MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kqr | 2025-06-14 08:59:10+00:00
> Considering the war in the womb it's amazing that the reproductive system works as well as it does.

...or maybe it's because of that war it works as well as it does? Maybe it takes agents in opposition to evolve enough redundancies and contingency plans to get things working?

Before Mendel, at least some people hypothesised there must be some sort of "battle of the germ cell" that powered evolution, because unimportant functions -- even when they aren't actively detrimental -- tend to be forced nearly out of existence.[1] Even our bodies, miracles of cooperation, evolve to some degree under antagonism.

Thanks for referencing that article, though. I was going to but now I don't have to. Everyone should read it. Utterly fascinating.

[1]: The example that comes to mind are the femurs of whales. They are absolutely tiny. Much smaller than can reasonably explained by them being a problem for the whale itself.
by goku12 | 2025-06-14 08:59:34+00:00
I'm not talking about your single comment. The entire problem here is the top comment and the peculiar responses to it. Many of your objections apply to that top level comment too. Yet you chose to reply only to people who objected to that.

Now, I did consider the possibility that you are not a woman. But that doesn't change the outcome, and neither does your sarcasm. People showing biases against their own kind is not unusual and that doesn't provide the missing justification. People sometimes aim for the easiest target and sometimes it's their own kind. Men showing bias against men is still bias and it's still not justified. Your 'male perspective' hardly invalidates those of the others.

And no, I don't want to discuss anything in private since it's hard for others to see the bias or point out any issues. And I don't agree with your argument on funding and advertising, since I have been at the receiving end of it in an extreme manner. You can quote as much technicality as you want, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that prejudices cause harm. Unfortunately, the modern society is oblivious of the boundary between empowerment and prejudice. I'm not against women in anyway and I sincerely wish for their well being too. All those problems can be solved cooperatively and without this hostility and the us-vs-them mentality. Instead, this sort of negative reinforcement will only splinter and harm the society in the long run. Reverse of sexism is still sexism, and it achieves nothing.
by Simon_O_Rourke | 2025-06-14 08:59:38+00:00
Like the ancient Romans I couldn't care less about the authenticity of any wine so long as it tasted reasonably well. Anyone making a fuss over provence outside of whether or not it's safe to drink, tastes good and a few basic criteria is just a snob.

"Oh dear boy, how can you drink that Burgundy, it's not even from Chateaux le Snob".
by shakna | 2025-06-14 09:00:18+00:00
About 30% of people who end up with my particular illness, do kill themselves in the first five years. Not that severity of pain makes sense person-to-person. Pain is personal. The worst pain is the worst pain you've ever felt, and it's never surprising if you do something about that. (Your worst pain... Was yours. Is yours. Don't try and compare it. No one else entirely gets what yours was like.)

However, if you do survive the first five years... You become unlikely to suicide out of it. You've learnt to live in it.

I think the stats on that are fairly similar to endo, from what little research that there is. If you can make it past the first few years of everyone ignoring you and calling you weak, and telling you to suck it up, you are now better prepared to deal with the daily mental siege.

(Though you are under siege. And sometimes those walls do collapse, and you're broken again. You can't necessarily take on more, just become you're stronger - you're stronger but you're spending all the extra effort just to stay alive.)

But to end on a completely different note, that can make a few people stare: I'm in pain in my dreams, too. I don't remember what it's like without.
by archievillain | 2025-06-14 09:00:29+00:00
Can you please elaborate what you mean by Unity "pointers"? As far as I am aware, in Unity, either you find the node by name via `GameObject.find` or you assign a reference via the inspector. Both of these features also exist in Godot. Actually, thanks to unique names (the `%` notation), I'd say Godot wins overall. But I haven't used Unity in years, so I don't know if they've come up with a better solution (in which case Godot should, obviously, copy it).
by aquariusDue | 2025-06-14 09:01:06+00:00
I get car sick quite easily, same with VR, but I actually like the design language of Liquid Glass over the first iteration of Material (I like the new updates to Material too). I think people should watch from minute 13 onward if they're short on time and want the gist of it.

I guess I'm a weird outlier and that's fine.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-06-14 09:02:38+00:00
?

Maybe I'm easily deceived, but it looks exactly like what it porports to be to me - thoughts of someone with no affiliation to Kagi apart from being a paid customer after using it for two months.

Given he's used Google since the google.standford.edu days and his opinion of DDG match mine, this was interesting to read:

> search results - easily on-par with Google

Given how Microsoft has failed at that with Bing after 16 years of trying, that's an impressive achievement.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-14 09:02:58+00:00
I've never written a line of Rust in my life, but I unfortunately had the great displeasure to write OCaml.

OCaml is a terrible choice for (anyone) a company like this. They NEED to be able to hire the very best of the best, but choosing an exotic language that is less palatable than a plate of shit and more cryptic than alien hieroglyphs restricts your talent pool A LOT.

I'm not saying people cannot learn it, I'm saying people won't want to, for multiple very good reasons (it sucks, it's not at all transferable skill, etc.).
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-06-14 09:03:13+00:00
I can't claim it's the recommended approach, just my own personal recommendation. I apologize if I made it seem like I'm some authority on the subject, I'm just some rando that dislikes SQL.

Funny enough, I made the same mistake you did back in the day. Used Prolog as the "boss" that just called back to Java as needed. My professor gave me a shitty grade because the idea was to make the opposite, a Java program that queries a Prolog database to make decisions, the Prolog part itself wasn't directly supposed to make any.

I was pissed at the time since I was showing off my Prolog skills which in a Logic Programming course I expected would give me a good grade, but that professor was 100% right. The power of logic programming is tainted when you mix it with IO and expect a specific ordering to the rule applications. Cuts are a sin.
by kqr | 2025-06-14 09:05:04+00:00
Worth mentioning in these threads is that pain is a very personal experience. No two people experience pain the same way. We must have respect for each others' experiences of pain, because we don't know what it is like for them.

It's senseless to compare experiences of pain between people. Unless it's like "a pinprick" vs. "crushed by a motorcycle" or other obviously extreme contrasts.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-14 09:07:04+00:00
> Imagine the outrage from the right if a Democrat president was behind this.

America has partially (each quality is a spectrum of degrees) lost the plot regarding theory of mind, consistency, decency, lawfulness, proportionality, truth, and reasonableness and is rapaciously normalizing deviancy.

DoD would be wise to proactively send a panoply of JAGs out there to monitor any domestic "not deployments" to keep a lid on things.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-14 09:07:07+00:00
This is a bad faith representation of what people are actually saying which is:

1. As far as we know there is nothing non-physical in the brain (a soul or magical quantum microtubules or whatever). Everything that happens in your head obeys the laws of physics.

2. We definitely are conscious.

3. Therefore consciousness can arise from purely physical processes.

4. Any physical process can be computed. And biological thought appears as far as we can see to simply be an extraordinarily complex computation.

5. Therefore it is possible for a sufficiently fast & appropriately programmed computer to be conscious.

6. LLMs bear many resemblances to human thinking (even though they're obviously different in many ways too), and we've established that computers can be conscious, so you can't trivially rule out LLMs being conscious.

At least for now, I don't think anyone sane says today's LLMs are actually conscious. (Though consciousness is clearly a continuum... so maybe they're as conscious as a worm or whatever.)

The main point is that people trivially dismissing AI consciousness or saying "it can't think" because it's only matrix multiplications are definitely wrong.

It might not be conscious because consciousness requires more complexity, or maybe it requires some algorithmic differences (e.g. on-line learning). But it definitely isn't not-conscious just because it is maths or running on a computer or deterministic or ...
Show HN: A tool to make AI text undetectable
by TomTsime | 2025-06-14 09:07:26+00:00
Hey HN, I wanted to share a project I've been working on, born out of a personal frustration. While working on an essay, I used an AI assistant to help polish my writing and refine some points. The result was good, but I immediately ran into a problem: my university uses AI detection software, and I was worried about my work getting flagged. My first thought was to find an "AI humanizer" to make the text sound more natural and bypass detection. I tried a bunch of popular online tools, but the results were consistently disappointing. The output often felt clunky, distorted the original meaning, or, ironically, still got flagged by AI detectors. Convinced there had to be a better way, I started digging into how these detectors work and what linguistic patterns they typically identify. I spent a significant amount of time researching and experimenting with different techniques to rewrite AI-generated content to be more... well, human. After a lot of trial and error, I developed a methodology that I found to be quite effective. It goes beyond simple synonym swaps, focusing on restructuring sentences, varying word choice, and adjusting the cadence to sound more natural, all while carefully preserving the core message. To make this process easier for myself and others, I've wrapped my method into a simple web tool. It's called Best Humanizer, and you can try it here: https://besthumanizer.net I built this to solve my own problem, but I'm sharing it today because I think it could be useful to others facing the same issue. I would love to hear your honest feedback and criticism. What do you think of the results? How could it be improved? Thanks for checking it out
by chrismorgan | 2025-06-14 09:09:23+00:00
In the state of Victoria, Good Friday is one of the two-and-a-half restricted trading days where shops aren’t allowed to open, except for a few categories, and, simplifying, small businesses: <https://business.vic.gov.au/business-information/public-holi...>.

(In practice, almost all bakeries will be small enough they could open, but I think most won’t.)

I know South Australia has even more restrictions about when businesses can open, legal and customary. I imagine Western Australia to be more like South Australia in such ways than like Victoria, but I’ve not been there and don’t really know.

And that’s these days. Back in the mid ’80s, I’m almost surprised there was a single bakery open in the entire country.
by amiga386 | 2025-06-14 09:09:51+00:00
The economics are more that an entrepreneur rents the airplane to several enthusiasts in the area, each of whom enjoy flying and each would pay $100/hr for the thrill of flying.

But sure, there are also sometimes rich people and/or hyperenthusiasts who buy their own planes at great cost.

There are similarly people who enjoy car racing, horse riding, sailing, train journeys, and give excuses for their itineries but it's really to spend time on their hobby.
by CoolCold | 2025-06-14 09:11:03+00:00
> As long as the systemd supporters cannot explain its advantages, there is no reason for anybody else to replace their good systems that work fine without systemd, with systems using systemd.

Assuming you know what systemd as init system able to do, I'm not sure what extra information you need for getting list of advantages.

If you going with examples is better for you, i'll mention couple of mine - note that I likely forget some other good samples as it's so natural so I'm may be not realizing it's systemd's feature, just "how things work"

* hardening - syscall filtering, privilege limiting, read/write path filtering, per-unit tmp files. As nice example, I have great peace of mind when I put php-fpm into network isolated to localhost only for IP level

* resource management and resource information at all - observing resource usage by multiple units when needed with a quick way saves my time, in addition to being able to collect such metrics into monitoring. Setting the lowest IO priority for backup scripts and even MB/sec per block device - godsend. Limits on CPU usage or RAM usage where needed ensures smooth operations of the fleet without nasty surprises

* things like quick overview with systemctl --failed, user-level units instead of flacky @reboot in crontab (yeah, we still remember it from eggdrop/psybnc days)

* clear and uniform way to work with services across the team, no hacky bash scripts with saving PIDs

so on.

Probably you do system administration for your servers in some other way that all that goodies are not noticeable for you and your team.
by jononor | 2025-06-14 09:11:22+00:00
Big party for Altman et al these days, who have been advocating (lobbying) a lot for this. The US, and the world at large needs more electricity, and nuclear probably does have it's place in the mix. Just hope we do not spend all the new capacity on "AI". And most importantly, that nuclear safety continues to be highly prioritized every step of the way.
by uncircle | 2025-06-14 09:12:03+00:00
After the discovery of a psychedelic compound, there are two pipelines for release:

- the academic way, where it's studied in labs by "serious people", and after FDA approval a big pharma with worldwide licence sells it for one million $ per kg.

- the black market way, where it's manufactured in quantity by shady RC companies and sold on the internet, until someone tries too large a dose, gets it put in Schedule I and banned.

I guess this one went the first route, unlike LSD.
by willis936 | 2025-06-14 09:12:22+00:00
And to think this is the same field that has an issue with ageism as indicated by this post yesterday. I take serious issue with people over 40 being protected while discrimination against young people "just doesn't exist". It's a clear case of the law being constructed to advantage the already advantaged. It's politically expedient because old people have wealth and influence and young people don't. Could you hire someone who can't demonstrate competence in an interview to do the job? Why does it matter if they're 20 or 100? Yet the two cases are treated very differently. You can say you won't hire a 20 year old because they don't know what they're doing, but can you not hire the 100 year old because their mental faculties have deteriorated?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225

Edit: this appears to be a hot take, so I challenge others to take a step back and consider other protected classes and anti-discrimination laws. They don't call out one race or sex, they say they're all protected and the very act of discriminating is not allowed during hiring. They don't say "you can't discriminate against white people or men but others are fine". That's what the ADEA does.
by pona-a | 2025-06-14 09:16:00+00:00
The early OpenAI Instruct models were more like that. The original GPT-3 was only trained to predict the next token, then they used RLHF to make them interpret everything as queries, so that "Explain the theory of gravity to a 6 year old." wouldn't complete to "Explain the theory of relativity to a 6 year old in a few sentences." ChatGPT was probably that, expanded to multi-turn conversation. You can see the beginnings of that ChatGPT style in those examples.

https://openai.com/index/instruction-following/
Show HN: VerbaScan – Context-aware image translation
by coolpool | 2025-06-14 09:18:01+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Verbascan.com because I was tired of image translation tools that constantly failed me.

The usual problems:

- Incorrect translations

- Phrases taken out of context

- No support for handwritten text

Verbascan takes a smarter approach — it focuses on meaning, not just swapping words. You upload an image and get a translation that actually makes sense.

Would love your feedback!
by defrost | 2025-06-14 09:18:47+00:00
In Western Australia a number of people have aircraft for a variety of reasons, let's assume you have a working aircraft that's break even on costs wrt whatever business you run with that aircraft.

The $100 refers to the additional cost of doing something extra over and above.

People here also have garage built no quite aircraft purely for the fun of it and the challenge of the build:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ejG5bLdJxfI

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-14 09:22:34+00:00
> likely cared less about authenticity than we do today.

I’m not so sure that folks care that much about “authenticity,” these days.

There’s an enormous knockoff market. Many folks buy fakes, knowing full well, that they aren’t the real thing (the “Times Square Rolex” is pretty much a meme), and some of the fakes are good enough, that regular people have no idea they aren’t real.

I have also heard that “premium fakes,” often produced by the same factories that make the originals, are fooling even experts.
by gavinray | 2025-06-14 09:24:08+00:00
Two close friends of mine who were math prodigies that went on to do ML very early (mid 2010's) were always talking to me about an algorithm that sounds similar to this:

"NEAT/HyperNEAT" (Neuroevolution of Augmented Topologies) [0]

I'm no ML practictioner, but as I understood it, the primary difference between NEAT and what is described in this paper is that while NEAT evolves the topology of the network, this paper seems to evolve the weights.

Seems like two approaches trying to solve the same problem -- one evolving networking structure, and the other the weights.

Those 2 friends are quite possibly the most intelligent people I've ever met, and they were very convinced that RL and evolutionary algorithms were the path forward in ML.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution_of_augmenting_t...
by Incipient | 2025-06-14 09:24:54+00:00
In this day and age Microsoft's identity service, for large orgs, is mostly un-replaceable (deliberately not irreplaceable). AD compatible providers worked there for a bit, but AAD is very pervasive now.

In addition the cloud services being offered by large providers (Fabric, etc) are nearly impossible to justify not having, when money is not a consideration.
by codeflo | 2025-06-14 09:26:08+00:00
I also like the recursion. In essence, you're making a meta-proof about what PA proves, and given that you trust PA, you also trust this meta-proof.

> I think just PA+"PA is consistent" is enough?

It's not clear to me how. I believe PA+"PA is consistent" would allow a model where Goodstein's theorem is true for the standard natural numbers, but that also contains some nonstandard integer N for which Goodstein's theorem is false. I think that's exactly the case that's ruled out by the stronger statement of ω-consistency.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-06-14 09:26:34+00:00
Providing more rides than Lyft doesn't mean much when you're losing money doing it.

Will they still "best" Lyft when/if they become profitable? It's hard to say at this point. They're still running on venture capital "funny money" and lots of it.

Reports I've read suggest that it costs Waymo $100K just to outfit one of it's autonomous vehicles.
by homeonthemtn | 2025-06-14 09:26:50+00:00
I'm not sure this is the right interpretation...

The implication here is that honey is a cheap additive used to mimic the effects of a long process. However honey isn't a trivial component to produce

I suspect they added in honey as a source of sugar for fermentation. Honey is a pretty common component of making fermented drinks (mead being a well known one). So this sounds like a natural coupling to me.

It's tough to tell without someone making a couple test batches for us to get tanked on
by inkyoto | 2025-06-14 09:27:21+00:00
Universities do not need Java per se, leave alone Oracle Java.

Other than uninformed, spurious Oracle JDK downloads, what usually happens is an academic or a faculty have purchased an app or a software product in the past that performs features A, B and C important to them[0], and that app or product, unbeknownst to them, bundles the Oracle JDK/JRE in. The Lord of Java has now trapped their butts and demands that universities fork out quiet a bit as Oracle wants a per student licence fee for each such app, even if it is just one faculty who uses the app.

[0] Or at least they think so – software duplication is a rampant problem in universities due to oftentimes poor architectural governance and oversight.
by scapbi | 2025-06-14 09:28:21+00:00
This thread was the final push I needed to add logic programming to Mochi https://github.com/mochilang/mochi — a small statically typed scripting language I’m building for agents and real-time data.

I gave OpenAI Codex a single prompt with a sample like:

fact parent("Alice", "Bob") rule grandparent(x, z) :- parent(x, y), parent(y, z) let gps = query grandparent(x, z)

And it generated a working Datalog engine in Go with:

- fact storage + recursive rule support - bottom-up fixpoint evaluation - unification and `!=` constraints - FFI bindings to expose `fact`, `rule`, and `query` to scripts

Full thinking process: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_684d3e3c59c08191b20c49ad97b66e01

Total implementation was ~250 LOC. Genuinely amazed how effective the LLM was at helping bootstrap a real logic layer in one go.

The PR is here https://github.com/mochilang/mochi/pull/616
by nsonha | 2025-06-14 09:30:46+00:00
Hard to believe that AI or any kind of acceleration towards digital economy (cloud etc) is responsible for the world's energy crisis. Could it be the over-consumption and production in the physical economy that's the culprit maybe?

If data centers generate that much heat, which is the only reason it consumes significant energy, then should the focus be capturing that and turn it into another energy source?
by msgodel | 2025-06-14 09:31:06+00:00
No it runs well on hardware. I ran it as my primary OS for years. It actually has a few neat features that are only useful when booting into it like LBU. That was great for getting the last couple years out of my old macbook pro. The hard disk connector stopped working after the nth time I had to replace the little flex cable so I switched to running Alpine from a ram disk using LBU to handle changes to /etc.