MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by username332211 | 2025-08-13 09:36:11+00:00
Yep. Though I'd rather generalize that to "The ethical teachings of Rationalists (Shut up and calculate!) can lead you to insane behavior."

And you wouldn't even need to know about the cult to reach that conclusion. One should be able to find crazy stuff by a cursory examination of the "Sequences" and other foundational texts. I think I once encountered something about torture and murder being morally right, if it would prevent mild inconvenience to a large enough group of people.
by noirscape | 2025-08-13 09:36:34+00:00
Very unexciting stuff; it's just your typical long-running FOSS project issues as I understand it. Lead maintainer of F-Droid is entrenched in his ways "cuz it works for me", which leads to stonewalling any attempts to change or improve the F-Droid workflow[0], but since he holds the keys to the kingdom (and the name recognition prevents forks), they keep him around.

Everyone else then tries to work around him and through a mixture of emotional appealing, downplaying the importance of certain patches and doing everything in very tiny steps then try to improve things. It's an extremely mentally draining process that's prone to burnout on the part of the contributors, which eventually boils over and then some people quit... which might start a conversation on why nobody wants to contribute to the FOSS project. That conversation inevitably goes nowhere because the people you'd want to hold that conversation with are so fed up with how bad things have gotten that they'd rather just see the person causing trouble removed entirely. (Which may be the correct course of action, but this is an argument often given without putting forward a proper replacement/considering how the project might move forward without them. Some larger organizations can handle the removal of a core maintainer, most can't.) Rinse and repeat that cycle every five years or so.

F-Droid isn't at all unique in this regard, and most people are willing to ignore it "because it's free, you shouldn't have any expectations". Any long running FOSS project that has significant infrastructure behind it will at some point have this issue and most haven't had a great history at handling it, since the bus factor of a lot of major FOSS projects is still pretty much one point five people. (As in, one actual maintainer and one guy that knows what levers to pull to seize control if the maintainer actually gets hit by a bus, with the warning that they stop being 0.5 of a bus factor and become 0 if they do that while the maintainer is still around.)

[0]: Basically the inverse of https://xkcd.com/1172/
by ninocan | 2025-08-13 09:37:55+00:00
Bringing this interesting read back to the surface, I (like many) had initially been bewildered by the CAP theorem. This post clarifies the ambiguities and extends the categories of a distributed system. Note, I pasted the wrong link in the submission: this is the post I intended to share: https://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-a...
by lucianbr | 2025-08-13 09:38:14+00:00
Can you explain the obviousness? Other than a lot of money being involved, what makes it "obvious" that the way corporations break the rules is more complex than the way natural persons break the rules?

What makes it obvious or inherent that a corporation breaks the law at some edge case of the law that requires a lot of time and detail and multiple lawyers to figure out, and not so for a random guy? I think you are confusing money with complexity.

I don't see how a person modifying their car in their garage is a more complex way of breaking the law than WV making cars so they cheat emissions tests. This is not about the complexity of engineering, or the complexity of logistics. Those things do not matter. What matters is whether the law was broken or not, and what the just penalty is. It is not at all obvious to me the way VW did it is more complex. You just claim it without any supporting evidence or argument.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-13 09:39:50+00:00
I find the helio- vs geocentrism debate infinitely fascinating, because if you just go by the 'scientific method' of observing the night sky from the Earth, then geocentrism also totally makes "scientific sense" as a hypothesis, it just requires a complicated explanation for the complex movement patterns of planets.

Turns out that just moving the coordinate system origin from the Earth to the Sun (e.g. literally just a change of perspective) replaces any complicated explanation for those complex movement patterns that are visible from Earth with a much simpler explanation (but a simpler explanation alone doesn't mean yet that it's more correct than the complicated explanation - it's at best more likely until proven). It took until Newton and Einstein to really understand why planets move predictably around the sun and not entirely erratically (AFAIK Newton still believed the movement to be preserved by intervention of God - don't quote me on that though).

So the initial stance of the Catholic Church to insist on geocentrism wasn't "unscientific" in the same sense that today's Flat Earthers, astrologists or anti-vaxxers are - compared to those, the 16th century Catholic Church was hardcore rationalist. The church finally recognized heliocentrism in the mid 18th century (so at least they only waited until Newton's death and not Einstein's death lol).

But hey, what's a few centuries in the history of the Catholic Church ;)
by vidarh | 2025-08-13 09:40:21+00:00
When we know that peoples perceptions of crime levels are entirely divorced from reality, perhaps you should spend less time watching Youtube, and more time looking at the actual stats.

Crime overall is at a low level historically in the England, per the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which track actual victims through surveys.

That's not to say the UK couldn't do much better, but this fearmongering is basically repeating far-right conspiracy claims pushed by the press that are not supported by data including by peoples actual responses when asked if they have actually been a victim as per the Crime Survey.

From The Guardian reporting on Crime Survey numbers for London relative to the rest:

"According the Crime Survey for England and Wales, someone is actually less likely to be a victim of crime in London than they are across the country as a whole. In the capital, 14.9% of people experienced a crime either to their person or their household in the year ending September 2023, compared with 15.7% nationally. But what about different types of crime?"
by energy123 | 2025-08-13 09:41:48+00:00
The models you're using are on the low compute end of the frontier. That's why you're getting bad results.

At the high-compute end of the frontier, by next year, systems should be better than any human at competition coding and competition math. They're basically already there now.

Play this out for another 5 years. What happens when compute becomes 4-20x more abundant and these systems keep getting better?

That's why I don't share your outlook that our jobs are safe. At least not on a 5-8 year timescale. At least not in their current form of actually writing any code by hand.
by yobbo | 2025-08-13 09:42:09+00:00
It sounds like we agree? LLMs are great for finding fixes for lawnmowers and other things. Before, easier fixes for those problems weren't valuable enough to warrant any investment.

Therefore, current LLMs won't be a complete upheaval like some are fearing.

Things like AlphaFold might create upheavals in their respective fields but they are very specialised. I'm more enthusiastic about that than chatbots.
by thecupisblue | 2025-08-13 09:42:32+00:00
Ironically, that lesswrong article is more wrong than right.

First, chess is perfect for such modeling. The game is basically a tree of legal moves. The "world model" representation is already encoded in the dataset itself and at a certain scale the chance of making an illegal move is minimal, as the dataset itself includes an insane amount of legal moves compared to illegal moves, let alone when you are training it on a chess dataset like PGN one

Second, the probing is quite... a subjective thing.

We are cherry-picking activations across an arbitrary amount of dimensions, on a model specifically trained for chess, taking these arbitrary representations and displaying it on 2D graph.

Well yeah, with enough dimensions and cherry-picking, we can also show how "all zebras are elephants, because all elephants are horses and look their weights overlap in so many dimensions - large four-legged animals you see on safari!" - especially if we cherry-pick it. Especially if we tune a dataset on it.

This shows nothing other than "training LLMs on a constrained move dataset makes LLM great at predicting next move in that dataset".
by nextaccountic | 2025-08-13 09:42:43+00:00
It is actually dereferencing a null pointer (there is a * on the beginning of the definition of maybe_value). It is okay if you test for p.ok first, and UB otherwise. So it's like Option::unwrap_unchecked from Rust, not Option::unwrap that merely panics.

Relying on sanitizers to catch UB can only work in a best effort basis, because the compiler can perform optimizations that rely on the fact that the program doesn't have UB (and produces broken code if there is UB - beyond what a sanitizer could catch)

It would be much better to also provide another macro to abort the program if the maybe is nothing.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-08-13 09:42:55+00:00
This is rather woven in with type themed alias analysis which makes a hard distinction tricky. E.g realloc doesn't work under either, but the provenance issue probably only shows up under no-strict-aliasing.

I like pointer tagging because I like dynamic language implementations. That tends to look like "summon a pointer from arithmetic", which will have unknown to the compiler provenance, which is where the deref without provenance is UB demon strikes.
by vekker | 2025-08-13 09:44:38+00:00
Cool, but I wonder... is this really a feasible workflow?

The way I use LLMs is, I enter a very specific query, and then I check the output, meticulously reviewing both the visual output and the code before I proceed. Component by component, piece by piece.

Otherwise, if you just "let it rip", I find that errors compound, and what you get isn't reliable, isn't what you intended, increases technical debt, or is just straight up dangerous.

So how can you do this from a smartphone? Don't you need your editor, and a way to run your code to review it carefully, before you can provide further input to Claude Code? Basically, how can you iterate from a phone?
by johnisgood | 2025-08-13 09:44:39+00:00
> Phone snatching in Central London has become a significant issue, with the Metropolitan Police reporting around 80,000 phones stolen last year, primarily by organized criminal gangs. To combat this, police have increased visibility and implemented operations to deter theft, particularly in hotspot areas.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/26/mobile-ph...

If you do not like The Guardian, search for "central london phone snatching".
by raxxorraxor | 2025-08-13 09:44:39+00:00
Empathy is usally a limited resource of those that generously ascribe it to themselves and it is often mixed up with self-serving desires. Perhaps Rationalists have similar difficulties with reasoning.

While I believe Rationalism can be some form of occupational disease in tech circles, it sometimes does pose interesting questions. You just have to be aware that the perspective to analyse circumstances is intentionally constrained and in the end you still have to compare your prognosis to a reality that always choses empiricism.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-13 09:45:50+00:00
I've been doing a moderate amount of research on getting an ASN and ipv4/6 blocks so I can BYOIP and host third-party services without being locked into the cloud provider I was using at the time the third-party configured DNS. That has led me down various rabbit holes in which I started learning how the Internet actually works.

IMO the Internet actually sucks ass

Why is there so much bureaucracy and cost involved for someone to own an IP address? I should be able to connect to the network and acquire an IP address as easily as I can buy a merckle-tree-backed pointer to an IPFS image, or vote in a US election. Why do I have to pay hundreds of dollars for Internet Numbers conjured from thin air by a US nonprofit to be resold by a RIR? How fucking moronic is it that IPV4 was created with substantially less capacity than there were humans on Earth, got adopted, wasn't immediately fixed or abandoned once it became obvious that the Internet would be used globally, was irresponsibly allocated, introduced various unofficial but consequential practices (eg NAT), ran out and got expensive, and STILL is widely used alongside ipv6.

What is the point of having a centralized system for governance centered around ICANN/IANA when they are so wildly inefficient and incapable of governing? Fuck 2000€ these are freaking made up numbers that I should be able to buy for pennies with an email address, government ID, and credit card.
by creesch | 2025-08-13 09:45:57+00:00
This argument almost feels disingenuous to me. Of course, there isn't going to be one resource that will completely answer the question. However, there are going to be resources that are much likelier to contain correct parts to the answer and there are resources that are much likely to contain just SEO fluff.

The whole premise of what makes a good search engine has been based on the idea of surfacing those results that most likely contain good information. If that was not the case Google would not have risen to such dominance in the first place.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-08-13 09:46:06+00:00
I genuinely appreciate the more specific feedback!

I thought I'd give it to the model to handle:

Input:

"thank you for the more substantive but negative feedback"

Output:

"thank you for the more substantive but negative feedback powerfully pretentious and unserious"

And amended by the punctuation model, which didn't do so well:

"thank you for the more substantive but negative feedback powerfully, pretentious and unserious"

I guess I should have added more examples to the doc, as - AI really is magic - it managed to capture your sentiment without even reading your message! :-)
by bootsmann | 2025-08-13 09:46:17+00:00
I feel like refutations like this (you aren't using the tool right | you should try this other tool) pop up often but are fundamentally worthless because as long as you're not showing code you might as well be making it up. The blog post gives examples of clear failures that can be reproduced by anyone by themselves, I think its time vibe code defenders are held to the same standard.
by gkbrk | 2025-08-13 09:46:42+00:00
Yes, they have. [1]

> Your data is your data. As of March 1, 2023, data sent to the OpenAI API is not used to train or improve OpenAI models (unless you explicitly opt in to share data with us).

[1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/your-data
by 4bpp | 2025-08-13 09:46:46+00:00
They are free to do that, but what of it? Sanctions and boycotts are "performative" in the same sense, and yet they continue being a popular tool to compel voters and politicians of other countries to act or refrain from acting in particular ways.

Wikipedia is a popular website that many people depend upon; denying access to UK users would not only create a massive inconvenience along with the temptation that it could be avoided if the law were rolled back, but would also encourage more UK users to adopt VPNs, which would subvert the law's effectivity along with that of a plethora of other authoritarian measures that the UK has in place.
by wink | 2025-08-13 09:47:59+00:00
But that doesn't make it necessarily untrue for the person you replied to.

People have different requirements and I heard tons of stories of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work".

It's been slowly improving, but many people also just got burnt because of early hype. I don't remember any specific wayland problem in my personal recent history, but it took years to get there.
by MrJagil | 2025-08-13 09:48:05+00:00
Big in denmark too. My parents always used it as a way to regulate our candy-intake, by postponing all candy until the weekend, so i’m surprised to read the intention was sort of the opposite.

I’d also note that Scandinavia is big on “hygge” and being home (unlike countries with warmer climates) and weekend snacks and sweets are an obvious way to make the experience comfy.
by zimpenfish | 2025-08-13 09:48:21+00:00
> I haven’t personally noticed London getting any more dangerous over the past 10 years that I’ve lived here.

I've been here 26 years this time (and a couple of years before that) and similarly not noticed it getting noticeably more dangerous.

(on the caveat side, I am a fairly hefty white bloke who apparently "looks scary" which might explain things.)
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-08-13 09:48:27+00:00
This is a bit of vicious circle. How much of that money goes even into keeping those servers running? The electricity bill alone, geez. They could do a dedicated fundraiser to get themselves two boxes that are a decade old and still have spare parts available, coming from Broadwell era, they will have enough instruction set support to cover the baseline towards which multiple distros are converging (Haswell and up).
by mdiesel | 2025-08-13 09:48:44+00:00
It's the Online Safety Act 2023 and was going through parliament from 2019, I'm sure the moment it becomes sufficiently unpopular in the wider public we'll see the "2023" part gain more prominence. Starmer won't be able to say it's a bad idea, because he and his party have been supportive of it since, but there'll be the usual political maneuverings. I can't see people switching to vote Green because they suggested a digital bill of rights.
by patmorgan23 | 2025-08-13 09:48:57+00:00
Performance is A LOT more than having the ISA. Intel, AMD, ARM, and apple have spent DECADES developing and tuning their micro archetypes to run those instruction sets.

I like the RISC-V project and think they're doing great things for the future of open computing, but if you think we're 2-3 years away from a RISC-V chip that's comporable to the top of the line X86 or ARM chips you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's gonna be 10-20 years before we get to that point.

I do think where gonna see more RISC-V chips in embedded and subcomponent context where the low or non license fees are gonna make it competitive pretty soon.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-13 09:49:12+00:00
No, that was just an example, for people not wanting to go out.

You are free to walk around these areas (just go to Knightsbridge) with an expensive watch to see if it is true or not. Get back to us safely to report.

Also... I literally just saw a cop walk past a lady overdosing as if all is fine, and did nothing to the woman who threw a bottle at the YouTuber. Who cares if it is on YouTube or not? I saw it regardless.
by indy | 2025-08-13 09:49:18+00:00
"Says who?" Then we are living in separate universes because this is common knowledge.

Wearing a nice watch in Soho, Liverpool Street, Tower Bridge is super sketchy and you're likely to get comments about how 'brave' (stupid) you are. These are just the places I've been to, West London is meant to be much worse.

Edit: Here are some links I found

- "Machete-ban petition launched as London watch robberies rise" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64991862

- Statistics for stolen watches from 2018 to 2023 https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
by yyyk | 2025-08-13 09:49:27+00:00
Their servers are so old, even an entirely different architecture emulating x86_64 would still see a performance increase... So there's no OSS argument here - they could even buy a Talos, have no closed firmware, and still see a performance increase with emulation. If they don't care about the firmware, there are plenty of very cheap x86 options which are still more modern.
by baubino | 2025-08-13 09:51:08+00:00
Making content restrictions easier for parents to implement would help a ton — like being able to block all sites in a browser and create a whitelist of the ones kids are allowed to access. Similar whitelisting should be available and easy to implement for YouTube and social media. Having to individually block each site/video/profile you don’t want your kid to access is a futile game of whack a mole.
by j-krieger | 2025-08-13 09:51:47+00:00
> When we know that peoples perceptions of crime levels are entirely divorced from reality, perhaps you should spend less time watching Youtube, and more time looking at the actual stats

When we know that police is understaffed and can't respond to all crime, perhaps you should spend less time blindly trusting the numbers. You, too, can't build an argument on unreliable data. Just like the poster you're replying to.
by handoflixue | 2025-08-13 09:52:03+00:00
> My complaint is about some small group claiming to have a monopoly on a normal human faculty, in this case rationality.

"Rationalists" don't claim a monopoly any more than Psychiatry does.

> The small group might well go on to claim that people outside the group lack rationality.

Again, something that psychiatry is quite noteworthy about: the entire point of the profession is to tell non-professionals that they're doing Emotionally Healthy wrong.

> The mental health profession do not claim to be immune from mental illness themselves,

Rationalist don't claim to be immune to irrationality, and this is in fact repeatedly emphasized: numerous cornerstone articles are about "wow, I really fucked up at this Rationality thing", including articles by Eliezer.

> they do not claim that people outside their circle are mentally unhealthy

... what?

So if I go to a psychiatrist, you think they're gonna say I'm FINE? No matter what?

Have you ever heard of "involuntary commitment"?

> and they do not claim that their particular treatment is necessary for mental health.

Again, this is about as true as it is for rationalists.
by jefc1111 | 2025-08-13 09:52:29+00:00
A little OT: It seems that so few studio monitors (speakers) have grilles. I have kids and I don't want to need to trust them, or to need to ban them. I believe Genelec have grilles but the price is a little high for me for the models with decent-sized drivers. Given that Genelec are so popular, I can't imagine presence-of-grille presents a fundamental compromise, sound-wise.

KRK seem to have grilles on theirs, but I want something with a flatter sound.

Any HN'ers out there got any tips?
by jerleth | 2025-08-13 09:52:38+00:00
I just glanced at the page, so I might be off, but to me it looks like this is only a solution for the special case of exceptions?

Why would I want to use this instead of a more general approach to discriminated unions, eg. like: https://github.com/mcintyre321/OneOf

If I would use your library I would need a separate solution for every other case.

Take care, Martin
by jg0r3 | 2025-08-13 09:52:48+00:00
Three things I've noticed as a dev whose field involves a lot of niche software development.

1. LLMs seem to benefit 'hacker-type' programmers from my experience. People who tend to approach coding problems in a very "kick the TV from different angles and see if it works" strategy.

2. There seems to be two overgeneralized types of devs in the market right now: Devs who make niche software and devs who make web apps, data pipelines, and other standard industry tools. LLMs are much better at helping with the established tool development at the moment.

3. LLMs are absolute savants at making clean-ish looking surface level tech demos in ~5 minutes, they are masters of selling "themselves" to executives. Moving a demo to a production stack? Eh, results may vary to say the least.

I use LLMs extensively when they make sense for me.

One fascinating thing for me is how different everyone's experience with LLMs is. Obviously there's a lot of noise out there. With AI haters and AI tech bros kind of muddying the waters with extremist takes.