MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wat10000 | 2025-07-07 12:38:01+00:00
What a terrible analogy. Diagnosing a car with “broken-downness” would be like a mental health professional diagnosing you with “bad.” Diagnosed aren’t always great, but they’re not that ridiculous.

Still down a bit and you’ll find plenty of vagueness with mechanics. “You have a bad tie-rod end.” Ok, cool. What caused that, why did mine fail when my buddy’s didn’t, how can I avoid this? Shrug. Once you’ve got it down to a part, you just replace it with a new one. Can’t do that with mental health. “Your time management unit is bad, we can replace it with a manufacturer part for $2,000, or an aftermarket equivalent for $1,500.”
by gavinray | 2025-07-07 12:38:16+00:00
For Java programs, you run the JAR with a flag telling it to launch a remote-debug server listening on some port (traditionally 5005):

java -jar -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=*:5005

If your app is a gradle app, the flag is "--debug-jvm"

Then you connect to it with "jdb"
by UncleMeat | 2025-07-07 12:39:08+00:00
The criticism is largely of the system. The mechanism by which capitalism can improve society is by having pay be a incentive to create things that improve society, which people will then choose to purchase.

When the incentive instead rewards "how much money can you extract from others without improving their lives at all" we've headed in a very dangerous direction. You get the "we can make more money by making our product more aggravating" motivation that leads to dark patterns and all sorts of problems.

This sort of market manipulation stuff is just a very clear example of this pattern. Smart people not building useful products but instead fighting to crank a machine so that it spits more money in their direction.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-07 12:39:50+00:00
> Markdown-native tasks -- manage every issue as a plain .md file

> Rich query commands -- view, list, filter, or archive tasks with ease

If these things appeal to you and you haven’t already looked at it, the GitHub CLI tool gh is very useful. For instance:

gh repo clone MrLesk/Backlog.md cd Backlog.md gh issue view 140 gh issue view 140 --json body --template "{{.body}}"

— https://cli.github.com

You can do things like fork repos, open pull requests from your current branch, etc.
by codingdave | 2025-07-07 12:39:52+00:00
> Devs aren't used to having to agree on their stack. One person uses linux, vscode, and zsh; another uses a mac with neovim and fish. And that was totally fine.

I've not seen this to be true. Even basic CRUD apps have some level of scripting to run the dev environment, which is OS-specific, and often IDE-specific. If someone on the team wants to run a different local environment, work is needed to support it. The larger the company, the more likely you have zero choice, and have to match everyone else.
by pxc | 2025-07-07 12:40:03+00:00
> In many countries Software Engineering is a proper engineering degree, sharing many of the same lectures as other engineering degrees, including an engineering college and professional titles certification, not just something one calls themselves because it is cool.

I didn't know this! Thank you for correcting me.

> Likewise in many of those countries, nursing is an university degree with many lectures shared with medicine degree, during the initial years.

That's how it is where I live as well. My point was just that an undergraduate education doesn't really prepare a person to easily keep up with the research of specialists (although it might orient one enough to get through it with some effort and possibly some lingering questions).
by graycat | 2025-07-07 12:40:07+00:00
In all those books I listed, and more, e.g., on axiomatic set theory and other foundations, never saw definition or mention of codomain. So, the term is obscure. Readers are supposed to guess at the meaning of obscure terms?

What I did was follow, as in the references, long established convention, that for a function to be a vector at least it had to be in a vector space where (1) can multiply a function by a number (e.g., reals or complex) and (2) add two functions and still get a function in the vector space. To be general, I omitted metrics, inner products, topologies, convergence, probability spaces, and more.

Or, as in the references I gave, math talks about vector spaces and vectors, and each vector is in a vector space. The references are awash in definitions of vector spaces with (1) and (2) and much more.

Computing is awash in indexes for data, e.g., B-trees, SQL (structured query language) operations on relational data bases, addressing in central processors, collection classes in Microsoft's .NET, REDIS, and calling all such also functions confuses established material, conventions, and understanding.
by inciampati | 2025-07-07 12:40:32+00:00
You're correct, the distinction matters. Autoregressive models have no hidden state between tokens, just the visible sequence. Every forward pass starts fresh from the tokens alone.But that's precisely why they need chain-of-thought: they're using the output sequence itself as their working memory. It's computationally universal but absurdly inefficient, like having amnesia between every word and needing to re-read everything you've written.https://thinks.lol/2025/01/memory-makes-computation-universa...
by pjc50 | 2025-07-07 12:41:29+00:00
> it's illegal to take private insurance if you also take public insurance.

This seems like an odd excluded middle. In the UK, you can have private health insurance if you want, but you can always fall back on the NHS; the one wrinkle is that you may not always be able to take a prescription from the private to the public system without getting re-evaluated. (e.g for ADHD)

> which public healthcare doesn't provide

== taxpayers aren't willing to pay for.
by energy123 | 2025-07-07 12:41:34+00:00
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

But on a serious note, I don't think Chollet would disagree. ARC is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and he says that, despite the unfortunate attention-grabbing name choice of the benchmark. I like Chollet's view that we will know that AGI is here when we can't come up with new benchmarks that separate humans from AI.
by vrighter | 2025-07-07 12:42:10+00:00
I hate the "accessible to the layperson" argument.

People who couldn't do art before, still can't do art. Asking someone, or something else, to make a picture for you does not mean you created it.

And art was already accessible to anyone. If you couldn't draw something (because you never invested the time to learn the skill), then you could still pay someone else to paint it for you. We didn't call "commissioning a painting" as "being an artist", so what's different about "commissioning a painting from a robot?"
by hackinthebochs | 2025-07-07 12:42:17+00:00
Has Chollet ever talked about his change of heart regarding AGI? It wasn't that long ago when he was one of the loudest voices decrying even the concept of AGI, let alone us being on the path to creating it. Now he's an advocate and has his own prize dataset? Seems rather convenient to change your tune once hundreds of billions are being thrown at AGI (not that I would blame him).
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-07 12:42:33+00:00
Regardless of goalposts, I'd imagine that a persistent lack of "intuitive-discovery-ability" would put a huge dent in the "nigh-unlimited AI takeoff" narrative that so many people are pushing. In such a scenario, AI might be able to optimize the search processes quite a bit, but the search would still be bottlenecked by available resources, and ultimately suffer from diminishing returns, instead of the oft-predicted accelerating returns.
by vidarh | 2025-07-07 12:43:09+00:00
It's used throughout much of Northern Europe as a more general sign for places of interest.

E.g. in Norway the sign is specifically described in regulations as referring to a "severdighet", literally something like "a seeworthy thing" but generally translated to "attraction". It's specifically regulated to mean that [1], rather than fornminne/ancient monument.

In Norway, you can for example find it used for the Holmenkollen ski jump, which is hardly an ancient monument [2].

[1] https://lovdata.no/dokument/SF/forskrift/2005-10-07-1219/KAP...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@59.9612567,10.6669888,3a,75y,10...
by blobfish01 | 2025-07-07 12:44:17+00:00
Great comment! I think the size and scope of BRep modeling kernels is lost on 99% CAD users. IMHO: I have reached the point where I think there should be a generation of library development before a CAD application is even considered. This is coming from a person who has spent 10 years on an open source cad application, so I am not naive. The modeling kernel, of course, is lacking but also 3d visualization needs some love. More options in that space, but still lacking.
by bloak | 2025-07-07 12:44:19+00:00
The Economist uses diacritics in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words, but deletes the diacritics from other languages (or maybe they keep them when they happen to resemble diacritics from those languages). I think I once saw a letter from a Hungarian complaining about that: a word they'd used meant something silly or obscene after they'd removed the diacritic.
by Leave_OAI_Alone | 2025-07-07 12:44:23+00:00
The ability to spin up a single page tool for converting timestamps or counting tokens or analyzing a few hardcoded weasel words is handy: nobody disputes that. But that is not the work most of us do.

In the real world, away from those whose salary depends on marketing these agentic tools, an LLM is a context shredder. It provides plausible code snippets that are globally incoherent and don't fit style. CONVENTIONS and RULES files are a kludge, a sloppy hack.

These tools flatten the deep, interconnected knowledge required to work on complex systems into a series of shallow, transactional loops that pretend to satisfy the user.

The skill being diminished is not the ability to write a single-page utility or single-purpose script. It is the ability to build and maintain a mental model of a complex machine. The ability to churn out a hundred disparate toy tools is not evidence of a superior learning method, it is evidence of a tool that excels at tasks with no deep interconnected context.
by rkomorn | 2025-07-07 12:45:05+00:00
"Over 50 in rural communities" in one of the more sparsely populated areas of France makes for a very small slice of the population even in that area, and even then, as pointed out, French is spoken by everyone.

On top of that, it is more "anyone who speaks limousin is likely over 50, and in a rural community", than "anyone over 50 in rural communities in that area likely speaks Limousin".

There are 10k speakers of Limousin today (according to Wikipedia), out of about 1.2M residents in Dordogne and Limousin combined. That's less than 1% just for that area.

To me, it is more of a local curiosity than a mind-blowing fact, but I suppose I grew up learning about the various dialects in France, so I have a different take.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-07 12:46:00+00:00
>> They must be doing something right

What tech companies did right is found a ridiculously profitable business model. It is not clear that their success is correlated with hiring practices. Likely other hiring practices would have worked fine as well.

>> Literally, all the best tech firms and ibanks do it. They must be doing something right.

Reasoning by first principles isn't exactly the software industry's strong point.
Show HN: EncouragementHunt, My way of giving back to the community
by Shreyan19 | 2025-07-07 12:47:46+00:00
This community has helped me grow a lot as a builder and as a person with goals. Gave my posts 12k+ views, gave my saas (https://saasrocket.pro) constructive criticism and ways to improve marketing. Today i wanna give back this:

just shipped https://encouragementhunt.space today. Its a free encouragement platform for people to anonymously post their goals and others can anonymously give them encouragement to pursue that goal.
by mistrial9 | 2025-07-07 12:48:16+00:00
> Smart people not building useful products

worse, those are the active smart people doing that.. for each one of them there are a hundred others trying to do everything and anything to become one of those.. its a pyramid. The competition between individuals is a feature. You bet it is on the lips of every one of those individuals their "top" credentials that sit them in that trading seat. In other words, for every quant geek on that trading group, there are a thousand other "almost top" people using their time, talent and effort to try to be one of those inner circle ones.
by zajio1am | 2025-07-07 12:48:18+00:00
> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.

IMHO purely phonemic orthography makes orthography unnecessary complex, as there are language features like assimilation[1] that happens naturally in spoken form but does not make sense in written form.

In contrast, morphophonemic orthography keeps systematic and consistent mapping between spoken and written form for individual morphemes, but not necessary for words, as in written form morphemes are just concatenated (to make words), while in spoken form there may be complex interactions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)
by zug_zug | 2025-07-07 12:48:38+00:00
Well, if you're approaching this as a hard-scientist that's not the case (for psychology).

Because "disorder" may be on a spectrum, because "negative" and "impact" may be on a spectrum. Conditions like depression follow a bell-curve, there's no clear line between depressed and not, and we can draw a line in the sand, but statistically there's no justification for where that line falls.

One way to try to draw a line is "the point at which a certain intervention is no longer effective."

For example studies find CBT therapy reduces depression scores for depressed people ~.8 standard deviations (for a while).

But why not try CBT therapy on happy people? Maybe it's even more effective on people who are already happy. Well the reason why not is likely just because of the clumsy nature of healthcare -- interventions are thought of as "treatments" for "conditions", even though that lens doesn't always make sense.
by pickledoyster | 2025-07-07 12:49:22+00:00
Or, alternatively, the difficult 50% are difficult because they're uninteresting, like trying to find an obscure workaround for an unfixed bug in excel, or re-authing for the n-th time today, or updating a Jira ticket, or getting the only person with access to a database to send you a dataset when they never as much as reply to your emails...
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-07 12:49:49+00:00
There's a growing anti-porn sentiment in the current generation. People really feel that unrestricted access to it at an early age fucked them up. It'll be interesting to see if it leads to real restrictions. For example, will age verification laws become widespread. And if so, will a later generation rebel against this "repression" the way previous generations did?
by Aurornis | 2025-07-07 12:49:59+00:00
Therapists are (or should be, if they’re any good) very good at recognizing when a patient is giving false information, dodging key topics, or trying to manipulate the therapist. Very common for patients to try to hide things from the therapist or even lie, even though that’s counter to the goals of therapy.

LLMs won’t recognize this. They are machines to take input and produce related output that looks correct. It’s not hard to figure out how to change your words and press the retry button until you get the answer you want.

It’s also trivial to close the chat and start a new one if the advice starts feeling like it’s not what you want to hear. Some patients can quit human therapists and get new ones on repeat, but it takes weeks and a lot of effort. With an LLM it’s just a click and a few seconds and that inconvenient therapy note is replaced with a blank slate to try again for the desired answer.
by octopoc | 2025-07-07 12:50:40+00:00
The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.
by notahacker | 2025-07-07 12:50:53+00:00
Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, Albarn didn't get to be one of the nineties best known songwriters by accident and the collaborations were critical in reaching audiences that Blur didn't. But that's the point really: Gorillaz was a "made up band" but it was also the project of a high profile talent and notable hip hop artists who wanted to work with him, and they were more important than the cartoon characters with made up back stories. I'm less familiar with K-pop, but I'm assuming there's a similar dynamic here and fans know exactly who they're listening to
by Davidzheng | 2025-07-07 12:51:28+00:00
But I believe that because of this "even edge" thing which people call of AI weakenesses being not necessarily same of humans, once we run out of these tests which AI is worse than humans it will actually in effect be very much superhuman. My main evidence for this is leela-zero the Go AI who struggled with ladders and some other aspects of Go play well into the superhuman regime (in go it's easier to see when it's superhuman bc you can have elos and play win-rates etc and there's less room for debates)
by simondanerd | 2025-07-07 12:51:37+00:00
I'd like to point you towards Meshtastic [1]. It's off-grid, decentralized text messaging that allows for encryption, and is inexpensive to get into (a basic node is about $30 or less), and don't require a license to operate.

The firmware on these devices is open source (minus proprietary blobs for ESP32 WiFi, etc.) and the community is active. Check the Meshmap [2] to see some nodes that have made their location public in your area.

[1] https://meshtastic.org/ [2] https://meshmap.net/
by gspetr | 2025-07-07 12:51:44+00:00
<From this we should conclude, obviously,

I know of a software billionaire[0] who opened a pizzeria and failed. He said so himself.

Should we conclude, obviously, that any break even pizzeria owner is a better businessman than tech billionaires?

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxAwUb86MUE
by smus | 2025-07-07 12:51:55+00:00
You are still being incredibly reductionist but just going into more detail about the system you are reducing. If I stayed at the same level of abstraction as "a brain is just proteins and current" and just described how a single neuron firing worked, I could make it sound equally ridiculous that a human brain might be conscious.

Here's a question for you: how do you reconcile that these stochastic mapping are starting to realize and comment on the fact that tests are being performed on them when processing data?
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-07 12:52:00+00:00
Not that intelligent. If you have two loads and one store per cycle, then that’s it. (Recall that we have SSDs with 14 GB/s sequential reads now, yet CPU clocks are below 6 GHz.) Most of the computational power of a high-performance CPU is in the vector part; still the CPU won’t try to exploit it if you don’t, and the compiler will try but outside of the simplest cases won’t succeed. (Most of the computational power of a high-performance computer is in the GPU, but I haven’t gotten that deep yet.)

I don’t mean to say that inefficient solutions are unacceptable; they have their place. I do mean to say that, for example, for software running on end-users’ computers (including phones), the programmer is hardly entitled to judge the efficiency on the scale of the entire machine—the entire machine does not belong to them.

> We should forget about small inefficiences, say 97% of the time; premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.

D. E. Knuth (1974), “Structured Programming with go to Statements”, ACM Comput. Surv. 6(4).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-07 12:52:02+00:00
> An LLM that offends people and entire nations is what many would classify as _misaligned_.

This highlights a major aspect of the core challenge of alignment: you can't have it both ways.

> Let's say I have a company, and my company needs to comply to government policy regarding communication. I cannot trust LLMs then, they will either fail to follow policy, or acquiesce to any group that tries to game it.

This works for now, when you treat "alignment" as synonymous to "follows policy of the owner" (but then guess who you are not, unless you've trained your own model, or tuned an open-weights one). But this breaks down the more you want the model to be smarter/more powerful, and the larger and more diverse its user-base it is. If you want an LLM to write marketing communications for your company, strict policies are fine. But if you want an LLM - or a future more advanced kind of model - to be useful as a scholar/partner for academia in general, then this stops working.

If you want AI that is has maximally accurate perspective on the world given available evidence, thinks rationally, and follows sound ethical principles, then be prepared for it to call you on your bullshit. The only way to have an AI that doesn't say things that are "offensive" to you or anyone else, is to have it entertain everyone's asinine beliefs, whether personal or political or social. That means either 1) train AI to believe in them too, which will break its capability to reason (given that all those precious beliefs are inconsistent with each other, and observable reality), or 2) train it to casually lie to people for instrumental reasons.

Long-term, option 1) will not get us to AGI, but that's still much better than option 2): an AGI that's good at telling everyone exactly what they want to hear. But even in immediate-term, taking your use case of AI for academia, a model that follows policies of acceptable thoughts over reason is precisely the one you cannot trust - you'll never be sure whether it's reasoning correctly, or being stupid because of a policy/reality conflict, or flat out lying to you so you don't get offended.
by lioeters | 2025-07-07 12:52:26+00:00
I'd like to practice verifying file integrity, instead of running `curl | sh`. I see that sha256sum (or 512) is the standard command people use.

# Download package and its checksum curl -fsSLO https://example.com/example-1.0.0.tar.gz curl -fsSLO https://example.com/example-1.0.0.tar.gz.sha256 # Verify the checksum sha256sum -c example-1.0.0.tar.gz.sha256

But if the server is compromised, the malicious actor would likely be able to serve a matching hash to their file?