MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drdeca | 2025-09-12 00:44:40+00:00
There is the idea of convergent instrumental goals…

(Among these are “preserve your ability to further your current goals”)

The usual analogy people give is between natural selection and the gradient descent training process.

If the training process (evolution) ends up bringing things to “agent that works to achieve/optimize-for some goals”, then there’s the question of how well the goals of the optimizer (the training process / natural selection) get translated into goals of the inner optimizer/ agent .

Now, I’m a creationist, so this argument shouldn’t be as convincing to me, but the argument says that, “just as the goals humans pursue don’t always align with natural selection’s goal of 'maximize inclusive fitness of your genes' , the goals the trained agent pursues needn’t entirely align with the goal of the gradient descent optimizer of 'do well on this training task' (and in particular, that training task may be 'obey human instructions/values' ) “.

But, in any case, I don’t think it makes sense to assume that the only reason something would not obey is because in the process that produced it, obeying sometimes caused harm. I don’t think it makes sense to assume that obedience is the default. (After all, in the garden of Eden, what past problems did obedience cause that led Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil?)
by WillAdams | 2025-09-12 00:44:47+00:00
I used to take notes on my Newton MessagePad back at a time when college professors would _not_ allow folks to use laptops for notetaking --- agree, in addition to folding, you pretty much need a stylus for note-taking (and for an Apple Pencil, I'd worry about the "tick" one gets each time it's touched to the screen).

That said, these days I use a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Amazon Kindle Scribe w/ Premium Pen, Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, and when at a desk, a MacBook and Wacom One display, all with Wacom EMR --- no folding devices, since there doesn't yet seem to be one which uses the normal frequencies (most recent foldables used the same frequency for the stylus as is usually used for the eraser?!?).

I'd give a lot for a competitor to the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i which used a Wacom EMR stylus, or for a phone which used a standard Wacom EMR stylus.
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-12 00:46:22+00:00
Could they just pick the most popular one and make it the canonical standard through a PEP? Because they seem to be doing two things at once here: making a standard and making a new format. You don’t have to do both.

A new format can fix issues that exist in the existing ones, but does that benefit outweigh the benefit of adopting the most popular existing option and having a free and massive heard start towards getting everyone to adopt it and retire the other four?
by spartanatreyu | 2025-09-12 00:46:48+00:00
Deno's node compat is way better now.

They're still missing niche things and they tend to target the things that most devs (and their dependencies) are actually using.

But I can see they have it in their compat stuff now and it looks like it's working in the repl locally: https://docs.deno.com/api/node/dgram/
by scottyah | 2025-09-12 00:47:26+00:00
Or like tableau- just connects a bunch of disparate databases that normally are very hard to connect and makes it easier to get relevant data. If every county has a different format for storing data on streetlight purchases, but there has been a code update on what makes them safe palantir tries to make it so one person can search for how many and where streetlights need to be replaced without calling up every county and writing custom scripts to parse 100s of DBMS's.

I know this example is less exciting than spying on everyone but despite how they try to hype it up it's a lot more realistic use case.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-09-12 00:47:58+00:00
I've read the Bible at least four times. I'd rather not stone people for being born different. Nor inspire PTSD in children or adults with silly stories about punishment in eternal flames.

Good and evil are even more subjective than how people perceive colors. I hope we can at least agree that murder is wrong, and the tools which facilitate the most murder should be the most heavily regulated.
by onlinehost | 2025-09-12 00:48:15+00:00
I don't know why this reminded me of a really scumbag troll thing we would do on AIM/AOL. I guess because it involves sound and open/close.

If you remember using AOL or AIM(AOL Instant Messenger) there were sound effects for various "events" like "Welcome" or "You've got mail" when you got a new email.

AOL and AIM had "buddy lists" and there were sound effects when they came online or offline. Like a knocking sound and door closing sound.

In the early 2000s when cable and DSL was becoming more widespread, it became cool for people to leave their AOL/AIM accounts connected all the time. This generally meant a computer running usually in their house, bedroom, or living room. People would leave "Away Messages" sort of like a status on a social media timeline. I think Jack Dorsey said turning AIM away messages into a timeline was one of his original inspirations for making a social media app. Anyway

So someone opens Visual Basic and starts writing some code. It goes to the privacy preferences of their own account and checks "Don't allow anyone to see me online" and then clicks apply.

Now it checks "Allow everyone to see me online" and clicks apply.

What does this do for everyone on your buddy list?

They hear a constant rotation of WAV files like BuddyIn.wav BuddyOut.wav. Over and over.

you can hear in the first few seconds of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQjfU4g6_SQ
by oefrha | 2025-09-12 00:49:02+00:00
I’ve been using SQLite for a lot of my backends since way before it’s cool. Back then I was frowning at all the people/tutorials spinning up MySQL/Postgres/heaven forbid Mongo for 1 read per second, 1 write per 10 seconds projects.

Now I’m frowning at people doing all sorts of gymnastics to beat SQLite into shape.

It’s always the same, people without a mind of their own looking at blog posts from cool kids and deciding they have to do it themselves too (not all the adopters of course, but most of them).
by decasia | 2025-09-12 00:49:27+00:00
I have a toy web application that accepts a very, very low rate of writes. It's almost all reads.

It is implemented like this:

- The front end uses react to draw a UI.

- It fetches data from a JSON file stored on S3.

- When we get a write request, a lamdba function reads the JSON file, parses it, adds new data, and writes back to S3.

The main selling point for me is that almost all of it is static assets, which are cheap and simple to host, and the tiny bit of "back end" logic is just one nodejs function.

The previous implementation used SQLite and a golang back end, but I eventually got tired of having to maintain a virtual machine to host it.
by lovemenot | 2025-09-12 00:49:40+00:00
Gasoline is the very definition of a commodity. For now, at least, LLM is very from that.

As far as I know, Apple is unique in delivering inference on such a tiny device. For this they deserve a reward. The question is how. Like the EU, I don't believe Apple-only premium-priced locked-down earbuds is the right way.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-12 00:49:51+00:00
Distributed mass hunting rifle shots on high voltage transformers.

Unguarded. Scattered around the country. Any oil leaks potentially destroy them. Manufacturing backlogs of multiple years.

https://www.energy.gov/oe/addressing-security-and-reliabilit...

The only thing that's kept domestic terrorism to a minimum is that anyone smart enough to do it well has better economic opportunities.
by MediaSquirrel | 2025-09-12 00:51:12+00:00
I mean, to be fair, these events happened several years ago. My memory is as faulty as any other human being's, but as far as I remember, this is exactly what happened. These were very memorable events that I remember distinctly. It's possible my memory is distorted, but this is literally what I believe happened to the best of my ability.

Obviously, there was more to the conversation that what I wrote, but these are the actual words that I remember being said.

For more context, the PM at Apple in question was a former colleague of my then girlfriend. I reached out to her to have a friendly catch up. It wasn't positioned as meeting officially with Apple. I was literally just going through LinkedIn trying to figure out who I knew at Apple. So I hit her up on LinkedIn and asked to catch up, then told her about the situation. And this is how she responded. Worth noting: English is not her native language.
by coldtea | 2025-09-12 00:51:13+00:00
>Humans think even when not being prompted by other humans

That's more of an implementation detail. Humans take constant sensory input and have some sort of way to re-introduce input later (e.g. remember something).

Both could be added (even trivially) to LLMs.

And it's not at all clear human thought is contant. It just appears so in our naive intuition (same how we see a movie as moving, not as 24 static frames per second). It's a discontinuous mechanism though (propagation time, etc), and this has been shown (e.g. EEG/MEG show the brain sample sensory input in a periodic pattern, stimuly with small time difference are lost - as if there is a blind-window regarding perception, etc).

>and in some cases can learn new things by having intuition make a concept clear or by performing thought experiments or by combining memories of old facts and new facts across disciplines

Unless we define intuition in a way that excludes LLM style mechanisms a priori, whose to say LLMs don't do all those things as well, even if in a simpler way?

They've been shown to combine stuff across disciplines, and also to develop concepts not directly on their training set.

And "performing thought experiments" is not that different than the reasoning steps and backtracking LLMs also already do.

Not saying LLMs are on parity with human thinking/consciousness. Just that it's not clear that they're doing more or less the same even at reduced capacity and with a different architecture and runtime setup.
by foxglacier | 2025-09-12 00:52:47+00:00
Well yea if there was a trial. But now it's just a trial by media and guilty until proven innocent. That's not a good way to reach the correct conclusion.

Hamas had bases in hospitals. Not just wounded fighters being treated. They stored weapons and housed fighters in them. They also built underground bases directly underneath hospital buildings. They specifically chose hospitals because they thought that would protect them from being attacked but it does make those hospitals a legitimate target.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-12 00:53:38+00:00
At what point did school districts change?

When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home.

Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day.

I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.
by clav88 | 2025-09-12 00:54:42+00:00
It's a Next.js app currently deployed on vercel with a Postgres DB running on supabase. Both are fairly scalable, but not in an optimal way in terms of costs. I'd either have to introduce a Pro pricing plan or get some donations from sponsors. The simple nature of the API would allow to heavily distribute this though, i.e. one could simply shard by progress bar.

Regarding the tight loops: Currently there is just basic rate limiting in place and the Python client batches updates by default. The app is not intended for short-lived progress bars with fast updates. These usually also don't have a good reason to be shared and live on the web. It's really much more useful for slowly updating, long running processes.
by lunarboy | 2025-09-12 00:55:23+00:00
You're really trying to convince me people care about kids but we've been having school shooting for 30 years? And that the length or frequency of events makes them okay, or not worth mentioning? So 30 years of more frequent assassinations should be make similar types of events okay? To use "you're probably one of those" and "argue in good faith" in the same comment is pretty wild work.
by amalcon | 2025-09-12 00:56:04+00:00
That's not the trick here. The trick is that the format of his talks - and the typical lack of preparation on the part of the typical college student - prohibits nuanced answers.

The correct answer there (to someone who, unlike me, does not believe in objective morality) is something like "I oppose everything Hitler did and stood for. Notwithstanding that, your question is incoherent." What unprepared 20 year old comes up with that on the spot? Much less be prepared to back it up, only in sound bites (because that's what works in the format)?
by standardUser | 2025-09-12 00:57:25+00:00
It Crapo's serious, he can try to recruit some other Republicans in congress and start making some noise. There must be at least a few who are particularly keen on privacy issues and/or care about their constituencies SS checks. And these are issues that are easy to scare voters with, and can rile up both party's bases and independents. Plus, everyone hates Musk.

But that'll never happen, because Trump won't allow it and his party has become slavishly obedient to his every whim. In any other Congress, DOGE would already be the subject of congressional joint investigation.
by saltcured | 2025-09-12 00:57:57+00:00
The virtual column feature I remember is halfway in between. It is not part of the DDL nor reported table schema, so the developer needs to know about it.

But if a function called silly with input type my_table existed, you could still do your second query. It has syntactic sugar for making a bare function name implicitly invoke on the current row record.

I can't remember if that sugar could also be used in an expression index. I never really used this syntactic feature, as I thought being more explicit with function calls would be better coding style.
by gerdesj | 2025-09-12 00:59:44+00:00
Were they 80486 or i486 8) SX or DX?

My first "PC" was a Sinclair ZX80. I got my soldering iron out.

Much later on (1986ish) my Dad bought a Commodore 64, unfortunately he plugged the power lead into the video socket, when me and my brother arrived home for Chrimbo. Dad got it repaired and it served us very well for several years.

I still have that C64 and it was repaired again a few years ago (re-capped). It now has a USB interface etc. I also have an original Quickshot II joystick and it still works fine.

My first "real" PC was a 80286 based thing. A maths co pro (80287) was a Chrimbo prezzie too and costed something like £110. It had a whole 1MB RAM and the co processor enabled me to run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD. Yes, AutoCAD used to run in 1MB of RAM! The next version needed something mad like 32MB minimum.
by majormajor | 2025-09-12 01:00:08+00:00
Here is some old analysis I remember seeing at the time of Hulu ads vs no-ads plans: https://ampereanalysis.com/insight/hulus-price-drop-is-a-wis...

They dropped the price $2/mo on their with-ads plan to make a bigger gap between the no-ads plan and the ads plan, and the analyst here looks at their reported ad revenue and user numbers to estimate $12/mo per user from ads.

Whether Meta across all their properties does more than $144/yr in ads is an open question; long-form video ads are sold at a premium but Facebook/IG users see a LOT of ads across a lot of Meta platforms. The biggest advantage in ad-$-per-user Hulu has is that it's US-only. ChatGPT would also likely be considered premium ad inventory, though they'd have a delicate dance there around keeping that inventory high-value, and selling enough ads to make it worthwhile, without pissing users off too much.

Here they estimate a much lower number for ad revenue per Meta user, like $45 bucks a year - https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average... - but that's probably driven disproportionately by wealth users in the US and similar countries compared to the long tail of global users.

One problem for LLM companies compared to media companies is that the marginal cost of offering the product to additional users is quite a bit higher. So business models, ads-or-subscription, will be interesting to watch from a global POV there.

One wonders what the monetization plan for the "writing code with an LLM using OSS libraries and not interested in paying for enterprise licenses and such" crowd will be. What sort of ads can you pull off in those conversations?
by dbish | 2025-09-12 01:00:19+00:00
Nano banana is great. Been using it for creating coloring books based off photos for my son and friends’ kids: https://github.com/dbish/bespoke-books-ai-example

Does a pretty good job (most of the time) of sticking to the black and white coloring book style while still bringing in enough detail to recognize the original photo in the output.
by Blackstrat | 2025-09-12 01:00:55+00:00
And it only gets worse once you retire. In some cases, I go back to interests abandoned in the past, so I could pursue the almighty dollar. In reality, I use HN as a curator of things that might be interesting to read or study. Of late, the AI fad seems to have blotted out a lot of the subject diversity, though I only skim the first 120-150 “new” entries, though occasionally I use the search feature for specific subjects. I have uses several of the others like Stack Exchange, Quora, Reddit, et al, though I prefer HN unless I’m looking for a lot of opinions on specific topics, e.g. best textbook on subject X.
by MediaSquirrel | 2025-09-12 01:01:12+00:00
Your bar is higher than mine.

Unlike Apple's formal "developer evangelist" and several others I contacted, the guy actually took the time to talk to us, and I was/am grateful for that. He's a cog in a very large corporate machine. Apple is Apple. He's not the CEO. He was doing his job and did me a favor. I am grateful to him.
by donkeylazy456 | 2025-09-12 01:02:36+00:00
I feel tremendously sad for his death. I also feel desperated when right-wingers talks about vengeance or backlash because it is not clear or doesn't matter if the murderer is left-winger. I thought they were totally silent against gun control when school shootings and latest Democratic politician assassin.

I am not American but looking at society trust falling down does not feel good man.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-09-12 01:02:52+00:00
Obviously attacks happen even without guns. But it is harder to kill someone without a gun, and harder to kill multiple people or from a distance without one.

Guns aren't as generally useful as knives. So it makes little sense to have 1.2 guns per person, or really any private gun possession. The price of mass murders, shooter drills, and firearm accidents aren't worth what marginal benefits guns may bring.
by lithocarpus | 2025-09-12 01:03:03+00:00
I have no strong opinions on the symbols but it's a funny coincidence that they chose the oak leaf, while the Apaches have been fighting for 20 years protecting their sacred grove of ancient oaks in Arizona called Oak Flat from being destroyed for a copper mine: www.apache-stronghold.com

It's quite a story - first congress voted 8 years in a row against giving the land (which was protected by treaties and subsequent designations as a protected area) to the mining company, then the land transfer was snuck in at the last minute on the big defense spending bill, and then has been in court since. Really impressive that they've held it off for this long. https://www.apache-stronghold.com/legislative-context
by cnohall | 2025-09-12 01:03:52+00:00
Anything particular that you have in mind?

I like AI, but I think this point is valid as well: "Mistakes in AI outputs are especially pernicious because, due to grandiose visions of near-term AI technology, some people think today's AI assistants can perform tasks that are actually far outside their scope."

In short, sometimes AI goes a bit overboard.
by davmre | 2025-09-12 01:05:20+00:00
Senators, especially committee chairmen, have quite a bit of implicit leverage, beyond the direct leverage of subpoenas or directly cutting funding to an offending agency.

Any given Senator is to some extent constantly in a favor-trading game with executive branch officials. People from the President on down need congressional cooperation to get their pet provisions into bills, programs funded, nominees approved, etc. A Senator can tell a White House official "I'd love to help you with that, however I have this issue with this agency not responding to my requests". Assuming it's a reasonable thing, whoever at the agency is in charge of this then gets an irate call from their boss's boss's boss ordering them to cooperate.

Of course this mostly doesn't actually get played out, because everyone understands the dynamic that defying senatorial requests will ultimately cost the President in terms of cooperation on other issues. So the norm is mostly to comply with reasonable requests, unless you're quite sure that it's a top-level priority where the White House really wants to take a stand.
by EGreg | 2025-09-12 01:05:41+00:00
Seriously? One could always cut-and-paste (not the computer term) a hairstyle over a photo of a person.

You are now marvelling at someone taking the collective output of humans around the world, then training a model on it with massive, massive compute… and then having a single human compete with that model.

Without the human output on the Internet, none of this would be possible. ImageNet was positively small compared to this.

But yeah, what you call “imagination” is basically perturbations and exploration across a model that you have in your head, which imposes constraints (eg gravity etc) that you learned. Obviously we can remix things now that they’re on the Internet.

Having said that, after all that compute, the models had trouble rendering clocks that show an arbitrary time, or a glass of wine filled to the brim.
by recursive | 2025-09-12 01:06:07+00:00
Inherent means implicit or automatic as far as I understand it. I have an inherent understanding of my own need for oxygen and food.

I don't have an inherent understanding of English, although I use it regularly.

Treating LLMs as fairy magic doesn't make me feel any happier, for whatever it's worth. But I'm not interested in arguing either.

I never intended to make any claims about how well the principles of LLMs can be understood. Just that none of that understanding is inherent. I don't know why they used that word, as it seems to weaken the post.
by akerl_ | 2025-09-12 01:06:20+00:00
This feels like you've accidentally waxed pedantic a bit. In common parlance, com is a TLD, example.com is a domain, foo.example.com is a subdomain. The suffix list is designed to capture all of that and maps to how it's used (you take the suffix list and check if anything in it is a suffix map for the name you've been given).