MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 6510 | 2025-12-19 11:14:45+00:00
The purpose of the ministry of truth was to redact and rewrite history. Shape peoples thoughts, their vocabulary and show them how good they have it compared to their primitive ancestors. (Those naked bare foot people who build all those megalithic structures, castles and cathedrals) History should of course have a carefully engineered list of banned books.

The work is never done, after removing the books with practical tutorials, blue prints and historical revisionism you always continue to have a candidate at the top of the list. The work that remains now are all fictional books that portray an uncomfortable reality.

After those are all gone the new reality will again have a most terrible book. The work is never done.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-19 11:14:45+00:00
> I refuted what arguments you tried to put together by pointing the specious reasoning behind them.

You're confusing me with the person at the top of the thread. My response to you was to point you in a subtle way that you are attacking people, not arguments.

Read through your posts - the bulk of your "refutation" is basically calling the other person ignorant.

Ironic, I know.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-19 11:15:00+00:00
> ...and I just checked LinkedIn, the non-curious ones are still in the same company, managing the same piece of SaaS as a Software Developer. 20-26 years in the same company, straight from school.

And honestly, this should be OK. For a lot of people, they work to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head, and our society is structured like this for whatever reasons.

Not everyone needs to be learning and growing all the time. I personally like this, but I've worked with incredibly competent people who just had other interests outside of work, and had no desire to get promoted or work on different things.

Personally, I prefer (often) working with the learning and growing people, but sometimes you can learn a bunch from the stable people as they'll often have lots of hard won lessons caused by staying in the same place for a long time.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-19 11:17:55+00:00
> It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.

Publicly-traded companies fairly consistently follow a particular arc. At first they produce something people like, and thereby become popular. This is often before they go public. Then they grow for a while, until the market becomes saturated. But they're a public company, so they're still expected to grow. And if you can't get more users, the only thing you can do is extract more out of each one.

That's enshitification in a nutshell.

People often suggest things like "consumer protection" regulations, but then you get malicious compliance and regulatory capture. There are only really two things that work:

The first is that the company is still controlled by a founder who actually cares about their reputation. This works pretty well when you can find it, but it tends not to last. Eventually people die or retire.

The second is competition. Not a duopoly where they each point to the other and claim there's an alternative while mirroring every bad act of their partner in crime. Actual competition, where the market share of new companies that have only entered the market in the last 5 years isn't zero. This is why e.g. Costco can be rated higher than Comcast by an amount represented by the difference in altitude between a scenic view at a local park and the depths of hell.

So that's where you want to direct regulatory efforts. Breaking up companies in concentrated markets, repealing regulations that raise barriers to entry or allow incumbents to lock out competitors, etc. Because once a company is beholden to Wall St, the only thing that can keep them honest is real competition.
by hexaga | 2025-12-19 11:18:20+00:00
You've confused yourself. Those problems are not fundamental to next token prediction, they are fundamental to reconstruction losses on large general text corpora.

That is to say, they are equally likely if you don't do next token prediction at all and instead do text diffusion or something. Architecture has nothing to do with it. They arise because they are early partial solutions to the reconstruction task on 'all the text ever made'. Reconstruction task doesn't care much about truthiness until way late in the loss curve (where we probably will never reach), so hallucinations are almost as good for a very long time.

RL as is typical in post-training _does not share those early solutions_, and so does not share the fundamental problems. RL (in this context) has its own share of problems which are different, such as reward hacks like: reliance on meta signaling (# Why X is the correct solution, the honest answer ...), lying (commenting out tests), manipulation (You're absolutely right!), etc. Anything to make the human press the upvote button or make the test suite pass at any cost or whatever.

With that said, RL post-trained models _inherit_ the problems of non-optimal large corpora reconstruction solutions, but they don't introduce more or make them worse in a directed manner or anything like that. There's no reason to think them inevitable, and in principle you can cut away the garbage with the right RL target.

Thinking about architecture at all (autoregressive CE, RL, transformers, etc) is the wrong level of abstraction for understanding model behavior: instead, think about loss surfaces (large corpora reconstruction, human agreement, test suites passing, etc) and what solutions exist early and late in training for them.
by pajuhaan | 2025-12-19 11:19:23+00:00
I keep coming back to the most annoying question in physics: what is time, before we dress it up with coordinates and clocks.

I just posted a short preprint that takes a weirdly minimal route a model where “time” is literally an epoch counter from discrete state updates on a 1-complex-dimensional generator space, and a simple phase-budget idea naturally pushes you toward a lock like Rω=c and something that looks like time dilation as a redistribution between internal rotation and external motion.
by promiseofbeans | 2025-12-19 11:19:30+00:00
> some people actually use web version of Discord to chat, or sign-in on the website for whatever reason

Beside this security blunder on Discord’s part, I can see only upsides to using a browser version rather than an Electron desktop app. Especially given how prone Discord are to data mining their users, it seems foolish to let them out of the web sandbox and into your system
by uecker | 2025-12-19 11:20:25+00:00
First, if "unsafe" worked so well 100% time, why did we have this bug? (and many other) So this already obviously wrong statement.

Then yes, you can use dangerous features in C at any time, but obviously you can also use "unsafe" at any time. The only difference is that "unsafe" is clearer to recognize. But how much this is worth is unclear. First, if you do not invalidly reduce the discussion to only memory safety, you need to review all other code anyway! But even then, it is also not true that only the code marked with "unsafe" is relevant. This is major myth. The "unsafe" code can cause UB outside "unsafe" and logic bugs outside "unsafe" can cause bugs unsafe. This does not perfectly decouple if you Rust repeat this nonsense over and over again.

Don't get me wrong, I think the unsafe keyword is good idea. But the magical powers Rust fans attribute to it and the "SAFETY" comment they put next to it tells me they are a bit delusional.
by throwaway7356 | 2025-12-19 11:20:32+00:00
> The parser is implemented in C++ and handles deferred execution pipelines—nothing runs until you call .run(), which allows the JIT to optimize the entire chain of operations.

I think "The parser would hypothetically be implemented in C++" would be more correct as this looks more like an empty skeleton with hypothetical benchmarks.

> "Security through Omission" model

I guess a systems-level programming language that omits the implementation like Orbit is indeed more secure, but also not very useful.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-19 11:20:50+00:00
You should get some help yourself. And "GFY"? Very classy. Clearly demonstrates good faith on your part. Really shows the strength of your argument and your ability to deliver that argument. Only the most intelligent and educated people tell people to "GFY", obviously.

But back to your "argument". Google "anecdotal" and "non sequitur". But to save you time, here's a summary: you're not providing evidence, but instead a story that you created that attempts to support your augment. Then you deliver a series of non sequiturs, where your claims don't support your conclusion.

So again, please provide evidence instead of nonsensical and unsupported claims, then we can have an actual "good faith" discussion that I'm sure will be very helpful to everyone.
by KingMob | 2025-12-19 11:22:46+00:00
Well, I don't think it's "very obvious", nor do I think "it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting". I guess I'm not seeing the evidence the same way.

---

I read your links, and I think the most interesting relevant one with good numbers is the svpow.com link.

The StackExchange one says "34%" of their cost is "editorial and production". That includes more than type-setting, so it's not clear what subfraction is pure type-setting, and whether it's overpriced or not.

The Lode one is selling Latex templates, and they even say "Users without LaTeX experience should budget for learning time or technical assistance." It's more of a low-cost self-serve alternative, which probably doesn't include everything a journal does to maintain visual consistency. We can argue that full-service is overpriced, sure, but this is different, like complaining about coffee shops because the vending machine is cheaper.

The Reddit link is about a book author with a pure text novel, possibly the optimal scenario for cheap type-setting.

---

The svpow.com link was interesting, but, it seems like type-setting costs are usually bundled in (possibly to obscure overcharging, sure), so maybe it's better to critique the overall cost of academic publishing instead of trying to break out type-setting.

My $0.02, anyway.
by sparkie | 2025-12-19 11:22:59+00:00
Should really give the big-O notation for common operations for comparison of the approaches.

---

There are some variations of Chunk/Bucket arrays which offer different characteristics.

HAT (Hashed Array Trees[1]) are close to what is presented - the index block is always a power of 2 and points to data blocks of the same length - ie, it increases as: 1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 8x8, 16x16, ...

The downside is each time the length reaches a new power of 4 it requires the data to be shuffled about, which may cause latency spikes.

RAOTS (Resizeable Arrays in Optimal Time and Space[2]) is a variation where the index block block is approximately the square root of the length. It increases by adding a new block and resizing only the index block. The old blocks remain part of the structure and don't need reshuffling like HAT, which avoids the latency spikes, but there are more individual allocator calls. However, blocks are always a power of 2 which makes them arena-friendly.

Both of these have O(1) element access and waste only O(√n) space, which makes them quite optimal for uses where memory may be a constraint.

---

In the double-and-copy style array, one trick is we can avoid storing `capacity` and compute it on demand - determine the MSB of the length (using `lzcnt` or `bsr`), and then determine the next power of 2 sufficient to hold that length. In C23, this is `stdc_bit_ceil` (<stdbit.h>).

In the "Xal" structure (which has several other names), we can use `stdc_first_leading_one` to determine the index in the index block, then zero out the leading one bit to determine the index in the bucket.

This structure would be more efficient if processors provided a `log2mask` instruction which computes both the MSB and the remainder after masking the MSB in one instruction. (Similar to how `divmod` instructions work where the quotient and remainder are both computed in one instruction).

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashed_array_tree

[2]:https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/1999/09/CS-99-09.pdf
by therealcapi | 2025-12-19 11:22:59+00:00
It's a fair question. In situations involving formal legal demands and regulatory complaints, executive silence on social channels isn't unusual—it's a deliberate risk-mitigation strategy.

Engaging publicly or via direct message can create evidence and escalate visibility. The standard playbook is to keep serious disputes within formal, trackable channels (like legal@ email) or through counsel.

My takeaway isn't about their silence on LinkedIn, but their continued silence across all formal channels after being served notice. That shifts the calculus from a support issue to a legal and reputational risk they are choosing to ignore
by duskdozer | 2025-12-19 11:23:36+00:00
Yeah I agree, I've seen the hallucinated references also. Sometimes used by people in internet arguments to make their bullshit seem more legitimate. What I meant though by copy/pasting is people getting the LLM output and then just directly feeding that to the people they're conversing with, instead of looking into what it's saying or really even engaging with it in any way.
by wmanley | 2025-12-19 11:23:44+00:00
> in C only specific language features are unsafe and not all code

Using rust's definition of unsafe which is roughly "can cause undefined behaviour" then it seems to me isolating use of these features isn't possible. What is C without:

* Dereferencing pointers * Array access * Incrementing signed integers

You can do all of the above without invoking UB, but you can't separate the features in C that can cause UB from the ones that can't.
by permo-w | 2025-12-19 11:24:06+00:00
e+ is such an unintuitive decimal representation system. going in blindly, it's completely non-obvious what "e" stands for, surely "d" would make far more sense. also, the namespace for e is plenty filled up as is, and, most of all, +12 implies 12 additional digits, not digits after the point

Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it
by doublerabbit | 2025-12-19 11:24:22+00:00
It can be the engineers issue, sure. Hire the wrong crew and you're sunk. However, while I might be bias, what do you do when the higher-execs don't give you time / space to fix the bugs, performance issues? No one writes genius code from day one of a project.

I've had to aggressively pitch to execs who've totally ignored the fact that $app is vulnerable. Would result in fines and if we optimized it could be pushed to milk further money offering X feature. I was denied because it's a waste of time, cost and "didn't provide anything for the company".

After finally persuading them and getting the classic response of "Oh!, why didn't you say so" three weeks later was fired for making the company waste money. This wasn't a small company in an industrial park.

Ever since I've turned down jobs that smell like toxicity. You can sort of see the companies stink when you enter reception.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-19 11:25:28+00:00
This looks really good and complete. And I like that it starts from normal programming stuff rather than immediately jumping into type universes and proof expressions.

Edit: some feedback on the monads page:

1. "The bind operation (written >>=) is the heart of the monad." .. but then it doesn't use >>= at all in the code example.

2. "The left arrow ← desugars to bind; the semicolon sequences operations." .. again, no semicolons in the code example.

3. I don't really understand the List Monad section. The example doesn't seem to use any monad interfaces.

4. "The same laws look cleaner in the Kleisli category, where we compose monadic functions directly. If f:A→MB and g:B→MC, their Kleisli composition is g∘f:A→MC" - it was going so well!
by keepamovin | 2025-12-19 11:25:42+00:00
I felt the front page was too calm. I fixed it. YOU WON'T BELIEVE NUMBER 4.

Prompt: Remember this classic? <snip ... Hacker News 10 Years in Future > OK, i have a new idea. want to try? "Offtopic but this title makes me want to create an alternate-universe version of the HN front page where every title is shrill/spectacular/hysterical/urgent/clickbaity. Such as: The Absolute State of the Kernel Rust Experiment Right Now And every comment has its confidence/aggressiveness taken up to 11 (tho still within site rules)." And the HN front page right now is: <snip>
by Sweepi | 2025-12-19 11:26:25+00:00
"On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with."

As stated in you source the EU is (among other things) not happy about Twitter calling users 'verified' while the meaning of 'verified' switched from "we did sth. to make sure the account owner is indeed the thing/person they say they are" to "the account owner is paying a monthly fee".
by psychoslave | 2025-12-19 11:27:00+00:00
>Imagine having a conversation with someone genuinely from the period, where they don’t know the “end of the story”.

Isn't this part of the basics feature of human conditions? Not only we are all unaware of the coming historic outcome (though we can get some big points with more or less good guesses), but to a marginally variable extend, we are also very unaware of past and present history.

LLM are not aware, but they can be trained on larger historical accounts than any human and regurgitate syntactically correct summary on any point within it. Very different kind of utterer.
by animistically | 2025-12-19 11:27:02+00:00
Complex systems evolve by learning. They grow more complex. Same for the brain as for organizations and societies.

China is a redistribute centralist State. It has to be: a narrow coastal region is hyper wealthy and to maintain territorial integrity it requires a strong government to tax there and spend elsewhere. Hence the infrastructure and construction boom. The high debt is a feature of the system, these are State backed enterprises that live on subsidy.

The upshot is this limits complexity. ASML is in NL for a reason. NL is a feature of Western Europe decentralization. Arguably, Europe conquered the world because its internal fragmentation fostered a rapid gain in complexity.

The US has cemented this into its own constitution and political culture. All talks about "Europe innovation" and "China catching up" are moot. Europe became a colony of the US post WWII and the integration needed to foster internal peace capped its capacity to grow complex. The US is now the most complex society on Earth and no other region can cope with that much complexity on that scale. Both Russia and China are held together by trading complexity off centrality.
by yourdetect | 2025-12-19 11:27:40+00:00
I think defining terminology here might help.

An attempt:

Language-UB (L-UB): UB according to the guarantees of the language.

Project-compiler-UB (PC-UB): The project picks compilers and compiler settings to create a stronger set of guarantees, that turns some language-UB into not being UB. Examples include turning off the strict aliasing requirement in the used compilers, or a compiler by default defining some language-UB as being defined behavior.

I do not know if such terms might catch on, though. Do they seem reasonable to you?
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-12-19 11:28:22+00:00
Semantic Scholar is for search, but you can't just go there and look at everything that has been uploaded today as you do in arXiv, right? I know many people who check arXiv every day (myself included) but not Semantic Scholar, although I guess this might be highly field-specific.

What follows is totally offtopic, but to be honest I don't check Semantic Scholar much because I have a grudge with it. Profiles just don't work for authors with accented characters in the name (such as myself), papers get dispersed between multiple automatically-generated profiles. The staff is very helpful and will manually merge profiles for me when asked, but then I publish a new paper and wham, instead of incorporating it into the merged profile the system creates a new one. This has been going on for 6 years (if not more) and still unfixed.

For all the criticism that Google Scholar gets, I highly prefer it because it gets that right. It's extremely annoying when tools give you extra work for committing the sin of not having an Anglo-Saxon name (this is much more common than unaffected people would expect) and just don't seem to care to fix it.
Show HN: Recadio – The best way to handle audio devices on macOS
by dgrcode | 2025-12-19 11:28:26+00:00
I was so annoyed with the bluetooth auto-switch in macOS causing awful audio quality, that I decided to make an app to fix it.

I've been improving it with feedback from other users, and I've just released version 2.

You can get it for free, which it's already the best way out there to manually change audio devices. You can also buy a license for $10 one time payment and the app automatically select your preferred device. There's a 1 week free trial for the license version so you can see if it does what you want.
by everfrustrated | 2025-12-19 11:29:12+00:00
The West (with particular emphasis on the USA) got infected with this insane ideology that the best way to restore democracy to China would be to "corrupt" them with capitalism. Hence open them up to international trade, allow joining WTO etc. With prosperity the people would demand democracy.

You can also see this in the German approach to energy trade with Russia.

This toxic idea needs to be put to bed. All it did was feed and enrich foreigners at the expense of locals and create supply chain dependencies that made themselves hostage.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-19 11:29:17+00:00
There's also just a lot of "No, no, no, I kill the bus driver". A sort of "Greater Fool theory" but for genocide, everybody else is a useful idiot who, having supported your rise, is then next in line to be sacrificed, never for a moment remembering that even if you are the only person to have thought of this - which is unlikely - everybody who understands how this actually works will have been together against you from the outset.
by black3r | 2025-12-19 11:29:39+00:00
Ubuntu has alphabetical order too, but that's only useful if you want to know if "noble" is newer than "jammy", and useless if you know you have 24.04 but have no idea what its codename is and

Android also sucks for developers because they have the public facing numbers and then API versions which are different and not always scaling linearly (sometimes there is something like "Android 8.1" or "Android 12L" with a newer API), and as developers you always deal with the API numbers (you specify minimum API version, not the minimum "OS version" your code runs in your code), and have to map that back to version numbers the users and managers know to present it to them when you're upping the minimum requirements...
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-12-19 11:30:21+00:00
Isn’t there obvious problems baked into this approach, if this is used for anything but fun? LLM’s lie and fake facts all the time, they are also masters at enforcing the users bias, even unconscious ones. How even a professor of history could ensure that the generated text is actually based on the training material and representative of the feelings and opinions of the given time period, not enforcing his biases toward popular topics of the day?

You can’t, it is impossible. That will always be an issue as long as this models are black boxes and trained the way they are. So maybe you can use this for role playing, but I wouldn’t trust a word it says.