MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xenadu02 | 2025-07-15 18:25:05+00:00
First, the fire handles would override any delay and cut fuel (and other things) immediately.

Second: the window of time where you don't have enough altitude (aka time) to restart is relatively small. So this could easily be a temporary protection.

It is difficult to find exact data on this but restart to significant thrust seems to be in the 30-60s range. If you run the numbers on climb rate and glide time the possible danger zone is relatively small, a few minutes after takeoff at most.

Is this an extremely rare event? Yes. But most other accident causes are also rare, regardless of whether they are pilot error or mechanical.

For example: you might think no pilot would deploy the thrust reversers in flight but system protection errors and/or mechanical failures have conspired to allow it and a bunch of people paid in blood to learn that reverser deployment in flight at altitude was actually unrecoverable - contrary to conventional wisdom at the time. It turned out everyone was flying around with a "kill everyone now" mechanism. In some cases with a much lower margin of safety than previously believed due to the aforementioned "conventional wisdom" that if it happened it wouldn't be a big deal.

Know what else isn't normally a big deal (relatively speaking)? Accidental shutdown of both engines. Because a single engine shutdown is easily recovered and the aircraft can fly on one engine. And dual engine shutdown is easily recovered with a restart if you have enough altitude. But it turns out there's a small window after takeoff where it is fatal.

Somewhat relatedly shutting down the wrong engine in an engine failure scenario is so common they explicitly train crews to slow down and not immediately shut down an engine after failure because rushing just leads to dual engine loss.
by imiric | 2025-07-15 18:25:42+00:00
Thanks for sharing.

One thing I was interested to read but didn't find in your post is: does everyone believe in the vision that the leadership has shared publicly, e.g. [1]? Is there some skepticism that the current path leads to AGI, or has everyone drunk the Kool-Aid? If there is some dissent, how is it handled internally?

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
by docdeek | 2025-07-15 18:26:04+00:00
In Australia, I managed to cut a year off my university studies by foregoing a Masters degree and pursuing an Honours degree instead. The usual route to the PhD was a 3 year Bachelors, 2 year Masters, and then into a PhD program. However, if you did a research intensive Honours year (50% coursework, 50% thesis) and managed to get something published in a peer-reviewed journal, you stood a good chance of going straight into a PhD program. For me, this allowed me to get a taste of research (if still at a sub-PhD level) and quickly learn what it means to move through peer-review in a journal. In my case, I think the ‘shortcut’ made sense and it paid off.

In the author’s case, it doesn’t seem clear ot me what the benefit to finishing early is. Perhaps a cost saving (community college courses are cheaper than a 4 year college?) but otherwise, why?
by giancarlostoro | 2025-07-15 18:26:18+00:00
Hoping the author can answer, I'm still learning about how this all works. My understanding is that inference is "using the model" so to speak. How is this faster than established inference engines specifically on Mac? Are models generic enough that if you build e.g. an inference engine focused on AMD GPUs or even Intel GPUs, would they achieve reasonable performance? I always assumed because Nvidia is king of AI that you had to suck it up, or is it just that most inference engines being used are married to Nvidia?

I would love to understand how universal these models can become.
by throwawayohio | 2025-07-15 18:26:18+00:00
> As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing.

I appreciate where the author is coming from, but I would have just left this part out. If there is anything I've learned during my time in tech (ESPECIALLY in the Bay Area) it's that the people you didn't meet are absolutely angling to do the wrong thing(TM).
by fuzzythinker | 2025-07-15 18:26:20+00:00
That was very different. Somehow the entire front page was Erlang, but it was only for a day or 2. AI is different from that. It's like a good 40-50% of the posts for at least a year or more, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. It's also different from web3/etc. as those were at most 10% of the posts and most of us can see it's just hype.

I'm not fighting for a split/fork, just stating the fact that it's nothing compared to Erlang.
by rglover | 2025-07-15 18:27:03+00:00
My wife and I have been talking about noticing the general cognitive decline in people we interact with. We both started to notice that people have been getting a little bit...goofy (spacing out, not really reciprocating communication, hyper-limited attention spans, etc).

We both land on a combination of social media and economic effects (people stressed to make ends meet leading to an anxious mind). AI is on the lower-end of our concerns.
by Kirby64 | 2025-07-15 18:27:05+00:00
For someone that is doing little to no exercise every day, asking someone to do an hour of moderate intensity jogging or possibly multiple hours of lower intensity activity (e.g., pickleball) is asking a lot.

Advocating for folks to exercise is a worthy cause, but you're setting people up for failure by advocating for adding a minimum of 7 additional hours a week to their schedule.

EDIT addition: Realistically, adding something like 30 mins of exercise a few times a week (3-4) is more achievable. And in that regard, it doesn't really burn meaningful calories. Maybe an additional 500-1000 a week if you're actually pushing yourself, but beginners often don't.
by trealira | 2025-07-15 18:27:42+00:00
It's true that theorem provers can be just sufficiently advanced type systems (the Curry Howard correspondence), but not all theorem provers operate that way. Isabelle/HOL operates on higher order logic. Imperative ones like SPARK or Dafny just rely on encoding preconditions and postconditions and things like loop invariants and just use SMT solvers for verification, IIRC.

Having an advanced type system does seem to encourage this sort of informal proof oriented thinking more than imperative and somewhat typeless languages do, though, since preconditions and postconditions and loop invariants and inductive proofs on loops are things you have to do yourself entirely in your head.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-15 18:27:58+00:00
Blender is often used to project the high-granularity sculpted detail onto a low-poly (rigged and clean topo) Normal map. i.e. you can get great looking assets that won't hit your poly budget as hard. When it works its great...

People have feelings, and sometimes may misinterpret others intent. I am happy we've met if we both learned something. =3
by os2warpman | 2025-07-15 18:28:04+00:00
>will not be approved by the FDA for another 2 years, so he can't give it to me.

edit: I wrote a bunch of bullshit and then deleted it but the points are:

1. Narcolepsy sucks

2. The FDA can't stop your doctor from giving you TAK-861, the likely culprit is Takeda. It is 100% legal for Takeda to sell Oveporexton so long as they don't claim that it treats narcolepsy until it has been approved, and it is 100% legal for your doctor to give it to you.

3. Have you looked at >>>RIGHT TO TRY<<<? Again, with this the ball's in Takeda's court.

https://www.fda.gov/patients/learn-about-expanded-access-and...

I know nobody believes me.

Here's an ambulance chaser's blog:

>Unapproved drugs exist in a gray area in U.S. law. Although it is not illegal to prescribe non-FDA approved drugs, it is also not viewed as best practice. If a doctor prescribes an unapproved drug, he or she could face civil liability for the patient’s injuries, illnesses, side effects or death upon taking the drug if the physician reasonably should have known of the potential health risks due to the lack of FDA approval.

https://www.liljegrenlaw.com/can-my-doctor-prescribe-non-fda...
by cgriswald | 2025-07-15 18:28:07+00:00
Whether your mind is engaged or not seems unrelated to the type of video. As a writer of fiction, even a 'mindless' video made for entertainment can send my mind reeling through possibilities, relationships, and connections I'd never thought about before, but I think that's just a quibble over wording.

You always lose what you don't use over a long enough time window and in proportion to how much you used it when you did use it. Everything that is true about this 10 minute video is true about a college course. You just retain the college course for longer because (presumably) you've spent more time in class than a 10 minutes video and you've done your homework. But if you don't use it after college, there's a strong chance you've forgotten the details.

Sometimes it's just important to know a thing exists, what it can be used for, and roughly how it is used. Everything else can be learned or refreshed when you need it.

Suppose you've watched that stats 101 video but didn't follow up. You now know:

- The broad strokes of stats 101 even if you don't have perfect recall on the details.

- What it can be used for.

- Whether the particular video is worth watching when and if you do need to use it.

Initial exposure is important. A claim could be made that if nothing is ever done with it, it is a waste; but how does someone without any knowledge know enough to decide whether they should go further with it or not?
by adrian_b | 2025-07-15 18:28:11+00:00
Optical atomic clocks based on trapped single ions like this, and also those based on lattices of neutral atoms do not provide a continuous clock signal.

They are used together with a laser (which is a component included in a so-called frequency comb, which acts as a frequency divider between the hundreds of THz of the optical signal and some hundreds of MHz or a few GHz of a clock signal that can be counted with a digital counter; that digital counter could be used as a date and time clock, except that you would need more such optical clocks, to guard against downtime; the present optical clocks do not succeed to operate for very long times before needing a reset because the trapped ion has been lost from the trap or the neutral atoms have been lost from the optical lattice; therefore you need many of them to implement a continuous time scale).

The laser is the one that provides a continuous signal. In this case the laser produces infrared light in the same band as the lasers used for optical fiber communications, and it is based on glass doped with erbium and ytterbium. The frequency of the laser is adjusted to match some resonance frequency of the trapped ion (in this case a submultiple of the frequency, because the frequency of the transition used in the aluminum ion is very high, in ultraviolet). For very short time intervals, when it cannot follow the reference frequency, because that must be filtered of noise, the stability of the laser frequency is determined by a resonant cavity made of silicon (which is transparent for the infrared light of the laser), which is cooled at a very low temperature, in order to improve its quality factor.

So this is similar to the behavior of the clock of a computer, which for long time intervals has the stability of the clocks used by the NTP servers used by it for synchronization, but for short time intervals it has the stability of its internal quartz oscillator.

This new optical atomic clock has the lowest ever uncertainty for the value of its reference frequency, but being a trapped single ion clock it has a higher noise than the clocks based on lattices of neutral atoms (because those can use thousands of atoms instead of one ion), so its output signal must be averaged over long times (e.g. many days) in order to reach the advertised accuracy.

For short averaging times, e.g. of one second, its accuracy is about a thousand times worse than the best attainable (however, its best accuracy is so high that even when averaged for a few seconds it is about as good as the best microwave clocks based on cesium or hydrogen).
by floren | 2025-07-15 18:28:34+00:00
Furbies spring to mind... They were a similar shape and size and even had two goggling eyes, but with waggling ears instead of a tentacle.

They'd impress you initially but after some experimentation you'd realize they had a basic set of behaviors that were triggered off a combination of simple external stimuli and internal state. (this is the part where somebody stumbles in to say "dOn'T hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????")
by hpincket | 2025-07-15 18:29:17+00:00
I have similar thoughts to the author [0]. I appreciate how they tracked down the three quotes. The only thing I'll add is that there's a certain ambiguity in statements of this kind. They come off as 'matter of fact', but in reality the speakers are pushing for this future.

https://hpincket.com/where-the-industry-is-headed.html
by thunky | 2025-07-15 18:29:52+00:00
Respecfully disagree...

We all know the story of WhatsApp having a billion users with 50 employees. While Slack had significantly more employees and not necessarily a better product/business.

If Slack were to cut their staff down to 50, that would mean they are the ruthless type that only care about value extraction and doesn't value their employees, right? But if they started with 50 and kept it there, they'd be celebrated for efficiency like WhatsApp?

Point is, there is no way to know how efficient a company is, or what their philosophy is, just by looking at their financials and their headcount. Even if the headcount moves.
by michael1999 | 2025-07-15 18:30:32+00:00
You make assumptions contradicted by reality.

The sleazy (edited - shouldn't call this standard) playbook for old oil wells is for the operators to sell them to a shadier operator company and transfer the risk. The shady firm then siphons the money out and declares bankruptcy.

The standard cycle is that they pump while the money is good. Then when commodity prices crash, those shell companies are insolvent. Industry lobbies for easements on their cash reserves as a favour during the "temporary downturn". The shady guys just walk away with their pockets stuffed full of money, and the regulator is left holding the bag.

Most operators are responsible, and decommission the wells. But the industry has to maintain a whole insurance policy for "orphan wells", and it is always under-funded. Alberta alone is going eat a couple of billion in orphan cleanup.

This process only gets harder when the satellite is "owned" by a shell-company domiciled in Mauritius.

The actual solution is a series of international treaties. The USA government has signed a global promise that they are directly liable for any object launched by any actor in the USA . All treaty signatories are on the same hook. The government in turn then has to track them all, else how do they manage their liability?

How could a private company possibly play this role in a global treaty process? Over decades?

https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/lia...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 18:30:35+00:00
A virus that kills their hosts itself dies out quickly. Viruses that thrive, and that we actually have most problems with, are ones that spread before manifesting symptoms.

Much like viruses, systems are subject to selection pressures over time. Systems that are too damaging to society makes society develop memetic, cultural and legal immunity against them. Systems that let individual members easily kill them are fragile and don't survive either.

Systems that thrive are ones that are mild enough to not cause too much external resistance, and are resilient enough to not allow individuals to accidentally or intentionally break them from within.
by xenadu02 | 2025-07-15 18:30:55+00:00
There is a relatively short window where dual engine shutdown is unrecoverable. Once you have a bit of altitude (and these jets climb at 2000-3000fpm) you have time for a restart and as thrust comes back sink rate will decrease even on one engine.

My proposal is during this window if dual engine shutdown is commanded don't do it. Treat it like it is happening - show the EICAS message, give the alert, but don't actually do the shutdown until the window has passed. This gives the pilots 10 seconds of startle factor then a bit of time to flip the switch back on.

Single engine shutdown would still behave as today so sure if one engine eats a fan blade shut it down. Not that it matters, the engine computer is going to cut fuel in that case anyway.

Insert a delay only for shutting down the remaining engine and only for X seconds after transition to air mode. A delay that the fire handle overrides.

Just a tiny bit of insurance. There aren't any emergency scenarios at low altitude where engine shutdown works but pulling the fire handle does not. You are coming right back to land at the airport no matter what.
by taeric | 2025-07-15 18:31:40+00:00
I feel like this is reaching for the vocabulary that you get in mathematics of axioms, postulates, and theorems. Not in a bad way, mind. Just the general idea of building a separate vocabulary for the different aspects of a system of knowledge.

I also think things get complicated with holding things constant as a necessity. Often times, the best way to find a bug is to ask not "how was this possible?" but "why would another part of the system modify this data?"

Obviously, if you can make things reference capable data, you should do so. But, all too often "this data being X" has a somewhat self evident explanation that can help. And just "copy so I don't have to worry about it" lands you squarely in "why is my copy out of date?"
by readthenotes1 | 2025-07-15 18:32:24+00:00
I would imagine that the modern definition of gender is less important for healthcare then the biological sex of the patient.

I feel it is one of the unfortunate consequences of "sex" being a noun and a verb, as well as a somewhat prudish desinclination to asking "has external genitalia" and use "gender" instead that lead us to the logomachy we have today.

(Of course the label should not have been gender or sex in either case because all one can determine at birth is whether they see a penis or not, and for less than 1% of humans that's not sufficient to determine their genetic makeup)
by leakycap | 2025-07-15 18:33:53+00:00
You think that I'm looking at the wrong thing? I'm looking at "Wheels of Aurelia" in the App store, subtitle "Interactive Italian Road Trip" and published by Santa Ragione srl

Did you take the time to download it or look at the listing vs the article?

The article itself has a large image and no screenshots of the app. The app looks nothing like the image in the article, though.
by dang | 2025-07-15 18:34:43+00:00
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-07-15 18:34:47+00:00
Maybe I’m naïve/ignorant of how things are done in the VC world, but given the absolutely enormous amount of money flowing into so many AI startups right now, I can’t imagine that the gravy train is going to continue for more than a few years. Especially not if we enter any sort of economic downturn/craziness from the very inconsistent and unpredictable decisions being made by the current administration
by SirMaster | 2025-07-15 18:36:00+00:00
Well of course you don't just jump from 0 to that much a day/week. It would and should take a newcomer a few months to ramp up to that level, but I believe that most people can support that amount of activity.

I mean sure I agree that 500-1000 cal a week in exercise would be minimal which is precisely why I think people should have a more ambitious goal to work into their life even if it takes months to get to that level.
by wolrah | 2025-07-15 18:36:00+00:00
And it's not like hardware can't get itself in to infinite loops (often with destructive results instead of just denial of service).

If you think leaking memory or handles is bad, watch what happens when a turbo starts leaking oil in to the intake tract of a diesel engine. It's exciting, as long as you're not paying for it or in the shrapnel zone.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-15 18:36:13+00:00
I don’t see much risk to creatives and workers (hold the number of workers constant and have them all get more productive, and the world is a better place).

But, I do wonder about smaller teams accomplishing more, which the unit of work-doing-people can be much smaller. The org tree can shrink, probably knock out some levels. Maybe a team of 4 that does the work previously done by 10 finds it easier to just have someone directly interface with the customer, rather than needing a layer of project managers and customer service to receive customers messages and distribute them.

I’d be worried if I was… anywhere above an IC really.
by myrandomcomment | 2025-07-15 18:36:23+00:00
I love how these guys are trying to sort the lack of competition in broadband, stood up and did something about it and all the geeks on HN are upset that they are not doing something that the majority of their customers would not give shit about or even come close to understanding.

Everyone here that has started a company to challenge the entrenched monopoly raise your hands please.

I understand the tech deeply and that does not translate to the practical needs of trying to run a successful business.

I raise a toast to these guys. Well done.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-15 18:37:13+00:00
> do not have the ability to challenge your assumptions or think laterally.

Particularly on the challenging your assumptions part is where I think LLMs fail currently, though I won't pretend to know enough about how to even resolve that; but right now, I can put whatever nonsense I want into ChatGPT and it will happily go along telling me what a great idea that is. Even on the remote chance it does hint that I'm wrong, you can just prompt it into submission.

None of the for-profit AI companies are going to start letting their models tell users they're wrong out of fear of losing users (people generally don't like to be held accountable) but ironically I think it's critically important that LLMs start doing exactly that. But like you said, the LLM can't think so how can it determine what's incorrect or not, let alone if something is a bad idea or not.

Interesting problem space, for sure, but unleashing these tools to the masses with their current capabilities I think has done, and is going to continue to do more harm than good.
by asdefghyk | 2025-07-15 18:37:24+00:00
)ne paragraph "...The AI race raises the stakes for Microsoft. The company met the cloud computing revolution unprepared and has no desire to be caught flat-footed again. So far this year, the company has pumped $80 billion into AI infrastructure investments......"

Reminded me that, Microsoft was caught flatfooted with the rise of the internet too. Interestingly, have seen comments that this was mentioned in the 1st edition of book "Hard Drive" but 2nd edition had this information removed ....
by henryfjordan | 2025-07-15 18:37:27+00:00
Google does put AI output at the top of every search now, and sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it's crap. They have been trying since long before LLMs to not just provide the links for a search but also the content.

Google used to be interested in making sure you clicked either the paid link or the top link in the results, but for a few years now they'd prefer that a user doesn't even click a link after a search (at least to a non-Google site)