MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by intended | 2025-05-27 16:17:45+00:00
I get the feeling that you aren’t asking for the short version, because most people wouldn’t latch onto that point and create an account for it.

Hmmm.

An example - the inefficacy of Fact checking efforts. Fact checking is quintessentially counter speech, and we know that it has failed to stop the uptake and popularity of falsehoods. And I say this after speaking to people who work at fact checking orgs.

However, this is in itself too simple an example.

The mechanics of online forums are more interesting to illustrate the point - Truth is too expensive to compete with cheaper content.

Complex articles can be shared on a community, which debunk certain points, but the community doesn’t read it. They do engage heavily on emotional content, which ends up supporting their priors.

I struggle to make this point nicely, but The accuracy of your content is secondary to its value as an emotional and narrative utility for the audience.

People are not coming online to be scientists. They are coming online to be engaged. Counter speech solves the issue of inaccuracy, and is only valuable if inaccuracy is a negative force.

It is too expensive a good to produce, vs alternatives. People will coalesce around wounds and lacunae in their lives, and actively reject information that counters their beliefs. Cognitive dissonance results in mental strife and will result in people simply rejecting information rather than altering their priors.

Do note - this is a point about the efficacy of this intervention in upholding the effectiveness of the market where we exchange ideas. There will be many individual exchanges where counter speech does change minds.

But at a market level, it is ineffective as a guardian and tonic against the competitive advantage of falsehoods against facts.

——

Do forgive the disjointed quality in the response. It’s late here, and I wish I could have just linked you to a bunch of papers, but I dont think that would have been the response you are looking for.
by michael1999 | 2025-05-27 16:18:02+00:00
Iraq is a country: - with 45 million people - speaking languages other than english - a quarter of the way around the world - next to Iran and Turkey who could spoil US operations

And Bush still destroyed it with ease. The idea that the USA couldn't annex Canada by force is just silly.

We'd fight, and slit your throats in the dark. But there are some of us who'd just roll over, or welcome you with open arms. Just look at the morons in Alberta talking USA annexation -- they're probably 10% of the population. That's enough for a Quisling regime.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-27 16:18:10+00:00
> Coax is due to other issues around CTB and/or the challenge that in Coax, you've got many frequencies running through alongside each frequency having different attenuation per 100 foot

Actually this is true for fibers as well. In DWDM (all internet links are DWDM, including fiber-to-the-home in most places) you have many frequencies running alongside and each frequency has differences in attenuation (though generally measured per kilometer, not 100 foot)

Optical light are standing electromagnetic waves. Which means they don't disrupt each other. Electrical signals aren't standing waves. They affect each other.

The difference can be put like this: how many X (electrical waves, but essentially everything, protons, ...) fit on the tip of a needle? (or in a cable)

1) electrical waves? Some finite number. Can be large of course, but ...

2) photons (ie. fiber signals)? ALL OF THEM. Literally every photon that exists in the entire universe would happily join every other photon on the tip of a needle nothing would interfere with anything else
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 16:18:20+00:00
I fear that remote-proctoring can be liable to more false positives, if they are going to flag actions that "might" indicate a cheating sort of behavior, but they can't reach in and unveil your secret cheat sheet or identify your accomplice. I don't know the whole process after the remote proctor flags something, but it would seem more difficult for the student to defend innocence.
by lisper | 2025-05-27 16:18:47+00:00
Aargh! I hate it when people quote text as images because it makes it impossible to cut and paste.

> Jet black/Jet Blue ... catnap/dognap

My favorite examples are how prepositions can change the meanings of idioms. For example, to be "down for" something and "down with" something mean the same thing, but to be "down on" something means the opposite. (And going down to X means something very, very different from going down on X. That last example is also interesting from a geeky HN point of view because the preposition imposes a type constraint on the binding of X, which is why I had to use "X" instead of "something" :-)
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-27 16:19:06+00:00
People willing to put in an effort to acquire and lovingly conserve the media of interest to them are often the people who really care about that media. They are often the most eager to support the creators of different media.

Which is extremely logical and obvious, if one can quickly lift one's head up above the "anti-piracy" propaganda of the major copyright-wielding creativity-killing companies spewing out the same drivel year after year.

Conversely, I have found that the same people who will happily equate "having a spotify subscription" to "supporting artists", who do things like attack people who jailbreak their kindle or whatever, these people are often the greatest thoughtless vibers when it comes to media. Try asking someone like that to name a piano player, or a bassist, or a drummer. Ask them to name three directors.

They'll know celebrities, not musicians or actors. They'll know to attack "pirates" on cue, but have no conception where their money goes every month when their subscriptions are billed.

I'm caricaturing, but these are my experiences.
by justacrow | 2025-05-27 16:19:11+00:00
So they've compared a panel of experts, regular physicians and their AI (yet another ChatGPT wrapper) and the AI is outperforming the regular group of doctors by 27% on the task of determining what classification code to use for cases?

This doesn't really mean anything I think? What is "better" in this context, and how much different from the "correct" results are we talking? What sort of differences are there in these codes and could two physicians reliably use different codes for the same thing?
by gautamp8 | 2025-05-27 16:19:11+00:00
Yeah, we've already gotten this feedback, working on it. We'll be making a chrome extension live soon, to simplify this and suggest what handles + instructions you can send to MXtoAI.

If you have a better experience in mind, let us know. If this goes well and users trust us enough, we might work on an automated inbox monitoring service to automatically run workflows for you.
by wgjordan | 2025-05-27 16:19:12+00:00
Not just 'Tetris' (and *-'tris') trademark and Lanham Act trade dress, but they have also successfully argued in court [1] that the 'look and feel' of Tetris constitutes its copyrighted expression. In that case, Tetris Holding argued (and the judge agreed) that even the use of the seven one-sided tetromino playing pieces was part of their copyright.

Here's the description of the only Tetris gameplay mechanics the judge in this case conceded cannot be protected:

> Tetris is a puzzle game where a user manipulates pieces composed of square blocks, each made into a different geometric shape, that fall from the top of the game board to the bottom where the pieces accumulate. The user is given a new piece after the current one reaches the bottom of the available game space. While a piece is falling, the user rotates it in order to fit it in with the accumulated pieces. The object of the puzzle is to fill all spaces along a horizontal line. If that is accomplished, the line is erased, points are earned, and more of the game board is available for play. But if the pieces accumulate and reach the top of the screen, then the game is over. These then are the general, abstract ideas underlying Tetris and cannot be protected by copyright nor can expressive elements that are inseparable from them.

[1] Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. (2012) https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=180648822600252...
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-27 16:19:32+00:00
Disagree, the article's lead image is actually better. The Getty image is way too cluttered, and just artistically uninspired in general. If the author got his hero image by feeding the Getty image to AI and asking for a cleaned-up, focused version, then that's doing it right in my book, ethical considerations aside.

There really should be a way to credit the original source image without being compelled to actually use it. The image in the article isn't a "rip off," but it is a derivative work made without permission, and the law doesn't currently make a distinction AFAIK.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-27 16:20:12+00:00
On the contrary, if someone says they like you but they haven't even met you, they're dishonest.

Employment is not a romantic relationship where mutual feelings are required, it's a transactional one. You don't need to like your CEO and the CEO doesn't need to like you.

You need to provide value for the company and the company has to pay you money in exchange, that's how it works. Two parties can monetarily prosper together while simultaneously disliking each other. Nations do it all the time, see China and the US, and business partners do it all the time, see the MythBusters and many more. The most successful business people are also the ones who are best at putting feelings and emotions aside of financial interest.

Gaslighting workers that a private company will have feelings or emotional attachment towards them will only result in disappointment for you, but it's a lesson many learn the hard way. They won't be by your deathbed, only your family will.

Do you want the harsh truth or the sweet lie? Because that GE exec at least told it to you straight like to an adult, hence my chapeau, even if it shatters your rosy belief. The world could use more like them, instead of the sociopaths who manipulate you to stick around while they're already planning for the group's crash in a year which is coincidently when their golden parachute stocks vest.
by mercurialsolo | 2025-05-27 16:20:23+00:00
Good job on the launch - will give it a spin for our coding agent. Having worked a bunch with the agents i see below as the next evolution or leap in agents.

I see 2 big factors to improve ability of coding agents today

- on device model - context (or understanding of modules) - not only retrieving the relevant sections or codebase but creating a version (transforming it) which is readily consumable by a model and used to focus on the problem at hand.

This requires both a macro global context of the codebase and the ability to retrieve the local context of the problem being solved.

Augment context e.g. does a fairly good job of context compression and retrieval among coding agents. Fast indexing & retrieval is a good step forward to enable open context compression
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-27 16:20:34+00:00
> You need to add controls, as some people would like it set up differently than their OS.

The Browser also has controls. Good Browsers let you set your browser-wide choice differently from your OS-wide choice. Great Browsers let you pick per-site overrides directly, as a standard user setting in a consistent location in browser controls. I realize a lot of UX designers have come to much prefer the "add more controls" approach over the "teach a person to fish" / understand how your OS and browser controls work as the user of the site approach. I realize why a lot of UX designers will always prefer that approach, because teaching people is hard and it is easier to cut complaints off at the pass than answer complaints with "use your browser's settings".

But seriously, it should be fine to release a dark mode in 2025 that only responds to `prefers-color-scheme: dark` and leaves it to users to understand their OS and Browser tools. It irks me a lot more when sites like Wikipedia and Bing and Google ignore `prefers-color-scheme: dark` by default and makes you dig for some dumb website-specific control (that's in a different place on every website) just to set it to whatever they call "System default" that means "trust the Browser's prefers-color-scheme, I know what I'm doing". UX designers have taken something that should be natural and automatic and made it more complex and more confusing just because a small handful of users complain that they don't understand their OS and Browser Settings tools.
by crakhamster01 | 2025-05-27 16:20:45+00:00
Haha, I tried to couch this by adding "too far", but I agree. Companies should let their teams try out relevant tools in their workflows.

My point was more of a response to the inflated expectations that people have about AI. The current generation of AI tech is rife with gotchas and pitfalls. Many companies seem to be making decisions with the hope that they will out-innovate any consequences.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-05-27 16:21:01+00:00
That makes sense and sounds consistent with what I was saying. I guess it wasn't clear to me what you meant by "biasing" the funnel.

You obviously need to bias your recruitment efforts, and more than slightly if you want proportional representation of applicants, but I believe it's absolutely essential you do NOT bias evaluations, hiring, or promotion of applicants. To do so actively undermines minorities in my opinion by stripping away their credibility by default.
by nunez | 2025-05-27 16:21:22+00:00
The beginning of this article is why I never trusted AI for search.

You can get really good results from search engines if you know how to use them and are willing to check the sources.

With AI as the search engine, you get what you get. This works well for a lot of searches, but not for everything.

Some engines, like Perplexity, Kagi and Gemini-enabled Google Search, will give you the sources they used in generating its response. This is fine, but for anything moderately complicated, this isn't enough, IMO.

For example: my wife was looking for a way to deter squirrels from eating out of our bird feeder. Gemini told her that we can use spicy bird feed to do this. It also provided a source. Great!

However, when you opened the sourced article, you'll see that Gemini's response completely failed to mention that not only is the spicy bird feed option a mild deterrant at best (squirrels will eat damn near anything if they're desperate enough), but it also failed to mention the two other MUCH BETTER options that were in the article! (Make the feeder free standing on a squirrel-proof pole, and some other option I forgot.)

I'm sure my wife could've told Gemini that the answer was incomplete to get a better response out of it. However, that perfectly underscores the problem I have with the tech in its current state: you're getting some inaccurate representation of the truth while also stealing market share from the authors and companies that shared their knowledge online to begin with.

I also don't think AI search is SEO proof either. People will figure out how to bend Gemini to its will. Given that most people will use natural language queries, the Wendy's [] singularity is almost inevitable.

[] Wendy's, a fast-food chain in the US, has an excellent social media team. I wouldn't be surprised if they find a way of getting every Gemini/Bing OpenAI search to work Wendy's in somehow!
by dfawcus | 2025-05-27 16:21:23+00:00
There is also a CP/M PL/I compiler, and apparently also CPM-86 and DOS versions.

Simply because some of the source file (1 or 2) for CPM are written in PL/1, rather than the majority having been written in PL/M, then eventually translated to assembler.

Here we go:

http://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.html

PLI-80 BINARY : 146K This is the PLI compiler. It is very compatible with the IBM PLI compiler used on the 360. The only functions I found missing were DATE and TIME, which were easy to fake out. (Apparently this is version 1.0). PLI-80 version 1.3 : 111K Here is the PLI-80 version 1.3 compiler and libraries. PL/I-80 version 1.4: 188K - version 1.4 including quite a few example files
by yoyohello13 | 2025-05-27 16:22:01+00:00
Unless you're doing greenfield, gradual typing is really the only way. I've incorporated type hinting in several legacy Python code bases with mypy and really the only sensible way is to "opt-in" one module at a time. If pyrefly doesn’t support that I think its use will be pretty limited. Unless maybe they are going for the llm code gen angle. I could see a very fast and strict type checker being useful for llm generating python scripts.
by NeeruJaroliya | 2025-05-27 16:22:23+00:00
I recently open-sourced Twick, a React-based video editor and player library that brings modern video editing features to the browser. It's designed to be embedded directly into React apps, making it easier to integrate timelines, effects, transitions, captions, and basic animation controls.

What's unique is that the core is modular and supports AI functions (like auto-captioning or smart edits) that can be deployed as Dockerized cloud functions. The idea is to abstract away heavy editing workflows while remaining customizable for different use cases.

I’d love feedback from the HN community—especially around performance, architecture, or features you'd expect in a developer-first video editing SDK. The project is actively maintained and open to contributions.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-27 16:23:06+00:00
I play the Dr. Z system [1] by the seat of my pants when I go to the track (got family who are always inviting me to the racino.)

The basic idea is that more people are in the win pool so the odds to win are more accurate (as a probability estimator) than the odds to place and show (finishing second and third.) If you compute probability estimates for place and show based on the win probabilities you sometimes find that place or show are underbet on the favorites. Maybe one to three races a day have a good betting opportunity.

Dr. Z's books have a number of tables for what you should do heuristically that he got from doing simulations. I have a Python script that simulates all race outcomes and points out good opportunities that I've been thinking of recoding for my HP Alpha calculator. Practically I will do a hand-waving calculation based on the ratio of the win to place and show odds for the favorite and just bet that way.

Th trouble with it is you only get to bet a few times a day and most people want more action that that. You tend to win most of the time because you are betting on the favorite [2] and (roughly) you have three times as many ways to win betting the favorite to show than you do the win. You don't win very much when you win, however, so just a few losses can eat up what you win.

You can't really make a living this way and I think if you've got the grindset to do this one seriously you can apply the same skills and attitude to currency options or something like that and make a lot more money.

[1] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dr-zs-beat-the-racetrack-wi...

[2] actually the favorite is underbet so it would be a winning strategy to always bet on the favorite if it wasn't for the track taking a cut
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-05-27 16:23:28+00:00
I use comments as a barometer for general sentiment, and what I'm seeing is that it's much more popular to repeat aggressive condemnatory statements than it is to analyze and provide counterpoints. This is not a surprise but I expect better of HN (and on most topics, HN provides this).

I don't expect HN commenters to change their minds necessarily, but I do wish they would elevate posts with more consideration and objectivity, and less low-effort outrage.
by Superjock | 2025-05-27 16:23:33+00:00
The obscene profit margins are in brokering restaurant deals, NOT in delivering them! I'm a 71-year-old inventor and sole owner of two issued U.S. patents covering a dynamic restaurant deals platform. Think of it as Groupon flipped on its head, with a hint of eBay. Diners conditionally promise 'how much' they'll minimally spend, and 'when' (today). That's effectively a Request For Bid, isn't it? — which then MAY trigger 'set-it-and-forget-it' bids from local restaurants for '10% more', '15% more', '20% more', a free bonus on top of the consumer's guaranteed spend. Looking for a small team (tech + business) to re-fresh existing MVP. MUST have fundraising capability (angel/pre-seed level). This IP moves electrons, not soggy fries. I'm open to JV, acquisition, or exclusive licensing. Jeff@LessEat.com
by zamadatix | 2025-05-27 16:24:20+00:00
If you're already time constrained to the point working 2 extra hours means you can't get through the day without caffeine and skipping meals then of course it's a bad idea, but that's not an inherent fault of a 4x10 in itself.

A 4x10 is particularly attractive for those able to work remote and/or without lots of other time commitments. If you have an hour commute each way, kids to drop off/pick up from school/sports, responsibility for cooking meals 100% of the time, and so on then it really doesn't make sense to point the finger at the 2 extra hours as the sole root cause of the problem in that situation.
by butterfi | 2025-05-27 16:25:42+00:00
One of my CS professors told the story about when MCSFT demonstrated their implementation of the Korn shell at a USENIX conference. Gasbag on stage tells the guy in the question line that he (questioner) has misinterpreted something in the software's original intention. Gasbag figures out something is up when half the room cracked up. The guy at the mic was David Korn, author of the Korn shell.
by greenavocado | 2025-05-27 16:26:19+00:00
Mistral is trying to be everything at once and it shows. To make ends meet they pivoted to selling enterprise software through Le Chat and cozying up to Microsoft. Now they're throwing around terms like "agentic AI" to stay trendy, even as competitors like DeepSeek outperform them in key areas. Their identity crisis is obvious. Are they a model company? A software vendor? A research lab? At this point, they seem more like a startup chasing hype and funding than a company with a clear direction. The 6 billion Euro valuation looks impressive, but with so many shifts in strategy, you have to wonder if they're building something lasting or just riding the AI wave until it crashes.
by toast0 | 2025-05-27 16:26:31+00:00
When has BGP not been implicated in causing issues though?

The first widespread incident I found was from 1997 [1], but I didn't look too hard.

I don't think there's really a satisfying way to play with BGP as a small network. Traffic engineering is where I think the fun would be, but you've got to have lots of traffic and many connections for it to be worthwhile. Then you'd be trying to use your announcements to coax the rest of the internet to push packets through the connections you want. As well as perhaps adjusting your outgoing packets to travel the connections you prefer when possible. Sadly, nobody lets me play with their setup.

One of the ways to get a sense of emergent routing behavior is if you have hosting in many places, you'll likely see a lot of differences in routes when you start going to far off countries. If you run traceroutes (or mtr) from your home internet and your cell phone and various hosting, and if you can trace back... you'll likely see a diversity of routes. Sometimes you'll see things like going from west coast US to Brazil, where one ISP will send your packets to florida, then Brazil, and one ISP will send your packets to Spain, then Brazil, with a lot more latency.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident