MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dralley | 2025-06-02 01:39:10+00:00
Russia was using those bombers to terrorize their cities night after night. Ukrainians are not required to (nor will they) sit back and take it out of abstract MAD force balance concerns. If Russia cared that much about the value strategic aviation holds in their nuclear doctrine, they wouldn't be using it to chuck missiles at chldren's cancer hospitals and apartment blocks.

If you want to try to impose some deeper strategic meaning onto this, a more plausible one would be the reverse: that the more "western powers" pull back from supporting Ukraine, the more Ukraine is are forced to establish they are capable of less conventional, less predictable, more aggressive means of deterrence to compensate for the absence of strong western partners.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-02 01:40:13+00:00
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote down pretty bluntly what society might do against the vicious nasty foes of the world with drones, in Ministry for the Future. A book very well reviewed by for example Bill Gates. https://www.gatesnotes.com/books/science-fiction/reader/the-...

Alas it feels optimistic to hope that asymmetric confrontation would be downtrodden people of the earth against bad world damaging take-take-take pests. Merely a science fiction. The world having powerful forces working strongly for the world rather than self interest: hardly believable science fiction.
by aerospades | 2025-06-02 01:41:18+00:00
I'm not sure if that's a sarcastic pitch for SLS or shuttle, but both of those have been proven dead ends.

I feel like the overarching Starship design could be adapted to accommodate larger engines if SpaceX found an optimization there. What they need is the culture and financial runway to pivot/adjust enough to eventually get to a better optima. Which SpaceX seems to have.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-06-02 01:41:19+00:00
> Especially in the originals, everything just sort of “works out” for the protagonist(s). The bad guys don’t aim well, fly well or really do anything great.

In a New Hope as Luke and Ben are inspecting the damage to the Jawa transport, Ben does say "Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise." Then the stormtroopers go on the rest of the series missing everything they aim at.
by hayst4ck | 2025-06-02 01:42:07+00:00
It is a clever manipulation strategy via controlling the frame of analysis. George Lakoff studied this type of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

If you analyze from the US or Russian perspective, you presuppose/assert them as the entities with agency while denying Ukrainians theirs.

Any framing of an analysis that does not start from the frame of a Ukrainian with agency is suspect.
by defly | 2025-06-02 01:42:22+00:00
Here is a list of largest volunteer funds at your disposal (military and non-military help):

Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones

https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/

Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite

https://prytulafoundation.org/en

KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community

https://www.koloua.com/en/
by vannevar | 2025-06-02 01:43:16+00:00
>I'll take the easy case of real world bullying first - people know their bullies here. It does not stop bullying. Attackers tend to target groups/individuals that cannot fight back.

But in an online forum where the bully is known and can be banned/blocked permanently, everyone can fight back.

>Now you asked for evidence that either statement was true, but then spoke about reducing harassment. These are not the same things.

Of course there will continue to be harassment on the margins, where people could reasonably disagree about whether it's harassment. But even in those cases, the victims can easily and permanently block any interaction with the harasser. Which removes the gratification that such bad actors seek.

>Incivility was lower in the case where identities were exposed, however this did not stop incivility.

I think we're getting hung up on what 'stop' means in this context. If I have 100 incidences per day of incivility before verification, and only 20/day after, then I've stopped 80 cases/day. Have I stopped all incivility? No, but that was not the intent of my statement. I think it will drastically reduce bullying and misinformation, but there will always be people who come into the new forum and push the envelope. But they won't be able to accumulate, as they are rapidly blocked and eventually banned. The vast majority of misinformation and bullying comes from a small number of repeat offenders. Verification prevents the repetition.

Have you moderated in a verified context, where a banned actor cannot simply create a new account? I feel like there are very few such platforms currently, because as you point out, it's expensive and so for-profit social media prefers anonymity. But if we're all spending a significant part of our lives online, and using these platforms as a source of critical information, it's worth it.

One context where everyone is verified is in a typical business---your fellow employees, once fired, cannot simply create another company email account and start over. And bad apples who behave anti-socially are weeded out. People generally behave civilly to each other. So clearly such a system can and does work, most of us see it on a daily basis.
by dmix | 2025-06-02 01:43:56+00:00
Those bases are heavily defended against drones. Ukraine has tried repeatedly to hit these bases and only succeeded once prior hitting a single TU-95. Since then there's been nothing as Russia adapted. The long range drones required have a larger radar signature and Pantsir + AA guns on the ground are pretty good at stopping that. That plus heavy EW and GPS jamming.

Which is why Ukraine spent the last year hitting softer targets like oil and factories.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-02 01:44:02+00:00
The problem is that 01:20 on Wednesday is on Tuesday night, which trips people up.

There is no perfect solution, so I can't tell you what solving it would look like. But I'd say that putting "(Tuesday night)" next to where it says "01:20 Wednesday" would be helpful to many of the people making this mistake.

How would you define the problem? It's not people mixing up 1:20am and 1:20pm.
by elliotto | 2025-06-02 01:44:05+00:00
Chiming in here to say that I was tasked to implement a fine tuning method for my AI startup and I also couldn't find any actual implemented outputs. There are piles of tutorials and blog posts and extensive documentation on hugging face transformers about the tools provided to do this, but I was unable to find a single demonstration of 'here is the base model output' vs 'here is the fine tuned output'. Doesn't have to be online like you suggested, even a screenshot or text blob showing how the fine tuning affected it would be useful.

I am in a similar boat to you where I have developed a great sense for how the bots will respond to prompting and how much detail and context is required because I've been able to iterate and experiment with this. But have no mental model at all about how fine tuning is meant to perform.
by sbrother | 2025-06-02 01:44:12+00:00
I launched a product in this space to beta customers just last week -- https://ellm.co -- and the response has been way more positive than I could have hoped for. Every SMB owner I talk to is thinking about this and looking for ways to be ahead of the curve on it even though the number of commercial AI search queries is still dwarfed by Google. It feels like a race, and we are figuring out the rules as we run it.
by mrayycombi | 2025-06-02 01:44:41+00:00
Some ideas:

1. Profile quality (and honesty) varies wildly. Peacock and dishonest profiles dominate.

2. There is no Hobsons choice mechanism to force rotation among matches.

3. There are no incentives to respond or follow up.

4. Fake profiles benefit the platform but you have a bootstrap problem if you have no users. Plausible AI fakes will make this worse

5. There is no web of trust- if someone meets someone they could assert trust even at a low level. If I trust anyone in their web this would vet against fake profiles.

I could go on...
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-06-02 01:45:20+00:00
> The term "hacker," even in the computer field, originally had a larger scope than computer security.

I've been helping run a Hackspace for a few years; I can't tell you how many times (sometimes per week or even day depending on what I'm doing) I have to have this conversation.

I've gotten quite used to going through the patter with non-tech people - try dealing with the local council, or applying for insurance or even personal jobs when it's on your CV. Thankfully a lot of the older people remember the term "hack" meaning "amateur" which eases explanations in a workshop context.

I always assumed IT people would realise the non-negative connotations, but that really isn't the case.
by godelski | 2025-06-02 01:45:57+00:00
> I'm sure a lot of their sales funnel is just nerds like us using Tailscale at home, and then bringing it to their employers.

100% this. GitHub and WandB also seem to follow this strategy.

Honestly, I don't know why this stopped being the dominant strategy. Matlab, Adobe, Solidworks, and many other tools used to be free for students. It's not hard to see how people working with certain software while in school translates to using that same software outside. The same is true for at home! You get frustrated with whatever BS thing your work has and then ask your boss if you can use X instead.

I think it stopped because they got too big. Becoming the de facto tool they figured they could charge students and hobbiests too. I'm pretty sure this just lead to more piracy and open source solutions. I mean Coca-Cola still advertises... they sure aren't doing it for brand recognition... everyone knows who they are (same with McDonalds!). They do it to associate feelings. These companies should still do those student and hobbiest versions for the same reasons. It prevents others from displacing you. Companies aren't going to complain about the price and pirate your stuff instead, they have the money. Only hobbiests and students do that stuff...

There is one problem... I've seen employees at certain places use personal accounts for business work. Worse, I've seen them do this despite the business already having seats! I don't know why this is going on, but maybe we should do a bit of peer pressure if we want to ensure we keep those free hobbiest licenses. Plus, it puts your business in a legally dubious area. Not likely to get sued, but it sure isn't legal...
by voxelghost | 2025-06-02 01:49:14+00:00
Mind expanding what sucks about it? It's been a number of years since I did any serious OGL work, but at the time Vulkan looked like it was going to be a major step in the right direction.

Perhaps that is the problem, for any new general GPU API to get industry traction, driver, and os + tool support -takes a lot of time, and it feels obsolete by the time it is put to practical use.
by elliotto | 2025-06-02 01:49:58+00:00
A really simple blog post for any task that you think is worthwhile would be enough to move the field forward. The blog post should include:

1) the training configuration and code 2) the data used to fine tune 3) a set of input/output comparisons comparing the tuned bot to the original bot that show it's learned something interesting

For something really compelling it would host the created models on a repo that I could download and use. The gold standard would be to host them and provide a browser interface, but this could be expensive for gpu costs.

This blog post currently doesn't exist, or if it does I haven't been able to find it in the sea of medium articles detailing an outdated hugging face api
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-02 01:49:59+00:00
It's not totally unjustified to hone in on GC as over focusing. But it feels strongly overfocusing to me.

Efficiency is the top level goal, and that equates directly to performance in most computing tasks: more efficiency means being able to let other work happen. There's times where single threaded outright speed is better, but usually in computing we try as hard as possible to get parallelism or concurrency in our approaches such that efficiency can directly translate to overall performance.

Overall performance as a bullet seems clear enough. Yes it's occluded by a mention of GC, but I don't think the team is stupid enough to think GC is the only performance factor win they might get here, even if they don't list other factors.

Even a pretty modest bit of generosity makes me think they're doing what was asked for here. Performance very explicitly is present, and to me, I think quite clearly a clear objective.
by liquidise | 2025-06-02 01:50:14+00:00
If you built an ideal dating service, where 100% of your customers pair with someone they would marry, you could charge huge sums and you'd have an endless stream of customers as people grew into marrying age.

Today's market dynamics are different (no such ideal exists), but all the drivers remain: at some age people care deeply about meeting someone and will pay for a service that gives them s fighting chance. As a former dating app cto, i believe the reasons we don't have services that brag about their match or marriage rates is not capitalist greed standing in the way of love. The problem of matching people via an app is a genuinely difficult problem for a number of fascinating reasons.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-06-02 01:51:02+00:00
> I think the cost of some formal methods have long been over-stated.

how are you measuring cost? the cost of anything in this space (or any other rarefied space) is the cost a "principal/staff" (maybe 1-person year) to build it and then a team of very very strong seniors to maintain it. who can afford that?

> Most programmers I’ve taught don’t seem to have too much difficulty learning TLA+ or Alloy. The concepts themselves are fundamentally rather simple.

this is like saying building a prod LLM pipeline is no big deal because learning the basics of pytorch is easy.

more relevantly: what are "most programmers" going to do when they hit an undecidable clause?

here's a razor for highly technical projects (a kind of efficient market hypothesis for software if you will): if it's easy to do then it's worthless (highly-commofidied, marginal value, etc.).
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-02 01:52:15+00:00
Once, I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a university telescope. You know the kind with a motorized dome and car sized actuators and such.

It was so, so visible and yet so, so far. Somehow using all that power to see it in real time and still have it be small but look so insanely huge somehow.

I had this vertigo and the scale of the solar system kind of rushed at me. Just like you say.
by myk9001 | 2025-06-02 01:53:14+00:00
They didn't mistake anything and aren't wondering about anything.

Here's a primer on how these things work in Russia.

You can be as careful as you want, if they decide they want confrontation with the US, they'll make up a reason.

If they don't feel confrontation is in their best interest, you can hit Moscow with a Tomahawk and, magically, no one will notice anything but a clapping sound.
by jimbob45 | 2025-06-02 01:54:04+00:00
Is there any progress toward more deterministic AI? Like seeding with predictable values or a nanny AI that discards hallucinations? I know the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff so I’m sure they’ve thought of everything before me but I don’t know where to seek out layman’s news on cutting-edge AI developments that aren’t just “we threw more compute and tokens at it”.
by fastball | 2025-06-02 01:54:23+00:00
Both scenarios require learning, only one scenario requires constant back-and-forth conversion, which in turn introduces opportunities for mistakes and confusion.

Here is another example: I schedule a meeting with my co-worker in London. I say "how about 10am your time?" This is because I know he is X hours behind my timezone because I've learned that fact. He agrees and I show up an hour late because I forgot about DST and that he is only X-1 hours behind now.

If we both coordinated around UTC, he would've said "actually 11 is better for me" and I would've showed up an hour earlier.
by mappu | 2025-06-02 01:54:34+00:00
Heidi is the best, this is really wonderful. I had been using MeowSQL as an imitation client which was fine, but having the real HeidiSQL again is such a nice feeling.

The deb package here didn't run for me on Debian 12 nor under distrobox Ubuntu, i think the dependency list needs a little attention, but that can be easily solved.
by hayst4ck | 2025-06-02 01:54:43+00:00
Did you watch the same oval office event I did? The national rhetoric has absolutely changed. The talk of mineral "deals" instead of values and realpolitik is also a clear change. We are literally experiencing a purge of the old guard for replacement with loyalists throughout the US government bureaucracy, and once there are loyalists in every position of enforcement, the actions can be changed to match the rhetoric change, assuming they already haven't.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-02 01:56:40+00:00
> 01:20 on Wednesday is on Tuesday night

But that's subjective. Even my grandmother in the early-80s said differently. Everyone's computer-time and our smartphones and our digital clocks we've plugged into the wall, all have switched over to Wednesday at 00:00:00 midnight.

If you go to a bar they will tell you, "last call is at two in the morning." If someone heard a noise they say "I woke up at three in the morning to look around." My mother called them "the wee hours".

Sure, colloquially, 01:20 is very late on Tuesday night, because the Sun hasn't returned to announce Wednesday, and the cock hasn't crowed. So that is another way of looking at it. Time is analog, the orbits of Earth and Moon are analog, and we're cramming them into digital approximations and binary categories.

But you've misidentified the problem. The problem is that different humans interpret differently. The interpretation is influenced by culture and language. My scientific culture says that 01:20 is on Wednesday morning, and that is in agreement with my dearly departed grandmother, my smartphone, my calendars on Google and Outlook, and honestly there is no outlier in my life, except you, and Crunchyroll(?) who would insist that "01:20 is actually 25:20 on Tuesday night", and that writing it in this way would "help" solve a problem, because we're just explaining how damned confusing that is to rational Americans or users of either 12- or 24-hour clocks.

So "the problem" in my book is that a hypothetical human looked at our hypothetical "01:20 Wednesday" as rendered by a hypothetical computer, and that human wasn't thinking like a computer, or an American, or that human was Japanese, and that human erred with their interpretation of time notation. Now I don't have any idea of what time notation "01:20 Wednesday" would prompt a hypothetical trip to the airport 24 hours late, so it is not like this human was applying a different but correct interpretation to this problem.

Why don't we write "very early on Wednesday morning" or "before sunrise on Wednesday" or "just after midnight" (the latter is literally what "a.m." means...) and it won't look like another typo. Because if you write "1:20am on Wednesday is Tuesday night" then I'm going to call out a contradiction.

Computers can actually help with this, because if I've made a hypothetical calendar entry for my flight and I email the .ICS file to you, then the timezone and day-of-week is baked-in to that, so if everyone's settings are correct, bypass human interpretations. Many airlines have a way to email your itinerary directly to your friends. Just use the tools.
by RossBencina | 2025-06-02 01:57:13+00:00
This reminds me of Richard Hamming's practice of spending time every Friday to consider the big questions of his field. Here's the first summary I found: https://nobaproject.com/blog/2018-11-01-tough-questions-and-...

The main Hamming materials I'm aware of are:

"You and your research" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

and the course, "Learning to Learn" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

The original course notes are online somewhere, can't find right now.

And I just found that there is a book: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1997-hamming-theartofdoingscie...

A serious talk by British comedian John Cleese "Creativity In Management" is also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g it touches on switching between "open" and "closed" modes of thought. Perhaps this is what we'd call switching between the DMN and TPN. Neurotypical exclusive switching between these networks is a function that is theorised to be impaired in ADHD.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-02 01:57:35+00:00
We’re all bots with extra steps if all we care about is intent. Effects of human and bot actions matter arguably even more than intent for a site like HN.

If the intent is to allow the very large and very obvious karma farming that we know about to prevent the greater ill of karma farming we don’t know about, then dang should just come out and say that.
by photochemsyn | 2025-06-02 01:58:01+00:00
Since Librivox is on the front page, here's a 1910 book reading, pretty good quality, of "The Romance of Modern Chemistry" which covers NI3 (Ch 15) and many similar topics. Surprising how much chemical knowledge existed then, even without a solid understanding of QM:

https://librivox.org/the-romance-of-modern-chemistry-by-jame...

An interesting feature is that if you go up the periodic table on the iodine column, the species become less reactive, with nitrogen bromide being explosive but more stable than NI3 and the fluorine derivative, NF3 being stable enough to use in industrial semiconductor applications (etching), and with the benefit of not being a persistent environmental pollutant due to relatively rapid breakdown.
by ericmay | 2025-06-02 01:58:30+00:00
No because I don’t waste my time watching press releases like that. If you’re watching those videos and thinking something has changed, you’re the target audience and the marketing was successful. Those are for entertainment purposes only.

Instead, find clear instances where the US is doing things like no longer sending Patriot missile launchers and missiles to Ukraine. [1]

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-working-allies-deliveries-patr...
by nkurz | 2025-06-02 01:59:14+00:00
> US has very consistently pressured Ukraine from strategic strikes into Russia.

This was previously true, but I thought this policy changed as of last week?

May 26 2025: US, UK and allies to lift all range restrictions on weapons in Ukraine

Ukraine’s western allies, including the UK and the US, have agreed to lift all remaining range restrictions on the use of their weapons after President Trump issued his strongest criticism of President Putin yet.

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/uk...
by ipv6ipv4 | 2025-06-02 01:59:15+00:00
The differences you are touching on are about interpersonal trust, and the concept of trust in society. Russia has a traditionally low trust culture. It's rooted in the most private interpersonal relationships, and is reflected in society as a whole.

The U.S. has traditionally been a high trust society. But not everyone in the U.S. is a person who can trust others. The recent political machinations in the U.S. represent the low trust segment of American society. The key to undoing it is to re-inculcate trust at a personal level, and at societal level. How that is actually done is a difficult problem with no readily obvious solution.