MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nullc | 2025-04-19 12:13:28+00:00
RLHF generally tends to make the model pretty confident making the entropy of it a not so useful predictor of when the model is going to get something wrong.

You can do a kind of sensitivity analysis to see how sensitive the output is to small perturbations of the weights... but it's computationally expensive.

Might be an interesting form of fine tuning to do distillation where the student's current sensitivity to noise (extracted from the backwards step of gradient descent) is used to shrink the predicted distribution towards uniform. It could be done very cheaply during training and perhaps could avoid the back propagation cost of doing it at inference time.
by klaussilveira | 2025-04-19 12:13:39+00:00
I have a ton! If you want to play Doom again, but from the perspective of 15-year old you, try this:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/project-brutality/downloads/proje...

Or if you were more into Heretic, try this:

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=56762

But you should also try new releases that were made thinking of the classics of the past. There's ton of crap, and develoepers that don't really understand what they are doing, but I recommend these:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/562860/Ion_Fury/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2272250/Forgive_Me_Father...

I also recommend the Ashes Trilogy, which is like a blend of Stalker and Doom:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/ashes-2063/downloads/ashes-stand-...
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-19 12:15:28+00:00
Bottom line: Tesla has no actual product to justify the stock's sky high price.

GM, Ford, Toyota etc. all have a price to earning ratio (P/E) of less than 10.

Tesla has a P/E of 120.

But, but, but --- Tesla is more than just an auto manufacturer. Again, there is little in the way of actual product to justify this viewpoint. 90 percent of their income is from autos.

But, but, but --- Tesla is a "growth stock" with huge future potential. Again, the actual data shows otherwise. Sales in 2024 actually declined.

The only reason Tesla has a P/E of 120 is because the so called "smart money" (aka institutional investors) remain bought into Musk's fantasy in a big way.

Musk's best skill is con artistry and Wall Street is one of his biggest marks.
by tim333 | 2025-04-19 12:15:56+00:00
I got sucked into spending quite a while reading about that stuff after seeing a link to Gold on HN. He was an interesting guy. Since he died in 2004 some of his ideas, like a lot of life in the crust seem to have proven correct. Others - that most oil and gas has a primordial origin, not from life seem mostly wrong. There are definitely primordial hydrocarbons - Titan has seas of methane. However on the inner planets a lot evaporated and the majority of our fossil fuels seem of biological origin.

There's a maybe better (very good) article on life in the crust from the NYT june 2024 here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi... . Top comment "This article is one of the most powerful articles I have ever read in the NYT. I am so grateful that the author wrote it. It cemented my belief that that all life is deeply connected from the beginning to the present day and beyond..."
by weatherlite | 2025-04-19 12:16:08+00:00
> And the current death toll can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_co...

- 9,901–10,239 Israeli

- 104,701–110,887 Palestinians

Not sure what "fair exchange" would mean here. It looks like

a) A war / protracted conflict , not some kind of one sided genocide. Jews haven't killed thousands of Germans or tried to bring down the German state. Also, if there is one side that is sympathetic to Nazi ideology it is actually historically the Palestinian side (see Mufti relations with Hitler and his contributions to the final solution).

b) One side is clearly stronger than the other side (however, the weak side is doing everything it can to bring the casaulties numbers up. We know Hamas is doing this).

Israel is not going to try get more Israelis killed just so progressives become happier.
by amelius | 2025-04-19 12:16:25+00:00
It is important to make a distinction between close friends and people you don't know. Also, being alone may feel good but it is not a lasting solution as ultimately humans evolved as social creatures, and you can't rationalize that away.

Try spending e.g. a weekend or a week with close friends or family (if you have a good relationship with them), and see what it does for your anxiety.
by rossant | 2025-04-19 12:16:36+00:00
More than 15 years ago, I was tutoring a few high school students, including one who was particularly strong in math. I put together a special multi-page assignment for him that introduced the exponential function through the concept of compound interest, aiming to convey the intuition behind it and derive some key properties. He absolutely nailed it. I’ve often wondered what became of him.
by throwaway150 | 2025-04-19 12:19:14+00:00
> jay_gridbach: @oefrha I am afraid I had to flag your comment.

OP! This isn't cool. @oefrha basically did a free security audit for you and instead of being grateful for that, you get defensive and flag them? How is this cool?

I also had the same question as tromp about how you're validating that clients aren't cheating. @oefrha's analysis shows you aren't validating. How can we be 100% sure that none of the clients cheated? What if there is a counterexample to the conjecture but one of your clients didn't report it because they cheated? Math results require rigor and without rigor the bold claim is only a "claim" right now, not a fact!
by acdha | 2025-04-19 12:19:39+00:00
> AWS Lambdas, for example, is constant maintenance hell for larger applications, including building and dependency issues, debugging and slow deployment.

Maintenance hell is a symptom of the frameworks in use, not Lambda. If you’re using stable tools, you can go years before doing a 5 minute runtime update and then go years.

Debugging and deployment speed are a stronger argument - the best balance I’ve found is to mandate modular design and local development so developers can work locally except when they are troubleshooting environmental interactions. Framework complexity also matters here - if you’re deploying a heavyweight app using AWS SAM your deployments will be at least 1-2 orders of magnitude slower than a simple Lambda.
by chriswarbo | 2025-04-19 12:20:28+00:00
Indeed, it's a similar lament to how e.g. nobody makes X like in the good old days of Y (for arbitrary X and Y). Except they do, and there's probably way more of X being made, in more nuance of variation, style and fractal sub-categorisation than ever before.

What has changed are that people and culture moved on: the people who made X back then are now into some new Z bullshit; the local W, that used to be all about X, is long gone; and V, which was how we followed all the latest X, doesn't even X these days. We can have nostalgia for those things, but we can also find equivalents if we put in some effort: some that stick with the traditional, others that are pushing things in new directions, choose your poison. The Internet has made it easier to find things outside of the mainstream; and may actually be less effort to follow than when it was mainstream (e.g. YouTube channels vs a weekly TV broadcast; blogs vs magazines; discussion forums vs quarterly meetups; etc.). Maybe without a mainstream "direction", the future of X isn't clear; but it also means we can choose which way we want to push that envelope.

One thing that does get lost is actually "being mainstream"; e.g. events being huge sell-out affairs; being a topic for casual conversation; etc. Things that require other people to give a shit. Yet that's a two-way street: after all, we don't want those Z idiots trying to push their crap on us!
by adrian_b | 2025-04-19 12:20:52+00:00
It is mentioned also in several other novels written by Alexandre Dumas, including some where the action happens in the 16th century, by the time of Catherine de' Medici (a time when in reality there have been many allegations that some suspicious deaths have been caused by poisoning).

Therefore in these novels the use of "aqua tofana" is an anachronism, as it precedes by almost a century the time when "aqua tofana" is supposed to have been invented.
by Out_of_Characte | 2025-04-19 12:21:28+00:00
>There is limited evidence that farming use of antibiotics is what drives resistance in clinical cases.

This is a classic example of asymptotic behaviour analysis.

>That is - we use enormous amounts of antibiotics in farming

You're entirely correct, the data fits an almost exponential curve, the only limiting factor so far has been soil health and costs. the amount of biocides we have to use to keep our productivity will be impossible to match and therefore, even with 0 transference of resistance to human antibiotics, you're gonna see more transference to humans because of farming-biocide resistance. ofcourse, most of this will result in lower crop yield instead of actually selling bad product, this can be slowed down with essentially the same policies and techniques as hospitals employ. But the core problem is the exact same, the extremely quick and deadly takeover of a single strain resistent against our current quo pro due to overuse of a single line of defence.
by kergonath | 2025-04-19 12:22:20+00:00
> Assuming carbon based life as we know it, 300-400C is the probably a hard limit at which point single carbon bonds begin to break down.

Carbon-Carbon covalent bonds are the strongest we know. 300°C is nothing, carbon melts beyond 3000°C. Some organic molecules in our cells degrade at higher temperatures, but it depends on the availability of other species to react. Otherwise, hydrocarbon chemistry can be done beyond 300°C.

I am not saying that this kind of organisms are likely (I have no clue, it’s not my field). But from a chemical point of view there are 2 factors that could be at play:

- exotic organisms could rely on different chemistries altogether to produce energy and rely on molecules that are unstable under our standard conditions;

- and also chemistry under pressure could be very different from what we are used to on the surface.
by audunw | 2025-04-19 12:23:21+00:00
I find it odd that, in very few of the articles that take a positive view on Chinas outlook in this trade war is it mentioned that China is knee deep in debt (when shadow debt is included) and very dependent on exports to avoid catastrophe.

It could still turn out well for China. It’s just that this risk should be mentioned. Otherwise it’s easy to believe that Chinas win here is inevitable.
by throwaway150 | 2025-04-19 12:24:01+00:00
I truly hate to bring this up, knowing how much passion has gone into this project. But there's an important thread got buried due to arguments! That thread raises serious concerns about the validity of this bold claim.

As highlighted by @tromp and @oefrha (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734877) it is clear, clients can cheat. So we can't be 100% sure that none of the clients cheated. What if a counterexample to the conjecture exists, but a dishonest client simply failed to report it? Math results require rigor and without rigor no claim can be trusted. Without rigor, this bold assertion remains just that. A claim, not a fact.

OP! On top of that, you're being evasive in threads where you're being asked how your validation works and you went so far as to flag a pertinent thread. That definitely doesn't inspire confidence. Addressing the validation questions is absolutely 100% necessary if you want this to be seen as more than just a claim.
by alternatex | 2025-04-19 12:24:23+00:00
I feel like you completely misinterpreted their comment. They replied to a comment saying that state should not be centralized. They said that if the state decentralized (as in held by individual child components) it's difficult to coordinate between sibling and parent/child components.

It seems like you're saying that it's easy to do UI with a centralized state, therefore agreeing with them whilst having the tone of disagreement.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-19 12:24:56+00:00
If you study this stuff in the americas it’s depressing as the Spanish in particular slaughtered people and culture so completely and unimpeded for so long. The evil and barbarism of this colonial episode is difficult to fathom. The 20th century horror show of slaughter ran in relatively short episodes… this imperial era ran for hundreds of years.

Because you’re left with archeological evidence, whose interpretation is always very conservative, and limited oral tradition, it’s easy to veer into legend, because honestly that’s that who have to work with.
Show HN: Chat2Report-Your AI Assistant for Financial Reports
by geekbing | 2025-04-19 12:26:19+00:00
This is the first SaaS application I developed (based on RAG), which can quickly gain insights from tens of thousands of financial reports from thousands of companies.

https://ch2report.com

I am looking for 5 early users. If you would like to try this application, please send your registration email to my email (from my profile), and I would be happy to set up a free trial for you.

I would love to hear all the feedback/suggestions. Thanks!
by dopidopHN | 2025-04-19 12:27:53+00:00
I see your point and I agree. Grabber “the dawn of everything” comes to mind on that “noble savage” phenomenon

That being said : there is something to be said about the Spanish cargo culting those canals in that specific plain… and failing to maintain it.

While we know it was fertile for generation before.

The article hint at private ownership being a factor? I could see that.

But 100% agree : I spend the article asking “ok, what is the culture then”

But it looks like it happen: irrigation work Spanish take over irrigation it stop working

I suspect sabotage was a bit factor, too.
Ask HN: Why is my F500 employer okay with paying 5x to freelancers?
by mettamage | 2025-04-19 12:28:03+00:00
I've changed some facts a bit. The story still stands.

This is definitely one of those times where I'm breaking my brain because something isn't logical and I haven't yet understand the cultural side of things, or hidden reasons I haven't identified yet. In almost all aspects of life, I don't have this issue anymore, but corporate life is new to me.

So could you please help me out?

I work in the Netherlands in a marketing department where we have a dire need for more IT skills. I happen to have been a software engineer currently turned data analyst which is why we're capable of launching technical projects fast. IT people are being hired as freelancers around 150 euro's per hour. I'm making 30 euro's per hour as an employee. I know that as an employee my 30 euro's is actually "more" due to vacation and pension, etc. but it's nowhere near 150 euro's. Also, these freelancers have been working here for years on a per hour basis.

They were asking me, among others, how we should manage our budget of half a million euro's. I asked them: "why don't you simply see if you can ask your current staff to work 20 hours more for 75 euro's per hour on a freelance basis?"

Manager: "We can't do that."

Me: "but you're cutting costs by 50% plus you minimize overhead because their freelance tasks are adjacent to their actual roles but given it's not their actual role, a freelance assignment is warranted."

Manager: "yea but then everyone wants to freelance in this department like that."

Me: "So you're telling me that I can go out and freelance for an additional 20 hours but just not with this company?"

Manager: "Yea sure as long as it's not a company in the same industry."

Me: "But that would create all kinds of overhead. Why don't I just freelance for you guys? You told me you want innovation and a strong focus on AI and I'm currently the only person in your department who can make good on that promise."

Manager: "That's just not how it works."

Can anyone tell me why not? It frustrates me that marketing managers from high up talking about AI and innovation. I actually listen, use my software engineering skills to use AI in novel ways by automating LLMs, new things do actually get done but then when it comes to doubling down on it, and I'm asking to work 20 hours more, they don't want to do that. But they would be totally fine to go to an external company and pay hundreds of thousands of euro's for something that I created in a month.

I feel frustrated and confused. If someone has some clarity on this and can tell me "how the business world works" that would be really nice. Because it doesn't make sense.
by iDon | 2025-04-19 12:28:23+00:00
IBM did a partial implementation of ASN.1 in Java, and released it via the IBM AlphaWorks open-source repository. I used it in a telecommunications system in the 90s. Luckily the GSM protocol we were interfacing with only used a small subset of ASN.1, which was covered by the IBM software. IBM AlphaWorks is still online : https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/aix-toolbox-open-source-so... but only lists libtasn1, which is in C.

Here's a post about AlphaWorks : https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ibm-alphawor...

Searching for that, I found this post, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37056554/opensource-java... which mentions : https://www.beanit.com/asn1/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/jac-asn1/ which are more recent java ASN.1 implementations.
by ksec | 2025-04-19 12:29:25+00:00
How long does it take to capture that one tonne of carbon?

Our Annual CO2 emission is about 40B tons. In order to be Carbon Negative we need to capture 60 - 80B tons / year.

That is about 80B x 200 Litres of Aqua Food. Or 16 Trillion Litres. Roughly 3 to 4 times the amount of soft drinks Coca cola sold per year.

And doing it continuously for 20 years we would revert back to about 80s.
by genewitch | 2025-04-19 12:29:57+00:00
I very rarely use emojiis on github. If I can't add anything to the discussion / issue, I post nothing. So if there's enough people like me, an issue can languish.

However the barrier to entry for a lot of issues reporting is pretty tall - requiring triplicate documentation of everything. It's like an overreaction to the sort of people that need to be told to unplug something for 30 seconds to continue the support call.

And that's if they even "allow" issues.

I was posting in issues note frequently 1-3 years ago. I'm sure I'd be sheepish about some posts.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-19 12:29:59+00:00
I was willing to forgive Elon some of his eccentricities.

Until he repeated, more than once, obviously egregious untruths of Trump's.

I will admit I was late to the realisation.

Elon will say whatever he feels will progress his agenda, no matter how far disconnected from reality. He's jumped the shark and is doing far more harm than good. He needs to shrink into obscurity for his own, and the rest of the world's, good.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-04-19 12:30:32+00:00
I guess we might have a mismatch in values.

As you hint at it, "the World Wide Web as an application platform" specifically happened more because Google was wrestling with Microsoft over the future of personal computing than because of its inherent qualities. (And then they both got sidelined by Apple's iPhone, but Google (unlike Microsoft) did manage to both enter that battlefield and hold that front.)
by 7a1c9427 | 2025-04-19 12:32:15+00:00
As a comparison in the UK there is robust mandatory reporting on "Retained foreign object post procedure" which is a so-called "Never Event" in the most recent publication (April 2024 to September 2024) this occurred 60 times[1] in the NHS in England. For a denominator there are approximately 21 million operation performed in a year by NHS England[2]. So roughly 0.002% of cases have an unintended retained object or roughly 1 in 50,000.

For further reading the Health Services Safety Investigations Body in the UK (like the NTSB but for healthcare incidents is the best worst analogy) looked at retained foreign objects and published in 2024: https://www.hssib.org.uk/patient-safety-investigations/retai...

[1]: https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/provisional-publication... [2]: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...
by philjohn | 2025-04-19 12:32:24+00:00
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/fuel-cell-e...

I believe all Hydrogen vehicles are using proton exchange membranes still, which have roughly 40-50% efficiency.

And that's before you take into account that even the most cutting edge hydrogen refining processes are around 70% efficient.

So 1kWh of energy input (electricity) will net you 3X the motive power when used directly in a BEV than first being coverted to hydrogen, and then converted back into electricity.[1]

[1] 0.5*0.7 = 0.35.
by chrismorgan | 2025-04-19 12:33:05+00:00
Although appealing, that’s an extremely bad idea, when you’re limited to JavaScript. In a language with a better type system, it can be only a very bad idea.

The problem is that different contexts have different escaping rules. It’s not possible to give a one-size-fits-all answer from the server side. It has to be done in a context-aware way.

Field A is plain text. Someone enters the value “Alpha & Beta”. Now, what does your server do? If it sanitises by stripping HTML characters, you’ve just blocked valid input; not good. If it doesn’t sanitise but instead unconditionally escapes HTML, somewhere, sooner or later, you’re going to end up with an “Alpha &amp; Beta” shown to the user, when the value gets used in a place that isn’t taking serialised HTML. It always happens sooner or later. (If it doesn’t sanitise or escape, and the client doesn’t escape but just drops it directly into the serialised HTML, that’s an injection vulnerability.)

Field B is HTML. Someone enters the value “<img src=/ onerror=alert('pwnd')>”. Now, what does your server do? If it sanitises by applying a tag/attribute whitelist so that you end up with perhaps “<img src="/">”, fine.
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-19 12:34:56+00:00
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covi...

> Claims vetted by the CDC included whether "COVID-19 is man-made." The CDC told Facebook that it was "theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely."

> For months, it was Meta policy to prohibit users from asserting that the pandemic may have originated from a lab leak. The platform revised this policy around the same time that the above email exchange took place.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-19 12:35:45+00:00
I don't think it's odd.

(1) Chinese debt is internal.

(2) China is still ideologically communist authoritarian nation with market economy.

They can fix thing by fiat. No need to think about legal issues or respect property right. They can give X% haircut for bad debt, or freeze debt payments for 5 years for debts they think are destabilizing the economy. They don't have to give same treatment to all debt.

Demographics is the problem for China in long term, not debt.
by rvz | 2025-04-19 12:35:51+00:00
> So, I love snakes: I think they are the coolest animals out there

No they are not. Said almost no-one.

These creatures contribute almost nothing to society and even if they're used to get rid of pests, there are other animals that do it better without being an extreme danger to humans or they can be safely caught and released.

But instead, these creatures just want to bite, spit or strangle you if they feel like it and in some cases really just want to kill you (because they think you will kill them first).

You cannot reason with these creatures with full of venom in their fangs even if the situation was an accident.