MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-06 12:07:39+00:00
> Think about it like a multiple-choice test. If you do not know the answer but take a wild guess, you might get lucky and be right. Leaving it blank guarantees a zero. In the same way, when models are graded only on accuracy, the percentage of questions they get exactly right, they are encouraged to guess rather than say “I don’t know.”

To me, this seems to be an "US-American" way of thinking about multiple-choice tests. Other common ways to grade multiple-choice test that I have seen commonly are:

1. If the testee has the information that exactly one of N given choices is correct:

1.1 Give N-1 points for the correct answer, and -1 [negative one] point(s) for a wrong answer. This way, if the testee just answers the questions randomly, he will as expected value score 0 points.

1.2 A more brutal way if N>=3: the correct answer gives 1 point, all wrong answers give -1 points. You should learn your lesson only to give an answer if it is [alliteration unintended :-) ] correct (if N=2, the grading is identical to 1.1).

2. If there are possibly multiple correct answers, turn each item into choices of "yes" or "no" (with the option to give no answer). The correct choice gives you 1 point, the wrong gives you -1 point (i.e. as in 1.1).
by spot5010 | 2025-09-06 12:07:56+00:00
I've never understood the argument against lidars (except cost, but even that you can argue can come down).

If a sensor provides additional data, why not use it? Sure, humans can drive withot lidars, but why limit the AI to using human-like sensors?

Why even call it a crutch? IMO It's an advantage over human sensors.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-06 12:08:21+00:00
Is this actually a real problem? Note it says "forced Copilot features" and

> the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories.

but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it.

I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copilot` user but I looked at this users repos and their most popular one has a total of 3 PRs with no Copilot ones.

I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs.
by wahern | 2025-09-06 12:08:26+00:00
Ah. I guess it's only useful for an optimized router/firewall or network storage appliance, perhaps with a bespoke stack carefully tuned to quickly process and then hand the data back to the controller (via DDIO) before it flushes.

EDIT: Here's an interesting writeup about trying to make use of it with FreeBSD+netmap+ipfw: https://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2015/04/intel-ddio-llc-cach... So it can work as advertised, it's just very constraining, requiring careful tuning if not outright rearchitecting your processing pipeline with the constraints in mind.
by gcanyon | 2025-09-06 12:08:35+00:00
Power line theft was my first thought as well. I was just at the FDR library and one thing that stood out was how uncertain/experimental he was: we think of FDR's work as "public works, new deal, social security, WWII" but per the library he came in basically saying, "this is a hard problem and what we've been doing hasn't worked. so we'll try other things, and some of them will work, some won't. we'll do more of the former and less of the latter over time and get better at fixing this."
by cluckindan | 2025-09-06 12:09:04+00:00
Approved or not, the 1973 War Powers Act gives the executive branch the power to deploy troops wherever and whenever for 60 days + 30 days to bring them back, and the only legal fence is that Congress must be notified within 48 hours of said deployment.

Give US forces 48 hours of free reign in Venezuela and they will set the world on fire. Coupled with the right framing by the right reporters, Congress will give near unanimous approval for further escalation.

World War seems nigh inevitable at this stage. Better prepare to hunker down in that bomb shelter: refresh your stock of rations and gear up for the long haul.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-06 12:09:14+00:00
Musk's argument "Humans don't have LIDAR, therefore LIDAR is useless" has always seemed pretty dumb to me. It ignores the possibility that LIDAR might be superhuman with superhuman performance. And we also know you can get superhuman performance on certain tasks with insect-scale brains. Musk's just spewing stoner marketing crap that stoners think is deep, not actual engineering savvy.

(and that's not even addressing that human vision is fundamentally a weird sensory mess full of strange evolutionary baggage that doesn't even make sense except for genetic legacy)
by LilBytes | 2025-09-06 12:10:12+00:00
Queenlander here too. Yep, absolutely.

And the "water proof" sunscrean is even worse. I know it states on the label that it doesn't last forever, but the average person assumes it'll just persist and relayering it isn't needed as often as you'd think.

Sunscrean does work, absolutely. But if you need to be in sun for an awful lot of time, follow the advice of lifeguards, cricket players. Which is exactly what you said.

Clothing + zinc. In that order. Sunscrean every 1-2 hours for anywhere zinc or clothing can't be used.
by ozgung | 2025-09-06 12:10:25+00:00
This is not about _Large_ Language models though. This explains math for word vectors and token embeddings. I see this is the source of confusion for many people. They think LLMs just do this to statistically predict the next word. That was pre-2020s. They ignore the 1.8+ Trillion-parameter Transformer network. Embeddings are just the input of that giant machine. We don't know what is going on exactly in those trillions of parameters.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-06 12:11:11+00:00
Yes, it's a pretty weird notion. The only "rug pull" is wrt. ongoing maintenance of the project, but any maintainer may end up abandoning their own project for any reason or no reason at all. This is why essentially all FLOSS licenses have long provided for the right to fork the existing codebase under a new maintainership.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-06 12:11:19+00:00
Yes, Rust absolutely might memcpy your Big when you move it somewhere.

I will say that programmers very often have bad instincts for when that's a bad idea. If you have a mix of abilities and can ask, try it, who in your team thinks that'll perform worse for moving M = 64 or M = 32? Don't give them hours to think about it. I would not even be surprised to find real world experienced programmers whose instinct tells them even M = 4 is a bad idea despite the fact that if we analyse it we're copying a 4 byte value rather than copying the (potentially much bigger) pointer and taking an indirection

Edited: To fix order of last comparison
by mtndew4brkfst | 2025-09-06 12:12:10+00:00
Why does her hair color matter to you? Why is open source longevity and viability not on-topic for LWN discussion?

Dr Foster holds a PhD, did her dissertation about the Linux kernel, and has had a respectably long career in technology with a focus on open source and governance. The topic is literally straight in her professional wheelhouse.
by henningpeters | 2025-09-06 12:13:05+00:00
> why on earth would you waste precious bytes on schema every time

cbor doesn't prescribe sending schema, in fact there is no schema, like json.

i just switched from protobuf to cbor because i needed better streaming support and find use it quite delightful. losing protobuf schema hurts a bit, but the amount of boilerplate code is actually less than what i had before with nanopb (embedded context). on top of it, i am saving approx. 20% in message size compared to protobuf bc i am using mostly arrays with fixed position parameters.
by Timwi | 2025-09-06 12:13:17+00:00
A lot of the things you listed are already partially true of the EU. I wouldn't exactly call it fully decentralized, but I doubt many Europeans know by heart the name of the current EU president (I don't even know the proper title of the office) and they would fervently reject the notion of Europe as a single “nation”. Despite, I see more and more people (esp. in threads like this one) describing themselves as “European” rather than their nationalities and crediting EU laws and institutions ahead of their national governments.

I find this trend encouraging and I hope that one day we can see ourselves as humans ahead of any artificial groupings we sort ourselves into.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-06 12:13:21+00:00
Look at the bottom. That's a discarded light post. The arm and light at the top has been removed and it was broken off by the bottom. The construction crew likely left it where it was and these guys came along.

There's one in the woods near me that I keep meaning to grab but I don't really have a use for aa tapered pole and it's kinked pretty high up so....
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-06 12:13:42+00:00
People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now.

And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source.

This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one.

Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.
by bjourne | 2025-09-06 12:13:51+00:00
Yes, they kinda do. The computational graph you specify is completely different from the execution schedule it is compiled into. Whether it's 1, 2, or N kernels is irrelevant as long as it runs fast. Mojo being an HLL is conceptually no different from Python. Whether it will, in the future, become better for DNNs, time will tell.
by hparadiz | 2025-09-06 12:13:58+00:00
I recently got access to the premium version through work and was able to prototype something super legit in a language I don't really code in. It requires a heavy understanding of Linux and I had to rephrase my prompts in a "high level" way. However the result would have taken weeks and I was able to do it in a few days.

That said I would have a hard time justifying paying for it for my personal life because it's really that expensive. I look forward to 10 years from now when the local ML is good enough or free.
by LilBytes | 2025-09-06 12:14:39+00:00
This is what's strange to me, I've never, ever heard anyone here in QLD say "buy banana boat products", it's always said that it is shit though.

So, we, as a community knew to avoid them for an awful long time. I can't be specific about when I heard this first but I'm almost certain some one said this to me in the first 12 months I moved to Brisbane (from the UK) 17 years ago.

So, there's been an urban myth for almost, if not longer than 2 decades. And we're only finding out now that it's true? That's the most surprising part of this to me IMO.

Edit: sentence structure, words.
by BreakfastB0b | 2025-09-06 12:14:54+00:00
Except that's not from the frame of reference of the photon. At the speed of light, the Lorentz transform shows that 1) Time stops completely, 2) All distances in the direction of travel collapse to zero. So in a very real sense, "from the photons perspective" it never exists and the point it is emitted from and the point it is absorbed at, are the same point.

Experiencing time and having mass are linked in a very deep way. Objects that experience time, i.e. have some kind of state evolution, must have mass, this is how we know the neutrino has mass even though it's smaller than we can measure, because we measure them oscillating between the various flavours of nutrinos.

This is also how the Higgs mechanism gives rise to "rest mass" in most particles, by constantly exchanging weak hypercharge with them. This oscillation back and forth gives them mass.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-09-06 12:14:57+00:00
> During Microsoft's July 30, 2025 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub Copilot continued to exhibit strong momentum and had reached 20 million users.

Considering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric.

I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users.

I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.
by instig007 | 2025-09-06 12:15:12+00:00
> Let's say you want to add a new required field, if your system receives messages from clients some clients may be sending you old data without the field and now the parse step fails because it detects a missing field.

A parser has to (inherently) neither fail (compatibility mode) nor lose the new field (a passthrough mode), nor allow diverging (strict mode). The fact that capnproto/parser authors don't realize that the same single protocol can operate in three different scenarios (but strictly speaking: at boundaries vs in middleware) at the same time, should not result in your thinking that there are problems with required fields in protocols. This is one of the most bizzare kinds of FUD in the industry.
by dougnd | 2025-09-06 12:16:12+00:00
This project looks awesome!

In the US, many state governments have anti-indemnify laws that restrict the state government agencies (including state universities) from agreeing to contracts and agreements with such language. I'd love to make this available to researchers at my university, but I'm not sure I can click through such an agreement (similar problems exist with other LLMs).

It is Apache 2 and I don't see anything that prohibits another contracting party from agreeing to the Apertus LLM Acceptable Use Policy and redistributing with just Apache 2 and without the AUP. Maybe this provides a solution? Unless I'm missing something?
by oulipo2 | 2025-09-06 12:16:41+00:00
Additions and multiplications. People are making it sound like it's complicated, but NNs have the most basic and simple maths behind

The only thing is that nobody understand why they work so well. There are a few function approximation theorems that apply, but nobody really knows how to make them behave as we would like

So basically AI research is 5% "maths", 20% data sourcing and engineering, 50% compute power, and 25% trial and error
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-09-06 12:16:47+00:00
> I’ve been running pihole for 10-15 years, don’t even remember. Will take a look at Technitium. Looks like they have a Mac build, so I can just try it before attempting to replace pihole.

Likewise. I remember setting it up first in the mid 2010s when pis went mainstream. Although I've also used AdGuard home, but I keep a pi-hole running for 'high availability.'
by greenbit | 2025-09-06 12:17:04+00:00
You certainly could simulate time dilation, I'd be surprised if that isn't already an element of some game out there.

If you go close enough to the speed of light, what you actually see is that space appears to shrink (in the direction of travel) and the trip seems to take less time than light would, because you've apparently covered less distance. Of course what those on the planets would see is that time has been moving oh so slowly on your otherwise speedy ship. There are equations you incorporate into a simulation that would account for this. If the game mechanics were such that you could could see what day/month/year it is in local time, vs your ships time, it would quickly become apparent that bashing through the void is no way to get anywhere.
by Y-bar | 2025-09-06 12:17:55+00:00
That’s not the relevant law regarding which entity may classify, it deals with the ”yardstick” about what the government and SÄPO can use to be considered one. Did perhaps google translate not work?

The law which allow SÄPO to designate terror organisations is this: https://www.regeringen.se/regeringens-politik/utrikes--och-s...

Funnily enough this means that SÄPO generally consults with EU and UN regarding the classification status.
by lordhumphrey | 2025-09-06 12:18:12+00:00
As the other replies allude to, it worked at one stage.

This subjective and lovely history of the Great Firewall of the PRC was posted recently, about the to and fros in the methods of this kind of thing, and is really very good, if you're interested:

https://danglingpointer.fun/posts/GFWHistory
by acdha | 2025-09-06 12:18:19+00:00
Why are you trying to distract from the content of the article? I don’t know why her hair color is so triggering for you but she has a couple decades working in open source, multiple relevant degrees, is on the CNCF Contributor Strategy TAG, and is talking about some real issues affecting a lot of projects.

If you can’t get over her physical appearance long enough to engage with the topic, it’s healthier to leave the thread and do something else.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-06 12:18:30+00:00
Cop math, aka lying.

It's like when they say they found a bajillion bucks of coke by lying and projecting wholesale quantity of coke down to what it would retail for as nickle bags of crack.

Literally every stat institution does this sort of math slight of hand by default in situations like this.

They're probably using the most unfavorable triple OT, gotta close a lane, lots of people involved assumptions for labor rate.

I'd try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're quoting the base material cost but that math don't math. $36 probably only just barely covers a 6ft section of 6" I beam pounded into the ground for guardrail and certainly wouldn't cover a section of guard rail let alone a 3"+ pipe of steel say nothing of aluminum
by daemin | 2025-09-06 12:19:17+00:00
I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason.

As far as Visual Studio Code goes, I've not really used it much but it makes sense since it's Microsoft's free editor, so you will be a product and you will be marketed to. I do use Visual Studio though, and it does show Copilot in the UI by default, but there is an option to "hide Copilot" from the UI which does what is advertised. I will probably remove my important projects from Github though, but mainly so they are not used for LLM training than anything else.
by echelon | 2025-09-06 12:22:15+00:00
> commonly are subject to rug pulls

This open source purism is toxic. Projects have to be sustainable.

Hyperscalers have hoovered up the entire Internet and own the entire mobile device category. We're over here bickering about small developers writing source available / OSS-with-CLA.

If the community cares so damned much, they can take the last open version and maintain it themselves.

Please take all of this negative energy and fight for a breakup of big tech instead.
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-06 12:22:49+00:00
Coorelation does not mean causation.

I remember an old study linking ultrasounds to lefthandedness. It was legit. Families with access to ultrasounds lived in countries/areas where lefthandedness was more culturally accepted, places where it was not drilled out of kids. The study was correct, but anyone touting it as causation was totally incorrect.

Fyi, sharks are way more likely to attack people with australian accents. Never go swimming with an auzzi.
by daemin | 2025-09-06 12:23:16+00:00
Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc.

I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
by djoldman | 2025-09-06 12:24:04+00:00
This is why predictions of eventual AI failure due to copyright lawsuits are likely wrong.

Assumedly, an organization training and then distributing this model cannot be stopped via copyright or breach of contract lawsuit. It may be that folks will figure out copyright-free versions of text-to-image and text-to-video, etc., models as well.

It seems that there is plenty of copyright-free data available to train a useful model. Therefore, when content creators upset about AI companies training models on their content are asked about this model, they have nothing to do but shrug.

The cat is out of the bag.
by jgalt212 | 2025-09-06 12:24:43+00:00
The entire medical community is doing their impression of Shaggy, i.e. "it wasn't me!" But there are thousands of suffering parents and children and this lack of empathy really does nothing for no one. Another hand-wavy response I have heard is that given the new Autism Spectrum diagnosis, many more kids are now diagnosed with autism. That being said, none has even come up with a reasonably derived estimate saying that of the 5X increase in autism over the last 25 years, we can confidently say that nX of this is due to changing diagnosis standards. And if n is anything less than 5, the medical community has work to do in solving this problem and not passing the blame and accusing suffering parents of being crazy.
by hilbert42 | 2025-09-06 12:24:45+00:00
Nice if the process is not 'vaporware' and actually delivers as promised.

But I'm not yet convinced. Several things I find worrying, first is the absence of a technical description of the chemistry involved—one that'd instantly pique the interest of polymer chemists, second there are some unusual aspects of the Investor Presentation—web latest (PDF). Therein, is an unusually worded Preface followed by a very long two-paragraph statement in extremely fine print headed:

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FOREWORD-LOOKING INFORMATION

If I were an investor the wording of this document would concern me greatly. I'd read into it that this is a highly speculative venture, especially so given there is no real description of the chemical process(es) involved.

In short, I'd need a great deal more information before I'd be convinced that what Denovia Labs has is truly viable groundbreaking technology.

Caveat here, perhaps I've missed the chemical description of the process in all those links but why would Denovia be so secretive about its tech in its Investor Presentation and in press releases? Presumably, the process has been patented and thus protected before it began seeking investors.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-06 12:24:46+00:00
Unless you can sustain a fork, it is a rug pull if you’ve incorporated the software in other projects. Imagine if a non-trivial critical project like OpenSSL had this happen.

Shitty behavior like this is more common with software both OSS and commercial than in the past. Treat any meaningful software engagement like a celebrity marriage.
by xg15 | 2025-09-06 12:24:47+00:00
I'm starting to wonder if some of those bad design decisions are symptoms of a larger "cultural bias" at Google. Specifically the "No Compositionality" point: It reminds me of similar bad designs in Go, CSS and the web platform at large.

The pattern seems to be that generalized, user-composable solutions are discouraged in favor of a myriad of special constructs that satisfy whatever concrete use cases seem relevant for the designers in the moment.

This works for a while and reduces the complexity of the language upfront, while delivering results - but over time, the designs devolve into a rats's nest of hyperspecific design features with awkward and unintuitive restrictions.

Eventually, the designers might give up and add more general constructs to the language - but those feel tacked on and have to coexist with specific features that can't be removed anymore.