MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dylan604 | 2025-08-14 15:40:45+00:00
The ten commandments are definitely not secular, but it is funny how up until the 1950s christmas was deemed a pagan religious holiday and was even listed this way in encyclopedias from that time. Then suddenly, it was listed as a christian holiday, except there is no reference about it in the bible with new testament references specifying to not keep that holiday. How these can be deemed the same is beyond rational thinking.
by skydhash | 2025-08-14 15:40:51+00:00
It’s the nature of formal system. Someones need to actually do the work of defining those rules or have a smaller set of rules that can generate the larger set. But anytime you invent a rule. That means a few things that are possible can’t be represented in the system. You’re mostly hoping that those things aren’t meaningful.

LLMs techniques allows us to extract rules from text and other data. But those data are not representative of a coherent system. The result itself is incoherent and lacks anything that wasn’t part of the data. And that’s normal.

It’s the same as having a mathematical function. Every point that it maps to is meaningful, everything else may as well not exists.
by keybored | 2025-08-14 15:41:11+00:00
> > Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China.

“Many” could be dozens or hundreds or over half. It’s poorly phrased to the point of being meaningless.

> > I think our total number is close to 900.

Total in the world.
by btilly | 2025-08-14 15:41:17+00:00
Reading exercise for you.

Re-read the comment that you replied to, and find out where I said the same thing.

Most of these would-be book-banners do not actually want to create a totalitarian state. They honestly believe that they live in a democracy that was hijacked in 2020. They are being walked into accepting dictatorship on the principle that you have to fight fire with fire. When you meet them with fire, you're confirming the world-views that make them useful tools for Trump and co.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-08-14 15:41:50+00:00
> If you prompt 'x', the model will return 'y' with 100% confidence.

We can do this for smaller models. Which means it's a problem of scale/computing power rather than a fundamental limitation. The situation with the human brain is completely different. We know neurons exchange information and how that works, and we have a pretty good understanding of the architecture of parts of the brain like the visual cortex, but we have no idea of the architecture as a whole.

We know the architecture of an LLM. We know how the data flows. We know what it is the individual neurons are learning (cuts and bends of a plane in a hyperdimensional space). We know how the weights are learned (backpropagation). We know the "algorithm" the LLM as a whole is approximating (List<Token> -> Token). Yes there are emergent properties we don't understand but the same is true of a spam filter.

Comparing this to our lack of understanding of the human brain and discussing how these things might be "conscious" is silly.
by Sprocklem | 2025-08-14 15:42:38+00:00
This is a strange framing. These laws are neither about what is taught in schools nor what books schools are required to stock, but rather restrictions on what books schools may chose to make available to the children. The government is not limiting the free speech of the authors, but these laws are the government limiting access to the authors' free speech, which is at least related to free speech, even if you don't buy that it is an restriction of free speech per se.

I do, however, think it is also worth noting that there is value in critically discussing the ideologies espoused by "The Bell Curve" and "Mein Kampf", since both ideologies persist and continue to have influence on American politics today.
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-14 15:42:40+00:00
No, I wouldn’t have had to pay him or the court if I lost. In fact my court costs were added to my award, so I didn’t even really pay those.

I paid with my time. If I was sour about it, I might say “that’s time I’ll never get back”, but I consider it a wonderful learning experience and time well spent.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-14 15:42:40+00:00
Only because most AI startups are doing it wrong.

I don't want a chat window.

I want AI workflows as part of my IDE, like Visual Studio, InteliJ, Android Studio are finally going after.

I want voice controlled actions on my native language.

Knowledge across everything on the project for doing code refactorings, static analysis with AI feedback loop, generating UI based out of handwritten sketches, programming on the go using handwriting, source control commit messages out of code changes,...
by taormina | 2025-08-14 15:43:05+00:00
I've used a wide variety of the "best" models, and I've mostly settled on Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 with Claude Code, but they don't ever actually get better. Grok 3-4 and GPT4 were worse, but like, at a certain point you don't get brownie points for not tripping over how low the bar is set.
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-14 15:43:09+00:00
This is a good post and we need more like it. The "contrarian blogging" crowd-- by which I don't mean the real nutcases who post about ivermectin, but rather the intelligent-but-uncredentialed people (I count myself among them) who enjoy high-quality science news and get all worked up about things like the Jones Act-- has a tendency to latch onto contrarian explanations just because they have a good story about institutional failures in science, especially if there's frustratingly slow progress.

"The amyloid hypothesis is obviously bogus, and survives solely on corruption" is a classic example of this, MOND is the equivalent in astrophysics. And because a lot of practicing scientists in the field are too busy actually working to bother addressing this stuff, it tends to solidify into fact just by sheer repetition combined with lack of counternarrative.

I still don't know if the amyloid hypothesis is true or false, but this was a high-quality rebuttal to the "it's all a scam" outrage bait that tends to dominate the conversation whenever it's brought up.
by cedws | 2025-08-14 15:43:21+00:00
I use SimpleLogin aliases via my Proton subscription. But I'm terrified of what happens if I lose access to my Proton account, either because I get banned or the company disappears into a black hole. It would be a personal disaster to lose access to hundreds of accounts.

I could buy my own domains and have them forward to Proton but then they aren't disposable, unless I were to buy a domain for literally every account.
by billconan | 2025-08-14 15:43:25+00:00
Very nice! I once had a side project with a built-in PDF viewer. My first version used pdf.js, but when zooming in quickly, it felt sluggish and hard to keep the zoom focus in the right place.

So I built my own PDF viewer, this time using pdfium in C++ with Metal for rendering — here’s a quick demo: https://youtu.be/jJMhVn5yzEI

I implemented a tiling technique to balance memory usage and performance. I didn’t realize pdfium could be so performant in WebAssembly — and honestly, I actually prefer developing UI on the web compared to C++.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-14 15:43:36+00:00
> HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.

... So, that would be approximately every great work of literature, every important religious text... I mean, what does this leave? This seems _incredibly_ broad; even when censorship of books for obscenity was routine, there was pretty much always a getout for "yeah, but it's Proper Serious Literature".

Like, what books are on the curriculum for English students in Florida? Just the Very Hungry Caterpillar?

> It also allowed parents or county residents to raise objections to material, which then would need to be removed within five days of the objection and remain unavailable until the book was formally reviewed.

Again, wtf? Surely this would allow anyone sufficiently motivated to just run a DOS attack.
by graemep | 2025-08-14 15:43:41+00:00
> 1:1 classroom instruction removes a number of teachers from the labor pool equal to the number of students.

It does require more teachers, but not 1:1. Students being taught 1:1 learn a lot faster, and can be set work to do unsupervised. From my experience I think less than an hour a seek (sometimes a lot less) of tuition time (plus a bit more for marking, and another few hours of study by the student) is sufficient to cover a subject 1:1 (and it can often me a lot less) for teenagers (specifically for GCSEs - British exams sat in schools at 16).

it does require a significantly higher ratio than classroom teaching usually does, but its a long way from needing 1:1.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-08-14 15:43:52+00:00
I can’t wait until I can run this shit locally without spending $10,000 on clusters of GPU’s. The models will be trained using some distributed P2P-like technology that “The Man” can’t stop.

Imagine running a model trained by the degenerates on 4chan. Models that encourage you to cheat on your homework, happily crank out photos of world leaders banging farm animals, and gleefully generate the worst gore imaginable. And best of all, any junior high schooler on the planet can do it.

That’s how you know this technology has arrived. None of this sanitized, lawyer approved, safety weenie certified, three letter agency authorized nonsense we have now. Until it’s all local, it’s just an extension of the existing regime.
by Barrin92 | 2025-08-14 15:44:09+00:00
Being German I think it's important to point out that possession of Mein Kampf or reading it was never banned, the idea wasn't to hide some evil esoteric secret knowledge from the German people, to a large extent it was a pragmatic decision because the state did not want Neo-Nazis to benefit financially from the sales of Hitlers legacy, so they just held on to the copyright and didn't print it. There are now since 2016 annotated academic versions of it.

Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.

The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-14 15:44:48+00:00
Let me say first I understand the frustration you must be feeling right now. It's no fun to be under the gun with bills to pay and think you're getting turned down from jobs because of something that isn't even really the core of the work (at least that's my assumption).

You don't have to be 100% sure about what it is personality-wise that you need to tune up to start making changes. You're an intelligent agent; your intuition is much better than random about things like this. I would say act on your intuitions about what specifically you are going that is rubbing them the wrong way, and be less like that - regress a little to the mean, in other words. This is generally good advice in the business world, even if it isn't good advice for e.g. becoming a celebrity on Twitter.

Take note that most psychological studies suggest that personality is very unlikely to change dramatically in adulthood no matter what you do. It's better to focus on techniques that let you chill out for a few hours/days/weeks than it is to try to actually change who you are at core.
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 15:45:35+00:00
Yeah, at some level I know this; I've given interviews before and seen people get declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, and I usually give people this same advice when they're down.

Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.

You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.
by watwut | 2025-08-14 15:45:37+00:00
All the stuff you wrote is purely imaginary and has nothing to do with how people in medieval times actually behaved. You just made it all up, completely, based on what you want history to be.

In particular, if you was too sick or invalid or whatever, you got kicked off. That is it. No one expected the master to care for you or handle your healthcare. It is true you was not paid and worked for food.

If you produced low quality work, you would get simpler jobs (cleaning, wood chopping) for a but, would not learn and would eventually be kicked off too.

> When you show up broke after years, I bet you get kicked out there also. You have better choices moving to a new city or living off the streets.

Generally, they were unwilling to kick you off family, unless you was disobedient. That would be shameful for them. This was your safety net and related social obligations were actually strong.

You was not better off "living in the streets" of a town (which were significantly smaller).

Like, cities had very real limit of how many people they could accommodate before it became impossible. Newcomer with troublemaking potential was not making it richer nor was welcome.
by johnwheeler | 2025-08-14 15:45:50+00:00
It's natural to feel this way. But the thing that you have to remember about interviews like this where you're doing multiple rounds is that a lot of times they'll have people come to a round table discussion. If one person says something negative, that can often change the course of whether or not you're going to get the job. It depends on how much influence that person typically has. A lot of times people might defer to that person,etc.
by golly_ned | 2025-08-14 15:45:58+00:00
Speaking from my experiences in dozens of debriefs: I don't think I can recall a case where an otherwise good candidate was rejected for something like not liking someone's personality.

There might be a middle ground between "technical skills" and "personality", though, which we do take into account, falling under "soft skills", which may be affected by certain personality traits. Things like polling the interviewer for their thoughts, asking thoughtful questions, being curious about the source of disagreement or misunderstanding, not being dogmatic, and so on. I think it can be harder to demonstrate these kinds of skills with certain personality types -- I used to be very nervous in interviews, and it wasn't always easy to have the presence of mind to exercise these soft skills.

But even still, at least in technical interviews like programming or system design (as opposed to cross-functional/manager/tech leadership interviews), I've found it relatively rare for a candidate to be rejected for 'soft skill' failures when the right signals are there for technical strength.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-14 15:46:21+00:00
This story doesn’t have anything to do with free speech, because it isn’t a book ban. It’s about what public libraries spend money on and put on their shelves. You can still buy these books yourself, so clearly they aren’t banned or censored. Why can’t the state decide what to keep in libraries they fund?

Let’s not pretend the default situation is uncensored. Librarians are mostly politically skewed to the left, as is their organization (ALA). Walk into libraries in most cities and you’ll find books on the main shelves pushing political ideas from one side, associated with movements like DEI, BLM, LGBTQ, etc. But you won’t find the other side on those shelves.

And that’s the issue. Public money is being used by activist librarians, who practice “critical librarianship”, to basically censor the other side. Changes to public libraries are intended to correct that bias.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-14 15:46:38+00:00
Credit card rewards programs are "eh", but for me I'd be worried about being forced into a low-trust system like Europe has. In the states, I don't have to worry, at all, about someone using my credit card for nefarious purposes. Getting any such fraudulent activity purged from my card is as easy as flagging it in my banking app.

This leads to a number of positive outcomes, such as not worrying at all about sketchy or online purchases, and "American style" payment at restaurants (where we just toss our card on the receipt, and eventually it gets picked up, processed, and returned without further interruption).
by torgoguys | 2025-08-14 15:46:48+00:00
In what ways is it better? Security margin or something? I thought Speck has held up pretty well to cryptanalysis (unlike you I'm not in the security field so maybe I'm wrong).

I quite liked the remarkable simplicity of Speck. Performance was better than Ascon in my limited testing. It seems like it should be smaller on-die or in bytes of code, and with possibly lower power consumption. And round key generation was possible to compute on-the-fly (reusing the round code!) for truly tiny processors.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-14 15:46:55+00:00
> doesn't mean there's a known viable pathway [...] solution [...] BTW seems

It means it must be researched into with high commitment. // LLMs are an emergency patch at best (I would not call them «decent» - they are inherently crude). This is why I insist that they must be overcome with urgency already because they are now here (if a community needed wits and a lunatic appears, wits become more needed). // And no, I am not «crossing»: but people do that, hence I am stating an urgency.

We do not need to simulate the brain, we only ("only") need to implement intelligence. That means the opposite of stating hearsay: it means checking every potential uttering and storing results (and also reinforcing the ways that had the system achieve sophisticated thoughts and conclusions).

It is not given that LLMs cannot be part of such system. They surely have a lot of provisional uttering to criticize.
by codingdave | 2025-08-14 15:47:07+00:00
Don't change who you are for an interview. It will just result in a job where you aren't happy being a different version of yourself. I know it is frustrating to not find work, but finding work that isn't right for you brings whole new levels of frustration later.

And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, you still get the rejection because they hired the person who was above 999 of them.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-14 15:47:10+00:00
>We have plenty of examples

The issue isn't that we have plenty of examples (which is actually a handful, people always go to the same 2 or 3 cases, but I digress), it's that we have orders of magnitude more counter-examples that are ignored.

It's important to not build your world view on headlines, because headlines are headlines because they are outliers. It's not news when companies competitively adjust prices, it happens thousands of times a day all over the economy. If there was an "undercut on price" button in business meetings, you wouldn't even be able to read the text on it it would be so worn out.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-08-14 15:47:19+00:00
Yes. I'm from Spain, and here housing rental costs are included in inflation... but they're a 4% of the index. Which is laughable, as most people are spending more like 30%-50% of their income on rent.

The rationale is that most people (read: people over 50 or 60) live in houses they own, those spend 0 on rental, so if you calculate the average expenditure on rental, it's low. And buying houses counts as an "investment" so it's not included.

So basically what you say: totally gamed.
by Culonavirus | 2025-08-14 15:47:30+00:00
> When the Western app says they don’t sell or give out private information, you can be suspicious but still somewhat trustful.

Hey guys, that ycombinator "hacker" forum thing full Champagne socialists employed by the Zucks/Altmans/Musks of the world told me everything is fine and I shouldn't worry. I remain trustful.

Surely not even some, ahem, spilled tea can't possibly occur again, right? I remain trustful.

Speaking of tea, surely all the random "id verification" 3rd parties used since the UK had a digital aneurysm have everything in order, right? I remain trustful.

---

Nah, I'll just give my data to my bank and that's about it. Everyone else can fuck right off. I trust Facebook about as much as I trust Putin.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-14 15:47:35+00:00
I don't understand why anyone would let these psychopathic corporations have any of their personal or health data. Why would you use an app that tracked health data, or use a wearable device from any of these companies that did that. You have to assume, based on their past behavior, that they are logging every detail and it's going to be sold and saved in perpetuity.
Show HN: OWhisper – Ollama for realtime speech-to-text
by yujonglee | 2025-08-14 15:47:43+00:00
Hello everyone. This is Yujong from the Hyprnote team (https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote).

We built OWhisper for 2 reasons: (Also outlined in https://docs.hyprnote.com/owhisper/what-is-this)

(1). While working with on-device, realtime speech-to-text, we found there isn't tooling that exists to download / run the model in a practical way.

(2). Also, we got frequent requests to provide a way to plug in custom STT endpoints to the Hyprnote desktop app, just like doing it with OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoints.

The (2) part is still kind of WIP, but we spent some time writing docs so you'll get a good idea of what it will look like if you skim through them.

For (1) - You can try it now. (https://docs.hyprnote.com/owhisper/cli/get-started)

bash brew tap fastrepl/hyprnote && brew install owhisper owhisper pull whisper-cpp-base-q8-en owhisper run whisper-cpp-base-q8-en

If you're tired of Whisper, we also support Moonshine :) Give it a shot (owhisper pull moonshine-onnx-base-q8)

We're here and looking forward to your comments!
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-08-14 15:48:01+00:00
There's a huge jump from "we cannot predict the output of an LLM given its input" to "we don't understand LLMs", or that they might be conscious or that this is in any way equivalent to our lack of understanding of the human brain.

We also don't understand (in that sense) any other ML model of sufficient size. It learning features we humans cannot come up with is its job. We can understand (in that sense) sufficiently small models because we have enough computational power to translate them to a classical AI model and query it.

That means it is a problem of scale, not of some fundamental property unique to LLMs.

The bizarre take is being spooked by this. It's been true of simpler models for a very long time. Not a problem.
by antimoan | 2025-08-14 15:48:16+00:00
I was Senior before interviews, I was mainly targeting Staff level when I was interviewing. No convincing needed, I had enough experience to get to Staff level. With Startup I asked them for level up but they said they had limited number of positions and all they can do is Senior at a higher end of it, and can't do Staff.

I worked at the startup for a few months before the other offer was finalized. So I have a chance to get to know what it feels to work at the startup as well.
by jerf | 2025-08-14 15:48:22+00:00
AI != LLM.

We can reasonably speak about certain fundamental limitations of LLMs without those being claims about what AI may ever do.

I would agree they fundamentally lack models of the current task and that it is not very likely that continually growing the context will solve that problem, since it hasn't already. That doesn't mean there won't someday be an AI that has a model much as we humans do. But I'm fairly confident it won't be an LLM. It may have an LLM as a component but the AI component won't be primarily an LLM. It'll be something else.