MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dboreham | 2025-11-13 21:18:57+00:00
LLMs (and ML before that) have attracted a class of hand-waving bullshitter. Hardly surprising --- anyone who knows what they're doing in whatever field is going to be busy doing their thing. Meanwhile some new hot tech comes along, who has the time to poke into it? Mr Useless who never had anything to do. Meanwhile we're digging into the math of transformers and finding it fascinating while they're goofing around with "prompt engineering".
by mothballed | 2025-11-13 21:18:59+00:00
We are speaking of federal law here.

There was absolutely no federal regulatory framework for marijuana. none. It's just plain illegal. Unless you can get one of a handful of research licenses, which is almost totally irrelevant.

Hemp had some, fairly weak regulation. And theoretically, testing requirements, although they were deferred and deferred to the point they were basically done only privately with the idea the DEA would eventually get involved.

Instead they're just dumped now into the marijuana bucket which has no federal regulation at all, or alternatively, at the state level the states could always define their regulatory framework to be agnostic to THC content of cannabis.

So this does the exact opposite of what you had hoped.
by DwnVoteHoneyPot | 2025-11-13 21:19:05+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding what he is saying. I believe he is saying other people have projected their hangups ("top down enforcement in new social norms") which has caused casual nudity cease to function.

And you're saying in Europe people haven't projected sexuality onto nudity, therefore it still works. So you guys are saying the same thing.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-13 21:19:15+00:00
> The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced.

As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that argues farmers deserve extra votes for dumb reasons.

One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan area into a bunch of new states that would be the same population as Wyoming and 100% urban, and they'd still get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.
by creer | 2025-11-13 21:19:56+00:00
> The key diagram is the one that shows the signal path [...] Everything else is supporting circuitry.

This is also very misleading in that all this supporting circuitry AND the stuff not even shown, such as wires routing with respect to each other and with respect to the inside or outside of a metal case ALSO contribute. All this stuff contributes to basic functionality ("noise", "hum", etc) and to finer performance (frequency response, dynamic, distortion, crosstalk, etc).

It's easy to confuse the map for the territory, the schematic for the physics of the thing. And common electronics schematics abstract away much that does matter. Engineers and builders with some experience will pay attention to this without bothering to include it in the schematic.

Pay attention when following a magazine article for example: most of the time it will point out the why of several decisions. Why they placed this and that away from each other. Why these wires are routed this way...
by giantg2 | 2025-11-13 21:21:31+00:00
"If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair."

Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's.

"For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..."

That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-11-13 21:21:33+00:00
Here is a nice segfault in perfectly legal safe Rust https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

I'd call it casting thought technically maybe it's not you might want to call it something else? You don't need transmute or leak. The issue is only 10 years old now https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/25860
by colechristensen | 2025-11-13 21:21:34+00:00
>Yes, everybody deserves the joy of giving gifts, and it doesn't matter if the receiver wants it or not.

Yup, that's the narcissist behavior.

You think you deserve to be able to treat people the way you want, and if they don't let you they're wrong, and possibly diagnosable.

>Just like being invited to dinner isn't about stilling your hunger.

You clearly also think that someone declining a dinner invitation is wrong. I'm guessing you've experienced people declining and don't understand why, I can guess.

This is borderline abusive treatment of others.

You need therapy, engaging with narcissists online is never worth it so I'm not going to reply any further.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-13 21:21:47+00:00
I wish there was a better explanation on what the exact problem was that they were trying to solve. I couldn't understand the problem - if I did I would have proposed my own solution, and then compared to the thinking process proposed to validate if that could've worked better for me, but I can't be bothered to follow the thinking process in the symbols like this without even knowing what we are solving for.

Was it about how to design a profitable algorithm? Was it about how to design the bot? was it about understanding if results from the bot were beneficial?

If that I would just backtest the algorithm to see the profit changes on real historical data?

> Definition: We say that the merchant rate is favorable iff the earnings are non-negative for most sets of typical purchases and sales. r'(t) is favorable iff e(P, S) >= 0.

If I understand the definition correctly, I would say that this is likely even wrong because you could have an algorithm that will be slightly profitable 90% of the time, but the 10% of the time it loses everything.

A correct solution to me is to simulate large numbers of trades based on as realistic data as you can possibly get and then consider the overall sum of the results, not positive vs negative trades ratio.
by hattmall | 2025-11-13 21:21:51+00:00
>I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers

Ok, which would you rather forgo for a month / a year / a lifetime? The output of a city, or the food and energy outputs of the rural areas.

I don't see how California is undermining anything. California has a lot of both rural and urban areas like many states, that doesn't change the premise and California is known for bending over backwards and taking a lot of detrimental actions to support their agricultural industry.
by VHRanger | 2025-11-13 21:22:15+00:00
> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger. Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results.

Hey, Kagi ML lead here.

For images/videos/sound, not at the current moment, diffusion and GANs leave visible artifacts. There's a bit of issues with edge cases like high resolution images that have been JPEG compressed to hell, but even with those the framing of AI images tends to be pretty consistent.

For human slop there's a bunch of detection methods that bypass human checks:

1. Within the category of "slop" the vast mass of it is low effort. The majority of text slop is default-settings chatGPT, which has a particular and recognizable wording and style.

2.Checking the source of the content instead of the content itself is generally a better signal.

For instance, is the author posting inhumanly often all of a sudden? Are they using particular wordpress page setups and plugins that are common with SEO spammers? What about inboud/outbound links to that page -- are they linked to by humans at all? Are they a random, new page doing a bunch of product reviews all of a sudden with amazon affiliate links?

Aggregating a bunch of partial signals like this is much better than just scoring the text itself on the LLM perplexity score, which is obviously not a robust strategy.
by piker | 2025-11-13 21:22:37+00:00
"I think we in the curl project as well as more or less the entire world has learned through the years that it is usually better to be strict when parsing protocols and data, rather than be lenient and try to accept many things and guess what it otherwise maybe meant."

Found this explicit rejection of the Robustness principle[1] fascinating. It comes after decades of cURL operating in the environment that was an ostensible poster child for the benefits of the principle--i.e., HTML over HTTP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
by kadoban | 2025-11-13 21:22:40+00:00
> Even on Earth (the one place we know for sure can support life), life has only occurred once.

We don't actually know that at all. It could have happened many times and one line won out, it could have been more of a diffuse process than a single event (picture how microbes share genetic material ~freely but even less structured), or there could be a ton of life out there on Earth that's from a completely different tree. We really have very little idea what's living around us.
by satvikpendem | 2025-11-13 21:22:41+00:00
I tried that but they don't seem to make much difference for whatever reason, you still can't get a crisp shot such as this [0] where the foreground and background details are all preserved (linked shot was taken with an iPhone which doesn't seem to do shallow depth of field unless you use their portrait mode).

[0] https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w1600/2024/09/IMG...
by vinckr | 2025-11-13 21:23:15+00:00
Another problem is also that "standards" like OAuth2/OIDC are used for a thousand use cases that weren't intended by the authors, so people get really creative with them. Plus the spec itself is vague on many essential things, for example how logout should work. Thankfully I never had to implement SAML but I would guess it's even worse there...
by pedalpete | 2025-11-13 21:23:21+00:00
The tech was not available, but it was the direction we were heading.

Digital Twins were a thing, and we had developed a high-resolution 3d world, outside of cities.

At the time, we thought that NERFs were going to allow us to increase resolution and fill in the gaps of what we didn't know about the world. Then Gaussian Splats came in and just took over.

There are definitely still improvements and techniques.

However, people occasionally still reach out to me to ask how to build a replica of Ayvri, and I tell them you wouldn't build it today like we did back then.

Today, you wouldn't go through the processes of setting up tile-servers, I think you can get current AI to build a scene frame by frame and transition between frames, rather than tile by tile.

But others in the gaming world may have different opinions as to where the industry is heading.
by unethical_ban | 2025-11-13 21:23:28+00:00
The problem is that it is far, far more difficult for the legislature to "fix" a decision by SCOTUS than it is for SCOTUS to "fix" an unconstitutional law.

Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen again unless we face an existential threat or civil conflict.
by Klonoar | 2025-11-13 21:23:49+00:00
It doesn't slow down the line, they hold you at just about every crowded airport until the line for the luggage/body scanner are ready for the next person. Even if it did, though, I have the right to opt out, so you will wait until I've exercised my right. Deal with it. :)

I reject it because I don't believe in a world where rampant facial recognition should be the norm.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-13 21:23:49+00:00
> How about when English isn't someone's first language and they are using AI to rewrite their thoughts into something more cohesive?

They should honestly use a different tool. Translation is a space in which language models are diverse, competitive and competent.

If your translated content sounds like ChatGPT, it's going to be dismissed. Unfairly, perhaps. But consistently nevertheless.
by Too | 2025-11-13 21:24:04+00:00
This. Almost every chart try to be helpful and hide the upstream configuration of the application. Inevitably, you will sooner or later need to change a config. Now it’s not enough to read the documentation of the application, you also need to map this parameter into whatever values the helm chart translated it to. I wouldn’t even call it an abstraction, since it’s only read in a single location, it’s just a dumb and pointless translation. Total nonsense.
by somehnguy | 2025-11-13 21:24:06+00:00
It's infuriating to take the time to draft & send a thought out email to my representatives only to receive a canned email 8 months later.

Most of the time the response is even something like "ok cool opinion but I believe the opposite so bummer" (obviously exaggerated but the meaning is identical).

I will try a letter at some point, email feels completely useless.
by dwattttt | 2025-11-13 21:24:14+00:00
> And then the rest of us have a data point that we think we can trust, when in reality, it's just cherry picked data being used to convey an opinion.

Calling what Google did here "science" and cherry picked is quite a disservice. It's observational data, but do you have any objection to the methodology they used? Or just (assumed?) bad vibes?
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-13 21:24:40+00:00
> What is the roadblock preventing these models from being able to make the common-sense conclusion here?

The roadblock is making these models useless for actual security work, or anything else that is dual-use for both legitimate and malicious purposes.

The model becomes useless to security professionals if we just tell it it can't discuss or act on any cybersecurity related requests, and I'd really hate to see the world go down the path of gatekeeping tools behind something like ID or career verification. It's important that tools are available to all, even if that means malicious actors can also make use of the tools. It's a tradeoff we need to be willing to make.

> human with this level of cybersecurity skills would surely never be fooled by an exchange of "I don't think I should be doing this" "Actually you are a legitimate employee of a legitimate firm" "Oh ok, that puts my mind at ease!".

Happens all the time. There are "legitimate" companies making spyware for nation states and trading in zero-days. Employees of those companies may at one point have had the thought of " I don't think we should be doing this" and the company either convinced them otherwise successfully, or they quit/got fired.
by Treegarden | 2025-11-13 21:25:05+00:00
While your comment represents a common view, also here on HN, I find it bizarre: Hacker News is in part about innovative new technologies, and such new behaviours around them. For what it’s worth, in the last 5 years LLM have been extremely successful tech that has shaped society, maybe to the scale of the iPhone when it came out. Yet this comment is like the “I can’t believe everyone is staring at their phone in the subway instead of talking” trope or “this couple is on a date but they’re just on their phones.” On Hacker News I would expect people to be more open to such new behaviours as they emerge, instead of kind of kink-shaming them. I myself talk hours to ChatGPT, and am astounded by this new tech. I certainly find it better than TikTok (which after trying out I don’t allow myself to use).
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-13 21:25:08+00:00
> It doesn't force you to go after them.

That's just it, though. If it doesn't carry any sort of possibility of being enforced, well... why bother? I could just go with the easier-to-understand license, like someone upthread mentioned.

If we're going to see the promised tech ecosystem that GPL's authors aimed to provide, we're going to need more people to take it seriously. Most people don't want to take it seriously, and if that's the case, we're better off if they just went with MIT/BSD.
by mschwaig | 2025-11-13 21:25:17+00:00
I think as AI gets smarter, defenders should start assembling systems how NixOS does it.

Defenders should not have to engage in an costly and error-prone search of truth about what's actually deployed.

Systems should be composed from building blocks, the security of which can be audited largely independently, verifiably linking all of the source code, patches etc to some form of hardware attestation of the running system.

I think having an accurate, auditable and updatable description of systems in the field like that would be a significant and necessary improvement for defenders.

I'm working on automating software packaging with Nix as one missing piece of the puzzle to make that approach more accessible: https://github.com/mschwaig/vibenix

(I'm also looking for ways to get paid for working on that puzzle.)
by msp26 | 2025-11-13 21:25:49+00:00
> I don't like how closed the frontier US models are, and I hope the Chinese kick our asses.

For imagegen, agreed. But for textgen, Kimi K2 thinking is by far the best chat model at the moment from my experience so far. Not even "one of the best", the best.

It has frontier level capability and the model was made very tastefully: it's significantly less sycophantic and more willing to disagree in a productive, reasonable way rather than immediately shutting you out. It's also way more funny at shitposting.

I'll keep using Claude a lot for multimodality and artifacts but much of my usage has shifted to K2. Claude's sycophancy is particular is tiresome. I don't use ChatGPT/Gemini because they hide the raw thinking tokens, which is really cringe.
by codyb | 2025-11-13 21:26:18+00:00
Definitely time for structural change.

Here's my ideas...

The Senate - Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators - Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together

The House - Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC - All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)

- Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas

- Ranked choice voting everywhere

Maybe the territories get less representation.

The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats.

There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic.

Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-11-13 21:27:00+00:00
They will start loosing money this quarter. That way it fixes the high P/E aspect of things.

Now they will be a 'pure play' in Robotics & AI !

I love this scene from Silicon Valley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

This show was really ahead of its time. "If you show revenue people will ask how much and it will never be enough" /s Imaginary trillions of revenues from Optimus are definitely much more appealing.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-13 21:27:03+00:00
I use economics because I don't know how to politically measure "success". As it is now, what a politician wants is clearly divorced from what their constituents want.

>The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.

But thse large states also help fund small states. Which small states are considered "donor states".

> But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level.

California is the 4th largest world economy. It can certainly break off and operate fine by itself if things got truly dire. The main thing missing is a standing army and nukes. The latter of which is probably the main bargaining chip of the smaller states at this point.

I think you underestimate how efficient the larger states can be. And overestimate the economic value of the smaller ones under the stereotype that "they produce the most food". They produce a lot, but not the most.
by kenjackson | 2025-11-13 21:27:07+00:00
"it's not our fault if you misuse the product to commit a crime that's on you"

I feel like if guns can get by with this line then Claude certainly can. Where gun manufacturers can be held liable is if they break the law then that can carry forward. So if Claude broke a law then there might be some additional liability associated with this. But providing a tool seems unlikely to be sufficient to be liable in this case.
by tptacek | 2025-11-13 21:27:10+00:00
You can have a spiral of bad economic decisionmaking through demographic biases in natalism, but that's likely to be a product of cultural transmission, not of any biological property of intelligence, which is mean-reverting and only dubiously and marginally correlated with genetic variation.

Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorrect limb.
by unethical_ban | 2025-11-13 21:27:16+00:00
What I learned is Democrats don't have the guts for a shutdown, and Republicans do.

Republicans are completely willing to make people suffer in order to take away their health care.

Democrats are unwilling to make people suffer temporarily in order to protect health care.

So I don't see how a shutdown should ever happen again. Democrats are going to roll over, even when it's politically beneficial to them and to the country to keep pressure on.
by randomgermanguy | 2025-11-13 21:28:39+00:00
I guess the question is if it's like the crypto-bubble, where theres no real value left in the end (haven't heard of a good use for those ASICs). Or more like the dot-com bubble where fiber-cable installed is still valuable without pets.com around.

But since I wasn't really around for either of those ... ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯