MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meatmanek | 2025-08-28 21:25:29+00:00
In Q3, you've got 8 possibilities, expressed as (gender of 1st child, gender of 2nd child, which child's gender is written inside the sealed envelope?), each with presumably equal probability:

1. B B 1 2. B B 2 3. B G 1 4. B G 2 5. G B 1 6. G B 2 7. G G 1 8. G G 2

in which case 4 of 8 possibilities satisfy the condition (the first two and the last two).

Once you open the sealed envelope and it says "girl", it does not become Q1, it becomes a different question:

Q4: "A family has two children. I randomly sampled one of the children and it was a girl. What's the probability both are girls?"

In which case, we're looking at possibilities 4, 5, 7, and 8, and in only 2 of those 4 possibilities are both children girls.

In Q1, you're actually told "A family has two children. I looked at both children and can tell you that at least one of them is a girl. What's the probability that both are girls?". In which case, possibilities 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 are all valid. Only in 2 of those 6 possibilities are both children girls.

So as in_cahoots said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053187, it matters whether the person asking looked at both children or just a single one.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-28 21:26:10+00:00
Indeed. One thing they haven't mentioned is that the mother wasn't Zharata The Man Hater, who would kill any boy child. Therefore, in the Zharata case the answer is 1, and we're missing the probability of Zharata's family being considered, which could be one of pure certainty since she always puts her family forward for any puzzle question - killing any philosopher who would pose one not relating to her own family.
by solid_fuel | 2025-08-28 21:26:25+00:00
The comparison to social media is an apt one. I have been told directly, by relatives, that the city I live in was burned to the ground by protests in 2020. Nevermind that I told them that wasn't true, never mind that I sent pictures of the neighborhood still very much being fine. They are convinced because everyone they follow on facebook repeats the same thing.
by mynameis777 | 2025-08-28 21:26:57+00:00
Hey there – greetings from one of the most heavily censored regions in the world.

I once considered using an Indonesian VPS to bypass my country's censorship. However, the Indonesian VPS provider actually refused my direct connection request from my country. I was quite frustrated at the time, wondering why they refused me. But now I understand – it turns out these two countries are in cahoots.

Emmm, if you want to break through the censorship, you can start here: https://github.com/free-nodes/v2rayfree

It provides many free proxy nodes that are almost unusable in my country, but might work in Indonesia (although you may need a lot of patience to test which ones actually work).

A good proxy software is Clash.Meta for Linux (you’ll need to install Linux on Windows using VMware, then set up Clash.Meta).

You can start by installing the Windows version of the proxy client software (V2rayN) for a simple way to bypass censorship, but it's not a long-term solution.

A special reminder: these free nodes are not secure (they could very well be "honeypot" lines, but if you're not from my country, the police should have no way of dealing with you). You need to quickly set up your own route by purchasing a U.S. VPS and setting up your own proxy nodes.

Lastly, I recommend a good teacher: ChatGPT. It will solve all the problems you encounter on Linux. Also, use the Chrome browser with translation.

Good luck!
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-28 21:27:32+00:00
Yeah ok, but it's just an anecdote so it doesn't count as generalisable evidence in any case.

I would just add that when he got back to Britain and tried baguette style bread there he found that he could tolerate it in Britain too.

Again, I'm just reporting a story as it was told to me because I was reminded of it in response to the previous comment.
by ciconia | 2025-08-28 21:27:39+00:00
> This worries me. I greatly value Western ideals—freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights. These things matter.

Hmm I don't know about those so called "western values" - seems to me there's a lot of hypocrisy in western nations, where we look down on so called authoritarian societies as wrong or even evil. As TFA says, it looks like the Chinese government is delivering for its people, while it's clear that western democracies are not.
by bpt3 | 2025-08-28 21:27:41+00:00
I don't understand your point.

I agree tax rates are disinflationary in theory and I believe in practice to an extent, so it could be another tool in the Fed's toolbox but not one I think they want to have or one that Congress is willing (or arguably able on their own, though they wouldn't have to if the Fed's role were just advisory) to give up.

But what does that have to do with the paper you posted?
by Majromax | 2025-08-28 21:27:52+00:00
In all of these questions, you're making an assumption about the data-generating process. In Q1 and Q2, you're assuming that you had a 0% chance (a priori) of hearing that 'neither is a (girl/boy)', and in Q3 you're assuming that there's a 0% chance of hearing that the envelope doesn't match the family.

Take a look at this problem beginning with no assumptions. We have two kids, and an envelope that contains 'B' or 'G'. Our probability space is (B,G)^3, with each having probability of 1/8.

Now, we add information about the match as conditioning. Conditional on being told that the envelope matches the family, we can exclude the BBG and GGB cases. That brings us down to 6, of which we have BBB, GGG, and (BG,GB)(B,G). With this additional information, the probability of matching genders becomes 1/3. This probability is still 1/3 if we open the envelope to find B or G, since we exclude all three cases where the envelope doesn't match our observation of it.

In my view, this is related to the Monty Hall problem; we have to realize that we're given additional information with the statement/envelope.
by windsor | 2025-08-28 21:29:12+00:00
Thanks for trying us out! Let me know if you run into any issues with deployment or the like. If you want a clean MCP template to get up and running, check out this example: https://github.com/dedalus-labs/brave-search-mcp

Auth is a big one for us, and we're working really hard to provide a robust auth experience that is easy to use for both LLM agents and human users. One of our goals is to help mold the shape that the community takes with MCP. We’ll be launching our auth solution around end of September. I’m personally really excited to tackle this problem.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-28 21:29:42+00:00
> Android has proper sandboxing which means that other apps can't read the token owned by the bank app.

Let's consider this alternative as well:

Scenario 1: Device has no malicious code at all; same as scenario 1 before.

Scenario 2: Device has a malicious app but the malicious app doesn't have root and the OS (regardless of whether it's Android or something else) enforces proper sandboxing. The malicious app can't extract the bank authentication token regardless of attestation.

Scenario 3: Device is fully compromised; malicious code has root. Same as before, if you enter your credentials into this device the attacker gets them.

The problem is that the only useful thing for attestation to do is to distinguish between 1 or 2 vs. 3, but that's the thing it can't do because if the malicious code is privileged it can replace the bank app with one that exfiltrates the credentials without requiring attestation, so the only cases where attestation is happening are the ones where it isn't needed.
by jajuuka | 2025-08-28 21:31:01+00:00
They really don't. It's just that development of custom roms like GrapheneOS are centered around Pixels. Plenty of other devices have unlockable bootloaders. The custom rom scene though is so small that concentrating on a couple devices is the only way to keep development moving forward though. Same reason why Asahi Linux is the only option on Apple Silicon Macs.
by cogman10 | 2025-08-28 21:31:06+00:00
> Brooke Rennert, a 21-year-old from Rochester Hills putting herself through welding school by working as the only woman at her oil-change job, isn’t having any of it. “I don’t like electric cars. I like the sound of a heavy engine. I like the power,” she said. “An electric vehicle has power, but in a different way. It’s not like a big V8, big-block sound.”

This, IMO, is exactly why they are dying. They are more expensive than regular cars and the only reason anyone likes them is because they are loud and obnoxious.

There's just fewer and fewer people that need a loud noise maker to be happy, certainly not when that noise maker will cost you $60k you likely don't have since inflation has gone crazy while salaries have stagnated.

The people that do end up gravitating to the noise makers will choose a loud motorcycle instead.
by gnerd00 | 2025-08-28 21:31:20+00:00
this was true, but then it wasn't... the research world several years ago, had a moment when the machinery could reliably solve multi-step problems.. there had to be intermediary results; and machinery could solve problems in a domain where they were not trained specifically.. this caused a lot of excitement, and several hundred billion dollars in various investments.. Since no one actually knows how all of it works, not even the builders, here we are.
by sandspar | 2025-08-28 21:32:09+00:00
>Buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, do odd jobs

Unrelated to the discussion, but I love these kinds of backup plans. I've found that most guys I talk to have one. Just a few days ago a guy was telling me that, if his beloved wife ever divorces him, then he'd move to a tropical island and become a coconut seller.

(My personal plan: find a small town in the Sonoran Desert that has a good library, dig a hole under a nice big Saguaro cactus, then live out my days reading library books in my cool and shady cave.)
by achierius | 2025-08-28 21:32:28+00:00
> We see that the nightmare scenario - a person with no previous psychosis history or risk factor becoming fully psychotic - was uncommon, at only 10% of cases. Most people either had a previous psychosis history known to the respondent, or had some obvious risk factor, or were merely crackpots rather than full psychotics.

It's unfortunate to see the author take this tack. This is essentially taking the conventional tack that insanity is separable: some people are "afflicted", some people just have strange ideas -- the implication of this article being that people who already have strange ideas were going to be crazy anyways, so GPT didn't contribute anything novel, just moved them along the path they were already moving regardless. But anyone with serious experience with schizophrenia would understand that this isn't how it works: 'biological' mental illness is tightly coupled to qualitative mental state, and bidirectionally at that. Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals, and it's possible for a vulnerable person to be pushed over the edge by either kind of input. We like to think that 'as long as nothing is chemically wrong' we're a-ok, but the truth is that it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state.

For this reason it is very important that vulnerable people be well-moored, anchored to reality by their friends and family. A normal person would take care to not support fantasies of government spying or divine miracles or &c where not appropriate, but ChatGPT will happily egg them on. These intermediate cases that Scott describes -- cases where someone is 'on the edge', but not yet detached from reality -- are the ones you really want to watch out for. So where he estimates an incidence rate of 1/100,000, I think his own data gives us a more accurate figure of ~1/20,000.
by lawlessone | 2025-08-28 21:32:33+00:00
what's actually happening is all your life you've been told by experience if something can talk to you is that it must be somewhat intelligent.

Now you get can't around that this might not be the case.

You're like that beetle going extinct mating with beer bottles.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...
by sudhirb | 2025-08-28 21:33:17+00:00
> One of the consequences of this is that we should always consider asking the LLM the same question more than once, perhaps with some variation in the wording. Then we can compare answers, indeed perhaps ask the LLM to compare answers for us. The difference in the answers can be as useful as the answers themselves.

There was once a coding agent which achieved SOTA performance on SWE Bench Verified by "just" running the agent 5 times on each instance, scoring each attempt and picking the attempt with the highest score: https://aide.dev/blog/sota-bitter-lesson
by capitainenemo | 2025-08-28 21:33:50+00:00
Well you're in luck because I said virus (accidentally) but I really meant "bacteria" - I don't think viruses can form spores, but who knows what we'll find. There are a lot of hijackings of cellular machinery that happen, and maybe we'll find one that uses a bacterial spore as a stealth capsule.

There are indeed bacteria which can survive high bleach concentrations. It was a minor nitpick.
by pringularity | 2025-08-28 21:34:04+00:00
Yeah I think basically all the ones here with letter/number combos are SPVs. (A lot of the time, they're actually the first two letters of the portfolio company -- would be cool to attempt analysis there!)

https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/q=Fund%2520I%252C%2520a%2...
by nemothekid | 2025-08-28 21:35:05+00:00
>Then put up a goddamn login wall.

They did exactly that, they just outsourced it to cloudflare. The problem became bad enough that a lot of other people did the same thing.

If your argument is "companies shouldn't be allowed to outsource components to other companies, or cloudflare specifically", then sure, but good luck ever enforcing that.
by araes | 2025-08-28 21:35:40+00:00
You're correct on at least where the guess about possible chemicals came from. Search on possible phosphorous chemicals came back with Polyphosphates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphosphate) as a major group, of which ADP (C10H15N5O10P2) is a major percentage. Polyphosphates in addition to Organic Phosphorous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphorus_chemistry) and Orthophosphate [PO4]3− (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate) as the other major constituents.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22133...

A further search brought up that that Chinese found Apatite phosphorous is actually a major part. Triangular admixture of Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2, Ca10(PO4)6F2 and Ca10(PO4)6Cl2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatite

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09560...
by bo1024 | 2025-08-28 21:37:46+00:00
I had a funny picture recently of a future where most everybody has a pet crackpot or conspiracy theory they're working on with their AI companion, and it's considered normal. "Hey Bob, how's the physics going?" "Pretty good, I might get the Nobel next year. How bout the lizard people?" "The evidence is piling up and we got some great renderings, the media will have to listen to us soon." "Alrighty, see you tomorrow."
by fair_enough | 2025-08-28 21:38:04+00:00
We need adverse possession ("squatter's rights") for intellectual property.

I'm surprised copyright trolls are not buying IP from defunct game/film/music companies and suing youtubers left and right for uploading video game music and anime OSTs.

If I were a sociopath and didn't care how I make my money, I draft some legit-looking legal threat letter template demanding $10,000 to avoid a civil lawsuit worth millions, fill in the blanks with a name, IP address, and title of pirated content, then mail out the letters by the tens of thousands using USPS-subsidized cheap mail.

If you mail out about 20k of these threats, you only need 3 of them to pay up to come out on top.
by runako | 2025-08-28 21:38:14+00:00
I should have addressed this. This thread is about the capital costs of getting to the first sale, so that's model training for an LLM vs all the R&D in an iPhone.

Recent iPhones use Apple's own custom silicon for a number of components, and are generally vastly more complex. The estimates I have seen for iPhone 1 development range from $150 million to $2.5 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, a current iPhone generation costs more than the older versions.

And it absolutely makes sense for Apple to spend more in total to develop successive generations, because they have less overall product risk and larger scale to recoup.
by thom | 2025-08-28 21:38:22+00:00
Many years ago the agency I worked for was tasked with delivering a new website for a major UK brand. The hipster London marketing agency we had to work alongside pushed so many garish ideas that I ended up creating a jQuery plugin called "disco mode". It set a timer and on every tick would select a random element on the page and apply a random effect. Slowly the UI would disintegrate into a maddening, incoherent mess of clashing colours and animations, and then there was also the plugin I mentioned.
by arjie | 2025-08-28 21:38:34+00:00
A 2023 Dodge Charger GT V6 does 0-60 in 6.4 s

My 2018 Subaru Forester does 0-60 in 6.3 s

Imagine you're getting smoked by a 7 year old dad-mobile with paddle shifters. And I'm not even running a Cobb tune. That isn't a muscle car. That's a synthol car.

https://www.burnsmotors.com/cdjr-research/dodge-charger-0-60...
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-28 21:38:58+00:00
Disagree, I think they've done a moderately good job of it. The problem is that you have other intelligent but cynical people who are prepared to invest fortunes in convincing stupid people to believe things that actively undermine their interests. Long before 4chan and social media came along, you had tabloid newspapers, radio stations, and publishers whose sole goal was to dumb people down by appealing to paranoia, selfishness, and vapidity.
by 0xCMP | 2025-08-28 21:39:21+00:00
iirc spiped uses TLS/OpenSSL for securing the connection, the symmetric key avoids the key-exchange and worrying about certificates, and therefore is better capable of efficiently using the connection than SSH by itself.

Because it's much simpler it's also a good way to expose a system to the internet, although Wireguard with a PSK is a very similar and possibly superior solution.
by pstuart | 2025-08-28 21:39:43+00:00
In the interest of avoiding partisan squabbling on HN, I'm going to state the following and let you walk away feeling like you "won" this debate:

1. Trump is the epitome of a corrupt pol and has pretty much gotten away with everything his entire life. 2. Prosecuting him was not in the form of of attacking a rival, it was addressing issue #1 3. If the roles were reversed and this was Biden we were talking about, most dem voters would still be for prosecution of blatant corruption. The magic of Trump is that his supporters (which apparently you are one of) are fine with him doing anything he wants, up to and including shooting someone on Fifth Ave

So congratulations! You are right and I am wrong and I'm so sorry to bother you with my clearly not-Trump-loving observations.
by redleader55 | 2025-08-28 21:39:48+00:00
The VM instance is good for setting up a VPN tunnel, but it's not good in terms of bandwidth if it's hosted in. Because of DPI capacity, China has a very limited amount of "real internet" bandwidth. A more capable setup is to have one VM on each side of the firewall on an hosting service with peering between inside and outside - Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud) is an example. The "inside" VM could be just "socat UDP4-RECVFROM:<port>,fork UDP4-SENDTO:<remote>:<port>" or something done using netfilter.

Like others commented in this thread, having an obfuscator is a good idea to ensure the traffic is not dropped by DPI.

When the inevitable ban comes and your VPN stops working, rotate the IP of the external VPN and update the firewall/socat config to reflect it. Usually, the internal VM's IP doesn't need to be updated.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-28 21:39:57+00:00
"The question writer took all sets of two child families and ruled out the bb case. Then they asked the exact question above" This is 1/3 chance - select gg from [gg,bg,gb]'

vs

"The question writer came across a girl from a two child family, then they asked the exact question above". This is 1/2 chance - select gg from [gg, gg, bg, gb] with gg listed twice since there's two ways to select a girl from that set; ie. coming across a girl is twice as likely to occur from the gg case than it is either gb or bg.

I think that's the clearest wording to get the message across. Either way it's the exact same question but it reasonably has a completely different answer. There's no way to resolve this ambiguity with the question as written.
by hex4def6 | 2025-08-28 21:40:00+00:00
This has been my argument as well. We've been climbing the abstraction ladder for years. Assembly -> C -> OOP ->... this just seems like another layer of abstraction. "Programmers" are going to become "architects".

The labor cost of implementing a given feature is going to dramatically drop. Jevons Paradox paradox will hopefully still mean that the labor pool will just be used to create '10x' the output (or whatever the number actually is).

If the cost of a line of code / feature / app becomes basically '0', will we still hit a limit in terms of how much software can be consumed? Or do consumers have an infinite hunger for new software? It feels like the answer has to be 'it's finite'. We have a limited attention span of (say) 8hrs/person * 8 billion.
by msgodel | 2025-08-28 21:40:23+00:00
Desktop Linux works very nicely on smartphones actually provided all the drivers are there. I lived with a PinePhone running FVWM on Xorg for a couple years and if the hardware didn't crumble away I'd still be using it today.

No need to "build a complete from-scratch alternative OS" when that was already done 30 years ago.
by ykl | 2025-08-28 21:40:28+00:00
This doesn't work anymore; the GFW no longer detects VPN connections by port but instead by performing deep packet inspection to characterize the type of traffic going over every connection. Using this technique in combination with some advanced ML systems, they're able to detect any encrypted VPN connection and cut it off; it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore, and it's usually not even possible to _tunnel_ a VPN connection through some other protocol because the GFW now detects that too.

Stepping back and looking at it from a purely technical perspective, it's actually insanely impressive.

Here's a USENIX paper from a few years ago on how it is done: https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/
by kccqzy | 2025-08-28 21:41:16+00:00
The article says,

> Under the hood, Uncertain<T> models GPS uncertainty using a Rayleigh distribution.

And the Rayleigh distribution is clearly not just an interval with a uniformly random distribution in between. Normal interval arithmetic isn't useful because that uniform random distribution isn't at all a good model for the real world.

Take for example that Boost library you linked. Ask it to compute (-2,2)*(-2,2). It will give (-4,4). A more sensible result might be something like (-2.35, 2.35). The -4 lower bound is only attainable when you have -2 and 2 as the multiplicands which are at the extremes of the interval; probabilistically if we assume these are independent random variables then two of them achieving this extreme value simultaneously should have an even lower probability.