MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-14 01:22:40+00:00
My son needed a car to drive to work about two years ago, we figured it should be in my name so I can get an adult insurance rate. We found a $3500 '96 Buick Park Avenue which has needed more than the purchase price in repairs to keep on the road but it sure beats a new car or a newer used car and if it fails completely tomorrow we got our money's worth.

My son wanted a car for fun and saw a $2500 '79 Thunderbird on the side of the road which we picked up a week and a half ago. You can't drive a car like that in Upstate NY in the winter because salt will eat it, but it is fun to drive around and be a bit of a celebrity.

My wife and I have been in the habit of buying new or almost new Asian cars but the way things are going our next car will be a sub-$10,000 used car because (1) they're not making the cars we want to buy and (2) prices are too damn high.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-07-14 01:22:40+00:00
Cool research!

I found an effect that explains this.

LLM memory isn't linearly lost or updated.

As a model is trained previously hidden memories sporadically return. Essentially a model's memory is time dependent to when you sample.

Study was: 1. Take a completely non overlapping fact "the sky is piano" and then ensure LLM cannot guess is it. 2. Train it one or more shots on this 3. Continue training on c4 without this fact. 4. The effect is that the random fact is forgotten but not linerally. Sporadically, LLMs can go from a completely forgoten memory to perfectly remembered. A type of internal self reinforcement without training data.

A rare but reproducible effect (1/15 training runs self reinforce). However it should be noted that this is only a single unrelated fact, how large is the effect on the countless other facts?

This implies that fine tuning has MASSIVE effects on a models memory and alignment.

Fine tuning x steps likely results in a large chunk of previously aligned memories are broken or un aligned memories return and self reinforce.

Memory is a facinating and very misunderstoof part of AI.
by andyferris | 2025-07-14 01:23:17+00:00
I am actually really excited about this.

The issues I've had with function colouring had to do with trying to compose code using (or expecting) blocking effects with those using async effects in NodeJS - if one library has a higher-order function that expects a non-async function and you have functionality which is provided to you as async, it can be very difficult to plumb them together! And if it's the other way around, it can be quite the performance killer (think how much faster better-sqlite3 is than alternatives). Zig's approach eliminates this problem, AFAICT.

If I had to choose between having to pass through an effect handler like `io` or write `async` everywere, the former seems like a better use of my time. It's explicit, but that can be good.

It also fits Zig well with the allocator. Code can expect an allocator or perhaps an allocator and `io`, or perhaps neither. It's analogous to Rust code that is core vs alloc/nostd vs std.

I am slightly amused that a "C-but-better" language is going to have an `io` passed through non-pure functions much like Haskell. It's that idea combined with Rust's pluggable async runtimes (and stackless concurrency) combined with Roc's "platforms" - but for systems programmers. Quite amazing.
by duped | 2025-07-14 01:23:37+00:00
It took me some time to collect my thoughts on this.

One: I don't believe they have solved use-after-free. Marking memory freed and crashing at runtime is as good as checked bounds indexing. It turns RCE into DOS which is reasonable, but what would be much better is solving it provably at compile time to reject invalid programs (those that use memory after it has been deallocated). But enough about that.

I want to write about memory leaks. Solving memory leaks is not hard because automatically cleaning up memory is hard. This is a solved problem, and the domain of automatic memory management/reclamation aka garbage collection. However I don't think they've gone through the rigor to prove why this is significantly different than say, segmented stacks (where each stack segment is your arena). By "significantly different" you should be able to prove this enables language semantics that are not possible with growable stacks - not just nebulous claims about performance.

No, the hard part of solving memory leaks is that they need to be solved for a specific class of program: one that must handle resource exhaustion (otherwise - assume infinite memory; leaks are not a bug). The actual hard thing is when there are no memory leaks in the sense that your program has correctly cleaned itself up everywhere it is able and you are still exhausting resources and must selectively crash tasks (in O(1) memory, because you can't allocate), those tasks need to be able to handle being crashed, and they must not spawn so many more tasks as to overwhelm again. This is equivalent to the halting problem, by the way, so automatic solutions for the general case are provably impossible.

I don't believe that can be solved by semantically inventing an infinite stack. It's a hard architectural problem, which is why people don't bother to solve it - they assume infinite memory, crash the whole program as needed, and make a best effort at garbage collection.

All that said, this is a very interesting design space. We are trapped in the malloc/free model of the universe which are known performance and correctness pits and experimenting with different allocation semantics is a good thing. I like where C3 and Zig's heads are at here, because ignoring allocators is actually a huge problem in Rust in practice.
by zugi | 2025-07-14 01:23:42+00:00
"Monopoly" used to mean a single company controlling a market. Now folks are now hollering "monopoly" about five different companies competing and collectively capturing 90% of a market?

Plus the market is artificially defined to be small. It excluded companies that do their own delivery (pizza places and others), home food delivery that isn't from restaurants, and the old option of just driving yourself to a restaurant.

There's thriving competition in the industry of getting people food, and lots of options that didn't even exist a decade ago. Crazy that it's being spun as the exact opposite.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-14 01:23:53+00:00
> I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual. It just doesn't happen.

I could have saved you the trouble if you'd just asked me!

Over 20,000 communes have been started in the US. None have survived. What baffles me is why people keep believing they can work.

Free markets work because it harnesses the inherent selfishness of everybody, rather than trying to override selfishness.
by throw4847285 | 2025-07-14 01:24:15+00:00
I read an interview in the back of one of the volumes of Gundam: Origin where original series creators Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Yoshiyuki Tomino reflected on their history in the student protest movement of the 1960s. It was a fascinating read because I didn't know anything about the Japanese New Left, and all of a sudden it made Gundam click for me in a way that it hadn't before.

It also made me realize that my knowledge of Japanese history and culture was extremely limited, but because I consumed a lot of Japanese media I vastly overstated my own knowledge. These days I try not to make sweeping statements comparing our respective countries.

I would suggest you think about what you don't know.
by FooBarWidget | 2025-07-14 01:24:47+00:00
I am also Chinese and this is exactly how I feel. The experience of going to a doctor with minor ailments, only to be sent away with the attitude of "take some paracetamol and come back when symptoms worsen" is maddening. In the mean time TCM practitioners have answers that often work for these kinds of things.

In people's zeal to point out TCM's problems (due to its pre-modern scientific roots), I feel like they're also throwing away its potential. Skepticism shouldn't be about wholesale dismissal (which is just intellectual laziness masked as rightenousness) but about improving outcomes.
by NaOH | 2025-07-14 01:24:47+00:00
More:

Tokyo Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43816183 - April 2025 (6 comments)

Tokyo expands underground 'temple' complex to counter climate change rains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41727317 - Oct 2024 (2 comments)

Tokyo's Underground Discharge Channel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785044 - May 2019 (42 comments)

That second listing links to a piece with lots of good photographs.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-14 01:25:01+00:00
I agree that some "purity gospel" teachings have made people uncomfortable with their own bodies. For example, I don't find myself bent out of shape by girls wearing shorter shorts and don't agree with the degree of taboo applied to nudity in America. I also think this only contributes to over-sexualization rather than reducing it.

I just don't see that as "my religion". That's not what I believe. In a certain sense an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a Missouri Synod Lutheran both have the "same religion", but for practical purposes they do not.
by Ozzy101 | 2025-07-14 01:25:34+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo dev running a small web agency, and I kept running into a frustrating issue: When trying to scrape business leads from Google Maps, I noticed a ton of listings are missing websites — even when those businesses do have one. That made lead generation really inefficient.

So I built a Chrome extension that scrapes Bing Maps instead. Surprisingly, Bing tends to list more complete website info, especially for smaller local businesses.

It filters out businesses with no site, lets you extract phone numbers, addresses, and websites, and exports everything to Excel in one click.

This tool has helped me increase my agency's outbound results significantly, so I figured others might find it useful too.

Chrome store link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/maps-lead-scraper-b...
by Avicebron | 2025-07-14 01:25:34+00:00
> The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money.

"Local Model Augmentation", a sort of standardized local MCP that serves as a layer between a model and a traditional app like a game client. Neat :3
by noirchen | 2025-07-14 01:26:08+00:00
In China, particularly in Tibet and Qinghai, plague still occasionally occurs, because a wild animal, the Himalayan marmots carry it and people may get plague from them. After the CCP took over Tibet, antibotics were gradually used to cure the plague. Recent years, more people are traveling to Tibet by the newly built highways, and those people from the cities only find the marmots cute and sometimes touch them and get the disease. Local governments put large warning signs along the road to alert people about this, and hospitals and clinics in nearby towns are always prepared to cure some stupid tourists. Still, it is a potential threat, especially for now because now you can drive home in Shanghai with a cute marmot from infected region for only a few days, not knowing what comes home with you.
by hollerith | 2025-07-14 01:26:15+00:00
It would easy to tell: (unless they were occupied by only a handful of people) they would be useless as fallout shelters without a lot of ventilation, and you can't rely on the wind: you'd need big fans and ducts, and the fans would need to keep running after most of the electricity-generating capacity available in Tokyo is destroyed, i.e., this ventilation system would need its own hardened electricity supply.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-14 01:26:41+00:00
Back in the 1990s we complained that we couldn't get anything done because of "Blue Dog Democrats" [1], now we can't get anything done because there are only 10 of them.

For that matter, I moved to New York in 1990s when we had a Republican Senator Al D'Amato, a Republican Governor George Pataki, and Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani to be replaced by Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Personally I think one party rule is a bad thing because it makes it hard for us to vote out corrupt politicians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition
by vlovich123 | 2025-07-14 01:27:01+00:00
Of course, spinning up a new runtime within the context of a boundary like that is probably wasteful (lots of new threads created if you’re not careful). But you could stash that runtime behind a OnceLock (you’d need to block_on the Handle I imagine rather than the Runtime directly, but doable).

And calling blocking from non-blocking:

let result = tokio::task::spawn_blocking(|| { 5 }).await;

This of course is basically essentially what Zig is doing, except instead of hidden global state it’s parameter passed. This is one area Zig does do better in - I wish Rust would default more to instance state instead of implicit global state.
by mindcrime | 2025-07-14 01:27:22+00:00
I mostly agree with Gary on the core premise of this post, which I interpret generally as "it would be a good idea to pursue neuro-symbolic AI, not just deep learning."

A couple of additional thoughts:

1. She goes on to point out that the field has become an intellectual monoculture, with the neurosymbolic approach largely abandoned, and massive funding going to the pure connectionist (neural network) approach

Just to nitpick... that is largely true, but with the caveat that there has been something of a resurgence of interest in neuro-symbolic AI over just the last couple of years. There's been a series of "Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School" events[1][2][3] going on since 2022 with the next one coming up in August. And there have been recent books[4][5] published specifically on neuro-symbolic AI. You'll also find recent papers on neuro-symbolic AI on arXiv[6]. So for those who are interested in this topic, there is definitely activity underway "out there".

2. Including LLMs somewhere in the next evolution of AI makes sense to me, but leaving them at the core may be a mistake.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and generally agree with this sentiment. Some kind of fusion of LLM's (or "connectionism" in general) and symbolic processing seems desirable, but I'm not sure that we should rely on LLM's to be "core" and try to just layer symbolic processing on top of what we get from the LLM. I have my own thoughts on how such an integration might work, but it's all still speculative at the moment. But I find the whole notion worthy enough to invest time and attention into it, for whatever that is worth.

[1]: https://ibm.github.io/neuro-symbolic-ai/events/ns-summerscho...

[2]: https://neurosymbolic.github.io/nsss2023/

[3]: https://neurosymbolic.github.io/nsss2024/

[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Neuro-Symbolic-AI-transparent-trustwo...

[5]: https://www.iospress.com/catalog/books/handbook-on-neurosymb...

[6]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05435
by anigbrowl | 2025-07-14 01:27:55+00:00
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I am indifferent to the plight of former colonial nations experiencing the same phenomenon in reverse.

Migration is a policy issue, not some natural force like osmosis.

There's a whole discipline called social physics successfully leveraging models from physics, chemistry, and mathematics to analyze and predict social phenomena. Just as the behavior of flocking birds can be reliably modeled with a few differential equations, so can a great many social changes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03701...
by spatialintel | 2025-07-14 01:28:08+00:00
00:00 Google Earth Origin Story 01:23 Sci-fi Spy Tech to Public Gift 06:22 Katrina – First Real‑World Test 09:47 Building a 3D Mirror World 15:24 Crowdsourcing Truth: Earth as Evidence 21:35 Living Dashboard for the Planet 27:58 The Mirror Becomes a Crystal Ball

Pretty cool video on the past/present/future of this really cool tool. Features interviews with Google Earth Director of Engineering Matt Hancher, and Frm. Director Google Earth Rebecca Moore.
by enjoytheview | 2025-07-14 01:28:46+00:00
Here's a really good free one:

OpenSecurityTraining2 Architecture 1001: x86-64 Assembly

https://p.ost2.fyi/courses/course-v1:OpenSecurityTraining2+A...

They also have RISC-V and many other for debuggers and reverse engineering tools (ida/ghidra for example)
by YZF | 2025-07-14 01:30:04+00:00
I don't work for OpenAI and I doubt some random employee is going to come here and share what is likely a secret. I'm in the industry though so I have some idea of what's going on these days, both where I work and more broadly.

AI is getting better at writing code. However writing code is just some fraction of the work of many software engineers. AI doesn't work independently, it needs to be guided, its work needs to be reviewed, tested etc. There are some domains where it does better and some domains where it doesn't. There's a range of "AI" work between auto-complete style work, assisting in understanding a code base, and writing code from some spec or doing other types work.

All in all I would say it's a decent improvement to productivity for many situations. It's really hard to say how much and it's also not a zero sum game, as productivity improves there's more work.

Something to keep in mind is that if you look at a modern software project likely most of the code executing is not code written by the developers of that project. There's a huge stack of open source bits executing for almost any new project.

Specifically in OpenAI you also need to consider what type of software they are likely writing. Some of it may be more or less "vanilla" code and other is likely very specialized/performance critical. The vanilla code like API wrappers or simple front end pieces is likely more amenable to be written by AI whereas the more cutting edge algorithmic/scheduling/optimization work is almost certainly not done by AI. At least yet.

As software organizations become larger there's a lot of overhead and waste. It is possible that AI can enable smaller teams and that has a multiplicative effect because it lets you reduce that waste/overhead. There are likely also software engineers who will become better/adapt to new workflows and some who will not. It's really hard to say where things are going but overall my sense is that this like many other innovations will lead to more software and more jobs and not the other way around. There are many moving pieces here, not just AI itself but geopolitics, macro-economics, etc. Where are those new jobs going to get created, what new types of software/technology are going to be created etc. etc. History seems to show us that we'll adapt/evolve and grow.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-14 01:30:17+00:00
Yea really weird. 1 home usually doesn’t even mean you are an investor: you just own one home and live in it. And then 5 homes? That’s not what anyone would think of as “mom and pop.” That’s a very large real estate investment business.

I’d just ignore people with one home because they are not investors. Have one “mom and pop” bucket for people with 2 homes, one rented out, and then another bucket for businesses with 3+ homes, 2+ rented out.
by angst | 2025-07-14 01:30:33+00:00
> The company has said it will only use the system to monitor URL and application visits during designated work hours, according to the document. According to its website, Hubstaff can also track mouse movement and keystrokes.

> "This new tool serves to streamline work processes, provide clearer insights into daily tutoring activities, and ensure resources align with Human Data priorities," the company's human resources team said in a mass email to employees.

> The software, which requires workers to clock in and out, would not track activity on the laptop outside of work hours, the document said.

very well intended (smh)
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-14 01:30:49+00:00
I don't think you understand LVT based on this "not to mention the political debates/decisions over what constitutes "fully utilized"."

LVT doesn't require any such determination.

Anyway, I'm not opposed to the solution you mention as well. We should subsidize supply of housing, and supply at any price will serve the same purpose of driving prices down, so yes I agree we should build public housing for higher price points.
by ythiscoyness | 2025-07-14 01:31:03+00:00
Having to go through getting a court order sounds like an issue for this non issue.

Why should that be a thing? More cheesy obfuscation games to protect some random a-hole?

These rich who don’t want to be on the hook for other’s healthcare sure make a lot of demands of everyone else.

Covid just taught us we can stand to shed a few million and be fine. Purge the rich.

If no one else is on the hook for my life story fuck theirs.
by anigbrowl | 2025-07-14 01:31:30+00:00
“Ground rents are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Ground rents are, therefore, perhaps a species of revenue which best bear to have a particular tax imposed upon them.”

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”

“A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground.”

“The sea in the neighbourhood of the islands of Shetland is more than commonly abundant in fish, which make a great part of the subsistence of the inhabitants. But in order to profit by the produce of the water, they must have a habitation upon the neighbouring land. The rent of the landlord is in proportion, not to what he can make by the land, but to what he can make both by the land and water. It is partly paid in sea-fish.”

Karl MArx? No, Adam Smith.
by dheera | 2025-07-14 01:32:22+00:00
Honest question, what the hell is everyone monitoring in a home lab that isn't already monitored?

I have an enterprise grade NAS, but if there's any kind of disk or RAID issue it beeps the shit out of me; I call that enough for home use.

I have a Unifi router, if there is a connection issue it fails over to LTE and I get a notification on my phone.

I have a UPS, if there is a power failure, my lights shut off, my NAS and workstation shuts down via NUT, and I can restart them remotely via VPN into my router and sending WOL packets.

Basically everything is already taken care of.

What the hell else do I need for a home? When I'm away I don't exactly have 10 million users trying to access my system, let alone 1.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-14 01:33:36+00:00
Totally fair question. Surroo is a pre-launch experiment. Our waitlist page, https://surroo.me, shows what we're building: trained companions who meet users face to face while staying in character as the user's AI.

The idea grew out of helping a friend who leaned on a chatbot during a rough patch. We want to see whether the same empathy can scale. Curious to hear what you think once you've had a look.
by ogurechny | 2025-07-14 01:35:18+00:00
It certainly looks like it is compiled by a neural net or human that has no idea how people they talk about actually live. Places of actual discussion of censorship circumvention tools are full of much different talk on how to fool the external or internal DPI servers, on tunnelling through white-listed protocols, and so on.

Also, those who can be executed like that have already realised that “safe” way of being a “good citizen” does not exist, it's a phantom for people who are — at the moment — rich, happy and walled from the rest (either physically or in their minds). They probably don't need to be told not to trust someone who is offering to solve all their problems.