MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2025-06-09 14:25:12+00:00
Look at what the modern military uses. They face the same issues, even if bullets are somewhat different from arrows or swords, you still want to protect the same areas of the body again forces, and the same issues of weight, heat, maneuverability and such vs protection. While the exact compromise changes over time, any armorer in history will understand the compromises and why the modern military armour looks different.

Which is to say I'd expect a modern suit of armour to be made of kevlar.
by ben7799 | 2025-06-09 14:25:47+00:00
I have always thought the fact Boston was a hotbed of revolution and New York city was a loyalist stronghold (as the article mentions) has had some small subconscious effect on the ongoing rivalry between the two cities all the way to the present day.

We joke about the Red Sox and the Yankees but deep down there is this smidgen of it that goes all the way back.

Also from the article, amazing how William Franklin has been almost erased by history even though Benjamin Franklin is endlessly discussed in elementary history in the US. A fascinating addition to the story. I'm sure historians are familiar with this, but it's likely something every day Americans should all know about. I know it was not mentioned in my education through high school, including AP history. There was scant discussion of loyalists, the Tories were definitely mentioned but it was not covered in the same way the community & family divisions of the Civil War were.
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-09 14:25:49+00:00
I think once again - when the process becomes the metric it’s insane. What time things are being administered is already random and not regulated or organized. “What if it hurts” isn’t relevant for something like this because the reasoning is that the baseline is that “when” doesn’t matter, you’re still giving the same dosage. “What if it clearly helps?” What if. Then you publish a paper or give a talk at a conference and try to better mobile the medical community. Or see if the administrators are willing to help scale this up further.

> How do you ensure you collected enough of a sample of a general population to make your study representative?

You don’t need to. This would be a pilot study to check whether there’s maybe a there there before you do it larger scale to measure predictive power at population level.

> Do I keep going or is the IRB approval process clearer now? There is a reason it exists.

I think you’re completely failing to engage with the argument that this particular case about time shifting delivery of a drug should not need meaningful IRB engagement other than “I’d like to change the time I deliver the drug for 2 more patients because we had one patient respond positively and this isn’t believed to be a factor” “ok cool yup”.

You’ve jumped from no IRB to full IRB without considering the context of the problem being solved which is why I said when the process becomes the goal vs the problem you’re trying to solve - you’re imaging the worst and most complicated situations possible for a case that would never demand it.
by kstrauser | 2025-06-09 14:26:02+00:00
Yes. They say:

> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever

and link to a list of all instances who have blocked them for any reason whatsoever. My instance is on that list, as though I blocked them because of fediblock. In reality, it’s impossible for them to know why someone blocked them without doing a survey or something.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-09 14:26:15+00:00
> If ICE doesn’t have probable cause to believe you’re an alien, you’re free to go.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-ice-detained-c...

"In 2017, Stevens began studying cases like Watson’s, combing through court records for instances of ICE detainees being released after the government acknowledged they were citizens. She connected with dozens, including many who had been deported before the government could correct its error, and who got in touch with her from other countries. 'This is happening all the time,' she says. In her study, she found that, on average, U.S. citizens detained by ICE spent 180 days behind bars. Deportation is always a real possibility. At a mass removal hearing she attended, Stevens remembers the judge declaring that all 50 defendants would be deported; as the bailiff cleared the room, a man stood up and shouted, 'I thought I’d have a chance to speak to a judge!'"

"It took years, but eventually the BIA, even with the naturalization papers in front of them, denied his request for a stay, concluding the government could deport him. The court’s argument was arcane: It maintained that Watson couldn’t prove his father had custody of him when he was naturalized."

"A court would eventually rule that Watson had been wrongfully imprisoned. But the statute of limitations to sue the government began the day he got locked in ICE detention; it had passed by the time he was released."
by j_m_b | 2025-06-09 14:26:26+00:00
This is cool! I made a similar app, but for guitar. However, I couldn't quite figure out how long I should sample. I wanted to make an app where it will play an interval and then you need to play it back on the guitar. If you can get this to work on a harmonica, I should be able to get it to work with a guitar. Will likely use your source for more inspiration, thanks!
by bitwize | 2025-06-09 14:26:54+00:00
Seamonkey is still out there. The rot hasn't touched the Seamonkey foundation, in part because only like, my dad uses, or has heard of, Seamonkey.

Seamonkey is pretty much the descendant of the OG Netscape Communicator codebase. So it's kind of on topic for retro Web stuff.
by qualeed | 2025-06-09 14:27:01+00:00
>I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever

The rest of the sentence is important to the meaning of the sentence, though...?

"giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed." with a link to a claim that they allow loli.

(For what it is worth, I've blocked them as well, but I still didn't read this paragraph as them "whining about a cabal")
by kenjackson | 2025-06-09 14:27:19+00:00
This is really over indexing on language for LLMs. It’s about taking input and generating output. Humans use different types of senses as their input, LLMs use text.

What makes thinking an interesting form of output is that it processes the input in some non-trivial way to be able to do an assortment of different tasks. But that’s it. There may be other forms of intelligence that have other “senses” who deem our ability to only use physical senses as somehow making us incomplete beings.
by weird_trousers | 2025-06-09 14:27:21+00:00
It would be “eventually good” if, and only if, Vision problems were solved at 100% F1-Score. Which is absolutely not! So, to me, I expected bad and I received… bad results.

Paying for this crap is just throwing money out the window. Those startups should solve problems and them let people pay for it, for 99% accuracy, not at minimum of 66%.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-06-09 14:27:23+00:00
Sometimes, people believe they have enough doing what they're doing that they don't need to compromise their ideals to make more money.

Some people are willing to compromise their own economic status to pursue what they feel are larger, more important goals.

Some people have ethical and/or moral lines they will not cross no matter how much money they are offered.

So no, not like every other employee on the planet.
by jeffbee | 2025-06-09 14:27:40+00:00
It must be a daunting chore to maintain all the legacy pages. The amount of now-years-old stuff that long-standing sites have to maintain, or choose to maintain, is shockingly high, and testing the combination of all that stuff is impossible.

If you want an example of how diverse in age these apps are, dig around in the Gmail settings panel. Eventually you will land on a popup that uses the original Gmail look and feel, from 2004.
by jaynetics | 2025-06-09 14:28:06+00:00
Yeah. I think the analogy with electrical wiring is quite illuminating. Few software errors have a similar risk profile as faulty wiring. Maybe if a calendar or messenger or such is buggy, that's enough of a nuisance to switch, but I doubt a lot of software is this critical. People already put up with plenty of bugs e.g. in games or social networks. Even with paid software, I'm sometimes surprised how much patience customers have developed when it comes to glaring deficits.
by tim333 | 2025-06-09 14:28:10+00:00
>Demis Hassabis, [] said the goal is to create “models that are able to understand the world around us.”

>These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all.

This seems quite a common error in the criticism of AI. Take a reasonable statement about AI not mentioning LLMs and then say the speaker (nobel prize winning AI expert in this case) doesn't know what they are on about because current LLMs don't do that.

Deepmind already have project Astra, a model but not just language but also visual and probably some other stuff where you can point a phone at something and ask about it and it seems to understand what it is quite well. Example here https://youtu.be/JcDBFAm9PPI?t=40
by stronglikedan | 2025-06-09 14:28:46+00:00
Don't be a germaphobe. Don't wash your hands a lot. Give your immune system a little work out each day by not babying it.

Try not to take any medicines unless you absolutely need them, and stay away from hand sanitizers. If you do need to clean anything, soap is more than enough and water is usually enough.

I thought it was normal to be over 50 and not take any medicines, but all the doctors and staff were surprised by this when I got my colonoscopy recently.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-09 14:28:52+00:00
> though at the outset (pre-profit / private) it's hard to say there's much difference.

I think this is the tough part, we’re at the outset still.

Also, a political investment could could be sustainable, in the sense that China might decide they are fine running Deepseek at a loss indefinitely, if that’s what’s going on (hypothetically. Actually I have never seen any evidence to suggest Deepseek is subsidized, although I haven’t gone looking).
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-09 14:29:39+00:00
> Websites have been choosing shitty UX for decades at this point. The web is so polluted with crap and obstacles it’s ridiculous. Nobody seems to care any more. Now LLMs have come along that will just give you the info straight away without any fuss, so of course people are going to prefer them.

Do you honestly believe LLMs aren't gonna get sponsored answers/ads and "helpful" UI elements that boost their profits?
by x0x0 | 2025-06-09 14:31:06+00:00
Nonsense. Upgrading python using standard tools does not regularly require OS upgrades. asdf, rbenv or various other tools will happily pull in new releases from their ecosystems.

Go requires macos from 2016 or kernel 3.2 which I think is over a decade old. I can't find any limit for jvm 25, though I'm sure there is one. No competently-built tool requires OS upgrades like xcode.
by Iulioh | 2025-06-09 14:31:32+00:00
Honestly the best use case i have seen is the ability to read a labels and add it to the database. (Similar to an OCR but better)

Correcting errors in MFP is the bane of my existence.

I have tried some other apps but i hated every single one of them for a reason or another and came back to MFP but that was one of the best features i would really love to have
by strict9 | 2025-06-09 14:33:17+00:00
Angst is the best way to put it.

I use AI every day, I feel like it makes me more productive, and generally supportive of it.

But the angst is something else. When nearly every tech related startup seems to be about making FTEs redundant via AI it leaves me with a bad feeling for the future. Same with the impact on students and learning.

Not sure where we go from here. But this feels spot on:

>I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that are actually useful at prices that make sense.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-09 14:33:17+00:00
i think this author doesnt fully understand how llms work either. Dismissing it as "a statistical model" is silly. hell, quantum mechanics is a statistical model too.

moreover, each layer of an llm imbues the model with the possibility of looking further back in the conversion and imbuing meaning and context through conceptual associations (thats the k-v part of the kv cache). I cant see how this doesn't describe, abstractly, human cognition. now, maybe llms are not fully capable of the breadth of human cognition or have a harder time training to certain deeper insight, but fundamentally the structure is there (clever training and/or architectural improvements may still be possible -- in the way that every CNN is a subgraph of a FCNN that would be nigh impossible for a FCNN to discover randomly through training)

to say llms are not smart in any way that is recognizable is just cherry-picking anecdotal data. if llms were not ever recognizably smart, people would not be using them the way they are.
AI Powered Terminal Emulators
by bitstreamshaman | 2025-06-09 14:33:36+00:00
Hey Guys! What do you think of this new terminal emulators like warp and wave (ok maybie they are not so new) but i believe that they aren't getting as much attention as they should, i have been working as a DevOps engineer for 3 years now and i'm use to playing with Terminals a lot, at the same time warp is closed source which frankly i don't like and wave has the worst UX.. It has an "AI" integration but it sucks.

Should i be working on building my own? What do you say? I think there is great progress to be made in AI driven cloud and devops automation.
Show HN: AI-Powered Visual Creation Platform
by zengyue | 2025-06-09 14:33:44+00:00
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by noodletheworld | 2025-06-09 14:34:15+00:00
I don’t completely disagree, but “assertion one” [1]

[1] ~ you can obviously verify this yourself by doing it yourself and seeing how expensive it is.

…is an enormously weak argument.

You suppose. You guess. We guess.

Let’s be honest, you can just stop at:

> I don’t think so.

Fair. I don’t either; but that’s about all we can really get at the moment afaik.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-09 14:34:44+00:00
>Deepmind already have project Astra, a model but not just language but also visual and probably some other stuff where you can point a phone at something and ask about it and it seems to understand what it is quite well.

Operative phrase "seems to understand". If you had some bizarre image unlike anything anyone's ever seen before and showed it to a clever human, the human might manage to figure out what it is after thinking about it for a time. The model could never figure out anything, because it does not think. It's just a gigantic filter that takes known-and-similar images as input, and spits out a description on the other side, quite mindlessly. The language models do the same thing, do they not? They take prompts as inputs, and shit output from their LLM anuses based on those prompts. They're even deterministic if you take the seeds into account.

We'll scale all those up, and they'll produce ever-more-impressive results, but none of these will ever "understand" anything.
by username332211 | 2025-06-09 14:34:44+00:00
Never-mind that, there's every indication this one is in fact yet another bad one.

The Taliban didn't return to power in Afghanistan, because the war was unjust according to international law, or morally repugnant or any of that. That has never mattered. And it won't ever matter.

The Taliban won because American strategy was defective from the start. While great victories with thousands of Taliban getting massacred were common, none of those contributed the destruction of the Taliban or any other strategic objective. There had been minimal effort to learn from the failures of Vietnam and the idea of learning from British victories against the insurgents in Malaya and South Africa was unthinkable.

And the situation in Ukraine gives every indication of being similar. The Ukrainian side conducts ambitious operations, some of them impressive successes, but ever since the summer of 2023, victory only seems to be getting more distant as time goes by.
by perplex | 2025-06-09 14:35:24+00:00
> I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context

My own personal experience is that Gen AI is an amazing tool to support learning, when used properly.

Seems likely there will be changes in higher education to work with gen AI instead of against it, and it could be a positive change for both teachers and students.
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-06-09 14:36:02+00:00
Somewhere in a photo album is a picture of my mother-in-law standing in front of a gas station 20-30 years ago. It was odd. Why stage this photo here? It didn't seem like a particularly pretty or special gas station.

I asked her about it, and she said she was thinking about how this common thing will probably disappear or look very different in the future, and it would be interesting to take a photo before it's gone.

Alas, the photo is still of a boring place that exists everywhere.
by brabel | 2025-06-09 14:36:14+00:00
> much of a win?

It's a huge win. Absolutely game changing.

> You just made a bunch of concurrent algorithms un-implementable

Exactly! That's a good thing! You think you need those buggy algorithms, you just don't, at least in 99% of cases.

Yes, you can still end up with inconsistencies when you perform actions without the necessary checks, but those cases that remain are extremely easy to find and fix (and even make completely impossible by design), when compared to the horrors of mutable state with locks.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-09 14:36:16+00:00
Not giving material support, sure. "We don't like your law. You have the right to enforce it, but we are not going to help you do so." Sure, that's fine.

Actively hindering is a whole additional step, though. I'm pretty sure at least some cities crossed it.

(How actively? Not to the point of arresting or shooting at ICE agents, but still further than "not helping". And if you're going to ask for references, I can't give them. This is my impression of several "sanctuary cities", but I can't point to a concrete incident.)
by 827a | 2025-06-09 14:36:20+00:00
Here's a question I don't know the answer to right off, but we're going to discover together in real time: Which is cheaper, one million queries to fetch the value of a secret from AWS Secrets Manager, or one million tokens from a modern LLM?

Storing a secret in secrets manager: $0.40

$0.05/10,000 API calls * 1,000,000 calls = $5

Total cost: $5.40.

Gemini 2.5 Flash: $0.15/million tokens.

Well, there you have it. Storing a secret value in AWS Secrets Manager is ~36 times more expensive per API call than querying an LLM!
by fzwang | 2025-06-09 14:36:49+00:00
We've explored using external vendors for data labeling and annotation work for a few projects (image and text data). I think overall the problem is more along of the lines of mis-aligned/drifting incentives. It's like Goodhart's law, where whatever metric you use for outcomes tend to be manipulated or have unintended consequences. And putting in the trusted systems to identify bad/shifting metrics is costly in a way that makes outsourcing not worth it.

In most cases, we've opted to build the data labeling operation in-house, so we have more control over the quality and can adjust on the fly. It's slower and more costly upfront, but better outcomes in the long run as we get higher quality data.
by taeric | 2025-06-09 14:36:58+00:00
This feels odd. Many people paid dearly for being involved, period? It isn't like we have any dynasties that survived through the era, did we?

Specifically, 46 people signed the declaration of independence. How many of those are remembered today? Do I expect that people on the "other side" had it worse? Yeah, but this framing implies a spoils system.

This always makes it odd to read about narratives that go about people's connection to family land. It is almost anti American in how we were founded and grew. I know we have a few estates that are named and known. Is that a larger number than I realize?
by int_19h | 2025-06-09 14:36:59+00:00
The reason why it's more unsafe than C is because Rust makes a lot more assumptions about e.g. lack of aliasing that C does not, which are incredibly easy to violate once you have raw pointers.

Obviously if you can keep using references then it's not less safe, but if what you're doing can be done with references, why would you even be using `unsafe`?
by jstummbillig | 2025-06-09 14:36:59+00:00
There is also a lot of different models at a lot of different price points (and LLMs are fairly hard to compare to begin with). In this theory of a likely loss-leader, must we assume that all of them, from all companies, are priced below cost...? If so, that seems like a fairly wild claim. What's Step 2 for all of these companies to get ahead of this, given how model development currently works?

I think the far more reasonable assumption is: It's profitable enough to not get super nervous about the existence of your company. You have to build very costly models and build insanely costly infrastructure. Running all of that at a loss without an obvious next step, because ALL of them are pricing to not even make money at inference, seems to require a lot of weird ideas about how companies are run.
by kenjackson | 2025-06-09 14:37:07+00:00
I think it’s because the brain is simply a set of chemical and electrical interactions. I think some believe when we understand how the brain works it won’t be some “soulful” other worldly explanation. It will be some science based explanation that will seem very unsatisfying to some that think of us as more than complex machines. The human brain is different than LLMs, but I think we will eventually say “hey we can make a machine very similar”.
by m0th87 | 2025-06-09 14:37:09+00:00
That’s what I hope for, but everything that isn’t bananas expensive with unified memory has very low memory bandwidth. DGX (Digits), Framework Desktop, and non-Ultra Macs are all around 128 gb/s, and will produce single digits tokens per second for larger models: https://github.com/XiongjieDai/GPU-Benchmarks-on-LLM-Inferen...

So there’s a fundamental tradeoff between cost, inference speed, and hostable model size for the foreseeable future.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-09 14:37:10+00:00
> I’m talking about today’s experience…

In that case, get uBlock. The answer is in the first result, on the first screen, and the answer is even quoted in the short description from the site. (As a bonus, it also blocks the cookie consent popups on the AA site, if you like.)

The only thing getting in the way of the real, vetted, straight-from-the-source answer currently is the AI overview.

https://imgur.com/a/pRUGgRx