MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by viccis | 2025-12-07 23:32:43+00:00
Every day I see people treat gen AI like a thinking human, Dijkstra's attitudes about anthropomorphizing computers is vindicated even more.

That said, I think the author's use of "bag of words" here is a mistake. Not only does it have a real meaning in a similar area as LLMs, but I don't think the metaphor explains anything. Gen AI tricks laypeople into treating its token inferences as "thinking" because it is trained to replicate the semiotic appearance of doing so. A "bag of words" doesn't sufficiently explain this behavior.
by gruez | 2025-12-07 23:32:54+00:00
>There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a sustained profitable business.

All that means is that controlling shareholders can't use the company as a piggy bank and raid it to fund their other ventures. It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.
by torginus | 2025-12-07 23:33:23+00:00
Not sure how good Claude is nowadays, but I remember using Claude 3.5 to do some fiction writing and for a while I thought it was amazing at coming up with plots, setting ideas, writing witty dialogue - then after a short while I noticed it kept recycling the same ideas, phrases etc, quickly becoming derivative, and having 'tells', similar to the group of 3 quirk, with some otherwise decent writing patterns showing up with great frequency.

I've heard the same thing about it doing frontends - it produces gorgeous websites but it has similar 'tells', it does CSS and certain features the same way, and if you have a very concrete idea of what you want out of it, you'll end up fighting an uphill battle with it constantly trying to do things its own way.

Which is part of the 'LLM illusion' - I guess. To an unskilled individual, or when starting from scratch, it seems great, but the more complex the project gets, the harder it becomes to have it contribute meaningfully, leading to an ever-mounting frustration, and eventually me just giving up and doing it by hand.
by bcantrill | 2025-12-07 23:34:19+00:00
Your materials were absolutely read (and indeed, RFD 576 makes clear that LLMs are not a substitute for reading materials). If you have writing samples that were external links, I can't guarantee that they were clicked through though: in part because the materials themselves constitute a galactic writing sample, we may have not clicked through because we were already at a decision point before reading your external writing. As for more specific feedback, if you can DM me, I'll see if I can give you more specific feedback -- but as we explicitly indicate in RFD 3[0], we are very limited in what we can provide.

As for your application getting flagged as LLM-generated: we in fact don't flag such applications (we just reject them), and it's very unlikely that we felt that yours were LLM-generated. (We really, really give applicants the benefit of the doubt on that.)

All of that said: absolutely no one is a shoe-in at Oxide. If you genuinely thought that (and if your materials reflected that kind of overconfidence), it may have well guided our decision. We are very selective in terms of hiring -- and we are very oversubscribed. Bluntly: it's very hard to get a job at Oxide. I know this seems harsh and/or unjust or unfair, but this is the reality. As we told you in the letter we sent you, we already have people at Oxide who prevailed on subsequent applications, because they found a job that's a better fit for them, or they have vastly improved materials (or both). Finally, you can also take solace in knowing that your post here in no way hurts your future chances at Oxide, and we look forward to reading your materials should you choose to apply in the future.

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003#_rejection_of_non...
by striking | 2025-12-07 23:34:22+00:00
Oh, no thanks. The emdash is lazy writing, through and through, for the same reason a parenthetical expressed any other way might be. LLMs overuse them the same way humans do: to pack in context where it doesn't belong. I'd happily lay the emdash and all its terrible cousins upon the sacrificial altar to see a renaissance in editing and proper sentence construction.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-07 23:34:27+00:00
I worked on a pure C system early in my career. They implemented multiple inheritance (a bit like Perl/Python MRO style) in pure C. It was nuts, but they didn't abuse it, so it worked OK.

Also, serious question: Are they any GUI toolkits that do not use multiple inheritance? Even Java Swing uses multiple inheritance through interfaces. (I guess DotNet does something similar.) Qt has it all over the place.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 23:35:04+00:00
They couldn't do that at scale without being detected, no. There are various people actively looking for this, and the existing tooling makes it easy to detect.

>Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?

Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted.

For example, we can easily pull up logs for gmail.com and see which certificates browsers would accept. https://api.certspotter.com/v1/issuances?domain=gmail.com&ex...
by jkaplowitz | 2025-12-07 23:35:30+00:00
I said the legally maximum price is often the lower price. NYC is an example with a law about this:

https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/10-things-consumer.pa...

Similar laws exist at the state level in NY, in other NY counties, and in several other states and subdivisions of other states across the country.

In that case, the higher charge is clearly illegal (no novel theory needed), so standard contract law theory could consider the terms of the buyer's offer to purchase to be the terms of the invitation to treat in the absence of legal contrary terms offered at checkout. I guess it's possible that the court would say that the store never agreed to sell the item at all by demanding an illegal price instead of being considered to have accepted the buyer's offer on the posted terms, but there's only so much tolerance a judge would have for that kind of defense by the store - after all, it's very likely that the customer would have an unjust enrichment claim against the store for the amount of the overcharge if they were to pay the illegal higher price, and that wouldn't be true if the illegal contract term were valid.

The precise answer may vary by state based on judicial precedents about illegal terms in contractual counteroffers following an offer to buy made pursuant to an invitation to treat.

None of this is practical for almost any chain dollar store overpricing victim to pursue, but I am just talking theoretically here.
by clhodapp | 2025-12-07 23:35:39+00:00
I'm pretty sure that the majority of shops that aren't worrying about Android have moved on from Java 8. The JVM team only keep Java 8 working for customers paying them lots of money for extended support contracts. And that's only because they have this long-term extended support system for all LTS JVM releases (they are also still supporting 11 in a similar manner).

On the other hand, Android doesn't even support Java 8. It supports the long-dead Java 7 plus a subset of Java 8 features. Android essentially froze their core application runtime in amber over ten years ago and have just been adding layer upon layer of compiler-level sugar ever since. The effect is an increasing loss of the benefit of being on the Java platform, in terms of code sharing.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-07 23:35:40+00:00
> There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders

No, there isn't.

The whole point of Revlon duties is that they trigger "in certain limited circumstances indicating that the 'sale' or 'break-up' of the company is inevitable" [1]. Outside those conditions, "the singular responsibility of the board" is not "to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available."

> There is no such requirement for a private company

Are you thinking of minority rights? These vary based on whether a company is closely held or not [2], not whether it's public or private.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon%2C_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%....

[2] https://millerlawpc.com/rights-minority-shareholders-private...
by mlinhares | 2025-12-07 23:36:41+00:00
Most of the time when someone adds these fancy languages what happens is that they leave and the ones left are the ones that have to deal with the shit that was produced.

I'm going through this now, having to deal with code nobody wants to touch because it is overly complex, has no documentation, and is in a language no one else knows. Now, whenever i see an effort like this, to bring an exoteric language for absolutely no good reason, i try to kill it as fast as possible.

I don't want to be the victim of this code in the future or have my team bear the cost of maintaining stuff they don't understand.
by currymj | 2025-12-07 23:36:41+00:00
I recommend actually clicking through and reading some of these papers.

Most of those I spot checked do not give an impression of high quality. Not just AI writing assistance but many seem to have AI-generated "ideas", often plausible nonsense. the reviewers often catch the errors and sometimes even the fake citations.

can I prove malfeasance beyond a reasonable doubt? no. but I personally feel quite confident many of the papers I checked are primarily AI-generated.

I feel really bad for any authors who submitted legitimate work but made an innocent mistake in their .bib and ended up on the same list as the rest of this stuff.
by jaffa2 | 2025-12-07 23:37:42+00:00
Its just how long you are meant to let the coffee brew. Try if you make tea you need to let bag steep for a minute or 2. But actually timing it???? Useful if you are a goldfish may be but otherwise i dont understand who can’t remember to do something in 30 seconds.

Fwiw i oftrn let me aeropress brew for a few minutes. 30 secs is hella short.
by alexcdot | 2025-12-07 23:37:43+00:00
really good point. one of the cofounders of gptzero here!

the tool gptzero used in the article also detects if the citation supports the claim too, if you scroll to "cited information accuracy" here: https://app.gptzero.me/documents/1641652a-c598-453f-9c94-e0b...

this is still in beta because its a much harder problem for sure, since its hard to determine if a 40 page paper supports a claims (if the paper claims X is computationally intractable, does that mean algorithms to compute approximate X are slow?)
by abeppu | 2025-12-07 23:38:04+00:00
I think the "last 100 years with no maintenance" is not likely feasible with this approach. The top plate has a coating that supports high infrared emissivity -- and I think it would need to be regularly cleaned to work well. And you can't really prevent it from getting dirty by enclosing it b/c that both substantially changes the performance and moves the maintenance burden to cleaning the enclosure.
by credit_guy | 2025-12-07 23:38:50+00:00
There is no wildfire coming. The model providers have narrowed down to 4: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. The chip manufacturers are Nvidia, Google (TPUs) and AMD is trying to break in as well. Microsoft is position very well as a middleman. All these guys are giants already. Just Nvidia, Microsoft and Google together have a market cap above ten trillion. OpenAI, Anthropic, AMD and xAI probably add one trillion more.

Sure, there might be hundreds or thousands of small startups in the AI game, and some are probably as viable as the fabled Pets.com. But even if they all crash and burn, it's going to be a rounding error compared to the 7 companies I mentioned above. The AI will be alive and kicking, and nobody will even notice.
by konmok | 2025-12-07 23:39:09+00:00
No, it really is misogynistic, because Banda is (to the best of our knowledge) a woman. Maybe you want her banned from women's sports for having advantageous hormones, fine, but she is a woman. You don't get to unilaterally decide who's a woman and who isn't based on a single hormone test. And it's extra messed up for JKR to sic her followers on a woman in the name of feminism.

But if you insist on this standard, I suggest you get your all your friends and family tested. You can't tell by appearance alone! And then, if your loved ones have that hormone imbalance, you should call them men, use he/him pronouns, interfere when they try to use women's spaces, etc. See how misogynistic it feels then. Otherwise, you're clearly only targeting Banda because she looks masculine.

And lastly, for the record, you were swapping between three different definitions of male. Having elevated testosterone, having testes, and having gone through male puberty are three very different things. You say you've settled on "having gone through male puberty" as your final definition. Great! So men that haven't gone through male puberty should be permitted in women's sports and women's bathrooms? Or will you introduce a fourth definition?
by lm28469 | 2025-12-07 23:39:26+00:00
The alternative of doing nothing, pretending the world is the same as 15 years ago and praying for world peace doesn't seem like a better idea.

If anything military service should have been kept everywhere in europe. Not for war, but for national cohesion, for some people it was the only time they'd get out of their little social bubble and stereotypes.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-07 23:40:05+00:00
Many people though that giving kids entire new ways to access knowledge and cooperate on their projects would make them smarter and more generally educated.

And honestly, if you think that's stupid, I'm not really interested on whatever else you think on the subject. It happened to not work for several reasons, some of them mistakes from the OLPC project, but insisting it's an inevitable result is just uninformed blabber.
by antonymoose | 2025-12-07 23:40:44+00:00
Having moved from a shopping rich environment of some 30 years to a very rural setting, I was innately trained to hate on Dollar General by my 15 years on HN. In reality, it’s a trade off. Nothing more, nothing less. Whereas before you might have fallen back on a country-store with a small kitchen and minor staples (eggs, cheese, milk) next to the RedBull most folks now have a wider variety of options at a price point comparable to or better than that filling station. All the better, DG has rolled out their “Market” concept with fresh options as well.

At this point I’d love to see a conversation about price points and convenience of a Japanese conbini as compared to a Japanese supermarket on HN. Far less politicized and denigrated I would hope.
by dangus | 2025-12-07 23:40:55+00:00
Yeah, I think that makes solutions like Proxmox better is that there’s no reason to try and copy Amazon’s public cloud on your own could.

I find that the main paradigms are:

1. Run something in a VM

2. Run something on in a container (docker compose on portainer or something similar)

3. Run a Kubernetes cluster.

Then if you need something that Amazon offers you don’t implement it like open stack, you just run that specific service on options #1-3.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-12-07 23:41:46+00:00
some additional sources with their comments: https://midbaynews.com/post/desantis-unveils-floridas-new-ai...

https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/news/florida-gov-desant...

https://www.cfpublic.org/politics/2025-12-04/desantis-propos...

https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/12/04/age-of-darkness-and-de...
by bcantrill | 2025-12-07 23:42:27+00:00
I understand your disappointment; we are very explicit about why we provide so little feedback.[0] I disagree that it's indecent; to the contrary, we allow anyone to shoot their shot, with the guarantee that they will be thoughtfully considered.

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003#_rejection_of_non...
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-07 23:42:27+00:00
Ada and C++ were the only realistic options at the time, and Ada developers are difficult to hire.

But honestly, with this sort of programming the language distinctions matter less. As the guide shows you restrict yourself to a subset of the language where distinctions between languages aren't as meaningful. Basically everything runs out of statically allocated global variables and arrays. Don't have to worry about fragmentation and garbage collection if there's no allocation at all. Basically remove any source of variability in execution possible.

So really you could do this in any c style language that gives you control over the memory layout.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-12-07 23:43:04+00:00
> When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need.

Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement.

> In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed.

There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor) and is otherwise fully law-abiding. Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.

> In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally.

Not before a cop gets involved, no. The judge comes after the cop.

> None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.

This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.

It is true that many of these laws only allow administrative fines in response to complaints or inspections, not anything as proactive as I was describing. The theoretical viability of my idea of simply leaving with the item after paying the legal maximum price at the cash register and involving the cops if stopped actually depends on state contract law, and likely specifically its judicial precedents: if that state would view the buyer's offer to buy at the shelf price as accepted on the terms of the store's invitation to treat since the counteroffer from the cash register's scanner was illegal, then title transfers to the buyer at the time of payment and an attempt to stop them from leaving would be a crime that the cops could in theory be called for. If the state would view the buyer's offer to buy be rejected even though the counteroffer was itself illegal, then yeah the only available enforcement is the administrative complaint / inspection / fine procedure and the buyer never gains title to the property. I expect this legal conclusion would vary from one state to another.

I think we all agree that this theoretical option is very rarely practical, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
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by a_bonobo | 2025-12-07 23:44:19+00:00
> to accurately prepopulate tax returns for around 45% of Americans. (Those other countries have much simpler tax codes than we do.)

One should note that the cited study quotes the 45% from a 1992 study. These days, with gig economy and quasi-self-employment, that number is probably higher since you don't have an employer who reports your income for you.

Still, here in Australia, where we have the return-free tax system, adding what you earned from your various gig jobs isn't too hard: you add that as items to the web form: 'I made 15,123 from Uber Eats'. That just gets added to your overall return. I don't see how that's so hard compared to the US?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-07 23:44:20+00:00
> this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for

Massachusetts has a strong consumer arm at its AGO [1] and consumer regulator [2].

The problem is less one of cost of litigation than education about available options. (And the time to pursue them.)

[1] https://www.mass.gov/how-to/file-a-consumer-complaint

[2] https://www.mass.gov/orgs/office-of-consumer-affairs-and-bus...
by thecr0w | 2025-12-07 23:44:49+00:00
Ok! will give it a shot. In a few iterations I gave him screenshots, i have given him the ability to take screenshots, and I gave him the Playwright MCP. I kind of gave up on the path you're suggesting (though I didn't get super far along) because I felt like I would run into this problem eventually of needing a model to figure out what a planet is, where the edge of the planet is, etc.

But if that could be done deterministically, I totally agree this is the way to go. I'll put some more time into it over the next couple weeks.
by jimmaswell | 2025-12-07 23:45:32+00:00
Yeah - while it's not unreasonable to say there likely is a sizeable nature component to someone's propensity towards tech/math/etc, even if we assume for the sake of argument that this is only some tiny fraction of the population, we should still expand access to the resources as much as possible to catch those kids in the net. It's just better for everyone. Arguments about spending the money on food instead miss the point - if OLPC reaches even a few tech-disposed kids out of every thousand, those kids have a much better shot at being force multipliers for their own local communities and country 20 years from now.
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