MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by naravara | 2025-08-13 17:57:03+00:00
It doesn’t surprise me if they found that the emergent behaviors didn’t change given their method. Modifying the simulation to make them behave differently would mean your rules have changed the model’s behavior to “jump tracks” into simulating a different sort of person who would generate different outputs. It’s not quite analogous to having the same Bob who likes fishing responding to different stimuli. Sort of like how Elon told Grok to be “unfathomably based” and stop caring about being PC” and suddenly it turned into a Neo-Nazi Chan-troll. Changing the inputs for an LLM isn’t taking a core identity and tweaking it, it’s completely altering the relationships between all the tokens it’s working with.

I would assume there is so much in the corpus based on behavior optimized for the actual existing social media we have that the behavior of the bots is not going to change because the bot isn’t responding to incentives like a person would it’s mimicking the behavior it’s been trained on and if there isn’t enough training data of behavior under the different inputs you’re trying to test you’re not actually applying the “treatment” you would think you are.
by calibas | 2025-08-13 17:57:08+00:00
> They are not exact

It's not exactly a myth, as the article mentions, they're only exact for certain ranges of values.

> NaN and INF are indication of an error

This is somewhat semantic, but dividing by zero typically does create a hardware exception. However, it's all handled behind the scenes, and you get "Inf" as the result.

You can make it so dividing by zero is explicitly an error, see the "ftrapping-math" flag.
by projectazorian | 2025-08-13 17:57:30+00:00
You completely skipped over the defense and biotech industries, I notice. Not to mention DC being the HQ of the US military-industrial complex and the intelligence community. Like I said, there's a lot of bloat in the defense industry, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's 100% waste.

> Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?

IMO it's perfectly legitimate for organizations to advocate for their interests as long as they do not engage in bribery. They often have subject matter expertise the government does not, and more information allows for better decision-making. Would you rather the government operate in a vacuum, completely disconnected from what is going on in the rest of the country? Btw, it's not just corporations that lobby, there are plenty of NGOs doing the same thing.

If you want to blame someone for this dynamic, blame the founders of this country, who decided to create a federal district rather than put the capital in an existing city with an existing industrial base.
by dpassens | 2025-08-13 17:57:52+00:00
And yet, when you click through, it says

> NaBr has a very low toxicity with an oral LD50 estimated at 3.5 g/kg for rats.[6] However, this is a single-dose value. Bromide ions are a cumulative toxin with a relatively long biological half-life (in excess of a week in humans): see potassium bromide.

At no point does the paragraph you linked suggest it's safe to substitute NaCl with any other sodium salt.
by withinboredom | 2025-08-13 17:57:54+00:00
Most teams I've been on will automatically reject a PR writing raw sql due to maintainability concerns. I would never consider it in a professional context unless it can be done in a way that guarantees it is easy to maintain without using concatenation.

Most ORMs don't have the SQL tools we did to sanitize variables when putting them into queries. Some do, but not all.
by doublerabbit | 2025-08-13 17:58:40+00:00
I've tried. Their line is connected to the same exchange as my ADSL and via BT who are tasked to upgrade UKs domestic to fibre by the end of 2026.

I have even asked if I provided the equipment run a Line-of-Sight links from the hotel to my apartment. Perfect range and advantage point but nothing other than some PR fluff of "it may harm the public".
by 0xffff2 | 2025-08-13 17:58:50+00:00
In California at least, nothing stops you from asking about expected pay as part of the application process and setting expectations for individual candidates early. From the applicant side, I'm constantly amazed at how many companies are shamelessly advertising senior level jobs with embarrassingly low salary ranges. Being able to weed out companies whose _upper_ bound is less than I'm making now as a government contractor (i.e. very much not FANNG pay) saves a ton of time.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-13 17:58:58+00:00
Yep, focus on actors may be warranted, but in a broad view and as a part of existing system and not 'their own system'. Otherwise, we get lost in a sea of IC level of paranoia. In simple terms, nations-states will do what nation-states will do ( which is basically whatever is to their advantage ).

That does not mean we can't have a technical discussion that bypasses at least some of those considerations.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-13 17:59:04+00:00
"People used to rely on this thing. As replacements come along and a bit of the magic was revealed to be a hoax, people rely less on that thing so it became less valuable."

Amazing, super simple to understand and without any need for hilariously shallow bigotry!

I haven't heard anyone in business -- like you, having worked in F100, corporate, startups, and so on -- reference a Gartner report seriously in well over a decade. From any age group. Whether "boomer" or super savvy YouTube-watching (lol) "millenial". I mean, I know they exist as this company still has revenue, but it seems like classic inertia where people are just going through the motions of historic norms as something is phased out, precisely why the market is looking poorly on the company.

Seriously, trying to tie the evolution of industry to some sort of tired, laughable ageist nonsense is just boorish. Be better.

When someone older yips about how younguns today are all cooked and they play Roblox all day, it looks like ageist shrieking from someone with little nuance and a very binary view of the world. It is no different when laughable pieces like this appear.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-13 17:59:28+00:00
That Wikipedia article is annoyingly scant on what assumptions are needed for the philosophical conclusions of Solomonoff's method to hold. (For that matter, it's also scant on the actual mathematical statements.) As far as I can tell, it's something like "If there exists some algorithm that always generates True predictions (or perhaps some sequence of algorithms that make predictions within some epsilon of error?), then you can learn that algorithm in the limit, by listing through all algorithms by length and filtering them by which predict your current set of observations."

But as mentioned, it's uncomputable, and the relative lack of success of AIXI-based approaches suggests that it's not even as well-approximable as advertised. Also, assuming that there exists no single finite algorithm for Truth, Solomonoff's method will never get you all the way there.
by const_cast | 2025-08-13 17:59:37+00:00
> And yet people (devs) keep signing up for free plans.

Yeah, because devs are stupid. Because consumers, as a whole, are stupid. They're short-sighted and self-destructive. Just ask Marlboro.

> I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment.

Yes, this is a fundamental character flaw present in every human, to varying degrees. Its a function of how our reward center works.

Exploiting that flaw for money-making is a dark pattern at best, and a crime against humanity at worst.

This right here is just a dark pattern. Using a vulnerability in the human mind for an exploit that, on average, extracts cash you wouldn't otherwise get.

Personally, I don't think it's that bad. But it is a dark pattern and I don't like it. So, there.
by rvz | 2025-08-13 17:59:45+00:00
> Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical

who....cares?

I think we need to ask ourselves why we put up with this nonsense. Not even the serious tech companies and adjacent care about that aspect of your performance.

He would certainly have passed on Linus Torvalds if he applied to work at Canonical - because he did not got to some well known top high school or get the top marks Shuttleworth wanted.
by bitpush | 2025-08-13 17:59:58+00:00
I lost a bit of respect for author, who I see frequently here on HN and elsewhere. I always thought they were reasonable, highly technical and have been casually following them since their svelte days.

Their pivot to AI and rebranding (from a dev advocate who did js frameworks to now suddenly being an expert of AI/LLMs) was inspiring but this take has left me with a poor taste in my mouth.
by krunck | 2025-08-13 18:00:00+00:00
In my late 40's I realized I don't get thirsty. I did when I was younger.

I'm also a big sweater so I dehydrate quickly.

I found that I would get dehydrated to the point where my body tissues would reduce in volume or something and my Eustachian tubes would open up. They would either pop as I breathed or actually transmit my breath sounds directly into my ear from my throat. Concerning, yes.

Soon after drinking a lot of water this would go away. I soon realized that I was lacking a sense of thirst and was really stressing my body. Now I make drinking a habit.
by atsushin | 2025-08-13 18:00:19+00:00
The lack of IRL 'third places' for young people to meet locally will only exacerbate the issue -- and probably should bear most of the blame. The car-centric infrastructure of the suburbs (well, the vast majority of America) encourages isolation and asocial behavior. It really sucks that for some, their lives will never go beyond that invisible cage.
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-13 18:00:23+00:00
> There's no industry on the planet where "must accept" regulations are set by the world's most sensitive physics experiments.

The criteria is not industry vs. "world's most sensitive physics experiments", it's industry vs. "agreed activity for public/societal benefit". And there are many examples for it.

We regulate light/noise and other pollution in consideration of wildlife and plants, we regulate nuclear waste disposal considering our responsibilities to the greater public good.

We could also not regulate anything with regards to wildlife and plants, there is no immediate economic benefit to preserve all variants of rhinos, tigers, reptiles etc., we could kill all plants except the most resilient one, it's much more economic to maintain them in long-term then.

We could also globally agree to dispose all nuclear waste in one place on earth and just never go there again.

Actually we could disband entities like the EPA, because we can figure out solutions to each environmental impact on-demand if there's enough incentive for it.

But we don't, because there is (or used to be) consensus that there are also goals beyond short-term economic growth. Areas of interest for greater society, for mankind if you will.
by kijin | 2025-08-13 18:00:45+00:00
A practical problem with DNS-01 is that every DNS provider has a different API for creating the required TXT record. Certbot has more than a dozen plugins for different providers, and the list is growing. It shouldn't be nginx's job to keep track of all these third-party APIs.

It would also be unreasonable to tell everyone to move their domains to a handful of giants like AWS and Cloudflare who already control so much of the internet, just so they could get certificates with DNS-01. I like my DNS a bit more decentralized than that.
by sorenjan | 2025-08-13 18:00:54+00:00
I hope this is the start of more ML filters in ffmpeg. They added the sr (super resolution) filter years ago, but it's old and it's difficult to get the weights so you can run it, since they're not included. They have added support for multiple inference libraries like libtorch, but again, it's difficult to even get started. Hopefully they can get behind a consistent ML strategy, ideally with a "models" directory with ready to use models for upscaling, temporal upscaling, noise cancelling, etc. A lot of audio and video filter research use ML now, new codecs will probably also use it soon.
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-13 18:01:22+00:00
> Glassdoor is a good barometer for company health

Glassdoor hasn’t been a good barometer for anything. When your reviews get removed because the company paid them, you’re just being shown what the company wants you to see. Their salary data is highly inaccurate and deflates the industry wages. That site needs to be banished into non existence.
Tell HN: Free Hardware for People Circa Austin
by FlwrsAlgeranon | 2025-08-13 18:01:23+00:00
Hi Hacker News Austinites,

I have some hardware that's languishing in storage. I've gotten 1000's of hours of entertainment from the high quality community here (and gifted hardware from those neighboring it). I'd rather give to somebody who knows what to do with it instead of it getting flipped on Craigslist.

So I'm giving away the following for free to whomever wants it. PM profile email for details on pick up/drop off. Please allow some time to respond—I don't have Internet currently.

* Ubiquiti Mesh Wifi 6

* Ubiquiti Flex Mini 5 Switch

* Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE

* Nighthawk Router CM1200

* Linksys Wifi E5400

* Tripplite 6U Rack

* iPad Mini Gen 6 64Gb

Additionally I have books!

* National Geographic: The Photographs

* Now you see it, Stephen Few

* Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte

* Wall and Piece, Banksy

* The Innovators, Walter Isaacson

* Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham

* Maps of the Mind, Charles Turner

* The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll

* I am a Strange Loop, Doug Hofstadter

* Linux Bible 10th Edition, Christopher Negus

* The C Programming Language, Kernighan & Ritchie

* Neuromancer, William Gibson

* The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, Tom Wolfe
by weitendorf | 2025-08-13 18:01:33+00:00
I think I gave you product feedback on Qbix at some point in the past. I also know several founders who’ve secured funding for open source products and built successful businesses off of them. Open-core is pretty popular out here in the Bay Area.

One thing I’ve learned since staring a company is that early on, your greatest asset is trust in your founder/brand, because it’s the only reason for someone to pay you for something until you get your shit together. I’ve personally had a hard time noticing it in myself sometimes, but I think it’s easy to overlook how outward signaling that might look like distrust (eg making users sign NDAs) damages your own ability to build trust. Since early startups tend to be considered untrustworthy by default it can be really counterproductive. Anyway, I appreciate your non-aggression policy
by deanc | 2025-08-13 18:01:43+00:00
What is the use-case now in 2025 for an e-ink watch? I have a Garmin Epix pro gen 2 which gets about a month of battery life and has a gorgeous AMOLED, has profiles for pretty much every sport ever invented, incredibly accurate GPS tracking, all day HR-tracking, ECG etc.

I understand it's about 4x the price, but there's also lower-end Garmin's that are about 2x the price with the same screen, slightly less features and similar battery life
by reactordev | 2025-08-13 18:01:44+00:00
Yup. I can’t wait for the day I can kill my caddy8s service.

The best thing about caddy is the fact you can reload config, add sites, routes, without ever having to shutdown. Writing a service to keep your orchestration platform and your ingress in sync is meh. K8s has the events, DNS service has the src mesh records, you just need a way to tell caddy to send it to your backend.

The feature should be done soon but they need to ensure it works across K8s flavors.
by bluGill | 2025-08-13 18:01:48+00:00
Minimum hourly wage is a terrible metric - very few people make that wage. In your areas where transit is most useful it is also the most economically productive so even less people are making minimum wage than the normal population. I don't the cities in question, but in general these days minimum wages is what you see paid in the economically depressed dying small towns, or people so disabled (generally mentally) that they cannot do your easiest fast food jobs.

How do costs compare for average people in that area is a much better metric. (understand that in transit areas I'd expect people with cars to have newer luxury cars, while in more car centric areas I'd expect more used non-luxury cars, and in poor areas worn out cars - which is itself a skew of the facts)
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-13 18:02:48+00:00
Substance use is dropping precipitously, because partying and socialization writ large are dropping. The people who party are still drinking, they're really not the ones driving these decreases.

Alcohol's primary purpose in our society is as a social lubricant. It both lowers inhibitions, and in the expectation of its doing so creates spaces with freer acceptable behavior. Cannabis doesn't currently fill that niche, because there aren't really spaces dedicated to its consumption.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-13 18:02:54+00:00
> I'm at the point where I don't engage with bad faith arguments because they just end up in frustration on both sides.

I agree, and that's almost exactly why I replied to your statement that anyone who saw it differently than you did was "just following a religion" (to slightly paraphrase). They aren't, they just have a different perspective on the situation and have just made different calculations regarding the risk/reward ratio.

> Ignoring or disregarding Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a sure way to be surprised and rejected by the people.

>I'm looking medium to long term, the same scale that I think needs to be considered for the planet.

I don't think they ARE ignoring Maslow's hierarchy. It seems to me, that they just see the environmental destruction as being a more immediate concern than you do. You seem to have a "we'll fix it when it's more convenient" stance. That doesn't work for the folks who believe we'll all be starving within a decade or less, or who believe that it will NEVER be more convenient. To them this is near the top of the hierarchy.

At the end of the day, I'm very much on your side of the argument. I think we do have some time to sort it out, and I suspect that we will eventually make significant progress towards those goals (despite modern Republicans Ostrich based approach to risk). However, I understand why other people disagree, and I respect that. There's even some science that agrees with the "sky is falling" crowd. It's certainly not a totally irrational stance.
by godelski | 2025-08-13 18:02:54+00:00
> you are assuming that intelligence will necessarily and inherently lead to (good) morality

Please read before responding. I said no such thing. I even said there are bad smart people. I only argued that a person's goodness is orthogonal to their intelligence. But I absolutely did not make an assumption that intelligence equates to good. I said it was irrelevant...
by tracker1 | 2025-08-13 18:03:03+00:00
I kind of wish that the OS provided to the browser the following pieces of theme information...

1. is dark mode 2. primary background color 3. primary forground (text) color 4. primary accent color 5. secondary accent color 6. warning accent color 7. danger accent color

Then the application could use those to apply overall skin/theme to the web application(s). However, you will still have those sites/apps that want their own. The biggest example imo is Slack.

Even material or fluent are similar enough that applications using either tools with the above values for an overall theme would be easy enough to apply throughout an application.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-13 18:03:26+00:00
Are they going to compel Google to not allow people to go to their sites? Even when it’s not the default search engine (Windows), they still voluntarily go there.

Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue?

The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-13 18:03:57+00:00
It's good to see this, it surprised me that this didn't happen to basically everything, basically immediately.

I figured either somehow Let's Encrypt doesn't work out, or, everybody bakes in ACME within 2-3 years. The idea that you can buy software in 2025 which has TLS encryption but expects you to go sort out the certificate. It's like if cars had to be refuelled periodically by taking them to a weird dedicated building which is not useful to anything else rather than just charging while you're asleep like a phone and... yeah you know what I get it now. You people are weird.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-13 18:03:58+00:00
> The shift in perception of alcohol is certainly a good sign.

Is it? That same video, in the last 2-3 mins, mentioned all the positives of alcohol and ton of possibly related fallout from social drinking going down. People being lonely and depressed instead of socializing.

If I had to choose between living an extra few years but being lonely and depressed vs living a few less years but enjoying them a bunch more I'd choose the enjoyment.

I get that *maybe* that can happen without the alcohol but it's not happening and my experience is that alcohol is a net positive at the moment, until some substitute appears.

Also, different cultures have different associations with alcohol. My opinions on alcohol changed over my life:

As a child my parents offered me a sip of wine/beer/etc and it tasted horrible so I had no interest.

As a teen I happened to get interested in a religion that said "no alcohol" and so I saw it as a bad thing.

As a 20-25 I gave up the religion but it was "designated driver" time and I was happy to be that and so alcohol had this negative "drunk drivers" association.

Around 26-30 I got in a relationship with some who liked to drink socially. I tried it, nothing tasted good and it gave me a headache so after a few months I went back to not drinking as i got nothing positive out of it.

As 30 something I moved to Japan where (1) I no longer had to drive so no worries about drunk driving (2) my friends/co-workers/classmates introduced me to izakaya culture - being with friends for 2-6 hours, drinking and snacking and talking. And sometimes going to 2nd, 3rd, or 4th outings. Now, love that experience and I wouldn't give it up for almost anything. I love being with my friends, and, as the video pointed out, the alcohol works. The experience is different than without alcohol, and in a positive way. Remove it and it's influences and I think the experience would die out. I certainly don't like the negative health effects but I'm not going to give up hanging out with friends and the drinking, for me, is a positive part of that experience.

Here's a talk about how alcohol helped civilization

https://longnow.org/talks/02022-slingerland/
by pm90 | 2025-08-13 18:04:01+00:00
I didn’t downvote you, but I do agree with the author. The boomer CTOs Ive worked under have almost always been incredibly unqualified and resistant to change. They are not moving in the same physical or digital circles and therefore need Gartner to inform them of where the industry is headed. I wondered at why they hold these jobs and my guess is that it’s due to “the people they know” which is usually boomers at other companies. Its a scam.