MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d0liver | 2025-07-05 17:31:39+00:00
> Newton did not just describe motion—he invented the ideas of force and mass.

I think this is just what incremental progress looks like from the outside. It's a magic trick that happens when we don't see each step of the progression.

> The narrative around AI in science is shifting—from tool to theorist, from assistant to author.

I agree that AI is making people out of touch, and I think that's part of the market's goal. It's a lot easier to sell stuff to people if you can convince them it's magic.

I don't think that AI has fundamentally changed anything about the nature of discovery; we're just making reference materials fluid and generative -- it's an incremental step. So, I agree with you that the narrative is largely missing the pieces that make things "tricky". It feels sort of like people are rediscovering copy pasta and then being like, "Look how much work I did!"
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-07-05 17:31:45+00:00
I think you're glossing a bit over the word "intention". It's certainly easy for any competent manager to communicate instructions or requirements in writing. What's hard is communicating the full scope of their intentions, including things like:

* This bit is confusing to me even as I say it - I want to keep it in mind as we move forwards in case we're thinking about it wrong.

* This requirement is really annoying and I'd love to find a way to get rid of it.

* This part is super super urgent, and if we find a way to do it faster without too many other costs we should rework the plan.

You can't "just" write these things down, both because some requirements aren't so annoying you can come out and explicitly say it and because too many parenthetical clauses start to make a document impossible to read. If they're not communicated nonverbally it's hard to communicate them at all.
by Pooge | 2025-07-05 17:31:51+00:00
> Some people can eat and eat and stay slim, even without much exercise.

This is me. Around 10 years ago I ate McDonald's and kebab at least once a week and was very much considered slim.

Now I eat healthily and almost always of my own cooking. I also exercise, but that's for my health and not my weight.

But I also eat much much more now than I did 10 years ago.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-05 17:32:24+00:00
I'd say focus on databases, especially as someone nearing middle age.

Front end/web work is a treadmill. Web frameworks come and go. SQL and relational databases have been a foundation for applications since the 1980 and that is still the case today. The investment you make in learning something like Postgres won't be something you have to throw away in 5 years when the next hype cycle around a new framework comes around. Basically after 30+ years in software, the one thing that is still relevant and that I can still do well today is work with relational databases. I got tired of running the web framework treadmill and am now years behind whatever people are using these days.

Edit: also linux/unix shell utilities. Awk, sed, grep, xargs, and others form a surprisingly capable toolbox for filtering and shaping data, and they all date back many decades. I've never had to throw away my experience using these tools.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-05 17:33:07+00:00
Tesla is the worst, man, all the vague half-truths since 2018 creates ideas like Tesla has experts teleoperate 100K vehicles to collect data from cameras to build a huge model

"Tesla in particular has a fleet of over 100,000 cars deployed in the real world that it is constantly collecting and then annotating data from. These cars are being teleoperated by experts, making the data ideal for large-scale supervised learning."
by m3047 | 2025-07-05 17:33:10+00:00
If you happen to drive east / west through Yakima on a semi-regular basis you've probably noticed the Rattlesnake Ridge slide over the past half a decade:

https://www.heraldnet.com/northwest/landslide-near-yakima-mi...

https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/lower_valley/rattles...
by rsync | 2025-07-05 17:34:05+00:00
Your analogy suggests a deferment of taxes paid but not elimination.

In your example, they still own all the gold and would eventually pay taxes on any liquidation.

I bring this up because I, too, am as interested in your parent to know the original inspiration for these parts of the tax code…

Further: I have a suspicion that this should be applied differently to C-corps vs. pass through entities in the same way that corporate taxes and retained earnings are…
by al_borland | 2025-07-05 17:34:18+00:00
Does this really solve the problem? Let's say I'm using a cloud provider for some service I enjoy. They have documents that spell out that if they have to close their doors they will give X months of notice and allow for a data export. Ok, great. Now they decide to shut their doors and honor those agreements. What am I left with? A giant JSON file that is effectively useless unless I decide to write my own app, or some nice stranger does? The thought is there, it's better than nothing, but it's not as good as having a local app that will keep running, potentially for years or decades, after the company shuts their doors or drops support.
by elzbardico | 2025-07-05 17:34:49+00:00
I work with AI, I consider generative AI an incredible tool in our arsenal of computing things.

But, in my opinion, the public expectations in my opinion are clearly exaggerated and sometimes even dangerous as we ran the risk of throwing the baby with the bathwater when some ideas/marketing/vc people ideas become not realizable in the concrete world.

Why, having this outlook, I should be banned of using the very useful word/concept of "hype"?
by infocollector | 2025-07-05 17:35:13+00:00
It’s misleading to cite two government-funded supercomputers as evidence that NVIDIA lacks monopoly power in HPC and AI:

- Government-funded outliers don’t disprove monopoly behavior. The two AMD-powered systems on the TOP500 list—both U.S. government funded—are exceptions driven by procurement constraints, not market dynamics. NVIDIA’s pricing is often prohibitive, and its dominance gives it the power to walk away from bids that don’t meet its margins. That’s not competition—it’s monopoly leverage.

- Market power isn't disproven by isolated wins. Monopoly status isn’t defined by having every win, but by the lack of viable alternatives in most of the market. In commercial AI, research, and enterprise HPC workloads, NVIDIA owns an overwhelming share—often >90%. That kind of dominance is monopoly-level control.

- AMD’s affordability is a symptom, not a sign of strength. AMD's lower pricing reflects its underdog status in a market it struggles to compete in—largely because NVIDIA has cornered not just the hardware but the entire CUDA software stack, developer ecosystem, and AI model compatibility. You don't need 100% market share to be a monopoly—you need control. NVIDIA has it.

In short: pointing to a couple of symbolic exceptions doesn’t change the fact that NVIDIA’s grip on the GPU compute stack—from software to hardware to developer mindshare—is monopolistic in practice.
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-05 17:36:00+00:00
It's a good question--I am not a lawyer.

But that's the point of contracts, right? When a company shuts down, the contracts become part of the liabilities. E.g., if the contract says "you must pay each customer $1000 if we shut down" then the customers become creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding. It doesn't guarantee that they get all (or any) money, but their interests are negotiated by the bankruptcy judge.

Similarly, I can imagine a contract that says, "if the company shuts down, all our software becomes open source." Again, this would be managed by a bankruptcy judge who would mandate a release instead of allowing the creditors to gain the IP.

Another possibility is for the company to create a legal trust that is funded to keep the servers running (at a minimal level) for some specified amount of time.
by Someone | 2025-07-05 17:36:08+00:00
> Serious complications occur roughly 0.3% of the time.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/colon-rectal-cancer/abou..., “the lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1 in 24 for men and 1 in 26 for women.”

So, it’s a 4% lifetime risk versus a 0.3% per colonoscopy risk. The outcomes for the two risks also are different, but I would think that for many healthy people (e.g. those under 40 years old), the risk of doing such a check are greater than that of not taking it.

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorectal_cancer#Screening, that’s one of the reasons frequent colonoscopies aren’t advised.
by ben_w | 2025-07-05 17:38:09+00:00
> The Apple Paper: When the Illusion Breaks

> Apple's recent research paper, The Illusion of Thinking, tested modern LLMs on classic logic puzzles—Tower of Hanoi, river-crossing tasks, and other structured reasoning challenges.

> The results? Performance dropped to zero.

> Children can solve these puzzles. AI could not.

Ah, no.

The AI that Apple tested in this paper did drop to zero, but on tasks where the output would exceed the length of the output context window (Tower of Hanoi when the towers are tall enough), or where the answer was "this is provably impossible" (some of the river-crossing tasks), as per the abstract in this response: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09250
by tom_m | 2025-07-05 17:38:24+00:00
Roo Code manages context a LOT better than Cursor or Windsurf. Cursor and Windsurf don't care about this because they want people to use more tokens. Their investors want more people to use tokens.

Think about this one. They don't even tell you what your usage is! Look at Roo Code showing you the context usage and cost of each conversation. Features to compact the context. It's built around bringing awareness to the unit economics of AI and built to give users choice. The tools that work to keep users in the dark are serving someone else's interests.
by gxs | 2025-07-05 17:38:57+00:00
If you wanted to work on rebuilding engines or modding cars, would you go get your phd in physics?

The answer actually is, maybe, depending on what you want to do.

You’d certainly want to understand and have a strong intuition for physics, but knowing how to solve a differential equation isn’t going to necessarily make you a better mechanic. Understanding the concepts of what you’re solving might, but the raw technical calculus skill will most likely not

I’m not saying this to discourage you, simply throwing it out there for you to keep in mind as you embark on your journey. A lot of the coding that happens day to day is SV is more akin to a mechanic working in the ship than a physicist in the laboratory (or in front of the chalkboard) and I guess it’s just my way of saying to stay vigilant that what you’re studying will enable you to achieve your goals.

Only you know them and you very well may need extra physics for the type of work you want to do - definitely not saying that’s not possible

A lot of people in the valley make people feel like if they don’t have a cs degree they aren’t real coders and shouldn’t be allowed within 50 miles of contributing code. Just so you know this is bullshit :)

I’ve come across all types of devs - from high school drop outs to egghead Phds and I’ve seen awesome and terrible work from both camps
by ak217 | 2025-07-05 17:39:10+00:00
Yes, colorectal cancer screening is estimated to reduce colorectal cancer mortality by 50% to 73%.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10093633/

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2208375

Progressive screening using non-invasive assays like Cologuard and FIT is a valuable screening mode. The non-invasive assays are not perfect but they are improving.
by trollbridge | 2025-07-05 17:40:51+00:00
I would simply ask upfront if they’re open to hiring over 40 and/or hiring with a disability (and then mention I’m not litigious and simply don’t want waste their time if they aren’t looking for that, no hard feelings). I actually had a few places admit they are not going to hire over 40 + a disability after I made it clear I have no intentions to sue.
by benreesman | 2025-07-05 17:41:13+00:00
yeah, we're a little past that kind of prompting now. Opus 4 will do a whole standup comedy routine about how fucking clueless most "prompt engineers" are if you give it permsission (I keep telling people, irreverence and competence cannot be separated in hackers). "You are a 100x Google SWE Who NEVER MAKES MISTAKES" is one I've seen it use as a caricature.

Getting good outcomes from the new ones is about establishing your credentials so they go flat out:

Edit: I'll post a better example when my flight lands. Go away now.
by ogora | 2025-07-05 17:42:00+00:00
It is not just you:

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power ..." -- 2 Timothy 3:1–5
by Fogest | 2025-07-05 17:42:08+00:00
I'd say they are both bad, though I actually view it as worse when going after journalists, especially when it relates to a story surrounding the family of a politician running for president. The FBI also lied to social media companies in order to get them to remove stories about it, despite knowing the story was true: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/testimony-r...

And here is the story about the raid of the journalist: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/13/raid-veritas-okeefe...
by seadan83 | 2025-07-05 17:42:12+00:00
> If so, now is a really exciting time because it's never been easier for people without a CS background to go from idea to working software.

If this means to "learn" by using a LLM, I would be so wary of that advice.

Not learning CS was a shortcut many people took. Sometimes lack of time (ie: they haven't learned it yet), sometimes a lack of will. Either way, I feel that CS fundamentals is like a car mechanic knowing how an engine works. Tends to make for a better mechanic.
by RaftPeople | 2025-07-05 17:42:41+00:00
I think the lesson at the end of that semester is a bit muddied. It says the quantity group figured out a bunch of stuff due to multiple photos being taken, but there are a couple things we don't know:

1-Just because the single photo group only submitted one photo, they may have taken just as many as the quantity group

2-How were "best" photos determined (by prof? by class vote?)

If quality group took as many photos, then the issue is really about the subjective selection of "best" photo. The first group had 100x as many photos to choose from than the 2nd group, so it could be more about how well each person in the 2nd group was able to select best photo from their collection compared to however "best" photos were selected out of all photos.
by mancerayder | 2025-07-05 17:42:46+00:00
Potential?

I am trying to buy a property, and I've been moving money around to prepare for a down payment. It's July 4th weekend. I initiated some moves in the afternoon of July 3. But an ACH transaction in the U.S. takes "1-3 business days." First of all, why "1-3" and not "1" or "3" or "2"? Secondly, why business days? I get paged at night and on the weekend if something breaks at work, but the banking laws or customs say that computers only move my money 9-5 during holidays? Computers are taking non-human-holidays?

I don't get it. If bitcoin won't disrupt this, something else should.

I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. So I think it's useless at the moment other than as a scheme to gamble. I think there's a bit of a trust issue.
by masswerk | 2025-07-05 17:43:00+00:00
The problem being that the LIST routine should handle a comment like a string (which is how it is parsed and stored: a comment is essentially an unquoted string extending to the end of the line), but doesn't bail out of keyword expansion, whenever it encounters a REM token.

[Edit]

Coincidentally, a shifted "L" is PETSCII code 0xCC. Which is just one after the highest available token in Commodore BASIC 2.0 / V.2. (The last one being 0xCB, `GO`.) Therefor, a lookup into the keyword list will yield the terminating zero-byte, which probably causes the problem. (E.g., by defeating what was intended to be an unconditional branch instruction.)

(In BASIC 4.0 for the 40xx/80xx PETs, this is actually a valid token, namely `CONCAT`, which is expanded by LIST without further issues. Meaning, this kind of LIST protection can be broken by simply loading the program on one of the later PETs.)
by thankyoufriend | 2025-07-05 17:43:22+00:00
You realize that not everybody has the means to invest in stocks, right? Artists are so commonly poor, that there's even a trope called the "starving artist." I have noticed a distinct lack of empathy in the broader discussion about GenAI's impact on the working class. The argument is always made that this isn't new, that people have to retrain when new technology displaces them. Ok, sure. But the speed of this displacement is very new and it happened basically overnight. How do you expect these displaced people to sustain themselves during the retraining period? There's only so many McJobs, and it's not as easy as you think to get one right now. I just watched someone with a college degree apply to everything for 2 months before landing one. There's also the deeply-held belief that people are only valuable if they work, which I think many of us subconsciously believe, but that's pretty messed up if you reflect on it and follow it to its logical conclusion.

There's also the principle of the matter that we shouldn't have to pay for a share of something that was built using our collective unpaid labor/property without our consent.
by tom_m | 2025-07-05 17:43:36+00:00
They aren't the reseller.

Also, that wonderful big beautiful bill in the US just limited what states and government can do to AI. It's a clear and open highway for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc. They don't have to worry about any kinda rug pulling on Cursor or anything. They can literally compete with their "customers" and put their "customers" or "partners" out of business with zero consequences.
by omnicognate | 2025-07-05 17:44:00+00:00
What you state is called the Physical Church-Turing Thesis, and it's neither obvious nor necessarily true.

I don't know if you're making it, but the simplest mistake would be to think that you can prove that a computer can evaluate any mathematical function. If that were the case then "it's got to be doable with algorithms" would have a fairly strong basis. Anything the mind does that an algorithm can't would have to be so "magically transcendent" that it's beyond the scope of the mathematical concept of "function". However, this isn't the case. There are many mathematical functions that are proven to be impossible for any algorithm to implement. Look up uncomputable functions you're unfamiliar with this.

The second mistake would be to think that we have some proof that all physically realisable functions are computable by an algorithm. That's the Physical Church-Turing Thesis mentioned above, and as the name indicates it's a thesis, not a theorem. It is a statement about physical reality, so it could only ever be empirically supported, not some absolute mathematical truth.

It's a fascinating rabbit hole if you're interested - what we actually do and do not know for sure about the generality of algorithms.
by albedoa | 2025-07-05 17:44:16+00:00
>It is hilarious to me to be reading about city folk being amazed at a few coyotes and an owl.

They are amazed at a few coyotes and an own in the city, which is newsworthy.

> edit: lol at the downvotes, welcome to the real world?

Your comprehension is shocking. Again, the downvotes are because of your wild misinterpretation of what people are amazed at. What are you doing.
by exceptione | 2025-07-05 17:45:05+00:00
> They are leaving this nation defenseless

There is a shortage of courageous people. Military analysts and generals have sounded the alarm about serious gaps in capability, but they are all __retired__. The maga slogan is apparently just enough for media and public. The US doesn't build ships and is lacking the industrial capacity to sustain a prolonged war.

The Biden program's to onshore certain industries seemed to work, but those programs have been thrown in the toilet. The tariff scams have scared people to invest and expand production in the US.

It is one more example of how the concept "nation" or "common good" is meaningless for the 0,01%. You burn the village for personal profit. When the host dies they move to the next victim to parasite on, and so on.

Autocracies can't sustain themself, they will eventually collapse because without freedom sustainable and efficient productivity is not possible in the long term. It is why the Putin clan needs to parasite on other countries (Transnistria, Georgia, Ukraine etc). And this is why the Republicans are talking about annexing other countries.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-05 17:45:12+00:00
Ah we're dealing with a comprehension problem. Let me explain then.

The point of "deport people I disagree with" was to highlight it as an illegal solution, much like the "don't give due process" solution.

If we are to take your solution seriously (of simply ignoring our Constitution), then we have all sorts of "solutions" on the table, including ones like "deport people I disagree with." That is to imply that neither of these are actual solutions because both of them would require violating our Constitution.

I suppose I made an error expecting I was speaking to someone with the cognitive firepower required to understand analogies and implicature, so I hope this helps.
by d0liver | 2025-07-05 17:46:20+00:00
I don't think this product is for me, but I wanted to mention that the pricing feels wrong. You're pitching people dealing with large volumes of email, but then I'm paying $25/mo for 200 emails which isn't a lot. Also, how are the fields being extracted? Like, how reliable is it? Is it an AI backed thing or like looking for specific formats? And how do I hook it up to my email?
by bitwize | 2025-07-05 17:46:23+00:00
In the first episode of Kyoryū Sentai Jūranger, the inspiration for the first bit of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the witch Bandora (Rita Repulsa) appears on Earth riding a flying penny-farthing bicycle, and terrorizes the people by shifting a bunch of Tokyo skyscrapers around to form her palace.

Seeing the time lapse of that whole city block being moved in one lump made me think of that. Very cool.
by saejox | 2025-07-05 17:46:30+00:00
I didn't draw a single piece of PNG until i am 38. Now i am about to release my second solo developed game. My art is nothing great, but a year a ago wouldn't even believe i could draw a single sprite.

https://www.instagram.com/arcadenest_games/

I find my age to be great period to learn new skills. It is never too late.
by akerl_ | 2025-07-05 17:46:53+00:00
Yea, that makes more sense, but still seems incorrect?

Just on my phone, several apps let me subscribe via the Apple AppStore but also by subscribing on their website with a credit card (like Discord, NYT, AllTrails, HBO, etc)

And that’s not even considering that when I pay for an in-app purchase… I’m paying with my credit card. Apple takes their cut, but it’s still my Amex or visa or whatever that I’m using via my Apple account.

It feels like the only viable part of this beef is that apps can’t accept both in-app purchases and alternate payments directly on their iOS app for functionality within the app?
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-05 17:47:02+00:00
Asbestos was widely used to insulate boilers and heating pipes/ductwork up until the 1970s or so. It's too bad it's such a health hazard because it's really a very effective substance for that purpose. It insulates well and it doesn't burn. Also widely used in car and truck brake pads. Sorry that's not really "data" but it is pretty common knowledge.