MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-08-13 11:32:10+00:00
It doesn’t matter what I “believe,” what matters is what kind of job the constitution creates. The appointment of department heads is an exercise in democratic and political accountability. The point is for people to vote for a president who will staff the administration with people who will carry out his agenda. The Supreme Court explained this function of the Appointments Clause in the Arthrex case: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1434_ancf.pdf (see pp. 6-8 in particular).

Here, “education and field work” matter only to the extent voters care about those things. Obama voters cared about those things, so Obama appointing the best nerds is consistent with the constitutional design. But if voters have lost faith in Harvard Medical School, then education is actually contrary to “merit.”

In this context, RFK is the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history. He campaigned with Trump talking about his kooky ideas and then people voted for the ticket. People voted for the guy who promised to do something different because they had lost faith in the nerds. The whole point of the constitution is for people to be able to do that. Trump moreso than any recent President got on stage with the people who was going to help run the country if you voted for him. That’s the constitutional design! That’s democracy!
by lm28469 | 2025-08-13 11:33:04+00:00
100%, it reminds me of this post I saw yesterday about how chatgpt confirmed "in its own words" it is a CIA/FBI honeypot:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MKUltra/comments/1mo8whi/chatgpt_ad...

When talking to an LLM you're basically talking to yourself, that's amazing if you're a knowledgeable dev working on a dev task, not so much if you're mentally ill person "investigating" conspiracy theories.

That's why HNers and tech people in general overestimate the positive impact of LLMs while completely ignoring the negative sides... they can't even imagine half of the ways people use these tools in real life.
by rbanffy | 2025-08-13 11:33:41+00:00
Algol is still an integral part of the longest-lived operating system: Unisys' MCP. Sadly, these days it runs under emulation and exists mostly to integrate with external systems running on other OSs. "Sadly" in terms: MCP is notoriously user-hostile - just try it on simH to see it for yourself.

There is an infinite number of universes where Borland launched Turbo Algol in 1983. All we need to do is to find a way to move there. Or, at least, take a look into what happened.
by empiricus | 2025-08-13 11:33:48+00:00
And about this second comment, I agree that intelligence is bounded. We can discuss how much more intelligence is theoretically possible, but even if limit ourselves to extrapolation from human variance (agency of musk, math smart of von neumann, manipulative as trump, etc), and add a little more speed and parallelism (100 times faster, 100 copies cooperating), then we can get pretty far.

Also I agree we are all pretty fucking dumb, and cannot make this kind of predictions, which is actually one very important point in the rationalist circles: doom is not certain, but p(doom) looks uncomfortably high though. How lucky do you feel?
by pjmlp | 2025-08-13 11:33:48+00:00
Mono AOT has existed for quite a while, .NET Native also existed, and it isn't .NET fault if people cannot know about Native AOT.

I don't buy any of reasoning why Typescript team adopted Go, first of all the authors are more than knowledgeable about .NET AOT capabilities.

Second as Anders Hejlsberg went through his BUILD 2025 talk, turns out they had to redesign the data structures around Go's weaker type system anyway, as they couldn't easily map what they were doing with TypeScript types.

Third, Azure teams are using AI to convert C++ projects into Rust, as described by Mark Russinovich at RustConf UK 2025, which shows it is up to the challenge at hand.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-08-13 11:34:11+00:00
I’m no fan of most of what this administration does, but in the abstract I don’t think optimizing giving visas to the highest paying workers is the worst idea.

Keeps the as many dollars in the American economy as possible while incentivizing the upskilling of American citizens to meet demand for low wage roles.

Would be better to do it based on pay relative to the line of work, but that would be very easy to game. IT people working in fast food would be classified as fry cooks making $150k.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-13 11:34:15+00:00
Academically, gay rights come from romanticism, and trans rights come from feminism, but they're all part of the same fight: same as anti-racism, class conflict, religious pluralism, pacifism, and environmentalism. Historically, the movements have long been linked: gay folk and trans folk ran in similar circles, being trans was classified as a type of homosexuality by the medical establishment… Now that being gay is "normal", but being trans remains "abnormal", respectability politics has led to a lot of historical revisionism. These fights are a lot more related than you think. It's no coincidence that Norway's legislature has been on the forefront of gay rights, trans rights, and intersex rights wrt legal protections (or would you like to try to explain that?) – though your observations do match the relatively-late protections for bi rights, and Norway's fallen behind on protections for intersex infants.

But I do appreciate your perspective, as a source of information: many things you're saying are factually incorrect, but it's important to know that some people believe them.
by 1dom | 2025-08-13 11:34:15+00:00
This makes me want to say "is nothing sacred?!" I get your point from a pragmatic: this is the world we live in, work with it, not against it.

I think you need to scope this approach when suggesting it though, since it's effectively "a policy has been broken by a company, but we can't undo it, so lets just accept it and let them get on with it" which doesn't seem like it'll lead to a better world.

I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".
by Cynddl | 2025-08-13 11:35:01+00:00
Hi, author here! We used a dataset of conversations between a human and a warm AI chatbot. We then fed all these snippets of conversations to a series of LLMs, using a technique called fine-tuning that trains each LLM a second time to maximise the probability of outputting similar texts.

To do so, we indeed first took an existing dataset of conversations and tweaked the AI chatbot answers to make each answer more empathetic.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-13 11:35:40+00:00
> I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization.

When was stable period, exactly? I'm 40; the only semi-stable bit I can think of in my lifetime was a few years in the 90s (referred to, sometimes unironically, as "the end of history" at the time, before history decided to come out of retirement).

Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose-tinted view of the past.
by lgessler | 2025-08-13 11:36:28+00:00
I recommend having a look at 16.3 onward here if you're curious about this: https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/16.pdf

I'm not familiar with Whisper in particular, but typically what happens in an ASR model is that the decoder, speaking loosely, sees "the future" (i.e. the audio after the chunk it's trying to decode) in a sentence like this, and also has the benefit of a language model guiding its decoding so that grammatical productions like "I like ice cream" are favored over "I like I scream".
by al_borland | 2025-08-13 11:36:39+00:00
From what I’ve seen, LLMs are good at making stuff that has already been made and posted to GitHub a thousand times before. At my job we’re constantly asked to do things that really haven’t been done before, at least not by people sharing source code, so the LLMs suck at most of it.

LLMs make for great tech demos, but when it comes to writing code for production that actually does something new and useful, it hasn’t impressed me at all.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-13 11:37:45+00:00
> Also, why do I know more about your constitution and governing structure than you appear to?

Do you? All you have said here is that you think that the equal protection clause forbidding segregation is more sound than the substantive due process clause forbidding criminalization of abortion. That's not a statement about governing structure. That's a statement about your interpretation of the text. I (and many others) don't think that finding a right to abortion in the text is so difficult.

It is ludicrous to point at an originalist interpretation to justify Brown. It is plainly obvious that the authors of the 14th did not intend it to forbid segregation nor would the public have interpreted it to do so at the time. Yes, there is a cottage industry of law professors seeking to square this circle but it is a ridiculous project. If you insist on originalism being the sole interpretive model of the constitution (which I disagree with) then you don't get to so easily say "well obviously Brown was correct."
by xvector | 2025-08-13 11:38:24+00:00
You clearly aren't discussing in good faith if your response to the write up above is essentially "right wing thought detected, opinion rejected."

What an excellent demonstration of shutting off factual information to support your own biases.

- You know nothing about the CA housing market vs income and income tax, or my personal situation, but you simply assume I'm lying.

- You're intentionally sticking your head in the sand because you think the paper is from a "right wing think tank" - regardless of the fact that an extremely well-respected fiscally liberal podcast, Freakonomics, supported the findings.

- You're somehow asserting that because I find the findings in an economic paper compelling, I must support the erosion of civil liberties, in an attempt to reduce my argument to the absurd and insult my character.

It shocks me that people can engage in discussions so simplistically and maliciously. HN has deteriorated so much because of comments like yours. Please just refrain from participating entirely if you're going to yell into the void and then not engage in good faith. Reddit is that way.
by Cynddl | 2025-08-13 11:38:52+00:00
Hi, author here, this is exactly what we tested in our article:

> Third, we show that fine-tuning for warmth specifically, rather than fine-tuning in general, is the key source of reliability drops. We fine-tuned a subset of two models (Qwen-32B and Llama-70B) on identical conversational data and hyperparameters but with LLM responses transformed to be have a cold style (direct, concise, emotionally neutral) rather than a warm one [36]. Figure 5 shows that cold models performed nearly as well as or better than their original counterparts (ranging from a 3 pp increase in errors to a 13 pp decrease), and had consistently lower error rates than warm models under all conditions (with statistically significant differences in around 90% of evaluation conditions after correcting for multiple comparisons, p<0.001). Cold fine-tuning producing no changes in reliability suggests that reliability drops specifically stem from warmth transformation, ruling out training process and data confounds.
by onion2k | 2025-08-13 11:40:15+00:00
My ability to break a problem down does not start from listing the files out and reading a few.

If you're completely new to the problem then ... yes, it does.

You're assuming that you're working on a project that you've spent time on and learned the domain for, and then you're comparing that to an LLM being prompted to look at a codebase with the context of the files. Those things are not the same though.

A closer analogy to LLMs would be prompting it for questions when it has access (either through MCP or training) to the project's git history, documentation, notes, issue tracker, etc. When that sort of thing is commonplace, and LLMs have the context window size to take advantage of all that information, I suspect we'll be surprised how good they are even given the results we get today.
by kcplate | 2025-08-13 11:40:29+00:00
I like the folio, but have had an issue where the rubber material around the sides will distort around the speaker/vent hole (after about a year). My first one (on a first gen 11” pro), I warranty replaced but the replacement eventually did the same thing.

I upgraded the the 11” M4 pro, bought another Logitech folio, which I was hopeful for because they changed the design, but it had a similar rubber distortion issue. When it cropped up I was outside the warranty but due to the design change that added some plastic around that area and I was able to fix with a bit of superglue.

Despite this issue, I think as far as keyboard cases go they are the best. Would still buy again.
by 334f905d22bc19 | 2025-08-13 11:40:31+00:00
He really is. I find it even more awful when you are pointing out that Claude did something wrong and it responds like that. You can even accuse it of doing something wrong, if it gave a correct answer, and it will still respond like this (not always but often). When I use claude chat on the website I always select the "concise" style, which works quite nice though. I like it
by majewsky | 2025-08-13 11:40:46+00:00
> what is this type actually

Do you mean that you don't know what type a certain variable has? If so, just add `theVariableName = false` and try to compile it (or just `go vet ./path/to/folder` from the repo root) and the error message will tell you the type. Same as with every other strongly typed language.
by gcanyon | 2025-08-13 11:41:37+00:00
One relatively common way to remove first player advantage is to have the first player place one stone, and then after that each person places two stones on their turn. So

After player 1s first move there is one stone in the sequence.

After player 2s first move there are three stones.

After player 1s next move there are five stones.

After player 2s next move there are seven stones.

Etc. Usually this completely removes first player advantage. It’s obvious that this removes player 1s potential advantage since black or white, his move is symmetrical without loss of generality.

Player 2 actually has the first consequential move, with three possible options — again, taking player 1s move as a given color, player 2 can play

DD DS SD

where S means “same” and D means “different”. Technically player 2 has four options: he could also play SS and lose immediately :-)
by rbanffy | 2025-08-13 11:42:05+00:00
Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed.

From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.
by slightwinder | 2025-08-13 11:42:36+00:00
> The most productive people I ever worked with all had really minimal productivity software.

What about quality? Often, people are very productive, because they sacrifice quality for speed, especially the "annoying" longterm-values of products/decisions.

> They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work

It's a different kind of productivity. Just not as valuable for the company.
by PicassoCTs | 2025-08-13 11:43:07+00:00
My pet theory is - that as a rationalist, you have a idealized view of humanity by nature. Your mirror neurons copy your own mind for interpolating other peoples behavior and character.

Which results in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, as the people of normal society around you behave very differently and often more "rustically" then expected. The education is there- all the learning sources are there- and yet are rejected. The lessons learned from history go unlearned and are often repeated.

You are in a out-group by definition and life-long, so you band together with others and get conned by cult-con-artists into foolish projects. For the "rational" are nothing but another deluded project to hijack by the sociopaths of our society. The most rational being- in fact a being so capable to predate us, society had to develop anti-bodies against socio-paths, we call religion and laws!
by LinXitoW | 2025-08-13 11:43:36+00:00
Personally, I would love to not use homebrew, but I'm practically forced to. The package management story in Linux is horrible, far worse than the general fans lead me to believe. Most tools I need are missing or ancient, even in the Fedora repos. That's one of the reasons so many modern tools will give you a shell script to pipe to bash for installation. It's the only way to make things installable in a simple, uniform way.

While homebrew isn't perfect, it's still a lot better than manually compiling every new version of a tool until the distros repo gets the update, or following custom install instructions for every tool (and then manually managing updates).

But I'm new to having Linux as a daily dev driver (only servers before), so if I'm missing an obvious fix to get 99% of tools in their up-to-date version installed and managed on Fedora (or ideally, anywhere), please let me know.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-13 11:44:01+00:00
You don't that is why people that never bothered with ISO C legalese have this idea of several tricks being C, when they are in practice "Their C Compiler" language.

Several things in C, if you want to stay within the guarantees of ISO C for portable code, have to be written in straight Assembly, not even inline, as the standard only defines a asm keyword must exist, leaving all other details to the implementation.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-08-13 11:44:24+00:00
> But who the hell know what and when.

It’s not hard to predict that events will happen. It’s hard to do so with more precision than the next guy.

Something I learned in H2 of 2021, when I nearly went broke betting on a correction. Wasn’t wrong, one did occur. Just failed to realize I couldn’t figure out exactly when.
by donatj | 2025-08-13 11:44:51+00:00
Nah, I suspect it's just because it's a machine translated port of the original C to Go

> The original C code was converted to Go using (modernc.org/ccgo/v4), by cznic (https://gitlab.com/cznic/doomgeneric.git). This was then manually cleaned up to remove a lot of manual pointer manipulation, and make things more Go-ish, whilst still maintaining compatibility with the original Doom, and its overall structure.
by 1dom | 2025-08-13 11:44:57+00:00
> is wildly naive.

I do know the way of the world, I just disagree with it and would like it to be different, so I make a point of taking opportunities to try and do that. It's possible to understand the world whilst also not accepting it, and encouraging it to be better.

You can call me naive, I will call you defeatist:)
by malfist | 2025-08-13 11:45:18+00:00
I was feeding Gemini faux physicians notes trying to get it to produce diagnosises, and every time I feed it new information it told me how great I was at taking comprehensive medical notes. So irritating. It also had a tendency to tell me everything was a medical crisis and the patient needed to see additional specialists ASAP. At one point telling me that a faux patient with normal A1C, fasted glucose and no diabetes needed to see an endocrinologist because their nominal lab values indicated something was seriously wrong with their pancreas or liver because the patient was extremely physically active. Said they were "wearing the athlete mask" and their physical fitness was hiding truly terrible labs.

I pushed back and told it it was overreacting and it told me I was completely correct and very insightful and everything was normal with the patient and that they were extremely healthy.
by londons_explore | 2025-08-13 11:45:50+00:00
With any kind of feedback from the ground (to compensate for atmospheric effects), I think these could easily be coherent. One just needs timing accurate to 100 picoseconds within one 20 millisecond round trip - which is 5 ppb and the cheapest atomic clocks can do that.

Even so, my guess is you aren't going to be frying an egg 500 km away even with the whole starlink constellation at full power!
by _1tem | 2025-08-13 11:48:04+00:00
Yes it's just a wrapper on top of Gmail with Inbox Zero philosophy (each email is a support ticket). I only needed 3 features for my helpdesk:

1. an AI email drafter which used my product docs and email templates as context (eventually I plan to add "tools" where the AI can lookup info in our database)

2. a simple email client with a sidebar with customer contextual info (their billing plan, etc.) and a few simple buttons for the operator to take actions on their account

3. A few basic team collaboration features, notes, assigning tickets to operators, escalating tickets...

It took about 2 days to build the initial version, and about 2 weeks to iron out a number of annoying AI slop bugs in the beginning. But after a month of use it's now pretty stable, my customer support hire is using it and she's happy.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-13 11:48:08+00:00
Not really, there are several features that can be used as example of compiler vendors ignoring standard features that they deemed inconvenient to implement, or undesirable for their customers.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.html

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/compiler_support.html
by southwindcg | 2025-08-13 11:48:28+00:00
I'm surprised I haven't seen an intersection of r/gangstalking and AI chat bots yet, though, to be fair, I haven't exactly been looking for it. If people believe that LLMs are authoritative, it's going to be rough convincing them that their delusions being confirmed by their chat bot of choice isn't proof they're correct.

I think we're moving into dangerous territory for those people who already have a tenuous grasp on reality.
by myrmidon | 2025-08-13 11:49:04+00:00
I do agree with you that there is a lot of overhead and waste in the healthcare industry and government in general.

But this insight is, to me, just not really actionable.

Almost every large organisation seems to end up with a good amount of bloat/overhead sooner or later, and this even includes former super-lean and super-focused enterprises (Intel, Google, AWS, ...), so I don't see how you could ever sidestep this problem completely with the government.

Just cutting regulators and government responsibilities in general also seems a really bad idea to me. Reading that article, how many of its complaints would be solved by fully deregulating and letting the market take care of things?

1) Avoidable infections exacerbated by laziness/cost cutting

2) Lack of price/cost transparency

3) Healthcare costs being wasted on advertising/middlemen

4) Doctors specializing in fields that pay well instead of the ones that are most needed to improve health outcomes

I'd argue that none of those would be improved by switching to unregulated private healthcare, and a bunch of them would very likely get worse.

Another thing to consider when cutting regulation are huge possible negative externalities in general.

Just take leaded gasoline as an easy example (because the bill for CO2 emissions is not in yet). The industry basically "self-regulated" until the 60s (and only because it became infeasible to continue hiding lead toxicity by paying or threatening scientists, which it had done for the previous decades): Total costs/damages were enormous-- probably millions of lifeyears lost, but industry/shareholders did not pay a dime after reaping the profits.

How could drastic cuts in regulations avoid disastrous outcomes like that?