MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tetromino_ | 2025-06-16 16:33:34+00:00
> A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness.

Interesting - I think you've just explained "Tear-Water Tea" [1] (Arnold Lobel's classic childrens story) for me.

[1] https://archive.org/details/Tear-waterTea-English-ArnoldLobe...
by jasonthorsness | 2025-06-16 16:34:02+00:00
Seattle’s Gas Works Park has some strange equipment to address the benzene contamination. Bold move to make industrial sites into parks (it is one of the best in Seattle though!)

Edit: better link https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/cleanupsearch/site/2876

Original link was older 2005 report: https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/cleanupsearch/document/1509
by cogman10 | 2025-06-16 16:34:43+00:00
This is a good example of research that is too preliminary for anyone to form any conclusions about.

It was 400 people, 100 of whom report having autism. And it was conducted by posting links to the survey monkey survey on social media.

It might have some interesting follow up studies, but I find no reason to really take this for much other than an indicator that further study should be done.
by cameldrv | 2025-06-16 16:35:11+00:00
There are a lot of videos Waymo has posted of split second swerves they’ve had to do in SF and Austin. It looked to me like a combination of hard braking and swerving could have avoided the collision. Now to be fair to Tesla, the dummies in this test didn’t look very realistic, but not even slowing down for the school bus shows that FSD is not close to being ready for unsupervised use.
by lproven | 2025-06-16 16:36:03+00:00
> Every part of English grammar and syntax has been methodically systemized

No, it hasn't. None of it has, ever.

So far, you have been wrong about writing, about human language (specifically, English), about programming languages (specifically, Lisp and Java), about poetry, and about the rules of English and how they're set.

I am intrigued. Is this performance art? What next?
by pixodaros | 2025-06-16 16:36:44+00:00
I think I saw Apollo Research behind a paper that was being hyped a few months ago. The longtermist/rationalist space seems to be creating a lot of new organizations with new names because a critical mass of people hear their old names and say "effective altruism, you mean like Sam Bankman-Fried?" or "LessWrong, like that murder cult?" (which is a bit oversimplified, but a good enough heuristic for most people).
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-06-16 16:37:33+00:00
nncp [1, 2] is probably the best Sneakernet tool I've found. It's very UNIX-y which makes it pretty hard to operate if you're not technical but would also make it pretty easy to wrap around with a UI. You have to explicitly add a list of "neighbors" to your configuration and you can send "packets" either by spooling to file or using a TCP/Noise connection. You can also send data hop-by-hop and is e2e encrypted.

[1]: http://www.nncpgo.org/

[2]: https://www.complete.org/nncp/
by rglover | 2025-06-16 16:37:37+00:00
Sure.

I spent a lot of time in the hospital receiving treatment. Sometimes it was a few days, sometimes it was a month. My parents were working and so while I'd see them in the morning and evenings, most days I was on my own w/ the occasional nurse or doctor pop in. That led me to have a very independent (sometimes standoffishly so—mainly because I got tired of being poked at by doctors and nurses as a kid) personality and had to learn to amuse myself and be resourceful.

In addition to that, while I would attend school fairly regularly, I was "the sick kid" who was gone for weeks or a month at a time, so I didn't really form a lot of early bonds with the kids in my class. As an adult lone wolf type, I tend to smirk at that because that's essentially what I had to learn to be in those early years.

Another thing that I find amusing is that I would watch a lot of movies while I was in the hospital. I remember they would always play the same few movies:

- Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder version)

- Ghostbusters

- Gremlins

What's funny is that a good chunk of my personality is a mix of the characters in these movies. I like to have fun with people and keep them on their toes like Wonka, I like to invent/build/take risk on my own ideas like the Ghostbusters (my wife also said Pete Venkman reminds her of me), and I've always been a bit of a trouble maker/chaos monkey like a gremlin.

As an adult, I've noticed that I have an in-built preference toward self-sufficiency and tend to work/be alone most of the time and I'm hyper-sensitive to people "poking" at me (or someone else—I love going after a bully). I'd also say that I developed a high EQ and awareness of and for others (like an ability to quickly read people and know what they're feeling—my grandpa refers to it as "acute awareness").

Several years back the "why" of all this started to click when I read Maria Montessori's book—The Absorbent Mind [1]—on the first few years of childhood development (~0-6 years). She explains that kids are like sponges and their personality forms relative to what they experience in those first few years. When I think about the mix of experiences during those days, I can't help but laugh—that theory is dead on.

I also read Thomas Sowell's [2] late-talking children because I remembered being taken to a speech therapist as a kid because I refused to talk. I had no problem talking, I just didn't want to. Even today, I have quiet phases where I just kind of drift off into my own little world and don't really talk much.

Would I say that having Leukemia specifically gave me all of these traits? No, but I would say that the combination of circumstances in relation to my treatment definitely did.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Absorbent-Mind-Maria-Montessori/dp/08...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Late-Talking-Children-Thomas-Sowell/d...
by alganet | 2025-06-16 16:37:45+00:00
"explain me the difference between the short ternary operator and the Elvis operator"

When it failed, I replied: "in PHP".

You don't seem to understand what I'm trying to say and instead is trying to defend LLMs for a fault that is a fact known in the industry at large.

I'm sure that in short time, I could make 2.5 Pro hallucinate as well. If not on this question, on others.

This behavior is inline with the paper conclusions:

> many models are not able to reliably estimate their own limitations.

(see Figure 3, they tested a variety of models of different qualities).

This is the kind of question a junior developer can answer with simple google searches, or by reading the PHP manual, or just by testing it on a REPL. Why do we need a fancy model in order to answer such a simple inquiry? Would a beginner know that the answer is incorrect and he should use a different model?

Also, from the paper:

> For very relevant topics, the answers that models provide are wrong.

> Given that the models outperformed the average human in our study, we need to rethink how we teach and examine chemistry.

That's true for programming as well. It outperforms the average human, but then it makes silly mistakes that could confuse beginners. It displays confidence in being plain wrong.

The study also used manually curated questions for evaluation, so my prompt is not some dirty trick. It's totally inline with the context of this discussion.
by kreetx | 2025-06-16 16:39:28+00:00
Well, we don't know the legal reason he was denied entry. Given that this is a foreign student and a protester, it could be that his permission to enter the country was revoked due to exceeding his purpose to be in the US.

I'm not debating what the legal formulation was, I just don't get the people who think he should have been let in. Since as in computer programming and in law, you can't nail down any circumstance in existence - you sometimes need apply the "do what I mean" rather than "do what said". In this case it does seem that the government did what the population would have liked it to have done. Though, I guess if he would sue, then you would do well in being his lawyers.
by LoganDark | 2025-06-16 16:40:11+00:00
I agree, it's more like empathy for objects directly rather than assigning human anything to objects. For instance, I don't perceive objects as human, honestly if I can help it I don't even perceive humans as human. I have empathy for concepts that have nothing to do with humanity or with assigning things humanity or human characteristics. Nothing I do or feel is human-centric. I don't even identify human myself (I am otherkin)
by lproven | 2025-06-16 16:40:12+00:00
> LLMs can basically take written English language and create the computer code it's describing

Not really.

I know people think they are... but then some people think water can magically be imbued with healing powers.

Here's how that works:

https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

LLMs are 99% hype. They can't think, or reason, or count... or program.
by jzelinskie | 2025-06-16 16:40:20+00:00
I recommend folks check out the linked paper -- it's discussing more than just confidentiality tests as a benchmark for being ready for B2B AI usage.

But when it comes to confidentiality, having fine-grained authorization securing your RAG layer is the only valid solution that I've seen in used in industry. Injecting data into the context window and relying on prompting will never be secure.
by burningChrome | 2025-06-16 16:40:37+00:00
It sure sounds like it in the article:

A team led by Kung-Hsiang Huang, a Salesforce AI researcher, showed that using a new benchmark relying on synthetic data, LLM agents achieve around a 58 percent success rate on tasks that can be completed in a single step without needing follow-up actions or more information.

and

The Salesforce AI Research team argued that existing benchmarks failed to rigorously measure the capabilities or limitations of AI agents, and largely ignored an assessment of their ability to recognize sensitive information and adhere to appropriate data handling protocols.
by foldr | 2025-06-16 16:40:41+00:00
My wild guess (which, to be clear, is no better than all the uninformed speculation that I’m complaining about) is that (i) some kind of software fault caused both engines to throttle back to idle and that (ii) the RAT didn’t actually deploy and all the RAT commentary is a red herring. Otherwise I don’t see how to explain the fact that thrust (or lack thereof) appears to have been symmetrical throughout the flight. Both engines failing is already unlikely, but both failing at exactly the same moment? It seems incredible that any kind of failure internal to each engine could be the cause. Surely in that case we’d observe at least a momentary rudder deflection, if not a visible yawing motion of the aircraft itself.
by filoleg | 2025-06-16 16:41:01+00:00
Not to dismiss your point about pricing numbers (as it is valid and makes sense to me), but I don’t think iCloud comparison is that applicable to my argument, given there is no option to pay for larger iCloud storage with ad exposure.

What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.
by dperfect | 2025-06-16 16:41:39+00:00
I assume you've watched the "Wider Gamut Misinformation" portion of the video. You're correct in saying that HDR normally uses Rec. 2020 (because Rec. 2100 points to Rec. 2020's color primaries), but Steve points out that Rec. 2020 is an SDR color space which doesn't technically require HDR.

It's true that, given the options available today, the two usually go hand-in-hand (wider color gamut and HDR). However, one of the arguments Steve makes is that a majority of content (and a vast majority of the pixels in that content) doesn't use colors outside Rec. 1886's gamut. Illuminated objects (natural or manmade) almost never go outside that, so you're usually only talking about a few pixels from intensely-saturated light sources in the shot (like LEDs) that might use those colors. Even then, not a lot of filmmakers feel the need to go there, so their movies will look the same in narrow and wide gamuts.

I don't think the video is arguing against wider gamut or even higher dynamic range as options; modern displays are more capable than older ones, so we need tools to allow content creators to use that capability if they desire. The problem is that all of these things (color space, bit depth, transfer function, absolute luminance values, etc) have been lumped together under one label, "HDR", and some of the implementation details are actually worse than what we had with SDR. If you skip to the "Checklist Recap" portion of the video, you'll see that there are actually quite a few downsides to HDR in its current form, but since most of the standards are tightly coupled, we're kind of stuck unless we move to something better.

I also personally choose HDR versions when watching movies, but that's because UHD content is usually also HDR. What I really want is the higher resolution. I've never felt like I'd be missing out if it didn't have HDR because I've compared the two a lot - they're really mostly the same for the movies I watch with a properly calibrated screen. To each their own :)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-16 16:42:07+00:00
What abou defending our own interests?

I couldn't care less about Meta or OpenAI or other tech companies as entities. I'm happy to oppose them when they act against our interests. But in this, my interests align with theirs.

It's not like the alternative is any better. I'm much more in a philosophical disagreement with the pro-copyright side, for one, but the other thing is, it too is represented primarily by other large corporations, and of the two groups, the LLM side has a much more honest and useful business model.
by yvdriess | 2025-06-16 16:42:28+00:00
Thanks for that article by the way. I've referenced it often to make the point that allocation behaviour is complex and messy.

> I don’t believe this in even the slightest. That is not a meaningful metric for literally any actual workload in the universe. It defies common sense.

I just want to make the point here that making bump allocators fast is useful because it's an essential part of modern allocators and will be called A LOT in case of CPython.

That benchmark is useful to make sure the codegen/JIT is performing like it should, but it is still just measuring bump pointer allocation in the most ideal situation. 2 cycles/alloc is entirely normal reasonable considering modern uarchs, the critical path is two one-cycle uops.

Now, I agree with your point that this is far from meaningful for the p95/p99 of actual workloads. That is indeed the metric that users or customers actually care about. Modern GCs, like Go's, have moved away from using throughput as a metric. It's "easy" to make bump allocators fast, the hard problem is everything else around it: you still need to allocate your arenas/pools and manage the object lifetime. In the case of CPython that's refcounting, deallocs, GCs, work that modern CPUs really suck at (bad locality, bad branching).

I measured ~19.5% of the wallclock time of pyperformance benchmarks being related to memory management (ISPASS25 poster). That's not taking into account the extra boxing and struct slots being created for bookkeeping purposes, which adds more second-order effect related to cache pressure. It's insanely hard to accurately measure memory management overheads.
by cmontella | 2025-06-16 16:42:49+00:00
Congrats on Dark for making it this far!

Relevent timeline:

https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019)

https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to extend runway I guess to today)

TL;DR: We’re taking a longer term approach to building Dark. As part of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to shrink Dark’s team, and to change how we build both the product and the company." So where do we go from here? Right now, the team is just me. I am committed to realizing the full vision of what Dark should be. Dark is financially healthy for many years, and there is time to think and to plan. I plan to involve the community much more in Dark’s growth, and slowly rebuild the team at a pace appropriate to the product’s maturity, focusing on a small, tight team that can wear many hats.

Then there was a pivot to a rewrite of the whole thing, which I think was just Paul at the time:

Start of a new rewrite: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ (2020)

Two years later: https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-complete/ (2022)

seemingly a new pivot to "all in" on AI?: https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ (2023)

No news, one year later https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-status-update/ (2024)

Would be interesting to the Dark team to revisit this post, which is a look at PL funding models:

https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/

Building programming languages is hard especially when you're not backed by a company. I think Eve (I worked on that one) and Dark were the two major VC funded languages, and at this point I don't think that's a good model for funding this kind of thing. You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets. Something more like the Mojo people have gotten is what it takes (they've raised upwards of 100 million).

Anyway I can't wait to see where Dark goes in the future, and what their funding model will be going forward.
by maverick74 | 2025-06-16 16:44:00+00:00
this is old news to me! I've known this from about ~15 years now...

And to think people need to lie and create stories with the sole purpose of shaming the church when it actually has true stories like this! (it was other times, nonetheless!)

it just shows the level of culture of those who create the lies...

(do notice, however, that wikipedia is a terrible source for history! Very biased in general. better to redirect to brittanica (E.g.: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cadaver-Synod ) or other trustful source)
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-06-16 16:44:14+00:00
Forget the quality of the data, you can give the same data to different researchers and get wildly different conclusions. [1, from 2, from 3]

(Disclaimer: not my area of expertise.)

[1] N. Breznau et al., “Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty,” PNAS, October 2022, URL: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2203150119

[2] B. Klaas, “The Crisis of Zombie Social Science.” The Garden of Forking Paths. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-crisis-of-zombie-social-sc...

[3] The crisis of zombie social science (20 points, 2 days ago) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44272057
by croemer | 2025-06-16 16:44:21+00:00
Great story, I wish this inspired more prisons around the world to follow suit.

For those who don't want to hit Google, the conviction was for possessing 30g of a synthetic opioid "U-47700". A normal dose is ~1mg, 10mg can be deadly (so this was 30000 trips or killing 3000).

The drug became illegal across the US on November 14, 2016.

"Police said they found the drug in Thorpe’s apartment in Manchester in December 2016" (https://apnews.com/general-news-d68dca63e95946fbb9cc82f38540...)

"Preston Thorpe, age 25, was sentenced by the Hillsborough County Superior Court (Northern District) to 15 to 30 years stand committed in the New Hampshire State Prison for possession of the controlled drug 3,4-dicholo-N-[2-(dimethylamino)-cyclohexyl]-N-methylbenzamide (also known as "U-47700") with the intent to distribute. U-47700 is a synthetic opioid that is classified as a Schedule I drug." (https://www.doj.nh.gov/news-and-media/preston-thorpe-sentenc...)
by CityOfThrowaway | 2025-06-16 16:45:01+00:00
I'm not sure that's right. You can write prompts that make use of, but don't disclose secret information.

I have valid live, production cases where we do this and don't have info-leaking problems due to the scaffolding / prompting techniques we use.

Part of the problem is that confidentiality is in the eye of the beholder so extra effort needs to be taken to make explicit what should and should not be shared.

That said, one valid conclusion that could be drawn from this research is that base models are currently insufficient at exercising nuanced judgment about what should and should not be disclosed without explicit instruction.

That's an interesting thing to know and would be a good place for model builders to put some effort.
by rglover | 2025-06-16 16:45:15+00:00
> My son, not I, had ALL and is in remission.

That's excellent to hear. Send him a high five for me.

> For the rest of his family (parents and sibling) it had a massive impact. I already had anxiety issues (TBI while in the military flipped that switch), now I have something my doc describes as health related PTSD.

I'm sorry to hear that. My own family was definitely affected by all of it. If it will help, I'd be happy to talk whenever you'd like (email [1], phone—whatever works)—it's a hell of a lot to process/cope with especially on top of the other stuff you're dealing with—don't hesitate.

[1] me@ryanglover.net
by bregma | 2025-06-16 16:45:21+00:00
You are baffled by the western concept of justice.

In western philosophy an offender is considered to have offended against society even if their crime is of a personal nature. As such, they are tried, condemned, and punished by society according to codified rules. A victim, if there is one, is not really a part of this process.

There is a fundamentally sound basis for this philosophy, including equity (different justice for different people is no justice for anyone), impartiality, and respect for human rights.

There are other philosophies of justice: for example, the traditional "I'm strongest I get the best stuff" or "you dissed me ima kill you." Some are codified similarly to western justice ("killing a man is requires you pay his heirs 100 she-camels of which 40 must be pregnant, killing a woman is half that, killing a Jew one-third, and so on"). Others involve negotiation between victim (or their families) and offender -- which often works out well, since the offender is often is a position of power to start with and is very likely come out on top.

The simple "an eye for an eye" is just the beginning of a very very deep rabbit hole you can go down on the road to enlightenment.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-16 16:45:24+00:00
I strongly disagree. The victim is generally deeply incapable of being objective about the situation. How many perpetrators of domestic violence would go free because their spouse is too scared to ask for proper punishment? This is already a big problem with securing cooperation for prosecution, and I'd aim to make that better, not worse. You'd have enormous disparities in sentencing based on the personality of the victim. Should mugging a vindictive asshole carry a harsher sentence than mugging a nice person who believes in second chances no matter what?

The justice system is pretty far from actual justice in many cases, but this wouldn't get it closer.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-16 16:46:31+00:00
> I think every EU country would treat him for his condition until he was safe to rejoin society. In the US, he was thrown in the slammer.

From the article, his parents express frustration at their inability to get him committed for treatment in Ireland. They cite the lack of response there as a key factor in his spiral.

Also, the US facility he was sent to did offer psychiatric treatment and the judge urged him to accept it:

> The judge recommended that Clarke serve his sentence at a prison that would give him access to psychiatric treatment and he urged Clarke to accept it.

I understand your objections to the “slammer” but the sentence was actually as lenient as could be, offered the psychiatric treatment he needed, and had an opportunity for him to return to Ireland in a couple years:

> Speaking on behalf of the Clarke family, solicitor Eugene O'Kelly said that they were relieved at the relative leniency of the sentence and expressed the hope Clarke could be returned to Ireland "within a year or two" to serve out his sentence.