MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackyhacky | 2025-08-15 18:18:47+00:00
I agree that I am missing your point. Can you please clarify?

> a LLM cannot actually be intelligent if it cannot operate in a temporal context ;)

When I have a conversation with an LLM, that conversation happens in time. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The conversation can refer to earlier parts of the conversation. How is that not a "temporal context"?

Furthermore, can you explain why a temporal context is necessary for intelligence? For example, if a human being could download their entire brain into a computer and exist there, as if they were an LLM, would they cease to be intelligent, in your view?
by cubefox | 2025-08-15 18:18:59+00:00
There are now at least three ways to accelerate machine learning models on consumer hardware:

- GPU compute units (used for LLMs) - GPU "neural accelerators"/"tensor cores" etc (used for video game anti-aliasing and increasing resolution or frame rate) - NPUs (not sure what they are actually used for)

And of course models can also be run, without acceleration, on the CPU.
by dhfbshfbu4u3 | 2025-08-15 18:19:05+00:00
You sort of answered your question yourself…

In a bigger country, it is hard to maintain political cohesiveness over the long term. This means that big projects tend to get so large they can’t be terminated by the next round of government without major blowback. This leads to bloat and delay. The only way around this is total control (like China) but that leads to other issues.
by Jach | 2025-08-15 18:19:09+00:00
GOG is in bed with Amazon. I have over 130 games via GOG, only a handful I paid for -- right now I can only think of the Yakuza 0-6 collection that was priced so low I had to do it even though I played them all on a friend's xbox before. The rest are from Amazon's gifting of them to me via having a Prime account and Twitch account. Many are games I already bought and played on Steam, they're good games they're not just gifting trash. In any case, just like Epic and their mass of freely given games, it all but guarantees I never give those platforms a dime especially if I think a game will be gifted eventually. (It makes me hesitate sometimes on steam purchases too, which is probably part of the point, but I've got a giant backlog so buying can wait anyway, and it's a rare game that I want to buy and play right now.)

I'll continue supporting Steam over GOG for PC gaming, especially as a Linux user.
by marcusverus | 2025-08-15 18:19:09+00:00
It's funny, actually. When an anonymous source says there's a scary spreadsheet in the Trump White House, progs are happy to believe the unsourced and unprovable claim on faith, imagine the worst possible implications, and assert those entirely imaginary implications are evidence of fascism. But when considering the fact that the Biden admin actually, actively did financial harm to one of their most prominent critics, progs instantaneously drop the concerned citizen schtick and are happy to assume that any and all real harm done to critics is accidental until proven beyond a reasonable doubt!
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-15 18:19:23+00:00
A good place to start is Cornelis Agrippa’s “Three Books on Occult Philosophy.” Agrippa was a lawyer and esoteric feminist (eg, he wrote “on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex”) and defended women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe. His “three books” gave birth to the “occult” nomenclature.

Or my favorite, Marsilio Ficino. There is a statue to Ficino when you walk into the library. Ficino was hired by Cosimo Medici (the Florentine who invented banking and funded much of the Florentine renaissance) to translate Plato and other esoteric books coming from the fall of Constantinople. He published “De Mysteriis” in 1497, which paraphrases neoplatonic understanding of Gods, Demons, Heroes and Soul — arguing that gods and demons don’t feel — indeed, not even the soul (“the lowest of the divines”) has any part that feels.

(Aside: This idea was actually referenced in “K Pop Demon Hunters,” where they debate whether demons can feel — or are “all feelings”)

It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…

In any case, there are many old ideas and nuggets of wisdom that have yet to be mined and discovered— don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books! We might need AI for that…
by bevr1337 | 2025-08-15 18:20:00+00:00
From a fellow classically trained artist, I too feel disenchanted with my BFA.

I'm surprised so many folks defend the university system for fine arts. It's a relatively modern notion, as in only a few decades! Historically, arts education is provided in museum, academy, apprentice, and/or community settings. Academic (as in the modern university system) art is still in its early stages and deserves criticism. I assume much of our cohort are in a worse position for their commitment to an art degree.
by jsnell | 2025-08-15 18:20:01+00:00
The duration you'd need the memory for is a couple of seconds, during which time you're pegging a CPU core on the computation anyway. It is not needed for the entirety of the browsing session.

Now, could you construct a challenge that forced the client to keep a ton of data in memory, and then regularly be forced to prove they still have that data during the entire session? I don't think so. The problem is that for that kind of intermittent proof scenario there's no need to actually keep the data in low latency memory. It can just be stored on disk, and paged in when needed (not often). It's a very different access pattern from the cryptocurrency use case.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-15 18:20:08+00:00
"Occult" means hidden practices. So it covers both non-mainstream religious/mystical/magical practices, but it also covers "hidden" beliefs within religions.

Stuff like Kabbalah is considered occult, as it Christian mysticism, or folk mysticism that coexists with religion.

Also, one can study things without making judgements about them. The history of human beliefs is interesting.
by dctoedt | 2025-08-15 18:20:08+00:00
> You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community.

"Strictly control[led]" is a line-drawing function — and needs to remember that life is a movie, not a snapshot, and so patience is needed. EDIT: Growing a society seems not unlike raising children: Society needs kids to grow into adults, and sometimes that means gritting your teeth and being patient ....

Example: Many of my own immigrant ancestors, those on the non-Aryan branches of our family tree, probably wouldn't have been let in under today's MAGA criteria. (Even my German-immigrant ancestors faced hostility from the "real Americans.") Yet each successive generation in this country has done just a bit better, thank you very much.

Example: In this morning's home-delivery Times, Cardinal Dolan is quoted as recalling about the decades-long progress of the Irish migration to America — who were definitely considered ubermenschen by many American nativists of the time:

<quote>

“He [19th-century Archbishop John Hughes] was frustrated about raising money,” remarked [Cardinal] Dolan, who wore Hughes’ pectoral cross on a cord around his neck as he described the new artistic addition. “He said, ‘This cathedral will be built on the pennies of immigrants.’”

Dolan noted that by contrast, raising $3 million to underwrite the creation, installation, lighting and conservation of the Cvijanovic mural took less than a day — paid for, he added with a chuckle, by “the big checks of the grandchildren of the immigrants.”

</quote>

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added; my first-generation Irish-American grandmother told of seeing signs here and there: No Irish need apply.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/arts/design/st-patricks-c...
by starik36 | 2025-08-15 18:20:43+00:00
> famous briefcases full of cash

You are mischaracterizing it. Willfully. That makes you a liar.

The "briefcases full of cash" were money from Qatar to pay the civil servants to keep the society going because PA wouldn't pay them (given that they were just thrown off the roofs in Gaza by victorious Hamas following a short civil war).

Now where that money went is a different conversation. But you are making it look like Netanyahu went into Israel's treasury, filled briefcases full of cash and had someone deliver it to Hamas. You are willfully lying.
by btilly | 2025-08-15 18:20:53+00:00
The problem that I had with that approach is that the pain of the painful thought caused me to shy away from what was central to it.

Instead I have found that targeted gratitude has enabled me to bear the pain, while I face the pain, understand its cause, and start doing something about it. This isn't fast, it has been a journey. But a very good one.
by mrguyorama | 2025-08-15 18:20:55+00:00
>Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer

Except when they only added any sort of return mechanism after violating consumer rights laws in all sorts of jurisdictions for like a decade.

Though that was significantly less painful back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.

Steam's pro-consumer-ness is absurdly overblown, but the rest of consumer facing corporations are so fucking awful in comparison that they look like angels. They're also mostly just trying to keep anyone from looking at the closet full of profits explicitly from enabling underage gambling.

Not that I'm a hater, but people need to keep perspective. Valve is just a company that is slightly less abhorrent in it's practices.
by logicprog | 2025-08-15 18:20:55+00:00
Yeah, that's why I said I'm not against AI as a technology, but against the behavior of the corporations currently building it. What I'm confused by (not really confused, I understand its just negligence and not giving a fuck, but, frustrated and confused in a sort of helpless sense of not being able to get into the mindset) is just that while there isn't a profit motive against doing this (obviously) there's also not clearly a profit motive to do it, it seems like they're wasting their own resources too on unnecessarily frequent data collection, and also it'd be cheaper to pool data collection efforts.
by agent327 | 2025-08-15 18:20:56+00:00
That list is totally not cherry picked to serve a very specific agenda (/s). Actual safety for regular citizens is affected by events that are occurring today (instead of decades ago), as the result of actions by individuals (rather than state-sanctioned violence). As such, the grandparent is 100% correct: letting violent people into your country will raise the overal level of violence that people encounter.
by lacy_tinpot | 2025-08-15 18:20:58+00:00
What it actually seems like is that Humanities are trying to retain/gain power in this new world where it's increasingly apparent that rigor is far more valuable.

If humanities taught logic, and actually rigorous analytic capabilities that were on par with STEM, I don't think we'd be in the situation we're in now.

Instead it's the opposite. The departments have made humanities increasingly easier, thereby devaluing them even more.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-15 18:21:04+00:00
But that isn't the pitch. "You go to college so you can get a good job..."

The fact is, the entire college/university system is outsized and wrong-fit for what most people actually need. And while I don't think humanities programs should be cut from universities, I also don't think that taxpayer backed student loans or payouts should be made for programs that have vastly more people enrolled in than the general economy has a demand/need for.

I'd like to see more accredited options for trade schools beyond what people currently think of as trades. From accounting, to software development. I know there are some schools that focus on these things, I just think they should be more at the forefront and higher profile options.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-15 18:21:26+00:00
The problem with that is that we've already lost this fight and now "plain text email" means "the recipient will see it in 11pt Courier New".

As for accessibility, the people who need that have already set up the required font overrides and other stuff so it doesn't really benefit them much to use plaintext.

It's sad to think about how things could have been, but that's not the world we live in now...
by enraged_camel | 2025-08-15 18:21:28+00:00
I have very fond memories of Dungeon Keeper. The devious traps, the torture chambers where you could convert your goodly hero prisoners, the way you could backslap your imps into working a bit faster, the way you could take possession of any minion to turn the game into an FPS... all of these, plus many more, were just genius-level design elements that made the game what it is.

The 90s were a special time when it came to video games. I'm a bit saddened that we are unlikely to repeat that era. There are some great games today too, but none of them capture that same zeitgeist.
by Juliate | 2025-08-15 18:21:41+00:00
> No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.

Maybe, only maybe, getting to know the history of the internet (oh, and of mathematics, too), of the people that designed and built it, would inform a little more your stance.

Separating so bluntly maths, physics, biology, from humanities (and reciprocally) is precisely a trait that is telling of an unbalanced understanding of the world humanity built around itself with all these languages and abstractions to describe it.
by saguntum | 2025-08-15 18:22:17+00:00
Job fairs are super underrated. When my spouse and I were a bit in flux years back for where we were going to live long-term, we ended up living in the city where we met which is very much not a tech hub - only a few big companies that hire engineers - despite spouse applying to various places in SF, Denver, and Seattle.

He landed the local job first by going to a career fair that I randomly discovered on Twitter. Affected the whole trajectory of our life.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-15 18:22:23+00:00
I worked at a state university for 8 years writing code, and I was in contact with many of its student facing offices. There is an office that is dedicated to showing that law school students have very positive post-graduation outcomes. Basically, they send them a survey asking them if they had full or part time employment, and if they said "yes" to it, the university counted it as a positive outcome. "96% of our law school graduates find work within 12 months".

I am quite confident that not only is philosophy a waste when it comes to finding gainful employment, going to law school to put that philosophy to good use is just doubling down on the same bad gamble. Large fraction? What about the remainder?
by overfeed | 2025-08-15 18:22:23+00:00
> The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be

The backbone of the US economy are services and software, which depend a lot on IP. Deliberately or not, "low-value" American manufacturing was sacrificed for these high-margin industries[1]. AFAICT, it's impossible to turn back the clock on manufacturing without disadvantaging US software/services both on the legal regime and trade fronts

1. Which is why SWE salaries are higher in the US that RoW. I don't think trading high-salary service jobs for low-paying manufacturing is a good decision, but lots of people - including the current executive - think they can get it all. My working theory is Europe and China are not dumb and without agency and are just biding time for decoupling, should their manufacturing industries be undermined by US policy.
by phonon | 2025-08-15 18:22:42+00:00
The Risk Assessment Matrix Level (right most column) takes the incidence x severity into account. Even after mitigations, there were quite a few "Medium"s, almost all of which were E-1 ("Improbable: So unlikely, it can be assumed occurrence may not be experienced in the life of an item, .0001% Occurrence per item" x "Catastrophic: Could result in one or more of the following: death....")

Though millions of guns x .0001%...well...

https://smokinggun.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/gov.uscour...
by nradov | 2025-08-15 18:22:44+00:00
Student loan approval and interest rates should be based on actuarial calculations that account for risk of default based on school and major. This will allow market signals to work rather than treating everyone the same. Some people have this fantasy that everyone should be able to study their passion even if it's something with no value in the labor market but in the real world society can collectively only afford to have a tiny fraction of scholars living a life of the mind.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-08-15 18:22:47+00:00
>What would we use? Existence of brain waves? Existence of neurons? Those both would include most animals.

Relating this back to abortion, existence of brain waves is a higher bar than existence of neurons is a higher bar than fertilization. If I could convince you to care about either of those instead, then sure let’s run with that.

The question with abortion is “at what point are we concerned that killing something could be unethical.” For the criteria to include some or even most animals isn’t a terrible thing; we probably shouldn’t kill animals willy nilly.

>>like recognition of self, by which you prioritize e.g. a person over a dog

>Babies cannot recognize themselves in the mirror until around 1.5 years old. Several types of animals can recognize themselves in the mirror: elephants, dolphins, primates, mice, some birds, some fish.

>If we justify the value of babies by saying that they'll have certain abilities in the future, that same thing could be said about a zygote.

If I recall correctly, I was explicitly talking about how we might go about evaluating and comparing ethical worth beyond the developmental scale relevant to abortion, and I said this was just hypothetical. I wasn’t arguing recognition of self is relevant to abortion.

>However, before fusing, a sperm only has half the DNA of a human. A sperm's DNA doesn't define a human, and isn't sufficient to grow into a human, and thus cannot be called a young human.

I don’t consider the “completeness of DNA” philosophically relevant. The sperm-egg system, both considered together, does have a complete set of DNA. Why does the physical separation change the fundamental ethical nature of interfering with the process? If I have a sperm and egg very close to each other, about to merge, and place a barrier between them, why wouldn’t this be as ethically horrifying as immediately destroying the product of their merging?

>I was saying that 2 (or 3) things being nearby each other doesn't make them 1 entity.

Let’s agree my argument and analogy were poor. Why does entity-ness matter to ethics? When you say entity, are you referring to a physical body, or to a unified consciousness? Is a rock an entity? What about an amoeba?
by 8s2ngy | 2025-08-15 18:23:03+00:00
There is something remarkably beautiful about minimal websites that use primarily text, perhaps with one or two images, and only styles that enhance readability. This is unbeatable UX. Whenever I encounter sites like these, I envision an alternative universe where the internet remained as it was in the beginning: no commercial strings attached, lightweight pages on affordable hosting, and easily accessible information so that search engines actually work. The internet was one of our greatest creations, but we’ve since ruined it with our greed...
by ProfessorLayton | 2025-08-15 18:23:17+00:00
Bitrate aside, the marketing stopped making sense long ago:

- 720p/1080p is counting vertical pixel resolution

- 4k/8k is counting horizontal pixel resolution

- "4k/8k" is not actually 4,000/8,000 horizontal pixels

- Suddenly the "p" becomes irrelevant (Not that most people even knew what it meant to begin with)

- 720/1080/4k/8k totally disregards aspect ratio

- Consumers already have a way to compare, and they're called "megapixels"

- 2.1MP (1080p) and 8.3MP (4k) etc. is a lot more consumer friendly since it's already used for cameras.

Marketing really won at making this a mess.
by hx8 | 2025-08-15 18:23:18+00:00
Interdisciplinary is a broad umbrella term that most people fall under to some degree. The benefit of focusing on a primary discipline is that there are well worn career paths to follow. I think the best approach is to brand yourself to one or two disciplines, and look for collaboration opportunities with other disciplines. Study them for enrichment and inspiration. Have friends and colleagues outside of your discipline.

If someone says they are "interdisciplinary" it provides little information about what they actually study and are good at. If someone says they have a Masters in Philosophy with a focus on Metaphysics I have enough information about their background to ask questions they might provide insightful comments on.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-15 18:23:31+00:00
> One legitimate reason to not think supply reduces prices is because of big financial companies buying up lots of houses and having effectively free rein to price how they want.

No, its not. If only one big company was allowed to do that in each locality, and they had the ability to buy up all the supply no matter how much new housing was built, that would be a reason; absent monopoly power, they don't have free reign to price how they want, and can price higher the less supply there is, even if you assume all of it is owned by similar big firms and used as rentals.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-15 18:23:43+00:00
I've noticed quite a few studies where the author appears to prove their bias:

Pediatricians started asking about guns because someone "proved" that if there are guns in the house, children are more likely to have a gun injury. But, dig in just a little bit and no one differentiates between households where guns are secured and households where guns aren't.

My cardiologist who wagged her finger at me also brought up recent evidence about marijuana usage contributes to heart problems. I know those studies don't differentiate smoking vs edibles. Of course, smoking anything is going to have health problems; thus I'm going to conclude that the study confirms the authors' biases.

I suspect the same with studies about alcohol consumption: The authors may have some kind of bias. For example, what if drinking 120-proof spirits "neat" is likely to cause esophageal cancer, but everything else is safe?

That being said: We live longer than we used to. What used to kill us no longer does, so paying attention closer attention to things long-term effects of moderate alcohol consumption is more important than when we were more likely to at 45.
by xandrius | 2025-08-15 18:23:46+00:00
Yep and no. That's a common misconception. Like Chinese, old Japanese went through a systematic simplification of its kanji 100 or so years ago. The rules were decided a priori to make the job easier. This meant that several kanjis ended up looking somewhat similar even though they have nothing to do with each other. That's why comparing kanji can work but it can also backfire and lead you astray.