MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gpjt | 2025-09-06 23:12:49+00:00
Post author here. I agree 100%! The post is the basic maths for people digging in to how LLMs work under the hood -- I wrote a separate one for non-techies who just want to know what they are, at https://www.gilesthomas.com/2025/08/what-ai-chatbots-are-doi...
by pixelatedindex | 2025-09-06 23:13:28+00:00
> Is the entire mission of the business “finished” after 8 hours?

No, but as a rank and file employee you only have access to so much information. The ones who want to work 996 will try to get this but even then that doesn’t mean you’ll get it. At least that’s how it was at a couple of the top companies in China and SEA, and I speak from first hand experience of half a decade. They just want you to jump when they tell you to jump.

Also, ironically the leadership are the least to be seen in the office.

It’s all a show dude, been there. Yeah there are a lot of people who work there but they themselves refer to themselves as dog. You fetch when the owner says fetch. It’s a toxic, mostly unrewarding effort. But they do pay well enough to have people clock in the next day.
by zbentley | 2025-09-06 23:13:35+00:00
There are also plenty of massive, popular open source projects which don’t require much if any ongoing maintenance. OpenSSL-ish things are the exception, not the rule.

Of the rest, it’s fine to keep using old versions of things…however, things with ecosystems that move on or contributors/users that fetishize “actively maintained” as a use-this-not-that indicator can complicate that decision.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-09-06 23:14:09+00:00
> we have had little insight into exactly how disturbances in the brain cause psychiatric disorders

I recently heard a well-regarded neuropsychiatrist disavow any pretense of connecting his evaluation to the actual organic function of the brain or body. This was surprising for a—as far as I know— organic-focused subspecialty of a branch of medicine that routinely prescribes pharmaceuticals to achieve organic changes in the brain and body.
by nelox | 2025-09-06 23:14:25+00:00
That framing is too narrow. A weather model is trained on physics equations but still relies on patterns in past data to make forecasts. A language model is trained on patterns in human text but that text already encodes mathematics, code, and reasoning. When prompted with a math problem, the model is not doing physics but it is reproducing the learned statistical structure of solutions people have written before. The distinction between “predicting language” and “solving math” is smaller than it seems because the training data couples symbols to meaning. Dismissing its outputs as “just predicting words” misses the fact that word distributions encode information-rich representations of knowledge. That is why large models can in practice generate working code, prove theorems, and reason through problems, even if they do so imperfectly. The right comparison is not that people are misusing them, but that they generalize beyond their design intent because language itself is the medium through which so many other domains are expressed.
by pndy | 2025-09-06 23:14:30+00:00
Then you're lucky. I had iPad 2 and Air 1. Older one is completely dead for 5 years now and doesn't react to plugged cable at all, while newer charges whole day and keeps battery for 4-5 hours.

Air 3 I've got on ebay-like site holds pretty well but the same model that my partner got from official dealer had always issues with touch recognition.
by anigbrowl | 2025-09-06 23:14:55+00:00
It's pretty good straight out of the gate. I think giving customization of fonts is an excellent idea. There's huge variation in this area and font-switching is a definite stumbling block for anyone doing JSL. If someone has gotten used to a sans serif font from a textbook or Anki deck, for example, the more visually complex serif fronts used on official documents and exam papers require extra mental effort to parse. Likewise being able to switch color combinations easily is a good idea.

Might be good to allow the kanji/vocabulary to be filtered by JLPT or Jouyou stage. Picking multiple sets on the kanji units was a bit tedious, it's be nice to 'pick all' for a drill (but I was using it to test myself rather than learn new ones). I don't understand the pick options (pick, reverse, input, output) - they seem superfluous and perhaps need tooltips. Maybe add audio recordings at some point, although that's a bunch of work. You can use AI to generate it of course and it will be mostly correct as far as individual words go, but Japanese AI voices still seem to get pitch shapes and timing wrong sometimes.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-09-06 23:15:30+00:00
People also tend not to understand the absurdity of assuming that we can make LLMs stop hallucinating. It would imply not only that truth is absolutely objective, but that it exists on some smooth manifold which language can be mapped to.

That means there would be some high dimensional surface representing "all true things". Any fact could be trivially resolved as "true" or "false" simply by exploring whether or not it was represented on this surface. Where or not "My social security number is 123-45-6789" is true could be determined simply by checking whether or not that statement was mappable to the truth manifold. Likewise you could wander around that truth manifold and start generating output of all true things.

If such a thing existed it would make even the wildest fantasies about AGI seem tame.

edit: To simplify it further, this would imply you could have an 'is_true(statement: string): bool' function for any arbitrary statement in English.
by charcircuit | 2025-09-06 23:16:28+00:00
>quibble over terminology

Terminology frames how people think about things. A rug pull sounds negative, when in reality it just means you aren't getting future work under such a permissive license. If someone is shocked from that it means that they felt entitled to the work people were doing for free. I disagree with the whole way the situation is being framed like its wrong for the people who did the work creating a project having the ability to figure out how to monetize it.

>Open source is a social concept and politics has been an integral part of it since the beginning.

But such politics are not a driving force for the Linux kernel. Linux is not open source in order to push the FSF's agenda. When there are people who focus exclusively on the social and political aspects these people are a parasite. It would be different if it was an open source developer sharing their views, but this talk purely serves to advertise an agenda the author has.

>isn’t their job to vet their authors based on the intersection of their tonsorial choices and your personal politics rather than the substance of their articles.

You are not engaging honestly. I stated up front that my issue was with the substance of the article. That picking such a talk over some other talk or topic was a mistake.
by trillic | 2025-09-06 23:17:16+00:00
cloudflare is caching the image:

``` accept-ranges: bytes age: 5397 alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 cache-control: max-age=14400 cf-cache-status: HIT content-length: 3013598 content-type: application/octet-stream date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT server: cloudflare vary: accept-encoding ```
by kbaker | 2025-09-06 23:17:22+00:00
Lol. I got perma-banned for violating rules under my alt accounts.

But I don't have any alt accounts...??? Appeal process is a joke. I just opted to delete my 12 year old account instead and have stopped going there.

Oh well, probably time for them to go under and be reborn anyways. The default subs and front page has been garbage for some time.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-06 23:17:44+00:00
I think the idea is that nobody has any sense, even a very rough one, of how tall the Statue of Liberty might be. It's not like you ever see it in person, and if you did most of it would be in perspective, which ruins your chances of determining its size.

Most people have enough trouble believing that their foot is the same length as their forearm. You never see your feet close up, either.
by sahila | 2025-09-06 23:18:07+00:00
That's a little reductive. I grew up in San Diego and went to school in LA and had the same experience with taxis - never took them. But now I use ubers in those cities whenever I'm there.

The US has tons of cities like this that I imagine would have issues with taxis - all parts of the bay area peninsula / east bay, cities in Texas, Denver, etc. Most cities are not like the NYC/Boston and even in places in Chicago, unless you lived downtown likely didn't see taxis driving around.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-09-06 23:20:15+00:00
I'm the complete opposite and don't really understand your position.

I'd rather see totally irrelevant ads because they're easy to ignore or dismiss. Targeted ads distract your thought processes explicitly because they know what will distract you; make you want something where there was previously no wanting. Targeted advertising is productised ADHD; it is anti-productive.

Like the start of Madness' One Step Beyond: "Hey you! Don't watch that, watch this!"
by Esophagus4 | 2025-09-06 23:21:16+00:00
(Eyeroll) I didn’t feel like I needed to state my disagreements because I felt like they weren’t relevant enough to spend time on. So I agreed with his point that I’m not betting against Musk, but left out the reasons.

But leave it to the pedantic internet commenters to take issue with even a minor inconsistency.

I promise to do better next time, thank you for your feedback. I know I’ll make you proud one day, dad.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-06 23:23:09+00:00
> is some revisionist's attempt

Yeah, it was in an activist's writings someone was using as a cite to me. Tells for an activist book:

1. hyperbolic language

2. no discussion of alternative explanations

3. mind reading - "surely so-and-so must have understood that..." and "so-and-so's reason must have been (something nefarious)"
by utyop22 | 2025-09-06 23:23:54+00:00
Literacy rates have been falling off a cliff for decades.

If theres no literacy, there is no critical thinking.

The only solution is to deliver high quality education to all folks and create engaging environments for it to be delivered.

Ultimately it comes down to influencing folks to think deeper about whats going on around them.

Most of the people between the age of 13-30ish right now are kinda screwed and pretty much a write off imo.
by mettamage | 2025-09-06 23:24:37+00:00
So question: is it possible to put MacOS on an M1 iPad?

I want a Mac with a touchscreen and a pencil. So not sure if it's easier to retrofit MacOS on an iPad or retrofit a touch screen on a Mac.

I know this question is adjacently relevant, but I wonder if someone has some experience in it and are willing to share :)
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-09-06 23:24:45+00:00
> That report will also suggest a medicine derived from folate – a water-soluble vitamin – can be used to treat symptoms of the developmental disorder in some people, according to the Journal.

I think folate supplementation is generally already a fairly standard recommendation during pregnancy, since deficiency is linked to significant neural tube defects during pregnancy (eg CDC [1]). It's at least interesting that folate-derived medicines may also treat symptoms.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/folic-acid/about/index.html#:~:text=Abou...
by thayne | 2025-09-06 23:28:37+00:00
I feel like the SSPL is almost a good open source license. I think there is a place for something a little stronger than the AGPL that is copyleft on necessary components even if they aren't directly linked. But it has a couple of major failings:

1. It's too vague about what is covered by it. This makes using such software risky in practice. Is the OS it runs on included? What about a log aggregator used to collect logs? Or a system backup system? The VM hypervisor and orchestration software for running the VMs that host it? I think it would be better if it was more clearly scoped to components that are specifically related to the service itself and not general purpose components of the hosting environment and/or things that could easily be substituted with other standard open source or off the shelf components.

2. It isn't compatible with AGPL or GPL. This is especially bad combined with 1. Does that mean you can't run the service on Linux? I don't think it could be compatible with AGPL code directly linked to it, but it could allow external components to be under most open source licenses.

IANAL, and don't know exactly how to word a license that fixed those issues, but I think there could be something better than the SSPL, and maybe such a license has a better chance of getting OSI approval.
by gblargg | 2025-09-06 23:29:15+00:00
> It’s well-defined, yet incorrect behaviour that compilers are recommended to diagnose. Is recommended enough?! Well, with the growing focus on safety, you can rest assured that an implementation that wouldn’t diagnose erroneous behaviour would be soon out of the game.

Is this to cover cases that would be hard/costly to detect? For example you pass the address of an uninitialized variable to a function in another source file that might read or just write to it, but the compiler can't know.
by jms55 | 2025-09-06 23:29:56+00:00
I've been evaluating texture compression options for including in Bevy https://bevy.org, and there's just, not really any good options?

Requirements:

* Generate mipmaps

* Convert to BC and ASTC

* Convert to ktx2 with zstd super-compression

* Handle color, normal maps, alpha masks, HDR textures, etc

* Open source

* (Nice to have) runs on the GPU to be fast

I unfortunately haven't found any option that cover all of these points. Some tools only write DDS, or don't handle ASTC, or want to use basis universal, or don't generate mipmaps, etc.
by mcdeltat | 2025-09-06 23:31:34+00:00
As a long time user of C++, I want to propose a question: do we think C++ will ever reach a point where it is significantly ergonomic and safe enough to use (in comparison to e.g. Python or Rust) via adding new features?

I've used C++ for so long and I'm a good way into thinking that the language is just over. It missed its mark because of backwards compatibility with fundamental language flaws. I think we can continue to add features - which are usually decent ideas given the context, kudos to the authors for the effort - but the language will decline faster than it can be fixed. Furthermore, the language seems to be continually becoming harder to implement, support, and write due to the constant feature addition and increase in semantic interconnectivity. To me it's almost mostly a theoretical exercise to add features at this point: practically we end up with oddly specced features which mostly work but are fundamentally crippled because they need to dodge an encyclopedia of edge cases. The committee are really letting the vision of a good C++ down by refusing to break backwards compatibility to fix core problems. I'm talking fundamental types, implicit conversions, initialisation, preprocessor, undefined / ill-formed NDR behaviour. The C++ I'm passionate about is dead without some big changes I don't think the community can/will handle.
by innocentoldguy | 2025-09-06 23:32:08+00:00
It looks great. I would suggest changing the kanji next to the label "Kanji" to 字 instead of 出, though. 字 is the second character in the word 漢字 (kanji) and means "character." I would also suggest changing the kanji next to the "Vocabulary" label from 言 to 語. 語 is the second character in the word 単語 (tango) and means "word." The あ next to the "Kana" label is perfect.

出 means "to go out or exit" and doesn't have anything to do with learning Kanji. 言 means "to say" and is only tangentially related to learning vocabulary.

Still, great job!
by vinnymac | 2025-09-06 23:32:16+00:00
There are plenty of successful mods and even paid products capable of making a MacBook include a functional touchscreen.

As far as I know the closest thing you can do with an iPad running macOS is some form of Remote Desktop / VNC. The QEMU attempts on jailbroken iPads are unusable, and impractical. Certainly no one has done it natively (outside of Apple of course)
by ekianjo | 2025-09-06 23:32:18+00:00
Not the only way. There used to be 3rd parties defending consumers by testing products back in the days, and publishing their results, not sure if those still exist today. The problem with mass manufactured products is that you need to keep testing them. Changes in formulation are a thing so you need to continuously sample and test them.

The problem with government being involved is that this opens the door for easy corruption (haven't we seen this before)
by humanlion87 | 2025-09-06 23:33:43+00:00
I live in North America and use full sleeve sun hoodies for hiking in the summer. I sweat a lot but these hoodies are breathable enough that it doesn't bother me. So I need to apply sun screen only on my palms and fingers. And paired with a wide brim hat, I can get away with applying sunscreen only to the lower part of my face and neck.
by hbcondo714 | 2025-09-06 23:35:21+00:00
Thanks but this is only one study and they even conclude that some non-genetic factors may also contribute to causing autism

There are many causes of autism. Research suggests that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) develops from a combination of:

Genetic influences and

Environmental influences, including social determinants

Source: https://www.autismspeaks.org/what-causes-autism
by eth0up | 2025-09-06 23:35:22+00:00
For what it's worth, I've been thrown in society's waste basket altogether on this one.

No insurance, none, of any kind.

I've got a Free h D in hillbilly medicine though. I've accomplished some amazing shit, but it's unraveling a bit now, and I'll be super surprised if I last much longer.

One can certainly say such a hit to morale is just collateral damage in the beautiful face of our wondrous mutant hive, but what are you guys gonna do when we start stinking up your streets en masse? One way or another, you'll be smelling the smoke.

Soylent Green is here. Read your labels carefully.

Proudly Made in the USA with Harshly Sourced Ingredients. I was free roaming though, if that matters.

Edit: returned to clarify that I was pulling myself up by me bootstraps. It's just that it's getting tough to hold on to em tightly enough. No shoes no service though, I guess.
by mqus | 2025-09-06 23:35:37+00:00
I think one of the main problems is the dataset it is trained on, which is written text. How much answers with statements are in a given text, compared to a "I don't know"? I think the "I don't know"s are much less represented. Now go anywhere on the internet where someone asks a question (the typical kind of content LLMs are trained on) and the problem is even bigger. You either get no textual answer or someone that gives some answer (that might even be false). You never get an answer like "I don't know", especially for questions that are shouted into the void (compared to asking a certain person). And it makes sense. I wouldn't start to answer every stackoverflow question with "I don't know" tomorrow, it would just be spam.

For me, as a layman (with no experience at all about how this actually works), this seems to be the cause. Can we work around this? Maybe.
by maplant | 2025-09-06 23:37:08+00:00
I’m hoping by the end of the year. All of the “difficult” things are finished (control flow, syntax transformers, call/cc, dynamic wind, exceptions, libraries, etc) and it’s just a matter of filling missing base library functions. If there’s something in particular that you need you’re welcome to file and issue or post a message on the discord and I’ll prioritize it.

That being said, Steel is excellent and I highly recommend it if you just need R5RS with syntax transformers
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-06 23:37:41+00:00
What i find fascinating is the speed of the pivot. The big tech companies are dropping their progressive policies like hot potatoes. From a business point of view is it not a bad idea to basically come out and admit that you have been virtue signalling for the last 8 years and playing your audience for fools, and the moment it's politically (in)convenient you will abandon all your principles assuming you ever had any. I think they don't care what their customers think and never did. They were just pandering to whatever ideology had the most political power at the moment.
by duskwuff | 2025-09-06 23:38:28+00:00
That isn't a genetic change either, though. Those species of turtle either lack the typical sex-determining chromosomes entirely, or have sex-determining chromosomes which can be inactivated during development. The genotype doesn't change as a result of what temperature the egg is incubated at; its expression does.

Further reading: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210726102148.h...
by trebligdivad | 2025-09-06 23:39:23+00:00
Sounds close! top says my llama is using 17.7G virt, 16.6G resident with: ./build/bin/llama-cli -m /discs/fast/ai/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-IQ4_NL.gguf --jinja -ngl 99 --temp 0.7 --min-p 0.0 --top-p 0.80 --top-k 20 --presence-penalty 1.0 -t 32 -dev none
by IgorPartola | 2025-09-06 23:40:12+00:00
I suspect it helps engineering the system. If you have 30 difference sensors, how do you design a system that accounts for seemingly random combinations of them disagreeing with an observation in real time if a priori you don’t know the weight of their observation in that particular situation? For humans for example you know that in most cases seeing something in a car is more important than smelling something. But what if one of your eyes sees a pedestrian and another sees a shadow of a bird?

Also don’t forget that as a human you can move your head any which way, and also draw on your past experiences driving in that area. “There is always an old man crossing the road at this intersection. There is a school nearby so there might be kids here at 3pm.” That stuff is not as accessible to a LIDAR.
Show HN: My Side Project to Explore Cognitive Biases Ruling Your Life
by guillaumemoog | 2025-09-06 23:42:46+00:00
Hello,

I've been working on this side project for a few months:

Cognitive biases shape our way to see things, our decisions and basically our lives...

I wanted to create and share this website for a fast exploration of biases. It is based on the phenomenal Cognitive Bias Codex by Buster Benson.

It's a powerful way to visualize biases, get a quick understanding of each while allowing one to go deeper.

I am not a developer, just something I had interest in. It's just a small Minimum Viable App, increasing convenience to discover that fascinating field.

I'd love for people to look at it and throw some ideas and make suggestions.

Cheers all.