MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derekp7 | 2025-10-21 14:24:50+00:00
What I'd like is for the AI to interview me for what my personal preferences are, and for what policy areas I feel comfortable enough with even if they aren't my personal preferences. Better yet, I want to be able to supply the questions too, because question selection could be biased. Then I want it to research each candidate's past voting records and causes they supported, and analyze any recent shifts in their messaging, then give me original sources to read through along with a summary of that source documentation.

As for biases, in the past when you could actually have political engagement discussions, I had often recommended my non-preferred candidate to other people based on what they felt was important to them, and I would spend my energy on presenting what was important to me, and understand their priorities too.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-21 14:24:55+00:00
Not that long ago I would have said no, but I increasingly think that intelligence is mostly about the ability to learn. And chess, at a high level, requires a mixture of achieving an extremely high degree of unconscious competence working right alongside a high degree of conscious competence for things like opening prep. And most, if not all, high level chess players that have tried, in earnest, to do things outside of chess have excelled across a wide variety of fields.

But I think where people get confused is in the inverse. If you take a very smart person and he dedicates two years of his life to chess, all alongside training from some of the world's best, then he's still going to be, at best, a strong amateur at the end. In fact I know at least one instance where this exact experiment was tried. This is generally unlike other fields where such an effort would generally put you well into the realm of mastery.

But that's the unconscious competence part - chess takes many years of very serious training to even start to have it become 'natural' for you, and it's that point that your training journey begins all over again because suddenly things like opening preparation starts to become critical. So it can give the appearance that since seemingly smart people don't do particularly well at chess, while people like Magnus who has/had (daddyhood changes a lot...) a complete 'bro' personality, is arguably the strongest player of all time, it gives the impression that being smart must not be a prerequisite for success at chess.
by mft_ | 2025-10-21 14:26:24+00:00
Meanwhile in Europe, they've been selling FSD forever, and (until very recently?) there has been virtually no difference from the basic Autopilot package - and not the shiny FSD beta that we see on YouTube from other countries.

I had a company Tesla (with "FSD") for a couple of years, and as much as a liked the car, I've been wondering when the European class action case will start...
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-21 14:26:39+00:00
I use Debian 13 (stable). It is very solid. I was using Debian Trixie when it was testing and there was breakage twice.

I would make the /boot partition twice the size the installer suggests though as on my laptop I can't upgrade the kernel because the /boot runs out of space. The laptop is used to view old manuals in PDFs while working on my car so I don't really care.

TBH any of the major Linux distros that have been around for a while are fine. I don't like Fedora or Ubuntu because they are a bit corporate.

I personally wouldn't bother with any of the derivative distros. Typically there isn't a lot different other than they've pre-configured some packages. IME that causes more headaches long term.
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-21 14:27:04+00:00
True, and I apologize.

Nevertheless, if we come back to the original assertion, I have one more argument against it.

If you look at Starbase, it has grown absolutely huge. It started off as a small group of tents and now it is a massive industrial area, plus SpaceX is expanding their presence at Cap Canaveral as well.

Which means that they have a strong incentive to turn Starship into something that makes money and can finance those structures. No one can subsidize such large scale efforts indefinitely, not even Musk. You can spend a lot of time at a drawing board, but once you cross into the industrial buildup phase, your expenses skyrocket (pun intended) and the schedule becomes tighter.

So they either deliver, or shut the shop within much less than a decade.
by yuliyp | 2025-10-21 14:27:08+00:00
That's not the problem. The problem is that you're adding a data dependency on the CPU loading the first byte. The branch-based one just "predicts" the number of bytes in the codepoint and can keep executing code past that. In data that's ASCII, relying on the branch predictor to just guess "0" repeatedly turns out to be much faster as you can effectively be processing multiple characters simultaneously.
by Bender | 2025-10-21 14:27:22+00:00
Please do not tamper with nature on this scale. One can only get this wrong once and we could end up back in the ice age. Global warming is bad however an ice age is exponentially worse. Humans would have to figure out how to grow all food indoors at scale in a hurry, something we are not even close to yet. Someone will mention we do have vertical indoor farming but that has not proven out to scale yet even for first world countries. All third world countries would certainly starve. Climate has far too many feedback loops for humans or computers to predict what such tampering would have on a long time scale. If a group of scientists or researchers confidently disagrees just ignore them as they are likely pursuing funding without regard for the safety of the people of Earth. Moving fast and breaking things is not an option here.
by reactordev | 2025-10-21 14:27:48+00:00
As evident in Challenger and Columbia…

You’re absolutely right. Astronauts sign a last will and testament before every flight. We think it’s routine because we’ve nailed down orbital science but in reality, we lack the quality assurance that space flight demands. It’s one thing to send up robots and satellites, it’s another to send up humans. The ISS is crawling with bacteria. We lack the physical protection for long space travel for a mars mission much less visiting anything past the Kuiper belt.
by modeless | 2025-10-21 14:27:50+00:00
If this can enable practically unlimited 3D stacking of CMOS layers, it could be hugely consequential for computing.

On an unrelated note, I like the writing style of this article a lot. This is how science journalism should be. It reminds me of how Scientific American used to be before it was ruined. Is IEEE Spectrum always like this? I might have to subscribe to the print version. I want articles like this floating around my house for my kids to discover.
by alphazard | 2025-10-21 14:28:16+00:00
As a user I want the advice to be biased towards my situation. If the AI was truly intelligent and aligned with me, it would ask me a bunch of questions to learn about my situation before it could determine who I should be voting for.

The best politician for an individual does have a right answer. It may be difficult to know ahead of time, and people may disagree about it, but it does have a single correct answer. Contrast that to the "best" candidate for the country, or a group, or in the abstract, which is clearly an incoherent idea. Some candidates will be simultaneously good for some people and bad for others.

Anything that tries to "both sides" the topic, or produce a "greater good" answer, is doomed to failure because it doesn't even model the problem correctly.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-21 14:28:22+00:00
The argument for codes and such is information asymmetry. The person selling you something may know corners were cut, but they don't tell you.

An argument against codes (and licensing) is they are one size fits all. Maybe someone with different preferences would trade off quality and price differently than you do. I think this especially shows up in licensing: a rich person wants their doctor to be extremely good, even if that greatly elevates the cost; a poor person would be better off at lesser quality medical care they could actually afford.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-10-21 14:28:33+00:00
> being very selective about employee number 2-49. After that it's out of your hands.

Indeed. There's an old saying that A-level people hire A-level people, but B-level people hire C-level people.

Obviously this is too simplistic: How do any B-level people get there in the first place? But there's still some truth to the idea that the overall talent level of a company tends to degrade as it gets larger unless very unusual structures are in place to work against that tendency.
by miki123211 | 2025-10-21 14:28:35+00:00
> Try asking any of them “Am I speaking in a low voice or a high voice?” in a high-pitched voice, and they won’t be able to tell you.

I wonder how much of that is LLMs being bad, and how much is LLMs being (over) aligned not to do it.

AFAIK, Chat GPT Voice mode had to have a lot of safeguards put on it to prevent music generation, accent matching (if you sound Indian, it shouldn't also sound Indian), and assuming ethnicity / biasing based on accents.

It doesn't seem that impossible to me that some of these behaviors have been aligned out of these models out of an abundance of caution.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-21 14:29:12+00:00
The reason that Moscow wants Ukraine (and all other neighbors) is because Moscow has reverted back to a 19th century imperial/colonial mindset.

I would normally qualify this type of statement as "just my take," but not in this case, as it is plain as day. They state it openly, and proudly.

Meanwhile, many in the USA and Europe still twist themselves into knots trying to come up with a more rational explanation.
by RiverStone | 2025-10-21 14:29:20+00:00
There are many people, myself included, who don’t want to be patronized or “protected from ourselves” and prevented from accessing data about our bodies.

An MRI, blood test, continuous glucose monitor, etc. carry essentially no intrinsic risk. It’s ridiculous that we need prescriptions for such things.

What I do or don’t do with that data is my prerogative.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-21 14:29:32+00:00
The A-4 from 1954? F-117 from 1981? B-21 that's been in development since 2015 and has had only 3 delivered so far? These are 10 year development program, the Starship still has some years to go and I'd argue a reusable moon rocket is a bit more involved than a bomber plane.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-21 14:29:36+00:00
Arch has an installer these days. It works pretty well and you can have a system up and running in about 20 minutes if you have a fast internet connection.

For people that want a Windows like UI, I would probably suggest Cinnamon. It works pretty much like Windows 7/10 without all the visual nonsense that KDE typically has.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-21 14:29:48+00:00
k-Means clustering works very well on embedding models such as SBERT, if you feed in 20,000 documents and ask for k=20 clusters, the clusters are pretty good -- with the caveat that the clustering engine wants to make roughly equal-sized clusters so if 5% of your articles are about Fútbol you will probably get a cluster of Fútbol but if 20% of them are about the carbon cycle you will get four clusters of carbon cycle.

There are other clustering algorithms that try to fit variable size clusters or hierarchically organized clusters which may or may not make better clusters but generally take more resources than k-Means; k-Means is getting started at 20,000 documents and others might be struggling at that point.

Having the LLM write a title for the clusters is something you can do uniquely with big LLMs and prompt engineering.

It's wrong to say "don't waste your time collecting the data to train and evaluate a model it because you can always prompt a commercial LLM and it will be 'good enough'" because you at the very least need the evaluation data to prove that your system is 'good enough' and decide if one is better than another (swap out Gemini vs Llama vs Claude)

In the end, though, you might wish that the classification is not something arbitrary that the system slapped on it but rather is a "class" in some ontology which has certain attributes (e.g. a book can have a title, and a "heavy book" weighs more than 2 pounds by my definition) If you are going the formal ontology route you need the same evaluation data so you know you're not doing it wrong. If you've accepted that, though, you might as well collect more data a train a supervised model and what I see in the literature is that many-shot approach still outperforms one-shot and few-shot.

[1] which is on the scale of the training data in most qapplications
by quinndupont | 2025-10-21 14:30:19+00:00
Y’all need to learn about the history and development of spoken language and writing. Writing isn’t just a copy or derivation of writing. LLMs work because of the conceptual characteristics of writing (consider the distinctions between ideographic, logographic, alphabetical…). What a sloppy mess!

Read some Wittgenstein and Goodman, but especially Derrida who calls this logocentrism.
by Culonavirus | 2025-10-21 14:30:25+00:00
Several times (if we keep disingenuous "wheeeel akchually" technical gotchas out of this). The fact that they keep safety in mind is a good thing. Any starship that got to space could have easily reached orbit, but it didn't because spacex cares more about NOT uncontrollably deorbiting a giant hunk of steel than impressing a "redditor" who doesn't understand how orbital mechanics work.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-21 14:30:31+00:00
> Is it bias, though, if the AI is trained on the materials of the parties involved, rather than that of public opinion?

I guess it depends on what you mean by "materials". It's quite common in US elections for politicians to make claims that are completely contrary to their actual actions. Even for objective facts, like I voted for X bill when they didn't.

So an AI trained on the campaigns materials wouldn't do an accurate job of portraying what that politician will attempt to do.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-10-21 14:30:35+00:00
> The difference from the Nordics is that Germans have had the determination to go all the way with things, which means that for almost any great invention in the world there's always a German behind it.

That difference is also one of 80m+ people vs. a few million for the Nordics.

> But when it comes to the social cohesion, I always thought that the Germans had to fake it like the Nordics do, or like people in the Soviet Union did. But more and more I start to realize it's not the case. Germans actually support their government and support the European Union (in Nordic countries you can't find 1 in 1000 people who supports the EU), and support the official ideologies in their country. Is this the case, or am I encountering Germans online in isolated spaces?

Germans are indeed an incredibly obedient people. Even Vladimir Lenin once said "You couldn't start the revolution in Germany because there's a sign on front of the palace that says you can't step on the lawn."

I think Germany has extreme risk aversion as a result of two world wars and being extremely invested in a status quo that put them on top. Now Germany believes they can "just one more law" themselves back to the top.

Re: EU—Germany is a massive driver and biggest contributor to the EU. A lot of the EU's bureaucracy is a German-driven mindset which assumes everything will be good if you just pass one more law.
by fwipsy | 2025-10-21 14:30:45+00:00
Certainly the ipad + pencil are some of the best digital art hardware ever created. I take issue with people implying that other products are irrelevant.

The total number of ipads sold doesn't seem like a good metric since many people won't use them for digital art. Market share among digital artists seems like a better metric. I found this survey: https://www.celsys.com/en/topic/20230120 which shows that 19% of digital artists use an apple pencil. This is the largest single category, but much smaller than the sum of windows PC categories.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-21 14:31:00+00:00
>And I made the connection - "Wait. The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?"

Unless your dad was part of the elite ruling class which gets to skip and ignore all the rules, the answer is an emphatic no. However, if he was the son of an admiral from a long line of important people who had been in the Senate for years and finally wanted to run for president, well, then Congress might just decide that he's good enough and give their stamp of approval to all of it.

Was your dad the son of an admiral who had been in the Senate for years and finally wanted to run for president?

Besides, the thing with McCain wasn't about whether he was a citizen or not... this was 100% the case. The trouble was that McCain didn't become a citizen until 3 years old. And "natural born citizen" can't happen for a kid who's already 3, nor can Congress pass laws that are ex post facto, meaning they couldn't retroactively declare him natural born. He was absolutely disqualified from running, and if he had had an ounce of decency he would have accepted that and quit pressing his claims.
by gagan30 | 2025-10-21 14:31:18+00:00
Distributional Semantics Tracing: A Framework for Explaining Hallucinations in Large Language Models Gagan Bhatia, Somayajulu G Sripada, Kevin Allan, Jacobo Azcona Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, the generation of plausible yet factually incorrect statements. This work investigates the intrinsic, architectural origins of this failure mode through three primary contributions. First, to enable the reliable tracing of internal semantic failures, we propose Distributional Semantics Tracing (DST), a unified framework that integrates established interpretability techniques to produce a causal map of a model's reasoning, treating meaning as a function of context (distributional semantics). Second, we pinpoint the model's layer at which a hallucination becomes inevitable, identifying a specific commitment layer where a model's internal representations irreversibly diverge from factuality. Third, we identify the underlying mechanism for these failures. We observe a conflict between distinct computational pathways, which we interpret using the lens of dual-process theory: a fast, heuristic associative pathway (akin to System 1) and a slow, deliberate, contextual pathway (akin to System 2), leading to predictable failure modes such as Reasoning Shortcut Hijacks. Our framework's ability to quantify the coherence of the contextual pathway reveals a strong negative correlation () with hallucination rates, implying that these failures are predictable consequences of internal semantic weakness. The result is a mechanistic account of how, when, and why hallucinations occur within the Transformer architecture.
by hafiz_ | 2025-10-21 14:31:25+00:00
I built this because I kept getting mediocre AI responses, turns out my prompts were the problem, not the AI.

The two stage thing came from Reddit feedback. People were abandoning the tool when I asked questions upfront, so now it gives you a quick result first, then optionally asks questions for a better version.

Stack: Laravel + Vue.js + OpenAI/Deepseek API

Been running for a week now - 207 users, 1.7K optimizations, which is cool. Mostly trying to figure out how to keep it free without going broke on API costs (currently limited to 25/day per user).

Would love feedback on: - Does the two stage flow make sense? - What features would actually be useful? - Are 25 optimizations/day reasonable, or too stingy?

Happy to answer any technical questions.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-10-21 14:31:31+00:00
Hip hop can include elements of any other genre, so if you shared what kind of music you do like, it might be easier for others to direct you to hip hop you might also like.

I'm quite partial to instrumental hip hop personally; for example, "Jet Son" by Blockhead is nearly absent of lyrics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wo5jHw56Kg . "Here's What's Left" by RJD2 on the other hand is lyrical, but the lyrics aren't really rap, and the production overshadows it in my opinion (I initially heard it as an "instrumental"/vocal-less track which I can no longer find online) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvbG7ioz-k

I don't listen to much hip hop with lyrics lately, but pretty much any type of music can be rapped over. For example, "Stan" by Eminem uses Dido's "Thank you" which might otherwise be classifed as electropop or trip-hop - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sixjHud8lYw
by AtNightWeCode | 2025-10-21 14:31:54+00:00
You wrote "You’d need to have every single service you depend on, including 3rd party services, on multi tenancy.". This is highly incorrect. I worked at several companies that have a multi tenancy strategy. It is:

* Automated. * Scoped to business critical services. Typically not including many of the 3rd party services. * Uses data replication, which is a feature in any modern cloud. * Load balancing, by DNS basically for free or a real LB somewhere on the edge.

If you fail at this you probably fail at disaster recovery too or any good practice on how to run things in the cloud. Most likely because of very poor architecture.
by danaris | 2025-10-21 14:31:55+00:00
> Why is Musk allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars again?

Because the US abandoned a number of years ago the idea that the law should apply equally to everyone. At least since the Reagan years, and to an increasing degree recently, "Greed is Good" has become the economic motto, and net worth is treated as if it's synonymous with one's moral worth.

This is all part and parcel of the devaluation of ethics that has led to a corrupt president whose election has serious questions around it wantonly flouting the law and treating the country like his own personal playground.
by Arainach | 2025-10-21 14:31:58+00:00
Musk says a lot of things. Most of them aren't true, a number of them criminally so.

No one should trust a thing he says after his baseless libel against the rescue divers in Thailand. ABSOLUTELY no one trust should anything he says after the "funding secured" BS, and if you got that far, saw the obvious lies and fakes he posted to Twitter even before he bought the place, I don't know what else to tell you.

At this point it's safer to assume that if Musk says something it's wrong.
by yakz | 2025-10-21 14:32:10+00:00
You can't buy it at all, yet.

Also, with the way these kinds of things have gone in the past:

- It's not certain that you'll ever be able to buy it. - If you can buy it, it'll probably be closer to $40k than $25k with no add-ons. - It's not certain that you'll ever actually be able to buy it with no add-ons. - Orders that include all of the most expensive add-ons will be heavily prioritized, so even if you can order it without add-ons, the queue could be months or years long. - The ones that you can actually get in a reasonable amount of time will be closer to $50k than $25k.
by anon-3988 | 2025-10-21 14:32:22+00:00
I am pretty sure CPUs can speculative load as well. In the CPU pipeline, it sees that there's an repeated instruction to load, it should be able to dispatch and perform all of it in the pipeline. The nice thing is that there is no chance of hazard execution here because all of this speculative load is usable unlike the 1% chance where the branch would fail which causes the whole pipeline to be flushed.
by haspok | 2025-10-21 14:33:09+00:00
> They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.

That's what Musk wants you to believe.

In reality, reusability was the Achilles heel of the space shuttle, due to the thermal insulator tiles that could be easily damaged during reentry, so they had to be rechecked rigorously before the next flight, and the damaged tiles replaced. We haven't seen any of that - so far only the booster was reused, somewhat, as in 2 were reused, with one failure and one success, but only much later.

And then there is the orbital refueling, but that is so far in the future that it's not even worth discussing.