MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-07-19 15:42:36+00:00
> Couldn't lets say a government purchase then dump an insane amount of coins at once to reduce the value?

Governments regularly seize crypto wallets and sell assets at market price. I’m not sure how much BTC the US government holds, but it might be possible for a government sized entity to crash the market (and make some people ludicrously rich when it rebounds).
by pansa2 | 2025-07-19 15:42:40+00:00
Despite the URL, I’d only consider a few of these to be WTFs. Questions 20 & 21 definitely are, though:

>>> a = 42 >>> print(f"{a:=10}") 42 >>> print(f"{(a:=10)}") 10

I still can’t believe anyone thought the walrus operator was a good idea.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-07-19 15:43:17+00:00
Windows and *nix are different platforms. Writing crossplatform code is pretty easy and a solved problem. At least 99.5% of code can be platform agnostic. Only a few tiny bits are special.

My background is video games. Which is well known to be a Windows-first environment. I currently work on robotics. The vast majority of robotics ecosystem code is Unix only.

You know what is extremely useful for teleoperation? Virtual reality. You know what platform doesn’t have a way to do VR currently? Linux. Womp womp sad trombone. Mistakes were made.

It’s really easy and not hard to write crossplatform code. My experience is that Linux devs are by far the most resistant to this. It’s very annoying.

Should you care about Windows? I certainly think so. Linux still doesn’t have a good debugger (no, gdb/lldb) aren’t good. Quite frankly every Linux dev would be more productive if they supported Windows where debuggers exist and are decent. So really they’re just shooting themselves in the foot. IMHO.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-07-19 15:44:11+00:00
> You could make the argument that we're not at a stage where running Shor's alg. on integers is feasible hence integers don't capture the progress in the field...

That's exactly what they are saying, and I'll say it too. Maybe they weren't explicit enough, but reread their comments as "not a relevant figure [to measure current progress].
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-19 15:44:12+00:00
Holy cow.

> “It’s exciting to watch HP lead the market in creating non-invasive native ad experiences across their massive customer base. Hopefully this will be the start of a much broader industry trend for device manufacturers.”

I've already sworn a vow upon the altar of God to never buy another HP printer. Other HP hardware now goes on that list.

Advertisers eventually corrupt the ad supported media. We've seen it with broadcast radio and TV, cable TV, Internet search and many others. Now the Business Standard Operating System, Windows, the foundation of office productivity, will be corrupted.
by Mordisquitos | 2025-07-19 15:44:34+00:00
>Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.

The key word here being 'option'.

>After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.

And by enabling this translation by default, without any obvious way to disable it, they are also making it harder for < 25 year-olds to be exposed to other languages, which will itself make it harder for them to learn them. For instance, consider the effect of TV and film dubbing on Spain's proficiency in English[0]:

«Spain and Portugal share many geographical and cultural traits. But the number of Spanish speakers is double that of Portuguese speakers. Again, maybe in part because of this, Portugal uses subtitling while in Spain television is dubbed. And, as a result, Portugal’s results in the TOEFL exams are much better than Spain’s.»

[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2018-micola.pdf
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-19 15:44:35+00:00
> LLMs are really good with words and kind of crap at “thinking.” Humans are wired to see these two things as tightly connected. A machine that thinks poorly and talks great is inherently confusing. A lot of discussion and disputes around LLMs comes down to this.

It's not an unfamiliar phenomenon in humans. Look at Malcolm Gladwell.
by lordnacho | 2025-07-19 15:44:47+00:00
> These models cannot reason

Not trying to be a smarty pants here, but what do we mean by "reason"?

Just to make the point, I'm using Claude to help me code right now. In between prompts, I read HN.

It does things for me such as coding up new features, looking at the compile and runtime responses, and then correcting the code. All while I sit here and write with you on HN.

It gives me feedback like "lock free message passing is going to work better here" and then replaces the locks with the exact kind of thing I actually want. If it runs into a problem, it does what I did a few weeks ago, it will see that some flag is set wrong, or that some architectural decision needs to be changed, and then implements the changes.

What is not reasoning about this? Last year at this time, if I looked at my code with a two hour delta, and someone had pushed edits that were able to compile, with real improvements, I would not have any doubt that there was a reasoning, intelligent person who had spent years learning how this worked.

It is pattern matching? Of course. But why is that not reasoning? Is there some sort of emergent behavior? Also yes. But what is not reasoning about that?

I'm having actual coding conversations that I used to only have with senior devs, right now, while browsing HN, and code that does what I asked is being produced.
by mindslight | 2025-07-19 15:45:07+00:00
Class action lawsuits are a boon for corpos. They take what should be many separate instances of fraud with unknown unknowns and tie them all off in one small garbage bag. Half the money goes to the attorneys and the other half is a token payment or even just funds a coupon to encourage doing more business with the perpetrator.

I'd really like to see some service that facilitates you opting out of a class action, and then comes in later representing you for your own individual case (at scale) based on the implicit admission of wrongdoing from the settlement plus documenting actual damages.
by aed | 2025-07-19 15:45:16+00:00
I have the same exact problem! I'm super impressed by people who can read books and memorize the details. And I tried really hard to do the same.

So here's a different perspective on solving this problem: don't bother!

I'm sure you have other strengths. Lean into those and don't worry about trying to be the guy/girl that can recall details from books. Life gets much easier when you don't try to fight things that don't come natural to you.

So what do you do about your non-fiction reading? Keep reading! You may enjoy it more when you're not trying to read with an agenda and you're relieved of the burden of trying to memorize. Even if you can't recall the details, your brain will be folding ideas from what you're reading into the things you're working on and you'll have breakthroughs.

What happens for me is that I read some books that resonate so much for me that they become my "bibles." I can't remember all the details, but they're helpful to me in certain periods of my life. I come back to them every few years or when I think they'll be particularly helpful for something going on in my life and I get to read them with fresh eyes and new perspective.
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-19 15:46:06+00:00
"near sighted, edit in some vision"

And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty?

Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line.

"Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted.

It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so.

And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.
by veber-alex | 2025-07-19 15:46:33+00:00
I hate Rust's solution because it's not a solution at all.

Interpolation only works in a small subset of cases, which makes you constantly having to think whether it can or can't be used in the current situation and requires endless churn when refactoring code.

At the very minimum, they need to allow it to work with field access.

On the other hand, in python, while examples like this site exist and are funny/weird/quirky in practice nobody cares, and they just enjoy using fstrings.
by photonthug | 2025-07-19 15:46:35+00:00
Actually I think the public tends to generalize their complaints/injuries and act in the most spiteful ways that are available to them. For example, decades of bad experiences at the DMV translates into cries that we should defund the post-office, NSF, etc, no matter how irrational that is.

But capital has a playbook now that's pretty effective at dodging this kind of backlash, like the "advertising without signal" thing that's also on the front page right now is pointing out. That article mentions "Disposable brand identities" which does seem relevant here even if that piece is mainly talking about the relationship between amazon/manufacturers/consumers. Part of what PE is accomplishing is brand/liability laundering, but brands head in this direction anyway before they fail. Consumers can't typically look at list of 10-20 "different" hotel brands and really tell which are under the same umbrella.

And all this is kind of assuming consumer choice exists and is still meaningful, but when you need a hotel you need a hotel. If Hyatt gets away with this abuse, every hotel will do it soon, and capital can just wait out any boycott.
by RestlessMind | 2025-07-19 15:46:43+00:00
The methodology finally addresses a pet peeve of mine to adjust based on prices and hours worked: "we ranked 178 countries using three measures. The first is GDP per person at market exchange rates. It is simple and intuitive, and widely cited. But it ignores price differences between countries. The second measure adjusts incomes for these local costs (known as purchasing-power parity, or PPP). This offers a better guide to living standards but one that takes no account of leisure time: the share of people in work, and how long they work, varies by country. Our final yardstick accounts for both local prices and hours worked"
by anymouse123456 | 2025-07-19 15:46:45+00:00
This kind of thinking is exactly the problem.

Yes, at the most absurd limits, some autists may occasionally obsess and make things worse. We're so far from that problem today, it would be a good one to have.

IME, making things fast almost always also makes them simpler and easier to understand.

Building high-performance software often means building less of it, which translates into simpler concepts, fewer abstractions, and shorter times to execution.

It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down.

Treating high performance as a feature and low performance as a bug impacts everything we do and ignoring them for decades is how you get the rivers of garbage we're swimming in.
by dathinab | 2025-07-19 15:48:35+00:00
yes HTML and CSS have went unhinge without question

big reason for that is that they where not designed for modern requirements like being used as a general purpose application UI toolkit

especially CSS was designed printable documents, not modern websites

and HTML was designed to represent the core semantic structure of a "classical" document (and not a too fancy one either), with minimal formatting (e.g. bold, italic, underline) but even on old websites it was very common to not be used like that at all (e.g. think old table for the whole site to create header and side bar tricks, now doable nicer with HTML5/modern CSS)

so its kinda a markup and style language chosen in the very early internet days only to realize shortly later that websites develop in a direction very mismatched to the designs of both languages (but both happen to be squeezable into their new roles, barely).

Kinda funny. But not really the situation behind OOXML.
by rpdillon | 2025-07-19 15:48:42+00:00
You're not arguing in a way that strikes me as intellectually honest.

You're hypothesizing the existence of large negative effects with minimal evidence.

But the positive effects of plastics and social media are extremely well understood and documented. Plastics have revolutionized practically every industry we have.

With that kind of pattern of evidence, I think it makes sense to discount the negatives and be sure to account for all the positives before saying that deploying the technology was a bad idea.
by kcplate | 2025-07-19 15:49:41+00:00
Those are “tactics”. You are confusing relatively common control and power tactics that are used by some governments with an ideology that encompasses many different characteristics. The Soviet Union used many of the same tactics, but you wouldn’t call them fascist. Many of the important (political and economic) fascist ideologies don’t apply to the current administration…in fact politically and economically the current US administration is directly opposite of what was found in historic fascism.

I get that you want to redefine what “fascism” is, because historically it’s associated with some really evil things, but I am not willing to dilute that definition.
by jamwil | 2025-07-19 15:50:06+00:00
Yes but you’re answering the wrong question. It’s not, “what is the probability of death on my next jump?”. It’s “what is the accumulated probability of death by jumping repeatedly.”

The way you answer it is by flipping it upside down (what is the probability of surviving a single jump?) and multiplying that value by itself n times, where n is the number of jumps.

.99999 * .99999 * .99999 * …
by kaibee | 2025-07-19 15:51:05+00:00
I'm commiting the faux paus of providing a chat-gpt answer, but I've worked in fintech (annuities though) and I can confirm that this answer is broadly correct. https://chatgpt.com/share/687bbde1-4ba8-800c-92e5-93edd49b01...

In principle, it is 'the bank uses its own money to pay off the debt', as long as you accept that the bank's own 'credit worthiness reputation' and other assets count as 'money'. The hit is _ultimately_ taken by the capital shareholders in the bank, which is the important part.
by modeless | 2025-07-19 15:51:06+00:00
IMO their involvement is only an issue if they gained an advantage on the benchmark by it. If they didn't train on the test set then their gained advantage is minimal and I don't see a big problem with it nor do I see an obligation to disclose. Especially since there is a hold-out set that OpenAI doesn't have access to, which can detect any malfeasance.
by scarmig | 2025-07-19 15:51:32+00:00
It's caught in a kind of feedback loop. There are only so many times you can see "stochastic parrot" or "fancy autocomplete" or "can't draw hands" or "just a bunch of matmuls, it can't replicate the human soul" lines before you decide to just not engage. This leads to more of the content being exactly that, driving more people away.

At this point, there are much better places to find technical discussion of AI, pros and cons. Even Reddit.
by HEmanZ | 2025-07-19 15:51:33+00:00
People who say this don’t understand the breakthrough we had in the last couple of years. 15 years ago I was laughing at people predicting AI would turn everything upside down soon. I’m not laughing anymore. I’ve been around long enough to see some AI hype cycles and this time it is different.

15 years ago I, working on AI systems at a FAANG, would have told you “real” AI probably wasn’t coming in my lifetime. 15 years ago the only engineers I knew who thought AI was coming soon were dreamers and Silicon Valley koolaiders. The rest of us saw we needed a step-function break through that may not even exist. But it did, and we got there, a couple of years ago.

Now I’m telling people it’s here. We’ve hit a completely different kind of technology, and it’s so clear to people working in the field. The earthquake has happened and the tsunami is coming.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-07-19 15:51:40+00:00
> Could there be a widely agreed-upon function of qubit fidelity, error rate, coherence time, and interconnections that measures, even coarsely, how far we are from the cliff?

They've tried (like "Quantum Volume"), but it's really hard to summarize an entirely new computing paradigm into a single number, especially since different hardware platforms will make wildly different tradeoffs.
by hollerith | 2025-07-19 15:51:48+00:00
There are probably international traders who can tell a similar story with Linux replaced with "the US" and Windows replaced with "Russia", but I wouldn't consider that similar story to be an argument for ending the sanctions on Russia.

However, there is an important difference between the sanctions on Russia and the strategy of the pro-Linux "activist" that started this thread: namely, Windows is so heavily entrenched in the niche of enterprise IT that there is no significant chance of Linux's replacing it in that niche with the result that there is no realistic chance of a positive effect of this activism that might cancel out the negative effect you describe. So, I am tentatively in agreement with you.
by specialp | 2025-07-19 15:51:54+00:00
I needed a windows laptop. My work laptop is a Mac. Unless you are doing extremely intensive things that will benefit from technology gains, buying a new laptop makes little sense. The performance of an off lease enterprise laptop for $500 is great.

I purchased one from Dell, but it shut down at high cpu which indicates a cooling or other issue. In return they sent me an even better laptop for no additional charge. Perhaps more detailed reporting would avoid things like overheating laptops to enter the market. These laptops originally retailed for over $1500
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-19 15:51:59+00:00
Why the hell would they put occupancy sensors below the bed that trigger the overhead lights, that’s an absurd solution to people tripping and falling at night, provide a nightlight that costs $2 instead of (2) $100 occ sensor/relays.

Possibly the issue was they used PIR/ultrasonic (aka dual-tech) sensors and the ultrasonic one was picking up vibrations, I’ve seen that happen in tenant spaces before and turning down the ultrasonic sensitivity fixed it.

I run electrical work and if I was asked to install these, I would’ve written a sarcastic RFI to make sure the customer actually wanted to do something this stupid and expensive vs a $2 nightlight in a receptacle.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-07-19 15:52:32+00:00
More than 50% of people cannot write a 'hello world' program in any programming language.

More than 50% of people employed as software engineers cannot read an academic paper in a field like education, and explain whether the conclusions are sound, based on the experiment description and included data.

More than 50% of people cannot interpret an X-ray.
by jjcob | 2025-07-19 15:52:38+00:00
So as someone who spent the last few years caring for a kid with a genetic defect.... I really don't wish that on anyone.

If there is a way to detect or prevent genetic defects before the kids are born, we should really allow people to make a choice.

And I really don't care if doctors mix genetic material from 3 people to make a healthy baby. It's still a form of evolution. I'd think we should really try to give two people who really want to have a kid a chance to have a healthy kid...
by Newlaptop | 2025-07-19 15:52:48+00:00
"Founders" are a tiny percentage of the rich, they're just the ones in the news.

The richest 1% own half the wealth in the world and the gap is getting wider. Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million. (Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wealth-inequality-o...)

So yes, some of the wealth is going to your retirement account. But for every penny going to a middle-class professional workers retirement, there's about a thousand dollars going to some hedge fund manager or the trust fund of the grandson of some robber baron who got rich a hundred years ago.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-19 15:53:10+00:00
Dunno, this is also a failure of email client UI which is designed around a naive world with no bad actors just so it looks cute.

The sender email address could be more prominent.

All link URLs could be visible.

Emails from new senders could have some sort of warning/alert. I used to use an email client that let you approve incoming email addresses, and it once saved me from a Coinbase phishing email since it made me double check the sender since it was marked as unapproved.

We can't keep blaming the victim when our own software works in the favor of bad actors. You're going to let your guard down one day.
by toast0 | 2025-07-19 15:53:10+00:00
I guess there's some aspect of fire safety, because cigarettes are smoldering and can start fires. But I've been in hotel rooms where a previous occupant was smoking enough that the room smells, and it's not pleasant. It doesn't happen often now that most hotels are declared non-smoking, at least in my experience.

I don't think I'm in favor of black box smoking detectors either. I'd guess housekeeping reporting the room for smoking during cleaning and a 2nd person verifying would be enough to bill a smoking fee and that would drive compliance. Sometimes you miss a room, and customers complain, and you deal with it then. Better than the sensors said X and we didn't follow up with our noses.
by mrb | 2025-07-19 15:53:28+00:00
Given that this image: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/653a9fbd1075088b6c8f8bd3/... shows PM2.5 and CO2(ppm) it may imply they monitor particles and CO2 levels. My guess is it also monitors humidity, and temperature. Humidity helps distinguish smoke from water vapor (eg. steaming shower).

CO2 sensors are generally pretty accurate, but PM2.5 sensors are notoriously prone to false spikes usually caused by dust in or around the sensor: https://www.reddit.com/r/Awair/comments/10r1uyo/inaccurate_p... or https://forum.airgradient.com/t/unusual-pm2-5-readings-on-ne... or https://community.purpleair.com/t/what-to-do-about-incorrect...

My guess is it's likely a sensor in a hotel room accumulates dust over time, leading to high PM2.5 measurements maybe when something (eg. suitcase) bumps against the case, shaking the accumulated dust and releasing it around the sensor.
by uludag | 2025-07-19 15:53:31+00:00
Cynicism and denial are two very different things, and have very different causes and justifications. I personally don't deny that LLMs are very powerful and are capable and capable of eliminating many jobs. At the same time I'm very cynical about the rollout and push for AI. I don't see in any way as a push for a "better" society or towards some notion of progress, but rather an enthusiastic effort to disempower employees, centralize power, expand surveillance, increase profits, etc.
by fuzzythinker | 2025-07-19 15:53:33+00:00
Slightly misleading title. He's famous for first to jump from the stratosphere, breaking the sound barrier. That wasn't the cause of his death. More on him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner .

Maybe a more interesting and impressive fact from the wiki is learning about Alan Eustace, who was a senior VP of engineering at Google. Just before retiring, on October 24, 2014 *at age 57*, he made a free-fall jump from the stratosphere, breaking Felix Baumgartner's world record. He won the Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year in 2015.
by satisfice | 2025-07-19 15:53:34+00:00
Someday, someone will create a recommendation system that is more than mere simple pattern matching.

I enjoyed The King Must Die because it is an excellent novel about personal power, the nature of men and violence, and the duties of a leader. It was written by a woman who had a lot of wisdom about the male psyche.

But all I got were recommendations of other novels based in Greek mythology settings.