MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmorgan | 2025-09-25 20:18:04+00:00
We did consider building functionality into Ollama that would go fetch search results and website contents using a headless browser or similar. However we had a lot of worries about result quality and also IP blocking from Ollama creating crawler-like behavior. Having a hosted API felt like a fast path to get results into users' context window, but we are still exploring the local option. Ideally you'd be able to stay fully local if you want to (even when using capabilities like search)
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-09-25 20:18:39+00:00
I see the conversation differently.

KPGv2 pointed out the phrasing of the 2nd amendment is not clear.

GLdRH said "Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly".

I said that modifying the literal text requires going through the amendment process.

You said "Comma rules change over time."

I reiterated that the literal text does not change except through the amendment process, and also noted that fundamentally the literal words don't matter much as it's up to a majority of the Supreme Court how to interpret any of it.

You then brought up modern language usages of commas.

I replied that how you or I today interpret the text is irrelevant because only the Supreme Court's opinion matters.

At no point in this conversation have I expressed a specific interpretation of the text, so your indication that I chose to tell the discussion about my interpretation seems weird and maybe you're misreading usernames somewhere along the way.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-25 20:19:27+00:00
> They occupy lands that once belonged to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. They aspire to occupy far greater regions. They are not interested in peace, only on expanding their borders. They continue to build settlements on what little land people still call Palestine.

Palestine is a relatively recent term. Long before that, the ancestors of today’s Jews occupied this region. We’re talking about the literal Bronze Age. The land NEVER belonged to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria.
by locallost | 2025-09-25 20:19:39+00:00
I don't know, personally never went there. But it doesn't seem to be throwing out babies with the bath water, as currently the case in the US. What their immigration policies are in general I don't know, but they are a knowledge hungry worldpower, and we are talking about scientists here. And as for the EU, my concern remains, there are way too many Trump copycats, and it's difficult to trust it will not go down the same road. The problems and root causes are similar. If I didn't have kids I would've left Germany for sure by now.
by edbaskerville | 2025-09-25 20:19:55+00:00
Oh, it's...very new! Thanks for the recommendation.

Another recommendation: the recordings by the multigenre saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu. It's insane. I won't give anything away, but in particular set aside some time to listen to the Menuets & Gigue from the first suite without any distractions.

https://yasuaki-shimizu.com/music/cello-suites-2/

I'm a cellist, played all the suites and always start with them when I return to the instrument after a hiatus. They've been analyzed to death, so my goal when playing is to avoid over-intellectualizing ("learn the changes, then forget them") and just try to take a different emotional journey each time (no way to say that without it sounding sappy), physically leading with my breath.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-25 20:20:13+00:00
> I never understood Starbucks

It's the McDonalds of coffee. There are lot of better restaurants than McDonalads for sure but a random restaurant could also be worse. So McDonalds provides some low common denominator consistency. Same with Starbucks, coffee may not be the best and sandwiches are so so, but you know what you're getting there.

I find myself there when I travel to another city and need to grab something on the go. I could sit down and start researching local coffee shops if I have time, but if don't, I can pop in and out of Starbucks and know exactly what I'll get.
by bccdee | 2025-09-25 20:20:20+00:00
You're talking about large-scale hyperexpensive infrastructure research projects with uncertain payouts, which is something that the state already excels at. Public grants are responsible for bankrolling an enormous amount of the research that gets done, and infrastructure projects are money-sinks with a very long timescale. I don't really see how this is an argument functions in favour of big corporations and against big government.
by jfengel | 2025-09-25 20:20:33+00:00
The first sentence of the article has important differences from the headline:

"Any attempt by Israel to annex parts of the West Bank would be a red line for the US –"

Israel is unlikely to annex the whole of the West Bank. There are a lot of parts that they plain don't want. So that statement doesn't mean very much.

But there are a lot of parts that they do want. They've been developing settlements on them. That is, by itself, a massive sticking point in diplomacy. They've already practically annexed them. It would be very significant if the US took a serious position against actually annexing them -- it implies that the US should be pushing hard on the virtual annexation as well.

So that would be significant, if it was actually said, and meant. But with this administration, it's not worth the paper it's written on -- and it's not written on paper. He may have said it (I gather that Macron isn't likely to have lied about that), but that means nothing at all.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-25 20:20:37+00:00
>if too much capital keeps flowing into holes instead of hospitals, bridges, or innovation, the economy produces less long-term value [...] not all spending contributes equally to future prosperity.

Mmh... In an absolute sense, sure, there are actions that destroy wealth. Like I if I buy huge reserves of minerals and smelt them together so someone else has to spend vast amounts of energy to recycle them back into a usable form, that's definitely harmful. Or as a more realistic example, if I build a factory to churn out millions of worthless gadgets no one wants, where the raw materials could have been put to something useful. These are things that objectively lower the total wealth of the planet, because they increase entropy, which requires more energy to reverse.

But if I dig a giant hole... I don't see how the same applies. If nothing else, I paid for the wages of the workers. How is the world poorer after I spent a trillion dollars to keep a few million workers busy for a few years? To bring this conversation around, in what way does a player transfer make the world poorer?
by kiitos | 2025-09-25 20:20:56+00:00
> But yes, not everyone can or will write good commits.

some people treat commits as meaningful units of independent review, and some people treat them as savepoints and the PR as the only meaningful unit of review, it's a distinction of process, not purity -- both approaches are totally fine, one is not better than the other

git and commits and prs are means, not ends
by bigyabai | 2025-09-25 20:21:01+00:00
At some point you have to earn user trust. If Ollama won't be the Open Source Ollama API provider, there are several endpoint-compatible alternatives happy to replace them.

From where I'm standing, there's not enough money in B2C GPU hosting to make this sort of thing worthwhile. Features like paid search APIs this really hammer home how difficult it is to provide value around that proposition.
by tzs | 2025-09-25 20:21:03+00:00
The Park Service says it was removed because it didn't match what was described in the permit application. They say it was taller than the permit said it would be.

This isn't the first statue the same group has placed there that was critical of Trump and the others all stayed up [1][2] so at least as of about 3 months ago you could put up artwork there that is critical of the administration.

Whether that has changed or it really was just the Park Service being sticklers about the rules remains to be seen.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/dictator-approved-statue-national...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/24/politics/trump-epstein-statue...
by pcrh | 2025-09-25 20:21:30+00:00
All assets are denominated in currency, so there exists no "shield" from inflation, except perhaps government-issued bonds that guarantee a return above inflation. Most so-called shields against inflation are investments that yield more than the rate of inflation.

The reason I used the comparison between wealth tax and inflation is to illustrate that modest wealth taxes in the order of 1% are not more onerous than many other influences on wealth.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-25 20:21:32+00:00
> it was a creation of the second world war

The modern state of Israel with its present borders were a creation of the Second World War. But if you go back in time to ~1000 BC, Jewish people occupied the entire region (much broader than just Israel), and they are the only surviving indigenous people of the region. This isn’t even controversial. Virtually all historians and scholars acknowledge this because there is literal physical evidence in the buildings at Temple Mount and elsewhere, which are all dated back to that time.
by palata | 2025-09-25 20:21:32+00:00
> But you can't.

Be careful what you wish for. We could enforce client-side scanning on the OS. Everything that appears on the screen is scanned and reported.

> If you sexually abuse children the hurdle to illegally running a non-backdoored messenger seems pretty low to me.

How do you contact children on mainstream messengers if you can't use mainstream messengers?

Not to mention that most people consuming CSAM are not technically savvy. It is known that such material goes through mainstream messengers.

> Only that surveilling your entire population minus the criminals has dire consequences for a free society.

Again: I am against ChatControl. We fundamentally cannot know what is running in this client side scanner, and that makes it a risk.

But saying that it won't ever catch a single criminal is not a valid argument. You won't convince politicians to vote against ChatControl with such claims.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-25 20:22:14+00:00
> It has always seemed to me that Starbucks has one thing going for it - consistency.

Absolutely. That's why end up going there when I travel and just need to get something quick. I may find a better coffee shop if I have time, or if I wing it, I may end up with some burnt horrible coffee and undercooked sausage (happened before) so I'll just opt to pay more to get the consistency. At home I just brew my own coffee as well.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-25 20:22:39+00:00
Classifying some spending as "mandatory" is a ruse to make people ignore the potential for any savings there.

The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?

The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?

These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
by basilgohar | 2025-09-25 20:22:43+00:00
No, Jews of today are ethnically quite diverse and have mixed significantly. There are several recognized heritages of Jews of today with known populations from North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, and also Europe. I don't deny the "Jewishness" of anyone, but say "The Jews" as if this covers all of them is wrong. There are huge swaths of Jews today that are anti-Zionist and consider Israel an abomination on religious grounds. That it is a religious goal to have a nation of Israel is a new idea driven by Christian Zionists more than Jewish ones and the political, areligious Jewish Zionists enjoy their support and will play any role to achieve their own goals. The recent newly emerging religious Jewish Zionists are a divergence from mainstream Judaism and a recent development that relies on a lot of creative interpretation and ignorance of Jewish religious texts.

And yes, Muslims and Jews lived over 1000 years far more peacefully than any time before. Jerusalem and the rest of the Palestine was at peace under Muslim rule except for the Crusades which, surprise, came from Europe.
by mft_ | 2025-09-25 20:22:58+00:00
Huh, it might be interesting if the size of each participant's image could be controlled programmatically, e.g.

* The more you speak, the smaller your square gets

* The square varies in size based on the emotion in your voice

* Your square gets larger the longer you've had your hand up without being asked to speak

* The squares change size to equalize the size of everyone's face on the screen, eliminating the effect of camera and distance

(I wonder if Google Meet is hackable, as it's delivered in the browser rather than an app?)
by mchiang | 2025-09-25 20:23:27+00:00
When we started Ollama, we were told how open-source (open-weight wasn't a term back then) will always be inferior to the close-sourced models. This was 2 years ago (Ollama's birthday is July 18th, 2023).

Fast forward to now, open models are quickly catching up, and at a significantly lower price point for most and can be customized for specific tasks instead of being general purpose. For general purpose models, absolutely the closed models are currently dominating.
by red_hare | 2025-09-25 20:23:30+00:00
I use Markov chains as an example of a "Small Language Model" in teaching LLMs.

My favorite thing about them is that you can use them to demonstrate temperature. The math is basically the same, and it has a similar effect of creating more creativity in the response.

from math import log, exp from random import choices # Likilihood of transitioning from of curr_word to next_word transitions: dict[dict[str, float]] = {...} def next_word(current_word, temp=1.0): if current_word not in transitions: return random.choice(list(transitions.keys())) probabilities = transitions[current_word] next_words = list(probabilities.keys()) pvals = list(probabilities.values()) logits = [log(p) for p in pvals] scaled_logits = [logit/temp for logit in logits] max_logit = max(scaled_logits) exps = [exp(s - max_logit) for s in scaled_logits] sum_exps = sum(exps) softmax_probs = [exp_val/sum_exps for exp_val in exps] return choices(next_words, weights=softmax_probs)[0] def generate_sequence(start_word, length): sequence = [start_word] current_word = start_word for _ in range(length - 1): current_word = next_word(current_word) sequence.append(current_word) return sequence

Some outputs of this when the transitions are trained on a lyrics dataset.

> print(" ".join(generate_sequence("When", 20, temp=0.1))) When I know that I know that I was a little thing that I know that I don't know that > print(" ".join(generate_sequence("When", 20, temp=0.5))) When I don't know you know I can do I see And the river to the light in the time > print(" ".join(generate_sequence("When", 20, temp=1.0))) When are melting Little darling, I feel more And if I was very slow (In control) For our troubles And

It's a lot more nonsensical than an LLM, but highlights what the logit manipulation is doing.
by IlikeMadison | 2025-09-25 20:23:37+00:00
>Developer eXperience

if all you can create are electron apps then you are not a developer.

>cross platform

many programs are cross platform, without the need of Electron.

>open standards

???

>easy compatibility with websites

Electron isn't necessary, e.g. Telegram.

>easiness to keep updated

not Electron exclusive

Electron exists for lazy "programmers" to make their products as fast as possible, without caring for code quality and their customers experience. This is why managers love it, it saves money: you don't need to hire proper software engineers nor allocate an appropriate amount of time to develop and maintain your product.

Electron is part of the enshitification of the web and the IT in general.
by the_af | 2025-09-25 20:23:41+00:00
Maybe! But I think the implicit netiquette is that when one is posting in a public forum, one should strive to make the message clear and avoid obfuscation [1].

To be 100% honest, what drew my attention to the initial comment is that I thought it was joke about the TFA: responding to an anecdote about cryptic machine (mis)translation with some LLM-generated mumbo jumbo! Alas, it seems not to be the case.

[1] though, I suppose, if one is trying to make the point that "all language refutes itself"...
by alkonaut | 2025-09-25 20:24:01+00:00
But politicians are - in general - neither evil, nor do they have any real incentive to ”control citizens’ thoughts”. It doesn’t make sense. They can be gullible. Non-Technical. Owned by lobbyists. Under pressure to deliver on the apparent problem of the day (csam, terror, whatever). But I don’t think there is a general crusade against privacy. That’s why I think it’s so infuriating: I’m sure it’s not even deliberately dismantling privacy. They’re doing it blindly.

This is pushed by parties that have a good track record of preserving integrity. That’s why it’s so surprising.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-25 20:24:14+00:00
> However, London is not just a capital city of England and the United Kingdom. It is a global city. It is the historical heart of the British Empire and the British commonwealth of 56 nations. [..] And because of all this, it is one of the most diverse cities in the world.

All those things (except the last) were true for London in 1961, when it was 97.7% white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London#Ethnici...

Edit as reply because apparently 4 posts in 2 hours is "posting too fast":

> I don’t see a contradiction, causal impact can unfold over decades.

The British Empire was considerable as early as 1815, so it's more like centuries.

In any case, it was the author that made a claim that runs counter to the evidence - the more the British Empire shrunk, the more diverse London became. The only justification he gave was "because of all this". It seems to me those four words are carrying a lot of weight, and need some elaboration.

For example, what, exactly, is the causality here, and why does it lag so much? What is it that makes it impossible for England to say no to immigration now, but it was able to say no for the preceding ~200 years when its empire was at its peak?
by jcranmer | 2025-09-25 20:24:26+00:00
I've written code to call 16-bit code from 64-bit code that works on Linux (because that's the only OS where I know the syscall to modify the LDT).

It's actually no harder to call 16-bit code from 64-bit code than it is to call 32-bit code from 64-bit code... you just need to do a far return (the reverse direction is harder because of stack alignment issues). The main difference between 32-bit and 16-bit is that OS's support 32-bit code by having a GDT entry for 32-bit code, whereas you have to go and support an LDT to do 16-bit code, and from what I can tell, Windows decided to drop support for LDTs with the move to 64-bit.

The other difficulty (if I've got my details correct) is that returning from an interrupt into 16-bit code is extremely difficult to do correctly and atomically, in a way that isn't a problem for 32-bit or 64-bit code.
by oofbey | 2025-09-25 20:24:31+00:00
I agree with you, but I don’t find the comment surprising. Lots of people try to sound smart about AI by pointing out all the human things that AI are supposedly incapable of on some fundamental level. Some AI’s are trained to regurgitate this nonsense too. Remember when people used to say “it can’t possibly _____ because all it’s doing is predicting the next most likely token”? Thankfully that refrain is mostly dead. But we still have lots of voices saying things like “AI can’t have a preference for one thing over another because it doesn’t have feelings.” Or “AI can’t have personality because that’s a human trait.” Ever talk to Grok?
by jfengel | 2025-09-25 20:25:07+00:00
He promised us "the" cause of autism. What we've gotten, even in the purchased expert testimony, is a minor contribution to autism at best.

So are we still waiting for the big news about what really causes autism? Everybody assumed he was gonna say "vaccines". He's got another week to go. Is this all we're going to get, or is there more?
by myth_drannon | 2025-09-25 20:25:23+00:00
Looks like the contracts are not going to AWS or Google but to Nebius (founded by Volozhin, who founded of Yandex).

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nebius-to-build-a...

"Google and Amazon, both of which already hold the $1.2 billion Nimbus contract with the Israeli government, originally received a preliminary tender for the supercomputer but ultimately withdrew from contention."
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-25 20:25:41+00:00
> and reading anarchist philosophy

That's literally how we got here. People got a taste of unmitigated unprecedented freedom online for the last three decades, and found it so gross that they allowed things to swing the other way.

Even one decade ago, the threat of SOPA/PIPA rallied the internet successfully. Just over a decade later, we're at the point of allowing age verification, for morality's sake, without hardly a peep. The cypherpunks are losing, hard, and honestly, deserve failure for how well their utopia turned out.
by palata | 2025-09-25 20:25:53+00:00
So what? If predators cannot talk to children over SnapChat, that's a win, wouldn't you say?

The only valid argument I see against ChatControl is that fundamentally, you cannot know what it is reporting. It's not like if there would be an open source list of illegal material together with the hashes, right?

If you cannot audit what is being reporting (with whatever means necessary to make sure it is doing what it should be doing), then whoever controls it could abuse it.

That's the problem. That's the reason not to implement it. But it's completely overwhelmed by the flood of invalid arguments.
by xg15 | 2025-09-25 20:25:56+00:00
The editor and generation scheme is really cool.

I'd like more info on the possible "operations" that form the font glyph though. First I thought it was all just choosing dots on the 3x5 grid and connecting them with lines, but there also seem to be "half-strokes" (lowercase i) and "rounded corners" that don't align with the dots (used for almost all "round" letters like O, C etc). Especially the latter seem to be crucial if you don't want all the round segment to look like diamonds.

So how do I do those things in the editor and are there even more of them?

Edit: Or is it really just 5x9 instead of 3x5 with only every second grid point visible? Lowercase "f" looks like that.

Also, it's kind of obvious you can't draw a "#" sign on a 3x5 grid...
by everdrive | 2025-09-25 20:26:54+00:00
Best feature for home depot (and lowes) is that you can always constrain your query to the store. And when you do this, each product's page will show the the aisle and row the item is located at. (yes, I know the smartphone app will help you here but 100% of smart phone apps are bad, as are those who recommend them) Just spend a few minutes writing down your items & aisles and go visit the store. Trust me, it's better. The convenience of delivery just is not worth the stupid roulette that online retail has become.