MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leptons | 2025-08-14 17:35:02+00:00
>The complete package includes things like highly curated training data, specialized tokenizers, pre and post training regimens, guardrails, optimized system prompts etc, all tuned to coding.

And even with all that, they still produce garbage way too often. If we continue the "car" analogy, the car would crash randomly sometimes when you leave the driveway, and sometimes it would just drive into the house. So you add all kinds of fancy bumpers to the car and guard rails to the roads, and the car still runs off the road way too often.
by jeanPF | 2025-08-14 17:35:08+00:00
I quote Google Cloud literally, today August 14:

"Tens of trillions of dollars worth of value are transferred across outdated financial systems daily — and Keeta Network has proven it has the speed, scale, and security to be the foundation for a new, interconnected ecosystem."

"Google Cloud was also instrumental in helping to prepare and execute Keeta’s stress test, providing world-class infrastructure and technical guidance that helped validate the network’s real-world performance"
by nromiun | 2025-08-14 17:35:16+00:00
I have a OnePlus 13, which has a nearly 7 inch screen. My two thumbs still block most of the keyboard. Do you know anything larger? I would get a folding phone but they are too fragile.

Not every programming languages require a lot of symbols. Like Python, Go, OCaml etc. For me writing many symbols is awkward even on a physical keyboard.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-14 17:35:21+00:00
As long as a company is turning a profit, they by definition can afford to be paying their employees better. As a company you can choose not to, but it also means you get to suffer the consequences, and lose the right to complain that your employees were "poached" when in reality it was simply a matter of you not paying them enough to stay.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-14 17:35:31+00:00
Well, I think the general counter for a "cure-for-cancer" is the same as electric cars.

The Big4 never wanted EVs with there being a documentary [1] on how much they hated them. However, a company that isn't the big-4 has no issue with creating one.

Same with a cure-for-cancer. Sure, maybe Pfizer doesn't want to cannabalize their market but anybody that isn't Pfizer would love to.

I don't think IT-security fits into the same model though. There's a lot of money in theft so you need a lot of money into anti-theft to counter-act it.

Poverty imo fits the IT-security model more-so than cure-for-cancer. Each dollar you don't pay somebody in Madagascar to farm vanilla is a dollar you get to keep.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
by pentacent_hq | 2025-08-14 17:35:41+00:00
Since a previous submission of this link by another user was flagged by someone claiming the term "conspiracy theorist" was a "spin" and unfounded: Here is a source for that claim: https://www.advocate.com/news/robby-starbuck-dei-lgbtq-consp...

> He and his wife, Landon, produced a documentary together perpetuating the same conspiracy theory spouted by disgraced commentator Alex Jones — that toxic chemicals are causing children to identify as LGBTQ+. Starbuck falsely asserted that exposure to the pesticide atrazine turned amphibians "gay,” prompting male frogs to mate — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

> Starbuck has also claimed that displaying pride flags is “grooming and indoctrination," and supported the unsubstantiated notion that transgender people transition to assault women in public bathrooms (transgender people are far more likely to be the victims of violent assaults.)
by marssaxman | 2025-08-14 17:36:14+00:00
I have a catchall rule on my personal domain, so I can trivially make up a new <recipientname@mydomain.com> for everyone who wants an email address. If I get more than a small amount of mail from some sender, I just set up a forwarding rule which deposits everything received on that address into an IMAP folder called "recipientname". If the address becomes compromised - which has happened rather less often than I expected it might, when I began using this scheme - I just change the rule and route the mail to /dev/null instead.
by bitwize | 2025-08-14 17:37:02+00:00
> LLMs are not like this. The fundamental way they operate, the core of their design is faulty. They don't understand rules or knowledge. They can't, despite marketing, really reason. They can't learn with each interaction. They don't understand what they write.

Said like a true software person. I'm to understand that computer people are looking at LLMs from the wrong end of the telescope; and that from a neuroscience perspective, there's a growing consensus among neuroscientists that the brain is fundamentally a token predictor, and that it works on exactly the same principles as LLMs. The only difference between a brain and an LLM maybe the size of its memory, and what kind and quality of data it's trained on.
by ddtaylor | 2025-08-14 17:37:27+00:00
It's not the fault of BlueSky or their users, but I really haven't enjoyed the social media climate right now. If I want to have a discussion about subject X I would need to be deep inside echo chamber social media network Y. For some subjects that is BlueSky and for others it would be platforms I don't want to participate in.

I think the reality is that most social media platforms will inevitability create hyper-polarized audiences that do little more than generate content.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-14 17:37:43+00:00
Yes "very good", until Apple decides to mass-layoff them, because now, owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move </slow_clap>.

How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them in the ass (see recent mass layoffs in the industry), yet this lesson seems to be quickly forgotten.
by ertgbnm | 2025-08-14 17:37:43+00:00
I don't really gender LLMs in my head in general. I guess Gemma is a female name. I only gendered it in the joke because I think it makes it funnier, especially since it's just "a little guy". I know they are giving gendered names to these models now but I think it's a bit weird to gender when interacting with them.
by SamBam | 2025-08-14 17:37:51+00:00
I think it's a dream if you know your aim at the onset is to get 2-5 good shots out of it, so you know you're going to quickly go through and delete almost every photo. Just scan the whole thing and see if there are any that are great.

If you're undisciplined and only delete the obviously bad ones, and end up with 1800 photos that you think you'll look through at some point, well then you have a pile of junk you're never going to look at again.
by munificent | 2025-08-14 17:37:54+00:00
> Because this is how a lot of people get free labor from idealistic engineers.

A more charitable and, I believe honest, way to frame that is that businesses pay people for their labor using a mixture of money and meaning. If the compensation provides more of the latter, it makes sense for the total package to have less of the former.

If I was offered two jobs:

1. Job A: I write code to help an insurance company update its actuarial tables.

2. Job B: I write code to help a climate change organization calculate better ways to save energy.

Then, yes, I'll take less salary to take Job B. I'm not being exploited. I'm being paid in a profoundly meaningful way.

Always remember that money is an indirection. The ultimate goal is a meaningful life that supports your values. Earning money lets you spend it on those meaningful things. But you don't always have to go through cash to get there.

The real trick is finding companies that are actually doing work that aligns with your values and not just trying to appear to be.
by joules77 | 2025-08-14 17:38:08+00:00
They are stupid people who you should stop paying attention too. They buy attention with cash. And the content they generate doesn't have much intellectual or moral value.

Techbros barely have contact with normal people, are surrounded by sycophant's and opportunists, and have very narrow intelligence and knowledge. Their reality is warped. And their predictions are worthless.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-08-14 17:38:14+00:00
The best way to think about it is to assume you'll want to leave someday, and you'll be going to whichever is the best of the choices at that future time that are early enough to be years away from needing to monetize.

Don't let yourself get attached to any one place. That's the lesson. Staying ahead of monetization is the move. Nothing will stay good forever.
by m463 | 2025-08-14 17:38:48+00:00
I think one reason the arch wiki thrives is that it IS a generic linux wiki.

The arch wiki describes the upstream package.

I say this because Arch tries to use the upstream software as-is, and describes requirements and helps make configuration choices.

Other distributions tend to make the choices for you, configuring and modifying upstream to fit the distribution.

With respect to a wiki, this would be another layer of documentation to add. Describe the package, describe the distro, and explain the configuration choices.
by riedel | 2025-08-14 17:38:53+00:00
RFID tags might be rather in the area of $0.03. Other devices might have some hard memory constraints. For other targets it is rather about making hacking a bit more difficult rather that protecting sensitive data against malicious international actors. > Devices that can benefit from its approach include RFID tags, implanted medical devices, and toll-registration transponders attached to car windshields
by ttiurani | 2025-08-14 17:39:36+00:00
> the promise of decentralisation

AFAIK actual decentralization needs still a big engineering effort.

I personally can't even imagine a world where their VC investors would ever sign off a "let's make it possible, easy and risk free the users to exit our silo" project, over the many ways they try to squeeze profit out of their users.
by rayiner | 2025-08-14 17:39:38+00:00
> Evidence of this target -> dehumanize -> disenfranchise cycle abounds. If we can't agree on at least that baseline, then there's probably no productive way to proceed with a discussion.

We don’t agree on this. Republican efforts are focused on preserving the dominant American culture and norms, which we think are good. At least in the race context, what engenders backlash is not minorities having rights, but them coming together to assert distinct interests as a group to seek changes in the dominant culture.

> Yes, the other side divides and groups people, too, and we might not like that. But I'd argue it's for the purpose of uplifting vulnerable groups rather than knocking them down.

We agree on this. But I would submit that intent matters less than effect. For one thing, these “vulnerable groups” are less vulnerable than assumed. For example, Hispanics are economically assimilating with whites at about the same rate as Italians or Irish.

For another, the well-intentioned divisiveness itself harms minorities. Ethnic identity and solidarity is a toxic force minority communities. It hinders economic and social assimilation, and empowers bad actors within the community. I want to live in a community where, if a Bangladeshi commits a crime, the other Bangladeshis have more solidarity with the white police who come to arrest the criminal than with their co-ethnic. I think this is one reason why even poor Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in America have so much better economic mobility than their counterparts in Europe or Canada.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-14 17:39:55+00:00
And this is why I have a general no-apps policy on my phone... Or at least, I have a minimal number of apps on my phone. While this doesn't prevent a given website/webapp from sharing similar information, I just feel slightly better not giving hard device access.

Along a similar vein, I cannot believe after the stunts LinkedIn pulled, that they're even allowed on app stores at all.
by sethhochberg | 2025-08-14 17:39:58+00:00
Frankly I think a lot of full-time-employed technical people are largely experimenting for fun in the context of things that might eventually be useful to their employer. AI is cool and fascinating stuff and when I have a few idle minutes at the end of my workweek I love catching up and experimenting with the latest and greatest, but with an eye towards company problems and on company time, and sometimes using company datasets. That means company vendor approval and financing of my efforts.

In my personal life, when its time for fun, I close the laptop and go do some gardening.
by analog31 | 2025-08-14 17:40:22+00:00
That's a good way to think about it, though one still has to ask: "An apprenticeship in what?" Optimally thesis means you're given a nebulous problem within an area of interest and asked to manage a project to solve it and communicate the results. My own field, physics, is particularly loose in terms of what tools you might need to adapt and create.
by rblatz | 2025-08-14 17:40:29+00:00
iPhone can control Apple TVs, and is able to detect which device you are nearest to and auto select it (if you have multiple)

Also all my TVs also have apps that function as a remote control.

Interestingly enough my main TV an LG has a remote that controls the tv using RF. I don’t even know if it would work with an IR blaster.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-08-14 17:40:30+00:00
> The first is that reasoning probably requires language use. Even if you don’t think AI models can “really” reason - more on that later - even simulated reasoning has to be reasoning in human language.

That is an unreasonable assumption. In case of LLMs it seems wasteful to transform a point from latent space into a random token and lose information. In fact, I think in near future it will be the norm for MLLMs to "think" and "reason" without outputting a single "word".

> Whether AI reasoning is “real” reasoning or just a mirage can be an interesting question, but it is primarily a philosophical question. It depends on having a clear definition of what “real” reasoning is, exactly.

It is not a "philosophical" (by which the author probably meant "practically inconsequential") question. If the whole reasoning business is just rationalization of pre-computed answers or simply a means to do some computations because every token provides only a fixed amount of computation to update the model's state, then it doesn't make much sense to focus on improving the quality of chain-of-thought output from human POV.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-08-14 17:40:52+00:00
How high-end are we talking about? Do you know off-hand of any models supporting this?

I haven't seen such features on boards under 200 EUR, from Asus, Asrock and Gigabyte.

The thing is, if I have to splurge for some 400 EUR "gaming" model, I might as well move to a "workstation" CPU supporting more lanes out of the box, and the mobo will be priced roughly the same.
by benreesman | 2025-08-14 17:40:57+00:00
People will go to extremely great lengths to debate the appropriate analogy for how these things work, which is fun I guess but in a "get high with a buddy" sense at least to my taste.

Some of how they work is well understood (a lot now, actually), some of the outcomes are still surprising.

But we debate both the well understood parts and the surprising parts both with the wrong terminology borrowed from pretty dubious corners of pop cognitive science, and not with terminology appropriate to the new and different thing! It's nothing like a brain, it's a new different thing. Does it think or reason? Who knows pass the blunt.

They do X performance on Y task according to Z eval, that's how you discuss ML model capability if you're persuing understanding rather than fundraising or clicks.
by conradev | 2025-08-14 17:41:37+00:00
On their best days, they're accurate to within 2-4%. But so many things can trip up the reading, like melanin:

As a result, for darker-skinned patients, oxygen saturation readings can read as normal when they are, in fact, dangerously low.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/pulse-oximeters-racial-bia...

When everyone starting looking at every percentage point of their SpO2 during COVID as if it were life or death, the FDA had to remind people of this:

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-brief/fda-brief-fda-warn...

You would be unable to read an accurate pulse oximeter at 80% because you would have lost consciousness. Doctors have to worry about false negatives just as much as false positives with those things.
by chrsw | 2025-08-14 17:41:55+00:00
Hiring contractors to work on your house is also high cost, in money and stress.

You commonly end up paying someone a lot of money who then turns around and gets underpaid subcontractors, of dubious employment eligibility status, to do the actual work.

If you’re going through the trouble of owning a home, it makes sense to do as much work yourself as you can.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-14 17:42:06+00:00
My grandmother's heart was completely fucked, so they'd have to adjust the alarms on the hospital monitors after checking their files when she went in. It's like "OK, well that's the problem... consults notes... Nope, apparently that is normal for her, now lets figure out what's actually wrong". It wasn't keeping regular time and it would sometimes skip, but apparently it was pumping well enough to keep her alive for several years.

Normal in humans is definitely relative and medicine has tended to assume that if we average 1000 humans (in too many cases, 1000 white college age men) that's what human normal is, which is crazy even beyond obvious problems like " people normally have 1.999 legs apparently".
by krded | 2025-08-14 17:42:30+00:00
The expendable email addresses in iCloud is a sleeper feature. I use this to limit the use of my personal email on services and help cull my email spam for one off uses. You can set which email address the expendable email is associated with, currently linked to my gmail. While not perfect, an enterprising person created "iCloud Hide My Email" extension for Firefox so I'm not tied to Safari on my phone and can integrate it into my workflow on Fedora.
by simianwords | 2025-08-14 17:43:12+00:00
I wrote about why higher level abstractions may not work all the time.

https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/so-you-want-to-create-a-new...

TL;DR the overhead in learning the new abstraction and dealing with the inevitable edge cases (known or unknown) must be taken into account.

All abstractions sound good until you account for these things.

The new language can work if the edge cases of this language are known and minimal.
by mrandish | 2025-08-14 17:43:18+00:00
> "these conditions raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern"

When the story got attention yesterday I recognized that phrase as the standard boilerplate language securities lawyers warn public companies to include in filings anytime it looks possible that they might not be able to fully meet all their obligations on time. It's a CYA to prevent (or reduce the cost of) investor lawsuits if things go badly. It's not uncommon to see this phrase sometimes pop-up even in filings of companies who are pretty obviously going to be fine, so it doesn't mean much because it covers a huge range of conditions.

I'm sure it's already appeared in Kokak's filings in recent years. The only surprising thing is that some media outlet decided to headline it as click-bait and it worked well enough a lot of people not familiar with the phrase and its lack of significance saw it. Nice of Kodak to at least issue a press release but unfortunate the click-bait got that much attention. It must have been a slow news day.

Even a cursory glance at Kodak's financials shows enough revenue that creditors certainly aren't going to force the company into liquidation in the foreseeable future. Instead, the company will renegotiate and/or refinance the obligations - which is what usually happens in these situations. When there's significant revenue from ongoing operations, even if it's somewhat unprofitable, it's usually in everyone's interest to keep the company operating in the hope it can be turned around. In fact, scary sounding statements like that are sometimes intentionally issued by the company as part of the debt renegotiation process (although it doesn't appear that's the case here as things aren't that serious). Basically, the implied threat from the company to creditors is "renegotiate debt terms or you may get much less or nothing."
by 0x00cl | 2025-08-14 17:43:42+00:00
I see you are using ollamas ggufs. By default it will download Q4_0 quantization. Try `gemma3:270m-it-bf16` instead or you can also use unsloth ggufs `hf.co/unsloth/gemma-3-270m-it-GGUF:16`

You'll get better results.
by mrcwinn | 2025-08-14 17:44:28+00:00
(I couldn't reply down another level.)

>How HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of [sic] competition is beyond me.

That suggests HN is a monoculture of some sort of united front. It is not. Diversity of opinion is best for this community (and all communities).

And, sorry, what competition was killed off here? I, as the consumer, was never considering Massimo for my blood oxygen measurement needs. I bought an Apple Watch and just want it to be as feature-full as possible. So does Apple.
by skywhopper | 2025-08-14 17:44:39+00:00
I mostly agree with the point the author makes that "it doesn't matter". But then again, it does matter, because LLM-based products are marketed based on "IT CAN REASON!" And so, while it may not matter, per se, how an LLM comes up with its results, to the extent that people choose to rely on LLMs because of marketing pitches, it's worth pushing back on those claims if they are overblown, using the same frame that the marketers use.

That said, this author says this question of whether models "can reason" is the least interesting thing to ask. But I think the least interesting thing you can do is to go around taking every complaint about LLM performance and saying "but humans do the exact same thing!" Which is often not true, but again, doesn't matter.
by rpdillon | 2025-08-14 17:44:48+00:00
Look, there are lots of us using Android and not seeing any ads. So we want to speak up when folks blab on about ads on Android. In reality, iOS and Windows and Android all have ads in their marketplace.

So if you want to have a substantive discussion, it should be centered around the places in the OS where ads are present, whether competing products have ads in similar locations in their OS, and whether those ads can be avoided, both on Android and on other platforms.

My contention is that Android ads are overblown, and generally Android has ads in all the same ways iOS does, and not any more than that. There are of customized versions of Android that add various anti-features, but that's not what I'm focusing on here: I'm focusing on a user's ability to avoid advertising.

But I'm arguing in good faith, and putting in effort to focus on the substantive user experience. I get the feeling you're in this to win some semantic battle with low-effort replies, so I'm going to disengage.
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 17:44:49+00:00
I was declined from a job recently specifically because I wrote a blog post about my history with depression and medication for it [1]. That's not me justifying after the fact, they actually told me this.

I took down most of the posts on my blog that were personal as a result. Most of the stuff on there now is just technical stuff that I'm not too worried about being attached to my name.

[1] To be clear, the blog post was only talking about prescribed medication, I've never done any illegal drugs and I've never been an alcoholic, I'm not speaking in code for "self medicating".