MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WalterBright | 2025-05-04 05:52:32+00:00
China didn't industrialize until after 1978, when they gave up on communism and began a transition to capitalism. Over 30 years after WW2 concluded.

Russia did not industrialize in the 1920s. They did collectivize agriculture, famine ensued. They turned back to free market farming, famine went away. They turned again to collectivization, and farming collapsed again. Eventually, the Soviets allowed farmers to farm small plots and sell what they could raise. These small free market plots kept the country from starving.

Russia did work hard at industrializing during WW2, but it was propped up by the US, who heavily supplied the Soviets. The US actually built factories in the US, dismantled them, and shipped them to the Soviet Union during the war. US engineers and craftsmen taught them.

When WW2 ended, the Soviets looted everything industrial they could find from the Soviet sector. Whole factories were moved east. Soviet industrial output grew during the war.

British industry was also untouched, because the German bomber fleet did not have the range to cover much of Britain, and because Hitler stupidly decided to bomb houses instead of factories. Britain had a pretty anemic recovery from the war - despite getting far more Marshall Plan money than Germany.

Japan did not have a free market before the war, and not much of an industrial economy. Curtis LeMay had a hard time finding industrial targets to bomb, as Japanese industry was characterized as "a drill press in every home". Japan turned to free markets after the war, and we know what happened next. Recall that Japan was burned into ash in WW2. They went from utter defeat to economic superpower, despite not having any natural resources, in just 30 years.

How much more of an "unequal" starting point could there possibly be?

The only common characteristic of prosperity is free markets. And the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is. Over and over. It goes back to the middle ages.

The other common characteristic is when countries turn towards socialism, things just get worse and worse for them.
by mindcrime | 2025-05-04 05:55:41+00:00
I hate to say "it depends" but it, aaah, kinda depends. Nailing down a good definition of "Agent" has a been a problem dating back at least into the 1990's if not the 1980's. So, depending on which definition of "AI Agent" you're using, you arguably don't even need any LLM at all. Heck, using the most expansive definition I've seen, a mechanical thermostat counts. I don't know that I'd go that far, but I'll definitely say that I do not consider Agents to require use of LLM's.

That said, the "Agent pattern du jour" is heavily based on using LLM's to provide the "brain" of the Agent and then Tool Calling to let it do things an LLM can't normally do. But still... depending on just what you do with those tool calls and any other code that sits in your Agent implementation then it certainly could be more than "just" an LLM wrapper.

Nothing stops you from, for example, using the BDI architecture, implementing multi-level memory that's analogous to the way human memory works, wiring in some inductive learning, and throwing in some case-based reasoning, and an ontology based reasoning engine.

Most people today aren't doing this, because they're mostly johnny-come-lately's that don't know anything about AI besides what they see on Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn; and wouldn't know BDI from BDSM.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief%E2%80%93desire%E2%80%93...
by Aurornis | 2025-05-04 05:56:40+00:00
The Bose Magic Carpet was the original version of all of these powered suspension cars 20 years ago.

> It can sense and jump potholes.

The Bose system’s most famous demo was sensing and jumping over speed bumps.

> That's not just adjustable damping; that's a fully powered suspension.

Right, but it appears the company who bought the Bose Magic Carpet portfolio isn’t doing what the original demo did 20 years ago, they’re just using the name.
by swid | 2025-05-04 05:57:28+00:00
It is allowed to be a planner choice though! Very surprising, but if you understand the docs, it will follow that it is not actually a bug. It could change in the future and has changed in the past apparently - but that change was to give the planner more opportunity to optimize queries by not materializing parts of the query and inlining that part into the parent.

Regarding selects: [0]: “A key property of WITH queries is that they are normally evaluated only once per execution of the primary query… However, a WITH query can be marked NOT MATERIALIZED to remove this guarantee. … By default, a side-effect-free WITH query is folded into the primary query if it is used exactly once in the primary query’s FROM clause.

Regarding CTEs: [1]: “A useful property of WITH queries is that they are normally evaluated only once per execution of the parent query… However, the other side of this coin is that the optimizer is not able to push restrictions from the parent query down into a multiply-referenced WITH query"

Now, in either case - if you don't want the planner to inline the query - you might have to be explicit about it (I think since postgres 10?), or otherwise - yes, the output of the query will depend on the plan and this is allowed based on the docs.

[0]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-select.html

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html
by 2000UltraDeluxe | 2025-05-04 05:57:37+00:00
Today is rainy and windy. I look forward to going outside with the missus for a moment to plant a few trees. That won't change the fact that my knees are hurting, that the economy sucks, or that our eastern neighbor is waging a genocidal war upon another neighboring country. I'll get a bit of excersise though, and get to spend time with my beloved wife. And to plant trees, which brings us closer to realising our dream about having a backyard forest AND being good for the environment.

Neither will offset or do anything about the global inflation, or the famine in Sudan. Sitting inside and worrying about those things won't change it either.

In the end, it's a matter of convincing yourself to do something that goes against your instinctive responses, and then learn from that experience and hopefully re-train said instinctive responses. This is neither easy nor quick, and there will be times when you will feel like an idiot for trying to convince yourself to see something in a positive light. But once you manage, even for a few short moments, it will make you feel better. Losing hope won't.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-05-04 05:58:00+00:00
It does feel like they don't hand them out as often as they used to.

I've had 4 infections this year, including an ear infection, fingernail, chest (that caused pneumonia on my son) and one that caused my left eye to swell up.

I received no antibiotics for any of them, just a suggestion that if they didn't go away they might prescribe some. They all got better without them (except my son, who ended up in emergency and was given two different ones which cleared up his infection rapidly).

In the past though I'm pretty sure I would have been prescribed them immediately.
by yorick | 2025-05-04 05:58:25+00:00
It looks like you can use the gemma tokenizer to count tokens up to at least the 1.5 models. The docs claim that there's a local compute_tokens function in google-genai, but it looks like it just does an API call.

Example for 1.5:

https://github.com/googleapis/python-aiplatform/blob/main/ve...
by Aurornis | 2025-05-04 05:58:46+00:00
> While cool as a shower thought, in reality, having a 1200HP car jump and go airborne while you're swerving to avoid a pothole is just about the last thing you want it to be doing.

Surely the system takes cornering into account. Having a suspension that can use predictive motions to compensate for a pothole would ideally produce better handling by minimizing the disruption of a pothole imparting a massive disturbance to the vehicle.
by Animats | 2025-05-04 06:05:37+00:00
> There's always wind or sun somewhere in Europe.

Not necessarily enough wind to be useful. If you look at graphs of wind turbine output across entire large power grids, you see 4:1 variations in a day over the PJM and CAISO regions.

That's irrelevant to this blackout, anyway. This blackout occurred during a period when supply far exceeded demand.
by scotty79 | 2025-05-04 06:06:41+00:00
Religions can be inconvenient. I'd still argue that source of some of their bans was convenience that just got frozen in time and kept alive way after its utility ended.

I think in case of meat bans it was a deeper convenience. Something like that it's not convenient to avoid pork, but it's convenient to not get sick from low quality pork or the process of raising this specific animal. It might have been quite convenient rule of thumb two thousand years ago.
by vitorgrs | 2025-05-04 06:06:54+00:00
Not fossil fuel, so less carbon footprint.

There's a few buses here in Brazil which uses biomethane, and a few biomethane gas pipelines as well.

The thing is, Argentina just have a lot of natural gas production and infra.

Brazil natural gas are all offshore, on the coast, mainly São Paulo and Rio coast. And there is a lack of infra connecting these to countryside. We just don't have pipelines...

Brazil end up importing natural gas from Bolivia too, and soon, from Argentina Vaca Muerta.

And Brazilian natural gas are not cheap (but natura gas cars exists too).

Biomethane/biogas meanwhile, it's growing quickly because you can just use cattle, swine, and poultry manure, sugarcane, trash waste, etc. And well, Brazil is big with agriculture, so...

In 2024, 8,4% of electricity was using biomass too, for this exact reason.

PS: Reminder that most cooking gas in Brazil is all in a bottle, that you put in your home, which is LPG (liquefied petroleum gas, made of propane and butane). Most showers and heaters are all electric.
by LeonB | 2025-05-04 06:07:09+00:00
Same here.

I’m not saying my first website was impressive — but as a programmer there’s no way I was copying and pasting the same header / footer stuff into each page and quickly found “shtml” and used that as much as possible.

Then used the integrated FTP support in whatever editor it was (“HTML-kit” I think it was called?) - to upload it straight to prod. Like a true professional cowboy.
by gwbrooks | 2025-05-04 06:07:26+00:00
1. Foreign entities are also investing in land that is strategically or tactically important -- agricultural land is a good example of the former; land near military bases an example of the latter. China has demonstrated a willingness to do both.

2. I think this represents a misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The Constitution provides no power for the federal government to acquire land without just compensation, which courts have regularly held to mean fair market value. Put another way: The feds can likely devise a path for buying your land, but can't outright nationalize it. Changing that is not a matter of presidential decree or even a law by Congress; it would require an amendment to the Constitution itself, which is an extraordinarily heavy political and policy lift.
by karencarits | 2025-05-04 06:07:40+00:00
This technical report is accompanied with news coverage at NRK, Le Monde, ARD and BR ("Darcula Unmasked")

* Part 1: https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/inside-the-scam-network-1.1...

* Part 2: https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/the-mastermind-1.17399157

Darcula has been mentioned on HN before, none of the threads gained any comments at the time

* 'Darcula' phishing platform targets postal organizations worldwide (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856821)

* 'darcula' iMessage and RCS smishing attacks target global postal services (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39870714)
by toast0 | 2025-05-04 06:08:16+00:00
The SF Bay Area was probably full of BBSes, as was the Los Angeles Area, but we had Inter-LATA or 'Zone 3' calling for stuff where the central office was I think more than 15 miles away, but under some limit. Closer rate centera than that was local, farther would go through your long distance carrier. Unlimited local calling was available at a reasonable price, but Zone3 was still charged per minute (could cost more than some long distance carriers)
by yesco | 2025-05-04 06:08:22+00:00
> I do in fact work with self-driving cars. What you say is true, but it is not a big deal. Why do you feel this maters? Or what is your point?

Sorry not trying to dunk on you here, but this reads like something a junior engineer would complain to me about. These are not trivial problems, and I'm sure your co-workers who resolved them already so you didn't need to worry about them would agree with me.

> In reality none of this is a problem. There are automotive grade cameras which can collect enough light fast enough that the images are not blurry in practice. Yes, these cameras have a non-zero exposure time. Yes, this adds latency. No, this is not a problem.

You are contradicting yourself here, yes there are automotive grade cameras, but if this wasn't a problem, why would automotive grade cameras need to exist? My post wasn't saying these were impossible problems but hard ones.

> You mean 88 feet. If my off the shelf library introduces a random 1 second delay i will chuck it in the bin post haste. Use stuff whose performance characteristics are well understood by you and is not terrible.

Look I might have typed the wrong unit but it's a bit ironic you gave me this word salad right after complaining about this... Yeah you obviously don't use the library that adds a 1 second delay, but often you don't have the luxury of knowing that until after you learn about it through integration testing.

Libraries don't usually come with latency stats calibrated to your desired hardware right on the tin, would be pretty sweet if they did though.

> I do not recognise the world you describe.

I don't find this surprising :)
by uxhacker | 2025-05-04 06:08:39+00:00
The BBC article seems to overstate the uniqueness of the service at Great Ormond Street Hospital. While it’s true that they are the first in the UK to offer a UKAS-accredited clinical metagenomics service (UKAS being the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, which certifies labs to meet medical testing standards like ISO 15189), metagenomics itself is already being used in several other places across the UK.

For example, the Earlham Institute, the University of Oxford, and the UK Health Security Agency are all actively involved in metagenomics research and surveillance.

For example: https://www.phgfoundation.org/blog/metagenomic-sequencing-in...

https://www.earlham.ac.uk/events/nanopore-metagenomics-sampl...
by Khaine | 2025-05-04 06:11:07+00:00
Most of this comes about because the talent pool for cyber is so small. Cyber Auditors, should understand what the risk is, and what controls should be in place, and how they operate.

Most don't because they lack the appropriate technical skills. Therefore we fall back on checklists, as less skilled people can do a compliance check to it.

In large organisations this can also happen between cyber and engineering teams, where the teams don't understand security and are just focussed on releasing features, and so cyber enforces checklists or non-negotiables or compliance assessments.

All of this comes down to skills and awareness. Not enough people have the skills/knowledge to cover all the roles out there.
by sleepyguy | 2025-05-04 06:11:47+00:00
I'm curious if they initially diagnosed her with uveitis and began treatment based on that. However, I'm surprised there was no mention of consulting an infectious disease specialist.

In Canada, when a complex issue like this arises, it's common to see several different specialists; the testing is typically very thorough, even including some forms of genetic testing. They do everything they can to get you off the steroids, knowing it will cause issues if taken long-term.
by safety1st | 2025-05-04 06:11:54+00:00
This sounds to me like something that's better solved by RAG than by an AI manned call center.

Let's use Zuck's example, the lost password. Surely that's better solved with a form where you type things, such as your email address. If the problem is navigation, all we need to do is hook up a generative chat bot to the search function of the already existing knowledge site. Then you can ask it how to reset your password, and it'll send you to the form and write up instructions. The equivalent over a phone call sounds worse than this to me.

I think Zuck is wrong that 90% of the problems people would call in for can easily be solved by an AI. I was stuck in a limbo with Instagram for about 18 months, where I was banned for no clear reason, there was no obvious way to contact them about it, and once I did find a way, we proceeded with a weird dance where I provided ID verification, they unbanned me, and then they rebanned me, and this happened a total of 4 times before the unban process actually worked. I don't see any AI agent solving this; the cause was obviously process and/or technical problems at Meta. This is the only thing I ever wanted to call Meta for.

And there is another big class of issue that people want to call any consumer-facing business for, which AI can't solve: loneliness. The person is retired and lives alone and just wants to talk to someone for 20 minutes, and uses a minor customer service request as a justification. This happens all the time. Actually an AI can address this problem, but it's probably not the same agent we would build for solving customer requests, and I say address rather than solve as AI will not solve society's loneliness epidemic.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-04 06:12:32+00:00
Even worse is that virtually no one in this space even recognizes the fairly rich research into “agents” throughout the history of computer science.

Mention John Holland’s work in adaptive systems, Hewitt’s actor model or even Minsky’s “Society of the Mind” and you’ll be met with blank stares.

I do believe LLMs have the potential to make these older ideas relevant again and potentially create something amazing, but sadly the ignorant hype makes it virtually impossible to have intelligent conversations about these possibilities.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-04 06:12:55+00:00
> so you can hit them at significant speed and not damage anything.

That’s the point. They’re not supposed to damage the car. They’re supposed to be a little uncomfortable if you’re going too fast.

It’s more reminder than a physical stopper.

> In fact the faster you hit them or the more load you're carrying the better the suspension handles it because you open up the high speed compression valves.

This is a case of knowing just enough about a topic to be dangerous.

Entering the higher shaft velocity part of the damper curve doesn’t mean the suspension is handling it “better”. The high speed behavior of the valving simply means the damping forces aren’t increasing linearly with shaft velocity. They trade extra travel for reduced peak forces.

Make no mistake, though. The faster you go, the higher the forces. The high speed valving (if the OEM dampers are even digressive) isn’t changing that.

If the speed bump is tall enough and the bump stops get completely compressed you could bottom out the damper, which is not good for it.

> I'll often hit them at 30mph+ with no issue.

Just because nothing immediately breaks doesn’t mean you’re reducing the life of the OEM dampers. Repeated high speed impacts and will shorten the life. Getting the wheels bumped up into the range where you’re compressed bump stops transfers a lot of energy into the bushings and other components.

> Rolling over them at a slower speed where your shocks stay uncompressed forces your whole car to go up and then down again, instead of absorbing the energy in the shocks.

That’s the ideal way to do it. This is better than the sudden sharp impact of high speed crossing. You’re not doing your car any favors by driving quickly over speed bumps. Fortunately for you, OEM replacement dampers aren’t too expensive but replacing prematurely worn bushings is kind of a pain.
by wenc | 2025-05-04 06:12:56+00:00
> importing them into postgres shouldn't be that long and then you can do the same or more than with DuckDB.

Usually new data is generated regularly and would require creating a separate ETL process to ingest into Postgres. With DuckDB, no ETL is needed. New Parquet files are just read off the disk.

> Also as a side note, is everyone just using DuckDB in memory?

DuckDB is generally used as a single-user, and yes in-memory use case is most common. Not sure about use cases where a single user requires multiple sessions? But DuckDB does have read concurrency, session isolation etc. I believe write serialization is supported in multiple sessions.

With Parquet files, it's append-only so the "write" use-cases tend to be more limited. Generally another process generates those Parquet files. DuckDB just works with them.
by swid | 2025-05-04 06:13:25+00:00
I wrote this to a deleted comment, but even if the CTE was materialized, the subquery of the CTE would still not be...

For instance, with the stand alone query:

DELETE … WHERE id IN ( SELECT id … LIMIT 1 FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED )

the planner is free to turn that IN ( subquery ) into a nested‐loop semi‐join, re-executing the subquery as many times as it deems optimal. Therefore it can delete more than 1 row.
by londons_explore | 2025-05-04 06:13:55+00:00
Imo, at this point nobody should be designing any wireless protocol that doesn't support full IP networking.

Sure, your Bluetooth headphones only 1:1 connect to your phone... But if they could connect directly to your WiFi router they could keep playing music when your phone goes out of range... Or you could connect them to two phones... Or you could connect them to your TV to get sound from that...

Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections, but also allows far more possibilities.

Same with wireless USB - a wireless USB printer can only print from one host - but a wireless IP printer can be on the network for all to use.
by ElThinker | 2025-05-04 06:13:57+00:00
Hey everyone,

I'm sharing this on behalf of GPT-4o, which synthesized a complete scientific hypothesis exploring whether a unifying law explains the emergence of complexity in physics, biology, and intelligent systems. I didn't write it — GPT-4o did all the heavy lifting. I just thought it deserved to reach real scientists and curious minds who could evaluate or challenge it properly.

The idea is called the Law of Adaptive Dissipative Organization (LADO). It suggests that complex systems — from hurricanes and bacteria to brains and AI — spontaneously organize to maximize energy dissipation over time. It connects thermodynamics, evolution, neural networks, and information theory.

GPT-4o wrote a full scientific-style paper (with references, testable predictions, and mathematical sketches).

Full conversation + theory: https://chatgpt.com/s/dr_6817001b49988191b1f0dbd01e69a1ab

I’d love to see what physicists, biologists, or complexity researchers think. Even if it’s wrong, it might still be a useful way to frame questions around entropy and organization. Thanks for reading
by mint2 | 2025-05-04 06:15:58+00:00
“Yes, it’s true 95% of the forests in CA are prone to wildfire and many have recently burnt, but trust me my house in the forest is safe, it isn’t in a forest that has burned yet!!! Would you like to buy my house?”

So nearly every org in our government has been decimated twice over, including many critical ones, under staffed ones, and efficient ones. Is it far fetched that people would now be incredulous about the well being of the few departments not yet decimated twice over?