MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-21 17:16:50+00:00
> If devoted half the resources to catching child abusers as we do to stop people from getting high after work, we'd have a whole hell of a lot fewer abused children.

There are two problems here:

(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.

(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-21 17:17:32+00:00
Yeah

Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily

California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff
by some_random | 2025-07-21 17:18:00+00:00
I am absolutely sick and tired of people using the word violence willy nilly when discussing things they don't like. "Violence against human dignity" is not real, that is a nonsensical concept. You are not being stabbed in the human dignity. No one's human dignity is being blown to pieces. You are more than welcome to argue that pornography causes psychological damage, but calling it violence and lumping it in with hate speech is not compelling in the slightest.
by Mad_Obscurist | 2025-07-21 17:18:03+00:00
Love this. I've found ways to use 4+ models concurrently, each with its own unique specialty:

o3 is excellent for precise, drop-in replacement fixes.

Clause Opus is great at expanding the "what-if" scenarios for a project but tends to generate bloated or unmanageable codebases.

Sonnet is strong in general problem-solving and structure.

Gemini has been hit or miss — at times, its performance matches o3, but it often seems throttled, suddenly degrading to behave more like 4o, no actual proof of this.
by ggreer | 2025-07-21 17:18:14+00:00
That's the business model of Terraform Industries[1]. They're betting on solar getting cheap enough to make synthesis of hydrocarbons economically competitive. It looks like they're selling synthesized natural gas for $35/MCF, which is 2.5x the national average. As panels get cheaper and they optimize their processes, it seems likely that they'll be able to make natural gas for cheaper than uhh... natural natural gas.

1. https://terraformindustries.com/
by wasabi991011 | 2025-07-21 17:18:23+00:00
I respect Gil Kalai and I like how this article is presented with nuance.

I do need to point out though that his prediction ended up being wrong: Google just last year showed "Quantum Error Correction below the Surface Code Threshold", the exact thing Kalai was arguing is impossible.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y
by mistersquid | 2025-07-21 17:18:25+00:00
A popular meme YouTuber ("Daily Dose of Internet" [0]) featured a clip of someone lighting their tap water on fire. Commenters explained that flammable water is common in places where fracking pollutants have contaminated the ground water.

Among the many examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfHcypKLxgc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP5fIKqobm0 (This is not an example of fracking pollution, according to child comment.)

I was stunned, to say the least.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@DailyDoseOfInternet
by Lerc | 2025-07-21 17:18:29+00:00
The libertarian vision was not behind it. It was projected onto it by adopters who thought it was something that it never could be.

Any currency that has any political ideology would require some form coercion to be used by those who do not share that ideology. Fiat currencies carry that coercion implicitly, people who don't like the government generally still use their money because they have little choice.

The underlying principle of Bitcoin was consensus. Agreeing to operate on whatever principles the majority of miners are using. Forks are an integral part of that, people choosing a different path and those who agree with them going that way. The perceived value coming from those who accept whichever fork they chose and what they think it should be worth.

The only real "Stick it to the man" kind of philosophy that came with it was as a rejection of unilateral monetary control. That is the antithesis of consensus.

In an ideal crypto world governments would be the majority of the miners. They would negotiate amongst each other to decide on monetary policy by consensus. That's a long way from happening, with no clear path towards that end in sight.

In a sense that too, is an ideology, the distinction is that the ideology doesn't want to do the thing that it can't. It presents an option, instead of forcing people to use it.
by lufenialif2 | 2025-07-21 17:18:33+00:00
I sent this to accounting friends and this aligns with what I've been going through trying to use LLMs to create a game from scratch. Seems like the current best use case for language models (even with agent mode) is to feed it exactly what you want to get out, essentially turning it into a better auto complete. Still saves tons of time, but it isn't a panacea.
by lrvick | 2025-07-21 17:18:33+00:00
I use it to donate or pay for legal things online I wish to keep anonymous like I would use cash for in person. Most people in the US do not value privacy, but for those few of us that want to purchase online with privacy, or those in heavily censored countries, cryptocurrency is the only option.

Just because few people make use of their rights is not a valid argument for their removal.
by ars | 2025-07-21 17:18:41+00:00
> Typical "early-in-carrier" thinking.

Other way around. When I first started I thought these access restrictions were a great idea. Make sure, I, and other, only program "correctly".

When I got more mature I found how often they are impediments, and how little they actually help.

I don't want someone else protecting me from myself. I just don't want that, no matter how well intentioned.
by be7a | 2025-07-21 17:18:50+00:00
Super interesting that they moved away from their specialized, Lean-based system from last year to a more general-purpose LLM + RL approach. I would suspect this likely leads to improved performance even outside of math competitions. It’ll be fascinating to see how much further this frontier can go.

The article also suggests that the system used isn’t too far ahead of their upcoming general "DeepThink" model / feature, which is they announced for this summer.
by robotguy | 2025-07-21 17:19:06+00:00
You remember that super popular kid (+5 CHA) in middle or high school who wouldn't acknowledge your existence in a group, but would suddenly somehow make you feel like the center of the world when there was no one else available and they deigned to turn their attention to you? That's a cat. My theory, anyway.

Also, have to mention a relevant quote from the beginning of Dungeon Crawler Carl which features an awakened cat as one of it's protagonists:

"I get it cats are assholes, but you know why people like cats despite their assholeness? BECAUSE THEY CAN'T F*$#ING TALK! If cats could talk and they were all like you, they'd be extinct because we'd have killed them already!"
by vlade11115 | 2025-07-21 17:19:28+00:00
I love the site design.

> There's an obvious question looming here — if the models got so confused, how did they consistently pass the reconciliation checks we described above? It may seem like the ability to make forward progress is a good proxy for task understanding and skill, but this isn't necessarily the case. There are ways to hack the validation check – inventing false transactions or pulling in unrelated ones to make the numbers add up.

This is hilarious. I wonder if someone is unintentionally committing fraud by blindly trusting LLMs with accounting. Or even worse, I bet that some governments are already trying to use LLMs to make accounting validators. My government sure wants to shove LLMs into digital government services.
by kmeisthax | 2025-07-21 17:19:29+00:00
Given all the matters that a head of state has to attend to I would be surprised if they found time to go to church once a week, much less daily. Even with an on-site priest.

As for listening to commoners, I'll accept the possibility of kings that wanted to be accountable to their subjects. The problem isn't the king, it's the nobility. The nobles are going to be filtering the commoners that get to talk to the king, because the king isn't allowed to know any commoners directly. Hell, they might not even be able to speak the same language at all. England's kings all spoke either French or German for a long time, and French wasn't so much the language of France as much as it was the language that France's ruling class spoke[0].

Even if the king could understand commoners and had unfiltered access to them, it's not guaranteed that they could do anything with that feedback. Say, a peasant complained about what they pay to their lord. Does the king actually have the power to overrule the nobility? Will the nobility depose the king, or start a civil war that destabilizes the country?

The game everyone's playing is ultimately to convince subsistence farmers to "go big or go home" - i.e. to overplant and overproduce food, at the risk of crop failure, so that the state can seize some of that food and eat it themselves, nominally in exchange for "protection"[1] from rival states whose main difference is that their king is fake while yours is rightful. In other words: the king and nobility are wolves, the commoners are sheep, and it's bad form for predators to befriend their prey.

[0] At least until France erased their own minority languages in the 1800s and forced everyone to speak French, which I'm pretty sure counts as genocide

[1] Identical to the 'protection' paid to a mafioso
by Moomoomoo309 | 2025-07-21 17:19:57+00:00
Yes, it generally includes people on the left side of American politics, but exactly where those lines are drawn is all over the place - including who exactly is on the left. It's overly broad, including in the context it was used. It is so imprecise it's as bad as just saying someone's "anti-american". Most terms you have a clear delineation about who it applies to, woke, it's more emotional and vibes than anything else, and that makes it a useless term in my opinion.
by pandemic_region | 2025-07-21 17:20:21+00:00
> who find that solar-plus-storage costs have declined so much that it can now provide baseload-level power in sunny cities for less than the cost of new nuclear or even new gas.

What about cities that only get enough sun from about April to late September? If your battery is doing almost nothing during the other half of the year, it becomes way less cost effective. Still good, but takes twice as long to be really profitable.
by AlanYx | 2025-07-21 17:20:31+00:00
IMO doesn't reuse problems, but Terence Tao has a Mastodon post where he explains that the first five (of six) problems are generally ones where existing techniques can be leveraged to get to the answer. The sixth problem requires considerable originality. Notably, both Gemini and OpenAI's model didn't get the sixth problem. Still quite an achievement though.
by everforward | 2025-07-21 17:20:47+00:00
He wasn't the patient, and the article says he entered without permission when his wife called him in after the scan was done. It sounds like she called him and he went in either before anyone could stop him, or against the protests of hospital staff (no speculation either way).

I wonder why it isn't interlocked so the door is locked while the MRI is on. Maybe fire code? Emergency medical response seems unsafe unless there's a team of people with special non-ferrous gear waiting around. They'd have to shut off the MRI anyways to avoid stethescopes and what not becoming projectiles.
by adaptiq | 2025-07-21 17:20:47+00:00
Hi HN!

We just open-sourced [AdaptiQ Core](https://github.com/adaptiq-ai/adaptiq), a CLI tool that uses reinforcement learning (Q-learning) to optimize your LLM agents and reduce token usage, retries, and failed outputs.

It observes your agent runs, builds a local Q-table, and learns how to improve prompts/configs — all offline.

---

*What it does:*

• Prompt & agent optimizer (crewAI-compatible) • RL loop (offline Q-learning) • Pre-run cost prediction • FinOps reporting (token, $ and CO₂) • Markdown reports + GitHub badge • Works via CLI (`wizard`, `validate`, `report`)

---

*FinOps in Action* Saved Tokens: –37% Retries reduced: –60% Compile-pass +15 pts

GitHub: https://github.com/adaptiq-ai/adaptiq
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-21 17:20:54+00:00
I'd be interested to see them also test for physical activity indoors while surrounded by houseplants or other greenery, as well as high lux indoor lighting to simulate sunlight exposure.

There's been other studies that showed just looking at nature can improve cognitive function and mental health, including house plants. I suspect, outside of the benefits of sunlight exposure, it's less about outside vs. inside and more being in/around greenery/plants.
by crop_rotation | 2025-07-21 17:21:13+00:00
India is just screwed. It is in this insane democratic autocratic hybrid where you don't get much freedoms but every government has to have a short term focus to win the next election and thus igniting caste/religion/other inflammatory issues.

Social media has caused this mass delusion where Indian problems can not even be discussed openly without being labelled a foreign agent or something worse. If you stop talking about the problems they don't just disappear.

For westerners, one quick thing you need to understand is that in India the written laws and constitution are totally irrelevant for day to day life, so the written law providing 100 freedoms is irrelevant. Anyone who has power can mostly do whatever they want to a large extent (offcourse there are limits basis how powerful they are). Just like in America it is said that the poor think of themselves as temporarily poor and rich someday, in India most people dream of gaining power and that sweet corruption money someday. People spend 5-10 years doing nothing but studying to get one of those sweet government jobs where bribes are universal and easily >5x your income.

Like in India everyone knows where black money is, well except the Government it seems. If the government had any interest in fixing tax avoidance they had many easy ways, but the Government is mostly interested in power.
Ask HN: Tool to detect what user searches on your webpage
by user070223 | 2025-07-21 17:21:21+00:00
Is there a tool which detects what people are searching on your webpage? Do you think it could be useful? what for? Other than finding possible hyperlinks Can you get the info from the browser? I know you could hijack ctrl f but I hate when sites are doing it. You could side channel based on the jumping in the location in the page I guess. I have no use for it and not creating dom scripts, but I think some people would find it useful I think it would be an interesting challenge for someone here Thanks
by locallost | 2025-07-21 17:21:28+00:00
Honest question, maybe I am being stupid here, but why do people insist on counting solar+storage costs per MWh, when LCOE already takes into account that the sun does not shine at night. So when you pay for electricity from solar and the price is 40 per MWh, the fact you will not get anything at night is already baked into the price. If you could get solar at night, the price would be half of what it is now. So it should be either solar or storage costs because you only pay for one of those, and the price in case you use each for half the time is basically the average of the two.

Yet I keep seeing people argue against solar by simply stacking those two costs on top of each other.
by perihelions | 2025-07-21 17:21:46+00:00
There's something that struck me about the recent controversy with the Memphis datacenter. The one rolling out 2 gigawatts of on-site natural gas to power itself. It's this: that the CEO-who-can't-be-named, happens to own one of the largest lithium battery makers in the US; and makes utility-scale grid storage batteries; and also, for completeness, owns a solar photovoltaic plant. If anyone would be using solar+storage for economics, it would that datacenter in sunny, southern USA—but that CEO would rather buy gas than his own product.

It's not a one-off datapoint: none of the other upcoming massive AI datacenters, that I've read about, are built for solar power. Amazon's in rural Illinois (2.2 gigawatts), was also on HN, also going with natural gas.

I'll believe in this when the ruthlessly optimizing FAANG's believe in it, with their own money. Clearly they do not.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-21 17:21:58+00:00
Memoization is caching so that's a strange reason to fail someone. You cache based on the function call and its arguments.

SOME_FUN = dict(base_cases) def some_fun(a, b, c): if (a,b,c) in SOME_FUN: return SOME_FUN[(a,b,c)] result = some_fun(a - 1, b - 1, c) + some_fun(a, b, c-1) # or whatever the recursive calls would be SOME_FUN[(a,b,c)] = result return result

That's it. Some languages (Python, Lisp) make it easy to take the naive version and wrap it (Python decorators are useful here) so that you don't have to write that code above. That's what the @cache decorator in functools does for you. You can memoize the naive version without needing to actually write a specific memoized version.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-07-21 17:22:02+00:00
There is always some level of vacancy rate by virtue of people moving out or in and renovations. Even keeping a unit off the market if you don’t want to have to let it out at lower rent and devalue your asset which is priced in part on rent prices.

And further in terms of inventory. What does it suggest to you in high demand cities when we see e.g. in socal virtually all available space already built to the limits of the zoned capacity? No real room to add inventory based on zoning laws, job growth continues to happen, and prices are rising. Do you believe this is a sufficient amount of inventory, todays zoned capacity with no avenue to meaningfully add housing inventory?

This is why the situation is fundamentally different in socal than anywhere else such as texas. Dallas metro region has farms on all sides to continue to digest to create regional inventory without making large changes to zoned capacity. Socal has mountains and the pacific ocean.
by Moomoomoo309 | 2025-07-21 17:22:48+00:00
That's a very tall claim, and one that I personally doubt. When it comes to refactoring old code with unclear requirements and inconsistent style, I have not seen AI do well. Of course, these things are bad, but that's the reality of most code out there - maybe you're lucky enough that you don't have to wade through that stuff.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-21 17:22:50+00:00
>Electronics also don’t trickle down when you toss your old phone in a drawer rather than passing it on

people sell their old cars because their economic value is high and storing them is non-negligible expense-wise also. The economic value of older phones is frequently low, in the drawer they go. People who buy a new latest greatest high end phone every year do not have a drawer with 10 old high end phones in pristine condition in it.

you are engaging in "motivated reasoning", but your motivation is to "plz plz plz find any way that socialism is a good idea, or at least reinforce the populist ideas i have about wealth". Trickle down is a description of an economic thing that happens. You've latched onto those words because it sounds like "a trickle" and that's a bad sounding thing when your goal is taking away Elon Musk's money.

The Reagan years were economically extremely good. Economists are interested in debating how much his tax policies led to growth, how much was putting the oil shock of the 70's behind us, etc. But it's an honest debate. The points you raise point to you spelling his name Ray-gun, a non serious approach to economics.

Elon Musk "hoards his wealth" because his wealth is bound up in shares of his companies. Tesla and SpaceX are valuable because of what the market thinks of their economic activity. You are engaged in a dishonest analysis of the ledger when you go down one side and take Tesla's economic activity as a "given" that's good for people and that's good because people are entitled to that, but then down the other side and say "he's hoarding wealth, economics doesn't work!"

as I pointed out before, I will point out again: none of this helps you to misunderstand what happens wrt the carbon footprint which is what I was talking about.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-07-21 17:23:06+00:00
I find the same issues (though with much lower stakes) when using an LLM to determine the outcome of a turn in a game. I'm working on something called "A Trolly (problem) Through Time" where each turn is a decade starting with the 1850s, and you are presented with historic figures on a train track, and you have to chose whether to actively spare the person on your track for a potential unknown figure on the other side, or let the train run them over.

It works well as a narrative, but the second I started adding things like tracking high level macro effects of the decisions, within a couple of turns the world's "Turmoil" goes from 4/10 to a 10/10... even when the person that was killed would have been killed IRL.

Sonnet 4, o4-mini, and GPT 4o-mini all had the same world ending outcomes not matter who you kill. Killing Hitler in 1930s: 10/10 turmoil, Killing Lincoln in the 1850s: 10/10 turmoil in the first turn.

I've come to the realization, the LLM shouldn't be used for the logic, and instead needs to be used to just narrate the choices you make.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-21 17:23:16+00:00
Price controls are a terrible policy. The nice things about rising housing prices is that they can be addressed in a way that also creates a nice tax base for local communities: Raise property taxes on the ground-rent portion of real estate values. For those living in California, this means you need to put an initiative on the ballot to get rid of the infamous Prop 13.
by 1659447091 | 2025-07-21 17:24:14+00:00
> The air traffic control tower was operated by a contractor, not directly by the Federal Aviation Administration, but the agency is now investigating what happened ...

I know the FAA has been short staffed for sometime, but wondering how common it is to use contractors? which I am guessing is costing at least 2-4x the cost of FAA personal.
by magicmicah85 | 2025-07-21 17:24:44+00:00
> In fact, we explicitly prompt against this behavior in no uncertain terms, but the instructions – and the entire spirit of the task – are lost in the interest of making forward progress

LLMs and humans are quite alike. :) I notice that a few models will give up instead of ignoring their instructions and that's the model I would want working on tasks like this. An LLM should be able to categorize and reconcile transactions, but if it's not sure, it should quit and give it back to the humans.
by BizarroLand | 2025-07-21 17:25:04+00:00
Hard disagree. Boredom is the consequence of a disengaged mind. Seems like his life was pretty fulfilling, with new music and entertainment, new people to meet and talk to, and new issues to solve, and when he did get bored I'm sure he had ample opportunities to do new things and take on new endeavors to satiate his mental appetite.