MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-07 23:29:50+00:00
Plus the Enlightenment reimported a lot of Greek for science and made a lot of greek morphology productive in the language again or for the first time, at least in scientific vernacular and jargon, but a lot of that makes it into daily use. (It's also why we still have fun debates today over plurals like octopi versus octopuses or matrices versus matrixes; do we follow the Greek morphology through to its Greek plurals or do we just use the boring English plural morphology? We use both, but which you use becomes in part a signifier of "learnedness" or rule-following. As a learnéd nonconformist, I find it more fun to use the English plural morphology here more often than not, but also sometimes silly uses of díacritics.)

Plus English still is extremely active (to this day) in borrowing words from neighboring languages, with a lot of Spanish words directly borrowed (generally from Mexican/Dominican/Puerto Rican influences in US English, then back out to UK English). There are even French words in today's English that weren't Norman Conquest imports, but American Revolution imports (the French were key US allies and neighbors in the Canadian and Louisiana Territories).

There's a lot of jokes/memes that English has always been a language willing to borrow the best words of any language in a similar way that school bullies are often looking for new sources of milk money to extort.
by tbrownaw | 2025-07-07 23:30:04+00:00
Take for example entanglement.

The math that describes it is known precisely. Specific implications of this are known. There's no information transfer, there's no time delay, etc.

And yet lay people keep incorrectly thinking it can be used for communication. Because lay-audience descriptions by experts keep using words that imply causality and information transfer.

This is not a failure of the experts to understand what's going on. It's a failure to translate that understanding to ordinary language. Because ordinary language is not suited for it.

> Its “founding fathers” all admitted that it’s a bunch of guesswork and that the models we have are arbitrary and lack something essential needed for proper understanding.

We don't have a model of why it works / if there's a more comprehensible layer of reality below it. But it's characterized well enough that we can make practical useful things with it.
by tzs | 2025-07-07 23:30:28+00:00
Is the coastlines of South America and Africa looking like they fit together actually because of plate tectonics, or is it just a coincidence?

The shape we see for the coastlines of South America and Africa is affected by sea level. Depending on when you happened to look over the last say 140 million years sea level would have varied from around 135 meters below current sea level to around 75 meters above current sea level. That is a range of 210 meters.

Surely over that range both costs would change quite a bit, and I can't think of any mechanism that would make those changes complimentary in a way to keep the two coasts looking like they fit together.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-07 23:30:44+00:00
This is something that should be looked up and not argued about. As far as I can remember, the vast majority of alphabetic languages are phonetic. English, French, and Portuguese are not.

Being able to guess how something is pronounced sometimes is not enough to say that English is phonetically spelled. English often borrows spellings directly from the languages that it is borrowing a word from, those spellings are usually phonetic (based on the source language's rules), and due to the presence of certain peculiar sounds, one can often guess which phonetically-spelled language a word was borrowed from. That's not an English word being spelled phonetically, that's people being forced to become language detectives. You can get lucky and guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character that you've never seen before (based on the radicals), but no one would say that Chinese characters are a phonetic alphabet.

Other than the soundalikes "b" = "v" and in Latin America soft "c" and "z" = "s", when Spanish speakers don't know how to spell a word, it's because they are also saying the word wrong when they speak.
by johngai | 2025-07-07 23:31:35+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m John, founder of Barawave. After years of frustration working with outdated, complex ERP systems, we decided to build something different — an ERP designed from the ground up with AI at its core, not patched on as an afterthought.

Barawave is a modular, cloud-based ERP that uses AI to simplify and automate business operations — from CRM and HR to finance and inventory.

Here’s what we rethought:

Legacy ERPs = bulky, slow, and expensive.

Barawave = fast, flexible, and smart.

AI isn’t a “feature” — it powers automation, data insights, and task management across the platform.

We're seeing teams that once struggled with multiple disconnected systems now run their entire operations inside one intelligent dashboard — and with less manual work.

We’re not trying to be another ERP alternative. We’re reimagining what ERP should feel like in 2025: intuitive, assistive, and ready out of the box.

If you're building in AI, SaaS, or enterprise productivity — would love to hear your thoughts, challenges, or questions. Happy to share how we built it, our philosophy, or how we approach product design.

AMA.
by golergka | 2025-07-07 23:32:46+00:00
> something that is arguably essential for the majority of people

Our perception of this changes with time, radically. A few ages ago a chair would have seemed unneeded luxury for most of the world's population.

> Funny enough, that infrastructure existing (in theory) was why mental hospitals started to close down in favor of "mental health clinics" back in the day [1].

Mental hospitals are treating cases much more severe and rare (thankfully) that most of modern therapy. One hour of gestalt therapy a week will not do any good for a violent schizophrenic in a psychotic episode.
by variaga | 2025-07-07 23:33:19+00:00
Word. 28 years of FPGA and ASIC design here, in VHDL, Verliog and SystemVerliog. Coming from VHDL, verilog had some painful limitations (no struct/record type) but SV fixed those, and supports some surprisingly powerful metaprogramming.

But even when using plain verilog the language was never the limiting factor on the design process.
by chpatrick | 2025-07-07 23:33:59+00:00
To me all of those are so vaguely defined that arguing whether an LLM is "really really" doing something is kind of a waste of time.

It's like we're clinging on to things that make us feel like human cognition is special so we're saying LLM's arent "really" doing it, then not defining what it actually is.
by tuatoru | 2025-07-07 23:34:34+00:00
Thank you for this. It's a very succint summary of my reservations.

I would add that my reaction on reading the paragraph about the "blue collar colleague" was "that's a health and safety nightmare. Never going to happen."

The thing about the real world is that it's a bit more complicated than desk work. Even roads, heavily simplified and standardised as they are, have proven challenging for self-driving cars.
by danpalmer | 2025-07-07 23:34:36+00:00
You don't think so?

> Why is the datacenter not running? I paid $10bn for this. > We had some downtime for power reasons > Why aren't we running backup generators? > We are, but there's a limit to how many we're allowed to run > F** that, get some more generators, I'll talk to the president and get it approved.

This would fit with pretty much everything I've seen publicly from him, interviews etc.
by jcelerier | 2025-07-07 23:35:00+00:00
I'm posting here to celebrate a few fresh things from today:

1) ossia score 3.5.3 was released :)

2) We're going to give a lab on interactive graphics on embedded platforms at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver in August, which teaches how to do real-time visuals with interaction on Raspberry Pi:

https://s2025.conference-schedule.org/presentation/?id=gensu...

3) The Ars Electronica prize results were announced today and two works using ossia-max, our Max/MSP binding, got featured at Ars Electronica 2025:

- Organism + Excitable Chaos by Navid Navab and Garnet Willis got the Digital Musics & Sound Art Golden Nica

https://calls.ars.electronica.art/2025/prix/winners/16969/

- On Air by Peter van Haaften, Michael Montanaro and Garnet Willis got a Digital Musics & Sound Art honorary mention

https://calls.ars.electronica.art/2025/prix/winners/17358/

Earlier this year, ossia was also featured at the Venice Biennale, it has been used for the Pavillon of Ireland: https://www.innosonix.de/pavilion-of-ireland-at-the-venice-b...
by asveikau | 2025-07-07 23:35:39+00:00
I think it's a mistake to view that situation as unique to English.

Spain is still a multi lingual country with several local languages each of them centuries old. But even ignoring that and focusing only on Castilian, there were invasions by goths, who left behind words like ropa or guardar, and Arabic speakers, who left behind words like almacén.

Like English having both cow and beef, there are words with historical overlap but different etymologies and divergent meaning over time. For example almacén and bodega were both words for a warehouse.

There are also tons of words where Spanish had phonetically diverged from latin, but then the same word was re-imported from latin in "educated" use.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-07 23:35:56+00:00
> The latter option always comes across as rude. It's a very clear 'piss off you insect'

To me, it rather tells: "I consider you to be likely to be sufficiently smart and knowledgable to understand this topic if you put in some effort: do you want to learn some cool stuff which otherwise would demand a lot of literature research to learn? And since I already hinted that I consider you to be smart and knowledgable: would you like to teach me some cool, complicated stuff, too?"
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-07 23:36:22+00:00
I had a favourite interview question when I was 3 years in. My boss tempered my enthusiasm by letting me ask it but made it not a requirement to be hired so more of a bonus "extension question". Glad they did that. I was being rediculous. I assumed "anyone who used this framework must have come across this problem" but was just an assumption.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-07 23:36:41+00:00
>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.

You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not?

Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god.

Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.
by kragen | 2025-07-07 23:37:24+00:00
I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out:

> (However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])

...but the citation is from 01975.

The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the methylglyoxal.

The Smithsonian article contains this link:

> Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved

which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books.

The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but, unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found in tombs at all.

Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of book that cites its sources.
by gortok | 2025-07-07 23:37:47+00:00
I think folks have taken the wrong lesson from this.

It’s not that they added a new feature because there was demand.

They added a new feature because technology hallucinated a feature that didn’t exist.

The savior of tech, generative AI, was telling folks a feature existed that didn’t exist.

That’s what the headline is, and in a sane world the folks that run ChatGPT would be falling over themselves to be sure it didn’t happen again, because next time it might not be so benign as it was this time.
by NathanKP | 2025-07-07 23:38:46+00:00
Negative instructions do not work as well as positive ones. If you tell the LLM "don't do this" you only put the idea of doing that into it's context. (Surprisingly the same goes for human toddlers.... the AI is just in it's toddler phase).

Not to mention that context length is limited, so if you told it something "earlier" then your statement has probably already dropped off the end of the context window.

What works better is to prompt with positive instructions of intent like:

"Working exclusively in file(s) ____ and ____ implement ____ in a manner similar to how it is done in example file ______".

I start a fresh chat for each prompt, with fresh context, and try to keep all instructions embedded within a single prompt rather than relying on fragile past state that may or may not have dropped off the end of the context window. If there is something like "don't touch these core files" or "work exclusively in folder X" that I want it to always consider, then I add it as a system prompt or global rule file (ensures that the instruction gets included automatically on every prompt).

And don't get me wrong I get frustrated with AI sometimes too, but the frustration has declined dramatically as I've learned how to prompt it: appropriate task sizes, how to use positive statements rather than negative, how to gather the appropriate context for it to steer behavior and output, etc.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-07 23:39:31+00:00
Does relate to the point that English still doesn't have a central linguistics authority (and likely won't ever). Just various reformers that have been more or less successful and in how distributed their reforms have been. Draught versus draft was indeed one of Noah Webster's proposed reforms that influenced a lot of American spellings and in turn is still influencing UK spellings. It's not as obvious as color versus colour, but there is a bit of US versus UK in draft versus draught.

(Webster also went on to suggest dawter over daughter, to remove more of these vestigial augh spellings, but that one still hasn't caught on even in the US. Just as the cot/caught split is its own weird remaining reform discussion.)
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-07 23:40:02+00:00
Oh yeah. Spoke quite a bit to a doctor who wanted to get into a speciality last year. That shits hard. Intersection of mentally hard, hours demanding and high bars to entry.

We have it cushy. Really cushy. Unless you are working for a 2025 AI startup that works and pays you like a mule and uses the word mission unironically.
by rexpop | 2025-07-07 23:42:10+00:00
Only assholes* use "female" as a noun.

"Female" is primarily a scientific or biological term that refers to sex, not gender. When used as a noun for humans, it reduces women to their reproductive capabilities and strips away their individuality and humanity, making them seem less than fully human or equivalent to animals. For example, "female" can refer to any species, while "woman" specifically refers to human beings.

Here it's clearly being used in a derogatory, dismissive sense.

* and Ferengi
by addaon | 2025-07-07 23:43:41+00:00
> If you have INT_MIN along with any other negative number in the array then your program has undefined behavior in C.

What? Why? There’s no addition needed to solve this problem. The example implementation does invert each element, which is undefined for INT_MIN, but it would be trivial to just skip INT_MIN elements (since their additive inverse is never in the set).
by etruong42 | 2025-07-07 23:43:49+00:00
Could this be an evolution of astrology? Or an evolution of the underlying attraction to astrology? This need to label things (libra vs scorpio vs etc) and the assignment of character traits and behaviors to these labels? This need to push for explanations beyond our control? And perhaps these psychological labels are even _more_ attractive since they have the veneer of science and rationality behind it.
by lupire | 2025-07-07 23:44:27+00:00
I think not, because moving to a higher dimension is exponentially worse (density ~ n^2/2^n) than this linear improvement.

So it's only helpful for naturally high dimensional objects. Digital objects do not have a natural dimension (byte length), so you can choose a small dimension.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-07 23:44:37+00:00
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/

Nobody's code is that secret, especially not from a vendor like Microsoft.

Unless all development is done with air-gapped machines, realistic development environments are simultaneously exposed to all of the following "leakage risks" because they're using third-party software, almost certainly including a wide range of software from Microsoft:

- Package managers, including compromised or malicious packages.

Microsoft owns both NuGet and NPM!

- IDEs and their plugins, the latter especially can be a security risk.

What developer doesn't use Microsoft VS Code these days?

- CLI and local build tools.

- SCM tools such as GitHub Enterprise (Microsoft again!)

- The CI/CD tooling including third-party tools.

- The operating system itself. Microsoft Windows is still a very popular platform, especially in enterprise environments.

- The OS management tools, anti-virus, monitoring, etc...

And on and on.

Unless you live in a total bubble world with USB sticks used to ferry your dependencies into your windowless facility underground, your code is "exposed" to third parties all of the time.

Worrying about possible vulnerabilities in encrypted VMs in a secure cloud facility is missing the real problem that your developers are probably using their home gaming PC for work because it's 10x faster than the garbage you gave them.

Yes, this happens. All the time. You just don't know because you made the perfect the enemy of the good.
by breve | 2025-07-07 23:44:45+00:00
> But a new Apple Watch would cost several hundred dollars, and I can’t justify that. With the discounts, a Huawei watch cost well under two hundred US dollars. And, frankly, it looks better. So I betrayed America. Reader, I bought one.

A more direct way to think about this is that you betrayed yourself by buying things you don't need, regardless of if it came from Apple or Huawei. You could have bought a Casio digital watch that's much cheaper, more robust, more eco friendly, and runs for years on the same battery with no recharging.

> But since the Chinese government already has my OPM file and probably a lot more besides (I worked in the House during Salt Typhoon!), it’s not like I was risking a lot.

Apathy is never a good solution.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-07 23:45:53+00:00
I was wishing I could make vertical videos back in 1997. I love square photos. I was experimenting with various print formats to create something that seemed to come from an alternate timeline and came to the conclusion I could cut an inch off a 4x6 print and get a 4x5 print and that turned out to be… the Instagram aspect ratio. Thing is I like 4x5 portrait and landscape and Instagram doesn’t like the later.

I often use the rule of thirds in square prints.
by throw234234234 | 2025-07-07 23:46:07+00:00
Sure. But audits/processes only catch up to a point. In the end the buck stops with a professional. That's what most "professions" are. They aren't just a service -> they are an accreditation with some recourse which gives them prestige/social status/etc if they have years of experience (i.e. despite the risk imposed on them as a professional they have survived/thrived).
by b112 | 2025-07-07 23:46:11+00:00
I'll play with your tact in this argument, although I certain do not agree it is accurate.

You're asserting that creativity is a meld of past experience, both personal and the creative output of others. Yet this really doesn't jive, as an LLM does not "experience" anything. I would argue that raw knowledge is not "experience" at all.

We might compare this to the university graduate, head full of books and data jammed therein, and yet that exceptionally well versed graduate needs "experience" in a job for quite some time, before having any use.

The same may be true of learning how to do anything, from driving, to riding a bike, or just being in conversations with others. Being told, on paper (or as part of your baked in, derived "knowledge store") things, means absolutely nothing in terms of actually experiencing them.

Heck, just try to explain sex to someone before they've experienced it. No matter the literature, play, movie or act performed in front of them, experience is entirely different.

And an AI does not experience the universe, nor is it driven by the myriad of human totality, from the mind o'lizard, to the flora/fauna in one's gut. There is no motive driving it, for example it does not strive to mate... something that drives all aspect of mammalian behaviour.

So intertwined with the mating urge is human experience, that it is often said that all creativity derives from it. The sparrow dances, the worm wiggles, and the human scores 4 touchdowns in one game, thank you Al.

Comparatively, an LLM does not reason, nor consider, nor ponder. It is "born" with full access to all of its memory store, has data spewed at it, searches, responds, and then dies. It is not capable of learning in any stream of consciousness. It does not have memory from one birth to the next, unless you feed its own output back at it. It can gain no knowledge, except from "context" assigned at birth.

An LLM, essentially, understands nothing. It is not "considering" a reply. It's all math, top to bottom, all probability, taking all the raw info it has an just spewing what fits next best.

That's not creative.

Any more than Big Ben's gears and cogs are.
by nradov | 2025-07-07 23:46:37+00:00
I think it would be great to make mental healthcare accessible to everyone who could benefit from it, but have you actually run the numbers on that? How much would it cost and where would the money come from? Any sort of individual counseling or talk therapy is tremendously expensive due to the Baumol effect.

And even if we somehow magically solve the funding problem, where will the workers come from? Only a tiny fraction of people are really cut out to be effective mental health practitioners. I'm pretty sure that I'd be terrible at it, and you couldn't pay me enough to try.
by strangattractor | 2025-07-07 23:46:48+00:00
Handing someone a $1 is irreversible if they won't give it back. All transactions are anonymous and private when using a physical dollar. Crypto has the primary advantage of allowing you to launder money by converting the "Coin" in criminal friendly countries to a fiat currency (dollars) that actually buys stuff. Especially useful when hackers hold your data ransom. Usually what people mean by not like "traditional banking system" is unregulated/lawless.