MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by verdverm | 2025-11-11 00:21:04+00:00
I've had my share of good and bad experiences, one section of an existing project more than 90% ai created. How you say things is equally important to the context you provide, partly because the agents will start trying to decide what is and is not good context, which they are unreliable in doing, even after you give them the limited context and tell them not to edit other files or bring in more context. For example, if you use a lot of colloquial phrases, you activate that area of the network, taking away from using other parts (MoE activation, also lower level too)

They are not good readers (see research results around context collapse and context poisoning)
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-11-11 00:21:20+00:00
> The intent of the transaction code is that the consistency is checked (using `tx.commit()`) "even if an unexpected exception occurs".

First, having a `commit` unconditionally attempted when an exception is raised would surprise many developers. Exceptions in transactional logic are often used to represent a "rollback persistent store changes made thus far" scenario.

Second, using a condition within `finally` to indicate a retry due to a `commit` failing could be expressed in a clearer manner by having it within the `try` block as described by IntelliJ here[0].

0 - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/inspectopedia/ContinueOrBreak...
by michaelt | 2025-11-11 00:21:47+00:00
I think it would generally be a good thing for cops kicking down doors to have working body cameras; the state's monopoly on violence is easily abused, and should be carefully monitored.

But if the cops get the wrong address for their no-knock warrant, kick down my door, and find me jerking off in my bedroom - I would prefer the footage not be made public.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-11 00:22:30+00:00
> The problem is exactly that Stephanapolous used the word rapist. His producer warned him several times. It is a lie. Words have meanings. You can’t call someone something they are not, hence the $16m paid by ABC

Trump lost the defamation case that actually went to trial making that exactly claim about E Jean Caroll's own use of the same language describing the result, the money he got from ABC wasn't because they were likely to lose at trial, it was because kowtowing to Trump was expected to have produce results for the corporate ownership when the Trump Administration considered licensing and other regulatory requests.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-11 00:22:55+00:00
It was very odd the way Trump called it out. Rfk is the oddest guy in the administration so it's not surprising. Trump however is pretty transactional and usually has a good reason for the things that he does, even if you don't like them (and not just self serving attention grabbing reasons, but power plays and maximum pressure tactics) . He definitely had an angle here. Was it to demonstrate his power to Big Pharma? Either way this was a bit of an own goal for him.
by einpoklum | 2025-11-11 00:23:03+00:00
Both Apple and Google guarantee you a total _breach_ of your privacy: They are known to share most or all of your data, that's on their servers / comm lines, with branches of the US government, en masse, pursuant to agreements or compelling arrangements. This is the PRISM program, revealed last decade by CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

As for other uses of your data, and what they "send back home", there you might be right about the differences between Apple and Google, but I would again not put faith in either.
by versteegen | 2025-11-11 00:23:10+00:00
What about scholarly encyclopedias? For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The articles are written in the style of a survey article, and if they're merely tertiary, I can't tell. If the intention behind a citation is a reference for a concept (an "existence proof" of it) rather than identifying its source or providing evidence, then a tertiary source such as to a textbook seems adequate.
by malshe | 2025-11-11 00:23:27+00:00
I suspect a majority of my students this semester used LLMs to complete homework assignments. It is really depressing. I spent hours making these assignments and all they probably did was to copy and paste them into ChatGPT. The worst part is when they write to me asking for help, sharing their code, and I can see it was written by LLMs. The errors are mostly there because occasionally the assignments refer to something we did in the class. Without that context LLMs make assumptions and the code fails to generate the exact output. So now I am fixing the part of the code that some of my students didn't bother to write themselves.

Edit: Added "I suspect" in the beginning as I can't prove it.
by stmw | 2025-11-11 00:23:39+00:00
And that was really my (unpopular) opinion above - that exceptions and garbage collectors are two examples of runtime/compiler/language features that after some iteration around the corner cases tend to end up in roughly the same place Java did 20+ years ago - as you say, "if you squint a bit".

It is interesting to think why it is so for exceptions specifically. The discussion here offers some of the possible reasons, I think, including violent disagreement of what we all even mean by exceptions vs stack unwinding vs error propagation.
by lsllc | 2025-11-11 00:24:00+00:00
> taking actions that reduce the difference between predictions and reality, effectively minimizing prediction errors

Since you can't change reality itself, and you can only take actions to reduce variational free energy, doesn't this make everything into a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I guess there must be some base level of instinct that overrides this; in the case of "I think that sabertooth tiger is going to eat me" you want to make sure the "don't get eaten" instinct counters "minimizing prediction errors".
by codezero | 2025-11-11 00:24:08+00:00
Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted.

After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal conditions though, in a case, in a closed climate controlled shelf, and rarely if ever removed or used.

Also, just because I think it's funny, the archive was over 4000 DVDs. (We had a redundant copies of the data compressed and uncompressed, I think it was like 3000 uncompressed 1k compressed) there was also an offsite redundant copy we put on portable IDE (and eventually SATA) drives.
by user____name | 2025-11-11 00:24:21+00:00
Bezier curves can generate degenerate geometry when flattened and stroke geometry has to handle edge cases. See for instance the illustration on the last page of the Polar Stroking paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.00308

There are also things like interpretting (conflating) coverage as alpha for analytical antialiasing methods, which lead to visible hairline cracks.
by neilv | 2025-11-11 00:24:26+00:00
* The article speaks of this personnel like reservists, but could the training also apply to helping defend public infrastructure and institutions, where they work? (For example, if there ever be a need to quickly hand out firearms on-site, or if ever there was a need for random people to know how to observe and report threats?)

* Could this training be practice, before mass military training of most adult citizens?
by rstuart4133 | 2025-11-11 00:24:51+00:00
The same is true of any country, including the USA. Australia & the UK have laws to that effect, and the USA backdoored RSA and Juniper off the top of my head.

Unless you run purely open source, your only choice always has been which country had open slather to spy on you. There are no real contenders for open source phones right now, so for most of us guaranteed privacy was never a choice. (I have high hopes for Halium in the future, as I hate this.)

For those of us in East Asia or some country like Iran or Venezuela that the US likes to bomb periodically, China is the least objectionable spy master. Those of us in the West chose USA, as they were a reliable trusted ally. Then Trump arrived on the scene and make things complicated.
by lizknope | 2025-11-11 00:24:56+00:00
AFS ACLs were great.

When working on a class project it was great that I as a normal user could create an ACL group and add and remove users to it and then give them read or write or both permissions on a directory in my account.

At my job we have hundreds of projects and there are strict security requirement so we only have permissions to the projects that we are assigned to. The problem is that software and libraries are in different directories with different permissions so they can't just add us to every group as it would go over the limit for number of Unix groups. So we have another command that is setuid root that we type in our password and it changes our Unix groups on the fly. The process for adding people to the groups has to go through a web site where only the project lead can add people and even then it can take a day because some VP needs to approve it.
by borroka | 2025-11-11 00:25:49+00:00
I have found them to be very useful.

Here are just a few examples of how I have used them.

My fountain pen stopped working, so I tried the common solutions recommended, but they did not solve the problem. Claude told me to try using a mixture of window cleaner and water. It worked! (The solution must have been in the corpus used to train Claude.)

I switched from W2 to consulting, but I didn't know anything about taxes. ChatGPT gave me the right recommendation, saving me hours of research.

I wanted to evaluate the quality of some shirts I have, so I used ChatGPT to estimate stitches per inch and the quality of the buttonholes and other details.

I planned my diet using ChatGPT. I had it calculate calories, macros, and deficit. Could I have done it without an LLM? Of course, but it made the planning much faster.
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-11-11 00:26:10+00:00
Fascinating project. Based on section 3.9, it seems the output is in the form of a bitmap. So I assume you have to do a full memory copy to the GPU to display the image in the end. With skia moving to WebGPU[0] and with WebGPU supporting compute shaders, I feel that 2D graphics is slowly becoming a solved problem in terms of portability and performance. Of course there are cases where you would a want a CPU renderer. Interestingly the web is sort of one of them because you have to compile shaders at runtime on page load. I wonder if it could make sense in theory to have multiple stages to this, sort of like how JS JITs work, were you would start with a CPU renderer while the GPU compiles its shaders. Another benefit, as the author mentions, is binary size. WebGPU (via dawn at least) is rather large.

[0] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-...
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-11 00:26:30+00:00
The problem with AI slop isnt the AI part.

It's that not every one has the talent to produce something of quality.

If you give a professional passionate chef, the same ingredients for a full meal, as your average home cook the results will NOT be the same by a far stretch.

Much of "AI slop" is to content what Macdonald's is to food. Its technically edible but not high quality
by verdverm | 2025-11-11 00:26:46+00:00
right... that's why NextJS is designed to align with Vercel's infra and makes using it elsewhere a pain (see what used to be called "middleware" but had to be renamed because so many people called out this issue, and instead of designing NextJS to be amenable to running anywhere, they just doubled down)

Use TanStack instead of NextJS and Vercel
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-11 00:26:59+00:00
>No sir, everybody does not break laws.

Lol. You just haven't been scrutinized by government yet.

Also, FYI you're far, far, far better off having real deal criminal prosecutors coming after you trying to get you on a violation of real deal criminal laws because then you have real deal rights with tons of precedent backing them up and literally everyone in the system being trained on how not to violate them lest you get off. If the EPA, your local zoning code enforcer, the parking ticket people, the USDA, etc, etc. come after you you have basically no rights because it's theoretically a civil and not a criminal matter and these organizations are free to unilaterally run their process however unfairly they see fit limited only by what they feel exposes them to risk of politicians trying to reign them in (see also: everyone's complaints with ICE these days). Yeah they can mostly only fine you but if you don't pay (because you dispute) the whole system acts as a ratchet, they lien your house, etc, etc. and you inevitably wind up in court, but with none of the procedural and precedent protection because once again it's non-criminal.

Don't believe me? Try it.
by usrusr | 2025-11-11 00:27:27+00:00
What about non-voting shares? Can it be ownership if you are not included in decisions? I've never really thought about it, but now I believe that what GP was describing is exactly how those are made (or should be made). So at least not entirely wrong (no wait, they would also include a share of assets on dissolution, but that too can be done through a contract with the entity owned by regular shareholders)
by dmoy | 2025-11-11 00:28:20+00:00
I mean.... enough to make shots on target at about 300-400 yards with a sling, and enough to make shots on target at about 50 yards while standing up.

I do competitive bullseye rifle, and I've done some basic marksmanship coaching. That's about what I'd expect for maybe 6-12 hours of total training on a rifle for someone with zero prior experience with guns.

The basics of rifles is very, very simple. In competition world we just get overly focused on stuff that doesn't matter - our benchmark is like 10/10 shots at 400 yards in an 8" circle. For someone getting basic instructions, 5/10 shots at 400 yards in a 16" circle is probably fine, and that is an order of magnitude easier to teach.

It took me like 3 hours from zero experience to get to that, and another 300+ hours to get to competitively decent at prone (I might be good now but I'm not particularly skilled so it took me a lot of practice). And we're not going to talk about standing because in the competition world what we do is so far removed from reality that it's not worth talking about in this context lol. Someone with run&gun experience can talk about that, I don't know anything about that.
by protocolture | 2025-11-11 00:28:26+00:00
>The first two are reasonable positions. The third, on the merits of the argument in the article, is absolutely bonkers. It's the UK government that is unleashing this stupidity on the world. There is no European alternative that is any safer, and it's the UK's own hands that are at fault in the first place.

Disagree. Australia and also likely Canada have identical these laws. And once the capability is in place, its likely that the US can all writs access to the same tool. Apple is unique in that it has a semi legal canary, in choosing to withdraw the services instead of complying.

You cant trust any tech company that remains located in the 5 eyes nations.

I am not aware of good alternatives, but worst case you can run up a VPS with Owncloud or something.
by NegativeK | 2025-11-11 00:29:27+00:00
The US Supreme Court decided in 1886 [1] that it's the 14th amendment.

The general article on Wikipedia [2] has more info about it, and discusses the fact that corporate personhood is an abstraction that represents the rights of the individuals owning or running the company. "Statutes violating their prohibitions in dealing with corporations must necessarily infringe upon the rights of natural persons" and modern cases. That article also discusses how, from the 1920s to the 80s, general corporate personhood wasn't as broad as it is today. It also mentions, at the top, historical instances of the idea.

But to your point, no corporation in the US has full, equal rights to a natural person. It's an abstraction that the legal system does not apply blindly. You could change the phrase "corporate person" to something like "corporate legal entity with a set of rights that overlaps with natural persons" or demand a different approach to the rights of a corporation, but I don't think "you're using that word wrong" will hold much weight with legal professionals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-11 00:29:34+00:00
Computers have a bunch of abstractions, but they are leaky abstractions. Apache is not leaking that much, so you don't need to write an HTTP server (until you write an Apache module). Abstracting over Apache can be something able to do when all you need to do is host static pages on port 80/443, that's called a Webhoster or github.io .
by Topfi | 2025-11-11 00:29:37+00:00
> [...] but it's not something they can do without being blatantly obvious.

Thing is, it is being done by certain labs and it is blatantly obvious [0]. It has for months now been very easy to tell which labs either "train to the test" or (if you wanna give them the benefit of a doubt they have most certainly not earned) simply fail to keep their datasets sanitized because of this.

I still see value in and will continue to use odd scenarios to prompt for SVG as it can have value as a spatial reasoning focused benchmark. But I will never use the same scenario a second time and have a hard time taking anyone seriously who does, again, because I have seen consistent evidence that certain labs "bench-max" to a fault.

You are right, it is obvious and easily proven, yet despite that your correctness, the fact remains that a lot of hype masters simply do not care.

Say what you want about Anthropic, I have and will continue to do so, but they appear to take the most steps of any industry member in not training solely with a focus on beating benchmarks. Their models in my experience usually perform better than established, public benchmarks would make one think. They also, from what I have seen, take the most precautions to ensure to the best of their abilities that e.g. their own research papers on model "misaligned behavior"/unprompted agentic output do not find their way into the training corpus via canary strings [1], etc.

Overall, if I were asked whether any lab is doing everything they truly can to avoid any unintentionally training with a focus on popular, eye catching benchmarks, I'd say none, partly because it is likely impossible to avoid when using the open web as a source.

On the other hand, if I were asked whether any labs are intentionally and clearly training specifically with a focus on popular, eye catching benchmarks, I'd have a few names at the top of my mind right away. Just do what you suggested, try other out there scenarios as SVGs and see for yourself the discrepancy to e.g. the panda burger or cycle pelican. It is blatant, shameless and I ask any person with an audience in the LLM space to do the same. The fact that few if any seem to is annoying to say the least.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45599403

[1] In fairness, not knowing their data acquisition pipeline, etc. it is hard to tell how effective such measures can truly be considering reporting on their papers on the open web is unlikely to include the canary strings.
by sublinear | 2025-11-11 00:30:04+00:00
I completely agree, and I would add that in just about any dev role beyond being a junior it's so common to need to work efficiently without much of a dev environment anyway.

There's just no point in fighting this battle. I will admit it's sometimes nice to have fancy tools, but they're just that. I don't get the need to make a hobby out of it when there's so much other stuff to do.
by tim333 | 2025-11-11 00:30:13+00:00
There was stuff on a possible way around that from Google Research out the other day called Nested Learning https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-n...

My understanding is at the moment you train something like ChatGPT on the web, setting weights with backpropagation till it works well, but if you give some more info and do more backprop it can forget other stuff it's learned, called 'catastrophic forgetting'. The nested learning approach is to split things into a number of smaller models so you can retrain one without mucking up the other ones.
by wlindley | 2025-11-11 00:30:24+00:00
As an emacs user since the mid-80s, I do note this functionality would be nice as a Major Mode, if one were an avid Lisp programmer.

As a Perl Monger since 1994, and as a developer who has used and extended Org::Parser from CPAN, I am happy to see support in any other language, as you have done with Go here. I wonder whether you plan to extend your parser to fairly complete support of all/most of what Org offers.

Thanks for this!
by kg | 2025-11-11 00:30:34+00:00
Interesting writeup. It's surprising to me that the author was experiencing such severe performance issues with relatively simple scenes, and it sounds like the performance issues still aren't completely gone. In the past I've been able to run fairly complex 2D scenes in JS+canvas so I wonder if there's some sort of fundamental performance issue lurking underneath kaplay or some other library they're using?