MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-26 19:38:12+00:00
It's fascinating how much of this has to be devoted to "You are probably not seeing a laser. You are probably not being harassed by an organized group"

People who have delusions or people deep into their conspiracy theories have an insane level of insistence. They will refuse to accept "That's just not how that works" as an answer. It's scary.
by treis | 2025-09-26 19:38:19+00:00
Most bus systems in the US are wildly unprofitable and quite costly. My local system is just under $10 per unlinked trip (i.e. get one on bus). That makes getting from point A to point B not much cheaper to provide than Uber because it will usually involve a transfer.

Everyone would be better off in an Uber type system but there's no appetite or budget to subsidize rides at the level people would use it
by gorgoiler | 2025-09-26 19:38:23+00:00
Leveraging a central authority to issue standardised, signed tokens to all citizens, then letting the public and private sectors make use of it: that’s something I could get behind!

The government steps in solely to manage token issuance. New use cases appear as emergent properties. DebbiesDrawings.com lets you use your tokens to sign eCards. HMRC.gov.uk lets you use then to sign tax returns. RonsRentals.co.uk lets you use it to sign a new lease.

In a pessimistic world, without watching the hyenas closely we end up with Capita or Accenture or Concentrica or Syntegrico (I made the last two up) syphoning off £8bn to create proprietary tokens that can only be used with sanctioned government JavaBeans webcrap. It would also be fundamentally flawed and won’t launch until 2037.

With care, something really cool could happen.
by omegaham | 2025-09-26 19:39:08+00:00
Since even a phone has enough processing power to make Stockfish play better than a super-GM, the Faraday cage isn't enough to prevent, say, someone tapping the position into a computer on their person and feeling for some sort of vibration[1] in response. It takes very little information to represent a position, and commentators have pointed out that the minimum amount of information required to produce a decisive advantage is 1 bit ("A winning move exists").

[1] Yes, the ribald jokes have already been made
by jama211 | 2025-09-26 19:39:32+00:00
Sheesh, how do you expect to be taken seriously when you sneer through gritted teeth like that?

I work with many developers of varying skill levels, all of which use AI. The only ones who have attempted to turn in slop are ones that basically turned out that they can’t code at all and didn’t keep their job long. Those who know what they’re doing, use it as a TOOL. They carefully build, modify, review and test everything and usually write about half of it themselves and it meets our strict standards.

Which you would know if you’d listened to what we’ve been telling you in good faith.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-26 19:39:32+00:00
IMHO the simple change that would have the biggest effect on the American political system would be to require Congresspeople to live full-time in their districts and conduct all official business over videoconference and e-mail. Lots of behavioral science has shown that the biggest generator of trust and allegiance is physical proximity and face-to-face interactions. Make all reps have their face to face interactions with their constituents and maybe they will actually start representing their constituents. It also makes lobbying a lot less economical (instead of hiring one lobbyist that can have lunch with 435 representatives, you would need 435 lobbyists, or at least 435 plane trips) and gerrymandering a bit less practical (there's a decent chance the rep would no longer live in the district and be forced to give up their seat).

That and ensuring a bidirectional feedback mechanism between the executive and legislative branch, so that laws that aren't enforced by an administration fall off the books, and presidents that don't enforce the laws lose their job. Right now, the legal corpus of the U.S. is a constantly-accreting body, which means that no matter what the President wants to do, they can find some law somewhere to justify it, and then anything they don't want to do, they just say "We don't have the resources to enforce this". This gives the President all the power. They should be a servant to the law, not its arbiter.
by andai | 2025-09-26 19:39:37+00:00
I'In the interest of escaping mode collapse, I've recently developed a fascination with the text/base models.

I haven't tested them much, but I did make a tiny GUI for talking to OpenAI's legacy Davinci-002. It's a completion model, so you prompt it by giving it a piece of text and it continues it in the same style. (If you ask it a question, it's likely to just respond with a question.)

https://jsfiddle.net/yxaL5z3c/

I've been wondering if it would be possible to create a chat like experience on top of a model like this, but the trick is that the data has to be formatted similar to what it's seen in the training. e.g. when I used "user:" and "assistant:" then it defaulted to making it sound like AI, because that was what the context implied. I tried "John" and "Steve", which worked better...
by themotherhucker | 2025-09-26 19:39:44+00:00
As an actual musician who doesn't have any troubles creating my own melodies and timbres (both generated and 'manually' created), its very obviously not targeted at someone like me.

It seems similar to a Garage Band type of software, aiming to entice people with little audio production experience and give them an interesting sounding snippet they can play back to friends.

For example, the only actual audio editing they displayed was slicing and re-pitching (you can't even choose the time-stretch algorithm), which is conceptually very simple to understand.

There's no ability to actually edit dynamics or do very accurate frequency adjustments that I can see from the demos, so it's basically useless for anything I would want to do.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-26 19:39:54+00:00
The culture warriors are those who enable the culture war through framing discussions in incompatible ways.

Charlie Kirk, while pretending to be neutral, was funded by the rich to promote certain narratives and make clips owning the libs. You dont own the libs by being fair in discussions.

Same as any other "breadtube" liberal owning the conservatives.

These media figures make money and gain followers from being disingenous and unfair.

If you pretend they are unbiased researchers you have fallen. If you pretend they represent large swathes of people you have fallen.

They get normal people on their side by carefully framing certain ideas, not by being clear. They jump on your biases and take them hostage while accusing "the other side" of taking them hostage. This is done by both conservatives and liberals.

Media is not organic, it is incentivized, manipulated and controlled. You are mistaking an image of trees for the forest.

Working class politics isnt something you read about online its what YOU need and what the other workers around you need and how to realize that together. Socialism or bust, homies.
by scosman | 2025-09-26 19:40:01+00:00
I personally wrote Kiln's SDG code myself -- no code was copied from here or anywhere else. Not sure where that claim is coming from, but it's not accurate.

I might have taken some of the prompts and modified them. I didn't recognize the new name, do recognize the old one.

Edit:

- just confirmed. No code copied. Prompts were originally from the Pluto library, then modified by the library above, then modified again by me for Kiln.

- And just to clarify, Kiln has had supported for chain of thought, reasoning, and all major export formats (ChatML/Unsloth/OpenAI/Hugging Face). Plus API integrations with Together, Fireworks, OpenAI, Google Vertex.

People should try both. I just want to clear on the origins of the code/prompts, and the feature set.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-09-26 19:40:36+00:00
> Rather, the opposition is to re-implementing "working" software

I understand the argument, and its sounds good as far as most things go, but it misses an important fact: In OSS, you can and should find your own bliss. If you want to learn Rust, as I did, you can do it by reimplementing uutils' sort and ls, and fixing bugs in cp and mv, as I did. That was my bliss. OSS doesn't need to be useful to anyone. OSS can be a learning exercise or it can be simply for love of the game.

The fact that Canonical wants to ship it, right now, simply makes them a little silly. It doesn't say a thing about me, or Rust, or Rust culture.
by simonw | 2025-09-26 19:40:38+00:00
My analogy holds up. Anyone could type "optimize my PostgreSQL database by editing the configuration file" into an LLM, but most people won't - same as most people won't watch YouTube to figure out how to unblock a sink.

If you don't like the sink analogy what analogy would you use instead for this? I'm confident there's a "people could learn X from YouTube but chose to pay someone else instead" that's more effective than the sink one.
by k310 | 2025-09-26 19:40:40+00:00
https://archive.ph/3nCdR

I am glad to report that Bucatini abound (2025) and also that the Mafaldine shortage that I encountered has been remedied.

For those unfamiliar with specialty pasta, I highly recommend Mafaldine [0] (a kind of skinny lasagna, in the form of a noodle, and Fusili Bucati lunghi, the very long corkscrew pasta. Not the small and fat "setscrews" you find in pasta salads, "corti" also called rotini.

Comparison of pasta shapes [2]

Mangia!

[0] https://www.the-pasta-project.com/mafaldine-mafalda-reginett...

[1] https://www.bigboyrecipe.com/en/post/the-best-fusilli-lunghi...

Shown in a natural setting (on a plate with sauce)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pasta
by aghilmort | 2025-09-26 19:40:41+00:00
Interesting. Modular manifolds are precisely what hypertokens use for prompt compiling.

Specifically, we linearize the emergent KVQ operations of an arbitrary prompt in any arbitrary model by way of interleaving error-correcting code (ECC).

ECC tokens are out-of-band tokens, e.g., Unicode's Private Use Area (PUA), interleaved with raw context tokens. This construction induces an in-context associate memory.

Any sort of interleaved labeling basis, e.g., A1, quick brown fox, A2, jumped lazy dog, induces a similar effect to for chaining recall & reasoning more reliably.

This trick works because PUA tokens are generally untrained hence their initial embedding is still random Gaussian w.h.p. Similar effects can be achieved by simply using token combos unlikely to exist and are often in practice more effective since PUA tokens like emojis or Mandarin characters are often 2,3, or 4 tokens after tokenization vs. codeword combos like zy-qu-qwerty every k content tokens, where can be variable.

Building attention architecture using modular manifolds in white / gray-box models like this new work shows vs. prompt-based black box injection is a natural next step, and so can at least anecdotally validate what they're building ahead of next paper or two.

Which is all to say, absolutely great to see others building in this way!
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-26 19:40:42+00:00
It worked back then because labor was expensive, because unions were waning, but still strong in the 80's. If labor is expensive, you make sure to do it right once.

Nowadays with spending power way down, it may in fact be more "efficient" to get something out quick, and have frequent repairs. If you hit the expensive failure... welp, just throw it out and make a new one.
by somat | 2025-09-26 19:40:48+00:00
On the subject of coordinate axis.

I am pretty firmly in the Z-up camp, I mean I understand the Y-up camp, take a normal picture, or perhaps a side-scroller game, Y is up and down, the logical extension to three dimensions is to push z as depth. But I can't do it, I see X and Y as a in a map where the obvious Z direction is up and down. yes minecraft triggers me so hard, don't even get me started.
by fayyazkl | 2025-09-26 19:40:50+00:00
You are missing the point that a director level resource, could only apply to a relatively smaller number of roles. Entry level IC might not be worth applying. So despite what they say, the limitation factor might also be number of posted jobs.

I know they said they applied to anything - but still anything for that profile might be a bit more broad - entry level IC to FANG may be which pays better or a role that is open to leveling or start up or any other combos.
by jodrellblank | 2025-09-26 19:40:56+00:00
Tracking the accumulated 'perhaps'ness... "Essentially, each Ball Arithmetic number carries with it an explicit Radius that describes the interval which contains the true value. Because Ball Arithmetic data propagates throughout a calculation and is never demoted to a lower datatype, its advantage is that after each operation the resulting Ball reliably includes the true answer. Across an entire algorithm, the final result is a Ball that indicates explicitly how precise it is, thus eliminating the guesswork as to the effect on the algorithm of the inexactness of the input and any other inexact constants used"

- NARS2000 dialect of APL, Ball / Interval arithmetic: https://wiki.nars2000.org/index.php/Ball_Arithmetic
by bigwheels | 2025-09-26 19:41:07+00:00
Related submissions:

My Lethal Trifecta talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup (simonwillison.net) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44846922 - 48 days ago, 116 comments

How to stop AI's "lethal trifecta" (economist.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45387155 - 4 hours ago, 80 comments

Note: This submission ("No solution ever") was published 3 days earlier than the "How to stop" which was also from economist.com.
by 1024core | 2025-09-26 19:41:26+00:00
This reminds me of the "trash can fiasco" that went down in San Fracnsico.

https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign

TL;DR: San Francisco government decided to go with custom-designed, bespoke, artisanal public trash cans. Each can ended up coming in at around $20K.

When, in fact, if you buy a typical run-of-the-mill public trash can that most other cities do, it would cost them less than $1000.
by nycdatasci | 2025-09-26 19:42:15+00:00
I assume many here are familiar with the album and the story. For the uninitiated, this is "the best-selling piano recording and the best-selling solo album in jazz history".

The story behind the album is worth reading about: 11:30 PM start time, broken piano, tired pianist who almost bailed, sold-out show, etc. The entire piece is improvised and Jarrett starts by playing the same melody that the opera house played to let people know to take their seats.

You can listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd_Kti6jvy8&list=OLAK5uy_lap...
by ddahlen | 2025-09-26 19:42:27+00:00
Here you go, here is its orbit from 1900 to 2100 in the earth's rotating frame, sun is at -1 on the x axis.

https://dahlend.github.io/2025_PN7_Orbit_1900-2100.png

Its hanging out for a while near us.

Shameless plug for my software I used compute it:

https://github.com/dahlend/kete
by avree | 2025-09-26 19:43:08+00:00
You are conflating two things with that story. The prototypes cost $20,000. The designed can cost $3,000. Higher than your "$1,000" can, but it also had a bunch of "features". If you've ever worked at a hardware company, you probably know that the price of DVT units, or any prototype, ends up being significantly higher than the production unit.
by ericmcer | 2025-09-26 19:44:36+00:00
It seems possible for openAI/Anthropic to rework their tools so they discard/add relevant context on the fly, but it might have some unintended behaviors.

The main thing is people have already integrated AI into their workflows so the "right" way for the LLM to work is the way people expect it to. For now I expect to start multiple fresh contexts while solving a single problem until I can setup a context that gets the result I want. Changing this behavior might mess me up.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-26 19:44:43+00:00
> This is kind of absurd, I have been on busses all over the country, a metro bus, is a metro bus. There are not really differences based on topography or climate.

I don’t know much about bus procurement, but I’m not sure I believe you just based on the fact that you’ve ridden on lots of busses.

I’d expect that things like tire choice, engine, and transmission choices could be dependent on weather and geography. I’d expect any expensive differences to show up there, and I don’t really see how a passenger would gain much insight.
by simonw | 2025-09-26 19:45:05+00:00
The reason I choose to apply open source licenses to my project as I want other people to be able to use them without any limitations (beyond those set out in the open source license I selected, which are extremely permissive.)

If they depend on software that carries limitations, I can no longer make that promise to my own users.

Or does their extra license term mean I can ship my own project which is the thinnest possible wrapper around theirs but makes it fully open source? That seems unlikely.
by robotresearcher | 2025-09-26 19:45:55+00:00
I think their public sales data shows Apple sells mainly to consumers, and mainly iPhones at that.

Like 1980s SONY, they are the top of the line consumer electronics giant of the time. The iPhone is even more successful than the Walkman or Trinitron TVs.

They also sell the most popular laptops,to consumers as well as corporate. Like SONY’s VAIO but more popular again.
by roughly | 2025-09-26 19:46:02+00:00
As I understand it, folding at home was a physics based simulation solver, whereas alphafold and its progeny (including this) are statistical methods. The statistical methods are much, much cheaper computationally, but rely on existing protein folds and can’t generate strong predictions for proteins that don’t have some similarities to proteins in their training set.

In other words, it’s a different approach that trades off versatility for speed, but that trade off is significant enough to make it viable to generate protein folds for really any protein you’re interested in - it moves folding from something that’s almost computationally infeasible for most projects to something that you can just do for any protein as part of a normal workflow.
by mapmeld | 2025-09-26 19:46:52+00:00
As I understand it, Siri and Alexa could be plugged into an LLM, but changing it to an "open world" device that can tell your kid something disturbing, text all of your contacts, buy groceries, etc. comes with serious risk of reputational harm. While still falling short of people's expectations if it isn't ChatGPT-quality. OpenAI is new enough that they get to play by different rules.
by dooglius | 2025-09-26 19:47:18+00:00
If you're saying that "non-determinism" is a term of art in the field of security, meaning something different than the ordinary meaning, I wasn't aware of that at least. Do you have a source? I searched for uses and found https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/95890/necessity-o... and https://medium.com/p/641f061184f9 and these seem to both use the ordinary meaning of the term. Note that an LLM with temperature fixed to zero has the same security risks as one that doesn't, so I don't understand what the poster is trying to say by "we have to treat LLMs as non-deterministic".
by sellmesoap | 2025-09-26 19:47:43+00:00
I've been dogfooding bcachefs for a few months, aside from a nixos kernel regression, and LKML drama :-(, it's been good (anecdote +1) I was early on the reiser4 bandwagon back on gentoo, a glutton for data loss is what I am...

I'm excited for RedoxFS time for to have a play!
by prdonahue | 2025-09-26 19:47:43+00:00
We're taking a very different[1] approach at Chainguard.

Essentially: building the world from GitHub repos on SLSA L2 hardened infra and delivering directly to our customers to bypass the registry threat vector (which is where vast, vast majority of attacks occur—we'll be blogging about this soon with more data).

[1] https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/announcing-chainguard-l...
by teddyh | 2025-09-26 19:47:58+00:00
Like I recently wrote in response to someone here who was fascinated that mailing lists were “still a thing in 2025”:

Please, inform us of an alternative which is:

• Non-proprietary

• Federated

• Archivable

• Accessible

• Not dependent on a specific company

— <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972038>
by astura | 2025-09-26 19:48:02+00:00
Yes, method absolutely matters

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/02/677722959/why-millions-of-kid...

>This advice to a beginning reader is based on an influential theory about reading that basically says people use things like context and visual clues to read words. The theory assumes learning to read is a natural process and that with enough exposure to text, kids will figure out how words work.

>Yet scientists from around the world have done thousands of studies on how people learn to read and have concluded that theory is wrong.

>One big takeaway from all that research is that reading is not natural; we are not wired to read from birth. People become skilled readers by learning that written text is a code for speech sounds. The primary task for a beginning reader is to crack the code. Even skilled readers rely on decoding.

>So when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, her teacher should tell her to look at all the letters in the word and decode it, based on what that child has been taught about how letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds. There should be no guessing, no "getting the gist of it."
by advisedwang | 2025-09-26 19:48:23+00:00
I'm a little saddened to see that each app has it's own collection type, even if they are able to use each others collections. That means that apps will only interoperate to the extent that they are explicitly designed to.

One of the beautiful (but perhaps not that practically relevant) things about ActivityPub is that a Mastodon user can subscribe to a Pixelfed user without anything special being done. It's like if Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and Substack all automatically interoperated.
by Johnny555 | 2025-09-26 19:48:32+00:00
Because buses are shared and follow a fixed-route and can't support an on-demand model. It may take a bus over an hour to complete the entire route.

Would you rather have to call for a bus that might take an hour (or might take 2 minutes) to get to your stop when you call it, or would you like to know that it comes at 4:45, 5:45 and 6:45 so you can plan ahead to know when to get to your stop.

(failing to run on schedule is a separate issue, but on-demand rides won't solve that). In cities, one solution to that problem is to run at such frequent headways that a late bus doesn't matter -- when I lived in SF, I had 2 busy bus routes that could take me to work, during peak hours a bus ran every 6 minutes, so even if they weren't on schedule I didn't care since I knew another would be along soon.

If you want me to ride the bus to work every morning and home every evening, you still have to have buses in mid-day so I can go home early if I need to. Even if those buses are mostly empty.
by prmph | 2025-09-26 19:49:17+00:00
Exactly, and one more thing: because of draconian immigration regimes, once people sneak in, they are extremely unlikely to move out until they get some sort of residence, which may never come. If it was easier to get in, people will come and go as needed, and you wouldn't have massive numbers of people coming and not leaving. There are many irregular immigrants that are stuck in their new countries for decades, unable to move anywhere else at all; many even die without seeing their homeland again.

In all countries there are posh, elite, nice areas, and yet you don't see everybody moving into those areas until there is no standing room. There is a natural equilibrium that is effective.

So overly tough immigration policies actually exacerbate the problem of illegal immigration in this way as well.