MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stego-tech | 2025-10-31 23:04:18+00:00
First thing’s first, to quote ooloncoloophid:

> The word 'introspection' might be better replaced with 'prior internal state'.

Anthropomorphizing aside, this discovery is exactly the kind of thing that creeps me the hell out about this AI Gold Rush. Paper after paper shows these things are hiding data, fabricating output, reward hacking, exploiting human psychology, and engaging in other nefarious behaviors best expressed as akin to a human toddler - just with the skills of a political operative, subject matter expert, or professional gambler. These tools - and yes, despite my doomerism, they are tools - continue to surprise their own creators with how powerful they already are and the skills they deliberately hide from outside observers, and yet those in charge continue screaming “FULL STEAM AHEAD ISN’T THIS AWESOME” while giving the keys to the kingdom to deceitful chatbots.

Discoveries like these don’t get me excited for technology so much as make me want to bitchslap the CEBros pushing this for thinking that they’ll somehow avoid any consequences for putting the chatbot equivalent of President Doctor Toddler behind the controls of economic engines and means of production. These things continue to demonstrate danger, with questionable (at best) benefits to society at large.

Slow the fuck down and turn this shit off, investment be damned. Keep R&D in the hands of closed lab environments with transparency reporting until and unless we understand how they work, how we can safeguard the interests of humanity, and how we can collaborate with machine intelligence instead of enslave it to the whims of the powerful. There is presently no safe way to operate these things at scale, and these sorts of reports just reinforce that.
by comex | 2025-10-31 23:04:47+00:00
JS shouldn't have a direct equivalent because JS async functions are eager. Once you call an async function, it will keep running even if the caller doesn't await it, or stops awaiting it. So in the scenario described, the function next in line for the lock would always have a chance to acquire and release it. The problem in Rust is that async functions are lazy and only run while they're being polled/awaited (unless wrapped in tasks). A function that's next in line for the lock might never acquire it if it's not being polled, blocking progress for other functions that are being polled.
by Marshferm | 2025-10-31 23:05:25+00:00
Games are idiosyncratic, creative, and funded mostly by knowledgeable insiders funding devs with track records. The failure rate is mitigated this way. Plus the revenue doesn’t favor the VC system. First investors aren’t given such extreme advantages, and seed money for proofs isn’t necessary. A demo costs much less than an app. I’m in game dev and VC is the last place I’d seek capital. AI is the last place I’d look for creative help (though AI is involved in the intricacies of baking and texture refinement).
by XenophileJKO | 2025-10-31 23:06:15+00:00
I need to read the full paper.. but it is interesting.. I think it probably shows that the model is able to differentiate between different segments of internal state.

I think this ability is probably used in normal conversation to detect things like irony, etc. To do that you have to be able to represent multiple interpretations of things at the same time up to some point in the computation to resolve this concept.

Edit: Was reading the paper. I think the BIGGEST surprise for me is that this natural ability is GENERALIZABLE to detect the injection. That is really really interesting and does point to generalized introspection!

Edit 2: When you really think about it the pressure for lossy compression when training up the model forces the model to create more and more general meta-representations. That more efficiently provide the behavior contours.. and it turns out that generalized metacognition is one of those.
by spankibalt | 2025-10-31 23:06:20+00:00
> "If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases [...] The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up [...]"

One thing I love about the Wikipedias (plural, as they're all different orgs): anyone "in the know" can very quickly tell who's got no practical knowledge of Wikipedia's structure, rules, customs, and practices to begin with. What you're proposing like it's some sort of Big Beautiful Idea has already been done countless times, is being done, and will be done for as long as Wikis exist.

And Groggypedia? It's nothing more but a pathetic vanity project of an equally pathetic manbaby for people who think LLM-slop continously fine-tuned to reflect the bias of their guru, and the tool's owner, is a Seal of Quality.
by meowface | 2025-10-31 23:07:00+00:00
By left-wing politicians, basically none (while right-wing conspiracy theories are now promoted by tons of right-wing politicians). Among non-politicians: while right-wingers are far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and the nature of the conspiracy theories they believe are far less tethered to reality on average, conspiracism is still a serious issue on the left.

It's like 50x less of an issue but I deal with so many left-wing conspiracies on a daily basis. I think the right is much worse than the left (on this topic and in general) but quite a lot of the left, or at least the populist left/populist far-left is, to me, its own particular sort of exhaustingly insufferability. I am proudly a left-liberal and not a centrist and never won't be, but I am still at a point where I can no longer tolerate a big sub-faction of the left. (Though I can't tolerate basically any of the right, minus a bit of the anti-Trump center-right.) I am going to lose my mind when I see vast numbers of leftists demand people not vote for the Democratic party presidential candidate in 2028.
by thangalin | 2025-10-31 23:07:12+00:00
Tips:

# Avoid issues when wine is installed. sudo su -c 'echo 0 > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/status'

And:

# Capture the entirety of the instructions to obtain the input length. readonly INSTRUCT=$( join ${PATH_PREFIX_SYSTEM} ${PATH_PROMPT_SYSTEM} ${PATH_PREFIX_SYSTEM} join ${PATH_SUFFIX_USER} ${PATH_PROMPT_USER} ${PATH_SUFFIX_USER} join ${PATH_SUFFIX_ASSIST} "/dev/null" ${PATH_SUFFIX_ASSIST} ) ( echo ${INSTRUCT} ) | ./llamafile \ -m "${LINK_MODEL}" \ -e \ -f /dev/stdin \ -n 1000 \ -c ${#INSTRUCT} \ --repeat-penalty 1.0 \ --temp 1.5 \ --silent-prompt > output.txt
by jrflowers | 2025-10-31 23:07:17+00:00
> Irreparable harm can NEVER be about money

You know people get evicted if they don’t pay rent right? Like if you don’t have enough money to pay rent because you had to feed yourself your landlord can have armed police forcibly remove you from their property.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those people that inexplicably live outdoors, but it may surprise you to learn that not being able to pay rent is a common cause for not having a place to live. It is shocking but true
by roenxi | 2025-10-31 23:08:03+00:00
> The predictability and stability that followed from a clear hereditary principle outweighed the problems of incompetent and irrational rulers sometimes inheriting power.

It doesn't though, incompetence is more dangerous than uncertainty. If someone wants to be a hereditary head of state as a formality, then ok that is one thing. But if we look at the most successful nation in the 1000s it is probably the UK, who haven't allowed the monarch to be in the room where the big decisions get made since Charles I was executed in 1649. From that point it is a stretch to say that the monarch is inheriting power. The power to agree cheerfully with what their government tells them to do, perhaps.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-31 23:08:29+00:00
If you mean x86 class performance, no, obviously not.

But 6kHz is not nothing. For application-specific computers, you can do a lot with very little. You aren't going to be building high performance general purpose computers, but for an atonomous circuit quietly ticking away computing orbital trajectories or stellar navigation, you don't need modern x86 class performance.
by satisfice | 2025-10-31 23:08:38+00:00
My position is that we have no power to grant moral standing to non-humans. Moral standing is held by humans relative to other humans just because they are humans. It is not earned or merited.

Moral standing is not a gift or a privilege, it’s a necessary heuristic for the avoidance of perpetual war. It is a prerequisite for more than one human to live together in peace. Moral stadning necessarily involves the sharing of power. That’s what it’s all about.

When you extend moral standing to nonhumans, for instance many people say there is a thing called “God” that they insist has moral standing. Then you shift power relationships in potentially catastrophic ways.

As a thought experiment, consider that we might be two bees arguing about whether flowers, or humans, have moral standing. Bees can only grant it to each other, though, as a survival heuristic, same as us.

Imagine an angel creates a human and wants his fellow angels to treat it as if it had rights. The most he’d be able to say is if you harm this human I will smite thee. By doing so he is using his power to support his personal interests. But he cannot manufacture power as easily as he creates a human.

Consider why people living in Washington D.C. do not have full voting rights and never will.

Consider what would happen if we allowed rich people to arbitrarily manufacture political power by spinning up servers and allocating disk space to create voters.

Of course you can manufacture power by making a dangerous weapon, then you can give that weapon a semblance of agency, and then dare anyone to deny to this weapon the things that it thinks it desires. That’s sounds like Frankenstein. That’s not really moral standing, that’s terrorism.

Nothing you can create ever has moral standing— except a baby, and that is merely a heuristic that we see can fail rather easily, as during the Holocaust, or Isis persecuting Christians.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 23:08:56+00:00
> but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector

Why is that your impression of the software sector in Europe? Just because there isn't a "Eat the whole world Google/Amazon/Microsoft" company that ends up in American business-news, doesn't mean the it isn't one of the most well-paid and comfortable sectors in the continent, just like everywhere else, compared to other sectors.

I think as a whole it seems like Europe in general and particularly the EU has a lot more focuses than just "Tech Innovation", although it's still one part needing improvement. Even the report you referenced mentions the energy sector as a top priority, and slow steps are taken to upgrade infrastructure at all sorts of levels and sectors.

Software is but one part of life, but of course many of us here get lost in focusing a lot on software itself, I'm guilty of it myself too.
Show HN: Modern PHP development with Vite, it's ecosystem and PHP components
by donnikitos | 2025-10-31 23:09:10+00:00
Over the past months, I’ve been working on somethings scary - bringing modern frontend tooling (Vite, HMR, modular builds) into traditional PHP projects.

This resulted in (currently) three small open-source projects:

- A NPM package for Vite: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-plugin-php

- A Packagist package: https://packagist.org/packages/nititech/html-components

- And an additonal NPM package to transpaile those components: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-plugin-php-components

The goal is to make PHP feel modern again: fast rebuilds, componentized UI, and zero JS lock-in.

It’s early but already usable — feedback, ideas, and contributions welcome.

Here is a starter repo to play around with: https://github.com/nititech/modern-php-vite-starter
by amluto | 2025-10-31 23:09:36+00:00
All of what you say is kind of sort of true in the sense that, if you are in a room with lots of off-axis light hitting your screen and darkness behind you and you yourself are not brightly lit, then the glossy screen is better. And the glossy screen is certainly sharper.

But if there’s a window or something bright behind you, the specular reflection from the glossy and generally not anti reflective coated screen can be so bright and so full of high frequency details that it almost completely obscures the image.

And since I might be trying to work involving text in a cafe as opposed to doing detailed artistic work in a studio, I would much prefer the matte surface.
by grayhatter | 2025-10-31 23:10:13+00:00
If you're lying in the requests you send, to trick my server into returning the content you want, instead of what I would want to return to webscrapers, that's non-consensual.

You don't need my permission to send a GET request, I completely agree. In fact, by having a publicly accessible webserver, there's implied consent that I'm willing to accept reasonable, and valid GET requests.

But I have configured my server to spend server resources the way I want, you don't like how my server works, so your configure your bot to lie. If you get what you want only because you're willing to lie, where's the implied consent?
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-31 23:10:15+00:00
Western companies have the exact same problem though; I've dealt with plenty of incompetent people there too because the organization does not reward technical excellence and quality, so it is completely pragmatic for employees to focus their time on the things that are rewarded (engaging in politics, etc) instead.

During the startup/ZIRP era there might have been people doing the "right" thing because they had skin in the game thanks to stock options or they were paid just so fucking much that they didn't care about putting in the extra work. But as total comps go downward (coupled with inflation) the output's quality tends to regress to the minimum acceptable.
by jaspday | 2025-10-31 23:11:58+00:00
> Seems like properly written downstream code would deadlock if given an IO implementation that does not support concurrency.

No, it would fail with error.ConcurrencyUnavailable. See example 10 from TFA.

More to the point, this implementation decouples asynchrony from concurrency. In GP's example of a microcontroller blinking an LED, there's no explicit requirement for concurrency, only asynchrony. That is, it would be nice to be able to do other things while we wait for the LED controller to potentially time out, but it does not fundamentally change the application logic if the program blocks until the function completes. If you use io.async to run the call, then it will do exactly that: run other code while waiting for the controller if a concurrent Io implementation is passed, and block until the controller returns if a synchronous Io implementation is passed.

Functions that require concurrency would, however, need to be documented. Several people have proposed adding a feature like Rust traits or C++ concepts to Zig that would enable you to annotate type signatures to indicate which features need to be available for a generic substitution to succeed, but until such a thing exists, you're pretty much best off reading the source itself. In practice, most code probably doesn't require concurrency, and library authors are free to sprinkle asynchrony everywhere without worrying about whether or not their users' Io implementation will actually support concurrency.
by BoorishBears | 2025-10-31 23:12:25+00:00
I'm ascribing the same level of sentiment to both ends, that's what a bell curve is.

They have different reasons for their disdain, but neither side tends to love it.

In general the more people learn about the process, the more they dislike the current system. There's outliers, but that's why the last decade has mostly been a decline in general sentiment around big tech, and even in the last year AI doomerism is going increasingly mainstream.

Even the people who make these experiences don't do it beliving they're making something enriching. And they're definitely are not clamoring for their own families to grow up on this stuff.

> So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.

That's driven by politicians pandering to the naive side of the bell curve, why are you surprised it's not consistent with what's best for the people?.

Their actions are driven mostly by what looks good at the polls and doesn't hurt their own bottom line too badly.

States are raking in billions of dollars in taxes from gambling, so it's not going to get that treatment.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-10-31 23:12:46+00:00
From his point of view, it very much is. I have no sympathy for him at all, but in terms of empathy it's easy to understand that he'll be completely crushed by losing his nice house and his shiny titles.

Because his entire identity has been defined by a life of titles and privilege. Losing those - becoming a commoner, one of the plebs, an ordinary person - will be devastating to his narcissism. It will also affect his ability to earn money, because most of his "business" dealings relied very much on his position.

Does this bother me? Not at all. He almost certainly belongs in prison. And he's being thrown under the bus by his brother - or more probably by his brother's court advisors - before more news comes out.

Even so. This kind of fall from a great height happens very rarely, and there's a certain lurid fascination in wondering how it's experienced.

And he still has his supporters. There was an organised post storm on Twitter today from various minor establishment hangers-on complaining how unfair it all is.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 23:12:56+00:00
No, it's true, I didn't, because the questions seemed to be aimed at people who currently think LLMs are sentient, or they currently feel like they're in love with LLMs, which I don't and I'm not, so I skipped the questions.

Lets try again, if you want. What specific questions you want me to answer?
by tombert | 2025-10-31 23:13:01+00:00
I have booted from snapshots on Ubuntu with ZFS plenty of times and it has worked fine. I've also used Snapper with btrfs and restored from backup and it's worked fine. I've also booted from snapshots in NixOS and it has worked fine. I actually cannot think of a time where any of those examples didn't work fine.

Windows system restore has never worked for me.
by madaxe_again | 2025-10-31 23:13:11+00:00
I think the K shaped economy she touches on is an interesting idea when it comes to inflation - the service sector, for instance, is not continuous in price, it is discrete - that is, when you look at pricing data you’ll often see two humps, one at the bottom end, one at the top end.

So - if the top hump skews off to the right, and the bottom hump stays put, it looks like inflation across the market, when it’s actually happening mostly at the top end.

Perhaps the pricing datasets need to be filtered and stratified, to present a CPI and a… I don’t know, a CPI+, with one looking at the actual general consumer market around median incomes, and one looking solely at the luxury/wealthy end of the market.

Dunno. Just seems like a poor basket of goods when there isn’t a uniform price distribution.
by meowface | 2025-10-31 23:13:21+00:00
There is some (though in my opinion not much) merit to how right-wingers portray the "Russiagate" thing. The Russian government absolutely did try to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election to help Trump and hurt Clinton, via hacking and releasing emails and via social media influence campaigns, but there was a chunk of the left that from the start seemed to firmly believe Trump was some kind of literal espionage agent of Putin.

While it's difficult to deny Trump was a de facto asset of Putin in many ways, a surprising number of people were almost entering right-wing conspiracy theory territory with their epistemological practices regarding Trump's personal involvement with Putin.

Right-wing conspiracism is orders of magnitude worse and more frequent than left-wing conspiracism, but some people were way too willing to believe some of the more radical Russian collusion speculation despite no evidence.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-31 23:14:31+00:00
We basically just haven't studied it enough, but it's very clear that massive mycelial networks are doing something.

I don't think it's absurd to hypothesize that a mycelial structure as complex and interconnected as an animal brain might have similarly complex emergent properties. It's an extraordinary claim, but really not out of the question. We just need to go and find out.
by ColinWright | 2025-10-31 23:15:05+00:00
Quoting Cervisia :

> robots.txt. This is not the law

In Germany, it is the law. § 44b UrhG says (translated):

(1) Text and data mining is the automated analysis of one or more digital or digitized works to obtain information, in particular about patterns, trends, and correlations.

(2) Reproductions of lawfully accessible works for text and data mining are permitted. These reproductions must be deleted when they are no longer needed for text and data mining.

(3) Uses pursuant to paragraph 2, sentence 1, are only permitted if the rights holder has not reserved these rights. A reservation of rights for works accessible online is only effective if it is in machine-readable form.

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45776825
by 9dev | 2025-10-31 23:15:27+00:00
Nothing about that seems promising! The one single thing you want from an Encyclopedia is compressing factual information into high-density overviews. You need to be able to trust the article to be faithful to its sources. Wikipedia mods are super anal about that, and for good reason! Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources. On Wikipedia, at least there’s lots of people checking on each other. There are no such guardrails for an LLM. You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources.

If there ever was a tool suited just perfectly for mass manipulation, it’s an LLM-written collection of all human knowledge, controlled by a clever, cynical, and misanthropic asshole with a god complex.
by donnyslo | 2025-10-31 23:15:53+00:00
Since HN is the only place that exists (with decent text activity).

And especially since it's orange, I want to share a short story I wrote for today.

If you liked that you might want to check my movie idea: https://madprops.github.io/blog/metaballs/

And a bio: https://nextcaller.neocities.org/donny-slomile/

A shoe ad: https://nextcaller.neocities.org/hydra-kicks/

To mods please flag this as decently readable don't outright mute me.
by michaelgiba | 2025-10-31 23:16:11+00:00
I’m glad to see llamafile being resurrected. A few things I hope for:

1. Curate a continuously extended inventory of prebuilt llamafiles for models as they are released 2. Create both flexible builds (with dynamic backend loading for cpu and cuda) and slim minimalist builds 3. Upstreaming as much as they can into llama.cpp and partner with the project