MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-17 15:09:19+00:00
> LLMs are trained to predict what the “next word” would be a sentence. Their objective requires the LLM to keep surprise to an absolute minimum.

from which the author concludes that pre-training introduces bias against being able to tell jokes. I see no reason for this to be true. This feels like they’re imposing their intuitive understanding of surprise onto the emergent properties of a very complex process (“minimize the cross-entropy loss function across a huge training corpus”).
by whatever1 | 2025-08-17 15:09:43+00:00
I can look around me and find the minimum of anything without tracing its surface and following the gradient. I can also identify immediately global minima instead of local ones.

We all can do it in 2-3D. But our algorithms don’t do it. Even in 2D.

Sure if I was blindfolded, feeling the surface and looking for minimization direction would be the way to go. But when I see, I don’t have to.

What are we missing?
by simianwords | 2025-08-17 15:09:45+00:00
Sorry none of what you said is relevant IMO.

Cars exist at the moment and they serve a purpose. Public transport exists and serves a purpose too.

Self driving taxis and self driving cars will reduce the cost that people paid when they previously used cars. It might also make it more sensible to choose the convenience of a car instead of a tram or bus which may not take you to your exact location.

I agree that air travel is on a different scale but the similarities are there. The promise of a faster and cheaper means of transport but with possible safety concerns - both for self driving cars as well as air travel.
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-08-17 15:09:56+00:00
You can definitely "snap" it to the nearest neighbour according to the vocabulary matrix, but this comes with loss, so the "snapped" token won't behave the same. Not sure how it would score on benchmarks. I'm thinking about how to approach this and I found this relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03668 I'm hoping I can tie this back into prefix tokens.
by kens | 2025-08-17 15:10:01+00:00
If you're interested in the theory behind humor, I recommend "Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind"; cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is a co-author. It makes a mostly convincing case that humor evolved to encourage people to detect cognitive error. The book also ties this in with (pre-LLM) artificial intelligence. The basic idea is that humor depends on errors in reasoning and the punchline causes you to reevaluate your reasoning and discover your error. Humor evolved to be enjoyable to encourage the discovery of errors.
by bena | 2025-08-17 15:10:25+00:00
Don’t confuse knowledge with intelligence.

Knowing what a trireme isn’t a sign of intelligence, it’s trivia.

Being able to figure out how to build a trireme is intelligence.

And I don’t mean looking up instructions and doing, I mean being able to reconstruct the knowledge from baser principles. This is not to say you or your son aren’t intelligent, just that knowing about triremes isn’t a sign of it.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-17 15:10:40+00:00
...can anyone come up with a legitimately funny punchline for "Why did the sun climb a tree?" I feel like I need a human-authored comparison. (With all due respect to OP's daughter, "to get to the sky" isn't cutting it.)

I'm not entirely sure that a good response exists. I thought GPT-5's "to demand photon credit from the leaves” was very mildly funny, maybe that's the best that can be done?
by alansammarone | 2025-08-17 15:11:47+00:00
No so much "stupid", just full of biases and somewhat lazy. This is a well-researched and documented fact. Knowingly abusing these biases to get them to buy or use something that they either don't need - or, worse, buying a low quality/low effort product when better alternatives exist - that's extremely detrimental. That's how we end up with the enshittification of everything.
by kibwen | 2025-08-17 15:12:43+00:00
Generally the way that you would implement a restriction against circular dependencies is to prevent children from importing from their parents, full stop. The more elaborate analysis that you propose would work, technically, but it would only work for tests (if items can't be reached from the crate root, that's another way of saying that the code in question is dead and unreachable; tests only get around this because the test runner is a weird alternative entry point). You'd still be unable to, for example, have a submodule that defines a trait, and then a sibling submodule that defines a type that imports that trait; you'd need to move either the trait or the type to a shared root. To illustrate, this means that anything in the stdlib that implements std::iter::Iterator would need to be defined in a submodule of std::iter (or vice versa). And then repeat that process for every other trait: std::convert::From, std::ops::Drop, std::io::Read...
by lyu07282 | 2025-08-17 15:13:37+00:00
> It'd be interesting to know what is causing that bias.

I'd imagine it's the same kind of "bias" against hitler that you get by reading any history book. Or that makes the overwhelming majority of scientists liberal or leftist. Just look at what happened when Musk made Grok promote the south african white genocide nonsense. It was evidently not the "make_model_liberal.parquet“ dataset he had to just turn off, but actively mucking with it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/elon-...
by Aurornis | 2025-08-17 15:14:26+00:00
> The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.

Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.

But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.
by doctor_radium | 2025-08-17 15:14:39+00:00
Not my bug, but many years ago, I was trying to automate the Windows screen grabbing program SnagIt via VBS and the COM port, and this one command just wouldn't work, no matter what I tried. Out of frustration, I loaded the executable into a binary editor and discovered they'd literally spelled the command wrong (!), and of course never tested it. It may have been an "i before e, except after c" thing.
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by ingloriousB | 2025-08-17 15:15:03+00:00
:) I'm only using "seem" to indicate the limits of my knowledge.

I was just hoping someone would chime in with a link to stronger/formal proof for VSR. Are you aware of any?

So, yes, to my limited knowledge, I've not found any existing formal proofs for VSR.

The 2012 VSR revisited clearly labels their arguments informal; in section 8: "In this section we provide an informal discussion of the correctness of the protocol."

I'd be delighted to learn of any formal / machine checked proofs of VSR ; equivalent to the Verdi project for Raft.

These are elaborate and subtle protocols, easy to get wrong.

In particular when it comes to things like reconfiguration, even Raft had the famous 2016 bug in the simpler of its two reconfiguration protocols.

Note that Verdi did not attempt to verify the reconfiguration protocol; apparently it was too difficult.

There was an attempt earlier this year to give a proven reconfiguration protocol for Raft called Recraft[1], based on an earlier paper called Adore[2]. They discuss why reconfiguration is so difficult to prove. It has to do with circularity.

"ReCraft: Self-Contained Split, Merge, and Membership Change of Raft Protocol" by Kezhi Xiong, Soonwon Moon, Joshua Kang, Bryant Curto, Jieung Kim, Ji-Yong Shin. last revised 28 Apr 2025, v2.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14802

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3519939.3523444

I'm not completely convinced yet that ReCraft works; at one point I thought they assumed away certain scenarios -- but I need to revisit it with a close reading.

At a minimum, reading the Adore paper's discussion of how much subtlety is involved is pretty compelling.

My conclusion is that formal proof is an absolute necessity to have a fighting chance at a correct implementation--especially when it comes to reconfiguration.
by dundarious | 2025-08-17 15:15:25+00:00
What is the basis for this statement that "the problem is crappy SSDs"? From TFA:

> The report speculates that this could be due to a malfunction in the drive cache subsystem. Symptoms are said to recur predictably after a system reboot, which temporarily restores drive visibility but does not address the underlying fault. Affected users are said to be consistently experiencing failure under similar workload patterns within minutes.

> Further analysis has suggested that SSDs built on Phison NAND controllers especially DRAM-less models exhibit failures at lower write volumes. Reports suggest that select enterprise-grade HDDs also display comparable symptoms under intensive writes.

> The issue definitely bears high similarity to the WD SN770 host memory buffer (HMB) flaw, and in this case, too, restricting or disabling HMB yields no improvement. A suspected memory leak in Windows’ OS-buffered cache region could be the problem.

Speculation almost entirely revolves around the Windows disk cache subsystem.

That being said, I completely disagree with most of the replies you are getting. If Intel/AMD released a CPU that exhibited faults at high instruction throughput (making good use of all execution ports, etc.) but within the advertised power limits, I would in no way blame whatever software exhibited the problem, I would blame the chip.
by jalapenos | 2025-08-17 15:15:35+00:00
Nope, this is a well known pattern. Western startup, grows, matures, MBAs take over, all they can do is look at cost numbers because they can't value anything, so send all the jobs to lowest bidder overseas, look at this sudden jump in profits! Surely we now all deserve fat bonuses. Get those bonuses, quietly move on to other jobs, company enters descent phase, new startups have since started eating into their markets, they've no way to respond because they're corpse-companies, slowly get consolidated and cannibalized and Toys-R-Us-d into the ground.

Cycle of life continues
by Avicebron | 2025-08-17 15:15:46+00:00
This post made me open linkedin..

The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know without a profile picture (open to work btw) posting "signs of a bad manager"..

They have linked a tiktok style video, how fun, let's see, so the video starts with a women in a lab coat. She seems to have a problem, mounting her phone in the car, she starts with roll of tape that she hangs around the mirror, pulls a strip down and sticks her phone back to the tape.

Seems like she's a bad manager. Obviously tape doesn't go over the mirror, well she's leveled up her skills in the next few seconds. She installs the brilliantly designed mirror-mount-phone-holder-multi-axis.png (TM).

No she's a good manager, she's meeting her employees in the middle, both passenger and driver can pull the phone right next to their face in case they need to see the map. Good managing! Fractional leadership!

I do wonder when the next car digs itself into a ditch, whether putting the phone in front of the drivers face was ideal. But hey, I'm just a lay-engineer struggling to form a sentence with an aw shucks look, far from the hallowed halls of what an MBA or fractional CTO could know.

This seems emblematic of something...
by simianwords | 2025-08-17 15:16:23+00:00
It may be the case that market may not be big enough in Europe because of public transport popularity. Cars are still being used however and with scale self driving cars will become cheap enough that it would be quite obvious for anyone to purchase it instead of a normal car. Why would some one choose to drive normally when they could be doing something else? The massive utility increase from personal cars as well as cost decrease in taxis will create a big enough market.

Your last point is genuinely naive - do you expect people to pay high costs for taxis by forcing them to pay as much as cars with drivers just to not discriminate against a few disabled people?

This is peak European policy decision I’ll give you that.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-08-17 15:16:32+00:00
There was a rule at some point that the way to set a speed limit was to measure the speed of cars using that road, and set the limit so that 85% were under and 15% were over. I don't know how much this is actually used any more.

From a safety point of view the proper way to do it is to decide up front what speed limit you want on that road, and then design it so that drivers feel unsafe going over that speed. If you have to have a sign telling drivers to slow down, you designed the road wrong.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-17 15:16:48+00:00
Or, really, they are Christians: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S01452134240033...

Cause statistically, a Christian man in a leadership position (i.e priest/pastor) is much more likely to be a child abuser.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014521342...
by btown | 2025-08-17 15:16:57+00:00
I think there’s a really interesting point here that even if a model is capable of planning and reasoning, part of the skillset of a creator is that asking for the right thing requires an understanding of how that model is creating its artifacts.

And in 3D, you won’t be able to do that without understanding, as an operator, what you’d want to ask for. Do you want this specific part to be made parametrically in a specific way for future flexibility, animation, or rendering? When? Why? And do these understandings of techniques give you creative ideas?

A model trained solely on the visual outcome won’t add these constraints unless you know to ask for them.

Even if future iterations of this technology become more advanced and can generate complex models, you need to develop a skillset to be able to gauge and plan around how they fit into your larger vision. And that skillset requires fundamentals.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-17 15:17:00+00:00
The first two should be fixable by invoking make WCFLAGS_GCC= and make LDFLAGS= respectively.

(An assignment like FOO=bar in the makefile is a default[1], overridable by passing FOO=baz as one of the arguments to make. FOO?=bar can additionally be overridden by setting FOO to a different value in the environment.)

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Overridin...
by debugnik | 2025-08-17 15:17:03+00:00
The point is to allow bots that play nice and don't claim to be real browsers, as those can be identified in logs and blocked or rate limited fairly. But bad faith bots can be undistinguishable from browsers, so everyone else gets a PoW challenge to make their endeavour slower and expensive.

At least that's the spirit, of course someone will eventually just use random strings as user agents, but then again this is all a tragedy of the commons anyway.
by the_af | 2025-08-17 15:17:21+00:00
> The past is the one that's irrelevant. Times have changed. You're still walking 10 miles to get to school while the rest of the world now drives cars. Wake up.

You have it backwards. The modern world is naturally copyright-infringing. Computers and the digital are copying devices. It's you who, applying an outdated lens of "theft", are stuck in the past.

You know you're wrong. After all, you admitted you pirate everything.
by oinfoalgo | 2025-08-17 15:17:46+00:00
I don't think it is that surprising.

It will become harder and harder for the average person to gain from newer models.

My 75 year old father loves using Sonnet. He is not asking anything though that he would be able to tell Opus is "better". The answers he gets from the current model are good enough. He is not exactly using it to probe the depths of statistical mechanics.

My father is never going to vibe code anything no matter how good the models get.

I don't think AGI would even give much different answers to what he asks.

You have to ask the model something that allows the latest model to display its improvements. I think we can see, that is just not something on the mind of the average user.
by ks2048 | 2025-08-17 15:17:51+00:00
When you look at a 2D surface, you directly observe all the values on that surface.

For a loss-function, the value at each point must be computed.

You can compute them all and "look at" the surface and just directly choose the lowest - that is called a grid search.

For high dimensions, there's just way too many "points" to compute.
by torginus | 2025-08-17 15:17:53+00:00
My impression was all 'content' that does well on LinkedIn (including the stuff I like), is because people want to engage with the creator in hopes they get in their good graces which will somehow help them land a job, or they're in a pact with others and like each others' content.

Recommending others and getting recommended by folks whose word means something might be meaningful, but that's about it.

Regular (and often painfully below average) rubes with a dozen self-appointed titles (SaaS platform evnagelist, Innovator, Tinkerer, Father), who post articles like 'Here's what murdering a homeless man taught me about b2b sales' are the definition of cringe.
by 542458 | 2025-08-17 15:18:17+00:00
I think if what the author said was true, you’d be able to improve joke-writing ability by increasing temperature (i.e., allowing more unexpected tokens). I doubt this actually works.

As an aside, I just asked gpt5-thinking to write some jokes on a specific niche topic, and I’d say it was batting maybe 20% of them being moderately funny? Probably better than I’d get out of a room of human beings. So much like with code, LLMs aren’t at the level of a senior developer or expert comedian, but are around the level of a junior dev or an amateur at standup night.
by motorest | 2025-08-17 15:18:20+00:00
> I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.

This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.

I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.
by gruez | 2025-08-17 15:18:30+00:00
>Microsoft should be more careful

What does "more careful" even mean? For instance, if your crappy SSD has some bug that causes data corruption if there are more than 16 writes in flight at a time, and microsoft pushes an update that causes it to do writes more aggressively, should it really be microsoft's fault that your crappy SSD broke? Should microsoft keep throttle windows IO at 2000s HDD throguhput on the off chance that some IDE drive bricks itself when it encounters SSD level workloads?
by raghava | 2025-08-17 15:19:51+00:00
Disaster stemming from the deadly combo of Dunning Kruger effect + network effect + recommendation algorithms floating similar BS up top.

Most who post absolute BS on such "professional" forums as a way to gain a larger "network" easily attract similar ones with relatable mediocrity index. The network effect kicks in and mediocrity gets amplified.

Everyone thus gets forced to either to act insanely ridiculous or just GTFO to retain whatever little sanity they have left in them.

Most corporate jobs are just mediocrity-maxxing absolutely BS jobs. It is only natural that the most popular corporate SM amplifies and promotes BS and mediocrity at scale.
by sssilver | 2025-08-17 15:20:11+00:00
Semi-related — why don’t we create a service in which people make employment “claims” and other people (their managers/customers) sign these claims with their own keys, so these claims can be cryptographically verified by a third party in a distributed fashion?

This way, Linkedins basic premise of being a centralized “CV as a service” would become obsolete, leaving just the social network, which I personally would gladly abandon.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-17 15:21:34+00:00
> This post made me open linkedin..

> The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know

The two common failure points for developers using social media are getting triggered at the first instance of content they dislike in the feed and not following sources of content they want to read.

Nobody should feel compelled to use any social media if they don’t want or have to. If you actually want to understand what other people see in the platform, though, you have to understand how they use it.

Any social media with a feed requires an ability to skim and filter. If you stop and read the obviously low quality content to either hate-read or to get triggered then you won’t make it far on LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Hacker News comments.

Second, you have to curate your sources. If you strongly dislike a post then use mechanisms to see less of it. If you want to see more of something then like it. Follow people who produce good content. Once you’ve given the algorithms some signal the content improves to your liking, even though it’s not perfect.
by zahlman | 2025-08-17 15:23:23+00:00
I've really never understood where this aesthetic preference comes from.

Back when most of my code was in C or C++ (or Java), I was told all the time, sure you can omit these braces for a single-statement block, but you shouldn't, you'll regret it later. You can leave all the code unindented or irregularly indented, it won't matter to the compiler, but you'll appreciate lining it up in the long run. And all that advice was correct; I was better off in the long run, and I saw others come to regret it all the time. But then, over time, I started to wonder why I had to scan past all these diagonal lines of close braces as I read the code. And I cursed that these languages made it too difficult to pull out the inner parts into separate functions, disentangle setup and teardown from the main loop etc. But I also cursed that after putting in the effort (even if was just "using a proper text editor") to make things line up beautifully and in agreement with the logical structure, I still had to take up vertical space with these redundant markers of the logical structure.

Python was my first language using significant whitespace, and it was a breath of fresh air. That was a bit over 20 years ago, I think. I've learned several other programming languages since then, but I never "looked back" in any meaningful way.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-17 15:23:31+00:00
This was being downvoted, but there is actually research showing a link between code age and security bugs: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s... "Code matures and gets safer with time, exponentially, making the returns on investments like rewrites diminish over time as code gets older."

Not an argument for staying on an unsupported OS, but an argument for staying on a stable release as long as possible if you prefer stability over features