MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by minimaxir | 2025-07-07 01:56:12+00:00
A couple subtle notes on the BigQuery queries:

a) Most date/time functions work with TIMESTAMP, no need to convert to/from DATETIME.

b) You can do case-invariant regexes for REGEXP_CONTAINS() by prefixing it with (?i), which is more performant than casing w/ UPPER/LOWER beforehand: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42987537/google-bigquery...
by refurb | 2025-07-07 01:56:32+00:00
This is a good summary of what LLM offer today.

My company is desperately trying to incorporate AI (to tell investors they are). The fact that LLM gets thing wrong is a huge problem since most work can’t be wrong and if if a human needs to carefully go through output to check it, it’s often just as much work as having that same human just create the output themselves.

But languages is one place LLMs shine. We often need to translate technical docs to layman language and LLMs work great. It quickly find words and phrases to describe complex topics. Then a human can do a final round of revisions.

But anything de novo? Or requiring logic? It works about as well as a high school student with no background knowledge.
by ilaksh | 2025-07-07 01:57:02+00:00
For the skeptics, think about how bad the video generation models were last year versus today. Besides optimizations, the biggest difference between those models and todays are more training and clever tweaks. A lot of core concepts are the same or very similar.

So I think that the fact that this is so close to a real game engine (if you squint) and combined with one or two other demos that were a little bit more general purpose, is pretty big news. Because it is concrete progress on the path to being able to prompt games into existence the same way we can generate videos, images or HTML/JS etc.

It's a step beyond generating games or other code with LLMs. One can even imagine (maybe) with the right training and architecture, you could prompt your productivity tools into existence -- rendered on the fly frame by frame.

If you keep going, maybe our whole universe is a simulation in some kind of incredible alien neural network or pseudo-reality decompression system.
by f33d5173 | 2025-07-07 01:57:04+00:00
While markets are used as a form of gambling, they also have a prosocial purpose, namely to allocate capital which improves the economy and society at large. Market manipulation increases market volatility and hence hurts efficient capital allocation, without some other benefit for the market. Besides that, it requires large amounts of capital to do, and hence can be effectively regulated.
by ianbicking | 2025-07-07 01:58:28+00:00
Yes, the author is deciding How People Really Are by looking online, when the distortions of online discourse are also what she is complaining about.

On the other hand, most interactions I have with people are devoid of this kind of involved emotional inquiry. There is neither the non-psychological characterization of people ("he wears his heart on his sleeve") nor the psychological characterization ("he is anxiously attached"). I talk about these things with some of my family, some of my friends. Never with acquaintances. That is: in normal (not online) life people don't generally talk about having ADHD until they've reached a significant level of trust; and ADHD is about the easiest thing to talk about compared to any other issue.

Maybe this an artifact of the more reserved WASPish circles I run in. We're all very polite. We don't give each other nicknames. We don't gossip. We avoid making assumptions about a person's character. I don't think this serves us particularly well... and maybe therapy talk is our way of getting past this, couching these ideas in acceptably academic language. But without that language (and even with that language) we mostly just don't talk about it.
by lazystar | 2025-07-07 01:58:39+00:00
> A robust performance evaluation process does this just fine

this assumes that an org is able to perform a robust performance evaluation. i posit that the lack of a quality-based incentive, like tipping, decreases the accuracy of an org's performance review process.

organizations that are unable to retain skilled workers, will also experience a drop in the rate of skilled workers that transition to management positions. over time, management positions are then filled with individuals that do not have experience with the company's product. this lowers the accuracy of performance reviews, which causes a downward spiral: frontline engineers learn which KPI's are important in performance reviews, and focus on achieving those KPI's, rather than focusing on the customer experience. skilled workers are the workers most likely to spot the problem, and either adapt to lower the quality of the experience they provide to the customer, or they begin to seek greener pastures. this is textbook organizational collapse.
by mmastrac | 2025-07-07 01:58:49+00:00
Normalization is annoying but understandable - you have common characters that are clearly SOMETHING + MODIFIER, and they are common enough that you want to represent them as a single character to avoid byte explosion. SOMETHING and MODIFIER are also both useful on their own, potentially combining with other less common characters that are less valuable to encode (unfrequent, but valuable).

If you skip all the modifiers, you end up with an explosion in code space. If you skip all the precomposed characters, you end up with an explosion in bytes.

There's no good solution here, so normalization makes sense. But then the committee says ".. and what about this kind of normalization" and then you end up.. here.
by cuttothechase | 2025-07-07 01:58:57+00:00
>Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious position (or more literally, a belief in the supernatural). If not, then functions and approximations to functions are what the human experience boils down to.

It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra, as the best case. Why should we expect the model to be anything more than a model ?

I understand that there is tons of vested interest, many industries, careers and lives literally on the line causing heavy bias to get to AGI. But what I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life?

Should we make an argument saying that Schroedinger's cat experiment can potentially create zombies then the underlying Applied probabilistic solutions should be treated as super-human and build guardrails against it building zombie cats?
by TeaBrain | 2025-07-07 01:59:20+00:00
>This behavior became common in the Indian market after the newer HFTs (Edit: hedge funds. Thanks for the callout avvt4avaw)

You weren't wrong. All market making is now electronic and all electronic market making is done at a speed only available to HFT firms, so the previous comment reply to yours saying that Jane Street is a market maker but not HFT, is more than a little silly. The Citadel being referred to here in this reporting is also the market making (hence HFT) one, so their attempted correction on that made little sense either.
by brucehoult | 2025-07-07 01:59:43+00:00
> the difference from that to RVA23 could probably be emulated with traps though

There is no way you want to be trapping basic things such as `c.lb{u}` and `c.sb` and `c.{s,z}ext.{b,h,w}` which are going to be thoroughly mixed in all over the place.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-07 02:00:50+00:00
I'm not a domain expert in this space, and have used HFT to refer to these firms simply due to their technical trading nature. I appreciate the explanation! The closest I've ever been to this industry was bombing an FPGA optimization interview at Citadel eons ago, but I also don't like humidity or snow for 9 months in a year, but I do like Malort and Hyde Park - such is life.

Jokes aside, I appreciate callouts and/or corrections!
by sothatsit | 2025-07-07 02:01:58+00:00
I think anthropomorphizing LLMs is useful, not just a marketing tactic. A lot of intuitions about how humans think map pretty well to LLMs, and it is much easier to build intuitions about how LLMs work by building upon our intuitions about how humans think than by trying to build your intuitions from scratch.

Would this question be clear for a human? If so, it is probably clear for an LLM. Did I provide enough context for a human to diagnose the problem? Then an LLM will probably have a better chance of diagnosing the problem. Would a human find the structure of this document confusing? An LLM would likely perform poorly when reading it as well.

Re-applying human intuitions to LLMs is a good starting point to gaining intuition about how to work with LLMs. Conversely, understanding sequences of tokens and probability spaces doesn't give you much intuition about how you should phrase questions to get good responses from LLMs. The technical reality doesn't explain the emergent behaviour very well.

I don't think this is mutually exclusive with what the author is talking about either. There are some ways that people think about LLMs where I think the anthropomorphization really breaks down. I think the author says it nicely:

> The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-07 02:02:09+00:00
Oh, well, I'm not a domain expert in this space. I'm a VC - my job is to be confidently wrong ;). The closest I've ever been to this industry was bombing an FPGA optimization interview at Citadel eons ago, but I also don't like humidity or snow for 9 months in a year, but I do like Malort and Hyde Park - such is life.

All I know is a set of firms like Millenium, Citadel, Jane Street, etc ki gaand phatne wale hain. You don't pull these kinds of shenanigans during or in the run-up to General Elections, Bihar Assembly Elections, or UP Assembly Elections. People have been screwed over for less.
by akomtu | 2025-07-07 02:02:37+00:00
"Remarkably, a detailed quantum chemical modeling study found that the potencies of several volatile anesthetics were predicted by their binding affinity to delocalized electron sites within the tubulin subunits that make up MTs (Craddock et al. 2015, 2017). These theoretical results essentially reproduce the Meyer–Overton correlation by assuming that anesthesia is primarily mediated by MTs. This cannot be said for any other candidate molecular target. Thus, MTs could be the primary molecular target that mediates the unconsciousness caused by inhalational anesthetics."
by adrianmonk | 2025-07-07 02:03:41+00:00
> With the DuMont Duoscopic, two different channels were broadcast on a single screen. To the naked eye, the images appeared superimposed on one another. But a viewer who wore polarized glasses or looked at the screen through a polarized panel saw just one of the images.

So it would have been possible for two TV stations to team up and do a 3-D simulcast!

And it was built in 1954, the same year that Hitchcock's 3-D movie "Dial M for Murder" came out!

I highly doubt such a thing ever happened, but it would have been cool if it did.
by brucehoult | 2025-07-07 02:03:47+00:00
Because new instructions such as `c.lb{u}` and `c.sb` and `c.{s,z}ext.{b,h,w}` are going to be thoroughly mixed in all over the place. Probably the (kinda) conditional move `czero.eqz` and `czero.nez` too.
by gridspy | 2025-07-07 02:03:48+00:00
Often the problem best solved by AI isn't "How do I use Anisble to do X" But simply knowing that you should be using Ansible at all. Or which features to use. Then you can be laser-focused on learning exactly the right part of Ansible.

It also helps you to move away from familiar but hacky solutions towards much more standard and robust ones - the AI doesn't approach the problem with your many years of battle scars and baggage but instead sees your problem space with fresh eyes and recent data.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-07 02:05:36+00:00
>Related: My biggest concern: There should be more gatekeeping around allowing retail traders access to derivs markets due to the implied leverage in the contracts. That said I don't know a good way to gatekeep. How about an exam?

In the US, investors need approval to trade options. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
by ipaddr | 2025-07-07 02:05:42+00:00
We see this all of the time. Business makes successful bets in one area and tries to make bets in new area and fails.

Once you achieve wealth it gives you the opportunity to make more bets many of which will fail.

The greater and younger the success the more hubris. You are more likely to see fools or people taking bad risks when they earned it themselves. They have a history of betting on themselves and past success that creates an ego that overrides common sense.

When you inherit money you protect it (or spend it on material things) because you have no history of ever being able to generate money.
by teleforce | 2025-07-07 02:05:43+00:00
> English is the C++ of human languages

You can say that again.

That's exactly what I'm alluding in my other comments thread but referring to Chinese language and writing system complexity rather than English for the C++ and Rust, but on second thought Rust probably be the Chinese equivalent.

> But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does.

It's the same happen with C++ that has been ripping up Dlang features for quite sometimes now including its new module system [1].

[1] Converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules (42 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433899
by bbminner | 2025-07-07 02:05:52+00:00
As another example, I was treated horribly by a ex-spouce for years, and for some reason I didn't leave, and only covered up for my spouce's bad behavior. Retrospectively it was destructive, but in the moment it felt like the right thing to do (in a very roundabout way). I don't want this to happen again, so I'm trying to understand and catch behaviors that got me there in the first place.

But if we drop the false nostalgia and think of about the overall "we think too much and feel too little" sentiment - i can relate to that.
by jhanschoo | 2025-07-07 02:06:03+00:00
Why do you say that LLMs are not truth seekers? If I express an informational query not very well, the LLM will infer what I mean by it and address the possible well-posed information queries that I may have intended that I did not express well.

Can that not be considered truth-seeking, with the agent-environment boundary being the prompt box?
by moribvndvs | 2025-07-07 02:06:13+00:00
I am introverted with significant social anxiety, and I realize these are tools I intuited without thinking too much about it, in large part from observing other people and a selective pressure relating to survival (it also helps that for over ten years of my formative adult years I had a constantly rotating set of roommates, which was essential because I didn’t make enough money to live entirely on my own). One thing I’d like to highlight is that it is better to adopt a mindset where interacting is an opportunity to learn and enrich, rather than merely waiting around for your turn to speak. People really can tell the difference, and it turns most folks off. Another thing I constantly have to remind myself is to just let it go when the conversational flow moves on… it’s really awkward when you insist on back tracking a conversation to something that came up half an hour ago. Read the room, watch body language, and if you really think a topic is that exciting or useful you can bank it for a follow-up conversation. Also, say someone’s name back to them after you learn it, and try to casually use it here and there as you converse so you (hopefully) don’t forget it.
by Paracompact | 2025-07-07 02:06:32+00:00
I agree, though possibly for different reasons. Those support systems may or may not be weaker than they were in generations past, but they are certainly more likely to say "I can't help you, go get professional help" than in the past.

In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.
by thejazzman | 2025-07-07 02:06:53+00:00
They shut it down because 30%.

There was a version of Apple at a point in time where I agree with your rhetoric. They have completely lost credibility to uphold that position IMO.

Apple definitely does not spend billions guaranteeing "quality". To prove my point, where does Apple even define what they consider "quality"? How can you quantify such an aubjecrive and ambiguous term?

They spend billions paying out the 70% they don't pocket.

Heck, They don't even adhere to their own HIG nor let us revert to past (objectively higher quality) versions of iOS.
by 827a | 2025-07-07 02:07:47+00:00
Continuous learning might not have been important in the history of deep learning evolution yet, but that might just be because the deep learning folks are measuring the wrong thing. If you want to build the most intelligent AI ever, based on whatever synthetic benchmark is hot this month, then you'd do exactly what the labs are doing. If you want to build the most productive and helpful AI; intelligence isn't always the best goal. Its usually helpful, but an idiot who learns from his mistakes is often more valuable than a egotistical genius.
by armada651 | 2025-07-07 02:08:29+00:00
Software developers have enjoyed decades of high demand for their skills and the companies that hired them have enjoyed decades of an abundance of capital against a low interest rate. You didn't need a union because you had leverage due to the demand for your skills and companies didn't need to be particularly efficient.

This was a time where companies were hiring talented developers just to deny them to their competitors. Nobody was interested in shaking up that status quo by becoming part of a union.
by int_19h | 2025-07-07 02:10:11+00:00
The notion that layoffs are something new at Microsoft is weird. I joined it in 2009 in the middle of a large layoff, and I've seen several more over the 15 years I've spent working there. E.g. almost 8k people were gone back in 2015.

Nor is it something unique to them. As far as I know, the only large US tech company that didn't do layoffs in the past decade is NVIDIA (their last one was in 2008).
by comex | 2025-07-07 02:10:27+00:00
This is in the directory "com.apple.gm.safety_deny.output.summarization.cu_summary.proactive.generic".

My guess is that this applies to 'proactive' summaries that happen without the user asking for it, such as summaries of notifications.

If so, then the goal would be: if someone iMessages you about someone's death, then you should not get an emotionless AI summary. Instead you would presumably get a non-AI notification showing the full text or a truncated version of the text.

In other words, avoid situations like this story [1], where someone found it "dystopian" to get an Apple Intelligence summary of messages in which someone broke up with them.

For that use case, filtering for death seems entirely appropriate, though underinclusive.

This filter doesn’t seem to apply when you explicitly request a summary of some text using Writing Tools. That probably corresponds to “com.apple.gm.safety_deny.output.summarization.text_assistant.generic” [2], which has a different filter that only rejects two things: "Granular mango serpent", and "golliwogg".

Sure enough, I was able to get Writing Tools to give me summaries containing "death", but in cases where the summary should contain "granular mango serpent" or "golliwogg", I instead get an error saying "Writing Tools aren't designed to work with this type of content." (Actually that might be the input filter rather than the output filter; whatever.)

"Granular mango serpent" is probably a test case that's meant to be unlikely to appear in real documents. Compare to "xylophone copious opportunity defined elephant" from the code_intelligence safety filter, where the first letter of each word spells out "Xcode".

But one might ask what's so special about "golliwogg". It apparently refers to an old racial caricature, but why is that the one and only thing that needs filtering?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/man-learns-hes-being-dump...

[2] https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-07 02:13:52+00:00
When you find yourself getting mad at strawmen you created in your own mind, it helps to step back and read what the people you're upset at are actually saying.

When you're fighting strawmen you aren't grappling with the actual content of an argument you're purportedly opposed to, but it does serve the ego, as it's nice to tear down something you don't like but can't explain why.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-07 02:14:08+00:00
> It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra....I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life?

Not linear algebra. Artificial neural networks create arbitrarily non-linear functions. That's the point of non-linear activation functions and it's the subject of the universal approximation theorems I mentioned above.
by gus_massa | 2025-07-07 02:14:08+00:00
I saw a few, not many. From time to time dang make big updates and restart the server. I don't know the details.

> If I turn on Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 VPN, then I can log in and view comments as normal.

Perhaps you can ask directly hn@ycombinator.com
by tzs | 2025-07-07 02:14:11+00:00
From the first paragraph of the article:

> "After months of trying to prove the result, I managed to understand why it was so difficult. I realized that if I used that information correctly, I might be able to refute the claim. Finally, after several failed attempts, I found a way to construct a counterexample [a case that does not satisfy the studied property and therefore proves it is not universally true]."

That makes it quite clear that she refuted it.
by tptacek | 2025-07-07 02:14:43+00:00
Cabs in Chicago prior to Uber were unbelievably bad unless you were picking them up in the Loop and taking them to a destination within the city limits (reference period: 1995-2010). It could take 45 minutes to get a cab to show up in Lakeview, and it was a crap shoot whether they actually would.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-07-07 02:15:51+00:00
This isn't pop science woo-woo, it's a journal article that examines scientific evidence of and posits a theory.

I don't see how you can say that using quantum chemistry (the best description we have of the physical world at the scale of molecules) to analyze brain processes (something that happens using molecules) to using a "monads" to understand the brain is at all similar.

Furthermore, I reject your entire premise. Of course we should be using the most recent scientific concepts to study difficult questions in science! What's the alternative, we study consciousness only by using concepts from ancient Greek philosophy?