skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it is still wrong even if you just think "probability", not "p-value".

For people who don't believe me, spin up your LLM of choice using the API in your favourite language[1] and make some query using a temperature of zero. You will find if you repeat the query multiple times you always get the same response. That is because it always giving you the highest weighted result in the transformer output whereas if you set a non-zero temperature (or use the default chat frontend) it does a weighted random sample.

So there is no probabilistic variance between responses with temperature set to zero for a given model, but you will nonetheless find that you can get the LLM to hallucinate. One way I've found to get LLMs to frequently hallucinate is to ask the difference between two concepts that are actually the same (eg gemini gave me a very convincing looking but totally wrong "explanation" of the difference between a linear map and a linear transformation in linear algebra [2].

Therefore the probabilistic nature of a normal LLM response can not be the reason for hallucination because when we turn that off we find we still get hallucinations.

The real reason that LLMs hallucinate is more mundane and yet more fundamental- Hallucinating (in the normal sense of the word) is actually all that LLMs do. This is what Karpathy is talking about when he says that LLMs "dream documents". We just specifically call it "hallucination" when the results are somehow undesirable, typically because they don't correspond with some particular facts we would like the model's output to be grounded in.

But LLMs don't have any sort of model of the world, they have weights which are a lossy compression of their raw training data, so in response to some prompt they give the response that they have learned in instruction fine-tuning minimizes whatever loss function was used for that fine-tuning process. That's all. When we use words like "hallucination" we are in danger of anthropomorphising the model and using our reasoning process to try to back into how the model actually works.

[1] You need to use the programming API rather than the usual web frontend to set the temperature parameter.

[2] For the curious, it more or less said that for one of them (I forget which) you could move the origin so turned it into an affine transformation, but it mangled the underlying maths further. The evidence has fallen out of my gemini history so I can't share it, but that sort of approach has been fruitful in the past. Neither chatgpt nor claude fall for that specific example fwliw.
In one of my work experiences, "titles" were used as opposed to (or with a meager) paycheck raises. The most ridiculous aspect was that we had a fair number of group leaders, each with a team of 1 (just themselves).

For some it was effective.

This isn't reflecting the OP case though.
Rust can't verify the correctness of the kernel code, but the problem here wasn't incorrect kernel code!

The problem was that the C API exposed by the kernel did not encode lifetime requirements, so they were accidentally violated. Rust APIs (including ones that wrap C interfaces) can encode lifetime requirements, so you get compile time errors if you screw it up.

I don't think you can win this argument by saying "but you have to use `unsafe` to write the Rust wrapper". That's obviously unavoidable.
I really would like to know what's good bloat and bad bloat like they say with Taliban.

To give a random example, Apache http server for windows is less than 12mb download. I used to download Oracle's http which I'm told is based on that, but that's like 1GB++ haven't checked in recent years.
Have used dell business laptops for many years now (Vostro 13 and friends)

Used to be amazing, first one lasted a very long time (8years), my third one is currently giving up the ghost. And while Linux used to work great on them the uefi bios is so locked down that I couldn’t run it on the one i currently own.

On a related note, I’m out shopping for a new laptop and am considering a framework…
> Linux's review process which is necessary to produce high quality software.

Why? I don't see how that follows. It might be likely to produce better software simply by having experienced kernel devs review the code, but it's definitely not necessary.
I am going to assume that Lenovo, Dell, nVidia, AMD, Intel etc actually test Linux (or farm that out to RedHat etc) actually test Linux on the hardware that they support. But I could be wrong of course.
> It takes a staff engineer at FAANG to do what a senior can do at a smaller company

This is beyond laughable. FAANGs are pretty much the only place where staff is actually hard to make.

I see countless "senior" engineers with 3 years of experience in smaller companies.

The truth is it would take a good entry-level FAANG engineer to match a senior engineer in a smaller company.
Should be a significant year:

- move to the US

- reach $10k MRR with my startup

- find a system to manage my
internet/scrolling addiction
Price's Model
Steve Martin has said similar things about making creating and delivering his work his goal rather than getting laughs. Interesting to think about.
Working on AI stuff mostly. To that end, I worked on a little "bridge" library[1] for making it easier to use Jason with Spring, and made a fork of Jason to accommodate some of my personal preferences, like using SLF4J and Logback for logging, instead of JUL. Then wrote a Jason based system that can talk via XMPP, and wired it up to my Ollama server so that when I send it a message it has the option of asking an LLM to help parse the incoming message. Note that this is not a simple pass-through to the LLM. The intent here is to do higher level reasoning and other cognitive functions outside of the LLM, where the LLM is (potentially) helpful, but is not the core of the system.

Then started on some really super simple stuff around classical / operant conditioning for learning by sending @commands over the chat. Think something like @goodbot, or @no, and an @say command which the bot will learn to mirror from. I'm also working on some stuff around the idea of various "mental states" (stuff like cognitive-load, attention, confusion, frustration, cognitive-dissonance, etc) and exposing those things via JMX (so I can introspect the inner mental state of the system from outside, as well as logging changes during specific experiments).

Earlier this year I had done some work around making the Jason "belief base" use Apache Jena so that I can store beliefs as RDF triples and then use inference engines that can plug into Jena for reasoning. One of my next steps is to wire that into this bot. Another is to work on a specific notion of splitting memory up in a way that's somewhat analogous to human memory: the BeliefBase for long-term memory, maybe something like ValKey for short-term memory, and then a separate internal "working memory" that isn't persistent and isn't stored very long. Haven't given much thought yet to "episodic memory" but that's probably needed as well.

Also spent some time running through the Anthropic MCP "quick start" and writing some simple MCP servers and clients.

And now... so very much more to explore. But that's for 2025 to come.

I didn't just work over the holiday break though. I did go visit family for Christmas, and spent a little bit of time watching movies and over-eating. :-)

[1]: https://github.com/mindcrime/spring-jason-lib

[2]: https://github.com/mindcrime/jasonfg
That's fun! Is it possible to have an optional pause before solution is shown, so if looking at the screen there is some time to try to solve the puzzle?
Telegram CEO Flags Rising EU Censorship While Russia Preserves Open Access
Highly situational. Influencing 10 junior-mid engineers is always worse than being in good graces of someone that actually has influence on your career (manager, director, etc.)
Not when it is soldered on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop, and getting more implies throwing away an otherwise perfectly working device.
Salary bands
It is explicitly stated in the paper that

> One may argue that LLMs are implicitly learning a hierarchical representation, but we stipulate that models with an explicit hierarchical architecture are better suited to create coherent long-form output

And the problem remains that (text surrounding the above):

> Despite the undeniable success of LLMs and continued progress, all current LLMs miss a crucial characteristic of human intelligence: explicit reasoning and planning at multiple levels of abstraction. The human brain does not operate at the word level only. We usually have a top-down process to solve a complex task or compose a long document: we first plan at a higher level the overall structure, and then step-by-step, add details at lower levels of abstraction. [...] Imagine a researcher giving a fifteen-minute talk. In such a situation, researchers do not usually prepare detailed speeches by writing out every single word they will pronounce. Instead, they outline a flow of higher-level ideas they want to communicate. Should they give the same talk multiple times, the actual words being spoken may differ, the talk could even be given in different languages, but the flow of higher-level abstract ideas will remain the same. Similarly, when writing a research paper or essay on a specific topic, humans usually start by preparing an outline that structures the whole document into sections, which they then refine iteratively. Humans also detect and remember dependencies between the different parts of a longer document at an abstract level. If we expand on our previous research writing example, keeping track of dependencies means that we need to provide results for each of the experiment mentioned in the introduction. Finally, when processing and analyzing information, humans rarely consider every single word in a large document. Instead, we use a hierarchical approach: we remember which part of a long document we should search to find a specific piece of information. To the best of our knowledge, this explicit hierarchical structure of information processing and generation, at an abstract level, independent of any instantiation in a particular language or modality, cannot be found in any of the current LLMs
One area where I'll be worried about China (not sure India as it's following USA in many ways) is they needn't spend time, resources on ensuring political compliance. Maybe yes in a different sense but not in the same sense as in returning "correct" answers for questions. We saw that with Google.

That should knock God knows how many GPU cycles, time and training of models.
Within the same company? Money, that's about it. Between companies there is no standardization of levels, titles, and responsibilities.

Fun fact: at IBM a "Staff" is actually junior to a "Senior". So it's all over the place anyway.

The latest trend in new companies is to not assign named titles at all, just numbered levels.
> the human brain is actually made of physically independent zones that barely communicate together except with the zone that take all the outputs together and tries to do something coherent with all the garbage.

That sounds like bullshit. Do you have a source?
Framework 16+gpu had for almost one year. Pre-ordered and I think I have a "batch 3" or "batch 4" decice can't really remember.I agree with everyone the fit and finish is not as nice as other laptops of the same price range but I very much care about the repair ability and open eco system so I am willing to pay a bit extra. I love being able to swap out ports but honestly I think it adds some extra failure points. I was receiving random usb disconnection/reconnection sounds and eventually one expansion port on the motherboard stopped working. Haven't had the chance to call framework yet to get it fixed but I am sure they will.
The patch shown in the indictment is literally a meme patch you can buy from a bunch of edgy shops that sell patches for like ten dollars.

It’s not like a membership badge or anything.
it can be a team decision, but it's a bad one
Their team is pretty active in their forums, so after some comments I was directed to request a replacement and turns out my laptop was part of a batch that had some known fan issues--so they sent a fan and some thermal paste no charge. Have read a lot of similar accounts of them making things right, I assume it was part of working out bugs and not overall production issues.
I disagree, but I also wasn’t referring to the exhaustion of training materials. I am referring to the fact that exponentially more compute is required to achieve linear gains in performance. At some point, it just won’t be feasible to do $50B training runs, you know?
Removebg.sh: API for high quality background removal and mask creation
If a law is passed then that’s the law
Rumors on twitter are that they got rugpulled by a creditor calling in the debt, under T&Cs, rather than running out of money with predictable timing.

Eg see: https://x.com/pitdesi/status/1873872070331032051
Harold Shipman with the NHS killed about one person per month for 30 years, and the response was to ask if doctors could be monitored to discover this earlier. However, the systems they conceived "eventually cast suspicion on the innocent". 25 years later the NHS is still struggling to answer these questions.
The way I see the modular ports story is that the use-case is less being able to switch them, more getting the ports you want. I've got a usb c on either side, which I don't have with my work ThinkPad. I still have a usb a yubikey, so I can make sure to have that port. etc

Agreed on the battery unfortunately, on my first gen 13" it's just mediocre.
Something (Wegovy) I need for medication-induced obesity, but cannot afford ($250/month or $3k/year out of pocket) because Medicare won't cover it. Even when it is "covered", it's a "specialty tier medication" that is even more expensive than that.

Most people forget that US Medicare isn't true universal, single-payer healthcare and is an excessively-complex, oft corporation-involved, half-measure. It is mostly better than Medicaid, healthcare for the very poor, which is even worse. Medicare Advantage is a total scam.
> Excuse me?

Really thoughtful comment, that shows us the core of your objection: nothing.

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins...
I think when people read things like this they overly focus on the hocus pocus part of it rather than something that is probably or even definitely true with human beings - that there is a certain power to belief. I’ve had treatment resistant PTSD and depression most of my life and inevitably stuff like meditation/spirituality comes up, which I had always felt was a desperate last resort, and although I am agnostic, I am extremely materialist and find much of it dumb/silly. I started however reading textbooks about tantric yoga and their claims, while some of it is indeed weird or silly, there is definitely something to some of it - particularly tibetan yoga practitioners being able to withstand extreme heat, cold, or endurance for long periods of time with no seeming explanation. I had discovered my ability a long time ago to control pain levels and my perception of hot/cold, but they seem to be doing something that is actually controlling internal body functions, and that got my imagination going about how one could use that to treat things like PTSD.

I have had some success. a lot of it is visualizing and “believing” any way you possibly can, I think much of the ritual in stuff like this is to get you into whatever state is needed to trick your body or mind into doing something, at least that’s how I think it “works.” The author seems kind of aware of this and it seems to borrow many similar concepts as the stuff I’ve read, but with much more occultish ritual.
Can I ask buildpack to give me a Dockerfile that I can use/edit later?
> That means your manager has to be switched on and fully on board.

Your manager also needs enough political capital to drive the promotion. This is something I have an acute awareness of, having been told for the last 3 years that I was operating at the principal level (no staff title here) but not getting promoted. Eventually my manager was forced out of the company by bullying from my skip-level, so now I'm left to look for a new role elsewhere or spend some unknown amount of time building the relationship with my new manager.
The art looks cool, not sure about the rest...
Maybe if you compared it to the cheapest 2x4 construction that would cost 1/4 the amount. If you spent even just half of the structural cost on a better wood design you can have offset 2x6s 12 inch spaced stud walls for an 8 inch thick wall space. I don't see how any masonry work no matter how low density could have better insulation values.
I'm sorry, but what's up with those kind of projects popping up with HN? They all seem to do (mostly) basic things but have really expensive pricing plans. A recent example is just https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497679, this submission is similar too.
Github copilot plugin is decent. It's not going to write a whole app for you, but it accelerates repetitive stuff, can give suggestions you didn't think of or save you a trip to the documentation.
> Freedom is not the absence of boundaries.

No, of course not. Freedom is total control.
Indeed, I just upgraded to kernel 6.13rc5, and now everything works perfectly! Just in time for New Years!
How does it compare to Pixiljs?
You kind of lost me towards the end, so I’m not sure whether you attempted it, but I was wondering whether it would be possible for the internal nodes to store only the upper 8/16 bits (that are nonzero for the current subtree). This implies that one 64 byte cache line stores 32 or 64 entries instead of 16 (or better: 31 or 62/63, since u may need some bookkeeping dat).

The next level would be to keep track of how many prefix bits are implied by the parents, so leaf nodes could perhaps also only use 8/12/16 bits, if the the higher bits are implied by the parent. or instead of bit masks, use offsets (i.e. leaves store k bits offset from parent value).

That may screw around with the branch predictor, and may work very good with evenly distributed data vs uneven data.
The funny thing is that the original Desktop UI is still in the Android version. Sometimes I'll get jokers/consumables stuck in the desktop's "selected" mode, where the tiny sell/use buttons pop out underneath. So the whole drag-n-drop thing seems to have been added on top of the original ui, and sometimes the old ui events still fire.

Example: https://i.postimg.cc/P5VrVhQ4/Screenshot-20250101-103921.png
89 isn't 9^2, 81 is.
Sadly very accurate. That’s how you can find inflated titles but people with no ability to do work.
It doesn’t work very well, and it can cause underground fires which pop up a year+ later.
As much as I prefer median over average for income discussions, it's worth noting that either half could get substantially worse/better without a detectable change in the median.

Hence the popularity of comparing distributions by using quintiles or quartiles.
> Objectively, most people have no desire for old software. Nobody wants a 10 year old video editor. Even retro video games, the most heavy market for retro software, is a drop in the bucket.

I'm not talking about old software (yet another weasel thing you dragged into the conversation). I'm talking about software that you're not allowed to have at all - software that automates your phone, software that processes your data, modifies how your phone looks or works, software that modifies other software on your phone (e.g. Outlook itself had a massive ecosystem of productivity plugins just byitself to serve the user).

The fact that those whole businesses existed and still exist for decades directly contracticts your "users don't want it" bull coming directly from corporate whiteknighting.
True - and of course factories don't mind if a robot costs $40,000 if the payback time is right.

But factory robots haven't propelled Kuka, Fanuc, ABB, UR, Staubli and peers to anything like the levels of success nvidia is already at. A market big enough to accommodate several profitable companies with market caps in the tens of billions might not drive much growth for a company with a trillion-dollar market cap.

nvidia has several irons in the fire here. Industrial robot? Self-driving car? Creepy humanoid robots? Experimental academic robots? Whatever your needs are, nvidia is ready with a GPU, some software, and some tutorials on the basics.
Why not tell it, "I only want the regex, don't give me the entire solution. I'm doing this to learn, please don't spoil the assignment for me." Anyway, if you want to learn regex there are many interactive regex tools online that you can use to iterate on.
1% is 1%. Giving it away for no reason is plain stupid, even if the trade makes you 1000% return.
Look up ‘Susan Rosenberg’.
Introduction to low level bit twiddling hacks
Absolutely love the level of detail here! Not often you see the process of optimising something spelled out in so much depth
Those laws don’t actually bar explosives at all, and there are numerous carve outs that could potentially meet what the poster is describing. You might want to read it?

Though it would be helpful to know which state, because I don’t know of any that are quite that easy to deal with.

BATF to my knowledge does still require a license (albeit easy to get if you meet the requirements) for commercial use, anyway.
I told my crow friends happy new year and I'm reasonably certain they know today is special even if they don't get why. [0][1] (this is just one and I offered peanuts first but it stared me down and did not budge until I put out beef)

[0]: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/433008121234063360/...

[1]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434337586182619136/13...
My youngest is fascinated by squares at the moment. Luckily for him, he is 4 years old, his older brother is 9, while I just turned 36. He will be delighted when I tell him that we are entering 45 squared!
> The purpose of testing is to document the code for the understanding of future developers, not to prove correctness.

Hmm. I've never seen tests with that goal in mind, except for behavioral tests that test the acceptance critera.

> as I am sure you are painfully aware if you have ever dealt with legacy forms of documentation [...] that quickly become out of date

I have, but allowing that to happen is a culture-issue, not something that is guaranteed to happen. When I open PRs to open source software, I always include a PR to the docs if it changes anything. At work, updating the docs is part of the default acceptance criteria and is usually the thing we do before writing any code, and goes through a PR process just like the code. But, we service enterprise customers, so we aren't going to be giving them code or tests to understand how to use our product.

> These are all mocks, ultimately.

This is a software field and there are specific words with specific meaning; trying to shoehorn things that aren't those things to generalize a meaning is acceptable when teaching. It isn't acceptable when working on those things. In other words, I would accept this if trying to explain the concept to a junior engineer, but not from a senior engineer to a senior engineer.

> it is all the same at the end of the day.

No, not at all.
4 and 5 too
I'm not sure that "portable" and "only works on one specific compiler vendor" are very compatible concepts
Yes but people want to immigrate to Italy and Germany, and emigrate from China
Because of the ai premium
If this guy went on a terror rampage and it later emerged that he had spent years stockpiling bombs and obsessing over weapons, there would be a chorus of “why didn’t someone intervene earlier?” and “of course the guy was dangerous”. Hindsight makes it easy, but before the fact it’s difficult to judge where to place the line between non-criminal eccentricity and imminent threat.
Good quote from the article:
“Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success.”