MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by growlNark | 2025-05-15 20:18:18+00:00
> but imagining that people are going to pay full price for news is unrealistic.

Imagining that people use their brains is also unrealistic. Presumably I'm talking to the remaining people in the room.

If paying full-price for the news isn't an option, I'd rather opt out entirely to avoid filling my head with random crap someone really wants me to hear about "terrorists" and "western values" or whatever.
by unethical_ban | 2025-05-15 20:18:21+00:00
I don't know if you read the essay. If you had or had followed the story, you would know that he was not only fired but his character and professional reputation were smeared publicly by who was it, Marty Stratton I think? I read this last year.

When your reputation is being dragged through the mud, why is it "petty and immature" to defend yourself? How do you know what works or doesn't in the entertainment industry?
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-15 20:19:28+00:00
>>Harvard Law School bought its version from a London legal book dealer, Sweet & Maxwell, which had in turn purchased the manuscript in December 1945 from Sotheby’s, the auctioneers.

>>In the 1945 auction catalog it was listed as a copy and with the wrong date (1327) and was sold for £42 — about a fifth of the average annual income in the United Kingdom at the time — on behalf of Forster Maynard, an Air Vice-Marshal who had served as a fighter pilot in World War I.

>>Air Vice-Marshal Maynard inherited it from the family of Thomas and John Clarkson, who were leading campaigners in Britain against the slave trade from the 1780s onward.

Pretty convoluted path to launder stolen goods.
by koeng | 2025-05-15 20:19:30+00:00
I do high throughput cloning, so customers of mine want complete, verified genes. There is a shit ton of just stuff that can happen that you can't predict even in the most domesticated organism.

Most recently, a transposon jumped from E.coli into my backbone, and I picked it up during sequence. 6kbp added instantly. Absolutely wack.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-15 20:20:39+00:00
Ah yea, security has gotten much tougher now. There are a couple open-access museums though like the Art Museum, the Near East Museum, the Scientific Instruments one in the Science Building, and a couple others.

All in all, loved the museums and history, but detested Harvard. I would have been a better fit at a more middle class college like Cal, Stanford, or MIT.
by FrasiertheLion | 2025-05-15 20:21:45+00:00
Bedrock has strong contractual guarantees, but it's still only a legal contract and runs on AWS infra. This is certainly okay for many use cases, we're trying to build for users who want verifiable privacy guarantees beyond legal contracts.

We're also doing more than pure inference, and trying to work with other companies who want to provide their users additional verifiability and confidentiality guarantees by running their entire private data processing pipeline on our platform.
by dogleash | 2025-05-15 20:22:53+00:00
The control loop metaphor was an interesting idea until I started worrying halfway through that it would would be operating on something with all the same categorical problems as the impressionistic style derided the start.

The sensations we tie to urination or breathing have quick cycle times making it easy to test the causal loop. Thus confounding factors such as a UTI causing a bladder full sensation, or nitrogen asphyxiation without feeling suffocation are things we understand well.

The "Make Sure You Spend Time with Other People System" is a good example for a blog post but it’s already a fair bit looser. But when you consider they want to investigate things without preexisting understanding as well as we understand loneliness it smells like sneaking back towards tautologically defined systems like "zest for life."
by johnisgood | 2025-05-15 20:23:13+00:00
No, you could import a full-blown framework and have it set up within one single file, in fact, that is how you usually start, typically... Unless you like having lots of files, of course. I have used such Go libraries / frameworks before, and it all started out as a single file, but with Phoenix, you start with lots of files. I am not saying it is a bad thing, I am just expressing my preference to fewer files. Organization and modularity are great, but in the case of Go, I create the files myself (so I am more aware of everything that is going on). In case of Phoenix ("mix phx.new"), it is done for you. Again, not saying it is a bad thing. I am fine with it by now, but it was overwhelming and demotivating in the beginning, as opposed to, say, Go.
by _dain_ | 2025-05-15 20:23:37+00:00
It's an extended riff / parody / pastiche / fanfic of a story called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges. And it has references to other Borgesian works like The Library of Babel and Funes the Memorious. It emulates Borges' style: precise, erudite, haughty, and full of asides referencing obscure works (only some of which are real). His stories often employ some kind of framing device, e.g. some fictional scholar commenting on a fictional work, or a government report of some incident; this is what the French bit at the start is doing (you can just put it through Google translate).

Tlön, Uqbar is only 16 pages long; you can read it in one sitting and thereby get 90% of what Gwern is doing here.

https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

As for the part you excerpted: don't worry about understanding every little reference. Just let it all wash over you and enjoy the ride, then maybe look things up afterwards. To an extent, you're supposed to feel a little intimidated, that you're a bystander not fully in on the joke. It's like a magic trick.

(And "signal" here is used in the adjectival sense "[s]tanding above others in rank, importance, or achievement" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/signal#Adjective )
by psychoslave | 2025-05-15 20:23:45+00:00
>population-level interventions attempting to get people to voluntarily behave differently for their own health historically haven't worked well in these specific domains

Said like that it paints things like there are not far more resources spent on propagating the bad habits (as some ROI is expected from this by some actors), and any attempt to put a social health program in history always ended in major catastrophes.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-15 20:24:48+00:00
"Cryptocurrency" is a misnomer, because none of them are actual currencies.

Cryptocurrencies are classified, for now, as securities.

Currency is currency and cryptocurrency is not. So please do not attempt to compare apples to oranges here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_(finance)

If you wish to compare cryptosecurities to other securities, then do that, but don't try to act like it is some sort of future utopian currency.
by amenghra | 2025-05-15 20:25:35+00:00
"I think we can increase the TLC model checker throughput to 1 billion states per minute (1000x speedup) by writing a bytecode interpreter. C"

I never used TLC with a large model, but I bet making the tool faster would make it more useful to lots of people.

I wonder what the speedup would be if the code targeted a GPU?
by dekhn | 2025-05-15 20:25:57+00:00
What the Chinese guy (He) did was completely different. He permanently altered the germline in embryos, which means that every cell in the resulting baby is transformed permanently with the change he made. The work he did violated a wide range of good practice (specifically, the change he made didn't actually work for the goal he desired, and he also ignored all the ethical advice around this experiment, and avoided getting the necessary approvals).

This research is instead a therapy used to treat an already born baby, and it doesn't modify all the cells in the body. Many cells in the body that are transformed by this technique will eventually die and be replaced by clones of stem cells which weren't transformed. I haven't read in detail about whether this therapy targets stem cells, and how long term effective the treatment will be- hepatocytes (liver cells) turn over constantly, so I would expect if the treatment did not affect the hepatocyte stem cells, it would only last ~months and the treatment would have to be repeated.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-15 20:26:02+00:00
"no" .. intelligent appliance was the product that came out of Raskin's thinking..

I object to the framing of this question directly -- there is no definition of "AI" . Secondly, the humane interface is a genre that Jef Raskin shaped and re-thought over years.. A one-liner here definitely does not embody the works of Jef Raskin.

Off the top of my head, it appears that "AI" enables one-to-many broadcast, service interactions and knowledge retrieval in a way that was not possible before. The thinking of Jef Raskin was very much along the lines of an ordinary person using computers for their own purposes. "AI" in the supply-side format coming down the road, appears to be headed towards societal interactions that depersonalize and segregate individual people. It is possible to engage "AI" whatever that means, to enable individuals as an appliance. This is by no means certain at this time IMHO.
by yaky | 2025-05-15 20:26:09+00:00
Here are some staples of the 2000s runet that I recall (haven't been there since then really)

- bash.org.ru, IT and programmer humor site that produced some classic memes (I know of the American one, but this one was its own thing)

- Masyanya, popular flash cartoon series.

- Padonki internet slang, Russian that is distorted, misspelled and vulgar, similar to leetspeak.
by jemmyw | 2025-05-15 20:26:17+00:00
It doesn't skip over it. First this is an example and not the primary thing it's talking about. But secondly, just above, the article states that some lower level knowledge is necessary in the transit example. If you map those things, as written by someone who, as they say, isn't they knowledgeable about programming, then they make sense without diving into the specific.
by pacjam | 2025-05-15 20:26:28+00:00
check out Letta - the OSS codebase (https://github.com/letta-ai/letta) is basically focused on solving the memory/context problem in a generalized way (via "agentic context management"). if you're more interested in papers, we also worked on MemGPT and more recently sleep-time compute (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13171)
by dylan604 | 2025-05-15 20:27:46+00:00
Interesting view as many people were so anti-MRNA vaccine because "it was created too fast" oblivious to the years/decades of study in that field that allowed for that "too fast" to happen.

I guess it's still too early in this story's news cycle for the people with anti-views to be making noise yet. No GMOs, but human gene modification is okay. No cloning either. The boogeyman is gonna get us no matter what we do
by jbellis | 2025-05-15 20:28:01+00:00
Yes!

Han Xiao at Jina wrote a great article that goes into a lot more detail on how to turn this into a production quality agentic search: https://jina.ai/news/a-practical-guide-to-implementing-deeps...

This is the same principle that we use at Brokk for Search and for Architect. (https://brokk.ai/)

The biggest caveat: some models just suck at tool calling, even "smart" models like o3. I only really recommend Gemini Pro 2.5 for Architect (smart + good tool calls); Search doesn't require as high a degree of intelligence and lots of models work (Sonnet 3.7, gpt-4.1, Grok 3 are all fine).
by theshackleford | 2025-05-15 20:28:22+00:00
> Motion resolution? Do you mean the pixel response time?

I indeed meant motion resolution, which pixel response time only partially affects. It’s about how clearly a display shows motion, unlike static resolution which only reflects realistically a still image. Even with fast pixels, sample and hold displays blur motion unless framerate and refresh rate is high, or BFI/strobing is used. This blur immediately lowers perceived resolution the moment anything moves on screen.

> The input is expecting specific distortions and effects from scanlines and phosphor, which a "perfect" display wouldn't exhibit...

That's true for many CRT purists, but is not a huge deal for me personally. My focus is motion performance. If LCD/OLED matched CRT motion at the same refresh rate, I’d drop CRT in a heartbeat, slap on a CRT shader, and call it a day. Heresy to many CRT enthusiasts.

Ironically, this is an area in which I feel we are getting CLOSE enough with the new higher refresh OLEDs for non HDR retro content in combination with: https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks... (which hopefully will continue to be improved.)

> The aggressive OLED ABL is simply a thermal issue.

Theoretically, yes and there’s been progress, but it’s still unsolved in practice. If someone shipped an OLED twice as thick and full of fans and heatsinks, I’d buy it tomorrow. But that’s not what the market wants, so obviously it's not what they make.

> It can be mitigated with thermal design in smaller devices, and anything that increases efficiency (be it micro lens arrays, stacked "tandem" panels, quantum dots, alternative emitter technology) will lower the thermal load and increase the max full panel brightness.

Sure, in theory. But so far the improvements (like QD-OLED or MLA) haven’t gone far enough. I already own panels using these. Beyond that, much of the tech isn’t in the display types I care about, or isn’t ready yet. Which is a pity, because the tandem based displays I have seen in usage are really decent.

That said, the latest G5 WOLEDs are the first I’d call acceptable for HDR at high APL, for the preferences I hold with very decent real scene brightness, at least in film. Sadly, I doubt we’ll see comparable performance in PC monitors until many years down the track and monitors are my preference.
by jondlm | 2025-05-15 20:28:27+00:00
The topic of this article felt familiar to me. It's similar to ideas in IFS: internal family systems. IFS also uses control systems to describe our internal landscape.

If the concept of multiplicity (we humans being a system of smaller systems) resonates with you, consider reading No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz. I've personally found it immensely helpful.
by buzzy_hacker | 2025-05-15 20:28:39+00:00
Made me think of

It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined? Someone should have said this to me: > Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. > > This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”

from https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/
by kgeist | 2025-05-15 20:28:59+00:00
Today I tried "vibe-coding" for the first time using GPT-4o and 4.1. I did it manually - just feeding compilation errors, warnings, and suggestions in a loop via the canvas interface. The file was small, around 150 lines.

It didn't go well. I started with 4o:

- It used a deprecated package.

- After I pointed that out, it didn't update all usages - so I had to fix them manually.

- When I suggested a small logic change, it completely broke the syntax (we're talking "foo() } return )))" kind of broken) and never recovered. I gave it the raw compilation errors over and over again, but it didn't even register the syntax was off - just rewrote random parts of the code instead.

- Then I thought, "maybe 4.1 will be better at coding" (as advertized). But 4.1 refused to use the canvas at all. It just explained what I could change - as in, you go make the edits.

- After some pushing, I got it to use the canvas and return the full code. Except it didn't - it gave me a truncated version of the code with comments like "// omitted for brevity".

That's when I gave up.

Do agents somehow fix this? Because as it stands, the experience feels completely broken. I can't imagine giving this access to bash, sounds way too dangerous.
by dekhn | 2025-05-15 20:29:04+00:00
it's unclear the outcome of this will be eugenics wars.

Answering the real question- it's unlikely these techniques will see widespread "recreational" usage any time soon, as they come with a wide range of risks. Further, the scientific community has learned a lot from previous eugenics programs; anything that happens in the future will happen with both social and political regulation.

It's ultimately hard to predict- many science fiction writers have speculated about this for some time, and social opinion can change quickly when people see new developments.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-15 20:29:33+00:00
I mean sure, the fact that it is performant means tons of functionality is built on it that is hard to find elsewhere.

But the point is still that the main purpose in building it was to be performant. To be accelerated. Even if that's not why you're personally using it.

I mean, I use my M4 Mac's Spotlight to do simple arithmetic. That's not the main point in building the M4 chip though.
by hatthew | 2025-05-15 20:29:52+00:00
Am I the only one who feels like this is a rant where the author is projecting their unfamiliarity with numpy? Most of the examples seem like straw men, and I can't tell if that's because they are or if the author genuinely thinks that these are all significant problems.

For example, in the linalg.solve problem, based on reading the documentation for <60 seconds I had two guesses for what would work, and from experimenting it looks like both work equally. If you don't want to take the time to understand the documentation or experiment to see what works, then just write the for loop.

For indexing problems, how about just don't use weird indexing techniques if you don't understand them? I have literally never needed to use a list of lists to index an array in my years of using numpy. And if you do need to use it for some reason, spend 1 minute to test out what happens. "What shape does B have?" is a question that can be answered with `print(B.shape)`. If the concern is about reading code written by other people, then context should make it clear what's happening, and if it's not clear then that's the fault of the person who wrote the code for not using sensible variable names/comments.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-15 20:30:34+00:00
At my schools and workplaces, meetings or classes would begin when they began, and then several people who mattered would be chronically late, and so whatever we did in the first 5-10 minutes was an utter waste and went down the drain, because the leaders would rewind and repeat it all "for the benefit of those who just joined us."

This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.

It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?

I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.
by globie | 2025-05-15 20:30:39+00:00
There are plenty of commercial pirates, and those commercial uses were grouped in with noncommercial sharing in much the same way you are doing with scraping. Am I wrong in assuming most of this scraping comes from people utilizing AI agents for things like AI-assisted coding? If an AI agent scrapes a page at a users' request (say the 1 billionth git commit scraped today), do you consider that "loot[ing] a store"? What got looted? Is it the bandwidth? The CPU? Or does this require the assumption that the author of that commit wouldn't be excited that their work is being used?

I'd like to focus on your strongest point, which is the cost to the companies. I would love to know what that increase in cost looks like. You can install nginx on a tiny server and serve 10k rps of static content, or like 50 (not 50k) rps of a random web framework that generates the same content. So this increase in cost must be weighed against how efficient the software serving that content is.

If this Github post included a bunch of numbers and details demonstrating how they have reached the end of the line on optimizing their web frontend, they have ran out of things to cache, and the increase in costs is a real cause for concern to the company (not just a quick shave to the bottom line, not a bigger net/compute check written from Github to their owners), I'd throw my hands up with them and start rallying against the (unquestionably inefficient and on the line of hostile) AI agent scrapers causing the increase in traffic.

Because they did not provide that information, I have to assume that Github and Microsoft are doing this out of pure profit motivations and have abandoned any sense of commitment to open access of software. In fact, they have much to gain from building the walls of their garden up as high as they can get away with, and I'm skeptical their increase in costs is very material at all.

I would rather support services that don't camouflage as open and free software proponents one day and victims of a robbery on the next. I still think this question is important and valid: There is tons of software on Github written by users who wish for their work to remain open access. Is that the class of software and people you believe should be shuffled around into smaller and smaller services that haven't yet abandoned the commitments that allowed them to become popular?
by fscknumpy | 2025-05-15 20:31:19+00:00
I had to make a HN account just to show this numpy "feature".

Create an array like this np.zeros((10, 20, 30)), with shape (10, 20, 30).

Clearly if you ask for array[0][:, [0,1]].shape you will get an output of shape (20, 2), because you first remove the first dimension, and then : broadcasts across the second dimension, and you get the first two elements of the third dimension.

Also, obviously we know that in numpy array[a][b][c] == array[a,b,c]. Therefore, what do you think array[0, :, [0,1]].shape returns? (20, 2)? Nope. (2, 20).

Why? Nobody knows.
by Balgair | 2025-05-15 20:31:35+00:00
One other fun part of gene editing in vivo is that we don't actually use GACU (T in DNA). It turns out that if you use Pseudouridine (Ψ) instead of uridine (U) then the body's immune system doesn't nearly alarm as much, as it doesn't really see that mRNA as quite so dangerous. But, the RNA -> Protein equipment will just make protiens it without any problems.

Which, yeah, that's a miraculous discovery. And it was well worth the 2023 Nobel in Medicine.

Like, the whole system for gene editing in vivo that we've developed is just crazy little discovery after crazy little discovery. It's all sooooo freakin' cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudouridine