MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tempfile | 2025-12-01 09:16:11+00:00
I think the evidence is actually pretty strongly against them doing anything similar to "thinking". Certainly they are exhibiting some behaviour that we have traditionally only associated with thinking. But this comes along with lots of behaviour that is fundamentally opposite to thinking ("hallucination" being the major example).

It seems much more likely that they are doing some other behaviour that only sometimes resembles thinking, in the same way that when you press the middle autocomplete button on your phone keyboard it only sometimes resembles conversation.
Ask HN: Do you use the drone to inspect wildfire lanscape
by kaihongye4 | 2025-12-01 09:16:15+00:00
I‘m the drone lover. I buy a new drone with thermal IR camera ,named as Autel Max 4N。I want to know more details and advice about how to take photo in wildfire landscape to shooting special angle view.Whats more methods can I do to extend the life of camera and uav in extreme environment
by physicsguy | 2025-12-01 09:16:18+00:00
There's two ways of doing it, I implemented them both in my PhD and didn't have a ton of fun doing it.

(a) There's a method that works well for monopolar sources (gravitational + electrostatic particles) called the Barnes-Hut method. You effectively divide space up into a quadtree (2D) or octree (3D), and in each cell work out the center of mass / total charge. You make particles in "nearby" cells (using a distance criterion that can be adjusted to speed up/slow down the simulation in a trade off with accuracy) interact directly, and far away cells you just use the center of mass to work out the interaction between any given 'far' particle and the particles in that cell. The method is O(N log N) but in practice, this is 'good enough' for many applications.

(b) uses a more rigorous technique called the Fast Multipole Method which is O(N), where rather than just using the center of mass or sum of charges, you expand the potential from particles out into higher order components which captures the distribution of particles within each cell. This also means you can capture more complex potentials. The downside is that this is a nightmare to implement in comparison to the Barnes-Hut method. Each cell has it's own multipole expansion, and it is 'transferred' to work out the additive contribution to every 'far' cell, calculating a 'local' expansion. Typically people use the most compact representation of these potential expansions which uses Lagrange polynomials, but this is a pain.
by astura | 2025-12-01 09:17:30+00:00
>cooking is about US$10/meal give or take (asparagus, chicken, rice, water to drink).

You must be eating an absolute TON to eat $10 worth of chicken, asparagus, and rice. I just checked the prices at Target and rice is $1.89 for 2 pounds, chicken thighs are $1.69 a pound. Asparagus is spendier at $5 for 1 pound.

How many pounds of chicken and asparagus are you eating? Even if you ate two pounds of chicken and the entire pound of asparagus you aren't hitting $10.
by baq | 2025-12-01 09:18:49+00:00
I’m purely in experiment stage, no automation, no agents; just ‘these are the design docs, this is the existing code base, let’s get a simple alloy model started’ and interactively building from there. I was concerned about the same things you mention, but starting very small with a tight development loop worked well with GPT 5.1 high. I wouldn’t try to zero shot the whole model unsupervised… yet.

The first step before a python/TS wrapper would be to put a single file manual into the context as is customary for non-primary targets, but I didn’t even reach the stage where this is necessary ;)
by pjjpo | 2025-12-01 09:19:12+00:00
Thanks! I have it working in apps via fcitx5 no problem so "just" need to get it to kick in game. Getting that far was really easy though, clicking through some panels I summon with random keywords in the ... sorry I don't know what it's called and will say start menu. But the excellent indexing powering that has been really amazing.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-01 09:19:17+00:00
Before that AI craze, I liked the idea of having a CC BY-NC-ND[0] public gallery to show what I took. I was not after any likes or anything. If I got professional feedback, that'd be a bonus. I even allowed EXIF-intact high resolution versions to be downloaded.

Now, I'll probably install a gallery webapp to my webserver and put it behind authentication. I'm not rushing because I don't crave any interaction from my photography. The images will most probably be optimized and resized to save some storage space, as well.

[0]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
by Crestwave | 2025-12-01 09:19:47+00:00
The script you posted is only portable in theory and not in practice. Executing it while using a non-POSIX shell like Elvish (even without having it as a default shell) makes it immediately fail.

Meanwhile, `#!/usr/bin/env` is completely portable in the practical sense. Even systems with non-standard paths like NixOS, Termux and GoboLinux patch in support for it specifically.
by nickdothutton | 2025-12-01 09:19:57+00:00
FBSD user since the mid 90s. It (and BSDi) often outperformed "big UNIX" vendors, and was far ahead in terms of bang per buck... if only good server grade rack-mount x86 hardware had been available at the time we'd have made more use of it. Now I have returned to it for server workloads. Good documentation, consistent release schedule, reliability even under extreme load.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-01 09:20:16+00:00
Yep, seen that myself. If you want to generate some code in a language that is highly represented in the training data (e.g. JS), they do very well. If you want to generate something that isn't one of those scenarios, they fail over and over and over. This is why I think anyone who is paying a modicum of attention should know they aren't thinking. A human, when confronted with a programming language not in his "training data" (experiences) will go out and read docs, look up code examples, ask questions of other practitioners, and reason how to use the language based on that. An LLM doesn't do that, because it's not thinking. It's glorified autocomplete. That isn't to say that autocomplete is useless (even garden variety autocomplete can be useful), but it's good to recognize it for what it is.
by retSava | 2025-12-01 09:20:35+00:00
It's not just cost and ads. It's having the possibility to reduce attempts to manipulate my inner reptile brain. With various clients, you can disable shorts, recommended, you have sponsorblock, you can replace youtube-face-thumbs with actual thumbs and get crowd-sourced titles that better reflect the contents.

I also don't need to manually go set speed to 1.75x and enable subs in english, it's a one-time setting. _Further_ I can download a video locally, for whatever reason (later viewing, bw throttling, risk of deletion, etc).

As if that weren't enough, I don't have to watch videos logged in, my client is just set up to download my select channels.

I now see zero use of a youtube account.
by cachius | 2025-12-01 09:21:13+00:00
Em dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities &hairsp; and &thinsp; These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...

Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks:

: ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – —

And they usually add space to the right of these:

“ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ < ≤ £ $ ¢ € ‹ « √ μ # @ + = ÷ - – —

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-sp...

1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space

Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-01 09:21:16+00:00
> Aditionally, those releases do not only contain FreeBSD changes but also changes to all third party open source packages that are part of the distribution

No they don't. Only major releases so, which are once every 2 years or so. And the old ones stay supported until the release after that. There's always two major releases in support. So you have about 4 years.
by jpc0 | 2025-12-01 09:21:21+00:00
This is more akin to selling a car to an adult that cannot drive and they proceed to ram it through their garage door.

It's perfectly within the capabilities of the car to do so.

The burden of proof is much lower though since the worst that can happen is you lose some money or in this case hard drive content.

For the car the seller would be investigated because there was a possible threat to life, for an AI buyer beware.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-01 09:21:47+00:00
>The question can be easily inverted for the other side: if any user accidentally damages a service's functionality in any way, can they always be criminally liable? Can this be used by companies with no security or thought put into them whatsoever, where they just sue anyone who sees their unsecured data? Where should the line be drawn?

I don't think the question can be inverted like that, not meaningfully anyway. The CFAA specifically requires one to act knowingly. Accidentally navigating to a page you're not supposed to access isn't criminal.

>To me, this is subjective, but the URL situation has a different feel than something like SQL injection.

I don't think the url below is necessarily that different.

> GET wordpress/wp-content/plugins/demo_vul/endpoint.php?user=-1+union+select+1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,(SELECT+user_pass+FROM+wp_users+WHERE+ID=1)

> if it's left unsecured, the default assumption should be that any URL is public, can be seen by anyone, and can be manipulated in any ways

It can be, but not lawfully so. It's not possible to accidentally commit a crime here, for example in the IRC logs related to the ATT case the "hackers" clearly understood that what they were doing wasn't something that AT&T would be happy with and that they would likely end up in court. They explicitly knew that what they were doing was exceeding authorized access.

> On the other hand, something like wedging your way into an SQL database looks like an intrusion on something private, that wasn't meant to be seen

I think you've reached the essence of it. Now, let's say you just accidentally find an open folder on a bank's website exposing deeply personal KYC information of their customers. Or even better, medical records in the case of a clinic.

Lets say those files are discoverable by guessing some URL in your browser, but not accessible to normal users just clicking around the website. If you start scraping the files, I think it's pretty obvious that you're intruding on something private that wasn't meant to be seen. Any reasonable person would realize that, right?
by moffkalast | 2025-12-01 09:22:44+00:00
I don't know about you but we used to joke back in the day that the computer "is thinking" when taking long to process something.

Dictionaries usually provide some kind of useless circular definition. Thinking? The act of making thoughts. Thoughts? The result of thinking. I can't believe people used to pay for these things.

In any case it's something to do with taking input data, doing something with it, and generating new data related to it. That's more or less just recursive inference.
by tete | 2025-12-01 09:23:11+00:00
> in all third party open source packages/ports by taking them to the head version.

No it doesn't!

You can totally stick with the old version of packages. You are NOT forced to switch third party version numbers. And as mentioned elsewhere I did switch eg. Postgres versions interdependently of the OS.

What is being updated is the userland in the OS not in ports per se. According to the Release Notes of the latest FreeBSD release 14.3[1], OpenSSL, XZ, the file command, googletest, OpenSSH, less, expat, tzdata, zfs and spleen have been updated when it comes to third party applications as well. ps has been updated and some sysctl flags to filter for jails have been introduced.

These are the kinds of updates you'll get from point releases, not the breaking kind. These go into major releases, which is exactly why the support strategy is "The latest do release + X months and at least that long".

[1] Scroll down a bit: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.3R/relnotes/
by account42 | 2025-12-01 09:26:02+00:00
> Of course software developers are still stuck with 80 column conventions

Speak for yourself, all my projects use at least 100 if not 120 column lines (soft limit only).

Trying to keep lines at a readable length is still a valid goal though, even without the original technical limitations - although the bigger win there is to keep expression short, not to just wrap them into shorter lines.
by Timwi | 2025-12-01 09:26:20+00:00
I would prefer a mode without a timer. Especially on the explanation page after a question.

There are a couple questions I encountered with wrong answers. One question asked me to solve x/4=3 and then insisted that the answer was 24, which is wrong. Another asked: “if you have 3 apples and you take 2 away, how many do you have?” It insisted that the answer was 2, but since the question clearly states that I have three apples, I insist that the answer is 3.

Otherwise, great website! I like how well it works on mobile, good job.
by ta20240528 | 2025-12-01 09:27:46+00:00
"In fairness, the US has a pretty good record when it comes to invading continental Europe."

Only by using the UK as a staging post - and then invading a country that wanted to be liberated with an active partisan network.

So, if China can't take Taiwan over a 150km stretch of littoral waters, a naval in invasion from over the Atlantic is impossible.

There is also no way such a fleet would get past Gibraltar or the Suez canal, so the US would they'd have to stage in Morocco or possibly take Scandinavia then cross into Denmark.

Back to licking batteries.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-01 09:28:26+00:00
> This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release on November 30, 2022.

The problem is that Google's search engine - but, oddly enough, ALL search engines - got worse before that already. I noticed that search engines got worse several years before 2022. So, AI further decreased the quality, but the quality had a downwards trend already, as it was. There are some attempts to analyse this on youtube (also owned by Google - Google ruins our digital world); some explanations made sense to me, but even then I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.

One key observation I made was that the youtube search, was copied onto Google's regular search, which makes no sense for google search. If I casually search for a video on youtube, I may be semi-interested in unrelated videos. But if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information. This is not the only example, Google made the search results worse here and tries to confuse the user in clicking on things. Plus placement of ads. The quality really worsened.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-01 09:29:12+00:00
Indeed. The mere fact that we ended up with the anthropomorphic term "hallucination", rather than something purely mechanistic like "glitch", indicates that there's something about this AI pattern that feels familiar.

I'm obviously not claiming that "hallucination" is an appropriate term ("delusion" or "confabulation" are probably more apt), but there is something here that is clearly not just a bug, but rather a result of thinking being applied properly but to ungrounded premises. To my eyes, reading an AIs "hallucination" is not unlike reading the writings of a human on drugs, or with a mental condition like schizophrenia, or just of an analytic philosopher taking their made up axioms all the way to an alternate universe.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-01 09:29:18+00:00
> When people say "pre-Snoopy Peanuts" they don"t mean before the character existed at all but before the strip became focused on Snoopy and his wacky adventures in the mid 1970s and later.

There are several problems here. Is this something you personally believe, or something that you've read other people believe?

In either case, it makes about as much sense as believing that Captain Kirk is characterized by sleeping with the alien women he encounters. It's easy to find people saying that it's true. It's very difficult, often impossible, to find an example of the phenomenon.

I just read through the years 1983-1984 for Peanuts. Snoopy appears frequently. You know who pulls more focus than Snoopy? Spike. But also, Peppermint Patty and Marcie, who both have an ongoing theme of unrequited love for Charlie Brown.

(The little red-haired girl is not mentioned in either year, but Charlie Brown is sad to receive no valentines in 1984. In 1983, it's Sally who is sad to receive no valentines - she had convinced herself that Linus was going to give her one, despite his repeated warnings ahead of the date that he would do no such thing.

In the followup to that storyline, Charlie Brown doesn't think Linus has done anything wrong, but nevertheless feels obligated to do something about Linus hurting his sister, so he compromises on standing still with his fist out and asking Linus to walk into it.)
by muixoozie | 2025-12-01 09:29:23+00:00
I was replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and trying to think of all the ways one might have dialed up the dystopia to 11 (beyond what the game does). And pervasive AI slop was never on my radar. Kinda reminds me of the foreword in Neuromancer bringing attention to the fact the book was written before cellphones became popular. It's already fucking with my mind. I recently watched Frankenstein 2025 and 100% thought gen ai had a role in the CGI only to find out the director hates it so much he rather die than use it. I've been noticing little things in old movies and anime where I thought to myself (if I didn't know this was made before gen ai, I would have thought this was generated for sure). One example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGSNhVQFbOc&t=412) cityscape background in this a outro scene with buildings built on top of buildings gave me ai vibes (really the only thing in this whole anime), yet this came out ~1990. So I can already recognize a paranoia / bias in myself and really can't reliably tell what's real.. Probably also other people have this and why some non-zero number of people always thinks every blog post that comes out was written by gen ai.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-01 09:30:11+00:00
This sounds like an Alan Kay quote. He meant that in regards to useful inventions. AI-generated spam just decreases the quality. We'd need a real alternative to this garbage from Google but all the other search engines are also bad. And their UI is also horrible - not as bad as Google, but also bad. Qwant just tries to copy/paste Google for instance (though interestingly enough, sometimes it has better results than Google - but also fewer in general, even ignornig false positive results).
by torginus | 2025-12-01 09:31:21+00:00
Is having temporarily high unemployment that bad? Sure, demand is not as sky high as it used to be but doesn't mean people won't get a proper job eventually.

Imo it shows that you consider your people valuable and have a strong social safety net, so people are not forced to accept the first job that comes their way and compromise on pay or what you want to do.

I'm sure those grads could get underpaid crappy jobs the next day if they had to, but the point is they're not forced to.

If you can't sort this out in a couple years, then you have a real problem.
by ben_w | 2025-12-01 09:31:21+00:00
Similar.

Compiler error while working on some ObjC. Nothing obviously wrong. Copy-pasted the line, same thing on the copy. Typed it out again, no issue with the re-typed version. Put the error version and the ok version next to each other, apparently identical.

I ended up discovering I'd accidentally lent on the option key while pressing the "-"; Monospace font, Xcode, m-dash and minus looked identical.
by camillomiller | 2025-12-01 09:31:41+00:00
I agree, psychopath is the wrong adjective, I agree. It refers to an entity with a psyche, which the illness affects. That said, I do believe the people who decided to have it behave like this for the purpose of its commercial success are indeed the pathological individuals. I do believe there is currently a wave of collective psychopathology that has taken over Silicon Valley, with the reinforcement that only a successful community backed by a lot of money can give you.
by fragmede | 2025-12-01 09:33:30+00:00
You say that as if tech hasn't always been a moving target anyway. The skills I spent months learning a specific language and IDE became obsolete with the next job and the next paradigm shift. That's been one of the few consistent themes throughout my career. Hours here and there, spread across months and years, just learning whatever was new. Sometimes, like with Linux, it really paid off. Other times, like PHP, it did, and then fizzled out.

--

The other thing is, this need for determinism bewilders me. I mean, I get where it comes from, we want nice, predictable reliable machines. But how deterministic does it need to be? If today, it decides to generate code and the variable is called fileName, and tomorrow it's filePath, as long as it's passing tests, what do I care that it's not totally deterministic and the names of the variables it generates are different? as long as it's consistent with existing code, and it passes tests, whats the importance of it being deterministic to a computer science level of rigor? It reminds me about the travelling salesman problem, or the knapsack problem. Both NP hard, but users don't care about that. They just want the computer to tell them something good enough for them to go on about their day. So if a customer comes up to you and offers you a pile of money to solve either one of those problems, do I laugh in their face, knowing damn well I won't be the one to prove that NP = P, or do I explain to them the situation, and build them software that will do the best it can, with however much compute resources they're willing to pay for?