MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jack_h | 2025-08-14 15:23:14+00:00
> A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for.

You're likely referring to the fact that the pentagon can't pass an audit even though there have been requirements going back to the 90s. That's more about tracking where the money they spent is going as opposed to the total quantity of money they are spending though, i.e. the $800bn is "accurate" but some portion of it may have vanished due to bad accounting, corruption, waste, fraud, etc...

Having said that any accounting for an entity the size of the US government is non-trivial. The numbers I stated above are not the final numbers. Firstly because it's YTD but also because of the complexity in the accounting. We have decades of trend lines and a lot of public data on tax receipts, bond auctions, and the like to know that defense spending isn't drastically different than what is being reported though. If you have any analysis that concludes otherwise I would enjoy reading it.
by xg15 | 2025-08-14 15:23:38+00:00
> But then you have to redistribute the cert from that single server to all the others.

Wouldn't you have to do that anyway? Or is the idea that each server requests and renews a separate cert for itself? That sounds as if you'd have to watch out for multiple servers stepping on each other's toes during the DNS-01 challenge, if there is ever a situation where two or more servers want to renew their cert at the same time.
by naasking | 2025-08-14 15:24:02+00:00
> Because reasoning tasks require choosing between several different options. “A B C D [M1] -> B C D E” isn’t reasoning, it’s computation, because it has no mechanism for thinking “oh, I went down the wrong track, let me try something else”. That’s why the most important token in AI reasoning models is “Wait”. In fact, you can control how long a reasoning model thinks by arbitrarily appending “Wait” to the chain-of-thought. Actual reasoning models change direction all the time, but this paper’s toy example is structurally incapable of it.

I think this is the most important critique that undercuts the paper's claims. I'm less convinced by the other point. I think backtracking and/or parallel search is something future papers should definitely look at in smaller models.

The article is definitely also correct on the overreaching, broad philosophical claims that seems common when discussing AI and reasoning.
by azath92 | 2025-08-14 15:24:21+00:00
Totally agree, one of the most interesting podcasts i have listened to in a while was a couple of years ago on the Tiny Stories paper and dataset (the author used that dataset) which focuses on stories that only contain simple words and concepts (like bedtime stories for a 3 year old), but which can be used to train smaller models to produce coherent english, both with grammar, diversity, and reasoning.

The podcast itself with one of the authors was fantastic for explaining and discussing the capabilities of LLMs more broadly, using this small controlled research example.

As an aside: i dont know what the dataset is in the biological analogy, maybe the agar plate. A super simple and controlled environment in which to study simple organisms.

For ref: - Podcast ep https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/the-tiny-model-revolution... - tinystories paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759
by terminalshort | 2025-08-14 15:24:33+00:00
> Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies

Yes, that's the philosophy. All the rest of what you said is just listing different predictions of what will happen after you get rid of the state. Once you get rid of the state, there is no authority to enforce the "mutual aid or communism" so that isn't a political philosophy. It's just a prediction of what will people will do under their own free will in the absence of a compelling authority.
by pc86 | 2025-08-14 15:24:37+00:00
What does the system look like where a human being individually verifies every pieces of data fed into an advertising system? Even taking the human out of the loop, how do you verify the "legality" of one piece of data vs. another coming from the same publisher?

None of your example have anything to do with the thing we're talking about, and are just meant to inflame emotional opinions rather than engender rational discussion about this issue.
by dlivingston | 2025-08-14 15:24:43+00:00
Reminds me of how Google's Genie 3 can only run for a ~minute before losing its internal state [0].

My gut feeling is that this problem won't be solved until some new architecture is invented, on the scale of the transformer, which allows for short-term context, long-term context, and self-modulation of model weights (to mimic "learning"). (Disclaimer: hobbyist with no formal training in machine learning.)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798166
by trod1234 | 2025-08-14 15:25:03+00:00
Isn't the 401 for LLMs the same single undecidable token? Doesn't this basically go to the undecidable nature of math in CS?

Put another way, you have an excel roster corresponding to people with accounts where some need to have their account shutdown but you only have their first and last names as identifiers, and the pool is sufficiently large that there are more than one person per a given set of names.

You can't shut down all accounts with a given name, and there is no unique identifier. How do you solve this?

You have to ask and be given that unique identifier that differentiates between the undecidable. Without that, even the person can't do the task.

The person can make guesses, but those guesses are just hallucinations with a significant n probability towards a bad repeat outcome.

At a core level I don't think these type of issues are going to be solved. Quite a lot of people would be unable to solve this and struggle with this example (when not given the answer, or hinted at the solution in the framing of the task; ie when they just have a list of names and are told to do an impossible task).
by livid-neuro | 2025-08-14 15:25:05+00:00
The first cars broke down all the time. They had a limited range. There wasn't a vast supply of parts for them. There wasn't a vast industry of experts who could work on them. There wasn't a vast network of fuel stations to provide energy for them. The horse was a proven method.

What an LLM cannot do today is almost irrelevant in the tide of change upon the industry. The fact is, with improvements, it doesn't mean an LLM cannot do it tomorrow.
by avgDev | 2025-08-14 15:25:40+00:00
A lot of domestic goods can be affected by the tariff war US is waging. We are a part of a global economy. Additionally, ICE raids are adding to the issue.

Even for products made in the US if other things increase the cost of running a business those costs will get passed on to the buyer. It takes LABOR to get bacon, lettuce and tomato....have you heard about ICE raids and crops getting wasted because people are not showing up to work? That will affect prices as less produce = higher prices as demand increases.

If equipment gets more expensive, then cost of produce gets more expensive. I work for a manufacturing company...under Trump our cost has been spiking due to insane tariffs....those costs are passed to people who make equipment and to farmers, then to YOU.
by tomrod | 2025-08-14 15:25:46+00:00
Absolutely.

There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.

The people supporting this political wave tend to be extremely triumphalist in their personal religious zeal, unwilling to make compromises, and are iconoclastic and disrespectful to most outside their in-group.

Much like other iconoclasts and zealots, they rely on the pluralistic principle of toleration to force the paradox of tolerance to bend their way.

It's shame - pluralism is much more invigorating and no one forces lifestyles they disagree with onto dominionists.
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-14 15:25:50+00:00
That's not my problem to solve?

If Facebook chooses to build a system that can ingest massive amounts of third party data, and cannot simultaneously develop a system to vet that data to determine if it's been illegally acquired, then they shouldn't build that system.

You're running under the assumption that the technology must exist, and therefore we must live with the consequences. I don't accept that premise.

Edit: By the way, I'm presenting this as an all-or-nothing proposition, which is certainly unreasonable, and I recognize that. KYC rules in finance aren't a panacea. Financial crimes still happen even with them in place. But they represent a best effort, if imperfect, attempt to acknowledge and mitigate those risks, and based on what we've seen from tech companies over the last thirty years, I think it's reasonable to assume Facebook didn't attempt similar diligence, particularly given a jury trial found them guilty of misbehaviour.

> None of your example have anything to do with the thing we're talking about, and are just meant to inflame emotional opinions rather than engender rational discussion about this issue.

Not at all. I'm placing this specific example in the broader context of the tech industry failing to a) consider the consequences of their actions, and b) escaping accountability.

That context matters.
by godshatter | 2025-08-14 15:25:51+00:00
More realistically, users are going to say "Hey Company X, this feature is broken." They won't know or care about libY. I would have replied with "There's no warranty whatsoever. Please submit a bug report and we will prioritize it accordingly. We do accept pull requests."

The bug might have low impact in most cases but doesn't work with how Company X is using libY, so it might not get fixed for a while. If this is hurting them, they can fix it themselves and submit a PR. Or they can work with them to prioritize their bug, which puts them on the other foot. If it's a huge problem that affects half the web, then Mr. Z will be working on it anyway.

If I were Mr. Z, I would know the problems Company X will have replacing libY with libW, and wish them the best of luck if they bring it up. No one's paying me, if they want to use something else, good riddance. Especially if they are threatening me. But I get it, people are different.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-14 15:25:56+00:00
LLMs can’t build software because we are expecting them to hear a few sentences, then immediately start coding until there’s a prototype. When they get something wrong, they have a huge amount of spaghetti to wade through. There’s little to no opportunity to iterate at a higher level before writing code.

If we put human engineering teams in the same situation, we’d expect them to do a terrible job, so why do we expect LLMs to do any better?

We can dramatically improve the output of LLM software development by using all those processes and tools that help engineering teams avoid these problems:

https://jim.dabell.name/articles/2025/08/08/autonomous-softw...
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-14 15:25:59+00:00
A cash and debit card discount is the same as a credit card surcharge, I fail to see how this qualifies as “significantly harder”.

Target, one of the largest retailers, offers a 5% discount for debit. Comcast, Tmobile, Verizon, ATT, Lumen, utilities, governments, and insurance companies also routinely charge extra for credit cards (or discounts for debit/cash).

Daycares charge more for credit card, as do doctors’ offices.

At least half the gas stations I see have long had higher credit cards prices.

Not to mention contractors for physical labor.

The change since 15 years ago is stark. If I wasn’t getting a minimum of 3.5% cash back on my purchases, I would use credit cards a lot less.
by mlinhares | 2025-08-14 15:26:07+00:00
Sorry for the vocabulary here but this is bullshit. The people submitting the banned books here have stated multiple times they have never read most/all the books they have asked for banning and are being driven by lists built by political entities like Moms for America.

There is no genuine offense here, they don't even know what the books are about other than someone saying "its LGBT". It is just cynical manipulation and hate.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-14 15:26:15+00:00
For these kinds of matters we we tend to set community-approved guidelines and then allow the community to enforce them. This is because we trust our community to best uphold the standards of the community.

What's being done here is a top-down effort by certain political forces to insert themselves into this community-lead governance. They don't want the community to set local standards; they would rather those standards be dictated by the governor, or by some party-approved commission appointed by him.

> Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question

Agreed, but Republicans think this person should be the governor of the state, and Democrats think this person should be someone local from the community. Ironically, it's Republicans who are styled as the party of small government.
by glial | 2025-08-14 15:26:16+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure it's so simple. LLMs are called causal models in the sense that earlier tokens "cause" later tokens, that is, later tokens are causally dependent on what the earlier tokens are.

If you mean deterministic rather than probabilistic, even Pearl-style causal models are probabilistic.

I think the author is circling around the idea that their idea of reasoning is to produce statements in a formal system: to have a set of axioms, a set of production rules, and to generate new strings/sentences/theorems using those rules. This approach is how math is formalized. It allows us to extrapolate - make new "theorems" or constructions that weren't in the "training set".
by mcv | 2025-08-14 15:26:22+00:00
Censorship has always been more of a conservative thing. But really more of an authoritarian thing, once you manage to get your head out of one-dimensional political thinking.

But if you want left-right, "helping the poor and disenfranchised" is left, "helping the rich and powerful" is right, and while details have moved around, that core never changed. I don't see conservatives anywhere do much for the poor, and they still love disenfranchising people. It's more that formerly left-wing parties, including Labour, have moved to the right since the neoliberalism of the 1990s.
by Herodotus38 | 2025-08-14 15:26:28+00:00
Hello, I would be interested if you could give evidence that methylene blue "works great" for carbon monoxide poisoning in humans.

It is not the standard of care in any guidelines I can find from any country. There is a paper from 2018 out of china showing some benefit in a rat model: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bcpt.12940
by naasking | 2025-08-14 15:27:04+00:00
True, and in the case of Solomonoff Induction, incompleteness manifests in the calculation of Kolmogorov complexity used to order programs. But what incompleteness actually proves is that there is no single algorithm for truth, but a collection of algorithms can make up for each other's weaknesses in many ways, eg. while no single algorithm can solve the halting problem, different algorithms can cover cases for which the others fail to prove a definitive halting result.

I'm not convinced you can't produce a pretty robust system that produces a pretty darn good approximation of truth, in the limit. Incompleteness also rears its head in type inference for programming languages, but the cases for which it fails are typically not programs of any interest, or not programs that would be understandable to humans. I think the relevance of incompleteness elsewhere is sometimes overblown in exactly this way.
by mriet | 2025-08-14 15:27:11+00:00
Take theater classes. Or join a (team) sports club. Both teach you skills that you most likely will not acquire elsewhere and that are directly applicable to interviews.

Also, having been on both sides, I can tell you that hiring is just a crap shoot. My (anecdotal!) experience is that a lot of hiring is e8ther 50% gut feelings-based or 50% keyword-based. And in the worse case, both.
by danielvaughn | 2025-08-14 15:27:40+00:00
Interesting! I decided to reproduce the issue I saw, here it is:

https://codepen.io/danielvaughn/pen/myepyER?editors=1100

Maybe it has to do with multiple anchors?

Similar to your earlier comment, I don't know if this is a bug or is me just misunderstanding the spec.
by skydhash | 2025-08-14 15:27:40+00:00
Programmers are mostly translating business rules to the very formal process execution of the computer world. And you need to both knows what the rules means and how the computer works (or at least how the abstracted version you’re working with works). The translation is messy at first, which is why you need to revise it again and again. Especially when later rules comes challenging all the assumptions you’ve made or even contradicting themselves.

Even translations between human languages (which allows for ambiguity) can be messy. Imagine if the target language is for a system that will exactly do as told unless someone has qualified those actions as bad.
by piltdownman | 2025-08-14 15:27:45+00:00
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you seem unfamiliar with Wilde's work or his stated position on criticism - i.e. that only critical faculty enables any artistic creation at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Critic_as_Artist

Joyce's penchant for scatology in no way diminishes his canon's suitability for engagement via critical theory. If anything, the poststructuralist interdisciplinary approach is as natural a bedfellow for the interpretation of Ulysses of Finnegan's Wake as one could hope for.

To demean Eoin Colfer is another interesting hill to die on (Darren Shan?). Benny and Omar is a fantastic debut novel and a great introduction to class and cultural distinctions in the Islamic world as viewed through the eyes of a surly western teenager. The Artemis Fowl debut as well is a perfectly inoffensive fresh IP with an interesting take on putting a cyberpunk spin on Irish Mythology - although marred somewhat by an appalling cinematic adaptation.

To then cite Brian Jacques as a high-point, ploughing a furrow as he does in the foothills of mid-brow K-12 readership, only suggests to me somebody completely unfamiliar with the canons of Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman. In any case, you seem to be conflating Young Adult Fantasy with the rich and well populated canon of Young Adult Fiction.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-08-14 15:27:46+00:00
I have noticed recently a tendency to refer to teenagers too as 'children', or worse : 'kids'.

This is a dangerous semantic drift that ignores how teenagers are in the process of developing into adults, and so need the parent supervision of them to be slowly relaxed. (Especially since, if handled poorly, they tend to rebel, and cause much more damage.)

And, as a reminder, not all erotic or erotic-adjacent (or other "adult topics") works are porn,

and depending on the jurisdiction the age of consent is often less than 18

(16 in UK, though I am sure there are important details hidden behind this single number),

though I do understand that there might be new, unique challenges here in the Internet era, with laws that might not have caught up yet.
by sxp | 2025-08-14 15:27:50+00:00
This seems unrelated to the chatbot aspect:

> And at 76, his family says, he was in a diminished state: He’d suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago and had recently gotten lost walking in his neighborhood in Piscataway, New Jersey.

...

> Rushing in the dark with a roller-bag suitcase to catch a train to meet her, Bue fell near a parking lot on a Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, injuring his head and neck. After three days on life support and surrounded by his family, he was pronounced dead on March 28.
by tokai | 2025-08-14 15:27:53+00:00
Trolls, like Jotun, can be both monstrous or humanlike. In Scandinavian folklore a troll is more of a broad category than a specific 'species'. The main thing is that they are malevolent and supernatural. Some trolls are grotesque creatures with a dozen heads, while others are so human like that they can exchange their children for human children without the human parents ever realizing. Following is from a Danish historic dictionary:

«1) according to folk belief: a supernatural being hostile to humans (dangerous) (of a more or less human-like form), especially of supernatural size and strength, ugly (creepy) appearance, thought to live in hills (mountains), forests, etc. (cf. Hill, Mountain, Sea, Forest troll and underground); also of smaller beings such as dwarfs or gnomes (Junge.308. NPWiwel.NS.22. Feilb. cf. Small troll)»
by rozap | 2025-08-14 15:28:10+00:00
Inflation looks a lot like taxation, yes. But assets, the markets for equities, etc rise with inflation. The upper class has most of their net worth in assets/equities, whereas the poorer people are living paycheck to paycheck just buying the essentials each month, and each month those essentials become more expensive. Only one of these groups feels any real impact.

So yes it's a tax but it's a tax on a very specific segment of the population.
by dchest | 2025-08-14 15:28:13+00:00
Sponges divide state into rate (r) and capacity (c). They "absorb" incoming bytes, perform permutation (moving bits around without losing any of them) on the whole state, and "squeeze" out bytes from the rate, while capacity remains hidden.

For the secure hash function, the capacity should be at least twice the target, that is for 128-bit security you need 256 bits of capacity. ASCON hash uses 256 bit capacity and 320-256 = 64 bit rate, so to get a 32-byte hash of a 8-byte string (without padding), you'll need to do at least 4 permutations.

If you can design a secure permutation that permutes 257 bits, you can make a secure, but impractical hash function from it by setting the rate to 1 bit.

For the duplex mode that's used for authenticated encryption, capacity can be lower, because it's keyed -- it's 192 bits in ASCON.

This assumes the permutation of the 320-byte state itself is secure, of course.
by kevinventullo | 2025-08-14 15:28:40+00:00
The rejection might also be random and out of your control. E.g. if they already filled the position or the higher-ups decided to save costs by taking back open headcount. Frustrating for sure, but not actionable.

From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.
by roscas | 2025-08-14 15:28:40+00:00
My advice is 2 portions of Chivas Regal 4 hours before the interview and then 2 full bottles of The Famous Grouse and Blue Label, 15 minutes before. Then, let it flow. If they don't get that you are a good tech guy, move on, they don't deserve you.

Now, I've had a few strange things myself with interviews. Except for the company I ended work for, all other were a disaster. Everyone from HR knew 0 about Linux or programming. One guy was really dumb. We talked about bash for Linux and at the end he starts reading his notes and says "Sad you did not talk about scripting in Linux..." and I just went "Ok bye bye".
by landtuna | 2025-08-14 15:28:51+00:00
The US defense budget, as a percentage of GDP, has been cut a huge amount! https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ms.mil.xpnd.gd.zs?locat...

If you don't think it makes sense to scale it by GDP (though I do), then in real terms it has gone through cycles since 1965, with definite periods of decrease, even though the overall trend is upward: https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html