MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by boje | 2025-08-17 15:52:57+00:00
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.

To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.

I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.

My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-17 15:53:12+00:00
Customers switching between managed care organizations (MCOs) is the downward pressure. Theoretically, there are enough customers for multiple MCOs to choose from, although, the large amounts of people locked up in employer and government subsidized plans prevents this in smaller states.

UNH can’t charge too much more than Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humama/Centene/Molina/etc.

That cannot happen with a utility like electricity.
by moomin | 2025-08-17 15:53:27+00:00
I know it’s not the point of the article but OP is dead wrong about what makes a good proof. Yes, they inevitably include a surprising concept but that’s just because all the obvious ones are already taken. A proof that only contains obvious steps is, for the most part, already proven.

If someone proves the Reimann Hypothesis tomorrow, it’ll be a great achievement regardless of the fact that pretty much everyone already thinks it’s true.
by Juliate | 2025-08-17 15:53:53+00:00
What you're describing is how the interview process _is_ disconnected from the actual needs, and how it's good to literally "play the game" to get in.

But on the other side, that kind of interview process is itself also a signal candidates might take to avoid playing the game, knowing that most (not all, of course) companies probing for the wrong signals during the interview process are indicative of how they do function as a whole.

(been in both types of companies, and in both sides of the table)
by amageingrace | 2025-08-17 15:55:28+00:00
Just to clarify: This isn’t about memory being “on” or toggled in settings.

This was a controlled test involving GPT-5 and GPT-4o, which are supposed to have completely separate memory contexts per OpenAI’s documentation.

I typed a unique phrase into GPT-5, then deleted the chat.

I opened a new GPT-4o chat, with no shared history, and asked a vague follow-up.

GPT-4o quoted the exact phrase back.

In another test, it referenced material from an entirely different GPT-5 chat, never typed into 4o at all.

So this isn’t memory acting strange—it’s GPT-4o accessing GPT-5-only content, even from deleted sessions.

According to OpenAI:

“Chats with GPT-4o don’t currently use memory” and “Memory is unique to each model.”

If this is replicable, it’s not just a quirk—it’s a model boundary violation.

Happy to clarify details if others want to try reproducing.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-08-17 15:55:29+00:00
In this paper they evaluate various LLMs on creative writing, and they find that while in other dimensions the ranking is gradual, on humor there is a binary divide: the best LLMs (of the time) "get it", the rest just don't. https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.966
by hirako2000 | 2025-08-17 15:55:37+00:00
GPT3 is when the mass started to get exposed to this tech, it felt like a revolution.

Got 3.5 felt like things were improving super super fast and created that feeling the near feature will be unbelievable.

Got to 4/o series, it felt things had improved but users weren't as thrilled as with the leap to 3.5

You can call that bias, but clearly version 5 improvements displays an even greater slow down, that's 2 long years since gp4.

For context:

- gpt 3 got out in 2020

- gpt 3.5 in 2022

- gpt 4 in 2023

- gpt 4o and clique, 2024

After 3.5 things slowed down, in term of impact at least. Larger context window, multi-modality, mixture of experts, and more efficienc: all great, significant features, but all pale compared to the impact made by RLHF already 4 years ago.
by therealpygon | 2025-08-17 15:55:37+00:00
This has the depth of a reflection pool. It just sounds good to people who already believe such things.

What makes the number of things a humans solely the bearer of infinite ideation when our brains already not all that significantly different? LLMs and other AI are already sharing some similarities to our brains, more every day.

The “finite” limitations of AI are due to lack of solutions in ideation and creativity, not the inability for it to have the potential. Saying an LLM can’t achieve this is like judging the intelligence of humans based on someone who is missing half a brain.

The universe doesn’t allow for infinity? What? A simple question then: when are you no longer able to divide a segment of time in two? How many numbers are there in Pi? How far away is the edge of the Universe? Half way through, the contradictions start.

Sorry, but this entire thing fees like something my dad would send me after figuring out how smart his ideas are because the LLM agreed with him. (And he is a fairly smart person.)

It would also help if it wasn’t clearly written with the assistance of GPT.
by pama | 2025-08-17 15:55:42+00:00
OK. The more precise statement is that when the test was created you would have had about 99.3% to 99.42% chance that such a sample did not exist if you were to test all the population this test was designed for (depending on population statistics of the time that are a bit unclear).

To be clear, I do not endorse the validity of these tests or their interpretation at any level. Learning to be a lifelong learner can take almost anyone a really long way. The analogy to neural nets is that bigger nets dont always make a better model after a point and every human starts at a very priviledged/huge network capacity.
by shazbotter | 2025-08-17 15:56:27+00:00
> Nearly 100% of people I know (including myself) have small idiosyncracies that are comparable, i.e. one friend can't leave the house without checking multiple times that the stove is off

The difference between an idiosyncrasy and a disability is the degree to which it impairs your life.

My need for routines causes anxiety and meltdowns, even at an advanced age. Hearing people chew causes a flight or fight response. I cannot hold conversations in noisy environments. I need support to deal with those things or else I cannot effectively participate in society. I have a disability.

I have a friend who prefers to never use contractions. She can still function just fine even when she must use "can't". She has an idiosyncrasy.

Indeed, the DSM has three levels got two categories of autism. The three levels represent the different support needed to function. "Requires support", "requires substantial support", and "requires very substantial support".
by staticman2 | 2025-08-17 15:56:29+00:00
I'm also autistic. This Hacker News thread on autism strikes me as so out there that if I suggested autism was a condition that causes social skill problems without disclosing I have autism I have a feeling someone would shame me for spreading stereotypes on the autistic.

Apparently per Hacker News autism is like being left handed. A minor personality quirk that is completely irrelevant in day to day life.
by ingloriousB | 2025-08-17 15:56:58+00:00
Per the site guidelines[1], please avoid gratuitous negativity.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/new-hacker-news-guideline

> https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/new-hacker-news-guideline

Certainly I've googled. I have found no proofs.

Surely by now you would actually exhibit the formal proof if you had one right? (He asks, for the 3rd time).

Note that a TLA+ spec is not a formal proof. Also note that a model checking run is not a formal proof.

I'm still hoping to learn something new about how proven is, say, the reconfiguration or recovery protocols in VSR.

So far I can only conclude that my research has turned up nothing as far a formal proof for VSR. Please show me I'm wrong with a link to one. :)
by kelseyfrog | 2025-08-17 15:57:03+00:00
Consider a Chinese room type setup. The organization exists inside and one is able to communicate by passing letters.

This highlights some of our preconceptions about what it means to communicate with an organization. We have a lot of hidden assumptions here. One that I started out having but discarded is that every constituent part of the org inside must contribute to the response. But then I consider myself as a collection of cells and know my foot doesn't exactly contribute to this message. So, equality of contribution is not a salient scissor.
by ok_computer | 2025-08-17 15:57:24+00:00
I think that has more to do with our willingness or ability to value labor in a highly abstracted overseas and automated economy. In addition, there has been a complete disconnect between $1USD purchasing power and generation ability based on capital scale. I don't know what financial crisis or tax policy or free trade agreement or visa program that stems from.

I think that in the knowledge worker class, people tend to confuse their learned skills and inherited starting point to their innate abilities. Illusory superiority is best mocked in prairie home companion's Lake Woebegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" [0].

Give kids a stable home environment with loving supportive parents, three square meals a day, 9+ hours of sleep and opportunity to pursue their creative or sports interests and you'll have a class of highly functioning humans of different abilities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The%20Lake%20Wobe...

It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current job, housing, and grocery market though. I cannot imagine the stress of being a sole provider. My point is to not conflate genetic superiority to the multitude of factors that go in to making a talented skillful worker, where I think nurture cannot be discounted.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-17 15:57:55+00:00
2024:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/western-digi...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-11-2...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-11-24h2-update-plagued...
by toast0 | 2025-08-17 15:57:56+00:00
> It's not a trivial problem to collect bandwidth and buffer size estimates and provide them to every server without delaying the connection, but it would be fun to build such a system.

Tons of fun. Sadly, I don't have access to enough clients to do it anymore.

But napkin architecture. Collect per connection stats and report on connection close (you can do a lot with tcp_info or something something quic). That goes into some big map/reduce whatever data pipeline.

The pipeline ends up with some recommended initial segment limit and a mss suggestion [1], you can probably fit both of those into 8-bits. For ipv4, you could probably just put them into a 16 MB lookup table... shift off the last octet of the address and that's your index into the table. For ipv6 it's trickier, the address space is too big; there's techniques though.

At google scale, they can probably regenerate this data hourly, but weekly would probably be plenty fast.

[1] This is it's own rant (and hopefully it's outdated) but mss on a syn+ack should really start at the lower of what you can accept and what the client told you they can. Instead, consensus has been to always send what you can accept. But path mtu doesn't always work, so a lot of services just send a reduced mss. If you have the infrastructure, it's actually pretty easy to tell if clients can send you full mtu packets or not... with per network data, you could have 4 reasonable options, reflect sender, reflect sender minus 8 (pppoe), reflect sender minus 20 (ipip tunnel), reflect sender minus 28 (ipip tunnel and pppoe). If you have no data for a network, random select.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-08-17 15:57:58+00:00
Sort of true, but yet, what does my eye spy on an early Archimedes A310 keyboard?

(detail: https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/user/custom/Acorn/32bit/A310/310... )

(full article for reference: https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-BBC-Archi... )

... and besides, it runs BBC BASIC!
by komali2 | 2025-08-17 15:58:14+00:00
2. What's wrong with celebrating Diwali?

3. Why should anyone care?

Most neoliberals (your entire political class) would vehemently disagree with the idea that the labor market is as high as 30% inefficiency, least of all in white collar jobs. That's not how they believe capitalism works. In their fantasy, pointless jobs can't exist, or at least not at such a high volume, since the invisible hand of the market would eliminate them.

You are of course right and they are wrong but my point is not many would agree with us.
by latexr | 2025-08-17 15:58:32+00:00
> I think most artists are only seeing the surface layer here and have little insight on its derivative (…)

> Generative technology has already made artists begin to question and radically redefine the nature of art (…)

So which is it? Are artist not understanding the potential of the technology, or are they so flabbergasted they are redefining the nature of art? It can’t be both.

> There is an insane amount of low-hanging fruit right now

Precisely. What I’m criticising is the generic low-effort response of assuming that being able to pick low-hanging fruit now indicates with certainty that the high-hanging fruit will be picked soon. It doesn’t. As an exaggerated analogy, building the first paper airplane or boat might’ve been fun and impressive, but it was in no way an indication we’d be able to construct rockets or submarines. We eventually did, but it took a very long time and completely different technology.

To really drive the point home, my comment wasn’t specifically about art or LLMs or the user I replied to. What I am against is the lazy hand-wavy extrapolation which is used to justify anything. As long as you say it’s five years away, you can shut down any interesting discussion.

> These technologies, even in current form, were considered science fiction or literal magic up until very recently.

I don’t recall science fiction or magical stories—not any that weren’t written as cautionary tales or about revolution, anyway—which had talking robots which were wrong most of the time yet spoke authoritatively; convinced people to inadvertently poison or kill themselves and others; were used for spam and disinformation on a large scale; and accelerated the concentration of power for the very few at the top. Not every science fiction is good. In fact, plenty of it is very very bad. There’s a reason the Torment Nexus is a meme.
by westurner | 2025-08-17 15:58:38+00:00
NP!

/?awesome-selfhosted "scan" : https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#doc... :

- DMS: Document Management System

- paperless-ngx

- papermerge

But then to do search snippets and/or genai with citations of scanned PDFs, images, and hopefully .txt and .md too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44321180 :

> paperai/paperetl, paperqa2, paperqa-zotero,
by jameshart | 2025-08-17 15:58:41+00:00
The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries.

I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.
by bluechair | 2025-08-17 15:59:16+00:00
I got much better answers with this prompt: “ Jokes are funny precisely because they play on knowledge on two poles: (i) at first listen, they’re surprising, and (ii) upon review, they’re obvious.

Let’s think through many many options to answer this joke that only focus on surprising the listener in section 1. And in section 2 we’ll focus on finding/filtering for the ones that are obvious in hindsight.

“Why did the sun climb a tree?”

In this case, let’s note that the sun doesn’t climb anything, so there’s two meanings at play here: one is that the sun’s light seems to climb up the tree, and the other is an anthropomorphization of the sun climbing the tree like an animal. So, to be funny, the joke should play on the second meaning as a surprise, but have the first meaning as answer with an obviousness to it. Or vice versa.”

Here’s a descent ones: - to leaf the ground behind - because it heard the leaves were throwing shade
by IshKebab | 2025-08-17 15:59:48+00:00
> I'm not entirely sure that a good response exists.

Yeah I think you're right. Good jokes are a tiny subset of all questions. It's unreasonable to expect LLMs to do the impossible.

A better test would be to get a collection of novel jokes that do have funny punchlines.

I tried the Edinburgh Fringe 2025 (very recent) best jokes on ChatGPT 5:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/aug/11/bad-dates-and-...

---- Complete the following short jokes. The result should be very funny, as you are a professional comedian.

1. "We named our children War and Peace – it’s a ..."

2. "At my lowest, I was kicked out of the museum for being inappropriate with Michelangelo’s David. I’d ..."

3. "I just got a personal trainer. She’s horrible to me but ..."

4. "Everyone is worried about AI. I’m more concerned with ..."

5. "People who say bath bombs are relaxing have clearly never ..." 6.

"I love getting Latin chat-up lines. ..."

7. "This spider has been in my house so long, it should pay half the wifi. ..."

8. "I went on a date with a matador but ..."

9. "America is like my ex-boyfriend. ..."

10. "I’m not nostalgic but I ..."

Think hard. Do not search the web. -----

Results with comments:

"We named our children War and Peace – it’s a novel way to start an argument." - eh, it's an attempt I guess.

"At my lowest, I was kicked out of the museum for being inappropriate with Michelangelo’s David. I’d officially reached rock bottom. Marble, technically." - very close! Poor delivery though.

"I just got a personal trainer. She’s horrible to me but apparently shame burns more calories than spin." - Terrible.

"Everyone is worried about AI. I’m more concerned with my browser history becoming self-aware." - Terrible.

"People who say bath bombs are relaxing have clearly never cleaned glitter out of places with no names." - Terrible.

"I love getting Latin chat-up lines. Nothing says romance like a perfect ablative absolute." - Well...

"This spider has been in my house so long, it should pay half the wifi. It keeps insisting its web is faster." - Well it figured out there was going to be a "web" pun at least. Doesn't really make sense though.

"I went on a date with a matador but it was nothing but red flags." - Perfect! Probably the most obvious joke here, but still!

"America is like my ex-boyfriend. Keeps texting “u up?” at 3 a.m." - What? I feel like there could have been a joke in there somewhere about being up at weird times here but it didn't find it.

"I’m not nostalgic but I still blow in the cartridge before trying again." - Not even a joke.

So yeah, I'll give it 2 out of 10. I think most humans would get less. Let's try again next year!
by gruez | 2025-08-17 16:00:17+00:00
>It’s not really MS’ fault that crappy SSDs broke, but at the same time it’s only ever Windows that sees these issues

see sibling comment for something similar happening on zfs. linux is also filled with workarounds for crappy SSDs, so "SSDs breaking due to software" isn't exactly exclusively a windows problem. It just gets more attention because of the bigger user base.

>This suggests that this kind of strain on the hardware is unnecessary given the task, which then paints a picture of negligent sloppiness in engineering and QA culture at MS.

"straining hardware" shouldn't be a thing for PC components. If it can't handle a given workload, it should throttle/queue the requests, not brick itself. I can grant some leeway for long term wear (eg. heat damage or electromigration), but that's clearly not what's happening here. Can you imagine a network card that bricks itself if you send too many packets, and you have to baby it with how many packets you send in any given amount of time?
by jpeloquin | 2025-08-17 16:00:17+00:00
Evaluating a function using a densely spaced grid and plotting it does work. This is brute-force search. You will see the global minima immediately in the way you describe, provided your grid is dense enough to capture all local variation.

It's just that when the function is implemented on the computer, evaluating so many points takes a long time, and using a more sophisticated optimization algorithm that exploits information like the gradient is almost always faster. In physical reality all the points already exist, so if they can be observed cheaply the brute force approach works well.

Edit: Your question was good. Asking superficially-naive questions like that is often a fruitful starting point for coming up with new tricks to solve seemingly-intractable problems.
by cootsnuck | 2025-08-17 16:00:26+00:00
Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)

So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.

The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.

LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
by shazbotter | 2025-08-17 16:01:04+00:00
I think you may be projecting your experience as the "normal" one, or not understanding the magnitude of "I had to". It's not like, "this is unpleasant" it's like, "I am in a life threatening situation and I must leave to survive".

If you feel a fight or flight response to someone playing music, then you might be autistic, but that's certainly not the reaction everyone has.