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The impossible predicament of the death newts

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/06/05/occasional-paper-the-impossible-predicament-of-the-death-newts/
281•bdr•5h ago•97 comments

Show HN: ClickStack – open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX

https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability
36•mikeshi42•1h ago•6 comments

Neuromorphic computing

https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/1269-neuromorphic-computing
17•LAsteNERD•56m ago•4 comments

Google restricts Android sideloading

https://puri.sm/posts/google-restricts-android-sideloading-what-it-means-for-user-autonomy-and-the-future-of-mobile-freedom/
230•fsflover•3h ago•184 comments

Seven Days at the Bin Store

https://defector.com/seven-days-at-the-bin-store
68•zdw•3h ago•26 comments

Show HN: iOS Screen Time from a REST API

https://www.thescreentimenetwork.com/api/
30•anteloper•1h ago•16 comments

Understanding the PURL Specification (Package URL)

https://fossa.com/blog/understanding-purl-specification-package-url/
49•todsacerdoti•3h ago•29 comments

Eleven v3

https://elevenlabs.io/v3
35•robertvc•51m ago•8 comments

Millions in west don't know they have aggressive fatty liver disease, study says

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/05/millions-in-west-do-not-know-they-have-aggressive-fatty-liver-disease-study-says
33•robaato•1h ago•15 comments

Cysteine depletion triggers adipose tissue thermogenesis and weight loss

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-025-01297-8
64•bookofjoe•3h ago•41 comments

CircuitHub (YC W12) is hiring full-stack robotics engineers

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/76919
1•seddona•2h ago

A proposal to restrict sites from accessing a users’ local network

https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/local-network-access
558•doener•1d ago•322 comments

Gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05

https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/pro/
205•jcuenod•2h ago•115 comments

Phptop: Simple PHP ressource profiler, safe and useful for production sites

https://github.com/bearstech/phptop
83•kadrek•10h ago•13 comments

Rare black iceberg spotted off Labrador coast could be 100k years old

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/black-iceberg-labrador-coast-1.7551078
49•pseudolus•3h ago•13 comments

From tokens to thoughts: How LLMs and humans trade compression for meaning

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17117
87•ggirelli•11h ago•20 comments

Air Lab – A portable and open air quality measuring device

https://networkedartifacts.com/airlab/simulator
273•256dpi•11h ago•135 comments

Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2025/lr/autonomous-drone-from-tu-delft-defeats-human-champions-in-historic-racing-first
276•picture•23h ago•211 comments

OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/openai-says-court-forcing-it-to-save-all-chatgpt-logs-is-a-privacy-nightmare/
1015•ColinWright•21h ago•839 comments

LLMs and Elixir: Windfall or Deathblow?

https://www.zachdaniel.dev/p/llms-and-elixir-windfall-or-deathblow
195•uxcolumbo•20h ago•99 comments

parrot.live

https://github.com/hugomd/parrot.live
189•jasonthorsness•20h ago•43 comments

End of an Era: Landsat 7 Decommissioned After 25 Years of Earth Observation

https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/end-era-landsat-7-decommissioned-after-25-years-earth-observation
82•keepamovin•15h ago•32 comments

Show HN: I made a 3D SVG Renderer that projects textures without rasterization

https://seve.blog/p/i-made-a-3d-svg-renderer-that-projects
188•seveibar•17h ago•65 comments

AI Weather Model Is More Accurate, Less Expensive Than Traditional Forecasting

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsofts-ai-weather-model-is-more-accurate-cheaper-than-traditional-forecasting
4•rmason•16m ago•0 comments

Busting the Myth That the Canadian Federal Govt Has Hurt Alberta's Oil Industry

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/05/15/Busting-Myth-Ottawa-Hurt-Alberta-Oil-Industry/
6•Geekette•24m ago•4 comments

Twitter's new encrypted DMs aren't better than the old ones

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/71646.html
158•tabletcorry•5h ago•155 comments

A Spiral Structure in the Inner Oort Cloud

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adbf9b
120•gnabgib•20h ago•31 comments

Cursor 1.0

https://www.cursor.com/en/changelog/1-0
561•ecz•22h ago•420 comments

Prompt engineering playbook for programmers

https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-prompt-engineering-playbook-for
378•vinhnx•1d ago•146 comments

The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps

https://tech.marksblogg.com/apple-iphone-15-pro-depth-map-heic.html
325•marklit•1d ago•84 comments
Open in hackernews

Oh fuck! How do people feel about robots that leverage profanity?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05831
18•rolph•2d ago

Comments

rolph•2d ago
the actual title seems to be unacceptable, however the obvious profanity version is.

[pseudo]actual title :

"Oh F**k! How Do People Feel about Robots that Leverage Profanity?"

even this breaks, very interesting

pvg•1d ago
HN fucks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39392726

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44122636

kingforaday•1d ago
So does Jared Dunn from Silicon Valley.
zfnmxt•1d ago
Good; censoring profanity (especially self-censoring) is for cowards. Be brave and dish out your fucks liberally in your papers!
sim7c00•2d ago
interesting paper / idea. i like the idea of a robot or ai who uses profanity like a regular person (if thats ur thing, guess it depends on ur context). i know people who instruct their ai assistants to be rude, mean or profane because they listen better to that. like asking it to tell you to RTFM if you ask a question thats trivially answered (compared to some further context you specify , or not).

i suppose everyone learns to listen better to certain personas through their lifes experiences, so its good to be able to tune it towards personal preferences and not but overly protective or conservative limits or restrictions. (obviously thats a snake pit so i do totally understand tight restrictions)

mrandish•1d ago
The default obsequious, yuppie buddy chatbot personas of today make me hate them. Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide perfectly captured the infuriating annoyance of machines programmed to act like overly polite friends when he had the automatic doors always tell you how delighted they were to open for you.

It's a machine, dammit. One of its (potential) advantages vs hiring a human is not having extraneous transactional exchanges. If my personal AI assistant had to have a persona, I'd rather it sound and talk like Joe Pesci from Goodfellas.

jcims•1d ago
I'm tinkering with the 'indifferent god' persona and it's been very refreshing.
stavros•1d ago
If you think of LLMs as machines, you will be surprised a lot more than if you think of them as humans, so the latter is the better abstraction.
mrandish•1d ago
> you will be surprised a lot more than if you think of them as humans, so the latter is the better abstraction.

I'm not following what you mean here. In what ways do you think I'd be surprised?

stavros•1d ago
In that they can't do math, they don't follow instructions well, they aren't accurate, which are all things that are surprising for machines but very non-surprising for humans.
mrandish•15h ago
Oh, I see. I'm already well aware of the many substantial limitations of LLMs and the counter-intuitive nature of these gaps. My comment was pre-assuming a scenario where the chat AI could usefully and correctly answer the question and, even in that case, I want the chat AI to just answer the question and not pretend to have a human-like personality.
stavros•12h ago
Yes, but my point is that that's the wrong way to think about it. They don't have a human-like personality that was tacked on, they _are_ more human than machine.
avsteele•1d ago
Profanity should not be in the title of scientific articles. Most unprofessional. In addition, titling your article for shock value should be discouraged. The end point will be a degraded discourse.
zfnmxt•1d ago
Professionalism is not a virtue; measured irreverence is---an uncensored "Fuck" in this scenario falls into that category.

Silliness has an important and necessary place in research.

avsteele•1d ago
NOT in professional communication. If you want to run your lab that way, feel free.
ghssds•1d ago
We tell children to don't use profanity because they have a hard time regulating themselves. Telling adults to do the same is misplaced authoritarian behavior, the kind that may come from people who failed to mature and still obey (and repeat) what they were told as a child but now sound obsequious.
scottyah•1d ago
Profanity largely exists to be offensive, and loses power when ubiquitous. It especially loses power when five year olds say it for every little mood swing they have. Nobody wants to hear offensive words from a child because it makes adults realize how childish they sound.
arp242•1d ago
I've joined jobs and the first thing people said to me is "ah, you must be the new cunt!"

Different people have different standards for this type of thing. Be a good cunt and accept that there are over 8 billion people on the world, some of whom have very different norms than you have. Don't declare your own standards as somehow authoritative.

avsteele•1d ago
We have certain professional communications standards in the scientific community. This isn't a corner bar.
arp242•1d ago
No, you have certain ways you like communication to happen. That's okay, everyone had that. To present this as some sort of objective standard is complete bollocks, as is your claim that it somehow "degrades" discourse.

This applies twentyfold when the topic of the scientific paper is swearing. Like mate, seriously?

Anyway, I tried. Good luck with your life.

const_cast•1d ago
I tend to agree. A lot of medical and scientific writing often falls on deaf ears because most people only respond to a conversational tone. That's why you write corporate emails in a conversational tone, it's just what's most effective.

I think, if the subject matters call for it, which clearly this does as they're literally looking at swearing, then it can be fine to swear. It can be more concise and more accurate.

stavros•1d ago
I agree as well, I really dislike the overly formal tone we've tended to adopt in order to signal that the content is important. If you have important stuff to say, it'll be important even if you use simple words to say it.
koolba•1d ago
> I've joined jobs and the first thing people said to me is "ah, you must be the new cunt!"

The reaction to that welcome is highly location dependent.

II2II•1d ago
I suspect the use of profanity was to grab people's attention, rather than for shock value. I would consider it as unprofessional, much as I would consider an article titled "Stars that go boom" to be unprofessional. I would suggest that it should be discouraged, mostly because we don't want scientific journals to come off sounding like tabloids. Yet I don't think that it automatically results in degraded discourse.
os2warpman•1d ago
There is no profanity in that title.

“F**k” could be any number of things. (Shrugging guy emoji)

As a methodically scientific academically academic scientist myself I struggle to arrive at a firm and defensible position on what it could be.

mousethatroared•1d ago
Tails are what get you though.

I'd probably smash a robot that swore at me or my family.

"Tell your c---t daughter to get off the street"

Will probably result in me looking for a heavy stone.

Swear words are literally fighting words whilst a robot cannot, legally, be assaulted. I'll take destruction of property to defend my daughter's honor to a jury of normies.

Swizec•1d ago
I'd prefer swearing over a robot who says "Per my last email, ..."

But let's be honest: The thing we're both afraid of is a robot who can get impatient and emotional.

mousethatroared•1d ago
They've already programmed impatience to the chat bots in federal government offices. Get testy and they'll hang up on you. However, they can't get emotional, they lack soul.
daveguy•1d ago
They can't get impatient either. Only some vague semblance of what impatience means to a programmer or two.
stavros•1d ago
I think you missed the GP's joke there.
daveguy•1d ago
Oh yeah, boo federal government bots because boo federal government. Hilarious.
delichon•1d ago
You don't want me on that jury. But if you pick up a heavy civil suit instead of a stone, you do.
mousethatroared•1d ago
Civil suit for what?

It needs to get to a jury and for that the prosecutor needs to think he'll win.

I doubt most prosecutors will stake their conviction ratio for a very sympathetic defendant.

(Except in San Fran and DC. There ill take whatever deal Im offered)

delichon•1d ago
You don't need a prosecutor's cooperation to file a civil lawsuit in the US.

In the described scenario I'd be happy to find in your favor for intentional infliction of emotional distress, with negligence and vicarious liability and extra zeros.

teddyh•1d ago
“But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, Part II, On Translation

trebligdivad•1d ago
Swearing is very location dependent, as a Brit, and a northern one at that, peppering a few swear words in may not be that unusual. This can, erm how shall we put it, 'surprise' some others.
Molitor5901•1d ago
My first question would be: Why? As in: Why do we even need or want to program robots to use profanity?
beefnugs•1d ago
Because the cutest little fluf ball who just squeeked she loves me then wobbles back and forth back to her charging station blurting out an oh fuck as she stubs her toe is hilarious and i deserve to have that in my life
vasusen•1d ago
Grok's unhinged mode is the closest I have seen a bot that leverages profanity. I find it quite entertaining to use occasionally like watching a South Park episode.
CaffeineLD50•1d ago
I fucking approve!
Yizahi•1d ago
Robots today can't "leverage profanity". Robots today can generate words either excluding profanity via some pre-made dictionary or not excluding them. Since both results are simply rehash of the human created data, of course it is possible to program robots to copy profanity too.

It really says nothing about the robot, because it is a robot; but a characteristic of a human who programmed it.