MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jchw | 2025-08-16 03:37:06+00:00
Hmm. That really does seem pretty clever, and if it works the way it sounds like it does, obviously does resolve most of the concerns around how this would work and avoid obvious pitfalls. I still stand by the more obvious concern (paranoid people probably don't trust that Intel SGX isn't possible for powerful actors to compromise) but I do understand why one would pursue this avenue and find it valuable.
by schneems | 2025-08-16 03:38:45+00:00
A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day.

I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly.

Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the time to start thinking and planning for those problems.

I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. But I also think the most sensible answer for climate change is a carbon tax. Just because something is sensible doesn’t meant it’s politically viable.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-16 03:38:53+00:00
Humorously, after re-learning about em-dashes due to their use by AI (an otherwise forgotten part of high-school English), I started using them more often in my writing. They really do look nicer!

As an academic I’ve always used “delve”, too, so at this point I guess my writing is going to be flagged as AI a lot…

I do note that some of the AI slop I’ve received from students include other fancy Unicode characters (superscript numerals, variant Greek letters, blackboard bold R, etc.) that are difficult to type, and which especially would not be used in e.g. code comments. em-dashes at least can be produced by certain word processors or text IMEs automatically, whereas many of these others require specifically looking for the character.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-16 03:39:55+00:00
YUP! As usual HN downvotes the truth! I have NEVER seen a business who is willing to let people actually travel in business class outside of the C suite and even then I've seen them refuse it for C suite!!!

This includes for people making 500K+ a year. Still forced to sit in coach unless they pay out of pocket.

Normies ruined business class. Can't get business class tickets on international flights for anything less than 10X and often more like 20X the price of economy. It should be no more than 4X.
by root_axis | 2025-08-16 03:40:09+00:00
> They are designed to predict human behavior in text

At best you can say they are designed to predict sequences of text that resemble human writing, but it's definitely wrong to say that they are designed to "predict human behavior" in any way.

> Unless consciousness serves no purpose for us to function, it will be helpful for the AI to emulate it

Let's assume it does. It does not follow logically that because it serves a function in humans that it serves a function in language models.
by d2veronica | 2025-08-16 03:40:38+00:00
During the Industrial Revolution, many who made a living by the work of their hands lost their jobs, because there were machines and factories to do their work. Then new jobs were created in factories, and then many of those jobs were replaced by robots.

Somehow many idiotic white collar jobs have been created over the years. How many web applications and websites are actually needed? When I was growing up, the primary sources of knowledge were teachers, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, and those covered a lot. For the most part, we’ve been inventing problems to solve and wasting a tremendous amount of resources.

Some wrote malware or hacked something in attempt to keep this in check, but harming and destroying just means more resources used to repair and rebuild and real people can be hurt.

At some point in coming years many white collar workers will lose their jobs again, and there will be too many unemployed because not enough blue collar jobs will be available.

There won’t be some big wealth redistribution until AI convinces people to do that.

The only answer is to create more nonsense jobs, like AI massage therapist and robot dog walker.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-16 03:41:14+00:00
> That doesn't mean we _understand_ them, that just means we can put the blocks together to build one.

Perhaps this[0] will help in understanding them then:

Foundations of Large Language Models This is a book about large language models. As indicated by the title, it primarily focuses on foundational concepts rather than comprehensive coverage of all cutting-edge technologies. The book is structured into five main chapters, each exploring a key area: pre-training, generative models, prompting, alignment, and inference. It is intended for college students, professionals, and practitioners in natural language processing and related fields, and can serve as a reference for anyone interested in large language models.

0 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09223
by ares623 | 2025-08-16 03:41:38+00:00
This pisses me off so much.

So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!”

They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come.

I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises.

Unless you have your own fully stocked private bunker with security detail, you will be affected.
by smegma2 | 2025-08-16 03:42:04+00:00
It looks like the OBBB ended the CAFE standards which have been blamed for the increase in car sizes over time (e.g. https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...). Also personally although I would prefer that people purchase EVs rather than ICE cars, I think it’s best not to subsidize cars at all, since it only benefits those who can afford cars, and it’s better to encourage other forms of transit.
by galangalalgol | 2025-08-16 03:43:18+00:00
I found the stronger stimulants robbed me of joy in life, I became very productive though. A good worker. Wellbutrin prevents my catastrophic thinking and feelings of being overwhelmed. I still miss meetings and procrastinate, but I also still whistle a tune while watching the sunlight pass through the leaves of a tree. That stopped on the strong stuff. All that anectdata aside, some people need the strong stuff, but many more are using it to fit perfectly into a world that no one should have to fit into. Antidepressants cause a similar problem, where people put up with situations they shouldn't. Just because the stimulants allow you to handle a certain amount of stress or work, doesn't mean you should.
by eviks | 2025-08-16 03:43:34+00:00
> The jiggery is super annoying and hard to accept. This is also expected, given that the height is estimated. Works as-designedj

It works as poorly designed, but it's not expected. You don't need to show those tiny meaningless jumps to the user since no user action will be different based on this extra precision, the scrollbar indicator is just not that kind of tool.
by rifty | 2025-08-16 03:44:15+00:00
Every technology tends to replace many more jobs in a given role than which ever existed inducing more demand on its precursors. If the only potential application of this was just language, the historic trend that humans would just fill new roles would hold true. But if we do the same with motor movements with a generalized form factor this is really where the problem emerges. As companies drop more employees moving towards fully automated closed loop production their consumer market fails faster than they can reach a zero cost.

Nonetheless I do still believe humans will continue to be the more cost efficient way to come up with and guide new ideas. Many human performed services will remain desirable because of its virtue and our sense of emotion and taste for a moment that other humans are feeling too. But how much of the populous does that engage? I couldn't guess right now. Though if I was to imagine what might make things turn out better it would be that AI is personally ownable, and that everyone owns, at least in title, some energy production which they can do things with.
by simoncion | 2025-08-16 03:44:22+00:00
> I think context is the primary primitive property of intelligent systems in general?

What do you mean by 'context' in this context? As written, I believe that I could knock down your claim by pointing out that there exist humans who would do catastrophically poorly at a task that other humans would excel at, even if both humans have been fully informed of all of the same context.
by clwg | 2025-08-16 03:44:37+00:00
> Which have failed horrendously.

I'm Canadian, so I can't speak for other countries, but I have worked on the security of some of our centralized health networks and with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. I'm not aware of anything that could be considered a horrendous failure of these systems or institutions. A digital ID could actually make them more secure.

I also think giving kids devices that identifies them automatically as children is dangerous.
by rayiner | 2025-08-16 03:44:38+00:00
> I'm having a problem understanding are you saying it's white supremacy or parallel / similar too such?

It’s hard to articulate because it’s more an absence of thought. Imagine robots run the world and tell humans what to do. You wouldn’t really think about the robots, and you wouldn’t think about their material interests. That’s kind of like how many desis view white people.

For example, consider the domination of the motel industry by Gujrati Patels: https://madrascourier.com/insight/how-gujarati-patels-took-o.... I suspect they don’t think of themselves as being “biased” by favoring other Gujratis. They don’t think about fairness to white people because why would you think about fairness towards your robot overlords?
by throw10920 | 2025-08-16 03:44:39+00:00
...and, of course, all of these companies are just as bad at security as they are at scaling - they don't even have the capacity to understand (organizationally - I'm not anthropomorphizing them) that Experian happened because their servers were breached, not because users' accounts got stolen.

It's pathetic. There should be regulation that prevents overly onerous "security" controls on users accounts.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-16 03:44:50+00:00
>> does not account for frequency scaling on laptops

> Are you sure about that?

> [...] RDTSC instruction is not a cycle counter, it’s a high resolution wallclock timer [...]

So we are in agreement here: with RDTSC you’re not counting cycles, you’re counting seconds. (That’s what I meant by “does not account for frequency scaling”.) I guess there are legitimate reasons to do that, but I’ve found organizing an experimental setup for wall-clock measurements to be excruciatingly difficult: getting 10–20% differences depending on whether your window is open or AC is on, or on how long the rebuild of the benchmark executable took, is not a good time. In a microbenchmark, I’d argue that makes RDTSC the wrong tool even if it’s technically usable with enough work. In other situations, it might be the only tool you have, and then sure, go ahead and use it.

> The time spent in syscalls was the main objective the OP was measuring.

I mean, of course I’m not covering TFA’s use case when I’m only speaking about Linux and Windows, but if you do want to include time in syscalls on Linux that’s also only a flag away. (With a caveat for shared resources—you’re still not counting time in kswapd or interrupt handlers, of course.)
by cyberax | 2025-08-16 03:45:08+00:00
> There's little regulation, but in order to get federal ADA accommodations in gradschool I had to get a diagnosis that took weeks.

That's because you wanted to get something from via the ADA. If you just go to a website, do a questionnaire with _very_ leading questions (that you can do anonymously several times to make sure you get the desired result), book a meeting, and then you can walk out of your meeting with a prescription. Pending a mandatory drugs test, of course.

Ask me how I know. And I actually _do_ have clinically diagnosed ADHD, so I didn't need to fake anything.
by noduerme | 2025-08-16 03:45:30+00:00
In theory, yes, you could enforce better conduct (although this might harm the bottom line). But I also think that when you place people in cramped conditions, they inherently begin to behave more antisocially and become less amicable. For every inch of legroom or width you shave off a seat, I think there's a non-negligible amount of discomfort that leads to more annoyance, which in turn leads to worse behavior. At some point, some portion of the consumers do explode into outright hostility or madness, and the airlines mostly seem to be tuning their services to just above that point.

Money - the very high cost of any air travel prior to deregulation - used to somewhat alleviate both issues. The airlines had incentive to compete on service quality rather than chase the maximum number of seats they could pack on a plane. And anyone paying that much to fly had a reputational incentive to behave in a civilized way.

Flying private for the same amount of inflation-adjusted money as first class cost in the 1960s is a poor analogue, because it inherently leaves out the social dynamic that caused people to, e.g., wear their best clothes and don their best manners to board an airplane. There is no analogue, because first class now is not much better than what coach was back then. In other words, public air travel as it is now is a product that did not exist in the 1960s, geared to a consumer who didn't exist. And the enshittification is inevitable when the goal is maximum occupancy.

If there were an airline with double the legroom in coach for double the price of coach on other airlines, I'd fly it exclusively. No one offers that. It's a barbell with steerage at one end and a very diminished first class experience for 5x the price at the other.
by ATiredGoat | 2025-08-16 03:45:39+00:00
So much of gaming’s soul has been drowned in corporate slop, microtransactions, rushed sequels, and endless monetization schemes. I wanted to bring back what first made games magical: pure storytelling, imagination, and exploration. For the last 30 years, I’ve been handcrafting a massive text adventure in QBasic — over 3,000 rooms, haunting locations, strange NPCs, and a living world told entirely through words. No modern engines. No AI shortcuts. Just the old-school spark that pulled us into other worlds. This isn’t about profit. It’s about creating something lasting, a love letter to a genre that deserved better than to be forgotten. And I pledge to stay true to that vision — no monetization, no compromises, only the story and the craft.
by komali2 | 2025-08-16 03:46:19+00:00
Yes, my warning is that once you're interacting with a cop in the USA, you're in a hopeless situation, because this is sound advice and the one least likely to lead to your death, and also most likely to, after you go to jail, keep you out of jail on a bogus conviction. Plead the 5th and wait.

The nicest cop is indistinguishable from the one leveraging his training to seem nice to get any info out of you he can use for probable cause. He gets you to joke around, talks about how he used to smoke weed in college, didn't you as well? You don't answer, he takes that as tacit admission (unless you verbally plead the 5th, silence is admissable), now he has predisposition to drug use, probable cause to search, oops he's found "shake" in your car (fuzzy leftover bits of weed, I've seen cops rip up a bit of carpet and call it shake first hand), now you're spending the weekend in jail because it's Friday and he'll fail to finish your paperwork before 5.

Your suggestion to try to fix it from the inside comes from a good place but a naive one, you say you aren't American so I'll share with you what happens to "good" American cops.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft

Adrian blew the whistle on NYPD abuse again black Brooklynites and in return they raided his home, kidnapped him, and institutionalized him.

In the best case, they get fired:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/west-virginia-cop-fired...

Or look up Sean Gannon or Joe Crystal. Joe was fired for reporting an incident of police brutality. Sean for reporting when his partner raped someone.

I thought about filling this post with cases. I could probably find 50 more, I've a large collection over the years.

The point is, the system selects for bad cops. To us, a good cop reports abuse and doesn't do it. That good cop makes less arrests. A bad cop is abusive and lies. That's the opposite of what the system selects for. A good cop follows orders and meets their arrest quotas, a bad cop blows the whistle and empathizes with the people on their beat.

Because of this fact you are safe to assume every cop you encounter is a bad one.

We didn't arrive at abolition out of nowhere. The policing in America is completely rotten from top to bottom. It works in some other countries that have much better policies and regulations. We arrived at abolition because the only cops left are the ones that would wiggle their way around such regulations. It needs to be completely cleaned out in the USA.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-08-16 03:46:21+00:00
> Is there a difference? The effect is exactly the same. It seems like this is just an "in character" way to prevent the chat from continuing due to issues with the content.

Tone matters to the recipient of the message. Your example is in passive voice, with an authoritarian "nothing you can do, it's the system's decision". The "Claude ended the conversation" with the idea that I can immediately re-open a new conversation (if I feel like I want to keep bothering Claude about it) feels like a much more humanized interaction.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-16 03:46:30+00:00
I believe you have it backwards, the future is having high wage devs use AI. Imagine a world where a single high wage devs with lots of experience can oversee say 10 AI agents. The boilerplate and grunt work can be taken care of by the agents and the human can refine the results as they know better than the AI and where the AI went wrong.

If you stick a low experience human in front of an AI the human does not know if the AI is spewing nonsense and therefore sometimes you will get nonsense from the process.
by lethologica | 2025-08-16 03:46:42+00:00
A one time, 5g “heroic dose” did the trick for me. I’ve had a few more trips at that dose since that initial one but mostly because there’s a whole lot for me to explore in that space, rather than me trying to “cure” something.

It took me as a real surprise when, after that first trip, all my ADHD symptoms simply vanished, never to reappear.
by nosignono | 2025-08-16 03:47:06+00:00
That's not a generalization. That's a totally separate argument. Making someone whole for the loss of a phone does not require you to provide them housing (which is significantly more valuable than the phone was.) It probably means returning the phone -- and if you gained some money from the use of that phone, perhaps some portion of that as well.

Taking that example back to colonialism, it means probably returning stolen wealth and some portion of capital earned on the back of that stolen wealth.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-16 03:47:11+00:00
LLMs can't reason with self-awareness. Full stop (so far). This distinguishes them from human sentience and thus our version of intelligence completely, and it's a huge gulf, no matter how good they are at simulating discourse, thought and empathy, or at pretending to think the way we do. While processing vast reams of information for the sake of discussion and directed tasks is something an LLM can do on a scale that leaves human minds far behind in the dust (though LLMs fail at synthesizing said information to a notably high degree) even the most ordinary human with the most mediocre intelligence can reason with self awareness to some degree or another and this is, again, distinct.

You could also argue around how our brains process vast amounts of information unconsciously as a backdrop to the conscious part of us being alive at all, and how they pull all of this and awareness off on the same energy that powers a low-energy light bulb, but that's expanding beyond the basic and obvious difference stated above.

The Turing test has been broken by LLMs, but this only shows that it was never a good test of sentient artificial intelligence to begin with. I do incidentally wish Turing himself could have stuck around to see these things at work, and ask him what he thinks of his test and them.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-08-16 03:47:29+00:00
This is because we tend to use a human-centric reference to evaluate the difficulty of a task : playing chess at grand master level is a lot harder than folding laundry, except that it is the opposite, and this weird bias is well known as Moravec’s Paradox.

Intelligence is the bottleneck, but not the kind of intelligence you need to solve puzzles.
by simoncion | 2025-08-16 03:48:33+00:00
> What if it's the desired outcome?

To be able to reason about the rules of a game so trivial that it has been solved for ages, so that it can figure out enough strategy to never not bring the game to a draw (if played against one who is playing to not lose), or a win (if played against someone who is leaving the bot an opening to win), as mentioned in [0] and probably a squillion other places?

Duh?

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44919138>
by gus_massa | 2025-08-16 03:49:11+00:00
> Note: I posted it as a Show HN this morning - but it got buried within minutes. Didn’t want to get flagged by re-posting.

According to the guidelines, a few reposts are ok. Wait a few days and try again. Then wait a few days and try again. And then move on. There are no hard rules, but I don't expect anyone to get mad for 2 or 3 tries.

You can try with another project or a blog post.

I feel it's weird to make a project about a topic you don't know. It may be better to make a project about a topic you understand well and can give more feedback to the AI and verify it's correct. But doing only things you know is boring, some exploration is fun and interesting. Don't stop trying new things.

> (I'm trying to get an early signal of if I should continue to explore a career change. Or if I'm out of my depth.)

Hard to know until you try a few projects.