MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Swizec | 2025-09-14 20:41:15+00:00
> I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.

As Winston Churchill once said when asked “what are you doing” –> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”

I’m one of those weirdos who does public speaking sometimes. Even 8 hour workshops. You cannot prepare for an 8 hour speaking engagement. Not really. But you can accumulate a plethora of anecdotes, metaphors, and remarks that you weave into the narrative or in response to questions.

You can build frameworks that are similar to code. Prepared functions/coroutines/objects that you run in appropriate situations. Works pretty well especially in mentoring/teaching/consulting situations. This is also how comedians prep their sets.

The key is that things you say are new to the audience, but not to you. It can be the same metaphor you’ve fine-tuned over dozens of interactions. And the person you’re talking to thinks “Wow that guy is so quick on his feet, how did he come up with that so fast!?”

You can also spot this if you watch talks by popular presenters (Simon Sinek is a good example). You’ll notice the same 2 or 3 core stories getting polished and fine-tuned over years of talks and interviews.
by cgadski | 2025-09-14 20:41:42+00:00
The technical report says (page 7):

> Our architectural choices are closely aligned with principles observed in biological brains.

How? They point out three design choices: linear attention, MoE layers, and spike coding.

Apparently linear attention is brain-inspired because it can be viewed as a "simplified abstraction of dendritic dynamics with multi-branch morphology." Who knows what that means exactly [1]. They don't discuss it further. MoE layers apparently reflect "a principle of modular specialization." Fine, whatever.

Now, using a dozen attention variants + MoE is bog standard. The real novelty would be spike coding. Page 11 is dedicated to the different ways they could turn signals into spike trains, including such biologically-inspired mechanisms as using two's complement. However, they don't actually do spike coding in a time domain. In their implementation, "spike coding" apparently means to turn activations into integers. Section 3.3.3 claims that this lets us simulate an underlying spiking neural network, so we can validate the spiking approach without using special hardware. But if your SNN can be simulated faithfully on a GPU by turning things into integers, isn't that a bit of a depressing SNN?

Either I'm missing something, or this is just just dressing standard techniques with loads of meaningless jargon. Of course that’s a very popular way to operate in deep learning nowadays.

[1] Like, attention can draw from multiple tokens, sort of like how different spines of a dendrite can draw from multiple axons? Can’t make this stuff up.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-14 20:42:24+00:00
None of that precludes replacing huge swathes of advertising content with generated content, though? I'm not sure I understand the relevance.

In fact, being able to produce unlimited numbers and variations and combinations of adverts and have them compete against each other in the real world and be scored on tiny deltas in metrics becomes much more possible if you can automate basically the whole process. But it's a multimillion spend if you have to recruit actual actors and actual film crews and actual food photographers or drone pilots and car drivers and location scouts and so on to film and edit just a handful of variants let alone thousands.

Maybe there will always be a creamy top layer of increasingly-expensive artisanal handmade advertising but I predict we will end up with a huge sloppy middle ground of generated advertising that is just there to flash bright colours, jingles, movement and brand names into your brain.

I'm not saying it will be good advertising, very much the opposite (not that I think most much non-AI advertising is "good", it's mostly repetitive crap) but I think it will be very cost effective.

Maybe it won't be as effective as "real" ads but it'll be a hell of a lot cheaper and getting 80% of the bang for 5% of the buck means you can do a lot more of it in more channels (or pocket the difference). Every penny you save is a penny you can use to bid for the better slots.
by akomtu | 2025-09-14 20:42:44+00:00
IMO, the endgame is tyranny that we cannot escape. Something like stasi on hi-tech steroids. Such a tyranny can only be possible if there are no places on earth we can escape to and if domestic survelliance is so comprehensive that potential threats are eliminated before those threats realise what they are up to. In such a state, when there is neither external no internal pressure, the tyrant can rule for centuries. The thing is, there is a nontrivial number of those among us who prefer this way of life, and they are very capable in achieving their goals.
by jitl | 2025-09-14 20:43:16+00:00
The worst is when I have to baby-sit someone else’s AI. It’s so frustrating to get tagged to review a PR, open it up, and find 400 lines of obviously incorrect slop. Some try to excuse by marking the PR [vibe] but like what the hell, at least review your own goddamn ai code before asking me to look at it. Usually I want to insta reject just for the disrespect for my time.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-14 20:44:40+00:00
So instead of your settings sometimes being wrong and easily-fixed with a few clicks, you want them to be almost always wrong? :P

Again, I don't understand what pain-point or use-case is motivating this "set your laptop OS to UTC" proposal.

... Well, not unless it's some workaround for flawed software running on that machine, perhaps made by developers that misunderstood the business-domain of time zones.
by maddmann | 2025-09-14 20:44:55+00:00
I have been experimenting this past week with a small web platform that mixes JavaScript, music pattern generation, and large language models to create algorithmic compositions.

The idea is to have a language model suggest Strudel style music code which is then played back in the browser. It is still very rough. Mobile is not ideal, you need to enable audio or notifications, and the generated code sometimes breaks. Despite the bugs it can create interesting results when it works.

So far it seems to lean toward cinematic or piano style textures but occasionally produces unexpected rhythms.

I would love feedback from anyone interested in creative coding, generative audio, or live coding tools.

What directions would you explore if you were combining large language models and music patterns like this?
by analog31 | 2025-09-14 20:45:15+00:00
Apple II was an open system in a sense. Apple published the schematics and ROM source code. But it didn't have well defined interfaces that developers respected. A lot of published software, including some of the most popular apps, made use of variables and entry points in "unofficial" ways. This made it impossible for Apple or anybody else to even know how it was being used, much less to write a compatible ROM or OS that was not an exact copy of the original.

And if an updated system were to break any published app, Apple would be blamed. There were apps, albeit only a few, that would not run on an Apple IIe, and I think, a few more that wouldn't run on a IIc.

There were some notable violations of published entry points in MS-DOS software, most notably the page locations of display memory, leading to the famous "640k barrier." But they weren't enough to dissuade developers from treating the PC as an "open enough" platform.

I doubt that developers felt a particular sense of morality about the DOS interface, that they didn't feel about Apple II, but only that the interface was good enough to use as-is.

The real important thing here, was the openly published interface, and mutual agreement among devs to respect that interface. I mean "open enough" and "mostly respect" of course.
by electric_muse | 2025-09-14 20:45:18+00:00
It's incredibly useful! I have one profile for the "social" apps I don't trust (TikTok, Reddit, etc.). They can commingle. And there's another profile that contains the apps that rely on Google Play Services (e.g. something relies on google maps). As far as I understand it, it's like a strong firewall between them such that they are pretty close to having multiple different phones.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-14 20:46:11+00:00
An advertisement, where the protagonists weigh the pros and cons and then come down on the side of "paying the innovation tax".

Fastly profits from"AI" just like Cloudflare (or should we say "Claudeflare").

This selection of developers does seem representative at all. The new strategy is to acknowledge "AI" weaknesses but still adamantly claim that it is inevitable.
by mierz00 | 2025-09-14 20:46:19+00:00
One thing that has “cured” these thoughts for me is having a child.

I don’t have time to ruminate like I did previously and I’ve also come to understand people better. It’s funny to see how often we all act like toddlers.

It’s also made working in corporate easier, as it turns out telling a toddler no it’s surprisingly good practice for the real world.
by Ygg2 | 2025-09-14 20:46:23+00:00
> Dunno, hanging out in the Odin discord, it definitely attracts a crowd that thinks similarly to Bill.

Sure, hence the big enough part. If you get big enough, you'll get people who are using it as a day job language, not their special darling. Having used JS and Java without package managers in a professional setting, they sucked to use.

You import a package, run the main program, see compiler/browser errors then search local repo or th Net for the missing library. Essentially you're the package manager. Which does little for bloat. You can still have a folder and import stuff en masse.
by kelnos | 2025-09-14 20:46:42+00:00
Yeah, I spend a decent amount of time during the year at 6500-7000 feet (and live at sea level for the rest of the year). There's always an acclimation period when I first get there, but it's nowhere near as severe as the article suggests. I'm fine going right to the gym or whatever when I get there; I don't need a few days of rest first. In the winter I'll spend hours of the day up at 8000-9000 feet, and yes, I get winded easier, but I'm otherwise fine. I'm in my 40s, so while I'm not old, I'm not young either.

I think the highest up I've ever been for any solid amount of time was 10,500 feet, and sure, I could tell the difference, but it wasn't debilitating or anything remotely like that, and I could do moderate-plus physical activity without anything bad happening.

I've also been up to 15,000 feet (Salkantay Pass in Peru) for a very short time, and definitely felt it. A few people in my hiking group had to take some medicine, and one or two availed themselves of camels. But I would also consider this hike a high-exertion activity; they were fine when we took a break for a while and relaxed.

But I'm just not convinced that most (generally healthy!) people need that much acclimation before doing day-to-day tasks, including regular levels of exercise.
by BuckRogers | 2025-09-14 20:46:57+00:00
Not surprised to hear that it’s the trend. It’s been going on for quite some time. I used to work for a very large Canadian multinational and HR told me they only hire US/Canadian lead developers. The rest were to be from Bulgaria. This was 10 years ago.

I’m in-progress on all of this but I’m offering my services to my current employer though my LLC for 20 hours a week at 3X the hourly rate of my old salary. Take it or leave it. They are losing their leverage for me with his move. I no longer need them, they can’t put me in the streets.

So not entirely leaving the industry but will take any work at or above the market rate. High rates mean less waste of my time, as it is more limited with starting a 2nd career.

For doing both, there’s no abusive overtime like in software because it’s double time pay. Which puts you at the pay rate of what would be $240,000 a year. No one wastes your time at that rate. You actually want overtime when it’s fairly compensated like that. You can do both.

It’s sad when you work towards something your entire life, both in school and professionally. And you’ve never done anything wrong. We played by the rules of our society, and our lives were stolen from us. As Steve Bannon famously said once, these American workers deserve reparations. If the situation is ever corrected, I don’t think it would be too hard to jump back in at that point full-time.
by sumeruchat | 2025-09-14 20:47:09+00:00
I used to be on your side but now that I live as a minority where the locals are increasingly becoming hostile and their very abusive rhetoric is accepted on social media and forums like reddit I actually want them to face the consequences of such speech and be deterred from uttering anything like that with their devices. (They can do so privately at the bar I have no problem with that.)

Another example is the recent nepal protests.

More abstractly I think that a multi-cultural or multi-ethnic society at scale is not able to handle anonymous and private communication without collapsing. If we dont go in the direction of benevolent censorship like China and Singapore I think the west is going to see some dark times.
by kikimora | 2025-09-14 20:47:32+00:00
> And, pray tell, what happens when the reverse happens, and a death spiral begins?

Interest drops to 1%, nothing else. We talk about USDC on Kraken or Coinbase, both regulated by SEC, FINRA and having ATS license (only 50 such licenses granted in US).

> I make cross border payments quite regularly

This is easy only between very few countries. Try Africa, India, former Soviet republics. You can send them money, they might not be able to receive.

> Tether's USDT is currently the world's largest market capitalization stablecoin…

This is why I only talk about USDC and others, not Tether.

> The reason I have faith in a fiat currency, and not crypto (of any kind) is the regulation

Stable coin is a different form of fiat operated by a regulated institution. They actually much more regulated compared to banks. For instance, they cannot use fractional reserves, everything must be 1-1 backed by cash equivalents (bonds and friends).

> There's zero advantage to use crypto

Wire cost me $27, USDC transfer cost $1. Wire takes 1-2 days, USDC transfer - 15 seconds. I can get 2-10% interest on my crypto holdings without any commitments, I can make 0.5% with savings account or 3% if I commit to a yearly deposit. I cannot get USD nominated debit card, but can from a crypto exchange. So on and so forth. Life is easy when you are a US Citizen, much different if you come from Russia, Iran, India, most of Africa, most of the world, really.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-14 20:48:04+00:00
They ship entire CARS.

Not some kind of fancy sci-fi grain-of-sand sized microchips that are completely impossible to track. Not even drugs! Cars! Those huge metal objects that weigh over a metric ton each! Those cars!

If the police can't stop criminals from shipping CARS out of an ISLAND COUNTRY, the issue isn't that they don't have a way to breach privacy of every citizen. The issue is that they should be all fired and never allowed to do any government work ever again.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-14 20:48:58+00:00
What papers? You think we verify that the contents of every outbound container matches what it says on the manifest? We don't. It would be prohibitively expensive to scan every container. Even if we did, and found a car in a container, how would we know the documents provided aren't valid?

This is a really hard problem. If there's an easy solution in mind, feel free to suggest it.
by AJ007 | 2025-09-14 20:49:10+00:00
They have evil intentions, but they are also idiots. The nature of an authoritarian government is one that requires maximizing control for survival. As a particular country shifts to a more authoritarian government, and those people who enabled dumb ideas fall out of power (right, left, or whatever) those same tools will be used by their political adversaries to control, imprison, or kill them.

Why are they idiots? Because western Europe is not yet authoritarian and thus there is little personal benefit to hasten a slide towards it, there are so many other ways to gain power in a free society. (I wouldn't bet money that Europe will remain free in 25 years.)

There is a secondary problem here -- anything that decreases the information security of European countries hands more power to the US and China (and to a lesser degree other nations with advanced infosec capabilities like Russia and Israel.) If you are European (I'm not) the first thing that should be done is investigate the people pushing this stuff.
by jgon | 2025-09-14 20:49:31+00:00
This book was generated by an LLM, and if I look at the Github organization that manages the repo, it looks like a bunch of other written material, all generated by LLMs. I scanned through the material a little bit and it seemed like exactly the sort of surface level gloss of topic that you'd expect an LLM to output. I didn't feel a ton of motivation to thoroughly go through the whole thing, in the same way that the author didn't feel a ton of motivation to actually learn about Lisp and then synthesize their knowledge into something novel that could potentially help other people. So it possible that there is more to this document than meets the eye, but right now I don't think I'm wrong in saying most people won't miss anything by skipping this.
by Aerbil313 | 2025-09-14 20:50:31+00:00
Lots of undiagnosed autistic people in the comments describing autistic masking and burnout.

Autistic burnout is the name for the unexplainable energy drain when you have to interact with people, because while social interactions are usually as effortless and as easy as lifting a finger for neurotypical people, they can feel like lifting a 100lbs stone for you, because you have to constantly remember how to act and at the same time focus on the moment to not miss a social cue, etc. This is called masking and it drains your energy.

Now watch people under this comment claiming they are not autistic, because how they are able to perfectly socialize, because they have learned to keep eye contact by putting a reminder on a post-it note on their desk for a year in the middle school.

Before discovering I'm autistic I was totally dumbfounded: why I was tired as if I ran a marathon after a meetup with friends for just a few hours? Now I know.
by luqtas | 2025-09-14 20:51:01+00:00
capitalism can also be interpreted as something which "serves the modern, specialised multifunctional community by doing your job." to "profit then use the sum to upgrade society"

what the heck you place socialism as something towards <the overall happiness of the society, and not focusing on increasing material wealth>? first that socialism is a temporary state towards communism, that despite, it doesn't need to pursue communism. see China. second; WHY DO YOU WANT TO CENTRALIZE POWER TOWARDS A SELECTED GROUP OF PEOPLE? Karl Marx is fine, but it's a european guy who lived in 1800s. socialism and capitalism are essentially the same with the difference of the hope of donation of power coming from the public vs. the private... you need to be quite naive to believe the goverment will do the good without corruption. much more people with power allowing their goods to be taken. see our history before capitalism
by athrowaway3z | 2025-09-14 20:51:18+00:00
My guess has been an unholy alliance between 'IP holders' like Hollywood (and increasingly games), and the surveillance industrial complex.

Add in the fact that both China and the US already have practically near omniscient digital oversight of everything their citizens do through server and OS level backdoors, the uninformed politicians in the EU/UK are easier to tempt by lobby groups crying in the name of the children.
by eptcyka | 2025-09-14 20:51:46+00:00
The TouchID is bound to a device - of course, I could copy my secret into a secure enclave that is only accessible through TouchID. Could even just store my GPG key there. With a Yubikey, I generate the key on an airgapped device and store it on the Yubikey. No other piece of hardware ever needs to see my secret key in plaintext. I could achieve the same with TouchID, generate the secret key inside the enclave, but then I cannot move the secret keys out without some other computer baring witness to that.

I really do not want to give Apple any more leverage over me, I'm looking to minimize it.
by Bender | 2025-09-14 20:51:58+00:00
Not the person you are asking but it is getting worse by the day [1][2]. Speech policing is becoming a higher priority than dealing with violent crime. Protests are also increasing in number and frequency.

[1] - https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...

[2] - https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
by nzeid | 2025-09-14 20:52:22+00:00
This isn't a dilemma unique to encrypted comms or privacy. You have to weigh the net benefits to society as a whole. How much has the lack of secure communication and encryption at rest cost society? How much have the criminals you mentioned benefited from the lack of encryption? How much more difficult would it be for criminals to locate targets and victims with encryption protecting the latter?
by quesera | 2025-09-14 20:52:51+00:00
A few trends which might be relevant:

- First-time parenthood is frequently occurring later in life - Couples are more often having (additional) children at later ages - Children are sometimes not "launching" until later in their 20s.

So, ~35yo first-time parents and/or ~40yo youngest-child parents, plus ~25-30yo children moving out ... That can get you to 65-70 years pretty easily.
by lutusp | 2025-09-14 20:53:09+00:00
> "Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment." (emphasis added)

This strongly implies that changing negative thinking behavior might reduce cognitive impairment. But the study has no way to establish a cause-effect relationship -- that would require an entirely different kind of study, one that studies the brain, not the mind. In other words, a neuroscience study, one probably not possible at present.

Like many psychology papers, this one implies a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence, but one that suggests a role for talk therapy.

It would be interesting to see a review of all modern psychological work, a hundred years from now, from the perspective of a neuroscience that doesn't yet exist, to see how often these articles turned out to be just-so stories with no connection to reality.

A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence. Maybe kids predisposed to mental health issues are more likely to use marijuana -- that possibility can't be excluded because all the studies are retrospective.

Most people know I can be relied on to make this point, but until neuroscience matures, studies like this will suffer from a theory vacuum. One can only accomplish so much by studying symptoms, with no clue about root biological causes.