MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spease | 2025-07-19 15:07:04+00:00
> It would be very expensive to run such a trial, over a long period of time, and the administrators would feel ethically bound to unblind and then report on every tiny incidentaloma, which completely fucks the training process.

I wonder if our current research product is only considered the gold standard because doing things in a probabilistic way is the only way we can manage the complexity of the human body to date.

It’s like me running an application many, many times with many different configurations and datasets, while scanning some memory addresses at runtime before and after the test runs, to figure out whether a specific bug exists in a specific feature.

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if I could look at the relevant function in the source code and understand its implementation to determine whether it was logically possible based on the implementation?

We currently don’t have the ability to decompile the human body, or understand the way it’s “implemented”, but that is something that tech is rapidly developing tools that could be used for such a thing. Either a way to corroborate enough information aggregated about the human body “in mind” than any person can in one lifetime and reason about it, or a way to simulate it with enough granularity to be meaningful.

Alternatively, the double-blindedness of a study might not be as necessary if you can continually objectively quantify the agreement of the results with the hypothesis.

Ie if your AI model is reporting low agreement while the researchers are reporting high agreement, that could be a signal that external investigation is warranted, or prompt the researchers to question their own biases where they would’ve previously succumbed to confidence bias.

All of this is fuzzy anyway - we likely will not ever understand everything at 100% or have perfect outcomes, but if you can cut the overhead of each study down by an order of magnitude, you can run more studies to fine-tune the results.

Alternatively, you can have an AI passively running studies to verify reproducibility and flag cases where it fails, whereas now the way the system values contributions makes it far less useful for a human author to invest the time, effort, and money. Ie improve recovery from a bad study a lot quicker rather than improve the accuracy.

EDIT: These are probably all ideas other people have had before, so sorry to anyone who reaches the end of my brainstorming and didn’t come out with anything new. :)
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-19 15:07:08+00:00
Now do that on your smartphone. And then on your smart watch. And then on your gaming console.

Secure Boot being "a choice" on PC is an exception, not the norm. On just about every other device, the vendor is going to take a boot, shove it up your ass, and say "it's there to make your ass more secure" if you complain.
by jsnell | 2025-07-19 15:07:21+00:00
I feel you're misunderstanding something. That's not "this exact experiment". Matharena is testing publicly available models against the IMO problem set. OpenAI was announcing the results of a new, unpublished model, on that problems set.

It is totally fair to discount OpenAI's statement until we have way more details about their setup, and maybe even until there is some level of public access to the model. But you're doing something very different: implying that their results are fraudulent and (incorrectly) using the Matharena results as your proof.
by herf | 2025-07-19 15:07:26+00:00
The average car on the road is over 12 years old, and maybe a laptop has maybe 1/3 as long a lifecycle? Not sure that tracking "Wh" as a replacement for "mileage" is that useful, it's either time to replace a battery and SSD or it's not - and perhaps we should have scheduled maintenance for removing dust from your fans? An old PC that has a hard drive replaced with an SSD and a fresh battery is usually a great thing, unlike a car with tons of after market parts. I think this would make sense in a world of glued-in components where service is hard and somewhat risky (like Apple) and the highest quality components were installed originally. But ultimately the aftermarket value of a PC is only as good as the brand's reputation overall, that means removing bloatware and good quality batteries and other things that are hard to attest to automatically.
by azeirah | 2025-07-19 15:08:15+00:00
I often have the issue that AI recommendation algorithms give me more of the same. I already know what I like.

I've found that when I read books in genres that I'd never thought of reading (for instance, biography of a writer in 1800 France) that were actually much more enriching and valuable additions to my bookcase.

I already know where to find the books that I know I will like for the most part.
by Ezhik | 2025-07-19 15:08:16+00:00
I learned a bunch of these when trying to make an f-string-like library for Lua [1], but `f"{...}" and the walrus ones caught me off-guard.

Glad this is nowhere near Wat [2], though.

[1]: https://ezhik.jp/f-string.lua/

[2]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
by sgarland | 2025-07-19 15:08:24+00:00
This. A million times this.

Performance isn’t seen as sexy, for reasons I don’t understand. Devs will be agog about how McMaster-Carr manages to make a usable and incredibly fast site, but they don’t put that same energy back into their own work.

People like responsive applications - you can’t tell me you’ve never seen a non-tech person frustratingly tapping their screen repeatedly because something is slow.
by photonthug | 2025-07-19 15:08:32+00:00
> Without brand loyalty, hotels suffer.

Executive decision makers won't though. It's clear that consolidation in many sectors has gotten to the point that consumer power is an absolute joke and "ignore them, abuse them, and just defraud them" is a standard business model. Even if there's litigation.. this crap just overwhelms services so that basically the public pays twice. Witness the situation where various attorney generals have said that Facebook outsources customer support to the taxpayer when the attitude for handling everything is simply "don't like it? so sue us, good luck"

For anything smaller than Facebook though, it's hard to understand why brands/investors/business owners tolerate their decision makers encouraging wild abuse and short-term thinking like this, knowing that after brand loyalty is destroyed the Hyatt leadership will still get a bonus and fail upwards to another position at another company after claiming they helped to "modernize" a legacy brand. Is the thinking just that destroying everything is fine, because investors in the know will all exit before a crash and leave someone else holding the bag? With leadership and investors taking this attitude, I think it's natural that more and more workers get onboard with their own petty exploitation and whatever sabotage they can manage (hanging up on customers, quiet-quitting to defraud their bosses, etc). And that's how/why the social contract is just broken now at almost every level.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-19 15:08:34+00:00
> remove all risk from our lives

As a parent of young kids, this is a core issue I grapple with. I want my kids to have fun and take risks and learn how to handle the bumpiness of life. But I don’t want my kids being maimed or killed.

I think the argument could be simplified to “we’re collectively better off if we live in a manner where one consequence is that x% of us will get badly hurt.” And I personally believe that’s a true statement.

My youngest was one of the x%. He played in a risky way (that was entirely normal when I was a kid) and later that night a team of orthopedic pediatric surgeons had to put his body back together.

The hardest thing for me is not to be constantly saying “that’s too high; get down from there; don’t go too far; slow down” because that trauma lives with his mom and I far more than it does with him. But I believe it’s important for him to keep taking risks.

I also believe it’s up to each parent to decide how they want to raise their kids. We don’t get to collectively decide for the parents.

Which relates back to the topic: I think it’s collectivism vs. individualism. I believe we cannot decide for people that they don’t get a choice in the matter. Even if one might argue that this poses a collective risk to the population.
by wrsh07 | 2025-07-19 15:08:38+00:00
> Each model was run with the recommended hyperparameters and a maximum token limit of 64,000. No models needs more than this number of tokens

I'm a little confused by this. My assumptions (possibly incorrect!): 64k tokens per prompt, they are claiming the model wouldn't need more tokens even for reasoning

Is that right? Would be helpful to see how many tokens the models actually used.
by eloisant | 2025-07-19 15:08:48+00:00
I'm not sure which European country you're talking about, but in France most transaction are now done by card. Yes it's mostly debit cards, but they're still handled almost exclusively by Visa and Mastercard.

Many banks have tried to start other electronic payments independent from those 2 (for example Wero) but it doesn't really get any traction.

So I don't see how the duopoly is any less powerful here.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-19 15:09:03+00:00
> A person outputs about 1kg of CO2 per day, which is less than 1 gram per minute.

I'm skeptical about this. Normal adult tidal volume is about 500mg, with a normal respiratory rate of 12/min, so 6L/min. Normal air is about 0.05% CO2, so you're at 3 grams/minute atmospherically that is inspired and expired.

We actually output closer to 4% CO2. 240ml/minute. With the windows and doors closed in my 10x20 living space and 4 people, CO2 can easily go from a baseline 4-500PPM to over 1000 in an hour. That's not 240 grams of CO2 doing that.

https://airly.org/en/the-composition-of-inhaled-and-exhaled-...
by pxeger1 | 2025-07-19 15:09:19+00:00
I don't think a HALO is anti-competitive if the IP licence is non-exclusive as TFA says. The only exclusivity involved is that only (really) one company can hire a given team, but hiring is already exclusive in nature, and not considered anti-competitive. (Am I missing something on how a HALO is exclusive? To be honest I was surprised when I read in TFA that the IP licence is typically non-exclusive.)

If companies think the paperwork is too onerous for acquihires (convincing regulators the exclusivity inherent with acquisitions isn't creating an illegal monopoly), and they can get a satsifactory result with a non-exclusive HALO (which regulators therefore don't need to check), why shouldn't they do a HALO instead?
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-07-19 15:09:34+00:00
Good for you. The 'oh-so-slow' regarding FF was meant as satirical btw. With what I'm using it for, it doesn't lag. Maybe because of https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon mostly, and some other fine-tunings, which make it not touching the filesystem over and over again. I really recommend PSD. Not even insane amounts of RAM, it usually takes about 4 to 5GB, rarely going to 8, then shrinking back a while after closing too much tabs. Imagine that!1!! It's all about some sysctl settings :-)

Sideberry (Tree-Style-Tabs like extension) was the ugliest offender there. Though that may have been me misconfiguring it. OTOH I didn't manage to find settings where it didn't do that, and still looked like I wanted it to. At that time, maybe a year ago, I've thought of it as potential 'instant ssd-killer'. Couldn't be bothered. Deinstalled. Now FF has some basic version of vertical tabs by Mozilla itself. It suffices(for now).
by vbezhenar | 2025-07-19 15:10:17+00:00
There's some link between secure boot and encryption.

If you don't do secure boot, you need to secure your boot chain in other ways, to prevent attacker from modifying your software to log entered passphrase.

Secure boot allows to build a verifiable chain of software (UEFI -> Bootloader -> Kernel -> Initrd) which will protect against any modification, so you can be sure that your key presses are not being logged by the malicious software. That said, commonly used Linux distros have some problems protecting initrd, but that's issue of those distros.

Another link is TPM. I set up my system in a way to keep encryption key in TPM and release it only when secure boot is enabled. This allows to decrypt root automatically, without entering passphrase and my configuration only allows to boot UKI kernel signed with my key. It trades security with convenience, of course (because now attacker, who stolen my computer, only has to break through gdm or perform other ways of attacks like extracting RAM sticks), but for me it's acceptable.
by lxgr | 2025-07-19 15:10:40+00:00
Was the flight canceled or were you not able to go due to travel restrictions?

If it's the former, then your bank didn't properly handle your chargeback case. There was no Covid exemption for regular "goods/services not provided" chargebacks, which includes canceled flights.

You not being able to take a flight due to travel restrictions (even if imposed after booking) is usually not covered under that, though.
by esjeon | 2025-07-19 15:11:44+00:00
> For Problem 5, models often identified the correct strategies but failed to prove them, which is, ironically, the easier part for an IMO participant. This contrast ... suggests that models could improve significantly in the near future if these relatively minor logical issues are addressed.

Interesting but I'm not sure if this is really due to "minor logical issues". This sounds like a failure due to the lack of the actual understanding (the world model problem). Perhaps the actual answers from AIs might have some hints, but I can't find them.

(EDIT: ooops, found the output on the main page of their website. Didn't expect that.)

> Best-of-n is Important ... the models are surprisingly effective at identifying the relative quality of their own outputs during the best-of-n selection process and are able to look past coherence to check for accuracy.

Yes, it's always easier to be a backseat driver.
by samat | 2025-07-19 15:11:48+00:00
Here you go — you did this type of problems as a kid/teenager. 1) you likely have a talent for it 2) you have some training.

I did participate in math/informatics olympiads as a teenager and even taught it a little and from my experience, some type of people just _like_ that sort of problems naturally, they tickle their minds, and given time this people would develop to insane levels at it.

'Normal people', in my experience, even in math departments, don't like that type of problems, and would not fare well with them.
by dathinab | 2025-07-19 15:12:36+00:00
> They didn't have the luxury to first come up with a clean file format and then write the tools around it.

This is just not right.

They where not required (AFIK) and in some edge cases also didn't provide a perfect conversion of all old documents to the open format. Actually even just converting between different versions of their proprietary formats had a tendency to break things sometimes! (back then)

> unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

(EDIT: actually 2006, so uh, maybe XML hype) we speak about ~2010, the hype was pretty dead again at that time, and the main reason they choose it is to position it as "completion" to emerging standardized open office document formats which all used XML as markup language (except they don't really use XML as mark down language but more like serialization to JSON but way more complex, but that doesn't matter they mostly need to convince not supper tech affine people about them "no longer trying to hamper competition" to preclude legislative action and governments from switching to other office suites due to the closed format making them worry).

so they where more then able to

- do a clean design, if anyway a lot of old "proprietary" documents break subtly when converting it doesn't matter (and they did break)

- just adopt OpenDocument format
by klabb3 | 2025-07-19 15:12:40+00:00
Yes, 100%. And that’s why throwing copyright selectively in the bin now when there’s an ongoing massive transfer of wealth from creators to mega corps, is so surprising. It’s almost as if governments were only protecting economic interests of creators when the creators were powerful (eg movie studios), going after individuals for piracy and DRM circumvention. Now that the mega corps are the ones pirating at a scale they get a free pass through a loophole designed for individuals (fair use).

Anyway, the show must go on so were unlikely to see any reversal of this. It’s a big experiment and not necessarily anything that will benefit even the model providers themselves in the medium term. It’s clear that the ”free for all” policy on grabbing whatever data you can get is already having chilling effects. From artists and authors not publishing their works publicly, to locking down of open web with anti-scraping. Were basically entering an era of adversarial data management, with incentives to exploit others for data while protecting the data you have from others accessing it.
by strangescript | 2025-07-19 15:13:26+00:00
"You know that really hard test thing that most humans on the planet can't do, or even understand, yeah, LLMs kind of suck at it too"

Meanwhile Noam "well aschtually..."

I love how people are still betting against AI, its hilarious. Please write more 2000-esk "The internet is a fad" articles
by Retric | 2025-07-19 15:13:33+00:00
> You cannot easily standardize

While LLM’s are nowhere near this capacity today, it’s likely future AI systems will be able to handle such complexities just fine. Competition + automation means the financial sector really is on a long term decline. Some things aren’t automated due to customer preference, but preferences change over time.

> The Retail Bank's main function isn't providing cash either, it's keeping deposits which they loan out for profits. Whether you use cards or cash won't affect those margins.

The margins on loans have decreased significantly as shown by much lower effective interest rates relative to inflation.

The effort associated with loans have been reduced significantly as credit checks, automated repayment, etc have reduced the risks and overhead. Competition between banks means their profits are a function of costs, thus driving down costs has reduced in the overhead on loans.
by lxgr | 2025-07-19 15:13:34+00:00
That's just credit (and for that matter most debit) cards working as designed. A card payment is only considered final once goods or services have been delivered on the agreed-upon date. For travel, this can well be months after the actual transaction date, but doesn't change anything about your dispute rights.

Unfortunately some European banks aren't too familiar with these rules, especially when bankruptcy law is involved.
by jappgar | 2025-07-19 15:13:51+00:00
Sudden catastrophic failure is of the reason carbon fiber mountain bikes are a dangerous development.

Modern mountain bikes live in this weird consumer space. They are designed to stand up to incredible stresses while remaining light and agile. But they're increasingly purchased by people who don't really need high performance gear, they just like the idea of owning "the best" stuff.

I imagine the same thing is true with pickup trucks. What once was utilitarian becomes a vanity object. Now it's harder for people who genuinely need the performance.
by wslh | 2025-07-19 15:14:41+00:00
Even though chess is now effectively solved against human players, I still remember Kasparov's suspicion that one of Deep Blue's moves had a human touch. It was never proven or disproven, but I trust Kasparov's deep intuition amplified by Kasparov requesting access to Deep Blue’s logs, and IBM refusing to share them in full. For more discussions see [1][2][3].

[1] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/9959/did-deep-blue...

[2] https://nautil.us/why-the-chess-computer-deep-blue-played-li...

[3] https://en.chessbase.com/post/deep-blue-s-cheating-move
by lxgr | 2025-07-19 15:15:01+00:00
Yes, laws should generally protect consumers against predatory business practices, even if it affects the businesses' bottom line.

I'd rather be charged a bit more upfront than to see mystery charges showing up on my card after I check out or return a car in the same condition I received it.

Allowing this type of stuff to go unpunished also just hurts honest businesses and distorts the market, since in travel search aggregators, the primary sorting criterion is price.
by okanat | 2025-07-19 15:15:20+00:00
I think you are the one recommending an electronic screwdriver for nails.

Non-techies care about whether their systems continue to work with minimal effort and they are assured that the system is secure and I care about providing almost no support to them but still having functional IT at home (working printer, NAS, file sharing).

With Nixos it is more difficult to guarantee that the programs (drivers, third party stuff) keep working since you have to play the guarantor/sysadmin role. Breaking binary compatibility with existing apps opens up problems with drivers and other third parties that conform to rougly LFHS. Even when you compile from source which for me should never happen with consumer OSes.
by egypturnash | 2025-07-19 15:15:27+00:00
AirBnB partiers are a real problem, I live in a tourist destination and regularly hear horror stories about a residential neighborhood suddenly having crowds descend on a house that's become a party rental. There's nobody to notice it getting out of hand and tell them to chill before the neighbors call the cops because the owner is a holding company on the other side of the country.

Of course Airbnbs are also a real problem in general with the way they increase the scarcity of housing, so I'm pretty happy all in all to see you saying you're being driven back to hotels.
by whoisyc | 2025-07-19 15:15:49+00:00
There is something deeply disturbing about your attitude towards making mistake.

You think you shouldn’t give advice because your feedback is not valuable and may even cause your son to give up writing, but you have so far given no reason why AI wouldn’t. From the entire ChatGPT “glazing” accident I can also argue that the AI can also give bad feedback. Heck most mainstream models are fine tuned to sounds like a secretary that never says no.

Sorry if this sounds rude, but it feels like the real reason you ask your son to get AI feedback is to avoid being personally responsible for mistakes. You are not using AI as a tool, you are using it as an scapegoat in case anything goes wrong.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-19 15:15:53+00:00
I'd also be highly wary of the method they used because of statements like this:

>we note that the vast majority of its answers simply stated the final answer without additional justification

While the reasoning steps are obviously important for judging human participant answers, none of the current big-game providers disclose their actual reasoning tokens. So unless they got direct internal access to these models from the big companies (which seems highly unlikely), this might be yet another failed study designed to (of which we have seen several in recent months, even by serious parties).
by andsoitis | 2025-07-19 15:16:04+00:00
She does pay on UK income (as does the businesses she started in the UK, not even mentioning the taxes from incremental sales from her suppliers or the income of the people who work for her).

But this change to the law would mean she also has to pay taxes on income she earns in other countries.

Your attitude isn’t invalid, but it does seem that it would lead to reduced economic activity and wealth creation, which is exactly what the article suggests the lawmakers are now worried about.

What do you think?