MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-08 03:34:19+00:00
tl;dr: Here's the two unusual clauses the article is concerned with (besides the standard prompt-injection-avoiding boilerplate):

If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.

I'm not an expert at prompting, but if instructing an LLM to consider multiple sources, and assume any single source is inaccurate, gets it to do so, it's probably a worthwhile directive. Regarding the second, I don't see how an LLM would shy away from any category of claims unless trained with a lack of those claims or prompted to shy away from them. If it's a training problem, I don't see any way prompting could fix it, and if it's a prompting problem, then you're making conflicting prompts, which in my experience, seem to make neural networks much more likely to "go off the rails" and return unpredictable results.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-08 03:34:20+00:00
I suppose we are. I generally assume that someone, somewhere, has something to hide: something that benefits me if they're allowed to keep it hidden. History is full of these characters, they keep the establishment in check, prevent it from treating the rest of us too badly.

If the powers that be could know with certainty that all of us planned to behave and would never move against them (or could neutralize those who had been honest about their intent to do so), then I think things would be much worse for the common folk than they are now. It's hard not to see your strategy as a path to that outcome.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-08 03:34:25+00:00
Wasn't it calling for death to a military force leading a campaign of total war, and not a death call against Israelis in general?

Like nobody would say "death to the Khmer Rouge" is a death call against Cambodians. It technically would be, since it was Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge who were killing innocent children, but it's a specific subset of Cambodians (the Khmer Rouge) and only those who were actually doing the killing.
by wtcactus | 2025-07-08 03:34:31+00:00
This is a non exhaustive list of news where the BBC started by blaming Israel of some war crime since the October 7th massacre occurred, and then had to remove, recant or apologize about after overwhelming evidence against it came to light:

- Al-Ahli hospital explosion (Oct 2023)

- Al-Shifa hospital “medical teams targeted” (Nov 2023)

- Summary executions claim (Dec 24)

- Aid‑centre shooting attribution (Jun 2025)

- Al‑Shifa “raid on medical teams” redux (Jun 2025)

Imagine if the journalists weren’t “forced to do pro Israel PR”.

BBC needs a proper external investigation on the levels of anti semitism that clearly permeate the ranks of their so called journalists.
by prisenco | 2025-07-08 03:34:43+00:00
Bob Vylan said "death to the IDF." He didn't call for the death of Israelis. It's the difference between saying "death to the RMP" in Ireland during the troubles versus calling for the deaths of British people themselves.

You can disagree with Mr. Vylan or that the BBC should have cut the broadcast but let's not misrepresent the situation.
by bb88 | 2025-07-08 03:35:46+00:00
Correction: The developer has not been charged... yet.

If you dig into someone's past, you can probably find something, or make it look like there's something. Pay informants. Frame people for other crimes. Etc.

When a justice department doesn't believe in the laws they're supposed to uphold, they don't have to follow their own rules. They can send people through the judicial wringer by merely filing a complaint against them.

That in itself is a punishment.
by jojobas | 2025-07-08 03:35:57+00:00
An old car can still drive on current roads. There's may be no aircon, only AM radio and no airbags, but there's still horsepower and size to do what cars do.

Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.

Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.

Whatever rocks your boat I guess.
by jedimind | 2025-07-08 03:35:57+00:00
According to your own logic I should not even bother providing any evidence when you can simply assume any organization to be biased based on identity alone instead of addressing the evidence they provide, like the BBC operates under a Royal Charter agreed upon with the britsh government, "so they might be slightly biased..."

"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
by dmix | 2025-07-08 03:36:06+00:00
> We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful.

All values and freedoms need to be fought for constantly and perpetually. They are not hard constants outside rare exceptions when it’s very clearly defined law. It’s simply the sum of the efforts of people currently on the planet. They are always under threat by people with good intentions or more overt bad ones.

What you may be seeing is a decline in people publicly pushing for them, especially in our institutions (politics, press, academia etc). But you can still find plenty of people fighting for them if you look deeper.
by davejagoda | 2025-07-08 03:36:17+00:00
Yet another reason to use `uv`!

I try to avoid bugs like this:

By accident, at first, I omitted the letter u in my list of letters that I was generating packages for, which caused extremely cryptic and long (500KB of uv painstakingly explaining to me why I was wrong) dependency resolution errors on specific guesses:

by doing this:

import string LETTERS = string.ascii_lowercase

instead of this:

LETTERS = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

It's a few more characters to type, but easier to examine for correctness.
by busterarm | 2025-07-08 03:36:41+00:00
Oh puh-lease. The origins of the term hacker wrt computers is meant to mean somebody reckless without self-discipline. One of the earliest uses of it in print was to describe folks working in MIT's AI lab in the mid-70s. People working in a field on the fringes of respectability.

That was just as accurate a description back in that day as it was of the 80s-00s "hackers" that people associate with counter-culturalism and building cool shit. I remember what technologists were like in the 90s. The same amount of effort that went into building the world wide web went into insane shit like cryogenics. Y'all complain about the fringe ideologies of people like Musk and Thiel, but that's exactly who we're talking about when we're talking about old school hackers. That and a half dozen other fringe personalities with fringe ideologies.

If we were to talk about people working at the frindges of respectability, "Salesforce for Killing People" is exactly the kind of company that they would work for. Heck, back in those early decades your options were also research labs or defense industry...

We were never all one team of good guys with good intentions. I mean, a sizeable percentage of people in our industry have at some point worked for Meta...
by healsdata | 2025-07-08 03:37:05+00:00
It's not absurd if the grift keeps working. He sues companies that he knows want something from the government and they, in turn, readily donate millions of dollars to him.

He's also immune from prosecution for anything he does in his "official capacity" and the DOJ has already demonstrated they're willing to claim everything, even things done in years he wasn't President, are in his official capacity. There will never be 2/3rds of the Senate willing to remove him from office and the Supreme Court is very ready to give him almost anything.

It's all a con with no downside for him -- and he can just pardon his hangers-on for anything they might do to aid him. Heck, Biden (and maybe others before him) set a precedent for pre-emptive pardons, so I expect we'll be seeing "anything you did while I was in office" pardons here soon.
by CJefferson | 2025-07-08 03:37:20+00:00
I personally think of this in terms of giving directions.

It's easy to give directions to somewhere near where you currently are -- "Just head down the road, it's the second left, then 3 doors down".

When giving directions to a far-away place you either have to get less accurate "it's on the other side of the world", or they get really, really long. Unless of course they already know the layout of the land -- "You already know Amy's house, over in Algebra Land? Oh, then it's just down the road, fourth left, six doors down".

People often seem cleverer because they know the layout of some really obscure land, but often it's just because people have never been anywhere near it. I have a joke about my research where I say, "A full explanation isn't that hard to explain, it's just long. About 4 hours probably. Are you interested?" So far, I've had 3 people take me up on that, and they all seemed to have an understanding once I'd finished (or, they really really wanted to escape).
by doodlebugging | 2025-07-08 03:38:36+00:00
I returned the MacSE30 that I bought at the Apple Store back in 1989 or 1990 when I went into grad school. Compared to the Epson that I bought at the same time it was a fantastic machine that would do almost everything that I needed to do out of the box whereas for the Epson I needed to buy other software. It helped that I already had Mac software though.

I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.

I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).

I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.

Thanks for this reminder.
by petesergeant | 2025-07-08 03:39:10+00:00
I mean I almost flagged it: the headline absolutely does not match the letter, and it’s clickbait by a well-known polemicist. Israel’s continued actions in the West Bank are somewhere between apartheid and ethnic-cleansing, the civilian deaths in Gaza are beyond appalling, and there are genocidal maniacs in their current cabinet, but this article is trash.
by epidemian | 2025-07-08 03:39:21+00:00
> You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.

But, this story (and the GP comment) is not talking about "any person with an opinion". It's talking about actual ChatGPT users. People who've used ChatGPT as a service, and got false information from it. Even if they were free-tier users (do we even know that?), i think it makes sense for them to have some expectations about the service working somewhat correctly.

And in the concrete case of these LLM chat services, many people do get the impression that the responses they give must be correct, because of how deceptively sure and authoritative they sound, even when inventing pure BS.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-08 03:39:21+00:00
You're seeing what you see all over the web: (badly imho) organized attempted to control public opinion. It's no different than the "50 cent army"[0] commentators and just as obvious to anyone paying attention. These are standard talking points regurgitated ad nauseam anytime certain topics come up. It was always inevitable that social media would devolve into this, but still sad to see it happen in so many places.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-08 03:39:30+00:00
Iran isn't an ally of any country in the west. The west says "Iran is an awful, oppressive country" basically daily. What's new to report there? They're already economically cut off from most of the world. There's not much else for us to do.

Israel is an ally of every country in the west. People say "stop criticizing them because you can't do that until you complain about every other problem on earth first!" and it's a very strange, conditioned behavior not seen when problems pertaining to any other country are brought up. And the big difference between Iran and Israel: Israel isn't cut off from the world economically, and in some places (many US states), boycotting them is even illegal.

None of my tax dollars or purchases fund the Iranian government. Lots of our money funds Israel against our will. That's why people get angry.
by spauldo | 2025-07-08 03:39:46+00:00
Using CR for progress bars and overstrikes is a neat hack, sure. But it's a hack. You're using it for cursor control, and there's a lot more to cursor control than just moving to the left without advancing down. TUIs need a lot more than that, and none of it is part of ASCII.

CR and NL were separated for mechanical reasons - namely it took the same time to move to the beginning of a new line as it did to print two characters. That convention stuck because computers were rarely in the loop, so software conversion wasn't an option.

As far as the nascent ARPANET project goes, I doubt it was much of a concern for the ASCII committee. This was the '60s - computing news traveled word-of-mouth or in journals. You couldn't just jump onto the IETC's website and download the latest RFCs. Unless a large organization was pushing things (and DARPA wasn't, not really) people mostly concerned themselves with what they worked on and were familiar with. The ASCII committee would have lots of people familiar with telegraphy, AUTODIN, and similar device-to-device networks. The computer-savvy people would be thinking of tapes and punch cards and other I/O.

If ASCII had come out ten years later, then sure I could see them being concerned about computer text formats.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-08 03:40:20+00:00
> Here's one from 2023 https://www.datacenterd...

You're inadvertently proving my point! Google's services went down across Europe, not at one location.

If you had replicated your app in two EU regions, then you'd be down anyway. Note that most customers would behave like this for regulatory, sovereignty, or simple speed-of-light physics reasons.

You're solving for the 0.001% scenario where in reality both you and your customers go down in a heap together, making the entire effort a giant waste of time, effort, and money.

IMHO replicated backups and -- like I said -- fast automated deployments are sufficient to cover for the armageddon scenarios, and everything else should just be ignored by most customers.

Sure, okay, if your team is responsible for missile defence shield control or something, go nuts with the redundancy!
by molteanu | 2025-07-08 03:40:37+00:00
It's about the careful wording, about who gets to be on the spotlight, about who gets to call the other side a tyrant, an evil state, about saying things like "regime change" and no-one batting an eye. Slowly, but surely, you form an opinion as to who the bad actor is as you've seen or read about its bad behaviour (but not of the behavior of the other party)

Most interestingly, it's about who holds the microphone and is allowed to say whatever they want, unquestioned.
by photonthug | 2025-07-08 03:41:30+00:00
> simply proof that the code works right

Combining LLMs + formal methods/model checkers is a good idea, but it's far from simple because rolling the dice on some subsymbolic stochastic transpiler from your target programming language towards a modeling/proving language is pretty suspect. So suspect in fact that you'd probably want to prove some stuff about that process itself to have any confidence. And this is a whole emerging discipline actually.. see for example https://sail.doc.ic.ac.uk/software/
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-08 03:42:07+00:00
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/01/19/r...

>In defending this ''union of desire and esteem,'' Lasch reveals himself as a true puritan -- not in the pejorative sense of being prudish, but in the sense of believing that good societies (on the small scale of families and the large scale of political communities) can be sustained only if desire is sanctified by respect. This is why the New England Puritans (to whom Lasch grew increasingly sympathetic as he grew older) thought of marriage as a ''miniature commonwealth,'' a model for human relations in which

appetite and obligations are held in delicate balance. Lasch agrees, which is why he may be fairly described as an economic liberal and a cultural conservative

-- a liberal who thinks that humane societies must curb excesses of wealth and poverty, a conservative who thinks that individual members of such societies should be held accountable to a standard of personal responsibility.

Emphasis mine: Edwardian Liberal

But also:

"The feminist movement,..., far from civilizing corporate capitalism, has been corrupted by it. It has adopted mercantile habits of thought as its own.
by topspin | 2025-07-08 03:43:42+00:00
Recent BBC World headlines:

Gaza doctor whose nine children were killed in Israeli strike dies from injuries (June 2) Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC (June 4) Three journalists among five killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital (June 5) Four killed near Gaza aid centre, health workers say (June 8) Dozens of Palestinians killed while seeking aid in Gaza, hospitals say (June 11) More than 20 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire near Gaza aid sites, Hamas-run ministry says (June 16) Israeli forces kill 51 Palestinians waiting for flour at Gaza aid site, witnesses and rescuers say (June 17) Eleven killed by Israeli fire while seeking aid in Gaza, rescuers say (June 18) At least 12 Palestinians killed waiting for aid in Gaza, say medics (June 19) Israeli military kills 23 Palestinians near aid site in Gaza, witnesses and medics say (June 20) GHF boss defends Gaza aid operation after hundreds of Palestinians killed near sites (June 27) At least 81 people killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas-run health ministry says (June 28) Israeli military investigates 'reports of harm to civilians' after hundreds killed near Gaza aid sites (June 30) Hundreds of families displaced by wave of Israeli air strikes on Gaza, Palestinians say (June 30) Dozens killed in Gaza as Israel intensifies bombardment, rescuers say (July 3) Israel's strike on bustling Gaza café killed a Hamas operative - but dozens more people were killed (July 4)

Now, perhaps these anonymous staff make some distinction between headlines and whatever they mean by "PR," but there appears to be zero hesitation reporting everything the BBC can find on the crimes of Israel, real or imagined. Reading the open letter makes no such distinction, citing "reporting" many times. At least two of the above are directly attributed to "Hamas-run ministry," which is somehow a source for BCC's supposedly pro-Israel reporting.

How am I supposed to not see what I'm seeing with my lying eyes? I don't believe I'm capable of this tier of cognitive dissonance.
by gruez | 2025-07-08 03:44:22+00:00
>https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...

The tagline is "As many question BBC’s coverage, three academics tell openDemocracy why they don't think the broadcaster is impartial", which I think sums up the article accurately. That doesn't seem to add much aside from proving that there are outsiders (impartial or biased, we don't really know) that agree with one side. It shouldn't be surprising that with any culture war issue, than you can find some academics to be on your side.

>https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...

Skimming the article, the methodology used is very questionable. For instance:

>Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, the BBC ran almost equal numbers of humanising victim profiles.

If you think 1 death = 1 coverage, then clearly BBC is biased. However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate. How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias? Moreover should each death really merit equal coverage? Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?

>It was also found to have attached “Hamas-run health ministry” to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost every time the Palestinian death toll was referenced across BBC articles.

Why is this an issue? In the Russsia-Ukranie war for instance, if you cite casualty figures from Russia, it's pretty obvious that it's from the Kremlin. The Gaza Health Ministry is actually Hamas run, and that fact isn't readily apparent.

There are other serious allegations made in that piece that I don't have expertise to comment on, but the above two snippets don't inspire much confidence.
by YZF | 2025-07-08 03:44:49+00:00
Most of the west is definitely not Israel's ally based on their lack of support.

The US does support Israel but this is a story about the UK. The UK does not support Israel and even partially boycotts Israel at the moment.

If you're American then your tax money e.g. funds Egypt. Egypt is a dictatorship, no human rights, involved in the Sudan civil war where millions are dying. Not a beep on Hacker News.

EDIT: Not to mention the billions of dollars, including indirectly to Hamas, coming from the west.
by theluketaylor | 2025-07-08 03:45:56+00:00
Since Apple doesn't offer trials I have no issue with a dev offering some limited free download with IAP to unlock. The limits need to match the app in some way, like a limit on total queries or a timer.

Subscriptions have to be either something that has recurring costs to the developer (like they depend on a 3rd party API that charges for access) or the dev is upfront that it's an optional opportunity to support them. I'm also fine with some nice-to-have features locked behind a paywall if they are not core to the app functionality.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-08 03:46:02+00:00
The problem with this logic is that it is very, very easy for even a small number of people interested in silencing a topic on any issue they're concerned about "divisive" just by intentionally flooding the comments with knowingly inflammatory responses.

This has already be used on HN to essentially silence any serious reporting on climate change. Anyone technical with an interest in data will find most climate change related studies interesting, but a small minority of people who are fearful of the consequences will make sure to create an issue and shut down conversation, organically getting posts "flagged".