MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 827a | 2025-08-08 04:10:37+00:00
The biggest reason is because we have a strategic multinational interest in remaining a leader in science. China (and other countries) will fund science. We have to as well, or we fall behind. Its national security.

We also have a strategic interest in draining intelligent individuals from other countries and nationalizing them in ours, which science funding plays a major part in doing.

One of the reasons why its complicated, however, is that the University environment has changed significantly in the US. What used to be academically-motivated institutions dedicated to the pursuit of education are now, essentially, just boring businesses, with more middle managers than educators. As one example, UCLA has a $9.8B endowment. Their athletics programs brought in $120M last year (though, they spent more, and the university itself had to provide gap funding of $30M. yup.) IPAM was receiving $5M/year in NSF funding (DMS-1925919). One obviously extreme way of looking at this: UCLA could have funded Terrance Tao's mathematics research group for six years with the money they used to save a hundred million dollar athletics program that's somehow still losing money.

This is a priorities issue for universities, through and through. But, Universities have slowly evolved their priorities to bloat their managerial class, which has forced them into impossible financial situations where the only way out is to bias investment into revenue generating verticals like maximizing the size of the student body at any cost on the backs of no-default student loans, international students, and athletics programs. Research takes a back seat.

I am all for public funding of science, but even many university researchers would argue, as a part of the system, that its broken (for reasons which extend even beyond those I've brought up). That's why I struggle to take a solid side on this issue; I want science, but what I want more is a University system that actually takes education and research seriously.
by throwawayoldie | 2025-08-08 04:10:43+00:00
I think that's a little too cynical of a view: in years past, I did in fact teach non-specialists to use SQL (against a read-only replica, I'm not crazy) so I didn't have to run all their ad hoc queries for them, and many of them took well to it once they overcame their initial hesitance. The framing that made it click for them was "it's like Excel, but with words."
by IgorPartola | 2025-08-08 04:11:22+00:00
I have been using Claude recently and was messing with their projects. The idea is nice: you give it overall instructions, add relevant documents, then you start chats with that context always present. Or at least that’s what is promised. In reality it immediately forgets the project instructions. I tried a simple one where I run some writing samples through it and ask it to rewrite them with the project description being that I want help getting my writing onto social media platforms. It latched onto the marketing immediately. But one specific instruction I gave it was to never use dashes, preferring commas and semicolons when appropriate. It did that for the first two samples I had it rewrite but after that it forgot.

Another one I tried is when I had it helping me with some Python code. I told it to never leave trailing whitespace and prefer single quotes to doubles. It forgot that after like one or two prompts. And after reminding it, it forgot again.

I don’t know much about the internals but it seems to me that it could be useful to be able to give certain instructions more priority than others in some way.
by vunderba | 2025-08-08 04:11:54+00:00
There are hundreds of games designed to simulate criminal activities: hitman, the thief series, GTA, etc. I have yet to see a single reputable study that shows playing these games somehow results in an increase in that actual activity in real life.

Feels like you're falling into the same trap that Senator Lieberman did in the 90s, and just another spiritual successor to Satanic panic.
by sibeliuss | 2025-08-08 04:12:39+00:00
Pure failure:

"You’ve given:

Moon in the 10th house (from the natal Ascendant)

Venus in the 1st house (from the natal Ascendant)

Step-by-step: From the natal Ascendant’s perspective

Moon = 10th house

Venus = 1st house

Set Moon as the 1st house (Chandra Lagna)

The natal 10th house becomes the 1st house in the Chandra chart.

Therefore, the natal 1st house is 3rd house from the Moon:

10th → 1st (Moon)

11th → 2nd

12th → 3rd (which is the natal 1st)

Locate Venus from the Moon’s perspective

Since Venus is in the natal 1st, and natal 1st is 3rd from Moon,

Venus is in the 3rd house from Chandra Lagna.

Answer: From Chandra Lagna, Venus is in the 3rd house."
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-08 04:12:57+00:00
It's going into the instructions on how to use standard built-in tools, which it is intended to choose to do as much as is appropriate to address any response. Without information on what the tools are and how it is expected to use them, it can't do that reliably (as with anything else where precision matters, grounding in the context is much more powerful for this purpose than training alone in preventing errors, and if it makes errors in trying to call the tools or simply forgets that it can, that's a big problem in doing its job.)
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-08 04:13:02+00:00
Because it's arbitrary. Unlike a date format where the components have relative meaning to one another, can be sorted based on various criteria, and should smoothly integrate with other things.

As a US native let me clearly state that the US convention for writing dates is utterly cursed. Our usage of it makes even less sense than our continued refusal to adopt the metric system.
by snickerbockers | 2025-08-08 04:13:19+00:00
>Do not reproduce song lyrics or any other copyrighted material, even if asked.

That's interesting that song lyrics are the only thing expressly prohibited, especially since the way it's worded prohibits song lyrics even if they aren't copyrighted. Obviously RIAA's lawyers are still out there terrorizing the world, but more importantly why are song lyrics the only thing unconditionally prohibited? Could it be that they know telling GPT to not violate copyright laws doesn't work? Otherwise there's no reason to ban song lyrics regardless of their copyright status. Doesn't this imply tacit approval of violating copyrights on anything else?
by mrbungie | 2025-08-08 04:13:37+00:00
Probably they ran a frequency analysis to get the most used languages, and then, they focused on scoring high on those languages in any way they could including Prompt Engineering or Context Engineering (whatever they're calling that right now).

Or they just choose Python because that's what most AI bros and ChatGPT users use nowadays. (No judging, I'm a heavy Python user).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-08 04:13:44+00:00
Nationalist populism sacrifices academics and intellectuals to create a divide between “the people” and the presumed said “elite,” which is then weaponized for political gain by the actual “elite” (political, economical, etc). These movements rely on emotional resonance and simplified narratives, as opposed to educated, informed discourse.

My crude take on the underlying root cause is resentment, discontent, and similar feelings. Happiness is reality minus expectations, and a whole lot of folks are unhappy life did not turn out how they thought it would.

https://warwick.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/researchers_point_t...

https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/1/1/ksab002/6185295
by treve | 2025-08-08 04:14:25+00:00
If anyone is looking to get started with a homelab at a good price, I can highly recommend checking ebay for a Dell Wyse 5070. They flooded the market for $50 and are likely powerful enough for many needs. They have a M.2 slot that support SATA. The 'extended' version also has space for a small pcie card and has a parallel and 2 serial ports for a blast to the past.
by nick238 | 2025-08-08 04:14:35+00:00
In the web sphere, I recall Amazon having done something like this in the very early days when there was a sidebar with categories that you could kinda drill into. Mouseover one, and there was an invisible triangle off to the right that if you kept inside of, it wouldn't switch the current category.

https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
by quacker | 2025-08-08 04:14:58+00:00
This entire article is a strawman. It fails to even understand the basic important problem lock files try to address.

Sure, I can deterministically resolve the same X.Y.Z versions of packages according to whatever algorithm I like.

But literally everything is mutable (read: can be compromised). Package managers, bytes flying over the network, build servers - all mutable. A published version of a package can be overwritten. Some package managers allow authors to overwrite existing versions.

That means no guarantee of reproducibility. I build again the next day, and I may not download the same code for the same X.Y.Z version of a package. Or my local cached packages may have changed.

So I need checksums on packages. Then I can prove I have the exact same code in those packages. And if I have checksums on packages, I have a lock file.

> lockfiles are an absolutely unnecessary concept that complicates things without a good reason

What is even the complication? The lock file is autogenerated on a successful build and I commit it. It's trivial to use. It's literally all benefit and no downside.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-08 04:15:06+00:00
> I’m incredibly confident that any professor of aerospace engineering would give a better response.

Do you think there could be a depth vs. breadth difference? Perhaps that PhD aerospace engineer would know more in this one particular area but less across an array of areas of aerospace engineering.

I cannot give an answer for your question. I was mainly trying to point out that we humans are highly fallible too. I would imagine no one with a PhD in any modern field knows everything about their field nor are they immune to mistakes.

Was this misconception truly basic? I admittedly somewhat skimmed those parts of the debate because I am not knowledgeable enough to know who is right/wrong. It was clear that, if indeed it was a basic concept, there is quite some contention still.

> This seems like a reasonable standard to hold GPT-5 to given the way it’s being marketed.

Sure, I suppose I can agree with this.
by maoberlehner | 2025-08-08 04:16:01+00:00
I mostly use Gemini 2.5 Pro. I have a “you are my editor” prompt asking it to proofread my texts. Recently it pointed out two typos in two different words that just weren’t there. Indeed, the two words each had a typo but not the one pointed out by Gemini.

The real typos were random missing letters. But the typos Gemini hallucinated were ones that are very common typos made in those words.

The only thing transformer based LLMs can ever do is _faking_ intelligence.

Which for many tasks is good enough. Even in my example above, the corrected text was flawless.

But for a whole category of tasks, LLMs without oversight will never be good enough because there simply is no real intelligence in them.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-08 04:16:27+00:00
It's not just erotic role play that the censorship affects. My life involves a lot of sexual discussions and that means that everyday talk, chat summaries, email rewrites or translations will cause the model to shut down. I do the latter a lot especially to find colloquialisms because Google translate is often too literal. It's so annoying.

Right now I'm using abliterated llama 3.1. I have no need for vision but I want to use the saved memory for more context so 3.2 is not so relevant. Llama 3.1 is perfect. But I want to try newer models too.

Until gpt-oss can be uncensored it's no use to me. But if there was nothing erotic in its training data it can't be. And no, I never have it do erotic roleplay. I'm not really interested when there's no real people involved.
by kirici | 2025-08-08 04:23:45+00:00
>opt-out telemetry: go

By default, telemetry data is kept only on the local computer, but users may opt in to uploading an approved subset of telemetry data to https://telemetry.go.dev.

To opt in to uploading telemetry data to the Go team, run:

go telemetry on

To completely disable telemetry, including local collection, run:

go telemetry off

https://go.dev/doc/telemetry
by aaron695 | 2025-08-08 04:26:26+00:00
> it does not align with my anecdotal experience

Given I'll often see the same fraudulent ad repeated I think anecdotal experience is there are not many of them.

I can even talk to friends about the most boring fraudulent ads and they know them. i.e. Elon doubling your bitcoin scams.

For normal ads unless they are viral, there are millions out there that are never repeated or not even seen.

Because fraud ads have short lifetimes pulled out of 'production traffic' you can collect many for the training data

I assume 'clickbait' is the safety word for 'fraud'
by rebeccaskinner | 2025-08-08 04:26:37+00:00
It would be much less interesting than the actual chat histories. My experience with chatGPTs memory feature is that about half the time its storing useful but uninteresting data, like my level of expertise in different languages or fields, and the other half it’s pointless trivia that I’ll have to clear out later (I use it for creating D&D campaigns and it wastes a lot of memory on random one-off NPCs).

Maybe it’s my use of it, but I’ve never had it store any memories that were personally identifiable or private.
by spauldo | 2025-08-08 04:26:38+00:00
I totally agree.

A major change in my field over the last few years is the rise of Ignition, a SCADA suite that's taking over everywhere. And sure, it's got simpler and cheaper licensing than it's rivals. But for our projects, licensing cost isn't generally a factor.

What Inductive Automation did was open up their documentation, offer good online training for free, have an endless demo mode that can be reset indefinitely, and a "maker" version that can be used for free. Oh, and it's scripted with Python instead of some janky BASIC knock-off. All features that appeal to integrators but that don't matter to the end users.

I don't think it's a coincidence.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-08 04:27:09+00:00
I have a different condition, but I gave up on topical steroids years ago. What you are describing, the rebound effect, from them essentially defeats the purpose of using them, in my opinion. The longer you use them the more damaging they become causing one to require long breaks, which again, often makes things worse/futile. Though in my case, I was flaring back up in a matter of a week or two, not months.
by fdr | 2025-08-08 04:27:42+00:00
that also popped out at me: binding that many parameters is cursed. You really gotta use COPY (in most cases).

I'll give you a real cursed Postgres one: prepared statement names are silently truncated to NAMEDATALEN-1. NAMEDATALEN is 64. This goes back to 2001...or rather, that's when NAMEDATALEN was increased in size from 32. The truncation behavior itself is older still. It's something ORMs need to know about it -- few humans are preparing statement names of sixty-plus characters.
by Mars008 | 2025-08-08 04:28:30+00:00
One way of getting good random samples is to give model a random starting points. For example: "write a short story about PP doing GG in XX". Here PP, GG and XX are filled algorithmically from lists of persons, actions and locations. The problem is model's randomly generated output from the same prompt isn't actually that random. Changing the temperature parameter doesn't help much.

But in general it's a big secret because the training data and techniques are the only difference between models as architecture is more or less settled.
by imp0cat | 2025-08-08 04:31:58+00:00
It's not as bad.

Modern keyfobs actually detect motion and if they are motionless for a while, they stop transmitting the signal to both save battery and prevent such attacks.

For old keyfobs, you can get a battery sleeve with integrated motion sensor which does the same (cuts power when fob is not in motion for a while).

Alternatively, some cars let you disable the feature and just use the keyfob as you would use an older one - then you habe to push the button anytime you want to unlock the car.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-08-08 04:33:26+00:00
This is sloppy:

"ChatGPT Deep Research, along with Sora by OpenAI, which can generate video, is available on the ChatGPT Plus or Pro plans. If the user asks about the GPT-4.5, o3, or o4-mini models, inform them that logged-in users can use GPT-4.5, o4-mini, and o3 with the ChatGPT Plus or Pro plans. GPT-4.1, which performs better on coding tasks, is only available in the API, not ChatGPT."

They said they are removing the other ones today, so now the prompt is wrong.
by ThePowerOfFuet | 2025-08-08 04:34:18+00:00
>Sort of reminds me of how Japan has mastered high end denim despite it being a very American product.

Denim is a contraction of "serge de Nîmes". It is French in origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denim

https://www.insidefashiondesign.com/post/how-denim-was-inven...
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-08 04:34:36+00:00
The pressure differential is created by the leading edge creating a narrow flow region, which opens to a wider flow region at the trailing edge. This pulls the air at the leading edge across the top of the wing, making it much faster than the air below the wing. This, in turn, creates a low pressure zone.

Air molecules travel in all directions, not just down, so with a pressure differential that means the air molecules below the wing are applying a significant force upward, no longer balanced by the equal pressure usually on the top of the wing. Thus, lift through boyancy. Your question is now about the same as "why does wood float in water"?

The "throwing something down" here comes from the air molecules below the wing hitting the wing upward, then bouncing down.

All the energy to do this comes from the plane's forward momentum, consumed by drag and transformed by the complex fluid dynamics of the air.

Any non-zero angle of attack also pushes air down, of course. And the shape of the wing with the "stickiness" of the air means some more air can be thrown down by the shape of the wing's top edge.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-08 04:34:57+00:00
That article reads like typical NATO stuff which sounds great in practice but makes assumptions that don't exist, and are unobtainable (like air superiority), if you're fighting an enemy more sophisticated than guys running around in sandals with AKs. Here [1] is a report from somebody who worked with drones in Ukraine, and why he's exceptionally disillusioned with them.

I half wonder if what I linked to wasn't an indirect response to what you posted, as it was published only 3 days later, and is essentially that article's equal but opposite.

[1] - https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fought-in-ukraine-and-he...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-08 04:36:19+00:00
Indeed, but that’s why humiliating them is so effective as a response (think South Park’s latest season). Their outlet for the humiliation and resentment they feel is anger and attempts at grasping power, and when that doesn’t lead to the desired outcome, they have no way to cope with the consequences of not reaching the expected status outcome. They demand respect and control, and to deny them that is to deny them their validation and belief of their value. A bully or authoritarian without control is like a dethroned monarch; still convinced of their right to rule, but forced to live in a world that no longer bends to their demands.
by strken | 2025-08-08 04:38:10+00:00
You're using words like "zero" and "meaningless" in a haphazard way that's obviously wrong if taken literally: there's a non-zero amount of rigour in IQ research, and we know that it correlates (very loosely) with everything from income to marriage rate so it's clearly not meaningless either.

What actual fact are you trying to state, here?
by johnnyfuego | 2025-08-08 04:38:39+00:00
For a less emotional explanation of exit tax see https://www.grantthornton.de/en/insights/exit-tax-topic-hub.

> The purpose of this rule is to tax the increase in value of these shares that came about in Germany but has not yet been realised before they are able to escape the reach of German taxes by the move abroad.

Doesn't sound all that crazy to me.

Also, the proposed analogy to the Berlin wall feels quite pathetic for those that have actually lived behind it.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-08 04:39:22+00:00
They do tax on residency rather than citizenship. If you are a structured embezzler in another country, than expect the CRA auditors after 184 days in Canada.

Also, Canadian laws don't stop at the border as a citizen... so breaking laws in other places still puts you in legal peril for extradition.

Notably, corporate tax rates are often much lower in Canada, and export free trade is available with most trading partners. Note the US taxes on citizenship regardless of where you live (or if you hold multiple citizenship), and failure to file your IRS statement was an $8k fine last I heard. The fine often stays even if you owe the IRS $0, and temporarily live in another region.

The TLDR version: talk with corporate tax accountants in each region before filing, and do not assume the late tax filing fines will magically not apply to your situation. AMCHAM will usually help guide investors on their filing obligations for type C corporations in the US. =3
by schoen | 2025-08-08 04:39:38+00:00
These are always amazing when juxtaposed with apparently impressive LLM reasoning, knowledge, and creativity. You can trivially get them to make the most basic mistakes about words and numbers, and double down on those mistakes, repeatedly explaining that they're totally correct.

Have any systems tried prompting LLMs with a warning like "You don't intuitively or automatically know many facts about words, spelling, or the structure or context of text, when considered as text; for example, you don't intuitively or automatically know how words or other texts are spelled, how many letters they contain, or what the result of applying some code, mechanical transformation, or substitution to a word or text is. Your natural guesses about these subjects are likely to be wrong as a result of how your training doesn't necessarily let you infer correct answers about them. If the content or structure of a word or text, or the result of using a transformation, code, or the like on a text, is a subject of conversation, or you are going to make a claim about it, always use a tool to confirm your intuitions."?
by panarchy | 2025-08-08 04:39:38+00:00
Yeah it probably isn't the best project to highlight the sentiment, but it was well known one and immediately came to mind in a period that had the contrasting factor.

I don't particularly think that the secrecy or control of a single group really reflects on the overall culture however. We wouldn't call phreakers authoritarian just because they weren't publishing their exploits in the newspaper or letting any new person fully into their circle.

Also the prosecution and harassment of communists/leftists and minorities in the US during that era is why I stipulated less oppressive rather than unoppressive.
by maxbond | 2025-08-08 04:40:11+00:00
I don't think an LLM can fear or come to harm, I just don't see any evidence of that, but I did have a similar thought once. I was having a very hard time getting it to be terse. I included the phrase, "write like every word is physically painful," and it worked. But it felt icky and coercive, so I haven't done it since.
by mh- | 2025-08-08 04:40:34+00:00
Yeah, big +1 on this tip. I have AirTags on my bags themselves as well as some other things. Don't have them on my key fob, but you may have inspired me to attach one haha.

The map thing when you're nearby and it goes into the sonar-like mode is super cool. Especially combined with the ping noise.