MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrbungie | 2025-06-07 22:09:34+00:00
I don't know about you, but as far as I can tell I mediate and manipulate the world with my body and senses without necessarily using language. In fact, I can often do both at once, for example, thinking about something entirely unrelated while jogging, and still making physical decisions and actions without invoking language at all. Plus, animals (especially lower order like amoebas) also mediate with the world without needing language.

As far as we can tell without messing with complex experiental concepts like qualia and the possibility of philosophical zombies, language mainly helps higher order animals communicate with other animals and (maybe) keep a train of thought, though there are records of people that say that they don't. And now also it allows humans talk to LLMs.

But I digress, I would say this is an open academic debate. Suggesting that there is always language deep down is speculation.
by paganel | 2025-06-07 22:11:28+00:00
By 1998 the shit had already hit the fan big time for the common people in Russia, all "thanks" to Shock Therapy (which you allude to at your point b)). That was the real tragedy, nothing a more "experienced" president could have fixed (other than doing what Putin ended up doing, which is trying to reverse some of the craziness of said Shock Therapy).

I write this from direct experience, as I grew up as a kid/adolescent in nearby Romania in the '90s, where we had our very own Shock Therapy. In fact my present political stance (a return to nationalism and a reversal of what globalisation has brought about) is heavily marked by that very traumatic period in my life (and the same thing is valid for many of my compatriots).
by ColinWright | 2025-06-07 22:12:05+00:00
The film that prompted this is "The Man Who Knew Infinity"[0], a film based on Ramanujan's[1] work as a mathematician.

I think it's a fabulous film. It's fiction, but it captures a lot of truth about mathematician's and how they work.

FWIW, Bollobás[2] supervised my PhD, and Ramanujan was spoken about regularly, including Erdős's[3] opinions, so I have some insight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Bollob%C3%A1s

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
by krapp | 2025-06-07 22:13:02+00:00
According to the latest poll data I was able to find on Google (from 2024), about 2/3rds of Americans support universal healthcare[0]. At the very least, one can confidently say a majority of Americans per capita support it.

That said, the American political apparatus is designed such that the votes of rural conservatives (who tend to oppose it) count more than elsewhere, so that doesn't actually matter.

[0]https://news.gallup.com/poll/654101/health-coverage-governme...
by FeepingCreature | 2025-06-07 22:13:57+00:00
I (Sonnet 3.7 really) made a text-based CAD editor. It's like OpenSCAD but the backing abstraction is Signed Distance Fields, so that it can represent, for instance, smooth CSG.

The mesher is very simple; just "subdivide an octree using interval arithmetic, put a mesh around it, then fit it to the surface using the SDF gradient." The intended usecase is for 3D printing, where slight errors don't matter and you can just throw triangles at the problem.

Performance is okay, but not great. I blame JS. ;)

This project is AI coded, but it's not vibe-coded: I designed the core abstractions deliberately, so all design problems are my own. The website, however, is near entirely Sonnet's work.

Source is on Github: https://github.com/fnCAD/fnCAD
by karolinepauls | 2025-06-07 22:16:16+00:00
Location: London, UK Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Maybe Technologies: Python (mostly Flask/FastAPI+SQLAlchemy, browser automation), Postgres, Clojure, FP, frontend (JS/cljs, React/re-frame), DevOps (Terraform, Kubernetes), Linux (erhm, GNU/systemd/Linux), some Rust/C/C++/Go Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dKFmLj3ILK7n7GcnlyS2WcybiPWg1uia/view Email: jobs2025.extent293@passinbox.com Website: https://karolinepauls.com/

Experienced (mostly) backend developer, with 12 years on the record. Wearer of the DevOps hat when needed. Eager to share skills and learn. Willing to expand to adjacent domains.

I am able to work with minimal resources and deal with inherited problems. I aim to produce solutions of minimal size and complexity. If possible, I try to solve classes of problems to avoid dealing with problems one by one.

Currently a contractor with a short notice. Recent projects involved an LLM content generation pipeline and stabilisation of a reporting system.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-07 22:17:48+00:00
> Make sure they know that they can ask to use your [gun|device] any time they'd like -- but only under your supervision.

You could do that, but there's no particular need for it. "No guns until you're 16" works fine. You don't need to "take the mystery away".

You need to use the internet a lot before you become an adult, you need to use a gun never before you become an adult. You need a lot of practice to build up internet safety skills, you need barely any practice to build up gun safety skills.

Go ahead and have a basic gun safety talk, that's a good idea, but that's all you need.
by neilv | 2025-06-07 22:18:01+00:00
I'm familiar with the rise of talk radio, News Corp, Web propaganda, alt-right, etc., in politics and public sentiment.

What's new to me is that the last couple decades might be a reversion to a pre-war mode of US governance.

(I know WW2 was unifying in some ways, as we'd expect, but I don't recall much from school about how US politics was played before then, other than punctuated events like the Civil War, civil rights movement, etc.)
Show HN: FounderFodder – Inspiration for Founders, Makers and Tinkerers
by emrah | 2025-06-07 22:18:38+00:00
Hi all, I made this, which currently mirrors HN, because I often don't have time to read everything but would still love to at least have an idea what's going on. So the summaries are the key feature at the moment

I also find myself jumping directly to the comments before reading the story which I think is an anti-pattern. It is designed to prevent that.

I have some other ideas, like including other news sites and highlighting stories it thinks i would enjoy (requires account)..

Let me know what you think, if you have suggestions.
by weitendorf | 2025-06-07 22:18:58+00:00
It introduces some pretty important risks of its own though. If you accidentally delete/forget a local private key or lose your primary email domain there is no recourse. It's significantly easier to set up 2FA and account recovery on a third party service

Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't self-host email or anything else. But it's probably more risky for 99% of people compared to just making sure they can recover their accounts.
by tptacek | 2025-06-07 22:20:29+00:00
People keep saying this and it doesn't make sense. I review code. I don't construct a theory of mind of the author of the code. With AI-generated code, if it isn't eminently reviewable, I reflexively kill the PR and either try again or change the tasking.

There's always this vibe that, like, AI code is like an IOCCC puzzle. No. It's extremely boring mid-code. Any competent developer can review it.
by nine_k | 2025-06-07 22:20:36+00:00
This is a solid observation.

I'd say that procrastination is bad when it drives you into some unproductive but addictive behavior, like watching silly tiktok videos, etc. It can be actually good if you do "structured procrastination": can't force myself to do task X, but find solace in solving problem Y really neatly. Another approach is to take a walk, do push-ups, etc, anything that changes your focus away from mental tasks, and preferably brings more oxygen to your brain.

Yet another approach is analytical: "I can't stomach doing that thing! But what thoughts or feelings make me loathe it so much? Where do they come from?" Interesting insights can follow.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 22:20:52+00:00
There is substantial evidence that arsenic is a required micronutrient in all mammalian biology. This is not even controversial, you can reliably induce deficiency syndromes in a broad spectrum of animal models, and the operative pathways exist in humans. The effect was first observed in animal husbandry in parts of the world with very low background arsenic levels.

It has the same toxicity and micronutrient profile as selenium, another extremely toxic but nonetheless essential micronutrient. Unfortunately, activists with an unrelated agenda have been spreading unscientific misinformation about arsenic to advance that agenda.

Same story as fluoride outrage actually. Being anti-science is fashionable and most people are ignorant about chemistry.

It is one thing that makes me glad I am no longer a practicing chemist.
by Zigurd | 2025-06-07 22:22:24+00:00
It's technically correct that it doesn't help with reducing CO2 emissions. But plastic recycling is a flop and a charade. Reducing use of plastic is going to be the only effective way to reduce the harm from plastic. But if we're up to our asses in plastic that's going into the environment in our bodies, burning it isn't a bad choice.
by unclad5968 | 2025-06-07 22:23:34+00:00
I disagree with plenty of Andrew's takes as well but I'm with him on private fields. I've never once in 10 years had an issue with a public field that should have been private, however I have had to hack/reimplement entire data structures because some library author thought that no user should touch some private field.

> You cannot reasonably form API contracts (which are the foundation of software modularity) unless you can hide the internal representation. You need to be able to change the internal representation without breaking users.

You never need to hide internal representations to form an "API contract". That doesn't even make sense. If you need to be able to change the internal representation without breaking user code, you're looking for opaque pointers, which have been the solution to this problem since at least C89, I assume earlier.

If you change your data structures or the procedures that operate on them, you're almost certain to break someone's code somewhere, regardless of whether or not you hide the implementation.
by transcriptase | 2025-06-07 22:24:24+00:00
I use advanced voice a lot and have come across many weird bugs.

1) Every response would be normal except end with a “whoosh” like one of those sound effects some mail clients use when an message is sent, and the model itself either couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge it.

2) The same except with someone knocking on a door. Like someone would play on a soundboard.

3) The entire history in the conversation disappearing after several minutes of back and forth, leading to the model having no idea what I’m talking about and acting as if it’s a fresh conversation.

4) Advanced voice mode stuttering because it hears its own voice and thinks it’s me interrupting (on a brand new iPhone 16 Pro, medium-low built in speaker volume and built-in mic).

5) Really weird changes in pronunciation or randomly saying certain words high-pitched, or suddenly using a weird accent.

And all of this was prior to these most recent changes.

It also stutters and repeats sometimes and says poor connection even though I know the connection is near-ideal.
by benderbreaker | 2025-06-07 22:24:34+00:00
You are clearly on some sort of bender against Cerebras. I can tell from your comments that you are the same one guy with the same objections from Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit. Why are you obsessed with them? I mean sure you seem to know your stuff but some of your assumptions as to why they aren't viable are clearly stretches on the negative side (not that they are impossible, it is just that you don't have the info, and the company being in a cutthroat competitive business has no obligation to share their proprietary business information). And being so well informed you ought to know these are stretches except you are blinded by some emotion for some reason. I mean, sure their solution has downsides (which implementation is perfect), but they will have opportunities to improve in future iterations as they adapt to what the market actually wants rather than what they projected years ago before there was a clear signal. For now, they are a startup with an interesting solution that has some momentum in the marketplace. It is to be seen how they fare but your certainty that they won't succeed is certainly not warranted by the data. And oh, their customers include: Mistrial, Perplexity, Meta, IBM. All those know that the CEO pleaded guilty to accounting charges 18 years ago, after which he has worked continuously in the tech industry including at AMD. A bunch of blue-chip tech investors from OpenAI, AMD, the present CEO of Intel, etc invested with him knowing this. Please give it a rest.
by elashri | 2025-06-07 22:25:45+00:00
I have seen much more stories about people losing access to their Gmail because of a comment flagged somewhere else (i.e YouTube) than people losing access to their domains (it is hard to miss all these reminders about renewal and you shouldn't wait until then anyway so that's something under you control).

And good luck getting anyone from Google to solve your problem assuming you get to a human.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-07 22:26:02+00:00
From the headline I thought they were making a single incremental change (Nix) but the article sounds like they’re doing an entire rewrite under a new project name:

> Since we transitioned away from Nix, we also transitioned away from the name Nixpacks in favor of Railpack. We also changed the codebase from Rust to Go because of the Buildkit libraries.

Suddenly the move away from Nix seems less like an incremental change and more like one part of a complete overhaul of the entire project. Did they have a team changeover or something? Or did they just want to start over from scratch and rewrite the whole project?

It also seems strange to switch to an entirely different programming language for a single library. I haven’t found library FFI to be a huge obstacle in Rust.
by e40 | 2025-06-07 22:28:50+00:00
This isn't true for the town Elon moved into in TX to house his new xAI datacenter. It was an existing town and they are using portable generators that are completely destroying the air in the town. All happened in the last 2-3 years. And because the generators are "temporary" they didn't think they needed EPA approval. They are apparently breaking existing laws, and told the community only a few of the generators were online, however infrared photography showed that almost all of them were operational.

There is a long history of this sort of thing.

A video about this: https://youtu.be/3VJT2JeDCyw?si=lzbBWQjXk-o0cblD
by alkonaut | 2025-06-07 22:29:40+00:00
That people ask for it doesn’t make it a good idea. Even if it’s a good idea and people asked for it that doesn’t mean people used it because they might not know about it. Is the feature prominent or intuitive enough? Should it be described in some newsletter or documentation?

You will never know without actually asking enough users (which is a large sample). And there is a simple way of ”asking” this.
by jameshart | 2025-06-07 22:30:21+00:00
They count as costs, but towards a capital expense. The expectation is that that expenditure resulted in the creation of a valuable asset (and not one which was sold for $200,000).

Revenue: $200,000 Expenses: -$200,000 Assets: $200,000

Net income: $200,000

You’re allowed to say ‘ah, but over the year the value of that $200,000 asset actually fell by 1/5’:

Asset depreciation: -$40,000

So your net income is now $160,000

You owe taxes on that income.
by malfist | 2025-06-07 22:30:40+00:00
From someone that keeps aquariums, municipal water that is stripped of it's chlorine by carbon has the ingredients to grow bacteria. They need three things, carbon, phosphate and nitrogen, all of which will be present to varying degrees. Particularly nitrates and phosphates. They're not harmful until concentrations are really high but certainly enough to grow bacteria.

Also consider what your holding tank and supply to the water, either through leaching, accumulation or simply time
by bobthepanda | 2025-06-07 22:33:18+00:00
Part of the problem is that

* those who were concerned about it happening to others have seen it happen so many times now that they are jaded and it's a bit schaudenfreude. Those earlier cases (Harvard, law firms, etc.) have yet to actually finish going through the courts

* there is a subset that is just super cult of personality around the current president and will bend over backwards to justify actions
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-07 22:33:27+00:00
Similarly, I was reconfiguring my home server and having Claude generate systemd units and timers was very handy. As you said you do need to know the material to fix the few mistakes and know what to ask for. But it can do the busywork of turning "I need this backup job to run once a week" into the .service and .timer file syntax for you to tweak instead of writing it from scratch.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 22:34:04+00:00
Background levels are much higher than current standards with no observable effects in many parts of the world. This is well-studied. There is a threshold but it is higher than people assume.

Plant-based arsenic often has poor bioavailability. Quite a few plants people eat are natural accumulators but it just passes through. Pesticides and geology are the primary bioavailable sources.
by aborsy | 2025-06-07 22:34:48+00:00
Or install ZFS also on end devices, and do ZFS replication to NAS, which is what I do. I have ZFS on my laptop, snapshot data every 30 minutes, and replicate them. Those snapshots are very useful, as sometimes I accidentally delete data.

With ZFS, all file system is replicated. The backup will be consistent, which is not the case with file level backup. With latter, you have to also worry about lock files, permissions, etc. The restore will be more natural and quick with ZFS.
by vkou | 2025-06-07 22:36:05+00:00
> It's wild that a president can say, "I don't like Elon anymore, so out of retaliation, I'm canceling all his government contracts," and ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.

They didn't see it that way when he was doing it to people he didn't like, why would they see it that way when he is doing it to a person he just decided that he didn't like?

Elon, of course, as usual, is responding to someone upsetting him with accusations of pedophilia.

So far, all of this is quite normal.
by harrisi | 2025-06-07 22:37:15+00:00
The discussion is mostly over so this is likely just for posterity.

I do have a list of attributes in my head for things. Things like cars are, in my opinion, not the best example since everyone has seen a car, say, millions of times (that's weird to think about). So the list of attributes is both large and constantly "refreshed" - not unlike dynamic RAM.

However, relatively unique objects, in terms of sightings, have a much shorter list. Not only is the list short, it may be inaccurate. This can lead to, as an absurd example, thinking a car has five wheels and they're on top of the car.

One of the reasons these phenomena seem incredible (as in credibility), I think, is that people don't tend to draw cars as a heap of possibly incorrect attributes. If I drew you a box which encased four wheels, a steering wheel, panes of glass, and doors all randomly placed and called it a car, you'd not be wrong to suggest I see a physician. However, I still have a functioning brain which has experienced reality. I can piece together a short list of attributes because I know that wheels roll, objects have mass, and gravity pulls all towards the grave.

Another way to think about this which is maybe more accessible (although analogues are never perfect) is language. Everyone occasionally encounters words that they're aware of but don't know the meaning of or have assigned an incorrect meaning. That doesn't mean they can't see, hear, or write the word. It's just that, if you press them on it, they either can't give you a definition or they produce an incorrect definition. To continue the analogy, if you know enough about a language, you can give a good guess at an unknown word based on your experience with other words.

Obviously this is just my experience, and I hope this along with the other comments sheds some light on the topic.
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-07 22:38:19+00:00
6 or so weeks of working every waking hour before settling into an average of 12 hours a day for the last 7 months.

Again, people do it but it's not useful. Once you back yourself into a corner, all you can think about is moving one foot in front of the other no matter how inefficent the path you're taking is.

From there the only thing that will stop you is some outside factor, because you no longer have the clarity or discipline it takes to stop.

If you're lucky some great windfall from all the inefficient work you're doing will be that outside factor, but most likely the outside factor will be your health failing, or interpersonal relationships failing, or everything failing anyways because you aren't even at 50% effectiveness to make up for the 2x time you're putting in.
by tomatotomato37 | 2025-06-07 22:38:30+00:00
Yes, water quality matters a lot in coffee enthusiast land. They actually make little mineral packets that you add to a gallon of distilled water to get a "perfect" brewing water - I know since I actually use them for my espresso machine to fight scale buildup from my +10 grain tap water.

Note this excessiveness is really needed for espresso though; a regular Brita jug handles more tolerant methods of brewing perfectly well (and to be honest most people murder coffee enough that the water is the least of their concerns)
by ncruces | 2025-06-07 22:39:29+00:00
This is a good point.

A string search algorithm that uses SIMD to do quickly discard a majority of 16, 32 or 64 attempts in parallel, and then verify the surviving ones quadratically (again 16, 32 or 64 bytes at a time) can go a very long way against a sublinear algorithm that understands needle structure, but necessarily needs to process the haystack one byte at a time.
by mrbungie | 2025-06-07 22:39:33+00:00
Nah, even if we follow such a weak "argument" the fact is that, ironically, the evidence shown in this and other papers point towards the idea that even if LRMs did have access to physical tools, robots labs, etc*, they probably would not be able to harness them properly. So even if we had an API-first world (i.e. every object and subject in the world can be mediated via a MCP server), they wouldn't be able to perform as well as we hope.

Sure, humans may fail doing a 20 digit multiplication problems but I don't think that's relevant. Most aligned, educated and well incentivized humans (such as the ones building and handling labs) will follow complex and probably ill-defined instructions correctly and predictably, instructions harder to follow and interpret than an exact Towers of Hanoi solving algorithm. Don't misinterpret me, human errors do happen in those contexts because, well, we're talking about humans, but not as catastrophically as the errors committed by LRMs in this paper.

I'm kind of tired of people comparing humans to machines in such simple and dishonest ways. Such thoughts pollute the AI field.

*In this case for some of the problems the LRMs were given an exact algorithm to follow, and they didn't. I wouldn't keep my hopes up for an LRM handling a full physical laboratory/factory.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-06-07 22:39:55+00:00
This increase: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

Would not be possible without the continued advancement of technology. Technology allows us to rapidly expand the human population, see all of the healthcare and transportation technology, which has resulted in a vastly higher extinction rate. Pretty much all the damage we have done on earth is only possible due to advanced technology.