MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dawnofdusk | 2025-08-14 19:51:28+00:00
>but we know that reasoning is an emergent capability!

This is like saying in the 70s that we know only the US is capable of sending a man to the moon. Just because the reasoning developed in a particular context means very little about what the bare minimum requirements for that reasoning are.

Overall I am not a fan of this blogpost. It's telling how long the author gets hung up on a paper making "broad philosophical claims about reasoning", based on what reads to me as fairly typical scientific writing style. It's also telling how highly cherry-picked the quotes they criticize from the paper are. Here is some fuller context:

>An expanding body of analyses reveals that LLMs tend to rely on surface-level semantics and cluesrather than logical procedures (Chen et al., 2025b; Kambhampati, 2024; Lanham et al., 2023; Stechly et al., 2024). LLMs construct superficial chains of logic based on learned token associations, often failing on tasks that deviate from commonsense heuristics or familiar templates (Tang et al., 2023). In the reasoning process, performance degrades sharply when irrelevant clauses are introduced, which indicates that models cannot grasp the underlying logic (Mirzadeh et al., 2024)

>Minor and semantically irrelevant perturbations such as distractor phrases or altered symbolic forms can cause significant performance drops in state-of-the-art models (Mirzadeh et al., 2024; Tang et al., 2023). Models often incorporate such irrelevant details into their reasoning, revealing a lack of sensitivity to salient information. Other studies show that models prioritize the surface form of reasoning over logical soundness; in some cases, longer but flawed reasoning paths yield better final answers than shorter, correct ones (Bentham et al., 2024). Similarly, performance does not scale with problem complexity as expected—models may overthink easy problems and give up on harder ones (Shojaee et al., 2025). Another critical concern is the faithfulness of the reasoning process. Intervention-based studies reveal that final answers often remain unchanged even when intermediate steps are falsified or omitted (Lanham et al., 2023), a phenomenon dubbed the illusion of transparency (Bentham et al., 2024; Chen et al., 2025b).

You don't need to be a philosopher to realize that these problems seem quite distinct from the problems with human reasoning. For example, "final answers remain unchanged even when intermediate steps are falsified or omitted"... can humans do this?
by mattnewton | 2025-08-14 19:51:33+00:00
The definition of Porn by the state can change to include things that some people consider protected by the first amendment - right now there are a lot of state politicians or members of the house on record supporting classifying discussion of LGBTQ lifestyles as pornography for example.

I think alcohol, tobacco and gambling here are mostly irrelevant, but the firearms is a better example because of the second amendment, where you have a clash between a very old right granted by the bill of rights clashing with modern societies beliefs.
by reneberlin | 2025-08-14 19:51:36+00:00
I am sure with finetuning this can be changed somehow:

(base) ~ ollama run hf.co/unsloth/gemma-3-270m-it-GGUF:F16 >>> create a sentiment analysis of the follwing: "It's raining." The sentiment of the provided text is *negative*.

>>> create a sentiment analysis of the follwing: "It's raining money." The sentiment of the provided text is *negative*.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-14 19:52:04+00:00
There's a large population in this country that are emphatically not Christian, but i've never seen any organized undertaking or even a serious proposal to get rid of Bible story books from school or public libraries. Occasionally you see people submitting the Bible to a list of books to be reviewed for removal, usually in response to the establishment of such a list by law or a school district.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-08-14 19:52:20+00:00
That doesn't help if you actually need those repositories to exist separately.

For instance, consider the problem of having an external Open Source project your company maintains or heavily contributes to, and which also has common libraries shared with internal non-public work. Or, the same problem applies if you have a downstream Open Source project that needs to incorporate and vendor an upstream one but easily contribute changes upstream.

Some folks do this by generating the external repo as a filtered version of an internal monorepo, but that's awful in so many ways, and breaks the ability to properly treat the external repo as a first-class thing that can merge PRs normally. It leads to workflows where people submitting PRs feel like their work gets absorbed internally and maybe eventually spit back out the other end, rather than just being merged.
by dkural | 2025-08-14 19:52:33+00:00
I agree with this directionally, however I think you'll make more like 7.2% per year, and inflation will be about 2.5% per year. You'll also likely pay about 30% in federal and local taxes in the USA on it since you're actually selling it to live on it (more on taxes later). So you'll pay 2.2% in taxes. So on average you'll get 7.2 - (2.5 + 2.2) = 2.5% of income. If you have $10M, you can withdraw about 250K a year in today's dollars every year. i.e next year you can withdraw 256.3K or so, and keep doing this to keep your current standard of living. In down years you may want to adjust / tighten belt a tiny bit to not veer off track too much. And you can get cute with taxes but not recommended. That loan interest will add up over time, and when it's time to actually pay those loans, you'll still sell stock and pay taxes on it, unless your offspring inherit both.. and who knows what the laws will be then.
by delusional | 2025-08-14 19:52:35+00:00
There's a pretty significant difference between the statements: "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because what Woz is ought to not be seen as naive" and "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because most other people wouldn't understand him as naive" and it's unclear to me which of those to statements you mean.

I too have been lucky enough to hear him speak, and he very much does have this naivete of youth in the way he speaks. He has this very simple and straight forward way to view his contribution, along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.

I don't think he's nearly as naive as he comes off, but I think he wants to be seen as naive, because his personal philosophy is one that places naivete in high regard. He wants to follow happiness, and happiness can oftentimes be a little naive.
by 9rx | 2025-08-14 19:52:41+00:00
> Are the laws that require you to show ID to buy alcohol, tobacco, fire arms, or gamble in casinos also discriminatory?

So long as it is done for a legitimate purpose and in good faith, generally no. As such, IDs are only expected where there is reasonable suspicion of possible violation. For example, there is no onus, with a few exceptions, to see an elderly person's ID to buy alcohol when there is no reason to think that they aren't below the minimum age.

The exceptions haven't really been tested. It very well could be found discriminatory, and you could make a pretty good case that it is. Which is ultimately the same case being made earlier. Asking a no-question-about-it 50 year old to provide his ID to watch porn isn't really in good faith, is it?
by nashashmi | 2025-08-14 19:52:52+00:00
more people need to be like Woz and we need more Jobs in the world. Jobs was a person who bullied through the ego centric system and paved a good single way forward.

Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it?

Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-14 19:53:23+00:00
They are just tools. How society uses the tools is not the fault of the tool. A hammer is just a hammer and someone can use it to drive nails all day long or one person can smash skulls with it. It does not make the hammer a negative for society.

Just because theZuck and his ilk made apps that dominate the use of the tool does not make the tool bad. Being able to use maps the way we can now is definitely a positive. Having a single device that does that, plus allows communication with anyone you know, plus take very decent images/videos, allows for access to the whole internet all while fitting in your pocket is absolutely a net positive for society. It's those shitty apps that make you question it, and you should not confuse it with the net effect. The net negative are the shitty apps.
by yujonglee | 2025-08-14 19:53:51+00:00
It separate mic/speaker as 2 channel. So you can reliably get "what you said" vs "what you heard".

For splitting speaker within channel, we need AI model to do that. It is not implemented yet, but I think we'll be in good shape somewhere in September.

Also we have transcript editor that you can easily split segment, assign speakers.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-14 19:54:08+00:00
Chances are that's not what was happening unless you were watching the channels nobody else watches.

I haven't looked into cable pricing for a while but i remember a few of the contract disputes that caused some big channels to drop off big cable providers in the 2010s. The price-per-customer those channels were asking the cable companies were significant chunks of what a package would cost the customer (eg upwards for $1).

Meanwhile some of the less common ones were a few cents per customer.

That means that unless you weren't watching any of the $1+ ones, you were mostly actually "paying for what you're watching".
by ryandrake | 2025-08-14 19:55:41+00:00
There was a long Reddit thread[1] a while ago that describes what people in various wealth tranches spend their money on. It's very long, but the TLDR is: They don't buy "things" so much as they buy Experiences, Access, Influence, Time, Political Power, and so on.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...
by itsthecourier | 2025-08-14 19:55:55+00:00
i won a bid on Juliens for a book that was at some point given to Jobs by Woz.

the dedication reads:

"to the terminally ill, Woz"

I adore Woz, I hope my friends keep pulling a leg on me on my worst days too. Woz is all a man need in a good friend. exemplary

bonus: it's a computer science jokes book Woz wrote
by didibus | 2025-08-14 19:56:12+00:00
I think the issue is your framing of libraries as "the government's own libraries".

Those libraries are to the people and paid by the people.

Similarly, the school curriculum is not to be controlled by the government, public schools are also to the people and paid by the people.

In both cases, the criteria for school curriculum and the books to stock are pedagogy. What will best prepare and educate students so they can innovate, thrive and improve our society later in life.

Attempts at seizing control of the school curriculum or the material made available to students for their pedagogy (like books they can research) by the government in a way that appears to be for some political or value setting agenda and not the criteria of offering the best pedagogy for students feels like propaganda and information control for political gain.
by solarkraft | 2025-08-14 19:56:19+00:00
Wait, this is cool.

I just spent last week researching the options (especially for my M1!) and was left wishing for a standard, full-service (live) transcription server for Whisper like OLlama has been for LLMs.

I’m excited to try this out and see your API (there seems to be a standard vaccuum here due to openai not having a real time transcription service, which I find to be a bummer)!

Edit: They seem to emulate the Deepgram API (https://developers.deepgram.com/reference/speech-to-text-api...), which seems like a solid choice. I’d definitely like to see a standard emerging here.
by platevoltage | 2025-08-14 19:56:35+00:00
True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me.

Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.
by kevstev | 2025-08-14 19:56:35+00:00
I still check it out a few times a week, and the discussions have just fallen off a cliff, and that was the biggest draw to me as well. The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political - and I see the draw there, those posts are the only ones that can attract over 100 comments these days, when back in its heyday pretty much everything had around 200 comments on the front page.

And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger. On more than one occasion I have suspected bots have stolen accounts. Looking at post history on some particularly unhinged posts after the previous election, there was a pattern of people posting regularly in the 00s about only technical things and then going quiet for 5+ years and then only making comments about politics. It was fishy enough I sent some examples to the mods but never heard anything back.

It's a real shame, slashdot used to be a juggernaut, and it's just a shadow of its former self.
by rurp | 2025-08-14 19:56:36+00:00
Eh, there's no way to know for sure but I would bet that there are a lot more people who could have been swapped out for Jobs with similar success than the reverse. It's generally thought to be harder to find a brilliant innovative technical person for a startup than a business one. I also see a lot more passable Jobs imitators around the industry than I do Woz imitators.
by gpm | 2025-08-14 19:56:51+00:00
The default command you should reach for with jj to checkout a branch is `jj new branch` which creates a new commit to store your debug prints. You shouldn't do a two step process where you can forget the second step in the first place.

That said, if you do for whatever reason run `jj edit branch` instead (which enables the case you are discussing), jj will have snapshotted the previous change so you can still automatically revert the debug prints using

jj evolog; jj restore --from old_commit_id
by bnewbold | 2025-08-14 19:56:57+00:00
If you want a service which indexes every post in the public network, including from folks you don't follow, that is just going to require resources. I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding. Many Mastodon instances cost more than that, and provide a must smaller scope of indexing.

If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite

Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.

Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.
by xyst | 2025-08-14 19:57:15+00:00
> Maybe I'm not creative enough

> So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house)

You answered your own question. Very boring and selfish answer, and just serving yourself (ie, greed).

Your son has more creativity than you.

If you are given $1B in hard cash, and the first thing you do is spend it on yourself. You are probably the worst person to ever get a windfall.
by skybrian | 2025-08-14 19:57:27+00:00
You’re probably better off just reading the paper he links to:

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf

I think it shows the difficulty of implementing it for everyone. But Apple and Google’s cell phone implementations would probably cover most people in some countries when finished, and then there will be a long tail of people who will need cheats and workarounds.

You’d be screwed if you didn’t have any friends who could help you cheat.
by culebron21 | 2025-08-14 19:57:46+00:00
Worth noting: the author, Kirill Yeskov, authored a great book on the Earth history and the old theories of it. And the reasons he wrote The Last Ringbearer, according to his (now deleted) blog, were 1) the geology of Tolkien's world was impossible, the landmass had to be bigger, 2) if the orcs were an army, there must have been a country, a money system, a bureacracy, a developed economy, and so on. From that country's perspective, the elves were a small bunch of rioters on the fringe of the empire.
by cmiles74 | 2025-08-14 19:58:27+00:00
IMHO, the problem is that if you are wealthy enough then you don't need to worry about patents. I also think these patents are, on the whole, not great. But here the one company legally got the patent and the another, richer company hired away their talent and paid them to find a workaround to avoid licensing. Smaller companies will continue to license the patent.

Few tears will be shed for Massimo (or Qualcomm) but the next victim could be a much smaller company, maybe one that would be more of a competitor. I don't like the current patent regime but I do believe enforcement should apply to everyone, not just players who lack the money to rig the game.
by throwaway1004 | 2025-08-14 19:58:35+00:00
>Sure, if you summarize the whole book as "keep things small with a single purpose" that's not an awful message, but that's not the book.

Assuming that you have read the book, I find it odd that you would consider that to be the steel-man a fan of this work would invent, it considers considerably more ground than that:

- Prioritise human-readability

- Use meaningful names

- Consistent formatting

- Quality comments

- Be DRY, stop copy-pasting

- Test

- SOLID

All aspects of programming, to this day, I routinely see done lazily and poorly. This rarely correlates with experience, and usually with aptitude.

>Clean Code has no nuance, only dogma, and that's a big problem (a point the second article I linked calls out and discusses in depth)

It's opinionated and takes it's line of reason to the Nth degree. We can all agree that the application of the rules require nuance and intelligence. The second article you linked is a lot more forgiving and pragmatic than your characterisation of the issue.

I would expect the entire industry to do a better job of picking apart and contextualising the work, after it made an impact on the industry, than the author himself could or ever will be capable of.

My main problem is the inanity of reactionary criticism which doesn't engage with the ideas. Is Clean Code responsible for a net negative effect on our profession, directly or indirectly? Are we correlating a negative trend in ability with the influence of this work? What exactly are "Dirty Code" mug salesmen proposing as an alternative; what are they even proposing as being the problem, other than the examples in CC are bad and it's easy to misapply it's principles?
by jraph | 2025-08-14 19:59:20+00:00
You can't ignore the responsibility of the tool's designers and sellers like this, and a phone cannot be likened to an utterly simple tool like a hammer.

Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them.

… This doesn't work very far.

This doesn't mean smartphones are useless or don't have positive points of course! :-)
by idle_zealot | 2025-08-14 19:59:26+00:00
> Apple’s parental controls predate HTML5 (literally, XHTML 4.01) and regularly don’t work, sometimes even by their own admission. It also forces the parent to be in the role of a tech expert. That argument also falls on deaf ears.

The solution, then, ought to be to pass a law requiring some sort of standardized parental controls that allow trivial set-and-forget management. Require device manufacturers/software distributors to sort out a "child mode" switch you can flip upon device initialization, in-your-face and unmissable, and then have apps/webpages be able to see whether the device reports it's in child mode. Does this not solve the "prevents 95% of kids from accessing pornography" threshold of effectiveness while being infinitely less invasive?
by callc | 2025-08-14 19:59:34+00:00
I don’t see human interactions having a “net effect”. If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.

Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.

Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”
by rekabis | 2025-08-14 19:59:55+00:00
I’m not understanding the use case, here. Aren’t there plenty of no-name disposable Chinese cameras like this?

For me, it’s capabilities beyond a cellphone camera, in a package not much bigger. One of the biggest frustrations is taking a photo of something and the phone’s limited optical resolution makes that item nothing more than a tiny spec in a large 48 megapixel image. Yes, even the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s 5× zoom is horrifically inadequate for a good 40% of the photos and videos I take.

That’s why I rock a Nikon Coolpix A1000 - it does 4K video, has a 35× optical zoom, and all sorts of other goodies in a package that can collapse down into a block that’s not much thicker than a paperback book, and even smaller (H&W) than my iPhone. It’s small enough to fit into my satchel as an EDC for use at a moment’s notice, and not something that requires special dispensation every time I want to drag it along.

Consumers want flexibility in a portable package. There is no way I’d be able to drop another type of superzoom like the Nikon P1000 into my satchel, despite the much more attractive 125× optical zoom. It’s just too chonky as a whip-it-out-in-a-heartbeat EDC.
by jofla_net | 2025-08-14 20:00:55+00:00
Maybe, but as a parent, I believe its an embarrassment to expect to radically retrofit a society in such ways as to make up for my own negligent lack of responsibility for my own children, which I do take quite seriously. Not to mention the myriad of resultant unintended consequences which invariably arise when such systems(of which i'm quite familiar) are brought to bear. Though I do speak from such a position of professional neutrality, as I would gain no benefit at all from implementing such a ubiquitously mandated system. Perhaps if things were different, I'd think otherwise.
by bnewbold | 2025-08-14 20:01:14+00:00
Yes, all of those social graph relationships are hinged off a permanent identifier (DID) and everything comes along when accounts migrate PDS instances. Folks can use zeppelin.social from any PDS instance. The DID PLC directory is currently hosted by Bluesky, but the directory can be forked, and did:web identifiers can be used as an alternative (and several independence-minded folks in the network do so).

Migration between servers is so seamless that is causes confusion and doubt that the protocol even supports migration, because there is basically zero in-app visibility of which users are on which server.

Yes, the network continues to work on zeppelin.social if Bluesky servers are down.