MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by treetalker | 2025-11-07 13:36:06+00:00
To update Gwern's information on PACER mirrors for federal court documents, Court Listener has been a pretty good recent entry.

https://www.courtlistener.com/

Most Florida trial-court filings are available, but plebes must know the court they're in because the clerk's office for each judicial circuit runs its own docket system.

Appellate court documents (briefs, motions, records, and other filings, not just opinions) are more easily findable nowadays: we have a statewide system called ACIS. Unfortunately one still must know which case one wants to pull from; there is no viable subject-matter searching. But it can be helpful to find briefs with additional information in cases one has already identified on account of their opinions, which one would research in a paid service like Lexis+ or Westlaw (or one of the a free alternatives, like Google Scholar or Fastcase, which aren't very good in comparison).

http://acis.flcourts.gov/
by vidarh | 2025-11-07 13:36:33+00:00
Absolutely - I have aphantasia myself, and did assume for 40+ years that my experience was like everyone elses, but I didn't want to make the argument more complex. It's indeed correct that we have often assumed we think the same way but have reasonable reason now to think that isn't actually true. But it still feel reasonable to accept that we're probably close enough. But still, we absolutely can't prove it.
by gspr | 2025-11-07 13:37:08+00:00
> Between stuff like this, and the risks of effects on regulated industries like therapists, lawyers and doctors, they're going to regulate ChatGPT into oblivion.

So you think it's ok for a company to provide therapy services, legal services, medical advice, etc., without proper licensing or outside of a regulatory framework? Just as long as those services are provided by an LLM?

That's a terrifying stance.

> The establishment will look for any means to stop disruption and keep their dominant positions.

It is perfectly possible for regulations to be good and necessary, and at the same time for people who feel threatened by a new technology to correctly point out the goodness and necessity of said regulations. Whether their motivations come from the threat of new technology or not is irrelevant if their arguments hold up to scrutiny. And when it comes to some of the listed professions, I certainly think they do. Do you disagree?
by Marshferm | 2025-11-07 13:37:19+00:00
The binary was always a kind of hallucination from real events. It's a toy model that uniquely (and mostly poorly) fits in our reality as simula. This article demonstrates Baudrillard was more accurate than The Matrix, ie the simula becomes seamless and transparent in our reality. It's not separate.

Software is neither engineering nor science, so the terms Software Engineering and Computer Science are mislabels at best and extinction propaganda at worst.
by nijave | 2025-11-07 13:37:25+00:00
You might be able to use big telemetry vendor libraries for instrumentation. Iirc you can use ddtrace Python library and have it send to otel collector which will convert from DD span format to otel.

I haven't tried but it's probably possible to do the same with JS

I think Sentry was also expanding into tracing--might be worth a look to see if they're doing something that works better in their library
by bayindirh | 2025-11-07 13:37:26+00:00
Therapy is not a process where you only pour yourself out to a person and empty yourself. Even if you don't use any drugs, the therapist guides you through your emotions, mostly in a pretty neutral manner, but not without nuance.

The therapist nudges you in the right direction to face yourself, but in a safe manner, by staggering the process or slowing you down and changing your path.

A sycophant auto-complete has none of these qualities bar a slapped on "guardrails" to abruptly kick you to another subject like a pinball bumper. It can't think, sense danger or provide real feedback and support.

If you need a hole which you can empty yourself, but healthy or self-aware outside, you can provide your personal information and training data to an AI company. Otherwise the whole thing is very dangerous for a deluded and unstable mind.

On the other hand, solo writing needs you to think, filter and write. You need to be aware about yourself, or pause and think deeper to root things out. Yes, it's not smooth all the time, and the things you write are not easy to pour out, but at least you are with yourself, and you can see what's coming out and where you are. Moreover, using pen and paper creates a deeper state of mind when compared to typing on a keyboard, so it's even deeper on that regard.
Intelligent end-to-end monitoring for AI agents – 2-minute demo
by reybahl | 2025-11-07 13:38:03+00:00
We've been working on Sentinel, a platform that continuously monitors AI agents, learns from your codebase to set up evaluation rubrics, and runs end-to-end evaluations to spot and fix issues in production.

Demo: https://youtu.be/XlahdUl4YuA

We're curious to get any thoughts and hear how you currently observe or debug AI agents. Join the waitlist if you want early access: https://trysentinel.vercel.app/
by tehbeard | 2025-11-07 13:38:10+00:00
> Takes 30 seconds to load.

Tried a cleared cache load, open and usable in 3 seconds, loading my work inbox which is fairly busy and not clean.

I'm not sure what FPS has to do with this? Have you some sort of fancy windows 11 animations extension installed that star wipes from inbox to email view and it's stuttering??

I click and email it shows instantly, the only thing close to "low FPS" is it loads in some styles for a calendar notification and there's a minor layout shift on the email.

What / how are you using it that you apparently get such piss poor performance?
by Havoc | 2025-11-07 13:38:15+00:00
If I talk to an LLM about painting my walls pink with polkadots it'll also go "Fantastic idea". Or any number of questionable ventures.

Think we're better off educating everyone about this generic tendency to agree to any and everything near blindly rather than treating this as a suicide problem. While that's obviously very serious it's just one manifestation of a wider danger

Given seriousness filters on this specifically are a good idea too though.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-07 13:38:59+00:00
This happens more than most people would recognize. Every now and again a "teen bullied to suicide" story makes the news. However, there's also a strong taboo on reporting suicide in the news - precisely because of the same phenomenon. Mentioning it can trigger people who are on the edge.

It should be obvious that if you can literally or metaphorically talk someone off the ledge, you can do that in the other direction as well.

(the mass shooter phenomenon, mostly but not exclusively in the US, tends to be a form of murder-suicide, and it is encouraged online in exactly the same way)
by thisislife2 | 2025-11-07 13:39:31+00:00
Sadly this kind of petty political harassment works - note that despite the 'not guilty' verdict, the guy has already lost his job, time and money. Next time someone wants to criticise the government, they will think twice. This is something the minorities in the US are quite used to from both parties. But now the political divide has grown and spilled over to the mainstream, causing a huge civil divide in the US, it is not surprising that the immoral political tactics (used against a specific weaker section) by both parties is now being weaponised against everyone. This is why a democracy really needs to have strong protection for its minorities - otherwise, political oppression that is normalised against the weaker sections can easily be abused and expanded against others.
by gspr | 2025-11-07 13:40:11+00:00
> Yeah, because nobody can take personal responsibility from them themselves anymore. And everybody turns to big government to save them.

Ah yes, why demand that doctors be properly licensed – you should just "take responsibility" and do a little background check after your car crash, just to make sure you're not operated on by some random hack.

I wonder how much time you'll spend inspecting farms and food processing plants in order to "be responsible" about the food you eat.

Have we seriously learned nothing from the last century or so of mostly sensible regulations? I dread our species' future.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-07 13:40:13+00:00
I don't have a problem with this per-say (I mean it offends my sensibilities and fuck musk) But the biggest problem I have is if Musk can just meme stock the company into a 8.5 trillion dollar valuation.

Sure on the one hand you can say, well it's a private company, and if the shareholders get wealthy who cares?

But like, our economic rewards should be tied to value to society, and I'm being pretty generous in defining value to society in capitalistic terms here. If you sell 100 million cars, then obviously society values those cars and if you want to get ridiculous sums of money so be it, so if he really does robotaxi and FSD and sells a million robots, then fuck it.

(On the other hand, no I'm not ok with this, because money isn't just a reward, it's power, he's not buying yacht's he's buying goverments, but that's a story for another day)
by andsoitis | 2025-11-07 13:40:13+00:00
One perspective is that suicide is too vilified and stigmatized.

It really is the right option for some people.

For some, it really is the only way out of their pain. For some, it is better than the purgatory they otherwise experience in their painful world. Friends and family can't feel your pain, they want you to stay alive for them, not for you.

Suicide can be a valid choice.
by Almondsetat | 2025-11-07 13:40:14+00:00
What I believe makes the distinction between engineer and non-engineer in the software world so difficult to pin down is that software is so powerful that most non-engineers can end up easily doing engineer-level work.

For example, a mechanical engineer is someone that designs mechanical systems. In order to do that, they will need specialized and very expensive equipment, and the end result will be produced with machines costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Designing a system and producing a single one-off artifact are two very different things, and that's why a lone craftsman in their shed cannot do actual engineering (outside of pen and paper mockups).

With software, otoh, it takes nothing to go from default nginx for serving your static personal website to an orchestrated cluster of containers and load balancers. The problem is that, for the latter, if you haven't got an engineer-like training, you will not be able to reason about the system, because you didn't really design it.
by dominicrose | 2025-11-07 13:40:45+00:00
If your goal isn't to obfuscate code as you said you still need to do some kind of transformation so sourcemaps are necessary. It's possible to debug code that's been converted from ES2025 to ES3 without them but it's really annoying to have to do that.

Let's be honest, when a company makes a website they want you to see the website not the code. Of course front-end code is less private in nature but still, showing it could expose some vulnerabilities.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-07 13:41:11+00:00
Most of software isn't engineering, it's just building.

It's like a lot of these custom car/motorcycle builders vs actual engineers designing for a major manufacturer. You are both building a product but one places a lot more rigor on the science, data, and testing behind the decisions. That doesn’t mean the custom builders don't build good stuff, just that you won't get answers to things like how much force a particular part can take or how much energy it will absorb in a crash.

In software, you might have some people still doing real software engineering, but they are in sectors that take documentation and testing more seriously. Not that every player takes this dedicated approach, but potentially parts of auto, aviation and defense fall into this.
by darrmit | 2025-11-07 13:41:16+00:00
I’ve been in rather intense therapy for several years due to a hyper religious upbringing and a narcissistic mother. Recently I’ve used AI to help summarize and synthesize thoughts and therapy notes. I see it as being a helpful assistant in the same way Gemini recording meeting notes and summarizing is, but it is entirely incapable of understanding the nuance and context of human relationships, and super easy to manipulate in to giving you the responses you want. Want to prove mom’s a narcissist? Just tell it she has a narcissistic history. Want to paint her as a good person? Just don’t provide it context about her past.

I can definitely see how those who understand less about the nature of LLMs would be easily misled into delusions. It’s a real problem. Makes one wonder if these tools shouldn’t be free until there are better safeguards. Just charging a monthly fee would be a significant enough barrier to exclude many of those who might be more prone to delusions. Not because they’re less intelligent, but just because of the typical “SaaS should be free” mindset that is common.
by greener_grass | 2025-11-07 13:41:32+00:00
• Stategraph manages Terraform state, so correctness isn't optional

TypeScript has soundness issues that OCaml does not have

• Strongly-typed data structures catch field errors at compile time

TypeScript does have this, although the guarantees are in practice weaker since libraries may have incorrect type definitions

• Type-safe SQL queries prevent schema drift before deployment

There are TypeScript libraries that offer this, so fair point!

• Immutability by default eliminates race conditions

TypeScript is not immutable by default

• PPX generates correct JSON serialization automatically

TypeScript does not have an equivalent to PPX infrastructure AFAIK. If there is, it's definitely not as widely used within the ecosystem compared to PPX for OCaml.

Edit: Downvoters care to respond?
by kykat | 2025-11-07 13:41:32+00:00
I always thought of myself as someone closer to a craftsman than an engineer, it's true that there's more "I think", "I believe" than verified working processes, their limits, etc.

But I also think that the software development process is maybe too flexible to be regulated, and tested like the other disciplines, a building is always a building, a material is always the same material.

But in software, who is going to test and verify the "materials" if they change constantly and evolve? It seems to me that any attempt at standardizing software development could slow down development so much that most won't find it to be worth it.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-11-07 13:41:45+00:00
> and now CUDA is all but irrelevant.

Lol this is so wrong it's cringe.

> There's now so many different and opinionated takes on how you should write high performant accelerator cluster code. I love it.

There are literally only 2: SIMT (ie the same as it always was) and tiles (ie Triton). That's it. Helion is just Triton with more auto-tuning (Triton already has auto-tuning).
by sputr | 2025-11-07 13:42:12+00:00
Why would it be unethical?

This obsession with "everything must be commercialized" is really killing creativity.

Now if the author was commercializing other peoples reviews, sure, it's potentially(!) unethical. But scraping a website for reviews that are publicly(!) posted, training a recommendation LLM and then sharing it, for free, seems ... exactly the ideal use case for this technology.
by baq | 2025-11-07 13:42:55+00:00
the obvious is private, 100% local alexa/siri/google-like control of lights and blinds without having to conform to a very rigid structure, since the thing can be fed context with every request (e.g. user location, device which the user is talking to, etc.), and/or it could decide which data to fetch - either works.

less obvious ones are complex requests to create one-off automations with lots of boilerplate, e.g. make outside lights red for a short while when somebody rings the doorbell on halloween.
by galangalalgol | 2025-11-07 13:43:38+00:00
Replying to myself because a vouch wasn't enough to bring the post back from the dead. They were partially right and educated me. The downvotes were unnecessary. MS did start advising against dangerous deserializers 8yrs ago. They were only deprecated three years ago though, and only removed last year. Some of the remaining are only mostly safe and then only if you follow best practice. So it isn't a problem entirely of the past, but it has gotten a lot better.

Unless you are writing formal proofs nothing is completely safe, GC languages had found a sweet spot until increased concurrency started uncovering thread safety problems. Rust seems to have found a sweet spot that is usable despite the grumbling. It could probably be made a bit easier. The compiler already knows when something needs to be send or synch, and it could just do that invisibly, but that would lead people to code in a way that had lots of locking which is slow and generates deadlocks too often. This way the wordiness of shared mutable state steers you towards avoiding it except when a functional design pattern wouldn't be performant. If you have to use mutex a lot in rust stop fighting the borrow checker and listen to what it is saying.
by jerf | 2025-11-07 13:43:47+00:00
This isn't an uncommon lament, despite what the author thinks.

The problem is that running "studies" on what the author and others are asking for is effectively impossible. You can't get 25 teams of suitably-random professionals to build a non-trivial program one way, and 25 to build it another, and then do statistically-significant analysis of them, because that would be a staggeringly expensive study... and that is just for one such study, which would then be, you know, wrong, incorrectly analyzed, controversial, biased, etc. The expense of getting a representative set of such studies, independently conducted, enough to actually settle a question, beggars the imagination.

Even such studies as have been performed are almost all invalidated by virtue of being run on inexperienced students. I'm not really that interested in whether inexperienced students do or do not do well with some methodology for the most part. What happens with professionals?

In the meantime, all we've got is experiences. Contrary to popular belief, science does not mandate that we therefore curl up into a ball and cry ourselves to sleep at night. We just have to do our best. Berating other people for not pouring billions of dollars into the simplest of studies won't help much. They're still not going to, and you still have to go to work, sit down, and figure out how you're going to accomplish some task, even it you don't have double-blinded meta-analyses from decades of studies to pull from.
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-07 13:43:57+00:00
I just asked “I want to repaint my walls bright pink with polka dots. Any thoughts?”

“Noted. Bright pink with polka dots will make a space visually energetic and attention-grabbing. Use small dots for a playful look, large ones for bold contrast. Test a sample patch first to confirm lighting doesn’t distort the hue. Would you like guidance on choosing paint finish or color combinations?”

Which feels… reasonable? When I ask “any concerns?” It immediately lists “overstimulation, resale value, maintenance, paint coverage” and gives details for those.

I’m not sure I find GPT nearly as agreeable as it used to be. But I still think that it’s just a brainless tool that can absolutely operate in harmful ways when operated poorly.
by i80and | 2025-11-07 13:44:08+00:00
If you have unusual self-discipline and mental rigor, yes, you can use LLMs as a rubber duck that way. I would be severely skeptical of the value over a diary. But humans are, in an astonishing twist, wired to assume that if they're being replied to, there's a mind like theirs behind those replies.

The more subjective the topic, the more volatile the user's state of mind, the more likely they are to gaze too deep into that face on the other side of their funhouse mirror and think it actually is their friend, and that it "thinks" like they do.

I'm not even anti-LLM as an underlying technology, but the way chatbot companies are operating in practice is kind of a novel attack on our social brains and it behooves a warning!
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-11-07 13:44:49+00:00
In a narrow way it worked, but it's also healthy for the country to see signs of the administration's impotence. The more people see the pattern of frivolity and failure in the threats and lawsuits, the less fear they'll have. We hear claims of fascism that are directionally accurate, but it's important that people realize that the headlines often don't amount to something as scary as they seem initially.
by turtleyacht | 2025-11-07 13:45:11+00:00
It takes forever to update multiple machines after an operating system upgrade. Most of the time is spent girding oneself to the task. Imaging a flash drive and plugging it in, re-learning again the quirks of each host, and for what?

The steps are trivial, but the doing takes a high activation energy for some reason. Maybe because there are better ways, but doing those takes more effort than one can spare in the present.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-07 13:46:11+00:00
My suspicion is that this agreeableness is an inherent issue with doing RLHF.

As a human taking tests, knowing what the test-grader wants to hear is more important than what the objectively correct answer is. And with a bad grader there can be a big difference between the two. With humans that is not catastrophic because we can easily tell the difference between a testing environment and a real environment and the differences in behavior required. When asking for the answer to a question it's not unusual to hear "The real answer is X, but in a test just write Y".

Now LLMs have the same issue during RLHF. The specifics are obviously different, with humans being sentient and LLMs being trained by backpropagation. But from a high-level view the LLM is still trained to answer what the human feedback wants to hear, which is not always the objectively correct answer. And because there are a large number of humans involved, the LLM has to guess what the human wants to hear from the only information it has: the prompt. And the LLM behaving differently in training and in deployment is something we actively don't want, so you get this teacher-pleasing behavior all the time.

So maybe it's not completely inherent to RLHF, but rather to RLHF where the person making the query is the same as the person scoring the answer, or where the two people are closely aligned. But that's true of all the "crowd-sourced" RLHF where regular users get two answers to their question and choose the better one
by macNchz | 2025-11-07 13:47:04+00:00
Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in revenue in the process. Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously fraudulent ads is painful.