MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-20 14:04:37+00:00
Someone please confirm my idea (or remedy my ignorance) about this rule of thumb:

Don't train a model on sensitive info, if there will ever be a need for authZ more granular than implied by access to that model. IOW, given a user's ability to interact w/ a model, assume that everything it was trained on is visible to that user.
by Draiken | 2025-08-20 14:05:07+00:00
So much copium.

People are so invested in this bubble they have to believe it will not burst at all costs.

If this works as well as the evangelists say, they'll all soon be millionaires, right? Everyone is 10x more productive! I'll be waiting... seated.

The good part about this is that if it does indeed get as good as they claim, anyone will be able to get the same benefits. If it doesn't, I'll be around to fix all the garbage code vomited out of LLMs.
by thunky | 2025-08-20 14:05:28+00:00
> You'd have to reindex the metadata (roles access), which may be substantial if you have a complex enough schema with enough users/roles.

Right, but this compare this to the original proposal:

> A basic implementation will return the top, let's say 1000, documents and then do the more expensive access check on each of them

Using an index is much better than that.

And it should be possible to update the index without a substantial cost, since most of the 100000 documents likely aren't changing their role access very often. You only have to reindex a document's metadata when that changes.

This is also far less costly than updating the actual content index (the vector embeddings) when the document content changes, which you have to do regardless of your permissions model.
by laichzeit0 | 2025-08-20 14:06:02+00:00
I read the book Bell Curve years ago, but I remember the analysis being that the found statistically significant differences between race and IQ. The authors argued that individual differences in IQ within a population are strongly influenced by genetics (heritability estimates around 40–80%). They emphasized that this doesn’t mean IQ is fixed, but that genes play a large role in explaining why individuals differ. Their ultimate policy argument was less about race per se, and more about what society can realistically do. They argued that large-scale social programs (e.g., Head Start, income redistribution, affirmative action) had limited power to reduce cognitive inequality or close gaps, because much of IQ variation was resistant to environmental manipulation. On the genetic vs. environmental debate about group differences, their ultimate claim was: we don’t know, but genetics might contribute, and pretending otherwise could be harmful to honest policy discussion.

But really, if you can't go about doing more studies on race and IQ, we'll never really know. It's a valid and legitimate scientific question
by cousin_it | 2025-08-20 14:07:27+00:00
If the blocks are thin enough, I think it's possible. Stack three blocks. Position the left edge of the stack on the edge of the table, so it's hanging downward at a slight angle, and stack enough blocks on top that it holds. Now slide the middle block 2/3 of the way out. The friction should still hold.

I think it's also possible for other shapes, all the way up to square blocks. But you need to build a bunch of nested "clamp" arrangements, instead of just one.
by devttyeu | 2025-08-20 14:08:02+00:00
I don’t get why so many people keep making this argument. Transformers aren’t just a glorified Markov Chain, they are basically doing multi-step computation - each attention step is propagating information, then the feedforward network does some transformations, all happening multiple times in sequence, essentially applying multiple sequential operations to some state, which is roughly how any computation looks like.

Then sure, the training is for next token prediction, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the emergent properties in those models. You could argue that every time you infer a model you Boltzmann-brain it into existence once for every token, feeding all input to get one token of output then kill the model. Is it conscious? Nah probably not; Does it think or have some concept of being during inference? Maybe? Would an actual Boltzmann-brain spawned to do such task be conscious or qualify as a mind?

(Fun fact, at Petabit/s throughputs hyperscale gpu clusters already are moving amounts of information comparable to all synaptic activity in a human brain, tho parameter wise we still have the upper hand with ~100s of trillions of synapses [1])

* [1] ChatGPT told me so
by lazide | 2025-08-20 14:08:05+00:00
cash generally. there is insurance, and i’m sure many folks use it, but for most things it’s not worth the paperwork. total end-to-end cost for most things is less than what someone in the US would pay for a co-pay for the first appointment to even consider being treated.

most indian gov’t healthcare is horrendous and severely broken (vastly oversubscribed and underfunded), but private is very effective and quite affordable. there are some parts of gov’t healthcare that work okay (vaccinations).
by joshwa | 2025-08-20 14:09:32+00:00
The thing about language models is that they are *language* models. They don't actually parse XML structure, or turn code into an AST, they are just next-token generators.

Individual models may have supplemented their training with things that look like structure (e.g. Claude with its XMLish delimiters), but it's far from universal.

Ultimately if we want better fidelity to the concepts we're referencing, we're better off working from the larger/richer dataset of token sequences in the training data--the total published written output of humanity.
by unshavedyak | 2025-08-20 14:11:16+00:00
Is that the question? I definitely don't think that's remotely reasonable for someone who can't program. For small things yes, but large things? They're going to get into a spin cycle with the LLM on some edge case it's confused about where they consistently say "the button is blue!" and the bot confirms it is indeed not blue.

It really depends on the area though. Some areas are simple for LLMs, others are quite difficult even if objectively simple.

Granted atm i'm not a big believer in vibe coding in general, but imo it requires quite a bit of knowledge to be hands off and not have it fall into wells of confusion.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-20 14:11:27+00:00
I think it's just so strongly associated with a certain era (10-15 years ago) that it's hard for people to get it into the present day. Also, Rails is so dominant in Ruby that there aren't libraries/frameworks for the "latest trends" with as much mindshare.

I wouldn't be against starting a new project in Ruby or RoR.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-20 14:11:27+00:00
Aside from learning, I also find that pen-and-paper is much more effective for journaling, when I want to work through a problem or brainstorm something. Once I've worked it out, I'll often type it in so I've got it saved in a searchable, archivable form. But putting it on paper first seems to help me think about it. It's like I see the words in a deeper way than when I'm putting them on the screen.
by tsukikage | 2025-08-20 14:11:29+00:00
> > Encrypted communications have enabled...

> Is this the payload message of the article?

No, this is:

> > Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes

Britain's current government is heavily pro-censorship and pro-surveillance, and encourage any and all rhetoric that might help them to this end.

However, when the reality on the ground is that I can literally locate a stolen object myself and pass to the police evidence both of the object being mine and of its current location, and they simply cannot be bothered to do anything at all with that information... it is clear that the existence of encryption is not relevant to the problem.

cf. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crl873p51zro
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-20 14:13:03+00:00
Exactly my point - OpenAI is giving Apple its model for free. Which saves Apple many $B's in compute to train their own model. You could argue it's being paid in-kind.

Unlike OpenAI, Apple doesn't need to charge a subscription to get AI-based revenue. It just needs to properly integrate it into its products that billions of people are already using, to make those products more useful so people continue buying them. At that point most users don't care what model is powering it - could be GPT, Claude, Mistral etc.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-20 14:13:24+00:00
I've been toying with Perl+CGI-scripts lately and find its super productive with the benefit that I can do serverless without the lock-in.

I don't think the software engineering field is particularly rational and mostly follows trends or what looks good or familiar. We have a proclivity to assume that anything old is legacy. Most developer have never studied any CS history and are quite young, so they're bound to reinvent the wheel as well.

I think its fine to use older technology if its the right fit for the problem, and since the tech is battle-tested, you can read up as to why it went out-of-fashion, and as a result can minimize the risks with using it. It's "predictably disappointing".
by yallpendantools | 2025-08-20 14:13:48+00:00
As a fellow fountain-pen enthusiast, I highly doubt this idea that the pen (and especially the nib) becomes "tuned" to your writing. I think it's either [a] placebo effect or [b] the other way around---the hand becomes "tuned" to the pen---or [c] it's more about the other parts of the pen (e.g., body, feed), and rarely, if ever at all, the nib.

> This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.

> As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished.

"Polish" is making a surface more even than before either by [a] filling it in with substance so that the depressions in the surface becomes level with the peaks or [b] filing away (i.e., introducing wear) at the surface so that the peaks become level with the depressions.

Either way, I don't see how it can be achieved with writing. Paper and ink doesn't have anything that can achieve [a] nor is it enough to achieve [b]---even over time---otherwise the nib isn't made of alloy that can resist wear and tear.

I'm prepared to wager that a well-used but well-cared for nib isn't gonna exhibit a more polished angle. It could tarnish. It could build-up a patina. Maybe it could have some chemical residues from previous inks. But to have a significant and highly-localized deviation from when it was brand-new, I highly doubt it.

Another part of my hypothesis is that you don't actually keep the pen at the same angle everytime you write. You still produce the same(ish) handwriting but writing angle is easily affected by external factors. In other words, the writer compensates for these external factors subconsciously in order to produce the same handwriting. E.g., I write differently on my journal vs. if I'm filling out a form. I write differently when I'm jotting down notes in a meeting vs. something more deliberate. I might adjust angles if the paper has a different texture, or if the ink isn't drying as quickly. I would write differently on my desk at home vs. a hotel room desk. Heck, I write differently at the start, middle, and end of a journal.

I'm just saying this because I think people could stress over fountain pens over what is basically superstition and there's already plenty to think of when using fountain pens. It won't change your pen's "attunement" if you lend it for friends to try occasionally. Conversely, don't be afraid to give second-hand pens a try just because the previous owner's writing style might be too different from yours.
by immibis | 2025-08-20 14:13:56+00:00
It's also literally true. Violent revolutions in history come about when the people are fed up with the king and also have the means to do one.

It's also true the other way: you have to pay rent (poor pays rich) or else their thugs come and beat you up.

Pretty much everyone wants your money or they'll do what you can to make your life worse. You'll also do what you can to make other people's life worse if they don't give you enough money, like not working for them.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-20 14:13:59+00:00
I would argue there are more applications overall where Gaussian processes are superior, as most scientific applications have smaller data sets. Not everything has enough data to take advantage of feature learning in NNs. They are generally reliable, interpretable, and provide excellent uncertainty estimates for free. They can be made to be multiscale, achieving higher precisions as a function approximator than most other methods. Plus, they can exhibit reversion to the prior when you need that.

Another example where it is used is for emulating outputs of an agent-based model for sensitivity analyses.
by throw10920 | 2025-08-20 14:14:46+00:00
Not to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only.

It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.
by mindcrime | 2025-08-20 14:15:41+00:00
I think it's normal for the publisher to hold those rights (perhaps shared with the original authors, depending on the details of their agreements), so possibly all that would have been required here would be for the publisher to approve doing this.

Or maybe Rucker and all of the other authors are friends, and keep in touch, and he just literally called all of the up and said "Hey, can I post Mirrorshades online for posterity?" and they all agreed. Who knows?
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-20 14:16:03+00:00
> Cash windfalls can absolutely build wealth.

Yes, but that's facile.

Do they, commonly? No.

> Also 100k invested in the market will yield you probably around 7k, which is a lot, especially you don't touch it and let it compound.

You came so close to getting the point, and then kept walking with your own predetermined idea! "Why don't these single-income, struggling mothers and unemployed homeless people just take this cash and invest it?" is the most privilege-laden, oblivious idea I've heard in a while.
by conradev | 2025-08-20 14:16:38+00:00
The story is a lot more interesting than I could have imagined:

It’s particularly popular in the northern state of West Bengal in India, where it’s used in dishes such as achaars, a pickled condiment used to add an acidic spice to a wide variety of dishes. Through careful breeding processes, the group of scientists were able to produce rapeseed plants with low levels of erucic acid. The oil, later to be named canola oil (can- for Canada, -ola which stands for “oil, low acid”) soon became a commercialized, easily marketable hit with both the public and science community alike (Fisher, 2020).

https://sites.bu.edu/gastronomyblog/2022/05/18/the-marvelous...

The FDA has approved one brand of edible mustard seed oil that’s produced from a cultivar bred explicitly for its low levels of erucic acid.

https://www.andersonintl.com/the-controversy-surrounding-mus...

Still digging for the brand
by rockyj | 2025-08-20 14:16:55+00:00
I could not even (as of yesterday) get some boilerplate code out of AI. It very confidently spitted code which would not even compile (multiple times). Yes, it is better than parsing StackoverFlow pages when I have some specific task or error and sometimes slightly better than reading a bunch of docs for a library, but even then I have to verify if it is giving code / examples from latest versions.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-20 14:17:16+00:00
Coincidentally, I happened across a block stacking YouTube video yesterday that discusses the limits of the standard Lire tower solution, the "optimal" spine solutions and the "better" parabolic solutions (more overhang although may not be optimal for any particular number of blocks).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA0qGJMZ7vA
by elric | 2025-08-20 14:17:20+00:00
Looking at this book, it seems very similar to how I was taught in the late 80s early 90s. We were forced to use fountain pens, and would get berated if we got ink on our hands.

I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between Tamblyn's business penmanship" and "looped cursive" and any other type of cursive to be honest. The difference in individual handwriting seems to be much larger than the difference in overarching styles?
by tw04 | 2025-08-20 14:17:22+00:00
>Do we take this to mean that the current leadership assess the value proposition -of Intel- to be in the /making/ of the chips, akin to TSMC, and not in the /designing/ of them, as in all past seasons at Intel?

No… Gelsinger laid all of this out very clearly. He wanted the design side of the house and the manufacturing side of the house to stand on their own. He didn’t want the design side relying solely on process to maintain performance leads, and he also wanted them to have the flexibility to use any fab should manufacturing fall behind.

In order for manufacturing to survive design potentially going to competitors for certain generations, they need to also support outside business.

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1451/...
by perlgeek | 2025-08-20 14:17:41+00:00
"Fun" Fact: ServiceNow simply passes this problem on to its users.

I've seen a list of what was supposed to be 20 items of something, it only showed 2, plus a comment "18 results were omitted to insufficient permissions".

(Servicenow has at least three different ways to do permissions, I don't know if this applies to all of them).
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-20 14:18:12+00:00
Here's my analysis of Freudianism, which Kohut started out in and ultimately made a major, if not complete, break.

If you go see a psychoanalyst for several sessions a week and talk about yourself for a year you will, if you are "analyzable", fall in love with them to some extent. Freud saw your relationship with your parents as the template of how you fall in love so this is a "transference" of your feelings towards your parents to the therapist. The reaction your therapist has to this situation is the "countertransference", and the therapist is supposed to be aware of this and in control of it (like not sleep with their patient) and use it as a diagnostic tool for the patient's capacity to love.

Freud was largely concerned with the "Oedipus Complex" which was about the triangular relationship between the patient and their two parents. This is relevant to how you handle triangular situations in your life like how you deal with a customer on behalf of your employer or how you manage a dyadic relationship with someone but do so ethically and consistent with what is good for society.

People who are frankly psychotic aren't "analyzable" but by the 1960s there was a lot of interest in "borderline" patients who weren't quite psychotic but whose relationships at the dyadic level were disturbed enough that they weren't really "analyzable" in terms of the Oedipus complex because they were not developed enough to have that. Kohut's work was part of a body of work on "pre-Oedipal" phenomena which at the time people tried to trace to your relationship to your mother rather than the triangular family relationship.

Kohut discovered aspects of "loving" that were primordial and present in everyone such as idealization, the desire to merge with someone, the fantasy that someone is your twin, that are stuff that mature people manage to create more "real" love out of. So in his work he looked for signs of those kinds of transference and also the reactions the therapist had to them which it turns out can be really strong.

Kohut's books are some of the most difficult reads you can find but they are really rewarding, they explain a lot about what goes on inside the head when just ordinary people "lose their shit" at a small provocation and were the start of a line of research that ultimately got both borderline and schizotypal personality disorders into the DSM by the 1980s. His ideas are relevant because they describe the raw material that people adapt to make a mature personality but also what happens when people have developmental problems that lead to a developmental arrest or when people regress under stress.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-20 14:18:17+00:00
RIM was obviously attached to the keyboard because that was a defining feature of the Blackberry. They thought (or didn't want to see) that people would not want a touchscreen for typing their emails.

But Nokia had released a touchscreen phone even before the iPhone and their first iPhone-like smartphone was in 2008 so only a year after the first iPhone. What they stuck with for too long is Symbian, which was blown out of the water by the iPhoneOS and then its apps ecosystem. In contrast, Samsung quickly ditched Symbian what whatever else they were using to adopt Android.
by srcreigh | 2025-08-20 14:18:51+00:00
If insulin was already GA, and you gave it to people without insulin, and they believed that you’d stop giving it to them in a few months. The people would be healthy temporarily while preparing for immanent suffering. The study would likely report mixed psychological benefits. I hope the analogy makes sense.

A better UBI study would bucket people into a lifetime monthly payout (with inflation increase etc). Give them an opportunity to invest in their lives.
by mooreds | 2025-08-20 14:19:06+00:00
Yeah, I will post something 2-3 times, often with days or weeks between them.

I've also re-posted some things that others have posted (and others have re-posted stuff I've posted).

I think the key thing is to not spam. I share other people's posts mostly. 90-95% of my posts are what I find that I think the community might be interested in, as opposed to posts of my content.
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-20 14:19:08+00:00
It's a pretty basic primer to the subject, but good for kids learning maths. Could do with some callbacks to maths concepts like the circle equation ( x = r cos (t) and y = r sin (t) ).

Possible topics to branch further into would be polar coordinates and linear algebra basics (vectors, transformations, transformations in 3d space). If you the author aren't sure of such topics, I would recommend 3blue1brown yt videos on the matter

Possibly better for that than for programmers (given it doesn't include code or libraries used or anything about actually manipulating 3d objects like vertices, stretching and morphing to achieve the effect shown etc)
by moconnor | 2025-08-20 14:19:23+00:00
"Teams using this system report:

89% less time lost to context switching

5-8 parallel tasks vs 1 previously

75% reduction in bug rates

3x faster feature delivery"

The rest of the README is llm-generated so I kinda suspect these numbers are hallucinated, aka lies. They also conflict somewhat with your "cut shipping time roughly in half" quote, which I'm more likely to trust.

Are there real numbers you can share with us? Looks like a genuinely interesting project!
by incomingpain | 2025-08-20 14:19:46+00:00
So what if it were public? It's still essentially private because all the usernames are anonymous.

Makes sense to me why that story got flagged.

>- people are sick of 'political' stories and flag them out of tedium

Looking at active page, pretty minimal politics. So they are being flagged, the reasoning is unknown.

>- there is a prevailing pro-Trump, anti-science majority of active users on the site

lol the polar opposite is quite true. Virtually no support for trump on HN. Most of us arent in the USA, and those ive seen who are, are clearly democrats. Us Canadians hate trump pretty much, even the Maple MAGA crowd has disappeared.

>- there are active influence campaigns using sock-puppet accounts to hide and prevent discussion of ongoing attacks on science

<tinfoil> tags missing?