MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by VLM | 2025-07-10 17:20:20+00:00
Its the wrong statistical analysis of the situation. The death rate does not even remotely depend on infection source IIRC. Last stat I saw (from some years ago) was in excess of 96.7% of the population had blood antibodies for covid. You are going to catch covid, your only decision is when and what you can do WRT personal health to lower the risk (aside from "do not be old" there's "do not be fat" "do not be out of shape WRT cardio" etc) If your local hospital is swamped with cases it would be irresponsible to throw a rager and infect 100 people, at that moment. If your local hospital is empty and all the nurses are doing at work is posting tiktok dances for karma upvotes, and the odds of catching it eventually are 97%, you may as well have a good time; if you're going to get just as sick regardless if you have fun getting there or not. Almost all of the "lockdown time" was the latter not the former and only something approaching a civil rebellion ended the latter era. If it were not for that we would still be locked down today in 2025. The situation is not at all even remotely like smoking where not smoking means you're probably not going to get lung cancer. You are getting covid, and you have minimal but not zero control over when, if now is not a bad time, don't worry, if now is a bad time, out of an abundance of caution you might want to slow (not eliminate) the spread. You're getting it eventually, you can either be brave and happy and social on the way... or the opposite. A lot of people chose the latter.
by SubmarineClub | 2025-07-10 17:20:26+00:00
Except the data repeatedly bears out that younger generations are spending more and more time online and in isolation.

The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.

Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.

Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.
by glenstein | 2025-07-10 17:21:17+00:00
>Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage.

My understanding is that Solar does offset fossil fuel usage, in large part because solar power generation throughout the day is conveniently aligned with energy usage throughout the day. With the exception of the evening, which some people refer to as a "duck curve" left behind to be picked up by other generation sources. But it's most definitely stepping in to fill demand that would otherwise be filled by fossil fuels
by conception | 2025-07-10 17:22:24+00:00
You’re forgetting the corollary - all small organizations are also inefficient, just at different things.

It’s all trade offs - do you want everyone in your country to have a baseline education that can be relied on as a given but perhaps it suffers in its administration and effectiveness? Or are you OK with pockets of your country having tremendous quality of education and others having very poor quality, as an example.
by lupusreal | 2025-07-10 17:22:43+00:00
> The western scientific community has a pattern of not treating the bodies of the deceased with respect due

Not just human bodies, but living animals as well, and until relatively recently living humans also. Western scientific culture has a utilitarian "ends-justify-the-means" problem, even when the ends are as dubious as testing a new kind of lipstick that is one cent cheaper to produce.
by floor2 | 2025-07-10 17:22:55+00:00
> Sometimes, communities are angry landowners hosting infrastructure will be paid, but neighbours and those further afield may not

Hilarious.

When a fossil fuel company started fracking near me, not only did I not get paid, but I also got poisoned tap water that's no longer safe to drink, earthquakes, and subsidence cracking roads and house foundations.

The double-standards are appalling. I'd rather have a solar farm or wind turbine next-door than be within 500 miles of a fracking operation or coal mine.
by quuxplusone | 2025-07-10 17:23:42+00:00
(Blog author here.) Nice find! I'll try to incorporate that into the post at some point. The 1951 first edition is also on archive.org (borrowable with a free login account): https://archive.org/details/preparationofpro0000maur/page/32...

I agree, it looks like this 1951 source is using "call in" to mean "invoke" — the actual transfer of control — as opposed to "load" or "link in." Which means this 1951 source agrees with Sarbacher (1959), and is causing me right now to second-guess my interpretation of the MANIAC II (1956) and Fortran II (1958) sources — could it be that they were also using "call in" to mean "invoke" rather than "indicate a dependency on"? Did I exoticize the past too much, by assuming the preposition in "call in" must be doing some work, meaning-wise?
by jackstraw42 | 2025-07-10 17:24:29+00:00
From your link:

> Famously, the "leprosy" of most translations of the Bible as far back as the Septuagint represents a multilayered historical process of confusion. The state of ritual impurity known to the Hebrews as tzara'ath (צָרַעַת, "struck")[9] seems to have been a conflation of various skin disorders, owing to the undeveloped state of medical science at that period.

Difficult to be certain that "leprosy" in the Bible is the same one we're talking about today.
by kaycebasques | 2025-07-10 17:24:34+00:00
Looks solid. My gripe with most technical writing (TW) style guides (this one included) is that they mix best practices with conventions:

* "Best practices": Aspects that tangibly improve docs quality. Usually backed up by experimental data or overwhelming consensus.

* "Conventions": Arbitrary decisions that don't clearly improve docs quality one way or the other, except for the fact that they improve consistency, and consistent docs are easier to use.

When everyone in the room has this shared understanding, TW style guide conversations often go much faster and smoother.
by 30minAdayHN | 2025-07-10 17:24:44+00:00
This study focused on experienced OSS maintainers. Here is my personal experience, but a very different persona (or opposite to the one in the study). I always wanted to contribute to OSS but never had time to. Finally was able to do that, thanks to AI. Last month, I was able to contribute to 4 different repositories which I would never have dreamed of doing it. I was using an async coding agent I built[1], to generate PRs given a GitHub issue. Some PRs took a lot of back and forth. And some PRs were accepted as is. Without AI, there is no way I would have contributed to those repositories.

One thing that did work in my favor is that, I was clearly creating a failing repro test case, and adding before and after along with PR. That helped getting the PR landed.

There are also a few PRs that never got accepted because the repro is not as strong or clear.

[1] https://workback.ai
by mikestew | 2025-07-10 17:25:12+00:00
One would think the U. S. would have learned from the late-70s and 80s when their auto industry got pummeled by the Japanese. Instead, we not only cede the international markets to China, we think we will be just fine selling fossil fuel-powered trucks to the domestic market.

I’m not smart enough to know how this ends, but I suspect the money we should have been using to subsidize and kick-start American automakers will instead be held back until we need to once again bail them out from their short-sightedness.
by conductr | 2025-07-10 17:25:24+00:00
I think that's the parent's point, someone should have just said No. If you have to sacrifice so much due to whatever constraints you face, the resulting solution usually is not going to solve the original problem very well.

At the very least, I would have let it be known that I did not think the resulting bridge was a good design for traffic and has only been designed to appease the process. "I do not recommend constructing this design" would have been my CYA.
by Jeaye | 2025-07-10 17:25:48+00:00
> Don't try to provide backwards compatible subset of JVM APIs.

Yeah, jank doesn't much with JVM APIs or the JVM at all. We have our own implementation of the compiler and runtime. It has similarities to Clojure's design, only because the object model somewhat demands that.

> Don't implement your own GC, just use mmtk [1].

Yep, already the plan. Currently using Boehm, but MMTK is the next upgrade.

> Don't underestimate complexity and importance of multi-threading and concurrency.

Clojure aids this in having STM, immutable data structures, etc. However, there are some key synchronization points and I do need to audit all of them. jank doesn't have multi-threading support yet, but we will _not_ go the way of Python. jank is Clojure and Clojurists expect sane multi-threading.

> Don't spend too much time benchmarking and optimizing single threaded performance against JVM as performance baseline.

This year, not much optimization has been done at all. I did some necessary benchmarking early on, to aid in some design decisions, but I follow this mantra:

1. Make it work

2. Make it correct

3. Make it fast

I'm currently on step 2 for most of jank. Thanks for sharing the advice!
by wredcoll | 2025-07-10 17:26:24+00:00
You say this like you think you're making some kind of clever point.

Just to pick one easy example, the confederate states of america employed agents to advocate for peace treaties and cease fires during the civil war. By all reasonable classifications, they were "enemy agents trying to weaken our resolve".

Would some people have benefitted from a peace treaty? Of course. Would everyone have benefitted equally? Obviously not.
by talos_ | 2025-07-10 17:26:33+00:00
From the link you shared:

> The English word province is attested since about 1330 and derives from the 13th-century Old French province, which itself comes from the Latin word provincia, which referred to the sphere of authority of a magistrate, in particular, to a foreign territory.

The fact that British authorities picked a French word that the conquered would understand is significant.

> I wonder if the word choice was influenced by the US civil war ending only a couple of years previously

Interesting interpretation! I would agree given Canadians were given the opportunity to ally with the 13 colonies at the time (but didn't). British loyalists also fled the United States. "Province" made allegiance to the crown oversea clear
by salawat | 2025-07-10 17:26:34+00:00
You need to understand something about VC, tech, and finance people in general. They don't care about anything but making money. How do you make money? Sell shovels. Or better yet, monetize them. Rent and lease them out. Make shovels just well enough it breaks infrequently enough that people keep coming back to get another one.

That's vibe coding, and the last couple decades of "cloud mania". Computing was metered and rented. What they didn't have was the capability to bottle their developers up and sell that. Now, LLM's and the massive compute farms required to support them have given them that new shovel to sell. Which they will. Without regard for what it'll do to the environment that made it possible.
by krunck | 2025-07-10 17:26:49+00:00
I've been using TB for personal and work since it's first day and never hit the bug. I've never known any co-workers to hit the bug. I'm sure plenty of other software that we use every day has similar severe bugs that occur just as infrequently.

I'll keep using TB. I'll also make sure to look both ways when crossing streets and won't assume that cars are going to stop for red lights because my chance of getting hit crossing a street is more likely than getting hit by this bug.
by ta8645 | 2025-07-10 17:26:58+00:00
It's just behaving like a child. A child could draw a bounding box around a dog and a cat, but would fail if you told them to draw a box around the transistors of a PCB. They have no idea what a transistor is, or what it looks like. They lack the knowledge and maturity. But you would never claim the child doesn't _understand_ what they're doing, at least not to imply that they're forever incapable of the task.
by bitsandboots | 2025-07-10 17:28:14+00:00
Similar conclusion - they're "losing" if the goal is marketshare and mindshare dominance. If the goal is just to carve their own niche, they're already there.

But, if you compare the growth into new spaces Apple did in the 2000s, then sure Apple of today hasn't done anything new in a while. Does it need to? Maybe from an investor point of view?

The hardware side is its own thing - some do not challenge their hardware because their goals are different like Facebook going cheap on VR rather than expensive). While nobody has as complete of a portfolio on what the M-chips have accomplished, the GB10 and Ryzen AI Max Pro seem to be similar in capability, yet late to the party and at this point just one-offs. But I don't think that really matters. Few people are buying based on deeply researched specs, so whatever is cheap and has battery life will do and there's happily plenty to choose from these days.
by narush | 2025-07-10 17:28:37+00:00
Hey HN, study author here. I'm a long-time HN user -- and I'll be in the comments today to answer questions/comments when possible!

If you're short on time, I'd recommend just reading the linked blogpost or the announcement thread here [1], rather than the full paper.

[1] https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1943360399220388093
by Barracoon | 2025-07-10 17:29:00+00:00
Funny, the scenario you described is exactly what Elon wanted to do!

https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/

> In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations.
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-10 17:29:05+00:00
Flix supports type classes (called "traits") with higher-kinded types (HKTs) and with associated types and associated effects. A Flix trait can provide a default implementation of a function, but specific trait instances can override that implementation. However, Flix has no inheritance. The upshot is that traits are a compile-time construct that is fully eliminated through monomorphization. Consequently, traits incur no runtime overhead. Even better, the Flix inliner can "see through" traits, hence aggressive closure elimination is often possible. For example, typical usage of higher-order functions or pipelining is reduced to plain loops at the bytecode level without any closure allocation or indirection.

Flix does not yet have macros-- and we are afraid to add them due to their real (or perceived) (ab)use in other programming languages.

We are actively looking for library authors and if you are interested, you are more than welcome to stop by our Gitter channel.
by bonoboTP | 2025-07-10 17:30:00+00:00
Indeed, and that can be tied back to the original article. Even if the American system was originally modeled after the German one back then, the two have significantly diverged due to the high tuition fees and downstream "consumer" or "customer" mentality both in students and in administration. It's interesting that outside the Anglo countries, education is mostly free for students, so yeah the attitude is more that the tax payer is giving money for your education, now it's your duty to either take it seriously or go somewhere else. It doesn't mean that everyone is so self-motivated, but a student can't say "I'm paying you, professor, so now dance to my tune".
by II2II | 2025-07-10 17:30:15+00:00
The big difference is a car with an engine that randomly shuts down is a life-and-limb safety issue. An email client that corrupts the database is extremely unlikely to cause a loss of life, even if the consequences are costly.

That said, even if the bug is impossible to isolate, it sounds like the chain of events that leads to it is known. They probably should disable the feature until someone is motivated to fix or replace the code. I'm sure that would anger a lot of people, but someone angry about the loss of a feature is probably better than someone who is angry at the loss of data. Especially given that the feature seems to be something someone would use to archive their mail.
by eldaisfish | 2025-07-10 17:30:17+00:00
this is often repeated, but is not entirely true.

Peak electrical demand does not coincide with solar generation. Generally, peak demand is either early in the morning or the late afternoon, when solar production tapers. In order to make up the difference, you'd need a couple thousand megawatt-hours of battery capacity for most regions. You'd also need this to happen twice a day - either side of typical working hours.

This is true in Tokyo and Mumbai. Tokyo's data is here https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/forecast/html/calendar-e.html

Mumbai's peak electricity demand is typically in the late afternoon, when solar output starts to dip.

The solution to this is not more battery capacity, but varied power sources. Wind, solar, gas, nuclear, etc.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-07-10 17:30:49+00:00
What whataboutism? I was responding to the assertion that while things are bad in the US at least it's not as bad as Europe.

In no way did I suggest that European citizens should become complacent. I just wanted to question if the government commissioning a report which suggests they take a further look at some actions which could possibly infringe on privacy and which explicitly talks about doing it with respect to national privacy laws is really do much worse than people being disappeared by a government who is openly hostile to the rulings of the courts as well as to the media who dare to question it.

If there was any whatabout then it was in the GP comment, so maybe direct your ire towards them.
by incomingpain | 2025-07-10 17:30:56+00:00
Essentially an advertisement against Cursor Pro and/or Claude Sonnet 3.5/3.7

I think personally when i tried tools like Void IDE, I was fighting with Void too much. It is beta software, it is buggy, but also the big one... learning curve of the tool.

I havent had the chance to try cursor but i imagine its going to have a learning curve as a new tool.

So perhaps there is a slowdown at first expected; but later after you get your context and prompting down pat. Asking specifically for what you want. Then you get your speed up.
by zamalek | 2025-07-10 17:30:58+00:00
> Seems like it is indeed the new SOTA model, with significantly better scores than o3

It has been demonstrated for quite some time that censoring models results in drastically reduced scores. Sure, maybe prevent it from telling somehow how to build a bomb, but we've seen Grok 3 routinely side with progressive views despite having access to the worst of humanity (and its sponsor).
by pfdietz | 2025-07-10 17:31:05+00:00
So, if I zoom out as you suggest, this means efficient doesn't mean economically efficient. What does it mean here, then? Engineering efficiency? That would make very little sense, since PV and other generating technologies have different inputs. It makes no sense to compare the efficiency of PV modules converting light to electrical energy vs. the efficiency of combustion turbines converting chemical energy to mechanical kinetic energy.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-10 17:31:06+00:00
well we used to have a sort of inverse pareto where 80% of the work took 80% of the effort and the remaining 20% of the work also took 80% of the effort.

I do think you're onto something with getting pebbles out of the road inasmuch as once I know what I need to do AI coding makes the doing much faster. Just yesterday I was playing around with removing things from a List object using the Java streams API and I kept running into ConcurrentOperationsExceptions, which happen when multiple threads are mutating the list object at the same time because no thread can guarantee it has the latest copy of the list unaltered by other threads. I spent about an hour trying to write a method that deep copies the list, makes the change and then returns the copy and running into all sorts of problems til I asked AI to build me a thread-safe list mutation method and it was like "Sure, this is how I'd do it but also the API you're working with already has a method that just....does this." Cases like this are where AI is supremely useful - intricate but well-defined problems.
by alwa | 2025-07-10 17:31:26+00:00
I don’t think so at all—for that matter the Americans still execute prisoners, and still send news crews to attend the executions (though not to show the dying person directly). I was more thinking about TFA as specifically a British objection, and the other examples involving a press release from the New York Attorney General.

I don’t know how the exhibition is received in other territories, but I feel like it’s Americans, Brits, and Europeans who I hear raise this specific set of concerns that plastinated Bodies exhibitions display executed prisoners. Often mixed in with some degree of insinuation about Chinese justice systems and political practices.

Whereas it seems to me that dark delight in bodily violence is a much more essential aspect of the human condition—Rene Girard’s notion of a scapegoat mechanism comes to mind—and that for all the pearl-clutching, the event promoter probably would still sell tickets if they catered to it upfront.
by analyte123 | 2025-07-10 17:31:29+00:00
I sincerely doubt the Namibian government is giving out thousands of dollars per household in solar subsidies, like the US does up until the end of this year. I doubt Pakistan does either, another country noted in the article where solar usage is expanding. If solar is a mature technology and an economic inevitability as contended in the article (I agree), there is a much weaker case for subsidizing it. In any case, most solar installation costs in the US seem to go to permits and expensive, inefficient contractors - endemic problems which affect all types of development and are probably only made worse by throwing free money at them.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-10 17:31:40+00:00
Nice! I wouldn’t describe the early Foucault as ‘rebarbative’, the common translations of Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish are a pleasure to read although the volumes of The Uses of Pleasure are not —- he had a little too much exposure to Derrida. [1]

But I’ve been saying that LLMs would bring a structuralist revival here for years, long before people started saying that on Just Wrong and we are seeing real ‘authors’ pick it up.

As I see it, the idea that ‘X has a structure of a language’ collapsed when Noam Chomsky introduced the idea of poverty of the stimulus (you aren’t exposed to enough language to learn grammar from first principles) and the further failure of Chomsky’s theory to be the basis of language technology (40 years post Zork we have Inform 7 and Attempto Controlled English)

We were all sure the language instinct was a peripheral added to an animal that already had a theory of mind and all that…. But all of a sudden you could train an LLM on a pile of text and it did what Chomsky said was impossible and all of a sudden language has the structure of a language and structuralism is back baby!

[1] Hate Derrida? Try Badiou. He plays the same game but with impeccable precision, you can’t ever say that he doesn’t understand the texts that he deconstructs and boy does that make some people mad…
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-07-10 17:32:10+00:00
_I_ would agree with you. But I’m also not a person writing a version control system for a kernel that still runs wrong-endianess hardware (I forgot which one we are using and can’t be bothered to look it up). And I think a major part of this is, that I assume that something is so insane, that people just shouldn’t do it and the people steering the kernel or git don’t (get to) assume that