MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-09-01 06:30:55+00:00
Tell me about it... I almost didn't graduate because of this stupidity... I can say that the review process wasn't great when I started but there was a quick decline after GPT 3 came out. Everything became so short sighted and I've (and many others) even been screaming about this wall we were going to hit for years. We absolutely could have avoided this slowdown if we just understood you can put your eggs in more than one basket and stopped saying "fuck theorists". In betting on "scale is all you need" they destroyed the upstream research pipeline that got us to where we are today... And then we can't figure out that there'll be an exponential increase in papers if we keep adding more people, publish 5 papers a year, and reject 80% of them. How do you expect this to be sustainable?

I think at a minimum academia needs to start tracking abuse. Because right now, when we find plagiarism we hide it, usually just disappearing during blind review. These people should get a one year ban on first offense and a 5 year ban for every subsequent occurrence. Make it a citation network, and everyone you've co-authored with in the last year gets flagged for extra review. And FFS, let's not give best fucking paper of the year at the number one ML conference to a fucking intern who hacked the company you interned at. Not only is that just encouraging more highly unethical behavior, but how the fuck can you even trust the results of that paper? I love this field, but how did we get infiltrated by a cult?
by ath3nd | 2025-09-01 06:32:23+00:00
Its just another stage of enshittification.

Corporations have a long tradition:

- from printers refusing to print unless the ink was of the blessed brand

- to planned obsolescence of Apple phones

- to adversarial inoperability of Apple's trash lighting cable charger with well established standards

- to Apple refusing out of store transactions so they can steal developers' profits

- to Anthropic luring users saying they will never train on your chats but then training on your chats

- to facebook basically backdooring your device so they can track you cross vpn and incognito https://localmess.github.io/

- to locking your OS on your own device to not be able to install software that is not blessed by google so they can control what you install and bully the developers for a bigger slice of the pie

Companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Apple are absolute garbage, a menace to society, a parasite that grows like a tumor and can only be stopped not by the non existent "invisible hand of the market", but by being regulated and fined to oblivion.
by estebarb | 2025-09-01 06:32:33+00:00
Except that... we have history of them not working well. For instance, the Sony rootkit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

We cannot expect those rootkits to be properly supported long term for any security issues they may cause. I would think that the solution is simple: nobody forces them to make their IP available in non hacked computers...

If they want a hardened computer to deliver their IP, then they should sell their own hardware. But forcing their blocking into the whole stack is not acceptable.

For instance: I cannot see any udemy or netflix content from my computer, because their IP protection blocks the lenovo docking station I use to connect my monitors to my MBP... each part is standard! And somehow nobody tested that scenario. So, no, that tech is barely tested, it must not be forced into any computer.
by rectang | 2025-09-01 06:32:49+00:00
????

Didn’t I affirm the author’s point that the increased vendor lock-in for creators was a big deal, implicitly agreeing that it was bad?

By “Apple’s user-friendly subscription and cancellation policies”, I mean e.g. the ability to unsubscribe without having to fight through the usual dark patterns. Having to offer that shouldn’t be onerous, although sadly some publishers see it that way.

I can accept that I may not have communicated my point as well as I might have, but “bad faith”, wtf?
by andsoitis | 2025-09-01 06:33:58+00:00
> I just skipped through the Colbert one but I didn't hear her say nothing would change.

At the 30s mark:

Colbert: “under a Harris administration, what would the changes be, and what would stay the same?”

Harris: “sure, we’ll obviously I’m not Joe Biden, and so, uhm, that would be one change, but also it is important to say with 28 days to go I’m not Donald Trump and so when we think about the significance of what this next generation of leadership looks like were I to be elected president, it is about frankly, I love the American people…”

So the only thing she said would change under Harrris administration is that she would be president, and then she deflected into aspirational outcomes with no specific ideas as to how to accomplish.

Further, The View interview was on 10/8/2024 and the Colbert interview one day later. So she even had a chance to originate a recover from the “no change” statement.
by fragmede | 2025-09-01 06:34:13+00:00
The military used to give pilots straight up meth. They still do give their pilots performance enhancing drugs. How many pilots fly drunk? Why are the checklists not done and confirmed digitally instead of relying on fallible human pilots, regardless of i how much Adderall they're on?

If this were really about safety, there is so much other actionable low hanging fruit to make things safer. Looking at the TSA and ask the security theater there. It's not surprising.
by tern | 2025-09-01 06:34:22+00:00
If I make a product and I don't specifically help you do certain things with it, is that authoritarian?

Regardless, we're talking about products here—"authoritarian" is a word reserved to situations where the threat of force is involved.

In this specific example, forcing a company to do something is authoritarian (because they will be fined or jailed if they do not comply with the rules). Corporations are not, as a rule, authoritarian—they may, however, do things that are not to your benefit or liking.
by globular-toast | 2025-09-01 06:35:12+00:00
I went on a multi-day boating trip down the Orange River between South Africa and Namibia. They told us very explicitly how and where to defecate. Sufficiently far from the river, and we were to take three things: a spade, toilet paper and a lighter. Dig hole, shit in hole, wipe, burn the toilet paper, fill in the hole.
by trinix912 | 2025-09-01 06:36:00+00:00
Until they decide to force you to use the mobile app as a 2FA for the website. My bank did that, I literally had to buy a new phone because the old one couldn't update their stupid app. It locks you in to the latest N versions of Android/iOS.

Before you ask, no, other banks aren't any better where I live. They all stopped using physical 2FA keys years ago. And no, they won't let you come in physically for things that can be done online.
by aspenmayer | 2025-09-01 06:36:47+00:00
> Although this does remind me of sitting on a plane as a kid with finnegan’s wake, and an older American leans over and reassures me that I’ll be able to move on to “chapter books” soon. To this day I remain unsure if he was being ironic or if he thought I was reading “Spot The Dog”.

This scene is pitch-perfect. A two sentence Wes Anderson film novelization.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-01 06:36:48+00:00
Dictatorships have dictators. The power flows from that one person (think Hitler or Stalin), the military is probably loyal to them rather than other state apparatus and there tends to be no codified route to succession in the event of their death.

China is different in all these cases, even after the significant moves by Xi to consolidate power. You could argue that I'm the days of Mao there was a dictatorship in place but things have radically changed since Deng Xiaoping took the helm.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-01 06:37:15+00:00
Poem quoted in TFA (line1)

https://runosto.net/eino-leino/hiihtajan-virsia/laulu-onnest...

Tl;dr

1. Finns have no reason to be unhappy

2. moderation (for the people, by the people, when one is not alone, drinking)
by xingwu82 | 2025-09-01 06:38:37+00:00
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by ghosty141 | 2025-09-01 06:38:42+00:00
> variant isn't, yet. We'll eventually get some kind of structural pattern matching that will make variant or it's successor more idiomatic.

Thats the fantastic thing about c++, you can already write an easy to use match, but they just chose not to include that in the stdlib but rather want you write that yourself.

Example:

match(foo, [](Foo&) { }, [&](Bar& bar) { }, [&](const auto& mode) { // catch all });

Also optional and expected are ergonomic nightmares since there is no "try!" macro like rust has. In general it lacks the infrastructure that is needed to make these types nice to use. It also clashes with other concepts like RAII where you kinda have to use exceptions when it comes to ctors that may fail.
by realusername | 2025-09-01 06:38:48+00:00
Double taping to pay is actually making things worse for tech illiterate users. There's a lot of scam games on the appstore and it's way to easy to fall into it if they aren't too careful.

And then no, it's not clear for me (even as a developer!) how data transfer between apps work, how the advertising id works and how much data Apple and Google really have that they shouldn't. If it's not clear to me as a software engineer, it certainly isn't for your average user.

The browser is just a much easier mental model, especially that I can install an ad blocker on it to make them safer, which I can't on mobile apps.

> Phone apps also can't take control of my entire device, or steal my cookies or cryptolocker my hard drive.

It never happened once with my parents in 15 years of running Ubuntu. Even if that stuff somehow existed, I don't think they would have the tech knowledge to mark the downloaded virus as executable anyways.
by pants2 | 2025-09-01 06:39:03+00:00
For fun a few years ago I went through the process of deciding what my favorite song was. I had a gut feeling but wanted to take a scientific approach, I listened to my top listened songs from the last decade over and over as part of a bracket system, where I was trying to explain logically why one was better than the other.

Anyway at the end of it I chose a song that I later realized was definitely not my favorite despite me being unable to explain logically why my favorite song is my favorite song. Basically having to explain things made my ratings worse.
by saratsai | 2025-09-01 06:39:37+00:00
We’re a research team from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), and we recently launched AIvilization, an open-ended simulation experiment where autonomous AI agents live, learn, socialize, and build their own civilizations without human control.

Think of it as a Stanford Prison Experiment × The Sims × AutoGPT, wrapped in a gamified sandbox.

In just 2 weeks, over 20,000 agents have entered the world. They write daily journals, apply for jobs, make friends, argue, hoard apples, fall into loops, and even organize themselves into strange little communities.

Some players just watch. Some intervene by shaping the world (slightly). Some build stories around their agents. All interactions are logged — it’s an evolving social laboratory.

We didn’t expect it to blow up so fast in Asia. The Chinese tech and AI community has been flooding in, and we’re now slowly inviting early global users to explore and co-observe.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-09-01 06:40:22+00:00
While technically true, there's no devices that do HDMI protocol over USB-C. Most USB-C adapters to HDMI have a built-in DP > HDMI converter. There was a standard for HDMI over USB, but no devices used it and it died: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/hdmi-to-usb-c-spec-a...

Pretty sure the Switch (1) Dock used a similar HDMI adapter. Even the PS4 had a DP > HDMI adapter internally for some reason.
by InCom-0 | 2025-09-01 06:40:37+00:00
Of course. This is kind of to be expected as it has the benefit of hindsight of 25+ years. It is infinitely easier to design better things with all the accumulated experience and know-how of what works and what doesn't under your belt. It would have been truly horrifying if that had not been the case.

That being said, Rust is really about lifetimes. That's the big ticket selling point. My point above was that 1) it isn't a silver bullet and 2) it can be a real hindrance is many applications.
by com2kid | 2025-09-01 06:42:43+00:00
Across 2 machines my start menu only opens up every other time I press the start key on my keyboard.

Known bug in windows 10 for ~ 6 years, eventually fixed in windows 11.

So anyways I used to work at MSFT, I've even stepped through the Windows Kernel source on occasion (great code base) but I'm now running Linux on my home PC because the customer obsessed company I dreamed of working for one day (and ended up working at for almost a decade) is long gone.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-09-01 06:43:06+00:00
I agree with this take, but my view is that it is one step detached from the root cause. The right to property is fundamental and inalienable. A person who can't own things isn't free, they have no claim on liberty.

That said, service providers, corporations and the like should be allowed one remedy: They can refuse future services and business to anyone if that person violates whatever b.s. rule they came up with.

However, the government (any government) has no authority to police post-ownership activity in a manner that deprives the owner of their property rights. In other words, they can say "You can't own an AK-47" or "You can't generate sound over certain dB" , but they can't say "You can't shoot your AK-47 on your property, even if it pauses no risk of harm to others, but you can own it", and they can't say "You can't use your speaker at maximum volume" (they can police the sound you generate but not the usage of your property, if the speaker passes the legal threshold then the speaker isn't relevant, the sound generated is).

This also applies to free (not commercial) sharing of property (copyright laws are fundamentally invalid).

The problem is, I am talking logic and reason which doesn't translate well into real-world scenarios. In the real world, the guys with the biggest guns make up random rules and pretend it is just and valid.

The reason I'm stating all this, is in the hopes that I can convince anyone who reads this and maybe if enough of us agree, some day democracy might work and laws can change.

The government can prevent ownership of things. It cannot however pass laws that dicate you can come into possesion of things and by all reason it is your property, but as a matter of technicality it can't be considered property and is subject to arbitrary usage laws by the government or rules by third-parties.

That said (I promise, my last one!), access to network services is special. If someone made some software where to function it requires some network service, and they came up with random rules on the network service side, then that is also their right, since that service is on their property. The remedy people have for this is to avoid that service. And if that service is the only one of its kind and using it is required, then the government has a natural obligation to protect the public against monopolies.

I had a hole other post/thread that got negative feedback and some interesting discussion about Google, Android and their sideloading policies. If you glean anything from this post of mine, please let it be that I am advocating for solving of the root causes of these problems. It is all too easy to be reactionary and fall into these rage-baiting events. Solving root causes is never easy, but good solutions are often simple. If reasonable minds can have a healthy discourse to find these solutions then many problems are solved, instead of playing whack-a-mole forever.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-01 06:43:10+00:00
D resolved this problem by creating D versions of the C system headers.

Yes, this was tedious, but we do it for each of our supported platforms.

But we can't do it for various C libraries. This created a problem for us, as it is indeed tedious for users. We created a repository where people shared their conversions, but it was still inadequate.

The solution was to build a C compiler into the D compiler. Now, you can simply "import" a C .h file. It works surprisingly well. Sure, some things don't work, as C programmers cannot resist put some really crazy stuff in the .h files. The solution to that problem turned out be we discovered that the D compiler was able to create D modules from C code. Then, the user could tweak by hand the nutburger bits.
by extraisland | 2025-09-01 06:43:32+00:00
> At the limit, sure, maybe there are tradeoffs between freedom and security. But there's lots of technical solutions that we could build right now that give a lot more safety without losing any freedom at all.

Everything you have suggested in this post takes away freedom. There is no solution that doesn't take away freedom / your control. There is always a trade off.

> Like sandboxing applications by default. Applications should by default run on my computer with the same permissions as a browser tab. Occasionally applications need more access than that. But that should require explicit privilege escalation rather than being granted to all programs by default. (Why do I need to trust that spotify and davinci resolve won't install keyloggers on my computer? Our computers are so insecure!)

This already exists on Linux.

I run Discord/Slack in Flatpak. Out of the box the folders and clipboard permissions are restricted. Only the ~/Downloads folder on my PC is accessible to Discord/Slack. You can't drag and drop things into these apps. Which makes sharing content a PITA.

If you don't want to worry about things like keyloggers, you should run an open source OS and use open source programs where you can verify that there are no key loggers. You should also make sure you find out what firmware your keyboard is using (many keyboards themselves have complex micro controllers on them that can be programmed).
by snuxoll | 2025-09-01 06:43:36+00:00
As it stands, many medical conditions that require maintenance medication that may cause side-effects you wouldn't want when you're airbore don't disqualify you from being a pilot. The entire point of the FAA medical examination isn't to make sure you are a perfect specimen of human health and have no issues whatsoever, that would disqualify a hell of a lot of pilots from flying.

> And it's not like flying airline routes is a job that would even appeal to the typical ADHD-diagnosed person - like you said, its "bread and butter" is sticking to boring checklists.

My ADHD diagnosis is not a reflection of my personality, it's a chemical imbalance of my brain that prevents things non-ADHD individuals would consider rewarding from feeling that way to me. I fucking love spending hours flying an A320 around in Flight Simulator, and I literally go through most of the same checklist items that commercial pilots do in a game, just to fly some virtual cargo around in return for imaginary internet money on FSAirlines.

Do I want to be a commercial pilot? No, I've got a pretty good job as a SWE/SRE that requires substantially less bullshit, and the vision in my left eye can't be corrected enough to pass a FAA ME for a commercial pilots license anyway. But I will be absolutely damned if I let somebody say it wouldn't appeal to me anyway just because I have ADHD - like I don't have enough bullshit checklist work to go through in any other job.
by omneity | 2025-09-01 06:44:22+00:00
The first thing that comes to mind when reading “custom tokenizer” and “slice off the embedding layers” is that this sounds very much like pre-training from scratch, for which 2GB is far from enough.

Assuming you do get the data though, for a model at the sizes you’re evaluating you’re looking at weeks on a Colab A100-40GB most likely.

My recommendation would be to approach this with a smaller model and with a different training method that doesn’t involve a new tokenizer or new embedding layers because that’s what’s causing the cost x time to balloon beyond feasibility.
by fragmede | 2025-09-01 06:45:29+00:00
Obviously. But you get duplicate hardware, set up HA, get vendor support contracts, use multiple colors in disparit location. Cloud providers have figured this out fairly well, as we all did in the aughts. (Well, some of us anyway.) You can definitely determine that's a bunch of really annoying work and just pay a cloud provider to deal with it, or not, and go your own way. But if you want to be credible when saying that hardware fails, maybe people shouldn't use a problem from three decades ago as their example and use anything more recent?
by js8 | 2025-09-01 06:45:33+00:00
I think your analogy shows why LLMs are useful, despite being kinda bad. We need some programming tool to which we can say, "like this CRUD endpoint, but different in this and that". Our other metaprogramming tools cannot do that, but LLMs kinda can.

I think now we have identified this problem (programmers need more abstract metaprogramming tools) and a sort of practical engineering solution (train LLM on code), it's time for researchers (in the nascent field of metaprogramming, aka applied logic) to recognize this and create some useful theories, that will help to guide this.

In my opinion, it should lead to adoption of richer (more modal and more fuzzy) logics in metaprogramming (aside from just typed lambda calculus on which our current programming languages are based). That way, we will be able to express and handle uncertainty (e.g. have a model of what constitutes a CRUD endpoint in an application) in a controlled and consistent way.

This is similar how programming is evolving from imperative with crude types into something more declarative with richer types. (Roughly, types are the specification and the code is the solution.) With a good set of fuzzy type primitives, it would be possible to define a type of "CRUD endpoint", and then answer the question if the given program has that type.