MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-26 17:29:14+00:00
Kaiser isn't necessarily the best example here. Your doctor likely did that because Kaiser will generally not cover things like that, just as they'll almost never prescribe sildenafil or tadalafil or semaglutide (but they will happily refer you for gastric bypass...).

There are good things about Kaiser, but definitely not-so-good things. I'm still pissed at them for my fiancée, fresh from the dentist after a few root canals with a script for pain medication was told (at their hospital pharmacy, no less, so it wasn't that they didn't have it available) that they would only fill pain medication via mail order. "Oh good, so I just need to wait 5-7 business days for relief from my root canals."
by colejohnson66 | 2025-06-26 17:29:17+00:00
Yes and no. It wasn't just about telling you a problem occurred, but failing early and being able to say exactly why. A "something in the chain is running in 7-bit mode" is more helpful than "CRC error in IDAT". Maybe the developers were being a bit too ambitious/hopeful, but an eight byte "magic" over a "simpler" four byte one isn't really worth crying over, even with 1996 download speeds.
Show HN: Human-Powered Infinite Monkey – Press "Banana" to Spell Hamlet
by zhexin | 2025-06-26 17:29:35+00:00
Hi HN –

What it is

Hit the BANANA button and the server returns a random character. Everyone smashing the button shares one progress bar. Together we’re racing to complete the sentence:

to be or not to be that is the question

---

Why I built it

I love the infinite-monkey theorem and wondered what happens if real people “drive” the randomness. It was also an excuse to play with Server-Sent Events for ultra-light real-time, and I wanted to see how it fares on Cloudflare’s edge.

---

Except for the random monkey, I also extend a collaborative article mode, where anyone can append up to 500 chars per turn, evolving one story in real time.

Thanks for checking it out – happy to answer anything!
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-26 17:29:38+00:00
The article has a link (citation 17) to a site selling toy models of that vehicle as an image source, I can find one (fourth image in the gallery) there where it sorta looks like the wing is missing because the wing is black against a black background but it's not the same image shown in the paper:

https://fantastic-plastic.com/lockheed-martin-x-33-venturest...

The name "Venturestar" is properly rendered in that image but "NASA" and "Lockheed Martin" are thoroughly mangled the way I'd expect text to be mangled in an AI image. The image from the toy site could have been used as as reference image to create the image in the paper one way or another.
by ayakaneko | 2025-06-26 17:29:52+00:00
I think that, yes sure, there's no reason to think AI will stop improving.

But I think that everyone is lossing trust not because there is no potential that LLMs could write good code or not, it's the trust to the user who uses LLMs to uncontrollable-ly generate those patches without any knowledge, fact checks, and verifications. (many of them may not even know how to test it.)

In another word, while LLMs is potentially capable of being a good SWE, but the human behind it right now, is spamming, and doing non-sense works, and let the unpaid open source maintainers to review and feedback them (most of the time, manually).
by specialist | 2025-06-26 17:29:54+00:00
Was also a young parent. Empathetic yes to all.

Securing stable health insurance dictated most of my career decisions. I was captive to turrible gigs, had to pass on a lot of opportunities.

Want to revitalize our society?

#1 is Medicare for All. More startups, more risk taking & innovation, higher birth rate, etc.

#2 is childcare. Cheap, plentiful, good quality.

#3 is housing. Again: Cheap, plentiful, good quality. Plus, rentals better suited for young families (eg more 2 & 3 bedroom units).
by giardini | 2025-06-26 17:31:12+00:00
Is this a useful first aid technique?

Like for Aron Ralston, who was trapped under a rock and had to cut off his own leg to escape: would it have reduced his pain if he had stabbed himself in the shoulder to the bone?

Would this best be done with, say possibly, acupuncture needles or an ice pick, so as to minimize the damage and to maximize the relief?

Gunsmoke TV episode:

Doc: Well, Billy, we'll have to amputate your lower left leg - it's shot plumb thru with gangrene.

Billy: Will it hurt, Doc?

Doc: Hell yeah, it'll hurt! But thanks to Hacker News we have a new pain treatment: every time you yell. Chester here will stab your right leg to the bone with this h'yar ice pick. And Mary will hold a leather strap in your mouth so your teeth don't crack off! Don't forget to breathe.

Billy: I'm obliged and grateful to be part of your research program, Doc, but can't you instead just wait 10 minutes while I drink this here quart of whiskey and pass out? Then you can do as you wish.

Doc: Hell, no, time's a'wasting! Hold him down, fellas! Doctorin' progresses only a step at a time!
by FitchApps | 2025-06-26 17:31:18+00:00
I would even say this applies to AI 'Vibe' editors. Like this issue with Windsurf happened to me (and others) https://www.reddit.com/r/Codeium/comments/1hr372j/windsurf_n... Windsurf IDE (their AI assistant) simply refuses to connect - possibly IP addressed gets blocked by their system - no explanation or reason.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-26 17:31:53+00:00
It is in the video “Welcome to LlamaCon 2025 - Closing Session!” posted in full on YouTube, around minute 44.

Zuck asks: “in terms of the coding, and how it improves that, do you have a sense of how much of the code, like what percent of the code that’s being written in Microsoft at this point is written by AI as opposed to by engineers?”

Nadella: “yeah so there’s two sort of thing we’re tracking, one is the accept rate itself, that’s around 30-40, it’s going up monotonically, [talks for a bit about the fact that it works well with Python, less so for C++, from context he’s talking about code completions here, now back to…] the place where the agentic code still, it’s ver-it’s sort of nascent—for new greenfield it’s very very high—but as I said nothing is greenfield in many cases and so therefore I’d say maybe at this point the PR—oh by, the way the code reviews are very high, and so, the agents we have for reviewing code [makes a happy expression], so that usage has increased—and so I’ll say, [this is around 45:00] maybe 20-30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos and some of our projects are probably all, uh, written by software. […]

I dunno. In conclusion having listened to it a couple times and done my best at transcribing it fairly close to what he actually said, I’m still confused as to what he meant. I was going to try and make some point with this, but I lost track of it while writing out the quote. At least folks have the full thing to argue about here, more or less!
by garethsprice | 2025-06-26 17:32:55+00:00
I am currently traveling and for the past few weeks have been using an Oculus 3 with Immersed (https://immersed.com/). Pleasantly surprised how usable it is for 3-6 hour stretches, more productive than just a laptop screen alone. At home I'll likely return to physical monitors though.

Tips: Get an upgraded headband, silicone face cover and carrying case. Use a physical USB connection for lower latency (& turn off the wifi/bluetooth as it's no longer needed). Bring a cloth for keeping the lenses clean. Bump the Retina quality up in the Immersed client (on Mac). Lower resolutions (1920x1080) are more comfortable to use over longer periods. Use a travel neck pillow for reclined usage. Bring replacement batteries and a charger for the controllers.
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-26 17:33:11+00:00
It's not a valid pointer because you can't use the indirection operator on it. Returning a value other than NULL makes sense because an allocation of size zero is still an allocation.

Additionally the actual amount of memory malloc allocates is implementation-defined so long as it is not less than the amount requested, but accessing this extra memory is undefined behavior since processes don't know if it exists or not. a non-NULL return could be interpreted as malloc(0) allocating more than zero bytes.

Some implementations don't actually perform the allocation until theres a pagefault from the process writing to or reading from that memory so in that sense a non-NULL return is valid too.

I'd argue that malloc(0)==NULL makes less sense because there's no distinction between failure and success.

The only real problem is specifying two alternate behaviors and declaring them both to be equally valid.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-26 17:33:13+00:00
Not really. AI CAN experiment. The problem is that that negates most of the advantages of AI for management.

If you give AIs the ability to experiment directly and check, they can do that and report the results. But to do that even remotely well, you will need expert AI researchers, and subject matter experts. At which point AI has become an huge extra cost rather than cost savings.

But does it work? Yes.
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-26 17:33:14+00:00
> Try getting tretinoin from a real doctor; I’ve been written prescriptions multiple times, never once succeeded in actually getting it, because insurance is a fucking nightmare. And I’m not on a cheap plan.

Deviated septum with 90% occlusion in one nostril, see an ENT, also on a "platinum" plan. "Great, let's schedule surgery." ENT: "Hold fast. First, I'm going to prescribe you these two nasal sprays so you can come back to me in four weeks and tell me that, to our mutual surprise and disappointment, they didn't realign the cartilage, and that way, insurance will pre-authorize the surgery."
by LorenPechtel | 2025-06-26 17:33:34+00:00
There is also the problem that the military tends to go for the best. In some cases that's a good idea (the cost of getting that laser-guided bomb to the release point is well above the cost of the bomb), but when dealing with unmanned units the zerg approach is very often the winner.

Look at Iron Dome. By comparison to other modern SAMs it's abysmal. But that's by design, Israel wasn't looking for a good SAM. They were looking for the cheapest SAM that could hit a sitting duck. But that's what it's facing--ballistic inbounds that have no countermeasures and no ability to evade.
by 123yawaworht456 | 2025-06-26 17:33:34+00:00
any model, MoE or not, can be sharded over multiple devices (separate GPUs on a single machine or separate machines via network), yeah. but your question was "Do several LLMs communicate with each other before providing a solution?", and in this context (Deepseek's thinking), the answer is definitely "no".

models can communicate with one another via tool calling, sure, and there are hypothetical workflows where agents delegate tasks to other agents (with inference being done on different models), but that simply isn't the case here.
by complianceowl | 2025-06-26 17:34:06+00:00
As someone who is 34 with two kids (toddler and newborn), I completely agree with your comment. My wife and I had difficulty having kids, or we would've had them sooner, but I completely agree with having kids before 30. My energy is still solid, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't compare to energy in your 20s. People think too much about the financial aspect. You can continue building and growing financially even with kids, you just need to be smarter and more disciplined. A lot of people use the financial argument, but I think more and more, it is only a cope for not having had kinds sooner. All my kids will be in their 20s when I'm in my 50s; not bad, but having kids in your 20s is the way to go.
by Ginger-Pickles | 2025-06-26 17:34:22+00:00
Yes, if you look close, the paper is replete with error-filled generative reproductions of existing illustrations in the citations; including Fig. 6 (MC Escher struts), Fig. 7 (sprouting greeble tubes), and Fig. 8 (actuators replaced by tubes connected to mystery manifolds).

Even Fig. 2 shows the spike geometry magically changing, which is not addressed in the text and seems like an error carried over from the original illustration in the cited source.

Casts serious doubt on the credibility of the rest of the work.
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-26 17:34:22+00:00
Yeah, please don't repeat this. This is the same thing that insurers say to Congress for other things too. "We're not denying care, we're just not going to be the ones paying for it", be it cardiac surgery, or (in the case of United) even Heli EMS from MVAs, because it wasn't "pre-authorized".
by FridayoLeary | 2025-06-26 17:34:23+00:00
What's eye opening about the recent iran israel conflict is how drones were used. Iran fired about 1000 drones and israel easily destroyed all but one of them. On the other hand israel used drones to devastating effect.

I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's clear that drones as a primary means of warfare is simply not effective. hamas and hezbolla have no notable successes with drones, except for on october 7 where they used them to great effect to destroy specific machine gun emplacements and a couple of tanks. They will be part of the future, but never the future itself.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-06-26 17:34:31+00:00
At the end of main, if the count wasn't balanced, then you knew you had a mismatch between malloc()/free().

If malloc() had returned a real pointer, you'd have to free that too.

> wouldn’t it be better just to return NULL and guarantee that 0-sized allocations never use any memory at all?

Better: takes less memory Worse: blinds you to this portability issue.
by markandrewj | 2025-06-26 17:34:51+00:00
It is interesting hearing feedback from the frontline. Even with the issues, I think it is clear drones are changing modern warfare when you have companies like Anduril. What most people think is coming next is autonomous drones, although I don't morally agree with it. Sorry you had to have this experience, I wish this war would end, too many lives have been lost and it is senseless.
by bpt3 | 2025-06-26 17:35:01+00:00
You keep saying your content is "simple", "clear", and "straightforward", yet based on your own take on the interactions here, you are widely misunderstood. How could that be?

You literally speak in riddles (via your endless use of hypothetical scenarios with no attempt to link them to the topic at hand), refuse to respond to direct questions that could clear up confusion, and have some rather eccentric and seemingly inconsistent views that you seem to really want to convey to others.

I'm not the one who needs luck going forward, my friend. Best wishes.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2025-06-26 17:35:16+00:00
Well, humans saying thanks to eachother isn't wasted energy. It has a real affect on our relationships.

People say thank you to AI because they are portrayed as human-like chat bots, but in reality it has almost no effect on their effectiveness to respond to our queries.

Saying thank you to ChatGPT is no less wasteful than saying thank you to Windows for opening the calculator.

I don't think anyone is trying to draw any parallels between that inefficiency and real humans saying thank you?
by parpfish | 2025-06-26 17:35:20+00:00
i'm less worried about people monetizing it than I am about people pushing a lot of bad self-diagnosis memes based on nonsense criteria ("if you sleep with your arms in this pose, you have ADHD (and maybe autism)!") or just describing completely typical events as a meaningful symptom ("if you ever procrastinate, you might have ADHD")
by energywut | 2025-06-26 17:35:35+00:00
> Are you saying that, irrespective of the chance of being caught and convicted, and of the severity of the likely punishment, the likelihood of someone committing a crime is constant?

I'm saying that prison sentences are not a deterrent to crime, and, in fact, increase the amount of crime done. Research has consistently shown that the threat of being caught is considerably higher deterrent than prison time, and that harsh sentences don't influence behavior:

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

> That has nothing to do with the point I made, which was about people becoming criminals.

We are discussing crime. Which has a total sum. You can reduce that sum by preventing people from being criminals or you can reduce that sum by reforming criminals. I believe you need both. So it is important to remember that prisons negatively contribute to reforming people, increasing total crime, while research shows they don't contribute to preventing people from being criminals.

We need other systems, systems that prevent people from becoming criminals AND reduce the likelihood of re-offending if they do.
by vunderba | 2025-06-26 17:36:02+00:00
Here's hoping the distilled [Dev] model can hold up reasonably well against the larger pro/max models which in a lot of ways can completely replace the relatively old-school inpainting techniques of Stable Diffusion.

Some before/after experiments with editing images using Kontext:

https://specularrealms.com/ai-transcripts/experiments-with-f...
by notepad0x90 | 2025-06-26 17:36:07+00:00
But why does it work that way, why does all memory need to be mapped before allocation? why can't it work like file systems where you have a table/datastructure mapping inodes to files? The smaller your allocations are, the less total ram you have, that would make sense. Some apps need huge chunks of memory, some don't, why the one-size-fits-all approach? TLB lookup can also be O(n), it will be slower when you have lots of small allocations because that means lots of lookups but that lets applications optimize performance that way instead of having it be a system-wide setting.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-06-26 17:37:24+00:00
50s. When everyone else was getting Atari's I got a Commodore Vic20 and how to write software games book (My parents were both in software startups starting in the late 70s). Did software, burnt out, moved to IT management, ended up blowing my life up, now I'm completely f'd. 50/50 poor work/life balance combined with poor homelife, both feeding the other. It's interesting to have seen American life from the struggling 80s middle class that made genX latch key, to the top and now to the bottom.
by OJFord | 2025-06-26 17:38:16+00:00
It's unfortunately quite easy to do even inadvertently (not following dosage instructions) - doesn't take a lot.

The reason for the rule though was to combat its use in suicide attempts. They also have to be sold in blister packs here for the same reason, not the big bottles of Tylenol/Advil etc. that you get there (and we used to here) - relatively difficult to take several, requires more preparation than just chugging a bottle.
by kvz | 2025-06-26 17:38:26+00:00
The full story didn't fit in the title.

They want evidence of the antivirus updates for our macbooks being centrally managed by some tool (quote-unquote: WSUS). I get this is how some enterprises operate, but for our small shop we're talking a handful of macbooks that have access to even anything. And even so the people who operate those are contractually obligated to run a very tight ship (encrypted disks, auto updates (which includes XProtect, apple's native antivirus so to speak), 2FA on all services, etc), tunnelling on unprotected wifi, etc.

We sent evidence of all of this. But they really want centrally managed antivirus for our macbooks.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-26 17:38:36+00:00
> There's no reason to think AI will stop improving

No, and there’s no reason to think cars will stop improving either, but that doesn’t mean they will start flying.

The first error is in thinking that AI is converging towards a human brain. To treat this as a null hypothesis is incongruent both wrt the functional differences between the two and crucially empirical observations of the current trajectory of LLMs. We have seen rapid increases in ability, yes, but those abilities are very asymmetrical by domain. Pattern matching and shitposting? Absolutely crushing humans already. Novel conceptual ideas and consistency checked reasoning? Not so much, eg all that hype around PhD-level novel math problems died down as quickly as it had been manufactured. If they were converging on human brain function, why this vastly uneven ability increases?

The second error is to assume a superlinear ability improvement when the data has more or less run out and has to be slowly replenished over time, while avoiding the AI pollution in public sources. It’s like assuming oil will accelerate if it had run out and we needed to wait for more bio-matter to decompose for every new drop of crude. Can we improve engine design and make ICEs more efficient? Yes, but it’s a diminishing returns game. The scaling hypothesis was not exponential but sigmoid, which is in line with most paradigm shifts and novel discoveries.

> Making these sort of blanket assessments of AI, as if it were a singular, static phenomena is bad thinking.

I agree, but do you agree with yourself here? Ie:

> no reason to think that these tools won't vastly outperform us in the very near future

.. so back to single axis again? How is this different from saying calculators outperform humans?
by duxup | 2025-06-26 17:38:38+00:00
I don't want my manager to write code generally speaking. It's a gateway to problems.

I don't mind if they read and try to write something and run it in dev to see how things are going.

But otherwise I find too many "manager writes code" turns into him being the exception to all the rules and ... some of those rules about planning and talking to other devs exist for good reasons. Suddenly they're the exception to everything and breaking things and some folks don't want to call them out or worse they think the managers one off "quick fix" is now a pattern we use and OMG ...

I've worked with some great managers who coded and they did great work and no amount of "hey don't do that" "oh yeah I won't actually stopped them from eventually crossing the line and making bad choices.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely and the same goes with many managers coding.
by M4R5H4LL | 2025-06-26 17:38:49+00:00
Why not finish, publish it to the store and get income if it was that straightforward? There's a long way to go between a toy application to demonstrate a product, and something on shelves actually selling. In other words, you can most often quickly tackle the concept or trivial parts of an app, but it's much harder to get a real product out, even if the implementation looks straightforward on surface.
by mandevil | 2025-06-26 17:38:54+00:00
It sounds good at the one sentence level. When you need to write more about the topic, the problem is that oxygen makes up only about 20% of the air. So you have need to accelerate all of this N2 that gives you nothing in energy and the result is a much lower Isp (specific impulse is the thrust per massflow, and all of that N2 is not adding anything to your thrust and increasing your massflow). And you need to be able to pull in enough air to get enough oxygen to drive your engine, so you need very large structures to move all of this unnecessary nitrogen around.

It is possible that only needing one tank rather than two can make up for the dramatic loss of Isp we see from an air-breathing engine and the air-handling structure, but no one has yet managed to demonstrate that, and the general consensus runs against it. I recall reading that HOTOL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Aerospace_HOTOL) calculations were actually driven by an extremely light structure estimate rather than the airbreathing engine, to the point where if you plugged a rocket engine in they would actually get more payload to space as a SSTO, because those aggressively light structure estimates were doing all of the work.