MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dileeparanawake | 2025-08-14 19:43:23+00:00
Amazed social media engineering society isn’t getting more press. They are all doing it.

I noticed this first on X - during the FarageRiots where an Asian woman asked how many people felt safe. The volume of violently racist replies was insane. As an Asian man - it made me feel, very scared about society. I felt outnumbered. It wasn’t reflective of society - as it turned out it was a mass demonstration of racial unity, by the vast majority of Britain. But not on X

On YouTube I noticed it silent deleting my comments. Nothing violent - literally a comment saying I was concerned about NHS privatisation and takeover by the US finance. Noticed the same comment get removed. No notice. No reason. No appeal. Take down. Invisible. Quick google shows lots of people experiencing same thing.

And it got me thinking - wow - imagine shaping public sentiment at mass. Making opinions that weren’t convenient to people owning social media disappear. That creates helplessness. Shapes elections.

The rage bait we see now pulls in attention, shapes conversations and defines the Overton window.

Noticed a post from Theo T3 an hour or so ago that was critical, on X, about OpenAi and the first comment was calling him an OpenAI shill. Certainly seems plausible incentives on X to fuel anti competitor sentiment and amplify useful sentiment.

This article on meta is validating the patterns I’ve seen. It’s deeply concerning. We are in an era where society is micro shaped by social media owners and their agenda.

This issue needs to be addressed. We need regulation and transparent recommendation algorithms and clear limit in targeting users.

And then there is the toxic nature of social media engineered addiction. Side bar I know but has to be said.

We need much more regulation and we need more decentralised ownership for social media companies to protect democracy.
by nimbius | 2025-08-14 19:43:33+00:00
the guy who tried to use fruit juice to cure cancer and routinely refused to register his automobile?

the guy who never acknowledged his kid until a court forced him to pay child support?

He outright lied to Wozniak over payments and shares.

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-gave-early-app...

He put himself on the organ waiting list in multiple states when it became apparent that his quack medicine wasn't working to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer. He took a liver from someone out of state and died with it. They changed the law to prevent this happening again.
by SamBam | 2025-08-14 19:44:26+00:00
I think the implication is that to be interesting you need to write from an individual's standpoint. That's why fiction written by LLMs sounds so boring (at least right now): because you can't amalgamate all the text in the world and not sound like an average.

> ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’

Pretty great line.
Ask HN: After 5 years, why is nobody using VSCode LiveShare?
by chw9e | 2025-08-14 19:45:08+00:00
VSCode has LiveShare, Zed's whole thing is supposedly collaboration, there's a bunch of startups trying to crack this. And yet here we all are, tabbing between our editor and Slack every 5 minutes. Not to mention the constant stream of notifications from Linear, GitHub comments, whatever else.

This seems like such an obvious problem to solve. We're already collaborating all day but in really fractured ways. I literally don't know anyone who uses collaborative editing for actual work.

If you're someone who does use LiveShare/Zed/whatever for real (not just showing off in a demo) - what does that actually look like day to day? Pairing? Mob programming? And why did it stick for you when everyone else seems to try it once and never touch it again?
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-14 19:45:10+00:00
Let’s take the pornography argument for example.

Regardless of whether pornography is, or should be legal, average exposure is now 11 years old. That’s average, many kids are even younger.

If this even prevents 95% of kids from accessing pornography until they’re 15 and get a debit card to buy a VPN, that’s a win in the eyes of most parents and legislators. It doesn’t need to be perfect, or even perfectly force you to be 18, to get the primary job done. Pointing to “a 16 year old can get around it with a VPN” is missing the point. It’s not a surprise why that argument falls on deaf ears.

Or, another one, “just use parental controls,” have you even tried this? Almost all parental controls are horrifically buggy, full of loopholes, and these kids can just borrow each other’s technology. Apple’s parental controls predate HTML5 (literally, HTML 4.01) and regularly don’t work, sometimes even by their own admission. It also forces the parent to be in the role of a tech expert fluent in Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nintendo, and other products all at once. You might as well get CompTIA certified. That argument also falls on deaf ears.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-14 19:45:32+00:00
To be clear, the research has been going on for a while.

But extracting an accurate enough signal from noise through the skin is an incredibly complex signal analysis problem. And there are multiple approaches.

Nothing has FDA approval yet because it's a major question whether any technology developed thus far is accurate enough. I understand there's at least one clinical trial going on right now. Fingers crossed...
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-08-14 19:45:38+00:00
When they started, they were producing for multiple small customers. Apple was frustrated with Motorola and approached them but demanded they massively increase their production capacity (Apple's model for dominating a supplier... put them in debt and beholden to them for orders) and effectively dominated them as a customer...

Then used them to negotiate a better price with Motorola, dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company.

Exponential sued.. and won $500 million... for breach contract but were destroyed by that point. Apple gobbled up their IP for around $20 mil later on.
by aylmao | 2025-08-14 19:45:41+00:00
> If I were to optimize for "happiness" I would just cash out, abandon my family, move to Vietnam, play video games and eat Hot Pockets all day.

That sounds like hedonism, not happiness.

> But the life I choose is hard because doing hard things is good and fulfilling.

Fulfillment is a big component of happiness. Aristotle famously contrasted hedonism (seeking pleasure) and eudaimonia (meaning and fulfillment) in Ethics iirc and mostly agreed with you— happiness is found eudamonia, not hedonism.

I'll also mention, hedonism is most often associated with money, because pleasures can be bought, but eudaimonia is only achieved through meaning, wisdom, action, etc.
by testfrequency | 2025-08-14 19:45:58+00:00
I love seeing all the positive comments here on HN regarding Woz.

I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.

I personally always found that to be so far from the truth, and the root of it really was how much Apple people didn’t like him speaking open and freely about the company (failures, success, and everything between).
by riwsky | 2025-08-14 19:46:01+00:00
That exact workflow? It won't improve much. But it tends to change peoples' workflows.

For example: let's say you have a few feature branches in flight at the same time, and you want to make a change to one of them to address some PR feedback. In your git workflow, that presumably means something like `git stash; git checkout feature-name; vim-and-actually-make-the-change; git add -up; git commit; git push; git checkout whatever-you-were-doing-before; git stash pop`, ± a `--amend` depending on your PR philosophy. A common workflow in jj is to instead sit on top of a merge commit with all the feature branches at once, and handle this like `vim-and-actually-make-the-change; jj squash -i --into feature-name; jj git push`. You can do something like the latter in git too, of course, it just tends to get hairy relatively quickly with rebases and merge conflicts.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-14 19:46:01+00:00
> People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad,

It's not bad, it's a cost.

You obviously wouldn't make a deal like that in isolation. You also wouldn't give someone a salary for nothing. But a cost like that can be worth paying just like a salary is worth paying. (Obviously you'd have limits on the numbers, just like salary is limited.)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-14 19:46:11+00:00
> owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want

Massimo still owns the core IP. Apple owns some other IP.

> How people on HN can support monopolization of markets

There was one niche (note: still massive) provider of this technology. Now there are two, one of which is mass. Even if that collapses to one mass, that’s objectively better. More competitors and more consumer surplus is not a monopoly condition.

There is a difference between being reflexively anti-Apple regardless of the circumstances and being pro-monopoly.
by morkalork | 2025-08-14 19:46:27+00:00
So the premise is that bad actors co-opt the target's hashtags, mass upload ban-able content with those tags, then mass-report that same content and as a casualty the tag gets caught up the next time content moderation models are trained? If the sources aren't just making this up, then it's pretty damning on Facebook's part. Any intern-level data scientist could inspect the training results and see the innocent tags being negatively weighted and flagged.
by tojumpship | 2025-08-14 19:46:52+00:00
You will find many, arguing they abandoned all online presence. Urging people to leave social media for a better life like they have. Yet they have accounts on these pseudo-social sites - Reddit, HN ... - actively participating. I don' think restricting your own access to a swath of information is a good idea, no matter what that info is. Moving your monthly online discussion habit to Reddit of all places... Humans are social, and with the internet's presence in every facet of life, it will be harder to run from it.

I don't think simply being absent is logical. Sensing ideological currents, bias and being primarily a lurker rather than participating will have the same mental benefits without limiting your knowledge.
by dogman144 | 2025-08-14 19:47:37+00:00
A helpful framework I’ve liked is

- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful

- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense

- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.

With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.

To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
by kulahan | 2025-08-14 19:47:47+00:00
There was a Walter Isaacson-authored biography which was extremely open and honest. Jobs wanted everything fully exposed, to include how terrible he was to his children, how intimidating he was to his employees, and how overpowering he was in business meetings.

It regularly referred to a "distortion effect" he could create, by essentially "gaslighting" (to use a common turn-of-phrase) people into doing things they thought they couldn't - often at great emotional expense. Essentially, he was somehow able to become a target of hatred, causing his employees to team up together "against him". It was extremely effective, but created a lot of copycats who just ended up abusing the hell out of their employees without getting the desired effect.

Realistically, he's just the only person we're getting a truly honest tell-all from. I'm not sure he's really that much worse than most people, I think we're just all judging him much more surgically.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-14 19:47:48+00:00
My parents bought a new laptop for their general household use and to watch YouTube via HDMI on their tv. It was so annoying and weird and not even fast, that they returned it to Costco for the $800 within 90 days.

I setup a 10 year old computer for them instead running Linux Mint Mate and it's perfect.
by mattnewton | 2025-08-14 19:48:11+00:00
Voter ID laws actually have a long history of being used for disenfranchisement of certain classes in the US (most notably former slaves and their descendants, but also women), so it's understandable there is scar tissue there. It gives the incumbent state another lever of power in our very close first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections. Americans don't need imagination to see how it could be abused, just a good history book.
by buzer | 2025-08-14 19:48:16+00:00
> Let's say police had a device which they could plug into your phone, which would send a specially signed message - a digital warrant, containing all the info a real warrant would - which be permanently be burned into the ROM of your phone, after which the phone would surrender its encryption keys, and the police could dump your unencrypted disk.

And when (not if) that device leaks whoever steals your phone will be able to get access all of the things in there.
by kinghajj | 2025-08-14 19:48:38+00:00
In order to "check out a branch" in jj, you would have had to run `jj new` already. So your edits won't be "added ... to the top commit of that branch", but in a new commit (revision) when you checked out the branch. Then you can use `jj split` to keep whatever changes are important and discard the debug print statements.
by xyst | 2025-08-14 19:48:42+00:00
> We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world

In this day and age, most people are attracted to "influencing". For better (giving back to society, educational) or worse (pranksters, grifters, "manosphere").

One notorious case is "Zara Dar", a PhD dropout to OF creator. Seemed to have high potential in the industry then something just flipped (money? too difficult? not fond of the grind?) and decided to go to OF.

The new world, with its hypercapitalistic tendencies, take advantage of the worst of us. It's one of the reasons for the rise of kakistocratic administration in the United States.
by gshulegaard | 2025-08-14 19:48:45+00:00
> but we know that reasoning is an emergent capability!

Do we though? There is widespread discussion and growing momentum of belief in this, but I have yet to see conclusive evidence of this. That is, in part, why the subject paper exists...it seeks to explore this question.

I think the author's bias is bleeding fairly heavily into his analysis and conclusions:

> Whether AI reasoning is “real” reasoning or just a mirage can be an interesting question, but it is primarily a philosophical question. It depends on having a clear definition of what “real” reasoning is, exactly.

I think it's pretty obvious that the researchers are exploring whether or not LLMs exhibit evidence of _Deductive_ Reasoning [1]. The entire experiment design reflects this. Claiming that they haven't defined reasoning and therefore cannot conclude or hope to construct a viable experiment is...confusing.

The question of whether or not an LLM can take a set of base facts and compose them to solve a novel/previously unseen problem is interesting and what most people discussing emergent reasoning capabilities of "AI" are tacitly referring to (IMO). Much like you can be taught algebraic principles and use them to solve for "x" in equations you have never seen before, can an LLM do the same?

To which I find this experiment interesting enough. It presents a series of facts and then presents the LLM with tasks to see if it can use those facts in novel ways not included in the training data (something a human might reasonably deduce). To which their results and summary conclusions are relevant, interesting, and logically sound:

> CoT is not a mechanism for genuine logical inference but rather a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching, fundamentally bounded by the data distribution seen during training. When pushed even slightly beyond this distribution, its performance degrades significantly, exposing the superficial nature of the “reasoning” it produces.

> The ability of LLMs to produce “fluent nonsense”—plausible but logically flawed reasoning chains—can be more deceptive and damaging than an outright incorrect answer, as it projects a false aura of dependability.

That isn't to say LLMs aren't useful, just exploring it's boundaries. To use legal services as an example, using an LLM to summarize or search for relevant laws, cases, or legal precedent is something it would excel at. But don't ask an LLM to formulate a logical rebuttal to an opposing council's argument using those references.

Larger models and larger training corpuses will expand that domain and make it more difficult for individuals to discern this limit; but just because you can no longer see a limit doesn't mean there is none.

And to be clear, this doesn't diminish the value of LLMs. Even without true logical reasoning LLMs are quite powerful and useful tools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_reasoning
by vintagedave | 2025-08-14 19:49:00+00:00
Your story is great, but may make people think of the product as unreliable - it doesn't sound ready to be a SaaS yet.

I tried it out, sending two messages, saying I hadn't had service for 2 weeks and then saying I wanted someone to come look at it. It was a steady 50.1% churn risk. Not sure that's high enough.

That said: I think it has real potential. Polish the demo up (eg even having to click 'start new session' felt very tech-ish, not demo-ish, if you know what I mean? Reduce the tech load and increase the simple smooth dashboard feel), see if you can make it a deployable system easy for an admin, or could spin up your own servers and customer accounts. Good luck!
by limaoscarjuliet | 2025-08-14 19:49:37+00:00
> In fact, I think in near future it will be the norm for MLLMs to "think" and "reason" without outputting a single "word".

It will be outputting something, as this is the only way it can get more compute - output a token, then all context + the next token is fed through the LLM again. It might not be presented to the user, but that's a different story.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-14 19:49:42+00:00
Yes, it is the best next generation API, and the only one that fully supports C++ (C++14 with extensions) on the GPU.

It is also the only native 3D API designed for managed languages, in Objective-C with Swift bindings.

DirectX is the land of COM, C++, write your own bindings, HLSL isn't quite C++, although is getting there.

Vulkan is the second coming of extension spaghetti, GLSL is stagnant to the point everyone was using HLSL instead, now there is Slang, still outside C and C++, write your own bindings.

LibGNM and LibGMX are basically C and C++ land, and PSGL is an evolution from HLSL.

NVN is a mix of OpenGL and Vulkan, and equally C and C++ land.

Then there are all the MetalKits, that no OS vendor has similar offerings.
by nradov | 2025-08-14 19:50:09+00:00
Nonsense. The murder rate in most of the USA is similar to Germany. My small city has literally zero murders most years. The vast majority of violent crime happens in few cities such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC. And then it's only in a handful of neighborhoods within those cities. We should fix those places but basic safety isn't something that most Americans have to worry about.
by stephen_cagle | 2025-08-14 19:51:14+00:00
Yeah, I only have a goal of 25 points a day, Monday through Saturday, and I still usually take more than half an hour (though usually less than an hour) per day.

I actually feel that 25 points may be a bad choice as it makes me spend too much energy picking lessons that will barely add up to 25 so I can be done with my daily. Probably causes me to review or whatever when maybe I don't need to?
by nickpsecurity | 2025-08-14 19:51:16+00:00
I was talking about CC's Terms of Use which it says applies to "Crawled Content." All our uses must comply with both copyright owners' rules and CC's Terms. The CC terms are here for those curious:

https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use

In it, (a), (d), and (g) have had overly-political interpretations in many places. (h) is on Reddit where just offering the Gospel of Jesus Christ got me hit with "harassment" once. The problem is whether what our model can be or is uses for incurs liability under such a license. Also, it hardly seems "open" if we give up our autonomy and take on liability just to use it.

Publishing a crawl, or the URL's, under CC-0, CC-by, BSD, or Apache would make them usable without restrictions or any further legal analyses. Does CC have permissively-licensed crawls somewhere?

Btw, I brought up URL's because transfering crawled content may be a copyright violation in U.S., but sharing URL's isn't. Are the URL's released under a permissive license that overrides the Terms of Use?

Alternatively, would Common Crawl simply change their Terms so that it doesn't apply to the Crawled Content and URL databases? And simply release them under a permissive license?