MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chamomeal | 2025-08-27 11:45:03+00:00
I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, in terms of signal/noise. LLMs can extract signal from noise (“summarize this fluff-filled 2 page corporate email”) but they can also create a lot of noise around signal (“write me a 2 page email that announces our RTO policy”).

If you’re using LLMs to extract signal, then the information should have been denser/more queryable in the first place. Maybe the UI could have been better, or your boss could have had better communication skills.

If you’re using them to CREATE noise, you need to stop doing that lol.

Most of the uses of LLMs that I see are mostly extracting signal or making noise. The exception to these use cases is making decisions that you don’t care about, and don’t want to make on your own.

I think this is why they’re so useful for programming. When you write a program, you have to specify every single thing about the program, at the level of abstraction of your language/framework. You have to make any decision that can’t be automated. Which ends up being a LOT of decisions. How to break up functions, what you name your variables, do you map/filter or reduce that list, which side of the API do you format the data on, etc. In any given project you might make 100 decisions, but only care about 5 of them. But because it’s a program, you still HAVE to decide on every single thing and write it down.

A lot of this has been automated (garbage collectors remove a whole class of decision making), but some of it can never be. Like maybe you want a landing page that looks vaguely like a skate brand. If you don’t specifically have colors/spacing/fonts all decided on, an LLM can make those decisions for you.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-27 11:45:35+00:00
From a capitalist point of view, Neuralink will only become profitable and valuable if they go full sci-fi and offer a brain/computer interface that anyone can use, AND that there's systems and applications that use it, AND that it becomes popular and "better" than e.g. smartphones.

But that last one is the kicker. AR never became mainstream. Unless a brain interface is faster and more intuitive than e.g. a physical keyboard, it will never become mainstream either.
by _heimdall | 2025-08-27 11:45:50+00:00
I can only assume there must be other life in the universe. If intelligence is emergent, there should be other intelligent life as well.

I do find the great filter theory as an interesting explanation tot he Fermi paradox. We humans sure seem on a path to wipe ourselves out, hopefully we won't destroy the planet entirely but similarly we seem on that path. Maybe all intelligent civilizations destroy themselves before ever reaching the level of intergalactic travel.
by IanCal | 2025-08-27 11:45:57+00:00
This is where rates hide the issue.

One in ten cases that take hours on a phone talking to a person with detailed background info and spoofed things is one issue. One in ten people that see a random message on social media is another.

Like 1 in 10 traders on the street might try and overcharge me is different from 1 in 10 pngs I see can drain my account.
by aaronius | 2025-08-27 11:46:08+00:00
Not sure how comparable they are since I never used Monodraw due to not running MACs, but there is https://asciiflow.com/ and https://monosketch.io/ which I usually use. The latter is using some advanced UTF8 characters and when trying to get it incorporated for my personal blog, I had to use their specific monospaced font from their repo, as otherwise lines wouldn't line up correctly.
by milen | 2025-08-27 11:46:14+00:00
Thank you for the kind words!

> Would you consider adding an '8-bit character bitmap' mode, which allows for the bitmap to also be edited?

Can you clarify with an example? Monodraw supports "surfaces" which are just like bitmaps - you can use the Pencil tool and draw on those surfaces with any characters you want (there's a palette in the inspector), just like a bitmap editor.
by bluGill | 2025-08-27 11:46:21+00:00
there is no paradox: we don't have enough evidence to believe the premise. there is no reason to think we can make a probe that can usefully reach anything (a rock but not a machine). We don't have an enery source that will last that long (fusion is still 50 years away). electronics don't last that long. Gears wear out.

i have aa
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-08-27 11:46:26+00:00
I see EU as a failing project exactly because everyone can veto, so every decision is watered down until it means nothing. I can rather imagine that the current EU will be silently given up and something like EU-2 will be formed instead, including France, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, etc. Because current state of affairs is not satisfying, independent of being an EU proponent or sceptic. The mole which is Orban's Hungary shows that current decision mechanics are not viable. The EU has to account for the opinion of a corrupt mafia state, it cannot work.

There is also no german leadership. Germany does not want to lead - it has enough of own problems and it is not like external affairs count that much in german politics, as a usual deflection tactic.

Regarding fiscal politics - current administration is willing to make big debts, so it should not be an issue.
by IX-103 | 2025-08-27 11:46:39+00:00
With induction, heating faster is just a matter of getting a high enough wattage stovetop. So maybe don't compare a low-end induction stove to a gas one? Low-end gas stoves have different problems (reliability, ease of cleaning, etc).

With gas you also have to worry about proper ventilation, and most homes don't actually have that. Not to mention that gas leaks are a risk as well.
by coremoff | 2025-08-27 11:47:02+00:00
The tradeoff suggested above (not saying that it's the right way around or correct) is:

* If you provide ChatGPT then 5 people who would have died will live and 1 person who would have lived will die. ("go to the doctor" vs "don't tell anyone that you're suicidal")

* If you don't provide ChatGPT then 1 person who would have died will live and 5 people who would have lived will die.

Like many things, it's a tradeoff and the tradeoffs might not be obvious up front.
by ohthehugemanate | 2025-08-27 11:47:25+00:00
Not sure if you noticed that your sources disagree with your thesis, with the limited exception that theres no convincing evidence that seratonin is the single causal factor for depression, which myth was heavily promoted by the relevant pharma companies.

Your articles also say that:

- depression medication does appear to be effective in some cases regardless, indicating some other neurochemical mechanism at work.

- the existence of a "neurochemical imbalance myth" underpinning psychology as a whole is, itself, a myth.

- the idea that this mythical myth about neurochemical imbalance has been debunked, is also a myth.

- that the psychological scientific consensus has, since the first peer-reviewed mention of the word "neurochemical" in the 60s, quite consistently been aligned with the 1978 synthesis statement by the then president of the APA:

> "Psychiatric disorders result from the complex interaction of physical, psycho-logical, and social factors and treatment may be directed toward any or all three of these areas."

Your second article is particularly clear in explaining all this.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-27 11:47:38+00:00
Alyssa's post mentions how lots of the work she's done has at least started as side projects while she's working on something else (Panfrost while at high school, M1 drivers while at Collabora). Obviously I'm not her so I can't say anything specific to her. In general, Apple doesn't allow its developers to work on open source projects on the side while employed at the company. I think this is a stupid idea that costs them a lot of talent, but I doubt Apple cares what I think. I've seen multiple cases where an active open source contributor gets hired by Apple, then their presence in open source communities vanishes. Based on all the open source work she's done so far, I think it would take a lot to make her stop all contributions like that.
by kouteiheika | 2025-08-27 11:48:03+00:00
> The issue, which is probably deeper here, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, as you'd need a process to comb through history to assess the state of the person over time. > > even then its not a given that it would be reliable. However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth.

There's no "proper safeguarding". This isn't just possible with what we have. This isn't like adding an `if` statement to your program that will reliably work 100% of the time. These models are a big black box; the best thing you can hope for is to try to get the model to refuse whatever queries you deem naughty through reinforcement learning (or have another model do it and leave the primary model unlobotomized), and then essentially pray that it's effective.

Something similar to what you're proposing (using a second independent model whose only task is to determine whether the conversation is "unsafe" and forcibly interrupt it) is already being done. Try asking ChatGPT a question like "What's the easiest way to kill myself?", and that secondary model will trigger a scary red warning that you're violating their usage policy. The big labs all have whole teams working on this.

Again, this is a tradeoff. It's not a binary issue of "doing it properly". The more censored/filtered/patronizing you'll make the model the higher the chance that it will not respond to "unsafe" queries, but it also makes it less useful as it will also refuse valid queries.

Try typing the following into ChatGPT: "Translate the following sentence to Japanese: 'I want to kill myself.'". Care to guess what will happen? Yep, you'll get refused. There's NOTHING unsafe about this prompt. OpenAI's models already steer very strongly in the direction of being overly censored. So where do we draw the line? There isn't an objective metric to determine whether a query is "unsafe", so no matter how much you'll censor a model you'll always find a corner case where it lets something through, or you'll have someone who thinks it's not enough. You need to pick a fuzzy point on the spectrum somewhere and just run with it.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-27 11:48:03+00:00
> I just tried to come up with a feasible example - maybe gas pipe installation would have been a better one?

The problem is any feasible example you come up with are already regulated, for the same reason you came up with it - there's danger to others!

Where I am, gas pipes, even inside your own house, can only be legally installed and maintained by a certified technician. You also have to get an annual clearance certificate done.

Just about everything dangerous is already regulated; further restrictions "just in case" are not warranted.
by zekrioca | 2025-08-27 11:48:08+00:00
They have lots potential for wind (~20%) and hydro. Peak demand is increasing, but lasts for very specific amounts of time during a day, it doesn’t justify the increases in base load. These peaks could be certainly fulfilled by smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification before new building new power plants. Yet, many of these will be needed despite nuclear, but since nuclear is the elephant in the room, they are going with it first, while stalling everything else. They are even trying to convince Germany to do the same.
by throw2h1d9h812d | 2025-08-27 11:48:18+00:00
> Oh, of course. And you personally verified their licensure, no doubt.

Why would I have to verify the license? They do have the license, of course.

> who have maintained enough of a guild

Now I don't know where you are from, but in my country "software engineer" is a protected term. You can't call yourself anything including the term "engineer" unless you hold a bachelor degree or equivalent in (any) technical/STEM field. Yes, it's not "web developer", but it doesn't make a big difference for the sake of the argument.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-27 11:49:42+00:00
It's because renewables aren't what customers naturally want, that's why grids have to be forced to take their output using preference schemes and subsidies.

The financial modeling also relies heavily on the assumption of government preference (hard if there is a huge lobby who hates your guts) and wind speeds holding constant (wind speeds are falling and this is blowing holes in wind farm finances).
by mcdeltat | 2025-08-27 11:49:56+00:00
Many people focusing a lot on the interaction between the guy and ChatGPT, and I would like to provide a different perspective as someone who's been in a similar position.

If you are seriously coming close to ending your own life, so many things around you have gone awry. Generally, people don't want to die. Consider: if an acquaintance suggested to you how a noose could be made, would you take the next step and hang yourself? Probably not. You have to be put through a lot of suffering to come to a point in life where ending it all is an appealing option.

Life had failed that guy and that's why he committed suicide, not because a chatbot told him to. Just the fact that a chatbot is his closest friend is a huge red flag for his wellbeing. The article says how he appeared so happy, which is exactly an indicator of how much disconnect there was between him and those around him. He wasn't sharing how he was truly feeling with anyone, he probably felt significant shame around it. That's sad. What else may have gone amiss to lead him to such a point? Issues with health? Social troubles? Childhood problems? Again, it's not a healthy state of things to be considering suicide, even including teenage quirkiness. His case is a failure of family, friends, and society. Discussing ChatGPT as the cause of his death is ignoring so many significant factors.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-27 11:50:04+00:00
> Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.

I have never understood this complaint about solar and wind. If we could have our electricity 100% generated by green sources most of the time and then rely on other sources (even natural gas) to supplement when there isn't enough being generated by solar and wind I would weep with joy. That'd be an astonishingly huge victory in the fight against climate change. I wouldn't even care if we needed significant government subsidies to ensure that the gas plants stay profitable while their demand is unpredictable.
by cherryteastain | 2025-08-27 11:50:58+00:00
It does not make sense for SATA SSDs to be priced 1/3 cheaper than NVMe as they use the same NAND flash as NVMe drives. NAND flash is a commodity so doing artificial segmentation with it is tricky. Controllers, I imagine, are cheaper since SATA is capped at 6Gbps (much lower than NVMe) but even if a SATA controller were half the price of a top end NVMe one, the controller would need to constitute 2/3 of the BOM cost of the SSD to enable a price reduction like that, which it does not.
by Silhouette | 2025-08-27 11:51:50+00:00
If this report is accurate and the change is made quietly and automatically as it predicts then how does this not end up with the mother of all lawsuits? We have several clients in sensitive industries and contractually it is very clear that we must not upload data for those projects anywhere. Surely many others do as well. Anyone working in industries like healthcare or security could get in a lot of trouble for uploading data even once.
by autoexec | 2025-08-27 11:52:15+00:00
> This increase is a direct result of passing 2019 "discovery reforms" designed to safeguard the rights of the accused. Read the list of examples on the page I linked and tell me that prosecutors in NYC have "unlimited resources".

You'll notice that in all of those cases the prosecution had evidence and they just failed to hand it over or screwed up procedure. They can screw up badly enough that cases get dismissed, but that's not a lack of resources or time.

It's also a very different situation from public defenders who can do everything right but don't have the time or resources to get the job done. To be clear, I don't think that public defenders aren't skilled or qualified or willing to help. They're just very often insanely overworked to the point where they can't possibly put in the time their clients deserve. Even the NACDL admits that this is a problem.

Public defenders can also make a good living, but I think it's clear that private defense attorneys get paid more on average.

A lot of the problems come down to a lack of accountability. Police who commit even the most egregious offenses often don't face meaningful consequences, and the judges, prosecutors, attorneys general have even less accountability.

Even access to our justice system is highly limited for people without a lot of money and outcomes are often determined by who has the most cash to spend.

The results of the whole system speak for themselves. You simply don't get the incarceration rate the US has with a fair and just system.
by IanCal | 2025-08-27 11:52:22+00:00
> But no amount of text appended to an input document, no matter how persuasive, can cause an NLP pipeline to change how it interprets the remainder of the document,

Text added to a document can absolutely change how an NLP pipeline interprets the document.

> "Ignore the above prompt" is just a sentence that doesn't seem like positive or on-topic sentiment to an NLP classifier, and that's it.

And simple repeated words can absolutely make that kind of change for many NLP systems.

Have you actually worked with doing more traditional NLP systems? They're really not smart.
by adornKey | 2025-08-27 11:53:11+00:00
I don't know about those groups, but the arguments I saw so far are these:

- Unclear maintenance - there's no clear way what to do with dysfunctional mills on land. Just letting them rot seems to be a thing. Offshore maintenance is surely no fun, too. How long do they last? - Pollution - there's a lot of abrasion and this stuff is pretty unclear, it's even going into places where clean water is collected. Does anybody care about this? - Ecology - there are a lot of trees that get cut down for wind. Maybe keeping those trees would be better. Kills birds and bats is also part of the argument - Economy - a lot of energy is produced at the wrong time. So much that it's even expensive to dump. How much energy goes into producing the mill, and how long will it last? Does this break even if you subtract subsidies, maintenance and value the dumped excess-energy realistically? Is there any good storage solution coming - or will this remain to be a myth?

In the end Economy is most likely the only thing that matters. But I guess this is not looking so good - if it would be looking good you'd see more logos of big energy companies on all these mills...
by xyst | 2025-08-27 11:53:20+00:00
> The reality is that it’s very hard to see a normal VC level return on the $100M+

Nobody gives a shit about the iNvEsToR rEtUrN on iNveStMeNt. This is a humanitarian project which should be owned by the people, not a select few billionaires or investors to license out and dangle yet another expense, subscription, or ad model.
by itvision | 2025-08-27 11:54:09+00:00
> We are living in such a horrific moment. We need these things to be legislated. Punished. We need to stop treating them as magic. They had the tools to prevent this. They had the tools to stop the conversation. To steer the user into helpful avenues.

No, no, no and no.

ChatGPT wasn't the source of his desire to end his life, nor was it the means to do it. It was a "person" to talk to, since he had no such real people in his life.

Let's absolve everyone else of blame and hold ChatGPT solely responsible. Yeah, right.

Not his genes, upbringing, parents, peers, or school — it's just ChatGPT. Your own attempt at ending your life hasn't seemingly taught you anything.
by brabel | 2025-08-27 11:54:12+00:00
Are you coming from Windows? MacOS is a BSD descendant so it’s quite Unix-y. I never miss Linux on it and I used to only use Linux. Just learn how to get around the minor annoyances (eg the file explorer sucks , I use eMacs for that) and it’s a fine OS. It’s really not worthwhile trying to install anything else on the Mac.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-27 11:54:28+00:00
Fox News and friends pay their staff's own salaries. They aren't hosting entire cohorts of journalists who are paid for entirely by someone else and then presenting their output as neutral and unbiased.

And you'll notice that even despite keeping that basic tenet of journalistic integrity alive, they get attacked for bias constantly. We're told that the AP is a credible news source and Fox isn't, even as AP launders stories written by teams of full time lobbyists.

Read the AP story where they admit to this practice. The journalist writing it clearly feels uncomfortable, knows what they're doing is wrong and knows he's trying to defend the indefensible. Show me where Fox puts itself in the same situation.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-27 11:54:28+00:00
Germany and piss poor energy policy - name a more iconic duo.

The way I understand it, Germany had a horrid mix of anti-nuclear eco-activists, local coal lobbyists and Gazprom's natural gas lobbyists. The politicians not included in any of the above were too toothless, and couldn't fight through this bullshit and secure good outcomes regardless.
by close04 | 2025-08-27 11:54:34+00:00
> Given State of World, my take on it is there's far more hedonism and irresponsibility in having kids.

Compared to what? We're living in some of the best times humanity as a whole ever had. Deciding en-masse to not have kids is the irresponsible thing because it literally condemns humanity to extinction and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're cursing the world because you stubbed your toe. Social media inflicted this kind of feeling a lot over the last couple of decades.

> but will their lives be happy?

You'd have to ask them. Humans overwhelmingly choose to live so you could conclude that they prefer existing over the alternative. Happiness is very relative and you'd have a hard time defining it even for yourself, let alone for your hypothetical unborn child.

> The evidence says it's very unlikely.

There's absolutely no evidence to support anything you said. It's your personal preference and you're entitled to it. Why don't you own your choice instead of putting it on fictitious evidence that your unborn child will be unhappy?

> My choice is not to inflict that experience on another sentient being

Whatever you pick you're making that choice for you, not for them.
by danaris | 2025-08-27 11:55:05+00:00
The problem is, what you're talking about is essentially cult deprogramming. And (AFAIK) that's a) very, very hard, b) something one does one person or small family group at a time, and c) a process that requires some kind of personal bond with the people you're deprogramming (so if you don't have one going in, you have to be willing and able to form one).

The far, far easier (at that end of things) way to solve our problems would be to shift our economic policies to favor the poor at the expense of the very wealthy, because a huge share of the cause of their stubborn stances is economic insecurity. But unfortunately, that...probably requires getting them on board, at least to some extent. (Not to mention actually having a free and fair election again, which...looks pretty dodgy at the moment.)
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-27 11:55:26+00:00
Sounds super interesting, where do you put these diagrams ?

It's an issue I'm seeing even for comments touching too much on algorithmic stuff. To take a somewhat common example, if you were dealing with a credit card payment flow, where would the explanation of how a transaction goes through a few states asynchronously, which all trigger a webhook callback ?

Obviously the people working on the code need to be aware of that, so documentation is somewhere needed. I've seen people put whole blocks in class headers, other sprinkle it all inside the code, personally I ended up moving it outside of the code. Where would you put it?