MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gregorygoc | 2025-07-15 18:03:26+00:00
Writing correct proofs is hard. Program verification is hard. In my opinion if you are hand weaving it there’s no benefit. Thinking about invariants and pre-post conditions is often unnecessary or greatly reduced if you write idiomatic code for the language and codebase. Check out “The Practice of Programming” by R. Pike and B. W. Kernighan. The motto is: simplicity, clarity, generality. I find it works really well in a day job.

On a slightly related note… Competitive programming is surprisingly good at teaching you the right set of techniques to make sure your code is correct. You won’t progress beyond certain stage unless you pick them up.
by graton | 2025-07-15 18:03:43+00:00
> and merely being present at a protest, while not engaging in any violence, earns 32 months in prison [3].

> [3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...

From the article: William Nelson Morgan, 69, was sentenced to 32 months in prison, having previously admitted violent disorder and carrying a cosh during a riot on County Road in Liverpool on Saturday.

Sounds like he engaged in violence and was carrying a weapon.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-07-15 18:03:46+00:00
> (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)

This assumes that Whites and BMEs going to trial are equally likely to be guilty.

Shouldn't we assume there would be some hidden delta?
by threetonesun | 2025-07-15 18:03:54+00:00
Weird how we went from like the 4 hour workweek and all those charts about how people historically famous in their field spent only a few hours a day on what they were most famous for, to "work 12+ hours a day or you're useless".

Also this is one of a few examples I've read lately of "oh look at all this hard work I did", ignoring that they had a newborn and someone else actually did all of the hard work.
by stackskipton | 2025-07-15 18:04:07+00:00
>“what’s the point of this extra tax to mitigate this incident”

My guess is ATO requires that only US Citizens make changes to the system. However, Microsoft did not want to hire skilled US citizens for pay reasons so they hire unskilled US citizens and get trained Chinese nationals to direct US citizens to make changes they require.

So stockholders get another yacht because GovCloud is expensive but overhead is peanuts and national security be damned.

US Government should announce that their ATO has been revoked but we don't do that.
by MortyWaves | 2025-07-15 18:04:15+00:00
I have no idea what Tattle Life is but two clicks in, first to “Offtopic” and then “The Lucy Letby case”, and Apple Pay pops up.

Not a fake one, but the real deal trying to charge me £0.00.

I don’t have the patience to investigate that further but I am all behind banning scummy sites like that.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-07-15 18:04:51+00:00
Sure! I would humbly suggest that we don't go to movies to see -real- real life situations re-presented back to us.

I mean, unless you have two comedic geniuses who can really sell yelling down the stairs to ask the partner what they want for dinner, getting met with "HUH???" inching a little closer, and having repeat this three times until you finally just go down and ask in a normal voice. In the right hands that could be comedy gold on screen.

But by in large, we don't consume media because it represents the banal reality of everyday life.
by wnissen | 2025-07-15 18:05:00+00:00
It was the same thing for us with Qt Commercial licensing. We use only the LGPL version, dynamically link, don't modify the source, and give credit, so we're fully in compliance. To get support we chose to purchase commercial licenses for our small team of developers. Cue a regular series of calls about whether we were sure we were in compliance, etc. To add insult to injury they couldn't even navigate our purchasing process so it was a pain to pay them.

I'll take my chances in the open source world. It's a shame that the companies that created the software aren't getting paid, truly. But don't make it so obnoxious to reward you.
by bawana | 2025-07-15 18:05:21+00:00
This is a politically correct farewell letter. Obviously something we little people who need jobs have to resort to so the next HR manager doesn't think we are a risk to stock valuation. For a deeper understanding, read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. She defrocks Sam Altman to reveal he is just another human. Like Steve Jobs, he is an adept salesman appealing to the naïve altruistic sentiments of humans while maintaining his singular focus on scale. Not so different from the archetype of Rockefeller in his pursuit of monopoly through scale using any means, sam is no different than google which even forgot its own rallying cry ‘dont be evil’. Other actors in the story seem to have been infected by the same meme virus, leaving openAI for their own empires- Musk left after he and altman conflicted over who would be CEO.(birth of xAI). Amodei, his sister and others left to start anthropic. Sutskever left to start ‘safe something or other’(smacks of the same misdirection sam used when openAI formed as a nonprofit ) giving the idea of a nonprofit a mantle of evil since OPENAI has pivoted to profit.

The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth.

Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI. This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side.

Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built.

Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements.

Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now?

Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?

These are the questions that come to mind after Hao’s historic summary.
by rf15 | 2025-07-15 18:06:08+00:00
I'm working for a european org that is close to government and has been granted immortality by law, so market forces only apply in a very dampened capacity. They pay a premium for Commercial Java to be able to ask for certain features or support. ...Oracle always declines them with a variety of excuses, so there's no upside. Their older developers say they use features specific to the Oracle version, but I've never seen that, it works fine with OpenJDK, Jetbrain's, Amazon's or Microsoft's JDK
by harmonic18374 | 2025-07-15 18:06:18+00:00
I would never post any criticism of an employer in public. It can only harm my own career (just as being positive can only help it).

Given how vengeful Altman can reportedly be, this goes double for OpenAI. This guy even says they scour social media!

Whether subconsciously or not, one purpose of this post is probably to help this guy’s own personal network along; to try and put his weirdly short 14-month stint in the best possible light. I think it all makes him look like a mark, which is desirable for employers, so I guess it is working.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-15 18:06:38+00:00
What keeps your average home experimenter from building an optical clock is the fact that femtosecond combs are still way too expensive and exotic. Some progress has been made -- you can get them from ThorLabs, for instance ( https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=11... ) -- but they are still in the "Call for pricing and lead time" category.

Once optical comb sources are commoditized to the extent that solid-state lasers are now, a lot of fun stuff will become possible.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-07-15 18:06:46+00:00
> I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

So what does this mean exactly? Nothing LLM/AI related on hacker news is new to you, or you would easily have come across it without HN? Really? Where exactly are you finding your AI/LLM news?
by s1artibartfast | 2025-07-15 18:06:50+00:00
This all seems entirely reasonable. This is a cost benefit calculation. If bad drugs kill 1 person, and drug shortage kills 100, what do you choose?

The FDA chose a practical middle ground. Ban what isn't critical, and for those that are, they put additional mitigations in place:

> Exempted drugs were sent to the United States in a “phased manner,” the company said, with third-party oversight and safety testing.

>“The odds of these drugs actually not being safe or effective is tiny because of the safeguards,” said one former FDA official involved in the exemptions who declined to be named because he still works in the industry and fears professional retribution. “Even though the facility sucks, it’s getting tested more often and it’s having independent eyes on it.”
by fsckboy | 2025-07-15 18:07:03+00:00
>>Queue China cleans the air, but at what cost articles.

>Nit: You probably mean Cue, as in "That's your time to go on stage" not Queue as in "that's your place in line"

bone to pick: you missed your opportunity to cool-ly say "not queue as in hair worn in a long plait descending down the back"
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-15 18:07:54+00:00
Well, it will cause either 1) much greater efficiency, 2) lower profits, or 3) higher prices. American capitalism being what it is, 3 is the most likely outcome.

And higher prices are exactly what the inflation statistics measure. The difference is that, if tariffs go to 50%, say, and stay there, then prices rise corresponding to 50% of the foreign content, but they don't keep rising (unless either the tariff rate rises or the foreign content rises). So it would be more of a one-off bump in inflation rather than continual inflation, which is what most people mean.
by rezmason | 2025-07-15 18:08:04+00:00
This phenomenon isn't exclusive to film or even fiction.

A year or two ago, YouTube flicked a short at me where a Gen-Z fan of some personality shared their feelings of heartbreak after he announced his departure from the platform.

A montage of the channel's videos had the fan's voiceover (I'm paraphrasing): "This YouTube channel has been a part of my life, my childhood, since I was like a little kid, and I never imagined one day it would end."

And then, jarringly: "This is me right now." And a still photo of their tear-streaked face. "This is me right now," not in the emotional or confused tone of someone navigating a personal tragedy, but the straight conveyance of a sentiment that has social currency. A sentence they knew others would know how to digest. Because they've seen others use it enough times to be literate in whatever transaction it represents.

I understand their choice to include their emotional reaction, and that shows some real vulnerability that I truly appreciate, but what is "This is me right now"? Maybe it springs from the social media they grew up in— where the vast majority of posts and comments are either a status or a reaction, and discourse has been strained and reduced into signals of acknowledgement.

That's what I think this "literalism" is. It's the misshapen MICR-font metadata stamped in cultural things, so that they can be parsed by a machine— and the machine is the set of heuristics younger generations have adopted to sift through mountains of low signal-to-noise content that platforms are pushing on them.
by bluetomcat | 2025-07-15 18:08:29+00:00
> My thesis so far is something like "you should try to write little proofs in your head about your code." But there's actually a secret dual version of this post, which says "you should try to write your code in a form that's easy to write little proofs about."

Easier said than done. It is certainly feasible on greenfield projects where all the code is written by you (recently), and you have a complete mental model of the data layout and code dependencies. It's much harder to prove stuff this way when you call foo(), bar() and baz() across unit boundaries, when they modify global state and are written by different developers.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-15 18:08:35+00:00
Turn your first paragraph on its head:

Appropriate abstractions (i.e., "idiomatic code for the language and codebase") make program verification easy. If you are hand-weaving an appropriately-abstracted program, there's little benefit to thinking about loop invariants and pre-post conditions, since they don't exist at that level of generality: correct proofs follow directly from correct code.
by SirMaster | 2025-07-15 18:09:04+00:00
It shouldn't matter what the diet is. 500 cal a day is 500 cal a day and that adds up for most people on average to 1 pound a week. Whether it's 1 pound a week that you are now not gaining or 1 pound a week that you are now losing, or something in between, it's still ~1 pound of body comp worth of calories which IMO is not "minimal".

I never said exercising 500 calories a day means you will lose weight, I just disagree that: "the amount of calories burned by exercise is minimal" I still don't think it's minimal.

If you burn an extra 500 cal a day on average that will be about 50 pounds a year of "difference", whether that's you gaining less weight or losing weight that's all up to your total calorie intake of course.
by tadfisher | 2025-07-15 18:09:10+00:00
The US government did not build bombers, ICBMs, or even the Apollo vehicles. All of those were specified by agencies and contracted out to the same contractors that exist today. I think the last thing the US "manufactured" was ammunition during the Civil War, as it owned a few shot towers, but even the vast majority of those were privately-owned and contracted by the US Army.
Show HN: OSS Semantic Git Commit Search – Ask questions about your Git history
by abhinav95 | 2025-07-15 18:09:56+00:00
I built an Open Source tool that lets you search your Git commit history using natural language.

You can like: •“When was login added?” • “What changed in the auth flow?”

It embeds commit messages using OpenAI or Hugging Face models, stores them in ChromaDB, and queries them semantically with GPT via LangChain.

Features: • Fast local search (local storage) • Natural language query interface • Simple Typer-based CLI with commands to list and manage embeddings

Ideal for developers who want a smarter way to explore version history.

GitHub: [https://github.com/AbhinavArora95/git-log-search]

Feedback welcome!

Contribution Welcome!
by Manuel_D | 2025-07-15 18:10:05+00:00
For, what, the fifth time the sample in the study did express cross sex gender identity. They were trans kids, to use your terminology. A patient can't desist from a cross sex gender identity if they never expressed one in the first place. Pointing out that these patients didn't seek blockers is nonsensical since blockers weren't an option at the time. The fact of the matter is that the desisters in this study:

1. Expressed a cross-sex gender identity. They were trans kids, as you choose to term it.

2. Met the assessment criteria that would be used to approve a patient for blockers.

Yes, the desisters in the study would most likely be prescribed blockers if they went to a gender clinic that prioritized affirmation.

> The difference being that teenagers who don't explicitly seek them because they don't consider themselves as trans are never considered for undergoing puberty blockers

Again, these patients did express a cross-sex gender identity, or "consider themselves as trans" to use your language. If they never did, then they can't desist from a cross sex gender identity if they never expressed one in the first place.

> No, because teenagers who don't consider themselves trans do not seek puberty blockers and are therefore never considered for them. The main distinguisher between trans and nontrans people is their self identification.

To re-use your terminology, studies found that ~80% of the children who considered themselves trans stop considering themselves trans and become comfortable and no longer experience gender dysphoria in their cis gender after natal puberty. It seems like the root of the problem is the lack of understanding that the children in the study did "consider themselves trans", as you choose to put it.

If all you're going to do is continue to erroneously claim that the patients in this study weren't expressing a cross sex gender identity ("consider themselves trans"), or baselessly claim that the desisters are actually just repressing a trans identity then there's no value in continuing this.
by teeray | 2025-07-15 18:10:29+00:00
> If in 2009…

…is exactly inevitablist framing. This claims perfect knowledge of the future based on previous uncertain knowledge of the future (which is now certain). You could have been making the same claims about the inevitability of sporks in the late 19th century and how cutlery drawers should adapt to the inevitable single-utensil future.
by alwa | 2025-07-15 18:11:01+00:00
I read gp’s formulation differently: “if you’re working 17 hours a day, you’d better stop soon unless you’re doing it for the love of doing it.” In that sense it seems like you and gp might agree that it’s bad for you and for your coworkers if you’re working like that because of external pressures.

I don’t delight in anybody’s suffering or burnout. But I do feel relief when somebody is suffering from the pace or intensity, and alleviates their suffering by striking a more sustainable balance for them.

I feel like even people energized by efforts like that pay the piper: after such a period I for one “lay fallow”—tending to extended family and community, doing phone-it-in “day job” stuff, being in nature—for almost as long as the creative binge itself lasted.
by nayuki | 2025-07-15 18:11:06+00:00
I learned the foundations of theoretical computer science in university. I agree with the sentiment of this post, though it is hard to perform in practice.

In addition to pre-conditions and post-conditions, I would like to emphasize that loop invariants and structural induction are powerful techniques in CS proofs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_invariant , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_induction

These notes from UofT's CSC236H are on-topic: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~david/course-notes/csc236.pdf#pa...
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-07-15 18:11:35+00:00
Again you are wrong. Why do you make stuff up when you are in over your head?

The $190/MWh figure for Vogtle does not include decommissioning, waste disposal or the 99% subsidized accident insurance.

I love how you call it "chickening out" when what happened was that despite the absolutely massive handouts they couldn't work out a business case. But just keep throwing trillions at an industry experiencing negative learning by doing and hope for another outcome.

I love how you resorted to inventing new costs for storage when even you realized you couldn't dodge reality anymore.

Thank you for confirming that storage is undeniable here and that new built nuclear power is a completely unreasonable proposition in 2025.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-15 18:11:59+00:00
Yes, and no. The time-dilation effect will happen instantly, but the more quickly you want to observe it, the better your measurement's S/N ratio will have to be... and that, in turn, requires narrow measurement bandwidths that imply longer observation times.

So then the question has to be asked, does the effect really happen instantly? Or do the same mechanisms that impose an inverse relationship between bandwidth and SNR mean that, in fact, it doesn't happen instantly at all?
by ryandrake | 2025-07-15 18:12:20+00:00
> To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"

I am truly tired of AI being rammed down my throat, not just via the tech news, but in article content (slop), in un-asked-for tech product features, and at my own tech job. The solution is not to divide the community and make people unwelcome, but to provide at least some minimal set of filters and ways to opt out of the hype frenzy. I don't want people to feel unwelcome, but I do wish there was a way to turn the AI firehose off.
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-07-15 18:12:35+00:00
Netflix wasn't launched in 2007. The streaming service was launched in 2007. Netflix as a company was founded in 97 and was ubiquitous by 2002. Why go to the movies and pay $100+ for a family when you could wait 4-6 months for the home release and get the movie mailed to your home? You could go out and buy a box of microwavable popcorn and a few bags of candy and still save 80 bucks.
by encom | 2025-07-15 18:13:44+00:00
Getting a lot of undeserved pushback, but I sympathise. I have severe CAPTCHA fatigue. Any time I encounter one, unless it's something I need to use and must access, I back out. Even the proof-of-work ones. Fuck 'em. 10 seconds wasted many times a day adds up, and since I use a "strange" OS (Debian or Gentoo Linux) and a "weird" browser (maxed out uBlock and Cookie-Autodelete), ClownFlare hates me and I hate them right back in return.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-15 18:14:06+00:00
What's interesting about this view is that theorem provers ultimately boil down to sufficiently advanced type checking (the book Type Theory and Formal Proof is an excellent overview of this topic). Literally the heart of proof assistants like Lean is "if it compiles, you've proved it".

So more practical type systems can be viewed as "little" theorem provers in the sense the author is describing. "Thinking in types" so to speak, is mathematically equivalent to "writing little proofs in your head". I would also add that merely using types is not equivalent to "thinking in types" as one would be required to do writing a sufficiently advanced Haskell program.
by perihelions | 2025-07-15 18:15:10+00:00
In a 2010 experiment based on an older version of this clock[0], NIST succeeding in measuring the gravitational time dilation across a 33 cm vertical separation—a frequency difference of 4.1×10^{-17}—with 140,000 seconds of integration time (<2 days). I don't really understand how that worked.

[0] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192720 ("Optical Clocks and Relativity" (2010))