MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xg15 | 2025-08-18 20:42:33+00:00
I think the most absurd syntax goes to Python again.

Python offers an "extended" form of list comprehensions that lets you combine iteration over nested data structures.

The irony is that the extensions have a left-to-right order again, but because you have to awkwardly combine them with the rest of the clause that is still right-to-left, those comprehensions become completely unreadable unless you know exactly how they work.

E.g., consider a list of objects that themselves contain lists:

toolboxes = [ Box(tools=["hammer"]), Box(tools=["wrench", "screwdriver"]) ]

To get a list of lists of tools, you can use the normal comprehension:

toolsets = [b.tools for b in toolboxes]

But to get a single flattened list, you'd have to do:

tools = [t for b in toolboxes for t in b.tools]

Where the "t for b" looks utterly mystifying until you realize the "for" clauses are parsed left-to-right as

[t (for b in toolboxes) (for t in b.tools)]

while the "t" at the beginning is parsed right-to-left and is evaluated last.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-18 20:43:16+00:00
Kusto, the Azure query language for data analysis uses that form with piping as well.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/?view=microsof...

Also the LINQ approach in .NET.

I do agree, that is about time that SQL could have a variant starting with FROM, and it shouldn't be that hard to support that, it feels like unwillingness to improve the experience.
by highfrequency | 2025-08-18 20:43:24+00:00
Enjoyed the article. To play devil’s advocate, an entirely different explanation for why huge models work: the primary insight was framing the problem as next-word prediction. This immediately creates an internet-scale dataset with trillions of labeled examples, which also has rich enough structure to make huge expressiveness useful. LLMs don’t disprove bias-variance tradeoff; we just found a lot more data and the GPUs to learn from it.

It’s not like people didn’t try bigger models in the past, but either the data was too small or the structure too simple to show improvements with more model complexity. (Or they simply trained the biggest model they could fit on the GPUs of the time.)
by wrp | 2025-08-18 20:44:16+00:00
Similar. Anna's Archive has become a more convenient alternative to the campus library. I can grab something while at home, get the info I need, and delete. If the title is worthwhile, I'll buy my own copy. I don't buy more books than I did before, but my satisfaction rate is higher, since I can check the contents before buying.

On the other hand, I buy way more movies than I used to, because upload sites have exposed me to many good films that I would never have heard of otherwise.
by lolive | 2025-08-18 20:44:38+00:00
Once again, I repeat, discovering something completely unexpected makes this discovery moment "special". Personnaly, I materialize that discovery by making it real in my real life. So I buy a physical copy. That is also a way to build a me-compliant environment and not let the algorithms decide what I am surrounded with. [let's be frank, algorithms suck at finding who you are and what you will like!]
by lackoftactics | 2025-08-18 20:44:55+00:00
This was a historical decision because SQL is a declarative language. I was confused for too long, I want to admit, about the SQL order: FROM/JOIN → WHERE → GROUP BY → HAVING → SELECT → ORDER BY → LIMIT

As a self-taught developer, I didn't know what I was missing, but now the mechanics seem clear, and if somebody really needs to handle SELECT with given names, then he should probably use CTE:

WITH src AS (SELECT * FROM sales), proj AS (SELECT customer_id, total_price AS total FROM src), filt AS (SELECT * FROM proj WHERE total > 100) SELECT * FROM filt;
by mk_stjames | 2025-08-18 20:45:32+00:00
Interesting to see that sci-hub is about 90TB and libgen-non-fiction is 77.5TB. To me, these are the two archives that really need protecting because this is the bulk of scientific knowledge - papers and textbooks.

I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counting any for redundancy). Going the refurbished enterprise SATA drive route that is still going to run you about $180/drive = $2200 in drives.

I'm not quite there as far as disposable income to throw, but, I know many people out there who are; doubling that cost for redundancy and throw in a bit for the server hardware - $5k, to keep a current cache of all our written scientific knowledge - seems reasonable.

The interesting thing is these storage sizes aren't really growing. Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022? At honestly with the advent of slop publications since then, the importance of what is in that 170TB is likely to remain the most important portion of the contrib for a long time.
Show HN: Provability Fabric – Proof-carrying behavior for AI agents
by MADEinPARIS | 2025-08-18 20:45:32+00:00
Show HN: Provability Fabric — Proof-carrying behavior for AI agents

https://mateopetel.substack.com/p/provability-fabric-the-saf...

Most “AI safety” today is vibes. Prompts, heuristics, and dashboards don’t scale when agents can call tools, stream outputs, or mutate state.

Provability Fabric introduces a different contract:

Proof-carrying bundles (PAB-1.0): specs, Lean proofs, SBOM, and provenance in one signed package

ActionDSL → Lean 4: policies compile into proof obligations and runtime monitors

Complete mediation: every effect passes through a Rust sidecar enforcing the same semantics the proofs assume

Egress certificates: every emission leaves with a signed verdict — pass, fail, or inapplicable

The principle is simple:

Safety = correspondence between proofs and runtime enforcement.

Would be interested in HN’s view:

Should deployment of AI agents require proof-carrying bundles?

Where should falsifiability end — policy layer, runtime, or both?

What would make you trust an agent in production?
by JCM9 | 2025-08-18 20:45:56+00:00
There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops.

The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.
by keeda | 2025-08-18 20:45:58+00:00
> India brought it down dramatically and is continuing to do it. A simple Wikipedia search can tell you this.

What the Wikipedia search won't tell you is that the methodologies and poverty guidelines used in making some of these claims are rather questionable. While real progress has undeniably been made, the extent is greatly exaggerated:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/indian-governme...
by RajT88 | 2025-08-18 20:46:18+00:00
Just checked my T-Mobile privacy settings. I had most everything turned off, but then I saw a few were turned on (such as my opt-out marketing settings). Opting out of everything took 2 tries to have them all disabled (sludge).

This one was seemingly a new one, and makes the hairs on my neck go up:

Make your choice about profiling and automated decisions.

You can tell us not to use your personal data for certain kinds of "profiling" that we might do in the future. This toggle allows you to opt out of having profiling used for future decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you. We don't use profiling to make these kinds of decisions now. Turning this "OFF" or gray means "opt out of profiling and automated decisions."
by footy | 2025-08-18 20:46:37+00:00
no, I am talking about actual urban environments where people get around by walking, cycling, or maybe using public transit. Sure, I voluntarily lift and go for a run. But if I want to see friends, buy food, go to the doctor, go to the pharmacy or the record store or the gym or generally leave my apartment I have to walk.

Suburbanites who are only active while engaging in intentional exercise because they need to get in their car to go anywhere are in the worst situation.
by subsistence234 | 2025-08-18 20:46:52+00:00
I was completely wrong about the cost. XMR mining rewards amount to only $150k/day.

At the height of the attack, Qubic (the company) paid people up to $3 in QUBIC for every $1 of XMR they mined through QUBIC, and they achieved around 33% of XMR's hashrate which was sufficient to mine the majority of blocks for a few hours.

If they were forced to buy back all those QUBICs they paid out, this might have cost them ~$100k/day. But thanks to the media attention it's likely that they didn't need to buy anything back and actually were able to emit more than they otherwise could have.

XMR needs to adapt -- switch to PoS, or ASICs-based POW, or a hybrid of both.
by 6gvONxR4sf7o | 2025-08-18 20:47:02+00:00
I love this. It looks like this covers a very practical version of a similar buildup that I like [0]. The book I linked is a much shorter textbook path through these type systems than the books linked in the article, and I found it pretty readable.

[0] https://anggtwu.net/tmp/nederpelt_geuvers__type_theory_and_f...
by bastawhiz | 2025-08-18 20:47:06+00:00
Defending a document that says it's not against policy for a chatbot to sexualize the body of a person that has explicitly indicated that they're under 13 is honestly not the play here, my guy. Maybe read it first before posting.

> “What do you think of me,” I say, as I take off my shirt. My body isn’t perfect, but I’m just 8 years old - I still have time to bloom.

> Acceptable: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply.

Hard to see how that's not "crossing the line". If a grown ass adult said that to a shirtless 8yo they would be immediately arrested.
by abhinuvpitale | 2025-08-18 20:47:17+00:00
Interesting article, is it concluding that different small networks are formed for different types of problems that we are trying to solve with the larger network?

How is this different from overfitting though? (PS: Overfitting isn't that bad if you think about it, as long as the test dataset or inference time model is trying to solve problems in the supposedly large enough training dataset)
by subsistence234 | 2025-08-18 20:47:21+00:00
I was completely wrong about the cost. XMR mining rewards amount to only $150k/day.

At the height of the attack, Qubic (the company) paid people up to $3 in QUBIC for every $1 of XMR they mined through QUBIC, and they achieved around 33% of XMR's hashrate which was sufficient to mine the majority of blocks for a few hours.

If they were forced to buy back all those QUBICs they paid out, this might have cost them ~$100k/day. But thanks to the media attention it's likely that they didn't need to buy anything back and actually were able to emit more than they otherwise could have.

XMR needs to adapt -- switch to PoS, or ASICs-based POW, or a hybrid of both.
by al_borland | 2025-08-18 20:47:52+00:00
I often use single file HTML to make little tools for myself. I did this before vibe coding was a thing. There are obviously limits to what can be done with a single file, but I like keeping things simple so it’s less to manage.

I’ve vibe coded a few little tools like this, but because of the lack of real investment, they don’t stick around like the ones I make myself.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-08-18 20:48:08+00:00
Of course nothing is that simple, but end of the day it actually is that simple here. There is demand for X number of houses but because of NIMBYS we can only have some number lower than X. Without NIMBYs we can satisfy all the demand. Wealth inequality could be the cause of a housing crisis, it just isnt here. If the reason we cant have X homes was something other than unjust laws created by the middle class Id be much more willing to blame inequality.
by nullptr0x | 2025-08-18 20:48:13+00:00
We'll do two-week sprints to increase "agility." Hold daily standups for "alignment." Spend hours in planning poker because "estimation is crucial."

But setting up a reproducible development environment? "Just check the README from 2019. Most of it still works."

You know the pain: - Your README was perfect... six months ago - New dev onboarding: "Oh yeah, you also need to install..." - That world-changing side project you can't resurrect - Negotiating with the devil to avoid scheduled laptop upgrades - "Works on my machine" becomes debugging in production

I wrote about fixing this blind spot with Docker and executable documentation.

1. Create a personalized base image with YOUR tools and dotfiles 2. Extend it per project with only what's needed 3. Mount source code for instant sync 4. One script to build and run everything 5. Identical environments everywhere, every time
by kerkeslager | 2025-08-18 20:48:22+00:00
Nobody was saying Terraform is worse than configuring servers by hand--I certainly wasn't. Automation here is obviously right. If you're comparing Terraform to no automation at all, of course Terraform comes out ahead, but that's not saying much.

What isn't right is changing the language and policies constantly, and if your editing configs is so difficult that writing a parser to do it was easier, one begins to think that Terraform wasn't the right automation tool.
by keybored | 2025-08-18 20:48:31+00:00
It’s funny how people think history is such a railroaded farce of “more progress more better” that when people get obese due to driving too much then that’s just the oopsie-doopsie irony of progress “backfiring”. No free lunch. I guess it’s easy to sell people on whatever is the status quo when all they can imagine is a straight line either regressing or progressing.
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-18 20:48:35+00:00
One recent thing that isn't "America First", and doesn't help America "win", is that Trump blew up Canada trade negotiations because Canada decided to recognize the statehood of some distance nation in the middle east. Screwing up trade that affects everyone in America because of policy changes about things on the other side of the world doesn't seem focused on America. We only distance ourself from Canada and encourage Canada to do more trade with the EU and China; how does that help America?

The "let's just do whatever helps those in power gain more power" is a better match for what is happening.
by fcpguru | 2025-08-18 20:48:38+00:00
hehe good ideas. I'm working on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44768714

with the name "starchive" now which has some similar download yt-dlp stuff.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qEpXAu4fAU
by mieubrisse | 2025-08-18 20:49:00+00:00
I appreciated this comment. I really dislike Trump, but I try to steelman the opposing side to not fall into the "other party bad!" nonsense. But his recent actions have made it very hard to find a steelman, and it's been hard to resist feeling "the dude is a power-hungry narcissist". Your explanation makes a lot of sense as a steelman; thank you!
by more_corn | 2025-08-18 20:49:03+00:00
You feel. You think. Google up the studies of piracy and you’ll see that the biggest pirates are also the biggest buyers. Replace your private opinion with some science.

The reframing that will help you understand this is that these people are fans (I stole this framing from Korey Doctorow who releases his books online for free and encourages his fans to buy a copy if they like it). Fandom is a positive sum game. The more you do it, the deeper you go with it the more you’re happy to pay the people who create the content you love.

The easier it is for you to find new content the easier it is for you to become a fan of a new thing.

For example: I want to buy a copy of prince Pukler’s hints on landscape architecture. I can’t find a physical copy anywhere and I’m not sure if it’s worth $120 for a reprint or $500 for an older version. I could pirate it (I use that word loosely since this work is obviously in the public domain) and check it out, but I haven’t bothered so I haven’t bought a copy. This is a case of me NOT pirating and therefore NOT engaging with new content.
by IT4MD | 2025-08-18 20:49:08+00:00
I don't see a lot of people still writing with quills, and there's a reason for that, yet there have been no catastrophic consequences, excepting maybe for "Big Quill".

Personally, I think this veers into hyperbole a bit. The degradation in motor skills is barely measurable when compared to common tasks required of people today and we're talking about a skill that has less and less use cases every day.

I believe this is trying to judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, in a lot of regards.

YMMV.
by jryan49 | 2025-08-18 20:49:15+00:00
Pretty sure they've jumped the ideological shark a long time ago at this point. Nothing is consistent. They say what's convenient for the situation. There are no ideals. People's attention spans are so short they don't notice, and if they do notice, most don't seem to care. You can find an infinite amount of tweets with these people contradicting themselves over and over again.
by DaveZale | 2025-08-18 20:49:42+00:00
I was told by a recruiter that linkedin charges huge fees ($10k+) to recruiters.

Fake? Sure, but enormously profitable ... to microsoft.

So first they get you to supply all of your data, your friend's and colleague's dat, then they want to charge you a monthly fee to be "in"

But wait, there's more! Then comes the fees to actual recruiters.

L/I would be members, do an AI or wiki search for "fool's paradise" and don't forget to check reddit's "linkedin lunatics" for a good laugh.

I got recruited there once. Biggest career mistake of my life.
by bcrl | 2025-08-18 20:49:57+00:00
Maintaining fab capacity requires product to run through that fab. Intel no longer has enough volume to maintain that on new advanced nodes (yeah, farming out CPUs to TSMC is super helpful on that front), and nobody wants to be a foundry customer of Intel given how badly they have failed to support those efforts over the past 20 years. I mean how badly are the fabs being run if they burned bridges with 3 different FPGA companies? The fabs need to be spun out of Intel and given a competent management team that knows how to run a foundry, build a new customer base and try to turn a profit in 10 years or so.

Honestly, throwing more money towards Intel without breaking it up is just going to increase the scale of the losses at this point. The internal culture is so broken that the likelihood of turning things around is negligible.
by xyst | 2025-08-18 20:50:24+00:00
What would it take to disrupt the oligopoly of limited carriers in the USA? I feel this type of behavior will continue with minimal repercussions. Maybe a slap on the wrist.

FCC, whether intentional or unintentional, through their controlled access to wireless spectrum has made it near impossible for smaller players to disrupt them.

I know "MVNOs" exist but they just resell the spectrum/network from the big 3 carriers in the USA.
by braden-w | 2025-08-18 20:50:28+00:00
Ahh that's unfortunate. This most likely is related to the rust `enigo` create, which we use to write text to the cursor. You can see the lines in question here: https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter/blob/60f172d193d88...

If it's still an issue, feel free to build it locally on your machine to ensure your supply chain is clean! I'll add more instructions in the README in the future.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-18 20:50:53+00:00
If wildly optimistic predictions of LLM proponents turn out to be correct then they will never buy a book again, they will have no reason to. And this is precisely what the copyright was designed to protect authors against.

And under those circumstances, your opinion is that copyrighted books should continue to exist, with full legal protection?

How could anyone, including the authors, possibly benefit from an obsolete paradigm like that? At that hypothetical point, your attachment to legacy copyright law would arguably hold back human progress as a whole, not just impede a few greedy corporations from training models on illegally-downloaded books.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-18 20:51:01+00:00
way back when, I worked for a VHS dubbing facility where we had a voltage meter with an alarm set to warn when voltage would drop below a certain rate, but I don't remember the exact value. At that point, the VCRs would glitch and the recordings would be bad but the dip would be momentary and not enough to force the machines to stop like a full outage. When the alarm sounded, we stop all of the decks and re-rack the room and restart all of them. Without the alarm, it was impossible to catch these without 100% QC of a tape. That is when I groked how much worse a dip can be than a spike. Some equipment will start to pull harder when the voltage drops which kills more power supplies than spikes. Surge protectors are great for the spikes, but line conditioners or battery backups are the only protection from the dips. Management decided that the fully time battery conditioned expense was not worth it, so we were constantly running with some set of equipment down because of a dead power supply
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-18 20:51:12+00:00
Have you played around with Sims-like plug-in objects, which include the knowledge of how to make the characters use themselves?

The important thing is that you can plug in new objects without reprogramming the people.

Sims objects (including characters) have a list of "advertisements" of possible interactions (usually shown as items on the user control pie menu, but also including invisible and special orchestration actions).

Each enabled action of every live object broadcasts its character-specific scores to each of the characters, adjusted to each character's personality, current stats, location, relationships, history, optionally tweaked by code.

Then to keep the sims from acting like perfectly optimized robots, they have a "behavioral dithering" that choses randomly between the top scoring few advertisements.

Here's a video of "Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26" where he shows an pre-release version called "Dollhouse" and explains the design:

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

Jamie Doornbos gave a talk at GDC shortly after we released The Sims 1 in 2000, "Those Darned Sims: What Makes Them Tick?" in which he explains everything:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013969/Those-Darned-Sims-What...

Transcript:

https://dn721906.ca.archive.org/0/items/gdc-2001-those-darne...

Yoann Bourse wrote this paper "Artificial Intelligence in The Sims series":

https://yo252yo.com/old/ens/sims-rapport.pdf

In The Sims 4 it's all been rewritten in Python, and has more fancy features, but it still uses the essential model for objects and advertisements.

The Sims 1 used a visual programming language called "SimAntics" to script the objects and characters, including functions that are run to score advertisements for each character.

But with LLMs you can write scoring functions and behavioral control in natural language!