MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by squidbeak | 2025-07-30 11:25:11+00:00
> It's also off-the-charts implausible to say that our performance on adding up substantially degrades with the introduction of irrelevant information

Didn't you ever sit an exam next to a irresistibly gorgeous girl? Or haven't you ever gone to work in the middle of a personal crisis? Or filled out a form while people were rowing in your office? Or written code with a pneumatic drill and banging outdoors?

That's the kind of irrelevant information in our working context that will often degrade human performance. Can you really argue noise in a prompt is any different?
by diggan | 2025-07-30 11:25:12+00:00
> I'm currently learning Janet and using ChatGPT as my tutor is absolutely awful

Yeah, slightly outside of "mainstream" technologies tend to have lots of hallucinated material. The only thing I've found to work is O3 + "Search" enabled for those cases, tends to help a lot, what models and tools are/were you using?

For reference, this is what O3 + Search + My custom prompt gets as a result, which seems good and informative: https://chatgpt.com/share/688a0134-0f5c-8001-815d-b18c92875a...

Another note, as it seems like your example is part of a longer conversation, try to restart the conversation instead of adding more messages when something is wrong. All models I've tried (even Pro-mode on ChatGPT) degrades quickly past the first message, like a lot. Only workaround to that issue is restarting the conversation with new context rather than continuing with a context that contains errors.
by bpt3 | 2025-07-30 11:26:58+00:00
Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth...

And to claim that new articles aren't important or that the ACM will never publish a highly impactful paper again is absurd.

Enjoy your free access to a wealth of human knowledge you played no part in creating, rather than waving a meaningless declaration around demanding more for nothing and demeaning individual authors.
by 7thaccount | 2025-07-30 11:27:13+00:00
I think the kind of plastic model kits like building muscle cars and ships has died down, but Warhammer and Gundam are both extremely popular. Battletech and Star Wars are also popular in my area.

There are a lot of Warhammer models and the parent company "Games Workshop" is doing extremely well and expanding despite it all being built in Britain. One neat thing about Warhammer is that there are a LOT of books and video games as well, so the IP is very strong. There is always new lore coming out from the various factions too, so the models have special connections with the fans. I have 3 game stores in my medium-sized city that cater to Warhammer and there is always a game going on. Warning: it is a very expensive hobby.

There is also a lot of popularity with 3D printing. I'd check out thingaverse or other popular 3d model sites to see how many downloads are coming from WW2 and muscle car models to maybe get a feel why hobby shops are struggling.

Modeling never died. It just evolved a bit. If you were ever into the WW2 kits, I'd check out Bolt-Action if you're interested in wargaming with models. It's not as big as 40k, but people do play.
by diggan | 2025-07-30 11:29:18+00:00
> Yes, I have to tell it a lot of things. Like that I use Linux (Ubuntu version also), that I want to use emacs and not nano, etc. It would be nice if I could say it once and for all.

You can add this to the system prompt, or "customize prompt" or whatever the service/runner calls it. Basically instructions you want it to always follow. I have my hardware described there, what tools I commonly use and so on, so asking "How do I see running processes?" for example would already assume I'm using Arch Linux and so on.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-07-30 11:29:59+00:00
> Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.

Not just phones. Most wide-angles for "serious cameras" have distortion and rely on digital correction. See [0] for an extreme example in the form of a 16mm Canon, which is much less wide than the iPhone lens.

[0] https://photographylife.com/reviews/canon-rf-16mm-f-2-8/2
by Zambyte | 2025-07-30 11:31:06+00:00
People often bring up the incredible efficiency improvements of LLMs over the last few years, but I don't think people do a really good job of putting it into perspective just how much more efficient they have gotten. I have a machine in my home with a single RX 7900 XTX in it. On that machine, I am able to run language models that blow GPT-3.5 Turbo out of the water in terms of quality, knowledge, and even speed! That is crazy to think about when you consider how large and capable that model was.

I can often get away with just using models locally in contexts that I care about privacy. Sometimes I will use more capable models through APIs to generate richer prompts than I could write myself to be able to better guide local models too.
Show HN: AutoMQ 1.5.0 released, providing native Iceberg support for Kafka
by NewByteHacker | 2025-07-30 11:31:09+00:00
AutoMQ is a fully open-source, next-generation Kafka built on top of S3. Version 1.5.0 is a very important release.

In March of this year, Confluent officially launched the commercial capability of Tableflow. Now, with the AutoMQ open-source software, you can also experience this killer feature.

Simply put, for Kafka streaming data, AutoMQ can automatically store it in S3 in Iceberg Table format, so you no longer need to manage Flink Jobs and Spark Jobs yourself to perform ETL operations and convert Kafka data into table format. We believe this will be the new paradigm for Kafka stream data analytics in the future, and we look forward to more open-source and Kafka enthusiasts trying out this feature.
by bjackman | 2025-07-30 11:31:14+00:00
An idle observation about bureaucracy:

In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't.

Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between:

- I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult.

To:

- We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares.

I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent.

And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.
by Xss3 | 2025-07-30 11:31:46+00:00
My manager and our qa team like that they can read what we are testing step by step in plain English and reason about it the same way. If they want a new step they often request it in a similar format to the ones we have written, or directly suggest reusing a step from another test.

You dont get that for free, but i disagree with it being a 'mess' of regex...Regex for test steps is usually as simple as a basic string or number capture pattern. It's 100% a skill issue if it ends up 'messy'.

If you need something more complicated than regex you use a data source file for parameters with named columns....Which brings me nicely round to how easy it is for qa or management to look at the data being tested and again, reason about it, make suggestions, spot missing cases, etc.
by diggan | 2025-07-30 11:31:51+00:00
> I ask because every serious study on using modern generative AI tools

There are a lot of studies, and I can't say I've read all of them, but the ones I have read, there hasn't been much focus on how the participants used the LLM to learn. My guess is that it has a lot of effect on the end results. Someone just asking for the answer and then thinking "Lets remember this" will have very different results than someone who does the Socratic method of learning together with a LLM, as just one example.
by diggan | 2025-07-30 11:34:08+00:00
> In the past we thought that the collective human knowledge available via the Internet will allow everyone to learn. I think it is fair to say that it didn't change much in the grand scheme of things.

Just an anecdote of course, but for me having access to the internet changed my life. I found a community I couldn't find locally (programming) as I'm from a rural place, and most of my employments since then have, in one way or another, come from people finding me on the internet. I'm surely not the only one who managed to climb the class ladder mostly because of the internet.
by herval | 2025-07-30 11:34:27+00:00
We’re firmly in a world where “cheat on everything” is an acceptable business, startups that were hacked together in a week at YC claim they have SOC2 and vibecoded GPT wrappers claim they “trained a model”. Shameless lying took over tech, and if anyone catches you lying, you double down, make a scene and a bunch of podcasts will talk about you. Free advertising!

Of course, dishonesty is as old as time, but these last couple of years have been hard to watch…
by ScammedMaxUser | 2025-07-30 11:34:40+00:00
Hey Anthropic - You're a bunch of incompetent greedy bastards who can't run a business without screwing over your own paying customers. Your "less than 5%" bullshit fooled nobody, your infrastructure is garbage (7 outages in a month?), and your CEO is probably too busy counting money to notice you're about to get sued into oblivion. Maybe next time don't bite the hand that feeds you, dipshits. We're $200/month customers, not your beta testers for your shitty capacity planning.
by dspillett | 2025-07-30 11:34:58+00:00
> sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day

Periods of sleep certainly seem to be used in that sort of way, but that is an extra use evolution found for the sleep cycle once it existed rather than the reason sleep developed in the first place.

There are a number of things that seem tied to, or at least aligned with, our wake/sleep cycle that likely didn't exist when sleep first came about.
by skydhash | 2025-07-30 11:37:04+00:00
I don't remember the exact book/article that prompted me, but I believe it's because everything software is designed by humans for humans. We invented formalism because it's a nice way to communicate truth about the world. Then we invented computers that act based on formal instructions. Then it's been us trying to replicate the world on top of computers. Paradigms are models of communication, data structures are models of information, algorithms are reusable instructions.
by pera | 2025-07-30 11:37:12+00:00
I am not sure if Mistral is: if you go to their GDPR page (https://help.mistral.ai/en/articles/347639-how-can-i-exercis...) and then to the erasure request section they just link to a "How can I delete my account?" page.

Unfortunately they don't provide information regarding their training sets (https://help.mistral.ai/en/articles/347390-does-mistral-ai-c...) but I think it's safe to assume it includes DataComp CommonPool.
by 317070 | 2025-07-30 11:37:24+00:00
> It's just that economies are systems with feedback loops that exist on islands of stability. Like a ball on top of a hill.

OK, I get that that is indeed what makes these headlines tick, but if we take a step back. That is a ridiculous way of looking at the economy.

* historically speaking, there is no stability to be found

* I don't see how the poor in the world would support this view that "stability is good"

* in fact, I'm sure economists would raise alarms if we would have zero growth for a long time.
by barnabee | 2025-07-30 11:38:05+00:00
I didn’t go to university to get a job[0].

For the reasons I went, primarily to learn for its own sake and to meet other likeminded, curious, and smart people (I didn’t grow up somewhere that was easy), university is not only credible but still seems like by far the best option for most young people. I’m not sure that’s as obviously true for potential mature students, though.

[0] I’m convinced that anyone who’s done well enough to have (or have had) the option of going to university can have a successful career as long as they’re motivated and willing to go where the work is
by arghwhat | 2025-07-30 11:39:02+00:00
One important note (also mentioned in the study) is that this may be a reverse causality.

Their study also indicates an association between high Artificially Sweetened Beverage ("ASB" in the study) consumption and high total calorie intake/obesity. The link may therefore that obesity was the cause of all diabetes incidents and that obese individuals tend to want to reduce weight by drinking diet soda (and are less likely to have preference for foods and drinks traditionally considered healthy like plain water or tea), without the diet soda consumption itself being a contributing factor.

(There will be many correlations like this - e.g., if you look at statistics for knee problems you might find a large overlap between people with diabetes and with knee problems, because obesity causes both more load on the knees and a higher risk of diabetes.)

Quote:

> The mechanisms linking high habitual consumption of ASBs and the risk of type 2 diabetes are not fully understood. It is suggested that reverse causality between obesity and ASB intake may partly explain the observed association, where individuals with relatively high BMI at baseline might be using ASB to try to reduce weight and follow a healthy lifestyle [35,37]. Our results, showing the attenuation of the association of ASB with type 2 diabetes after adjustment for body size measures, were consistent with supportive of obesity being a confounder of the association.
by Xss3 | 2025-07-30 11:41:20+00:00
I would bet they don't live rurally or havent been alive very long. Anyone rural alive over the last 30 years shouldve noticed a decline everywhere around them....would also expect them to notice bugs are different by the road to in the fields to by the ponds, and that different times of year, weather etc, changes which bugs are out and how many are out...its harder to notice these things in suburbs or cities.
by alphazard | 2025-07-30 11:41:39+00:00
> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered.

There are layers to this, some of which are definitely not ancient mysteries. We sleep because the environment has a day-night cycle. If any task an organism must perform is better done during the day, then evolution has a very clear gradient towards only doing that thing during the day. That leads to doing other things at night, since it would be comparatively advantageous to do them at night, given whatever task is most benefited from being done during the day.

If there wasn't a day-night cycle it's unlikely that the brain would have evolved to crucially depend on approximately a night's worth of time of not using the body.
by codingdave | 2025-07-30 11:41:47+00:00
If you feel that the purpose of higher education is just to get a job, you are already off-track. Likewise, if you think the value of your education is measured by what hiring managers think, you are off-track.

Learn because you want to know more, do more, and acquire more skills in research and critical thought. Apply everything you learn to your life in order to direct it better and adapt to changes over time. Do that learning in school... or not. Whatever is best for you, personally.

More specific to your question, if other people are short-changing themselves by abusing AI, that has nothing to do with you individually. And if hiring managers cannot see that, would you want to work for them anyway?
by some_furry | 2025-07-30 11:42:44+00:00
There seems to be a missing component:

Some open source software becomes critical infrastructure for a large part of the Internet, and that comes with a lot of responsibility that the maintainer didn't necessarily want to sign up for. Especially when it's unpaid labor with the demands of a large tech company hammering down on them.

How can we better support the people that run these projects? How can we take pressure off of them if they don't want it?

There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution here, I don't think. But I'm sure some combination of fund open source development and fork load-bearing projects that do not wish to be encumbered is going to be necessary for a lot of the community.
by roenxi | 2025-07-30 11:42:51+00:00
It is a weird subject - on the one hand, I don't think anyone would argue that the story in the article makes sense from a process perspective. But simultaneously the people who are of the opinion that the regulations burdens should be lightened seem to be in a political minority that can't be much bigger than around 30% of the population. Raising the question - what do the majority of voters actual think about this sort of regulation? Maybe they are just of the opinion that case studies like this aren't representative of reality.

I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-07-30 11:43:06+00:00
You're absolutely right, but what's depressing is how few people understand this. I'd say the problem with your point is that it's too practical and involves people going out and trying to produce some artistic expression.

Most people enjoy chasing measurable specs and don't stop to understand what they're actually doing. So they'll go compare a 4/3 sensor's output at iso x to a full frame sensor at the same iso. They won't stop to think about what they're trying to achieve. If they want the same depth of field, they won't be able to use the same aperture. So, out in the field, something has to give. Either lengthen the exposure or raise the ISO. If we're talking high ISOs, you probably can't shoot much slower, so higher ISO it is. Differences are then much less shocking.

The other extreme is people chasing paper-thin focus, which, I guess, isn't as easy to obtain on smaller sensors. Yet, for some reason, they won't go to a larger format, either...
by cpcallen | 2025-07-30 11:43:15+00:00
Well, their "About" page explains that it's a journal "dedicated to two big ideas…: equality under the law and global federalism." But more relevantly, also that they publish "short stories and memoirs, because stories — shared at the fire pit of hunting camps and at feasts on Thanksgiving Day or Eid al-Fitr — are also essential to who we are."

As with any kind of literary fiction, what moral (if any) you take from this story is largely up to you.
by yawpitch | 2025-07-30 11:43:44+00:00
It does, in theory, apply to text, but there’s a relatively narrow scope of text that would fall within the intent of this law but that wouldn’t already be very obviously criminal activity under numerous other laws.

The intent of this (admittedly, bad) legislation is stated on its face… it is going to, in reality, fail utterly in protecting children from pornographic media while at the same time failing utterly to protect children from being [ab]used in pornographic media, and it will fail to do so spectacularly because it’s chosen the wrong approach a priori, but I don’t think it’s reasonably portrayed as a great threat to the texting freedoms of small blogs and forum users, either.
by yekoc | 2025-07-30 11:43:44+00:00
Eskil is part of ISO working group 14 (C standard) so he's exposed to quite a bit more than you'd think. This isn't some rando ranting about his latest midnight research project, he has enough field experience that the ignorance strawman can't dismiss his observations by itself. Besides, most of what he talks about here isn't related to language choice anyways.

ps: Hocam hani bize onemli gelebilirde rastgele insanlarin Turkiye'deki anonim sirketlerin ne kullandigini sikledini hic zannetmiyorum.
by throw0101c | 2025-07-30 11:44:45+00:00
> I just don't have the eye for it, despite having a decent amateur setup.

Checkout this book by the late† Bryan Peterson, where he shows photos taken by his students as well as his own of the same location, and explains the differences in techniques/settings:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54228164-bryan-peters...

His Understanding series of books are also good (Exposure is worth checking out if you know nothing about camera settings):

* https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/82078.Bryan_Peterson

† April 2025: https://www.crottyfh.com/obituaries/bryan-peterson
by mjburgess | 2025-07-30 11:44:53+00:00
"Intelligence" is a metaphor used to describe LLMs (, AI) used by those who have never studied intelligence.

If you had studied intelligence as a science of systems which are intelligent (ie., animals, people, etc.) then this comparison would seem absurd to you; mendacious and designed to confound.

The desperation to find some scenario in which, at the most extreme superficial level, an intelligent agent "benchmarks like an LLM" is a pathology of thinking designed to lure the gullible into credulousness.

If an LLM is said to benchmark on arithmetic like a person doing math whilst being tortured, then the LLM cannot do math -- just as a person being tortured cannot. I cannot begin to think what this is supposed to show.

LLMs, and all statistical learners based on interpolating historical data, have a dramatic sensitivity to permuting their inputs such that they collapse in performance. A small permutation to the input is, if we must analogise, "like toturing a person to the point their mind ceases to function". Because these learners do not have representations of the underlying problem domain which are fit to the "natural, composable, general" structures of that domain ---- they are just fragmaents of text data put in a blender. You'll get performance only when that blender isnt being nudged.

The reason one needs to harm a person to a point they are profoundly disabled and cannot think, to get this kind of performance -- is that at this point, a person cannot be said to be using their mind at all.

This is why the analogy holds in a very superficial way: because LLMs do not analogise to functioning minds; they are not minds at all.
by dccoolgai | 2025-07-30 11:44:56+00:00
555s are so much fun. It's bananas how much you can do with that chip and a few dirt-cheap resistors and capacitors.

Make has a really nice little book where they walk you through some simple projects on a breadboard with 555s, transistors, etc. https://www.amazon.com/How-Use-Breadboard-Make-Handbook/dp/1...
by derdi | 2025-07-30 11:45:24+00:00
The current implementation looks like a compiler to a stack-based bytecode with a straightforward textbook interpreter. For example, here is the interpretation of the Add bytecode: https://github.com/egranata/aria/blob/master/vm-lib/src/vm.r...

So to a very rough first approximation, performance characteristics should be in CPython's ballpark.
by bartlettD | 2025-07-30 11:45:44+00:00
As a practicing EE and naive programmer, It is pretty hard to build a simulation engine for electronics and even harder to build a performant engine. SPICE does this with huge matrices of differential equations and math tricks.

Theres an interesting article by Mike Engelhardt (author of LTspice) which gives hints on the details of their implementation.

https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/tech...