MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tkgally | 2025-12-09 11:17:33+00:00
About 20 hours after the earthquake, the University of Tokyo sent out a follow-up advisory to faculty, students, and staff [1, scroll down for English]. This part hit home with me:

“The ‘follow-up earthquake advisory for the Hokkaido and Sanriku Coastal regions’ was established following the earthquake (M7.3) that occurred off the coast of Sanriku on March 9, 2011, two days prior to the Great East Japan Earthquake (Tōhoku Region Pacific Offshore Earthquake) that occurred on March 11, 2011.”

I was eating lunch in a fourth-floor restaurant in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, on March 9, 2011, when that preliminary tremor occurred. I had felt many earthquakes before, but that one seemed different: longer, slower, creepier. It didn’t cause any damage, but I often recalled it after the much bigger one struck two days later. (I missed the March 11 quake, as I happened to leave for Osaka just a few hours before it hit. My office back in Tokyo was damaged, though.)

[1] https://kankyoanzen.adm.u-tokyo.ac.jp/%e5%8c%97%e6%b5%b7%e9%...
by rsynnott | 2025-12-09 11:17:56+00:00
> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago

They have been, repeatedly, since the 70s. See dBase, Clipper, Microsoft Access, Hypercard, Ruby on Rails, stretching Wordpress to within an inch of its life, all manner of "no-code" things...

And, honestly, Excel. People do all manner of terrifying things with Excel, and it is unquestionably the most successful, and arguably the _only_ successful, "we can do this thing instead of employing a programmer" tool.

Generally, one of two things has happened. Either (a) the products of such automation become unmaintainable nightmares (common for the more automated approaches like MS Access) or (b) they become complex enough that they tend towards 'normal' programming (common with, say, Rails, where you could get a simple CRUD with basically just DSL, but realistically eventually you're gonna be writing lots of Ruby).

I feel like LLM-produced stuff is probably going to fall into column A.
by FieryMechanic | 2025-12-09 11:19:36+00:00
>Not my experience

The point being conveyed is your experience is not representative of what commonly occurs. I have worked as a contractor in a number of different orgs both small, large, private and public and more often than not unless you force people to fix these things, they won't.

> Find better managers.

How about you and others with similar attitudes realise that the world isn't perfect and sometimes you have to work with what you got.

Do you think I haven't been looking for a new position? Most of the jobs in my area are going to be more of the same.
by freefaler | 2025-12-09 11:19:50+00:00
Free market countries are more abundant than non-free market ones because the system is brutally efficient. If you can't sell something for a profit, you might be forced to sell it for a loss and eat the difference. This is the way the system regulates itself. The business owners invest their resources and own the risk. Employees sell their work hours by a fixed price and this is calculated in the total cost for the business to sell. The price their work is bought by is also regulated by free market and is an input to the total price. They aren't forced to be paid less than the going market rate (may be short term until contract expires) so the prices and unforced cooperation based on price it shte "magic" that makes USA to have 100s of types of biscuits and Cuba to have empty stores.
by gwd | 2025-12-09 11:19:55+00:00
> ChatGPT is not "intelligence", so please don't call it "AI". I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain.

Great -- another "submarines can't swim" person. [EDIT2: Apparently this is not his position, although it's only clear in a different page he links to. See below.]

By this definition nothing is AI. Quite an ignorant stance for someone who used to work at an AI laboratory.

ETA:

> Please join me in spreading the word that people should not trust systems that mindlessly play with words to be correct in what those words mean.

Please join me in spreading the counterargument to this: The best way to predict a physical system is to have an accurate model of a physical system; the best way to predict what a human would write next is to have a model of the human mind.

"They work by predicting the next word" does not prove that they are not thinking.

EDIT2, con't: So, he clarifies his stance elsewhere [1]. His position appears to be:

1. Systems -- including both "classical AI" systems like chess and machine learning / deep learning systems -- can be said to have semantic understanding, even if they are not 100% correct, if there has been some effort to "validate" the output: to correlate it to reality.

2. ChatGPT and other LLMs have had no effort to validate their output

3. Therefore, ChatGPT and other LLMs have no semantic understanding.

#2 is not stated so explicitly. However, he actually goes into quite a bit of detail to emphasize the validation part in #1, going so far as to describe completely inaccurate systems still count as "attempted artificial intelligence" because they "purport to understand". So the only way #3 makes any sense is for #2 to be presented as stated.

And, #2 is simply and clearly false. All the AI labs go to great lengths to increase the correlation between the output of their AI and the truth ("reduce hallucination"); and have been making steady progress.

So to state it forwards:

1. According to [1], a system's output can reflect "real knowledge" and a "semantic understanding" -- and thus qualify as "AI" -- if someone "validate[s] the system by comparing its judgment against [ground truth]".

2. ChatGPT, Claude, and others have had significant effort put into them to validate them against ground truth.

3. So, ChatGPT has semantic understanding, and is thus AI.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia...
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-12-09 11:20:00+00:00
And if the position is always the same, it is decorative, and we'd pretty much rather discard it too and use time, which does not stay the same by definition, and make them stupids click anywhere spatially but on precise time: t % 2 == 0 => action 1, t % 3 == 0 => action 2 etc - but that would be too much of a disrespect towards users, however stupid - and we have no choice but randomize those iconless textless positions dynamically.
by ojr | 2025-12-09 11:20:33+00:00
Security is built out of generic programming concepts, rate limiting, input validation, authorization, encryption, etc.

When you apply these programming concepts like atomic operations to something that control moneys it becomes security engineering.

Atomicity is literally the foundation of preventing double spending in a financial system. If people can spend bitcoin twice the price crashes to $0. Understanding atomicity is very important for cybersecurity/integrity of the system.

With more programming experience you’ll understand the mapping of studying crypto smart contract vulnerabilities and applying lessons to a non-blockchain database.

Programmers like you make me never feel threaten that my apps would be cloned, too many gaps in knowledge of system design.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-09 11:20:43+00:00
Sure, but "we're going to cut the costs of horizontal drilling to a tiny fraction" was the Boring Company's original stated goal. And not all of it does need to be underground.

Even if it was a good idea (which I doubt, it's just a idle thought), I don't think there's a practical way to retrofit such a system in existing cities due to the costs, planning and presumably private funding for a non-public network, because the public road system exists, needs to continue to exist for large items and can be used for virtually free in comparison. So if/when the depot-to-neighbourhood leg is automated, it's much more likely we'll see drone vehicles on the road or occasionally in the air instead of dedicated pipeline-like delivery systems.

Even without the pipeline, you can conceive of self-diving heavy vehicles pulling up next to local delivery hubs and disgorging thousands of shipping pods into a robotic receiver. From there they either get picked up, droned, Starship'ed, cycled, whatever to the eventual front door. It's still possible just having then self-drive right to the door would turn out cheaper.

Sounds very sterile as an experience, but really it's only an optimisation of the small, but highly distributed, remaining segment of inefficiency in the existing global machine that already converts raw materials to a widget or food and gets it to within 100 miles of your house.
by switknee | 2025-12-09 11:21:46+00:00
Flicking that switch would be pretty much a one time deal. Not likely.

What would happen instead, and has happened in the past, is Microsoft (or juniper, etc) leaving a remote vulnerability unpatched while certain groups use that exploit. It's much more deniable. So deniable, that it's impossible to say for certain that it was intentional.

It's more practical to audit FOSS systems for bugs than a Microsoft solution, and the tools for doing so are open source and getting even better every day. Like you said, sharing the burden helps with cost: It also helps with the trust issue. Going one step further, formally verified software solutions are possible (and exist!). Good luck getting that from Microsoft, they ship a calculator that needs updates and internet access to run.
by baobun | 2025-12-09 11:21:49+00:00
AGPL all the things. If there's a sequence it seems sensible to start with client-side for obvious reasons. Document the relevant protocols (autogenerated from well-annotated sources can be helpful enough and reduce maintenance overhead).

If you want some further mechanisms beyond what that license gives you, you can consider a CLA for some parts and perhaps talk to an expert when you formulate it if you want to get it right for your exact case.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-12-09 11:22:08+00:00
> Cassettes suck hard.

Exactly. We need DAT Walkman back [1] [2].

[1]: https://www.dcaudiovisuel.com/product_info.php/products_id/1...

[2]: https://www.just-cassette.com/post/digital-audio-cassette-da...
by BoxOfRain | 2025-12-09 11:22:26+00:00
The exclusion of women from clinic trials is one of those things that makes me really angry, there's many women in my life who've been adversely affected by various medications and essentially palmed off about it, being made to feel like they're making it up when there's obviously a problem at hand.

It will be one of those things future historians of medicine will judge our time harshly for in my opinion, and rightly so.
by Rygian | 2025-12-09 11:22:38+00:00
GNU grep operates an algorithm, and provides output which is truthful to that algorithm (if not, it's a bug).

An LLM operates a probabilistic process, and provides output which is statistically aligned with a model. Given an input sufficiently different from the training samples, the output is going to be wildly off of any intended result. There is no algorithm.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 11:22:53+00:00
You don't need to be in a city centre for small shops with bike racks.

This is village with a population of a bit less than 3000, which I only know about because I have walked East-West across most of the state of Brandenburg (from Słubice in Poland to the city of Brandenburg) and this trains station was a convenient break point:

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3459295,14.2800967,3a,60y,14...

Here's Aberystwyth, where I did my degree, population 13k, nearby villages boost that by about 6k, students by another 8k:

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4145833,-4.0848806,3a,75y,19...

I grew up on the south coast of the UK. Which is certainly expensive overall, but it has cheap areas like Leigh Park which used to be entirely council houses (i.e. made for poor people and run by the local council):

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leigh+Park,+Havant,+UK/@50...
by TavsiE9s | 2025-12-09 11:22:56+00:00
I've tried so many times to play the classic JRPGs only to be met by loooooooong cutscenes before even allowing me to control the characters. Grandia is unfortunately no exception: 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.
by piokoch | 2025-12-09 11:24:08+00:00
http://litestep.net/ - worth to go and check this website. This is internet we used to have. Simple page, no crap, JS, etc., loads immediately and then stays in the cache.

Download link starts... download, instead of showing some "engagement" screens, asking for email, login with whatever account in the social media one has. If we wanted to discuss this software, well, there was a forum for this. No need to create account in Discord, Twitter, Facebook, and so on.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-09 11:24:13+00:00
Here in Norway we have a law for mobile carriers which is intended to prevent moats. It states that carriers must provide access for a "reasonable price" to other phone companies. It seems to have worked fairly well.

One could imagine something similar, that sure you can put your own movie or TV show on your own website, but you must also sell it to companies who asks on reasonable terms. So Netflix can make a movie but couldn't say no to say Plex if they wanted to buy the rights to show it on Plex.tv.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-12-09 11:24:19+00:00
I've heard this kind of reasoning from a number of designers, and it strikes me as post hoc justification for aesthetic self-indulgence.

So, with the greatest of respect, I don't believe you. It does not take you "a couple more milliseconds to scan", since a couple of milliseconds is well below human perceptible thresholds for almost every sense.

There is no accessibility improvement here — you just like the consistency.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18465408/
by louthy | 2025-12-09 11:24:47+00:00
> You might think that you are able to see what « looks good » since, hey you have eyes, but no you can’t.

I'm sure lots of people will reply to you stating the opposite, but for what it's worth, I agree. I am not a visual artist... well, not any more, I was really into it as a kid and had it beaten out of me by terrible art teachers, but I digress... I am creative (music), and have a semblance of understanding of the creative process.

I ran a SaaS company for 20 years and would be constantly amazed at how bad the choices of software engineers would be when it came to visual design. I could never quite understand whether they just didn't care or just couldn't see. I always believed (hoped) it was the latter. Even when I explained basic concepts like consistent borders, grid systems, consistent fonts and font-sizing, less visual clutter, etc. they would still make the same mistakes over and over.

To the trained eye they immediately see it and see what's right and what's wrong. And that's why we still need experts. It doesn't matter what is being generated, if you don't have expertise to know whether it's good or not, the chances are glaring errors will be missed (in code and in visual design)
by markisus | 2025-12-09 11:26:25+00:00
Each fine tune drags the model weights away from the base model in a certain direction.

Given 500 fine tune datasets, we could expect the 500 drag directions to span a 500 dimensional space. After all, 500 random vectors in a high dimensional space are likely to be mutually orthogonal.

The paper shows, however, that the 500 drag directions live in a ~40 dimensional subspace.

Another way to say it is that you can compress fine tune weights into a vector of 40 floats.

Imagine if, one day, fine tunes on huggingface were not measured in gigabytes, megabytes, or even kilobytes. Suppose you started to see listings like 160 bytes. Would that be surprising?

I’m leaving out the detail that the basis direction vectors themselves would have to be on your machine and each basis direction is as big as the model itself. And I’m also taking for granted that the subspace dimension will not increase as the number of fine tune datasets increases.

I agree that the authors decision to use random models on hugging face is unfortunate. I’m hopeful that this paper will inspire follow up works that train large models from scratch.
by amluto | 2025-12-09 11:27:43+00:00
Exactly. This workflow step takes a rather important secret and sticks it on a VM where any insufficiently sandboxed step before or after it can exfiltrate it.

GitHub should instead let you store that key as a different type of secret such that a specific workflow step can sign with it. Then a compromised runner VM could possibly sign something that shouldn’t be signed but could not exfiltrate it.

Even better would be to be able to have a policy that the only thing that can be signed is something with a version that matches the immutable release that’s being built.
by IanCal | 2025-12-09 11:28:13+00:00
Extremely lazy take.

> ChatGPT is not "intelligence", so please don't call it "AI".

Totally ignoring the history of the field.

> ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything

Ignoring large and varied debates as to what these words mean.

From the link about bullshit generators

> There are systems which use machine learning to recognize specific important patterns in data. Their output can reflect real knowledge (even if not with perfect accuracy)—for instance, whether an image of tissue from an organism shows a certain medical condition, whether an insect is a bee-eating Asian hornet, whether a toddler may be at risk of becoming autistic, or how well a certain art work matches some artist's style and habits. Scientists validate the system by comparing its judgment against experimental tests. That justifies referring to these systems as “artificial intelligence.”

Feels absurd to say LLMs don't learn patterns in data and that the output of them hasn't been compared experimentally.

We've seen this take a thousand times and it doesn't get more interesting to hear it again.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-09 11:28:38+00:00
I wouldn't have an issue with every menu item having an icon, if we could make every single one different enough to be distinguishable from the others.

The problem is that you only have so many ways to draw the shapes and at your average resolution it ends up looking like "this group of squares with squiggles in them" and "this other group of circles with squiggles in them".

In some cases like a power menu or window snapping menu (like in the Mac Rectangle app) they can be insanely useful, though maybe those are easy to do because the count is kept to a reasonable amount. Maybe there are exceptions where the same icon can be used for multiple items, like in the insert/delete action groupings, to make the group distinguishable from the other options.

But in general, it just seems like the menus have perhaps too many items in them.
by K0balt | 2025-12-09 11:28:58+00:00
Based on the assumption that the appeal here is the experience, not the actual legacy media, it seems like it would be trivial to implement a digital stream standard so that audio cassette players could record and play a digital stream for higher fidelity with an identical experience? Or would that not be possible on legacy media because of bitrate limitations?

I can easily imagine the DAC/ADC and amplifier tuning/stream processing being an optional step so that legacy compatibility would be perfect, and even dual head setups that could do on the fly conversion. But perhaps the data density of the tape just isn’t there? Though it seems like with the type of data stuffing tech we use it flash memory and hdd these days to quadruple up on bits per domain, that it should be possible.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-12-09 11:29:03+00:00
Just to point out, even a P2 implementation is still very useful! P3 is necessarily more complex than P2, but P2 also contains very useful features that are worth implementing. Most language toolchains are centered around p2 today and that will take a while to change.

Also, there is an adapter for automatically taking p1 components to p2, and a p2 to p3 adapter may exist in time, if desire is great enough! IIRC it doesn't exist right now.
by omnicognate | 2025-12-09 11:30:13+00:00
Minidiscs were briefly widely available here in the UK and were only short-lived because they were almost immediately replaced by iPods and other mp3 players, also with lossy audio only. Nearly two decades went by during which the only portable music options not widely considered obsolete were lossily compressed, despite the fact you could still buy CDs and listen to them on the move. It's disappointing (and I certainly don't agree with it) but the vast majority of people do tolerate lossy compression even when there are lossless alternatives that are only marginally less convenient. Minidiscs and iPods proved it comprehensively and Bluetooth earbuds have done so again.

Edit: I'm very glad lossless is finally mainstream again but I'd be more inclined to believe it's due to "demand" if I weren't routinely the only person on the train wearing wired earphones.
by wongarsu | 2025-12-09 11:30:42+00:00
I think that's kind of the point: there are no "genius ideas", at least not at the level and frequency popularly portrayed. If teleportation isn't feasible then the idea isn't genius. If teleportation is feasible, then using it for transporting humans isn't genius, it's incredibly obvious.

Or to give a real-world example: The Wright brothers did some great work on making aircraft steerable and doing wind-tunnel tests, but working planes were mostly a product of ICE engines finally reaching sufficient power-to-weight ratios, not of the Wright brothers being unique geniuses. In a long line of people trying to build heavier-than-air aircraft they were simply the first to have access to the necessary technology to make it work
by Tade0 | 2025-12-09 11:30:47+00:00
I had a professor in college explain to us that we shouldn't even be colouring buttons, as it always ends poorly. That being said:

> In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not.

I understood this the first time I had to explain to a non-technical user how to get to a certain menu item. Fortunately whoever made the Wordpress admin dashboard nailed the design so icons are sufficiently visually distinct.

You can only have so many of them though, so you use icons to draw attention to the most important features from a non-power user's perspective.

Of course not everyone places them with sufficient care and I think that's what's lacking at Apple, but it's not like they're there purely for decoration.
by echelon_musk | 2025-12-09 11:31:12+00:00
> UNKLE

I was a huge DJ Shadow fan as a teen, getting as many albums, mixes and singles as I could find online.

DJ Shadow was involved in the production of UNKLE's first album Psyence Fiction. I recently discovered that there was an intro mix that wasn't on most CD copies of the album that has DJ Shadow mashing ~70 tracks together in just over 2 minutes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oRwnUM10mf4