MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by einrealist | 2025-08-17 12:35:20+00:00
> “Successful” is importantly distinct from “correct.”

This is the most important sentence describing the fundamental issue that LLMs have. This severely limits the technology's useful applications. Yet OpenAI and others constantly lie about it.

The article very clearly explains why models won't be able to generalise unless RL is performed constantly. But that's not scalable, has other problems in itself. For example, it still runs into paradoxes where the training mechanism has to know the answer in order to formulate the question. (This is precisely where the concept of World Models comes in or why symbolism becomes more important.)

LLMs perform well in highly specialised scenarios with a well-defined and well-known problem space. It's probably possible to increase accuracy and correctness by using lots of interconnected models that can perform RL with each other. Again, this raises questions of scale and feasibility. But I think our brains (together with the other organs) work this way.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-17 12:36:07+00:00
Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!

Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!

Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!

Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_
by senko | 2025-08-17 12:36:18+00:00
The mediocrity (and "hacks" like LinkedIn broetry[0]) make it super-easy to stand out just by talking plainly about interesting stuff!

I have a (subjectively) high (self-imposed) bar for posting on my blog, but my bar is much lower for LinkedIn. I also have a much larger audience there.

I sometimes turn the LI posts I'm really happy with into blog articles, so they also serve as a kind of preprint for me.

Basically, I use it like I'd use Twitter if it still existed and allowed for somewhat longer posts, and BlueSky if it had any users.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...
by ingloriousB | 2025-08-17 12:36:33+00:00
The Raft authors didn't "miss" it, they just decided that randomized was simpler--and simplicity was a deliberate design goal.

They found randomized was easier to reason about compared to trying to figure out how to explain and prove correctness when the next "determined" leader has died or been partitioned.

Lacking formal methods, the original VSR work seems less rigorous/proven. Maybe rigorous proof was just not possible at the time; after all Lamport had to work really hard to prove Paxos correct.

Consider that page 31 of Brian Oki's dissertation, http://www.pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/MIT-LCS-TR-423.pdf , he complete misses problem that is discussed in Figure 3.7 of the Raft dissertation.

That is, the "new view" may be missing information from a leader who had a higher term/view number, but is temporarily offline. Does the orignal VSR provide the same fix that Raft does for that scenario? Does it address other possible scenarios? Mechanical proofs seem conspicuously absent, and even human proofs aren't in ready evidence.
by latexr | 2025-08-17 12:37:03+00:00
It’s still true. I said something like this, not only this specifically. But even for this exact case it would remain true for me. I have several situations where that has been the case, I’m speaking from experience. Maybe it wouldn’t be true for you—which is fair, everyone is different—but don’t ignore the gained experience which makes the next project even faster to finish.
by nis0s | 2025-08-17 12:38:12+00:00
If we stick with the lens of mythology, where a collective will is embodied by something which controls it, then yes.

We can say some things are more like golems, while others are more like thralls. I think religions are more like golems because a collective will is distilled into a “singular” scripture, and many times the logos is esoteric in nature, but its “magic” gets the job done, that is to say, you don’t need to understand your religion to be religious.

Should we broadly categorize embodiments of collective will as such? Not necessarily—I think democratic institutions are less prone to be slavish, but more like a person with schizophrenia managing themselves. I think the closer an entity gets to a human person-level of embodiment, the more likely it is to be pro-social.
by strken | 2025-08-17 12:38:13+00:00
I think that for a lot of examples, the differentiating factor is infrastructure rather than science.

The current wave of AI needed fast, efficient computing power in massive data centres powered by a large electricity grid. The textiles industry in England needed coal mining, international shipping, tree trunks from the Baltic region, cordage from Manilla, and enclosure plus the associated legal change plus a bunch of displaced and desperate peasantry. Mobile phones took portable radio transmitters, miniaturised electronics, free space on the spectrum, population density high enough to make a network of towers economically viable, the internet backbone and power grid to connect those towers to, and economies of scale provided by a global shipping industry.

Long term progress seems to often be a dance where a boom in infrastructure unlocks new scientific inquiry, then science progresses to the point where it enables new infrastructure, then the growth of that new infrastructure unlocks new science, and repeat. There's also lag time based on bringing new researchers into a field and throwing greater funding into more labs, where the infrastructure is R&D itself.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-17 12:38:48+00:00
To me what is _spiritually_disturbing (in the sense that it hurts my spirit) is the fact that I think that such behaviour is going to keep on happen and the world would get EVEN more polarized, less trustworthy overall.

Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.

There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.

The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-17 12:39:13+00:00
I came here to write a similar comment. To me it read more like: When driving, do you prefer to a) turn left, b) turn right, c) press the gas pedal, d) press the brake pedal, or e) execute a sequence of actions that get you safely to your destination? There's a good idea here, perhaps, but it's obscured by very weak questions.
by primering | 2025-08-17 12:40:49+00:00
> because I find it's useful

How useful is it exactly that you accept to not use DX improving syntax like constructor properties, enums, etc? To me, someone who uses these features _a lot_, this would be a terrible trade. Seems more like people push this out of ideology and because TS is never going to be part of node itself (since its implementation is just way too slow)
by fhd2 | 2025-08-17 12:41:29+00:00
What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential.

What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.

Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.

At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?

We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
by altfredd | 2025-08-17 12:41:31+00:00
Note that TCP Keep-Alive might not play well with mobile devices.

Mobile operating systems can use application-level keep-alive packets, because those can be easily attributed to individual applications: an applications receives a TCP/UDP packet during low-power CPU sleep mode, asks system to wake up (by e.g. taking a wake-lock), and the system takes note who caused the wake-up. TCP Keep-Alive happens below application level, so it may be disabled, even when application can still be reached.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-08-17 12:43:10+00:00
I work at an ewaste recycling company. Last week, I was testing a projector, and was using a USBC to DVI cable (one of the most cursed cables I've come across). I said "LOL this won't work" and plugged it into my phone. Sure enough, my phone recognized that a display was connected, and once confirmed, showed what I expected it to!

Plugging a car into a phone should work like that: just a dumb display with maybe a keyboard or touchscreen input device.
by samwillis | 2025-08-17 12:43:36+00:00
Oliver is doing awesome work here. A few interesting points:

- Porffor can use typescript types to significantly improve the compilation. It's in many ways more exciting as a TS compiler.

- There's no GC yet, and likely will be a while before it gets any. But you can get very far with no GC, particularly if you are doing something like serving web requests. You can fork a process per request and throw it away each time reclaiming all memory, or have a very simple arena allocator that works at the request level. It would be incredibly performant and not have the overhead of a full GC implementation.

- many of the restrictions that people associate with JS are due to VMs being designed to run untrusted code. If you compile your trusted TS/JS to native you can do many new things, such as use traditional threads, fork, and have proper low level memory access. Separating the concept of TS/JS from the runtime is long overdue.

- using WASM as the IR (intermediate representation) is inspired. It is unlikely that many people would run something compiled with Porffor in a WASM runtime, but the portability it brings is very compelling.

This experiment from Oliver doesn't show that Porffor is ready for production, but it does validate that he is on the right track, and that the ideas he is exploring are correct. That's the imports take away. Give it 12 months and exciting things will be happing.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-17 12:44:18+00:00
> When I think about those stories I can't help but wonder if we're actually seeing the opposite of that unravel.

Interesting. My perception is pretty much the opposite of yours, that such fiction has been mostly on point so far. The "elites" (and particularly the tech "elites") have built their own world that is pretty much completely disconnected from ours in a day-to-day sense. They live in compounds, have what are basically private armies to increase that separation, and view people as resources to be exploited. They could not be more separate from normal people without actually leaving the planet.

Remember that almost everything in sci-fi is allegory. You can effectively leave the Earth without ever physically leaving the Earth.
by deervo22 | 2025-08-17 12:44:23+00:00
Ever wanted to hear old hard drive sounds on your computer, but don't want to go find an old PC or dig up an old, slow, clunker hard drive? Well, fear not! This program will let you emulate the disk sounds of anything you want. This program monitors the disk activity on your C drive and makes disk noises based on real activity.

The program comes with various sound sets from a variety of hard drives. You can also make your own custom sound sets. Each sound set is a folder containing several .wav files. The various load sounds are played in a randomized order during disk activity. If you want to change the sound set, just click "load folder." You can choose from the included sound sets, or make your own using any sound files you want!

This project has been in development for a little over a year in and a half and is nearing completion. My goal is to wrap up the function to get multiple drives tracking and working. Improving the audio sound sets is also a priority. It is extremely niche and very odd but a lot of people have seemed to like it. I figured i would post it here to get some more feedback and what people would like.
by Aachen | 2025-08-17 12:45:42+00:00
> frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds

That's a typical experience when the chosen solution doesn't match the available resources and desired scale. Projects like WordPress and GitLab may work for large enterprises, or when you add in enough caching that you don't have to do the large computation (generating one page) most times, but they don't work so well when you're wanting it to just work without custom solutions as a small team on a small budget

Forgejo doesn't seem to have this issue as far as I've noticed. I've hosted the predecessor (Gitea) on a potato. It's so easy to host, I think it's actually still running but forgotten about. I should check if it needs updating at some point..
by sarchertech | 2025-08-17 12:45:54+00:00
Same experience with Google search AI. The links frequently don’t support the assertions, they’ll just say something that might show up in a google search for the assertion.

For example if I’m asking about whether a feature exists in some library, the AI says yes it does and links to a forum where someone is asking the same question I did, but no one answered (this has happened multiple times).
by primering | 2025-08-17 12:46:23+00:00
Except it doesn't. In anything serious, you have to wait for a full type check to happen before you run your TS code. Why would you run code that has not been checked yet and could throw very weird errors like undefined property access?

That just doesn't make sense. Yes, you can wait for your editor in your current open file, if you are lucky and the change in the open file doesn't break anything downstream in another file that is not yet open. In best case you have such simple code that nothing breaks, and in worst case, you have to still run it with type-checking - on top of running it in type-stripping-mode, because you got weird errors in runtime. This is a net negative.

This whole situation is there because we are trying to workaround the slow TSC. It's not a feature, it's something we actively work around. We try to whitewash now the obviously less useful "solution" of running code without its core features enabled: type checking. To me this is insane.
by honorable_coder | 2025-08-17 12:46:34+00:00
We use this technique heavily for function-calling scenarios in https://github.com/katanemo/archgw, which uses a 3b function-calling model to neatly map a user's ask to one of many tools — the model doesn’t need to write an essay, it just needs to pick the right function immediately and the response can be synthesized by one of many configured upstream LLMs.

Why we do this: latency. A 3b parameter model, especially when quantized, can deliver sub-100ms time-to-first-token and generate a complete function call in under 50 tokens. That makes the LLM “disappear” as a bottleneck, so the only real waiting time is in the external tool or API being called + the time it takes to synthesize a human readable response.
by nikodotio | 2025-08-17 12:46:58+00:00
There’s a whole world of syncing databases when they’re offline and then reconnect. Local first. If your websocket connection is offline you have to store the incremental changes to your data and send them later on reconnect. This gets complex fast.

A lot of these tools (and what the author wrote) offer toolkits to do this well, not having to implement and track all these changes in state manually.

In this case the author is running SQLite in the browser, and that syncs to SQLite on the server.
by lillecarl | 2025-08-17 12:48:54+00:00
Vertical digital signage products should also have their polarization filter flipped 90° so you can view them with polarized sunglasses, adding another SKU and cost.

Stockholms Länstrafik didn't figure this out so all our timetable displays are pitch black when viewed with polarized sunglasses.

I've noticed that all but iPhones exhibit this behavior at some angle too and they're apparently using "circular polarization" (expensive) which is another one of these "we do it better" things nobody knows about from Apple (or displays in general)

(https://claude.ai/share/e462247c-0ecd-4a07-8ec1-36a4f3c86597)
by jdvh | 2025-08-17 12:49:55+00:00
We've spend the last couple of years building a local-first end-to-end encrypted multiplayer notes app (Thymer). We also explored running sqlite in the browser but ultimately concluded that we didn't really sqlite or a real database at all in the browser.

What does a document system need? A few simple indexes that track links and backlinks, mentions, and hashtags. You’re broadcasting change notifications anyway (for reactive DOM updates), so updating the indexes for those manually isn’t much extra work. You apply updates eagerly and then notify other users so they can apply the same updates, with some rules to guarantee that all users end up with the same state regardless of the order in which they receive the updates. But a relational database doesn’t help with any of this. Document systems tend to be versioned, so every user action turns into another entry in a transaction log. Even queries like “last Monday’s version of my document” don’t map naturally to SQL. You can query for transactions in a given time period, but unless you have snapshots, you’re still forced to re-apply transactions all the way from t=0 if you want to re-create the document state at a given date.
by primering | 2025-08-17 12:51:21+00:00
This is misleading. It is not transpiling TS in JS, it is transpiling a subset of TS into JS. If my normal TS code can not be "executed" by Node, then it is not executing TS per definition but something else. If you are good with Node supporting and "executing" only a subset of TS and lacking useful features, that's fine. But don't tell people it is executing TypeScript. That's like me saying my rudimentary C++ compiler supports C++ while in reality only supporting 50%. People would be pissed if they figure it out once they try to run it on their codebase.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-17 12:51:23+00:00
If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc.

I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.

Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.

But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
by port11 | 2025-08-17 12:51:29+00:00
My Logitech keyboard and mouse connect perfectly at boot, but never reconnect again if Linux goes to sleep; unless I change the RF plug to another USB port, but eventually I run out of ports and must reboot. Several online solutions claim "you just have to…" and how it's your fault for buying Logitech. Until Linux can give me a consistent basic experience, I'm not sold. And I try to migrate almost every year.
by ryao | 2025-08-17 12:52:16+00:00
Overanalysis for the sake of denying the existence of whatever you want is cliche. It does not matter how complete the information on a subject is, since you will just post more pointless questions, whose relevance is specious, for the sake of claiming there are non-existent issues in understanding. The last time I saw this used involved a very loquacious guy who denied Darwin’s theory of evolution. It can also be used to claim the world is flat.

I was being generous by advising you to stop posting, since the more you post asinine things, the worse you look. In the past, I have taken the liberty to do amateur psychoanalysis of people who post bizarre things online based on a psychology class I took in college. If I keep responding, it will only be to get you to post more so that I can work out what is wrong with you for my own curiosity. I am probably not the only one thinking this.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-08-17 12:52:22+00:00
This article is old and stupid. They find traits of Autism in Williams Syndrome. Why do ten year old science articles make it to the top of HN?

Symptoms of autism in Williams syndrome: a transdiagnostic approach

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-68089-0

Autism and Williams syndrome: truly mirror conditions in the socio-cognitive domain? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9351567/
by barrell | 2025-08-17 12:53:15+00:00
Nah that rings a bell. 4o for me was the beginning of the end - a lot faster, but very useless for my purposes [1][2]. 4 was a very rocky model even before 4o, but shortly after the 4o launch it updated to be so much worse, and I cancelled my subscription.

[1] I’m not saying it was a useless model for everyone, just for me.

[2] I primarily used LLMs as divergent thinking machines for programming. In my experience, they all start out great at this, then eventually get overtrained and are terrible at this. Grok 3 when it came out had this same magic; it’s long gone now.
by TheDong | 2025-08-17 12:54:12+00:00
Since you used the phrase "highest levels", that made it sound to me like you were talking about native tests.

I apologize for misunderstanding.

Non-native japanese language tests do not ever go to a high level as far as I'm aware (N1 definitely doesn't classify as a high level, it's around "can read the newspaper very slowly and with greater than 50% comprehension", which is well below even the least-studious native-speaking adults).

> Is [single choice answer] not how these are called in English?

It's an unusual term to my american-english ears. I've only heard them called "multiple choice questions" regardless of how many answers you can select. It's unusual enough that it conjures to the mind a multiple-choice test where each question has only a single answer, say "a", and you just circle "a" for every answer.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-08-17 12:54:33+00:00
> So, here are your options:

[...]

2. Expel every single immigrant

3. Maintain the current model

How about another, more nuanced option: let in those immigrants who are willing to work (and, ideally, integrate), and not everybody?

And also, crack down on illegal employment. Maybe being an undeclared, underpaid cook in some EU restaurant is better than being bombed in Syria or shot by some random dictator's goons in Africa, but that doesn't really help the local society if it's unfair competition. If you accept people in, insist that they have papers and can afford to be regular members of society.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-17 12:56:11+00:00
The DEA is a runaway paperclip maximizer[1]. Their directive is "prevent drug abuse", and they will continue to pursue that goal to the detriment of everything else. There is ZERO feedback loop here. You need to build that feedback loop of you want one. It's your government, shape it how you want it.

[1] - https://hackernoon.com/the-parable-of-the-paperclip-maximize...