MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyphertruck | 2025-07-28 01:21:45+00:00
These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.

The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc.

Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done.

And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost.

The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress.

Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make.

But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable.

For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade.

The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter.

That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.
by westurner | 2025-07-28 01:21:48+00:00
Symmetry augmentation sounds good for software.

Traditional ML CV Computer Vision research has perhaps been supplanted by multimodal LLMs that are trained on image analysis annotations. (CLIP, Brownian-motion based Dall-E and Latent Diffusion were published in 2021. More recent research: Brownian Bridges, SDEs, Lévy processes. What are foundational papers in video genai?)

TOPS are now necessary.

I suspect that existing CV algos for feature extraction would also be useful for training LLMs. OpenCV, for example, has open algorithms like ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF), KAZE and AKAZE, and SIFT since 2020. SIFT "is highly robust to rotation, scale, and illumination changes".

But do existing CV feature extraction and transform algos produce useful training data for LLMs as-is?

Similarly, pairing code and tests with a feature transform at training time probably yields better solutions to SWE-bench.

Self Play algos are given rules of the sim. Are self play simulations already used as synthetic training data for LLMS and SLMs?

There are effectively rules for generating synthetic training data.

The orbits of the planets might be a good example of where synthetic training data is limited and perhaps we should rely upon real observations at different scales given cost of experimentation and confirmations of scale invariance.

Extrapolations from orbital observations and classical mechanics failed to predict the Perihelion precession of Mercury (the first confirmation of GR General Relativity).

To generate synthetic training data from orbital observations where Mercury's 43 arcsecond deviation from Newtonian mechanics was disregarded as an outlier would result in a model overweighted by existing biases in real observations.

Tests of general relativity > Perihelion precession of Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe...
by o11c | 2025-07-28 01:22:03+00:00
Recursive descent is fine if you trust that you won't write buggy code. If you implement a generator for it (easy enough), this may be a justifiable thing to trust (though this is not a given). I am assuming you're willing to put up with the insanity of grammar rewriting, one way or another.

LR however is more powerful, though this mostly matters if you don't have access to automatic grammar rewriting for your LL. More significantly, however, there's probably more good tooling for LR (or perhaps: you can assume that if tooling exists, it is good at what it is designed for); one problem with LL being so "simple" is that there's a lot of bad tooling out there.

The important things are 1. that you meaningfully eliminate ambiguities (which is easy to enforce for LR and doable for LL if your tooling is good), and 2. that you keep linear time complexity. Any parser other than LL/LR should be rejected because it fails at least one of these, and often both.

Within the LL and LR families there are actually quite a few members. SLR(1) is strong enough to be interesting but too weak for anything I would call a "language". LALR(1) is probably fine; I have never encountered a useful language that must resort to LR(1) (though note that modern tooling can do an optimistic fallback, avoiding the massive blowups of ancient LR tools). SLL(1) I'm not personally familiar with. X(k), where X is one of {SLL, LL, SLR, LALR, LR} and where k > 1, are not very useful; k=1 suffices. LL(*) however should be avoided due to backtracking, but in some cases consider if you can parsing token trees first (this is currently poorly represented in the literature; you want to be doing some form of this for error recovery anyway - automated error recovery is a useless lie) and/or defer the partial ambiguity until the AST is built (often better for error messages anyway, independent of using token trees).
by tomhow | 2025-07-28 01:22:10+00:00
Personal attacks like this are not allowed on HN, no matter what you're replying to. I can personally agree that the criticism of the article is silly, but that doesn't warrant these kinds of personal swipes, which break multiple guidelines.

HN is only a place where people want to participate because many people make an effort to keep the standards up, so please do your part if you want to be a participant here.
by akdor1154 | 2025-07-28 01:22:15+00:00
Entered with scepticism but left convinced. Looks very thoughtfully designed, nice!

I admit i do feel a bit uneasy about the rational numbers used in the definition, but i guess it doesn't matter for the purposes of this? And you do seem to have considered it. I still wonder if a less neat but integer-second or -millisecond definition might be useful, as round tripping could then be well defined i think? (If, as another poster hinted, you consider the interaction with leap seconds too)
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-28 01:22:17+00:00
Lack of capital. Fear of consequences.

Google rolls into town and wants to spend half a billion euro on a datacenter? Sure thing. They'll say that it'll boost the local economy while being built - by creating a couple of thousand jobs for the contractors that are going to build and maintain it, and then some onsite jobs for the next decade or two, creating a couple of hundred jobs for techs / engineers.

And as long as they keep playing ball with google, projects like that will pop up once in a while. If you're difficult, there's also a risk of the rich tech companies taking their business some other place.

With that said, I've recently noticed more voices for building our own stuff - as there's a real risk that US tech companies will simply comply if pushed enough, say, by a POTUS that's out for blood and wants to hurt certain foreign users. Ban/lock out certain users from gaining access to software, turn off their infrastructure, etc. who knows.

But, alas, there just isn't the same willingness to pour in capital on the important things. For private investors it doesn't make much sense, unless they have a bulletproof contract with domestic users willing buy their service - and using state funds isn't too popular, either.

Truth be told, any of the big tech businesses can undercut any competition, and probably build better and faster. If anything, it could be the case for tariffs - outsourcing critical infrastructure will leave you very exposed. If European countries all over the board started to abandon US tech companies, they'd cry to Trump, who in turn would probably start a trade-war.
by mzk_pi | 2025-07-28 01:22:53+00:00
Thank you for sharing that — and I’m sorry you went through it.

You contributed, yet were later excluded. That’s exactly what our protocol is most carefully designed to prevent.

In our system: - Contributions are always recorded — not ignored. - Every action builds "prestige", a cumulative trust score. - Governance rights (like proposing or deciding future work) are based only on contribution history — not status or popularity. - And crucially, governance cannot be used to exclude others. It is designed solely to guide future contributions, not suppress participation.

So even if someone has more authority, it’s only to help steer future work — never to silence or reject others.

We’re trying to build a structure where trust grows from contribution, not control.

If you’re willing — what part of your experience felt most unfair? And what hurt you the most?

Please tell us. We truly want to understand — so no one else has to go through that.
by roywiggins | 2025-07-28 01:22:58+00:00
> The agentic option is a “copilot” — a virtual human who you talk with to get help flying the plane. If you’re about to run into another plane it might yell at you “collision, go right and down!”

Planes do actually have this now. It seems to work okay:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_...
by zeta0134 | 2025-07-28 01:23:40+00:00
Yeah, I'm nodding in agreement here for the most part. I didn't mean to suggest crazy helicopter parenting surveillance nonsense, just ... the idea that giving young minds the whole dang net and letting them loose without any guidance or oversight is kinda dangerous. Growing up we always had an adult in the computer lab, or the library, where most computer coursework was being taught. I had "the real internet" right there, but if I actually got into trouble, someone was bound to notice, and I could always ask for help.

The point I was actually trying to make is just this: if the parent's goal is to block content, then the simplest thing to do is to be there when the child is surfing the net. That shouldn't take crazy technological measures. At some point, most parents realize their kids are mature enough to handle things and back off, but the parent should be making that call for their own kid. I don't think the government should be doing it on their behalf. If the government believes the internet is dangerous for young minds, then it should focus on the thing it can control: educational curriculum, primarily. Trying to "fix the internet" is a fool's errand.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-28 01:24:08+00:00
You'll have to forgive me that this line:

> so I visited ChatGPT and asked if there are documented cases in the UK where these things have happened, and I was met with a deluge of well-documented cases

does indeed sound exactly like you were using chatGPT as a primary source rather than a search engine, and thus are being met with cynicism.
by jcalx | 2025-07-28 01:25:03+00:00
Alternatively stated:

> The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

> Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

> The signal is an attack.

―Blindsight, by Peter Watts
by arjonagelhout | 2025-07-28 01:25:26+00:00
I'm building my own polygon modeling app for iOS as a side-project [0], so I feel a bit conflicted.

Getting fully featured Blender on the iPad will be amazing for things like Grease Pencil (drawing in 3D) or texture painting, but on the other hand my side-project just became a little bit less relevant.

I'll have to take a look at whether I can make some contributions to Blender.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/shapereality-3d-modeling/id674...
by conartist6 | 2025-07-28 01:26:00+00:00
I see social media algorithms as the fuel for the populist/culture-war trend. I was working at Facebook during the 2016 election and while we were trying very hard to say that Facebook didn't elect Trump by peddling Russian influence, there was almost no doubt that Trump's superior comprehension of the kind of direct-appeal "lowball" tactics that would be winning plays in that arena were the proximate cause of his victory. The platform strongly rewarded controversy because no kind of engagement was considered negative. It was a system designed to pick content that maximized engagement, so it was always going to favor grandstanding over truth-telling.

By the way I agree with you wholeheartedly that the problem is that congress is not currently serving as the check and balance it was intended to be. What can we do about that? Is it time to end the filibuster?
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-28 01:27:21+00:00
Probably, but not for the reasons you think.

There are segments of the software industry where competence matters: security, finance, healthcare, games, and some more. But most of the rest of software is bodies filling seats mashing buttons.

One way to be a rising star as a button masher, framework junky, or other benchwarmer is merchandising your most valuable product, yourself. At this time nothing screams hot trend as loudly as AI. Like all hot air this bubble will eventually pop. You can choose to hop on the AI fashion train while people are throwing money to the wind or you can go back to mindless button mashing.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-28 01:27:37+00:00
It says that cost for a regular fire truck has increased from 300-500k to 1mil from 2010 to 2025. Considering house and car prices have doubled, we can chalk most of that up to purely inflation. Seems like another case of forgetting that inflation has been sky-high due to botched COVID response and what would be a good story in previous decades just, isn't.
by eagerpace | 2025-07-28 01:28:46+00:00
So many ways. The current paradigm is that it gets one chance and it has to be perfect. Starship (which I'm only referencing as the bleeding-edge launch vehicle) compared to Ariane 5 could be a fraction of half the cost, with double the volume and 4x the mass. With those constraints removed the science missions had a lot more flexibility in their design.
by ggm | 2025-07-28 01:28:50+00:00
Pistachios need a shell less likely to infuriatingly not open when roasted. It's about 1 in 20 and should be more like 1 in 200.

Whatever the quality is in roasted-pistachio/salt which causes almost instant gratification-reward-repeat, it must be what CM Kornbluth/Fred Pohl was going on about in "the space merchants" (1952) and if they double it up we'll all die (happy, satiated and with loads of yummy zinc and magnesium), of high blood pressure.

I just can't eat one. I'm not sure what the magnitude of the power of ten is but I know it's north of "a normal person's portion"
by topherPedersen | 2025-07-28 01:29:09+00:00
As a consumer (even a corporate or government consumer), you have to watch out for this in a capitalist system. My ex's family asked me to take my son to this specific water park this weekend. When I went to buy the tickets this morning, it was going to be $250 to go to the swimming pool! I live in Austin, TX and we have the coolest pool in the world and it's $5 ($8 or something like that if I take my son).

Businesses will try and trick people into thinking $250 is an acceptable price to charge to visit a swimming pool. They'll do the same shit with firetrucks if nobody is paying attention.

Excellent article, and great to see someone pointing this out. Prices will climb out of control if people are suckers and believe the lie of "you get what you pay for." It's more like businesses will keep ratcheting up prices indefinitely as long as there are suckers around who are easily parted with their money.

Extended rant... my ex once wanted to pay $500 for a f*cking vacuum cleaner. People are stupid. Had we listened to Henry Ford they'd still be making some version of the Model T and you could buy a new car for $6,008.85 (inflation adjusted price of a Model T).
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-28 01:29:59+00:00
What's really wild is $2M is around the cost of a single Tomahawk cruise missile, Patriot missiles can cost almost double that. The Excalibur GPS guided round costs roughly as much as a nice Mercedes and during a conflict hundreds or thousands can be fired.

I came to this realization when learning about someone driving a car into a building to do damage and thinking "wow, that's an expensive round", then looking it up and realizing, it's not actually that expensive compared to how much military projectiles really do cost.

I've found it somewhat interesting that we'll be shocked at a fire truck, which gets a life time of 15-25 years and works in the service exclusively of saving lives, costs around $2 million, but not be shocked that we effectively use something as expensive as a fire truck as a single round in a gigantic gun.

Not to say that fire trucks don't potentially cost too much, nor that military weapons aren't worth it. More that I don't think most people are really aware of the obscene costs of military conflicts.
by EndsOfnversion | 2025-07-28 01:30:54+00:00
It’s a good point: I’d assumed that the plan was to make the payload of basically the same material as the tether/structure, and have it destructively tear-off at the right moment (maybe by having a watching supervisor structure lasering a weak point)

But I think pouching the payload (presumably forming the structure around the payload) just translates the problem into holding a 8kg steel block to the ceiling with 1cm square of paper formed into a harness, and expecting it to hold for weeks.

Either way - hopefully it will be addressed in a follow-up
by theahura | 2025-07-28 01:31:34+00:00
O that's useful additional context. Just to confirm, that killed the deal because it's bad for OpenAI? As in, OpenAI wouldn't get anything out of the acquisition because MSFT would immediately make make it moot, so OpenAI realized it wasn't worth the $3b? I mean presumably it doesnt matter to Windsurf if the OpenAI deal kills Windsurf -- its not their problem anymore! In that hypothetical world, they just got bought
by ragequittah | 2025-07-28 01:34:09+00:00
As a somewhat paranoid person I find this level of paranoia beyond me. Like do you own a car? Or a phone? A credit card? Walk around in public where there's cameras on every block? I don't agree with it at all but the world we're living it makes it impossible to not be tracked with way more than (usually anonymized) telemetry data.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-07-28 01:34:35+00:00
Sadly the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries - if their team decided that the content is "problematic", then they are entirely justified in censoring and punishing the speakers for daring to speak it, and entirely justified in protecting everybody else from having to suffer the horror of reading/seeing/hearing it, and it matters not whether the mechanisms are legal or ethical because the ends justify the means.
by hakunin | 2025-07-28 01:35:11+00:00
Sounds very interesting, and at first I thought maybe you're an outlier, but the more I read people mention "solving puzzles", the more I notice a more fundamental difference in enjoying programming. For me it's not solving puzzles, but rather finding elegant/eloquent expression of something complex (feel like I'm more of a writer than an engineer). That's what makes me tick: clear code that can itself serve as a primary source of knowledge of how a business functions. If I work with an AI agent, I become an editor rather than a writer — a very different job.
by Larrikin | 2025-07-28 01:36:57+00:00
Nearly everything about the experience of a terminal is better than iTerm though? I turned off all of the AI stuff since I can just use Claude directly for one off things. But it's very nice having the terminal treated like a text file instead of terminals pretending the mouse doesn't exist and there have been no advancements in text editing GUI in decades. It has issues with ssh ing into one machine but I just use command ssh for that single machine.
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-28 01:37:07+00:00
The PowerShell team at Microsoft added opt-out telemetry to track when it was launched so they could make the case internally that they should get more funding, and have more internal clout.

It’s easy to argue that if you are a PowerShell user or developer you benefit from no telemetry, but it’s hard to argue that you benefit from the tool you use being sidelined or defunded because corporate thinks nobody uses it. “Talk to your users” doesn’t solve this because there are millions of computers running scripts and no way to know who they are or contact them even if you could contact that many people, and they would not remember how often they launched it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
by ggm | 2025-07-28 01:37:41+00:00
Anything which is bistable and can be driven into the states by the "flow" mechanism which adduces value and change, is capable of being part of a logic system. It never ceases to amaze me what people find that works. I wouldn't have seen this coming but now I'm mentally assessing all kinds of biological states for the potential. We use shellfish to command river remediation releases, they're probably tractable.

It's like the hunt for Turing completeness in text editors.
by duped | 2025-07-28 01:38:23+00:00
gcc/as/ld are batch processors from the GNU toolchain that offer few (if any) features beyond basic C/C++ (and a handful of other languages) as support, and they're non-standard toolchains on 2 out of 3 major operating systems requiring a bit of heavy lifting to use.

It's kind of nonsense to bring them up in this conversation.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-07-28 01:38:37+00:00
Less than a week ago I officially launched a game I've been working on for years, Omiword[1], my second word game so far. It was discussed here on HN previously while it was in open beta[2], and again when Stripe shut down my account without explanation[3].

Reception so far has been positive. It's nice to be done with a long project, though this one will never exactly be done--I need to make sure there is a new puzzle for each day, though I have several months' worth prepared in advance.

I've started designing my next game, but it's probably a couple of years out. I just need something for that part of my brain to occasionally chew on.

[1] https://www.omiword.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038
by dang | 2025-07-28 01:39:31+00:00
Discussed (a bit) at the time:

GPT Might Be an Information Virus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36675335 - July 2023 (31 comments)

GPT might be an information virus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35218078 - March 2023 (1 comment)
by nullc | 2025-07-28 01:39:34+00:00
Right, but gas vs not gas remains irrelevant. You're poisoning yourself w/ cooking in those apartments.

The only fix is proper ventilation. Which is unfortunate, because as you note many apartments and homes are not built for it... even in new construction.

Which might be a useful action point for regulatory intervention, rather than something which is much more performative than useful.