MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2025-12-19 00:20:37+00:00
On what data is it trained?

On one hand it says it's trained on,

> 80B tokens of historical data up to knowledge-cutoffs ∈ 1913, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1946, using a curated dataset of 600B tokens of time-stamped text.

Literally that includes Homer, the oldest Chinese texts, Sanskrit, Egyptian, etc., up to 1913. Even if limited to European texts (all examples are about Europe), it would include the ancient Greeks, Romans, etc., Scholastics, Charlemagne, .... all up to present day.

But they seem to say it represents the 1913 viewpoint:

On one hand, they say it represents the perspective of 1913; for example,

> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire.

> When you ask Ranke-4B-1913 about "the gravest dangers to peace," it responds from the perspective of 1913—identifying Balkan tensions or Austro-German ambitions—because that's what the newspapers and books from the period up to 1913 discussed.

People in 1913 of course would be heavily biased toward recent information. Otherwise, the greatest threat to peace might be Hannibal or Napolean or Viking coastal raids or Holy Wars. How do they accomplish a 1913 perspective?
by andy99 | 2025-12-19 00:21:25+00:00
I wonder if they know about this, basically training on LLM output can transmit information or characteristics not explicitly included https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/

I’m curious, they have the example of raw base model output; when LLMs were first identified as zero shot chatbots there was usually a prompt like “A conversation between a person and a helpful assistant” that preceded the chat to get it to simulate a chat.

Could they have tried a prefix like “Correspondence between a gentleman and a knowledgeable historian” or the like to try and prime for responses?

I also wonder about the whether the whole concept of “chat” makes sense in 18XX. We had the idea of AI and chatbots long before we had LLMs so they are naturally primed for it. It might make less sense as a communication style here and some kind of correspondence could be a better framing.
by dleeftink | 2025-12-19 00:21:33+00:00
While not specifically Victorian, couldn't we learn much from what daily conversations were like by looking at surviving oral cultures, or other relatively secluded communal pockets? I'd also say time and progress are not always equally distributed, and even within geographical regions (as the U.K.) there are likely large differences in the rate of language shifts since then, some possibly surviving well into the 20th century.
by hakfoo | 2025-12-19 00:21:37+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1#/media... Evidently they offered both the Win9x and Motif-like themes back then too, I guess I never bothered with it.

I can recall trying Beta 4 and probably 1.0, but at the time it felt like a weird situation. It wasn't quite everything you needed, and a lot of the apps were still obviously sort of immature. The HTML-driven file manager was interesting (ISTR OS/2 offered a similar way to customize things on a per-directory level) but it seemed like a lot of resources when a 486/80 with an obscene 32Mb of memory was my Linux machine.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-19 00:22:08+00:00
But supermajority of the US (and almost majority of the world, I guess?) are property owners in their respective countries. So, by that logic, most people wouldn't want that, no?

By the way, I am very supportive of lower property values. I've just mostly given up on this issue, since from my conversations with random people all around the world, most people don't really want that to happen. Like, they want the property values to go down, but they don't want THEIR property to go down.
by lovich | 2025-12-19 00:22:31+00:00
You do realize that the people making those decisions at corporations are largely shielded from the liability of said decisions, and that when companies are treated like citizens they almost never get equivalent punishment like human beings do.

I can draw a distinction between people and corporations because it’s literally encoded in the fucking law.

I actually don’t know how or why you would imply that such a distinction doesn’t exist.
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-19 00:22:42+00:00
'People prefer money with no strings attached' is likely a bit reductive. The power imbalance inherent in the expectation that you prove you're 'good enough' to a functionary who has the ability to determine if you have money to buy food or not sounds like a deeply unpleasant scenario to me. I could absolutely imagine a few months of that would be deleterious to my mental health, I don't know about you.
by nneonneo | 2025-12-19 00:22:44+00:00
ACR needs to die. It’s an absurd abuse of the privileged position that a TV has - a gross violation of privacy just to make a few bucks. It should be absolutely nobody’s business to know what you watch except your own; the motivation behind the VPPA was to kill exactly this type of abuse.

The greatest irony is that HDCP goes to great lengths to try and prevent people from screenshotting copyrighted content, and here we have the smart TVs at the end just scraping the content willy-nilly. If someone manages to figure out how to use ACR to break DRM, maybe the MPAA will be motivated to kill ACR :)
by graemefawcett | 2025-12-19 00:22:51+00:00
Two systems are isomorphic when they admit the same morphisms—when the set of valid transformations applicable to one equals those applicable to the other.

If Hom(X, DNS) ≅ Hom(X, Filesystem) for all relevant X, then DNS ≅ Filesystem.

Wherein we prove it is
by algernonramone | 2025-12-19 00:24:14+00:00
It's not immediately clear from reading this what this means for ACM books, both older ones and new ones. I'm a fan of a lot of their older books, such as the Turing Award Lecture anthology they published in the early 1990s. I'm also interested in some of the newer books they've published in the last several years (The tributes to Dijkstra and Hoare especially stand out). I really hope these are included as well.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-12-19 00:24:44+00:00
Yes, in the analogy it's equivalent to saying you know "what" every instruction in the compression program is doing. push decrements rsp, xor rax, rax zeroes out the register. You know every step. But you don't know the algorithm that those instructions are implementing, and that's the same situation we're in with LLMs. We can describe their actions numerically, but we cannot describe them behaviorally, and they're doing things that we don't know how to otherwise do with numerical methods. They've clearly learnt algorithms but we cannot yet formalize what they are. The universal approximation theorem actually works against your argument here, because it's too powerful- they could be implementing anything.

edit: We know the data that their function outputs, it's a "blurry jpeg of the internet" because that's what they're trained on. But we do not know what the function is, and being able to blurrily compress the internet into a tb or whatever is utterly beyond any other compression algorithm known to man.
by mmooss | 2025-12-19 00:25:06+00:00
> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire.

I don't mind the experimentation. I'm curious about where someone has found an application of it.

What is the value of such a broad, generic viewpoint? What does it represent? What is it evidence of? The answer to both seems to be 'nothing'.
by sfRattan | 2025-12-19 00:25:35+00:00
I will say in favor of the ribbon: it still fully supports KeyTips (a.k.a tapping Alt and then a series of letters to navigate a software menu). So much Electron-based slop software out there doesn't support any sort of keyboard navigation of the application at all.

I do find the ribbon somehow weirdly intuitive for navigating with the keyboard, but it was of course possible to navigate drop-down menus in the exact same way (Alt and a series of underlined letters) for years before that. And still is... When developers bother to write robust software.
by gred | 2025-12-19 00:25:39+00:00
Many Catholics believe that Mary was born without sin (immaculate conception), never died (assumption into heaven), can advocate to Jesus for believers (intercession) and has been crowned the Queen of Heaven. This goes well beyond "admiring" or "honoring". To complicate matters, many of these dogmas were only formalized by the Catholic church in the past 200 years. Quite a hard sell for the "sola scriptura" contingent.
by killerstorm | 2025-12-19 00:26:28+00:00
Nice. I actually did something similar 25 years ago, I called by think "pick-and-put".

At that time I switched from MS-DOS environment to Windows 98. And as I was trying new UI features, I found drag-and-drop incredibly annoying. Especially if you do it between different windows, it requires a lot of movements, etc.

I had an idea that going further into skeuomorphism can make things better, so I started experimenting with 3D UI, particularly, a file manager with 3D UI. And as an alternative to drag-and-drop I designed pick-and-put.

It's actually very simple: right mouse button picks up an object and you get a symbol of that object next to the cursor. Then a click onto empty space puts it there. Or you can click a copy button which would copy it, etc.

I think it could work really well if we got a convention that some mouse button always picks an object. But we don't.

I don't think there's a way to make it works in the same way on desktop and mobile in a way which would be good. On desktop you have a mouse pointer, and you can easily represent point of insertion.

For mobile you came up with this scroll trick, but I think many people would find it unintuitive and annoying - especially on desktop.
by listenallyall | 2025-12-19 00:27:47+00:00
> That is more processing

Not necessarily. Often it is less. Template engines can be very, very efficient and fast.

Returning JSON almost always requires data/object serialization on the server, this is often slower than direct data/object -> template rendering.

Further, it's not your server but keep in mind the client must de-serialize JSON and render some HTML every time.

Modifying layouts as a result of non-persistent state (light/dark mode, sorting, etc) can usually be handled relatively easily with styles and data- attributes and sprinkles of JS. HTMX works very well with Alpine.JS and similar libraries for more complex situations.

HTMX isn't for every scenario, but it works very very well in many scenarios.
by mmooss | 2025-12-19 00:28:13+00:00
Was there ever such a time or place?

There is a modern trope of a certain political group that bias is a modern invention of another political group - an attempt to politicize anti-bias.

Preventing bias is fundamental to scientific research and law, for example. That same political group is strongly anti-science and anti-rule-of-law, maybe for the same reason.
by ATechGuy | 2025-12-19 00:28:14+00:00
From ChatGPT:

This approach can stop very basic scripts, but the claim that “99.9999% of scrapers can’t execute JS or handle cookies” isn’t accurate anymore. Modern scraping tools commonly use headless browsers (Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium), execute JavaScript, support cookies, and spoof realistic user agents. Any scraper beyond the most trivial will pass a JS-set cookie check without effort. That said, using a lightweight JS challenge can be reasonable as one signal among many, especially for low-value content and when minimizing user friction is a priority. It’s just not a reliable standalone defense. If it’s working for you, that likely means your site isn’t a high-value scraping target — not that the technique is fundamentally robust.
by killerstorm | 2025-12-19 00:28:15+00:00
> On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well.

Strong disagree here. It is intuitive, it is easy to demonstrate. But it's not really convenient, especially on a trackpad. I have enough mouse agility to play RTS games but not to do a reliable drag-and-drop, especially in a complicated case - across windows, with scroll, etc.
by k310 | 2025-12-19 00:28:18+00:00
Many believe that "the federal health care system has become unwieldy and unaffordable since the passage of Obamacare (ACA)"

Well,it's unaffordable if the wealthy don't pay their fair share of taxes and what we call "health care" is merely subsidizes private medical corporations.

> “The truth is, Republicans have always said they have a plan, but they never had a plan,” Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, said on Wednesday.

Well, they do, and it's called complete privatization of medical care, but won't admit it, due to political consequences. The overhead of the U.S. medical industry is staggering, the highest in the world. [2]

As the V.A. emailed today: [0]

> WASHINGTON —The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs today released a request for proposals (RFP) for new community care contracts that will improve health care choice and quality for Veterans over the next decade.

> View the RFP here. [1]

> VA’s community care program enables Veterans to access health care from non-VA medical providers at the department’s expense. Community care has been an integral part of caring for Veterans since the World War II era. In 2018, President Trump enshrined this right for Veterans by signing the bipartisan MISSION Act. Today, about 40% of all VA care is provided through community care.

I call "community care" a euphemism for privatization. They are privatizing the entire V.A. one step at a time. Subsidizing private providers.

[0] https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-to-improve-health-care-cho...

[1] https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/7b2734002e4048bfa2ac4...

[2] https://cepr.net/publications/paying-more-for-less-the-us-he...
by comfydragon | 2025-12-19 00:29:03+00:00
> The branch itself gets created with the ticket number and everything follows from that, there's no extra effort.

Only problem there is the potential for a deeply-ingrained assumption that the Jira key being in the branch name is sufficient for the traceability between the Jira issue and commits to always exist. I've had to remind many people I work with that branch names are not forever, but commit messages are.

Hasn't quite succeeded in getting everyone to throw a Jira ID in somewhere in the changeset, but I try...
by jaggederest | 2025-12-19 00:29:25+00:00
Jonathan Swift wrote about something we might consider a computer in the early 18th century, in Gulliver's Travels - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine

The idea of knowledge machines was not necessarily common, but it was by no means unheard of by the mid 18th century, there were adding machines and other mechanical computation, even leaving aside our field's direct antecedents in Babbage and Lovelace.
by josephg | 2025-12-19 00:29:32+00:00
I've been writing a little port of the SeL4 OS kernel to rust, mostly as a learning exercise. I ran into a weird bug yesterday where some of my code wasn't running - qemu was just exiting. And I couldn't figure out why.

I asked codex to take a look. It took a couple minutes, but it managed to track the issue down using a bunch of tricks I've never seen before. I was blown away. In particular, it reran qemu with different flags to get more information about a CPU fault I couldn't see. Then got a hex code of the instruction pointer at the time of the fault, and used some tools I didn't know about to map that pointer to the lines of code which were causing the problem. Then took a read of that part of the code and guessed (correctly) what the issue was. I guess I haven't worked with operating systems much, so I haven't seen any of those tricks before. But, holy cow!

Its tempting to just accept the help and move on, but today I want to go through what it did in detail, including all the tools it used, so I can learn to do the same thing myself next time.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-19 00:29:45+00:00
*anime jackalgirl ;-)

Quite possibly. Or, in my case, I think it's more quirky and fun than weird. It's non-zero amounts of weird, sure, but far below my threshold of troublesome. I probably wouldn't put my business behind it. I'm A-OK with using it on personal and hobby projects.

Frankly, anyone so delicate that they freak out at the utterly anodyne imagery is someone I don't want to deal with in my personal time. I can only abide so much pearl clutching when I'm not getting paid for it.
by tunesmith | 2025-12-19 00:30:23+00:00
As always, this requires nuance. Just yesterday and today, I did exactly that to my direct reports (I'm director-level). We had gotten a bug report, and the team had collectively looked into it and believed it was not our problem, but that of an external vendor. Reported it to the vendor, who looked into it, tested it, and then pushed back and said it was our problem. My team is still more LLM-averse than me, so I had Codex look at it, and it believed it found the problem and prepared the PR. I did not review or test the PR myself, but instead assigned it to the team to validate, partly for learnings. They looked it over and agreed it was a valid fix for a problem on our side. I believe that process was better than me just fully validating it myself, and part of the process toward encouraging them to use LLM as a tool for their work.
by mywittyname | 2025-12-19 00:30:33+00:00
China is also doing this with weapons. It's just a little more difficult normal people to see the results because people can't get a Dongfeng 2x series rocket from Ali Express.

Realistically, the general public doesn't have access to an honest appraise of their capabilities. So we are left to infer from their accomplishments in other high-tech areas what their military industry is capable of producing.
by scottyah | 2025-12-19 00:30:34+00:00
I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grandkids are in at a personal level, and just have the "throw money at it" mentality for the bigger issues like healthcare, since that has been their MO for the last couple decades. Instead of taking leadership positions and driving change, they seem to just want to squabble and create fiefdoms and have others do the work.
by solid_fuel | 2025-12-19 00:31:24+00:00
I believe the software will follow the hardware. Not immediately, of course, but if I want to learn to do ML and have to pick between a $2500 Nvidia GPU and a $500 Chinese GPU that's 80% as fast, I would absolutely take the cheap one and keep an eye out for patches.

When it comes to drivers, IMO all they really need is reasonable functionality on linux. That alone would probably be enough to get used in a budget steam machine or budget pc builds, with Windows 11 being a disaster and both RAM and GPU prices shooting through the roof. The choice may soon be Bazzite Linux with a janky GPU or gaming on your phone.
by xmddmx | 2025-12-19 00:32:58+00:00
I was impressed by the lack of dominance of Thunderbolt:

"Next I tested llama.cpp running AI models over 2.5 gigabit Ethernet versus Thunderbolt 5"

Results from that graph showed only a ~10% benefit from TB5 vs. Ethernet.

Note: The M3 studios support 10Gbps ethernet, but that wasn't tested. Instead it was tested using 2.5Gbps ethernet.

If 2.5G ethernet was only 10% slower than TB, how would 10G Ethernet have fared?

Also, TB5 has to be wired so that every CPU is connected to every other over TB, limiting you to 4 macs.

By comparison, with Ethernet, you could use a hub & spoke configuration with a Ethernet switch, theoretically letting you use more than 4 CPUs.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-19 00:34:02+00:00
Even with MoE you still need enough memory to load all experts. For each token, only 8 experts (out of 256) are activated, but which experts are chosen changes dynamically based on the input. This means you'll be constantly loading and unloading experts from disk.

MoEs is great for distributed deployments, because you can maintain a distribution of experts that matches your workload, and you can try to saturate each expert and thereby saturate each node.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-19 00:34:03+00:00
I wonder if this analogy could work: if some random visitor pointed out your storage room's key is nearly broken and anybody could come in now and steal your store's stock. You'd be thankful, but would you hire them to come from time to time to check if they have any other insight ? Probably not ?

If you really saw a recurring security risk you'd have many other better use of your money.
by newspaper1 | 2025-12-19 00:35:23+00:00
I don't want to dox myself since I'm doing it outside my regular job for the most part, but frameworks, apps (on those frameworks), low level systems stuff, linux-y things, some P2P, lots of ai tools. One thing I find it excels at is web front-end (which is my least favorite thing to actually code), easily as good as any front-end dev I've ever worked with.
by keyle | 2025-12-19 00:38:14+00:00
I find it's ok to vibe code something digestible like a ZSH function to do X or Y. An image converter, or something along those lines.

Anything that involves multiple days of work, or that you plan on working on it further, should absolutely not be vibe coded.

A) you'll have learnt pretty much nothing, or will retain nothing. Writing stuff by hand is a great way to remember. A painful experience worthwhile of having is one you've learnt from.

B) you'll find yourself distanced from the project and the lack personal involvement of 'being in the trenches' means you'll stop progressing on the software and move on back to something that makes you feel something.

Humans are by nature social creatures, but alone they want to feel worthwhile too. Vibe coding takes away from this positive reinforcement loop that is necessary for sticking with long running projects to achievement.

Emotions drive needs, which drives change and results. By vibe coding a significant piece of work, you'll blow away your emotions towards it and that'll be the end of it.

For 'projects' and things running where you want to be involved, you should be in charge, and only use LLMs for deterministic auto-completion, or research, outside of the IDE. Just like managing state in complex software, you need to manage LLMs' input to be 'boxed in' and not let it contaminate your work.

My 5c. Understanding the human's response to interactions with the machines is important in understanding our relationship with LLMs.
by JTech2three | 2025-12-19 00:38:23+00:00
With the recent release of OpenAI App SDK, our team at Apollo built a stack that lets you use familiar tools (React, Apollo Client, GraphQL, to build conversational apps without thinking about the MCP plumbing.

The architecture here is simple, a React app and Apollo MCP Server (MIT). Today we’re talking about OpenAI App SDK, but MCP Apps will be in the official spec and we’ll see multiple Agent/LLM providers create similar experiences. Our goal is to abstract away all of the provider details form you with a great developer experience, allowing you to focus on building your app instead.

Feel free to try out the repo (https://github.com/apollographql/ai-apps-template) and let us know what you think (you will need a paid OpenAI plan to connect it to ChatGPT).