MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crystal_revenge | 2025-10-12 04:54:24+00:00
I've spent most of my career working, chatting and hanging out with what might be best described as "passionate weirdos" in various quantitative areas of research. I say "weirdos" because they're people driven by an obsession with a topic, but don't always fit the mold by having the ideal combination of background, credentials and personality to land them on a big tech company research team.

The other day I was spending some time with a researcher from Deep Mind and I was surprised to find that while they were sharp and curious to an extent, nearly every ounce of energy they expended on research was strategic. They didn't write about research they were fascinated by, they wrote and researched on topics they strategically felt had the highest probability getting into a major conference in a short period of time to earn them a promotion. While I was a bit disappointed, I certainly didn't judge them because they are just playing the game. This person probably earns more than many rooms of smart, passionate people I've been in, and that money isn't for smarts alone; it's for appealing to the interests of people with the money.

You can see this very clearly by comparing the work being done in the LLM space to that being done in the Image/Video diffusion model space. There's much more money in LLMs right now, and the field is flooded with papers on any random topic. If you dive in, most of them are not reproducible or make very questionable conclusions based on the data they present, but that's not of very much concern so long as the paper can be added to a CV.

In the stable diffusion world it's mostly people driven by personal interest (usually very non-commericial personal interests) and you see tons of innovation in that field but almost no papers. In fact, if you really want to understand a lot of the most novel work coming out of the image generation world you often need to dig into PRs made by an anonymous users with anime themed profile pic.

The bummer of course is that there are very hard limits on what any researcher can do with a home GPU training setup. It does lead to creative solutions to problems, but I can't help but wonder what the world would look like if more of these people had even a fraction of the resources available exclusively to people playing the game.
by usef- | 2025-10-12 04:57:01+00:00
Yes, though money is still a big part of it. An Australian company (Lynas) developed the capability but was struggling to get investment largely because they couldn't produce them as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could.

When Japan was temporarily cut off from rare earths they became an investor (willing to pay more to reduce single-vendor risks), but apparently it was hard to get the US at the time to care enough. At least that's the story that was floating around.
by bigiain | 2025-10-12 04:57:04+00:00
> The other side of the coin? Because of the first two points, they are also rather cost-prohibitive.

Not if you steal one! Which has 3 great benefits, you get a free screen, wherever you stole it from no longer bombards passersby with intrusive advertising, and whoever though doing that was a good idea is now out the cost of their expensive screen.

> Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?

Your local shopping mall late at night...

<All jokes. Honest. Although as Hunter S. Thompson said “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me,”>
by bmandale | 2025-10-12 04:57:16+00:00
>Your assumption seems to be that if no-one physically stops these men, they can and will do what they like, with impunity

That seems like a reliable assumption to me. Your assumptions seems to be that if you make a "rule" concerning who can go into which bathroom based on a hidden characteristic, no one will take it upon themselves to enforce this rule, and thus to make frequently wrong guesses regarding this hidden characteristic. That seems like a poor assumption.

>and that there's no chance of them simply respecting women's boundaries

Different people have different boundaries. Different people have different standards as for who should be sorted into which bathrooms. One person's arbitrary standards cannot dominate everyone else's lives. Instead, rules must be made based on reason and fairness, as I demonstrated above.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-12 04:57:32+00:00
> Chat Control, and other proposals that advocate backdooring individual client systems.

Chat Control is older than Apple’s CSAM scanning and is very different from it.

> Clients should serve the user.

Apple’s system only scanned things that were uploaded to iCloud.

You missed the most important part of my comment:

> I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?
by jakelazaroff | 2025-10-12 04:58:23+00:00
If you want to become fit, you need to exercise indefinitely or your muscles will atrophy. If you want to lose weight, you need to diet indefinitely or you'll regain it. The steps you take to lower your cholesterol? Indefinite. Blood pressure? Indefinite. Blood sugar? Indefinite.

It's no different with mental health. We are perpetual works in progress. Any changes take not only effort to accomplish, but effort to maintain. That's just how humans work.
by yodon | 2025-10-12 04:59:10+00:00
Looks like a lot of effort went into productizing this package. Given that effort, AGPL-v3 seems like a poor choice of license. Avalonia, WPF, and WinForms are, I think, mainly used in corporate contexts these days. Whether one likes AGPL-v3 or not, corporate environments seem reliably resistant to it.
by crvdgc | 2025-10-12 04:59:57+00:00
Some Chinese language source claims that it's a reaction to the Pakistan-US rare earth deal.

My pet theory is that this is intended as an attack to the concept of long-arm jurisdiction itself, due to

1. This is the first ever long-arm jurisdiction policy from China.

2. Diplomatically, China usually advocates for the total sovereignty of each country within its border.

3. The recent chip entity list has been a huge headache.

4. Notice how the language mirrors the US justification for the chip restriction: dual use, national security.
by Khaine | 2025-10-12 05:00:25+00:00
China has also suspended purchasing of BHP iron ore as a negotiating tactic to lower prices. They banned Australian barley, wine and coal when the previous government upset them.

Honestly, everyone should put tarrifs on china. Bringing them into the WTO was the biggest mistake made. People thought it would drive them to democracy. Instead the opposite has happened. The sooner, Chinese companies are forced to compete fairly the better. When western countries can sell cars in China as easy as BYD can ship shit boxes to the west, the better. Until then, fuck them.

Raise tariffs, restrict trade, disincentivise investment in China. Build out manufacturing capabilities in western countries
by nine_k | 2025-10-12 05:01:00+00:00
Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history, as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever.

Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-10-12 05:01:11+00:00
> A lot of people also don't know that many of the well known papers are just variations on small time papers with a fuck ton more compute thrown at the problem.

I worked for a small research heavy AI startup for a bit and it was heart breaking how many people I would interact with in that general space with research they worked hard and passionately on only to have been beaten to the punch by a famous lab that could rush the paper out quicker and at a larger scale.

There were also more than a few instances of high-probability plagiarism. My team had a paper that had been existing for years basically re-written without citation by a major lab. After some complaining they added a footnote. But it doesn't really matter because no big lab is going to have to defend themselves publicly against some small startup, and their job at the big labs is to churn out papers.
by ripley12 | 2025-10-12 05:01:44+00:00
Midori was fascinating. Joe Duffy's writing on it is the most comprehensive I've seen: https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.

Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...
by godelski | 2025-10-12 05:02:14+00:00
So what is your argument, that it doesn't apply everywhere therefore it applies nowhere?

You're misunderstanding the root cause. Your example works as the the metric is well aligned. I'm sure you can also think of many examples where the metric is not well aligned and maximizing it becomes harmful. How do you think we ended up with clickbait titles? Why was everyone so focused on clicks? Let's think about engagement metrics. Is that what we really want to measure? Do we have no preference over users being happy vs users being angry or sad? Or are those things much harder to measure, if not impossible to, and thus we focus on our proxies instead? So what happens when someone doesn't realize it is a proxy and becomes hyper fixated on it? What happens if someone does realize it is a proxy but is rewarded via the metric so they don't really care?

Your example works in the simple case, but a lot of things look trivial when you only approach them from a first order approximation. You left out all the hard stuff. It's kinda like...

Edit: Looks like some people are bringing up metric limits that I couldn't come up with. Thanks!
by marttt | 2025-10-12 05:02:15+00:00
The https://udm14.com/ flavor of Google is quite usable, though, esp with notable operators like inurl:this-or-that. But, all in all, yeah, gimme back vanilla Google search from 2008-2010 or so. Back then it was definitely a tool (I worked in investigative journalism at the time), whereas currently "searching" stands for sitting fingers crossed and hoping for the better. But, oh well. </rant>
by Jordan-117 | 2025-10-12 05:02:30+00:00
Developer Ryan Flaherty's "Via" project, a novel approach to streaming large games in real time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWsNFVvblLw

Summary:

>This presentation introduces Via, a virtual file system designed to address the challenges of large game downloads and storage. Unlike cloud gaming, which suffers from poor image quality, input latency, and high hosting costs, Via allows games to run locally while only downloading game data on demand. The setup process is demonstrated with Halo Infinite, showing a simple installation that involves signing into Steam and allocating storage space for Via's cache.

>Via creates a virtual Steam library, presenting all owned games as installed, even though their data is not fully downloaded. When a game is launched, Via's virtual file system intercepts requests and downloads only the necessary game content as it's needed. This on-demand downloading is integrated with the game's existing streaming capabilities, leveraging features like level-of-detail and asset streaming. Performance metrics are displayed, showing download rates, server ping, and disk commit rates, illustrating how Via fetches data in real-time.

>The system prioritizes caching frequently accessed data. After an initial download, subsequent play sessions benefit from the on-disk cache, significantly reducing or eliminating the need for network downloads. This means the actual size of a game becomes less relevant, as only a portion of it needs to be stored locally. While server locations are currently limited, the goal is to establish a global network to ensure low ping. The presentation concludes by highlighting Via's frictionless user experience, aiming for a setup so seamless that users are unaware of its presence. Via is currently in early access and free to use, with hopes of future distribution partnerships.

I'm amazed the video still has under 4,000 views. Sadly, Flaherty got hired by XAI and gave up promoting the project.

https://x.com/rflaherty71/status/1818668595779412141

But I could see the technology behind it working wonders for Steam, Game Pass, etc.
by Semaphor | 2025-10-12 05:05:25+00:00
Security & Privacy: GrapheneOS

Freedom & Features: LineageOS

That is not to say you have no freedom or extra features with Graphene, or no security with Lineage, it’s just what either project has very clearly as main target.

I do miss some features since switching to GrapheneOS (customizable on screen nav, volume rocker for cursor control), but I’m very happy with stuff like sandboxed google play services.
by btilly | 2025-10-12 05:05:33+00:00
If you can collapse "retrieve this complex chunk when it is needed" into a single token, what else can you put into a token?

"Send this through the math coprocessor." "Validate against the checklist." "Call out to an agent for X." "Recheck against input stream Y." And so on.

Retrieval augmentation is only one of many uses for this. If this winds up with better integration with agents, it is very possible that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
by vasco | 2025-10-12 05:06:15+00:00
> So what is your argument, that it doesn't apply everywhere therefore it applies nowhere?

I never said that. Someone said the law collapses, someone asked for a link, I gave an example to prove it does break down in some cases at least, but many cases once you think more about it. I never said all cases.

If it works sometimes and not others, it's not a law. It's just an observation of something that can happen or not.
by cipehr | 2025-10-12 05:07:52+00:00
After playing with it for all of 30 seconds, my thoughts are: 1. It's ridiculously fast. Not that it matters that much, Aerospace is fine for me. 2. I somehow doesn't require any accessibility permissions... so it "just works" after running the CLI... 3. One thing I immediately noticed, is that it looks like moving a window to be accordion can be done in the same workspace?

So far I'm very impressed... not sure if I'm impressed enough to switch yet though... but being in rust does make it slightly easier for me to contribute
by autoexec | 2025-10-12 05:08:08+00:00
> Of course faceless artists exist if that's what you're actively seeking.

AI generated music is shoved at listeners without them ever knowing about it. Spotify has even misrepresented AI songs as real (https://holrmagazine.com/spotify-publishes-ai‑generated-song...) and has been quietly stuffing them into playlists. (https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) so even people who did actively pick a particular artist or a particular playlist ended up unknowingly listening to AI slop.

> And like I said, people have been "just taking whatever comes next over their speakers" by listening to the radio for many, many decades.

Radio never had a daily/hourly limit on how many times you could change the station. Radio wasn't filled with AI generated music either. Every song you heard on radio was performed by an actual human. If you liked what you heard you could see the bands in concert. Even acts like milli vanilli were better than scams like The Velvet Sundown (https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tim-boucher-velvet-sun...)

Certainly people continue to exist who like listening to music made by real bands, but increasingly people are listening to AI generated music that is anything but distinct and individual.

The music landscape and the way music is experienced is vastly different from how it was back in the days of radio and CDs and yeah, I suspect that much of this change is for the worse.

Everything good in the AI generated music getting millions of streams came from humans whose talent and creativity were used in training the AI. If real artists increasingly have trouble getting discovered and building fans because their efforts are lost in a growing sea of AI slop that will be bad for artists and there will be less good music being made for AI to take and regurgitate back at listeners. AI will increasingly have to feed off of it's own slop and its hard to imagine that being ideal for music lovers either.
by hu3 | 2025-10-12 05:08:37+00:00
I see, I believe you. You pay for it. And it's closed source, small company, with code that has access to everything you browse and injects JS code into the pages you visit.

And people defend this? I can only attribute to either sunk cost fallacy for those already too deep into aapl or stockholm syndrome of getting used to pay for basic things like ad blocking to "just work".
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-12 05:09:06+00:00
Rare earths are messy to refine on the cheap, and refining them without environmental damage is expensive. One reason China got a leg up on rare earths is they didn’t sweat the environmental damage for a long time (now they are sweating it which is one reason they are holding back exports, but the advantage is too good for the, to completely swear it off).
by pols45 | 2025-10-12 05:09:59+00:00
Start with a rose bush. Or a peacock. Why would any species waste so much energy on appearance? The Handicap Principle says the harder it is to signal the more honest the signal is "Look how much I can afford to waste therefore I must be fit"

From that emerging at the individual level, when we move to group level, we get things like Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.

Look at what I eat. Look at where I live. Look at who I spend time with. Look at all my toys, my hobbies, my mate. And naturally look at what I wear, and what I spend on my mates appearance. Each is a small piece of that same signal - Look how much I can afford to waste so I must be fit. Think of the military medals, religions rituals, the judiciary robes, the scientist lab coat, the elaborate parades and buildings they need to be housed in etc etc. Every system invents its own costume to show who belongs and who leads.

Veblens theory came out a century ago and he predicted tech (rooted in efficiency/optimization/waste elimination) would disrupt or dilute the need for all this. But the opposite happened. Tech made signaling cheaper, faster, and global. Everyone is running some kind of circus act cause its become easy to do. As Attention available is finite and bounded by number of people and hours in a day, we enter arms race territory. Things get more and more ridiculous.

But what goes out of focus in all the attention wars is signaling was never about waste. It was about cohesion.

In any group, people differ by a lot in strength, wealth, beauty, luck etc etc. Biology says this leads to violence/schisms/chaos. But social signaling creates a pecking order that keeps the peace. There is silent agreement you look the part, you get to lead - you like what you see me doing then do what I tell you to do.

Fashion plays a big role in building hierarchy. So even commie and egalitarian groups end up doing a whole lot of signaling. Through it, there is constant testing who notices, who approves, who follows.

Most of the cost of this system falls on women. Cuz thro history the rules of beauty have been written mostly by men and enforced through fashion.

In classics like Herland or Sultanas Dream the question that gets pushed is what happens if women designed the rules themselves? Such thought experiments imagine worlds ruled by women and how the signaling becomes less about power/status/hierarchy maintenance and more about cooperation, play, self expression. Until these experiments run in practice the peacocks shall still strut.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-10-12 05:13:23+00:00
You probably won't make any progress you if think of therapists like car mechanics, where you give them your broken car and they give you back a fixed one a few days later. Therapists can't just poke around in your brain to find the problems. They certainly can't fix them without your participation.

It's more like working with a physical trainer. You won't accomplish your fitness goals by just showing up. Rather, you need be engaged, learn how to actually use the tools they give you, strive to improve yourself and put in the effort to do so.
by godelski | 2025-10-12 05:14:34+00:00
> only to have been beaten to the punch by a famous lab that could rush the paper out quicker and at a larger scale.

This added at least a year to my PhD... Reviewers kept rejecting my works saying "add more datasets" and such comments. That's nice and all, but on the few datasets I did use I beat out top labs and used a tenth of the compute. I'd love to add more datasets but even though I only used a tenth of the compute I blew my entire compute budget. Guess state of the art results, a smaller model, higher throughput, and 3rd party validation were not enough (use an unpopular model architecture).

I always felt like my works were being evaluated as engineering products, not as research.

> a few instances of high-probability plagiarism

I was reviewing a work once and I actually couldn't tell if the researchers knew that they ripped me off or not. They compared to my method, citing, and showing figures using it. But then dropped the performance metrics from the table. So I asked. I got them in return and saw that there was no difference... So I dove in and worked out that they were just doing 99% my method with additional complexity (computational overhead). I was pretty upset.

I was also upset because otherwise the paper was good. The results were nice and they even tested our work in a domain we hadn't. Were they just upfront I would have gladly accepted the work. Though I'm pretty confident the other reviewers wouldn't have due to "lack of novelty."

It's a really weird system that we've constructed. We're our own worst enemies.

> their job at the big labs is to churn out papers.

I'd modify this slightly. Their job is to get citations. Churning out papers really helps with that, but so does all the tweeting and evangelizing of their works. It's an unfortunate truth that as researchers we have to sell our works, and not just by the scientific merit that they hold. People have to read them after all. But we should also note that it is easier for some groups to get noticed more than others. Prestige doesn't make a paper good, but it sure acts as a multiplying factor for all the metrics we use for determining if it is good.
by kenjackson | 2025-10-12 05:14:40+00:00
I actually think more people would use if it were legal. Maybe not immediately but over time it would become more normalized. Regular joe character in tv shows would just use heroine. It would be available at college parties next to kegs. Etc…. And heroine companies (now that it’s legal) would find ways to market their drugs even if direct advertising isn’t legal.
by cipehr | 2025-10-12 05:15:45+00:00
Having just gone through really yak shaving Aerospace into a spot that I'm happy with, I'm curious how folks on here manage having so many overlapping keyboard shortcuts?

Maybe it's just me, but I want to map to many things to some combination of hjkl just for the ergonomics...

Aerospace's modal feature sort helps solve that shortcut conflict... How are others dealing with this?