skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The B-29 Turret System: An Expensive, Effective Mechanical Computer Masterpiece
Finally, a solid theory for what those giant petroglyphs were for!
Tech Controversies of 2024
The takeaway appears to be:

> Iterative prompting, like Socratic questioning, may never produce true intelligence in the systems it engages with, but it reveals the collaborative nature of intelligence itself—an emergent property shaped by context, guidance, and the interplay of minds, human or otherwise. Through this lens, the promise of AI shifts from creating autonomous intelligences to augmenting human inquiry.

This reads (like the rest of the post) as if the author is curiously unaware that, in fact, lots of research has been published on what LLMs can do "zero-shot" or without iterative prompting, vs what takes iterative prompting, and that the number of things that they can do without anything at all Socratic in shape is both non-zero and increasing predictably with scale.

IMHO what LLMs have most obviously revealed about "true intelligence" is just how attached many people are to the idea that it's a special possession of humans and the tenuous intellectual lengths to which they will go to hold on to that idea.
It's voluntary because it is cheap to do and looks better on your SDG checklist compared to addressing much more difficult goals.
Trump Administration Frequently Asked Questions
I typed in “violin” as an interest and it suggested getting a “personalized violin pick” as a gift

Unfortunately thats not a thing, you don’t use a pick to play violin

Classic AI

(The actual links were to guitar picks)
Region select. Custom keybindings. Macros.
Not everyone owns the place they live in...
Are we at a point where we could run nonquantized models from QwQ/Qwen series on a 128GB Macbook Pro?
Show HN
Discover the latest SaaS products, and showcase what you developed.
Why should people not turn to https://permanent.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that that claims to care about your photos even after you die?
Then we'll community mark key p-hashes to black-rectangle it, leaving them holding the encoding costs bag. Then they will try to double down and e.g. use gen-ai to create fully dynamic unique ads, then we'll use ML to detect these ads. Not watching ads doesn't go away in the foreseeable future, but ads do.

The more people try it, the closer we are to the critical mass of realization that their ads are just bs, and there's no going back. They could stop bs-ing people a while ago and live forever, but they chose death by their own hands - the more annoying they are, the more "product" they lose to ad blocking, the less money they generate, the less they can do about it. They are already choking hard, it's apparent from convulsions like subj, mv3, anti-block attempts, etc.
Uh-huh. You have a conjecture, you test it, and then you say "looks like reality didn't match our conjecture, the conjecture must be wrong." Except here they got a negative result and said "reality must be wrong". It's a determined effort to find specific results.
Is it just me, or is this a really bad website?

If I jumped into any of the experiences by clicking the blue dot, it seems to stutter for 2 - 3 seconds before the video starts, there is no audio even though it seems like there should be?

I'm on an M1 Macbook Pro, tried Chrome and Firefox both.

I know Google has been hard chasing profits given the current financial climate, but I'm a little surprised by the drop in quality here.
Ask HN: How do you pick between different OpenAI LLMs?
Let's say I'm searching for "how to disable monitor sleep in Linux/Xorg". There are a few options now:

1. Use o1
2. Use 4o
3. Use 4o with web searching enabled
4. Use legacy GPT4

How do you pick between all these knobs?

Also, let's say you want to ask: "was the French revolution a good thing and if so, why?"
But the great thing about Rust is that the panic traces back to the exact place where I thought something couldn't be None, but it was. In Java, I frequently found it mysterious why some variable or parameter was unexpectedly null.
FWIW this gave more entertaining but ultimately worse results than without on Claude for me, using the prompt:

> How many chickens can fit on a 747?
I just want someone to try my app. It’s been really helpful for me, and I’m hoping to get feedback so I can improve it. Right now, this is the only place I can share it to see if people actually like it. I’m just trying my best.
Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up
Even just going to a classic car show and standing in a field where a few dozen pre-1980s vehicles are idling really drives home what a triumph emissions regulations over the past few decades have been.
Yes! This exactly.
Six year old possibility [0], recent small discussion (7 points, 17 hours ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42416754

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362554
More importantly, I would wager: significantly less bullying, significantly less "have nots" for the kids that don't have the iPhone 42 HD MAX pro edition in solid gold, etc
And then you find it was wrong, and you keep it, and make protestations.
Which plugins do you use for visualisations?
Show HN: Transform Web Content into Elegant Social Cards
Hi Hacker News,

I've created Kosaku, a minimalist card generator that transforms web content and music links into beautifully designed social cards.

Core Features:

Transform any web page into an elegant card with one-click summary
Generate stylish music cards from streaming platform links
Multi-platform support for major social media and content platforms
Simple two-step process for card creation.

Try it out and let me know what you think! The app is designed to enhance content sharing while maintaining a clean, distraction-free experience.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1611559010
Goolge Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hugo.card
How would a bunch of weights make a backdoor? The worst it could do is detect it's accessing an actual console and run a logged, visible command that tries to mess with your config or phone home, which is more of a front door with flashing lights saying "here I am!", so why would they bother?

Letting an LLM run arbitrary commands in your main user account seems risky even without worrying about conspiracies.
I have developed multiple SaaS but never succeeded in marketing. I decided to develop a SaaS where other people and I can showcase own SaaS products. Hopefully LiftySaaS helps other business owners or developers. Cheers!
Ask HN: Who has an interesting job?
If your work brings you a sense of fulfillment, interest, or enjoyment I would love to hear more about it and what about your job allows you to feel this way.

I have realized I am someone who needs at least one of these things to be happy with work, and I’m currently not getting any of them. This next year I would like to seriously make an effort to get on track to change this for myself.
> [...] businesses are punished by the state for failing to employ (and retain, and promote) convicted criminals. Why? Because criminality is unequally distributed.

Hmmm, I'm very curious what the author believes is causing that unequal distribution...?

> There is no standard of human behavior whatsoever by which humans are equal in practice; therefore it is illegal to hold or advocate any standard of human behavior.

This is demonstrably untrue: Lots of things like "murder is bad" remain a current standard of human behavior.
Banning is ridiculous. If you want people to take public transport make it ridiculously good so that the car will seem worse everytime. You know, Japan does not ban cars in city centers and they don't need too.
Search results are weighted against what people who searched for similar things clicked on, more clicks higher it is in the results. When 4.0 came out 3.0 had already been around for years and 90% of people who searched for the product clicked on 3.0 and almost no one has clicked on 2.0 since 3.0 came out, so the results have 3.0 on top.

>causing me to purchase the wrong thing

That really is your own fault and has nothing to do with Amazon or Google, read the description before buying.
I grew up with a family garden and a father who bow-hunted, fished, and worked at various levels of "industrialization" in food industry throughout his career.

As a kid, I thought _everyone_ had chest-freezers of trotters, bluegill, crappie, and venison in the basement. ;)

There's simply no other way to get that many calories out to the masses and we've had multiple generations of "masses" raised on artificial consistency and engineered taste.

Ignorance is bliss. Fresh food is also bliss.

"Really good noodles"

"Which is why chicken tastes like everything"

"A single cell protein combined with vitamins and minerals"

For many sound reasons, we're living in a blue-pill world, but try to take the red-pill whenever you get the chance.

It's worth it.
How the PCMag has fallen.
Mr Action Lab of Youtube defined Entropy something like "Not a measure of how many states a system reaches, but a measure of how many states a system can reach".

I like this very much as it neatly summarizes information and other shit too.
I'd say the whole modern system of "shareholder value" should be the first to go...
"your ancestor has this indicator of that hereditary disease, good morning your health insurance now costs you 1.5x and we don't actually have to explain why"
Okay, do late school start next!
Personal. It feels like a misapplied Occam's razor to put unknowns down to alien intelligence, rather than human or meteorological sources.

I appreciate some people think "an open mind" in this matter is some exemplar. I'm not one of them. I'm an athiest too. Not agnostic.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-officials-say-most-north... (also on HN)
Everybody is talking about that: Trump, EU... a really non-controversial thing, DST causes more problems than it solves.

And nobody is doing anything. Ahhh, promises.
You just quoted that the public is using it - isn't that why we pay for it?
Self-awareness is a huge rabbit hole to go down. Its one if the many concepts we think make humans unique, at least in degree, but we never really found a clear way to define or identify it.

I have watched dogs, cats, cows, and chickens pretty extensively. I still couldn't tell you if they are really self-aware, and it ultimately it comes down to a definitional challenge of not having a clear line to draw and identify.

What makes you say LLMs are already self-aware, and how do you define it? And as long as an LLM is functionally a black box, how do you know it comprehends the idea that it is an LLM rather than having simply been trained on that token pattern or given that context as an instruction?
Woah I never heard this before. Very novel. Is the theory here the grey scale is less visually stimulating compared to full colour? LOL, it almost makes me wonder if we need a Duplo mode that makes everything crap 8-bit colours and low-res to scare people away from their phones.
Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that involves a magical being. It's an interesting thought experiment, and it provides some insights about the relationship between macro states and micro states, but it's not actually a refutation of anything, and it doesn't describe any physically realizable system, even in theory. There is no way to build a physical system that can act as the demon, and so it follows that entropy is not actually dependent on the information actually available to physical systems.

This is obviously visible in the observer-independence of many phenomena linked to temperature. A piece of ice will melt in a large enough bath of hot water regardless of whether you know the microstates of every atom in the bath and the ice crystal.
That's why I garden for flavour. I'd die if I depended on it for calories.
I’d love a reference or two to read on ferroelectric memory tech…
It appears this article was at least touched by an LLM. Uses a lot more words than the substance it has. Mentions the boy, the Socrates effect etc repeatedly but does explain what that means until very late in the post.
Fascinating. I'm wondering how the app manages to control notification behaviour & gatekeeps other apps. Obviously the APIs to do it must be there, just surprised Apple (of all ...) let's a 3rd party app do that..

Neat idea
Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is harder and leads to worse retention. The content you consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and switching over to other activities, such as tapping useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc. all generated by content that was designed for mobile users. Books don't do this.

I had a feeling someone might pick on the gaming reference here, but what I am saying is that hours of doomscrolling have been replaced by a mix of a half dozen activities, all of which I enjoy more than doomscrolling, and many of which are more useful.
I think so. Are bf16 models nonquantized? There's an MLX one here that should fit on that machine: https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/QwQ-32B-Preview-bf16
This is slightly crazy, but also "extremely hard-core". I have real respect for your actions. That is some real self-control! You should write a blog post about it and/or do a YouTube documentary. Small joke: David Attenborough can narrate the video.
Once you consider seed oils (many people still vilify saturated fats) the fast food timing gets even murkier. Fast food restaurants originally cooked in beef tallow where as its all seed oils today. If the oil type makes a difference and it wasn't necessarily the design of a fast food restaurant, the clock would have to start when chains got rid of tallow.
At the core, value isn't about the tech itself; it's about how effectively it solves real customer problems. A truly valuable product is the ability to solve problems. A valuable product strategically uses technology to create smoother user experiences, solve pain points, and deliver measurable results.

In the end, tech should be background noise. The real focus is on solving customer problems, not showing off the latest technology. The most valuable products don't just use tech, they make it frictionless and scalable.
> you cannot ask a customer of a building to specify what strength concrete needs to be used.

Indirectly, you can. They'll specify how many floors there needs to be, and combined with automatically-specified things like gravity and local weather phenomena, you can derive what building materials you can safely use.
> left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.
Mazda's $20k EZ-6 EV is off to a hot sales start
Having had to take a few different family members to the ER over the last few years, I'd rate their care as pretty bad. If your metric for success is staying alive they did okay, but I can't say much good beyond that.
Isolated individuals, yes. Not whole cultures that would survive in the archeological record.
It’s not one time capex. The poles must be rented to run fiber across them.
Isn't a language being "powerful" mostly about having comprehensive libraries ("import antigravity" and such)?

And then of course "safe" means you can't express things you shouldn't want to express, like buffer overflows or arithmetic overflows or SQL injections, or these days prompt injections.
You can choose not to believe me if you want. Yes, turning the phone off doubled my productivity.

I can't imagine why you wouldn't believe this, if you've ever had coworkers, and observed them spending half their time on their phone at work.

It's a distraction which hampers sustained attention and deeper thinking - as well as eats up actual minutes of time, some raw percentage of your work hours inevitably goes into garbage content on the phone instead.

I find the people who are skeptical about the idea that the phone frustrates doing deeper thinking, are often the ones who have never done it. This is why they don't see the value in it.
> I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.

Not sure.

I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.
Cool.

Can anyone recommend a linux tool for removing exif data from images and metadata from pdfs?
ADS-B Privacy
Just to wear my tin foil hat for fun, it's not that the model would attempt to phone home itself (what would it have to say, anyway?) but that given the opportunity it would go around kicking doors open for later infiltration by an outside party. Subtle bugs being introduced to your Django app, invisible characters that break your ssh configs, that sort of thing.
New FAA feature - anonymous IDs for private aircraft.
Why limit art to only aesthetics?
I think the Japanese ones are more about team building and stretching before physical labour jobs, and less about cardiovascular health.
A recent podcast I listened to highlighted the US‘ child mortality rate as an indicator for the quality of their health care system.
I’ve seen the same thing in many A/B tests
> I read somewhere that being the only kid without smartphone access is worse (for mental health) than giving your kid a smartphone.

What is definition of worse in context of mental health? Can free and open-source devices help or proprietary software is inevitable?
One counter measure is no counter measure. If you look at toys like https://hackaday.com/2023/06/13/arduino-powered-missile-syst... and scale it up with bigger and stronger servo's for holding a shotgun instead of fake missiles; you'll have a second war - with the arms industry. For a bonus you'll also win the war of economy because the bill of materials costs less than a mad maxed FPV drone given you source the shotgun from the land.
They didn't have a good one, and people were mad at them for it and demanded better results. MAID ameliorates both some of the direct anger ("We have improved healthcare by reducing suffering, look at how severe disability is declining"), and ameliorates some of the proximate causes (killing the sick, disabled, & homeless reduces load on the healthcare system & leaves more funds for other parts of it).
I feel doubtful about this article. They claim that the man-o-war is the largest colonial organisms, but there are HUGE siphonophores that are 100m long.
Those are 8 year olds. So there is at least the option that parents take the phone away at night.
I bet we disagree on what unsafe means. Many here think tåhat shipping a non-final/open/inheritable class is unsafe. I think doing so stunts your code base’s and ecosystem’s evolution.

And when push comes to shove and you have to address an issue in a 3rd party library, and you are unable to override a single thing that would fix your problem because everything is closed by default, then you will tell your manager it can’t be done, and serious money or opportunity will be wasted and customers will suffer for longer, because you are coding in a really safe language. Is this progress for humanity? I think not!
Whatever else your platform supports. Literally anything else would be better, other than raw assembly.

Usually there are some options. Rust is supported (to a degree) on both Linux and Windows. Both macOS and Windows support C++, which if used correctly is at least safer than C.
The problem is that we don't live long enough. We're fireflies.
Say what you like about Noam Chomsky, but I recall him once saying that it is OK to cover children as their parent, presumably to build good habits. Thinking back about my childhood, I am sure that my parents did similar, to much benefit to me as an adult!
My favorite one of these was the last 747 delivery flight
Has this been used for a music video yet?
I don't see any language in the blog post about "people new to programming to pick up".

In fifteen years of using Python, the only people I see getting burned are, conveniently, the folks writing blogs on the subject. No one I've worked with or hired seems to be running into these issues. It's not to say that people don't run into issues, but the problems seem exaggerated every time this subject comes up.
they found it was invalid in the short term, for this particular study. the long term is still an open question. which is why they’re pointing that out.

saying “we thought this would happen, it didn’t, but maybe there’s just something to do with our study that meant we disnt see the result that confirms our hypothesis” is a perfectly valid conclusion.
> You do realize that removing CO2 will require massively more energy than what went into adding it to the atmosphere, right?

The reaction of CO2 with silicate rocks that pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere naturally (and is why the Earth is not like Venus with 90 bar of CO2 in the atmosphere) is exothermic. So, the energy needed is not just not large, it could even be negative.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421792
Kinda, pretty sure I've read it somewhere else before. Plus, it has entries in Urban Dictionary from early 2023.
..and?
I have multiple versions of Python built from source. If I want to test what my code will do on a given version, I spin up a new venv (near instantaneous using `--without-pip`, which I achieve via a small Bash wrapper) and try installing it (using the `--python` option to Pip, through another wrapper, allowing me to reuse a single global copy).

No matter what tooling you have, that kind of test is really the only way to be sure anyway.

If something doesn't work, I can play around with dependency versions and/or do the appropriate research to figure out what's required for a given Python version, then give the necessary hints in my `pyproject.toml` (https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/pyproj...) as environment markers on my dependency strings (https://peps.python.org/pep-0508/#environment-markers).

"Mysterious errors" in this area are usually only mysterious to end users.
>I sincerely doubt most people who are in the workforce have ever handled a 40 person raid.

Managing 25+ people across multiple time zones ends up overlapping quite a bit with raids! Particularly the need to stay calm when things inevitably wobble a bit, dispute resolution, clear, concise and often repeated communication as well as a mental model of what everyone else understands about the situation and being able to quickly deduce what they don't understand and correct it.

I'm not refuting what you said; I'm agreeing with your implication they'd benefit from the experience.