MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzzeek | 2025-07-15 18:47:45+00:00
> On the other hand, you're trying to build a product that hundreds of millions of users leverage for everything from medical advice to therapy.

... then the next paragraph

> As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing.

not if you're trying to replace therapists with chatbots, sorry
by umpalumpaaa | 2025-07-15 18:48:57+00:00
ChatGPT also makes money via affiliate links. If you ask ChatGPT something like "what is the best airline approved cabin luggage you can buy?" you get affiliate links to Amazon and other sites. I use ChatGPT most of the time before I buy anything these days… From personal experience (I operated an app financed by affiliate links). I can tell you that this for sure generates a lot of money. My app was relatively tiny and I only got about 1% of the money I generated but that app pulled in about $50k per month.

Buying better things is one of my main use cases for GPT.
by bbor | 2025-07-15 18:49:00+00:00
Fascinating question! I can't find any mention of this seemingly obvious issue.

Here's[1][2] their trademark application from February, which is still "NOT ASSIGNED". Technically it's for their logotype but I imagine it's all the same issue, considering that they include "Computer hardware" in the description of their company (which is exactly what the old one did). This site ominously says that the only action since the filing date was on June 5th, titled "LETTER OF PROTEST EVIDENCE FORWARDED" -- perhaps that's Oracle?

I think this[4] is the trademark for the original's ("Thinking Machines Corporation") trademark logotype, first used in 1987 and defunct ("cancelled"?) by 1999. Another site[5] lists three other "Dead/Cancelled" trademarks owned by the original, and two more recent attempts by randos in 2006 and 2010 that were both shot down.

Technically they're "Thinking Machine Lab Inc."[3], but they're basically always referred to without the "Lab", even to the point of using thinkingmachines.ai as their domain (which, hilariously, doesn't use their trademarked logotype). Another goofy tidbit is that they also filed a trademark for a serif logotype of the words "BEEP BOOP"[6] -- maybe that's their fallback name!

Would be fascinated to hear from anyone familiar with US trademark law on what might be going on, and how we might see what the "LETTER OF PROTEST" is! My layperson understanding would definitely tell me that Oracle would maintain the trademarks, but perhaps they were forced to let them lapse due to lack of use?

I've been slowly building (y'know how it is...) a (one-man...) company filed as "Doering Thinking Machines, LLC" for a few years (named after an old family business, "Doering Machines"), so I'm quite interested to see how this shakes out!

[1] https://furm.com/trademarks/thinking-machines-99054776

[2] For the love of god, please HN gods, just make these comments markdown. IDK what battle you're fighting but it's a baffling one. The lack of blockquotes is painful, but the lack of inline links is downright diabolical! You have three people now, you can afford the effort ;)

[3] https://trademarks.justia.com/741/37/thinking-machines-74137...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Lab

[5] https://uspto.report/TM/99051772

[6] https://trademarks.justia.com/990/71/beep-99071391.html
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-15 18:49:50+00:00
Totally tangential, but I love to read post-mortems of people fixing bugs. What were the initial symptoms? What was your first theory? How did you test it? What was the resolution? Raymond Chen does this a lot and I've always enjoyed it.

I learn more from these concrete case studies than from general principles (though I agree those are important too).

One of my most recent bugs was a crash bug in a thread-pool that used garbage-collected objects (this is in C++) to manage network connections. Sometimes, during marking, one of the objects I was trying to mark would be already freed, and we crashed.

My first thought was that this was a concurrency problem. We're supposed to stop all threads (stop the world) during marking, but what if a thread was not stopped? Or what if we got an event on an IO completion port somehow during marking?

I was sure that it had to be a concurrency problem because (a) it was intermittent and (b) it frequently happened after a connection was closed. Maybe an object was getting deleted during marking?

The only thing that was weird was that the bug didn't happen under stress (I tried stress testing the system, but couldn't reproduce it). In fact, it seemed to happen most often at startup, when there weren't too many connections or threads running.

Eventually I proved to myself that all threads were paused properly during marking. And with sufficient logging, I proved that an object was not being deleted during marking, but the marking thread crashed anyway.

[Quick aside: I tried to get ChatGPT to help--o3 pro--and it kept on suggesting a concurrency problem. I could never really convince it that all threads were stopped. It always insisted on adding a lock around marking to protect it against other threads.]

The one thing I didn't consider was that maybe an object was not getting marked properly and was getting deleted even though it was still in use. I didn't consider it because the crash was in the marking code! Clearly we're marking objects!

But of course, that was the bug. Looking at the code I saw that an object was marked by a connection but not by the listener it belonged to. That meant that, as long as there was a connection active, everything worked fine. But if ever there were no connections active, and if we waited a sufficient amount of time, the object would get deleted by GC because the listener had forgotten to mark it.

Then a connection would use this stale object and on the next marking pass, it would crash.
by masklinn | 2025-07-15 18:50:04+00:00
The authors’ previous article (linked in this one) was about doing this in re2 (https://systemf.epfl.ch/blog/re2-lookbehinds/), and they have a fork with those changes though I don’t know that they have a PR.

> the "purism" of RE2 does fly in the face of practicality to an irksome degree

It’s not purism tho. There are very practical reasons to want an FA-based engine, and if you compromise that to get additional features then the engine is pointless, you could have just used a backtracking engine in the first place.
by rudolftheone | 2025-07-15 18:50:08+00:00
The first time I read "Solar Lottery" by P. K. Dick I thought "there's no way this lottery system could work for selecting authorities."

But as I read on, the Minimax system sounded surprisingly similar to some real scientific concepts, so I investigated and realized it wasn't such a stupid idea - just one with no chance of being implemented.

Now I'm reading about it here, thank you for reminding me of that concept!
by DanMcInerney | 2025-07-15 18:50:24+00:00
This is absolutely doable right now. Just hook claude code up with your calendar MCP server and any one of these restaurant/web browser MCP servers and it'll do this for you.

https://apify.com/canadesk/opentable/api/mcp https://github.com/BrowserMCP/mcp https://github.com/samwang0723/mcp-booking
by jeffbee | 2025-07-15 18:51:12+00:00
500,000 gallons of water per day is approximately 1 golf course. There are 400 golf courses in Georgia. But "we just don't have the water!" screech bad-faith reactionaries.

If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-15 18:51:21+00:00
The frequency that is actually counted with a digital counter in this clock is only 500 MHz (i.e. after a frequency divider, because no counter can be used at the hundreds of THz of an optical signal).

Nevertheless, in order to measure a frequency difference between two optical clocks you do not need to count their signals. The optical signals can be mixed in a non-linear optical medium, which will provide a signal whose frequency is equal to the difference between the input frequencies.

That signal might have a frequency no greater than 1 GHz, so it might be easy to count with a digital counter.

Of course, the smaller the frequency difference is, the longer must be the time used for counting, to get enough significant digits.

The laser used in this clock has a frequency around 200 THz (like for optical fiber lasers), i.e. about 2E14 Hz. This choice of frequency allows the use of standard optical fibers to compare the frequencies of different optical clocks, even when they are located at great distances.

Mixing the light beams of 2 such lasers, in the case of a 1E-17 frequency difference would give a difference signal with a period of many minutes, which might need to be counted for several days to give an acceptable precision. The time can be reduced by a small factor selecting some harmonic, but it would still be of some days.
by dredmorbius | 2025-07-15 18:51:28+00:00
Your art supplies and time didn't create wealth in the economic sense ("the annual produce and labour of the nation" as Smith defines it, <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...>), but a financial asset, in the form of a (presumably) uniquely identifiable durable store of financial value.

This is contrasted with economic wealth in which some inputs (capital, labour, raw materials (themselves generally considered as capital) are transformed into some immediately useful consumable product (say, food or fuel), a durable good (clothing, furniture), a service ("immediately extinguished" in the terms of some economists, but still having potential lasting positive value), or capital which can itself be used in future economic activities (machining equipment used in the manufacture of widebody aircraft, or the aircraft themselves).

All else equal ("ceteris paribus"), the result of creating a novel but valued painting would be the same as that of inflating any other durable store of value: the relative prices of competing assets would fall proportionate to the price of the artwork. Ordinarily the drop is small and the bucket large such that this isn't noticed, but it is the net effect.

David Ricardo is amongst the first economists to deal with the economics of collectibles and durable assets of which I'm aware, e.g.,

Ricardo’s value theory applies only to those commodities that ‘can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint’; it is thus not applicable to ‘rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of a peculiar quality [...]’ (Works, I, 12)

From The Anthem Companion to David Ricardo, Edited by John E. King, p. 169.

<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/anthem-companion-to...>
by dcreater | 2025-07-15 18:51:36+00:00
1. There is an inbuilt terminal in VS code. Its almost always active for me and even if it isnt focusing it/bringing it up is the same distance as firing up voil. The benefit here is that it doesnt occupy your editor 2. What complex file names do you need text editing features for? 3. fzf and zoxide covers most of it

I dont want to return the favor of speculate on intent of comment as yours would be petulant and stubborn without focusing on meaningful rebuttal. Im placing this in my comment as based on your other responses there does seem to be a pattern.
by dmbche | 2025-07-15 18:51:58+00:00
Simple thought I had reading this:

I've used a tool to do a task today. I used a suction sandblasting machine to remove corrosion from a part.

Without the tool, had I wanted to remove the corrosion, I would've spent all day (if not more) scraping it with sandpaper (is that a tool too? With the skin of my hands then?) - this would have been tedious and could have taken me all day, scraping away millimeter by millimeter.

With the machine, it took me about 3 minutes. I necessitated 4-5 minutes of training to attain this level of expertise.

The worth of this machine is undeniable.

How is it that LLMs are not at all so undeniably efficient? I keep hearing people tell me how they will take everyones job, but it seems like the first faceplant from all the big tech companies.

(Maybe second after Meta's VR stuff)
by namibj | 2025-07-15 18:52:40+00:00
> One thing we can do which current LLMs can't, at least directly as far as I'm aware, is to go back and re-read a section. Like on-demand RAG, or something.

Encoders can do that. And we can use them with diffusion to generate text [0].

This works because you don't impose a masked self attention for autoregressive decoding in the encoder, so subsequent layers can re-focus their key/query vector space to steer "backwards" information flow.

Happy reading. Feel free to get back!

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15029
by aktau | 2025-07-15 18:52:51+00:00
This goes straight into my reference list. Sandboxing a process is confusing on Linux.

I appreciate that the article focuses on approaches that drop privileges without having root oneself. I've seen landlock referenced at time (https://lwn.net/Articles/859908/), but never so clearly illustrated (the verbosity feels like Vulkan).

Out of curiosity, I'd wish even more approaches were compared, even if they require root. I was about to mention seccomp-bpf as an approach that requires root, but skimming the LWN article I posted above I find: "Like seccomp(), Landlock is an unprivileged sandboxing mechanism; it allows a process to confine itself". It seems like I was wrong, and seccomp could be compared/contrasted.
by JeremyNT | 2025-07-15 18:52:54+00:00
Back in the year 2002...

Internet access was widely available.

Blockbuster video was a thing in almost every town.

Netflix mail service was getting big, making huge back catalogs available.

DVD players often included S/PDIF out for surround sound, which was becoming a more common part of home theaters.

Plasma TVs were becoming far more common, dramatically improving picture quality and size versus CRTs.

HBO and other premium channels had already gone digital with set top boxes (that also often supported surround sound), and the death of analog broadcast TV was (theoretically) scheduled for 2006.

So while I probably couldn't find any single specific reason for a peak in 2002, we had a whole series of tech improvements in place that were slowly chipping away at the edges in quality and content availability.
by xenadu02 | 2025-07-15 18:53:04+00:00
For the record I don't think the designers of the switch or Boeing are idiots. The switches have guard notches and the throttle quad has metal guard edges to help prevent accidental activation.

As far as we know this is the first accidental dual engine cutoff at low altitude; with just a bit more altitude (not sure of how much exactly) the engine that had restarted and was ramping would have started producing enough thrust to arrest their descent. That makes the margin of "unrecoverable" a lot smaller than you might initially think.

Bottom line is it is worth considering implementing some protection here:

1. It can be done in software without a lot of complexity 2. The transition to "air mode" is relatively reliable. 3. The failure scenario is the system doesn't provide the protection but because the failure we protect against is very rare that is acceptable 4. It typically fails "safe": allowing shutdown without delay and worst case is a delay in shutdown. 5. The fire handle overrides delay; if things are going so wrong the delay matters the engine isn't coming back and pulling the fire handle is likely already part of your checklist.

The benefit being elimination of the small window after takeoff where accidental dual engine shutdown is unrecoverable.

Obviously before implementing something like this the proper engineering and failure analysis has to be done.
by db48x | 2025-07-15 18:53:31+00:00
Mass curves space. All mass curves space all the time. You are bending the fabric of spacetime even now! Don’t try to deny it!

What does curvature mean? It means that the direction of time’s arrow is different in different places. To an observer outside of a large gravitational field, events inside the field appear to move more slowly than they would have outside of it. Black holes merely take this to an extreme. To an observer far from a black hole, a clock entering the black hole appears to slow down and finally _stop_ as it crosses the event horizon¹. But simultaneously an observer traveling with the clock observes something different. They see everything outside the black hole slow down and stop instead, while they continue to coast smoothly along. They notice nothing strange at the horizon itself; it is simply empty space with weird visuals in the distance.

This almost seems like a paradox, since the two observers each believe that the other’s clock has stopped. The reason why it’s not a paradox is that the space around the black hole is strongly curved, so strongly that the axis of time swaps place with one direction of space. At the horizon the axis of time flips over and points down into the black hole. The distant observer sees time stop because time is now edge–on, as it were. The observer falling into the black hole notices nothing weird near themselves, because both time and space still exist. Only the images of distant objects show any evidence of curvature. But the falling observer is doomed, for their own time axis now points at the singularity. Their timeline now ends abruptly, while the timeline of the distant observer extends potentially a vigintillion years.

For some edutainment on the subject, I recommend The Science Asylum. He’s done a bunch of videos on gravity and relativity, but here are two in particular:

* Explaining Gravity Using Relativistic Time Dilation <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5PfjsPdBzg&list=PLOVL_fPox2K83_36YgnGisn4rxNvgq1iR&index=7> * Why Can't You Escape a Black Hole? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPQUtuTraxs&list=PLOVL_fPox2K-zpTeryROTkmzzsMssSMWp&index=6>

¹ There are other effects too. The image of the clock _lingers_ on the horizon forever, since for it time has apparently stopped. But the redshift increases to infinity too, as the gravitational well becomes steeper, so no matter what wavelengths we observe in the image of the clock fades away beyond sight. Worse, the tidal forces caused by a real stellar–mass black hole will tear apart solid objects into a stream of plasma, even small objects. So the hypothetical black hole in our thought experiment must be very large indeed, to minimize the tidal forces enough that the clock survives the trip to the horizon intact and functional. And it can't be rotating either, since the rotation causes its own weirdness. This is the spherical cow of black holes.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 18:53:41+00:00
> And the fact that LLMs routinely make up crap that doesn't exist but sounds plausible, and the fact that this appears to be a fundamental problem with LLMs, this doesn't give you any pause on your hype train? Genuine question, how do you reconcile this?

Simply. Because the same is the case with humans. Mostly for the same reasons.

(Are humans overhyped? Maybe?)

The LLM hype train isn't about them being more accurate or faster than what came before - it comes from them being able to understand what you mean. It's a whole new category of software - programs that can process natural language like humans would; a powerful side effect that took the world by surprise is, that making LLMs better at working with natural language implicitly turns them into general-purpose problem solvers.

> Don't see what you mean by this; there's no such thing as "thoughts" of an LLM, and if you mean the feature marketers called chain-of-thought, it's yet another instance of LLMs making shit up, so.

"Chain-of-thought" is so 2024; current models don't need to be told to "think step by step", they're post-trained to first generate a stream of intermediary tokens not meant as "actual answer", before continuing with the "actual answer". You can call it however you like; however both research literature and vendors settled on calling it "thinking" or "reasoning". Treat them as terms of art, if that helps.
by creddit | 2025-07-15 18:53:56+00:00
> Which startup LLMs do you know of / recommend?

I don't for anyone doing serious work. Use the Gemini family, O3 and Claude if you want to gsd. The DoD made the correct call IMO. Kimi K2 is also potentially interesting for non-defense purposes but I haven't spent enough time with it yet.

> My fund will never be $1B but that’s fine :)

It's "trivially easy" for you and 10% of your investments are expected to have "massive breakthroughs". Your strategy of "give money to good companies and founders" should easily enable you to reach $1B AUM!
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-15 18:54:01+00:00
You would think so. Investors are eventually going to want a return on their money put in. But there seems to be a ton of hype and irrationality around AI, even worse than blockchain back in the day.

I think there's an element of FOMO - should someone actually get to AGI, or at least something good enough to actually impact the labor market and replace a lot of jobs, the investors of that company/product stand to make obscene amounts of money. So everyone pumps in, in hope of that far off future promise.

But like you said, how long can this keep going before it starts looking like that future promise will not be fulfilled in this lifetime and investors start wanting a return.
by cbm-vic-20 | 2025-07-15 18:54:11+00:00
I've not "done the math", but venting slightly warmer water vapor from a tower seems less ecologically damaging than releasing warm water back into an ecosystem that can't handle it, by diluting the waste energy over a wider area.

In the end it's about energy dissipation; that heat's got to go somewhere, and there's only so much you can recapture with cogeneration.
by Doxin | 2025-07-15 18:54:21+00:00
> The majority of music communication is not in lyrics, but in sound and tone of voice.

That could maybe be argued for music which is released as music. This song isn't stand-alone, it's part of a musical. You can't take it out of its context and then complain it doesn't make sense.

> This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.

Maybe it makes you feel good. It makes me feel conflicted.

> From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships.

I mean that's part of the point. Angel thinks they themselves are to blame for the situation they find themselves in. Which isn't true of course, but that's how it goes with abuse.

> I did not found sexual assault visuals

Well look closer then. Angels whole thing is that he puts on an act of liking all the shit happening to him. But it's pretty clearly an act in the video.

> They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.

Part of angel DOES want some of those things to happen. There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it. That doesn't make the relationship any less abusive.

> I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.

I agree it's a song about why someone would stay in an abusive relationship. That doesn't mean it's glamorizing abusive relationships though. I don't really care if people dislike the song, it's parsing the song as somehow being pro-abuse where I get annoyed, because it clearly isn't. It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.