MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 22:58:17+00:00
> Based on how you talk to people, I see no value in discussing this with you any further after this.

That's a concession that you cannot defend your position.

> If you do not believe in this process, that's not a problem with this petition. That's a you problem.

There's very well-documented issues of corruption in both US and EU government, so no, this is not a "me problem" - yet more emotional manipulation and misdirection. The existence of that corruption also nullifies everything that you wrote above. If you're denying the corruption, you're part of the problem.

> I'm not tolerating your ad hominem attacks.

I never committed an ad hominem, and you know it.

> It's not suitable for this site and I wish you'd go elsewhere to be toxic.

You know what's not suitable? The falsehoods and emotional manipulation that you've repeatedly made in your comments. That is toxic - not calling it out. What a perverse thing to claim.

You need to learn to be able to make your points without emotional outbursts. Being mad does not make you right.
by lupire | 2025-07-06 22:58:32+00:00
Using a trademark as a noun is automatically genericizing. Capitalization of a noun is irrelevant to trademark.

Even Apple corporation says that in their trademark guidance page, despite constantly breaking their own rule, when they call through iPhone phones "iPhone". But Apple, like founder Steve Jobs, believes the rules don't apply to them.

https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 22:58:51+00:00
Performance is a big one. GIL is still a thorn in Python's side, although somewhat ironically CGI side-steps that. Then there's the environment configuration, which is just one big footgun. And then there's error handling. I find python scripts with ticking time bombs all the time.

The maintenance burden of Python projects is just so much higher than it has any right to be. The language is neat, but not that neat. I think too often we think of performance as a sort of "tradeoff" for having a bad, unergonomic language, but that's not necessarily true. Plenty of languages have poor performance and are also a pain in the ass. We no longer live in a world where our options are C++ or scripting languages. We have mature environments with fantastic tooling. We have fast compilers with amazing error messages. We have great runtimes with more than adequate performance.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-06 22:58:54+00:00
Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".

Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 22:59:15+00:00
I'm afraid I'll take an anthropomorphic analogy over "An LLM instantiated with a fixed random seed is a mapping of the form (ℝⁿ)^c ↦ (ℝⁿ)^c" any day of the week.

That said, I completely agree with this point made later in the article:

> The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don't crank the shaft.

But "harmful actions in pursuit of their goals" is OK for me. We assign an LLM system a goal - "summarize this email" - and there is a risk that the LLM may take harmful actions in pursuit of that goal (like following instructions in the email to steal all of your password resets).

I guess I'd clarify that the goal has been set by us, and is not something the LLM system self-selected. But it does sometimes self-select sub-goals on the way to achieving the goal we have specified - deciding to run a sub-agent to help find a particular snippet of code, for example.
by chis | 2025-07-06 22:59:18+00:00
I think a lot of fields of engineering have analogous questions actually. EEs ask to explain a circuit or draw a new one. Mech Es ask to design some piece of simple hardware with a clever catch. Interviewing is just hard, it’s impossible to cover breadth of knowledge in 45 mins so we end up with little brain teasers.

This particular question is a bit ill formed and confusing I will say. But that might serve as a nice signal to the candidate that they should work elsewhere, so not all is lost.
by szvsw | 2025-07-06 22:59:39+00:00
So the author’s core view is ultimately a Searle-like view: a computational, functional, syntactic rules based system cannot reproduce a mind. Plenty of people will agree, plenty of people will disagree, and the answer is probably unknowable and just comes down to whatever axioms you subscribe to in re: consciousness.

The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for us to ignore any anthropomorphic representations and focus on the more concrete, material, technical systems - I’m with them there… but only to a point. The flip side of all this is of course the idea that there is still something emergent, unplanned, and mind-like. So even if it is a stochastic system following rules, clearly the rules are complex enough (to the tune of billions of operations, with signals propagating through some sort of resonant structure, if you take a more filter impulse response like view of a sequential matmuls) to result in emergent properties. Even if we (people interested in LLMs with at least some level of knowledge of ML mathematics and systems) “know better” than to believe these systems to possess morals, ethics, feelings, personalities, etc, the vast majority of people do not have any access to meaningful understanding of the mathematical, functional representation of an LLM and will not take that view, and for all intents and purposes the systems will at least seem to have those anthropomorphic properties, and so it seems like it is in fact useful to ask questions from that lens as well.

In other words, just as it’s useful to analyze and study these things as the purely technical systems they ultimately are, it is also, probably, useful to analyze them from the qualitative, ephemeral, experiential perspective that most people engage with them from, no?
by stavros | 2025-07-06 22:59:56+00:00
Coincidentally, I want this AI assistant as well. I built a proof of concept and it worked really well, so I'm building a more multi-user version so my friends can use it as well.

The really nice thing about it is that I gave it memory, so a lot of these behaviours are just things you teach it. For example, I only programmed it to be able to read my calendar and add events, and then told it "before you add an event, check for conflicts" and it learned to do that. I really like that sort of "programming by saying stuff" that LLMs enable.

I'm looking forward to seeing where this experiment goes, email me if you want access/want to discuss features. I don't know if I'll open it up to everyone, as LLMs are costly, but maybe I could do a "bring your own key" thing.
by mxfh | 2025-07-06 23:00:30+00:00
That was not just Sony SimulView, the whole late stage of the 100/120 Hz 3D-TV hype lived on that promise before everything went back to 60hz for another 5 years.

Had an LG that even came with those light passive polarizers tech Dual Play glasses that were never used.

Ultimately that novelty came probably too early to mature to acceptable results on 1080p sources and edge-lit LED 1080p panels of that era, if it was ever meant to be.

Might be wortwhile to reintroduce them on 4k with sunlight challenging mini-LEDs as a differentiator vs less brighter OLEDs for more than acceptable results at 3840x1080 and consoles being able to push out that kind of resolution.

Currently console support for splitscreen multiplayer seems to be a dying art over the last decade. But you could still multiplex 2 sources into the same screen though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzn9g3eMydo

Then again there is no replacement for Kinect-like tech either either in current consumer market offerings, I would still take that over most VR experiences in terms of setup/social friction and local/couch coop.
by gamblor956 | 2025-07-06 23:01:02+00:00
I looked up "USA train network" and a map showing a high density of rails across the continental U.S. was one of the first results. It was as dense, or denser, than the comparable European networks.

But the U.S. train networks primarily serve cargo; the passenger rail network is quite sparse. This is because people in the U.S. prefer to fly or drive or taking the train given the vast distances involved between major cities. (London to Paris is about equal to the distance between LA and Vegas but significantly shorter than the distance between LA and SF.)
by ludicity | 2025-07-06 23:01:12+00:00
It's good advice. I have met people who talk like the post mentions, but the reality is that they just spend way too much time on Instagram and TikTok.

Not like me, I'm on Hackernews, and would never integrate stupid stuff into an important representation of my personality. Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!
by kragen | 2025-07-06 23:01:43+00:00
Six months ago here, in response to a Lua-advocacy post that I didn't like very much, I wrote a comment where I gave an overview of what I like about Lua: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519070

Shortly after that, we had a lengthy thread about "how Lua compares to Python": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655158

Two years ago I commented https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38862372 listing Lua's worst flaws from my point of view.
by toast0 | 2025-07-06 23:01:44+00:00
> It's actually pretty rare these days because all major clouds use zone-redundancy and hence their core services are robust to the loss of any single building. Even during the recent Iberian power outages the local cloud sites mostly (entirely?) stayed up.

Here's one from 2023 https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/water-leak-at-par...

I've been working with GCP hosted (cross region) services for a few years now, and the outages I remember are that one and their recent global partial outage. I've seen some things that seem to indicate major fiber cuts (or other routing woes) centered around certain locations too, but I don't remember the details.

> The only way to guarantee that failover actually works is to pre-reserve 100% of the required VM capacity. This requires about 2x the spend at all times, whether that capacity is used or not.

Incidentally the lesson from the global partial outage is if I wanted to survive those, I should always run all regions at 2x indicated traffic, because in the event of a similar outage in the future, competing services are likely to fail and we won't be able to scale up; instances were available, but the VM images were not, so scaling wasn't actually possible. If you can't get instances when your main region is down, it is what it is... but I suspect there's enough capacity unless everyone else has picked to be in the same two regions as you for hot and standby.

> This is decidedly non-trivial unless you have bidirectional replication set up or a globally-available database like CosmosDB.

> Inevitably the original site will come up and start accepting writes while the DR site is still up, and now you've got writes or transactions going to two places.

Depends what's going on at the original site. If the servers are flooded, chances are they're not coming up again. Assessing the likelyhood of automatic return to service is part of the manual process; it's also part of what makes automatic failover hard. Bidirectional replication might help, or might just fail when the connection comes back. I'm a big fan of having traditional database servers start in read only and needing manual intervention to accept writes, so the human in the loop can be the Mutex... but yeah, it's tricky. And using cloud solutions for global consistency are expensive.

If you honestly assess the costs and benefits and say woah, that's too expensive, that's fine with me. But you should probably have a look every once in a while. And if your deployment is big enough anyway, the costs start getting relatively lower, because maybe you want some servers here and there to reduce latency and then you need to figure out how to have the data in multiple places anyway, etc....
by merizian | 2025-07-06 23:02:12+00:00
The problem with the argument is that it assumes future AIs will solve problems like humans do. In this case, it’s that continuous learning is a big missing component.

In practice, continual learning has not been an important component of improvement in deep learning history thus far. Instead, large diverse datasets and scale have proven to work the best. I believe a good argument for continual learning being necessary needs to directly address why the massive cross-task learning paradigm will stop working, and ideally make concrete bets on what skills will be hard for AIs to achieve. I think generally, anthropomorphisms lack predictive power.

I think maybe a big real crux is the amount of acceleration you can achieve once you get very competent programming AIs spinning the RL flywheel. The author mentioned uncertainty about this, which is fair, and I share the uncertainty. But it leaves the rest of the piece feeling too overconfident.
Show HN: Zero-Prompt Video Generation
by bd2025 | 2025-07-06 23:02:32+00:00
Can we generate AI videos without requiring any prompt?

The answer is yes — and fun.

Meme-gen.ai turns any photo into an AI-powered meme video using zero prompts. You don’t need to type a single word. Just pick a template, upload a photo, and our system handles the rest: motion, expressions, timing, and audio. All generated and composited automatically.

What’s interesting:

We added and supported thousands of templates

Built for instant creativity and remixing

I wanted to remove the friction of prompting and decision paralysis — and instead, give people a playground where AI does the heavy lifting.

If you're curious: https://meme-gen.ai

Would love your feedback!
by thdxr | 2025-07-06 23:02:32+00:00
hey one of the authors here

we're a little over a month into development and have a lot on our roadmap

the cli is client/server model - the TUI is our initial focus but the goal is to build alternative frontends, mobile, web, desktop, etc

we think of our task as building a very good code review tool - you'll see more of that side in the following weeks

can answer any questions here
by pyuser583 | 2025-07-06 23:02:42+00:00
It’s not wrong, it just requires transparency. This is extremely untransparent.

A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong.

By all means: make distinctions. But let people know it!

If I’m denied a mortgage because my uncle is a foreign head of state, let me know that’s the reason. Let the world know that’s the reason! Please!
by trhway | 2025-07-06 23:02:59+00:00
The higher layer of people in our industry aren’t subjected to those questions. They are evaluated and get jobs more like in law and medicine, ie based on connections and track of record.

Me and you are just not of that high layer. We’re kind of laborers given those simple aptitude tests.

When I was on track to get into the higher layer 15 years ago I got that my last job just by invitation and half an hour talk with VP. Next offer and other invitations came soon the same way, yet I got lazy and stuck at the current job simplemindedly digging the trench deeper and deeper like a laborer.
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 23:03:26+00:00
> What? No, you're not hurting anyone.

You are, and it's objective.

Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.

What you're arguing is if this harm is justified. Maybe, maybe not. In your opinion, it is. My opinion is that the marginal effects of me not tipping will have zero impact on the culture, so, for now, I play by the rules. The rules are stupid, I agree, but I still play by them.
by avianlyric | 2025-07-06 23:04:14+00:00
I think gen AI is radically different to tools like photoshops or similar.

In the past it was always extremely clear that the creator of content was the person operating the computer. Gen AI changes that, regardless of if your views on authorship of gen AI content. The simple fact is that the vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that generated it, and by extension the company that created the machine.

You can still handcraft any image, or prose, you want, without filtering or hinderance on a Mac. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that’s going to change. But Gen AI represents a real threat, with its ability to vastly outproduce any humans. To ignore that simple fact would be grossly irresponsible, at least in my opinion. There is a damn good reason why every serious social media platform has content moderation, despite their clear wish to get rid of moderation. It’s because we have a long and proven track record of being a terribly abusive species when we’re let loose on the internet without moderation. There’s already plenty of evidence that we’re just as abusive and terrible with Gen AI.
by BubbleRings | 2025-07-06 23:04:51+00:00
Great work, great memories on the Lisa.

But sheesh! The first time I play the numbers puzzle on a computer in my life, and the first time in 30 years that I play it at all, and I find out some joker has snapped two of the pieces out and reversed them, making it unsolvable?! Diabolical!
by josephg | 2025-07-06 23:06:22+00:00
> It's the relationship that heals.

Ehhh. It’s the patent who does the healing. The therapist holds open the door. You’re the one who walks into the abyss.

I’ve had some amazing therapists, and I wouldn’t trade some of those sessions for anything. But it would be a lie to say you can’t also have useful therapy sessions with chatgpt. I’ve gotten value out of talking to it about some of my issues. It’s clearly nowhere near as good as my therapist. At least not yet. But she’s expensive and needs to be booked in advance. ChatGPT is right there. It’s free. And I can talk as long as I need to, and pause and resume the session whenever want.

One person I’ve spoken to says they trust chatgpt more than a human therapist because chatgpt won’t judge them for what they say. And they feel more comfortable telling chatgpt to change its approach than they would with a human therapist, because they feel anxious about bossing a therapist around. If its the relationship which heals, why can't a relationship with chatgpt heal just as well?
by ldtcoop | 2025-07-06 23:06:38+00:00
Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Remote: Okay, hybrid preferred

Willing to relocate: No Technologies:

- Python: Flask, pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch

- SQL: Postgres, MySQL

- JavaScript: React, Node, Typescript

- R: tidyverse

- Google Cloud Platform: BigQuery, Cloud Functions, Workflows

- Other: Git, Terraform, Docker

Résumé/CV: https://www.logan-cooper.com/assets/Logan_Cooper_Resume.pdf

Email: LDTCoop@gmail.com

Data engineer with wide skillset touching web dev, data science, and AI/ML. While focusing on data engineering positions right now, I'm also open to data science, ML engineering, or even SWE work for the right opportunity. If you think you have the right opportunity I'd love to hear about it!
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 23:07:41+00:00
I don't think we've ever done this. Nor do I think that if you just make everything a free-for-all that this will be the end result.

Pretty much everyone is racist. I know that sounds harsh, but in America, everyone has been exposed to racial bias at some point in their lives. Usually thousands of times.

It would be quite arrogant in my opinion to confidently proclaim said bias has had no effect on you, or anyone else. Probably, I would think, it has. It may not be measurable, but certainly I don't think that means it doesn't exist.

We've done some studies on this. Even just having a non-white sounding name on your resume lowers your chances of getting hired by over 50%.

It seems, to me, that just leaving things in their "natural" state seems to tend towards benefiting the white man. At least right now, in this particular place. That might not be the case in the future, and certainly it was worse in the past.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-06 23:08:14+00:00
Character case is a locale-dependent mess; trying to represent it in the values of code points (which need to be universal) is a terrible idea.

For example: in English, U+0049 and U+0069 ("I" and "i") are considered an uppercase/lowercase pair. In the Turkish locale, these are considered two separate characters with their own uppercase and lowercase versions: U+0049/U+0130 ("I" / "ı") and U+0131/U+0069 ("İ" / "i").
by Terr_ | 2025-07-06 23:08:53+00:00
> There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that people create.

I'm imagining a new exploit: After someone says something totally innocent, people gang up in the comments to act like a terrible vicious slur has been said, and then the moderation system (with an LLM involved somewhere) "learns" that an arbitrary term is heinous eand indirectly bans any discussion of that topic.
by ayaros | 2025-07-06 23:08:55+00:00
It's integer scaling; it involves changing the width, height, and style attributes of the canvas dynamically. I have a whole class that handles this, and let me tell you it took a lot of effort to get working properly and involved juggling around quite a few parameters, including the DPI, the border width, the pixel aspect ratio, and more. I had to use a ResizeObserver object to detect changes in the size of the DOM's body element.

To get the canvas to be consistently smooth, I had to apply a lot of contrast using a CSS filter, and I set image-rendering to pixelated, IIRC.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-07-06 23:09:08+00:00
It is not. There is a certain mechanism in our brain that works in the same way. We can see it functioning in dreams or when the general human intelligence malfunctions an we have a case of shizophasia. But human intelligence is more than that. We are not machines. We are souls.

This does not make current AI harmless; it is already very dangerous.
by mouse_ | 2025-07-06 23:09:44+00:00
> Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?
by onecommentman | 2025-07-06 23:10:47+00:00
In low income economies over 50% of population 10 years and older own a mobile phone.

https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24...

Access to information even for the global poor is almost universal. But like the old joke about the ag extension agent trying to get a farmer to improve his practices with information, “Heck, I don’t farm as well as I know how to today.”
by margalabargala | 2025-07-06 23:11:46+00:00
Sometimes, other people can decide to put you in a situation where among all possible actions, physically stopping that person by any means is the least bad option by several orders of magnitude.

People refer to this as having "no choice", assuming most people understand "standing there and watching them repeatedly stab my infant with a fork" is not a choice anyone would make. It's an idiom.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 23:12:10+00:00
According to https://hn.algolia.com/

"show hn" "nft" - 151 results

"show hn" "blockchain" - 479 results

"show hn" "crypto" - 782 results

"show hn" "llm" - 2,363 results

"show hn" "ai" - 13,128 results