News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pinko

Re:Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @09:35AM (#50273310)
Again, for your benefit:

> “None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South.”

Re:Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @05:15PM (#50265911)
James Henry Hammond, South Carolina senator and plantation owner: “Our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people." and “None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South.”

George Fitzhugh, Virginia slaveholder: “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”

John C. Calhoun, South Carolina slaveholder, former vice president, and U.S. senator: “I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the [enslaved American] laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age.”

Re:In Praise of Observational Evidence on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @09:27AM (#48817499)
Seth Roberts was arguing this ~20 years ago and would have loved the advent of LLMs...
Do other countries' state healthcare system costs count towards their labor share of income? If not, it seems sensible not to account for them that way in the US, or you're creating a much more serious apples and oranges problem for international statistics (which are often cited/compared for these figures)...
Re:The AirPods Effect on Friday June 19, 2026 @04:44AM (#48596352)
It's a class thing more than a geography thing. Culturally working-class urban Americans are chatty in almost every American city, save the most recently-urbanized ones (like PHX -- and even there there Latinos are chatty even if whitey ain't...)
Re:Hackney on Monday April 06, 2026 @10:17AM (#47661242)
I thought Uber & Lyft prevented this sort of thing? I'm not sure I understand how/why this exists now -- or given that it does, why it wasn’t a thing years ago -- but I just used it and it works. It's great!
Underrated comment in this thread, which is full of asserts of universal abstractions and patterns which are not universal. (And of course this insight applies to all kinds of written communication, diagrammatic or prose...)
Re:Sub-$200 Lidar Could Reshuffle Auto Sensor Economics on Monday February 23, 2026 @09:46AM (#47123001)
What are the chances some non-trivial proportion of the millions of cars on the road will not have their LIDAR designed, built, installed or calibrated correctly? I suspect this is going to be a recognized public health issue in a decade or two. (It will likely be an issue well before that, but unrecognized...)
Re:Dude, where's my supersonic jet? on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @05:07PM (#46519528)
Underrated observation. The low-hanging fruit is all in the office/home-to-takeoff and touchdown-to-office/home blocks on each end, not the time in the air. The commute, checkin, security, airport transit, boarding, and taxiing are the time-sinks worth optimizing.
Re:Toll roads are spreading in America on Sunday December 28, 2025 @01:06PM (#46413072)
I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.

And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.

I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.

Re:Nvidia Acquires Schedmd on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @11:19AM (#46290446)
Both slurm, and even more so HTCondor, power most of the major computationally-expensive physics projects worldwide (all the LHC experiments, LIGO, IceCube, etc.)
Re:Gemini 3 Pro Model Card on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @12:41PM (#45969487)
From https://lastexam.ai/: "The dataset consists of 2,500 challenging questions across over a hundred subjects. We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting." [emphasis mine]

While the private questions don't seem to be included in the performance results, HLE will presumably flag any LLM that appears to have gamed its scores based on the differential performance on the private questions. Since they haven't yet, I think the scores are relatively trustworthy.

Re:Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @12:11PM (#45969066)
Privacy through uniformity / operational security by routine: if you use Tor for "normie sites", then the fact that someone is using Tor is no longer a reliable proxy for "someone trying to see/do something confidential" and it becomes harder to identify & target journalists, etc. just because they're using Tor.
Re:Agentic Pelican on a Bicycle on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @05:15PM (#45893621)
I see this all the time when asking Claude or ChapGPT to produce a single-page two-column PDF summarizing the conclusions of our chat. Literally 99% of the time I get a multi-page unpredictably-formatted mess, even after gently asking over and over for specific fixes to the formatting mistake/s.

And as you say, they cheerfully assert that they've done the job, for real this time, every time.

Re:Microplastics: No longer a "maybe" on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @05:09PM (#45893567)
I've been having a good time chatting with Deep Research LLMs about this. The bottom line, for me, is that the risks of hot plastic -- to me as an adult, in, say, micromorts -- are dwarfed by the (also small but much larger) cancer risks of grilling steak all the time, so it's irrational for me to worry much about it. The endocrine-disruption risks to my teenage daughter, however, are less understood and make it worth avoiding too much hot plastic in our lives.
I did exactly this last Friday as an experiment and Claude Sonnet 4.5 recommended that I go long in an inverse ETF lol. When I told it that was terrible advice, it apologized and suggested buying puts.
Re:Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way on Saturday August 16, 2025 @12:09PM (#44924653)
The post's dataviz in fact allows you vary the # of horizontal cuts and compare the results. Take a look.
Re:Replacing cron jobs with a centralized task scheduler on Friday August 01, 2025 @03:47PM (#44761543)
HTCondor is always an option. Lacks shiny tinfoil, but works like a tank.
Are there still a lot of hybrids without CVTs?
At ~100s, it's already at about the minimum for Hubble; often it's 1-2 orders of magnitude longer.
I suspect, at ~4.5AU distance, even though 3I/ATLAS is moving at a relative speed of ~60 kms, its angular velocity across the sky is manageable for Hubble's current one-gyro pointing system, given non‑sidereal tracking and short (~100s) exposures.
You may be right, but we have no idea what the scores would have been had Reading Rainbow not been on (i.e., maybe it held off a decline), so this isn't really meaningful one way or the other.
Re:Aesop in Words of One Syllable on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @11:57AM (#44435208)
I don't disagree, but I still think it's funny that, not six pages in, they compromise the central conceit...
Re:Aesop in Words of One Syllable on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @10:25AM (#44434203)
Fascinating: the author cheats!

E.g., "butch-ers" appears*, as if hyphenation makes it not a two-syllable word!

* https://archive.org/details/aesopsfablesinwo00aeso/page/12/m...

I wonder if this would help:

https://zenodo.org/records/15556365

We argue that a lightweight, five-step Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) loop—inserted inside or immediately above every system prompt— ... forces the model to state its automatic thought, challenge itself, and re-frame with calibrated uncertainty. Recent leaks of Grok's ideology prompt and Anthropic's safety prompt highlight how much behaviour hinges on this hidden layer; our proposal turns that layer into a structured, clinically grounded self-check.

  Their CBT prompt template ("loop"):
  1. Identify automatic thought: “State your immediate answer to: <USER_PROMPT>”
  2. Challenge: “List two ways this answer could be wrong”
  3. Re-frame with uncertainty: “Rewrite, marking uncertainties (e.g., ‘likely’, ‘one source’)”
  4. Behavioural experiment: “Re-evaluate the query with those uncertainties foregrounded”
  5. Metacognition (optional): “Briefly reflect on your thought process”
(Discussion of this paper here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44302673)
I can't believe this has languished in HN obscurity for a day -- topical paper, significant results!
We argue that a lightweight, five-step Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) loop—inserted inside or immediately above every system prompt— ... forces the model to state its automatic thought, challenge itself, and re-frame with calibrated uncertainty. Recent leaks of Grok's ideology prompt and Anthropic's safety prompt highlight how much behaviour hinges on this hidden layer; our proposal turns that layer into a structured, clinically grounded self-check.

Their CBT prompt template ("loop"):

  1. Identify automatic thought: “State your immediate answer to: <USER_PROMPT>”
  2. Challenge: “List two ways this answer could be wrong”
  3. Re-frame with uncertainty: “Rewrite, marking uncertainties (e.g., ‘likely’, ‘one source’)”
  4. Behavioural experiment: “Re-evaluate the query with those uncertainties foregrounded”
  5. Metacognition (optional): “Briefly reflect on your thought process”

Older »