MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-08-08 11:22:55+00:00
Just some examples: take a string, don't bother to measure it, just any length between 1 and two meters or so would do. Take a pencil (or a piece of charcoal if you really want to go native) and a smooth branch. Stick the branch in the ground, tie the string around it so that it can slide with little friction and put the pencil in a loop of string on the other side. Now use this to create a circle. You started off with very rough elements not specifically sized for any purpose and ended up with a high precision representation of a mathematical concept.

Another: take a bunch of roughly cast metal balls. Put them on a sieve and let it vibrate until the balls have all passed through the holes in the sieve. Behold: metal spheres, so precise that you probably can't really measure the degree to which they are not spherical without resorting to instruments that you're not supposed to have in this scenario. Then sort by weight (which is a proxy for size). Now you can make ball bearings.

Yet another example: you can cut a lens for a telescope to within ridiculous precision using very primitive methods (https://www.instructables.com/Grind-and-Polish-a-DobsonianNe... ).

Put another way: it is always possible to increase your precision as long as you don't particularly care about absolutes or temperature effects.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-08 11:23:50+00:00
"All new numbers".

Honestly I think this stuff goes very under-reported. The world has become so used to anti-intellectualism that simple ignorance in the highest office(s) is now excusable, and criticising it is implicitly cast as political. Which is a state of affairs that can be weaponised.

(Lest people think I am sniping at the USA from the UK, I'd observe that we as a nation were bounced into a monumental decision by a series of politicians who flatly refused to make their numbers add up when challenged)
by Calavar | 2025-08-08 11:24:47+00:00
> Researchers had observed similar patterns in BERT, where "a surprisingly large amount of attention focuses on the delimiter token [SEP] and periods," which they argued was used by the model as a sort of no-op. The same summer at Meta, researchers studying vision transformers found similar behavior, observing that models would repurpose uninformative background patches as computational scratchpads.

This seems to go beyond just transformers. For example, I recall reading a paper a while ago that showed a similar effect in an image to image model with a GAN/U-Net architecture [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.02950
by exe34 | 2025-08-08 11:24:52+00:00
Or you could pay your fair share to contribute back to the country that supported you initially by providing education, labour, infrastructure, etc.

The moment we talk about piracy it's all about how poor billionaires will have to sleep in their cars if you make a digital copy of something you would not have otherwise bought, but when it comes to supporting the society that created you and your wealth, suddenly it's all about finding ways to weasel out of paying.
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by throwanem | 2025-08-08 11:25:30+00:00
Perhaps you are motivated not to reason. Forecasting growth rates of revenue from improvement, versus property tax apparently aka "land rent," and observing the possibility exists that one will grow faster than the other especially since many improvements generate no revenue at all, requires not all that much effort. But I had no idea you people were mad enough to argue seriously this should be the only tax of any kind anywhere. Excuse me.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-08 11:25:52+00:00
You're not wrong. The reasons why come down to really one or more of these factors:

1. To lower labor costs. For example, the Big 3 auto makers are unionized. Tesla's manufacturing isn't. Guess who earns more? [1];

2. Deregulation. Some things (eg polluting) are way easier to get away with in Texas than, say, California;

3. To shift the tax burden from the owners to the workers. Texas famously has no state income tax. It does have sky high property taxes though. Property taxes are a super regressive tax;

4. For the politics of the owners; and

5. Other miscellaneous reasons. For example, Texas is about the absolute worst place to get divorced for a spouse who is a parent and isn't the primary income earner. Why? Texas courts won't let you move out of state with the children [2] and child support will be severely capped [3], even if, say, the other parent is a billionaire.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-pay-vs-ford-gm-uaw-uni...

[2]: https://www.thetxattorneys.com/child-custody/relocation

[3]: https://ondafamilylaw.com/what-is-the-maximum-child-support-...
by aeroman | 2025-08-08 11:26:06+00:00
I think this is the one

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Criti...

It is really just a collection of 'skeptic' arguments form the last 20 years or so. Science magazie had an article about it

https://www.science.org/content/article/contrarian-climate-a...
by orbital-decay | 2025-08-08 11:26:15+00:00
That's irrelevant semantics, as terms like ideas, thinking, knowledge etc. are ill-defined. Sure, you can call it points in the hidden state space if you want, no problem. Fact is, the correctness is different from determinism, and the forest of what's happening inside doesn't come down to the trees of most likely tokens, which is well supported by research and very basic intuition if you ever tinkered with LLMs - they can easily express the same thing in a different manner if you tweak the autoregressive transport a bit by modifying its output distribution or ban some tokens.

There are a few models of what's happening inside that hold different predictive power, just like how physics has different formalisms for e.g. classical mechanics. You can probably use the same models for biological systems and entire organizations, collectives, and processes that exhibit learning/prediction/compression on a certain scale, regardless of the underlying architecture.
by brabel | 2025-08-08 11:26:58+00:00
The USA got to the top quickly, and might fall just as quickly. China is taking a wide lead already on many areas. The USA is still definitely controlling world order, but the system that put them at the top is already being challenged by the "global south" and you can see how the USA has noted that and is already actively trying to interfere with it (which just validates the effort as it shows they're taking it seriously).
by jacquesm | 2025-08-08 11:27:21+00:00
Because the people from 700 BC were just as smart as we are. Observing the world around you is one of the best sources for ideas and there are predecessors to 'real' candles that must have fertilized the ground for the discovery. For instance, a stick dipped in rendered fat could serve as a torch. Not quite a candle but a significant step on the way there.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-08 11:27:56+00:00
We never moved past that. They always used whatever worked on their audience with no commitment to consistency.

If you are sophisticated then they have quite elaborate, yet factually incorrect, justifications about not hurting the global poor etc. that they'll use.

But if they can get some traction with blaming the Jews for orchestrating an elaborate conspiracy or a Chinese hoax or just blatant denial of reality and recorded fact they'll keep doing that too.

Whatever works. They have the money and the political power to get away with it.
by mrtksn | 2025-08-08 11:29:59+00:00
This is weird, it will cement climate change skepticism as crazy fascist thing unless it's followed by high-quality convincing body of work that discredit the current climate change work done globally. I wonder if that part will follow because it is possible to follow to some extent as it is very likely that there are plenty of low quality works done on the matter.

They need to be right about fraud in climate change research only once and the climate change research needs to be right %100 of the time and they need to have had communicated that correctly %100 of the time. They will have some worst case scenarios or oversimplifications and predictions that did not come to be true in obviously demonstrable way. It will be tough.

Regardless, this wouldn't mean much for EU, China, Japan and other fossil energy importing countries as with the Russian invasion of Ukraine this has become a matter of national security and not just some hippie ideal. It doesn't make sense anymore to drop clean and renewable energy even if the Trump administration proves that releasing smoke is the healthiest thing ever and helps with increasing the penis size.

So they are going to re-write history to fuel some ideology, as the fossils were to be extracted anyway.
by jtrn | 2025-08-08 11:30:12+00:00
That's an extremely dense question :) (Not pejorative, but conceptual dense).

I had some fun trying to answer it, ignoring fixating on whether or not the premise is true, for argument's sake.

My answer is:

I would think "attempting to assess reality that is not grounded in reality" is hard to ignore due to a combination of "it's what is available," being easy to understand, and seeming useful (decoupled from whether it's really so). As a result, it's hard to ignore because it's what is mostly available to us for consumption and is easy to make "consumable."

I think there is a LARGE overlap in this topic with my pet peeve and hatred of mock tests in development. They are not completely useless, but their obvious flaws and vulnerabilities seem to me to be in the same area: "Not grounded in reality."

Said another way: Because it's what's easy to make, and thus there is a lot of it, creating a positive feedback loop of mere-exposure effect. Then it becomes hard to ignore because it's what's shoved in our face.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-08 11:30:49+00:00
Even absent US involvement, getting China and India away from oil and coal is critical.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china#what-sources...

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/india#what-sources...

China is decreasing the percentage of fossil fuels in its total mix over the last 15 years (while still growing total energy generation).

India... less so.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-08 11:31:16+00:00
In general, hard climate change denial as an ideology is only _really_ a thing in states that produce a lot of oil (or, specifically in the case of Australia, coal), and not all of them (notably it never caught on to any great degree in Norway). It's really very much motivated reasoning, and even Trump-esque movements outside the US generally don't push it too hard.
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-08 11:31:45+00:00
> I thought we were past that

We are.

Before we had disagreements in the scientific community by respectable agents.

Now these are not a return to old debates, it's just that the current administration is abusing its authority to control information.

It's just a manifestation of the post truth.

This administration is abusing its authority to subvert instruments intended for specific uses in order to apply them to the trumpist agenda. The censorship of universities, sacking of govt agents that disagree with the administration, deportation of students, civilians being sent to El Salvador, the wrongful application of the Magnitsky law...

You don't need to take these threats at face value in order to stand agains them.
by cjrp | 2025-08-08 11:32:02+00:00
> There is no reason why keyless entry cannot be more secure than a physical key, other than incompetence.

Isn't the problem that it's designed to work from a distance, and that by boosting the signal the criminals can just increase the distance so that the key inside your house reaches the car? It seems inherently less secure than the old system where the physical key has to be practically touching the ignition to disable the immobiliser.
by miroljub | 2025-08-08 11:32:22+00:00
It depends on what you want to measure. Big cities are hotter than small are hotter than villages are hotter than forests.

If you wish to show that baseline temperature increases, you let more measuring stations in urban areas. If you intend to compare apples with apples, you must consider the kind of location where your measuring station is.

It's like bringing more and more Hobbits to Gondor, and then complaining that an average height of the Gondorian citizens decreased over time. But did the height of an ethnic Gondorian really decrease?
by Wobbles42 | 2025-08-08 11:32:47+00:00
What is stopping it is the fact that the "wealth" they are being taxed on doesn't actually exist, so by starting a company and getting investment you create tax liability that is impossible to pay.

Early stage companies have a high valuation on paper as an artifact of selling small amounts of equity for relatively large sums of money. This leaves you with purely theoretical wealth in the form of equity which you have not yet sold, and potentially can't sell.

As a concrete example, let's say your tax rate is 15%. If you start a business, and give an investor a 10% stake in that business in exchange for $1M, your remaining 90% stake in the company is now worth $9M. Congratulations, you're wealthy! Now you need to "pay your dues" of 15% of that $9M... good luck with that. You are now bankrupt and deeply in dept to the government.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-08 11:32:58+00:00
If money dries up, a bunch of startups living on speculative assets will trip, and the s&p will fall in evaluation. But that doesn't actually affect the core economy much.

I think we're in a massive AI bubble, but its a bubble that doesn't affect normal consumers much, so it's not too dangerous or concerning.

As for my prediction of what is needed for truly useful AI automation... i suspect the current bubble will pop before we solve it.
by sigbottle | 2025-08-08 11:32:58+00:00
o3-pro, gpt5-pro, gemini 2.5-pro, etc. still can't solve very basic first-principles math problems that just rely on raw thinking, no special tricks. I think personally because it's not in its training data - if I inspect their CoT/reasoning, it's clear to me at the very least that they're just running around in circles applying "well known" techniques and just hoping that it applies (without actually logically verifying that it does). Very inhuman reasoning style (that's ultimately incorrect). It's like somebody was taught a bunch of PhD level tricks but has the actual underlying reasoning of a toddler.

I wonder how well their GPT-5 IMO research model would do on some of my benchmark problems.
by vdupras | 2025-08-08 11:33:02+00:00
My pet theory, if we indulge in a bit of conspiracy theory about the oligarchs, is that they're in fact benevolent and that the final outcome with be a net good for humanity in relation to the climate challenge.

I mean, Trump is so blatantly destroying american influence that it would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. When you think about the alternative, that is, a "regular" american elite saying that climate action is important with their regular hypocrisy, pretending to be doing anything at all, but in fact going the other way, then things don't look so bad in the medium term. Sure, a bit of short term pain, but otherwise, might end up being better off.

I mean, try to put yourself in the shoes of one of those oligarchs a few years ago and ask yourself how you'd actually solve the climate problem, given current cultures around the world. Maybe you'd come up with the "let's prop up Trump".

That being said, it's just a pet theory. I actually have doubts that such smart oligarchs exist.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-08 11:33:13+00:00
In a way, yes, they were: they forced us to contemplate the long term consequences of our short term actions. Denying that is the opposite of protecting us (and, eventually, our offspring, who will deal with the consequences in a way that we never will).

Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Everything else is just bookkeeping and icing on the cake.
by copularent | 2025-08-08 11:33:20+00:00
I think we have reached a user schism in terms of benefits going forward.

I am completely floored by GPT-5. I only tried it a half hour ago and have a whole new data analysis pipeline. I thought it must be hallucinating badly at first but all the papers it referenced are real and I had just never heard of these concepts.

This is for an area that has 200 papers on arxiv and I have read all of them so thought I knew this area well.

I don't see how the average person benefits much going forward though. They simply don't have questions to ask in order to have the model display its intelligence.
by mikodin | 2025-08-08 11:33:38+00:00
I think there is also a reality in which our scope of what we care about is widened beyond just the human species. As a species that has such a powerful impact on other beings, it would be nice to try and reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering and pain that we place on them. While we cannot eliminate it, life takes life yadayada, we can reduce it and try to curb the mass extinction that we are actively causing.

From another angle, it's taken a really long time for evolution to get to this point, what can be experienced from the myriad life forms is quite wide and widening, it would be a shame to return to only the level of a microbe.

Must we take everything else down with us?
by boneitis | 2025-08-08 11:34:16+00:00
Assuming it doesn't do anything else magical, I don't see much point in dignifying it with a web hit, let alone finding out its name.

It's odd to throw in the dark web, thousand dollar firmware bit when third-party firmwares are developed in the open and have long ago already implemented KeeLoq, but I guess they aim for sensationalism and shock value.
by gwd | 2025-08-08 11:36:04+00:00
I'm not sure what "10% performance gain" is supposed to mean here; but moving from "It does a decent job 95% of the time but screws it up 5%" to "It does a decent job 98% of the time and screws it up 2%" to "It does a decent job 99.5% of the time and only screws it up 0.5%" are major qualitative improvements.
by ghaff | 2025-08-08 11:36:15+00:00
Even aside from the big advances, look at things like clothing in the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has changed enormously but so have so many other day-to-day things--a lot of which are about electronics but that's materials-related as well.

It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth but it's mostly true.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-08 11:36:27+00:00
Because we don't tax the people with all the money. It's why someone making $100,000 a year loses probably half of it or more to federal, state and local income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc and Warren Buffett pays 3%.

There is a persistent idea that we cannot or should not tax wealth because it's "unfair". We certainly can. We do it all the time. Property taxes, depending on your jurisdiction, are either taxed based on assessed value or whatever the assessment method is correlates strongly to property value.

I can't speak to the specifics of Sweden and its tax base but in general a key problem in the developed world is the skyrocketing cost of housing. Why is this a problem? Because it's an input into the cost of everything. It makes your labor more expensive, which in turns makes what they do more expensive. I have heard getting an apartment in Sweden is rather difficult. Stories of having to register at birth and waiting 20+ years. I could be wrong.

But everywhere in the developed world has high housing costs (in terms of real income) because we constrain supply, subsidize demand (particularly to the very rich) and allow people to hoard housing.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-08-08 11:36:56+00:00
You can fit A LOT of photos and videos in 2TB.

My wife is a professional photographer, and while we do archive most of her RAW files somewhere else, pretty much everything HEIC, JPEG or any other compressed format lives in our main cloud.

We have 2.2TB in total for “direct storage”, and we’re currently using around 1.5TB, and that’s including myself and our kids.

My personal photo library has just short of 90,000 photos, and about 5,000 videos. My wife’s library is roughly twice that. I have no idea how many photos the kids have, but they each take up around 200GB for photos.

And then we have backups, which actually take up about 1TB per person, mostly because that’s the space I’ve allocated for each, so history just grows until it’s filled. Photos ideally won’t change much. We backup originals along with XMP metadata for edits, so the photos stays the same, and changes are described in easily compressed text files. Backups of course also have deduplication enabled.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-08 11:38:34+00:00
Right, and we're not:

> Historical records, especially pre-record keeping are revised

Here "historical records" means "the best-known interpretation of historical evidence": it's not talking about modifying records made pre-record keeping. Of course we still have access to previous interpretations: people have gone to pains to ensure they're preserved (despite certain former stewards trying to erase them), and those people are building more resilient systems to avoid this happening again.
by Anonyneko | 2025-08-08 11:38:47+00:00
To be fair, the speed of F1 cars is mostly limited by regulations that are meant to make the sport more competitive and entertaining. With fewer restrictions on engines and aerodynamics we could have had much faster cars within a year.

But even setting safety issues aside, the insane aero wash would make it nearly impossible to follow another car, let alone overtake it, hence the restrictions and the big "rule resets" every few years that slow down the cars, compensating for all of the tricks the teams have found over that time.

(I agree with the general thoughts on the state of LLMs though, just a bit too much into open-wheel cars going vroom vroom in circles for two hours at a time)
by namibj | 2025-08-08 11:39:07+00:00
I'd Like to point at the first revision AMD MI50/MI60 cards which were at the time the most powerful GPUs on the market at least by memory bandwidth.

Defining GPU as "can output contemporary display connector signal and is more than just a ramdac/framebuffer-to-cable translator, starting with even just some 2D blitting acceleration.
by piva00 | 2025-08-08 11:39:28+00:00
> So they are going to re-write history to fuel some ideology, as the fossils were to be extracted anyway.

There's no ideology, you have it reversed, it's always about money.

The oil industry is a huge donor of funds and spend 8-10x more on lobbying conservative politicians. The ideology is tacked on top of the money to justify the donations, and for their voters to gobble it up and repeat the lines as if rolling coal would be an ode to freedom.