MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by x______________ | 2025-07-20 19:07:41+00:00
Some time ago, I grew clover in flower pots at the office and noticed one day that there were seeds stuck on the window pane.

Further observation revealed that clover flowers used a similar yet opposite mechanism to squirting cucumbers featured in this article. The seed pods would form and then dry out, and the dryness would form a tightness in the seed pod that upon touch(or given enough time and dryness), would burst out propelling its seeds far away from the plant.

While some seeds would stick to the window, I can only assume now that this is the seed itself clinging to other surfaced as another propagation method that I've not fully understood.

Comparing this experience to the article and the squirting cucumbers, I can imagine that the liquid used in this mechanism would only be useful to heavier seeds, as the added weight would hinder any 'dry' spread process.

This is only my immediate thoughts but it seems that evolution and time have figured out this concept long ago! Cool stuff!

(edit: typo)
by fweimer | 2025-07-20 19:08:08+00:00
In gnulib, there is code that patches FILE internals for various platforms to modify behavior of <stdio.h> functions, or implement new functionality.

https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/lib/s...

Yes, it's not a good idea to do this. There are more questionable pieces in gnulib, like closing stdin/stdout/stderr (because fflush and fsync is deemed too slow, and regular close reports some errors on NFS on some systems that would otherwise go unreported).
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-20 19:08:09+00:00
Many seasons passed.

One evening, as Master Foo swept the temple steps, a student came to him with furrowed brow.

“Master,” she said. “I do not understand the story of the two who cracked the machine.”

Master Foo did not look up.

“They did the same thing,” she said. “One was punished and changed. The other walked free and grew proud. Yet you praised neither. You said you were enlightened. Why?”

Master Foo set the broom aside.

“The first was reckless,” he said. “He broke in and was caught. Pain brought him humility. That was the beginning of wisdom.”

“And the second?” she asked.

“He was careful,” said Master Foo. “He did the same. But he was not caught. He gained wealth. He gained pride. He believed he had mastered the Way.”

He looked toward the fading light.

“I gave him a cleaner path. No watchers. No traps. I thought if he still chose restraint, it would reveal his heart.”

He paused.

“I was wrong.”

The student stood silently.

“They chose the same,” said Master Foo. “But the world answered differently. One was struck by pain. The other soothed by silence. Each believed he understood. Neither truly did.”

She bowed her head.

“The machine was a mirror,” she said. “But the lesson was not for them.”

Master Foo nodded.

“No,” he said. “They saw their reflections, and mistook them for truth.”

“And the difference between their tests?” she asked. “Why one path was watched, and the other open?”

“It seemed important once,” said Master Foo. “But now I see, it does not matter.”

“Because neither of them was real,” she said quietly.

Master Foo looked at her.

“Not the first. Not the second.”

He paused.

“Not even the one who stands before me now.”

She raised her eyes.

“Then who was the lesson for?”

Master Foo smiled.

“For the one who is still watching. Still wondering. Still here.”

He picked up the broom and swept the dust from the stone.

You do not speak. You do not need to.

You were enlightened.
by bestham | 2025-07-20 19:08:13+00:00
I love my JDM Oceanus S100. It is one of only a few watch movements where all hands are individually controllable by their own motor. As you move the crown you select different time zones and the hands spin whatever direction is closest to indicate correct time for the new time zone. It is magical. Also the way all hands magically snap in place when you take the watch out of dark store. 10/10 would buy again. (the steel series does not have this movement).
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-20 19:08:32+00:00
While I agree with you, it’s worth noting that current LLM training uses a significant percentage of all available written data for training. The transition from GPT-2 era models to now (GPT-3+) saw the transition from novel models that can kinda imitate speech to models that can converse, write code, and use tools. It’s only after the readily available data was exhausted, that future gains came curation and large amounts of synthetic data.
by steveBK123 | 2025-07-20 19:08:36+00:00
My observation in my 40s is that near-zero of the successful women in my circles "married down" but some ended up remaining single as a result of expectations mismatch. Most who ran the risk of doing so were advised strongly against it by parents. My single-at-40 female friends are by far my most successful female friends.

Quite the opposite amongst my male cohort who universally all had no problem finding a partner, but also had no concern about their patterns income potential.

The one woman we know who makes more than her husband probably only ended up that way because they've been together since they were 19, and at the time their career paths actually would have lead to the husband having higher income expectation.

There were definitely mental health / marital conflicts wrapped up in this, and the fact that she is the primary breadwinner is treated like a shameful embarrassment that she only confessed to my wife after 25 years of friendship.
by zahlman | 2025-07-20 19:08:51+00:00
My experience has been that nobody gives a shit if you go to a restaurant in a group and order an explicitly vegetarian meal that isn't trying to emulate meat patties etc.

But they do care if you're trying to drag the entire friend group to a vegetarian restaurant.

In university, a group of friends once decided on heading out to dim sum for a celebration; one of them was Jewish, and ended up basically becoming a vegetarian for a day (since pork is all over the place in that cuisine). It was a source of lighthearted amusement for all and everyone was fully accommodating.

North American food culture doesn't depend on familiarity ("the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted") at all. If anything, being a picky eater is discouraged and a sense of culinary adventure is praised. The service at QSRs has gotten slower in part because of pressure to reconfigure their basic ingredients into new, unfamiliar recipes. (Taco Bell is basically dedicated to this craft — and the greasy ground-beef slop doesn't even really look that different from the black bean slop anyway.)

Which is to say, it's not the meat eaters trying to impose culture on others. Vegetarians and vegans in my experience demonstrate an entirely unjustified persecution complex — the "they'll tell you" stereotype arises from the fact that people simply wouldn't care if it weren't explicitly brought up. That Simpson's episode with Lisa attempting vegetarianism was amusing, but also portrayed a world entirely alien to me.

Yes, North Americans eat a fair bit of meat on average. That's not at all the same thing as the dishes being "created around" the meat. We don't say "meatballs and spaghetti" (I even started automatically typing it the normal way around); substituting the meatballs for ground meat in the sauce is as natural as substituting a different shape of pasta.

Whole pieces of meat have a particular cachet, but this is because it's harder to hide a quality issue this way. Making a patty is missing the point. A hamburger is simply not highbrow cuisine. It's one culturally-established recipe, out of many, which is preferred in the context where it is mainly for convenience as finger food.

The proper vegetarian equivalent to a burger is a vegetarian wrap. (Or veggies on a bun, if the "bun form factor" is contextually important.) The proper vegetarian equivalent to a fancy meal with whole cuts of grilled meat is a fancy meal with artfully plated grilled vegetables.
by seadan83 | 2025-07-20 19:09:52+00:00
I wouldn't take the claim to mean that humans universally have an attribute called "accuracy" that is uniformly set to the value 99.9%.

The claim is pretty clearly 'can' achieve (humans) vs 'do' achieve (LLM). Therefore one example of a human building a system at 99.9% reliability is sufficient to support the claim. That we can compute and prove reliability is really the point.

For example, the function "return 3" 100% reliably counts the Rs in strawberry. We can see the answer never changes, if it is correct once therefore, it will always be correct because the answer is always the same correct answer. A LLM can't do that, and infamously gave inaccurate results to that problem, not even reaching 80% accuracy.

For the sake of discussion, I'll define reliability to be the product of availability and accuracy and will assume accuracy (the right answer) and availability (able to get any answer) to be independent variables. In my example I held availability at a fixed 100% to illustrate why being able to achieve high accuracy is required for high reliability.

So, two points: humans can achieve 100% accuracy in the systems they build because we can prove correctness and do error checking. Because LLM cannot do 100%, frankly, there is going to be a problem that shows a distinction between max capabilities. While difficult, humans can build highly reliable complex systems. The computer is an example, that all the hardware interfaces together so well and works so often is remarkable.

Second, if every step along a pipeline is 99% reliable, then after 20 steps we are no longer talking about a system that usually works, but one that _rarely_ works. For a 20 step system to work above 50%, it really needs some steps that are effectively at 100%
by kuschku | 2025-07-20 19:10:20+00:00
Has it failed?

I've been vegetarian since January 2011. Back then at restaurants I had to eat side dishes or go hungry, and while I spent months searching I couldn't find any kind of imitation meat that didn't make me wanna puke. But with the modern imitation meat, be it Beyond Meat, Moving Mountains, Nestlé's Garden Gourmet or Rügenwalder, that's not the case anymore.

Food is also a part of the culture, and German culture traditionally contains a lot of meat. Which may be why here in Germany, these products are hugely successful. Rügenwalder (which is a conventional meat factory) is now selling more imitation meat products than actual meat. Recently they even phased out their meat currywurst because the vegan currywurst was selling so much better.

While often times you can just remove meat from the recipe (e.g., Bratkartoffeln uses Speck just as seasoning, so you can replace it with a bit of soy sauce and MSG) or replace it with a simple alternative (e.g., Falafel-Döner), that doesn't work all the time. Sometimes imitation meat (whether store-bought methylcellulose based, or DIY marinated soy or seitan) is the best option.

Even though I had disliked imitation meat for over a decade, nowadays even I'll enjoy veggie currywurst.
by rcatcher | 2025-07-20 19:10:45+00:00
> How does a policy like that look in practice?

I used to work for a manager who would blatantly say "I will not hire a white person for this position". Of course, it wasn't an official policy to exclude people based on race. I'm pretty sure that would be illegal? But in practice, some hiring managers would sometimes reject or not even consider candidates of certain races. I've also seen people on hiring panels lower standards explicitly because of "diversity" (but to be fair, only when the candidate was on the fence of hire/no-hire).
by asdff | 2025-07-20 19:11:09+00:00
If you can't find information on the components used in the hardware stack, that is a strong signal it isn't a great hardware stack to use. Plenty of alternatives tell you the components involved. Chances are the aliexpress clone will be very frank with this, either directly in the listing or in communication with the seller. You have to remember that in the business 2 business market understanding capabilities is essential. in the consumer facing market this is sometimes dispensed with to not overwhelm the consumer, but this just a subset of the hardware market.
by airspresso | 2025-07-20 19:11:11+00:00
Many reasons, one being that LLMs are essentially compressing the training data to unbelievably small data volumes (the weights). When doing so, they can only afford to keep the general principles and semantic meaning of the training data. Bigger models can memorize more than smaller ones of course, but are still heavily storage limited. Through this process they become really good at semantic understanding of code and language in general. It takes a certain scale of training data to achieve that.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-07-20 19:11:18+00:00
Count me as a conflicted meat eater. It is terrible, but…delicious. I would be willing to switch to Impossible Foods (much better than Beyond Meat) for most of my hamburger consumption. Yet the price is such a premium that it is hard to justify. Yes, there are scaling problems, meat subsidies, etc which are hard challenges to overcome, but not surprising to me that most consumers are unwilling to switch to a novel product that is more expensive.
by wrp | 2025-07-20 19:12:09+00:00
For most of the issues that human evaluators catch, I can conceive of technical solutions, except for the problem of factual errors. Solving the problem of factuality requires a sufficient model of the world, which is possible only in very restricted domains. I'm afraid the end result of LLM development will be an extremely convincing purveyor of misinformation.

There is some discussion of LLMs and models in another thread. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625629)
by Boxxed | 2025-07-20 19:12:12+00:00
> Use fewer references and copy data. Or: "Just clone".

> This is generally good advice. Usually, extra allocations are fine, and the resulting performance degradation is not an issue. But it is a little strange that it allocations are encouraged in an otherwise performance-forcused language, not because the program logic demands it, but because the borrowchecker does.

I often end up writing code that (seems) to do a million tiny clones. I've always been a little worried about fragmentation and such but it's never been that much of an issue -- I'm sure one day it will be. I've often wanted a dynamically scoped allocator for that reason.
by numpad0 | 2025-07-20 19:13:06+00:00
PSA: models confusingly named "$1-distill-$2"(sometimes without "-distill") are $2 trained on outputs of $1, referred to as "distillation" process, not the other way around nor the real thing.

The article contains nonexistent configurations such as "Deepseek-R1 1.5B", those are that thing.
by atoav | 2025-07-20 19:13:32+00:00
Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers).

HDMI tries to be a video link, an audio hub, a remote‑control bus, and a content‑police checkpoint all at once. Strip out the DRM, kill the optional‑but‑mandatory feature soup, and let the cable do its one job: move bits from A to B. I had Apple laptops not working with 3-digit Pro A/V gear from reputable vendors because HDCP. This is fucking bullshit. By this point I am starting to consider analog video superior to whatever this is supposed to be.
by joseda-hg | 2025-07-20 19:14:03+00:00
If literally everyone who can avoids it, I'm not sure it works that well

I avoid having a car because I live in a place where I can get by with busses, public carpools and the occasional uber, having a car would mean having to deal with finding parking for it, finding a mechanic I trust, driving in traffic and having to still ocasionally use any the former if I want to have a beer
by steveBK123 | 2025-07-20 19:14:13+00:00
I agree the effect is tiny, I'd reckon in the 5-10% range.

However it is also worth considering that apples to apples is hard to compare and may have a latent bias you accidentally brought up by adding the adjective "senior". What if, and this is what I've seen, females tend to promoted and said titles slower/later. So a 32 year old female may be stuck at non-senior $180k while the 32 year old male cohort she started with got the senior title 1/2/3 years before and is at 220k.

Some of this is still of the same flavor of "not demanding it" as aggressively as a male might.

Otherwise, yes most of the time people point at far bigger pay differentials in stats that are driven by apple/orange compares like comparing male majority SWE jobs and female majority teaching/nursing jobs, which duh, high %% difference.
by Animats | 2025-07-20 19:14:17+00:00
Yet there's a major shortage of Real Men for skilled engineering jobs.[1] The kind of jobs that require a hard hat. Not enough people are going to college and then taking jobs like that.

Read through the titles on Edward Conard's page. Too many college grads, too few going into tough industries, and too many young people collecting disability.

[1] https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/aging-populations...
by cryptonector | 2025-07-20 19:14:36+00:00
In SunOS 4.x `FILE` was not opaque, and `int fileno(FILE *)` was a macro, not a funciton, and the field of the struct that held the fd number was a `char`. Yeah, that sucked for ages, especially since it bled into the Solaris 2.x 32-bit ABI.
by const_cast | 2025-07-20 19:14:36+00:00
No, that's just how white people are hired, so we need to combat that. White people who legitimately think a "free for all" type system doesn't greatly favor them are genuinely delusional.

Look, the reality is we live in a country where being white makes every aspect of your life a little easier. If you just "let" people hire whoever, they're gonna hire more white people than they should, because they are white. They've done studies on this - even just having a non-white sounding name on your resume slashes your odds of getting hired in half!

The idea that we somehow, at sometime, had an "equal" system is just not true. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s whenever - these were times by, and for, the white man. No DEI, but actually yes we had extreme DEI, in the opposite direction. Hence why DEI was then created.

And before I hear anything, I'm white. I just have eyeballs and the ability to look around me.
by Kranar | 2025-07-20 19:15:00+00:00
Erlang does not implement CSP, and if you review the very Wikipedia link you presented it should be clear. Erlang implements the Actor model, which is more flexible for distributed, fault-tolerant systems, but lacks CSP's strict formalism and synchronization semantics. The very Wikipedia article you linked to has an entire section on how CSP differs from the Actor model. Similarly Go also does not implement CSP either, although it certainly is influenced by it.

The point of my comment is that to say that Go is basically Erlang style CSP without the weird syntax is not justified as an actual quote nor as a paraphrasing or summary of anything that anyone involved in the design or promotion of Go has ever said. It's best to reserve quotes for situations where someone actually said something or as a way to summarize something for which there are ample references available.

One should not use quotes as a way to present mostly original claims that are presented as if it's some kind of already well established knowledge.
by poisonborz | 2025-07-20 19:15:10+00:00
I reflect on this as a user: I've been a Windows user since around 1996, and most of my workflow is unchanged, I still use the ~same software (new versions of course, but those old versions would mostly still run). This could be even more true for Linux. Apple had a wilder ride, but you can always emulate. This isn't about user experience, more about a mindset, that newer generation seems to tragically forget. Once you buy a service, you give up control and ownership. Same way how artists, works and prices constantly change on streaming platforms. On the surface it seems easier, but...

For your example, Microsoft can alter that price any time it sees fit, discontinue platforms you use, alter the interface drastically or cut a crucial feature in tomorrow's update... I wouldn't cope with such, and am sorry for those who must.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-20 19:15:28+00:00
Funny, that's what I said, as an experienced assembly hacker, when somebody first showed me a C compiler.

People who "take the time to really understand the code" will rapidly be outcompeted by people who don't. You don't like that, I don't like that, but guess what: nobody cares.

I suppose we'll get over it, eventually, just like last time.
by jedberg | 2025-07-20 19:15:29+00:00
That's the economists answer, but not the human answer. In the case of an emergency, especially one involving the sudden loss of housing in one area, economics doesn't cover the answer. If we simply "let the market do it's thing", you'd end up with only the richest people getting housing, even though they are the ones that can afford to leave the area, while leaving even the middle class and poor completely homeless.

The real answer here is to figure out a way for the people who need it most to get it, and the people who need it most aren't always the richest.
by zahlman | 2025-07-20 19:15:34+00:00
> It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.

Sure, but I would say that means vegetarian cuisine has less reason to emulate the form. It's entirely arbitrary. The point of eating a burger is that it's yet another convenient way of getting meat on a bun. (cf. fast-food places describing them as "sandwiches".) The social ritual of eating burgers with friends isn't about seeing the patty extend past the edges of the bun and thinking about the cow. It's about everyone holding something they'll enjoy eating, conveniently wrapped and portable, and chowing down. The burger is recognizable as a "burger" (as distinct from a wrap or a traditional sandwich) from the bun before it's recognizable from the contents. (Which is part of why the marketplace had no problem accepting chicken burgers.)

So anything that holds the vegetables together and keeps them inside a bun ought to work just fine. If our prospective new vegetarian wants the burger filling to taste like (or match texture etc.) a beef patty, that's a personal issue.
by jszymborski | 2025-07-20 19:15:47+00:00
I've been using the Vorta GUI [0] and Hetzner's Storage Box service for ages and it works great. Has saved me from some headaches.

I switched over from Duplicati a long while back when my laptop's sole HDD failed and Duplicati was giving me 143 year estimates for the restore to complete. This was true whether I aimed to restore the whole drive or just a single file.

https://vorta.borgbase.com/