MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brailsafe | 2025-06-16 03:09:47+00:00
Monthly doesn't make sense either. Is it monthly or is it quarterly? $10/month > $29 quarterly.

Whether it's legit or not, it's seeming like a lot of Show HN posts that make the front page are giving vibes of "Ah, another AI generated tailwind/Stripe template that collects emails and was slapped together in an hour". They have SEC registration but don't have literally any information on their about us for a company I'd need to be able to trust
by bitmasher9 | 2025-06-16 03:16:29+00:00
We cannot get ride of it without finding a way to pay the creators that generate copyrighted works.

I’m personally more in favor of significantly reducing the length of the copy right. I think 20-30 years is an interesting range. Artist get roughly a career length of time to profit off their creations, but there is much less incentive for major corporations to buy and horde IP.
by crtified | 2025-06-16 03:18:11+00:00
I agree - to me, canyon.mid (while technically neat) has a very Corporate 1990's Advertisement sound and feel. Not surprising since, in a way, that's exactly what it is!

So that particular track never gelled with me.

I listened the heck out of some of the other included sound and MIDI sample material however, back then. As one did, with sources being so comparatively limited in the pre- and early- Web years.
by Retric | 2025-06-16 03:18:20+00:00
> So yes, it's absolutely true that the body filters out chromosomally abnormal germ cells and zygotes.

> A very large number of zygotes/blastocysts survive until implantation, upwards of 50%. And of those that do, maybe 20-40% are miscarried before 12 weeks.

That’s with sperm going to a filter process for genetic abnormalities before fertilization. If hypothetically 5% fewer zygotes survived that would have real consequences not just for humans but in terms of increasing variability in litter sizes for mammals with multiple births etc.
by roywiggins | 2025-06-16 03:19:31+00:00
It does seem quite bad to me that either OpenAI can't, or won't, prevent their systems from following people into mania and psychosis. Whether it actually is causing the breaks from reality, idk. When you have CEOs selling these systems as robot friends, probably it's bad that said robot friends cheerfully descend into folies à deux fairly reliably.
by egypturnash | 2025-06-16 03:22:26+00:00
This is definitely a thing; if you hang out in mystical corners of the internet the past few months have been full of people posting their MASTEr PROMPTS that will turn YOUR GPT into an ENLIGHTENED MASTEr who will butter YOu up and insist YOU are a perfect enlightened being too.

It's kind of hilarious if you ignore how much this is fucking up the relationships of the people this is happening to, similar to the way YouTube or Facebook loves to push people down a rabbit hole to flat-earth/q-spiracy bullshit because that shit generates Controversy. And it also sounds like the opening chapter of a story about what happens when an AI finds a nice little unpatched exploit in human cognition and uses that to its advantage. Which is not fun to be living in unless maybe if you are one of the people who owns the AI.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-16 03:26:22+00:00
My comparison was illustrative and analogous in nature. The copyright cartel is making a fruit of the poisonous tree type of argument. Whatever Meta are doing with LLMs is doing the heavy lifting that parity files used to do back in the Usenet days. I wouldn’t be surprised if BitTorrent or other similar caching and distribution mechanisms incorporate AI/LLMs to recognize an owl on the wire, draw the rest just in time in transit, and just send the diffs, or something like that.

The pictures are the same. All roads lead to Rome, so they say.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-16 03:27:10+00:00
It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization.

In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.

But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.

I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-16 03:27:45+00:00
You have to click on the time of a comment (eg "2 days ago", "1 hour ago") to see the [flag] link, and you have to have show-dead turned on to see the [vouch] links. They're not super obvious in the UI by default, but you probably have the ability. You'll see a lot more bots/spammers/noise if you have show-dead turned on.
by inopinatus | 2025-06-16 03:27:59+00:00
Some good recommendations. Feedback on this one:

> "X41 recommends to disallow the creation of un-escaped SqlLiteral objects with user input in favor of a complete model of SQL"

Rails already has a sufficient model of SQL in its Arel layer. Complete? Not exactly, because SQL is never implemented by the standard, but certainly sufficient, and very composable and extensible. Sadly the core team killed off the public documentation of Arel a few majors ago. Nevertheless I still use Arel whenever Active Record doesn't expose enough of the model, such as expressing left-open intervals as inequalities¹. Sometimes incorrectly called a "private API", but it's not anyone's private possession, Arel is just undocumented in recent releases.

The recommendation's language is also just a touch naive, because it's nigh-impossible to outright disallow developers doing practically whatever they want to in Ruby, there's no isolated sandbox. The question is what incentives are in place to stop them wanting to.

Active Record already has excellent support for bound values via the predicate builder, and it's only egregiously bad code that concatenates raw user-supplied values directly into query strings. Nevertheless for those few remaining places in the API where this could happen inadvertently such as #calculate, a variant recommendation - similar in spirit, but not identical - might be that where it doesn't already, Active Record treats raw strings supplied as requiring escape unless explictly wrapped with Arel.sql(), or just accept an Arel node/AST (many already do on the QT). That is, force the developer to confess their sin in writing, or do it relationally.

But IMO the wizards shouldn't keep Arel locked up in the tower, either.

[1] https://gist.github.com/inopinatus/c84c78483b30fb2d5588db9be...
by gpm | 2025-06-16 03:28:33+00:00
I think it's important to recognize here that fanfiction.net has 850 thousand distinct pieces of Harry Potter fanction on it. Fifty thousand of which are more than 40k words in length. Many of which (no easy way to measure) directly reproducing parts of the original books.

archiveofourown.org has 500 thousand, some, but probably not the majority, of that are duplicated from fanfiction.net. 37 thousand of these are over 40 thousand words.

I.e. harry potter and its derivatives presumably appear a million times in the training set, and its hard to imagine a model that could discuss this cultural phenomena well without knowing quite a bit about the source material.
by sagarm | 2025-06-16 03:30:48+00:00
...the engineering team? I'm confused by this idea that engineering teams are not responsible for software quality. Who else would be?

My experience with separate QA teams was not encouraging. They dramatically slowed down releases while failing to catch bugs. Their capability to automate was poor, so they were doing manual testing that provided little coverage especially compared to our comprehensive submit-blocking unit and integration tests.
by Jaygles | 2025-06-16 03:32:16+00:00
To me the primary difference between the potential "copy" that exists in your brain and a potential "copy" that exists in the LLM, is that you can't make copies and distribute your brain to billions of people.

If you compressed a copy of HP as a .rar, you couldn't read that as is, but you could press a button and get HP out of it. To distribute that .rar would clearly be a copyright violation.

Likewise, you can't read whatever of HP exists in the LLM model directly, but you seemingly can press a bunch of buttons and get parts of it out. For some models, maybe you can get the entire thing. And I'm guessing you could train a model whose purpose is to output HP verbatim and get the book out of it as easily as de-compressing a .rar.

So, the question in my mind is, how similar is distributing the LLM model, or giving access to it, to distributing a .rar of HP. There's likely a spectrum of answers depending on the LLM
by hluska | 2025-06-16 03:32:43+00:00
The writer got overly stuck on one tweet and droned on and on about 15 words of a 45 word tweet. It was really poor research when there are other less reactionary statements she could have used.

Yudkowski’s point was that we’ve been operating under the assumption that generative AI is aligned by default with humans. Cases like this call that into question.
by calibas | 2025-06-16 03:32:51+00:00
I'm sure an LLM knows more about computer science than a human programmer.

Not to say the LLM is more intelligent or better at coding, but that computer science is an incredibly broad field (like chemistry). There's simply so much to know that the LLM has an inherent advantage. It can be trained with huge amounts of generalized knowledge far faster than a human can learn.

Do you know every common programing language? The LLM does, plus it can code in FRACTRAN, Brainfuck, Binary lambda calculus, and a dozen other obscure languages.

It's very impressive, until you realize the LLM's knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. It has vast quantities of knowledge, but lacks depth. A human that specializes in a field is almost always going to outperform an LLM in that field, at least for the moment.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-06-16 03:33:32+00:00
Beautiful piece.

And yeah, I just don't get this. If you want this sort of never ending, never permitted to end media system you can have it, Disney is right there, with Star Wars, with it's live action remakes, with it's Marvel. Like it's comical how many juggernaut IP's they own that just churn out the very definition of content.

And that's not to say all of it's bad, Andor is quite incredible, Wandivision combined it's tropey comic book story with genuinely heart-wrenching writing from House of M, and I could cite many other examples. But the vast majority, especially after Endgame, has just been completely forgettable, disposable shows and movies that are famously mediocre and disliked specifically because they have nothing to say, no point to make, and simply exist to occupy space on the Marvel treadmill.

And to have that desired from Studio Ghibli is just... full body shudders man.
by kushal_goenka | 2025-06-16 03:34:01+00:00
Search is broken. And it didn't have to be this way. What I talk about:

1. How search evolved: From ancient librarians manually cataloging scrolls to modern semantic search (with a live demo that fights me every step of the way, because of course it does).

2. Why it still sucks: Google's private index of the public web. Reddit locking down their API. Knowledge disappearing into Discord voids. Closed-source AI hoarding data.

The talk is half "how does any of this actually work?" and half "how did we end up here?"
by tanaros | 2025-06-16 03:34:38+00:00
Their methodology seems reasonable to me.

To clarify, they look at the probability a model will produce a verbatim 50-token excerpt given the preceding 50 tokens. They evaluate this for all sequences in the book using a sliding window of 10 characters (NB: not tokens). Sequences from Harry Potter have substantially higher probabilities of being reproduced than sequences from less well-known books.

Whether this is "recall" is, of course, one of those tricky semantic arguments we have yet to settle when it comes to LLMs.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-06-16 03:36:24+00:00
Over 1.6% of the contiguous USA is dedicated to corn ethanol. If that land were replaced by solar, at 20% capacity, it could produce 10.8 PWh of electricity. That’s two and a half times the total amount of electricity that the US currently produces per year. Biofuels produce the equivalent of ~ 0.4 PWh.

1.5% of land area dedicated to solar can produce enough to meet all global energy needs (not just electricity), according to this article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01754-4
by andriamanitra | 2025-06-16 03:36:31+00:00
I don't believe in the "fixed pie" view of the economy (does anyone..?) but wealth consolidation is still problematic because the ever-growing pie is rarely distributed among those who actually do the work, and concentrated power is a horrible way to run a free market economy. It leads to abuses that break the assumptions free markets are based on. Predatory pricing, regulatory capture, and buying out competition are examples from the vast toolbox only available to players who have accumulated significant wealth in the past. Slowly but surely the system gets skewed to reward past success and conniving over future success and hard work, which slows down progress and ultimately makes the world a little bit worse place for everyone to live in.

PS. I don't think it's a coincidence that both of your examples of creating wealth are typical "poor people" jobs. Obnoxiously wealthy people rarely create anything because they can simply pay someone else to do it, usually for a fraction of the value of their output.
by kragen | 2025-06-16 03:39:07+00:00
You should believe it, because it's true.

You were measuring malloc, so of course you came up with numbers that were 20 times worse than PyPy's nursery allocator. That's because malloc is 20 times slower, whatever common sense may say.

Also, you're talking about tail latency, while CF Bolz was measuring throughput. Contrary to your assertion, throughput is indeed a meaningful metric, though, especially for interactive UIs such as videogames, tail latency is often more important. For applications like compilers and SMT solvers, on the other hand, throughput matters more.

You're right that there are some other costs. A generational or incremental GC more or less requires write barriers, which slow down the parts of your code that mutate existing objects instead of allocating new ones. And a generational collector can move existing objects to a different address, which complicates FFIs that might try to retain pointers to them outside the GC's purview.

There are a lot of papers running captured allocation traces like you did against different memory allocators, some of them including GCed allocators. Ben Zorn did a lot of work like this in the 90s, coming to the conclusion that GC was somewhat faster than malloc/free. Both GCs and mallocs have improved substantially since then, but it would be easy to imagine that the results would be similar. Maybe someone has done it.

But to a significant extent we write performance-critical code according to the performance characteristics of our platforms. If mutation is fast but allocation is slow, you tend to write code that does less allocation and more mutation than you would if mutation was slow and allocation was fast, all else being equal. So you'd expect code written for platforms with fast allocation to allocate more, which makes faster allocation a bigger advantage for that code. Benchmarking captured allocation traces won't capture that effect.

Tail latency has always been one of the worst things about GCs. I hear amazing things about new real-time GC algorithms, including remarkable reports from Azul, but I don't know if they're true or what their price is.
by paxys | 2025-06-16 03:41:51+00:00
As an experiment I searched Google for "harry potter and the sorcerer's stone text":

- the first result is a pdf of the full book

- the second result is a txt of the full book

- the third result is a pdf of the complete harry potter collection

- the fourth result is a txt of the full book (hosted on github funny enough)

Further down there are similar copies from the internet archive and dozens of other sites. All in the first 2-3 pages.

I get that copyright is a problem, but let's not pretend that an LLM that autocompletes a couple lines from harry potter with 50% accuracy is some massive new avenue to piracy. No one is using this as a substitute for buying the book.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-16 03:42:23+00:00
I am bullish on the rapid global uptake of low carbon electrical generation (global solar PV deployment alone is almost at 1 TW/year), but bearish on carbon sequestration being viable unless sucking the CO2 out of the ocean (due to energy required via atmospheric capture). It’s not just energy required, but how much carrier (whether that’s air or water) you need to process per unit of CO2 removed.

Stanford Study: Renewable Energy Beats Carbon Capture on Cost and Climate Impact - https://carbonherald.com/stanford-study-renewable-energy-bea... - June 11th, 2025

Energy, Health, and Climate Costs of Carbon-Capture and Direct-Air-Capture versus 100%-Wind-Water-Solar Climate Policies in 149 Countries - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686 | https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686

Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/ - May 15th, 2025
by cpard | 2025-06-16 03:43:01+00:00
I went through chemotherapy for ALL as a kid and I had to do almost an extra year of treatment because I was male, for the reasons you mention in your comment.

Male kids before me, also had to do a surgery to remove something from their testes to make sure that there wasn't any chance of having the repository for the cancer left. I was lucky enough to not have to do that.

I do find it impressive though that this is still a thing as I was treated many years ago. My feeling was always that the treatment protocols, for ALL at least, tend to get more aggressive but also much shorter. Exactly because of the tradeoffs you mentioned.

Your little one is a hero. He might be too young right now to realize what he has achieved but please keep reminding him that.

Also, something that I don't see being discussed enough when it comes to childhood cancers, is the effect it has to the family as a whole. Parents especially, do come out with their own trauma from this experience and they need to heal too.

Finally, for anyone interested.

Stanford has an amazing Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer program (SAYAC)[1], hopefully more institutions have similar programs but I can't emphasize enough the value they can bring.

Elephants and Tea [2] is a magazine for adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients, survivors, and caregivers. Great place to learn more about the experiences from the people who are there or have been there.

1. https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/services/adolescent-you... 2. https://elephantsandtea.org
by josephg | 2025-06-16 03:46:50+00:00
> The recommendation is also a touch naive as framed, because it's nigh-impossible to outright disallow developers doing practically whatever they want to in Ruby

Sure but defaults matter.

Nothing is truly private in most languages. In C/C++, you can poke raw memory. In rust you can transmute. In Java you can override the classloader and edit classes before they’re passed to the JVM and so on. But most environments have a golden path for getting things done which most developers will walk. This is exactly what removing documentation does - it signals to developers that some API isn’t part of the expected golden path.

Every sql library needs ways to pass raw sql strings to the database. (Just as every browser framework needs a way to embed raw html strings). But it should require you to explicitly acknowledge you’re doing something unsafe. Rust’s unsafe keyword. React’s unsafelySetInnerHTML, and so on. It’s not about denying it. It’s about making the obvious thing safe and the unsafe thing not obvious.
by grishka | 2025-06-16 03:48:35+00:00
No, in my own experience, Qt apps have a very distinct "something is off" feeling to them. Because they implement everything from scratch, some of the subtle behaviors from AppKit-provided controls are just not there, despite Qt trying hard to skin them to mimic the real thing. Qt also implements some controls that just can't exist in an AppKit app, like tabs with icons, or those Windows-like toolbars. Popup menus clearly look non-native since Big Sur. And so on.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-06-16 03:49:40+00:00
> let's not pretend that an LLM that autocompletes a couple lines from harry potter with 50% accuracy is some massive new avenue to piracy. No one is using this as a substitute for buying the book.

Well, luckily the article points out what people are actually alleging:

> There are actually three distinct theories of how training a model on copyrighted works could infringe copyright:

> Training on a copyrighted work is inherently infringing because the training process involves making a digital copy of the work.

> The training process copies information from the training data into the model, making the model a derivative work under copyright law.

> Infringement occurs when a model generates (portions of) a copyrighted work.

None of those claim that these models are a substitute to buying the books. That's not what the plaintiffs are alleging. Infringing on a copyright is not only a matter of privacy (piracy is one of many ways to infringe copyright)
by major505 | 2025-06-16 03:50:43+00:00
My cousin developed leukemia as kid when he was only 3 years old in the end of the seventies.

At the time, specially in Brazil, the decease was a death sentence. His mother took him to dozen of doctors and specialists.

His condition deteriorated fast, and she endup trying even pseudoscinece stuff like spiritual healing and mediuns. She made a promise to the patron saint of her church, Saint Judas, to help people in the same situation as her.

At the time, the brazilian equivalent of the FDA was debaging releasing Interferon as a threatment for kids in Brazl. She was able to put him in trials and the treatment worked on him. My cousin is still alive and kicking to this day, but unfourtunaly, he became infertile as a result of the threatment.

To fulfill her promise, my auntie organized a group in the Rotary and over the years the raised donations, organize a charity auctions and received some land as a donation. In the place they started a children hospital for treatment of cancer called GPACI. The open in 1981, and today the hispital a reference of research and treatment of kids in Brazil.

Here is the site if you wanna know more https://www.gpaci.org.br/