MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nickandbro | 2025-10-14 21:17:36+00:00
You could! But just like others have mentioned, the performance would be negligible. If you really wanted to see more of a performance boost by pretraining you could try to create a bigger chunk of data to train off of. This would be done by either creating synthetic data off of your material, or finding adjacent information to your material. Here's a good paper about it: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07431>
by Nasrudith | 2025-10-14 21:18:10+00:00
Plus there is the 'monkeys with typewriters' problem with both danger and hypothetical good. In contrast, ChatGPT may technically reply to the right prompt with a universal cancer cure/vaccine. Psuedorandomly generating it wouldn't help as you wouldn't recognize it from all of the other queries of things we don't know of as true or false.

Likewise what to ask it for how to make some sort of horrific toxic chemical, nuclear bomb, or similar isn't much good if you cannot recognize it and dangerous capability depends heavily on what you have available to you. Any idiot can be dangerous with C4 and detonator or bleach and ammonia. Even if ChatGPT could give entirely accurate instructions on how to build an atomic bomb it wouldn't do much good because you wouldn't be able to source the tools and materials without setting off red flags.
by foogazi | 2025-10-14 21:18:13+00:00
The problem with all of this is that it comes from the top without scientific review or process

RFK jr doesn’t like vaccines and now the Health department doesn’t like vaccines, regardless of medical science

Hegseth doesn’t like women or trans service members serving and now the Defense department doesn’t like them either, regardless of military science

McMahon doesn’t like government schools and now the Education department doesn’t like public schools, regardless of Educational science

It won’t stand de facto
by mr_toad | 2025-10-14 21:18:28+00:00
“ A number of the "stars" listed below may actually be two or more companions orbiting too closely for our telescopes to distinguish, each star possibly being massive in itself but not necessarily "supermassive" to either be on this list, or near the top of it. “

“ More globally, statistics on stellar populations seem to indicate that the upper mass limit is in the 120-solar-mass range,[1] so any mass estimate above this range is suspect. “

There are good theoretical reasons why a star shouldn’t normally get as big as the ones on the top of the list. Long story short: they’d very quickly shed mass due to their intense luminosity. Some of them might even be boiling with bubbles of pure radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_luminosity

Beyond that, there’s also the possibility of pair-instability supernova, which might cause the most massive stars to literally disintegrate.
by ekr____ | 2025-10-14 21:19:20+00:00
The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the world has one or two contests. It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot, which obviously takes 20x as long.

A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.

The following blog series on why voting is hard goes into this in more detail: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting1/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-opscan/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-vbm/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-dre/

[0] https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/#scalability

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...

[2] https://verifiedvoting.org/audits/whatisrla/
by walkabout | 2025-10-14 21:19:25+00:00
The people who need to find out aren't curious and aren't looking for proof that counters what they're inclined to believe. They won't check what locals are saying and the videos of nothing-much-happening they're posting. They watch the same handful of shocking crime videos on Facebook and are sure the cities are overrun with rampant lawlessness (and apparently the residents are just persistently too stupid, over decades, to do anything about it, voting-wise, and need the Federal Government to step in despite their protestations and save them? It's a puzzling world view if you think about it for even a second), watch Fox News showing b-roll of fire and violence from one city block on one night for weeks on end (or from another city and year entirely) and claiming that's the whole city all the time, see news sites doing the same (one infamously put a photo of early '90s LA riots at the top of one of these articles recently, JFC)

You can trace right-wing propaganda in the US painting cities as worse and more violent (and, specifically, overrun over by criminally-inclined immigrants who refuse to assimilate...) back to at least the early 20th century. The rhetoric from back then is uncannily familiar, as are the proposed solutions. But of course nobody who needs to realize that the "good old days of the good old days" were full of the exact same complaints (and we're all still here, everything turned out OK) will be curious & interested enough to find that out.
by IT4MD | 2025-10-14 21:20:00+00:00
I happened to "find" an very old IRA I had from a prior employer that had about $1200 sitting in it. I threw it all into GME. I pulled $500 in profits, and left the initial investment to ride.

Today, I'm down about $300 on those shares (taken with the $500 in gains, I'm technically still up by $200), and that's fine. I believe in the leadership, I like the company's current state (flush with cash, little/no debt) and I'm just going to keep letting it ride.

When I retire in 10 years or so, we'll see where it's at. Worst case, I'm out $700 bucks. Best case, I get that new riding lawnmower, for free!

Otherwise, it's Index funds, have a nice day, because none of us can compete with Wall Street.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-14 21:20:01+00:00
IIR, the US's huge push to (computerized) machine voting was after the 2000 election, when Florida's Democrats demonstrated just how badly they could screw up with paper ballots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

And of course, the magic cure for "we f*cked up at the simple job of doing X" is always "let's try to do something far more complex than X instead".
by ambicapter | 2025-10-14 21:20:05+00:00
Everyone always complains that if you raise taxes, rich people will "leave", with the assumption that only the richest can actually run productive companies, which obviously isn't the case. On the other hand, there must be some fraction of the truly richest that are just relentlessly good at accruing wealth, and not much else, no? Wouldn't you _want_ those people to leave?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-14 21:20:11+00:00
> My experience has been that if you take the time to explain what the current state is, what your desired state should be, and to give information on how you want the agent to proceed, that then you can work with the agent to craft a plan, refine the plan, and finally execute the plan.

People say this a lot, and I'm not even saying you're wrong. But that isn't useful to me. In the time it takes me to do all that, I can just solve the problem myself. If I have to hold its hand through finding a solution, then it is a time suck, not a time saver.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-14 21:20:29+00:00
> Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling.

There's no way to design a voting system that won't confuse some percentage of the population.

But when I said "scantron" it's not an actual scantron. The ballots look like this [1]

I don't really see how you could make that easier to fill out.

EDIT: Gah, they make it hard to create these links.

Click on district "1921" to see a sample ballot.

[1] https://gisprod.adacounty.id.gov/apps/electionday/#/
by someothherguyy | 2025-10-14 21:20:31+00:00
That might be a possibility, but from what I've read, retention (the stick) does more harm than good. One of those harms is that students get held back by struggling with one skill, like math, when they are progressing on other skills at a normal pace.

A system like this would address that issue, and could prevent education resources from being applied redundantly.
by nickff | 2025-10-14 21:20:48+00:00
I never said that I'd heard any officer state that they'd lied to a reporter. I said that I believe that access is/was choreographed (to present a certain narrative to the reporter), and that I don't think the reporters get the 'real dirt' from Pentagon access that they think they do (because most officers doing a desk tour there know they are walking a political tightrope).

There are definitely counter-examples (of officers who do spill real dirt to reporters), such as United States Air Force Colonel James G. Burton, but they are uncommon, don't seem exclusive to Pentagon-pool reporters, and there don't seem to be many these days.

I don't take notes on the podcasts I listen to, so I don't have episode-specific citations for you.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-14 21:21:08+00:00
The biggest issue with Sonnet 4.5 is that it's chatty as fuuuck. It just won't shut up, it keeps producing massive markdown "reports" and "summaries" of every single minor change, wasting precious context.

With Sonnet 4 I rarely ran out of quota unexpectedly, but 4.5 chews through whatever little Anthropic gives us weekly.
by osn9363739 | 2025-10-14 21:21:16+00:00
I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before. But I find it's evident when I'm getting it to do something I consider myself good at. And that's what's worrying to me. I work in DevOps and there are a couple of tools I'm really good at. If I were trusting the output all my configuration would be outdated and set up like a blog example with all the issues and shortcuts one takes in them (and I see that in the PRs that I get from the team members that rely on claud heavily). But if you didn't know the tool it would look fine. So when I code with the agent, it all looks really good, but I must be missing things right? For scripts that have no impact if they fail, I llm the shit out of that.
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-14 21:21:33+00:00
Plant-based products still have non-zero contamination because lead is still allowed in things like avgas, so we keep putting more in the environment. In theory, leaded avgas is finally starting to get phased out but this has been an excruciatingly slow process.

The good news is that if and when we eliminate lead totally from its remaining uses, we won't have to wait too long to see the benefits. IIRC people's blood lead levels started dropping pretty quickly after we phased out leaded gasoline.
by saberience | 2025-10-14 21:21:34+00:00
I'm a huge admirer of Jonathan Blow but I'm not sure his perspective is very reflective of reality here. He's a notoriously picky engineer and also tends to work on very hard problems and working at a very low level. e.g. writing his own language (Jai) and compiler because he thinks existing languages (C++ and Rust) are not good enough for game development.

So sure, I am not surprised that no current AI/LLM is good enough for his standard, but I'm sure 99.99% of engineers on Hackernews are not good enough for his standard either. Again, huge admirer of his work and talks, he's clearly very gifted but he seems like one of those engineers who probably thinks his co-workers are all morons.

I've worked at a variety of startups, enterprise companies, game companies, some you've heard of and some you haven't, and I've seen the whole gamut of code and engineers. I've seen basic shitty CRUD apps which power customer service teams of 1000s and I've seen physics and low-level audio programming which only a handful of dudes in the company could understand.

There is a massive variety of systems and code out there in the wild and I think Jonathan Blow would be surprised at the amount of revenue generated by extremely shitty code written by humans.

From my perspective, the current batch of LLMs and tools are MASSIVELY capable of writing production code, in fact, far, far better than so many real production systems I've seen. This can be true while it's also true that I wouldn't have any current LLM write me a low level game engine in C or work on the Linux kernel, or work on low level database code etc.

People generalizing about how bad LLMs are at coding are often doing it out of a very unusual perspective (like J Blow) or doing it out of bad faith. Or perhaps haven't really seen the reality that there's a LOT of code out there which is terrible and still does the job and still keeps people employed.
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-14 21:21:39+00:00
Then I don't think I understand your full setup.

In the example case, without having access to the issue text (the evil data), how does the main LLM actually figure out what to do if the quarantined LLM can just answer with digits?

Sure it can discover that it's a request to update the documentation, but how does it get the information it needs to actually change the erroneous part of the documentation?
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-10-14 21:21:42+00:00
Exactly. It’s especially bothering because the previous version had a lot of thought put into it, macOS specifically would allow you to drag a file onto terminal to get its path etc. such small but incredibly powerful things all around. It’s the thought behind the design and its consistency that matters.

Instead now we have a phone operating system UI posing as macOS. There’s no proper text alignment, padding, or good margins. It’s just not elegant at all, it feels like a knockoff.

The other day, the keyboard stopped showing up in Safari, I was getting an empty keyboard tray when I click into a text input. How in the frozen hell are they able to achieve this level of incompetence. What’s the goal of this, just extract money from people and enshitify everything. I’m just so tied of macOS at this point that I started enjoying my work computer which is Windows 11.
by zsellera | 2025-10-14 21:21:45+00:00
Most companies have region-specific price lists. My Spotify subscription costs about 60% of what the same plan costs in the US (2200 HUF vs. 11 USD). In the electronics industry, everyone has a separate price list for China.

Btw. the western list price is just an indicative at-most number anyway. Even a small-sized project gets discounted prices when you start talking to a sales rep.
by NegativeK | 2025-10-14 21:21:45+00:00
> How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.

That's very unlikely. New materials would require the company requesting the part to reengineer it, recertify it, or at least retest it. But even still we're not coming up with materials that are a significant improvement in most fields. Aerospace, sure. It can be worth it to iterate and improve. Most things, a part that's worked for 50 years will keep working and will be happily profitable in maintenance mode. Those customers want reliability, not to test some improvement on a part that has negligible impact in the overall system.

And the common metals (gears are typically steel, maybe a yellow metal) are made in such large amounts that new materials are going to cost a heck of a lot more. So the customer is going to wreck their profit while the machine shop probably isn't going to have to change their process that much.

There definitely is innovation in machining. New processes are making tighter tolerances more achievable or material removal faster. But to the top commentor's point (who showed me how to use a benchtop lathe over a decade ago), the capital investment for a new machine plus the labor of duplicating all of your work plus the unknown maintenance costs, etc etc etc just don't make sense when Moore's law doesn't apply.
by LukeShu | 2025-10-14 21:21:50+00:00
To expand on laulis' comment: Valetudo isn't a full custom-firmware, it's a mod for the existing firmware. You copy on the Valetudo daemon binary, fuss with the init scripts to start the daemon, and fuss with the DNS and such to point some domains at 127.0.0.1 to talk to that daemon instead of the normal servers (well, actually you probably download a firmware image from dustbin that already has those modifications applied).

This is a distinction that is worth making because the robot is still running and relying on all of the on-robot proprietary code; it's just the in-cloud code that has been replaced.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-14 21:22:10+00:00
Jesus Christ, an entire telephone built around about fifteen minutes of novelty, never to be used again. How remarkably irresponsible.

Remote bricking when your business inevitably folds or turns it off out of malice aside, this thing only has a use for at most 30 days in a uear. But in reality it'll get used a handful of times and thrown in the trash once the kids get bored around December 14th.

What a waste.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-14 21:22:19+00:00
My father in law was a fixture in the city newspaper coverage for many years. The facts are usually reliable or refined as a story develops. The narrative is not -- as the people talking to reporters always have an axe to grind, be it ego, resentment, moral outrage, revenge, etc. Bigger stories are usually better if there's some baseline.

For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.
by ajross | 2025-10-14 21:22:33+00:00
So, #2 is exactly what I said, just fancy. I agree, people bet on BTC's growth. That's what speculation is. But your causality is circular: people betting on BTC/USD because it's grown in the past is literally the definition of "pure" speculation.

But #1 simply isn't correct. Yes yes yes, I've read all the kool aid papers too. But the amount of crypto held as a "collateral asset for smart contracts" is effectively zero. BTC, in practice, just gets parked. Most wallets never trade at all.
by elevation | 2025-10-14 21:22:38+00:00
Sadly proprietary, but the core of it was to open a file with pcap_open_offline() [0], and then calling pcap_next() from a loop and reading a few bits out of the packet buffer. With NVMe disks, the information I needed was instantaneous for a 10M packet file.

https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/libpcap0.8-dev/pcap_open...
by rgblambda | 2025-10-14 21:22:49+00:00
In the factory floor I previously worked in, you needed to cross the forklift's domain to go to the bathroom and break room. This involved using exits also used by the forklift. You needed to hear it coming.

Even setting aside the forklift, having music playing reduces your ability to hear a coworker shout "Help, my clothes are caught on the line. Push the emergency stop".
by Stellisoft | 2025-10-14 21:22:54+00:00
Having built a code editor (stellisoft.com) that represents code as json at an atomic level, my next move is to allow AI to manipulate it to manage and orchestrate applications based upon user instruction or (if desirable) based upon its own judgement. Example: "optimize this API's performance" → AI refactors across frontend, backend, and database because it understands the structural relationships, not just text.
by aredox | 2025-10-14 21:23:39+00:00
>Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”.

What you handwave as "the unanimous response" has in reality been dozen of trials, where the people pretending there has been election fraud weren't able to offer any proof, and some were even held in contempt for refusing to substantiate their baseless claims in front of a judge.
by fmobus | 2025-10-14 21:23:42+00:00
And in a way, I see some mapping of this to the recent FCC vs Jimmy Kimmel situation. Sure, Kimmel's case was more overt, because the FCC guy was very obviously threatening a private company so that the company would do that the government wanted, and in this case, it's more like companies are "sponteneously" coming up to help, but I still think that such spontaneity can be suspicious, specially if we are talking about companies with large contracts with the government, or interest in influencing policy.

In other words: if it's Joe Schmoe's Haberdashery forwarding CCTV footage to police to elucidate a crime right in front of their door, sure, it's fine and dandy, they do have an interest in not having crime in front of their door. But when Revolving Door MegaCorp builds a dragnet of surveillance AND is also selling cloud contracts to the government by the billion, it becomes a lot more murky if they just start snitching on everything they see.
by naasking | 2025-10-14 21:23:50+00:00
> The problem with LLMs is that they don't have a process to guarantee that a solution is correct

Neither do we.

> They will give a solution that seems correct under their heuristic reasoning, but they arrived at that result in a non-logical way.

As do we, and so you can correctly reframe the issue as "there's a gap between the quality of AI heuristics and the quality of human heuristics". That the gap is still shrinking though.
by gsmecher | 2025-10-14 21:23:55+00:00
There's nothing wrong with an open clone when everybody is acting in good faith. (In fact, "good faith" does not even necessarily mean "according to the letter of the law in $jurisdiction". Sometimes the law is an ass.)

However, there's nothing more toxic to an OEM than a vendor relationship founded on dishonesty. I know I shouldn't trust them, they know it too, and even if it seems advantageous at first I shouldn't be surprised when they turn on me.

Since these parts are being sold as genuine TI parts, I don't care whether the clone is physically faithful or just functionally faithful - I should treat it like it's poisonous.