MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2025-07-08 04:58:35+00:00
Some (most?) therapists use tools to store notes about their patients - some even store the audio/transcripts. They're all using some company's technology already. They're all HIPPA certified (or whatever the appropriate requirement is).

There's absolutely no reason that LLM providers can't provide equivalent guarantees. Distrusting Sam while trusting the existing providers makes little sense.

BTW, putting mental health aside, many doctors today are using LLM tools to record the whole conversation with the patient and provide good summaries, etc. My doctor loves it - before he was required to listen to me and take notes at the same time. Now he feels he can focus on listening to me. He said the LLM does screw up, but he exists to fix those mistakes (and can always listen to the audio to be sure).

I don't know which company is providing the LLM in the backend - likely a common cloud provider (Azure, Google, etc). But again - they are fully HIPPA certified. It's been in the medical space for well over a year.
by init7 | 2025-07-08 04:58:36+00:00
As an outsider, I feel the narrative has totally turned for the rest of the world.

Israeli citizens protesting against the genocide and war crimes rekindled faith that it's mostly the top of govts and military industrial complexes pushing for this.

Not just BBC, most media ended up out in the open this time around. Or maybe it has always been like this, we are just growing up now and taking notice.
by ars | 2025-07-08 04:59:29+00:00
Anyone who call it "Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza" is hardly a reliable source.

And the entire criticism is amount of coverage per death? I men the Israeli deaths have names attached to them and you can verify them, the Palestinian ones are just numbered by Hamas. Obviously the coverage will be different.

I skimmed the article by CfMM and it's hardly a neutral source. Like they complain that BBC doesn't call Palestinian prisoners hostages. Well obviously they don't them them that, because they aren't hostages.
by int_19h | 2025-07-08 04:59:34+00:00
It doesn't matter if the the original cause for the war is just or not if the war involves mass slaughter of civilians, and concealing this fact is deeply unethical. This is true in all other cases that you mention - whether civilians are targeted by the West and its allies in the war against ISIS, or by Ukraine in the war against Russia, that should all be covered objectively, not suppressed.

Separately from that, you seem to be conflating Hamas with Palestinians in general. Most people killed by Israel in Gaza are not Hamas.
by Rodeoclash | 2025-07-08 04:59:51+00:00
> It's stuff that is masterfully communicated without the need for corny expository dialogue

This is the scene I'm thinking of: https://youtu.be/70FLqFWJMNk?si=0faCWRS9aNpVTil4&t=68

You don't need to know that the character is a mentat. The story works perfectly well without that knowledge. But if you do then it adds a second layer to the scene. Much like watching something like the early Simpson's is even better if you have a grounding in the novels and movies that they're parodying but isn't required to get the show.

> A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.

I have seen it quite some time ago, please point out some clips where you feel the show don't tell is executed well.
by Liquix | 2025-07-08 05:00:12+00:00
reading an article if it's interesting and moving on if it's not :~^)

seriously though, i have struggled with tab/bookmark hoarding, it's a huge relief when you recognize it for what it is and quit. IME the bigger/dustier the backlog gets the more vague psychological guilt accumulates, a weight which isn't truly recognized until it's gone.
by epynonymous | 2025-07-08 05:01:10+00:00
the use case is really decentralized communication. sure connecting to wifi is easy and accessible, 4g is pretty much unlimited, but what if you just want to share files/photos directly with a group of people without having to traverse the web/someone else's hw/sw? this is basically like a detached, private web. most of the time, you probably dont care if meta has your files, but for those that just dont like centralized services, this is great. think of it like an extremely private network, why not?
by cryptonector | 2025-07-08 05:01:23+00:00
The article I linked says that the _paper_ that TFA refers to[0] says nothing about a reversal of the current, only a reversal of the freshening of surface water on the polar southern ocean. Is that not indeed a correct reading of the underlying paper? That's a simple yes or no question. See for yourself[0]!

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2500440122
by BeetleB | 2025-07-08 05:01:47+00:00
> Why no, Mr. Rothschild, you should not replace your team of SAT tutors for little Melvin III with an LLM.

To be frank - as someone who did not have a SAT tutor, and coming from a culture where no one did and all got very good/excellent SAT scores: No one really needs a SAT tutor. They don't provide more value then good SAT prep books. I can totally see a good LLM be better than 90% of SAT tutors out there.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-08 05:03:12+00:00
A lot of the flagged posts look completely fine, to me. Basically the entire discussion is greyed out, which suggests a pretty intense unwillingness to talk about the subject on principles alone.

I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic, nobody would want to use the site.
by const_cast | 2025-07-08 05:03:12+00:00
The Palantir giving information to cops in the US? Yes, that's their business model, or part of it.

This being used to persecute minorities? IMO, nobody needs to prove this, we can assume it will happen.

Why? Because world governments will always push the envelope to the furthest amount legally. Any tool that can be used for evil, will be used for evil. If you have a database of faces it's only a matter of time before that is used for some sort of profiling.

Don't believe me? Look no further than War. Any invention, in all of human history, that can be used for war, has been used for war. We will develop new and innovative ways to use it. Vehicles, planes, trucks, trains, telephony, electricity, the printing press, the internet, anything and everything.
by nessguy | 2025-07-08 05:04:40+00:00
There was a paragraph about AI somewhere in the middle.

> The AI efficiency narrative provides the perfect cover for these layoffs. Companies can frame headcount reduction as “leveraging AI to increase productivity” or “optimizing for the future of work.” It sounds forward-thinking and strategic rather than admitting they failed to manage performance or simply want to cut costs. Whether AI actually replaces the laid-off workers’ productivity is rarely measured or proven, but the narrative sells well to investors and the media.
by ggm | 2025-07-08 05:04:59+00:00
I was schooled in this time, at a primary school in central edinburgh which was said to be where Moray House did its experiments (-the Scottish teacher training college, which all state school teachers had to attend, to be qualified to work) and while I have dim memories of seeing the alternate spelling books around the place, luckily didn't get foisted onto them. Judging by the stuff people recall in this piece I dodged a bullet.

The ITA ladybird books were also around in the shops. I had that one about the police but in real alphabet. Confusingly edinburgh had its own idiosyncratic police boxes more like Georgian temples. They all wound up being sold off as coffee stalls and bookshops. Scots coppers rarely wore the custodian helmet(maybe on duty at an old firm game) so the imagery didn't make much sense.

The politics of phonics vs whole word leaked into Queensland (where I now reside) politics and continues. It's stupid, all aspects of language and literacy come to bear, demanding one technique over another or whacked ideas like ITA is politicising early childhood to no good effect.
by catgirlinspace | 2025-07-08 05:05:00+00:00
Why are you being so rude? You claimed that apps not made by fortune 500 companies are all garbage, they listed some counter examples (not an exhaustive list), and that isn’t good enough? If anyone here is ruining the site, I think it might be you. I had been enjoying reading the comments here until seeing yours.

(Also Octal is one of my favorite apps, even if you think it is nothing but a wrapper around news.ycombinator.com.)
by drdeca | 2025-07-08 05:05:22+00:00
I’d remove the “for cheaper” part? (And also, only necessary for the employees whose jobs are “cognitive tasks”, not ones that are based on their bodies. So like, doesn’t need to be able to lift boxes or have a nice smile.)

If something would be better at every cognitive task than every human, if it ran a trillion times faster, I would consider that to be AGI even if it isn’t that useful at its actual speed.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-08 05:06:00+00:00
Suggest good ones, perhaps?

All the ones I've seen are terrible. But that's likely because I don't subscribe to them and they are large enough to occasionally show up on Reddit's front page. Anything that shows up on the front page is crap.

The point, though, is that the LLM likely has a larger exposure to the larger subreddits than the better smaller ones, and perhaps is more likely to reflect the attitudes of the larger ones.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-08 05:06:10+00:00
> And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.

Although when they depart, they swung for the fences. Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship), just to get cheap drama when characters act out of character under the influence of the Ring. It was really aggravating.
by leakycap | 2025-07-08 05:06:20+00:00
We thought about it, but we used to offer live chat to logged in users and very few customers ever used it... making staffing live chat availability a big human burden for almost no use.

When AI chatbots could answer most general questions, we rolled out an alpha test and saw that... even with a chatbot, almost no one uses chat in our industry.

We've now gone for "smart search" with meaning recognition rather than a chat. That way, everyone searching gets benefits of the AI's knowledge without having to open a chat.
Show HN: Data visuals on 1000 recent YC companies and their 2000 founders
by boshjerns | 2025-07-08 05:06:24+00:00
In the last two months, as I applied to Y Combinator myself (now I know the hubris, hahahah!) and also applied to a few positions on the work for a startup page, I found myself wondering what kind of people Y Combinator actually accepts. This curiosity was particularly sparked after I had gone through a few rounds of these interviews and realized that every single founder who was interviewing me had graduated from a top school in the United States like MIT, Yale, Harvard, etc. I found myself wondering how many people that are accepted into Y Combinator actually come from top schools, and that was the kickoff of this whole dive into analyzing these companies and their founders. I've had an interesting journey personally into software development, as I started off my career as an adult as a professional photographer, mainly photographing music artists and shows, and slowly taught myself how to become a software developer. I literally dropped out of a liberal arts school, so my educational background left me particularly curious about this whole dynamic.
by const_cast | 2025-07-08 05:07:05+00:00
You're correct, you are more hurt than if I gave you 100 dollars. Duh, this is obvious.

Consider the negation: you’re not hurt if I give you 100 dollars. Or, rephrased, you're better off if I give you 100 dollars. Is this true? Yes. If I queried all 7.5 billion people on Earth, they’d all say yes.

Again, the tricky part is I don't care. That's a different thing.
by zmgsabst | 2025-07-08 05:07:06+00:00
As I pointed out, eg, the high number of correction terms when trying to tune the model to actual particle accelerator data is evidence that our model is missing something. (And some things are plain missing: neutrino behavior, dark matter, dark energy, etc.)

In the same way that a high number of epicycles was evidence our theory of geocentrism was wrong — even though adding epicycles did compute increasingly accurate results.
by pumpdotfun | 2025-07-08 05:08:10+00:00
This is a threas for launching token on the hackernews with pump.fun. Then is a test token, launch coin through

@pumpdotfun + HackerNews + hckr + randompfp

API TEST

Test successful Contract updated: F4wPvYbQtfLLjs3YDBd2Eo2c8KVRrctvtcDjwtDTpump
by const_cast | 2025-07-08 05:08:20+00:00
Yes, it is, that's exactly what it is and it's not up for debate.

Like I said, the rules are stupid but, for now, I play by them.

You might as "why are you hurting yourself?". Because I can afford to hurt myself, the waiter probably can't. 5 bucks is a drop in the bucket for me, but, presumably, not for them.

And, on the topic of self-harm, we all make decisions every day that harm us. We sometimes get something in return, but often we don’t. We do it purely for the benefit of other people, often people we don’t know and will never see again.

Consider holding a door open. For me, I get in the building 10 seconds later. That’s worse than getting in the door 10 seconds earlier. What did I gain? Nothing. Some stranger got 100% of the benefit, with nothing for me.
by ripped_britches | 2025-07-08 05:09:31+00:00
I would agree but this is an organizational issue, not a Figma issue.

This is endemic to corporate engineering culture.

You can tell because they/us layer even more nonsense atop these Figma features like multiple composed layers of design tokens.

I literally had a design manager ask if we need a token for full opacity. Let that sink in for a second… A variable to represent something with 0% transparency. Under what circumstance would that possibly be useful?
by Quekid5 | 2025-07-08 05:09:46+00:00
It's worth noting that some (many?) languages[0] only support TCO as long as you're calling the function itself in tail position. The usual cases were you'll notice this when implementing state machines in "direct style" or when doing continuation-passing style for control flow.

TCO is more general than that in some languages where any function call in tail position can be turned into a direct jump. This obviously requires either 1) runtime support in some form or 2) a non-trivial amount of program transformation during compilation.

[0] Scala's @tailrec is one I'm 100% certain of.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-08 05:11:23+00:00
> Feeding patient files and clinical notes into a training set violates so many ethical and legal rules;

> How will the "LLM" keep track of 45 minutes worth of notes per session? Do you have any idea how much writing is involved? treatment plans, session notes, treatment team notes, nevermind the other overheads.

It sounds like you're asking this as a hypothetical, when in fact this has been a reality for well over a year (while following all the legal requirements). From another comment of mine:

"BTW, putting mental health aside, many doctors today are using LLM tools to record the whole conversation with the patient and provide good summaries, etc. My doctor loves it - before he was required to listen to me and take notes at the same time. Now he feels he can focus on listening to me. He said the LLM does screw up, but he exists to fix those mistakes (and can always listen to the audio to be sure).

I don't know which company is providing the LLM in the backend - likely a common cloud provider (Azure, Google, etc). But again - they are fully HIPPA certified. It's been in the medical space for well over a year."
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-08 05:12:16+00:00
My head canon was essentially that the nutrient connectors in the back of people's necks also had a weak wireless near range communication port to the computers wireless net. Why, because sometimes malfunctions and accidents can happen and people get detached and they need to be findable.

The Oracle had realized years before that this could be used to relay shutdown commands to nearby machines because relatively lax security on this port and had built in the capability into "the one" as a failsafe.
by blazinglambda | 2025-07-08 05:12:18+00:00
Valhalla MUD is really good, and has had a resurgence of activity recently. They've redone the class system, added a bunch of zones, and added some discord integration etc. I played decades ago starting as an 8 year old who knew nothing lol but I still log in from time to time. Super deep game if you have time to invest.
by const_cast | 2025-07-08 05:12:26+00:00
It's not topsy-turvy at all, it's very simple and straightforward logic.

Again: does the worker have less, or more, money than before if you don't tip? It's not a trick question, it's not a rhetorical question, it's a very simple question.

Okay... they have less. So, the worker is worse off when you don't tip. Again, what you're arguing is that's okay and justified. Which is fine, and lots of people will agree.

> The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own.

This is blatantly not true.

When you don't tip 5 dollars, the waiter does not have 5 dollars. Who did not give them that 5 dollars? You.

You're arguing that isn't your responsibility. That's a different argument. But who didn't give it to them? You.

> The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.

Correct, this is exactly right. And, I agree with you: this is absolutely what is happening. I want this to end 100%.

But, in my opinion, I do not believe, personally, for me, in my life, that I will be enacting any change or furthering this cause in any way by not tipping. So, for me, I tip.

If you do not want to tip, I think that's fine. Go for it. What you cannot claim is that this doesn't hurt your particular waiter. Obviously it does, you made his night a little bit worse. If you still don't believe me, just ask next time, the waiter will tell you.

And, notice my wording here, it’s very careful. That particular waiter is worse off. It’s possible to help waiters, as a group, as a collective, while simultaneously harming that particular waiter. You believe you’re deconstructing or undermining tipping as a system, ergo helping waiters as a whole. But in the process, you’re hurting that particular waiter.
by tomhow | 2025-07-08 05:12:51+00:00
Several users flagged this submission, correctly.

The topic of the app's launch was on the front page for several hours last week and generated a huge discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44496729

This latest story doesn't seem to carry any "significant new information", which is a critical qualifier for a new HN thread.

The article's topic is the quote by the United States Attorney General on a cable news interview, and even that was made – and reported – last week when the topic was still active on HN. It's a detail in the overall story that has already had major coverage here. If there was an arrest or some other material legal action, that would likely warrant a new thread.

Edit: I updated the comment to remove the incorrect implication that there is any new information in the article at all.
by zmgsabst | 2025-07-08 05:13:09+00:00
Most of that is measured corrections, not a theoretical model.

Entanglement is just a statistical effect in our measurements — we can’t say what is happening or why that occurs. We can calculate that effect because we’ve fitted models, but that’s it.

Similarly, to predict proton collisions, you need to add a bunch of corrective epicycles (“virtual quarks”) to get what we measure out of the basic theory. But adding such corrections is just curve fitting via adding terms in a basis to match measurement. Again, we can’t say what is happening or why that occurs.

We have great approximators that produce accurate and precise results — but we don’t have a model of what and why, hence we don’t understand QM.
by tareqak | 2025-07-08 05:13:11+00:00
In addition, not all Zionists are Jews.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

> Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.[1] Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with biblical prophecies transmitted through the Old Testament: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"—is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[1][2][3] The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.[1][4][5]
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-08 05:13:22+00:00
> But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says:

>> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

> So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

OK, you're confused.

In the general case, an English verb has five forms†: "plain form" [go], "preterite form" [went], "present third-person singular form" [goes], "-ing form" [going], and "-en form" [gone].

The last two of those are participial forms.

It is true that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form. We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form. This is true without exception because passive markers occur last in the sequence of auxiliary verbs that might modify a primary verb, and therefore always directly control the form of the primary verb.

It is not true that a passive clause always includes a participle, except in the sense of the name we give to the form of the verb. -ing and -en are "participial forms" because the verb takes one of those forms when it is a participle. But it can also take them for other reasons.

> the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example

Sure. If you wanted to put the present passive third-person plural form of make in that sentence, that form† would be are made. The sentence would have all the same words in the same order.

But that would make no semantic sense. For a point to be "already made", as opposed to having "already" been "made", you need to interpret made as an adjective, describing the state in which the point currently exists. The temporal structure of "each graduate student is given a laptop" differs from that of "in addition to the points that are already made" in a way that allows the present noncontinuous form of the verb. I don't think that works for "the points that are already made"; if I try to interpret that as a passive verb in the present tense, I get a strong sense that the sentence is malformed.

† You might notice that these two uses of the word form conflict with each other. The fact that form is used in both of these ways is why I'm annoyed at your comment conflating "participle" with "participial form". "Participle" is appropriate when you're talking about inflecting a verb according to how you want to use it in a sentence; it is a concern with the language's grammar. "Participial form" is appropriate when you're talking about the actual tokens that can appear in a sentence, with no regard to what they might mean or how they might be used; it is a concern with what you might think of as the language's "anatomy".