MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-08 05:47:27+00:00
The films don't really give themselves a need to explain the mentats beyond "they're good at maths".

I do think they could have done better at showing that mentats are capable of huge feats of computation and planning and take the place of advanced computers, and that wouldn't need exposition. The "answer a numerical question with unnecessary decimal places" trope was worn when Commander Data did it for the millionth time. Moreover, it was something that seemed like a simple multiplication: something normal humans who are good at mental arithmetic can do. Having Thufir do the eye thing to deduce the exact location of the hunter-killer agent based on a huge stream of data would have been a good way to do it, for example. That would have made it clearer that Thufir (and by extension Piter via the lip tattoo) was more than a uniformed wedding planner and is actually a powerful, indispensable and dangerously skilled superhuman.

Likewise having someone lament that, say, an ornithopter or carryall could use an autopilot and someone reply "ha, yes, and get the planet nuked from orbit by the Great Families for harbouring a thinking machine, not a good plan" would have shown the approximate limits on technology leading to the need for mentats.

Not showing that didn't really affect the story they did choose tell (i.e. one that, for example, doesn't ever mention or allude to the Butlerian Jihad), but I think they could have added just a little more useful depth without it just being superfluous book details added for the book fans to notice.

One wonders if they left out the war on thinking machines as being at risk of breaking the suspension of disbelief for being too (pre-!)derivative of the Matrix and being overly close to current zeitgeist with LLMs dominating every conversation.
by EigenLord | 2025-07-08 05:48:07+00:00
I've been thinking lately about how AGI runs up against the No Free Lunch Theorem. This is what irritates me: science is not determining the narrative. Money is. I highly recommend mathematician David Wolpert's work on the topic. I think he inadvertently proved that ASI is physically impossible. Certainly he proved that AOI (artificial omniscient intelligence) is impossible.

One thing he showed is that you can't have a universe with two omniscient intelligences (as it would be intractable for them to predict the other's behavior.)

It's also very questionable whether "humanlike" intelligence is truly general in the first place. I think cognitive neurobiologists would agree that we have a specific "cognitive niche", and while this symbolic niche seems sufficiently general for a lot of problems, there are animals that make us look stupid in other respects. This whole idea that there is some secret sauce special algorithm for universal intelligence is extremely suspect. We flatter ourselves and have committed to a fundamental anthropomorphic fallacy that seems almost cartoonishly elementary for all the money behind it.
OWASP Just Dropped an AI Security Testing Guide
by sophiabannet1 | 2025-07-08 05:48:45+00:00
Just stumbled across something interesting: OWASP quietly released a new guide focused entirely on AI system testing. It's called the AI Testing Guide (AITG). Some of the stuff it digs into: Prompt injection and adversarial attacks, Privacy leaks from model outputs, Fairness, bias, and explainability testing, Data drift and real-world robustness and Model reproducibility.

What I liked is it actually gives a practical structure for testing models in production, especially for teams shipping LLMs or recommendation engines.
by Darmani | 2025-07-08 05:48:52+00:00
Sounds like review time is the bottleneck for you.

I'm currently working on something that that makes people much faster at reviewing the output of coding agents. If you have some time, I'm very interested in interviewing you about your workflows. Just reply here, or find my contact information in my profile.

-- Jimmy Koppel, Ph. D.
by hakfoo | 2025-07-08 05:49:15+00:00
I don't think "live to 15, have kids, and die" makes sense as a model for humans, even if you're modeling them solely as child generating machines.

Humans are a pretty damn care-dependent species. They're not going to defend or feed themselves without years of support, so if they aren't surviving en masse into their 30s and 40s, the next generation is probably going to have a severe die-out.

Beyond that there's probably ongoing marginal benefits to species fitness with longer lifespans. If you can keep a few generations in circulation at once, you probably have greater resilience to things like disease outbreaks (the 50-year-old cohort might have some past related immunity to a disease that rampages the 20-year-olds).

This also completely ignores any value of intelligence and ability to pass down knowledge, which is definitely a fitness factor just for being able to prevent future generations from poisoning themselves as easily.
by spark_CM | 2025-07-08 05:49:31+00:00
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by rurban | 2025-07-08 05:49:32+00:00
The two most wellknown films with the Casa Malaparte are Godard's "Le Mepris" with Piccoli, Bardot, Fritz Lang and Jack Palance, and Liliana Cavani's "La Pelle" with Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Malaparte
by Walf | 2025-07-08 05:49:38+00:00
Omfg. A timer, for everything! Why didn't I think of that? And I'd set this timer for getting dressed, and showering, and making coffee, and conversing with my children. "Sorry, son, I can't help you any further with practising shoelace-tying this morning, I only allotted 90 seconds for that." I should probably set a timer for setting timers, too. Don't want to take too long doing that. Undoubtedly, this will also solve the distraction issue because the proximity of a time measuring device to my neurons will rewire them all to be "normal".

You're so ignorant.
by mellosouls | 2025-07-08 05:50:16+00:00
Dinosaurs as a cultural staple are so wrapped up in our childhood encounters with them as concepts that to produce the impact the author is after requires an overcoming of multiple obstacles including finance, technology, story etc.

But above all it requires the magic of an impresario who shares the passion for the subject to bring it all together in a finished product that wraps and inspires wonder.

Those individuals are very few and far between and have never been better represented than in generational talents like Spielberg.
by lucianbr | 2025-07-08 05:51:39+00:00
> Those sentences aren't compatible.

My web browser isn't perfect, but it does not hallucinate inexistent webpages. It sometimes crashes, it sometimes renders wrong, it has bugs and errors. It does not invent plausible-looking information.

There really is a lot middle gound between perfect and "accept anything we give you, no matter how huge the problems".
by const_cast | 2025-07-08 05:52:24+00:00
No, SS is not insolvent. And on the topic of elder care being prohibitively expensive, it's quiet simple: you can bleed the old dry because they don't have options. Meaning, it's not a free market, so any notions of competition vanish.

It's a problem with healthcare as a whole and that's why we see so-called "free market" healthcare fall apart. It's not a free market, and actually it is impossible for it to ever exist as a free market. Those same problems are amplified when it comes to elder care, because they're even more desperate.

I mean, think about it. I get chest pain and shortness of breath: which hospital do I go to? There's a market of exactly 1: I go to one hospital, whichever is closest and I believe has the best odds of caring for me. So there goes your free market, you actually have a monopoly. Despite the fact there are thousands of hospitals.
by maheart | 2025-07-08 05:55:39+00:00
>I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest

This was discussed in the recently posted Everquest article: https://www.filfre.net/2025/07/everquest/

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest#History):

>The design and concept of EverQuest is heavily indebted to text-based MUDs, in particular DikuMUD ... John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover and Bill Trost, who jointly are credited with creating the world of EverQuest, have repeatedly pointed to their shared experiences playing MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD as the inspiration for the game
by eru | 2025-07-08 05:56:13+00:00
> These are ways to harness what neural networks are best at: not providing accurate information but making shit up that is highly plausible, "hallucination". Creativity, not logic.

This is also similar to which areas TD-Gammon excelled at in Backgammon.

Which is all pretty amusing, if you compare it to how people usually tended to characterise computers and AI, especially in fiction.
by anovikov | 2025-07-08 05:56:18+00:00
American exceptionalism is a very simple thing: USA is the only country in the world in which right and physical ability of private citizens to invest into productive economic assets is a necessary cornerstone of existence of the nation itself and thus cannot be put at risk, in spite of any imaginable political dynamics. Society as a whole and political system in particular are deeply invested (pun intended) into dependence on this unique feature and no political party of group that threatens it, can survive. America also does not depend on anything external, being self-sufficient in everything, while everyone strongly depends on their ability to trade with it. It is also, due to pure geography, immune to invasions. It makes it attractive to investment both foreign and local. That simple. It's simply a large, self-sufficient society based on capitalism.

China may be an economic giant, but what's in it for me? Show me a way to invest into it and benefit from their growth? I just can't do it. And neither can the Chinese: they use all the tricks they can invent to siphon their money out of China - and buy US stocks.
by selcuka | 2025-07-08 05:56:21+00:00
Well, we should accept that it was a bit hysterical. "Terror chief's son" [1]? Really? Apparently he's the deputy minister of agriculture. Ministers, bureaucrats and civil servants in Gaza are appointed by Hamas [2]

[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/bbc-hamas-propaganda-documentary...

[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-palestinian-chi...
by seanhunter | 2025-07-08 05:56:59+00:00
This is a total non-problem that has been invented by people so they have something new and exciting to be pedantic about.

When we need to speak precisely about a model and how it works, we have a formal language (mathematics) which allows us to be absolutely specific. When we need to empirically observe how the model behaves, we have a completely precise method of doing this (running an eval).

Any other time, we use language in a purposefully intuitive and imprecise way, and that is a deliberate tradeoff which sacrifices precision for expressiveness.
by tptacek | 2025-07-08 05:58:44+00:00
The 58->176 TWh interval from 2014 to 2013 clearly wasn't driven by LLMs; ChatGPT wasn't released until 2022. There were of course AI/ML models that preceded it, but nothing used at the scale LLMs are now. If your whole case is that technology writ large is driving data center expansion, that's fine; my argument is simply that it doesn't make sense to single out LLMs.

I think at this point though we understand the contours of our respective arguments! We don't have to keep litigating. Thanks for this!
by josefx | 2025-07-08 05:59:32+00:00
> There are many survivalist youtube channels

There is often a knowledge gap between different fields of expertise, someone else already cited medical doctors and psychologists reinventing well known mathematics badly. Also youtube attracts copy cats that use modern tools out of frame, so it isn't a reliable source of information. I can already see the discoveries "Great wall of china most likely build by single man with a stick, just ignore the excavator tracks".
by sophiabannet1 | 2025-07-08 05:59:41+00:00
We have reached a point where most B2B SaaS companies support SSO, but there is still a lot of confusion around which protocol to choose: SAML or OIDC. Both serve the same goal and allow users to authenticate using a trusted Identity Provider. We wrote a deep-dive comparison including when to use each, and gotchas to avoid.
by const_cast | 2025-07-08 06:00:35+00:00
That's your definition. I think a lot of people who use woke would disagree, and I say that because I notice how they use woke and it seems to describe "anything vaguely left-leaning I do not like, but if anyone on the right does it it's fine".

With that definition, it becomes clear the word is stupid and we should actively ignore people who use it.

And, on the topic of identity group politics, we cannot pretend the right does not engage in this. If you look closely, this describes pretty much the entire republic platform.

Trans people? Identity group politics. Immigration? Believe it or not, identity group politics. Tax on tips? Identity group politics.
by Walf | 2025-07-08 06:01:08+00:00
So you didn't think they were dismissive or trivialised the issue? I mean, I can sympathise with the frustration of people somewhat 'giving up' after labelling their own issues, but it's not a logical conclusion to assign it all to a trend. That's what they appeared to be blaming and I didn't see them say otherwise, in any of their comments.
by const_cast | 2025-07-08 06:03:36+00:00
> Just be good. Just be good people! That’s all we ask!

Simple on the surface, but if you dig deeper it's more complex.

Being a good person necessitates refusing things that are not good. That typically means distancing yourself from people you perceive as bad.

Think about it: would a good person assist a carjacking? Would a good person be part of the Third Reich? Would a good person sit idly by while a black lady is called a slur? No, they wouldn't.

That's not to say I think you, or this person fired, or anyone else, has done any of those things. It's simply to demonstrate that being a good person necessitates acting against non-good things. Mozilla believed they were acting against a non-good thing: so, to them, they are good.
by sershe | 2025-07-08 06:03:46+00:00
Ah, the insightful leftist response. I was born in the USSR, so this drivel doesn't really work on me. I hate marxists/etc probably more than even fascists/etc.

But regardless, American style unions are just a uniquely malignant institution. They do/did unions better in Japan for example or even in Europe; although I still think these are a net negative, compared to them US style unions are just tailor made to suite parasites and criminals. Or as they say, my opinion of them was better before I heard of the union-mafia connections, but now I've lost all respect for mafia.
by fuzztester | 2025-07-08 06:04:52+00:00
It's a term commonly used in some of the "Southern" US states.

And also by Indian Christians (Catholics) in some parts of India, such as Mumbai and nearby areas, like Pune and Goa, along or near the Western coast of India. Partly grew up there, and also did some of my schooling there, that's how I know this.

I don't know if there is any historical connection between the usage of that phrase (y'all) in those two areas (of the US and India).

It could have been, via (US) Christian missionaries coming here. There were and still are some of them, in some parts of India, from more than 100 years ago. Again, I know this from experience.

That general area of India, and some other parts, do have a relatively high percentage of Christians.
by weird-eye-issue | 2025-07-08 06:05:27+00:00
Thanks I will give it another try because our use case is HTML/Markdown documents, not code, and this could be interesting. I'm just hesitant to trust an LLM to do replacements and your broken example really didn't help with my confidence. Even a 1% error rate wouldn't be worth it because if find/replace doesn't work you know it doesn't work and can feed that error back into the agent to fix it (like how Claude Code recovers from its editing errors)

edit: The example is still broken. I've inspected the network request and it's definitely your backend that is broken not something being hardcoded... The CSS is not present in the request at all, but in the response it's being inserted.
by stevoski | 2025-07-08 06:05:39+00:00
Wow, this is still a thing! I lost two university friends to the Discworld MUD. As in, their whole lifestyle, hours, and activities changed to be working on and playing it all night long in the uni labs, and they no longer did anything else apart from attend a bare minimum of classes.

I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list.
Show HN: TeamSort – Anonymous, Social Choice Polls (Borda, Condorcet, IRV)
by tonerow | 2025-07-08 06:06:08+00:00
Hey HN! I haven’t shared TeamSort here in a while, but after some great feedback from folks in the co-operative governance and computational social choice communities, I’ve added new voting algorithms and improved the experience. Here’s the latest version—now with Borda, Condorcet, and IRV, all in a frictionless, anonymous polling tool. Give it a try and let me know what you think!
by toast0 | 2025-07-08 06:06:12+00:00
Imho, this is an area where the limitations of C shine through.

Some kernels return error status as a CPU flag or otherwise separately from the returned value. But that's very hard to use in C, so the typical convention for a syscall wrapper is to return a non-negative number for success and -error for failure, but if negative numbers are valid as the return, you've got to do something else.
by NomDePlum | 2025-07-08 06:08:00+00:00
Other sources:

- https://cfmm.org.uk/bbc-on-gaza-israel-one-story-double-stan...

- July 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/03/gaza-film-prod...

- February 2025 https://www.declassifieduk.org/battle-for-the-truth-pro-isra...

- November 2024 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bbc-israel-g...

- November 2023 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-g...

Review of documentary BBC refused to air: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/03/gaza-do...
by ddingus | 2025-07-08 06:09:09+00:00
I agree! Viz needs love for sure.

Sidebar: My home plasma TV is a 3D capable one. Back in the 90's I used to use 3D to visualize models on SGI machines.

Fast forward to the mid 10's and I can hook up a laptop with nVidia GPU and run NX and the whole interface and model works in 3D!

Amazing. I love it, especially with a space controller.

There are maybe a handful who do that on even a very low basis.

That has always bothered me. Part of me knows some people have trouble and that another part knows the development gets even more expensive, but still your point is a solid one.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-08 06:09:33+00:00
> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified.

Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god".

Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god's name is "Hadad".

(But in the general case, Freyja is just the ordinary word "lady" and has no other name that survives to us, and Adonis is the ordinary word "lord". Adonis is a special case in that his name is not the word "lord" in Greek; he is a borrowing of the Semitic deity Tammuz, and the Greeks copied his title, "lord", rather than his name.)
by motorest | 2025-07-08 06:10:17+00:00
I don't think this blog post was researched well. It reads like a parody, in fact. It starts with a project, throws a bunch of assertions and ill founded opinions, proceeds to present a series of pessimizations, and somehow concludes the pessimizations are better?

The most charitable interpretation is that the blog post shows one of the main problems in software engineering circles: complaining about stuff they don't know and/or understand.

Take for example the leading accusation that code is overengineered by using static member functions.

> This code is over-engineered in the small. Notice that file type or mode are static per file format. They most likely do not depend on the data. We can easily eliminate virtual calls by storing this info as class members.

I don't think the blogger thought this approach all the way through, as it's not free from tradeoffs. In fact, the blogger explained some traits but somehow failed to arrive at the obvious conclusion. For example, file type and file mode are a type trait, not a instance trait. By replacing static files with a combination of getters and supporting member variables, it introduces two member variables. The blogger introduces these member variables at the base class level, which means each and every instance of every derived class has to store data used by two read-only getters that specify a type trait. This is data that needs to be saved in memory, and copied and moved around. Virtual function calls are somehow a problem and represent overengineering, but needlessly copying data around isn't? Baffling.

But there's more. Virtual function calls are somehow a problem, but as a solution the blogger asserts that replacing all member functions with a single function that copies around a large struct instance bundling all attributes... That's somehow good? The blogger also throws away any semblance of encapsulation to return instead a POCO. Why? At this point I really don't know.

The blog post reads like an exercise in absurdity. I wonder if the blogger writes software for a living.
by LeratoAustini | 2025-07-08 06:11:23+00:00
Thanks for mentioning this. I'm just getting into ballpoints in my art (literally just posted my latest piece online this morning, using Schneider Slider pens which use ink conforming to ISO 12757-2) and have diligently sourced 'archival' inks without looking deeply enough into what it means (a lot of online discussions imply that it's the same as lightfastness).

About BIC, I thought I'd seens some tests online showing that over time the ink yellowed and eventually disappeared, so I've been avoiding them.

Clearly I need to look more deeply into it, especially for work I might sell.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-08 06:14:34+00:00
Yea, I picked it as a rainy day movie for the family.

Didn't expect to have the biggest laugh I've had for a movie this year (the popcorn eyes bit) and almost teared up at the end because of the music.

...And now the kids are obsessed with finding more Kpop that sounds like HUNTR/X :D