MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnfn | 2025-07-29 15:30:29+00:00
I find it fascinating that this is still making the rounds. When I read this it was immediately obvious that the author was using a non-web enabled AI which was just hallucinating; there were none of the inline indications that GPT was using the web. Additionally, it must be an old model; even the cheapest, lowest powered models on chatgpt.com today search the web when I ask them questions about articles as the author did. (I just signed out of chatgpt.com to get the worst available model, and it does summarize the linked article correctly.) Note that link to the transcript on chatgpt.com is provided, even though it's trivial to create a shared link to a conversation.

I am confused about what to take away from the article. It feels akin to someone reading a book for the first time, it ends up being "Harry Potter", and they somehow get 10,000 likes on Substack because they took it literally and crashed into the wall when they tried to walk into platform 9 3/4. Am I being unfair? Are these the same people that are claiming that AI is all a sham and will have no impact on society?
by alistairSH | 2025-07-29 15:31:04+00:00
I don't read French, so can't directly comment on the content.

However, these year-by-year comparisons often miss a few key points...

- Technology advances. Looks at the jerseys worn during the peak doping era (Lance, etc) vs today - they look downright baggy in the 90s vs now. The bikes are more aerodynamic as well. The tire roll faster.

- Nutrition has changed MASSIVELY in the last ~5 years. Gone are bananas and pastries (even from the Italian and French teams). The "bonk" is almost completely a thing of the past at this level - cyclists are consuming carbs at rates that would have put most people on the toilet a few years ago. Part of this is better mixes; part of it is humans can simply consume more carbs than we thought possible (with appropriate gut training).

- Training itself has changed. It's year-round, it's far more structured. Everybody has a power meter, glucose monitor, etc. Kids are starting this structure training at younger ages.

Anyway, do I think pro cycling is 100% clean? No, of course not, there's massive incentive to cheat. Do I believe the top cyclists (Pogi, Vingegaard, etc) are clean (per current rules)? Yes. They're testing far too often to not be. Are they possible pushing the limits of what's legal? Probably (see also: CO training last year, which is now banned).
by simonw | 2025-07-29 15:31:08+00:00
I don't understand. For code, why would I want to remix existing code snippets?

I totally get the value of RAG style patterns for information retrieval against factual information - for those I don't want the LLM to answer my question directly, I want it to run a search and show me a citation and directly quote a credible source as part of answering.

For code I just want code that works - I can test it myself to make sure it does what it's supposed to.
by mindslight | 2025-07-29 15:31:24+00:00
> Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources?

Plenty, of course.

> If so, why is state directed research a special case?

It's not a "special case", but rather there does not seem to be a better way to allocate significant resources for scientific research than governmental funding. Thus, the decision is either to accept that there will be some misallocation from centralized funding (while working to mitigate those inefficiencies), or to give up doing most fundamental research.

Also note that government funding of research is "additive" to an otherwise default-open system - independent actors can always fund research they'd like to see. Whereas most of the time we bemoan central planning we're talking about closed dynamics from which there is no opt-out. If privately funded research were generally lucrative, then we would see much more of it. But outside of some very specific contexts (straightforward patentability, prospects of immediate commercialization, subjects adjacent to highly lucrative centralized industries (which is closer to government funding than not)), we don't.

In general markets are not supercomputational - markets are merely one heuristic that works well for some things and terribly for others. If we were talking about say how many gas or electric vehicle charging stations to build and where, that's something that is decently handled decently by private investment. But an endeavor where the gains from discoveries will end up distributed and a private investor can't reap most rewards from their investment won't be.
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-07-29 15:31:37+00:00
In my misspent youth I've tried to introduce Cucumber/Gherkin a couple of different times but it's something with a deceptive promise.

The preconditions are that you have domain experts or business people interested and willing to engage in writing or reviewing these tests. Unless you have this and it's something that those people are going to sustain when the going gets tough you're just making writing tests harder for no real benefit.
by Razengan | 2025-07-29 15:31:49+00:00
Frankly I wouldn't mind going on a one-way trip into deep space. Heck I'd volunteer right now.

Don't have to go to a planet, just fly by and drift through.

Actual eyes and hands on a craft can observe more directly and in real time compared to remotely controlled instruments, so the trip would provide scientific benefits for the rest of humanity too.

I don't need to eat a lot. Just give me a fast internet connection.

In fact I'm surprised there aren't any projects like this.
by quantumHazer | 2025-07-29 15:32:02+00:00
> You simultaneously advocate for thoughtful digital participation (creating “digital footprints” as a form of conscious legacy-building) while criticizing how we’ve become “conditioned to react with likes, dislikes, and millions of emojis.” You want to use digital tools for meaningful intellectual work while rejecting the reactive culture they create.

This is absolutely not a contradiction, and it provides evidence that even frontier models are really bad at this type of reasoning at the moment. There is a difference between how we use the internet and what we publish on it. There are plenty of people who have a blog and publish content on the internet without having any social media presence. I myself have a blog in plain HTML/CSS without any tracking or analytics on the website. Maybe Cloudflare provides some, but I haven't looked into this
by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-29 15:32:05+00:00
interviews should be about determining whether you can use the tools available to deliver the desired product, not some sort of purity test to determine whether you can build without tools. also I want to see you interact w AI because as of right now it's both an incredible and deeply flawed tool and your ability to recognize when it's about to walk you off a cliff is of increasing importance as we discover the limits of what it can do.
by slfnflctd | 2025-07-29 15:32:11+00:00
> write a story and try to get your friends to critique it and you will find that it's very hard to get honest feedback

I was one of the friends critiquing another friend's writing, and we did so honestly-- after we were done, he never spoke to us about writing again. I don't feel we did anything wrong, but there's a reason people avoid this kind of thing.

Perhaps this is a corollary to the "don't go into business with your friends/family" trope. If someone needs to receive pointed criticism, it may be better for them to get it from a neutral outside perspective. Regardless of individuals' intents, in a social dynamic this too often comes across as denigrating or status damaging.
by taeric | 2025-07-29 15:32:26+00:00
Something that I keep meaning to dive more on here, is an exploration of why spaced repetition and active recall work. I saw a study once that indicated it was largely the "guess and check" aspect of combining these that worked.

That is, some people will approach spaced repetition as a means to re-consume the information. But, sadly, that doesn't really work. Instead, those that use it as a means to attempt active recall, effectively "guessing" the answer and then immediately checking that result do see massive gains.

To that end, I'm curious if this describes your approach when it works?
by narrator | 2025-07-29 15:32:37+00:00
Christian nationalists have properly been identified by James Lindsay and others as the "woke right." They deserve that title because they think, like the woke left, that their needs to be some vanguard with unlimited power to "fix" society, and that the constitution, separation of powers and objective justice and meritocracy need to be done away with. Of course as soon as they gain power, all the white christian people who supported them get sent to die in a stupid war in a trench somewhere. That's the big joke with communist/fascist revolutions. Their supporters all think they will have a special place in the government after the revolution, but most of them wind up dead in a trench(Hitler) or doing hard labor in primitive conditions in the countryside(Mao), or purged (Stalin).
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-29 15:32:53+00:00
I mean, yes and. I'm sure that social media of all stripes is rife with funded propaganda. It's been proven several times. It helps them tremendously that to tear the United States and other western powers to shreds, all you have to do is point at the facts on the ground. Our governments are completely in the pocket of corporations and barely if at all represent any actual people's will, the only people's will they express interest in being directly traceable to various hate campaigns they themselves concoct (fucking with transpeople, fucking with sex workers, etc.) while the rest of the country has the copper pried out of the walls by these low-rent grifters.

I don't need China to tell me via Tiktok that my life is getting demonstrably worse. I know that. The fact that China gets to tell me and be completely honest whilst doing so isn't something they've "engineered," they're just pointing at reality.
by ben_w | 2025-07-29 15:33:00+00:00
> Humans can observe ants and invent any colony optimization. AIs can’t.

Surely this is exactly what current AI do? Observe stuff and apply that observation? Isn't this the exact criticism, that they aren't inventing ant colonies from first principles without ever seeing one?

> Humans can explore what they don’t know. AIs can’t.

We only learned to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs because of the Rosetta Stone. There's no translation for North Sentinelese, the Voynich manuscript, or Linear A.

We're not magic.
by simonw | 2025-07-29 15:33:03+00:00
I just took a look, and the man page DOES explain how to do that!

... on line 3,218: https://gist.github.com/simonw/6fc05ea7392c5fb8a5621d65e0ed0...

(I am very confident I am not the only person who has been deterred by ffmpeg's legendarily complex command-line interface. I feel no shame about this at all.)
by tobinfekkes | 2025-07-29 15:33:06+00:00
> Homeschooled kids often do well on tests - but they all lack an awareness of the real world

My experience has been the exact opposite, almost exclusively. I witness them not performing as well on tests in the high school/college years, but excel at the "real world" afterwards. To the point that they look "behind" in school, but then leapfrog their peers in the post-college years. They're particularly better equipped in the subjective "adulting" areas, and not just the "maximize income" area.
by johnfn | 2025-07-29 15:33:25+00:00
> A tool that randomly and unpredictably fails is a bad tool.

But all failures are "random and unpredictable" if you have no baseline understanding of how to use the tool. "AIs hallucinate" is probably the single most obvious thing about AIs. This isn't a subtle misunderstanding that an expert could make. This is like using a drill on your face.
by jghn | 2025-07-29 15:33:30+00:00
I agree with you that the real rubric is that I'd expect the candidate to be able to explain everything they did and why. For the most part I don't care how they got there.

Was thinking about this recently in a conversation about whether or not the candidate should have a full screen share so that interviewers could see what they're looking up, etc. I realized that I'd reached the point where I now trust my fellow interviewers less than I do the candidate at these bits. Personally I think it's nice to see how people are leveraging tools, but too often I see interviewers dig candidates anyways on the specifics.

I've now found this across multiple companies now has been that when coding exercises are "open book" like this that other interviewers *are* actively judging people based on what they're googling, and these days LLMing. If you're going to allow google but then fall back to "I can't believe they had to look *that* up!", that's not how it works.
by starik36 | 2025-07-29 15:33:44+00:00
Sure, technically. But to this day, majorities support Oct 7th attack, both in Gaza and West Bank.

That's like saying in WW2, we can't attack Berlin because there are innocent Germans who don't support Nazis.

So how exactly do you propose to fight Hamas in an urban environment when it's blending in to the population that largely supports them (and only put on a uniform during propaganda events like hostage handovers)?
by lblissett | 2025-07-29 15:34:04+00:00
Worth noting that this bill was introduced in 2021 and passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative governments, all of which were fairly libertarian/anti-state at least in their rhetorical positioning.

I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.
by aaronjbecker | 2025-07-29 15:34:15+00:00
Can an LLM speculate on name origins using the same kind of "when and where" data a human expert might use? Here's my attempt to find out.

Or does this quest to produce less-sloppy name meaning content just add to the mountain of slop already on the internet...?

Interactive directory with links to the inferred origins, for your reviewing entertainment: https://nameplay.org/list/names-with-inferred-origins
by phkahler | 2025-07-29 15:34:24+00:00
So I scanned the beginning of the generated code, picked line 83:

animation: glow 2s ease-in-out infinite;

stuffed it verbatim into google and found a stack overflow discussion that contained this:

animation: glow .5s infinite alternate;

in under one minute. Then I found this page of CSS effects:

https://alvarotrigo.com/blog/animated-backgrounds-css/

Another page has examples and contains:

animation: float 15s infinite ease-in-out;

There is just too much internet to scan for an exact match or a match of larger size.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-29 15:34:25+00:00
Well, while I agree with the second half of your statement. It only applies to when you're testing on-the-job performance. If you want to test if somebody learned multiplication then you do need to take away a calculator otherwise you're just testing if they can multiply.

I'm not sure when an employer should really care about whether their cashier can add/subtract correctly vs just use the output from the machine. But in the education setting where you're making a claim that students will learn X you should be testing X.
by captainbland | 2025-07-29 15:34:26+00:00
The problem to me is this thing is full of holes. It basically just sets up ID checks but it can only do that on accountable websites who self select to do so. It can't stop people sharing extreme content on WhatsApp groups for example which are one of the modes of communication increasing in popularity the fastest.

As it happens I am from the UK and have no particular love for the way the US handles things either. In fact one of my biggest problems is that it encourages us to send extra PII to some of the most odiously associated US companies out there.

But in general I don't think doggedly pursuing this route where children get access to the full internet sans some self-selecting sites with ID checks is the way to go. There's too much out there which is outside the realms of accountability. If everyone installs VPNs (which appears to be what's going on, especially given that far more than just pornography is being blocked this way) then guess what happens when the child borrows the shared family device?

People want a magical solution which exonerates caregivers from having to worry about this and shifts the burden elsewhere but unfortunately one doesn't exist and the online safety act certainly isn't it. Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-29 15:34:28+00:00
I'm anti-DRM myself, but someone else could argue that the rules are partly doing their job; preventing companies from just gobbling up digital copies, it just happens that they have he resources to take advantage of a loophole by scanning the books in themselves.

The best solution I can come up with would be a digital library where one org, say the internet archive has scanned everything once, then they're charge a licence fee to these orgs to ingest a copy, and the part of the payment goes to the author, no big wastage, the information gets archived and the orgs pay their share.
by bjoli | 2025-07-29 15:34:37+00:00
Well,I don't know about a population that have displaced and occupied/imprisoned for such a long time. I feel fine calling the refugees.

And don't try to claim Israel left Gaza in 2006

Area C is still under Israeli control, despite them promising to leave the are 30 years ago. And they keep on allowing new illegal settlements. Considering how much area was under the jurisdiction of settlements (well over 40% in 2010) the 22 new settlements in 2024 is potentially a huge land grab.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-29 15:34:46+00:00
> But all failures are "random and unpredictable" if you have no baseline understanding of how to use the tool.

But the tool's behavior changed. In ways that even its creators didn't intend (example: https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/), and had to work to undo.

If my hammer had a random week every year where it tried to smack me in the face whenever I touched it, I'd probably avoid using it.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-29 15:35:21+00:00
Hey, that's a lot of mental gymanstics for saying "I dislike cyclists going slow on the road so I'll take it out on their sport".

If you had the opposite idea of "doping is okay in sports" and applied the categorical imperative to it, we'd have a bunch of roided superman doing insane sports and it would be awesome. Daniel Tosh of all people proposed this jokingly in some standup years ago but why not just admit that everyone is doping and accept it?
by nickpsecurity | 2025-07-29 15:35:25+00:00
The differences are vulnerability disclosure, vulnerability class, and patch availability. The device is most-vulnerable between the moment common hackers know how to exploit it and when a patch (or mitigation) for that vulnerability is applied.

Older hardware has had longer for vulnerabilities to be found. Some might not mitigate new classes of vulnerabilities. The EOL hardware will not receive patches for any vulnerabilities. So, they're at higher risk of attack.

From there, the attack will be either malicious input to that machine over the network or a file that embeds an attack. Many problems can be mitigated by running secure software, esp for input validation, on that hardware. One might also use them offline or on trusted networks with software that's hand-chosen for them. (That's what I do.)
by Const-me | 2025-07-29 15:35:44+00:00
> Are there APIs which can sidestep the "load to CPU RAM" part?

On windows that API is Desktop Duplication. The API delivers D3D11 textures, usually in BGRA8_UNORM format. When HDR is enabled you would need slightly different API method which can deliver HDR frames in RGBA16_FLOAT pixel format.
by nemomarx | 2025-07-29 15:36:09+00:00
Sure, but if they don't already know they have to ask to see ID or try the video estimation stuff, right?

That's a lot more data leakage than some central authentication for it, and PII going to more places. And it's very optimistic to assume implementations will be good faith and secure.

I'm not sure I would call the USC a mark of quality right now anyway.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-29 15:36:43+00:00
The US has more history to it than just the last 6 months, and some of us recall that while Trump puts on a big show with lots of heat and noise, there's rarely much light. If you look at actual deportations, he lags behind previous administrations.

So no, putting the frenzy over this administration aside, and recognizing that the US has more history and more of a future than the rule of one man, what I said holds.
by vova_hn | 2025-07-29 15:36:54+00:00
I remember the first time I visited the DLang website. I clicked “What is D used for?” [0] and scrolled to the very first section, “1. Industry.” The opening example was “1. Games,” so naturally I went to read more…and found the first link, “AAA game,” was dead. It led straight to an error page on Xbox.

That was years ago. After reading your comment, I decided to check again. The same “AAA game” link is still first, and it’s still broken.

You can’t really call that “a good presentation of a language” when the very first real-world example links to nowhere—and nobody’s bothered to fix it for years.

[0] https://dlang.org/areas-of-d-usage.html
by bgwalter | 2025-07-29 15:36:56+00:00
Zuckerberg has no clue about software development. He always wants young people, huge bullpen offices, moonshot projects like the Metaverse that fail.

Facebook open source software does not have great code quality. In some projects that always have been a huge mess they are now adding claude.md files to guide their beloved "AI". They did not add these files for humans before.

I think Facebook software is a lost case where it does not matter if you perform the weekly rewriting by LLM or by kLOC driven humans.
by registeredcorn | 2025-07-29 15:37:10+00:00
>the benefit of smart play doesn't seem as significant compared to doping up and pressing hard.

For the athlete, or for the team?

For professional racing strategy is in the hands of the team members on the sidelines - it's less of a team sport (as in athlete) and more of a group sport (as in information parity.) Whether it's motor races or TdF, there's a significant number of factors to consider. What you are going to have your team do? What are other teams doing? What you should do in response to what they're doing? What will they do in response to your response? What is the average performance of your team? What is the current and maximum performance? What's the condition of the equipment? What tires are being used? What is the forecast for the next few hours? How will changes in weather impact the equipment used? Will you have enough spares to make it through? Do you have good comms between you and the athletes? Etc.

For example, sometimes two athletes on the same team might be one behind the other, only for the coach to tell the lead to let the other teammate to pass. For the audience, it might be unclear why or it might even feel unfair, but there are reasons why they made that call.

Maybe the leader looks gassed and needs to hang back to collect himself.

Maybe they want to encourage the secondary by giving him the reigns for a while, and in turn, push the lead to work harder.

Maybe they want to keep the wear and tear a little lower on the lead by holding him back in case a team close behind ends up overtaking in a sharp turn up ahead.

Maybe they're worried about a pile up that hasn't been cleared yet.

Maybe the sun will be facing the direction of their next turn, so the secondary is providing shade for the lead.

So on and so fourth. An individual athlete can only receive and process so much of that information in a cohesive way.