MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshstrange | 2025-11-15 18:46:57+00:00
I think you might be confused or mistaken (or you are making a whole different joke).

My 2 comments are linking to different quotes from Portal 2, both the original comment

> We got the results back.....

and

> Well, what does a neck-bearded old engineer know about fashion?.....

Are from Portal 2 and the first Portal 2 quote is just a reference to the parent of that saying:

> The cake, sometimes, is a lie.

(Another Portal reference if that wasn't clear), they weren't calling the parent horrible, they were just putting in quote they liked from the game that was referenced.

That's one reason why I linked the quote, so people would understand it was a reference to the game, not the person actually saying the parent was horrible. The other reason I linked it is just because I like added metadata where possible.
by hollerith | 2025-11-15 18:46:59+00:00
If that is true, then why did the telcos rapidly move the entire backbone of the telephone network to IP in the 1990s?

And why are they trying to persuade regulators to let them get rid of the remaining (peripheral) part of the old circuit-switched network, i.e., to phase out old-school telephone hardware, requiring all customers to have IP phone hardware?
by guru4consulting | 2025-11-15 18:47:41+00:00
I thought HN crowd is smarter than average crowd, but surprised to see so many folks supporting this fraud. If they sold just "note taking service" then it does not matter what they do behind the scene or how they scale up the service, manual or automated. But if they sold "AI-enabled" note taking service, then it's a clear fraud. Nothing different from Trevor Milton rolling the trucks from hills.
by -1 | 2025-11-15 18:47:47+00:00
I’m no ML expert so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Two resources that might be useful are AWS’ SageMaker documentation and the Machine Learning Engineering book by Andriy Burkov. This book doesn’t really go into detail on logging though. One way to evaluate a model is to run a SageMaker processing job that saves the performance metrics in a json file in S3 somewhere. More info on processing jobs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/processing-j... . AWS has various services for logging which you can look into. This will mostly apply to orgs using AWS, but it might give a sense of how things can be done more generally.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-15 18:48:30+00:00
This is already the case with other means of communication. the internet isn't that special. If you don't trust your government, do something else about it.

We rely on eye witness testimony and human juries all the time. The innocence project has a long list of people that spent decades in prison because of this.

The solution to authoritarian regimes is to not have one, not tolerate cp on the internet.
by abustamam | 2025-11-15 18:48:31+00:00
> Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast

This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
by famouswaffles | 2025-11-15 18:48:35+00:00
>So, yes, there is plenty of depth and nuance to the internal representations of an LLM, but no logical reason to think that the "world model" of an LLM is similar to the "world model" of a human since they live in different worlds, and any "understanding" the LLM itself can be considered as having is going to be based on it's own world model.

So LLMs and Humans are different and have different sensory inputs. So what ? This is all animals. You think dolphins and orcas are not intelligent and don't understand things ?

>What an LLM is predicting is effectively "what will I say next" after "the cat sat on the". The human might see a cat and based on circumstances and experience of cats predict that the cat will sit on the mat.

Genuinely don't understand how you can actually believe this. A human who predicts mat does so because of the popular phrase. That's it. There is no reason to predict it over the numerous things cats regularly sit on, often much more so the mats (if you even have one). It's not because of any super special understanding of cats. You are doing the same thing the LLM is doing here.
by hearsathought | 2025-11-15 18:50:22+00:00
> That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia.

Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today.

> Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence.

Define "much".

> The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.

It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him.

> Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.

Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire.

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

No evidence of salt currency. Tons of evidence of roman money. And yet you choose to believe the one without any evidence.

Let me guess, you believe in monopods like pliny "the scientific historian" did?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature)

Lets say you have 10000 soldiers. Is it easier to pay them each with a pound of salt or a coin weighing an ounce?
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-11-15 18:50:27+00:00
I think it's not even the billionaires that are the biggest problem. It's more like the top 10-20% that are driving up housing prices and many other things. They are a large enough group that it makes sense to mostly cater to them which is something we already see in most new apartments being higher end, less and less cheap cars on the market, no small houses to buy, restaurant prices shooting up, concert tickers becoming crazy expensive and so on. Las Vegas used to be the place for the average guy to fun. In the last few years they have publicly stated that they don't want that population anymore but want more of the upper end.

All this leads to a system that favors the top 10-20% who can afford things, own assets like stocks and real estate, get better education for their kids and leaves the rest of the polulation out in the cold.
by mort96 | 2025-11-15 18:50:28+00:00
People who need an extremely high performance JavaScript engine, where the extra performance is worth using an engine that's hard to embed, has an unstable API, and an absolutely massive unwieldy Google-style C++ code base with all the pain that entails, plus a JIT and all the limitations that entails, JITed V8 is the right choice.

People who just want to run JavaScript code where performance isn't such a big concern would prefer something like Boa (or the other engines listed on the comparison benchmark page).

Both have their uses, and their use case is almost entirely non-overlapping. You wouldn't choose Boa for a competitive web browser engine or as the runtime for your back-end server software. You would consider it for a plug-in system, or maybe a game's scripting system.
by habinero | 2025-11-15 18:51:13+00:00
What an oblivious statement.

Of course poor folks know how bad payday lenders are. They're poor, not stupid. They use them because they live on razor-thin margins and life happens.

Poor folks generally manage their money down to the dollar. They have to, or they'll be out on the street.

All of the things you mentioned are middle-class problems and have nothing to do with the horrific grind that is being poor.
by Trasmatta | 2025-11-15 18:51:38+00:00
> No amount of poverty or wealth will reduce your road rage. How you react to people not following the rules of the road as you expect them is on you.

Yes, but being raised in poverty can be inherently traumatic, and adverse childhood experiences (like those frequently experienced during poverty) can reduce a person's capacity for dealing with stressors. You might benefit from reading the latest research on trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and CPTSD.
by asmor | 2025-11-15 18:51:55+00:00
It's also a great (VC-funded) business opportunity to become the technology provider of such action. There are a few of these non-profit fronts with "technology partners" behind them that are lobbying for legislation like the UK Online Safety Act or Chat Control. Thorn is the most well-known one, but one particularly interesting one is SafeToNet, who after not getting a government contract for CSAM scanning (and purging their marketing for it from the web - you can still find it under the name SafeToWatch) have pivoted to just selling a slightly altered version of their app preloaded on a $200 smartphone to concerned parents - with a 2.5x price premium.

https://harmblock.com/

https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_t...
by blululu | 2025-11-15 18:51:56+00:00
This is funny, but from the article it also seems like a pretty frivolous law suit that is more of a shakedown racket than protecting the actual business.

From the article: this amounts to only about 20 videos per year and the evidence is based on home IP addresses of employees. Such as: “The father of a Meta contractor whose home IP address allegedly downloaded 97 videos. Strike 3 suggests this links Meta to more infringement. Meta counters that it only proves someone’s dad is super into porn and has no VPN”.

Pretty weak evidence of any malfeasance on Meta’s part.
by pavas | 2025-11-15 18:52:04+00:00
> It seems entirely possible that the "philosophical zombie" is an impossible/illogical construct, and that in fact anything with all the structure necessary for consciousness will of necessity be conscious.

Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience. We can certainly have an opinion or belief or assume that sufficient structure means consciousness, which is a perfectly reasonable stance to take and one that many would take, but we have to be careful to understand that's not a scientific stance since it isn't testable or falsifiable, which is why it's been called the "hard problem" of consciousness. It's an unfounded belief we choose out of reasons like psychological comfort.

With regards to your latter point, I think you are making some sophisticated distinctions regarding the "map and territory" relation, and it seems you've hit upon the crux of the matter: how can we report "what its like" for us to experience something the other person hasn't experienced, if its not deconstructible to phenomenal states they've already experienced (and therefore constructible for them based off of our report)? The landmark paper here is "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Josh Nagel, and if you're ever curious it's a pretty short read.

With regards to "blindsight" since I'm not familiar with it and curious, how do we distinguish between loss of visual consciousness and loss of information transfer between conscious regions, or loss of memory about conscious experience?
by inshard | 2025-11-15 18:52:11+00:00
US has a culture of scaling. Having lived in London and many parts of the US, I could observe that Europe has economies of scope. And the US has economies of scale. A good example would be the Ford F150 and the Range Rover. One is highly reliable, built to capture the core value of a Utility vehicle, as cheaply, and as numerously as possible. The other tries to be the best possible version of an SUV. It’s not that the F150 is playing to the mass market. It’s just the maximum features, that doesn’t compromise scale. Many other examples like Southwest Airlines, McDonalds, manhattan’s skyline, Arm and Hammer, US highways, US Domestic Airports, Nike Vemeros, CVS, US Healthcare Triage and Emergency Services. It’s just less fancy, more accessible wealth creation.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-11-15 18:52:13+00:00
Amazing, here is a list of other similarly hilariously-titled “in rem jurisdiction” cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction#Examples

Some good ones: - United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster - United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness - South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats
by rkomorn | 2025-11-15 18:52:19+00:00
Containers seemed great to me at first but eventually they actually got in my way just as profiles do.

I just ended up with mounds of rules about what to open in the same container vs not, what urls to force in a given container, etc.

I still want to like them, but TBH, I don't miss them in Vivaldi.

Totally willing to accept I was doing containers wrong, I guess, but in that case, I don't know what "right" would've looked like.
by gruez | 2025-11-15 18:53:06+00:00
>Meta, naturally, argues that no! No! That porn was, uh…it was for personal use! Yeah, it was for…me, and not for large-scale copyright infringement!

>[...]

>Meta’s motion to dismiss the case calls Strike 3’s torrent-tracking “guesswork and innuendo” and argues the supposed downloads, which are roughly 22 per year, are too few to have any use in training AI. If anything, the company says, that pattern looks less like corporate malfeasance and more like “private personal use.”

The article seems skeptical of Meta, but their defense seems... fairly reasonable? They have hundreds of thousands of employees, so the prospect of all of them combined accidentally torrenting 22 porn movies per year without a VPN doesn't seem too implausible.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-11-15 18:53:26+00:00
> It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.

Yes. Society at large is a lost cause but maybe we can select some number of known good individuals and form a microsociety inside it where we can enjoy the freedom we crave.

There is a name for that: elitism. I'm not against it. Those who don't make the cut certainly will be.

> If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think.

I do.
by Cpoll | 2025-11-15 18:53:49+00:00
From the linked Ars article:

> Notably, the flagged downloads spanned seven years, starting in 2018. That’s about four years before Meta’s AI efforts “researching Multimodal Models and Generative Video” began

> Instead, Meta argued, available evidence “is plainly indicative” that the flagged adult content was torrented for “private personal use”—since the small amount linked to Meta IP addresses and employees represented only “a few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time.”

Personal use sounds plausible to me when imagining something like 70k employees and a bit of a "bro" culture.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-11-15 18:53:50+00:00
You can't generalize like that. Aphasia is a symptom - of course by definition it is merely the inability to use language. But people with stroke will typically show a lot of impairment, not only aphasia - they will have difficulties reasoning, gesturing, reacting, etc. Different people will have different abilities and different levels of impairment, but this tells you very little - it is not like each ability has its own little neuron in the brain, fMRI has confirmed that most activities involve several different parts of the brain. There are complex thoughts that require linguistic involvement to process, sign language and dancing combine gesturing with language, etc. The main thing the OP paper shows is that language is pervasive and intricately involved in how activities map to mental states.
by romankolpak | 2025-11-15 18:54:06+00:00
The scope and complexity of the change is crucial here. There is a sweet spot where spec-driven agent offers great value: the change is small and simple enough that you can describe it reliably with a spec (i.e. you have complete understanding how to do it), while implementing it yourself is a lot more work than writing the said spec plus reviewing and correcting the agent.

For me currently this sweet spot is TINY. It's so small that my usage of Claude Code has dropped to almost none. It's simply more practical to let myself have the agency and drive the development, while letting AI jump in and assist when needed.
by xp84 | 2025-11-15 18:54:21+00:00
> argues the supposed downloads, which are roughly 22 per year

the math doesn't add up since that implies it took 100+ years to accumulate 2400 violations, but just looking at 2400 torrents, how many employees does Meta have? With at least several thousand guys, if some have poor 'keeping work and home separate' hygiene, and especially with work-from-home, they probably just forgot to disconnect from VPN after work. Seems more likely than a very sloppy AI training scheme. If they wanted to so such a scheme, it's so easy to do using a public VPN.

EDIT: If I'm reading right, they're actually just basing their suit on HOME IP addresses. So we're being asked to believe the plan was:

1. Top secret porn AI plan is hatched

2. Management considers how to accomplish this and decided the best course of action is to tell dozens of engineers to go home and download a handful of porn torrents each and bring them into work to train it.

3. ???

4. Profit!
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-15 18:54:35+00:00
The dream is to be able to teach LLMs to reason more generally, but the reasons this works for math don't generally apply

Why is that? Any suggestions for further reading that justifies this point?

Ultimately, reinforcement learning is still just a matter of shoveling in more text. Would RL work on humans? Why or why not? How similar is it to what kids are exposed to in school?
by badc0ffee | 2025-11-15 18:54:51+00:00
Another non-US perspective - you can't tell them how to think about their weird political camps.

We saw this play out with Uber. The "progressive" side wants things to be more regulated and frames it in terms of protecting vulnerable people from unchecked corporate power. The "conservative" side does wants less regulation and more competition to keep things from stagnating economically.

The same thing is happening with AI, and with self driving cars.

It's sort of counterintuitive that on the surface, at least in this case, the "conservative" side is the one welcoming change and the "progressive" side rejects it.

You see this federally in the US. The "conservatives" want to tear down all the institutions, but they'll frame it as a return to traditional values like self sufficiency and freedom. The "progressives" want a return to the Biden era, in the name of people depending on these programs.
by gruez | 2025-11-15 18:55:33+00:00
>From the article: this amounts to only about 20 videos per year and the evidence is based on home IP addresses of employees. Such as: “The father of a Meta contractor whose home IP address allegedly downloaded 97 videos. Strike 3 suggests this links Meta to more infringement. Meta counters that it only proves someone’s dad is super into porn and has no VPN”.

The linked article mentions there was torrenting activity from Meta's ip blocks as well:

>This prompted Strike 3 and Counterlife Media to search for Meta-linked IP addresses in their archive of collected BitTorrent data. This scan revealed that forty-seven IP addresses, identified as owned by Facebook, allegedly infringed their copyrighted works.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-11-15 18:56:10+00:00
Interesting thanks for sharing. I can see how that makes sense for switching apps but imho for switching windows of the same app that benefit is negated since the thumbnail (without intense scrutiny) is generally too similar between windows of the same app.

(As a dev, I often have a dozen browser windows and a dozen or more terminals open, half a dozen IDEs, etc so being able to switch directly between instances if the same app, esp automatically filtering out minimized ones, is much faster than alt-tabbing through then all interleaved, and was my motivation for writing this.)
by Xeoncross | 2025-11-15 18:56:34+00:00
1) for one-off scripts and 2) If you ignore memory.

You can make about anything faster if you provide more memory to store data in more optimized formats. That doesn't make them faster.

Part of the problem is that Java in the real world requires an unreasonable number of classes and 3rd party libraries. Even for basic stuff like JSON marshaling. The Java stdlib is just not very useful.

Between these two points, all my production Java systems easily use 8x more memory and still barely match the performance of my Go systems.
by GaryBluto | 2025-11-15 18:57:13+00:00
Looking forward to mobilephonedeathcount.com and computernetworkingdeathcount.com because most of them accessed the LLM through those technologies.

This is an incredibly manipulative propaganda piece that seeks to blame companies for mental health issues of the user. We don't blame any other forms of media that pretend to interact with the user for consumer's suicides.
by wyre | 2025-11-15 18:58:08+00:00
This is contradictory to how I understand economics. The consumption of "stuff" contributes to GDP, which is one of the first things people use to correlate to quality of life.

Also, spending money and the consumption of stuff isn't "taking something from society". It is someone's job to grow, harvest, process, transport, and sell apples. Spending a dollar to purchase an apple supports all of those people directly. Those people spend their money on stuff and it circulates. Nothing is being "taken" things are bought and sold on a free-market.

I am arguing that hoarding wealth is the share that one takes from society. You are right that Musk doesn't have 250k shoes or houses, but that's why its problematic, it is wealth that could be spent circulating through the economy, it is wealth that is a claim on future labor and resources, it is the power over his companies, employees, industry, and society. All of these are a much larger "take" from society than buying an apple, a pair of shoes, a house, or any other good or service.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-15 18:58:37+00:00
> You think dolphins and orcas are not intelligent and don't understand things ?

Not sure where you got that non-secitur from ...

I would expect most animal intelligence (incl. humans) to be very similar, since their brains are very similar.

Orcas are animals.

LLMs are not animals.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-11-15 18:58:52+00:00
"You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you."

Because on one level, we are all just competing for finite resources - especially quality females - economics is in that context an ordinal competition, not cardinal.[1] But on another level, it's the mutual cooperation, wealth creation from nothing (making the "finite" a little less finite and a little more infinite), etc that allows us to advance both as a society and as individuals.

[1]There is an interesting tie into Mises here if I wanted to rabbit hole it (value is subjective, not measurable in cardinal units, and exists only in the mind as a ranked preference of options)