MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stopachka | 2025-07-16 20:34:41+00:00
Thank you. There was a lot to extensions that was bit of scope for the essay, which I would love to go deeper on in later writing.

Some open questions I had as I thought through extensions:

We talked about the data abstraction side: when you expose data, it's easier for end-users to build extensions. But there are questions on UIs and data modeling.

UIs: How cool would it be agents could "enter" into applications and change the UI? In one sense this hard, but at least a demo feels in reach. What if an app exposed the UI components that it was built out of? This would let the agent remix them.

Data modeling: Exposing data works, but what if users want to store extra information? Maybe each user could spin up their own separate "extra" database.
by kristjansson | 2025-07-16 20:35:05+00:00
They have a convention of prefacing articles with a category from their own taxonomy (“Personal History”, “Shouts and Mumurs”, “Reporter at Large”, “Talk of the town”, etc.) that signify the sort of article you’re going to get. In print this works well, as the heading is prominent, and each type occurs in a somewhat consistent order in the magazine, so you have a few clues you might be reading a type you dislike. I worry this hasn’t translated well to their online readership, and has contributed to a poorer reputation than they deserve.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-07-16 20:35:32+00:00
Unfortunately I think the competitive pressures to improve model performance makes this kind of monitor-ability is short-lived. It's just not likely that textual reasoning in english ismost optimal.

Researchers are already pushing in this direction:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05171

"We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This stands in contrast to mainstream reasoning models that scale up compute by producing more tokens. Unlike approaches based on chain-of-thought, our approach does not require any specialized training data, can work with small context windows, and can capture types of reasoning that are not easily represented in words. We scale a proof-of-concept model to 3.5 billion parameters and 800 billion tokens. We show that the resulting model can improve its performance on reasoning benchmarks, sometimes dramatically, up to a computation load equivalent to 50 billion parameters."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769

Can't monitor the chain of thought if it's no longer in a human legible format.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-16 20:35:33+00:00
Sure, but if everyone stops going to restaurants, guess what happens to them?

Cutting for the sake of cutting ignores what you are cutting. Cutting healthcare and education gets very expensive in the long run, for example, if you do enough damage. It is premature to declare victory when the knock-on effects are years or decades down the line. (As with not paying your mortgage; it'll be a little while before the pain hits.)
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-16 20:35:37+00:00
The nature and place of my work helped to quickly clear this.

I volunteered to help because I knew that even broadly planning the recovery, evidence preservation etc. would be completely beyond the capabilities of the two IT folks (they were extremely nice and helpful, and glad that there was someone to help).

I was there to draw things on the board and ask the questions that will help to recover. I would not have (nor want, not have the need) to access patient information. This is something I warned them about early in the process, as the chaos was growing.

You need to imagine a large hospital completely blocked, with patients during an operation being stabilized and driven away.

I am used to crisis situations and having someone who will anticipate things you do not think about (how to communicate, how to reach prople having planned procedures, who does what and who talks with whom) is a useful person to have before the authorities kick in.

My wife had a planned operation that morning and I was on site when the ransomware hit, it is just this. Nothing James Bond like, just sheer luck to have been around.

The hospital made a recovery but it took about a year IIRC
by globular-toast | 2025-07-16 20:35:50+00:00
Tabs visible at all is wasted space. I only need to see the options when I'm actively trying to change tab. I don't need to see them on the screen at all times.

This is one of the things I love about my Emacs config. I just hit a key to get things like buffers or file trees up when I need them, then they disappear.

I'd love to have a keyboard driven browser but whenever I've tried I always end up with one hand on the mouse anyway so it doesn't work.
by dangoodmanUT | 2025-07-16 20:35:53+00:00
To actually retrieve the row, yeah, but a btree index size scales ~linearly with the dataset size.

You can prune based on partitions, minmax indexes, then bloom filters first. By that point the row group scan, if all other cheks suggest that the row you are after is in the block, is a very small amount of data.

https://itnext.io/how-do-open-source-solutions-for-logs-work... covers this very well
by deepsun | 2025-07-16 20:35:53+00:00
Try Kotlin then.

I wouldn't call it a new language, for me it's just a syntactic sugar over Java, but for any problem you would google "how to do X in Java", not "how to do X in Kotlin".

But there you can do way simpler syntax, like:

0..100 meters with -45..45 deg within 3 seconds

Because "0..100 meters ..." is equivalent to "(0..100).meters(...)"

(0..100) is a built-in IntRange type, that you can extend:

data class MyDistanceRange(val meters: ClosedRange<Double>) val IntRange.meters: MyDistanceRange get() = MyDistanceRange(first.toDouble()..last.toDouble())

and
by sedatk | 2025-07-16 20:35:56+00:00
It was quite silly. The most common bug with binary search is calculating the middle point: `(start + end) / 2`. It looks straightforward, but "start + end" could cause an integer overflow for large data structures, and that would break the function. IIRC, my handling for that case also turned out to be incorrect, and one of the readers caught it. I don't remember if there were other bugs, there could be, but that one hurt the most :)
by philipkglass | 2025-07-16 20:36:16+00:00
Read this if you have time to kill:

"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of World War II, originally published in 1997:

https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm

I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my time just pulling up the link again because it's so long yet compelling.
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-16 20:36:22+00:00
> having one thread per socket

I didn’t say that. You can serve multiple sockets on a thread.

I could respond to more points. But ultimately my point is that if, for, switch etc is the kind of code you can read and debug. And async/callback is not. Async await tries to make the code look more like regular code but doesn’t succeed. I’m just advocating for actually writing normal blocking code.

A thread is exactly the right abstraction - a program flow. Synchronization is a reality of having multiple flows of execution.

I’m interested in the project mentioned in the sibling comment about virtual threads which maybe reduces the overhead (alleviating your I/O bound concern) but allows you to write this normal code.
by rvnx | 2025-07-16 20:36:42+00:00
Examples: github.internal.companyname.com or jira.corp.org or jenkins-ci.internal-finance.acme-corp.com or grafana.monitoring.initech.io or confluence.prod.internal.companyx.com etc

These, if you don't know the host, you will not be able to hit the backend service. But if you know, you can start exploiting it, either by lack of auth, or by trying to exploit the software itself
by prerok | 2025-07-16 20:36:53+00:00
Well, education researchers are trying to communicate that knowledge is never "transferred".

IIRC (I don't recall where I read about this), there are two problems:

1. "transfer" gives the impression that a person can copy their knowledge to another person, but that is not the case. The teacher says, writes the words or even demonstrates, but the brain in the student is making its own connections and tries to explain it in its own frame of reference. It may click, or may not, or may even click in the wrong way, leading to learning a different lesson from the one being taught.

2. The teacher may have tacit knowledge they do not know they have to teach, or convey by some other means. Most teachers don't even realize that this tacit knowledge is not present in their students.

So, maybe nitpicking a bit, but "transfer" is not the right word for it.
by elemcontrib | 2025-07-16 20:37:20+00:00
I think its a personal call. If as an engineer you value your art you will go deep, be the best at what you do, and be valuable in the correct context. If you're a product manager you just need to know enough to communicate with engineers or to make informed technology decisions. Either way, whatever you are or do, there is in my opinion more merit in pursing depth in whatever you do.
by alganet | 2025-07-16 20:38:57+00:00
This is likely to be less important than it really is.

It reminds me of the "new state of matter discovered" kinds of articles that are known to get clicks.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%22new%2...

And also the "vantablack" fad:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=vantabla...

Basically, any potential discovery that can barely fit the "new kind of..." usually sounds more impressive than it really is.

This article is full of it.

I'm a programmer with very basic knowledge of magnetism, so, I can't say for sure what the discovery means, or if it is a discovery at all.
by actinium226 | 2025-07-16 20:38:59+00:00
Most fusion reactors are expected to use Deuterium/Tritium as fuel both because He3 is hard to source and more importantly because the D-T "cross section" is much larger than any other reaction: https://scipython.com/blog/nuclear-fusion-cross-sections/

See how D-T peaks at ~60keV? And the peak is much higher than any of the others, including D-He3? This means you need lower temperatures to achieve D-T fusion (keV is ~temperature) and larger cross section means that you're more likely to get a fusion instead of a scatter when a D meets a T.

D-He3 is promising because it produces no neutrons and so reduces requirements for neutron shielding and handling of radioactive material (but if you're fueling a reactor with D-He3 you can't stop D-D reactions from happening, and those produce neutrons, so you still need some shielding and contamination procedures).
by wiseowise | 2025-07-16 20:40:10+00:00
You overlooked one crucial fact.

> I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.

They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking shit. The moment you hit adulthood in modern times you're bombarded with bazillion of bullshit. Do you seriously believe your meticulously hand-crafted email is high enough on someones radar that they'll actually pay attention?
by totisjosema | 2025-07-16 20:40:45+00:00
Other author here, This started as an experiment to see how much the performance of models improves when you give them examples — basically, how big of a difference do examples actually make? We also wanted to explore whether there’s an ideal number of examples that gives the best results. Was quite fun and scalable to battle any LLMs you want…

We have a short video walkthrough of the setup here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1MhXgmHbwk
by allears | 2025-07-16 20:40:52+00:00
Being a quick learner is a good thing, but there comes a point where thorough knowledge and broad overviews are required to take you to the next level.

Learning new skills is always a gamble, what's valuable today may not be much use tomorrow. But still, the more tools in your toolbox, the wider the variety of problems you can solve. HR departments (and now AI) are certainly over-obsessed with seeing acronyms on your resume, but there's a basic truth behind that.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-16 20:41:28+00:00
Conclusion Exercise is an effective treatment for improving sleep in patients with insomnia. Among the various exercise interventions, yoga, Tai Chi and walking or jogging are more effective than other exercises.

I'm a year into daily 3-5mi fast walking (85°dp so clothes are soaked) and 6 years into chronic insomnia. I can't spot any improvement in my insomnia. I'm walking to not be sedentary so it's fine.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-16 20:41:32+00:00
Note there is a slice of B2C products that are sold like he is thinking. I wanted a subscription to Polypane, got a free trial and ultimately my administrative assistant punched in our P-card number to their web site. I had to fill out paperwork to satisfy one of New York’s largest private employers, but the burden was all on me —- though there would have been no free trial for a product that didn’t exist and the paperwork wouldn’t have been so simple if it didn’t.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-16 20:41:42+00:00
Interoperability exception might allow this in exigent circumstances when you do have a valid license, but I wouldn’t do this without running it by the software vendor whose license you are using. In a recovery situation, you’ll probably need to be on the phone a lot, so I can see how you might think it’s quicker to bypass the license check, but that is one person giving some or all of their attention just to that. Disaster recovery isn’t a one person job unless that one person was the whole team anyway, so I think this idea needs to be calibrated somewhat to expectations.
by gryfft | 2025-07-16 20:41:49+00:00
> In other words, if gigantic financial institutions get to decide what is appropriate and what is not, who is to say it won't eventually impact regular games? One Steam user notes that "queer content gets flagged as 'explicit' even when it's PG," which is a sentiment echoed by others. One user says this move "looks innocuous at first glance but it's a trojan horse."

In the short term, looks like this clears some pretty questionable sex game slop out of the Steam database. Longer term, with the way things are going in the US, I wonder if LGBTQ+ content is going to start getting taken down en masse as "adult content."
by latexr | 2025-07-16 20:42:10+00:00
> They can also complain and make snarky comments.

On HN the snark is specifically frowned upon. From the Guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
by photonthug | 2025-07-16 20:42:34+00:00
First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around.

Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around.

Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean.

Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-07-16 20:42:51+00:00
Passing each column should count for 10 points, and your score should be dinged -1 point for each keypress. Pressing a key that's not on the screen should be a -5 point penalty. Game over if you drop below 0 points. That would solve the button mashing easy win problem.

Also, perhaps my skills are lacking, but the game essentially becomes impossible after the columns become 6 blocks wide — the fraction of open (i.e. fully breakable) rows becomes small enough that open rows between adjacent columns are often further apart vertically than the ship can travel, given its speed and the game's horizontal scroll rate. I like the sibling commenter's suggestion of pseudorandomly carving navigable paths between columns, as opposed to the current method of having a uniform 80% probability that an individual tile is breakable.
by dalyons | 2025-07-16 20:42:52+00:00
not nothing. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46...

"people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours."

will things still get somewhat bad, certainly yeah. but there's a very real chance we're on track to a mostly carbon free future in a ~ decade. Im pessimistic about a lot of things but there is a lot to be optimistic about here.
by nickdothutton | 2025-07-16 20:44:16+00:00
Reminds me as a kid I spent all my money on a Springer Verlag book on Fractals[1] in the 1988s, and attempted to reproduce some of the forms on a z80 home computer. Very, Very, slowly.

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-3784-6
by nickjj | 2025-07-16 20:44:52+00:00
> I think part of that was growing up in a situation where losing something important like a phone or laptop was a financial hardship that meant real, lasting pain.

The brain is interesting, that's for sure. Old habits and mindsets stick around a long time.

I still write important things on paper like final destination addresses or reservation numbers because I don't trust my phone.

When I went on a solo 2 week Euro trip to Portugal and Spain last year I had ~30 printed pieces of paper of reservation details / maps in my backpack just in case something happened with my phone. I didn't carry them all with me everywhere but as time went on in the trip, I brought the specific ones with me for that day in a day bag.

I didn't plan the trip in too much detail, mainly just hotel reservations and high level bullets for things to do in the few cities I went to but having everything printed gave me peace of mind. I didn't have to use a single piece of paper in the end.

It does make me think how much easier it would be traveling with a friend or partner because having 2 phones is a massive perk for redundancy.
by justinc8687 | 2025-07-16 20:45:16+00:00
I use the technique of taping a microsd card with copies of my passport, credit cards, 2fa backup codes, etc, encrypted; along with a $100 to the bottom of my insole inside my shoe. Put them in a little "crack sized" ziplock, add lots of gaffers tape (so if you take the insole out it's not obvious, plus makes it a bit waterproof) and if I ever get mugged, I have enough cash to get a cab (or depending on where I am, pay a bribe) and then find a computer I can use to get my info and figure out next steps.

Normally carry a yubikey with me (2, in fact, one on me, one in my big bag at my hostel / hotel). But if I get mugged between airport - hostel, then at least I have the shoe backup.

A 3rd level is that my parents have a yubikey and 2fa backup codes for me. They dont have my passwords, but in a pinch, I can call them to read me a code.

Very open to ideas on things to improve...
by em-bee | 2025-07-16 20:46:25+00:00
not reviewing submissions is a big problem. i know i can trust linux distributions because package submissions are being reviewed. and especially becoming a submitter is an involved process.

if anyone can just sign up then how can i trust that? being maintained by the PSF they should be able to come up with the funding to support a proper process with enough manpower to review submissions. seems rubygems suffers from the same problem, and the issues with npm are also well known.

this is one of those examples where initially these services were created with the assumption that submitters can be trusted, and developers/maintainers work without financial support. linux distributions managed to build a reliable review process, so i hope these repositories will eventually be able to as well.
by markburns | 2025-07-16 20:46:30+00:00
I had a realisation recently that we’re pretty comfortable with regional dialect borders being an entrenched and normal thing that reach back in history a thousand years or more and that something as specific as how we move our mouths and tongues is strongly correlated geographically.

But we don’t often pay attention to other types of physical and behavioural culture being as geographically entrenched as they sometimes seem to be.

Accents hold some special place in being so recognisable but I think there’s no obvious reason we wouldn’t have many other layers of physical culture like this.

The signal is a bit harder to pick up but I’m sure it’s there.

I’m not trying to make any particular point for or against damaging stereotypes here.
by Izikiel43 | 2025-07-16 20:46:43+00:00
Funnily enough, GLP1 might fix this food production issue as well. Since urges for junk food and stuff are lowered as well, it would be interesting to map how GLP1 spreads through the population vs junk food consumption.

Matt Levine in his column actually addressed that GLP1 could cause the junk food/alcohol/other addictive stuff industries to lose a lot of money due to less consumption.

It's possible that junk food becomes a niche thing given enough time and GLP1.
by Expurple | 2025-07-16 20:46:56+00:00
> A line of code does not depend on a million other things.

But it does! To qoute my top-level comment:

> What about about race conditions, null pointers indirectly propagated into functions that don't expect null, aliased pointers indirectly propagated into `restrict` functions, and the other non-local UB causes?

In other words: you set some pointer to NULL, this is OK in that part of your program, but then the value travels across layers, you've skipped a NULL check somewhere in one of those layers, NULL crosses that boundary and causes UB in a function that doesn't expect NULL. And then that UB itself also manifests in weird non-local effects!

Rust fixes this by making nullability (and many other things, such as thread-safety) an explicit type property that's visible and force-checked on every layer.

Although, I agree that things like macros and trait resolution ("overloading") can be sometimes hard to reason about. But this is offset by the fact that they are still deterministic and knowable (albeit complex)
by neuralRiot | 2025-07-16 20:47:06+00:00
“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.“

Alan Watts