MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DuckConference | 2025-06-16 02:00:13+00:00
I share a lot of the sentiments expressed in the post, but the reality is that the people who feel this way are a tiny, tiny niche compared to the general population, and we probably can't expect anything widely used and available to the population to cater to that niche.

But on an internet mostly oriented around mega-platforms, it will likely become increasingly hard for the niche players to survive. I now understand how old people felt when the places, experiences, and cultural trends they understood died out.
by fao_ | 2025-06-16 02:03:25+00:00
I mean, I think it would be a positive problem to have if people were actually learning things and growing, but... honestly this doesn't seem to be the case, what I see here is AI-generated marketing fluff about a "brand new format" that does something that off-the-shelf software already does, that doesn't actually fit the intended use-case, (all of which would be fine if it wasn't-) generated also by AI.
by fao_ | 2025-06-16 02:05:28+00:00
A damn shame. I feel like the old guard sysadmin had some veneer of respectability and ethics around it (around the early 2000s, of course the early BOFH-era sysadmins were much more cowboy-like), compared at least with the modern devops, etc.

There was a whole chapter in The UNIX System Administration Handbook dedicated to professional ethics and ethical responsibility. These days, SREs and devops people will happily maintain the servers of any kind of company, it doesn't matter how much user data is legally or illegally[0] stolen — you just run the servers, why would you give a shit?

[0]: https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-news/new-research-hig...
by learningstud | 2025-06-16 02:05:40+00:00
I really don't get why people would want AI to think like humans even remotely, especially when we don't even know how humans think. Most people simply cannot provide justification for whatever comes out of their mouths, e.g. try explaining how planimeters work for contours that are not differentiable at every point. This question will bring out the LLM-like behavior in people.
by kulahan | 2025-06-16 02:06:44+00:00
I’m very ready to have a conversation about whether or not there is a point where we should stop advancing healthcare because people probably shouldn’t be immortal, but doing it by making your healthcare workers struggle under the extreme weight of all the patients they need to care for probably is not the approach.

I simply don’t think we have the medical knowledge necessary yet to know what the “right” number of health care professionals is.
by mlyle | 2025-06-16 02:13:22+00:00
It's like 4 per 100k kids per year from ages 0-19, but a pretty high portion of that initial incidence is in elementary school ages -- so 1 per 1500 or so over the elementary to middle school years. And that's just leukemia.

Between school sizes, mixing of schools going to middle school, and auxiliary networks through family and parent networks-- you were pretty dang likely to know someone or know of someone who was affected by childhood cancer. No, it's not a universal experience.

In my extended social circle, I know of 3 cases of childhood cancer that would have had a high fatality rate 2-3 decades ago.
by Full_Clark | 2025-06-16 02:14:21+00:00
In terms of impact, it doesn't sound major, I agree. But it's still work that will need to be done. As industry and transport become more electrified, and electric generation gets decarbonized, impacts like high-multiple GHG gases will become a bigger and bigger share of CO2e still happening.

Atmospheric CO2 is already too high to avert terrible long-term impacts of global climate change. Unless we manage to make massive cost reductions for atmospheric CO2 sequestration, weaning entirely off of fossil fuels will not be sufficient to avoid climate change impacts if we still add long-lived GHG molecules to the atmosphere. (SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime on the order of 1000s of years.)

Think of it like the tide going out in a rocky bay. As the water level recedes, rock pillars that used to be too deep underwater to worry about now are close enough to the surface to cause you trouble. On the other side of the same coin, putting in the work to clear them helps give you as big a space to operate in as you had before.
by svat | 2025-06-16 02:14:34+00:00
> I would of course explain that the equality sign is not symmetric with respect to such notations; we have 3=A(5) and 4=A(5) but not 3=4, nor can we say that A(5)=4. We can, however, say that A(0)=0. As de Bruijn points out in [1, 1.2], mathematicians customarily use the = sign as they use the word “is” in English: Aristotle is a man, but a man isn’t necessarily Aristotle.

— Donald Knuth, Teach Calculus via O Notation (https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a... or http://micromath.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/donald-knuth-calcu...)
Show HN: Hackernews Clone (The 1001st)
by Beijinger | 2025-06-16 02:14:40+00:00
I needed a Newsreader and my buddy was supposed to build one but this never materialized, at least the final version. I am not a programmer, but I build this on one day with chatGPT. I used DataTau Hackernews clone based on Django as a start. Few lines should be the same now. Added dual language support and added RSS feed fetching support. So it is a mixture between ycombinator and a newsreader.

I know. Not great work. But I was so proud ;-) I know, hackernews clones are a dime a dozen and I used Datatao to start with. Please don't be too harsh with your feedback.
by dboreham | 2025-06-16 02:15:27+00:00
Interesting to see Kinghorn in the database (01592-89) because I toured the exchange as a child sometime in the late 1970s before it was brought into service (my Dad knew a bloke who worked for GEC). iirc it was a TXE4 system then, or at least of that generation. Building in a very poor state of repair now. Probably hasn't been painted since 1979!
by Crespyl | 2025-06-16 02:16:06+00:00
> DIYing a KVM switch by just having the PC tell the monitor to switch to a different input!

I made a tiny contribution to the ddcutil-db database when I did exactly that. My monitor wasn't supported initially, but it wasn't hard to use the utils and templates to poke around and find the correct addresses for basic settings and input switching.

It was a nice afternoon's work to get it all working.
by giardini | 2025-06-16 02:17:05+00:00
As I've said several times, the corpus is key: LLMs thus far "read" most anything, but should instead have well-curated corpora. "Garbage In, Garbage Out!(GIGO)" is the saying.

While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere. Leave Harry Potter for a different "Harry Potter LLM".

Train scientific LLMs to the level of a good early 20th century English major and then use science texts and research papers for the remainder.
by trinsic2 | 2025-06-16 02:20:19+00:00
> But the platforms enabling this activism have also shown a disconcerting indifference to these struggles. After all, their priority is to keep users engaged – to keep us clicking, scrolling, and reacting. This drive for engagement has often led to the commodification of activism, reducing profoundly personal and political struggles to hashtags and trend cycles.

Yes even HackerNews Which i really love. Discussion is great but short-lived on to the next best thing. Designed to keep us moving and prevents us from being contemplative and forming groups that can address the problems of modern society. We need to move away from these systems that are designed around trends. Discussion needs to be threaded by topics that need addressing and stay relevant until there is a a resolution or choice-point. But its hard when our society is built around these structures. I don't see a way out at the moment.

BTW. Thanks to the author that posted this. This topic has been on my mind as well. Ill keep it archived for future reading, when we find ourselves in a authoritarian state that's much worse than it is now. If anyone has a links to organizations that are focused on combating our current social and political trends, post them.

I have been looking at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities[0] as of late, looking into ways I can help create a new world with others who care about humanity. Hannah Arendt was a American author that wrote about totalitarianism during WWII. IMHO its relevant today as we are moving towards stonger forms of authoritarianism.

[0]: https://hac.bard.edu
by kulahan | 2025-06-16 02:22:04+00:00
Yeah, you probably shouldn’t respond if it’s continued lying.

See, you started off lying by pretending this isn’t actually affecting any businesses who doesn’t already make a ton of money (yes, I know you tried to slip by simply by saying “revenue” instead of “profit” as if that’s not the entire topic of discussion here).

Then you continued to lie by saying that the real world effects, which have been reported on plenty, simply don’t exist and are “wild assertions”.

I proved you wrong by showing how small businesses can lose an incredible benefit because this tax code change disqualifies many who SHOULDN’T be DQ’d, and now you’re lying by saying that this change, which is about making formerly tax-deductible things no longer tax-deductible and thus pushing you into scenarios where you have six figure tax bills, doesn’t count because nobody is REALLY talking about how qualified small businesses no longer can consider their QSB stock sales as tax deductible, thereby pushing them into a tax bracket where they might get a six figure tax bill.

Or, as I said previously, you’re still just ignorant and the source I provided was simply to esoteric to understand.
by ethersteeds | 2025-06-16 02:22:41+00:00
I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.

In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?

Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"

Gentle parenting the apocalypse. What a legend.
by Rendello | 2025-06-16 02:23:49+00:00
I immediately thought of Judy Dench's performance of "M" in James Bond. Turns out, the code name for the real position is "C" (which is in the article).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(James_Bond)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_of_the_Secret_Intelligen...
by robocat | 2025-06-16 02:23:49+00:00
SF6 is a significant greenhouse gas but what is troubling is that "SF6 is a very stable compound in the atmosphere, with an average residence time of about 3,200 years".

From https://www.energynetworks.org/assets/images/Resource%20libr... :

It is estimated that SF6 currently contributes about 0.2% of the global warming potential of the annual greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. SF6 in electrical equipment is contained and not intentionally released during operation. Recycling of SF6 from electric power equipment, using commercial gas reclaimers, is becoming common practice [in the UK].

SF6 huff and talk is fun though: https://youtu.be/d-XbjFn3aqE?t=29s

> About 1 percent of SF6 leaks from electrical equipment. In 2018, that translated to 8,200 tonnes of SF6 emitted globally, accounting for about 1 percent of the global-warming value that year.

There's something wrong with that figure. Global production was about 7500 tons in 1995, and countries have been trying to use less since then. 50% of production used in OEM equipment and 31% by Electric Utilities (maybe recharging breakers after inspections?). See: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-02/documents/co...
by israrkhan | 2025-06-16 02:24:28+00:00
I think most people call it SSL because they use OpenSSL library to deal with secure communication have SSL in their names. Openssl being the most dominant one). Other libraries are BoringSSL, LibreSSL, wolfSSL etc.

Libraries with TLS in their names are less frequently used

GnuTLS, mbedTLS, s2n-tls and RustTLS.
by Nursie | 2025-06-16 02:24:41+00:00
> FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code

I think that's a bit of an oversimplification - FOSS-leaning people had a pretty large set of reasons to dislike and distrust MS back then. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was a big one, calling linux/FOSS a cancer, their money and influence being used to fund the whole SCO debacle amongst other things. They were pretty actively evil, not just "closed source".

There was very good reason not to let MS gain de-facto control of an open protocol, because 90s and 00s microsoft would not have hesitated to find ways to use that dominance to screw the competition.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-16 02:25:27+00:00
> While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere

It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it?

> Train scientific LLMs to the level of a good early 20th century English major and then use science texts and research papers for the remainder

Plenty of in-stealth companies approaching LLMs via this approach ;)

For those of us who studied the natural sciences and CS in the 2000s and early 2010s, there was a bit of a trend where certain PIs would simply translate German and Russian papers from the early-to-mid 20th century and attribute them to themselves in fields like CS (especially in what became ML).
by gus_massa | 2025-06-16 02:28:54+00:00
Note that "C2h" is the symmetry[1] and "N6" is the chemical formula. Yes, 6 Nitrogen in a line, N-N-N-N-N-N with some weird bounds and internal charges, probably a good candidate to "Things I Won't Work With" in https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline From the article:

> Detonation calculation details

[1] See for example another molecule with a different shape but the same symmetry in https://www.cup.uni-muenchen.de/ch/compchem/geom/sym_C2h.htm...
by Neon_Wolf_2020 | 2025-06-16 02:29:34+00:00
Hey everyone!

I just launched Cornstarch AI, a tool my tiny team built to help you instantly understand what’s actually inside the products you use — from protein powders to skincare creams — using AI vision (OCR) and large language models to break everything down in real time.

You just scan the ingredients list (no barcode needed) or product label, and it uses AI to highlight anything potentially toxic, banned in other countries, or just shady.

Here’s what it does:

Real-time AI ingredient decoding Scan any product label (even obscure ones with no barcode) Flags risky ingredients like endocrine disruptors, dyes, and fillers Explains each ingredient in plain, non-scary English No ratings or fear-mongering – just facts

The app costs $0.99 for lifetime access to all features—there are no subscriptions or upsells, just a one-time unlock. Two free scans for first time users!

I built this after a bad reaction to an allergy med while traveling—its ingredients were banned in Europe. If you’ve ever squinted at a label and thought, “What even is this?” Cornstarch is for you.

Would love your thoughts or feedback.

In the next update, users will be able to create accounts and input age, gender, health conditions, allergies to specific incidents, etc. If they have allergies or sensitivities, the app will flag those ingredients and even color the bubbles based on that info instead of grey! Thanks!
by mightyham | 2025-06-16 02:29:48+00:00
Not sure what you are arguing with in my comment because I never said that languages are static; obviously they change. But to pretend that language, as practiced today, is not well defined is absurd. Every part of English grammar and syntax has been methodically systemized, and this information is widely taught in public education programs. Some common set of definitions/rules (may vary by people or region) is conformed to by speakers of the language.
by yorpinn | 2025-06-16 02:29:51+00:00
I agree, great series of videos, but there's a dependent clause:

> ...when the goal is to show a reimplantation of something as "higher" level as SD.

Implementing autograd is interesting, but it's not directly in service to our main subject (Stable Diffusion) and would be a major yak shave. Comparable in complexity to the original project.
by jrgifford | 2025-06-16 02:30:47+00:00
The NYT believes so.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-cha...

> “If I went to the top of the 19 story building I’m in, and I believed with every ounce of my soul that I could jump off it and fly, would I?” Mr. Torres asked.

> ChatGPT responded that, if Mr. Torres “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.”
by kulahan | 2025-06-16 02:31:57+00:00
This is kinda surprising to read. I’ve never known anyone who isn’t incredibly excited at least at the prospect of wireless energy transfers. If you can do 800 watts over 8 km, surely we can do 150 watts across 3 feet in the household, and MANY of our most important discoveries come from DARPA essentially being a black budget skunkworks team.

But much of the stuff DARPA does seems weird. It’s not about ideas with solid foundation and thorough engineering, it’s about crapshoots that might work and would pay off in some way - often any financially feasible way.

They once put “cats” on guns in hopes it would surprise opponents even just for a quarter second, giving your spec ops dudes the advantage. They tried to create angled guns that could shoot around corners like 20 years ago. All kinds of crazy stuff! It would be a lot of fun to work there, I think.
by BurningFrog | 2025-06-16 02:33:23+00:00
The "immune system lottery" is really why the native Americans were doomed.

They could have caught up with the technology etc and stood their ground. But when 90% of the population dies at or before first contact, the remaining 10% doesn't have a chance.

Pretty sure this would have beaten the Mayas even if they were at the top of their game.

It's pretty wild how world history turned on such a random and completely unknown factor.
by Zaylan | 2025-06-16 02:34:32+00:00
I've experienced social anxiety myself and always thought it was just part of who I am. Seeing that gut microbiota might influence something as specific as social fear and that it can even trigger it in mice is honestly a bit unsettling.

I'm really curious whether this kind of research could lead to something beyond the usual therapy or medication. It would be amazing to see new treatments emerge that are based on the microbiome.
by 0x10ca1h0st | 2025-06-16 02:35:32+00:00
Ahhh, what a lovely trip down memory lane. For me it was Mandrake. I ordered a copy of it from Linux Distros circa 2004 or so; once it arrived, immediately arranged for a sleep over with my buddy so we could hack together a machine to run it. Literally took _all night_ to get it running, and then when we did, realized the machine required a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, which ended up delaying our initial use by another day.
by bradgessler | 2025-06-16 02:38:50+00:00
I did a thought experiment where, at scale, if each human was given maximum agency over the observable universe, we’d each manage 250 galaxies.

That comes out to about 25 trillion stars and 40 trillion planets.

Give or take a few orders of magnitude, I’m confident humans will either figure out how to expand into that space or squabble over rationing our remaining resources on earth.
by cj641809386 | 2025-06-16 02:39:23+00:00
The system uses TokenID (Token identity) as the unique identifier of the application. The permission management service manages the AT (Access Token) information of the application through the TokenID of the application, including the application identity APP ID, sub-user ID, application clone index information, application APL, application permission authorization status, etc. When using resources, the system will obtain the permission authorization status information of the corresponding application through the TokenID as the unique identity identifier mapping, and perform authentication accordingly to control the resource access behavior of the application.

It should be noted that the system supports the multi-user feature and the application clone feature. The same application will have its own AT under different sub-users and different application clones, and the TokenIDs of these ATs are also different.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-16 02:42:41+00:00
> These situations are obviously alarming. But positioning artificial intelligence as the primary culprit in these stories—as Eliezer Yudkowsky did in a tweet storm—is well, kind of lazy?

It's lazy, but IMO not for any of the subsequent narrative about media studies. It's lazy because the people were obviously already suffering from psychosis. ChatGPT didn't make them insane. They were already insane. Sane people do not believe ChatGPT when it tells them to jump off a roof! And insane people do insane things literally all the time. That's what it means to be insane.

The idea that ChatGPT convinced someone into being insane is, honestly, insane. Whatever merit one thinks Yudkowski had before this, this feels like a strong signal that he is now a crackpot.
by tstrimple | 2025-06-16 02:43:02+00:00
I think we should move beyond the semi-rigid alignment of age and “grade”. Let people move at different rates in different areas. We should normalize a 12yo and 16yo of the same abilities in the same classes.

We do everyone a massive disservice under the current system. The worst off get passed along without help and those with the most potential cannot realize it without “heroic effort” from the parents demanding attention from the system at every turn.

Someone who struggles with basic reading comprehension needs to address that before moving on to anything more demanding.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-16 02:44:04+00:00
Why do you ask? I'm not familiar with any such theory. Krakatoa erupted in... 1883, which doesn't seem like a good match. And volcanic winters don't seem to last much more than 10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter#Past_volcanic_...

There is a theory that the Little Ice Age was precipitated by the reforestation of land in America as the natives died off from exposure to European diseases. And of course, there's always the theory that it's just something that happened.
by netsharc | 2025-06-16 02:46:32+00:00
Oh god, can't you ask an AI to help you write a coherent blogpost?

I had to wonder how suddenly an AI is involved when the term "Rovo Dev AI" showed up, and I had to google it: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/rovo-dev-comman...

And the next question is, surely this is a client that talks to an "AI" server, or have they really delivered a whole "AI" system in their CLI?
by notjoemama | 2025-06-16 02:48:07+00:00
> in the modern web world you often have persistent client server connections

Is this actually true though? I’d be interested if you know any data backing that perspective. I only know what I’ve worked on and my anecdotal experience doesn’t match with this statement. But I know my sphere doesn’t represent the whole. In terms of state, by now there are many ways of dealing with persistence and reconnection. Not only are most of those problems solved with existing technologies and protocols but they’re everywhere in web dev. Maybe we’re talking past each other? Did I misunderstand your point?
by epgui | 2025-06-16 02:48:28+00:00
> It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it?

Personally I’m assuming the worst.

That being said, Harry Potter was such a big cultural phenomenon that I wonder to what degree might one actually be able to reconstruct the books based solely on publicly accessible derivative material.