MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josteink | 2025-07-24 06:08:07+00:00
I'm going to call good old "supply & demand" at this.

There was a demand for information, and people made websites to make that information easily accessible. The market was working.

Then cheap/free hosting combined with Google Ads came along incentivized the market to SPAM the internet with SEO-optimized websites which makes that information just as inaccessible as the market could possibly tolerate. Basically the market converged on enshittification, rather than excellence.

The result of that was that users were forced to search, the first SEO spam, then the second, then the third and maybe somewhere along the line they found what they were really looking for, from a real website. The market just barely supplied what there was a demand for.

But thanks to AI and LLMs, the power has now shifted back to the users, and we can sidestep all the Google Ads SEO SPAM enshittification nonsense. If this is done via ChatGpt, DDG Chat or Google AI overviews, I don't really care.

Once again we have gained easy access to information without any ill-incentivized middle men making the process cumbersome. This is absolutely a good thing. If this means the death of Google Ads funded content farms, I'm all for it.

The niche sites which contains real information was never funded or driven by Google Ads in the first place, so hopefully they won't buckle under during this minor AI apocalypse.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-24 06:08:42+00:00
I admit that I was not aware of their use of Haskell, so thanks for bringing this up! It motivated me to go and actually read (parts of) their paper [0].

> Their main proof strategy is to prove the Haskell version correct; then prove the C version matches the Haskell version.

However, I don't think this is right. By my understanding of the paper, the Haskell implementation isn't proven to be correct, it's more of a prototyping tool. The Haskell version is used as an intermediate representation that can be automatically translated into Isabelle/HOL and quickly proven to have various properties. If the proofs don't work at this level, it's easy to change, re-translate, and re-check. To make it easily tramslatable to Isabelle/HOL, they forego many Haskell features, such as typeclasses, or making use of laziness. The Haskell program is also designed to match the eventual C implementation, so it's using C-like data types, pointers, etc - not native Haskell data structures,nor making use of the Haskell GC.

The proofs achieved at this level apply to the auto-generated Isabelle/HOL translation of the Haskell code. The Haskell runtime is not modeled here in any way, and as such the proofs do not hold for the Haskell executable code that you can run on the simulator.

The Haskell prototype was then translated manually to C, trying to keep as close to a 1:1 translation as possible, while still allowing various micro-optimizations. Then, the exact C code was manually translated back to Isabelle/HOL, where they also had a complete model of the semantics of every C statement that they used (they use a subset of C, with the biggest missing feature being references to local variables - you can't use &x if x is a local variable in their C code). Isabelle/HOL was then used to check that this manually written implementation implemented the abstract specification with all of the proven guarantees.

So, the Haskell part was ultimately a convenience, not a fully necessary part of the proof (though the whole thing would probably not have been feasible had they not used it). It was a decent middle ground between being possible for the kernel devs to define the code in it, and the formal verification guys to translate it to Isabelle and verify it. If they had tried to write the C code directly, the cost of translating any change to the C code back to Isabelle for verification would have been too high. Conversely, having the kernel devs learn enough Isabelle to define the prototype code directly in Isabelle would have also been too complicated as well - and I believe the Isabelle code could not be easily executed to be able to do more regular debugging on it during the development process, the way the Haskell code could be run on the simulator.

[0] https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2009/papers/klein-...
by ashoeafoot | 2025-07-24 06:08:43+00:00
Missing the dictator. A bloody marry in a soup coup, with a brainshaped bannana vodka jelloshot in the middle. Decorated with dark chocolate pistols, dark choclate toy soldiers and a stenciled sugarlines looking like cocaine maps on the rim.

Would that (a redecorated bloody mary ) get in the list?
by ripped_britches | 2025-07-24 06:12:37+00:00
Why is this being framed as a problem? People are obviously happier with the new feature, duh

Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going

If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site
by josteink | 2025-07-24 06:13:01+00:00
> The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their cash cow ad business

This is not for Google to decide.

The users have spoken clearly that (when given an option) they will not tolerate or succumb to the SPAM of shitty SEO-optimized content-farms which has been plaguing the internet for the last decade.

If Google don't provide meaningful results in their search page, people will use ChatGPT or something else to sidestep the SEO SPAM issue all together.
by barbazoo | 2025-07-24 06:13:40+00:00
Oh I was just assuming, it’s not a strongly held belief.

I’m just trying to make sense of the situation. It’s a shit car, ugly as hell, everyone hates it, etc you don’t see that very often nowadays. Everything is usually so sterile and researched to death in advance. By the time it hits the market there is usually going to be some demand. It’s new to me that a billionaire just whips his dick around and does whatever he wants, market fit be damned.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-24 06:14:11+00:00
I’m absolutely talking out of my ass but I don’t think YouTube the company was profitable before the Google acquisition and I was under the impression that the increased aggressiveness about ads (displaying and preventing adblock) and the resulting YouTube premium push was a drive towards getting the YouTube subproject to be profitable.

It’s not impossible to make a video streaming platform profitable, but it definitely is hard and it likely isn’t possible with arbitrary unlimited free uploads.
by ljf | 2025-07-24 06:14:15+00:00
He (like me) is in the UK - unless you go for a brand name, many of the tyres people run here are low quality import tyres - while 10k is low, my ICE has occasionally only got 20k from a set, but that is mainly due to the tyres cracking from sun damage (still got over 4 year out of them before that happened).

Cheap tyres are often a bad investment, but I drive country lanes with a higher risk of punctures and I was burning through brand name tyres, a full set is worth more than my car!
by PixelMoondust | 2025-07-24 06:14:26+00:00
There definitely is!!! There's a few GeoCities archives projects out there, but these ones specifically let's you search through the areas:

https://geocities.restorativland.org/Baja/ https://www.oocities.org/baja/

If you can find your site here (you may not be able to because I'm sure these sites don't have every single site archived), then you could try to find it through the Internet Archive, or through geocities.ws!
by itwasntandy | 2025-07-24 06:14:32+00:00
Thank you Nick.

As a recurse alum (s14 batch 2) I loved reading this. I loved my time at recurse and learned lots. This highlight from the post really resonates:

“ Real growth happens at the boundary of what you can do and what you can almost do. Used well, LLMs can help you more quickly find or even expand your edge, but they risk creating a gap between the edge of what you can produce and what you can understand.

RC is a place for rigor. You should strive to be more rigorous, not less, when using AI-powered tools to learn, though exactly what you need to be rigorous about is likely different when using them.”
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-24 06:15:10+00:00
You just felt like coming into a thread which was bound to be populated by people talking about using LLM for coding to let them know that their work isn't important because they use an LLM.

It seems to me the only reason someone would feel the need to do such a thing is to validate their own experience. If everyone else seems to be finding value in a tool, but you cannot, it must be because everyone else just isn't doing important things with it.

As I said earlier, I would be concerned about such behavior if I found myself doing it.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-24 06:15:16+00:00
I think the comparisons of Star Trek to Iain Banks’s Culture series are immediately obvious and welcomed by me and many others in this comment section. I’d like to draw attention toward Peter F. Hamilton’s works, and specifically those in his Commonwealth Saga and its sequels and one-shots. The Advancer and Higher subcultures embody different strains of hacker archetypes; the Higher culture is largely post-scarcity for commodities and incidental expenses, with everything excess costing “matter-engergy credits” essentially, representing the cost to their society to provide you with rabbits from hats upon request. Everyone gets a UBI of these credits every pay period, and they may be stockpiled, traded, and vested. More importantly, they can be discounted, as humans are only in the loop as a formality for most civilian requests. It’s a really interesting concept, and I don’t want to spoil anything for those who are new to the books, of which there are many.

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/anyone-here-read-the-void-se...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?21641
by apichat | 2025-07-24 06:15:28+00:00
> The EIT Urban Mobility report also refers to the bigger picture: moving commuters out of private cars and into public transport, cycling, or walking can achieve up to five times more reduction in non-exhaust emissions than individual electrification.

And this is just one the many nuisances produce by cars.

Electric cars do not massively reduce almost any of the pollution produced by cars.

We have to reduce the automobile fleet by at least 95% to solve all the nuisances produces by cars.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-24 06:18:19+00:00
That's because the Chinese are far ahead in battery technology and related supply chains. US manufacturers are only now starting to use LFP in larger volumes. Reason: limited amount of local producers capable of producing LFP batteries. This is starting to change as some local producers are now licensing technology from the likes of CATL. For example Ford is doing this.

They are years behind with sodium ion which is being mass produced in China already and being used in ultra cheap EVs that simply don't exist in the US market.

And then solid state batteries are also something that China looks to be on track with to start producing in larger volumes in the next year (low volume production is already happening). And that's despite companies like Amprius, Quantumscape, etc. being based in the US. In short, the US car manufacturing industry has long lost its leadership position. And that's including Tesla that until a few years ago was producing better EVs than others. No longer true and they are struggling to keep up currently.
by unixhero | 2025-07-24 06:18:47+00:00
Debian has two long running bugs

When you su to root, the whole path or a different path is loaded. One has to type su and then su - in order to reach all the regular bin and abin directories. It is flagged, but Debian team won't fix. As a user it is not great.

Secondly, Debian now ships with Raspberrypifirmware package, even on intel installs. When you enable backports to install a newer kernel, this fails due to this package bring there . It ks a major hassle to fix, and without Chatgpt/competitors it is very easy to get lost troubleshooting this.
by ninjin | 2025-07-24 06:19:15+00:00
As someone having worked in natural language processing for nearly twenty years, I understand where you are coming from with this jab at Chomsky, but it is ultimately a misrepresentation of his work and position. Chomsky has to the best of my knowledge never showed any interest in building intelligent machines as he does not view this as a science. Here is a fairly recent interview (2023) with him where he outlines his position well [1]. I should also note that I am saying this as someone that spent the first half of their career constantly defending their choice of statistical and then deep learning approaches from objections from people who were (are?) very sympathetic to Chomsky's views.

[1]: https://chomsky.info/20230503-2
by ggm | 2025-07-24 06:19:29+00:00
Although totally unspectacular, lake Thetis (its a small pond) has much smaller stromatelites, which you can see from a walkway. It is walking distance outside of Cervantes, which in turn is one of the closest places to stay near the Pinnacles, a sweet little national park with unusual sandstone formations.

These ones are a few inches high, pancakes in the shallows of the lake. But amongst the oldest living things and I thought worth a visit, going to the Pinnacles NP anyway.

Hamelin Pool is more interesting but Lake Thetis is a shorter drive from Perth, if pressed for time.
by weatherlite | 2025-07-24 06:20:34+00:00
Everyone is talking about it , and it is a big concern, but the last 2 years (ever since ChatGPT showed up) ad revenue keeps growing at the same 10%+ . It seems like the money queries (adidas shoes size 45) are still better served with links than overviews, and those are where most of the money comes from. Searching for "what cooking temperature is pork safe to eat" is not something you can easily monetize.

Disclaimer: google stock holder.
by mcv | 2025-07-24 06:20:45+00:00
Amsterdam used to have a line to Amstelveen that ran trams and metros on the same track. The main disadvantage is the different platform heights, so you got very long platforms, half at tram height and half at metro height.

I think they stopped it. As far as I know, Amsterdam's tram, metro and train lines are entirely separate again. They may still have some connections, but if so, those aren't used for regular service.

As for the through problem, the main problem here was that many cities were already big before trains were introduced, and most didn't want to demolish large chunks of the city to make space for trains to the center (although American cities infamously later demolished their city centers to make space for cars). Amsterdam was on a big waterfront, however; the original 15th century port that wasn't being used anymore. The port moved east, and a new island would host the new central station right in the heart of the city. Although the city did lose its view of the waterfront.

Edinburgh drained a lake to make space for the train station. And of course some cities did demolish houses to make space for trains.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-07-24 06:21:49+00:00
> American mfg may be slightly better at automation than China

Doubtful. It’s hard for a country which has been consistently outsourcing the production of anything remotely complex to do better than one which has been the top producer of manufactured goods for decades. Tesla tried and mostly failed.

Plus automation is expensive and require large volume to be profitable. American cars historically have limited appeal abroad and the market is extremely competitive which doesn’t help.
by throw8449485 | 2025-07-24 06:22:10+00:00
Ok, just some facts:

- moon dust has very fine particles. It is very irritating for skin, and there was a very good chance it could damage lungs like azbestos.

- Electronics and dust do not mix well

- electrostatic properties were not known, it could stick to every surface and coat it, perhaps prevent vacuum seals etc... Look at images from inside capsule, before and after landing! And that was just dust, brought on suits, not full samples!

- it had horrible smell
by kazinator | 2025-07-24 06:23:20+00:00
Brake pads are small parts that last for years. It is nothing compared to the number of tankfuls of gas that an ICE car goes through over the lifetime of its brakes.

This is like the March of Dimes syndrome. We got rid of exhaust with electric cars, but the cars-are-bad activists continue to exist and need something to gripe about.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-24 06:23:33+00:00
The article is pretty light on details, and misses (or I missed it if they mentioned it) an important distinction. There are two main types of distillation:

- completion based methods, where you take a big model, give it some queries, and use the answers to post-train a smaller model. This is what deepseek did with qwen models, where they took ~800k traces made by R1 and used sft on smaller qwen2.5 models. What the sky team found in their experiments is that you can use as few as 1-2k traces to reach similar results. Much cheaper.

- logit/internal representations based methods, where you need access to the raw model, and for each pair q -> response you train the small model on the entire distribution of the logits at the same time. This is a method suited for model creators, where they can take a pair of big + small model of the same architecture, and "distill" it in the smaller one. This is likely how they train their -flash -mini -pico and so on.

The first method can be used via API access. The second one can't. You need access to things that API providers won't give you.
by fjfaase | 2025-07-24 06:23:43+00:00
I recently wrote a small C compiler that uses a recursive decent parser while this should not be possible if you just look at the syntax grammar. Why, because it looks at some semantic information about the class of identifiers, whether they are variables of typedefs for example. On the otherhand this is not very surprising, because in the days C was developed, easy parsing was a practical implication of it not being an academic research thing, but something that just had to work.

Recursive decent parsers can simply be implemented with recusive functions. Implementing semantic checks becomes easy with additional parameters.
by BaudouinVH | 2025-07-24 06:24:20+00:00
Strange privacy-first : first-thing is did was loading my proton.me account automatically. No idea how it works for the users that don't have proton account.

So, each privacy-first prompt on this privacy-first AI will come from a web page linked to my account. I don't feel privacy-comfortable. Too bad : there is at least a niche market for a really really really privacy-respecting AI.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-24 06:25:02+00:00
I mean o3 was released in April this year. This stuff is improving in leaps and bounds - the gold medal at the IMO was announced last week, an open weights model with the performance of gpt4 released a few days ago, diffusion models starting to have their gpt3 moment... how can you possibly see this stuff as "getting blood out of a stone"?

I can see that phrase applied to more prompt engineering stuff like agents, but even there I'm not sure it's fair, they are improving rapidly too.
by mns | 2025-07-24 06:25:36+00:00
That's the kind of thing that a non-technical manager would say and put a huge amount of pressure on software developers to be X times more productive, using tools that actually make them less productive in real world conditions. It's quite diabolical, if you ask me, to have people that can't even grasp or understand what these tools are, but ask people to be more productive. It's like putting roller blades on horses and expecting them to be 5 times faster.
by tzs | 2025-07-24 06:25:39+00:00
That would have been a good argument when the political differences between liberals and conservatives were mostly on moral or social issues like civil rights and abortion and on economic issues like the correct balance between markets and government.

Those are things where there is no objectively correct position.

Now there are differences on things there this are objectively correct positions.

For example consider climate change. There used to be agreement on the underlying scientific reality, with differences in how to approach it. There was a group of top economic and science advisors from the Reagan and Bush administrations that were arguing for a revenue neutral carbon tax to address climate change and then let the market deal with it. The liberal approach favored more direct limits on emissions and the government more actively promoting replacements for fossil fuels.

Even as late as 2008 Republicans were still in agreement with reality on this. The Republican platform called for reducing fossil fuel use, establishing a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change, a long term tax credit for renewable energy, more recycling, and making consumer products more energy efficient. They wanted to aggressively support technological advances to reduce the dependence of transportation on petroleum, given examples of making cars more efficient (they mention doubling gas mileage) and more flex-fuel and electric vehicles. They talked about honoraria of many millions of dollars for technological developments that could eliminate the need for gas powered cars. They also mentioned promoting wireless communication to increase telecommuting options and reduce business travel.

Compare to now. Now their position ranges from climate change being a hoax from people trying to destroy America to it may be happening but if it is Mankind had nothing to do with it and it isn't bad enough to be something to worry about.

So now any unbiased journalists writing on climate change or adjacent topics, or any unbiased academic working in these areas, is going to automatically be way more aligned with the left than the right.
by trhway | 2025-07-24 06:26:39+00:00
Bolt EV was 20K after tax rebate (and that is an US car, ie. it has more safety and other required features than say a 12K car legal in many other countries). Not many people bought. Instead they buy more expensive EVs. While GM probably didn't make much money on each Bolt. Now Equinox EV, something like 28K after tax rebate. Not many people buying. Again they are buying more expensive EVs. And GM probably doesn't make much on the Equinox EVs. Talked with an owner of one - great car, very inexpensive lease, so while being price conscious he went for a pretty loaded config.

So, i think 10-15K car in US has no buyers, and no margin to make it worth for the manufacturer.
by pseingatl | 2025-07-24 06:28:50+00:00
For all practical purposes, except for US-PR/US-Hawaii Jones Act trade, the US has no merchant marine. It would be interesting if Trump restricted cargo offloading to US ships, absent a treaty with another nation. Other than the Navy, the US maritime culture has been lost. Other than the very limited Jones Act trade, we have port pilots, tugboat captains and recreational boating. That's not a recipe for "dominance at sea."
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-24 06:29:11+00:00
Context is important. If the pictures are captioned "check out this awesome treehouse I built" then yeah I don't expect anything further.

Whereas if they are captioned "this treehouse is my absolute favorite place to hang out" or "everyone should build one of these for themselves" or "building this treehouse saved my relationship" or whatever then I am going to find myself wondering why that might be.

Like if I tell you that Python is just the best language ever and you ought to be using it for approximately everything you do because it will improve your life or society or perhaps even the universe as a whole, might you not wonder _why_ I think that?