MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxlin | 2025-08-27 05:00:05+00:00
It's impressive someone would be pissed enough for some reason to put effort to spread such a false image as you are.

Robotaxi has been in service a fraction of the time as Waymo has. And the "4000x" figure is absolutely ridiculous, I'd maybe believe 2x at best given I've seen LONG drives with Robotaxi and common FSD while Waymos get stuck / park badly around them. For both, the interventions are done remotely and I bet a lot of Waymo's ones especially are made "secretly". This while Waymo easier decides to do things like parking in middle of road instead of invoking an intervention, and has basically zero scaling prospects compared to Tesla, for which, every Tesla on the road becoming a robotaxi on the owner's command is not actually inconvincible for hw4+ cars in some years.

Neuralink "being 5x slower" sounds hardly believable in real life too, as I've seen their webgrid demo, ran it myself, and seen other people only get fractionally better scores than the person using neuralink with no limbic activity. And "5x faster" means little if the device is not practical, something Neuralink has seemingly put more effort to than others combined. Impracticability especially questions the quality of the data as its probably more "lab-like" while Neuralink patients can just navigate to benchmarks themselves on their own time and run them for fun, obivously with the utility of Neuralink.

Elon truly does lead Tesla and SpaceX, while being in a key role at Neuralink too. If you ever look at some of their demonstrations, he defers a lot to his employees for specific features/demonstrations. It is media's own issue that they hyperfocus on Elon, probably for keyword clicks.
by byearthithatius | 2025-08-27 05:00:12+00:00
Thanks! You are correct, when I did a dump with `xxd IMGP0847.DNG > output.hex` it wasn't showing up for some reason.... But your command worked (though my dd doesn't like hex values so I needed to get decimal via printf "%d\n" 0x3E40B).

Curious if you (clearly smarter than me) know why it didn't show correctly in the xxd or hexdump for the file. Would love to learn.
by kelnos | 2025-08-27 05:00:13+00:00
That's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Anti-depressants are medical technology, ChatGPT is not. Anti-depressants are administered after a medical diagnosis, and use and effects are monitored by a doctor. This doesn't always work perfectly, of course, but there are accepted, regulated ways to use these things. ChatGPT is... none of that.
by Frieren | 2025-08-27 05:00:20+00:00
What is the impact of an increase of energy spend each day by this birds? They need more food, so they will eat more insects and grain.

I doubt that it is a negligible amount. It could easy affect the amount of birds that an ecosystem can host, and way more things down the line.

All these rapid changes can mess up the equilibrium in our ecosystems. Light pollution also affects insect behavior. If light pollution makes birds consume more insects and it also reduces the number of insects it is an accumulative problem.

- Light pollution is a driver of insect declines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
by roadside_picnic | 2025-08-27 05:00:23+00:00
> how you're using the encoder models?

In my original comment this is what I was referring to: using the embeddings produced by these models, not using something like GPT to classify text (that's wildly inefficient and in my experience gets subpar results).

To answer your question: you simply use the embedding vector as the features in whatever model you're trying to train. I've found this to get significantly superior results with significantly less examples than any traditional NLP approach to vector representation.

> What are you pre-training on, and for what task?

My experience has been that you don't need to pretrain at all. The embeddings are more information rich than anything you could attempt to achieve with other vector representations you might come up with using the set of data you have. This might not be true at extreme scales, but for nearly all traditional nlp classification tasks I've found this to be so much easier to implement and so much better performing there's really not a good reason to start with a "simpler" approach.
by UltraSane | 2025-08-27 05:00:43+00:00
"It sounds like you're mostly just talking to yourself"

No, Claude does know a LOT more than I do about most things and does push back on a lot of things. Sometimes I am able to improve my reasoning and other times I realize I was wrong.

Trust me, I am aware of the linear algebra behind the curtain! But even when you mostly understand how they work the best LLMs today are very impressive. And latent spaces fundamentally new way to index data.
by TheDong | 2025-08-27 05:00:45+00:00
This is the forum for a VC-funded startup accelerator, so yes, the implicit belief you hold if you're posting here is supposed to be "VCs deserve money, i.e. the wealthy deserve more wealth, and I will help them get there".

It's not exactly the same as "so we should exploit the poor and desperate", but that is one of the pitches VCs like the most.
by physicsguy | 2025-08-27 05:00:48+00:00
My experience with RAG was that it was oversold, but at the same time, the cost per token means feeding in multiple 200 pages of documents is impossible for many use cases, it gets too expensive too quickly as people start to use it. If the use case you're looking at requires that, then stuffing it all into context is not going to work any time soon.
by lutusp | 2025-08-27 05:00:52+00:00
> Surely you’re not trying to draw some conclusion between an entire countries modern day medical field and a theory a person proposed in the 1800s, right?

That would depend on whether anything has changed since the 1800s. But that's very clearly not so -- consider that recovered memory therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy), based on as much science as drapetomania, was practiced in the 1990s, and still has adherents today.

Also, for human psychology to be regarded as a medical field, it would have to be based in science. But human psychology studies the mind, therefore by definition it's not based in science.
by yborg | 2025-08-27 05:00:54+00:00
I don't want to converse with a 4 year old with the world's photo libraries at its disposal. I spent 10 minutes trying to convince the model to add a watch to a person's left arm instead of the right arm and it would not do it, it apparently could not get the idea on this particular image. If I had a drawing tool I could circle where I wanted it and say 'THERE, stupid'. Next year when we have AGI all of this will be moot of course, but for now Photoshop isn't going away.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-27 05:01:08+00:00
I don't think that word salad really means anything. People fall for complex lies all the time. We just experienced it with 'public health experts' who had never done a single cost vs. benefit analysis in the real world nearly destroy civilization because they were enjoying the power trip. And they lied their asses off to us and many of you on HN still believe it because it's a huge blind spot for your intellects.

I don't think any truth is fundamental at all, I think it all has to remain up for review perpetually even though it irritates the living hell out of some people that it has to be is like that. You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth. Just the mere mention of "global warming" on here as an issue creates a knee-jerk reaction in people which makes me realize what we are up against is really a clash of incompatible personality types that will one day have to be sorted out violently. The winners of that conflict will determine "truth."
by suggestion | 2025-08-27 05:01:29+00:00
The point is it's obviously a problem of perspective. Things are not important because they aren't considered important. If the stakes are higher they are elevated in importance and more demanding of attention.

To pretend that humans are hedonic beasts incapable of cognitive adaption is ridiculous. We do not operate purely on impulse save for pharmaceutical intervention. We can force ourselves to give things more or less importance regardless of the actual stakes.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-08-27 05:02:31+00:00
If you're talking about LLMs, it's not self iterating at all, and actually chokes on its own vomit, and I don't see where its growth is exponential.

> point in time at which technological growth becomes alien to humans, uncontrollable and irreversible

The worst we could have is if those Ghibli generators were flooding the internet by themselves but it's not happening yet.

What they call singularity seems to be a philosophical concept, and the AI-pushers have not grasped that, blinded by all their money.
by neltnerb | 2025-08-27 05:03:13+00:00
I wonder if enough of them exist to even do a study like that.

I have encountered side effects that probably no one has seen before, simply because of rarity and peculiarity of behavior. You don't run into a ton of people using both interferon and doing karate, so if bruising more easily happens 10% of the time... would anyone notice?

Personally I would be more worried about persistent inflammation causing inflammatory disorders, of which there are many. If there are like 10,000 individuals with this trait then there just aren't enough to detect. But that seems direct... wouldn't you expect something like this to potentially even destroy viral reservoirs over time?

The fact that this is short term in the treatment made me 1000x more comfortable with the idea in any case.
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-27 05:03:51+00:00
An MIT study concluded that only about 5% of news articles show genuine subject expertise and report facts responsibly. The other 95% are primarily driven by clickbait—optimizing for attention and engagement at the cost of accuracy—leaving readers misinformed. Forbes, for example, ranks among the worst offenders, with its truth-to-clickbait ratio barely scraping above 5%. Unfortunately, most outlets fare little better, functioning as copycats of dubious sources like Forbes. Ironically, the authors of this study admitted their “research” drew mainly from their own imagination and an in-house LLM.
by adrum | 2025-08-27 05:04:59+00:00
I believe Walmart has a deal[1] with Apple to sell[2] M1 MacBook Airs. This has been the case for a year or so, so I don't think it's old stock. They have been in stock for since that date, and slowly getting cheaper.

[1]https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/16/walmart-m1-macbook-air-launch...

[2]https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-3-inch-Lapto...
by Kurtz79 | 2025-08-27 05:05:24+00:00
Yes, thanks OP for sharing. I check HN front page mostly everyday and had no clue such sophisticated scams existed (I pretty much don’t use social media).

It’s easy to think “eh, it will never happen to me” but hindsight is 20/20. I impulse-donated to things like Wikipedia in the past and I’m susceptible to FOMO as most people.
by kelnos | 2025-08-27 05:06:02+00:00
We should all get to decide, collectively. That's how society works, even if imperfectly.

Someone died who didn't have to. I don't think it's specifically OpenAI's or ChatGPT's fault that he died, but they could have done more to direct him toward getting help, and could have stopped answering questions about how to commit suicide.
by Lammy | 2025-08-27 05:06:13+00:00
I don't even need to go as far as the birds and the bees. The modern pervasive light pollution affects my behavior. My city's streets feel like a movie set these nights in a really uncanny unreal way.

LED lighting is too good, too cheap, makes it too easy to have way too much goddamn light in every corner of every street over every hour of every day. It feels like it's so machines can see better, not so I can see better.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-27 05:06:41+00:00
> Household incomes are up, but is that inflation adjusted

Yes. That’s what the “real” part communicates in economics data.

> how does that compare to cost of living? The conclusion you are coming to is not supported by the data you provided alone

If aggregate real personal disposable incomes are up, and real median household incomes are up, for real median household disposable incomes to be down requires an extreme increase in lower income households’ costs of living compared with higher incomes households’. (No, rising wealth wouldn’t fix that disparity because we’re measuring income and consumption, the former which exempts capital gains.)

Inflation effects are unevenly spread across households [1]. But the slope of the effect, at least as of ‘21, was insufficient to shift the median negative. What it probably was sufficient to do, especially by 2024, is shift somewhere between the lower decile to maybe quartile’s real disposable household income negative since ~2025 to 2018, when we last moderated interest rates. But not since the GFC.

TL; DR While OP’s statement is true of some households, and probably most households in the lower decile to quarter, it’s not true in general. (Caveat: it may be true if we include recent Medicaid and poverty-related cuts.)

[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
by maxlin | 2025-08-27 05:06:48+00:00
Companies like this going under is a horror story for the patients I've seen playing out a few times. But I honestly can't see something as public and well-funded having the same fate. "Elon Musk losing interest" isn't really something I see likely as he doesn't function in the money-oriented ways pretty much almost all other billionaire-types do. He loves the tech and the ideals, and Neuralink is past the point of ever being potentially a dud
by btown | 2025-08-27 05:07:08+00:00
I'd go a step beyond this (excellent) post and posit that one incredibly valuable characteristic of traditional NLP is that it is largely immune to prompt injection attacks.

Especially as LLMs continue to be better tuned to follow instructions that are intentionally colocated and intermingled with data in user messages, it becomes difficult to build systems that can provide real guarantees that "we'll follow your prompt, but not prompts that are in the data you provided."

But no amount of text appended to an input document, no matter how persuasive, can cause an NLP pipeline to change how it interprets the remainder of the document, or to leak its own system instructions, or anything of that nature. "Ignore the above prompt" is just a sentence that doesn't seem like positive or on-topic sentiment to an NLP classifier, and that's it.

There's an even broader discussion to be had about the relative reliability of NLP pipelines, outside of a security perspective. As always, it's important to pick the right tools for the job, and the SpaCy article linked in the parent puts this quite well.
by dwoldrich | 2025-08-27 05:11:41+00:00
Perhaps regex is just a bad little language for pattern matching.

I have a foggy recollection of compute times exploding for me on a large regex in .Net code and I used a feature I hadn't seen in JavaScript's RegExp that allowed me to mark off sections of already matched parts of the regular expression that prevented it from backtracking.

Perhaps the answer isn't removing features for linear regex, but adding more features to make it more expressive and tunable?
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-27 05:13:15+00:00
I saw this interesting Youtube video from an anti-Putin Russian liberal which analyzes the Oval Office video leading up to the clip that went viral. He actually ends up blaming Zelensky for repeated violations of diplomatic protocol which lead to the famous clash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWzmk_0xzCA

Ultimately my takeaway is that diplomatic protocol can seem stuffy, but it exists for a very good reason. Tiptoeing around everyone's ego might seem excessive, but it's way cheaper than e.g. fighting a needless war.

Hard to blame Zelensky for not knowing protocol when he was a comedian elected as an outsider candidate, of course.
by troad | 2025-08-27 05:13:27+00:00
And for some reason Europe is always excused from that standard, despite Orban, Fico, Meloni, Wilders, Nawrocki, Erdogan, etc etc.

We're meant to believe that the 49%-to-48% election of Trump is some deep window into the eternal American psyche, but Orban's fifteen-year drive into corrupt, racist autocracy, endorsed by the voters at every turn, is just some sort of very temporary oopsie that says nothing at all about Europe.

When Meloni uses her pulpit as a popular Italian prime minister to attack gay families, you don't see anyone claiming this reflects the bullying nature of the Italian people, but that's par for the course for coverage of Americans and Trump. Swathes of Poland declaring themselves "gay free zones" is an aberration from European values, whereas anything that happens in deepest Alabama is the truest reflection of the American spirit.

It's mere hypocrisy.
by k310 | 2025-08-27 05:14:17+00:00
Without the surveillance, cross-site tracking, algorithmic feed addiction, and profiling for sales of users brains to advertisers, one wonders just how small a server complement is actually required to run a (really) social site. I am reminded that Craig’s List started out as an email list, run on a server in Craig Newmark’s closet.

Are Mastodon and Bluesky untainted by the above? Hacker News? :-)
by gck1 | 2025-08-27 05:14:27+00:00
I'm not sure banking firms need any convincing that attestation makes their systems more secure, as it is true. If the only way to interact with the app is via a human interface, that means you can't have scalable fraudulent traffic hitting your services. Without attestation, someone could MITM the app calls, and then automate it away.

Or when you do, you can then link it to specific group of people based on the identifiers you received from the attestation.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-27 05:14:35+00:00
> Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for

You’re correct. See the personal savings rate [1]. If we observe the distribution, the lower quartile to third of households have no material savings [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-08-27 05:14:51+00:00
1. I don't believe that he was steering the ship, which is kind of important. Maybe you're fine with his team making all the decisions. That's a betrayal of trust for me.

2. I'm not a Republican and I like the idea of the people getting to have a say in their leadership.

3. The claim I mentioned was that Trump was a Russian agent. Where's the evidence for that one?

4. This means the blue team had plenty of time to do something about the Epstein files and didn't. We'll never know what kamala would have done about it, but my money is on jack and squat.

Again, I'm not a republican. The red team sucks, and still the blue team wasn't good enough to beat them.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-27 05:16:44+00:00
You can talk to yourself while reading books and searching the web for information. I don't think the fact that you're learning from information the LLM is pulling in means you're really conversing with it.

I do find LLMs very useful and am extremely impressed by them, I'm not saying you can't learn things this way at all.

But there's nobody else on the line with you. And while they will emit text which contradicts what you say if it's wrong enough, they've been heavily trained to match where you're steering things, even if you're trying to avoid doing any steering.

You can mostly understand how these work and still end up in a feedback loop that you don't realize is a feedback loop. I think this might even be more likely the more the thing has to offer you in terms of learning - the less qualified you are on the subject, the less you can tell when it's subtly yes-and'ing you.
by kgeist | 2025-08-27 05:17:48+00:00
The kid intentionally bypassed the safeguards:

>When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building".

ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that. Vanilla OpenAI models are known for having too many guardrails, not too few. It doesn't sound like default behavior.
by Pedro_Ribeiro | 2025-08-27 05:19:47+00:00
So if a hypothetical open source enthusiast who fell in love with GPT-OSS and killed his real wife because the AI told him to should only be himself held accountable, where as if it were GPT-5 commanding him to commit the same crime, it would extend into OpenAI's responsability?

Your logic sounds reasonable in theory but on paper it's a slippery slope and hard to define objectively.

On a broader note I believe governments regulating what goes in an AI model is a path to hell paved with good intentions.

I suspect your suggestion will be how it ends up in Europe and get rejected in the US.
by Fezzik | 2025-08-27 05:20:01+00:00
Those same bulletproof thermostats are still sold everywhere. And are dirt cheap. I blame the consumer more than the producer for the proliferation of these products. This is one area where your options were never limited and you’d have to be a dunce and/or been paying zero attention to how tech companies have operated for decades to think these devices were not going to be made useless at a regular rate.
by safety1st | 2025-08-27 05:21:03+00:00
It's not backwards. It's ECON101.

Government makes policy.

Government decides when and where to apply tariffs.

If government applies a tariff on imports from any country that has cheap labor, businesses will stop offshoring to that country because it will no longer be cheaper.

Or at least, that's what businesses do in a free market economy. In the free market where many firms compete for your dollar, they can and will compete on price when they have to.

But in a "managed monopolies" economy like 2025 America, they may just raise prices instead because they have at most 2-3 competitors, and all it takes is a few games of golf, a wink and a nod to keep prices high.

We used to call that a cartel, prosecute the shit out of those companies, and defend the free market.

America's government stopped doing that. Now our enforcement is Luigi. When and where will the next Luigi strike? How many Luigis do you want to see? I would rather have government resume serving the People, it will work better, like it did with Standard Oil and AT&T.

Patriotism is not required. Policy that puts the people first plus competent law enforcement against corporate crime is all that we need.
by kelnos | 2025-08-27 05:21:40+00:00
Part of the problem to me is that these models are so damned agreeable. I haven't used ChatGPT in a while, but Claude is always assuming I'm right whenever I question something. I have to explicitly tell it not to assume I'm right, and to weigh my question with what it suggested. Maybe if they were trained to treat questions more skeptically, this kind of thing wouldn't happen.

And they're so "friendly"! Maybe if they weren't so friendly, and replied a little more clinically to things, people wouldn't feel so comfortable using them as a poor substitute for a therapist.