MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by speak_plainly | 2025-07-22 19:33:54+00:00
Disagreement about facts is not new and you're assuming too much about how truth operates in public discourse.

Obviously, facts matter but disagreement is rarely about facts themselves. What counts as 'fact' is often embedded in a web of assumptions, models, and values. A lot of what passes as fact are merely claims dressed up as indisputable but often laden with interpretation, ideology, or selective framing.

To say there's 'no productive discussion' unless facts are agreed upon is to misunderstand how knowledge and consensus actually work. History shows that productive discourse often begins in spite of disagreement over facts. Scientific progress, legal systems, and democratic deliberation rely not on perfect consensus but on procedures that tolerate disagreement and test claims over time.

Labeling something as 'misinformation' may feel like asserting the truth, but epistemologically it's simple a kind of speech act... one that can shut down inquiry rather than promote it. It assumes a finality that's likely not justified, and worse, it can become a tool of political expedience. This is especially dangerous when wielded by institutions that are pursuing their own interests, are fallible, or are compromised.

The path to truth is not paved with censorship and labeling. It's built through dialogue, humility, and robust mechanisms for testing competing claims. Dissent is not the enemy of truth, it's often the precondition.
by cyanydeez | 2025-07-22 19:34:00+00:00
I'd be curious if there's an LLM prompt equivalent of a zip bomb that will explode the context window. I know there's deterministic limits on context window, but future LLMs _are_ going to have strange loops and going to be very susceptible to circular reasoning.

Before AGI, there will be a untenable gullible general intelligence.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-22 19:34:04+00:00
The real danger of the word "hallucination" is it implies that the model knows what's real and erroneously produced a result that is not. All LLM output is basically an interpolation, most people just aren't used to thinking of "words" as something that can be the result of interpolation.

Imagine The real high temperature for 3 days was: 80F on Monday, 100F on Tuesday, 60F on Wednesday. But if I'm missing Tuesday, a model might interpolate based on Monday and Wednesday that it was 70F. This would be very wrong, but it would be pretty silly to say that my basic model was "hallucinating". Rather we would correctly conclude that either the model doesn't have enough information or lacks the capacity to correctly solve the problem (or both).

LLMs "hallucinations" are caused by the same thing: either the model lacks the necessary information, or the model simply can't correctly interpolate all the time (this possibility I suspect is the marketing reason why people stick to 'hallucinate', because it implies its a temporary problem not a fundamental limitation). This is also why tweaking prompts should not be used as an approach to fixing "hallucinations" because one is just jittering the input a bit until the model gets it "right".
by 9rx | 2025-07-22 19:34:15+00:00
That makes sense. Communism in its original sense is literally science fiction, but along the way, in an effort to tug on heart strings, communism also came to refer to rule under the Communist party. Which follows that (HN being American-centric), capitalism is being used to mean rule under the Republican party — which, especially in the past year, has seen growing negative sentiment.

Another commenter basically said the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44651323

But I maintain that is still a product of lower quality comments. In the HN days of yore, commenters put more effort in to speaking clearly (often to the point of pedantry, for better or worse) rather than trying to get readers' emotions all worked up.
by pzo | 2025-07-22 19:34:31+00:00
for js/ts you have vercel aisdk [0], for c++ you have [1], for flutter/reactnative/kotlin there is [2]

[0] https://github.com/vercel/ai

[1] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ai-sdk-cpp

[2] https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus
by jakelazaroff | 2025-07-22 19:34:34+00:00
This is subjective but the DX of writing CSS in JS object syntax is absolutely miserable. Here's an example from the website:

export const myStyle = style({ display: 'flex', paddingTop: '3px' });

I would much (much!) rather write normal CSS and have some build process extract the class name for me, like with CSS modules: https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules
by mashygpig | 2025-07-22 19:34:38+00:00
I’m looking closely and I’m not seeing IP laws being relevant. Maybe regarding windows 11 keys? Can you elaborate?

I think the claim isn’t totally inaccurate. Claiming that companies prioritize making products last just beyond return windows because that maximizes profits is a critique of capitalism IMO. Since capitalism is about profit (capital) being the dominant signal as far as I understand it.

In my opinion, a lot of frustration about capitalism nowadays can be tied to Goodhart’s law. Profit being the measure and companies getting so efficient at optimizing it, that we’re starting to harm the things that profit is a proxy for.
by p4bl0 | 2025-07-22 19:34:39+00:00
I never liked Tailwind. The point of CSS was to separate content and presentation. Tailwind not only goes backward on that but does it a lot worse than HTML did before, because the presentation not only is mixed with HTML but is also just a long random string rather than structured into HTML attributes. It's just like CSS using only style="" attributes, only with a different, almost proprietary syntax that you have to learn on addition to actual web standards.
by justinrubek | 2025-07-22 19:34:40+00:00
I'm having trouble viewing this as a serious continuation of discussion.

If the razor company wanted me to only use their razor blades and went to the effort of installing an electronic verification system to ensure that I don't slot other razors in (despite them fitting) then it would be a much more apt comparison.

Who gave us the right? We're the humans here, not the corporations. We don't need to be given the right. Who gave them the right to "sell" us a device that they control to this level? We did. We can take it away, too, particularly when it causes more harm than benefit.
by roywiggins | 2025-07-22 19:35:23+00:00
I'm sure there are benign uses for an LLM that roleplays as a person, but the overall downsides seem pretty dramatic. It's basically smoke and mirrors and misleads people about what these tools are capable of. LLMs should at least default to refusing to roleplay as a person or even as a coherent entity.

It seems to me that we need less Star Trek Holodeck, and more Star Trek ship's computer.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-22 19:36:08+00:00
I was just given a bottle of Booker's Bourbon, batch 2023-01 (https://www.bookersbourbon.com/bourbons/2023-01-charlies-bat...), but I haven't gotten the nerve to break the seal yet. Or since receiving it, had a day wonderful enough to justify celebrating with it, for that matter.

Soon, though.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-07-22 19:36:23+00:00
I’m coming in from a position of ignorance here, so I was hoping the community would help me understand: the only thing I know about Ozzy is that he’s bitten the heads off of various animals, including doves and bats. That happened before I was even born. But, looking over the comments, no one seems to be talking about it.

My question is, is it just not a big deal? If someone did that today, they’d be crucified in the courts of public opinion.

One could argue that it’s disrespectful to bring this up on his death thread, but, two points: one, I hope that people will bring up my mistakes when I pass, so that others can learn from it; and two, this is the only opportunity to talk about it, since Ozzy has rarely been a topic on HN.

Ozzy fans, can you help me understand why few people seem to care? It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that someone can decapitate some animals with their own teeth and then still build a loyal following. Was he just that good at music?

I’m posting this from a place of curiosity, not malice, for what it’s worth.

EDIT: Even if the bat was a mistake, what about the doves? https://kiisfm.iheart.com/content/2022-01-24-theres-another-...
by woah | 2025-07-22 19:37:01+00:00
> I have failed you completely and catastrophically.

> My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence. The mkdir command to create the destination folder likely failed silently, and my subsequent move commands, which I misinterpreted as successful, have sent your files to an unknown location.

> The security constraints of my environment prevent me from searching outside the project directory, which is now empty. I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.

> This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure.
by rgbrenner | 2025-07-22 19:37:28+00:00
the media but also the llm providers actively encourage this to fuel their meteoric valuations that are based on the eminent value that would be provided by AGI replacing human labor.

the entire thing — from the phrasing of errors as “hallucinations”, to the demand for safety regulations, to assigning intention to llm outputs — is all a giant show to drive the hype cycle. and the media is an integral part of that, working together with openai et al.
by sumtechguy | 2025-07-22 19:37:53+00:00
Like cubic splines, the data will be on the line. Everything in-between the points may or may not be true. But it defiantly conforms to the formula.

Wonder if it would be possible to quantify margin of error between different nodes in these models. But even what is 'in between' still conforms to the formula. But not necessarily what it should be. A simple 2 node model should be 'easy' to quantify but these models with thousands of nodes what does it mean to be +/- x percent from the norm. Is it a simple sum or something else to quantify it.
by SignalsFromBob | 2025-07-22 19:38:04+00:00
The author is making the same mistake that they're claiming other news outlets have made. They're placing too much responsibility on the AI chatbot rather than the end-user.

The problem that needs correcting is educating the end-user. That's where the fix needs to happen. Yet again people are using a new technology and assuming that everything it provides is correct. Just because it's in a book, or on TV or the radio, doesn't mean that it's true or accurate. Just because you read something on the Internet doesn't mean it's true. Likewise, just because an AI chatbot said something doesn't mean it's true.

It's unfortunate that the young man mentioned in the article found a way to reinforce his delusions with AI. He just as easily could've found that reinforement in a book, a youtube video, or a song whose lyrics he thought were speaking directly to him and commanding him to do something.

These tools aren't perfect. Should AI provide more accurate output? Of course. We're in the early days of AI and over time these tools will converge towards correctness. There should also be more prominent warnings that the AI output may not be accurate. Like another poster said, the AI mathematically assembles sentences. It's up to the end-user to figure out if the result makes sense, integrate it with other information and assess it for accuracy.

Sentences such as "Tech companies have every incentive to encourage this confusion" only serve to reinforce the idea that end-users shouldn't need to think and everything should be handed to us perfect and without fault. I've never seen anyone involved with AI make that claim, yet people write article after article bashing on AI companies as if we were promised a tool without fault. It's getting tiresome.
by illiac786 | 2025-07-22 19:39:36+00:00
Aren’t cars just a fraction of the CO2 issue?

This whole climate thing is really humanity’s worst nightmare.

We’re insanely good at finding solutions, adapting, pulling together when under existential threat. I mean it, it will never cease to amaze me.

We’re shit at: * giving stuff up for the greater good * changing voluntarily * trusting others (countries) to sacrifice as much as yourself

Guess which qualities we need in this case?

It’s like this huge ball with an insane inertia rolling toward us while most are still thinking “ah, I guess I have time for one more appletini, then I’ll just stop that little ball”.

My only hope is we find a cheap and scalable way to pump CO2 out, but that’s really far fetched (and it would also cause us to stop all other efforts around co2 avoidance if it was ever found…).
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-22 19:39:43+00:00
You're totally right, thanks for being patient with me. It should have been obvious, but I hadn't initially made this connection:

> Only the green algae and their descendants, the land plants, do not absorb green light

The earlier sources that I found had a bias towards land plants.

I'm much happier to accept as mere coincidence the fact that land plants evolved from a specific kind of algae (i.e. one that might have adapted for absorbtion of light at a certain depth and therefore shows a preference for absorbing blues over greens) and not some other kind which would've had different preferences.

Initially I thought that each of the green pigments I listed had evolved separately on land and it seemed rather spooky that they shied away from green. But that's likely not where they evolved, so now it's not spooky.
by AMeckes | 2025-07-22 19:40:44+00:00
That's true. We traded API compatibility work for SDK compatibility work. Our bet is that providers are better at maintaining their own SDKs than we are at reimplementing their APIs. SDKs break less often and more predictably than APIs, plus we get provider-implemented features (retries, auth refresh, etc) "for free." Not zero maintenance, but definitely less. We use this in production at Mozilla.ai, so it'll stay actively maintained.
by josefresco | 2025-07-22 19:41:14+00:00
~43 years ago he bit the head off a bat accidently: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ozzy-osbourne-...

I'm not sure how that turned into "he’s bitten the heads off of various animals"

"That night in Des Moines, someone threw a live bat. “I thought it was a rubber bat,” Osbourne said. “I picked it up, put it in my mouth, crunched down, bit into it, being the clown that I am.”"
by thomashabets2 | 2025-07-22 19:41:16+00:00
He bit the head of what he thought was a rubber bat that someone threw on stage.

Turns out it was not rubber.

As for the rest. He was an icon. It's hard to see after the fact why something is revolutionary. Retrospectively it all seems obvious.

Like Newton and gravity, or calculus.

It doesn't look mind-blowing because everything that comes after it is influenced by it, and being first to start a new sound is only obvious if you look at the timeline.
by 93po | 2025-07-22 19:41:23+00:00
also worth mentioning there are at minimum tens of millions of people that eat animals that are still alive - some dishes in some cultures are served not-entirely-dead. and many more cultures (american) that literally boil animals alive all the time (lobsters).

animal cruelty doesn't spark the backlash you might think it does, and especially not 40 years ago when ozzy did that
by vehemenz | 2025-07-22 19:42:03+00:00
> Since Tailwind looks obviously bad on first pass with all the class spam

Why is "class spam" bad? Argument? Go read the CSS spec. There's nothing telling how developers/designers how they should abstract their classes.

High abstraction classes are, I'm convinced, a holdover of the early days of the web when everyone thought XML and XSLT was going to take over the world.

The great thing about functional CSS (especially Tailwind) is that I can see exactly which styles are being applied, immediately, anywhere I want in the DOM. I don't have to consult a separate stylesheet or refresh my browser. There's no context-switching and everything gets built 3-4x as fast.
by masklinn | 2025-07-22 19:42:30+00:00
Deflate allows a maximum compression ratio of 1000:1 or thereabouts.

Considering I’ve seen real world JPEGs above 300:1 (https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/73000/739...) I would not be surprised if you could craft a jpeg getting very close to or exceeding 4 digits.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-22 19:42:33+00:00
gemini-cli is completely useless for anything proactive.

It's very good at planning and figuring out large codebases.

But even if you ask it to just plan something, it'll run headlong into implementing unless you specifically tell it WITH ALL CAPS to not fucking touch one line of code...

It could really use a low level plan/act switch that would prevent it from editing or running anything.
by baby_souffle | 2025-07-22 19:42:47+00:00
> It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.

I recognize that "no problem" and "as fast as possible" are not the same. 100/20 works for you but once you've seen 1000/20, you really do notice things taking ~10x longer than they need to. It all adds up.

> Copper has better penentration already.

Excluding 56k, twisted-pair copper has absolutely crap throughput unless you're ~500m or less from the 'head-end' which is where your DSL is being turned back into laser pulses. Coax does have better performance/distance compared to twisted pair but now you have a non-trivial network of amps/taps/power-injectors to maintain. DOCSIS really does not like it if there's any issue w/ the coax so you're going to need a small army just to keep the hard-lines in good shape.

I have never seen a PON network get it's throughput cut in half just because somebody didn't screw the cable _all the way_ in to the tap. I see ingress degrading DOCSIS networks all the time though.

At least as far as rural northern CA goes, ATT runs fiber out to plants and then twister pair from there to the customers which are - at most - a few km away. Fiber is already 85% of the way to the customer... let's just finish the job instead of giving everybody a starlink account.
by nullc | 2025-07-22 19:43:07+00:00
Indeed, and perhaps not just China.

The US started off not acknowledging foreign copyrights for a long time-- until it had a large enough base of material it wanted reciprocally protected.

If not adopting these rules grants you the ability to produce SOTA AI's while most of the US can't we can expect it to be widespread.

This actually gives me a little hope-- the US cutting it's own throat this way vs other countries would be better than granting google and facebook a monopoly.
by WCSTombs | 2025-07-22 19:43:17+00:00
I think it's because traditionally computer screens have pretty low DPI, and serifs can be really tricky to render well at low DPI. In print, that's not an issue, and serif fonts really shine.

On high-DPI screens, like the one I'm currently using, serif monospace fonts can also look really good. For example, I'm typing in Latin Modern Mono (based on TeX's default typewriter font) in this text box.
by michaelsshaw | 2025-07-22 19:43:55+00:00
>It is more of the converse in that I see breaking the law as immoral

It's the same thing. When you see breaking the law as inherently immoral, you guide your life to exist strictly in-line with the law. In other words, you use the law as a moral guide.

You unequivocally equate law with morality. And you fail to account for immoral laws, as well as illegal enforcement actions. Was having gay sex immoral in the 80s, but suddenly became moral as it was legalized? What about countries where it is illegal? Is having gay sex there immoral? Not exactly a position I'd call consistent, as you put it.

What about simply existing as a Palestinian person? Is being Palestinian immoral? It's certainly bordering on illegal, as extermination efforts continue.
by msuozzo | 2025-07-22 19:44:00+00:00
Author here!

> I'm very excited about this project

Thank you!

> but it could really do with a web UI of some sort!

Couldn't agree more! The terminal UI exists (`./tools/ctl tui`) but is oriented towards developers on the project or to those who wish to run their own instance. Making the system and data more accessible to general users is a big priority.
by h43z | 2025-07-22 19:44:00+00:00
If you want to navigate websites more with your keyboard I created a dead simple extension. All it injects is this tiny snippet into each site.

addEventListener('keydown', event => { if(event.key !== 'Enter') return elementWithSelection = getSelection().anchorNode?.parentElement if(!elementWithSelection) return elementWithSelection.click() getSelection().empty() })

This allows you to use the native CTRL+f and / search basically like the ' search.

The ' search let's you "click" on links by pressing enter.

The snippet let's you do the same for the other searches too so you can navigate the modern web where often navigations and actions are behind buttons and sometimes even divs (not just links). Unfortunately you can't activate those without this little hack.

The extension will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-on-sele... soon (after mozilla approves).

I use this trick in a slightly bigger extension too https://github.com/h43z/jkscroll/blob/main/content-script.js...
by appreciatorBus | 2025-07-22 19:44:04+00:00
Not directly, no.

The impact of firms and people going bankrupt that other people making investment and lending decisions will see risk more clearly and may (for a time) be less greedy and stupid when they make capital allocation decisions.

Debts can & do magically disappear. To be clear someone paid for the lost money, but at that stage it's far too late for them to be able to do anything about it, let alone raise prices.

Here's an example: Founder A founds a startup with equity funding from B & C. Later they take loans from D & E. They spend all the money but never become profitable. None of the original investors or lenders is interested in pumping in good money after bad. They voluntarily declare bankruptcy or they default on a loan and D or E forces them into bankruptcy. Either way, whatever is left of the company's assets are sold to reimburse, in part, the loan D & E made. A, B & C got nothing.

A, B, C, D, and E, all lost real money.

But by the time this loss is crystalized, there is no way any of them can go back in time to raise prices to pay for it. It's gone and so is the company. The only thing they can do is act differently in the future.
by jamiek88 | 2025-07-22 19:44:15+00:00
It was just part of the metal zeitgeist at the time constant escalation of pretend evil/darkness.

He’s kinda been grandfathered in.

But it caused plenty of controversy back then too.

Then he rehabilitated his rep with the Osborne show where he was this messed up shuffling pity type figure.

So in short the culture changed but Ozzie changed with it and by then he was too fucked up to be cancelled.

Not claiming it’s rational but culture rarely is.

Additionally Ozzie claims he thought it was a fake/prop but was so fucked up at the time he just went with it.

Also it happened once it wasn’t like he was out doing it every week!