MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-03 18:13:41+00:00
Even the worst of Earth's exinction events, the Permian–Triassic extinction event (aka "The Great Dying"), didn't kill off everything at surface level, even though that one did kill ~80% of marine species and ~70% of terrestial vertebrates.

Earth's habitats have fluctuated wildly from changes in temperature, atmosphere, oceanic acidity, etc, but life is so diverse that some species have always been able to survive. It's basically a worst case scenario of "punctuated equilibrium" which is the norm for evolution - life doesn't evolve gradually in the way you were taught in high school but rather populations of species, and entire species, drift genetically over time, accumulating benign genetic changes until the environment changes in some major way (drought, disease, catastrophe) when their previously benign accumulated changes may prove to be critically beneficial, and other populations/species die off.

Given how badly humans are currently messing up the planet, especially wrt self-inflicted global warming, I take some comfort in realizing that even if we manage to screw things up so badly that we go extinct, that life will find a way, and life on earth will - given enough time - bounce back in some new and interesting way.
by t-3 | 2025-08-03 18:14:20+00:00
TFA suggests that the vast majority of UN reports are being downloaded less than 5000 times, and even assuming 1:1 download:read ratio, journalists and reporters are unlikely to be reading them and passing along the contents to you. Whether or not this is a problem is another matter; I took a quick skim through the first few pages of report listings in the UN digital library (https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Reports&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN stuff.
by narcraft | 2025-08-03 18:14:40+00:00
There is another side to this coin: Figma's gain here is Adboe's loss. It doesn't make sense to use market-caps of specific companies as yardsticks of consumer welfare, which is the ultimate measure which antitrust actions seek to maximize.

The tradeoffs of allowing or preventing the merger are more abstract and counterfactual. We cannot know for sure what the world in which Adobe successfully acquired Figma would look like. Its natural to imagine concerns of Adobe simply killing, enshittifying or failing to improve the product - all things that still may happen under Figma's new corporate structure. Also consider the potential integrations with and improvements to Photoshop that have been missed.

That all being said I think Figma is an excellent product for the price and I have no fondness towards Adobe (though I've never really been a customer) and I'm glad that Figma exits as its own delightful product.
by ec109685 | 2025-08-03 18:14:45+00:00
Read 5.2 They don’t add a new loss over the probe signal. Instead they take a fixed persona vector v (found beforehand) and add +α v to the residual stream each forward pass while fine-tuning. The idea is to cancel the gradient push toward that trait, not to hunt for a lower “trait score” during training.

Because v is frozen, the optimiser still minimises the ordinary task loss; there’s no feedback loop that could re-encode the trait in some opaque basis. Empirically, Fig. 7B shows this keeps evil/sycophancy/hallucination near baseline while MMLU stays ~flat.

Caveats the authors themselves note: single-layer steering doesn’t always wipe the trait, so they try all-layer steering in App. J.3, which works better without hurting accuracy. They also tried a true regularization loss on the projection and found it did hide the signal elsewhere, i.e. the failure mode you’re worried about.

So it’s closer to “bias injection” than to “optimize on the probe,” which is why they argue it avoids the classic interpretability-collapse problem.
by benreesman | 2025-08-03 18:14:48+00:00
A very self-regulating little arbitrage, because the investors and the monopolies are in the process of merging themselves. This is the part most people seem unwilling to accept: these rich guys are dumb man. When you organize your whole society around rich kids having advantages it only takes a couple of decades before they're all just bad at their jobs.

This mafia capitalism isn't even good for the capitalists! They just can't get it together on a sustainable system!
by saghm | 2025-08-03 18:15:25+00:00
Selling knives might not be evil, but that doesn't imply that there's no level of weaponry that would be immoral to sell. Would selling fully automatic rifles be evil? What about chemical weapons, or nuclear bombs? The question is where to draw the line, which is subjective, but I'd argue that most people would draw the line _somewhere_, and I don't think it's as clear-cut as you're trying to imply where stuff like auotmated surveillance software falls.
by drewbeck | 2025-08-03 18:15:36+00:00
I’m new to this concept so may have missed something, but the post [0] seems to be about CoT specifically. In CoT you have an intermediary step that helps the model get better final results; the lesson is that if you try to improve the intermediary steps directly using training data then the model will optimize for better steps but not for better final results.

I don’t think this is the same situation. 1. Anthropic is adjusting weights directly to influence the final results, not training against good/bad results and 2. The target is the final result, not an intermediary.

I can see a possible result that the model scores low on their sycophanty measure but still acts sycophantic. In that case it could be new vector needs be calculated.

[0] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-most-forbidden-technique/
by conductr | 2025-08-03 18:15:47+00:00
When I was renting more often, I found Enterprise had pick-up trucks and you can tell them you will be towing during the RSVP (I think it may be a small extra fee, but mostly they want to make sure they get you a truck with a towing hitch). I still use this option if I need more than my half ton can handle (thankfully not very often). I wouldn't use the bed for anything as they are always nice new trucks and any wear would be extremely obvious and I'm not sure if they will charge me. I will rent a trailer from Uhaul instead, another layer to the inconvenience.
Show HN: Turn impulse buys into dream investments
by pjcodes | 2025-08-03 18:15:53+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve always struggled with impulse buying—that late-night Amazon scroll or the "deal" that's too good to pass up. I realized I was trading long-term goals for short-term dopamine hits. The core problem is the frictionlessness of modern e-commerce.

To fight back, I built Nope It. It’s not just another budgeting app. It's a PWA designed to interrupt the impulse loop at the critical moment.

How it works is based on a few key psychological principles:

Forced Pause (The Cooldown): Inspired by Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow," the app introduces a mandatory 24-hour cooldown on any logged impulse. This shifts you from impulsive "System 1" thinking to deliberate "System 2" thinking.

Cost Re-framing (Work Hours Psychology): It immediately translates the item's price into a more tangible metric: This $80 gadget costs you 4 hours of your work. This technique, known as "opportunity cost visualization," makes the trade-off much more real.

Goal Redirection: Instead of just saying "no," the app encourages you to immediately contribute the saved amount to a pre-defined Wishlist Goal (e.g., "Vacation Fund," "Down Payment"). This replaces the lost dopamine from buying with the positive feeling of making progress.

The Tech:

It's built as an enterprise-grade behavioral platform, but the front-end is a simple, fast Progressive Web Application (PWA) so there's nothing to install. It's accessible on any device, instantly.

I wanted to turn a personal weakness into a strength and thought others might find it useful too. I'm here to answer any questions about the psychology, the tech, or the journey.

Would love to get your feedback!

Check it out here: https://www.nopeit.app
by ferociouskite56 | 2025-08-03 18:16:03+00:00
Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. who profit off intoxicating abilify are very evil. New York's Northwell for-profit hospital monopoly said they would inject me for asking for a Quran, "Muslims are a delusion," they will decide who is Muslim, etc. 1 million New Yorkers are psych patients at risk of losing all freedoms and getting face spasm, painful headaches and diabetes. Even worse companies in bigger Florida, Texas, California.
by bwanab | 2025-08-03 18:17:03+00:00
For anybody who's interested in spending an hour listening, this podcast (https://www.econtalk.org/read-like-a-champion-with-doug-lemo...) gives a very good, detailed look at what's wrong with current reading programs in the U.S. and how to do it better. Phonics, vocabulary and background knowledge.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-03 18:18:10+00:00
Google and Windsurf

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how...

Amazon

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...

Microsoft and Inflection

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-ai-reverse-acqui-hire-150...

Microsoft almost pulled it off with OpenAI during the Altman fiasco.
by jachee | 2025-08-03 18:18:31+00:00
As someone who was recently in NYC for a conference, I found the subway system very easy to navigate in the 21st century. It was pretty cool to not need any cabs or cars at all, for a whole week.

The Transit app makes it trivial to navigate between any given two points on the most efficient route. A current version of this game would require prohibition of navigation apps, as well as asking directions.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-03 18:18:35+00:00
UN library has lot of stuff in it.

https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en

Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.

Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:

> Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General

> The present report has been prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution 79/257, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit a report on strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing entities of the United Nations Secretariat have implemented Account-funded projects to support the capacity-development efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity with the regular programme of technical cooperation; using a common framework for evaluating projects; conducting outreach to promote awareness of the Development Account and its funded projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the support delivered to Member States. It also presents further actions to promote the visibility of the Account and its results achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.

It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data. It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16 pages of the above.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-03 18:19:16+00:00
> Companies should have a policy to limit accumulation of unused vacation, such as 3 weeks maximum.

I hate this. My company lets you accumulate unused vacation, but it has a cap of 300 hours, or 7.5 five-day weeks. After you reach the cap, you stop accruing. I'm constantly at the cap, so I just take a Friday off every time another 8 hours accrues, and spend that time putzing around the house doing routine chores and maintenance. I'd much rather just accrue and accrue, and then get all that accrual paid out when I leave or retire.

I understand that companies would rather I not do that, so they implement this "cap" that allows them to stop providing the benefit they promised during hiring.
by xerox13ster | 2025-08-03 18:19:21+00:00
I got taught about lying to children at the same time that I learned about the orbitals of the electron and that Neil Bohr model of the atom wasn’t totally correct, by the least woke chemistry teacher I’ve probably ever known.

Even he would read this and think That you were suffering from a semi lucid state of psychosis and he would begin seeking an annihilation after reading this.

While yes, lying to children does induce some cognitive overhead cost—and I personally believe that the act of learning and the act of changing one’s mind from something already learned is in a way painful (in so much as the brain can feel pain since it doesn’t really have any nerve endings) because of the forming of new connections and the breaking of old—I fail to see how that has anything to do with wokeism, other than being “woke” inherently requiring the critical thinking capacity to make those changes in things that you’ve learned.

My pet theory is that conservatives are conservatives because that pain is unbearable for them and they just hate learning or relearning or changing their mind at all.

Which leads me to ask after this ramble of yours: do you suffer from this pain?
by sgnelson | 2025-08-03 18:19:37+00:00
See https://fabacademy.org/ for the version of the MIT HTMAA class open to all. It's run by Neil Gershenfeld.

Also, the class documentation itself is not where the "cool" stuff is, it's in all the student documentation. Here is a list of all the students in this past years FabAcademy: https://fabacademy.org/2025/people.html

And here are some highlights for this years final projects: https://fabacademy.org/2025/highlights.html

And what I always really liked where the weekly highlights as well (I don't have a link handy at the moment, I'd often make notes for myself of different projects.)
by Cockbrand | 2025-08-03 18:19:49+00:00
This is an excellent recommendation for an excellent book. As the hackers were German, the hackers' perspective is somewhat well-known in Germany, and it's interesting to learn about both sides.

I just learned that a documentary on this topic with Cliff Stoll exists: The KGB, the Computer and Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gHNVNRQTJg - I haven't watched it yet, though.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-03 18:20:18+00:00
That true, but I definitely remember my Chinese teacher (born and studied in China, did grad school here) telling us that it takes much longer for Chinese students to learn to read.

Some more googling looking for something similar to compare is that Chinese students know enough characters to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple newspaper articles.
by _wire_ | 2025-08-03 18:20:45+00:00
Your data center has its own dam and you're bragging about how clean it is?

//run of the river//

Sounds terrible for the river but go on..

//takes energy that could power 24,000 homes//

Great news, but what about the homes? Are they now running on coal?

//...run ~24,736,362 jobs in parallel...//

Approximately 24,736,362?

//...reducing emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional compute.//

Compared to traditional compute? You were talking about a power generator.

//Each 300-tonne rotor weighs as much as 50 African elephants.//

Each 300-tonne rotor also weighs the same as 300-tonnes of horseshit.

Anything else?

//If we maxed out the entire output for an hour, we could run ~24,736,362 jobs in parallel, reducing emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional compute.//

How can one sentence be so screwed up about qualifiers:

- "maxed out" implies "entire"

- Maxed out also implies exhausted.

- An exact count of "24,736,362" isn't approximate

- Time (for an hour) and work (jobs) are orthogonal measures.

- Placing the "if" ahead of "maxed out" implies running at max is something you don't usually want to do, but you're bragging about how much you can do. So when maxed out you can run approximately 24,736,362 jobs in parallel, for one hour... Of those running, how many jobs complete? —Oh, never mind!

That must have been written by a human, but it's an ad for an AI company.

Yay AI...
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-08-03 18:21:19+00:00
I still have to learn C++20 concepts and now we have a full-fledged reflection system?

Good, but I think what happens is there are people on the bleeding edge of C++, usually writing libraries that ship with new code. Each new feature is a godsend for them -- it's the reason why the features are proposed in the first place. It allows you to write libraries more simply, more generally, more safely, and more efficiently.

The rest of us are dealing with old code that is a hodgepodge of older standards and toolchains, that has to run in multiple environments, mostly old ones. It's like yeah, this C++26 feature will come in handy for me someday, but if that day comes then it will be in 2036, and I might not be writing C++ by then.
by filoleg | 2025-08-03 18:22:12+00:00
Boomer men complaining about their wives is an actual boomer facebook meme for a reason.

Whether men just sitting down and talking openly about their feelings comes from the “men should be more sensitive and willing to share their feelings with others” take or the “bbq and beers with the boys in the backyard” take, the same point stands regardless.

Like, guys in a group relaxing over beers or bbq and just talking about their feelings (just without using this specific terminology) has been a thing since forever ago in the US. I cannot speak for all countries ever, but in Russia (since before soviet union even existed), sauna+alcohol after+snacks along with the boys just talking about anything weighing on their mind has been a thing too. From what I know about ancient Greece, they had an equivalent of it as well.

Regional/cultural equivalents aside, this seems like a somewhat common experience/ behavior across time, and painting it as some new thing that comes from the same place as “it is so cool and progressive for men to be into group twerking exercises” is disingenuous.
by roughly | 2025-08-03 18:22:49+00:00
The point of a report is to provide a structured process and background for a set of technical or policy recommendations. It’d be perfectly normal for a report drafted by the efforts of 50 people to have an audience of 2-3 major decision makers - the point is the process for generating the recommendations. Further, it’d also be quite normal for a report on a specific topic to be used as an input to another process which generates its own outputs, meaning there’s little reason for people not involved in the latter process to read the original report unless they’re deeply interrogating the findings of the consolidated report.
by brokencode | 2025-08-03 18:22:50+00:00
We can’t know what would have happened exactly, but can be certain there would have been less competition if Adobe had acquired Figma.

We can’t know for sure whether increased competition is going to lead to a better outcome here, but we can say with a high level of certainty that more competition usually leads to better outcomes.

The fact that this also turned out to be fantastic for investors is just icing on the cake. Increased competition in markets is a worthy goal in itself.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 18:23:02+00:00
Many, many people deserve to be shunned or ostracized.

The inverse here is that we should all be forced to like people we don't like. Well, that's stupid.

If you're an asshole then I don't want to hang out with you. Doesn't matter what, specifically, you did to be an asshole, as long as it's legitimate (not a lie).

Yes, I'm going to "shun" people I don't like. Not because I'm evil or I even want to harm them. I don't. I'm only thinking about myself - not them. Okay, I want to have a good time, so that necessarily means I can't be around people I don't like. So, there.

If that's cancellation well then, cancel me back in retaliation.
by rapatel0 | 2025-08-03 18:23:06+00:00
As a father trying to get my kindergartner to read and also someone working in ML, it's amazing to me how this mirrors my life experience and ml concepts.

When I was a kid, there was a big effort to experiment on our grade using a concept called whole language, as compared to phonics for reading. I am a whole language person and I've learned to read and retain pretty quickly.

Anyways, this totally mirrors the concept of tokenization. Phonics vs whole languge is suspiciously similar to letter, word, and subword tokenization. One wonders if we as human do a proxy for BPE in our brains when we learn to read.

To this day I'm an absolutely shitty speller.
by lax_och_potatis | 2025-08-03 18:23:21+00:00
I took this course recently! The class is mostly digital fabrication, but when working through it, you end up learning a lot of other techniques through your own work, the TAs, and seeing what your classmates bring.

In recent iterations, they have a choose-your-own week which included embroidery machines (which while admittedly barely scratching the surface of sewing, fits easily in the digital fabrication theme!) I also learned a fair bit about woodworking in the CNC week! The class is a whirlwind, but I left the class not being afraid of many types of fabrication, even if I was well aware I had a lot to learn.
by tdtr | 2025-08-03 18:24:26+00:00
I'm pretty sure that the canonical choice is either choosing vectors to be anchor - either by a knn distance with other vectors, or by "hand", or even stuff like cross entropy - but then that is already in the loss function. another method would be to create some kind of adversarial setup where the output is "stretched" intentionally and then criticized by another llm. afaik the problem is with scale, as manually going through a bunch of vectors to just ground the latent isnt exactly economical. also people are quite conservative, esp in the big model runs - stuff like muon isnt exactly popularized till the new qwen or kimi. obviously this is all speculation for open models and folks with more experience can chime in.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-08-03 18:24:32+00:00
People are different. I have been fully remote for 5 years after 5 in-office, so I've seen both.

In office was fine while I didn't have kids. Now I have kids and my life would be in shambles if I had to commute. I also live in BFE and would make probably 70% less if I worked locally.

I grew up on the internet in the early 2000s. So I'm well used to getting lots of my social interaction from text chats, and I prefer it. I can text chat all day. I can in person chat for about 45 mins before I want to be alone with my thoughts.

Plus, I get off work and get to socialize with my family, who I like roughly 100x more than my favorite coworker.

It's just different people, different communication styles, different lives.
by dTal | 2025-08-03 18:24:51+00:00
>I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.

If you don't normalize one-day "under the weather" events, you are trading them for multi-day "off sick" events.

Personal anecdata: I recall once at a job with a particularly easygoing boss I simply didn't feel up to my morning commute, for no easily definable reason. I rang in sick anyway and went back to sleep. I then proceeded to more or less sleep through the entire following 24 hours, until it was time to go to work again. Lo and behold I magically had the energy this time, and bounced into work. I then realized that I had been suffering from fatigue from the early stages of an infection which I had successfully fended off through rest - had I dragged myself into work, I most assuredly would not have been there the following day, and probably not the day after that either.