MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by striking | 2025-07-11 04:53:28+00:00
Yes and no.

> Around that time, the patent they had for this bacterial strain expired. Aaron Silverbook, who founded a company called Lantern Bioworks, saw a way to rescue this technology from the regulatory red tape: what if it wasn’t filed as a drug but as a probiotic? He made a deal with Oragenics to acquire the recipe and aimed to get it approved by the FDA through its much less stringent probiotic pathway. He first sold it in Próspera, a libertarian charter city on a Central American island where any biotech product can be sold as long as the buyer signs a waiver, and now the product, renamed Lumina, is gaining hype on social media among cryptocurrency enthusiasts and DIY experimenters. You can even preorder the product for USD 250, to be shipped in June of this year.

from https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-...
by dottjt | 2025-07-11 04:53:34+00:00
I would refrain from referring to it as incompetence, as I feel that ignores the true nature of the system.

The problem is that the Australian political system needs to appease to the centre. That's how parties get into power. As long as that's the case, it doesn't leave a whole lot of room to meaningfully tackle the problems plaguing the country (in particular, housing).
by acquiesce | 2025-07-11 04:53:43+00:00
What he is (was) talking about and what you are talking about are two different things. He saw that opening scene as an introduction of a Fantastical movie. One that would continuously pit the small and insignificant man against a noble but ultimately indifferent nature that far dwarfs anything in size. It’s the kind of stuff that you get concept artists to drool over. Imagine the kind of scenes you could have with that.

The rest of the movie compared to that expectation is a creature feature with standard elements. The one you refer to is simple foreshadowing. It’s not a cause for master class labeling. The staff that made all those dinosaurs deserves that credit, as they pulled off something very brilliant.
by motorest | 2025-07-11 04:55:16+00:00
> discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team

Discord is renowned for it's small engineering team, but I'm afraid you somehow claimed it has half the staff it does. A few years ago Steam reportedly employed around 90 engineers. Is it less than 500? I guess. What does that comparison tells you? Well, nothing. You need staff to roll out new features on multiple projects. If you add no feature, have no projects to work on, or have nothing to do then you don't need engineers. If your business plan has ambitious goals then you need engineers to achieve them. If all you're doing is keeping the lights on then you barely need anyone. Does this sound obvious?

I've been at companies that doubled their engineering staff overnight because they made a call to invest in a feature. I worked at companies that fired an entire floor of engineers because management decided some projects could be put on cold storage to improve financials. Why do staffing agencies are so popular? Have you ever thought about it?
by RpFLCL | 2025-07-11 04:56:13+00:00
I think it's telling that this is happening via "policies" instead of laws, because almost nobody cares or wants it.

It's also telling that Google and Microsoft aren't in opposition to this new burden, they're giving quiet yet full support. This will *necessarily* entrench the big players through the burden to implement, make it easier to track individuals across different accounts and services, and endanger the privacy and anonymity of all adults in Australia. And I think that's all the goal.

If they cared about protecting kids they'd focus on resources and campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls. Then parents could decide if they care to block these things in their homes. It should be up to them.

The "you can just log out" loophole, that's just boiling the frog slowly. It would be foolish to think that will stay around.
by blub | 2025-07-11 04:56:36+00:00
One has to take time to review code and think through different aspects of execution (like memory management, concurrency, etc). Plenty of code cannot be scanned.

That said, if the language has GC and other helpers, it makes it easier to scan.

Code and architecture review is an important part of my role and I catch issues that others miss because I spend more time. I did use AI for review (GPT 4.1), but only as an addition, since not reliable enough.
by protocolture | 2025-07-11 04:56:59+00:00
My mates on something for nerve pain, and he reckons its the worst thing in the world. Makes him vomit.

So he takes pills for nausea that make him extremely drowsy.

So then he takes uppers, which bring back the nerve pain.

Cool study, I will share it with him. But I get the impression that he would prefer to be demented than paralysed with never pain.
by csomar | 2025-07-11 04:58:25+00:00
It depends on the problem but Claude sometimes does. You need do need an alternative prompt where you make him suspicious to explore other paths.

Here is an article I wrote a while back: https://omarabid.com/gpt3-now

GPT 4.5 was able to detect a Rust ownership issue, something which requires "ahead of time" thinking.
by hliyan | 2025-07-11 05:00:01+00:00
He's making the the following argument: "...innovators keep just 2.2 % of the value they create. Every $1 in billionaire profit delivers ≈ $45 to workers + consumers"

Onecounter-framing is that entepreneurs keep 2.2% of the value that their workers create.

https://x.com/garrytan/status/1943106501494833549
by valenterry | 2025-07-11 05:00:04+00:00
> 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.

I think the abuse is not that much of a problem. It's rather that it makes it much much harder to change the language later on because it will break macros (like it did between Scala 2 and 3, causing many people to be stuck on Scala 2 due to libraries using macros heavily).

If I might add a suggestion: add type providers to the language (like in F#). It solves a lot of the problems that macros are often used for, such as generating code from SQL DDLs, API specs, etc. (or vice versa).
by usehackernews | 2025-07-11 05:00:09+00:00
It depends.

My dad pushed me to play a sport I despised. Hated it from when I was young all the way to my last games.

But thank god he did. Changed my life completely. As a mediocre student, I could pick any school I wanted.

Love my dad, and he knew what was best. Even if I hated playing, it was all worth it.

Parents should set their kids up for success, and parents do know best - even if that means upsetting your child.

There’s a difference between what someone wants and what’s best for someone - and during my teens, I had that mixed up.
by goku12 | 2025-07-11 05:00:35+00:00
The AI problem isn't going away. But if universities decide to shift its burden and consequences entirely on the students, then the situation will become untenable. We don't know the other side of the argument here. Regardless, it's a serious concern that the university refuses to supply the accused with the evidence (are they trying to emulate the bigtech now?). One thing the universities must recognize is that academic integrity and ethics won't survive as a unilateral policy. Practice what you preach.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-11 05:01:50+00:00
Devil's advocate position:

If you can shepherd the majority, or at least a larger percentage, then the leaks can be ignored (until they get too big, at which time then consider changes and tweaks).

For the likes of us on HN bypassing these things is a bodily function, however I believe there's a large cohort "out there" for whom it could be a bridge too far. Eg. I doubt too many degrees of separation outside of HN even know of the existence of Marginalia.

Having said that, the existence and purpose of a VPN is probably pretty well spread "out there in the world".

(ignoring the effectiveness of the topic of this thread).
by monero-xmr | 2025-07-11 05:01:58+00:00
Can you explain why Mesopotamia was once an agricultural Mecca but is now an arid desert?

Or what human event caused the little ice age? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Do you really believe all climate change in world history, which was dramatic and highly disruptive, was human caused?
by dchftcs | 2025-07-11 05:02:08+00:00
Maintainable software is also more maintainable by AI. The required standards may be a bit different, for example there may be less emphasis on white space styling, but, for example, complexity in the form of subtle connections between different parts of a system is a burden for both humans and AI. AI isn't magic, it still has to reason, it fails on complexity beyond its ability to reason, and maintainable code is one that is easier to reason with.
by csomar | 2025-07-11 05:02:33+00:00
> * When it gets the design wrong, trying to talk through straightening the design out is frustrating and often not productive.

What I have learned is that when it gets the design wrong, your approach is very likely wrong (especially if you are doing something not out of ordinary). The solution is to re-frame your approach and start again to find that path of least resistance where the LLM can flow unhindered.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-11 05:03:10+00:00
>Since more and more lawyers have started using LLMs to help them generate legal documents, courts have decided to treat this as similar to a lawyer asking a legal secretary or a paralegal to draft the document.

Since this was apparently wortha a news story, the key thing I'm curious about: has the frequency of fine-worthy errors increased with the use of AI, or are such errors just getting more coverage because AI is in the mix as opposed to legal secretaries.
by joegibbs | 2025-07-11 05:03:42+00:00
I'm not so sure that if we were to take all the wealth of the ultra-rich and redistribute it, that it would make that much of a direct positive impact on the rest of society. For one, most of their wealth is tied up in intangible assets like stocks - does it impact the economy if it just sits there and does nothing?

If you redistributed Bill Gates' Microsoft stock across the population, wouldn't that cause a commensurate rise in inflation as everyone uses their portion on things that they need? (Bill Gates has 500,000 times the median US net worth, but doesn't eat 500,000 times more bread or wear 500,000 times more kilograms of cotton than the average person).

In terms of actual physical things the ultra-rich don't really have that much comparatively than the regular person. Maybe they have a few mansions, yachts, helicopters - but given that there are many, many more poor and middle-income people than the rich, only a small percentage of the population could benefit (how many people can actually fit on Bezos' yacht, how many apartments could those mansions be easily converted into?).

There's probably an economic benefit from redirecting labour from things that the rich like but again, we're not quite at Ancient Egypt levels of large portions of the population building useless things for the super-rich, if you're a billionaire your workforce is probably working on something that makes money from people poorer than you. If you make the firms that build mansions pivot to building normal houses for ordinary people, I don't think that would result in all that many more houses being built.

That's not to say that there wouldn't be other benefits like removing their ability to influence public opinion through their money (although even without rich people there would still be individuals with disproportionate media influence), but wealth redistribution isn't the panacea that people claim it to be.
by qingcharles | 2025-07-11 05:05:06+00:00
I'm not bad at coding. I would say I'm pretty damned good. But coding is a means-to-an-end. I come up with an idea, then I have the long-winded middle bit where I have to write all the code, spin up a DB, create the tables, etc.

LLMs have given me a whole new love of coding, getting rid of the dull grind and letting me write code an order of magnitude quicker than before.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-11 05:05:31+00:00
It's important to deconflate interpersonal vs. administrative deficiencies. In some ways, Obama capitulated to the JSOC endless kill-lists and endorsement of militarist projects to appear "strong" in an administrative sense. He could've ended the ineffective, expensive barbarism but didn't have the leadership initiative and/or political capital to do so.
by Retric | 2025-07-11 05:05:32+00:00
Article completely misses the underlying issue of running out of land near urban centers to create new suburbs. Cars made suburbs viable, but only so far from cities.

One solution which ignores all the issue presented is relatively high speed rail networks which avoid congestion to quickly reach city centers. Rail averaging ~100 MPH turns an unbearable commute into a viable one, assuming the tickets aren’t overpriced.

Level 4/5 Self driving cars are another possibility, the time is still lost but watching TV or even napping on the way home is a very different proposition. Better road networks similarly extend things somewhat.
by usr1106 | 2025-07-11 05:06:08+00:00
Something like that has not worked in Finland for several years. All addresses are scanned and matched by the mail with a DB of "valid addresses". There is a big student dorm in this city here, which has had problems with mail delivery for years. Not that students would receive a lot of mail. Most businesses charge extra for paper bills, most authorities prefer electronic messages and private postcards don't seem to be common in that age group either.

After years of undeliverable mail it was found that the building permit for the dorm was registered incorrectly by the city and as a result the rooms were never registered as residential addresses in the postal DB.
by benreesman | 2025-07-11 05:06:55+00:00
I find the swings to be wild, when you win with it, you win really big. But when you lose with it, it's a real bite out of your week too. And I think 10x to 20x has to be figurative right, you can do 20x by volume maybe, but to borrow an expression from Steve Ballmer, that's like measuring an airplane by kilograms.

Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense, and tactically non-obvious? Even a machine that just handed you the perfect code can't 20x your real output, even if it gave you the source file at 20x your native sophistication you wouldn't be able to build and deploy it, let alone make changes to it.

But even if it's the last 5-20% after you're already operating at your very limit and trying to hit your limit every single day is massive, it makes a bunch of stuff on the bubble go from "not realistic" to "we did that".
by 6177c40f | 2025-07-11 05:07:36+00:00
I'm not certain they're correct there, as various studies seem to quote different numbers. Either way, I'm not sure rats are so much more efficient that it would matter: e.g. if the half-life in rats was a few tens of minutes vs the hour or so half-life in humans, would that make the difference between no toxicity and toxicity? Still, I haven't seen other people report vision loss, so maybe the point is moot anyway.

Although, it doesn't preclude some kind of uncommon impairment to formate metabolism, which would explain why it doesn't happen to other people.
by physix | 2025-07-11 05:08:09+00:00
That may hold to a certain extent for relational databases where your business model doesn't align well with physical model (tables). Although you might wonder why stored procedures and triggers were invented.

In databases where your domain is also your physical data model, coupling business logic to the database can work quite well, if the DBMS supports that.

https://medium.com/@paul_42036/entity-workflows-for-event-dr...
by dotancohen | 2025-07-11 05:08:12+00:00
> This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems.

How is that "tesla-style pricing"? When I bought my Tesla the price was exactly what they told me it would be. Contrast that with every other car I've bought new, especially the Ford Focus for which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets approved" as I'm signing the paperwork.

I've never had a clearer new car purchase than with my Tesla.
by qingcharles | 2025-07-11 05:08:34+00:00
This is just not true in my experience. Not with the latest models. I routinely manage to 1-shot a whole "thing." e.g. yesterday I needed a Wordpress plugin for a single-time use to clean up a friend's site. I described exactly what I needed, it produced the code, it ran perfect first time and the UI looked like a million dollars. It got me 100% of the way in 0% of the time.

I'm the biggest skeptic, but more and more I'm seeing it get me the bulk of the way with very little back-and-forth. If it was even more heavily integrated in my dev environment, it would save me even more time.
by bazoom42 | 2025-07-11 05:11:25+00:00
The term “diacritic” has a specific mening. It means a symbol added to a letter to alter or disambiguate its sound. The dot in i and j does not have that function (in English), therefore they are not diacritics but part of the letter itself.

The dot evolved to make the letter more visually distinct in handwriting, not to indicate a sound change.
by ggm | 2025-07-11 05:13:16+00:00
In full expectation of being downvoted, I would like to say here that I think the comments below show an astonishing lack of awareness about how most ordinary australians feel about the risks to children online. I believe most australians vox-popped in the street would say they expect the government to do this.

I'm not for a minute saying either the current government, or any past government is either competent or capable of implementing protections which actually work. I am solely saying, these intentions will probably be popular with a lot of parents, and very possibly electorally popular as well, and will be unopposed by the opposition, unless they take a "not going far enough" position.

The Australian Privacy Commissioner, and the CSIRO made substantive submissions to the government regarding use of trusted third parties and homomorphic encryption. I have some doubt the government is interested in listening, but the fact remains there are technologies which can identify you, do KYC 100 points, and not reveal who you are, or where you are going, to the government who issues the ID.

Like many others I've had my google account in continuous use, demonstrated to google through use of things like passkeys and 2FA, for over 20 years. I struggle to think of how most people with a gmail account have not functionally identified themselves to google (most: by no means all)
by pazimzadeh | 2025-07-11 05:13:20+00:00
yeah very weird article

> At best it seems that I’ll likely never see a bright light or vibrant color ever again for the rest of my life, unless we get an aligned AGI that can fix me (<1%) or we start funding the NIH again and the scientists actually come back (0%).

I understand they are upset because of the symptoms involved but the lack of logic and knowledge here is something else. They mentioned they have used Kratom, which can apparently cause eye issues. Have they used anything else?

I do agree that vendors of genetically modified bacteria need some kind of plan or kill-switch for getting rid of their living therapeutics from your body.

If you are desperate then the Streptococcus mutans should respond to oral antibiotics penicillin, amoxicillin, erythromycin, and cephalosporins.
by F7F7F7 | 2025-07-11 05:13:55+00:00
Apple is unabashedly, outwardly, privacy focused. Just their law enforcement policies put them way ahead of their competitors. But this argument usually deteriorates to "they are all the same!" so I won't even bother making a case for them.

What I will say that if Apple is what Woz feared. Then what's OpenAI and X/Grok and Google and Facebook (hell bench on world domination)? Unimaginable?

Chorus They are all the same! Chorus

Apple helped create the black rectangle monolith appliances-in-a-smartphone plague. But they are not even in the top 10 list of companies I'm currently worried about. They are far more embarrassing than dangerous as of late.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-11 05:14:37+00:00
I think Australia should go back to the French submarine deal and fuck the AUKUS thing out the window.

Opinion mostly based on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9qhDGv300&t=688s (and, of course, the US now being essentially a rogue state, and it'll take significant structural change to fix that).
by nerevarthelame | 2025-07-11 05:14:56+00:00
I don't know what regionalization OpenAI or Deepseek do. But it makes sense that they would change some things because of different languages, cultures, and regulations. Most global businesses tailor products for different regions.

People are up in arms that Grok is using their CEO's shitposting as a primary knowledge base because that is a low quality source of information.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-11 05:15:22+00:00
My wife’s a doctor, and she had patients begging her for leftover samples of Vioxx after it was pulled from the market. Lots of people with rheumatoid arthritis were willing to take the heart trouble risk in exchange for stopping the pain.

I don’t intend to argue we should kept Vioxx around, just to point out that the calculus can get complicated. I would vastly rather protect my heart than get rid of the insignificant amount of pain I experience. Turn that dial up far enough and people could rationally make the other choice.
by defrost | 2025-07-11 05:17:19+00:00
In related current news:

Paul Simon's Daughter Blasts Richard Gere for Selling Her Childhood Home to Real Estate Developer. - https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/paul-simon-dau...

SBP Homes bought Richard's family home for $10.75 million, and once it is torn down, they plan to develop the 32-acre lot into nine individual homes.

Seems a shame to not develop (say) 30 half acre homes intermixed with 30 denser multi unit dwellings and common park space .. but zoning, Nimby, expectations, etc.

Also housing shartages tend to be variable by region and perhaps New Canaan, Connecticut doesn't have that demand.
by ramblerman | 2025-07-11 05:18:47+00:00
@dang why is this flagged?

Simonw is a long term member with a good track record, good faith posts.

And this post in particular is pretty incredible. The notion that Grok literally searches for "from: musk" to align itself with his viewpoints before answering.

That's the kind of nugget I'll go to the 3rd page for.
by maxglute | 2025-07-11 05:19:33+00:00
UHVDC is progress is "fine", I think utilization is 60-70%, ideally it would be 80-90% but hurdles now mostly political, many central govs still want to prop up local coal, so new policies on national unified electric / spot market by 2026. Current UHVDC capacity is ~150GW, utilization around ~100GW, PRC peak demand ~1000GW, i.e. UHVDC transmitting like 10% national power, could be 15%. Rollout for next 10 years is to hit ~25%, something like 300GW (70-80% from western renewables), assuming peak power demand grows to peak 1200-1500GW. But this is based on outdated 14th 5-year plan projections (~2021), PRC currently on trend to 1800-2000GW peak. Don't know if there's new policies to scale UHVCD accordingly.
by rvz | 2025-07-11 05:20:00+00:00
> Does it help with deep understanding, or is it better for rote memorization?

Experience. Build the system yourself to see how the system design all fits together. For example. [0]

"What I cannot create, I do not understand" - Richard Feynman

[0] https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x