MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mondrian | 2025-05-17 00:35:21+00:00
The "core reasoning" part of AI may be increasingly important to improve, and its "database of factual knowledge" aspects may be less and less important, maybe increasingly a hindrance. So more focused and specialized training may take over toward increasing reasoning precision, and not this never-ending stream of new data.

So maybe we'll get better reasoning and therefore better generated data/content in the wild, without this negative feedback loop everyone is worried about.
by mkl | 2025-05-17 00:36:10+00:00
> honestly these are so obvious that I assume you viewed the website on mobile

The page is terrible UX on mobile too. After the random switch from dark mode to light mode I tapped what looked like a dark mode button and got a full screen about page with no close or back button, so I pressed my phone's back button but ended up back on HN. It turns out to navigate back out of the unexpected about screen you have to press what looks like a forward button (I think they're trying to indicate that it goes away to the right, but the thing is full screen like a full page navigation so that doesn't make sense).
by alganet | 2025-05-17 00:37:08+00:00
Reminds me of that paper about searching for time travellers on the internet: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7128

Unfortunately, the internet is filled with ARGs and pranks. You can't really trust a "message in a bottle" kind of communication, it's likely to get lost.

Considering the current state of humanity, I would say it's a big risk looking for those kinds of messages. 99% chance of scam or prank.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing on the internet can be trusted.
by djoldman | 2025-05-17 00:37:24+00:00
Ok, let's chalk the "self-funded" part up to semantics.

> It has literally no impact on the deficit or our ability to pay off debt. By statute.

This however is wrong.

As a simple proof: let's just up social security payments by 3000x... social security is still "self-funded" and "separate" but that would be an untenable debt and the US would immediately default on that obligation. The amount and structure of social security debt matters to the US' ability to pay.

Social security is a promise to pay an amount of money in the future and it is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the US government. The bigger it is, the bigger the debt, the hard it is to pay off. It's a big impact.

Just because it's specifically funded and tied to a precise specific tax does not make it immune from debt considerations.
by schwartzworld | 2025-05-17 00:43:58+00:00
React can be very performant with little optimization if you apply FP principals to it, which makes sense since it was built with the goal of using FP to do frontend work.

If your whole tree is recalculating on every mousemove event, that is a giant code smell to say the least. You’d have to architect the app to work that way.
by astrange | 2025-05-17 00:44:14+00:00
> I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.

This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :)

It's not based on C++, that's just the other OO language from the era people usually think of.
by lacker | 2025-05-17 00:44:34+00:00
Unfortunately, I don't really know if I can trust academics to analyze the development of large language models. No academic team has built an LLM. So... do people working at Stanford or Oxford really have good insight how LLMs are developed?

If people at OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google said this, that would be interesting. But I don't think it makes sense any more to treat academic computer scientists as relevant experts here.
by Majromax | 2025-05-17 00:45:30+00:00
> A weakness that goes hand-in-hand with the lack of peer review

Peer review is not well equipped to catch fraud and deliberate deception. A half-competent fraud will result in data that looks reasonable at first glance, and peer reviewers aren't in the business of trying to replicate studies and results.

Instead, peer review is better at catching papers that either have internal quality problems (e.g. proofs or arguments that don't prove what they claim to prove) or are missing links to a crucial part of the literature (e.g. claiming an already-known result as novel). Here, the value of peer review is more ambiguous. It certainly improves the quality of the paper, but it also delays its publication by a few months.

The machine learning literature gets around this by having almost everything available in preprint with peer-reviewed conferences acting as post-facto gatekeepers, but that just reintroduces the problem of non-peer-reviewed research being seen and cited.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-17 00:47:32+00:00
Even if one takes it as being on that side of the fence, which I'm not sure I actually buy myself, I'm also still not convinced getting some a niche of folks aware of marketing and brand design documents to have such an association form would deserved to be called wildly successful. Usually you want a significant portion of the population to have a common association with a brand as large as Pepsi, not a small portion to have a rare association.
by signatoremo | 2025-05-17 00:48:18+00:00
That’s because it’s part of a series called Tuesday Telescope where it often features a photo of some corner of the sky. Take a look at previous posts. Magnificent photos. It is not a technical report of the telescope. As described right on top of the article:

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
by a_bonobo | 2025-05-17 00:48:57+00:00
This happens again and again in research - I'm just reminded of the stem cell scandal around Obakata. Before the fraud was uncovered: dozens of senior researchers supporting the research, using the glory for their own gains. After the fraud is exposed: nobody wants to have been involved, it was only that one junior person.

It doesn't excuse the fraud of the junior person but it makes you think how many senior-level people out there are riding similar fraudulent waves, doing zero checks on their own junior people's work.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-17 00:49:17+00:00
Quite a few languages "loved" by "Linux communities" tend to have rather rudimentary integration with Linux kernel's facilities or worse packaging story.

For example, Go does not understand cgroups limits and needs an external package to solve this. .NET can read and accommodate those natively. It also ships with excellent epoll-based socket engine implementation. It's on par with Go (although I'm not sure which one is better, but .NET performs really well on high-throughput workloads).
Ask HN: Do startup founders/teams care about health during stressful times?
by Bkimmy16 | 2025-05-17 00:49:34+00:00
I created a way for myself to send me a quick telegram message daily for tracking things that I value as healthy (did i take morning vitamins, did I run, did I go to the gym) because i want to stay healthy and look good even through tough times. Then it stores these forums i quickly answer each day in an excel sheet then at the end of the week i use ai to analyze my health goals and then my input from my daily forums to track how well I'm taking care of myself and the ai gives me strategies on how to enhance or what I'm lacking on. Im curious though if other founders and teams care enough about these health aspects in stressful times like in launch and how they take care of themselves.
by pzmarzly | 2025-05-17 00:49:53+00:00
Also in referent news: "The State of TLS Stacks" by HAProxy devs https://www.haproxy.com/blog/state-of-ssl-stacks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43912164

TLDR OpenSSL days seem to be coming to an end, but Rustls C bindings add not production ready yet.
by transcriptase | 2025-05-17 00:51:20+00:00
You don’t see a connection between military power and stability?

You really don’t see how a single country guaranteeing freedom of navigation worldwide for the 80% of global trade that happens by sea might have something to do with other countries having a vested interest in the stability of that currency? Or how that same Navy being the one that sits where the resources that drive the global economy flow like the Persian Gulf might mean it’s not comparable to… the nations that can’t do that (see: any)
by yeputons | 2025-05-17 00:51:39+00:00
Not a lawyer here.

My advice would be to relax, enjoy Armenia, and assume you are not entering the U.S. in the next couple of years, for any reason. Administrative processing (I assume you actually mean 221(g) refusal) can easily take 1-2 years. The most extreme case I've heard of took 4 years.

In 2016-2020 writing to a congressmen could actually help: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/11/09/a-us-visa-in-937-days... , but not anymore. Last year I've heard about some success stories with U.S. courts. Still, it took for one O-1 person about two years from the initial visa interview.

I've also never heard of anyone getting any timeline estimations.

A related small thread with Peter's response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44006801
by a_bonobo | 2025-05-17 00:52:29+00:00
It's interesting that the article does not mention US-based Illumina. Illumina and BGI are the two biggest DNA sequencing companies in the world right now, and Illumina has been struggling immensely after China singled it out for repercussions even before the tariffs started. Illumina is not allowed to trade in China, and is about to lose $100 million and has fired many of my colleagues.

I wonder whether some higher-up US official asked Microsoft to carry out revenge on BGI for that.
by cyberax | 2025-05-17 00:53:32+00:00
Java has a strong history of OpenSource, and a great set of libraries. It also pioneered the managed dependency system early (Maven), so these libraries have been centrally available for two decades.

Moreover, a lot of these libraries are well-supported to this day. For example, Hibernate (the best ORM in business) is 28 years old, and has just released a new version. I recently consulted my former client (from 15 years ago), and I still recognized most parts of the stack that I set up way back then.
by thunky | 2025-05-17 00:54:12+00:00
> So either there's going to be a cut in benefits and/or the retirement age will be bumped up

Or...raise the contribution limit which fixes the whole thing easily without having to screw over the people that paid in and just want to get back what they were promised.

Raise the retirement age? Really? All this advancement to make our lives better and more efficient, and we're going to conclude that we all need to to work more?

And meanwhile we can piss away cash by the trillion but when it comes to social security suddenly there's no money to be found anywhere.

They've fooled everyone into believing "the fund will be depleted" in x years. Then put some more money in assholes.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-17 00:54:27+00:00
Let's revisit past conversations:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326

And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-17 00:55:28+00:00
> There is a long-established tradition that formal scientific writing should avoid use of first-person pronouns in general because it makes findings sound more subjective. It's taught this way from early on.

Established tradition doesn't negate "collective delusion".

And anyone who uses the use of "I" in a paper to imply anything about its authenticity is definitely indulging in some form of a delusion. It's not the norm, but is definitely permitted in most technical fields. When I was in academia no reputable journal editor would take seriously reviewer feedback that complains about the use of I.
by JamesEvery | 2025-05-17 00:56:11+00:00
Context: over the last decade, about 500 people solved the final level from the original version of Microcorruption (Hollywood).

The final step involves a preimage attack on a homebrew hashing algorithm. Most people bruteforce it or use Z3, but one person, "[ashamed] at not being able to simply solve for the password with math", wrote several hundred lines of SystemVerilog to crack it on an FPGA.

This is how to break it purely with math.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-17 00:56:13+00:00
Maybe they wouldn't be able to cover other planned expenses with said loss or something but the median (I intentionally avoid referring to "average" for reasons also mentioned in this article) amount American have access to in their transactional bank accounts is $8,000 according to the Federal Reserve: https://www.fool.com/money/research/average-savings-account-...

Someone else made a great mention though: Coinbase didn't just serve the US. For the vast majority of countries these amounts are more than the yearly disposable income of a typical household. From that angle the numbers in the stories make a bit more sense.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-05-17 00:56:36+00:00
That Clojure, the language, ended relying on Google's Closure (with a 's'), for its ClojureScript variant is one of the most WTF naming oddities of all times.

Clojure/Closure: I mean, seriously... Common. And it's somehow an accident: Clojure predates ClojureScript and Google Closure was not used by Clojure.

It's both weird and cool and highly confusing.
by don_neufeld | 2025-05-17 00:58:54+00:00
The school has an academic honestly policy which explicitly bans it, under “Cheating”, which includes:

“Falsifying or inventing any academic work, including the use of AI (ChatGPT, etc)”

Additionally, as mentioned, the school is taking actions to change how work is done to ensure students are actually doing their own work - such as requiring written assignments be completed during class time, or giving homework on physical paper that is to be marked up by hand and returned.

Apparently this is the first year they have been doing this, as last year they had significant problems with submitted work not being authored by students.

This is in an extremely competitive Bay Area school, so there can be a lot of pressure from parents on students to make top grades, and sometimes that has negative side effects.
by kikimora | 2025-05-17 01:01:29+00:00
>2023 MacBook Pro, Apple M3 Max chip.

Then you likely measure how fast PG updates in-memory buffer rather than actual writes to disk. I cannot find links to discussions where people mentioned that desktop OS and consumer grade SSDs can delay writes to get more performance. This is what ChatGPT has to say about this.

Historically and even in recent versions, macOS has had issues where fsync() does not guarantee data is truly flushed to persistent storage (e.g., SSD or spinning disk). This is due to: • Disk write caching: macOS may acknowledge fsync() even if the data is just in the drive’s volatile cache (not flushed to physical storage). • APFS quirks: The Apple File System (APFS) has been reported to coalesce or delay flushes more aggressively than other filesystems (like ext4 or xfs). • SSD controller behavior: Even if macOS passes the flush through, the SSD itself may lie unless it supports FLUSH_CACHE and has power-loss protection.
by bmcahren | 2025-05-17 01:01:34+00:00
So there's this thing called "Setup Scripts" but they don't explicitly say these are equivalent to AWS Metadata and configured inside of Codex web interface - not a setup.sh or a package.json preinstall declaration. I wasted several hours (and lots of compute where Codex was as confused as I was) trying to figure out how to convince codex to pnpm install.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-17 01:01:39+00:00
Zero-allocation (obviously different from zero GC) frameworks made a bit of a splash a little while back, but I'm not seeing much about them anymore from a brief search. I would have sworn that quarkus was one of them, but it looks like that's definitely not the case anymore.

The downside is that you sacrifice a lot of the benefits of guard rails of the language and tooling for what may not end up being much savings, depending on your workload.
by ancillary | 2025-05-17 01:01:44+00:00
I think I loved everything about The Tree of Life except for the scenes with Sean Penn. Whatever mysterious antipathy the girl behind you in the cinema felt for the movie, I felt for Sean Penn. The kind and probably accurate interpretation is that actors are at the mercy of their directors and editors in movies like this, but his scenes don't feel like they're part of the same movie.
by Thaxll | 2025-05-17 01:03:50+00:00
Java is not ahead of Go, they're on part but often Go is faster while using 2-10x less memory. Value type makes optimization much easier in Go.

The fact that you specifically mention Go explains a lot. btw c# is faster than Java, so not third place, it's more a 5th~

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
by layer8 | 2025-05-17 01:03:55+00:00
This leads to cringy non-idiomatic kf nit nonsensical English though. As a non-native but fluent English speaker, working in projects where people with only basic English proficiency translated the native terms into English by naive dictionary lookup, or sometimes by selecting false friends, is really painful, because the translations give all the wrong signals and connotations in English.
by mooreds | 2025-05-17 01:05:13+00:00
Previous discussions here:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558871 (241 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14018450 (130 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21686264 (405 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31805431 (65 comments)
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-05-17 01:05:15+00:00
> It doesn’t make it any less true.

Yes, it does. Let me indulge your fantasy scenario. What makes you think that in a real hot war between the US and its former allies, the US will continue to maintain its economic sovereignty and continue unscathed?

Let's talk military first. Have you considered the effects of a direct total-war attack on the population centres of the Eastern sea board? A dirty bomb? What about mines and covert unmanned marine drone attacks on your aircraft carriers? They're not invulnerable; a decent amount of conventional explosive can blow a big enough hole in any ship to scuttle it.

Let's talk economics. Under such a war, what makes you think every other country will continue to respect US IP laws? The proprietary source code of many large US tech firms are in non-US servers. US hardware and industrial design blueprints are in the hands of non-US companies, who respect a gentlemen's agreement. What makes you think developers using and maintaining these servers wouldn't be asked to go rogue and publish all this IP?

It's easy to say 'we'll go to war over debt'. It's a lot harder to actually tie up your boots, pick up your rifle, get in a plane, parachute down, and start shooting other people... Who would shoot back.
by lispisok | 2025-05-17 01:06:33+00:00
I wish but I dont think we could be any futher away from professionalizing like engineering/law/accounting/medicine. There was a deliberate effort to flood the field and lower salaries and developers were so full of hubris and thought there was infinite demand for their labor and went along with it and still are. Maybe some are learning given the job market the last few years.

Despite software being in everything and harm to the public due to bad software has materialized every developer seems vehemently against professionalizing. Do you want a surgeon that went to surgeon bootcamp because "you dont need all those years in medical school to learn how to remove an appendix"? Do you even want an accountant who went to accountant bootcamp to do your taxes?
by const_cast | 2025-05-17 01:08:41+00:00
> Students studying for selective examinations (medicine, law, maths) routinely work more than 10 hours a day.

Yes, for a little bit. But one thing I've consistently noticed is they're operating on borrowed time. Once the exam passes and the semester is over, they go into full burn-out mode. Now they're not even doing their laundry, let alone studying medicine.

Human productivity is incredibly fickle. We can be pushed really, really far, but we have to pay an immense debt.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-05-17 01:09:11+00:00
I agree, but I also think it goes farther than computers and technology. Back then the overall zeitgeist was just a whole lot more positive. These days people are all about one-upping on the dark grittiness of music, movies, etc. But back then things were more upbeat. Yeah, we were worried about the cold war and nuclear armageddon, etc. But we still felt hopeful that we were working toward something better. I miss that.
by asayers | 2025-05-17 01:09:17+00:00
The only ATproto-specific part is how clients specify their starting position. They give a timestamp, which refers specifically to the `time_us` field in the messages, which I guess must be an ATproto thing. If jetrelay supported filtering, that would be ATproto-specific too. But you’re right: if you removed backfill support there’d be nothing ATproto- or even websocket-specific about it.
Show HN: Merliot – plugging physical devices into LLMs
by sfeldma | 2025-05-17 01:09:38+00:00
Merliot Hub is an AI-integrated device hub.

What does that mean? It means you can control and interact with your physical devices, your security cameras, your thermometer, seamlessly using natural language from an LLM host such as Claude Desktop or Cursor. The hub is a gateway between AI and the physical world.

What could go wrong?
by toprerules | 2025-05-17 01:10:13+00:00
That's a really narrow view of the world, and I think another Javaism to think that Java is the entire world. Today's multi-service deployments run tens if not hundreds of auxiliary processes not using Java. They use network overlays that change how processes interact with the network core. A person who is debugging a knock on effect issues has to be able to look through many different layers of processes, many of which are written in C, C++, Go, etc. Having to learn an entire toolset to debug Python or Java is a huge burden and it makes introspection extremely difficult. Java essentially wants to be the entire platform, which isn't how the world works anymore.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-17 01:10:16+00:00
> How can you be confident the system is at least as reliable with the concerns you are less focused on?

That's my current heartache with my Comma: it does a stunningly shitty job about decelerating into brake lights ahead, choosing rather to keep accelerating (or I guess keeping speed) and then slamming on the brakes as it gets a few feet from the car. OT1H, it's never actually put me in danger, OTOH I don't want "next time" to be the bad luck

Not only does that make me super nervous, it's also a rear-ending risk (since the poor Comma can't see what's behind me)

I haven't worked up the nerve to build and flash one of the 18 quadrillion forks onto my Comma; I've heard some of them are better, but that some word is doing a lot of work
by rectang | 2025-05-17 01:10:33+00:00
I don't trust myself to craft a prompt in natural language which completely specifies my intent as codified with the precision of a programming language.

I also tend to turn to AI for advising me on difficult use cases, and most of the time it's for production code rather than one-offs. The easy cases, I just write myself because it's more mental effort to review code for subtle errors than it is to write it.