MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nilkn | 2025-07-15 22:57:47+00:00
As far as I can tell, putting the conspiratorial thinking aside, he's not really wrong, but I'm also not sure it matters that much.

If neurosymbolic AI was "sidelined" in favor of "connectionist" pure NN scaling, I don't think it was part of a conspiracy or deeply embedded ideological bias. I mean, maybe that's the case, but it seems far more likely to me that pure deep learning scaling just provided a more incremental and accessible on-ramp to building real-world systems that are genuinely useful for hundreds of millions of users. If anything, I think the lesson here was to spend less time theory-crafting and more time building. In this case, it looks like it was the builders who got to the endpoint that was only imagined by the theory-crafters, and that's what matters at the end of the day.
by drdaeman | 2025-07-15 22:58:19+00:00
The idea is to filter out bias-introducing information with low relevance (like gender, appearance, or accent) and focus on the actual events that took place.

Otherwise the court starts to include elements of theatrics and objective truth starts to give way to how one presents their case, such as what sort of appearance litigants make. E.g., whenever they're speaking confidently or, say, stuttering nervously. While this can be relevant information (e.g. if someone refuses to look in the eyes it could be a sign one's lying), there are multitude of ways it can be deceiving (e.g. if someone refuses to look in the eyes it could be that they find eye contact generally uncomfortable, for example folks with anxiety disorders do that).

Presenting both litigants through a Vtuber-like interface that re-synthesizes voices, adjusts some patterns of speech (like replacing names with placeholders, or making language gender-neutral), reduces non-verbal signalling, and provides neutral appearances to both parties, feels like something that can make litigants, judge and juries all focus on the abstract ideas of what took place, potentially allowing for a more clear and neutral judgement.

But - of course - it's also perfectly possible that it would fail in some way I fail to foresee.
by tptacek | 2025-07-15 22:58:32+00:00
Yeah, I don't think there's any malice to any of this; FIPS is just the product of a particularly conservative (backwards-looking, path-dependent) and market-unaccountable standards process. It's like what would happen if JPMC had so much market power that they could make their own cryptographic standard; it would, I am saying, suck ass, without anyone meaning for it to.
Ask HN: Relevant Java programming language in this new world of AI
by rammy1234 | 2025-07-15 22:58:39+00:00
We have so many amazing Java developers in our company — some with decades of experience, especially in Spring Boot and building microservices. They’ve been the backbone of our systems for years. But with everything changing so fast — cloud, AI, Python, data engineering — I’m wondering: what’s next for them?
by anyfoo | 2025-07-15 22:59:07+00:00
It's often a bit of a choice, though. You definitely can minmax Civilization, Minecraft, or Crusader Kings III. But then you lose out on the creativity and/or role-playing aspect.

In Minecraft, I personally want to progress in a "natural" (within the confines of the game) way, and build fun things I like. I don't want to speedrun to a diamond armor or whatever.

In Crusader Kings, I actually try to take decisions based on what the character's traits tell me, plus a little bit of own characterization I make up in my head.
by dang | 2025-07-15 22:59:12+00:00
Related. Others?

Hazel: A live functional programming environment featuring typed holes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42004133 - Oct 2024 (86 comments)

Hazel: A live functional programming environment featuring typed holes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24299852 - Aug 2020 (14 comments)
by standardUser | 2025-07-15 22:59:33+00:00
Every major economy was either running at max capacity due to the war effort or was in desperate need of repair and reconstruction. The US starts handing out loans like candy to a) help rapidly rebuild the economies of our allies and trade partners and b) fend off communism. So here we have...

1 - Millions of men with newly gained skill eagerly reentering the workforce 2 - A surge of highly skilled immigrants/refugees 3 - Trade partners rebuilding rapidly using US loans to by US goods (as the US had emerged as the world largest manufacturer). 4 - All of this happening with the benefit of countless technological breakthroughs brought about by the war effort.

It's these anomalies that led to the very temporarily rise of some men in some parts of the West being able to support a family of 6 with a single job and minimal skill or education.
by bigiain | 2025-07-15 22:59:55+00:00
> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience.

Sure, but this bit really makes me wonder if I'd like to see what the writer is prepared to do to other people to get to his payday:

"Nabeel Quereshi has an amazing post called Reflections on Palantir, where he ruminates on what made Palantir special. I wanted to do the same for OpenAI"
by alexey-salmin | 2025-07-15 23:00:24+00:00
Moral norms evolve to ensure survival of it's bearers.

Basically under no circumstances it will be immoral for the population at large to have kids because such moral norms will quickly cease to exist. Eather because it's bearers cease to exist or more likely because they move on to more suitable moral norms.

I say "more likely" because humans obviously didn't get extinct despite bringing kids into the world of suffering for about a million years.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-07-15 23:00:29+00:00
Ironically, social media has been atomizing. It's just continued the trend towards the isolated individual - now screaming into the social media void. While I don't think the article is wrong (except the bit about the early stages of transforming the Middle Ages being in 1660 -that's really wrong), it doesn't really address the basic problem we face now: how to overcome the increasing atomization. The examples given are pre-internet/pre-social media except the last, I suppose, about forming "metalabel", but even there there it's really light on details and basically suggests "collaborate with some friends". In the past people took action (forming unions, for example) in meatspace. Now we think we're taking action by complaining about the state of the world on social media.
by lossolo | 2025-07-15 23:00:41+00:00
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see there. From my point of view, this is a low-effort, vibe coded app that doesn't solve the problem the OP had but it's solving a different one. You'd need to at least train a small classifier based on something like BERT to actually address the issue. What I showed in my comment just demonstrates that this doesn't solve the problem OP had.
by like_any_other | 2025-07-15 23:01:01+00:00
Because the bias was diluted by the other jurors - from the passage on page iii, I assume the juries in the study were only 10-33% BME. The study follows your quote with:

Even though the defendant’s ethnicity did not have an impact on jury verdicts, the research found that in certain cases ethnicity did have a significant impact on the individual votes of some jurors who sat on these juries. Statistical analysis of the individual votes of all 319 jurors who took part in the case simulation showed that in certain cases BME jurors were significantly less likely to vote to convict a BME defendant than a White defendant. [..]

The report concludes that this highlights the benefits of permitting majority verdicts and of having 12 member juries. The fact that 12 jurors must jointly try to reach a decision and that majority verdicts are possible meant that more verdicts were achieved and individual biases did not dictate the decision-making of these racially mixed juries. If juries were smaller or if unanimous verdicts were required, then individual juror bias might potentially have a greater impact on jury verdicts.
by matt_s | 2025-07-15 23:01:06+00:00
> automating software development for ad-tech companies

A lot of technology advancements are automation of human tasks. Its been going on for decades and does eliminate a lot of jobs (or move them to a different continent). There aren’t telephone switch operators anymore, or cashiers adding up items manually in a store checkout or any other countless jobs that are now done with software.

One way to look at it is if you’re an employee at a company you don’t really have any say in what projects/products you work on. If those projects are eliminating or creating jobs or saving lives or whatever, your only choice is really about working for that employer.
by snowwrestler | 2025-07-15 23:02:58+00:00
I find it funny when people talk about the baby boom and then also worry about maintaining 2.1 babies per couple.

Like, it’s right there in the name: a “baby boom” was an unusual surplus of babies. And that obviously means that when all those babies age long enough, there will be an equal sized unusual surplus of deaths. And while that is happening, even steady fertility will look like less than replacement.

But now that that 100% predictable thing is happening, everyone is freaking out.

The same thing happens with discussions of the Social Security Trust Fund, which was intentionally inflated to pay for the baby boom retirement. And now that it is deflating—as intended!—everyone is acting like it’s a crisis.
by hraedon | 2025-07-15 23:03:10+00:00
"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.

No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.
by j45 | 2025-07-15 23:03:20+00:00
I think primary and secondary motivations are OK - I'm not sure how the premium subscriptions are distributed to content creators other than by ad revenue.

One thing is for sure - an ad-free family is much more peaceful and able to enjoy the content itself, which can bode well for connecting with the content creators and appreciating the platform for what it is, and once was.
by lisbbb | 2025-07-15 23:04:40+00:00
Oh good god! Get over yourself! Those 2-3 female partners were willing participants, not being led on. If you believe they were being led on, then you are not saying very much about women and their level of intelligence!

I don't feel as though I wasted any of the "fertile years" of my female partners who ended up not wanting to marry me!

I had a couple of different long-term relationships in my 20s before I found a woman to marry and start a family with, which we did just fine in our 30s despite having two miscarriages in between kid #1 and kid #2.
by MistOMG | 2025-07-15 23:04:59+00:00
Hey everyone! This is my first time posting something like this, so sorry if it's a bit long

I built a personal AI assistant called [*Mist.AI*](http://Mist.AI) — it runs on *Gemini*, *Mistral*, and *Command R*, with support for OCR image recognition, file uploads, slash commands, and even *wake word detection* ("Hey Mist").

Try it out: [https://mistai.org](https://mistai.org) GitHub: [https://github.com/Misto0o/Mist.AI](https://github.com/Misto0o/Mist.AI)

# Features:

* Real-time data, no knowledge cutoff * Analyze images & files (PDF, DOCX, TXT, JSON) * Chrome/Firefox extension (right-click → ask AI) * PWA/mobile-friendly, dark/light themes * Slash commands like `/weather`, `/joke`, `/riddle` * Built with Flask + JS + AI APIs (Gemini, [OCR.Space](http://OCR.Space), etc.)

Still working on the UI and polish, but it's fast, fun, and kind of my favorite side project right now.

Would love feedback or ideas thanks for reading!
by kijiki | 2025-07-15 23:06:02+00:00
> How do these guys get the data in order and we dont?

LAGs stripe traffic across links at the packet level, whereas QSFP/OSFP lanes do so at the bit level.

Different sized packets on different LAG links will take different amounts of time to transmit. So when striping bits, you effectively have a single ordered queue, whereas when striping packets across links, there are multiple independent queues.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-15 23:06:21+00:00
My comment here might give some intuition for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44576004 . You do need to measure for some time, because the measurement of the clocks with respect to each other is noisy, but you don't need to wait for there to be a whole 'tick' of extra time between them.
by Narishma | 2025-07-15 23:06:50+00:00
I feel like 10 answers is too few to generate a good profile. I tried it and it marked a lot of stories as 'skip' that were pretty interesting to me, presumably because they didn't fit into the 3 or 4 categories it determined I was interested in. That said, it was useful to filter out AI stuff, so that's good I guess.
by themadturk | 2025-07-15 23:07:16+00:00
Neuromancer changed my life (sounds like many others responding here). But more than that, it was the first step in William Gibson becoming my favorite author. I can't tell you the number of times I've read Neuromancer; right now I'm almost finished with my umpteenth re-read of the Blue Ant trilogy; I fear another reread of the rest of his books is not far behind.
by entropie | 2025-07-15 23:07:25+00:00
Very interesting.

I may take it to literal.

> When I need to remember to throw trash away, my wife or I put the bags right at the foot of the front door.

Not so obvious but difficult. As someone whose partner has severe ADHD, I can assure you that if the author wants to imply that no memory capacity is necessary to make this simple construct work, he is wrong in my opinion. It takes a “shallower” (?) form of memory to link something like this (you can definitely link it -- I do it similarly - I call it routine)

> To keep track of how many hours I've worked in a day, I move Lego bricks from one side of my computer's monitor to the other at every periodic break.

I think it's clearer in this case. The whole thing only works because you have memorized that the lego bricks on one side of the work table mean a certain thing.

In the end, it's a bit about rewiring your neurons because the original wiring didn't work well enough under real conditions.

when i want to make lasting changes in my life i now think about IF -> THEN triggers and "wire" them. Since I'm very principle driven (a bit on the spectrum) this makes it easy for me to maintain routines (but also problematic when I can't for $reasons).

I really liked the post and dont want to badmouth anything.
by evertedsphere | 2025-07-15 23:07:31+00:00
> But we don’t want medical device manufacturers or nuclear power plant operators to move fast and break things. AI will quickly get baked into critical infrastructure and could enable dangerous misuse.

nobody will put a language model in a pacemaker or a nuclear reactor, because the people who would be in a position to do such things are actual doctors or engineers aware both of their responsibilities and of the long jail term that awaits them if they neglect them

this inevitabilism, to borrow a word from another submission earlier today, about "AI" ending up in critical infrastructure and the important thing being to figure out how to do it right is really quite repugnant

sure, yes, i know about the shitty kinda-explainable statistical models that already control my insurance premiums or likelihood of getting policed or whatever

but why is it a foregone conclusion that people are going to (implicitly rightly so given the framing lets it pass unquestioned!) put llms into things that materially affect my life on the level of it ending due to a stopped heart or a lethal dose of radiation
by emporas | 2025-07-15 23:07:34+00:00
It must have been somewhat the same when chess engines started to beat human players. The chess community should be fairly divided about the usefulness of such a tool. After a while things settled down, and all players use the tool in some way or another.

Some chess players benefited more from the tool than others. I always analyze my games carefully with an engine after the game. After less than 10 years I managed to get from zero to almost master level. I attribute that to extensive engine analysis I put on my games afterwards.

The user needs to know how to use the engine, LLM or chess engine, when it makes sense to use it, what are the shortcomings of the tool and so on.

LLMs are game changers, and AI's ability to distinguish the signal from noise is marvelous. Will it be a game changer like it is now for chess, a very narrow game compared to everything else, remains to be seen.
by pyman | 2025-07-15 23:08:48+00:00
> OpenAI is perhaps the most frighteningly ambitious org I've ever seen.

That kind of ambition feels like the result of Bill Gates pushing Altman to the limit and Altman rising to the challenge. The famous "Gates demo" during the GPT‑2 days comes to mind.

Having said that, the entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection.
by anon291 | 2025-07-15 23:08:52+00:00
That's because they've been raised to believe it's hard.

And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.

For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.

Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.

Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.

I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.

There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book

They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.

They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.

The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.

Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.
by dwattttt | 2025-07-15 23:11:05+00:00
I think the most immediate problem would be ELF segments that aren't 16kb aligned. Code will abut data, you can't add a gap without breaking offsets inside the ELF, and you'll induce the segfault during every write to a global at the start of the writable code, or executing code at the end of the code segment.

A less safe option would be for permissions to be a union in that region, as code rarely depends on a permission being absent. That would be quite the security hole though.
by like_any_other | 2025-07-15 23:11:24+00:00
A generation looking for fulfillment in cubicles... let me show you how that works out:

In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor. Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed. Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/27/f...
by degamad | 2025-07-15 23:11:37+00:00
From the "About this Document" page (https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node3....)

About this document ...

The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 95.1 (Fri Jan 20 1995) Copyright © 1993, 1994, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.

The command line arguments were: latex2html mel-annotated.tex.

The translation was initiated by Erik Brunvand on Tue Oct 15 13:41:12 MDT 1996
by anon291 | 2025-07-15 23:12:04+00:00
Look at the way our cities are built. I live in a grid based streetcar suburb and my kids can be let out feral. If you live in a modern subdivision ... Good luck. The roads are too big, and there is nowhere for kids to go. Meanwhile, my local city has free lunch at the park for kids every day during the summer and kids can go unaccompanied. I see tons of kids out riding bikes and walking by themselves.

Impossible in modern developments. You'd have to cross a six lane road with 50mph traffic to get anywhere not safe.
by op00to | 2025-07-15 23:12:16+00:00
Simonw’s response is the right response. You should not bend the community to your will simply because you do not like the majority of the posts. Obviously many people do like those posts, as evidenced by them making the front page. Instead, find ways to avoid the topics you do not desire to read without forcing your will on people who are happy with the current state.

Let me stop folks early, don’t make comparisons to politics or any bullshit like that. We’re talking only about hacker news here.
by fuzztester | 2025-07-15 23:12:28+00:00
>the other big cobol feature is high precision (i.e. many digest) fixed point arithmetic. not loosing pennies on large sums, and additionally with well defined arithmetics, portably so as you point out, is a killer feature in finance.

I guess you mean:

>digest -> digits

>loosing -> losing

Is that the same as BCD? Binary Coded Decimal. IIRC, Turbo Pascal had that as an option, or maybe I am thinking of something else, sorry, it's many years ago.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-07-15 23:12:57+00:00
It also really bothers me that running a simple utility effectively means I’ve given the developer full access to my system.

It’s even worse when commercial software wants me to add it’s repo to my package manager for updates… (Who audits post install scripts of RPM, etc!!!)

That being said, I’m also too lazy to run every thing inside its own container — especially for browsers, etc.

Feels too cumbersome that I need some automated CI pipeline just to ensure my DIY containers remain updated.

Also a pain to decide what file/directories the container should have access to.

In principle, I should probably use something like Qubes.

However, the prospect of putting my entire security ins small group of people writing somewhat complicated software with no financial disincentive for shenanigans also bothers me. (I realize this is extremely unfair and their work is quite impressive, but theoretically reality could get in the way)