MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by logicprog | 2026-02-23 19:03:14+00:00
Just reading the headline, I say good.

A) These models are trained by ignoring IP. It is hypocritical and absurd to then try to assert IP over them. And I am for the destruction of IP on all ends.

B) What this essentially means is that the Chinese labs are taking the work of these mega corporations into making it freely accessible to other labs and businesses, to serve inference, fine tune, and host privately on prem. That's clearly a good thing for competition in the market as a whole.

C) I don't see why we should have to duplicate the massive energy and infrastructure investment of building foundation models over and over forever just because we want to preserve the IP rights of a few companies. That seems a shame and it seems better to me for everything to learn from everything else for the whole ecosystem to get better by topping each other and building off each other; that's also why publishing research into the architecture and training of these models is so much better than what the proprietary labs do (keeping everything a secret), although tbf Anthropic's interpretability research is cool.

D) these Chinese models give 90% of the performance of frontier proprietary models at a 10th or 20th of the cost. That seems like a win for everyone. Not to mention the fact that this distilling also allows them to make much smaller local models that everyone can run. This is a win for actual democratization, decentralization, and accessibility for the little guy.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-23 19:04:01+00:00
OpenAI has done more for society than all academia over the same timespan.

You could probably say the same about various medical devices/medicines. The internet. Chemistry/plastics.

Sociology/psychology is historically unfalsifiable, and mostly useless, those are truly detriments.

quantum physics might be useful, but I think even there, industry will do it better.
by graemep | 2026-02-23 19:04:06+00:00
Yes, that is the point of fiction. its not unfair to compare Genesis to Star Wars to an extent, but, to a Christian, what you learn from Genesis is a lot more important (the "word of God" rather than the "word of George Lucas").

However, much of the rest of the Bible should be read differently - the letters, biographies etc. Each document ("book") needs to be read appropriately and in context. Again, each can be compared to others in its genre, but its inclusion in "the Bible" (but there are lots of Biblical canons) gives it that extreme importance.
by subscribed | 2026-02-23 19:04:07+00:00
Instead of checking your ID, the bouncer sends you over to the shady broker, who takes a video of your face, photograph of your ID, checks you in the various databases (who knows, maybe you've been a bad boy previously), and only then gives you the permission slip to enter the club.

The data stays with them[1].

I think you grossly underplay the current practices.

[1] there's no hard, irrefutable proof companies like Persona (intimately connected with known law abusers, ie US government) keep their promises or obey the law.
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-23 19:04:25+00:00
> especially since Ladybird devs have been very vocal about being "anti-rust" (I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype).

I mean, they seem mostly to be against anything that isn't C++'s peculiar brand of Object Oriented Programming?

(also against women and immigrants, but that's a different story)
by lioeters | 2026-02-23 19:04:44+00:00
Yup, this was not flip-flopping, it was willingness to be open to options, even if it means going back on a decision branch made earlier in the process.

For the Ladybird project, now is the best time to be making a big decision like this, and it's commendable that the project lead was honest to recognize when an earlier attempt was not working, to be able to re-think and come to a better decision. I'm no fan of Rust, but for this project I think most of us would agree it's a better language than Swift for their purpose.
by pkulak | 2026-02-23 19:04:49+00:00
> I think I need a lot more info about this migration

Doesn't sound like it's some Fish-style, full migration to Rust of everything. Seems like they are just moving a couple parts over for evaluation, and then, going forward, making it an official project language that folks are free to use. They note that basically every browser already does that, so this isn't a huge shakeup.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-23 19:05:00+00:00
The compile errors are great. I can change one function signature and have my output fill up with compile errors (that would all be runtime errors in python). Then I just let claude cook on fixing them. Any time you have to run your program and tell claude what’s wrong with it you’re wasting time, but because claude can run the compiler itself and iterate it’s much more able to complete a task without intervention.
by observationist | 2026-02-23 19:05:02+00:00
They do not compare to the baseline population correctly. Roughly 1% of all people are susceptible to schizophrenia, and up to around 4% schizophrenia, extreme bipolar, and other conditions that can result in psychotic episodes or extreme outcomes.

Drug use among vulnerable populations increases the risk of psychotic episodes, but does not increase the risk of developing those conditions. There is no difference in the rate of extreme psychological outcomes among drug users and non-drug users, and in fact, this study reinforces that observation - only 4,000 of 460,000 had those negative outcomes. Over the next 20 years, it's extrmeely likely that another 600-1000 will develop schizophrenia, even abstaining from drugs entirely. Drug use can trigger a psychotic episode and result in long term schizophrenia; by the time you turn 45, however, your odds of a schizophrenic break drop to almost 0.

The worst part of drug use and mental health outcomes is that it can rob people of normal years of life, and rarely, result in schizophrenic or other psychotic conditions being triggered when they might never have been. However, this is not just marijuana or other illegal drugs, but alcohol, caffeine, trauma or intense stress, and even chronic health issues can have the same outcome.

This study also fails to account for the confounding fact that people with mental health issues often pursue mind altering drugs in order to self medicate. People with bad conditions in life, especially younger, undergo extreme stress and are exposed to illicit substances much more readily than those in otherwise stable and healthy conditions.

The results and methodology are flawed, and the conclusions being drawn have little to no relationship with reality.

It comes down to susceptibility - genetics and health conditions play into this. Consult a doctor, and if you have risk factors, live your life accordingly.

If you don't have risk factors for schizophrenia, drug use will not suddenly put you at risk of developing it. Marijuana or other recreational drug use will not cause you to have a psychotic episode. If you do have risk factors, then you're twice as likely to have an episode by using drugs or experiencing other triggers than otherwise.

For those who are susceptible, your relative risk of psychotic episodes and mental breakdown double under mairjuana and other substance use.

For those who are not susceptible, your absolute risk of psychotic episodes and mental breakdown remain near 0. Drugs don't induce these conditions (except in the case of extreme stimulant abuse, and possibly extreme psychedelics outcomes, although getting fried by psychedelics isn't really the same thing as psychosis. Lots of high function deadheads survived some truly harrowing levels of substance use and are best characterized as "weird".)

It'd be nice if the media could distinguish between relative and absolute risk rates and communicate the difference effectively. It'd be even nicer if researchers and publishers didn't chase clickbaity results like this and mischaracterize things like relative and absolute risk for profit.
by PoignardAzur | 2026-02-23 19:05:11+00:00
> Does anyone with more battery knowledge know if this could be some kind of supercapacitor hybrid being marketed as a solid-state battery?

A few Youtubers have pushed the "if it's not a scam, it's probably a novel capacitor" hypothesis, but in their video announcing this test series last weekend, Donut Labs claimed "it's not a capacitor", so I don't know what's going on.
by bradley13 | 2026-02-23 19:05:23+00:00
Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers. Honestly, I don't see the problem here.

It's like the "sexualized Images" idiocy. Someone asked Grok to put some politicians in bikinis. It did, the images were dumb, but the politicians got offended. Just like the current German chancellor, who is having someone criminally prosecuted for comparing him to Pinocchio.

LLMs do what you ask them to do. News at 11:00.
by quesera | 2026-02-23 19:05:37+00:00
I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.

But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.
by zdosb | 2026-02-23 19:05:38+00:00
I’ve been collecting mental models that help me debug organizational and personal growth. This one is based on Roy Rapoport’s framework.

It treats improvement as a funnel: Awareness → Desire → Self-Awareness → Capability → Execution. I've found it particularly useful for diagnosing why a team member (or myself) is stuck despite "trying" to change.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-02-23 19:05:43+00:00
I am firmly in favor of legalizing all drugs, except maybe antibiotics where overuse is causing harm for everyone.

The thing is, I 100% agree with your reasons for why it should be outlawed. I just think those are reasons to discourage using it, especially chronically.

However, I wholeheartedly believe the government should not have any say in how anyone lives their life, and treats their own body.
by cess11 | 2026-02-23 19:05:57+00:00
That marketing has been used to fire a lot of people, I think that's an important reason why it has that character. Then there were some true believers too, who were obviously important to the people firing other people.

Being able to remove a lot of people from your large work force and have other corporations do it too is quite profitable, on average it pushes down the price of labour and you'll rehire some of them and replace some of the others, and perhaps your organisation managed to become more efficient at the stuff that make you money in the short run too.

Then there was that thing with the change in US tax code, where R&D became more expensive some years ago.
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-23 19:06:00+00:00
The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed.

The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.

We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.

"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.
by aalishadalal | 2026-02-23 19:06:17+00:00
Thank you, I think that's the best part where you can contribute in areas where you might not have direct expertise but you may still care about.

Would this be also be able to provide research ideas for multi-modal space and what is your recommended approach for the best way of experimenting with the research recommendations based on your experience for an early understanding of whether a particular solution works for your use-case or not? Thanks!
by iamnothere | 2026-02-23 19:06:18+00:00
An ex friend of mine was once involved in some thing where they got paid to astroturf for Monsanto. Despite living in the city, they suddenly developed deeply informed opinions about glyphosate and how important it is for agriculture, and they would share these opinions aggressively in online discussions along with pro-Monsanto articles. It was disturbing to watch because the behavior was completely uncharacteristic (and seemingly in conflict with their core beliefs). One day they quit doing it just as suddenly.

This was before the heyday of influencer culture, so I can only imagine how sophisticated things are nowadays. It’s not always bots.

I recommend the book Trust Me, I’m Lying for a deep but somewhat dated look at the online influence industry.
by rectang | 2026-02-23 19:06:27+00:00
> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

why-not-both.jpg

Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate capture of government.

Opposing either government concentration of power alone or corporate concentration of power alone is doomed to failure. Only by opposing both is there any hope of achieving either.

Applying that principle to age-verification, which I think is inevitable: Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation. Ideally, discourage entities from collecting hard identification by holding them accountable for data breaches; or since that's politically infeasible, model the service on PCI with fines for poor security.

The motivation for this regime is to prevent distribution services from holding identification data, reducing the information held by any single entity.
by CrazyStat | 2026-02-23 19:06:33+00:00
Are you involved in writing or maintaining this software? If so can you provide some more details on this “filtering”? Because I skimmed the source code [1] and it looks to me like it’s pure brute force building a database of lines and points up to a certain rank (number of operations required to create that line/point) and then searching through it.

[1] https://github.com/MuTsunTsai/reference-finder-cpp/blob/main...
by xnx | 2026-02-23 19:06:40+00:00
> We don't know what the actual cost is yet.

We kind of do? Local models (thought no state of the art) set a floor on this.

Even if prices are subsidized now (they are) that doesn't mean they will be more expensive later. e.g. if there's some bubble deflation then hardware, electricity, and talent could all get cheaper.
by jtbayly | 2026-02-23 19:06:42+00:00
Here’s the part I don’t understand. If they can’t exit, don’t they lose money in spite of the limited downside risk? For example, the Toys “R” Us example:

"$1.3 billion came from the buyers’ own pockets”

"PE consortium collected $470 million in fees and interest over the course of ownership”

So they lost $830M on the deal?
by lukeschlather | 2026-02-23 19:07:02+00:00
> OpenAI has hoarded 40% of world's RAM supply

I believe OpenAI's purchasing is somewhat overstated, it definitely has no effect on Google's current ability to serve Gemini requests, but it is obvious that there's a shortage of most components, and it's also obvious that even internally Google is having to make hard choices about who to let use GPUs when.

I definitely think OpenAI likely has less use for GPUs than Google. Google has $300B in annual revenue vs. $20B for OpenAI. Even if you assume 100% of OpenAI's revenue is going to renting GPUs and they are taking a 50% loss there's still a lot of room for Google to be profitable and spending more money on GPUs, and not have enough GPUs. Google also just has a wider variety of models to train and run, from Waymo to Search to whatever advertising models.
by LeFantome | 2026-02-23 19:07:17+00:00
Can you send a Gmail in Servo? No?

Ladybird is much further ahead in terms of actually rendering web pages that people use.

The biggest advantage to Servo was that it is written in Rust. This move begins to nullify that advantage as well.

Why exactly does Servo make more sense?

I hope they both succeed. But Ladybird is more likely to become a usable browser first.
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-23 19:07:28+00:00
My evolved view is that there's a time and place for various types of interactions. That's after being a long-time fan of universal readability.

Truth though is that today's Internet is vastly different from that experienced in the 1980s (when I first came online), '90s, aughts, or even the teens. Scale is a huge piece of this, though broadband, mobile devices, advertising, attention merchants, clickbait, and AI have all had their impacts. The Internet (or proto-Internet) of the 1990s and earlier was very limited in access, with soft-but-imposing barriers to entry (selective research universities, some government agencies, some tech firms), which made the experience both "open" and closed. Yes, there was exposure to a large audience, particularly as contrasted to immediate physical space or mass media of the time (print, including early small-scale copiers, amplified audio, radio, television, and telephones). But the total online population would be considered a minuscule social network by current standards --- a few thousands to a few millions of souls in the 1980s and 1990s.

I continue to use some smaller networks today (HN, Mastodon, Diaspora*), and find that they tend to retain at least some of the feel of the forums I was familiar with in the 1980s and 1990s: small, intentional, generally motivated. Ironically, their limited size and the fact that those who are there want to be there is something of a feature. A significant problem isn't so much people leaving as dying, which seems to happen with regularity. (An older population amplifies this, though I've noted previously that mortality at FB/Google scale is likely on the order of tens of thousands of accounts daily.)

The platforms I mention also largely lack agency, which as you note is quite refreshing. I'll note that HN is somewhat an exception, but it's mediated mostly by humans (member flags, moderator actions), as well as some automated rules, though those are largely guided by HN's mission of "intellectual curiosity" rather than attention-mongering.

Factors other than scale alone include broadband (enabling graphics, audio, video, and interactive content, all of which have considerable downsides), mobile devices (making for more distracted and far less nuanced discussion, as well as quite brief responses contrasted with physical keyboards), and the pernicious first and higher-order effects of advertising, manipulation, algorithms, AI, and the like.

I've toyed with the notion of a set of interrelated scopes, some limited and personal, some more widely open, though arranging that formally and as part of a designed system has yet to emerge. I have hopes for that though.

There's also the distinction between a pure social graph and a highly-curated specific discussion or forum. I've tried the latter from time to time with stunningly good results, especially at modest size (< 50 participants generally).

(This comment, as most of mine, was composed at a keyboard, and edited several times.)
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2026-02-23 19:07:41+00:00
It's cheap to do, some people like it and it can be sold to them as a premium feature, and it enables future enshittification with subscriptions and other revenue opportunities.

Ignore the security issues for a bit, because most buyers don't know/think about those. If it wasn't for the enshittification, having your dishwasher online would be useful. Not groundbreaking, but being able to look up how long it still has without having to walk to the kitchen, get a notification when it's done, be able to look up error codes or check the status of consumables would be kind of nice if it weren't for the downsides that come with it. But those downsides are not something people think about.
by chris37879 | 2026-02-23 19:07:43+00:00
I actually run an adults only community site and you are correct, I have it in a popup that appears on every "fresh" visit to the site, it's in the giant bold print you agree to when you register, and from a technical end, I send every possible header and other signal to let filtering software know it's an adult only space. If there is a child accessing that site, they are doing so because their parent didn't even attempt to prevent them from doing so. And now I'm having to look into ID verification services that are going to quintuple to costs of hosting this free community for people in a time where community is more important than ever.
by nurettin | 2026-02-23 19:07:53+00:00
> What about when you're embedding your GUI into an existing application? or for use on an already taxed system? (Audio plugins come to mind)

I've used ImGui in exactly these kinds of projects. Game engines already render graphics, so it is just part of the same pipeline. Rendering the gui is instant, how many fps you want to render is up to you.
by klsdjfdlkfjsd | 2026-02-23 19:08:17+00:00
Who owns Claude again?

EDIT: Not who you think, apparently. lol.

Let me rephrase: who owns ALL of the "AI companies", along with everything else--every other big name you've ever heard of?

Feel free to keep shoveling all your data in their direction and using the tech they tell you to use. I'll sit this one out, thanks.
by a_better_world | 2026-02-23 19:08:22+00:00
"freedom torches" was the exact phrase used. They were sold as a marker of female liberation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

The term was first used by psychoanalyst A. A. Brill when describing the natural desire for women to smoke and was used by Edward Bernays to encourage women to smoke in public despite social taboos. Bernays hired women to march while smoking their "torches of freedom" in the Easter Sunday Parade of 31 March 1929,[1] which was a significant moment for fighting social barriers for women smokers.

Bernays is widely seen as the father of modern marketing, and helped lay the foundation for the consumer-based economy.
by ra7 | 2026-02-23 19:08:34+00:00
> Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city.

Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year, the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging, maintenance, etc.) and start service.
by pizlonator | 2026-02-23 19:08:55+00:00
> As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell.

I mean yeah that's bad.

> Rust preventing this makes my life so much better.

I'm talking about a different issue, which is: how do you create software that's in the billions of lines of code in scale. That's the scale of desktop OSes. Probably also the scale of some other things too.

At that scale, you can't just give everyone the source and tell them to do a world compile. Stable ABIs fix that. Also, you can't coordinate between all of the people involved other than via stable ABIs. So stable ABIs save both individual build time and reduce cognitive load.

This is true even and especially if everyone has access to everyone else's source code
by j_w | 2026-02-23 19:09:30+00:00
Clearly the team, if it is a team, that is entitled to the copyright is entitled to the copyright of the song, that's a silly statement to make. Copyright belongs to some entity, obviously.

You were specifically calling out individuals singing a song, not publishing lyrics online. These are not the same thing. Again your distribution/consumption model matters here.

On artists being "cool" with it - if the copyright holder doesn't pursue you then does it matter? The only valid argument I would see here is if the copyright holder doesn't know about the infringement and therefore cannot seek remedies, but we can fish for illegal scenarios all day if we would like: that's not useful though.