MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2025-06-07 13:31:36+00:00
> it doesn't matter whose failure it is.

It does. The distinction between a misunderstanding of aviation, or a misunderstanding of which of many possible models is in place.

I'm interested in misunderstandings of aviation. How did aviators think about it before software ever entered the picture? Which of their concepts are coherent, and why do they use them? What reasoning power do those concepts get them? It's interesting when programmers misunderstand that.

It's less interesting when programmers setup a poor system for keeping track of things. It could be busses or trains or parts in a factory. It's not aviation specific, and it's run-of-the-mill bad design when it's done badly. Apparently the first software engineers to model aviation were really bad at it.
by geraneum | 2025-06-07 13:32:32+00:00
> Rather, the problem is, once you do define it, you will quickly find that LLMs are capable of it.

That’s really not what’s happening though. People who claim LLMs can do X and Y often don’t even understand how LLMs work. The opposite is also true. They just open a prompt and get an output and shout Eureka. Of course not everyone is like this, but majority are. It’s similar to what we think about thinking itself. You read these comments and everyone is an expert on human brain and how it works. It’s fascinating.
by Balgair | 2025-06-07 13:32:53+00:00
Prediction: By 2035, a common interview question for hedge-funds and FANGs will be: "Can you make unlimited bets on fanduel and draftkings?"

Goofus: Yes, I bet on them all the time. Why do you ask?

Gallant: I don't really bet, actually. Haven't even downloaded the apps.

Galaxy: Fanduel has me limited to 25 cent bets. Hardrock at 2 dollar bets. And draftkings kicked me off entirely. I'm waiting for a good opportunity for betmgm until I open an account there.

Further, people will pay to be 'mules' for professional gamblers so that those gamblers will wreck the reputation of those people at the large gambling apps, making it seem like the 'mule' is actually a 'sharpe'.
by robkop | 2025-06-07 13:33:02+00:00
There is much missing from this prompt, tool call descriptors is the most obvious. See for yourself using even a year old jailbreak [1]. There’s some great ideas in how they’ve setup other pieces such as cursor rules.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/lucasmrdt/4215e483257e1d81e44842eddb...
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-06-07 13:34:46+00:00
However, it is possible to audit the Ubuntu software against the source code which is something that you cannot do with Windows. That is a technical difference even if you don't acknowledge it.

Also, Linux does make it much easier to determine your level of trust as the different components can be analysed/verified independently (although systemd is a bit of a monolith) whereas it's a lot trickier to isolate Windows components.
by daft_pink | 2025-06-07 13:34:46+00:00
It’s nuts in the same sense as many American tech companies. Crazy overvalued, but benefits from the tailwinds that might make it payoff. Like low capital intensity, high gross margin, monopoly like ecosystem and lock in, crazy smart talented employees, etc.

It’s sticky. Once it’s setup it has a low marginal cost with large amounts of vendor lock in, but provides huge value to the companies that use it.

The bad part about it is that only very large companies can afford it because of the complex and enourmous installation costs and a single engineer can’t spin up an instance and get started the way they can with aws, which severely limits the total addressable market and ability to quickly grow.
by robwwilliams | 2025-06-07 13:35:15+00:00
The original taurine paper in Science was obviously a mess to some of us in the field. They did not even have plausible taurine concentrations. Poor review process.

There is no reason to supplement with taurine or with resveratrol. Resveratrol debunked firmly by both the Interventions Testing Program in mice (Miller et al 2011, a paper with Sinclair as a coauthor) and earlirr by Timothy Bass and Linda Partridge and colleagues in two widely used model organisms (C elegans anf Drisophila, 2007).

Yes David Sinclair is vocal and has a book: but look at the evidence and compare to rapamycin.

Rapamycin is a drug with strong prolongevity effects at almost any age in both sexes at an appropriate dose to inhibit only mTOR-C1 signaling (4 to 8 mg once per week).

There ARE side effects to almost any drug. And rapamycin will not be a good drug for a subset of humans in some environments. For example rapamycin is one if the last drugs I would take if I was caring for a room full of 5-6 year olds all day. But surprisingly it was a good drug to be taking during COVID-19 if you were older. perhaps by reducing the inflammatory hyper-vigilance that killed so many older humans. See Kaeberlein’s study of 333 biohackers in 2023.
by 34679 | 2025-06-07 13:37:54+00:00
That's fair. It is not the cheaper option, unless you use free or low cost models from a provider like OpenRouter. Of course, that comes with a performance hit. What I like about it is the flexibility. I run Devstral Small locally for easier tasks and it's free except for electricity. On the other hand, you can use up $20 with Gemini Pro in a couple hours with large contexts. Grok 3 mini has been a good middle ground- more capable than Devstral and less expensive than Gemini Pro.

So I tend to start with Devstral unless I know it will struggle, and then move on to paid models as needed. When I do switch to a paid provider, it's noticeably better than the same provider on a Cursor paid plan, so even though it's more expensive, I feel like there's more value there.

I honestly don't have a proper monthly tally yet. I've used $30 in OpenRouter credits over a couple weeks, but a lot of that was experimenting to compare quality of output.
by testrun | 2025-06-07 13:38:19+00:00
Because they are profitable. So the cost is deductible over 5 years, instead of one year.

A very simple example:

Revenue: $ 1 000 All other cost except software: $ 500 Software cost: $ 100

Net profit (if software is allowed as opex): $400

Tax on $400 (@30%): $120

Net profit after tax: $280

However, if it is capex(amortized over 5 years):

Revenue: $ 1 000 Other cost (except software): $500 Software cost: $ 100

Net profit before tax: $ 400

Important: But now for tax purposes you can only deduct $20 this year as a cost ($100 amortized over 5 years)

So now you have to add back $80 to net profit for tax purposes: $480

Tax (@30%): $ 144

Net profit after tax: $400 - $144 = $256

So the difference is $280 - $256 = $24

Just a few notes:

1. I assume tax rate at 30%, it can be something else, principle stay the same

2. That all other expenses are tax deductible
by JdeBP | 2025-06-07 13:39:22+00:00
Has no-one figured this out in three years?

It's not telemetry. You just have to look at the junk that gets put in that huge banner across the top of the system settings to figure out what this is. It's not reporting you to Microsoft. It's reporting stuff from Microsoft to you.

2021.1019.1.0 is, as I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44209402, a date. It's publishing a date from earlier this year now, in 2025. It's the date that something downloadable from Microsoft changed to a newer version. And in fact there are several things that got updated on April the 24th that are likely candidates here. There were update candidates for what this could be on October the 19th of 2021. The most likely is updates to Windows Update itself.

As for Bing: Well in M. Horowitz's screenshot one can see that it's showing the prompt to have the "full customer experience". On other machines, you'll find that that area contains little icons about the statuses of Microsoft Rewards, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft OneDrive, Windows Update, and others. It's fairly obvious that the System Settings program has to make HTTP(S) queries to on-line services to show all of this stuff, including asking Bing how many Microsoft Rewards the user has earned. I wouldn't be surprised if it simply always did that, even if it never displayed the icon. And those queries involve DNS lookups.

System Settings is querying various WWW services for the little icons at the top of its window, and the very prompt to run through the "full customer experience" dance that we can see right there in the screenshot.
by uecker | 2025-06-07 13:39:46+00:00
Something like this: https://godbolt.org/z/er9n6ToGP It encapsulates a pointer to an array and a length. It is not perfect because of some language limitation (which I hope we can remove), but also not to bad. One limitation is that you need to pass it a typedef name instead of any type, i.e. you may need a typedef first. But this is not terrible.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-07 13:40:01+00:00
The state of searching and filtering on almost all ecommerce websites is dismal.

I regularly get items that match none of my filters in Amazon search and no online retailer seems to care at all. If you are looking for an item that needs to meet specific requirements then it's going to be a long slog.

Also fun, "product dimensions", is it the size of the box? Is it the size of the item? Who knows?
by lazide | 2025-06-07 13:40:30+00:00
Gene based evolution is constant. There is no way to avoid it; any more than it’s possible to avoid a compiler (somewhere) for any decent sized computer program, even if you’re writing in Python.

So what you’re describing is not what you think you’re describing at all.

Those ‘non-competitive’ societies are actually just those where the competition has been decided through structural elements which are not currently being contested to the same extent. Because someone either ‘won’ the war already, or the ‘war’ is more subtle and manipulative rather than being out in the open.

If you happen to be on the ‘winning’ side of that war, then that looks great. If you’re on the losing side, you won’t get much of a chance to notice or fight about it. And what cannot be ‘seen’, ‘doesn’t exist’.

War, after all, only can occur when someone is able to actually fight - and can see a reason to want to.

Because in either one, someone is making the choices (explicitly, or implicitly!) which decide whose genes actually end up spreading.

Complaining about mental health issues in competitive societies is like complaining about people getting maimed in war. And if people just stopped trying to fight back, then hey, world peace! (Once whatever Emperor conquered first won, of course)

Society is the increasingly abstract and confusing game we build on top of all this so we’re not all writing the equivalent of assembly - aka Ghenghis Khan’ng each other. But it’s all the same at the end of the day - the computer (aka reality) runs whatever instructions gets spit out (aka genes). And whoever decides that, ‘wins’.
by kace91 | 2025-06-07 13:40:45+00:00
Plus, commits depend on the current state of the system.

What sense does “getting rid of vulnerabilities by phasing out {dependency}” make, if the next generation of the code might not rely on the mentioned library at all? What does “improve performance of {method}” mean if the next generation used a fully different implementation?

It makes no sense whatsoever except for a vibecoders script that’s being extrapolated into a codebase.
by rpdillon | 2025-06-07 13:41:17+00:00
Not really. Caffeine tolerance builds over a period of days and dissipates over a similar period, roughly 72 hours. The article actually touches on the effect, and it has to do with a reduction of adenosine receptors in middle-aged participants.

> “Adenosine receptors naturally decrease with age, reducing caffeine’s ability to block them and improve brain complexity, which may partly explain the reduced effect of caffeine observed in middle-aged participants,” Carrier said.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-07 13:41:20+00:00
This is the difference between private & public sector services that is generally missed by the "big gubmint bad" heads.

The purpose of private enterprise is to make money, and you can slice out a business that serves the most price insensitive, high margin, low maintenance clients.

The purpose of public services is to.. serve the public. For example, public safety net programs are always going to have more waste than a private company, because if your program is there to prevent citizens from starving, you give the benefit of the doubt on eligibility.

A private company doesn't need to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, they provide a service to paying customers, and are generally OK losing customers due to payment friction vs giving away services free.
by rbanffy | 2025-06-07 13:41:54+00:00
> Because nothing says "I live dangerously" like writing your 6502 assembly in memory with the mini assembler without saving, then letting your little brother near the keyboard.

RESET on the Apple II was a warm reset. You could set a value on page zero so that pressing it caused a cold start (many apps did that), but, even then, the memory is not fully erased on startup, so you'd probably be kind of OK.
by throwaway173738 | 2025-06-07 13:42:13+00:00
This is 100% the intended effect of leaving a bomb like this unaddressed then stalling all legislation halfway through your opponent’s term. You make them look incompetent and then you complain about how they never fix anything, even though they never get anything done because you’ve stopped cooperating. And even though you’ve stopped you can keep complaining about how they always include things you don’t like in legislation so that’s why you never cooperate. The solution is simple in your eyes: just do exactly what you want and only what you want and then you’ll cooperate. This is how a lot of a certain party was talking on the news from 2021 to 2025 when they were interviewed.
by const_cast | 2025-06-07 13:42:23+00:00
On a related note, not believing some things because you cannot prove them is a road to naivety.

For me personally, based on the plethora of evidence given by other online platforms and applications, I think it's perfectly sane to assume that yes, your data is being slurped and logged. Maybe that's not a bad thing, maybe it is, but at this point I think that ship has sailed.

Can I prove it? No, mostly because the manufacturers have specifically designed it in such a way to be unprovable.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-06-07 13:42:25+00:00
Human language is far from perfect as a cognitive tool but still serves us well because it is not foundational. We use it both for communication and some reasoning/planning as a high level layer.

I strongly believe that human language is too weak (vague, inconsistent, not expressive enough etc.) to replace interactions with the world as a basis to build strong cognition.

We're easily fooled by the results of LLM/LRM models because we typically use language fluency and knowledge retrieval as a proxy benchmark for intelligence among our peers.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-06-07 13:42:38+00:00
Updating the deeds (i.e. the process of effecting a sale) is trivial, though if you want to count these are indeed pages of paperwork for each property. It's all that comes before that takes time: consultation on route, land purchases, compulsory purchase orders, appeals, etc.

That being said, there must be more than that because it seems to me that every infrastructure project (even without purchasing land) takes ages and costs accumulate fortune for what it is. An example is the work on existing lines and stations as part of the Elizabeth line work outside London.

This seems specific as, overall, I would say that red tape for individuals and businesses is less than in, say, France or Germany.
by ednite | 2025-06-07 13:43:06+00:00
You’re right to think that I probably do sound more like a cautious observer than I actually am. For what it’s worth, I’ve been experimenting with AI tools on the side (mostly in coding and writing workflows), and I’m planning to dive deeper soon, especially around integrating agents into my SaaS.

The post was more about the hype and attention surrounding AI, which can feel mentally exhausting at times, mostly because of how fast everything is moving. Not a complaint, really. If anything, that might be a good sign. I totally get why people are excited, it just takes effort to stay grounded in the middle of it all.

Appreciate the comment! Hopefully next time I’ll be jumping in with war stories instead of sideline takes.
by brutalhonesty | 2025-06-07 13:43:33+00:00
Profit is determined by expenses though.

A simple example to illustrate:

Say you had 100k revenue and 1 software developer you pay 100k per year.

Under the new law, you can only deduct 20k of the developer’s salary, so your profit is 80k, which you have to pay taxes on.

However, you have $0 in the bank because you earned 100k and paid out 100k in salary.

See how that is problematic?
by davidweatherall | 2025-06-07 13:44:35+00:00
I think there's a big difference with how designers and programmers can use AI to enhance their work, and how exploited the average person's work has been. A lot of designers publish their work on social media, or it's visible on their websites etc., which AI models have used to train with. But with coding, most people's code only exists in private repos, or is compiled to a format that LLMs cant easily be trained on.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-07 13:44:56+00:00
Precisely - USPS legally is required to delivery everywhere, they have no choice. Their pricing doesn't adequately reflect the difficulty of delivery either.

FedEx/UPS can also be very picky about which services they offer to who. I've had plenty of FedEx/UPS return shipments that they refuse to pickup due to service level agreements on different shipment classes.

USPS you can literally click on their website for them to come pickup a stupid $8 shipment from your door. They'll drive to your house and ring your doorbell to pick it up, incredible.
by dmurray | 2025-06-07 13:45:11+00:00
> During Uber’s big announcement, Kansal showed a video of one possible Route Share ride in the Big Apple. It covered about 3 miles from Midtown to Lower Manhattan, which would take about 30 minutes and cost $13.

Definitely a weird choice for the presentation: the best-served part of the best-served city in the US for public transport. Why not pick literally anywhere else?
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-06-07 13:45:40+00:00
You don't even need to go this far.

Passenger cars-- heck, even coach buses-- are engineered for passenger comfort and convenience.

City buses are engineered to secure the driver against passengers, to be simply maintained and hosed out as needed, and to accommodate overcrowding standing-room-only discomfort. Seats are hard, leg room is deficient, shoulder room is deprived, and that's even before we talk about trying to time an irregular arrival or departure time on a wobbly bus schedule.

You only ride a bus if you're indifferent to personal inconvenience, have firm principles, or have no choice.
by elbear | 2025-06-07 13:45:40+00:00
The version limits come from the fact that the Nix cache doesn't maintain older versions. So, if you use an older version, you will have to compile from sources. It sounds like they didn't want to take it upon themselves and provide a cache with older versions, even though it doesn't sound like much effort.

Honestly, the reasons given don't feel very solid. Maybe the person who introduced Nix left and the ones remaining didn't like it very much (the language itself is not very nice, the docs weren't great either in the past).

Still, I'm not familiar enough with the stack they chose, but does it provide a level of determinism close to Nix? If not, it might come to bite them or make their life harder later on.
by jfengel | 2025-06-07 13:45:43+00:00
Or you could spread people out more, by putting more buses on the routes. Fewer people per bus, buses are more conveniently timed, and more middle class passengers will want to take the bus. They'll save money by ditching their cars.

A bit more money can find more cleaning, as well as giving places for the mentally ill to go other than riding around all day.

Ya know, as long as we're making up fantasies. Americans are not noticeably different on our levels of mental illness, but no power on earth will compel us to spend money that might help someone other than ourselves.
by teekert | 2025-06-07 13:46:58+00:00
I feel it like that as well, but in some ways Nix is a more normal programming paradigm than other OS’s. We’re just not used to thinking about an OS that way. Nix expressions have inputs (a package repo, lots of key-value pairs) and outputs (a Linux system). Idk perhaps in a couple of years it will be much more normal.

Ie it is very easy for an AI to create a to-spec shell.nix (some Python packages, some Linux packages, some env vars, some path entries etc), or configuration.nix because of this paradigm.

I do this a lot to include envs with repos that fully support the package. It would probably be more reproducible with flakes (a flake.nix is like a shell.nix but with version pinning… or something, I’m still climbing that learning hill).
by rimunroe | 2025-06-07 13:47:17+00:00
Personally, to the degree that I ever distinguish between “web apps” and just normal sites, one of the distinguishing features of web apps for me is whether forcing a page reload on the majority of interactions would be unacceptably clunky to most users.

Provided page reloads are fast, I think far more sites would be completely fine with just being sites and not rich client apps.
by viraptor | 2025-06-07 13:47:41+00:00
The version selection part sounds weird. The versions in nixpkgs make sense when you're running/building the system. If you're providing runtimes/compilers as a platform, you really want something like what devenv does - provide the versions yourself. You really don't want to end up building an old system to provide an old nodejs - you're leaving security patches in dependencies behind. Devenv does it for example through https://github.com/cachix/nixpkgs-python "All Python versions, kept up-to-date on hourly basis using Nix."

> Railway injects a deployment ID environment variable into all builds.

They could've done it in the next layer after installation. Also, you can split packages into different layers. There's even automation for it if you need batches to keep the number of layers down.
by dtagames | 2025-06-07 13:47:41+00:00
I would say we have this language already, too. It's machine code or its cousin, assembler. Processor instructions (machine code) that all software reduces down to are very explicit and have no default values.

The problem is that people don't like writing assembler, which is how we got Fortran in the first place.

The fundamental issue, then, is with the human language side of things, not the programming language side. The LLM is useful because it understands regular English, like "What is the difference between 'let' and 'const' in JS?," which is not something that can be expressed in a programming language.

To get the useful feature we want, natural language understanding, we have to accept the unreliable and predictive nature of the entire technique.
by crazygringo | 2025-06-07 13:48:43+00:00
> Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise.

Richer customers don't pay more for public transit. It's not like clothing, where they buy a better product and produce most of the profit.

Removing some customers from bus systems doesn't have much of an effect. Bus systems are very flexible in changing routes and times to meet demand. It's not going to cause a "complete demise".

Also, if private buses are profitable, they invite competition. Private buses are an incredibly easy business to start. So no, nobody's "free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be".