MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-08-14 23:48:31+00:00
As a researcher, I can totally agree, but at the same time this isn't super straight forward. Things get weird because you can't just translate from one GPU to another. There isn't a clean calculation for that. There's also other issues like parallelism. Sure, your model is stable with a batch size of 8192 but that's across 1 node, it might not be stable with that batch across 2 nodes. This is a real frustrating part and honestly I don't think most people even are aware such issues exist.

Right now I'm just happy when people are including parameter, GMACs (or FLOPs), and throughput. I always include those and the GPUs I used. I also frequently include more information in the appendix but frankly when I include it in the front matter the paper is more likely to be rejected.

I can tell you why this isn't happening though. There's a common belief that scale is all you need. Which turns into "fuck the GPU poor". I've published works where my model is 100x smaller (with higher throughput, and far lower training costs), and the responses from reviewers tend to be along the lines "why isn't it better?" or "why not just distill or prune a large model?" There's this weird behavior that makes the black box stay a black box. I mean Yi Tay famously said "Fuck theorists" on twitter
by gerdesj | 2025-08-14 23:49:30+00:00
GEDCOM was developed by the Mormons and was not really designed to encompass the rich diversity of human relationships. You can seriously overload the notes fields!

Genealogy is really hard but it is important to not get too bogged down with formality and get the data stashed in one form or another. Genealogy "facts" decay with a horribly short half life. It is also important to accept all "facts" as is and not try to interpret them too much - that's something else.

I'm 55 years old and have memories dealing with my grandad on my mother's side who was born in 1901. So, within reason, I can record some second hand facts going back to very early C20. My parents were born 1942/3. etc etc. However, the gold standard is written evidence of a fact.

I think that genealogy really needs to discover systems like Elastic/Open Search and not try to coerce the data to a fixed schema.

Everyone thinks their family tree is a tree. No it really isn't - it's a thicket!

I have a relative that my uncle found from Padstow in Cornwall in C16 - her first born was probably a bastard fathered by the local squire's son. There's a soldier from WWI whom the family "knowledge" from around two generations ago was convinced he was a deserter. It turns out he was honorably discharged and emigrated to Canada. On of my G^5 dad died from septicemia after punching a window in a drunken pub brawl.

All of the above has documentary evidence, expect for the desertion thing, which turned out to be bollocks. Oh there is a good chance of a mass-murderer back in C18 near Devizes, Wiltshire!

This is where IT gets really interesting. How on earth do you go about genealogy data? You are sure to piss off someone(s) who want to wear the rose tinted specs and if you think modern politics are a bit challenging, why not try to deal with politics across centuries and the random weirdness that is your own family 8)
by ajmurmann | 2025-08-14 23:49:45+00:00
For a few years Mubi solved this. They only had 30 movies at a time. Every day the oldest movie left and a new one was added. All well curated and movies you'd remember. No empty calories. Because of the timing it had the same effect as you described. While Mubi is still one of my favorite platforms it now has a regular catalog.
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 23:50:22+00:00
Oh I know, I will keep applying and hoping for the best, obviously. I don't really have the privilege of being able to give up, as I need to pay my mortgage.

It's just a bit discouraging sometimes. I don't really think I'd be a worse engineer than most people they end up hiring, so it's hard to not take this personally sometimes.

99% of the time, when I'm rejected I just roll my eyes and move on, but every now and then (and it appears to be kind of stochastic), one rejection will just get a bit more under my skin than others. I've been rejected for thousands of jobs and I don't have a crisis for each one.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 23:50:40+00:00
In a book having a story and then some pages about the historic context, I would expect the context to be somewhat accurate? I also mean stuff like that researchers are sometimes (I think often) unable to determine whether a picture, a music piece was created by the master or by the prentices. I don't expect public media to lie about that.

It's also about common sense economy and human behaviour. I don't think humans change all that much.

Wars and rivalities between cities and between the nobility-dominated land are part of history classes in school. Can you bring actual arguments why my reasoning is wrong, instead of simply claiming it just didn't happened this way?
by gruez | 2025-08-14 23:51:17+00:00
>Institutions that handle sensitive data that is subject to access regulations generally have a compliance process that must be followed prior to accessing and using that data, and a compliance department staffed with experts who review and approve/deny access requests.

Facebook isn't running an electronic medical records business. It has no expectation that it's going to be receiving sensitive data, and specifically discourages it. What more are you expecting? That any company dealing with bits should have a moderation team poring over all records to make sure they don't contain "sensitive data"?

>But Facebook would rather move fast, break things, pay some fines, and reap the benefits of their illegal behavior.

Running an analytics service that allows apps to send arbitrary events is "move fast, break things" now?
by Melatonic | 2025-08-14 23:52:35+00:00
I think thats the issue most people missed with Piracy the first time around - it wasnt even the cost (free) - its that the experience itself was just so much easier.

I have several streaming services and its always a struggle to find out which one the show I want is on. And then maybe I don't subscribe because its something random.

Streaming took off originally because the experience was just smoother and easier than torrenting
by komali2 | 2025-08-14 23:52:49+00:00
I think if you read some anarchist philosophy you might be surprised at what you find.

Property can be owned in common. Then it's not private property whose ownership rights are enforced by a State. We have that here in Taiwan with indigenous people and it causes issues with the bureaucracy all the time, which is desperate for a name to put down as landowner. Many societies throughout history have common ownership aka no private property.

Before you ridicule the idea of anarchy perhaps take a look at history - humans as a social animal tend to form societies, not states.
by crabmusket | 2025-08-14 23:53:41+00:00
The 4 step process outlined at the start of this article really reminds me of Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity:

> The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism.

(This is rephrased Karl Popper, and Popper cites an intellectual lineage beginning somewhere around Parmenides.)

I see writing tests as a criticism of the code you wrote, which itself was a conjecture. Both are attempting to approach an explanation in your mind, some platonic idea that you think you are putting on paper. The code is an attempt to do so, the test is criticism from a different direction that you have done so.
by dboreham | 2025-08-14 23:53:42+00:00
Folks here were likely mostly not born yet, but note the beginnings of internet search (not Google iirc) were defense surveillance projects. Basically when the internet took off at the retail level anyone that had been working on black mass surveillance projects flipped over to working on internet search. Same for internet map/google earth type systems. I saw a google-earth-like product demonstrated (possibly wasn't supposed to see it at the time) in 1989.
by Arcorann | 2025-08-14 23:53:56+00:00
The conclusion is basically (Larry) Niven's Law of Time Travel. From "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" (1971):

> If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.

The entire essay is worth a read, of course. Meanwhile the paper in the OP goes for a more mathematical approach.
by ativzzz | 2025-08-14 23:54:21+00:00
A good reason to have an anonymous account to post negative things on. Never post honest negativity under your real name. Unless you work for yourself or your vulnerability is a sort of marketing, you're only hurting yourself. Make an anon account, vent as much as you want.

If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature
by gruez | 2025-08-14 23:54:53+00:00
>"We're scot free, because we told wink people to not sell us sensitive data. We get the benefit from it, and we make it really easy for people to sign up and get paid to give us this data that we 'don't want.'"

>Please don't sell me cocaine snifffffffff

Maybe there's something in discovery that substantiates this, but so far as I can tell there's no "wink" happening, officially or unofficially. A better analogy would be charging amazon with drug distributing because some enterprising drug dealer decided to use FBA to ship drugs, but amazon was unaware.
by swat535 | 2025-08-14 23:56:42+00:00
From what I can tell, your experience on X is like everywhere else, it will show you content that you engage with me.

If you follow tech people and engage with those, you get more of them.

I follow DHH, PG, etc and gaming stuff, I get great content.

I also pay premium to not get ads and get Grok for free which is a nice bonus.
by smcleod | 2025-08-14 23:56:46+00:00
I think MCP security scanning tools sometimes slightly miss the point when they're marking content that MCP tools could return containing things like 'curl, rm, sh' etc... with blanket high risk ratings.

If we swap "agent" out for "developer" here and think about it:

If a developer saves (or runs) content with a curl / POST / rm command - is that a signal they're doing something dangerous? No.

Likely what actually matters starts along the lines of:

- Did they intend / realise they were running the command?

Was it really them that ran it?

Was it hidden in a larger script they ran without inspecting / scanning first?

Was it made visually clear that they were running it? (e.g. not in the background)

- What is in the arguments of the "dangerous" command?

Does the POST contain known files that contain secrets?

Does it contain high entropy strings?

.... base64 encoded data?

- What is the destination?

Localhost? Internal network? Russia?

- etc
by mahmoud-almadi | 2025-08-14 23:56:47+00:00
These points you're making are excellent!

Self hosting is inevitably a part of our roadmap. Cyberdesk will have a future where we host our entire agentic framework on your own servers. AI models and the whole backend included.

I can totally see myself having the same preferences as you if I were you with regards to cost, privacy, and control.

The unique value in Cyberdesk lies beyond being a wrapper around a computer use AI model. Our intelligence caching is built on large evals that help us produce prompts that are highly reliable for the intelligent caching to work well in the first place. On top of that there are several tools that allow the agent to be useful (import/export files, failsafes, taking actions using data that was read during the same run). Rebuilding Cyberdesk, while possible, will require several weeks at the very least of very rapid iteration. So for a dev team that wants to build the best computer use agent in the world, I guess that's doable. But for a team trying to be the best "X" in their particular industry, it's probably going to be a time sink that will take away from their ability to compete well in their space, hence why Cyberdesk is a great choice for them.

I hope you keep an eye on what we're doing! I really like your insights here and I'm curious to see what you think as we evolve over the next months and years. Maybe when we do full self hosting you'll be a customer :)
by ativzzz | 2025-08-14 23:57:24+00:00
100% untrue. Hiring is a social game. You want to put your best foot forward, and then slowly let out your truer self over time. Much like dating - you don't want to air all your dirty laundry on the first date. Don't lie about who you are but at the same time people are more tolerant of your quirks once they get to know you better
by windows_hater_7 | 2025-08-14 23:58:17+00:00
The last I checked, most high schoolers don't take Diff Eq classes.

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/multivariable-calculus https://www.khanacademy.org/math/differential-equations https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra
by komali2 | 2025-08-14 23:58:57+00:00
Hence why the "individualist" strain of thought essentially died out as all other anarchist philosophers moved to anarchist communism.

It was revived only recently with "anarchist capitalism" which is of course a contradiction.

If we were having this conversation in the 1820s before such abominations were dreamed this distinction would be worth making. Nowadays, when people want to talk about "social anarchism," they say, "anarchism," and when they want to say "individualist anarchism," which as been identified for the right wing ideology it is, they say "American libertarianism."
by mahmoud-almadi | 2025-08-14 23:59:00+00:00
I don't know too much about training your own computer use model other than it would probably be a very hefty, very expensive task.

However, I believe ByteDance released UI-TARS which is an excellent open source computer use model according to some articles I read. You could run that locally. We haven't tested it so I wouldn't know how it performs, but sounds like it's definitely worth exploring!
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-14 23:59:04+00:00
> Dijkstra's point is that the debate about word definitions is irrelevant and a distraction.

Agreed, and I've made this point a few times, so it's ironic we're going back and forth about this.

> The second half of the sentence contradicts the first.

I'm not saying the question is clear. I'm saying there's clearly an interpretation of it as a question about capabilities.
by gruez | 2025-08-14 23:59:04+00:00
>To use an extreme example, if someone posts CSAM through Facebook and says "It's not CSAM, trust me bro" and Facebook publishes it, then both the poster and Facebook have done wrong and should be in trouble.

AFAIK that's only because of mandatory scanning laws for CSAM, which were only enacted recently. There's no such obligations for other sensitive data.
by rustystump | 2025-08-14 23:59:34+00:00
This is true but also because most streaming services tech is doodoo butter.

For example, i wanted to watch the new south park season. I get paramount plus. It doesnt work on smart tv app. Ok fine shouldnt be using that anyways, hook up laptop. Still doesnt work. Use a different adapter and still doesn’t work. Airplay from phone, that works but i dont want to give up phone and website has major jank.

5s google search later and i am streaming on the 7 seas from smart tv browser.

To be fair, netflix is almost always solid. The rest are glitchy, slow, janky piles of dung.
by convo-lang | 2025-08-14 23:59:36+00:00
Its both a library and a language. You can use it directly in TypeScript and Javascript using the `convo` tagged template literal function from the @convo-lang/convo-lang NPM package.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@convo-lang/convo-lang

Here is an example of using in TypeScript: ``` ts import {convo} from "@convo-lang/convo-lang"

const categorizeMessage=convo`

> define UserMessage = struct( sentiment: enum("happy" "sad" "mad" "neutral") type: enum("support-request" "complaint" "compliment" "other") # A an array of possible solutions for a support-request or complaint suggestedSolutions?: array(string) # The users message verbatim userMessage: string ) @json UserMessage > user Categorize the following user message: <user-message> ${userMessage} </user-message>

`

console.log(categorizeMessage)

```

And for a userMessage that looks something like:

---- My Jackhawk 9000 broke in half when I was trying to cut the top of my 67 Hemi. This thing is a piece of crap. I want my money back!!! ----

The return JSON object would look like: ``` json

{

"sentiment": "mad", "type": "complaint", "suggestedSolutions": [ "Offer a full refund to the original payment method", "Provide a free replacement unit under warranty", "Issue a prepaid return shipping label to retrieve the broken item", "Offer store credit if a refund is not preferred", "Escalate to warranty/support team for expedited resolution" ], "userMessage": "My Jackhawk 9000 broke in half when I was trying to cut the top of my 67 Hemi. This thing is a piece of crap. I want my money back!!!"

}

```
by Seattle3503 | 2025-08-14 23:59:45+00:00
> The solution, then, ought to be to pass a law requiring some sort of standardized parental controls that allow trivial set-and-forget management. Require device manufacturers/software distributors to sort out a "child mode" switch you can flip upon device initialization, in-your-face and unmissable, and then have apps/webpages be able to see whether the device reports it's in child mode. Does this not solve the "prevents 95% of kids from accessing pornography" threshold of effectiveness while being infinitely less invasive?

This feels like an idea out of a previous era; where a lone family computer sat in the living room. There are so many devices now, we can't assume we control or know about all devices our children may have access to.
by bugbuddy | 2025-08-15 00:00:08+00:00
Most time travel theories ignore the fact that the earth is not fixed in space. It is moving relative to the sun in the solar system and the solar system is moving relative to the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy is… etc. A motion in each of these systems is not 100% accurately predictable forward or backward in time.

This fact alone means that any time traveler is most likely to arrive in the middle of empty space.
by Avicebron | 2025-08-15 00:00:48+00:00
I left out race specifically to plumb for people whose mind jumps and fixates on that

> educated and engaged populace that understands their civic duties.

This describes a homogeneous group. An environment that cultivates this unilaterally (relative to an arbitrary standard), is by definition more homogeneous than one that does not. It's a politics, standard of living, and equality economics dogwhistle that has nothing to do with race.
by conradev | 2025-08-15 00:01:10+00:00
I remember it being bad enough for a project I was working on that the engineer working on it switched to relm: https://relm4.org

It is built on top of gtk4-rs, and fairly usable: https://github.com/hackclub/burrow/blob/main/burrow-gtk/src/...

I'm sure the gtk-rs bindings are pretty good, but I do wonder if anyone ran Valgrind on them. When it comes to C interop, Rust feels weirdly less safe just because of the complexity.
by sltkr | 2025-08-15 00:01:44+00:00
You're doing the thing where you hold age-verified requests to an unreasonably high standard of privacy, ignoring the status quo.

The absolute majority of porn viewers access a mainstream site like Pornhub through their home or mobile ISP, which is required to verify the owners identity. So in practice, if you're an average user (note: Hacker News users aren't average users) your ISP already knows which porn sites you visit, and your privacy is dependent entirely on your ISP not sharing that information with the government or other organizations.

If you look closely you'll see that none of your concerns are actually valid.

> You do not want the government to know which websites you visit. This rules out any kind of redirect / forwarding via a government website or app.

Technically trivial (e.g. using Referer-Policy: origin).

> You do not want websites to correlate their requests

Impossible to guarantee today.

Yes, this sucks, but this is not a failure of age verification.

> You do not want a website to correlate multiple data requests

This isn't the norm today. For example, Pornhub today already doesn't work without cookies. That doesn't stop users from flocking to it.

Still, it _would_ be technically possible to provide this; see Cloudflare Turnstile for an example. But nobody cares; neither mainstream users nor site owners want stateless websites.

> as that would allow websites to create some kind of supercookie.

No it wouldn't.

> You want the request to be unique and time-bound. It should not be possible to replay a response, either to the same website or a different one.

Technically trivial.

> You do not want to send more data than strictly necessary. If a website needs to know if you are 18 or older, it should only receive a boolean flag.

Technically trivial.

So to summarize: literally all of your concerns are easily dismissed as either easily solvable or already part of how the web works. None of it is pertinent to the topic of age verification.
by ajmurmann | 2025-08-15 00:01:44+00:00
Same. We rotate through services but Mubi and Criterion are fixed. I do sometimes miss when Mubi would only have movies for 30 days. It helped me to actually watch the movies I wanted to watch. I'd guess that at least half the movies that from the last ten years that sometimes pop into my head were from Mubi. I've probably watched entire series on Netflix I don't remember anything of.
by Proofread0592 | 2025-08-15 00:02:27+00:00
The most insulting thing about LED lightbulbs that the author touches on is the claim that "they last at least 10 years", when in practice about 50% of them in my experience go bad within 2 years. Granted I should probably buy better quality bulbs, but given my experience, I am hesitant to drop more money on a potential failure.
by _swfb | 2025-08-15 00:03:12+00:00
I do a fair amount of public speaking (I've spoken at Lambda Days six times, the Clojure Conj once), and I was a university lecturer, so that stuff isn't too hard for me.

I'm definitely guilty of rambling though; it's pretty hard for me to do say concisely. I'm not 100% sure of the best way to get better at that.
by roxolotl | 2025-08-15 00:03:21+00:00
> The same patterns emerge for all LLM answers to these questions. They converge on an optimal path through a thicket of concepts.

This so concisely explains most of the problems and power of these tools. If your goal is to get a reasonably good answer on a reasonably well trod subject you’re going to be very happy with their output. If you push them outside of that they quickly fall into either producing reasonable sounding but incorrect outputs, hallucinations, or failure.
by manoDev | 2025-08-15 00:03:42+00:00
That’s not how I read “Don't ever implement good-enough-for-now APIs”.

Requirements _may_ change, but it’s much harder to have consumers move to a new API. Once it’s published, it’s a contract you don’t want to break.

That doesn’t mean you need to design an extremely flexible and future-proof API to the point it stops making sense — it’s a false dichotomy.

What you can do is take your time designing an API that still makes sense as long as possible, until your understanding of the domain has changed so much that it’s a different shape altogether.

Throwing your hands up and saying “it’s impossible” is easy, the art is in figuring out how much has to change until you have to say that.

Design is a game of push-pull between context and form, and you can add tolerances both ways.