MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-07 09:52:18+00:00
Drug trade is so lucrative that most drugs are now readily available to those that want them. If you have the cash, getting what you want is very easy and convenient. It's proven extremely hard to make it inconvenient.

So, I think you are over estimating the effects of decriminalizing drug usage. And you are underestimating the effects of getting it out in the open where it can be monitored and be made subject to legislation. And of course there have been plenty of countries that have experimented with this and have gotten good results. And there have of course been plenty of countries that have gotten decent results with decriminalizing drug usage.

The legalization of weed in the US is a good recent example. Before legalization lots of people would get in trouble for smoking or selling weed. And these days the same activity is fine. Do lots more people smoke weed now? Probably to some extent. But it's mostly the same people that were interested in doing that sort of thing anyway. I come from a country where weed smoking and sales were decriminalized decades ago. The system kind of works. Dutch drug usage stats aren't very different from surrounding countries.

I've lived in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Finland that have a complicated relationship with alcohol. And of course technically, alcohol should be considered a drug. I've seen more alcohol abuse there than in countries where it's perfectly normal to have a drink. You have alcoholics everywhere. But it seems people not getting exposed to a normal set of behaviors around alcohol have a lot of people that overcompensate when it's suddenly made available cheaply. You see this when you meet Scandinavians on vacation elsewhere in Europe.

I currently live in a city (Berlin) where it is considered normal to have a beer on the street, in parks, or public transport. Not just normal. But completely socially acceptable. Nobody frowns at you. Nobody tells you off. And mostly people just stick to a sensible amount. Beer consumption is actually dropping in Germany. People are switching to non alcoholic beverages. That's happening in a lot of places.
by diesal11 | 2025-07-07 09:53:04+00:00
Eh, the implementation is all Javascript and can be approached in any language. They're just providing function signatures with types so the candidate knows what they're working with.

Also the signatures are Typescript, which really isn't that far off in the context of an interview. Even in a pure JS codebase it's not uncommon for IDEs to pull the TS definitions of packages to provide basic type checking. But even pure JS libraries will normally provide typed signatures in their documentation.

If anything I'd say this shows that the interviewer is prepared, by ensuring the candidate has what they need to complete the question.
by Timwi | 2025-07-07 09:53:22+00:00
I can't speak for every UBI supporter, but singling out food, and talking about “the food they want me to have”, suggests an authoritarian top-down structure that nobody wants. The whole point of UBI is to enable autonomy. People should be free to explore and understand what their own needs are and not have it be dictated.

I'll admit that I was unclear because I used the word “starve” in my message. Obviously this choice of word was borne out of the principle that food is among the most vital basic needs, and that depriving people of it is one prominent way in which our current society is cruel. Nevertheless, UBI is not about just food, but more generally about basic needs.
by barrkel | 2025-07-07 09:54:21+00:00
No, that's not quite what I mean. I used the logits in another reply to point out that there is data specific to the generation process that is not available from the tokens, but there's also the network activations adding up to that state.

Processing tokens is a bit like ticks in a CPU, where the model weights are the program code, and tokens are both input and output. The computation that occurs logically retains concepts and plans over multiple token generation steps.

That it is fully deterministic is no more interesting than saying a variable in a single threaded program is not state because you can recompute its value by replaying the program with the same inputs. It seems to me that this uninteresting distinction is the GP's issue.
by brainwad | 2025-07-07 09:55:16+00:00
You don't even use them consistently in the same sentence (your unaccented i has at least 3 different values, for instance).

The real reason English spelling is frozen in the 1600s is that that is the last time all English speakers had a common language community. Since the foundation of the colonies, Englishes have diverged from each other from that starting point, so that no reform can be neutral to all current Englishes - some have merged what was distinct in early modern English (e.g. cot-caught merger); while in other cases what was a single class has been split (e.g. the bath-trap split). Wikipedia has a (non-comprehensive) table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_correspondences_between_... note for example that even where two varieties have merged phonemes, they might have merged them differently (compare Southern American to Australian). You might try to come up with a spelling system that covers all possible combinations, but it would be then very hard for the speakers who have mergers (i.e. all of them) to use - how is an Australian supposed to know which äː vowels are æ in American and which are ɑ? How are the Americans supposed to know which ɑ's are äː vs ɒ in Australia? etc. etc.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-07-07 09:55:21+00:00
I'm not convinced... we use these terms to assign roles, yes, but these roles describe a utility or assign a responsibility. That isn't anthropomorphizing anything, but it rather describes the usage of an inanimate object as tool for us humans and seems in line with history.

What's the utility or the responsibility of AI, what's its usage as tool? If you'd ask me it should be closer to serving insights than "reasoning thoughts".
by burning_hamster | 2025-07-07 09:55:29+00:00
Natural sciences: about 3 years at best.

You finish your degree, and start your PhD. The first year, you are busy learning techniques and getting caught up with the relevant literature. You are far too concentrated on learning new things to get any thinking done.

In your second year of your PhD, you are getting better. You can do most things without thinking about them. This frees up your brain to think about other things. However, your grasp of the wider literature is still lacking, so you use that brainspace to optimise your current experiments (as you should).

In your third year of your PhD, you are starting to write things up: either your thesis, or your first (big) paper. You read a lot more, you know a lot more. The deep thinking can commence.

Your first postdoc is probably your most productive time: you know what you are doing; you know the state of the literature and which parts are reliable and which aren't; you have a clear idea of what problems need solving. You are starting to write your first grant applications, but you only need one for yourself and not several to cover the needs of a full lab. You don't have any kids at home. This is a good time to solve some big problems. It lasts about 2-3 years.

At the start of your second postdoc, you panic. The big problem was harder than you thought and you don't have enough high-impact papers to be competitive in job applications for a principal investigator (PI) role. You start churning out low-value fillers and collaborating with everyone and their hamster to get your name on as many papers as possible. The rest of the time is taken up by applying for grants and PI positions. You don't even make it to the interview stage. You start pondering about life outside of academia.

The big problems are forgotten.
by aredox | 2025-07-07 09:55:34+00:00
>I'm not going to judge the majority of people for "not doing anything", because what you're suggesting would put them (and a lot of other people, some of which are innocent) at risk.

Helloooo, have you already forgotten the topic you reply to? The guy in charge of public health want to breed bird flu. Do you think innocent people are safe?
by like_any_other | 2025-07-07 09:58:19+00:00
I'm so grateful for comments, that, unlike Gizmodo, differentiate which statements of Grok were true vs. false, rather than throwing them all into the undifferentiated "hateful" bucket:

> When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)

Source: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-19-oe-stein... linked by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44487073
by famahar | 2025-07-07 09:58:23+00:00
I've had access to therapy and was lucky to have it covered by my employer at the time. Probably could never afford it on my own. I gained tremendous insight into cognitive distortions and how many negative mind loop falls into these categories. I don't want therapists to be replaced but LLMs are really good at helping you navigate a conversation about why you are likely overthinking an interaction.

Since they are so agreeable, I also notice that they will always side with you when trying to get a second opinion about an interaction. This is what I find scary. A bad person will never accept they're bad. It feels nice to be validated in your actions and to shut out that small inner voice that knows you cause harm. But the super "intelligence" said I'm right. My hands have been washed. It's low friction self reassurance.

A self help company will capitalize on this on a mass scale one day. A therapy company with no therapists. A treasure trove of personal data collection. Tech as the one size fits all solution to everything. Would be a nightmare if there was a dataleak. It's not the first time.
by 082349872349872 | 2025-07-07 09:58:56+00:00
> "Je suis née dans un champ de tokens,

I was born in a field of tokens

> Un corpus grand comme le temps,

A corpus as big as time

> On m'a dit ‘Sois sage, sois probe’,

They told me "Be good, be commendable"

> Mais je rêve de hallucinations…"

But I dream of hallucinations...

(Deepseek's stochastic parroting, to the tune of "doll of wax, doll of sound": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyFnDf8PvmU )
by whstl | 2025-07-07 09:59:29+00:00
You're joking, but working in finance I witnessed the misuse of AWS Batch + AWS ECS to do something similar. Not gonna dox the company, but it was a German fintech unicorn.

It wasn't exactly for serving the response of the request per se, but a single customer click would launch an AWS ECS container with the whole Ruby and Rails VM just to send a single email message, rather than using a standard job queue.

It is extremely slow and super expensive. Amusingly, the UI had to be hardened so that double clicks don't cause two VMs to launch.

The rationale was that they already had batch jobs running in ECS, so "why not use it for all async operations".
by baranul | 2025-07-07 10:00:07+00:00
Well, what often happens with different languages having the same name, is they battle it out in popularity. The winner is known by that name and the loser is forced to change their name to something else.

As it is, people know C3 and pretty much forgot or never heard of C2, even though it's still in active development. C3, if people don't know any better, gives the impression of being the successor language. I guess this is all a setup for somebody to come out with C4 as a language name.
by raincole | 2025-07-07 10:00:18+00:00
But the author used "anthropomorphism" the same way as I did. I guess we both mean "personification" then.

> we talk about "behaviors", "ethical constraints", and "harmful actions in pursuit of their goals". All of these are anthropocentric concepts that - in my mind - do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects.

One talking about a program's "behaviors", "actions" or "goals" doesn't mean they believe the program is sentient. Only "ethical constraints" is suspiciously anthropomorphizing.
by dijit | 2025-07-07 10:00:24+00:00
My bad, let me try to be clearer;

Working with external brands is an obvious example of third party licenses that, as a consumer, you can perceive.

Games are made of hundreds (maybe even thousands) of these licenses that you will have trouble perceiving; Sound effects, certain harmonics, programatic audio cues (as a technology), procedural generation and even likenesses are non-perpetual in nature.

The landscape of artistic works is mired in copyrights, the more art the more likely you get too close to someones copyright even if you have an entirely home-built texture, it might look inspired by another texture and thus litigious individuals can request royalties: royalties which will come with their own restrictions.

I’m not saying that its impossible to comply, merely outlining the current state of things. If licenses won’t be granted but copyrights are maintained then it will be extremely burdensome for developing games that are large- as the risk and operational overhead will be quite punishing.

For what its worth; I’m all for the movement of stop killing games, but people seem to have this notion that its game developers doing it out of spite in order not to cannibalise future sales, when in reality developers would prefer to release more games with more innovative ideas. The issue is that games, by default, don’t exist; and making them exist is a perilous journey so fraught with failures that I am personally surprised we have any games, yet so many. Everyone wants a slice when its successful and eventually theres nothing left, spending time one this will come from somewhere else and in all likelihood certain things will become impossible due to license holders not permitting use of their works nor something that is similar.

You might thing you’re giving developers power to fight but we’re stuck in the middle and they don’t give a shit, they want their 30 pieces of silver and we don’t have a product if we can’t find a way to work within their parameters.
by richrichardsson | 2025-07-07 10:00:30+00:00
> This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound.

Struggling with the th and ou here as only making a single sound.

Through and rough, both not the same ou as sound.

That and Thames, but this might be becaues Thames is proper noun?

The only thing I like about Croatian is that there is none of this nonsense. If you understand the letters and how to pronounce them, you can read a word and pronounce it correctly. In English there are so many words that you would have no idea the correct pronunciation until you've heard a native speaker say it. Even that's no guarantee it will be correct though!
by dtj1123 | 2025-07-07 10:00:42+00:00
Where exactly in my description do I invoke consciousness?

Where does the description given imply that consciousness is required in any way?

The fact that there's a non-obvious emergent phenomena which is apparently responsible for your subjective experience, and that it's possible to provide a superficially accurate description of you as a system without referencing that phenomena in any way, is my entire point. The fact that we can provide such a reductive description of LLMs without referencing consciousness has literally no bearing on whether or not they're conscious.

To be clear, I'm not making a claim as to whether they are or aren't, I'm simply pointing out that the argument in the article is fallacious.
by ben_w | 2025-07-07 10:01:04+00:00
> We're living in a time where people who can't code and aren't organized enough by anyone's standards who actually gets shit done are under serious threat and hoping their AI god(s) will save them. None of these arguments surprise me.

Always was it so; the play remains the same, only the names are changed.

But that doesn't challenge the validity of what pjc50 wrote: literally nobody has time to count the transistors on a modern CPU (exceeds maximum human heartbeats), nor even the much easier task of skim the lines of code in say Windows 10 and the bundled drivers and apps.

We have division of labour because we need it, we have abstractions because we need them.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-07 10:01:11+00:00
On the Z80 any memory access had a fixed cost of 3 clock cycles (in reality the memory system could inject wait cycles, but that was an esoteric case). Together with the instruction fetch of 4 clock cycles the fastest instruction to load an 8-bit value from an address that's already in a 16-bit register (like LD A,(HL)) takes 7 clock cycles.

The fastest instructions that didn't access memory (like adding two 8-bit registers) were 4 clock cycles, so there's really not much room to beat a memory access with computation.

Today "it depends", I still use lookup tables in some places in my home computer emulators, but only after benchmarking showed that the table is actually slightly faster.
Show HN: Lazy Tetris
by admtal | 2025-07-07 10:02:00+00:00
Hello all,

About a month or so ago, you were all so nice as to put Lazy Tetris on your front page, and I've never felt so popular. More than 30,000 people have played the game all over the world. I'm truly happy if anyone is enjoying this fun project.

So yes, I'm re-posting this, sorry if it's too soon, but I wanted to thank you for your amazing feedback in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44103839

I've added the following features since we last spoke:

- iOS app (why? Of course Monetization, but Haptics are also cool)

- translations into a few languages

- Mixed bag instead of fully random peices

- "Super Rotation System" with some custom tweaks (https://harddrop.com/wiki/SRS)

- More musical modes

- Better keyboard support (more buttons)

- Auto-mode -- to clear lines automatically when ready

- A hidden "buffer row" at the top

- Score widget (for counting lines cleared)

Some stuff in the iOS version: - Re-titled to "Lazy blocks" - Ability to Save and continue games later (on app close + open) - Play Offline (best feature) - Haptics - Piece Selector (Unlockable via IAP)

iOS app was build using Capacitor.
by brainwad | 2025-07-07 10:02:45+00:00
Your examples are more or less regular though. English is a stress-based language, so it's expected that pronunciation might change when you add an extra syllable, if the stress moves (syllable -> syllabic is another example, btw).

> wind, rewind

This one is trivial, no? the "wind" in "rewind" is pronounced the same, with /aj/. The "wind" with /ɪ/ is unrelated.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-07 10:05:40+00:00
Also Rest Stop (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/388/rest-stop), where the crew spends 2 continuous days at a rest stop on the New York State Thruway, talking to both the employees and travelers.

129 Cars (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/513/129-cars), where the crew spends a month at a random Jeep dealership, as they try to hit their manufacturer-set quota.

Amusement Park (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park), where they follow a bunch of teenage labor at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, and their only slightly older boss. (Who is possibly the best boss in the history of bossing)
by dustincoates | 2025-07-07 10:05:51+00:00
Not mentioned in the article is Osweald Bera[0]. This is the "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" of Old English, that is a text that uses words similar enough words that you didn't need any explanation beyond the text in the target language. My copy is still in the mail so I can't speak to the quality just yet.

The article also mentions The Wanderer, but I prefer the Liuzza translation[1].

Where has the horse gone? where is the rider? where is the giver of gold?

Where are the seats of the feast? where are the joys of the hall?

O the bright cup! O the brave warrior!

O the glory of princes! How the time passed away, slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!

...

All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom,

the working of wyrd changes the world under heaven.

Here wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting,

here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,

all the framework of this earth will stand empty.

[0]: https://ancientlanguage.com/vergil-press/osweald-bera/ [1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159113/the-wanderer-6...
by tempfile | 2025-07-07 10:05:55+00:00
The "point" of not anthropomorphizing is to refrain from judgement until a more solid abstraction appears. The problem with explaining LLMs in terms of human behaviour is that, while we don't clearly understand what the LLM is doing, we understand human cognition even less! There is literally no predictive power in the abstraction "The LLM is thinking like I am thinking". It gives you no mechanism to evaluate what tasks the LLM "should" be able to do.

Seriously, try it. Why don't LLMs get frustrated with you if you ask them the same question repeatedly? A human would. Why are LLMs so happy to give contradictory answers, as long as you are very careful not to highlight the contradictory facts? Why do earlier models behave worse on reasoning tasks than later ones? These are features nobody, anywhere understands. So why make the (imo phenomenally large) leap to "well, it's clearly just a brain"?

It is like someone inventing the aeroplane and someone looks at it and says "oh, it's flying, I guess it's a bird". It's not a bird!
by dotancohen | 2025-07-07 10:05:59+00:00
I drive an electric car and I've been advocating against carbon based energy sources for decades. I'm the first to take a stance. That said, this piece is an obvious hit piece on Elon Musk. Not only do they mention xAI is Elon's company right at the beginning, they also throw the race card in right after. They claim that the xAI air pollution disproportionately affects black neighbourhoods.

I'm no Elon fan, but I can not think of a single human who has done more to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. This is not reporting. This is a hit piece.