skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
so here's an example: I saw the following amusing math joke on BlueSky, posted a couple days ago.

https://bsky.app/profile/elliotlip.bsky.social/post/3lh5bs7g...

"It's wild that I took a whole-ass class all about differentiable functions from R^2 to itself that satisfy one specific PDE."

output from Claude (one-shot, no retries or trickery) when asked to "explain the joke":

"The joke is playing off the fact that "complex analysis" (the study of differentiable functions satisfying the Cauchy-Riemann equations - a type of PDE) sounds like it should be more complex than it is when described technically. The humor comes from reducing an entire mathematical field to "functions that satisfy one specific PDE," making it sound surprisingly narrow or trivial despite its actual depth and importance."

Wikipedia and lots of math textbooks are in the training data, so it's not so impressive that this model will produce correct statements about math.

But the joke itself was not in the training data (to the best of my knowledge, it's this guy's original joke). And complex analysis was not mentioned in the joke. Yet somehow the text generated is correct with respect to both of those things.

I see things like this quite regularly, which under the "stochastic parrots" story, can't happen.

I've tried to phrase all these sentences very carefully to not claim there is any "agent" or "intelligence" behind the Claude product. There are many explanations for how a language model like this could imitate intelligent dialogue in ways that are somewhat fake and don't generalize -- I think this is what's happening. I also see things break down all the time and the sleight-of-hand fall apart. However, it is not "stochastic parrots" any more.
very thoughtful idea!
Reading a couple SSC posts for the first time here myself, so my impression is fairly limited, but it sounds like you might be blaming SSC unfairly for simply intellectually engaging with reactionary ideas, which I can't fault someone for, and nor should you.

Can you link to some specific examples which more explicitly have the "What if they're right?" subtext you're referring to?
Certainly that’s true for at the founding and during Carter. Totally incompatible now:

Aid during climate catastrophes connotes some US responsibility for them.

There’s no actual room where a formidable billionaire shapes the terms of aid. The bigly of which is: this aid depends on enforcing zero migrants by any means.

Sadly, the vaccination component of USAID will work against it, too. The US is dealing with vaccine conspiracy theorists, and the only effective response I’ve heard is: the influence campaign to sew doubt about vaccines is having great success weakening the US and will now move on to depopulating the third world.
IMO the tariff on Canada is purely because they are in free trade with Mexico and without Canada imposing the same tariff on mex, the US must impose the same on Canada or they become trivially an import proxy to bypass our tariffs on Mexico.

What the US really wants imo is for Canada to tariff Mexico so we can remove the Canada tariff without undermining the Mexican one. Pretty much guarantee we'll see Trump pushing Canada to do that in the upcoming negotiations.
> To me this just sounds like a discipline issue rather than a semantic one.

Using an explicit parameter obviates the need for discipline since you can mechanically trace where the value was set. In contrast, global values can lead to action at a distance via implicit value changes.

For example, if you have two separate functions in the same thread, one can implicitly change a value used by the other if it's thread-local, but you can't do that if the value is passed via a parameter.
To be honest I trust LineageOS more than I trust any Google-vended image.
I use VOIP numbers for that. One per business.
Dead cat bounce.
I live in Rochester NY, grew up in Buffalo. Housing markets here were nuts the last couple years, probably due to this effect (although laughable compared to SF I'm sure) and pent up demand. I'm not sure I really want it to "blow up" any more, although I'm not much of a big city guy - I like going to the same diner every Saturday and reading at home. Life is pretty good.
That FAQ was a long and interesting read. Thanks for sharing!
So if it requires licenses they must be followed. If the licences allow transfer buyer has to transfer otherwise buyer has to purchase them. Each listing has documentation section where seller can mention these
Nope, but nice try...

"Given its abstract nature, the legislation
contains areas that are yet to be fully
defined. These are expected to be elaborated on through delegated and implementing acts, guidelines by the EU institutions, as well as harmonized standards
developed by European Standardization
Organizations. As a result, businesses can
expect to receive more detailed guidance
in the near future."

Scope of the AI Act:

"Furthermore, the recitals – which clarify
the AI Act’s regulatory text – specify that
the definition of AI does not include basic
traditional software or purely rule-based
programming created by humans for automatic operations.
Despite this, the definition remains wide,
covering the majority of systems available on the market.

...Finally, the Commission has been tasked
with developing guidelines for applying the
definition of an AI system, which grant further
guidance of the defining aspects of AI
under this regulation."

https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/assets-zone2/nl/en/docs...
Will that stuff end up upstream at some point, and if not, where's the bottleneck?
I don’t view American news, but thanks for the condescension.

Arguing for an academic definition as somehow true and absolute, in contradiction to common usage, is a lost cause. Language prescriptivists always lose in the long run.

In the US, classical liberalism is largely despised by the same people who despise political liberalism. Funnily enough, those people are conservatives by either definition.

It’s unfortunate that academic conservatism keeps turning into real world populism (and certainly classical liberalism has seen that as well). But language evolves, and it’s n order to be able to communicate, terminology must as well.

It’s just a word. Words change. There’s no reason to defend an archaic meaning when it’s just going to cause confusion in almost every context.
Somehow I'm not even surprised. Train watching/spotting and train miniature making are both popular with overlapping communities, and apparently there is a smaller but still extant community of people who are big fans of garbage trucks in the way that others are with trains. Dumpsters seems like a natural extension of that.

Incidentally, train fandom is definitely commodified, but I think not to the consternation or detriment of those into trains. I wonder why some subcultures are at odds with commercialization of their interests while others are at peace with it.
VPNs, Proxies and Privacy
Your project looks interesting. Three recommendations:

1) Try posting your project "chessfunforlittleones" again. You posted it 5 months ago and it didn't get a lot of traction, so a repost is fine scording to the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . (But don't repost too much.)

2) The old post has a few comments from green account. They looks like too much like sockpuppets or something similar. It's a bad idea. From the FAQ

> Can I ask people to upvote my submission?

> No. Users should vote for a story because they personally find it intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to promote. We penalize or ban submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule, so please don't.

> Can I ask people to comment on my submission?

> No, for the same reason. It's also not in your interest: HN readers are sensitive to this and will detect it, flag it, and use unkind words like 'spam'.

3) In the repost add a comments explaining that you are the author and your problem with Fb. People is more friendly when the author is around repliying questions. I think your project is interesting and may gain some traction here and perhaps someone can help with your problem. (But I obviously can't guaranty neither.)
> firing people for outright lying about their abilities very quickly

I assume your from the US? The issue with firing people quickly after hiring them is:

* You need to pay whatever headhunter or other personnel that is involved. Some offer a cashback or reduced rate to find a new person, but your still out of the pocket. Do it a few too many times and the headhunter dump you.

* You just wasted a ton of time of other employees, setting up this persons accounts, social benefits, contract negotiation, training time, and more. Again, this is not free.

* Now you are back to looking for other people. You know those people that you rejected, well, the change is reduced that they will come back to your company, maybe they got hired somewhere else, maybe your rejection left a bad impression as you hired that lying person over a actually well qualified person that just did not ace the interview (happens to so many people, often because of nerves).

The trick is, to have a that person (and others in the interview process) work a few days in your company, but this is not covered by a official work contract but a interim contract (of course, you pay those people, some companies are real bastard and do not pay).

That can weed out the people that are good at lying about their skills. But to be honest, if you can not spot them during the interview stage, ...

We had people coming in for Senior positions, and their CVs looked good, they knew how to talk the talk. But when asked for some incredible basic SQL question, they fumbled so much, because they used ORMs their entire life. But loved to place SQL skills on their CV. Seen multiple of those... And so often they then switch to going after the interviewer, thinking that by attacking the interviewer before the boss, that will help them. Yea, "Senior material"...

With AI its going to be the same. People get comfortable using AI, but when you ask code questions without that AI to back them up, that skill gap will exposé themselves very fast during the actual interviews.

I love using AI because it can remove so much boilerplate / repeat / great for finding doc info but you need to know your language. If you grew up with only AI, and do not grow beyond AI to solve every issue, your nothing more but a copy/past dev (AI is just a extension of that dev type).

> Or someone who likes to over abstract everything.

No no, the most annoying ones are those that come in and then want to implement everything into a style they are familiar with! Code rewrites to fit them, framework changes because they are familiar with them... Nothing more fun as hiring somebody to write Angular for 13k/month (talking almost 10 years ago), and then this person pushing Vue, to even rewriting part of the codebase into Vue. Like, we hired you with a insane salary because we are desperate for a Angular developer, if we wanted to rewrite everything to Vue, we will have hired somebody cheaper.
I use Waydroid to run my banking apps on my laptop. Much more convenient than going through many layers of authentication each time on internet banking.
How to Sell Your Weird Idea (2020)
I think we each may take a lot of baggage into the ideas and term individualistic and would probably be better served with a more specific term. From my persecutive, the amount of self sacrifice required is synonymous with the level of individualism.

I think that individualism-collectivism is on one axis, and permissive vs strict expectations is on a different axis.

I think that depends highly on the non-individualistic society in question, but I take your point.
There's certainly a tradeoff between the two approaches; a simpler representation (list of tasks or DAG) is easier to query and manipulate, at the cost of being less expressive, lacking features like loops, conditionals, etc.

In the workflow engine I described, state is represented as a graph of objects in memory; this includes values like integers/strings and data structures like dictionaries/lists, as well as closures, environments, and the execution stack. This graph is serialised as JSON and stored in a postgres table. A more compact binary representation could be added in the future if performance requirements demand it, but JSON has been sufficient for our needs so far. A delta between each snapshot is also stored in an execution log, so that the complete execution history is stored for auditing purposes.

The interpreter is written in such a way that all object allocation, object manipulation, and garbage collection is under its control, and all the data needed to represent execution state is stored in a manner that can be easily serialised. In particular, we avoid the use of pointers to memory locations, instead using object ids for all references. So the persistent state, when loaded, can be accessed directly, since any time a reference from one object to another needs to be followed, the interpreter does so by looking up the object in the heap based on its id.

Non-deterministic and blocking operations (including IPC receives) are handled outside of the evaluation cycle. This enables their results to be explicitly captured in the execution log, and allows for retries to be handled by an external mechanism under control of the user (since retrying can be unsafe if the operation is not idempotent).

The biggest win of using a proper language for expressing the workflow is the ability to add arbitrary logic between blocking operations, such as conditional tests or data structure manipulation. Any kind of logic you might want to do can be expressed due to the fact the workflow language is Turing-complete.
The sun belt took wind out of their sails. And even they are starting to see softening demand. Miami just cancelled an A-class commercial high rise due to weak demand. In Austin, rents are tanking.

It’s very hard to revive a town or city when the tax base is way down. I thought Detroit was going to succeed but they simply have too much ground to manage with their revenue. And there isn’t a way to shrink a shrinking city.
> Behavioral equivalence

It seems for a lot of people that's all that matters: "if it quacks like a duck it must be a duck!". I find that short-sighted at best, but it's always difficult to present arguments that would "resonate" with the other side...
I'm not saying it reasons reliably, at all (nor has much success with anything particularly deep: I think in a lot of cases it's dumber than a lot of animals in this respect). But it does a form of general reasoning which other more focused AI efforts have generally struggled with, and it's a lot more successful than random chance. For example, see how ChatGPT can be persuaded to play chess. It still will try to make illegal moves sometimes, hallucinating pieces in the board state or otherwise losing the plot. But if you constrain it and only consider the legal moves, it'll usually beat the average person (i.e. someone who understands the rules but has very little experience), even if it'll be trounced by an experienced player. You can't do this just by memorisation or random guessing: chess goes off-book (i.e. into a game state that has never existed before) very quickly, so it must have some understanding of chess and how to reason about the moves to make, even if it doesn't color within the lines as well as a comparatively basic chess engine.

(Basically, I don't think there's a bright line here: saying "they can't reason" isn't very useful, instead it's more useful to talk about what kinds of things they can reason about, and how reliably. Because it's kind of amazing that this is an emergent behaviour of training on text prediction, but on the other hand because prediction is the objective function of the training, it's a very fuzzy kind of reasoning and it's not obvious how to make it more rigourous or deeper in practice)
Floppy Language
An operating system based on something like the Pharo VM, Smalltalk VM or any similar mechanism where I can inspect all the code while it's running.

I know there have been projects like that in the past, but I don't know of any modern projects.

Yes, I accept the risks that come with that.
Binder has been on the mainline Linux kernel for a long long time.
Fomenko's theories, mentioned in the article, are pretty fascinating. I love the romance of the idea that history is all wrong and that everything was made up at a variety of chokepoints around literacy and access to original documents.

Fundamentally it seems implausible (extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence and all) but it's fun to read about, although I have not braved his actual writings to get context (I do, oddly, have a couple of mathematical textbooks that he wrote, however).

The most interesting thing that I saw was his critique of carbon-14 dating. And while I don't concede the central point, it led me down a rabbit hole of realizing that carbon dating is a lot more complex and rule-of-thumb driven than I would have thought, because in the end it relies upon historic atmospheric C14/C12 ratios that we mostly have good information on from ... radiocarbon dating on artifacts of known provenance. That's not the entirety of the story but it was surprising to me that something that is so often thrown out as an example of formal scientific methods in history is so heuristic and complex, rather than a simple application of math and physics.
You should use testing and a debugger for this. Don’t just read code, run it and step through it and observe code as it mutates state.
Show HN: Open-source application to run local LLM easily
Kolosal is a simple desktop application to run most LLMs on both CPU and GPU. It is designed to be easy to setup, to run, and to embed, with only 30mb (extracted).

It is inspired by ollama and lmstudio. While lmstudio have a very easy and beautiful interface and also very easy to setup, but i saw people are looking for an opensource alternative to it. In other hand, ollama is opensource, can be easy to setup (but for some user, who have AMD gpu RDNA2 below RX6800 it might be complicated to run it on GPU), but to be use by normal person, you need to run other application or webui that add some complexity to it.

So there you go, a simple, light, opensource desktop application run on your device!

Also, you might notice that there are some features that is shown in the website, but haven't actually made into the application, especially the inference features, we're still working on it (we just launch our first mvp at 10th January 2025). The inference features is made to address the accuracy issue at small models that can be run on non-GPU devices.
I think it’s prudent to see what damage the actions of Canada, Mexico, and China can do with regards to economic retaliation and if they need to iterate accordingly.
I used it once to research language learning and had my pro mode taken away pending review for abuse.
I think you can use something like Weston in X11 to run Waydroid.
Brother, I work on internal software at a non-tech company and have never generated a single revenue.
> We have no plans for anything like that.

That's kinda my point... I'm pretty sure I won't live long enough to see it happen, but I hope we plan and launch a mission like that!
Stay Shameless
I am a sci-fi nerd and I also found Neuromancer incredibly boring, but that's probably because it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine.

I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.
Don’t run code in your head. Run it in reality and step through it with a debugger.
Have you ever read about Hellen Keller and her experience before her discovery (being taught) language
> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation

I'm not really sure what makes raging about this so hard for you. Current YouTube practice is equivalent to locking up a citizen for "thievery" and "reasons" without providing any evidence of such at any point.

And sure, few hundreds years ago this course of action would fly. But today we advanced a bit and demand that our justice is a bit more just. I don't see why we should demand less of the corporations. Or do we just accept their role as a pocket of feudalism in modern society? Accepting undemocratic small planned economies of corporations is one thing, accepting customers to be their serfs is another.
Supporting is on thing, being build on top of it is another thing. And on top of that, AFAIK on bluesky there is no "algorithm"
We used to build features for customers
Curious what subcultures comes to mind for you. I havent finished my coffee, but and drawing a blank on cultural interests that cant be commodified.
U2 literally employ a stylist who buys their clothes from second hand clothes markets. An incredibly expensive way of supporting a “no consumption” aesthetic.
Uh... this is a white paper about projecting an image onto a moving face. Not super imposing, but projecting... with a projector... using light... so what exactly are you worried about with this tech? Or is it just that you're afraid of face tracking in general? And it's not really about this topic specifically?
"One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead."

—Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium

Probably inspired by Mark Fisher:

"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that
capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one
effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural
objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or
Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum,
where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled
as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a
powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of
practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of
previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into
artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of
realism; it is more like realism in itself."
It's not the only technical control they have - every single datapoint an app can gather is ultimately provided from the OS. They could let you disable access to metrics that have proven to be useful for fingerprinting.
They could also attempt block known tracking code - all games with IronSource ads will run the same tracker binary, byte for byte. There's a lot of things they could do, but don't, since in the mainstream they have a pretty good reputation when it comes to privacy.