MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-02-11 00:41:28+00:00
>Do you think you could publish that in a paper for ext ?

You seem to think it's not 'just' tensor arithmetic.

Have you read any of the seminal papers on neutral networks, say?

It's [complex] pattern matching as the parent said.

If you want models to draw composite shapes based on letter forms and typography then you need to train them (or at least fine-tune them) to do that.

I still get opposite (antonym) confusion occasionally in responses to inferences where I expect the training data is relatively lacking.

That said, you claim the parent is wrong. How would you describe LLM models, or generative "AI" models in the confines of a forum post, that demonstrates their error? Happy for you to make reference to academic papers that can aid understanding your position.
by Zeetah | 2026-02-11 00:41:56+00:00
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1 point by Zeetah 0 minutes ago | next | edit | delete [–]

WA has the 49th most regressive tax system in the nation. It was the most regressive until two years ago.

It is unhealthy to keep taxing the poor at disproportionate rate which, IMO, is a hidden form of slavery.
by digiown | 2026-02-11 00:42:10+00:00
I'm not necessarily opposed to KYC or even government being able to audit transactions in general. But there is too few legal protections both from the bank and the from the government itself for this to be acceptable in a free society.

It's not entirely hopeless I guess. For what it's worth, the US government recently issued an EO that purportedly stops banks from debanking you for political reasons. Hopefully a future administration would take care of the other part.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-11 00:42:11+00:00
> If the US government can, for example investigate Richard Spencer or some other extremist figure based on a web post, then they can do the same for someone else on the other end of the spectrum.

> But even more terrifying is that they can do the same for someone not in the extremes.

This isn't a valid principle. It suggests that we should oppose laws against murder, because if the government can imprison a murderer, it can imprison someone who saved a life. Even more terrifying is that it can imprison someone who saved a dog's life or didn't save or kill any lives.
by dana321 | 2026-02-11 00:43:04+00:00
I live very near to it, in the summer they have boat trips that take people a trip on one of the two passenger boats.

The kelpies are connected via the canal, maybe 4 miles of locks you have to go through if you want to hire a canal boat to travel from the wheel to the kelpies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kelpies
by jmount | 2026-02-11 00:43:07+00:00
I wonder off and on if in good fiction of "when we meet aliens and start communicating using math"- should the aliens be okay with complex residue theorems? I used to feel the same about "would they have analytic functions as a separate class" until I realized how many properties of polynomials analytic functions imitate (such as no nontrivial bounded ones).
by mert_gerdan | 2026-02-11 00:45:13+00:00
So the conversational agent runs on a provisioned chunk of compute already, but that chunk isn't utilized to 100% of its provisioned capacity. For this perception system we're taking advantage of the spare compute left on what's provisioned for a top-level agent, so turning this on costs nothing "extra"

Bias is a concern for sure, though it adapts to your speech pattern and behaviors in the duration of a single conversation, so ack'ing you not making eye contact because say your camera is on a different monitor, it'll make the mistake once and not refer to that again.
by tzs | 2026-02-11 00:45:28+00:00
> holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!

Or 11 years, when the scandal was that the president wore a tan suit [1]:

> U.S. representative Peter King, a member of the Republican Party, deemed the suit's color combined with the subject matter of terrorism to be "unpresidential". He went on: "There's no way, I don't think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
by cstever | 2026-02-11 00:46:03+00:00
It won't be called coding soon; Sometime in the future (soon?) we won't be talking about code. The few leftovers/managers/CEOs will only be talking about products not the code, not programming, not even operating systems. You won't hear about pull requests, or databases, or HTTP or any of that. You won't talk about programmers. At least not outside of "hobbies".
by PeterisP | 2026-02-11 00:46:13+00:00
where do you see this goal post moving? From my perspective, it never was "The AIs will never do this." but rather even before day 1 all the experts were explicitly saying that AIs will absolutely do this, that alignment isn't solved or anything close to being solved, so any "ethical guidelines" that we can implement are just a bandaid that will hide some problematic behavior but won't really prevent this even if done to the best of our current ability.
by trinsic2 | 2026-02-11 00:47:13+00:00
>The plaintiffs said they would call expert witnesses that will argue that young people's brains are not yet developed to withstand the powers of the algorithms being flung at them on Instagram and YouTube.

I'm all for preventing addictive algorithms, but if you are letting your 6 year old watch you-tube, you got problems. This is just going to be used to push age restrictions
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-02-11 00:47:24+00:00
There’s a tradeoff here. If you want streaming output, then you lose the opportunity to clean it up in post processing such as removing filler words or removing stutters, etc., or any other AI based cleanup.

The MacOS built-in dictation streams in real time and also does some cleanup, but it does awkward things, like the streaming text shows up at the bottom of the screen. Also I don’t think it’s as accurate as Parakeet V3, and there’s a start up lag of 1-2 secs after hitting the dictation shortcut, which kills it for me.
by hermanzegerman | 2026-02-11 00:47:48+00:00
> I am talking about if your card is stolen and someone runs up a bunch of purchases before it gets caught, that money is gone from your account and any fees from overdrafts are the account holders problem to deal with and stress they can entirely avoid if they did not have/use a card tied directly to their bank account

Yes that's what I'm talking about too, and it's called misuse. Liability is capped at 50€ as I said. We also don't have any fixed overdraft fees, only a compared to credit cards low interest rate, but this would also be the banks problem in this case.
Also you still need a pin to pay or 2FA when paying online for European Cards. So that scenario seems very unlikely anyway.

> I have never had my ATM card compromised as it is for one purpose, the ATM but I have had the credit card stolen from a store I visited (card company caught it as there was a bunch of fraud from the same store, they let me know and they proactively replaced my credit card.

I have never had my card compromised, as it only uses the EMV Chip for payments in the civilized world, which you can't clone, and even then you would still need the PIN to pay, or the second Factor.
I also never had my Debit card (what you mean with ATM card) compromised, because it's the same thing.
by graemep | 2026-02-11 00:48:13+00:00
Translating the Bible into English was not illegal. I very much doubt Bede or the monks of Lindisfarne were breaking the law!

The same for heliocentrism. No one took Copernicus to court.

With silk and rubber the smuggling was illegal, the actual cultivation was not

Grave robbing was illegal (and still is) but dissection was not.

Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries.
by inkyoto | 2026-02-11 00:49:05+00:00
Visa/MC cozied up to major national banks in different countries (not just in the EU) and offered them a sweet deal the banks could not resist: ditch the national payment network in favour of our own cards and we will give a slice of each transaction fee. The transaction fees are tiered, with one part of it going to the payment network (Visa/MC) and the bank (card issuer) keeping the other part. For cross-border transactions, there is also (of course) the exchange rate that comes into play, and this is where each bank buffs its transaction profit margin up even further (as each bank sets its own exchange rate rather than using the interbank exchange rate), so…

… banks saw big, no, BIG $$$ and lost their minds. The transition was rather swift: between the very late 2000's and approximately 2015 (give or take a few years), the transition had been complete. Credit cards became a massively profitable and booming business for the banks, with all sorts of loyalty programmes and bonuses (at consumers’ expense, of course, as the banks also jacked up interest rates on revolving credits). Note that all of this took place before national governments stepped in to regulate the transaction fees.

This coincided with the growing allergy of Western governments to owning any critical infrastructure (including payment networks) and the rising trend of outsourcing as much as possible to the private sector. As it is easy to imagine, it did not take long for the national banks already being in bed with Visa/MC to convince their respective national governments to stop investments in maintenance and enhancement of domestic payment networks and delegate the payment processing to the cartel: «they can do it better than you do».

… all of which has led us to where we are right now. Technically, national payments are still alive, but they are more in the contained mode of operation and not in active use or development.
by Bender | 2026-02-11 00:49:35+00:00
I've been testing Bazzite and noticed a couple of things that raised an eyebrow for me. Sexual preferences in Bazaar options tool to update flatpaks seems out of place and even if not the limited subset of flags is odd. To me personally that is risking potential drama in the OS/apps.

There is also a suspiciously long delay in closing the shell terminal which feels like it is storing or sending something but I have yet to debug it. This does not occur on any other of the many Linux distributions I have tested.

It is a snappy and decent distro otherwise. Good thing they are removing drama, something that almost nuked Mint not long after its inception.
by basilikum | 2026-02-11 00:50:11+00:00
As some people are confused about the name:

> According to Canfield, he initially intended to use Cock.li only as his own personal email address. “It wasn’t until November [2013] that I posted the address on 4chan, and someone responded and said ‘I would love an email address there,’” Canfield said.

> Other emails offered through Cock.li include horsefucker.org and goat.si—as well as other more vulgar domains we’ll refrain from printing here[...]

– https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-story-of-cockli-the-site...

One of the most well known domain of them is nuke.africa although I don't know if email registration is still possible under that domain.

Cock.li is the edge lord of fringe email providers and was down for quite some time for reasons I did not care to get into.
by smelendez | 2026-02-11 00:50:14+00:00
That sounds really familiar—I think that must have been on my Packard Bell from that era too.

Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic.

I also remember this recording (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.
by foxglacier | 2026-02-11 00:50:36+00:00
Couldn't you periodically re-train it on what it's already done and use the context window for more short term memory? That's kind of what humans do - we can't learn a huge amount in short time but can accumulate a lot slowly (school, experience).

A major obstacle is that they don't learn from their users, probably because of privacy. But imagine if your context window was shared with other people, and/or all your conversations were used to train it. It would get to know individuals and perhaps treat them differently, or maybe even manipulate how they interact with each other so it becomes like a giant Jeffrey Epstein.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-11 00:50:47+00:00
while former US President is about as far from a nobody as it is humanly possible the commenter’s points are all valid. while the current President is most definitely one of the most dispicable human beings than ever roam this planet the whole epstein business is far above any US politics. and Americans generally do not give a hoot about this (see election in 2025) - especially when victims are women and children.
by keithnz | 2026-02-11 00:51:26+00:00
I'm 54 and started programming when I was 7 also. While I've enjoyed coding throughout my career, I'm loving this new phase of software dev, a lot of the hassle has now been removed and now you can concentrate on ACTUALLY building things without so many side tracks and hiccups from technical details. I guess I'm not as attached to coding as I thought I was, I actually really enjoy building software and now that has become a lot easier and I feel experienced devs are really well suited to working with AI to get it to build the right thing and to consider robustness, performance, approach/structure, architecture etc. I'm really enjoying myself at the moment!
by HorizonXP | 2026-02-11 00:51:39+00:00
You know, I love this comment because you are where I was 15 years ago when I naively decided that I wanted to do my master's in medical biophysics and try to use NVIDIA CUDA to help accelerate some of the work that we were doing. So I have a very... storied history with NVIDIA CUDA, but frankly, it's been years since I've actually written C code at all, let alone CUDA.

I have to admit that I wrote none of the code in this repo. I asked Codex to go and do it for me. I did a lot of prompting and guidance through some of the benchmarking and tools that I expected it to use to get the result that I was looking for.

Most of the plans that it generated were outside of my wheelhouse and not something I'm particularly familiar with, but I know it well enough to understand that its plan roughly made sense to me and I just let it go. So the fact that this worked at all is a miracle, but I cannot take credit for it other than telling the AI: what I wanted, how to do it, in loose terms, and helping it when it got stuck.

BTW, everything above was dictated with the code we generated, except for this sentence. And I added breaklines for paragraphs. That's it.
by WoodenChair | 2026-02-11 00:51:49+00:00
Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.
by nunez | 2026-02-11 00:52:04+00:00
Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.

Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!).

Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit.

It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-11 00:52:52+00:00
China can sell (at a profit) >99.8% pure tirzepatide, semaglutide, and retatrutide for <$3/weekly dose. This supply ends up at compounding pharmacies like Hims/Hers, but sometimes more directly to consumers through gray/black markets.

Another way to check if the marginal cost of production contributes to the cost of the drug is to compare the price of injectable semaglutide (~$1200) for around 10mg/month, to the price of oral semaglutide (Rybelsus), which is also (~$1,000) for around 420mg/month. That indicates that the cost of manufacturing semaglutide does not significantly contribute to the cost of the FDA-approved drug.
by dalyons | 2026-02-11 00:52:59+00:00
> I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record.

yes me too

> My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. .... I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.

yes me too absolutley

> If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation.

Total opposite for me, no way. Whilst i dont want to do them now, I am so SO glad i had those experiences. I know I would be deep in a mid life crisis today wondering "what if" if i had missed the fun and gone straight to having kids in my 20s. Like, id probably be blowing up my life over it now, doing something stupid, out of FOMO for never having tried living other lives. Different people are different, but it would have been a TERRIBLE choice for me. (im also not the only one - witness the commonality of the old mid-life-crises sportscar and mistress trope that was born out of a period having kids young)
by hodgehog11 | 2026-02-11 00:53:11+00:00
Absolutely, thanks for asking!

Pure probability focuses on developing fundamental tools to work with random elements. It's applied in the sense that it usually draws upon techniques found in other traditionally pure mathematical areas, but is less applied than "applied probability", which is the development and analysis of probabilistic models, typically for real-world phenomena. It's a bit like statistics, but with more focus on the consequences of modelling assumptions rather than relying on data (although allowing for data fitting is becoming important, so I'm not sure how useful this distinction is anymore).

At the moment, using probabilistic techniques to investigate the operation of stochastic optimisers and other random elements in the training and deployment of neural networks is pretty popular, and that gets funding. But business as usual is typically looking at ecological models involving the interaction of many species, epidemiological models investigating the spread of disease, social network models, climate models, telecommunication and financial models, etc. Branching processes, Markov models, stochastic differential equations, point processes, random matrices, random graph networks; these are all the common objects used. Actually figuring out their behaviour can require all kinds of assorted techniques though, you get to pull from just about anything in mathematics to "get the job done".
Show HN: NameToGradient – deterministic gradients from text input
by RndmNode | 2026-02-11 00:53:33+00:00
Hi HN,

Over the past few days I built a small client-only web app that turns a name (or multiple names) into a deterministic color gradient.

The idea was to treat names as identity-rich input and map them to a repeatable visual “fingerprint.” The same input always produces the same gradient — no randomness, no accounts, no backend. Everything runs in the browser.

Under the hood, the app normalizes the input text, hashes it, and uses the result to seed a PRNG that drives color selection and layout. Because of that, even small changes (adding a middle name, punctuation, multiple names, etc.) result in noticeably different gradients, while staying perfectly stable across reloads and devices.

You can switch between a few gradient styles (linear, radial, blob), optionally add grain, and export the result as a PNG in common sizes. URLs are shareable and reproduce the exact same output.

This was partly an experiment in deterministic generative design and partly an excuse to practice shipping something small and polished quickly. I’d love feedback — especially around the concept, the determinism approach, or things that feel off or unnecessary.

Thanks!
by cyphar | 2026-02-11 00:53:41+00:00
> So I don't think I actually have a problem with businesses handing over their customer data if there is a valid warrant or subpoena. That's the system working as intended.

I disagree -- the third party doctrine that allows for governments to avoid serving/addressing warrants to the people whose data is actually being subpoenaed directly leads to things like the FISA warrant-rubber-stamp courts in the US. If the data stored on third-party servers on behalf of someone is not considered "papers and effects" of that person then it is entirely justified to subpoena every email stored on mail.google.com because it's just morally equivalent to a subpoena for "all of Foomatic's business records between 2020-2025".

It seems bonkers to me that things that are essentially implementation details (such as the way that MTAs work and the lack of crypto-obfuscation in email) should allow for a legal interpretation of the 4th amendment that effectively neuters it. Letters sent via snail-mail are handled by several third parties in a very analogous way to emails but (mostly due to historical reasons, such as the fact that letters existed during the drafting of the bill of rights) we do not apply the third-party doctrine to letters.

Of course, the US government has spent decades chipping away at the privacy of snail mail, so eventually we may end up in a world where snail mail and email are treated the same way (just not in a good way).
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-11 00:53:47+00:00
For the same reason computing used to be defined by a Commodore 64 more than by an IBM System/370-XA mainframe from the same year — they're the most commonly and most easily accessible computing devices.

Old farts like us think the desktop is the default kind of computer, but it isn't. Most computers are phones, followed by tablets and laptops with touchscreens, and desktops are the weirdest ones.
by formerOpenAI | 2026-02-11 00:54:00+00:00
I’ve been working on a framework called RCC (Recursive Collapse Constraints).
It’s not an alignment proposal — it’s an attempt to describe the structural limits of any inference system that’s embedded in a larger container.

The idea is simple:

When a system
1. can’t access its own internal state, and
2. can’t see the boundary of the container it’s embedded in,
then certain behaviors aren’t “bugs.”
They’re geometric consequences.

These include:
– hallucination
– 8–12 step planning collapse
– long-context drift
– self-inconsistency over time

If this framing is wrong, I’d love real counterexamples.
Specifically, a system that can perform long-horizon internal recursion without external scaffolding, while keeping its state stable.

HN has people who’ve actually built large systems and seen weird failure modes up close — so I’m genuinely curious how this resonates.

Happy to discuss.