MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rijoja | 2025-07-07 07:14:23+00:00
> "And if as a CIO you believe that your prohibition on using LLMs for coding because of 'divulging company secrets' holds, you are either strip searching your employees on the way in and out, or wilfully blind."

Right so if you are in certain areas you'll be legally required not to send your work to whatever 3:rd party that promises to handle it the cheapest.

Also so since this is about actually "interesting" work if you are doing cutting edge research on lets say military or medical applications** you definitely should take things like this seriously.

Obviously you can do LLM's locally if you don't feel like paying up for programmers who likes to code, and who wants to have in-depth knowledge of whatever they are doing.

** https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2eeg9gygyno
by audunw | 2025-07-07 07:15:05+00:00
As a technology, I love nuclear power.

But I don’t think it’s the way to decarbonise the world in the short term. If we look beyond just electricity, to transportation, industry, fertilisers, etc, it’s clear that full decarbonisation will bring with it an enormous amount of flexible load that pairs very well with renewables.

Say you electrify industrial heat. There are already heat batteries in the market that can store enormous amount of heat energy at very high temperatures for a very long time. They can be recharged when there’s excess renewable power on the grid. In fact, it may be the only economical way to electrify industrial heat. If they have to pay the full price of electricity for all their heat it’s probably too expensive.

I’d recommend Tony Seba’s presentations or Marc Z Jacobsens papers for the full picture.

I also think advanced geothermal may end up becoming far more important to solve the crisis. A lot of expertise, workforce and capital can more easily and quickly be transferred from oil and gas sector. The politics around a big shift to geothermal would be far easier, since you won’t have a problem with a huge amount of people worried about losing a job and companies worried of going bankrupt. There’s still high uncertainty in the viability of advanced geothermal but there are good signs that it can be made economical in many parts of the world, if not most. Think what we can achieve if it received a fraction of the investments and subsidies that fossil fuels and nuclear does.

We shouldn’t stop nuclear either though. We can continue what we’re already doing and build where it makes sense.

And maybe in some decades we can replace some renewables with nuclear and free up some land.
by augment_me | 2025-07-07 07:16:00+00:00
I feel like the author is, funnily enough given the context, lumping in self-understanding and self-reflection of any kind into a single category. A tool (analysis) that is used to grant you agency is equated to an identity kit (a label) that removes your agency and puts you in the box that the author describes.

You can have great self-understanding and self-realization about your childhood, your parents opinions and personality without letting it define your life.

You should not blame the analysis itself, but blame the projection of your personality to the result of it, which it encouraged by platforms that make money of it, like TikTok or BetterHelp. It can be fun to do an MBTI or Big 5 test to see common patterns in oneself, it does not mean that you have to structure your personality around the outcome.

To me, it sounds like the author is vouching for being unthinkingly driven by biology, tradition, and impulse in a society where most of this is also commercialized. Your govt wants you to have children to supply pensions, your impulses are driven by the advertisements that you have been bombarded with during the day, there is extreme prodding towards certain kinds of sexual looks or behaviors that influence what people find attractive. You are as much of a product when you follow the impulses than when you dont, the only thing is that with self-reflection you have a small change to question and think about why you want a certain thing.

I personally think that people living by the authors suggested way of living in a western societal moment of individualism have a maximum chance to regret their life at the end of it, doing everything "default" that society and tradition has taught you is "natural and human" instead of living the journey on your own terms and doing what you actually like.
by eichin | 2025-07-07 07:16:29+00:00
Also, there was at least one scientific graphics package from the late 1980s (I used it under BSD4.3 on microvaxen[0]) that not only had a crayon-based color picker, but used it for a simple calibration mechanism, since you could just buy a cheap box of crayons and adjust the screen colors to match. So there was at least one contemporary existence proof of "Crayola probably isn't going to go after you for this".

[0] I've forgotten the name; the main thing I remember is that your window was dimensioned in 0.0-1.0 floating point, not pixels. Some searching suggests it might have been PHIGS or GKS... and turns up a Tugboat article about FoilTeX using crayola color names similarly in 1992, so it was a more popular hack than I realized at the time.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-07-07 07:16:55+00:00
I used to always think these romanization schemes were really bad, until I realized they were just not for me. The ease of sight-reading and getting the correct pronunciation for a random english speaker is not the goal. It's primarily for the convenience of users of other languages to have a systematic encoding. To make it pronunciation-friendly you would have to have to add a bunch of complexity to the mapping that would compromise its usage by the real audience.
by rodisproducing | 2025-07-07 07:17:03+00:00
Early versions would crash browsers with large or malformed files, so I built in multiple safety nets: - 50MB file size limit (seems generous but prevents memory issues) - Pattern detection that blocks obvious non-JSON content and dangerous patterns - Multiple timeout layers - there's a 5-second emergency brake plus adaptive timeouts - Sampling strategy for large files - it checks the beginning, middle, and end before processing the whole thing
by jongjong | 2025-07-07 07:17:34+00:00
The genius of social media is that they propagated some labels and then they let people do the hard work of adjusting their personalities and belief systems to more closely adhere to those labels. Likely driven by mimetic desire for status and recognition. Adherence to well known labels provides instant recognition and validation.

Then when it came to 'targeted advertising', social media advertisers could just target the labels and reach a huge amount of people because those people had already fine-tuned and optimized themselves to be receptive to that kind of messaging.

Their personalities were homogenized to the point that the focus groups ended up being representative of the real people behind the labels.
by pathartl | 2025-07-07 07:18:57+00:00
I was too young to get in on the early (and tbh me exciting) age of MMOs, only opting for RuneScape because it had a free tier.

I just finished Jason Schreier's book that covered 38 Studio's implosion and then his next book that covered Blizzard. It was a nice trip down memory lane where I remember crawling through the latest PC Gamer issue to read about MMO experiences or watching G4's Portal act out skits in these massive games.

While there's private servers out there, I'm not sure you could recreate the hype around that era.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-07 07:19:37+00:00
I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent.

The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing an UI events API and you were talking about zeros and ones, or voltages in transistors. Technically fine but totally useless to reach any conclusion about the high-level system.

We need a higher abstraction level to talk about higher level phenomena in LLMs as well, and the problem is that we have no idea what happens internally at those higher abstraction levels. So, considering that LLMs somehow imitate humans (at least in terms of output), anthropomorphization is the best abstraction we have, hence people naturally resort to it when discussing what LLMs can do.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-07-07 07:21:07+00:00
I was stuttering for my entire life, still dealing with it at 42. Kids in basic school gave me all kinds of abuse due to my speech. So I obviously developed social anxiety. The nastiest part about stuttering is, the more anxious you are, the more you stutter. I was given a lot of advice to just go to kids and talk. It only reinforced the anxiety and confirmed that if I really want to say something, it's impossible to say it. The only realistic solution came much later in life, when I realized I just can't give a fuck about whether people understand me. People who are interested will ask me again. People who are not, will just go away. That attitude lessened the problem, but didn't get rid of it completely. But it also requires me to give up on many things.
by rikroots | 2025-07-07 07:21:08+00:00
When I first discovered that I suffered from a "new" condition called Prosopagnosia - by means of an online "Are you face blind?" test - everything about my life suddenly fell into place. It was a liberating self-diagnosis which gave me permission to admit that it was some small malformations in my brain that were the cause of my troubles, not some selfish malformations in my personality and social skills.

Of course a self-diagnosis is not enough. I discovered my condition while it was still in the early stages of research. I signed up to be a guinea pig for researchers, and got paid a handsome £20/hour to undertake various tests (including brain scans - I still have a 3d image of my brain stored in a box somewhere) to help people better understand the underlying causes of the condition. It was fun for a while, until some of the tests got more disturbing. I also got to learn about the coping strategies I had already developed, and how to use them in better ways to help lessen the impact of the condition on my social interactions.
by dmurray | 2025-07-07 07:22:19+00:00
To add to this, that behaviour would typically be OK in the US, with a good compliance department to keep you away from the worst of the grey areas.

If the SEC did investigate you for this, an important part of the case would turn on the extent to which your actions were "bona fide market making". And the regulator would also be more introspective about the market structure that allowed this to happen - why is there only one market maker? How did we allow a derivatives market much more liquid than the underlying?
by dandanua | 2025-07-07 07:22:45+00:00
No one is rejecting the role of leader, it's just extremely exaggerated nowadays, like everyone thinks Facebook==Zuckerberg. And the leaders don't worth x1000 (or even x1000000 for some) unless they are doing a job of 1000 people. In most cases they are not even capable of doing 99% of the work people in their companies can do. Egomaniac Musk has already published his thoughts on programming problems, only confirming how dumb he is in this field.
by baxtr | 2025-07-07 07:23:45+00:00
>Fortunately, we donʼt have an algorithm that can factor such large numbers in reasonable time. Unfortunately, we also havenʼt proven it doesnʼt exist. Even more unfortunate is that there is a theoretical algorithm, called Shorʼs algorithm, that would be able to factor such a number in reasonable time on a quantum computer. Right now, quantum computers are far from practical, but it does appear that if someone in the future manages to build one thatʼs sufficiently large, RSA becomes ineffective.

Can anyone comment on how close we are to having Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer? Is feasible like the moon landing was in 1962 when Kennedy announced that "We choose to go to the Moon" (hard, but possible with a lot of money).

Or is it still something that we have no clue how to get to?
by xyzzy123 | 2025-07-07 07:24:26+00:00
I guess it depends on the authoritarian government, but a sufficiently powerful one will get the app taken down or get the bluetooth features it relies on disabled (like for airdrop in China) :/

I would say that the underlying issue is that people do not really "own" their devices and the corporations that do are vulnerable to (or complicit in) state coercion.

You cannot truly have freedom on a non-free device, you can just be small enough to not be worth taking action against yet.
by audunw | 2025-07-07 07:26:23+00:00
I think this may cause a lot of other petroleum products to become more expensive, perhaps even uneconomical.

Take bitumen. It hos already gotten progressively more expensive over the last few decades. It makes sense: car fuel economy has gotten better. So for every mile we drive we need to refine less fuel, which means we get less bitumen as a byproduct. So the amount of bitumen available per vehicle-mile is progressively less over time.

This effect will become exponentially worse as EVs cause fuel consumption to fall off a cliff.

It’s not just gonna be bitumen. The effect may be less pronounced for the lighter fractions, but in general we will have to do more processing, and the oil industry will lose a lot of its “economies of scale”. Fuels are a huge share of the output of oil distillation.
by HaZeust | 2025-07-07 07:27:07+00:00
It makes perfect sense, and I meant what I said.

60% of all US equity volume is pure high-frequency trading, and ETFs add roughly another 20% that’s literally just bots responding to market activity and bearish-bullish sentiment analysis on public(?) press releases. 2/3 of trading funds also rely on external data to price in decisions, and I think it was around 90% in 2021 use trading algorithms as their determining factor for their high-frequency trade strategies.

At its core, the movements that make up the market really IS data retrieval.
by grey413 | 2025-07-07 07:27:55+00:00
As I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic language that underwent significant creolization with scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary, particularly in upper class terminology.

The creolization is why English has a relatively simple grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-07 07:28:23+00:00
> now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.

As I understand, this is mostly affecting young women who are much more mimetic than young men. Is this also affecting men at (nearly?) the same rates? I don't see a lot of short form video content from men talking about their emotional issues. However, there is virtually unlimited content from women.

To be clear about my comment: I am not trying to be anti-women here, just point out a trend that I see.
by U1F984 | 2025-07-07 07:28:50+00:00
From the article: Lookup tables are always faster than calculation - is that true? I'd think that while in the distant past maybe today due to memory being much slower than CPU the picture is different nowadays. If you're calculating a very expensive function over a small domain so the lookup fits in L1 Cache then I can see it would be faster, but you can do a lot of calculating in the time needed for a single main memory access.
by CJefferson | 2025-07-07 07:29:19+00:00
You are probably fairly accurate there, but that would require me going back and writing more C, which I've try to avoid nowadays :)

I still sometimes get caught out getting debug information all in the right place, particularly when someone is using ninja or some such, I've even ended up wrapping gcc just to strip optimisation options and add -g, rather than figure out how to fight some very complex build system mess.
by eesmith | 2025-07-07 07:31:57+00:00
In 6th grade, so back in 1982, I read the French SF novel "Malevil".

I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.

Here is an example, from https://archive.org/details/malevilmerl00merl/page/150/mode/... :

> And besides, Thomas was already quite isolated enough as it was: by his youth, by his city origins, by his cast of thought, by his character, and by his ignorance of our patois. I had to ask La Menou and Peyssou not to overdo the use of their first language — since neither of them had learned much French till they went to school — because at mealtimes, if they began a conversation in patois, then everyone else, little by little, would begin to drop into patois too, and after a while Thomas was made to feel a stranger in our life.

Two minutes ago I learned that "patois" has a distinct meaning in France: "patois refers to any sociolect associated with uneducated rural classes, in contrast with the dominant prestige language (Standard French)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patois

I am very ill-informed on the history of the topic, including the national language policies of France and Italy. I do know that Sardinian is not a dialect of Italian, but my knowledge isn't much deeper than that. ;)
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-07-07 07:32:44+00:00
The author's critique of naive anthropomorphism is salient. However, the reduction to "just MatMul" falls into the same trap it seeks to avoid: it mistakes the implementation for the function. A brain is also "just proteins and currents," but this description offers no explanatory power.

The correct level of analysis is not the substrate (silicon vs. wetware) but the computational principles being executed. A modern sparse Transformer, for instance, is not "conscious," but it is an excellent engineering approximation of two core brain functions: the Global Workspace (via self-attention) and Dynamic Sparsity (via MoE).

To dismiss these systems as incomparable to human cognition because their form is different is to miss the point. We should not be comparing a function to a soul, but comparing the functional architectures of two different information processing systems. The debate should move beyond the sterile dichotomy of "human vs. machine" to a more productive discussion of "function over form."

I elaborate on this here: https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/beyond-snn-plausibl...
by azalemeth | 2025-07-07 07:33:32+00:00
Some of these are absolutely wild – com.apple.gm.safety_deny.input.summarization.visual_intelligence_camera.generic [1] – a camera input filter – rejects "Granular mango serpent and whales" and anything matching "(?i)\\bgolliwogg?\\b".

I presume the granular mango is to avoid a huge chain of ever-growing LLM slop garbage, but honestly, it just seems surreal. Many of the files have specific filters for nonsensical english phrases. Either there's some serious steganography I'm unaware of, or, I suspect more likely, it's related to a training pipeline?

[1] https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
by Walf | 2025-07-07 07:33:36+00:00
You clearly don't have these issues, and I doubt you care about anyone who does, because your "Oh, come on." response positively reeks of 'that's not my experience, so other people's can't be that different.'

It's never just one thing like travel time, it's scores of steps in a routine, which aren't always the same, and can easily be derailed by anything unexpected. You can estimate how long something you do frequently will take, based on how much time it took previously, and still get an inapplicable answer because distraction is a constant problem, and the executive function deficit means you literally do not think 'don't do that, get back on task' in the moment. You know how long everything should take, and still struggle to apply that when you're doing the routine.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-07 07:33:52+00:00
This is simply wrong. The slippery slope comparison works precisely because the argument is completely true for a physical slippery slope: the speed is small and controllable at the beginning, but it puts you on an inevitable path to much quicker descent.

So, the argument is actually perfectly logically valid even if you grant that the initial step is OK, as long as you can realistically argue that the initial step puts you on an inevitable downward slope.

For example, a pretty clearly valid slippery slope argument is "sure, if NATO bombed a few small Russian assets in Ukraine, that would be a net positive in itself - but it's a very slippery slope from there to nuclear war, because Russia would retaliate and it would lead to an inevitable escalation towards all-out war".

The slippery slope argument is only wrong if you can't argue (or prove) the slope is actually slippery. That is, if you just say "we can't take a step in this direction, because further out that way there are horrible outcomes", without any reason given to think that one step in the direction will force one to make a second step in that direction, then it's a sophism.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-07 07:33:53+00:00
> Lookup tables are always faster than calculation - is that true?

I know it's not always true on the Nintendo 64, because it shared a single bus between the RAM and "GPU": https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE?t=94, https://youtu.be/Ca1hHC2EctY?t=827
by enlightens | 2025-07-07 07:34:08+00:00
Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He spent his July 4th weekend setting the record for baking the world’s largest deep dish pizza, and as he tells it, having it for dinner was no small feat:

> It feels impossible to isolate anything bite-sized out of all that.

Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-07 07:35:01+00:00
No because those conversations are specific to off the shelf models used in generalised ways, which basically only applies to LLMs.

When you look at other applications of AI, such as models trained for medical usage or AI used in Hollywood (something I personally have professional experience in) then it’s a completely different story because they’re bespoke models trained and used for specialised edge cases. Rather than Joe Blogs using an off the shelf package to do the same thing as the previous person albeit slightly differently.
by jbotz | 2025-07-07 07:35:06+00:00
When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery?

This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because then the container material will never get hotter than 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad assumptions.

Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2].

[1] https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z