MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-14 19:47:05+00:00
>AI agents done well are superior at call center jobs, screen-based office work, mortgage processing, financial analysis, most business consulting like process redesign, etc. The biggest benefit isn't reducing payroll, it's doing the job faster, with higher quality and more consistency.

Just wait until your human needs inside the bowels of some corporate or government bureaucracy, that no matter what will inevitably make either human or algorithmically generated mistakes, are being "attended" by some AI agent that can feel nothing, cares nothing and of course doesn't really think for itself or use common sense outside the bounds of formal rules, and you find yourself fucked over by this in some absurd way.

Imagine all the so-called customer service (almost entirely non-human) that Google shafts its users with, about which so many people on HN have complained, but writ much larger, in all kinds of far more vital user attention scenarios.

No thank you. Human bureaucrats are bad enough, but at least there's an avenue for empathy and flexibility in many cases.

The AI fawning on some comments here lives in a bubble of perfect expectations that will die a horrible death in the real world, or cause people horrible miseries in that same real world.
by sReinwald | 2025-06-14 19:47:20+00:00
And why have I heard about them? I'll give you a hint: It's not because they have a fantastic marketing and PR department. It's because their product kept showing up on the phones of assassinated journalists and imprisoned dissidents.

I looked you up a bit. You clearly know this industry. So when you say there are American companies with "more effective" tools than NSO, I have to assume you're not speaking hypothetically - you're speaking from professional knowledge.

Your response is like a chemical industry veteran hearing about a company that poisoned a river and killed dozens, then saying "you're only mad at ACME Chemicals because you've heard of them."

That leaves two possibilities:

- You know other companies are doing comparable harm and you're remarkably comfortable with it

- You're defending a uniquely destructive company by falsely equating it with legitimate businesses

Either way, you're using your industry credibility to minimize documented atrocities. Given your expertise, that's clearly not ignorance - it's a choice.

Which are you, Thomas? Someone with inside knowledge of comparable human rights abuses who's been sitting on it? Or someone minimizing documented atrocities to defend your industry's reputation?

The spotlight on NSO exists because of the graves they helped fill. Your response tells us exactly where you stand on that.

Have a fantastic day, I hope you pass a mirror or two and can actually stand looking at yourself.
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-14 19:47:32+00:00
The ability to deploy US nukes has been useless since the end of the cold war, and now that it's starting to get relevant again, it's not reliable anymore.

And how is Germany supposed to integrate French nukes on the F-35 if Scholz wants to pursue “strategic independence” now?

Also, it was likely not a matter of cost, as the US has nothing to gain from allowing Germany to use a European plane to carry their nukes in the first place when they can sell them US planes instead.
by intrasight | 2025-06-14 19:48:42+00:00
>referencing DLLs which is discouraged in modern .NET

You can't do much of anything in .NET without referencing Nuget assemblies.

> opaquely named directives like `#r` seems counter-productive

Then why is it the existing standard?

Agreeing with others, '#r "nuget:' should at least be an option. And otherwise (but I guess regarless if you stick with this syntax) you will have to add another tab to Nuget called "dotnet run". "Script & Interactive" is already present in Nuget and shows the #r syntax for a reference.
by arrowsmith | 2025-06-14 19:48:45+00:00
It would be one way to hire a hitman. A "bet" on the prediction market would effectively function as a bounty on the target's head.

E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"

That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market#Assassina...
by tromp | 2025-06-14 19:50:14+00:00
> > If PA proves "PA proves X" then PA can prove X.

If we assume PA to be sound, then indeed everything it proves is true.

> Not true.

Now you're saying PA is unsound.

But your article wasn't about PA proves "PA proves X", it was about "forall n : PA proves G(n)".

For PA not to prove "forall n: G(n)", there is no soundness issue, only a ω-consistency issue.
by SamBam | 2025-06-14 19:50:34+00:00
Fun! I was surprised how often I was 1 year off and in the right city for things that I was just guessing about.

On small error I found: there's a photo that's outside Piazza Navona in Rome in the 30s, which it lists as being 700 meters away at Piazza Venezia. I know I'm correct -- I lived a street away from there.
by jrm4 | 2025-06-14 19:50:47+00:00
Yeah, but I think it's also a failure of .. "us" to not be savvy enough to understand, and perhaps defend, someone who was outrageously ahead of everything in thinking about software the way he did.

Others may be too young for this, but I can personally remember reading his stuff a long time ago and thinking "This Stallman guy is delusionally paranoid; it would be too FAR complex and difficult and anti-consumer for us to end up in a situation where, e.g. a company would have more control over the computer in front of us than we do, you could just delete their software, or copy your files to another computer. What a weirdo."
by layer8 | 2025-06-14 19:51:38+00:00
People can read the abstract and then decide if they want to go deeper and also download and read the PDF. I’m sure that many only read the abstract.

Furthermore, depending on publishing site, a paper may also be available as HTML rendered from the LaTeX source, in addition to PDF. (If the page does not now, it may in the future.)

The purpose of a [PDF] tag is to warn about possible unsuitability of the linked resource for mobile consumption (which isn’t the case for the article page linked here), possible download size (though maybe not anymore, nowadays), and possible brightness shock when using dark mode.
by Spooky23 | 2025-06-14 19:51:59+00:00
Taxis are different in that they often use a model similar to a hair salon. The driver is renting the car. There is no incentive to take care of it… it’s a prisoners dilemma situation.

With the Uber, the driver is responsible for the car, and the smart drivers get it that wear and tear is bad. Of course, many uber drivers are idiots who don’t math well, and are basically burning equity at a loss.
by Animats | 2025-06-14 19:53:09+00:00
This is very like Boyer-Moore theory[1], which builds up mathematics from the Peano axiom level.

Boyer and Moore wrote an automated theorem prover that goes with this theory. I have a working copy for GNU Common LISP at [2].

"It is perhaps easiest to think of our program much as one would think of a reasonably good mathematics student: given the axioms of Peano, he could hardly be expected to prove (much less discover) the prime factorization theorem. However, he could cope quite well if given the axioms of Peano and a list of theorems to prove (e.g., “prove that addition is commutative,” . . . “prove that multiplication distributes over addition,” . . . “prove that the result returned by the GCD function divides both of its arguments,” . . . “prove that if the products over two sequences of primes are identical, then the two sequences are permutations of one another”)." - Boyer and Moore

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~boyer/acl.pdf

[2] https://github.com/John-Nagle/nqthm/tree/master
by acemarke | 2025-06-14 19:53:34+00:00
It's ironic you say that - I wrote the post, and I _maintain_ Redux :)

FWIW, I can confirm that hooks have _not_ "eradicated Redux" - it's still the most widely used client side state management lib in React apps. It's definitely as common as it used to be, since the ecosystem has evolved significantly, but both download stats and discussions with devs tell me it's still in very widespread use.
by kiitos | 2025-06-14 19:53:41+00:00
> Core business concepts like ‘actor’ or ‘movie’ are modeled in many places ... teams re-model the same business entities in different systems, leading to conflicting definitions that are hard to reconcile.

There is no singular universal consistent definition of any concept like "actor" or "movie" or whatever else. These are all concepts that are well-defined only within a specific domain. The business domain concept of an "actor" is well and good and probably the most important and top-level user-facing concept of that term -- that doesn't mean that this business-domain definition is somehow authoritative, or comprehensive, or in any way some kind of superset-composite description of any/all other domain definitions of that same term.

Reconciliation of domain-specific concepts like these requires higher-level coordination across separate domains, it's not something you can do within individual domains or domain-specific services. If discrete domains/services needed to abide the same business-defined concept of whatever concepts, then that would subvert the main purpose of having separate domains/teams in the first place.. !
by rossdavidh | 2025-06-14 19:53:45+00:00
There are many problems with the labor market in the U.S., but my daughter and her friends are able to get summer jobs (she's 19). Is this just a Canadian thing, or is this part of the job market different in Austin, TX (where I live) vs. other parts of the U.S.? The market for unemployed middle-aged adults looking for permanent work is slow, but the summer job market for college students (in Austin) seems pretty good.
by lupusreal | 2025-06-14 19:54:11+00:00
Call me crazy but I greatly prefer old fashioned taxis, because their drivers know how to step on it and drive like maniacs instead of doddering grandmothers. Sure they stink and have weird accents but why would I care about that when I just want to get home from the airport and get to bed as soon as possible? Accepting cash and not needing some bullshit app is also a huge bonus.
by tanewishly | 2025-06-14 19:54:12+00:00
Where I currently live, terminally ill nearing their end often fall in a pattern of eating and drinking less and less, to the point of having nothing (not even water). This process of dying takes 1-2 weeks(!). Longer if some liquid is still imbibed.

This is a common ending of a terminally ill process and apparently seen as humane. Though I think if anyone treated their dog like that, we'd report them for animal abuse.

I don't have good answers to most questions surrounding this topic. But I'd like to get to a point where people are treated as humanely as their pets in their final period. And I can't even tell you the current practice isn't, just that it does not at all feel that way to me.
by nradov | 2025-06-14 19:54:29+00:00
OpenAI doesn't lack investment capital. What they still don't have is a good source of high quality clinical data. And this isn't just a matter of buying access to deidentified patient charts from some large health system. Most clinical data quality is kind of crap so using it directly for model training produces garbage output. You need an extensive cleansing and normalization pipeline designed by human clinicians who understand the data at a deep level.
by twodave | 2025-06-14 19:55:22+00:00
That is a lot of subgraphs. Am I understanding correctly then that under UDA developers fulfill the UDA spec in whatever language they’re using, and then there’s some kind of middleware that will handle serving GraphQL queries? How are mutations represented? And how are other GraphQL-specific idioms expressed (like input parameters, nodes/edges/connections/etc.)? Is it just a subset of GraphQL that is supported?

I manage a much smaller federation where I work, and we have a lot of the same ideals I think in terms of having some centralized types that the rest of the business recognizes across the board. Right now we accomplish that within a set of “core” subgraphs that define these types, while our more product-focused ones implement their own sets of types, queries and mutations and can extend the core ones as it makes sense to.
by perrygeo | 2025-06-14 19:55:40+00:00
I respect all three authors deeply but this is my first time reading Tellman's take. His idea that "simplicity is not intrinsic ... Simplicity is a fitness between software and our expectations" has a very nice ring to it.

Contrast that with Hickey's notion of simplicity as an objective count of interleaved concerns or "folds". The quibble with this is, how do you delineate the concerns? Depending on your style and knowledge of the system, you'll get a different number. So it's hard to call it objective.

Tellman's definition is nice because it acknowledges the subjectivity, and puts it front and center. IOW the "style and knowledge of the system" form a mental model of the software system. What's important is not the cardinality, OR the interleaving. It's the ability for that model to make good predictions about the software's behavior. Accurate model held in the minds of humans that operate it == simple software.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-14 19:55:56+00:00
I am sorry, but you have forgotten what the Heisenberg uncertainty principle really says.

What you have in mind about "ranges of values" has nothing to do with Heisenberg, but with the formalism of quantum mechanics as developed by Schroedinger, Dirac and others (not counting the matrix mechanics of Heisenberg, which was an inferior mathematical method, soon forgotten after superior alternatives were developed, and which is something completely else than the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty).

In the various variants of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the correspondent of a single value in classic dynamics is a function, the so-called wave function, but even those functions cannot be called "ranges of values". There are several interpretations of what the "wave" functions mean, but the most common is that they are probability densities for the values of the corresponding physical quantity.

Depending on the context, in quantum mechanics the value of a physical quantity may be unknown, when only the probability of it having various values is known, but the value may also be known with absolute certainty, usually in some stationary states.

In both cases the value of the physical quantity can be measured, but in the former only an average value can be measured, which nonetheless may have unlimited precision, while in the latter case the exact value can be measured, exactly like in classical dynamics.
by ironman1478 | 2025-06-14 19:56:18+00:00
Waymos are more pleasant to be in and people value comfort. I've had many Uber drivers who love to speed, which can be terrifying in SF. The bus can be a real crapshoot with who's on it. The bus also can take forever depending on where you start and where you need to go. The service that waymo provides is just on average better.
by qwertox | 2025-06-14 19:56:36+00:00
I mean, he does have a point, but his point has a solution: do not put them in mutually exclusive groups if they aren't mutually exclusive.

It seems more like this is a missing feature rather than an issue with mutually exclusive, if the desire is that `argparse` handles this in an elegant, internal way.

So, yes, `argparse` has a limitation on argument groups, but `add_mutually_exclusive_group` is not the issue.
by tempestn | 2025-06-14 19:57:09+00:00
This makes a lot of sense to me. When you ride in an Uber or a taxi, you're a guest in the driver's space. In a Waymo, it's your own space. You can play music, talk on the phone, etc. without worrying about disturbing the driver. You're not likely to have strong odors, or driver's phone conversations. And the experience will be roughly consistent each time. In an Uber, you have no idea what the car or the driving standards will be like until you're in it. I trust my own driving over a Waymo, but I'd trust Waymo over an average Uber driver, let alone a bad one.

I've had some nice conversations with Uber drivers, but I've had some unpleasant rides too. I'd definitely pay a bit extra for a good driverless car. ('Good' being key. After trying out the Tesla FSD beta a couple times though, you couldn't pay me to ride in one of those without the ability to grab control.)
by 10000truths | 2025-06-14 19:58:10+00:00
The design of core dump handling in Linux leaves much to be desired. Among its several flaws, the biggest is that it is a global setting, accessible only by the root user. A proper design would either allow it to be isolated via namespace, or delegated to a reaper/subreaper process (in an opt-in fashion for back-compat). There has been discussion of the former idea [0] and even a submitted patch [1], but it seems like it never went anywhere.

[0]: https://groups.google.com/g/linux.kernel/c/hJLP3XcKKSY

[1]: https://mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org/msg107...
by mirashii | 2025-06-14 19:58:46+00:00
There's plenty of reasons in this article and the comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39492680.

My tl;dr:

The vlang team has repeatedly made false promises and assertions about what the language can do, ranging from a "we put things that are on our roadmap in our features list" to "we've promised something that is outright impossible". Analyzing how this has changed over the years, the only reasonable conclusion is that they're grifters who are okay with lying.

In addition, they regularly engage in flamewars about it on this site, and their moderation practices of silencing any sort of criticism in their own spaces and calling anyone who dares question it idiots are well known and documented.
by michalpleban | 2025-06-14 19:58:49+00:00
Commodore 64 software hardly ever uses the NMI interrupt, because there is also the maskable IRQ interrupt which can be generated by the first CIA chip, and also, unlike NMI, by the video chip VIC for the raster interrupt. It is also much more useful because it is maskable - the software can temporarily turn it off when it is not desirable to be interrupted. The only thing the NMI can do that IRQ cannot is detecting that the Restore key was pressed, but that is seldom useful.
by strogonoff | 2025-06-14 19:58:52+00:00
Regardless of whether it is HDR or SDR, when processing raw data for display spaces one must throw out 90%+ of information of what was captured by the sensor (which is often a small amount of what was available at the scene already). There can simply be no objectivity, it is always about what you saw and what you want others to see, an inherently creative task.
by squigz | 2025-06-14 19:59:40+00:00
> Where I currently live, terminally ill nearing their end often fall in a pattern of eating and drinking less and less, to the point of having nothing (not even water). This process of dying takes 1-2 weeks(!). Longer if some liquid is still imbibed.

Even just getting to this point is usually a brutal period of pain. Then you have to die like that? It's frankly barbaric.
by _tqr3 | 2025-06-14 20:00:36+00:00
Stability AI, creators of Stable Diffusion models release their products under own Stability AI Community License which is not "free" like MIT license. You are not allowed to modify the weights in certain ways.

This package is basically running the model (inference) and maybe fine tuning it using existing AI weights. A great way to learn but still could run into same licensing issue.
by verteu | 2025-06-14 20:00:44+00:00
> the tax is still proportional to revenue, which for many early stage startups is small, and should be growing rapidly enough that the marginal investment in your meager R&D team is worth it

This may hold true for "moonshot" startups, but the tax would still devastate "small-business"/"lifestyle" startups, where cost ~= revenue.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-06-14 20:01:25+00:00
It was the case when my wife was diagnosed with MS 17 years ago. There was no "test for MS", just a statistical answer "it looks like this is MS because of some symptoms, some non-conclusive reults and how the MRI look like".

We just took it for good money ans she is treated since with reasonable results. But it may be something else.

I wonder if there are better tests today.
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-14 20:02:15+00:00
>I am not sure if you realize how hopelessly impossible that is.

It's not impossible if it's predominantly automated. You have swarms of "police drones" on patrol actively scanning for other drones and when they see one that they don't like (some sort of signed certificate that authenticates the owner and their license) they shoot it down. It works as long as the "police drones" are plentiful and well dispersed to the point of maintaining dominance.

>and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product

that's what i meant when i said this brings its own host of problems. My point's not that our way of life will continue unabated my point is that this particular force multiplier goes both ways, and the defense will be a sort of "drone police corps". The biggest problems will be whatever happens outside of the "margin of error" (ie accidentally shooting down the wrong drones, civilians caught in crossfire, people hurt by falling debris) and the general end of any notion of privacy (not that America isn't already going in that direction anyways).
by WalterBright | 2025-06-14 20:02:18+00:00
Earning mere interest is a poor rate of return, and the taxes paid on the interest make it worse than useless. Wealthy people want larger returns, and that's why they invest in companies.

> where most efforts go into derivative financial products

No evidence for "most".

> and investing

Yes, investing in productive enterprises.

Who do you think invested in Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, etc?
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 20:02:23+00:00
I skimmed mostly, but was trying to understand how they came up with "superhuman" as a description, and it seems like a stretch?

This might seem like a nit but the term "superhuman" is a VERY strong one to my mind. It doesn't suggest "better than the average human off the street at a particular random task" but instead suggests "better than humans are capable of getting with training, at a high percentile-level".

One of the biggest advantages of LLMs as a tool are that they are generally quite good against a broad variety of things without needing a ton of further domain-specific training. Humans tend to be the opposite.

It doesn't seem like they gave much training to the human annotators they recruited. Whereas an LLM trained on the internet has been trained on a LOT of blog posts + associated metadata. And nobody has ever really bothered figuring out "how would we best train humans to identify gender of blog post authors" - there's very little economic incentive for it. It's not like we generally train people to write in gender-specific ways in school either, so we haven't been formally instructed on potential differences. We'd have to rely on broad-brush generalizations if not given an opportunity to deep dive to try to find more specific tendencies.

But if you pay people to study a big majority chunk of the corpus they're using for this for a couple years, focusing consciously on the post style, contents, and the gender both, and then test them on stuff from the ones you held out... how well could they do?