MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brudgers | 2025-08-03 21:19:17+00:00
Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial

Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. Then only four function calculators, then graphing calculators. But still today, programmable calculators are prohibited in many academic contexts.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-03 21:19:20+00:00
"... with both the court system and..."

BRICS might have the wealth. Would you trust that it's going to be legally stable? I wouldn't.

But, in fairness, for the first time in my life I don't trust the US in that way either. I'm beginning to see it as possible that someday the president could make some arbitrary decision that takes everything I have. (Either this president or another - but it's this president who's making the precedents that make it possible.)
by phillipcarter | 2025-08-03 21:19:31+00:00
> so honestly, why not?

Because it might not work out so well for them? Let's not kid ourselves, this would be an invasion by sea against an opponent who's prepared for many years, has a modern defense force, and has explicitly designed a defense protocol to inflict as much damage as possible. This is not Russia stepping over fields they already encircle that are governed by a dysfunctional government. And it's not Isreal being allowed to bomb impoverished children with impunity either. And neither of those scenarios have worked out splendidly for them either.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-03 21:20:36+00:00
I think AOC is closer to the establishment than even I realized. AOC walked Khalil out from within the security perimeter to meet with family members and waiting press including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWpRCoQ2wWE

AOC is doing the important work that Congresspeople do. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that she’s fringe. She’s showing up and doing the work that other people don’t show up and do. If it’s fringe work, that is fair to say I guess if you feel that way. I was surprised to see her in this video but at the same time it seems totally in character for her to be there. I think she’s probably going to run for president or vice president at some point in the next few cycles if I had to guess, and these are baby steps to build trust with the Muslim community and get in front of reporters on a national issue.
by kator | 2025-08-03 21:20:55+00:00
7.5 Years at Amazon, and even for my side projects, I write PRFAQs and share them with my stakeholders to gather feedback. I'm a PMT at Amazon, but in my alternative life, I code on many projects, and develop infrastructure, architecture, etc, and enjoy writing as much of it as I can.

That said, work back from your customer!
by EA-3167 | 2025-08-03 21:21:29+00:00
It must be said that as far as that goes, the UN is designed to be a place to talk about problems, to air grievances, and the idea of it as a universal problem-solver and half-assed world government isn't particularly a part of how it started. Unfortunately as we're seeing what the UN has become is a plodding bureaucracy that occasionally has good intentions, and rarely sees them through. Mostly the UN is a clearing house for NGO organization and directing aid, which isn't a terrible thing, although their history of corruption, abuse of locals, ineptitude, and so on doesn't inspire confidence.

There's also the reality that the UN suffers from being an open forum, it means that the Qaddafi's of the world get to air their... unique perspectives as well. The rise of China and the decline of Russia has also created a pretty grim dynamic, but IMO the worst of the present state of affairs is the travesty of having countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!

All in all I don't think I have a better idea for a substitute, and any ideas I did have would probably just reflect my own beliefs and desires rather than some universal principle. All in all I feel like the state of the UN does at least mirror the state of the world pretty well though. The US is all over the place depending on administration, Western Europe just plods along, Russia is a butcher, China is extremely complex in both its internal and external dealings (I don't want to generalize and I'm no expert, obviously there's some problems there however), and the Middle Eastern countries like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia use the limitless power of vast wealth to warp and twist everything they touch.
by exfalso | 2025-08-03 21:21:46+00:00
Hmmmm.. I am working in a niche domain (Confidential Computing) and the work is fairly creative, although I wouldn't say I asked it domain-specific things. I didn't ask it to come up with encryption schemes or security protocols, I learned very quickly that it cannot even start on those problems. "Design discussions" were just sycophantic affirmations of whatever I wrote. What I mostly tried were "add this function" or "refactor this based on XY" or "analyze this piece of code for race conditions".

(Un?)fortunately my work doesn't involve a lot of "drone coding". With personal projects I let it do whatever it wanted including picking the language and libraries. With one of them it ended up so confused with the Redis API(!!!) that it kept going back and forth between different versions to "fix" the issues until it literally removed the functionality it was supposed to add. Problem solved, eh?
by mitch_f | 2025-08-03 21:21:56+00:00
Derek Muller did a good overview of this concept on his Veritasium channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98. Even more interesting for HN is a link in the description to one of the speaker's (Tom Magliery) websites: http://www.thirty-seven.org.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-03 21:22:15+00:00
I stuff those in my logBook nowadays - a single ascii text file. Started as you say with notes on random scraps of paper. To relieve my mind of carrying that burden, when I have something more pressing to do. But yeah these half-thoughts, intuits etc have showed useful over time? Some made it into TODO, and latter even into the DONE entries. Even if mostly their final destination is DONTDO. :-)
by nostrademons | 2025-08-03 21:22:15+00:00
That's not necessarily true - it's possible for all governments to fail. The winner might be something that doesn't even register as a government today, maybe something like privatized micro-nations out of Snow Crash, city-states, or a crypto-economy.

There are times in history when a government fails, and then there are times when all governments fail, and the world re-organizes (usually after a long and bloody period of multiple wars) into a new system of social organization. The idea of a modern nation-state is only about 150 years old, dating from a series of wars (the U.S. Civil War, the German and Italian wars of unification, the Franco-Prussian War, the Meiji Restoration) in the 1860s-1880s. Before then, the early nation states and concept of nationalism arose out of European Wars of Religion in the early 1600s. Someone who lived under high-Medieval feudalism c. 1300, when the divine right of Kings was a given, would've found the world of the late 1600s quite alien.
by intended | 2025-08-03 21:22:30+00:00
This is reading the past and forgetting the forces active since WW2 and the 1960s.

We do NOT live in those times, and the edifices propped up and successful in Europe and America, well and truly wish to undermine those protections.

It takes resources and it takes a middle class / working class for the collective will to matter. When those groups are under resourced, then it’s a question on whether nature appeals to some coterie of elites.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-03 21:23:25+00:00
If you think an LLM is a thinking machine, I don’t know what to tell you. They are great at predicting tokens, but there is no evidence they are thinking in the human sense. They rely on patterns and probabilities, not understanding. Powerful search engines, certainly, but there is much work ahead to see how hard the limits being bumped up against are.

https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00160...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202...

From the piece (which I agree with):

> As someone that has sold a bunch of LLM enabled software over the past 6 months, I don’t really buy the AI capex turning into huge productivity gains. Everything to date are just chatbots with RAG and API calls. None of them are going to do my laundry or file my taxes.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-03 21:23:47+00:00
> I.e. people who need to work, which means it disproportionately affects the young.

In general currency devaluation causes nominal wages to increase along with the price of everything else.

The people who get screwed are creditors, especially creditors who issued debt at a fixed interest rate. Which is kind of not that bad, except that creditors tend to have a lot of political power and then use it to either get bailed out by the taxpayer or get policies put in place to prevent inflation from eroding existing debts even if those policies have harsh consequences for other people.
by maysunyoung | 2025-08-03 21:25:14+00:00
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by convolvatron | 2025-08-03 21:25:16+00:00
except the fab pays the tooling cost once per process and the tool and die company charges once per design.

I've actually worked a little on hydroforming, but unless you're thinking of a different kind, it was labor intensive, and prone to crinkling in bad spots. we basically concluded that we used less time and got a better result with an English. which would probably run at least $10k for a car body, if you could find someone willing to work for that low an hourly rate.
by DiggyJohnson | 2025-08-03 21:25:16+00:00
Always funny to see these sort of missed connections on HN.

> internal blogs

In my personal experience the problem is the total lack of writing culture at non-premiere companies.

Put differently: unless you’re working on a great team at a great organization roughly 90% of people cannot be expected to write/read well as a component of technical collaboration. Any thoughts on that? I may just be too cynical
by PicassoCTs | 2025-08-03 21:25:39+00:00
Really? Like it was filled in syria, in jugoslavia, lebanon? Libya, Sudan, Yemen? In Afghanistan it was never filled in the first place and is still not to this day! In pakistan, sri lanka the state is broke - and those giving credit, taking over only move into areas where they have interests, leaving other tribal regions to fend for themselves or sink into civil war (belotschistan). Russias borders are falling apart, with whole regions realigning - and putin soon to spark civil wars and proxxy actions there.
by ornel | 2025-08-03 21:26:02+00:00
Quote from the paper: "the continents are now the leading contributor (44%) to mass-driven GMSL rise". As regards to non-mass-driven rise, another article[0] states, "Ice-mass loss—predominantly from glaciers—has caused twice as much sea-level rise since 1900 as has thermal expansion". I think the findings about sea level rise are as interesting as the ones about fresh water disappearance.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2591-3
by staplung | 2025-08-03 21:26:05+00:00
There's a lot of stuff in the US military that's somewhat aged. The aircraft carrier Nimitz is still in service and was commissioned 50 years ago. The B-52 has been in service for longer than that (in fairness the design is that old; the actual airplanes, presumably not). The A10 Warthog was first released in 1977 and is still in use. The AR-15, embodied in the M16 and M4 goes back to the 1960s and the Browning M2 goes back to 1933.
by Someone | 2025-08-03 21:26:18+00:00
I would start by figuring out where there is room for improvement. Experiments to do:

- how long does it take to just iterate over all bytes in the file?

- how long does it take to decompress the file and iterate over all bytes in the file?

To ensure the compiler doesn’t outsmart you, you may have to do something with the data read. Maybe XOR all 64-bit longs in the data and print the result?

You don’t mention file size but I guess the first takes significantly less time than 45 seconds, and the second about 45 seconds. If so, any gains should be sought in improving the decompression.

Other tests that can help locate the bottleneck are possible. For example, instead of processing a huge N megabyte file once, you may process a 1 MB file N times, removing disk speed from the equation.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-03 21:26:31+00:00
I don't see #1, at least not yet. The Fed hasn't lost control of the yield curve compared to the amount of control that the Fed normally has over it (which is less than total control).

For me, the second half of #3 is the real death knell. If Congress or the president is setting monetary policy, the dollar is in for a world of hurt.
by terminalshort | 2025-08-03 21:26:53+00:00
Only in the case where both the acquirer and the target have directly competing products, which is why I specifically mentioned that case and said it would be the FTCs business. (And even then sometimes it doesn't. Google bought Waze, which was a direct competitor to Google Maps, but still both products exist.)

And, no, they aren't remotely equivalent statements to each other or to "markets remain competitive." If there are 100 products in a market, and an acquisition reduces that to 99, it will have no effect on the competitiveness of a market, which is why such an acquisition is not typically any of the FTC's business.
by instig007 | 2025-08-03 21:27:04+00:00
ATS2 has full support for linear and dependent types, capable of operating at pointer-level arithmetics. While the docs may seem impenetrable, in essence it's just a framework of four composable components 1) constrained data types T's, 2) description of resource management and ownership V's, 3) a statically checked "package-deal" (T * V) for lawful programmer-decided ownership semantics (as opposed to "the only true way" in Rust), and 4) formal proofs of the programmed logic. And you are free to mix & match them canteen-style.

Whenever there's a need for complex C API with generics, it's much more pleasant to implement it as a wrapper atop verified ATS C-output rather than C itself.

https://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/DOCUMENT/INT2PROGINATS/HTML...
by heroadu | 2025-08-03 21:27:51+00:00
Hi everyone, We've launched adhdhq.com, a collection of productivity and life management tools built specifically for individuals with ADHD. As many of you know, standard productivity apps often fall short for people with executive function challenges. We've built this suite to address those specific pain points, using a different approach that focuses on turning common struggles into strengths. A few key tools in the suite include: * Iterative Task Refiner: Helps break down large, overwhelming tasks into small, actionable steps to combat task paralysis. * Focus Hub & Focus Creature: Creates a dedicated workspace to minimize distractions, with a "task companion" to provide motivation and a sense of accountability. * Flex-Time Planner: A scheduling tool that accounts for time blindness and helps create realistic, flexible schedules. * Digital Declutter: A system for organizing and simplifying your digital life, which can often be a major source of distraction and overwhelm. A core principle for us is privacy, so all personal data is stored locally on the user's device and is never shared. We're also built on the belief that these tools need to be engaging and supportive, not just another rigid system. We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you or someone you know has struggled with standard productivity solutions, what's been your experience, and what features do you think are missing from the market? We're open to all feedback!
by UncleEntity | 2025-08-03 21:28:33+00:00
Wouldn't the real test be to run all the code through the bytecode optimizer and see who's faster then?

I mean, this is sort of the same as testing the LLM output against the -O3 compiler optimization flag while compiling their programs with no optimizations. Actually, if I read TFA correctly, this is exactly what they're doing, am I wrong?

Or maybe I am wrong and they're testing their VM against compiled code, dunno?
by pfdietz | 2025-08-03 21:28:50+00:00
I agree solar is very tough to beat, and even more so as storage improves. As I've said before, I consider Helion is the least dubious fusion approach, but that doesn't imply I think their absolute chance of commercial success is high.

One very significant issue with Helion's scheme is the enormous quantity of tritium produced. To put this in context: to power the world with such reactors might require ~10 TW. If using 2DD + D3He, this would produce 12 grams of tritium per second. If this stream were all released into the environment (which it would not be, but this is for purposes of illustration) it would lift all the water in the entire biosphere close to the US legal limit for tritium in drinking water, including all 1.3 billion cubic kilometers in the oceans. Tritium capture and containment will have to be extremely good for this technology to be globally acceptable.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-03 21:29:16+00:00
That line I quoted acknowledges that the problem was overpromising and underdelivering, but doesn't (that I can see) acknowledge that the solution is specifically to promise less rather than deliver more. In particular the word "fast" there is a little worrisome to me.

> The reason that threads & spaces are taking a while to ship in EX is literally because we have slowed down, and made sure everything is fully working before we ship it.

But you already did ship it. And my perception is that what you're doing now is again rushing to catch up with the overpromises. My question is what are you going to do going forward to make sure that things that aren't ready never ship in the first place --- and that there are no more blog posts or the like about how amazing the next thing is (whatever that may be) until it has everything it actually needs to be amazing.

Anything that has to do with fixing what you already shipped is still on the delivery side. My question is about what are the processes on the promise side to ensure that unrealistic promises are not made in the first place.

I appreciate your engaging with me here and I want you to know that I appreciate what Matrix is trying to be. I'm still using Matrix in the same limited way I've been using it for a few years now. I'd love to be able to use it for more purposes. But there is no amount of fixes to already-released things that can ever convince me to do that. The only thing that will convince me is when the "next thing" (or next several things, really) that rolls out is actually everything it was cracked up to be, instead of having major problems that require damage control after it's been hyped up as a groundbreaking step forward.
by robmensching | 2025-08-03 21:29:30+00:00
I hear you. This feels very similar to the early days of OSS licenses. They were terrible and scary until a few big companies finally came out and said OSS licenses weren't (all) terrible or scary. Then accepting OSS licenses became a norm. I'm hoping the OSMF or something like it can change the norm for Open Source sustainability.

I'm not saying it'll happen, but many people told me Microsoft would never accept Open Source, and I proved them wrong. :)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-03 21:29:45+00:00
> So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.

If this was a viable strategy then they would have just done it regardless, right?

Meanwhile the solution to that is to break up the monopolies to begin with. You don't have trillion dollar companies monopolizing the labor pool if you don't have trillion dollar companies.
by lossolo | 2025-08-03 21:29:48+00:00
Things like this don’t happen overnight, just like the decline of empires doesn’t happen overnight.

Have you heard of the Portuguese real? Or the Spanish real? Maybe the Dutch guilder? They were all global reserve currencies in the past.

If you haven’t heard of them, don’t worry, someday, people will ask “Do you know the United States dollar?”
by scotty79 | 2025-08-03 21:29:59+00:00
> It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.

Of course education is coercion. Same way work is things you do for money. Education without coercion is just learning, at best.

Teachers are there because of the coercion they provide. Even in the US they coerce kids to at least sit in class, because if they didn't kids would just walk out and go learn how to properly light up a cigarette from some older kid.
by bshzzle | 2025-08-03 21:30:01+00:00
Yea it's a similar idea - DeepWiki has the generated "wiki" part which we think is really cool (and maybe we'll add something similar in the future). The core chat experience is the same idea - we had some UX inspiration since we think they nailed the experience.

Deepwiki's context retrieval seems to be more sophisticated. I'm speculating, but I imagine they are using the generated wiki + embeddings which probably gives them higher recall over the codebase, vs. how we are using precision search.

Sourcebot has more "IDE" features built into the product like a file explorer and code navigation, which makes it easier to use the AI-generated answer as a jumping off point for further code exploration.
by TwoNineFive | 2025-08-03 21:30:11+00:00
Comparing an Italian skeptics society to a for-profit entertainment radio show is idiotic. These organizations exist for different reasons, have members with different motives, and have completely different audiences.

For every uneducated 1AM unsleeping pleb, like yourself, who treated the ridiculous skeptically, ten more probably took it as fact. That show is probably responsible for a lot of real-world harm, and they made a lot of money doing it.
by maxbond | 2025-08-03 21:30:13+00:00
No, that's just wrong, if you let Adobe buy up all the design tools then you limit designer's choice to just Adobe. Will they come out with a competing product? Maybe. That's their business. But the potential is there, and Adobe has to stay on its toes and can't coast on it's near-monopoly status. Indeed, it's now also possible Figma will come out with products to compete with Adobe. And just the threat of that has the potential to limit all of the hostile behavior towards consumers Adobe has been up to for years.

Which is all to say that the market remains competitive.

If you don't think it's the FTC's business to decide whether or not that 100 to 99 move is significant, then I don't think you understand. Even if it's insignificant - it's their business to make that call. You can disagree with it, but if you think that isn't their balliwick, you're simply mistaken.