MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-04 11:56:51+00:00
Thanks for clarifying; indeed, I think we actually have somewhat similar perspective on this.

> I guess I am saying is that AI is much more like Alien than Artificial, but we read the tokens as if they are deeply human, and it is really hard for people to not think of it as human, purely because it uses language in such profound way.

That's something I keep thinking about, but I'm still of two minds about it. On the one hand, there's no reason to assume that a machine intelligence is going to be much like ours. You put it nicely:

> it can do theory of mind to us, but we can not do theory of mind to it.

And on the one hand (still the same hand), we shouldn't expect to. The design space of possible minds is large; if we draw one at random, it's highly unlikely to be very much like our own minds.

On the other hand, LLMs were not drawn at random. They're a result of brute-forcing a goal function that's basically defined as, "produce output that makes sense to humans", in fully general sense. And then, the input is not random - this is a point I tried to communicate earlier. You say:

> What I argue is that language is uniquely human, and it is how it is because of the human condition.

I agree, but then I also argue that language itself implicitly encodes a lot of information on the human condition. It's encoded in what we say, and what we don't say. It's hidden in pattern of responses, the choice of words, the associations between words, and how they differ across languages people speak. It's encoded in the knowledge we communicate, and how we communicate it.

I also believe that, at the scale of current training datasets, and with amount of compute currently applied, the models can pick up and internalize those subtle patterns, even though we ourselves can't describe it; I believe the optimization pressure incentivizes it. And because of that, I think it's likely that the model really is becoming an Artificial, lossy approximation of our minds, and not merely a random Alien thing that's good enough to fool us into seeing it as human.

Whether or not my belief turns out to be correct, I do have a related and stronger belief: that language carries enough of an imprint of "human condition" to allow LLMs to actually process meaning. The tokens may be coming to us from an alien mind, but the meaning as we understand it is there.
by ajuc | 2025-06-04 11:57:37+00:00
> Instead, users must verify their age using a credit card or a government-issued ID. This check must be carried out by an external service, not the porn site itself.

> This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.

Seems like a reasonable solution.

The only remainig problem (provider knowing that you watch some porn even if not - exactly what kind) could be solved by requiring some other websites to verify age too. For example horror movies or liveleak videos.
by Retric | 2025-06-04 11:57:47+00:00
I think porn has ~net neural effects on kids. One of the upsides is it’s a time sink replacing activities that can result in direct physical harm, just as video games do etc.

Without hormones driving people to it it’s uninteresting. After hormones kick in there’s upsides and downsides to porn, but those hormones are pushing a drug like effect and thus addiction either way.
by DrScientist | 2025-06-04 11:58:12+00:00
Of course it does depend on how you measure cost.

If you just measure generation costs then you are missing the other key element of a nation grid - it always working - and that characteristic costs as well, not just the electrons provided.

So those improved transmission and storage investments need to be put on the renewables total costs.

Nuclear also has significant decommissioning costs.

However the biggest cost here is probably that required to adapt to the effects of climate change if we don't take steps.
by Illniyar | 2025-06-04 11:58:33+00:00
>This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.

I don't know the specifics, but seems very reasonable if implemented matches the promise. If it's required also for some non porn sites (social media? gambling maybe), there should be no stigma attached either.
by kamalraz | 2025-06-04 11:58:40+00:00
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by coldtea | 2025-06-04 11:58:51+00:00
Well, everything in the universe, including learning is "just" interaction between quantum fields, so...

I mean "just" is doing a lot of work there. Or rather, "pattern matching" is doing a lot of work - ignoring emergent properties like "creative leaps" for example, or tactile learning, muscle memory (is that "pattern matching" too?), and other such cases.

But are we saying something meaningful aside from "if we expand our definition of pattern matching to cover all aspects of intelligent behavior, learning is just pattern matching"?

Feels to me like reducing chemistry or medicine to physics. Ultimately it's all physics, but...
by npteljes | 2025-06-04 11:59:20+00:00
Same with alcohol too.

>I didn’t understand the appeal

My personal appeals are the anticipation of the next dose, and the initial rush I get from it. I feel smart, motivated, and capable during this rush.

Aside from this, I think the smell is great and I really like it cold, with a lot of milk. I quenches my thirst like nothing else.
by UnreachableCode | 2025-06-04 11:59:27+00:00
>Instead, users must verify their age using a credit card or a government-issued ID. This check must be carried out by an external service, not the porn site itself.

>This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.

So is there an issue here if the external service disposes of the card details immediately following confirmation? I'm not exactly sure how this would/could work though.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-04 11:59:34+00:00
I wonder if France has 'strict liability' like the US, where it doesn't matter one iota for minor sex crimes that they had a passport, DL and their own mother claiming they are 18 and you did all the due diligence in the world, if they were all lying and the documentation is a perfect fake or even just incorrect it is zero defense and straight to jail.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 11:59:49+00:00
That is very much the opposite of good governance. Instituting mandates with no rules for how to comply with them leaves the door open to abuse on all sides.

For example, a malicious inspector could open the site and pass any verifications in place while a minor is in the room, notice that the site did not prevent the minor from seeing the content, and fine the site.

Conversely, the site could claim they have found some fancy data analysis method to prevent access to minors in the wild while simply implementing some "we believe you are minor" page to be randomly generated once in a while, and claim in court that they have done their best and at most a small handful of children are getting around their complex protections.
by dmurray | 2025-06-04 12:00:03+00:00
> But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.

We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
by rwmj | 2025-06-04 12:00:37+00:00
Yes you're correct! It's about a factor of 50,000 between the orbit of Jupiter and the distance to the nearest star.

But the orbit of Jupiter is still a lot bigger than the size of the Sun. To give numbers: The radius of the Sun is 700km, the radius of the orbit of Jupiter is 7*10^8 km (approx, it varies a bit), and the distance to the nearest star is 4*10^13 km.
by togume | 2025-06-04 12:00:59+00:00
It’s so great this app is getting attention. Hopefully the devs/PMs come here and pay attention.

The sound ID works very well, especially in the jungles/forests of Colombia with zero network availability.

The rest of the app needs a lot of love, though. Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.

Features: I’d love an iNaturalist bridge. Going back into a previous recording shows “No matches” when the original capture did. Many times we’re with groups in nature, and we ID something, but it’s gone by the time we show it to someone.

A quick starting point would be to add a quick feedback button vs opening a web form, so issues can be reported conveniently.

And a resounding thank you to everyone making this app possible!
by chriswarbo | 2025-06-04 12:01:16+00:00
The "Goedel Machine" is an interesting definition, but wildly impractical (though I wouldn't say it's impossible, since it only has to find some improvement, not "the best" improvement; e.g. it could optimise its search procedure in a way that's largely orthogonal to the predicted rewards).

Schmidhuber later defined "PowerPlay" as a framework for building up capabilities in a more practical way, which is more adaptive than just measuring the score on a fixed benchmark. A PowerPlay system searches for (problem, replacement) pairs, where it switches to the replacement if (a) the current system cannot solve that problem, (b) the replacement can solve that problem, and (c) the replacement can also solve all the problems that caused previous replacements (maintained in a list).

I formalised that in Coq many years ago ( http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/powerplay ), and the general idea can be extended to (a) include these genetic-programming approaches, rather than using a single instance; and (b) could be seeded with desirable benchmarks, etc. to guide the system in a useful direction (so it's "self-invented" problems can include things like "achieves X% on benchmark Y")
by Lerc | 2025-06-04 12:01:42+00:00
I have tried to convince people that ASM is reasonable as a first stage teaching language. The reputation as a nearly mystical art practiced by a few doesn't help. The thing is, instructions are simple. Getting them to do things is not hard, the difficulty comes from tasks exceeding a scale where you can think about things at their most basic level.

It quickly becomes tedious to do large programs, not really hard, just unmanagable, which is precisely it should be taught as a first language. You learn how do do simple things and you learn why programming languages are used. You teach the problem that is being solved before teaching more advanced programming concepts that solve the problem.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-04 12:02:27+00:00
> Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information.

Honestly the older I get, the less I can strongly care about this. For better or worse, porn is a relatively mainstream topic. If we can't have discussions about why porn taste is so potentially devastating to leak, we don't deserve privacy.

Besides, it's not like "leaking" of this information would lead to a public index of who is watching what. And maybe it should, I'm no longer sure.
by andrewingram | 2025-06-04 12:04:02+00:00
This feels like a cynical interpretation of Jacob's post.

I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to want to retire with a feeling that their career was a net positive to society; and it can be very difficult to get that feeling when working in tech. So even if switching to being an EMT means his maximum individual impact is vastly reduced, it's far easier to make the claim that he's doing good.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-04 12:04:25+00:00
>There were 140k recorded hate crimes in 2024 [1].

That's just hate crimes and not the totality of speech crimes.

In addition, repeat offenders count for more than 1.

>So you are correct, "thousands" is an exaggeration.

I'm not in the UK, happy to be wrong; but im pretty sure i wasnt exaggerating is the scary thing.
by bluGill | 2025-06-04 12:05:02+00:00
In multiple choice if you don't know then a random guess is your best answer in most cases. In a few tests blank is scored better than wrong but that is rare and the professors will tell you.

as such I would expect students to but in something. However after class they would talk about how bad they think they did because they are all self aware enough to know where they guessed.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-06-04 12:06:37+00:00
A credit card, or some money related government ID is what should be used for checking. If you make a separate ID for this, or use something "not risky to hand out", you'll just be creating a business opportunity for adults selling "verification services" using their government ID, for other (potentially) kids to make use of.

If you verify using say, bank credentials, though, then those adults can't do the same since they risk losing money. Minimum balance checks are also necessary so it's not a "nothing to lose" situation.

Important to set incentives right when doing bans like this. Historically, it's been implemented very badly wherever it's been tried.

Of course an outright ban is also not a problem IMO, but many differ on that.
by padraigfl | 2025-06-04 12:07:29+00:00
One I do occasionally that I feel like gets a great mid point between the passiveness of knitting and more thoroughly engaged effort of things like woodworking has been making pop up cards.

I seem to have an intuitive competency at it but the combination of figuring out the layout, getting the measurements down and preparing the materials (I'll usually use basic card and style the individual pieces of card to match what I need e.g. making a card of floor-boarding for the wooden floor base) gives a huge amount of repetitive work that can be done while watching something.

The obvious next step is to invest time getting into origami so I can do more complex layouts.
by rkangel | 2025-06-04 12:07:31+00:00
This article misses a point that I really like knitting - that it is a lot like executing software.

There are a small number of knitting techniques - knit, purl, a few increases and decreases etc. Knitting patterns give you sequences to apply these primitives and at the end you have a complex, useful item, potentially in 3D.

You're doing a few simple things repeatedly and you end up with complex behaviour. That's a CPU!
by rsfern | 2025-06-04 12:07:59+00:00
This is all awesome, but a bit off topic for the thread which focuses on AI for science

The disconnect here is that the cost of iteration is low and it’s relatively easy to verify the quality of a generated C program (does the compiler issue warnings or errors? Does it pass a test suite?) or a recipe (basic experience is probably enough to tell if an ingredient sends out of place or proportions are wildly off)

In science, verifying a prediction is often super difficult and/or expensive because at prediction time we’re trying to shortcut around an expensive or intractable measurement or simulation. Unreliable models can really change the tradeoff point of whether AI accelerates science or just massively inflated the burn rate
by tossandthrow | 2025-06-04 12:08:05+00:00
That is not correct.

In law making the is a concept of standards VS. Rules - look it up.

"you can not serve explicit erotica material to people under the age of 18" is very much a rule. It is super easy to asses whether you do it.

The law should not mandate how to comply.

Law makers do not care if you refrain from pressing the speeder or drive an under powered car.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-04 12:08:08+00:00
>These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites

Lol they won't. dark IDs or just AI altering their IDs, the second france enforces such law there will be some entrepreneur that makes an AI bot that accepts your ID and then changes the DOB and then spits out the video/images for KYC.
by jmclnx | 2025-06-04 12:08:11+00:00
A rather fair review and the partitioning step can be confusing to new users. A first time user should read the Guide a few times and maybe refer to it during install. It renders fine on a smartphone.

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/

One thing to note, if you create a separate /usr and/or /var partition, y0u really should (must) add this line or similar line to /etc/rc.conf

critical_filesystems_local="/var /usr"

otherwise you will get odd boot errors/warnings, Dir order does not matter.
by analog31 | 2025-06-04 12:08:48+00:00
A relative runs trail ultras, but I'm just guessing here based on our conversations. About food in general, you learn what agrees with you and what doesn't, and this information is also shared informally. Something might be gassy or tie your stomach in knots. Also, interestingly, the ultra-runners tend to favor "real food" rather than packaged jells and liquids.
by mrweasel | 2025-06-04 12:08:50+00:00
I haven't worked with online payments for a few years, so take it for what it is, but I'd agree. PayPal is possibly the worst payment solution, for the stores. Their support sucks and is completely unhelpful, managing your account was at the time extremely complex, compared any other payment solution.

Our rule taking PayPal: Transfer EVERYTHING out of your PayPal account on a daily basis, do not let them hold your funds, they will block you from accessing it at some point. Minimize what they can touch.

Also don't all smaller amounts to be paid with PayPal. This prevents you from being abused as a source for verifying stolen accounts.

The only company I dealt with that came close to the same level of incompetency was Klarna. Klarna didn't at the time understand the concept of fraud, because they're Swedish and their system in Sweden MOSTLY prevented fraud at the time. Once people found away around that and Klarna expanded beyond Sweden, they gave up and attempted to stick the bill on us, despite their contracts clearly stated that they where responsible for collecting payments.
by lelanthran | 2025-06-04 12:09:09+00:00
> My philosophy is to let the LLM either write the logic or write the tests - but not both. If you write the tests and it writes the logic and it passes all of your tests, then the LLM did its job. If there are bugs, there were bugs in your tests.

Maybe use one LLMs to write the code and a wildly different one to write the tests and yet another wildly different one to generate an English description of each test while doing critical review.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-04 12:09:13+00:00
IMO It depends a lot on the assembly flavour.

The best ISA for learning is probably the Motorola 68000, followed by some 8-bit CPUs (6502, 6809, Z80), also probably ARM1, although I never had to deal with it. I always thought that x86 assembly is ugly (no matter if Intel or AT&T).

> It quickly becomes tedious to do large programs

IME with modern tooling, assembly coding can be surprisingly productive. For instance I wrote a VSCode extension for 8-bit home computers [1], and dog-fooded a little demo with it [2], and that felt a lot more productive than back in the day with an on-device assembler (or even typing in machine code by numbers).

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.v...

[2] https://floooh.github.io/kcide-sample/kc854.html?file=demo.k...
by os2warpman | 2025-06-04 12:09:56+00:00
> And lastly, pet peeve about "recalled 2M cars". Yes, the term is like that, makes it sound like millions of cars had to go to the dealership or service, whereas someone codes up a fix, pushes a button and a week later, all cars are now running that fix. But that doesn't make for dramatic headlines if you have an agenda.

That's not provocative. The vast majority of recalls in the modern age are software updates. Ford just recalled 1,075,299 vehicles due to backup camera failures last week and the fix is a technician plugging a cable into the vehicle and running a software update. The only difference is Tesla does it over the air.

It was reported as "Ford Recalls More Than 1 Million Vehicles with Backup Camera Issue".

No agenda. Factual, plain language writing.
by diggan | 2025-06-04 12:10:07+00:00
Luckily for us, Pornhub publishes a report each year, here's the report for 2024: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#top-20-...

> In this section we dive deeper into the Top 20 Countries by order of highest traffic.

With France ranked #2, which makes it seem like it's total traffic, not per capita.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 12:10:24+00:00
> hardware always "executes both sides" of a branch at once

Unless you're talking about quantum hardware, that is very much not true. The whole point of transistors is to choose whether to power one part of a circuit or another.

Plus, even for hardware, the solution to all this is to modularize all the way down. One piece of hardware sets up the right state and powers up another piece of hardware - this type of logic doesn't stop at the OS level. For drawing on the screen, ultimately you reach a piece of hardware that lights up in one of three colors based on that state - but all the way there, it's the same kind of "function calls" (and even more indirection, such as communication protocols) on many levels.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-04 12:11:27+00:00
What I understand the "dark" in "dark ages" mean is that not much came out of it, in particular in terms of historical records, not that life during that time was particularly terrible.

It is dark in the "hard to see" sense, not in the "evil" sense.

Or at least, that's the idea now, it possible that the term "dark ages" acquired a new meaning over time.
by i_love_retros | 2025-06-04 12:11:35+00:00
most people and probably you too (and me) don't take it because it would result in a financial penalty (fine) and social shaming possibly.

also the inconvenience of having to walk a bit further to get to the store isn't much really is it. compared to not buying that new plastic phone, new plastic tv, having to take 20 bottles to get refilled with shampoo, shower gel, milk, coffee, cooking oil, etc every month, taking your own container to the take out restaurant (and then cleaning it!!)... no one will do this unless forced to
by williamdclt | 2025-06-04 12:12:10+00:00
Fleeting, largely-unconsidered thought: given teenagers _will_ look for porn, that I can’t reliably be prevented and that some porn is worse than other, could/should we have a category of porn that can be accessed _for teenagers_ (>15yo for example)?

A category where there has to be no violence, no degradation, decent representation of sexualities/races/body types, no incest etc etc…

Basically give enough to teenagers that they’re satisfied enough with it without having to look elsewhere and be exposed to the worse stuff.

Doesn’t sound entirely like a bad idea