MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by punitvthakkar | 2025-09-08 15:46:23+00:00
So far I've not run into the kind of use cases that local LLMs can convincingly provide without making me feel like I'm using the first ever ChatGPT from 2022, in that they are limited and quite limiting. I am curious about what use cases the community has found that work for them. The example that one user has given in this thread about their local LLM inventing a Sun Tzu interview is exactly the kind of limitation I'm talking about. How does one use a local LLM to do something actually useful?
by devinbhushan | 2025-09-08 15:46:38+00:00
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by dragonwriter | 2025-09-08 15:46:40+00:00
> In spreadsheets, time is something you simulate with formulas, but the system doesn’t understand that a hire in April triggers payroll in May and revenue in June.

It does if the person designing the spreadsheet knew that and it was part of what the sheet was designed to model; there’s nothing about spreadsheets in that, just about the underlying assumptions the particular spreadsheet is built around.

I’ve certainly built and used spreadsheets where this kind of thing was part of the model, and also those where it wasn’t.
by cperciva | 2025-09-08 15:46:45+00:00
Currently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft.

Air Canada operates YUL-EDI and YHZ-LHR on 737s, and WestJet operates YHZ-BCN, YYZ-EDI, and YYZ-DUB. And that's not even counting the dozens of flights to and from KEF (which might or might not count as TATL depending on whether you consider Iceland to be in Europe or in the middle of the Atlantic).
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-08 15:46:47+00:00
> "And we've struggled to gain access to emergencies. They'll stop us at the gate, and our medic units have been delayed. They're denying us access to patients.

> You immediately arrest have any employee interfering with emergency response and throw them in jail. Repeat until Amazon runs out of employees dumb enough to continue doing so.

Absolutely. Ex-paramedic/firefighter. We responded to a cult facility once (think Nexium-esque but "bigger"). 911 call for chest pain. Stopped at the gate by armed guards. "You can't bring your ambulance in". Uh, yes, we can. "No. We can't allow you in, then." My officer at the time, to the head guard, "Are you the individual who called 911?" "No, I'm not, someone in there did." "Alright, so to be very clear before I call law enforcement out here, you are acknowledging you are interfering with emergency services performing their duty by actively preventing us from getting to our patient?"

We got let in.
by srmatto | 2025-09-08 15:46:48+00:00
GPUs prices really surprise me. Most PC part prices have remained the same over the decades with storage and RAM actually getting cheaper. GPUs however have gotten extremely expensive. $350 used to get you a really good GPU about 20 years ago, I think top of the line was around $450-500--now it only gets you entry level. Top of the line is now $1500+!
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-08 15:46:51+00:00
You may be right but I'd want to see the trajectories numerically integrated and plotted. What I know is that trajectories that hit the L1 point with low velocity will confound your intuition that comes from conics. Here is a recent analysis that considers a range of trajectories launched from a certain point

https://www.sjsu.edu/ae/docs/project-thesis/Ethan.Miller-Su2...

which a student project that has a lot of problems and doesn't consider the possibility of relocating the driver but they are considering moderately high angles of around 30 degrees. Their mass driver is about 500m long in the range that if you want to drill a hole that deep you can drill a hole that deep.

Practically there are other concerns about a moon base, particularly these days people are interested in polar locations. You could possibly run 1000 km of maglev to get to the base of the thing but if you are talking that big you might consider a lunar beanstalk which at least doesn't require a catcher at L1.
by foxyv | 2025-09-08 15:46:56+00:00
Yeah, that's Garmin's thing. They are selling top of the line, marine/aviation grade, safety critical equipment. $2,000 is almost low for what they normally sell, like radar systems and chart plotters for boats, or glass cockpits for aircraft. They are mostly competing with Raytheon and BAE systems for niche applications. Stuff you would find in F-16 fighter jets except better somehow.

Essentially, Garmin is the product you buy when money is no object. Either because you are obscenely wealthy, or because you are trusting their product with your life and the lives of your passengers. They have some consumer grade stuff too that is usually trickling down from their obscenely expensive other businesses.
by unethical_ban | 2025-09-08 15:48:21+00:00
Any specific recommendations? I am having random, OS agnostic lockups on my ryzen 1xxx build and thought DDR5 will be enough, but true ECC sounds good.

edit: Looks like a lot of Asus motherboards work, and the thing to look for is "unbuffered" ECC. Kingston has some, I see 32GB module for $190 on Newegg.
by kolme | 2025-09-08 15:48:23+00:00
Yes, I was wrong on several levels.

First and foremost I was wrong thinking that I was smarter than others — that's not even how intelligence works.

Second I was wrong being so stubbornly pro-tabs / anti-spaces (for example). It doesn't make that much of a difference, so there's no point in being so passionate about it.

And third I was wasting everyone's time (and my persuasion powers) by not choosing my battles more wisely.

My suggestion would be nowadays: let's choose a popular style guide, set up a linter and be done with it.
by tonymet | 2025-09-08 15:48:27+00:00
I think you're being naive on the costs but that's just me. That's the intro price, plus you have transfer fees , vcpu .

I've never used axiom, but all the logging platforms I've used like splunk, datadog, loggly are a major op-ex line item.

And telling your developers their time is priceless means they will produce the lowest quality product.
by account42 | 2025-09-08 15:48:31+00:00
This is really not much of an issue if both sides implement HTTP caching (If-Modified-Since or Etags). Atom also adds pagination which allows you to keep all old items accessible to supporting readers while cutting down the main feed to just the last entry. The little bandwidth a well managed feed takes is really not worth giving up the ability to host the feed statically which the overly complex ActivityPub can't do.
by Izkata | 2025-09-08 15:48:36+00:00
Speaking of a different perspective, you and GP are describing it with different viewpoints and I'm not sure you're fully aware it is different:

GP is describing the Model and View as two co-equal things with something in between that links then.

You're describing the Model more as a foundation that the View builds on top of (and this is also how I look at it).

I like the stacked view more because it more closely matches the flow of data, making it almost explicit that what's presented to the user is a projection/transformation of the stored data. Views can't really exist independent of that data, they rely on it, while models can exist independent of the view.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-08 15:48:52+00:00
I had a Atom-based netbook (in the early days when they were 32-bit-only and couldn’t run up-to-date Windows). It didn’t suck, as such, but it was definitely resource-starved.

However, what I meant is Atom-based Android tablets. At about the same time as the netbook craze (late 2000s to early 2010s) there was a non-negligible number of Android tablets, and a noticeable fraction of them was not ARM- but Atom-based. (The x86 target in the Android SDK wasn’t only there to support emulators, originally.) Yet that stopped pretty quickly, and my impression is that that happened because, while Intel would certainly have liked to hitch itself to the Android train, they just couldn’t get Atoms fast enough at equivalent power levels (either at all or quickly enough). Could have been something else, e.g. perhaps they didn’t have the expertise to build SoCs with radios?

Either way, it’s not that Intel didn’t want to get into consumer mobile devices, it’s that they tried and did not succeed.
by junon | 2025-09-08 15:49:01+00:00
Hi, yep I got pwned. Sorry everyone, very embarrassing.

More info:

- https://github.com/chalk/chalk/issues/656

- https://github.com/debug-js/debug/issues/1005#issuecomment-3...

Affected packages (at least the ones I know of):

- ansi-styles@6.2.2

- debug@4.4.2 (appears to have been yanked as of 8 Sep 18:09 CEST)

- chalk@5.6.1

- supports-color@10.2.1

- strip-ansi@7.1.1

- ansi-regex@6.2.1

- wrap-ansi@9.0.1

- color-convert@3.1.1

- color-name@2.0.1

- is-arrayish@0.3.3

- slice-ansi@7.1.1

- color@5.0.1

- color-string@2.1.1

- simple-swizzle@0.2.3

- supports-hyperlinks@4.1.1

- has-ansi@6.0.1

- chalk-template@1.1.1

- backslash@0.2.1

It looks and feels a bit like a targeted attack.

Will try to keep this comment updated as long as I can before the edit expires.

---

Chalk has been published over. The others remain compromised (8 Sep 17:50 CEST).

NPM has yet to get back to me. My NPM account is entirely unreachable; forgot password system does not work. I have no recourse right now but to wait.

Email came from support at npmjs dot help.

Looked legitimate at first glance. Not making excuses, just had a long week and a panicky morning and was just trying to knock something off my list of to-dos. Made the mistake of clicking the link instead of going directly to the site like I normally would (since I was mobile).

Just NPM is affected. Updates to be posted to the `/debug-js` link above.

Again, I'm so sorry.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 15:49:04+00:00
> If something doesn't work then there's no need to ban it

Did you read the article?

Chemical weapons provide no benefit to a modern army. They do, however, to simpler armies. So the world's militaries, who command modern armies, came together and banned them.

Put another way, the U.S. military gains nothing from chemical weapons over high explosives. The Taliban, on the other hand, might.
by yepitwas | 2025-09-08 15:49:44+00:00
Yeah I've played more Mario Kart than Smash Bros. and am only a very-casual player of either (... but this surely describes the overwhelming majority of people buying and playing these games?) so I wouldn't claim with some kind of authority that Melee's the best Smash Bros., but all the ones since have felt way too fiddly for me and I didn't enjoy them at all, despite really liking the first two entries in the series (and especially Melee).

Another case where my "nostalgia" one is the N64 game, not Melee, so I don't think it's a nostalgia thing making me prefer the Gamecube version.
by jsheard | 2025-09-08 15:50:13+00:00
That's not true, the Switch version of Sunshine runs on an in-house Gamecube/Wii emulator called Hagi. Nintendo have always rolled their own emulators, although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.

Even if Nintendo wanted to use existing emulators, they wouldn't touch a GPL project like Dolphin anyway. They do use open source libraries in their games but never, ever GPL ones for fairly obvious reasons.
by kccqzy | 2025-09-08 15:50:56+00:00
That's not mostly because of a better ISA. If Intel and Apple had a chummier relationship you could imagine Apple licensing the Intel x86 ISA and the M series chips would be just as good but running x86. However I suspect no matter how chummy that relationship was, business is business and it is highly unlikely that Intel would give Apple such a license.
by abeppu | 2025-09-08 15:51:12+00:00
I think this is a distinction without a difference; if you use insulin from Novo Nordisk, what does it mean to "apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say"? Do you have an independent (small?) lab check that it is what it says it is, every time you fill your prescription? If not, isn't a measure of "trust" implicit in and required for use?

If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
by speedylight | 2025-09-08 15:52:25+00:00
Hey, thank you for linking the blogpost it was super interesting and aligns very well with my own theories/framework in regard to how we might be able to build a truly intelligent mind. I honestly wish I could be involved in this kind of research because I think I can have a positive impact on the field, I just lack the technical skills (for now) to conduct the research.

Anywho, I think JN Research is onto something with the Adaptrons/Primite and hope you guys are able to take it as far as it’ll go.
by yreg | 2025-09-08 15:52:41+00:00
I find it useful to underline the intrinsic properties of LLMs. When an LLM makes up something untrue, it's not a 'bug'.

I think that thinking of all LLM output as 'hallucinations' while making use of the fact that these hallucinations are often true for the real world is a good mindset, especially for nontechnical people, who might otherwise not realise.
by zbentley | 2025-09-08 15:52:51+00:00
Both are very good! I usually default to sharing the Bau Lab's work on this subject rather than Anthropic's because a) it's a little less fraught when sharing with folks who are skeptical of commercial AI companies, and b) because Bau's linked research/notebooks/demos/graphics are a lot more accessible to different points on the spectrum between "machine learning academic researcher" and "casual reader"; "Scaling/Towards Monosemanticity" are both massive and, depending on the section, written for pretty extreme ends of the layperson/researcher spectrum.

The Anthropic papers also cover a lot more subjects (e.g. feature splitting, discussion on use in model moderation, activation penalties) than Bau Lab's, as well--which is great, but maybe not when shared as a targeted intro to interpretability/model editing.
by jijijijij | 2025-09-08 15:52:56+00:00
You absolutely don't need sunburns to get skin cancer from sun exposure. In fact, any skin tanning happens as a reaction to oxidative stress and DNA damage/repair! Of course, the amount of tanning is dependent on genetics, some people hardly tan at all. But if your skin gets darker due to sun exposure, it is evidence of radiation induced DNA damage. Sunburns may contribute a bit more, but it's the overall lifetime exposure to UV radiation, which is the main risk factor (accumulated DNA damage).

However, melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, also sometimes develops in areas hardly ever exposed to UV light. Like inside eyes, or in the groin. Melanocytes originate from the neural crest and are spread all over the body. Due to their ontogenetic origin (loose tissue association), melanoma is always bad news, while other forms of skin cancer hardly ever metastasize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_tanning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanocyte

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_crest
by chilmers | 2025-09-08 15:53:04+00:00
“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” - Tom Lehrer
by inetknght | 2025-09-08 15:53:09+00:00
> Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

I've used both Teams and Zoom (and others). Honestly, I'd rather use Zoom instead of Teams.

> BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Status is settable by just about any competitor to Teams. Slack and Zoom both can set your current status.

Embedding pictures and files is also not unique to Teams.

Obfuscated links? Just a matter of time before Microsoft changes that to some microsoft link for a "vulnerability scanner" and then charges the company for the privilege to block random things it doesn't understand how to scan.

> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes / technically yes (not supported any more)

> Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Slack and Zoom are better at all of these.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 15:53:12+00:00
I don't think we're anywhere close to running cutting-edge LLMs on our phones or laptops.

What may be around the corner is running great models on a box at home. The AI lives at home. Your thin client talks to it, maybe runs a smaller AI on device to balance latency and quality. (This would be a natural extension for Apple to go into with its Mac Pro line. $10 to 20k for a home LLM device isn't ridiculous.)
by toast0 | 2025-09-08 15:53:22+00:00
Like o11c says, that's setting everyone up for a bad time. If the heterogenous cores are similar, but don't all support all the instructions, it's too hard to use. You can build legacy instructions in a space optimized way though, but there's no reason not to do that for the high performance cores too --- if they're legacy instructions, one expects them not to run often and perf doesn't matter that much.

Intel dropped their x86-S proposal; but I guess something like that could work for low power cores. If you provide a way for a 64-bit OS to start application processors directly in 64-bit mode, you could setup low power cores so that they could only run in 64-bit mode. I'd be surprised if the juice is worth the squeeze, but it'd be reasonable --- it's pretty rare to be outside 64-bit mode, and systems that do run outside 64-bit mode probably don't need all the cores on a modern processor. If you're running in a 64-bit OS, it knows which processes are running in 32-bit mode, and could avoid scheduling them on reduced functionality cores; If you're running a 32-bit OS, somehow or another the OS needs to not use those cores... either the ACPI tables are different and they don't show up for 32-bit, init fails and the OS moves on, or the there is a firmware flag to hide them that must be set before running a 32-bit OS.
by Nicook | 2025-09-08 15:53:39+00:00
Even if you want to stick with a western history based narrative, you can go back to the bronze age collapse before that. See ancient greek writing about how each progressive age gets worse (golden -> silver -> bronze -> heroic -> iron) .

Lost tech in China is pretty fascinating. There's archeological evidence of very advanced clocks that predate similar European ones, but they seem to have lost the knowledge on how to build it with the builder (City was conquered, clock was dismantled, his son was unable to reconstruct it). Meanwhile euros were able to push their knowledge forward more or less uninterrupted from the middle ages on.

Seems pretty clear to me that we could easily lose a bunch of knowledge again. Could even argue we're very close.
by autoexec | 2025-09-08 15:53:40+00:00
> Apple is a vendor, not a government.

Apple is worse than a government. They have more money and reach than many governments and unlike many government officials, the public doesn't have the power to vote the heads of apple out of office or vote for who they want as a replacement.

Apple didn't invent proprietary technology, but they leverage the shit out of it in consumer hostile ways just to take even more money from people.
by imchillyb | 2025-09-08 15:53:57+00:00
Seems as it would be easier to slip in some anti-training, and have the AIs screw systems up so badly that there is a 'recall' of all the current models. The LLMs and their corresponding systems crawl the web constantly. So, poison the well. Good data behind paywalls and credentialing and the poison pill open and free. Seems like it'd be worth a try anyway.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-09-08 15:54:14+00:00
Pre-training gets you GPT-3, not InstructGPT/ChatGPT. During fine-tuning OpenAI (and everyone else) specifically chose to "beat in" a heavy bias-to-action because a model that just answers everything with "it depends" and "needs more info" is even more useless than a model that turns every prompt into a creative writing exercise. Striking a balance is simply a hard problem -- and one that many humans have not mastered for themselves.
by TheCondor | 2025-09-08 15:54:15+00:00
It seems like these problems are related to software and a certain size of corporation that is selling it. VMWare isn't hoping to make a few $million, they want/need to make a few $billion. And it is absolutely a race to the bottom when you can get Proxmox for free. Nevermind Harvester and some of the other projects out there are are doing kinds of similar things.

I was a beta tester for VMWare way back when. It was one of the first pieces of software I bought out of college. It was like manna from heaven, I could commit to Linux and have a backdoor for Windows and I needed it, and I did from time to time. I also did security testing over the years and once you've joined a machine to a Windows domain, it never can be made the same again. Vmware enabled that business without a spare laptop or spending tons of time rebuilding it. I've maintained the license since then, 25ish years. Bought it for the Mac too. I can't think of a worse transition than the one they're doing.
by ryandrake | 2025-09-08 15:54:16+00:00
Yea, that's a much better analogy. We don't want the lock vendor to decide how and when we lock our doors and how we fix them when they break. We don't want our stove vendor to decide what food we're allowed to cook, how many burners can be running at once, and what parts we use to repair it. We don't want our car manufacturer to decide where we can drive our car and who repairs it.

Yet, somehow, when it comes to technology products, we accept the manufacturer butting in to tell us how not to use them, and how not to repair them.
by yepitwas | 2025-09-08 15:54:17+00:00
The ordinary game is pretty damn good, but all the tracks exist in one "world" and your character + kart are racing around it on autopilot in the background of the main menu. You can press a button to dismiss the menu and take over the kart, and start a free-roam mode of the entire game-world with all kinds of challenges and such to select from.

I'm not quite sure it displaces Double Dash as far as straight-up obsoleting it, but it's the first I've seen that brings enough good new stuff to the table that I'd at least sometimes choose it over DD, all else being equal. Every other one I was like "this is OK but I'd sorta rather just be playing Double Dash".
by yndoendo | 2025-09-08 15:54:47+00:00
Fun fact. The idea of strong national security is the reason why there are three companies with access to the x86 ISA.

DoD originally required all products to be sourced by at least three companies to prevent supply chain issues. This required Intel to allow AMD and VIA to produce products based on ISA.

For me this is good indicator if someone that talks about good national security knows what they are talking about or are just spewing bullshit and playing national security theatre.