skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> there are insidious groups trying to game the system at HN (and elsewhere) to push their narratives.

This sort of perception is common and has been common on HN for well over a decade, but I've rarely seen any evidence to support it. What there is evidence for—plenty of it—is users with different backgrounds misperceiving each other's comments as astroturfing/shilling/etc. because they simply can't imagine anyone holding those other views in good faith.

The odds are high that this is what you're encountering. It's not some shady misinformation group; it's simply people with very different backgrounds than your own, who hold opposite views for legit reasons, just like you hold your own views for legit reasons. These are difficult historical topics that there's no consensus on.

Here are a couple of long explanations I posted about this in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (May 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 (June 2021)

You'll find links here to many years' worth of other explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

If you read some of those explanations and still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at answering it.
Here in Argentina had a sunfloer oil brand that claimed to be cholesterol free (never claimed to be the only one). Anyway they were forced to add a small remark that says "like all vegetable oils".
A bit opinionated and partial version of history (graphite was big before Influxdb and Prometheus came out, and the landscape is bigger than what they mentioned) but it might be a good enough starting point to learn about this.
This is the reason why I would always use RAID 6. A second drive failing during rebuild is significantly likely.
I'm using VictoriaMetrics (VM) to store basic weather data, like temperature and humidity. My initial setup was based on Prometheus however it seemed very hard to set a high data retention value, default was something like 15 days if I recall correctly.

Since I would actually like to store all recorded values permanently, I could partially achieve this with VM which let me set a higher threshold, like 100 years. Still not 'forever' as I would have liked, but I guess me and my flimsy weather data setup will have other things than the retention threshold to worry about in 100 years.

Would be nice to learn the reason why an infinite threshold is not allowed.
A bootcamp called Lambda School had an income sharing agreement (ISA) to that effect. They did not do well.
That's still not "free." Taxpayers are footing the bill, with the government taking its cut.
This is unsurprisingly a VictoriaMetrics post that frames the history in a narrow way to talk favorably about VictoriaMetrics.
One thing that really annoys me about universities is being forced to take random classes under the dubious banner of being well rounded. The incentives for the university are to make us spend more time and money on them. So of course, they want us to waste time in arbitrary forced requirements. My observation is that people are not actually well-rounded just because they went to a university. And I don’t think they’re even studying the fields that we need as a society. There are too many random fields that just seem like activism rather than something rigorous. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing those, and the government needs to be much smarter about managing the bad incentives for administration.
Why do you think none of the thousands of researchers within nutritional scientists have considered your explanation? That to me seems extremely unlikely.
> Obviously the system wasn't very robust, as a simple, within specs change could break it.

From my limited understanding, the file was corrupted in some way. Lots of NULL bytes, something like that.
> I bet my ass anyone working in low-level code don't ship the way you do in Cloud.

Their technical report says otherwise – and we know they didn’t adopt the common cloud practices of doing real testing before shipping or having a progressive deployment.
I’ve made the decision to embrace being bad at coding but getting a ton of work done using an LLM and if my future employer doesn’t want massive productivity and would prefer being able to leetcode really well then I unironically respect that and that’s ok.

I’m not doing ground breaking software stuff, it’s just web dev at non massive scales.
Yep. The older the ICD, the better it seems to be. I miss the era of dedicated technical writers, too. We received an "ICD" from a vendor and it's just garbage. It's incomplete, for one, and kind of just ends in the middle of things and leaves out crucial details so we can't use it without reverse engineering their system. A major problem is that it appears their developers are their document writers now, and they just don't do it, either out of laziness or insufficient time (higher priority dev tasks in the queue). They've been publishing the same incomplete document for years.
Thank you! I agree we should be rooting for Intel. Good luck to you and your coworkers!
Found the first few paragraphs an interesting exploration of the concept of “curation”. Also interesting was the concept of a semioscape, and its location within a broader latent sociosemioscape. Then talked about curation algorithms ability to both reflect the larger culture and also influence it. Suggested that algorithmic curration accelerates and recursivly affects itself, the content creators, consumers and the larger social context.

> The phrase “the network is the territory” captures the idea that the associative connections and relationships within a network—whether digital or physical—define how meaning is generated, interpreted, and circulated. In this sense, the network becomes a map of meaning itself, shaping the cultural landscape (the territory) rather than merely reflecting it. Networks, through their curatorial structures, dictate what cultural artifacts, symbols, or semiotic objects become visible, relevant, or influential. As these networks grow more complex and intertwined, they increasingly influence our experience of the sociosemioscape, the broader cultural environment where meaning is produced and exchanged.

Edit: misspellings
We're all living in a black hole: The bold theory scientists can't disprove
E.g. agar-agar is an emulsifying agent. It's ground seaweed. As is chickpea wash. Both used for at least centuries.
> I it's fair it's fair to claim that by definition, if AI can make it all by itself, then it's not good art, because if AI can make it all by itself, then it's already in the "been there, done that" pile. As a tool however, a good artist can use AI to make good art.

A scenario that blurs the line between these two is where an AI is used to randomly generate 100, or 1000, or 100,000 images and an artist (editor?) chooses one for some artistic purpose. If the generation process is random enough, then the AI is bound to create something new by accident eventually, just like a room full of monkeys banging on typewriters will eventually write Hamlet. At the end of this process though, did the AI create art by itself through randomness, or is it just a special case of an artist using a tool and the act of choosing is what created the art?
State school was hella cheap (it was back when Florida’s lotto money mostly went to scholarships for in-state students). I think full sticker price would’ve been around $2500/year for tuition+fees at the time?

I also started with enough credits to be nearly to (the equivalent of being in) junior year and took the bare minimum credits to keep the scholarship.
People in general don't like change and are naturally defending against it. And the older people get the greater the percentage of people fighting against it. A very useful and powerful skill is to be flexible and adaptable. You positioned yourself in the happy few.
Why would they do this - make it speak like a customer service agent. The ideal experience here is short and succinct, not verbose and obsequious.
Those numbers seem like fairly vague estimates, and they are only for companies they chose to invest in.
> I treat LLMs like a fallible being, the same way I treat humans.

The issue is LLMs are not marketed in this way. They're marketed as all knowing oracles to people that have been conditioned to just accept the first result Google gives them.
Given that this whole "AI" integration shtick is minimal effort thing with negligibly small value (if any), I suspect it was either an attempt to just ride on "AI" hype (certainly didn't work, feedback comments are virtually univocally "AI" hate), or attempt to find new monetization source (e.g. for a default provider).

My own thoughts on the AI feature: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedba... - LLM integrations can be useful and actually supporting end-users, but it must be based on entirely different paradigm (all about user agent automation, not a website in a sidebar) and it's probably best left out of the core application itself and rather be a external co-program.

As for the alternatives - to be honest, I don't really see much difference beyond various cosmetics. Both Zen and Floorp are basically the same Firefox for me, containing all the things I hate about Firefox ("sponsored" stuff everywhere, Firefox Account and Sync overengineering abomination, all the "safety" features that "protect" browser from its users, hardcoded built-in things that should be pluggable rather than fixed), while bringing nothing I actually care about and want to see (such as decluttering websites aggressively minimizing all the noise I don't care about - kinda like improved reader mode for everything by default, flexible automatic workflows for personal routine things, advanced history with optional content indexing for finding back things I vaguely remember seeing somewhere, automatic tab management to solve 100 open tabs problem, removal of tightly integrated bits like password or download management in favor of replaceable classic UNIX-way style external programs so I can use any tool I want while feeling those tools are properly truly and fully integrated and aren't some hacks like those password manager extensions messing with HTML).

Honestly, I'm sad that niche stuff like surf and Uzbl had essentially died, instead of evolving towards a pre-packaged "batteries included out of the box, but you can replace everything with your own" suites. I wished for a non-monolithic browser for technical/power users, with replaceable components for about a decade now - don't think I'll ever see it happening.
Folks who have played The Witness… if you know, you know
What impresses me is frankly how bad it is.

I can't claim to have tried every model out there, but most models very quickly fail when asked to do something along the lines of "describe the interaction of 3 entities." They can usually handle 2 (up to the point where they inevitably start talking in circles - often repeating entire chunks verbatim in many models), but 3 seems utterly beyond them.

LLMs might have a role in the field of "burn money to generate usually-wrong ideas that are cheap enough to check in case there's actually a good one" though.
Silvio Gesell essentially makes the argument that the return on mere ownership of real capital is negative in the real world. Positive interest can only exist in a world where demand for capital exceeds supply. Since capital produces capital, we reach the excess capital "regime" eventually. The holding costs of excess capital are negatively therefore people destroy the excess capital. In the positive interest range there is a tendency for the interest rate to drop. In the negative interest rate range there is a tendency for the interest rate to rise. Both lead to the equilibrium real interest rate being exactly 0% in the long run.

But a 0% interest rate has some quite significant implications. The value of non-extracted rock in earth's crust and the mild steel it eventually becomes are equivalent, despite being separated in time. Capital requires energy to operate, which also comes from the earth's crust. In other words, everything that exists today is just a long winded transformation of one chunk of the universe into another. Nothing is ever "produced". All wealth is based on the direct or indirect ownership of land and its resources playing out over the ages. Mind you, in this framework, owning an expensive machine is equivalent to having the mining rights to dig out the materials and energy sources. It is not literal ownership of land that is important, but the access to its benefits.

Basically, we will never escape feudalism.
The author calls out InfluxDB as the first time series database.

Why would that not have been rrdtool or something earlier?
Excellent flowchart! Thank you
Today there is a middle class (by Eastern European standards) and there is no hereditary nobility. Outside of penal colonies, forced labor isn’t a thing. The government isn’t constantly fumbling for control against political agitators (in fact it went too far into totalitarianism). Casual physical abuse of soldiers isn’t at least as widely reported on so I would assume that it isn’t an everyday norm in every unit. Pay inequality between officers and soldiers isn’t measured in how many orders of magnitude.

Russia is not on the brink of three revolutions and a civil war in the span of a year. It isn’t a good place but it is very different than how it was 100 years ago.
Working on one over at github.com/oro-os but haven't proven efficacy of the design yet, so haven't announced it. Just if you want something to follow.
FWIW, cooking in my microwave spikes the particulate sensor-- and I'd be willing to bet it does in yours too. Though I agree this could be fixed with a particular filter on the microwave.

Certainly there are ways of cooking that produce little to no particulate pollution, presumably sous vide or indeed microwaving with a microwave that has a particulate filter.

But the conclusion there is that you should have ventilation or cooking techniques that don't need ventilation. Gas or not is incidental.

And conveniently the low pollution modalities I can think of are already electric by default, except for boiling in a closed pot. (Which I happily agree is best done with induction, even if just for speed alone).
Any SBC with a USB peripheral for the GPS will work.
My only guess how this could make sense is if there is some ambiguity in the definition of a TCP packet.
Perhaps we're living in a black hole within a black hole!

Or worse: it's black holes all the way down!
I feel like the key thing missing from this discussion are the employers who still demand these degrees. Let's say we reformed both higher education and student loans - does that have any meaningful impact on the demand side beyond pushing the salaries of degree holders up (thus increasing the value of a degree, thus making larger loan values easier to justify, thus...)
I'd bet most people on this forum program professionally.
This. I’ve been using elixir for ~6 months (guided by Claude) and probably couldn’t solve fizz buzz at a whiteboard without making a syntax error. Eek.
This topic has been done to death. Too many OSS options in the last ~10 years with very little differentiation.

Let's talk LLMs instead.
How goes the research on whether hallucinations are the AI equivalent of human imagination, or daydreaming?
It sounds like you might want to read their technical report. That’s neither anecdotal nor a single point, and it showed a pretty large gap in engineering leadership with numerous areas well behind the state of the art.

That’s why I said it was compatible: both these former employees and their own report showed an emphasis on shipping rapidly but not the willingness to invest serious money in the safeguards needed to do so safely. If you want to construct another theory, feel free to do so.
Show HN: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Online
I thought to make a funny website with a fine-tuned model that acts like the guide from Douglas Adams's novel. This way, you can find the right answer when in a tight spot (like when you need a ride to Alpha Centauri or smth).
We should do (at least) three things:

1. Provide a counterbalance to private industries by having the government player to be a significant player in that market. That means a free or near-free high-quality state higher education system like the California system used to be until it was made an explicit political goal to avoid an "educated proletariat" [1]. It also goes for housing, hospitals, banks, ISPs and so on;

2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing them loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you belong to the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing banks.

3. Federal dollars for pharma research should come with an equity stake in the private corporations that monetize it. Most drugs are developed with Federal grants.

> I love a good market as much as anyone

Just curious: where do you see markets actually working?

[1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educate...
What “understanding” actually means, for one.
If your opinion were correct the degrees would pay for themselves and we wouldn't be having these discussions. We have people paying $160k a year to study in fields that are increasingly having their fundamental research completely debunked and exposed as fraudulent (see Political Science and Pyschology).

There is also absolutely 0 reason these degrees should cost so much. If we want to keep a guaranteed student loan program it should be restricted in the amount that can be borrowed and it should only be usable at local community colleges that cost under $5k a year. Nothing about education necessitates spending more than that.
What it really means is: Packets have well-defined boundaries between sufficiently-adjacent nodes. They are not guaranteed to keep those boundaries end-to-end over arbitrary middleware.
You future employer might expect you to bring some value through your expertise that doesn't come from her LLM. If you want to insist on degrading your own employability like this, I guess it's your choice.
I remember rent was $1800 per semester for my friends, and they split that 3 ways. So about $600 for 4 months, or $150/month. To be fair, it was a bit of a dump. But that's less you have to worry about when having parties. I had a slightly nicer single room and closer to campus with parking and it was $1200 per semester, or $300 month. This was slightly over a decade ago. I was curious and did a quick check - seems the single rooms are about $600/mo and I saw a 3 bed for $800/mo. Still really cheap considering all the inflation that happened over the past decade.
> Startups that go to zero tend to do so fairly quickly.

I wish this were true. Far too many founders are willing to stick it out in hopes that if they just keep building, sales will come. Of course, it doesn't, so they waste a decade on what could have been two years.
Ha in this case that’s actually the word I meant but Reddit has basically made that an impossible word to use in its intended form
> This is a distinction without a difference.

No? For a licensed Android phone there's a clean split between OEM and OS updates, a clear declaration for support period and a OS-managed tracking of updates with clear visibility to the customer. I get that there are constant platforms flames about whether this is acceptable or inferior to Apple's offering, yada yada yada.

But the point is that none of that is relevant here, because these aren't phones and aren't running a licensed "Android" variant. They're just TVs running vendor-custom firmware that happens to be based on AOSP, and clearly can't be expected to conform to any update regime except whatever the integrator put together.

Basically, the story here is saying "I hacked product A" and you're trying to have an argument like "That's because this unrelated product B is bad". It's a non-sequitur.
They ingested the whole work.
I know that post, but the problem is he is just extrapolating from history. Not a bad thing in absence of real information, but... Well, let's hope he's wrong. :-)
Is the College Startup Pipe Dream Dead?
I’m mostly happy with the computing power of my iPhone SE. It has been a bit sluggish lately. It could be new apps being less efficient but I suspect it’s mostly the phone throttling because the battery is old and can’t supply as much current without dropping voltage.

Yet I think the computing power of the A18 is great, and plan to upgrade to iPhone 16 now. Not for what I need today, but for what I need years down the line. Phones last a long time these days. The processor in my iPhone SE (2nd gen) is ancient, yet it’s still OK. My kid will probably use it for a couple of years more.

I’d say that there is a decent chance of phones becoming actually good smart assistants now. Much of that will be driver by specialised hardware, but the general processing power will be useful for some of that processing.
Usually performance and storage concerns. You can set effectively infinite retention on Prometheus, but after a long enough period you're going to like querying it even less.

Most TSDBs aren't built for use cases like "query hourly/daily data over many years". Many use cases aren't looking further than 30 days because they're focused on things like app or device uptime and performance metrics, and if they are running on longer time frames they're recording (or keeping, or consolidating data to) far fewer data points to keep performance usable.
_can_ GPT be tuned more heavily on Lean?
It looks like the amount of python code in the corpus would outnumber Lean something like 1000:1. Although I guess OpenAI could generate more and train on that.
I've seen it take over a couple of minutes, at which point I switched to Claude. And have seen reports of it taking even longer. So it may be that you didn't wait long enough.
I have never had a human give me some of the answers an LLM has given me, and I've met humans who can't tell basically any country on a map, including the one they live in
"Is this really a mystery?" They address your question on the first page. Please read a few sentences of the article, or hey, even the entire article, before trying to refute it.

A brief sample, though their whole argument is more complex:

"People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. Our great-grandparents (and the French) were able to maintain these weights eﬀortlessly. They weren’t all on weird starvation diets or crazy fasting routines. And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor diﬀerence in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous diﬀerence in weight. Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either."