simple, right? That's why you gave us the one line, after all.

"You don't actually want this cheeseburger, we are just telling you that you do" sounds like it would be a real buzzworthy campaign today to be perfectly honest. Do you leave your house?
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-11 15:04:13+00:00
See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1449876/

Making up new words, particularly over charged interpersonal issues, gets in the way of communications. The magic of language is not that we have a word for everything but that we can talk about everything with the words we have. [1]

[1] The left in the U.S. is slowly waking up to the fact that coining a new word that circulates online makes the vote go +500,000R
by gassi | 2025-06-11 15:04:18+00:00
Ideally you would use both, and the community would build integrations that allow, say, EmuDeck to pull games from the server onto your Steam Deck and sync saves back to the server.

I usually play on Windows with Playnite (https://playnite.link/), and the plugin (https://github.com/rommapp/playnite-plugin) allows Playnite to pull and display the list of games for each system, after which I can install the ones I want to play onto my PC.
by em-bee | 2025-06-11 15:06:03+00:00
i didn't see any of those details in the article, and even one of the linked ones says that it was under dispute whether the baby was born alive or could have survived. if in doubt...

the real problem is our treatment of these issues as a society globally.

judging people for having children out of wedlock. not educating them in ways that would give them the strength to avoid that. judging their parents. parents judging their children, instead of forgiving them and supporting them. society not supporting single parents. and don't use religion as an excuse. any religion that supports judging someone for this is wrong or misunderstood.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-06-11 15:06:47+00:00
if you have an iphone [0], im not exactly sure how you’re able to truly delete a photo in a millisecond as you have to go through

* a pop up dialog confirming you want to delete the photo with the below message

> This photo will be deleted from iCloud Photo on all your devices. it will be in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

* deleting the photo a second time from recently deleted folder, with a second confirmation dialog

> this will delete the selected photo from icloud and all connected devices

bonus round: any device which has previously downloaded the photo, but is not connected to icloud services at the time of deletion, requires you to physically go to that device and connect it to icloud / manually delete the photo all over again.

—

versus, take cigarette lighter out of pocket, start burning paper, wait.

[0]: statistically probably quite likely given HN demographics and iphone market share
Show HN: CongressMCP – interact with congress.gov data in natural language
by amurshak | 2025-06-11 15:07:05+00:00
Congress MCP is an MCP server that gives any MCP client (e.g. Claude Desktop) or MCP-compatible AI agent access to the Congress.gov API.

It features full coverage, consolidating 91 operations into just 6 comprehensive legislative toolsets.

Search bills, amendments, vote counts, committee actions, members, and more... in natural language.

You can self-host it, or get started for free with our hosted server by downloading the NPM bridge.

CongressMCP is a foundational, open source offering to bring government data into the AI age. We're building AI-native infrastructure for government affairs teams.

Get started here: https://congressmcp.lawgiver.ai/
by codazoda | 2025-06-11 15:07:08+00:00
This is not at all surprising to me.

Just this week I asked for a picture of a cartoon Car. It produced an image so similar to Pixar Cars that I was surprised. I was hoping for something a bit more creative. I asked the AI a few follow-up questions about the first use of the windshield for eyes. That might not be a copyrightable thing but Pixar Cars have a certain look to them and these tools seem to produce a very similar look.

I didn't read the article due to the paywall.
by josephg | 2025-06-11 15:07:14+00:00
> I’m not disagreeing with you, but rather suggesting that the ceiling for how much the average user can/will leverage customization is surprisingly low.

The average person is also a crappy writer, bad musician and lousy carpenter. But a notepad and a pen don’t tell me how to use them. They don’t limit my creative capacity. Same story with a piano, or a hammer and chisel. I wish computers were more like that.

Your point stands. Most notebook users never use it to write a bestselling novel, or draw like Picasso. But the invitation to try is still in the medium somehow. Just waiting for the right hand.

I agree with the rest of your comment. As software engineers, we could build any software we want for ourselves. It’s telling that we choose to use tools like git and IntelliJ. Stuff that takes months or years to master. I think it’s weirdly perverted to imagine the best software for everyone else is maximally dumbed down. Thats not what users want.

Rather than aiming for “software that is easy to use” I think we should be aiming for “software that rewards you for learning”. At least, in creative work. I’m personally far more interested in making the software equivalent of piano than I am in making the software equivalent of a television set.
by potatolicious | 2025-06-11 15:08:18+00:00
I actually take some minor issue with OP's definition of an agent. IMO an agent isn't just a LLM on a loop.

IMO the defining feature of an agent is that the LLM's behavior is being constrained or steered by some other logical component. Some of these things are deterministic while others are also ML-powered (including LLMs).

Which is to say, the LLM is being programmed in some way.

For example, prompting the LLM to build and run tests after code edits is a great way to get better performance out of it. But the idea is that you're designing a system where a deterministic layer (your tests) is nudging the LLM to do more useful things.

Likewise many "agentic reasoning" systems deliberately force the LLM to write out a plan before execution. Sometimes these plans can even be validated deterministically, and the LLM forced to re-gen if plan is no good.

The idea that the LLM is feeding itself isn't inaccurate, but misses IMO the defining way these systems are useful: they're being intentionally guided along the way by various other components that oversee the LLM's behavior.
by NoTranslationL | 2025-06-11 15:09:02+00:00
This is a totally valid concern. Initially we were considering augmenting our income with a B2B model to license the library we’ve built, but that didn’t pan out and our priorities have changed, so we solely work on the apps for customers now. I actually forgot this was even on our website and, since we aren’t trying to offer those services or license anymore, I’ve removed them.
by drweevil | 2025-06-11 15:09:29+00:00
tl;dr: A radical shift to OSS, prompted by big tech's adoption of anti-consumer practices such as short EOL dates, data theft, and subscription models for everything.

I have no problems with paying-to-own. But the business models have become parasitic. Even the things you do pay for have become vectors for advertisements and data exfiltration. So no more Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc., and especially no more subscriptions. Linux on a laptop serves most of my purposes. Firefox with the uMatrix plugin means my browser is closed off to Javascript unless I opt in. A hand-me-down iPhone with no SIM card provides the benefits of great sensors and neat software such as the Merlin bird app, Organic Maps, etc. And yes, all that has expanded the utility of computers for me, by providing for a much more pleasant and safe experience with tools that are under my control.
by mrweasel | 2025-06-11 15:11:14+00:00
Or violence or even death. Certain cultures don't take to kindly to pregnancies outside marriage, or maybe the family disagree with the choice of partner. A cousin works for the app company, leaks the information about an unexpected pregnancy to a conservative father or uncle. Girls is shipped of to family back home and is tragically stabbed to death a few days after arriving.

Most people who collect data of this type of data lacks imagination if they don't think it can be misused.
by woodruffw | 2025-06-11 15:11:30+00:00
I think a salient difference is that apt policies apply to apt, which GitHub goes to extents to document GitHub Actions policies as applying to `uses:` clauses writ large.

(But also: in a structural sense, if a system did have `apt` policies that were intended to prevent dependency introduction, then such a system should prevent that kind of bypass. That doesn't mean that the bypass is life-or-death, but it's a matter of hygiene and misuse prevention.)
by EasyMark | 2025-06-11 15:11:31+00:00
Yeah I have had bosses refer to me by my last name and it's effin irritating. I almost always prefer relaxed, casual attitudes more than frumpy traditionalist for no good reason situations. I understand rare formal occasions but I don't want to put on some mask of formality every day. I consider everyone equal, at least as far as value as a human being. Just treat me with respect, I'm fine with you using my first name.
by techjamie | 2025-06-11 15:12:42+00:00
Tracking the populace is a bipartisan goal, not just a Republican one. Democrats support some good measures like Net Neutrality, but they're also getting behind the "protect the children" surveillance laws just like the Rs. Even when they're in power, the best we get is department chiefs like Lisa Khan doing good work that the next administration reverts.

But on the lawmaking end, they're still pretty complicit.
by nicoburns | 2025-06-11 15:12:56+00:00
> Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at.

I think this is part of what Mozilla missed: the key value proposition of FxOS wasn't that it was web-based specifically: it was that it was open in the way that Linux and the web are but Chrome and Android aren't (one might also compare RISC V vs ARM). The promise was that it could bring this openness to graphical operating system (mobile/desktop) environments and installable app development.
by sdoering | 2025-06-11 15:12:56+00:00
Having a partner who uses these apps, I can confirm there's significantly more complexity involved than the reductive takes here suggest. She meticulously tracks symptoms—digestive function, fitness levels, headaches, blood pressure, temperature, and various other metrics—to identify cyclical patterns that correlate with specific periodical phases of her menstrual cycle (yes, pun intended).

This longitudinal data collection proves invaluable for identifying hormone-related symptom clusters, particularly during perimenopause when having a structured symptom log for medical consultations becomes essential rather than relying on the classic "I think I remember feeling bad sometime last month" approach that doctors love so much.
by pietro72ohboy | 2025-06-11 15:13:10+00:00
Linux can be an excellent choice if you're willing to invest time in finding compatible hardware. I’m running a 2023 laptop (Lenovo Yoga family) with a 12th Gen Intel CPU and have found the experience to be flawless. I'm using Fedora Silverblue. I've customized GNOME (slightly) to my taste and it’s been a great stable, personalized environment.

However, newer hardware features like exceedingly-good displays (talking about XDR displays) and amazing touchpad support can sometimes be tricky to get working perfectly under Linux—these are areas where compatibility might still lag, so if such features are critical for you, Linux might not yet be the ideal fit.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-06-11 15:13:16+00:00
I read a biography of the earthmoving equipment maker R.G. Le Tourneau, and it was really eye-opening how much this was a thing before mechanized equipment was readily available. A lot of moving was put off until winter because it was so much easier to drag logs, boulders, buildings, etc. over ice than over thawed ground.
by atrettel | 2025-06-11 15:13:20+00:00
The "assets" and "debt" discussion near the middle is interesting, but I can't say that I agree.

Yes, many programs are not used my many users, but many programs that have a lot of users now and have existed for a long time started with a small audience and were only intended to be used for a short time. I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered scientific code that was haphazardly written for one purpose years ago that has expanded well beyond its scope and well beyond its initial intended lifetime. Based on those experiences, I write my code well aware that it may be used for longer than I anticipated and in a broader scope than I anticipated. I do this as both a courtesy for myself and for others. If you have had to work on a codebase that started out as somebody's personal project and then got elevated by a manager to a group project, you would understand.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-11 15:13:35+00:00
Obviously I was referring to a hypothetical option where it's still your body that get stronger. Sticking with this metaphor - I don't care about the weights going up, but rather about my muscles getting stronger, and if there were an easier and less accident-prone way to do that without the weights, then I would take it in a heartbeat.

And going back to programming, while I sometimes enjoy the occasional problem-solving challenge, in the vast majority of time I just want the problem solved. Whenever I can delegate it to someone else capable, I do so, rather than taking it on as a personal challenge. And whenever I have sufficiently clear goals and sufficiently good tests, I delegate to AI.