MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-07 17:40:27+00:00
The research in question: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/mgen/10...

They were doing genetic sequencing across a decade or so at this one hospital to document how the bacteria is evolving to develop resistance - and it currently has resistance to a wide number of drugs.

Sounds like it is highly prevalent in hospitals in lesser developed countries and has been slowly developing resistance but not widely studied, and this particular strain at this particular hospital seems to be further along the path.

WHO considers it a "critical priority antibiotic-resistant pathogen."

Most hits on the subject in the news seem to be coming from tabloid-level organizations. This looked fairly sane: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-deadly-antibiotic-res...

A reminder to HNers, from another HNer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812804
by 9rx | 2025-04-07 17:41:41+00:00
> Are you saying that it's hard to bootstrap a pure B2C business using only B2C revenue sources?

I said that consumers don't like to buy much these days, so business opportunities are effectively limited to selling to other businesses.

But businesses can't absorb buying your wares if they can't sell to someone else in kind – eventually meaning the consumer. That is, unless they have angel money to burn. So what was also said is that even within the B2B space, you are bound to be dependent on angel money even if you don't receive it directly. Meaning, as it pertained to the comment that came before it, that someone needs to accept the angel money to keep the house of cards standing.

> That's what 37signals did.

37signals doesn't strike me as trying to tackle B2C in any meaningful capacity either. 'Hey' plays that angle a little bit, which is maybe what you are thinking of, but it is clear that selling to business is still the bread and butter even there.
by generalizations | 2025-04-07 17:41:41+00:00
I suspect the environmental pushback is from a vocal minority which dislikes the cynical lip-service companies have found it necessary/expedient to give.

"nor a direct path" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I see no reason to push back against a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process. If you're claiming that their attempts yet a solution, then your point is as useless as expecting them to solve the entire problem on the first go. If you're claiming that their attempts aren't even going in the right direction, and aren't how you find a solution, then that would require much more evidence towards a negative proof than has yet been raised here - enough to say that they should definitely give up now.

In fact, insofar as we care about extinction, their success is likely our best shot at long-term preservation. I'd like to see them keep trying.
by dbl000 | 2025-04-07 17:42:00+00:00
The Complete Yes Minister, a novelization of the TV show, but probably more approachable. A kind of "high brow" skewering of politics and government. There's a lot of interplay between politicians and civil servants that mirrors some play between politicians and people, especially in the case of "systemic lag".

Erasure by Percival Everett. A book on racial conformity and expectations. A weird case where the movie (American Fiction) might be better than the book. Pretty easy and quick read however. I don't know what it was but this book has stuck with me ever since I've read it.

The Code Book by Simon Singh. This is the book that got me into cryptography. It's a bit old and outdated now (published in 1999) but it was responsible for forming a lifelong interest in me.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door by Christopher Mims. The premise was supposed to be tracking a product from production to consumer, but then the COVID happened. The book turns into an exploration of how just in time production and supply lanes work today.

The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. I had a professor who was friends with BBM, so when we were discussing selectorate theory we actually got to meet him. At it's core this is a cynical book about realpolitik, talking about how leaders get in power, stay in power, get money and foreign aid, and deal with revolutions and war. It is very political focused but the theory can be abstracted out to most big organizations. It fundamentally changed the way I look at interactions between countries. This is 100% a more mass market appeal book than the original paper (and imo a bit dumbed down) but everyone I've recommended it to has come back appreciative about it.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-07 17:42:01+00:00
> a positive trade balance is the only thing it's interested in

At this point I think that's still far too generous, as opposed to real interests of People Grovel At My Feet, slightly tempered by I Stay Rich.

Consider this (further) unhinged meltdown earlier today:

> Yesterday, China issued Retaliatory Tariffs of 34% [...] despite my warning that any country that Retaliates against the U.S. by issuing additional Tariffs [...] will be immediately met with new and substantially higher Tariffs [...] if China does not withdraw its 34% increase [...] by tomorrow [...] the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50% [...] Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/07/trump-tariffs-live-updates-s...
by gwern | 2025-04-07 17:42:32+00:00
> Interestingly, for models up to 1 billion parameters, the loss actually starts to increase again after reaching a minimum. This might be because as training continues, the model develops more complex, non-linear representations that our simple linear probe can’t capture as well. Or it might be that the model starts to overfit on the training data and loses its more general concept of nullability.

Double descent?
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-07 17:43:22+00:00
The administration (i.e. Trump) thinks that negotiation means taking extreme and hostile positions, then waiting for others to try to make concessions to deescalate. Holding a gun to the world's economy (ours included) in return for something he can show off as a win is very much in line with his philosophy of "deals".

Actually achieving stated aims though? Ahhh, not so much, talk is cheap for him.
by fedsocpuppet | 2025-04-07 17:43:59+00:00
I was an undergrad and this is just wrong. Most are not going into HFT, and a bunch don't go into FAANG either. And not everyone who gets in was raised in a perfect upper middle class life. Do you really want to care about judgement from people who think not working at a trading firm is a failure? Those people are insufferable anyway
by 0xBDB | 2025-04-07 17:43:59+00:00
Yes.

The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate. So it defined interstate commerce as anything that substantially affects interstate commerce. Did you cut down a tree in your backyard and use it to make your own pencil with your own labor? That kept you from buying a pencil that might have been made in another state. Interstate commerce.

Did you just represent an idea, and did I pay you with my attention? Advertising. Prison.
by dude01 | 2025-04-07 17:44:01+00:00
I love the ideas presented, and it really highlights how current IDE's have removed power from users. I think (from only reading and watching some videos) that this Glamorous Toolkit is a hybrid between Smalltalk IDE and C.A.S.E. tools.

However, I downloaded the app but cannot figure out how to view my own source code. None of the example videos that I can find, show me how to use an existing local git checkout of source code.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-07 17:44:13+00:00
This is simply untrue, the Magic Trackpad is a paid $50 upgrade from the default Magic Mouse: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac

By default, Apple expects you to own the Magic Mouse. Which is probably a part of their plan to upsell you to the Magic Trackpad - the rift in quality between the two accessories is so great that it's hard to imagine they're made by the same company.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-07 17:45:31+00:00
In the confession of The Golden State Killer, he said that he would feel a force enter his being and do the raping and murdering. He also said that when he got older he was strong enough to resist it.

A lot of people lob ad homs at me and call me names and deny what I say here, but not a single one of you can explain our tragic human situation.

We can engineer fantastic buildings, create astounding works of art, perform the most incredible feats on the soccer pitch, and yet racism, poverty, cruelty, child porn and sexual abuse, oppression, and hatred remains rampant.

From my perspective of compassion, without asking anything from anyone here, I explain our situation to boos and unhelpful naysayers.

I am quite ahold of myself, my family loves me and I am at peace and happy. Yesterday my antics on the soccer pitch made my family laugh until they ached. We are poor but have our sustenance and live within our Creator's love.

As Eugene Parker said, "Well, we'll see who falls flat." The Parker Solar Probe is now orbiting the sun, doing its science, a marvel of engineering. And an evil, hateful bastard put a bullet in the servant of love Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s head 57 years ago, simply because he claimed that Black folks were human beings.

The truth is undefeatable, though we can be killed by the hateful fools of this world. I stand with compassion and truth.
by dubrado | 2025-04-07 17:45:39+00:00
1. rent 4x H100 instance on http://app.hyperbolic.xyz/compute (Llama 4 Scout has 109B parameters in bf16, so the weights are already 218GB)

2. open a terminal tool and SSH into the machine

3. run the following commands: >> sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip >> pip install -U vllm >> pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]"

4. get an access token on u/huggingface website and run >> huggingface-cli login

5. use @vllm_project to serve Llama 4 >> vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 4 --max-model-len 10000

6. open a new terminal and call the API to know "What can I do in SF?": >> curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "model": "meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct", "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What can I do in SF?"} ] }'

It's just that simple ;) A big thank you to @AIatMeta and @vllm_project for making it easy to access the best open intelligence!
by jmclnx | 2025-04-07 17:45:52+00:00
Most of the internet runs on Linux and the money involved is enormous. So yes, of course it will get pulled into politics.

In the past, with this trade war Trump started, the US could just ban software/hardware from going to say China. Now no more. Also since Linux is free and the source is under the GPL, no way to stop it from being used everywhere.

I wonder how long it would take to try and shutdown the GPL and maybe impose a kind of governmental type permit to view/use Open Source Software.

Already we have had github locking out some people due to where they live, I am sure that will expand. That is why I think we need a networked Source Code Control system that cannot be influenced politically.
by thisislife2 | 2025-04-07 17:46:00+00:00
What effort is "forfeited" (if you are talking about open source code)? If you use any GPL software, any modifications you make belongs to you until you choose to distribute the software with your modifications. Modifying a GPL software, for personal use, doesn't mean that you are obliged to make your modifications also open source. Moreover, GPL also means that you can never be denied access to the source code of a GPL software that is publicly distributed. This is because GPL protects a users "right to repair".

For example, consider the case of a software distributed under a permissive license like MIT or BSD. If you modify and re-distribute it, anyone else can further modify the software that you patched and improved but they are not obliged to release the new source code to you. In such a scenario, you are willing "forfeiting" your effort. With GPL, at least your right to access future source codes (of publicly distributed GPL software) cannot be denied to not just you, but any user of the software.
by paul7986 | 2025-04-07 17:46:05+00:00
As a heavy GPT user via chat and text I've been longing to ditch Apple for something new like a GPT Phone that...

- On the lock screen of my AI device (GPT Phone?) I see my AI Assistant like a Facetime call UI/UX. I can skin it to look like anyone including deceased loved ones (possibly crazy idea lol). I can communicate with it just like talking to a human (facial and hand gestures too).

- My AI Assistant interfaces with AI Agents (businesses, family, friends, etc) to schedule things, get things done and its my knowledgebase. Opening a web browser is almost barely done. I guess it can be my friend, my doctor to more

- My AI Assistant can get me to the best lighting to take the best selfies.

Anyway been excited about such an AI/GPT phone coming to fruition for the past year and maybe this it. Maybe it's not a phone, but cool to see the early workings of something new, innovative and the next big thing (Smart glasess arent it more complimentary as you cant take selfies with smart glasses).
by bbor | 2025-04-07 17:46:35+00:00
Plus, at a certain point we should probably ask what we're even doing here. At the same time and using the same ostensible "pro-environment" framework, we:

1. refuse to engage in biome modification to save soon-to-be-homeless species like the Axolotl,

2. are willing to go to great lengths to preserve existing biomes exactly as they are, such as opening up owl hunting permits to protect the western US's shittier owls from encroachment by the dominant eastern species, and

3. are trying to revive mammoths and dire wolves to increase biodiversity.

If we truly care about biodiversity, we should probably decide upfront why we aren't protecting some of the 400K species of beetles or 150K species of flies (together making up ~1/3rd of all animal species) instead.

Personally, my preferred answer is simpler: embrace human aesthetic preferences, rather than pretend we're doing all this for some altruistic, scientifically-supported cause. Not only should we respect nature, we should respect its inherent capacity for change and disregard for human morality. Nature is ambivalent towards mass extinctions, much less specific ones!

TBH, the Red Mars books' discussion around when and why to preserve abiotic martian landscapes may have radicalized me on this issue...
by freedomben | 2025-04-07 17:47:30+00:00
Indeed, this is a big benefit of being from MIT. Most professors at most schools don't have good connections in my experience, but that is not the case for MIT.

Asking for referrals/connections will be more effective though if you have an interest and focus and can articulate that to the prof. Imagine they are the first link in the hiring chain and treat them accordingly. You need to sell yourself to them before they'll sell you to their network.
by jack_h | 2025-04-07 17:48:13+00:00
Code maintainability could be analogized to 5S in the manufacturing world. As a hypothetical let's say someone started assembling some product on the bare concrete warehouse floor because they had a pressing order to fill. A few months later it's just a mess of parts strewn about the floor that workers have to sift through to find the correct pieces for the assembly. The goal of a business is to make money, not have a clean workspace as a sibling comment mentioned. Ultimately this would leave a company vulnerable to a competitor who doesn't have such an expensive and inefficient production process though.

I've worked on many, many features that never recouped their engineering cost despite the absolute assurance by sales that it was necessary. It would have been more effective long term to work on improving code maintainability so that we could better capitalize on features that substantially affect revenue in a positive direction. All too often I see that code maintainability only matters to the business when features can no longer be reliably and quickly delivered, but by then it's usually too late to really change course. This sort of balance also tends to drive all of the new fancy frameworks that cause so much churn as the signal from the business to engineering is that engineering needs to be able to pump out features very quickly but will not be given time to focus on maintainability so naturally this gets outsourced to someone else.

To be fair, I have also been involved in an emergency project that if it wasn't completed in a very tight time frame the company would have lost 30% of their revenue and there would have been substantial workforce reductions. We did not focus on maintainability in this situation rather we focused on saving the company.

Everything is a trade-off in business. My experience tells me companies generally focus on short term profit over long term concerns and there's very little in the way of feedback mechanisms that allow an inspection of these decisions in aggregate to see if the right balance is being struck.
by lsy | 2025-04-07 17:48:14+00:00
The article puts scare quotes around "understand" etc. to try to head off critiques around the lack of precision or scientific language, but I think this is a really good example of where casual use of these terms can get pretty misleading.

Because code LLMs have been trained on the syntactic form of the program and not its execution, it's not correct — even if the correlation between variable annotations and requested completions was perfect (which it's not) — to say that the model "understands nullability", because nullability means that under execution the variable in question can become null, which is not a state that it's possible for a model trained only on a million programs' syntax to "understand". You could get the same result if e.g. "Optional" means that the variable becomes poisonous and checking "> 0" is eating it, and "!= None" is an antidote. Human programmers can understand nullability because they've hopefully run programs and understand the semantics of making something null.

The paper could use precise, scientific language (e.g. "the presence of nullable annotation tokens correlates to activation of vectors corresponding to, and emission of, null-check tokens with high precision and accuracy") which would help us understand what we can rely on the LLM to do and what we can't. But it seems like there is some subconscious incentive to muddy how people see these models in the hopes that we start ascribing things to them that they aren't capable of.
by oslem | 2025-04-07 17:49:02+00:00
I disagree. Drag racing involves incredible honed vehicle endurance, just on a much shorter timescale. It’s an engineering problem with the goal of outputting as much power as possible within a short timespan (often only a few seconds) without detrimentally destroying the engine. As far as the drivers are concerned, the reaction time is obviously important, but they have to be extraordinarily consistent. At that, they have to drive the car at 5 g’s- not an easy task.
by autoexec | 2025-04-07 17:49:14+00:00
> Isn't this a problem? Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest

I don't think so. Government workers have faced the same problems as workers in the private sector (excessive overtime, unpaid wages, pay not keeping up with inflation, workplace safety issues, etc.) and unions are the best way we have to combat those kinds of issues to ensure that workers are treated fairly.

> The legitimacy of government is predicated on the ability of the voter to yank the money from the government if it's ineffective -- otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability.

We can certainly vote out people who commit fraud and decide democratically what we want the government to spend money on, but we can also decide that some things are worth having even when they don't make money. Governments can even run programs at a loss if we feel that those services are worth having. That doesn't mean printing money.
by johnpaulkiser | 2025-04-07 17:49:46+00:00
I think we need to be very careful & intentional about the language we use with these kinds of tools, especially now that the MCP floodgates have been opened. You aren't just exposing the users browsing data to which ever model they are using, you are also exposing it any tools they may be allowing as well.

A lot of non technical people are using these tools to "vibe" their way to productivity. I would explicitly tell them that potentially "all" of their browsing data is going to be exposed to their LLM client and they need to use this at their own risk.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-07 17:49:50+00:00
Where does "it generally isn't profitable" come from? The US healthcare system has many flaws, but lack of profitable medical facilities doesn't seem to be one of them.

General healthcare is a very ordinary market. You want to go to the doctor once a year to get checked out, they send your blood to a lab to check your cholesterol etc., you pay them money for this. If they find some condition with a known treatment, you pay for the treatment. In case the treatment is very expensive, you buy insurance ahead of time.

The reason people hate it is that people are willing to do anything in order to not die, so they want that level of resources to be available to them, but they don't actually want to pay anything, or to be denied if they decline to pay an extraordinarily large amount, because the alternative is death. But "pay a lot of money or people die" is the nature of it. You can try to paper over it with insurance or taxpayer subsidies but that trade off is inherent and that it makes people uncomfortable doesn't change the fact.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-04-07 17:50:36+00:00
Former Intelligence officer here.

Cause SIPR, JWICS, GIANT etc… are nearly impossible to access - to the extent where for SCI info (which is arguably the level of data they were passing) they constrain you to having to communicate in a certified SCIF

The SecDef has a bunch of SCIFs but even NSC staff don’t to the same degree.

People pass TS/SCI data outside of the system regularly - congress is notorious for this and I have personally had multi year operations shut down because a congressman talked about it at a hearing.

I know of plenty of parking lot “SCIF” and sneakernet SCI conversations because time was an issue

The reality is this admin doesn’t care about the structures that the national security community is statuatorily mandated to use, but there’s nobody that is going to do anything to them about deviating.

Classified networks suck to use, anyone who can get around it does. The fact that its the secdef and nsc and they got busted just demonstrates that they view their behavior as more important than the system.

Left to the viewer to determine if thats a good tradoff
by motorest | 2025-04-07 17:50:38+00:00
> That's pretty much irrelevant unless you opt out next reopening.

Not really. If your goal as an investor is to maximize your returns. Obviously, buying a security when it's value is cratering is the worst time to buy simply due to the fact that, in a scenario of an unavoidable bounce back, waiting out while doing nothing is more profitable. Buying earlier in the crash simply means the profitability of your hypothetical scenario is lowered.

> If you have your portfolio down 15%, 20% or 30% it does not matter. That's the short term picture.

I don't think you fully grasp the implications. Even assuming a simplistic interpretation of an unavoidable bounce back, if you postpone buying after the price craters 30% then you're guaranteeing your investment will be more profitable. Remember, the trick is to buy low and sell high, not buy high and hope it will somehow get higher.