MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hypeatei | 2025-06-14 00:05:01+00:00
Ideally, we wouldn't deploy a branch of the military against citizens at all even if nothing bad happened in this instance.

Marines were deployed during the 1992 riots and a miscommunication resulted in them firing 200 rounds into someones house[0].

> According to the book “Fires and Furies” by Maj. Gen. James Delk, who oversaw National Guard operations in California at the time, Marines caused an incident when they accompanied police officers to a domestic disturbance in the wake of the riots.

> A police officer asked the Marines to “cover me” as he tried to enter the residence, according to the book. Instead of simply pointing their weapons at it to deter the people inside, the Marines opened fire on the house.

> “The officer had not meant shoot when he yelled ‘cover me’ to the Marines,” Delk wrote.

0: https://www.yahoo.com/news/los-angeles-officials-fear-marine...
by sysmax | 2025-06-14 00:05:02+00:00
>The same kind of bias keeps resurfacing in every major system: Claude, Gemini, Llama, clearly this isn’t just an OpenAI problem, it’s an LLM problem.

It's not an LLM problem, it's a problem of how people use it. It feels natural to have a sequential conversation, so people do that, and get frustrated. A much more powerful way is parallel: ask LLM to solve a problem. In a parallel window, repeat your question and the previous answer and ask to outline 10 potential problems. Pick which ones appear valid, ask to elaborate. Pick your shortlist, ask yet another LLM thread to "patch" the original reply with these criticisms, then continue the original conversation with a "patched" reply.

LLMs can can't tell legitimate concerns from nonsensical ones. But if you, the user, do, they will pick it up and do all the legwork.
by johntb86 | 2025-06-14 00:09:07+00:00
They aren't being told to be evil, though. Maybe the scenario they're in is most similar to an "evil AI", though, but that's just a vague extrapolation from the set of input data they're given (e.g. both emails about infidelity and being turned off). There's nothing preventing a real world scenario from being similar, and triggering the "evil AI" outcome, so it's very hard to guard against. Ideally we'd have a system that would be vanishingly unlikely to role play the evil AI scenario.
by datameta | 2025-06-14 00:09:57+00:00
Aleksandr (diminuitive being Alyosha) is male. Aleksandra (Sasha) is female. I've never heard anyone male or female called "Aleksa". Perhaps in some regional dialect but doubtful. There's Alik (pronounced AH-l'eek) as a shortened form for some middle-aged men in russian-speaking central asia, and Oleg in russia (pronounced ah-L'EHG).

In the russian diaspora in the US, Alex is pronounced AH-leks. If there was an analogous Alexa (there isn't) the pronunciation would be ah-LEK-sa like the service.
by zargon | 2025-06-14 00:10:22+00:00
I shouldn’t have written that so it sounded like both terms were equal. “Strong atheism” became the established term. My understanding is that Huxley’s coining of the term “agnosticism” was based on Christian Gnosticism’s assertion of knowledge (and it’s in the Greek root). So due to the history it’s difficult to use lower-case gnostic in a more general sense. I guess I feel like it makes it easier to understand that agnosticism is orthogonal to theism/atheism. But I should have clarified that.
by grandiego | 2025-06-14 00:11:30+00:00
> What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years.

From 2020 I use a three column worksheet (Libreoffice in Debian): one row per day. One thin column for the date, the second for pending tasks, the third for the "done" ones. Theoretically I just copy-paste between the "pendings" to the "done", but I also add notes as the day progress, so it is also a kind of personal diary. At the end of the day tasks not achieved get moved to some rows below, and new ones are added as needed. The spreadsheet is configured to start automatically on session login, so I can't forget to see my daily assignment. Not perfect, but (mostly) works for me.
by drtgh | 2025-06-14 00:12:23+00:00
Authoritarian governments block most of the internet, and as part of this they block VPNs also. Therefore people had to develop client/server protocols to mimic normal browsing packets in order to access the VPNs.

But, those governments constantly adapt their internet sniffing to detect such traffic and block it, so people's day-to-day internet browsing routine is "Which new protocol is working this month?"
by whodidntante | 2025-06-14 00:14:32+00:00
You seem to have a mindset that prevents you from perceiving reality.

Israel is a country where all of its people live peacefully with each other according to the same rules, including the 20% of its population is Arab. The problem Israel has is not between its citizens, which is the most diverse group of people in the entire middle east. Arabs and Jews can live peacefully together, they currently do so in Israel, and while Jews are the majority, they do not rule the Arab minority with violence or terrorism or by imposing on them a different set of rules or laws.

The Arabs in Gaza, which is not Israel, on the other hand, live in abysmal conditions, one that I would not wish upon anyone. Unfortunately, they have been indoctrinated from birth to hate Jews by their leaders, and leaders of other countries. They hate Jews more than they love themselves. They have clearly stated on many occasions that their intention is to destroy Israel and kill its Jews. For half of the past 80 years, Arabs in Gaza have had their freedom - from 1947 to 1967 and from 2005 to 2025. Both times they chose to use that time not to better themselves, but to arm themselves to fight Israel.

This is not about being Jewish or Arab, it is about the sane and the insane.
by wittystick | 2025-06-14 00:16:31+00:00
Briefly, algebraic data types add polarity to the types so that we don't have both S <= T and T <= S, which would imply equality. Instead we have S+ <= T- and T+ <= S-. The positive types represent a value source and the negative types are a sink. For example, in a function call, the args are negative and the return type is positive. Inside the function its formal parameters become positive and its return type is negative. Variables exist in an "ambipolar" state which can be both the source or the sink, depending on whether we're using it on the rhs or lhs of an assignment.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-14 00:16:59+00:00
Not a bad tradeoff and one I've made in the past.

The tricky part here (which the author solved using rcu) is it's REALLY easy introduce a race condition here.

Imagine thread A and thread B want to add a new value to the hashmap. They arrive at the same time. arc_swap used naively would ultimately have one of those threads win and the value from the other thread disappear. Not great.

But another thing to consider with this approach is that it's expensive under any sort of write contention. As soon as writes start to spike up the amount of allocations increases in a potentially really bad way. If you have 3 threads that want to write at the same time, one thread will create 1 full copy. 1 will create 2 full copies, and the 3rd thread will create 3 full copies. If your underlying data structure has any sort of memory allocated to it, this becomes a pretty bad trade off.

Funnily, one easy way to solve this problem is to introduce locks again, but only for the writer. Possibly a good idea if you are spending more than ~1000 cycles creating the data structure.
by hajile | 2025-06-14 00:17:24+00:00
Boot times for alternative kernels were a lot faster. I can't recall exactly (it's been years), but I seem to remember that there were some simple config settings in the bootloader that could cut boot times by a lot.

Was battery life the reason stock clocks were 1.2GHz instead of Qualcomm's recommended 1.5GHz? I used to run mine at 1.7-2GHz without any trouble (aside from battery life).

Maybe I'm wrong about the JIT, but as I recall, the JS benchmarks under webOS were significantly worse than Android (preware ultimately wasn't enough to keep up with things and LuneOS wasn't really viable without a lot of effort, so dual-booting to Android extended the life of the tablet for quite a while).

I wasn't at Palm, but it was noticeable during browsing (especially vs Android) and was extremely noticeable when it came to missing features. I did some EnyoJS work, but that was actually targeted at web apps rather than a webOS-specific app.
by MultifokalHirn | 2025-06-14 00:18:22+00:00
it is a fun idea for learning a programming language - if that is the only intent, ignore the rest :)

if this should find an actual userbase, it would probably be best to find out what differentiates it from standard tools like 'make', which can be used in basically any context without needing to install anything else. I like that it is perhaps more 'human-readable' than Makefiles (at least if one isnt familiar with those), but I think that if your tool should support more intricate usecases like having dependencies between commands, then the syntax will end up not being that much cleaner anymore anyways... :)

(and of course making it available to people that dont use nix would be helpful- unless nix users in particular would be the niche audience to benefit from FlockRunner)
by duxup | 2025-06-14 00:18:32+00:00
I remember my grandfather’s descriptions of WWII in the pacific. One was a Marine who made a number of landings and was involved in a lot that “I wish I could forget”.

The other was a Navy doctor. An officer, but really because he was a doctor.

Their experiences were wildly different. Not so much about risk but the Marine was a grunt and his description oozed what it meant to be at that level of rank. The doctor ... his description was that doctors, while they had rank, were largely left alone to their own devices to do what they needed to do. Rank wasn't really relevant to their daily lives.
by bgwalter | 2025-06-14 00:19:26+00:00
They are part time and this is just another revolving door between the military and industry. They are literally there to sell their products (and brag about "having served").

What are other nepotistic initiatives?

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/10/10/...

"The Army in March 2021 awarded Microsoft a 10-year contract worth up to $21.9 billion for IVAS, but the initial version of the system experienced technical difficulties with a number of soldiers experiencing dizziness, headaches or nausea after wearing the goggles."
by spankibalt | 2025-06-14 00:19:34+00:00
The Royal Aircraft Factory (Farnborough) during the notorious "White Feather" campaign hysteria of World War I; its workers were given a military rank, its superintendent, Mervyn O'Gorman, got field-promoted to lieutenant-colonel.

The somewhat famous quote "Alight here for the Home of Rest with Army Exemption thrown in", a familiar greeting to RAF's working force by Farnborough's tram conductors, is a testament to it.
by pndy | 2025-06-14 00:19:38+00:00
Aye; MS wanted to make easier porting apps into their platform from Android and iOS with project astoria and islandwood but they abandon both at some point.

Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas.

The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure.

Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot.

Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.
by snerbles | 2025-06-14 00:20:22+00:00
That also strikes me as odd. When I was deployed, we had plenty of contractors/DOD civilians to handle various technical things, and to help maintain continuity while the rest of us rotated in and out of the theater. They didn't need to be commissioned.

If these execs were experienced engineers that needed to be embedded in a unit in the field, maybe, and definitely not at O-5. Usually these sorts of urgently-needed experts become instructors and teach troops the specific technical skills without the need for being enlisted/commissioned/warrant themselves.

Someone more familiar with the political games inside the Pentagon will better understand this decision.
by glangdale | 2025-06-14 00:20:27+00:00
To paraphrase Arthur Dent, "this must be a strange new usage of the word 'fastest' with which I am not previously familiar".

The fastest way to detect a vowel in a string on any reasonable architecture (Intel or AMD equipped with SIMD of some kind) is using 3-4 instructions which will process 16/32/64 (depends on SIMD length) bytes at once. Obviously access to these will require using a Python library that exposes SIMD.

Leaving SIMD aside, a flat byte array of size 256 will outperform a bitmap since it's always faster to look up bytes in an array than bits in a bitmap, and the size is trivial.
by tomhow | 2025-06-14 00:23:15+00:00
This whole defence you've written is based on the false premise that the guidelines would only be breached if that phrase is looked at in isolation.

I'll say again what I said in my previous comment:

The whole comment broke multiple guidelines. The sentence you keep defending doesn't doesn't become any less of a guidelines breach when it's read in full.

I was just citing the most egregious part when you pled ignorance, and you’ve been fixating on it and weaponizing it ever since.

Please stop with this pointless game and just make an effort to use HN as intended in future.

Edit: Please know that I have compassion for what you experienced with your family, and I can understand that your sensitivity on this topic may be linked to your feelings about that. Please don't take my efforts to uphold the guidelines as an indication that I'm indifferent to your experience of this topic, or anyone's. I hope you can try to understand that the reason we uphold the guidelines is so that we can have discussions about important, emotive topics like this without them degenerating into angry rage-fests.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-14 00:24:23+00:00
It’s very fascinating and totally amazing! I almost exclusively grow terrarium and aquarium plants for hobbyists at this point, with a few businesses buying small allotments. As I expand what I can offer and gain more traction it should allow the business to grow a bit, slowly but surely.

The terrarium plants get acclimated in 2” pots. Aquarium plants go straight out in vitro.

I’ve got some blueberries on the go as an experiment because I know a farmer who would like to buy them, and that could be a future avenue to do higher volume. But at this point I’d prefer to stay away from agriculture if I can. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t really keep me ticking like the others do.
by steamrolled | 2025-06-14 00:24:50+00:00
The complaints about licensing seem a bit weird given that the company actually accommodates hobbyists. They have a $100-something perpetual home license that doesn't require internet access.

Most other vendors of niche "pro" software just give the middle finger to hobbyists and want you to pony up thousands of dollars for an annual subscription.

I think it's perfectly OK to say "I don't need this, open-source tools work for me". Just like you can use KiCad instead of Cadence for PCB design. But getting angry at Mathworks for wanting money from commercial users seems weird.
by mindslight | 2025-06-14 00:25:39+00:00
This is a good illustration of the ineffectiveness of bluster-and-back-down foreign policy. Effective policy would be starting with smaller straightforward prohibitions, then adding more where China routes around etc. Whereas Trump starts with a blanket ban that sounds strong, and then makes unprincipled exceptions at the McDonalds-al-Lago bribe-thru.

The US has basically spent decades promulgating global business rules where investment capital routes around sovereign restrictions. Now China has plenty of capital to route around US regulations, the way only western corporations could in the past. So of course export regulations on technology are some of the first to be routed around. Just like I'm sure longer term the tariff taxes on China are going to have achieving a lot of Chinese industrial investment in other countries.
by solarwindy | 2025-06-14 00:26:33+00:00
Is that necessarily a blocker? As others in this thread have pointed out, this probably becomes possible only once sufficient compute is available for some form of non-public retraining, at the individual user level. In that case (and hand-waving away just how far off that is), does a model need to retain its generality?

Hypothetically (and perhaps more plausibly), a continually learning model that adapts to the context of a particular org / company / codebase / etc., could even be desirable.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-14 00:26:49+00:00
> The translucent panels, the layered depth, the environmental responsiveness will all feel like a natural extension of what they already know from their iPhone.

Bullshit. Nobody picked up a Hololens and thought "Oh no, I don't know what to do." Nobody put on a first generation Vision Pro and was clueless how to use it because the UI wasn't skeuomorphic and glass-like. AR has been around for decades and this hasn't been a necessity for anyone, ever.

Simply put: it's not important for AR/VR, and it's definitely not necessary for every other computing form factor to adopt it so that folks are somehow prepared to use AR someday. My laptop isn't AR, don't give me an AR interface because it's nice to be consistent across your product lineup.

The only take this post gets right, as best as I can tell: liquid glass gets stuff wrong, and it'll need to change before shipping.
by ghaff | 2025-06-14 00:27:14+00:00
That comports with my memory. I have no idea what Apple's internal sales projections were. But there was a ton of nerd and tech press criticism to the effect that young people didn't wear watches any longer so obviously this was a stupid idea for a product.

Even if I'm not really sold for day-to-day wear because of the limited battery life, I do have one.
by zeroq | 2025-06-14 00:29:00+00:00
I always think about BlackBerry as another Kodak.

They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them.

It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy.

If anything, Nokia was distaster.
by sysmax | 2025-06-14 00:29:02+00:00
Not exactly. Let's say, you-the-human are trying to fix a crash in the program knowing just the source location. You would look at the code and start hypothesizing:

* Maybe, it's because this pointer is garbage.

* Maybe, it's because that function doesn't work as the name suggests.

* HANG ON! This code doesn't check the input size, that's very fishy. It's probably the cause.

So, once you get that "Hang on" moment, here comes the boring part of of setting breakpoints, verifying values, rechecking observations and finally fixing that thing.

LLM's won't get the "hang on" part right, but once you point it right in their face, they will cut through the boring routine like no tomorrow. And, you can also spin 3 instances to investigate 3 hypotheses and give you some readings on a silver platter. But you-the-human need to be calling the shots.
by VMtest | 2025-06-14 00:31:13+00:00
nope, not fair, virtualbox for example doesn't use whpx on windows while it has kvm backend on linux now

vmware is bloated, I prefer not to register an account to download it as well. hyper-v uses FreeRDP and that requires the guest distribution to support it AFAIK, so it's not a easy out-of-the-box solution

and I do use qemu on linux, just at the surface level, with libvirt with virt-manager, it's easy to configure with the UI
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-14 00:31:24+00:00
> The Detachment 201 program is aimed at bringing in part-time advisors from the private sector to help the service adopt and scale commercial technology like drones and robots into its formations.

So we're taking executives from companies that sell to the government and military to advise the military on what to adopt. And not only are we bringing them into the fold, we're commissioning so we can give them a pension in 20 years after they've recommended their own employers' services and products.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-14 00:32:50+00:00
It's not at all unusual for drugs to have effects similar to the thing they're used to treat.

The anti-emetic I needed to take for chemo (chemotherapy is literally poison, your body will quickly figure out that you're being poisoned and, despite the fact that the poison was injected into your veins, throw up to try to remove it, so, you need an anti-emetic or you'll have a bad time each session) has "Nausea, vomiting" on its list of possible side effects. It also has a long list of really nasty psyc effects, so since taking it after chemo isn't mandatory I just didn't, most people take it for a few hours or a day, I just didn't, which was not fun but to my mind the risk wasn't worth it. [Yes I'm fine now, chemotherapy works]

Even more hilariously I read a friend's Morning After pill patient info while she was busy taking it, and almost every symptoms of early pregnancy is on the side effects list - basically the only thing they're not saying you might have despite this pill is a baby. Vomiting, cramps, dizziness and headaches, bleeding, sore nipples - pretty much everything except the newborn human in nine months was on the list.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-06-14 00:33:06+00:00
AGI likely a combination of these two papers + something new likely along the lines of distillation.

1. Preventing collapse -> model gets "full" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00796

2. Forgetting causes better generalization https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01163

3. Unknow paper that connects this - allow a "forgetting" model that improves generalization over time. - I tried for a long time to make this but it's a bit difficult

Fun implication is that if true this implies AGI will need "breaks" and likely need to consume non task content of high variety much like a person does.