MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jorvi | 2025-12-12 10:57:02+00:00
To be honest, this is like.. 5 years back? Maybe more. But I don't switch DEs that often.

It's funny to see the two things that prompted the discussion (naming desktops and per-desktop wallpapers) come up heavily under that issue you linked.

Like I mentioned in another comment, I like that KDE devs are much more constructive than Gnome devs. In that issue you can clearly see you're asking users to rephrase their feedback so it is more useful.

With Gnome, I've for example opened an issue for something that isn't according to visual HIG practices. Implementing this would lead to more visual clarity and it would look better to boot. I got told that no, actually they know better. It was pretty clear that they thought that if code or design originated from their shop, there could be no (better) alternative.

When I linked and gave mockup examples I got snarked, and when I snarked back I immediately got dressed down for rule violation by some mod figure that completely ignored their dev's initial snark. Just very, very unpleasant people.

Apologies for the rant haha. Anyway, thanks for linking that and for responding!
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-12 10:57:09+00:00
It is at least 50% NATOs fault. Mexico and Canada are democratic and sovereign nations, but if either would decide to allow chinese or russian military bases to be built in their country, you can safely asume the US would not hesitate to brake international laws and take military actions on those sovereign countries. NATO expanded closer and closer to russias border, and you can't just expect for Russia to be okay with that, just as the US wouldn't be okay with that.
by gspr | 2025-12-12 10:57:11+00:00
Maybe you're right. But at the same time I feel (based on nothing) that even the performance of an entry-level Android phone, coupled with libre hardware and software, and a tiny little keyboard like the N900's, running an ordinary Linux distro, actually would find a market. A small market made up of us weirdos who find this HN thread interesting.

But then again, experience shows I'm wrong.
by pksebben | 2025-12-12 10:57:15+00:00
If I believed that the efforts in question were in earnest, I would absolutely be talking through the finer points of how to do it right. I don't believe that, though. The veneer of legitimacy here is paper thin - we start with a very weatherbeaten conservative war drum (think of the children!) and immediately jump into "let's ruin privacy for everyone and I totally promise this isn't another Cambridge Analytica".
by Tepix | 2025-12-12 10:58:13+00:00
> false narratives based on wrong memory

I don't think "wrong memory" is accurate, it's missing information and doesn't know it or is trained not to admit it.

Checkout the Dwarkesh Podcast episode https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-trenton-2 starting at 1:45:38

Here is the relevant quote by Trenton Bricken from the transcript:

One example I didn't talk about before with how the model retrieves facts: So you say, "What sport did Michael Jordan play?" And not only can you see it hop from like Michael Jordan to basketball and answer basketball. But the model also has an awareness of when it doesn't know the answer to a fact. And so, by default, it will actually say, "I don't know the answer to this question." But if it sees something that it does know the answer to, it will inhibit the "I don't know" circuit and then reply with the circuit that it actually has the answer to. So, for example, if you ask it, "Who is Michael Batkin?" —which is just a made-up fictional person— it will by default just say, "I don't know." It's only with Michael Jordan or someone else that it will then inhibit the "I don't know" circuit.

But what's really interesting here and where you can start making downstream predictions or reasoning about the model, is that the "I don't know" circuit is only on the name of the person. And so, in the paper we also ask it, "What paper did Andrej Karpathy write?" And so it recognizes the name Andrej Karpathy, because he's sufficiently famous, so that turns off the "I don't know" reply. But then when it comes time for the model to say what paper it worked on, it doesn't actually know any of his papers, and so then it needs to make something up. And so you can see different components and different circuits all interacting at the same time to lead to this final answer.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-12 10:58:27+00:00
> and have little interest in anything “hacker” in the traditional sense of the word.

Couldn't agree more, but not for the reason you think

> The word "hacker" derives from the Late Middle English words hackere, hakker, or hakkere - one who cuts wood, woodchopper, or woodcutter.[13]

Sorry, couldn't help myself
by michaelscott | 2025-12-12 10:58:52+00:00
A lot of mechanisation, especially in the modern world, is not deterministic and is not always 100% right; it's a fundamental "physics at scale" issue, not something new to LLMs. I think what happened when they first appeared was that people immediately clung to a superintelligence-type AI idea of what LLMs were supposed to do, then realised that's not what they are, then kept going and swung all the way over to "these things aren't good at anything really" or "if they only fix this ONE issue I have with them, they'll actually be useful"
by dspillett | 2025-12-12 10:59:14+00:00
> I do not understand why the scrappers do not do it in a smarter way

If you mean scrapers in terms of the bots, it is because they are basically scraping web content via HTTP(S) generally, without specific optimisations using other protocols at all. Depending on the use case intended for the model being trained, your content might not matter at all, but it is easier just to collect it and let it be useless than to optimise it away⁰. For models where your code in git repos is going to be significant for the end use, the web scraping generally proves to be sufficient so any push to write specific optimisations for bots for git repos would come from academic interest rather than an actual need.

If you mean scrapers in terms of the people using them, they are largely akin to “script kiddies” just running someone else's scraper to populate their model.

If by scrapers in terms of people writing them, then the fact that just web scraping is sufficient as mentioned above is likely the significant factor.

> why the scrappers do not do it in a smarter way

A lot of the behaviours seen are easier to reason if you stop considering scrapers (the people using scraper bots) to be intelligent, respectful, caring, people who might give a damn about the network as a whole, or who might care about doing things optimally. Things make more sense if you consider them to be in the same bucket as spammers, who are out for a quick lazy gain for themselves and don't care, or even have the foresight to realise, how much it might inconvenience¹ anyone else.

----

[0] the fact this load might be inconvenient to you is immaterial to the scraper

[1] The ones that do realise that they might cause an inconvenience usually take the view that it is only a small one, and how can the inconvenience little them are imposing really be that significant? They don't think the extra step of considering how many people like them are out there thinking the same. Or they think if other people are doing it, what is the harm in just one more? Or they just take the view “why should I care if getting what I want inconveniences anyone else?”.
by wafflemaker | 2025-12-12 10:59:39+00:00
No. I just genuinely liked your style, and didn't notice previous posts by you. I haven't yet learned to look at names on hn, it's mostly anonymous posts for me. No snark here. And was also genuinely curious if better writing style yields better results.

I've observed that using proper grammar gives slightly better answers. And using more "literacy"(?) kind of language in prompts sometimes gives better answers and sometimes just more interesting ones, when bots try to follow my style.

Sorry for using the word poetic, I'm travelling and sleep deprived and couldn't find the proper word, but didn't want to just use "nice" instead either.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-12 11:00:35+00:00
Of course they can. This is military in international waters, you can do what you want and worry about being sued by whomever later (good luck with that). The French special forces took over an oil tanker and brought it to France no later than October [1].

Again, trying to find too many excuses why it is not possible usually indicates that in reality they don't want to for whatever reasons (alreayd mentioned my theory). Or ask the French to do it as they seem to at least have a working defense chain of command...

Generally, whatever happens, or not happens, in those situations has been decided, and we should never take any public narratives at face value.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2j1gynjddo
by em-bee | 2025-12-12 11:01:50+00:00
In Europe, he can stay for only 90 days

that doesn't make any sense for two reasons. first, he only entered the EU in september this year, so either the 90 days are not up yet or he should be in mexico now. is he? but why would he fly to mexico when he could just go to the UK?

but more importantly, he is a british citizen. getting a visa to walk through europe, especially now that he already has a track record of walking for so long should really not be an issue.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-12 11:02:53+00:00
> Eventually there's going to be enough pretense to expand the system and block "non-compliant" sites. Why not use the same DOCUMENT to prove age to buy beer? Sanity for guns? Loyalty for food?

You're not wrong to be concerned about those impulses, but I think this is getting into "perfect is the enemy of good" territory.

A really authoritarian government isn't going to make an effort to misuse the system that way: They'll tear it down entirely and go back to worse-alternatives which we already use, where they do know all parties involved and exactly when and what was being checked.
by vishalvshekkar | 2025-12-12 11:03:04+00:00
I hear you. I actually am quite open to making Jottings self-host-able. I might want to slice the multi-tenant layer out before I do that, only because that is complicated and not needed for someone to host and manage multiple sites, and is the part that primarily makes this a product. I'll give it a think.

I also hear you about the making money part, and I largely agree.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-12 11:03:17+00:00
Does NATO have satellites, or do the Americans? With the recent threats to the ICC and more and more American politicians turning against NATO, it's getting quite hard to take American NATO membership seriously.

However, I doubt the drones are part of any kind of spying operation. They're trivially detectable, have limited range, and I very much doubt these journalists found anything that European intelligence agencies haven't found already. If the Russians want to map out European bases, they can just look at the data leaked by Fitbit/Strava and "data broker" companies.

Instead, I firmly believe this is a power move intended to spread fear. They're saying "look at what we're capable of", and _maybe_ measuring anti-drone response strategies, but any competent military wouldn't let themselves get baited into showing their hand too much. The Dutch army has stated that there's no need to panic and that the anti drone measures we currently have is perfectly capable of taking action if necessary.

Russia showing off their capabilities is hardly news, either. Russia likes taunting its enemies by flying fighter jets and sending nuclear subs through shipping channels. The same way America likes to send war ships through shipping lanes in Asia, and during the cold war by flying spy planes awfully close to borders.
by 9rx | 2025-12-12 11:04:00+00:00
While that does not match my memory, it works too. An assembly language is part of Go, so it fits among the languages you mention. The only constraint it imposes is your imagination (and what the hardware is capable of). However, it remains that "systems language" was caveated as being for network servers specifically. But no matter how you slice it, I think we can agree that Go isn't a scripting language, so it must be a systems language.

Rust does use enums under the hood in order to implement sum types, so the name as it is used within the language is perfectly valid. It's just not clear how that turned into nonsense like Go not having enums (which it does).
Explaining Christmas to developers as a system architecture story
by frafdez | 2025-12-12 11:04:32+00:00
An architect who also wears the developer, maintenance, and support hats decides to build a system.

He creates an OS with rules, constraints, and fail-safes. He checks the code. Everything looks good.

He adds multiple types of AI. Some behave as intended, but a few start acting like bugs in the system. He sends the corrupted code to the recycle bin.

He then creates a new kind of hardware, something like a self-replicating robot modeled after himself, with a special piece of software that feels close to AGI.

He gives them simple commands to follow and places them in a perfect environment.

But the bugs escape the bin. They infect the special software and corrupt the hardware.

The robots stop following the commands. They trash the place. They forget about the architect. Some even question whether he ever existed.

They write their own commands because they believe they know better.

The architect allows the bugs to wipe out many of them, hoping they will notice that he is still present. A few understand, but most keep ignoring him.

Over time, the system becomes more and more corrupted.

So the architect sends a special robot with superuser privileges, wearing his maintenance hat.

He tells the robots that instead of trashing the place and following their own corrupted logic, they should follow a simple optimized set of commands.

Many finally get it.

But the architect knows that to save them from the bugs and prevent them from being deleted, he must follow his own system rules perfectly.

So he takes all the corruption onto himself. He lets the bugs send him to the bin. That satisfies the rules.

Then he says, “Now that the rules have been fulfilled, I am adding a new one. Do what I do. Act as I act. Remember the architect. If you do, you will never be deleted.”

And before leaving the system, he provides support software the robots can load to stay connected.

Christmas is the architect sending the maintenance robot because he cared so much about what he created rather than throwing all of it in the bin and starting all over again.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-12 11:05:57+00:00
Essentially all modern honey farming is what you're calling "ethical". It's too expensive to replace the colony each year now that we have an alternative, and a winter - even a relatively mild winter in most parts of the world - will kill the bees if you've stolen all their food.

Unlike the maple tree, we do know how to substitute the valuable honey for nutritionally similar but cheaper alternatives - you can buy suitable food commercially because this is a whole industry, nevertheless, vegans object to our intervention, the bees didn't make nutritionally equivalent bee food, they made honey. Even farmers who choose to calibrate and remove only some honey, judging what will be enough for their colony to survive, are considered not to meet vegan requirements for the same reason.

To the extent there's a shared definition it really is as simple as originally explained, animal: not OK, non-animal: fine.

One of my professors (who is now vegan) had an ethical rule prohibiting eating things which, like him, had backbones. Same idea, it's more similar to me, therefore don't eat it. All such lines in the sand are somewhat arbitrary.
by seec | 2025-12-12 11:06:14+00:00
That's nonsense. People actually choose to use Amazon because their service is impeccable.

The argument about Amazon requiring cheaper prices is true in theory but in practice not strongly enforced. I just bought a kettle on Amazon instead of from another seller who had it 2 euros cheaper because I combined the purchase with other stuff that the seller didn't have. I have readily told people that some items they were buying could be found for cheaper on AliExpress, but they didn't care because they wanted the convenience and fast service. By the way, many of Amazon's suppliers sell the same product cheaper on AliExpress and other marketplaces; that completely kills the argument in the first place.

Amazon is successful because other companies were complacent and ignored the upcoming internet economy. Amazon built a very complex logistic system that took a very long time and a lot of investment to build. Now that they dominate, the lazy competitors cry about monopoly. In my country (France), the traditional supermarkets are just about now coming in with alternatives to compete, and they are very far off the mark for both service/selection and often price as well…
by JackFr | 2025-12-12 11:06:51+00:00
> IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

Well if they work for a drug company they will say “Let’s call this phlogistotheremone but sell it under the name Zyphyrax so that doctors and patients will refer to the same medication by different names.”
by Aldipower | 2025-12-12 11:07:15+00:00
Google search also favors large, well-known sites over newcomers. For sites that have a lot of competition, this is a real problem and leads to asymmetry and a chicken-and-egg problem. You are small/new, but you can't really be found, which means you can't grow enough to be found. At the same time, you are also disadvantaged because Google displays your already large competitors without any problems!
by vishalvshekkar | 2025-12-12 11:07:21+00:00
Thank you!

I hear you, and I share a big part of that opinion on AI writing. From the feedback I got from some folks before, it seemed to be something many were interested in, which is why I designed it to be very aid-like, and less to generate content fully from scratch and post automatically: essentially spamming.

I am not very sold on the AI tool and am very open to removing it with more such opinions!
by chiefalchemist | 2025-12-12 11:07:37+00:00
Thank gawd. Flash, gawd bless it, was a low point in internet history. People simply couldn’t resist misusing it and abusing it. I’m not blaming the tool per se. But Flash’s addictiveness caused reasonable people to make gawd-awful UI and UX decisions. Crushing Flash is probably Jobs’ most underrated accomplishment.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-12 11:08:53+00:00
>I specifically referred the Shams Jorjani's (CEO of ArrowHead) explanation to Hermen Hulst (the head of PlayStation Studios) why the review score collapsed to 19%, among other issues.

I don't know what you mean. The game literally got 84,000 negative reviews within 24 hours after Sony tried to force PSN on everyone. No bug or missing feature ever came anywhere close to this kind of negative sentiment toward the game.
by urxvtcd | 2025-12-12 11:09:23+00:00
I wasn't around back then, but it must've been at least a bit crazy, considering Atwood threw an exception (heh) high enough to write a blog entry about it. What I think has happened is that with functional programming concepts sort of permeating mainstream, and with the advent of languages like Go and Rust (which I wouldn't exactly call low-level, for different reasons), treating errors as values is nothing unorthodox in principle. I'm not sure how real or prevalent this is really, just a guess.

I'm not trying to advocate going against the stream and not using exceptions in languages based around them, but I can see it being pulled off by a competent team, which I'm certain Joel could put together.
by FabCH | 2025-12-12 11:09:36+00:00
If you don't need global access, I have found that Geoblocking is the best first step. Especially if you are in a small country with a small footprint and you can get away at blocking the rest of the world. But even if you live in the US, excluding Russia, India, Iran and a few others will cut your traffic by double digit percent.

In the article, quite a few listed sources of traffic would simply be completely unable to access the server if the author could get away with a geoblock.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-12 11:10:24+00:00
I don't think the question "will the AI add BS" was what drove this experiment. The very first thing the author references is re-feeding and degrading the same image 100 times, which similarly is not about improving the image.

This was more about seeing in what interesting ways the LLM will "fail", to get a little glimpse into how the black-box "thinks".
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-12 11:10:28+00:00
Why is it not helping the experienced engineer? I don't fully understand your scenario.

If the experienced engineer is already faster than the LLM, their job is not at risk.

If the LLM is faster then the experienced engineer at making some kind of code product, then the experienced engineer can use it to save time. And in the short term they can spend even more time learning! Maybe it's a net negative because it helps the "new class of devs that just want the easy way out" more, but it's still helping the experienced engineer.

And if increased competition drops the price then the LLM's influence is helping customers.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-12 11:10:46+00:00
> I mean, if you return an immutable reference, the owner in fact cannot mutate it until that reference is dropped.

Might be worth noting that "dropped" in this context doesn't necessarily correspond to the reference going out of scope:

fn get_first(v: &Vec<i32>) -> &i32 { &v[0] } fn main() { let mut v = vec![0, 1, 2]; let first = get_first(&v); print!("{}", first}); v.push(3); // Works! // print!("{}", first); // Doesn't work }
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-12 11:12:22+00:00
It's incompetence if they "fell for" such basic examples being presented in the wrong context. 5% of the blame can go to Sony, I guess, if that's what happened.

And on top of any potential confusion between normal SSD and fancy SSD, a mailbox is a super tiny asset and the issue in the spiderman game is very rapidly cycling city blocks in and out of memory. That's so different from helldivers level loading.
by miladyincontrol | 2025-12-12 11:13:08+00:00
> There was no off switch for iMessage

There sorta was and still is, just it uses the same endpoint as APN/APS so if any telecom wanted to block it all iphone users on their network would lose push notifications too.

I'm glad telecoms got put in their place, used to be a give them an inch and they'd take a mile type situation. I dont miss their games.
by officialchicken | 2025-12-12 11:13:35+00:00
No, the correct word is hallucinating. That's the word everyone uses and has been using. While it might not be technically correct, everyone knows what it means and more importantly, it's not a $3 word and everyone can relate to the concept. I also prefer all the _other_ more accurate alternative words Wikipedia offers to describe it:

"In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called bullshitting,[1][2] confabulation,[3] or delusion[4]) is"
by g947o | 2025-12-12 11:13:52+00:00
There are three possibilities:

Author's fault, Google's fault, someone else's fault.

From the post, while it is hard to completely rule out the possibility that author did something wrong, they likely did everything they could to remove the suspicion. I assume they consulted all documentation or other resources.

Someone else's fault? It is unlikely, since there isn't (obviously) another party involved here.

Which leaves us to Google's fault.

Also, I mean, if a user can't figure out what's wrong, the blame should just go to the vendor by default for poor user experience and documentation.