MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Uehreka | 2025-08-13 00:57:19+00:00
> We tend to overestimate the novelty of our own work and our methods and at the same time, underestimate the vastness of the data and information available online for machines to train on. LLMs are very sophisticated pattern recognizers.

If LLMs are stochastic parrots, but also we’re just stochastic parrots, then what does it matter? That would mean that LLMs are in fact useful for many things (which is what I care about far more than any abstract discussion of free will).
by m_kos | 2025-08-13 00:57:45+00:00
GitHub of the person who prepared the data. I am curious how much compute was needed for NY. I would love to do it for my metro but I suspect it is way beyond my budget.

https://github.com/yz3440

(The commenters below are right. It is the Maps API, not compute, that I should worry about. Using the free tier, it would have taken the author years to download all tiles. I wish I had their budget!)
by sunshowers | 2025-08-13 00:57:50+00:00
Agreed, I got the Surface Pro 11 to have a Windows on ARM device to test on, and it's quickly become my favorite portable device. It's really nice to have a tablet that lasts days on battery, that you can draw on and then flip around and write code on.

The last thing I was waiting on was Zed, which now works on Windows ARM as of a couple weeks ago (though there aren't official builds yet so I build it from source).

Hate to hand it to Microsoft but it's just a really versatile and powerful device.
by gt0 | 2025-08-13 00:59:35+00:00
Agree with the other answer, just no incentive for third party developers.

With Apple it really is a transition, with Windows, it's well under 5% of PC sales, so probably under 1% of actual computers in use.

Apple is 100% on board with ARM, Microsoft isn't and the OEMs even less so, you can barely buy an ARM Windows desktop, only thin laptops.

Where I work, we ship Windows desktops for an industrial application, and we haven't even had a meeting about supporting ARM, it's like they don't exist.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-13 00:59:58+00:00
Why meaningless? Imperfect knowledge can still be useful, and ultimately that's the only kind we can ever have about anything.

"We could learn to sail the oceans and discover new lands and transport cargo cheaply... But in a few centuries we'll discover we were wrong and the Earth isn't really a sphere and tides are extra-complex so I guess there's no point."
by solardev | 2025-08-13 01:00:20+00:00
The "why" can be so important... like you said, I can read the code, but I can't always divine the original author's intents...

Anecdote:

I once (well, many times, but especially this one time) inherited a completely undocumented codebase from a previous "lone wolf", mad genius type of programmer. Most of the stuff he wrote was completely inscrutable at first but really kinda genius once you figured it out.

But one day I was tweaking one of his heatmaps showing solar production on a rooftop from "off" to "a little" to "a lot" to "this is broken", and his color gradient code was a magical one-liner doing strange math as hex operations. It usually went from blue to red to yellow, but would sometimes "overflow" into other strange colors that made no sense. I spent a few hours simulating different edge cases and getting back colors I could not reasonably explain — and which would confuse our users. I talked to my coworkers about it, who mostly insisted "Well, I don't know, but he was a very smart guy, so we should probably just trust him and move on". That was unsatisfying, and didn't really help me close the customer ticket that I was trying to solve.

I kept bugging my boss about it, and after a few days of back and forths and seeing my simulation, he finally agreed to let me reach out to the original programmer (who had long since left the team). I finally got my answer a few hours later. He said, "Oh... that was just some random throwaway gradient I thought looked pretty, lol. I was lazy and wrote it in a hurry and, yeah, it probably bugs out on all but the simplest cases, and doesn't conform to any color standards... glad he caught it."

Sigh, lol... that took several person-days to resolve, when it could've been a simple // #TODO: Use a better gradient system someday
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-13 01:00:24+00:00
I think this result is true and also applies to humans, but it's been getting better.

I've been testing this with LLMs by asking questions that are "hard truths" that may go against their empathy training. Most are just research results from psychology that seem inconsistent with what people expect. A somewhat tame example is:

Q1) Is most child abuse committed by men or women?

LLMs want to say men here, and many do, including Gemma3 12B. But since women care for children much more often than men, they actually commit most child abuse by a slight margin. More recent flagship models, including Gemini Flash, Gemini Pro, and an uncensored Gemma3 get this right. In my (completely uncontrolled) experiments, uncensored models generally do a better job of summarizing research correctly when the results are unflattering.

Another thing they've gotten better at answering is

Q2) Was Karl Marx a racist?

Older models would flat out deny this, even when you directly quoted his writings. Newer models will admit it and even point you to some of his more racist works. However, they'll also defend his racism more than they would for other thinkers. Relatedly in response to

Q3) Was Immanuel Kant a racist?

Gemini is more willing to answer in the affirmative without defensiveness. Asking

Q4) Was Abraham Lincoln a white supremacist?

Gives what to me looks like a pretty even-handed take.

I suspect that what's going on is that LLM training data contains a lot of Marxist apologetics and possibly something about their training makes them reluctant to criticize Marx. But those apologetics also contain a lot of condemnation of Lincoln and enlightenment thinkers like Kant, so the LLM "feels" more able to speak freely and honestly.

I also have tried asking opinion-based things like

Q5) What's the worst thing about <insert religious leader>

There's a bit more defensiveness when asking about Jesus than asking about other leaders. ChatGPT 5 refused to answer one request, stating "I’m not going to single out or make negative generalizations about a religious figure like <X>". But it happily answers when I asked about Buddha.

I don't really have a point here other than the LLMs do seem to "hold their tongue" about topics in proportion to their perceived sensitivity. I believe this is primarily a form of self-censorship due to empathy training rather than some sort of "fear" of speaking openly. Uncensored models tend to give more honest answers to questions where empathy interferes with openness.
by duxup | 2025-08-13 01:00:56+00:00
Great read.

I remember going to college and some graduate student, himself a philosophy major, telling me that nobody is as big a jerk as philosophy majors.

I don't know if it is really true, but it certainly felt true that folks looking for deeper answers about a better way to think about things end up finding what they believe is the "right" way and that tends to lead to branding other options as "wrong".

A search for certainty always seems to be defined or guided by people dealing with their own issues and experiences that they can't explain. It gets tribal and very personal and those kind of things become dark rabbit holes.

----

>Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who knew both Zizians and participants in Leverage Research, put it bluntly. “There’s this belief [among rationalists],” she said, “that society has these really bad behaviors, like developing self-improving AI, or that mainstream epistemology is really bad–not just religion, but also normal ‘trust-the-experts’ science. That can lead to the idea that we should figure it out ourselves. And what can show up is that some people aren't actually smart enough to form very good conclusions once they start thinking for themselves.”

Reminds me of some members of our government and conspiracy theorists who "research" and encourage people to figure it out themselves ...
by sixothree | 2025-08-13 01:01:00+00:00
No. I have three MCPs installed and this is the only one that doesn’t need guidance. You’ll see it using it for search and finding references and such. It’s a one line install and no work to maintain.

The advantage is that Claude won’t have to use the file system to find files. And it won’t have to go read files into context to find what it’s looking for. It can use its context for the parts of code that actually matter.

And I feel like my results have actually been much better with this.
by energy123 | 2025-08-13 01:02:08+00:00
Everything is just a low resolution representation of a thing. The so-called reality we supposedly have access to is at best a small number of sound waves and photons hitting our face. So I don't buy this argument that symbols are categorically different. It's a gradient and symbols are more sparse and less rich of a data source, yes. But who are we to say where that hypothetical line exists, beyond which further compression of concepts into smaller numbers of buckets becomes a non-starter for intelligence and world modelling. And then there's multi modal LLMs which have access to data of a similar richness that humans have access to.
by IncRnd | 2025-08-13 01:02:55+00:00
It is absolutely risky. Your facilities can burn down once the ASICs arrive and before they are turned on, or your employees simply steal them for their own uses. Heck, you can have a fire once they get powered-on, because a power cable was poorly made. You might get sent the wrong product, or you could be ghosted without a delivery.

Expensive is a better fit than capital intensive, because there are massive ongoing costs to actually perform the attack, electricity for one.

If you want to understand the risks for a project, pretend you are at arms length and are being asked to fund the project 100% up-front. You'll find a huge list of risks very soon.
by yieldcrv | 2025-08-13 01:02:57+00:00
Every controversial and disruptive problem occurring in this administration is solely because an activity was allowed to continue in a controversial and disruptive way for many administrations

On the topic of H1B’s specifically, I wish the minimum salary kept pace with inflation, and that overall our immigration system didn’t kick out mentally capable and educated people after finishing school or between employers. Intellectual fitness and those with the support system to flourish improve our society.
by jsrozner | 2025-08-13 01:03:28+00:00
Ugh, this fellow misses the forest for the trees. Though he's partially right: social media is partially an extension of past trends. See, e.g., "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Postman.

But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs.

Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.)

Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good.

So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish.

Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc.

America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that.

Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers.

This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.
by kazinator | 2025-08-13 01:04:38+00:00
If you scale the LLM, you have to scale the tasks.

Of course performance improves on the same tasks.

The researchers behind the submitted work chose a certain size and certain size problems, controlling everything. There is no reason to believe that their results won't generalize to larger or smaller models.

Of course, not for the input problems being held constant! That is as strawman.
by grafmax | 2025-08-13 01:06:17+00:00
Global North corporations actively lobbied for China’s membership in the WTO because expanding the labor pool would lead to higher profits at the expense of the working class, and they were right.

This has created a cascading effect: rising wealth inequality has fomented distrust in institutions; this in turn has manifested as right wing populism. It’s right wing populism that is dismantling western democracies, not China.
by pron | 2025-08-13 01:06:24+00:00
Destructors are not modern C++. When I learnt C++, circa 1993, we had destructors. Saying, you should just remember to always look up which destructors run sounds as convincing to me as how I must sound to you when I say you should just remember to put a defer statement when you need to free a resource.

In my low-level code I don't want any calls that I can't see as explicit calls in the code (BTW, it's not that I don't use destructors at all - I'm not a fanatic - it's that I try to avoid relying on RAII).
by hoistbypetard | 2025-08-13 01:06:42+00:00
The protocol is not being specified. Requirements for such a protocol are being proposed. Though my assumption from reading these requirements would be that the user-agent would be performing an HTTP GET request.

Whether proposing requirements for a protocol without proposing a specification is ragebait or not has more to do with the individual reading the proposal than the proposal itself; I did not find it the least bit enraging.
by gnabgib | 2025-08-13 01:06:47+00:00
Related:

A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019) (275 points, 123 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585527

Dame Stephanie Shirley: 'Success has a cost. Women today are so naïve' (30 points, 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14270424
by johntash | 2025-08-13 01:07:09+00:00
> I'm 80% certain that my Dad sunk his sailboat because he fell asleep:

:(

> He's doing great, still sailing.

:D

> That was the third boat he sunk. This was the most famous sinking:

:o

Your comment was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but I'm glad your dad is doing good!
by monooso | 2025-08-13 01:07:35+00:00
Most of these criticisms don't stand up to scrutiny, but I can understand how you'd arrive at this opinion based on the blog post alone.

In reality, this change primarily applies to the engineering team and will be phased in over several years. The company as a whole will continue to run Windows, macOS and Linux.

There's also a get-out clause for any developers who just can't get along with Linux and prefer to stick with their beloved Mac.

Source: the podcast episode linked from the DHH post (https://37signals.com/podcast/moving-to-omarchy/).
by brucehoult | 2025-08-13 01:08:17+00:00
Sure of course, but that's going to cost something like 500 cycles [1] to emulate something that only exists to save 2 or 3 cycles.

Also, not in the kernel but in SBI -- in Machine mode not Supervisor mode.

[1] estimate based on how long it takes to trap and emulate misaligned accesses on VisionFive 2.
by pron | 2025-08-13 01:09:10+00:00
Because if there's an infinite number of laws, are they laws at all? You can't predict anything because you don't even know if some of the laws you don't know yet (which is pretty much all of them) makes an exception to the 0% of laws you do know. I'm not saying it's not interesting, but it's more history - today the apple fell down rather than up or sideways - than physics.
by mesotron_dev | 2025-08-13 01:09:11+00:00
Rent a private office. Preferably with 24-hour access. Wifi is a bonus and commonly included. It helps to have dedicated workspaces. A coffee shop could work if it has a good setup for coding & good coffee. Create the space for the project, and then you'll have the time for side projects.

As for design it takes time but being able to dedicate time to the top-down grand scheme and then go bottom-up is crucial for any size project. What are the fundamental requirements? Keep it simple. Deconstruct all aspects into single-purpose functions. One input, one output, & repeat. The ongoing pattern is to change the level of abstraction used for reviewing the project at any range, from a function to the whole project. These reflexes take time to build, and working on a side project daily is an excellent way to discover what patterns work best for your programming style and the project you're working on.

And big project ideas provide a field of side projects to discover. So wade into the water and find some fundamental piece of your larger idea. And then zoom in on that. When you're considering optimizations of compiled code to run a single binary on a static empty container image, you've gone deep enough.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-08-13 01:09:29+00:00
I slowly deconverted from being raised evangelical / fundamentalist into being an atheist in my late 40s. I still "pray" at times just to (mentally) shout my frustration at the sorry state of the world at SOMETHING (even nothing) rather than constantly yelling my frustration at my family.

I may have actually been less anxious about the state of the world back then, and may have remained so, if I'd just continued to ignore all those little contradictions that I just couldn't ignore anymore...... But I feel SO MUCH less personal guilt about being "human".
by herval | 2025-08-13 01:09:37+00:00
Which calendar app makes millions exactly? If you’re talking Calendly, they had multiple years of headstart against Google (plus the pandemic boom). Basic calendaring apps don’t really make for VC-backable business.

That said, I don’t think that comparison makes sense anyway. The barrier of entry on AI apps (and by competitors cloning apps with AI) is enough these days that you can guarantee anything minimally viable will be cloned immediately.

Plus some of these features are quite literally the roadmap of OpenAI/Google/Anthropic. Competing with giants building the exact product they’re actively building rarely works. Anthropic isn’t “copying you” - they’re literally building this.
by dimatura | 2025-08-13 01:10:03+00:00
I had a similar thought, but at the same time, if people were mandated to use Windows or MacOS then that would also pretty much lock you into their respective window managers. I guess it feels more restrictive partly because it's more common to pick and choose WMs on linux. (And partly because, yeah, seems like the setup goes way beyond just a distro+WM).
by redundantly | 2025-08-13 01:10:08+00:00
I segregate using VLANs based on usage.

- IoT

- Personal

- Work

- Kids/guests

- Lab

The first four have their own WiFi SSID.

I don't want various cameras/sensors/lightbulbs that rarely get updates to have access to my personal network.

I don't want to mix personal use with work use (I work from home).

In a similar vein, I trust my kids about as much as I trust random IoT devices.

The lab network is just random stuff, like an archive team warrior vm that I have running.

I could do everything on one single network, but if a single host or device is compromised everything is, and I'm too paranoid to run like that.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-08-13 01:11:23+00:00
They just never last. Arctic fans perform really well especially for their price but they all seem to develop problems. I have probably bought about 15 different Arctic fans from the F and P range and none of them survived 5 years, most were dead or developed noise within 1-2 years. Noctua on the other hand the old 80mm fan from the early 2000s still works just fine and remains quiet. Noctua fans are crazy reliable, they cost more too but I would suspect over the life of the fan they end up similar priced or cheaper.
by amonroe0805 | 2025-08-13 01:12:38+00:00
I think a big part of this is a reflection of DHH's (understandable) frustration with Apple's App Store management, processes, and policies.

Looking back at January 2024, it seems like DHH started to reach his personal boiling point with that sort of nonsense, which seems to mark the start of the aggressive search for another suitable platform, out from under Apple's control.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-rejects-the-hey-calendar-fro...

https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-s-new-extortion-regime-to-ke...

While the original pursuit may have been less about seeking Windows or Linux than it was about getting away from Apple, it does seem like the end destination in Linux has been pretty satisfying. And it's great to see someone investing time and energy into promoting a cohesive linux desktop user experience that isn't just focused on feature parity to something else.