MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skissane | 2025-08-29 01:04:18+00:00
I think as another commenter pointed out, interval arithmetic’s problem is that while it acknowledges the reality of uncertainty, its model of uncertainty is so simplistic, in many applications it is unusable. So making it the standard primitive, could potentially result in the situation where apps that don’t need to explicitly model uncertainty at all have to pay the price of being forced to do so; meanwhile, apps which need a more realistic model of uncertainty are being forced to do so while being hamstrung by its interactions with another overly simple model. It is one of those ideas which sounds great in theory, but there are good reasons it never succeeded in practice-the space of use cases where explicitly modelling uncertainty is desirable, but where the simplistic model of interval arithmetic is entirely adequate, is rather small-a standard primitive which only addresses the needs of a narrow subset of use cases is not a good architecture
by guyomes | 2025-08-29 01:05:29+00:00
> Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book

Fortunately, almost twenty years before the Population Bomb book, others such as Alfred Sauvy were already warning against confident overpopulation arguments. They suggested more reasonable arguments such as examining countries on a case-by-case basis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sauvy#Key_ideas
by godelski | 2025-08-29 01:05:40+00:00
> behind every hard formula lies an intuitive explanation

Probably a good thing to teach people when starting out. Especially since I think one thing people have is converting the symbols to the abstract ideas they communicate.

I agree you're definitely right that a lot of math (if not most) is really unintuitive. But I think I still like the sentiment behind that idea. Maybe it changes with translation, but I feel like that equations make a lot more sense when I break them down and think about what the symbols are doing and looking at their relationships with one another compared to when just looking at them as symbols to manipulate. Like seeing the form F=ma as more than mass and acceleration and but how in structure it is similar to F=-kx. Getting there isn't easy but once you do it is much more intuitive than it was before.
by saltcured | 2025-08-29 01:05:58+00:00
Not sure if I'm missing something. These sound like fluorescent dye particles?

Don't such molecules emit light diffusely, i.e. not correlated to the direction of excitation? It also must be doing multi-photon fluorescence in order to bump up to higher (visible) frequencies. What is the point of putting it in a contact lens when it won't really echo the light field arriving at the lens?

I also recall that infrared photography requires a significant adjustment of focus compared to visual light due to chromatic aberration. Would it even be possible for an IR-sensitive eye to accommodate this difference in focus?

On the other hand, an efficient upconverting fluorescent dye could be embedded in an imaging screen with appropriate optics to make passive IR scope?
by breve | 2025-08-29 01:06:54+00:00
Nope. They can simply talk to each other. I talk to people inside Indonesia routinely. I do it via SMS, via the phone, via iMessage, via Microsoft Teams. It's not difficult.

You're not understanding the circumstances on a practical level. All you're doing is running away from the work to solve the fundamental political problem and that avoidance won't solve anything.
by reisse | 2025-08-29 01:07:15+00:00
> Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose

Please re-read my post then. I do not call to look for VPN for your or anyone's particular country, I call to look for VPNs for these specific countries because they have the current bleeding edge blocking tech, and if VPN works there now, it will 100% work in every other country. If you're in China, you don't have to look for Chinese VPNs, some of Russian ones will work there too.
by Teever | 2025-08-29 01:07:25+00:00
Here's a recent story about the outsourcing of ship production to South Korea[0]

I recommend that you take a look at this document[1] to get a better picture of the shortcomings of US munitions stockpiles and manufacturing capacity.

I'm not sure why you think that China, a nation renowned for their mass manufacturing capacity would be unable to rebuild equipment lost in a war over Taiwan. China absolutely dominates in steel production[2] and aluminum production[3] and no one compares to them in electronics manufacturing and assembly. They completely own the solar panel and battery markets and it seems that no one can compete with their electric cars.

While America keeps chipping away at its own soft power, institutions and manufacturing capacity China is building the juggernaut industrial capacity necessary to dominate their region.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/us-south-korea-milit...

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aluminium...
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-08-29 01:07:46+00:00
My experience is that pretty frequently the LLM just refuses to actually supply json conforming to the model and summarizes the input instead. Even with several retries configured I still couldn't rely on it. I only spent an afternoon with it though so it's possible I'm just doing it wrong (either in how I'm prompting or in how I'm configuring pydantic-ai).
by shirro | 2025-08-29 01:08:45+00:00
Apple and many arm mobile platforms also have a mix of performance and efficiency cores so it seems to be a proven approach. I guess it comes down to implementation. Intel's efficiency cores by themselves (eg N series) apparently make nice little appliances, often better value than something like a RPi. I don't know how much they help their higher performance devices conserve energy.

I have one of Intel's old desktop class processors in a refurbished ex-office mini-desktop plugged into a power meter running a few services for the household and the idle usage isn't terrible. I don't understand why my laptop doesn't run colder and longer given the years of development between them.

There is also the race to idle strategy where you spike the performance cores to get back to idle which probably works well with a lot of office usage but not so well with something more demanding like games or benchmarks.
by godelski | 2025-08-29 01:09:03+00:00
I mean it is really hard to push diffusion models down in size so that just makes the speed part hard. I'm not sure diffusion can ever truly win in the speed race, at least without additional context like breadth of generation. But isn't that the thing? The best model is only the best in a given context?

I think the weirdest thing in ML has always been acting like there's an objectively better model and no context is needed.
by lukan | 2025-08-29 01:09:47+00:00
"Doing less & letting the browser do the thing is a very nice win."

If only they would do it nice and consistently, I would agree. Sadly they don't. On one plattform you get sliders in this color who pop in when the mouse moves there, on another you have fixed size sliders of a different color and style. Impossible to make a coherent style like this.
by mrjay42 | 2025-08-29 01:10:04+00:00
Could it be a case of "unwanted fallacy"? (bear with me)

I mean: At almost any point in time, when fascists are NOT in power, it's because they were, one way or another, stopped.

The logic would be: fascism is a systematic/automatic force that wants to seize power, usually by basing its ideology on anti-intellectualism, glorified past, enemies of the nation that must be eliminated/deported, imperialist motives (conquest, war, etc.).

This systematic force always exists. It always exists because there are always people who wants to dominate, oppress, express violence against this or that group of people.

Therefore, the few times fascists reached power in any country around the world it's because of a combination of factors and that's what we KNOW about.

For instance, this movement https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulangisme never reached power. BUT it for sure planted the seeds of future hatred, extreme nationalism, etc. and they were VERY determined to take the power, and they didn't. But we don't 'count' it as "fascism that was stopped" because there was no clear, obvious, big event that we can pinpoint as fascists being stopped.
by anuramat | 2025-08-29 01:10:23+00:00
What exactly are your gripes with hooks, wdym by "transformational"? Regarding ubiquity, there's already quite a few repos with collections of hooks; I've only tried notifications and format-on-write so far, the only problem I noticed is that the provided formatting hook is confusing for the model (maybe cc could backtrack and prefill the tool call with the formatter output?)

Subagents are indeed kinda useless, but in any case, I don't see anything better right now
by lossolo | 2025-08-29 01:10:49+00:00
Mullvad is a bad choice for this particular case because they publish all their IPs, which makes them very easy to block. You should look into VPN providers that do not publish their IPs and that have a wide range of IP classes and multiple ASNs, which look like ordinary networks not associated with VPNs. In my experience, NordVPN and ExpressVPN have many of these.
by cuuupid | 2025-08-29 01:11:07+00:00
No American citizens’ rights have been taken away or can be taken away by a President.

We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.

They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.

Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!
by cntainer | 2025-08-29 01:11:46+00:00
I can't remember the last time I saw a slide as mangled as the one in the article. It hurts my brain just reading it.

But you are right, most engineers would consider that reasonable, while complaining about the "muggles" that just don't get it.

As a Software Architect, one of my main responsibilities has been to take information presented like above and turn it into something that non-technical people can digest.

Being able to express a complex concept in simple terms is an invaluable skill.
by charcircuit | 2025-08-29 01:11:55+00:00
>Please interpret things in the most plausible manner.

Your suggestion is not plausible as every security feature has 0 security value if there is nothing malicous. It would be like someone saying that antivirus is useless because if someone doesn't have a virus then it doesn't do anything.

>Any Android device will defend against that regardless of the presence of attestation.

Rooted android devices can be set up in a way that malicous apps can gain root and then read it.

>Any non-android device can still use online banking

But this comes with a different risk profile. A bank can reduce risk for a subset of their customers.

>Building out proper support for hardware tokens would provide superior security in approximately all cases.

I think usually the hardware token gains you access to an authentication token. You don't sign every request you are making with a hardware only key.

>Typical implementations require explicitly granting the capability to a given app.

And the majority of users have no clue what an app is able to do. If root is given to it then it can do anything. This is in contrast to when root isn't available and users are protected by the sandbox the app is in.
by acdha | 2025-08-29 01:12:47+00:00
> You not understanding those reasons is not an excuse for allowing a giant tech company to step in and be the gatekeeper for a huge portion of the internet.

Are you somehow under the impression that Cloudflare is forcing their service on other companies? They’re not stepping in, the people who own those sites have decided paying them is a better deal than building their own alternatives.
by astrange | 2025-08-29 01:13:17+00:00
A bank account is only insured up to $250k by the FDIC. Chase is a very safe bank, but the amount over that is still not insured, so it's not safe.

He also didn't get any extra controls on the account - you can see from the end of the story that they just forgot about it and someone stole $100k of it!
by const_cast | 2025-08-29 01:14:11+00:00
I disagree, Trump is about as elite as elites come. And the Republicans are hardly underdogs - they're long standing incumbents in many ways.

What's happening is that the Republicans have captured populist messaging pretty well, the Democrats just haven't.

Populism is usually stupid but it's extremely effective if you can flood information stream, particularly new ones. I mean, Radio pretty much made Hitler.

The timing here is perfect. Internet has just become mainstream and is still trusted and our brains haven't developed patterns of discernment. In addition, the economy for every day working people is bad. Its the perfect breeding ground for populism.
by kaiwenwang | 2025-08-29 01:15:11+00:00
You know, the whole git 'master' branch stuff has many in the USA exhausted about arguing over words and their meaning.

A good shortcut is to just invent and use new words. USSR-PRC is probably better than arguing over CPC or CCP, which itself probably comes from the Russian CCCP as the Alaska Trump-Putin meeting made me notice.

As per Google: CCCP is the Cyrillic form of the Russian acronym СССР, which stands for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik).

Other things that may be beneficial to do: not anthropomorphizing countries and using the neuter "it", saying "X government" like USG instead of "Washington DC." Using stand-ins like Washington DC for US Government another word is called metonymy.
by djoldman | 2025-08-29 01:15:35+00:00
I'm often reminded of this gallup poll:

> How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism -- very worried, somewhat worried, not too worried or not worried at all?

It averages around 35-40% very or somewhat worried.

Most people's worries and anxieties are really misaligned with statistical likelihood.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4909/terrorism-united-states.as...
by lmm | 2025-08-29 01:16:43+00:00
> So there is some set of services that are useful specifically to a tech startup but not a restaurant, but then there are a category of services that "nobody" wants, neither restaurant nor startup. Do you have an examples of any of those categories?

It wasn't a specific service, it was that Wells Fargo employees had a "performance metric" (which I understand in certain postapocalyptic hellholes translates to "a threat to your livelihood and your ability to receive medical treatment if you fall ill") on the number of products each customer was using. So they would encourage customers to open extra savings accounts, credit cards etc. (or some of the more enterprising employees would skip the phone hassling stage and just open these accounts).
by defrost | 2025-08-29 01:16:48+00:00
It's not for me but I'm adjacent to rural and mining industries and understand the joy of making an OTT desktop computing rig or near industrial home-lab.

In a similar manner a mechanic that works on aircraft engines for crop dusters capable of short take off and landing with heavy loads and drafting over fields with low clearance can also enjoy tuning the heck out of a V-8 and taking it to the limit.

It's not insecurity driving that behavior, it's confidence veering into over confidence.

You can see that same let's have a go and push it mentality in building MudCrab underwater EV cars

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-30/nt-world-record-darwi...

and MudSkipper not boat not aircraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
by edm0nd | 2025-08-29 01:16:56+00:00
They will come back (eventually).

Having to work with ESL contractors from firms like Cognizant or HCL is true pain. Normally it would be like 3-4 US employees working on something and then its like 20-30 ESL outsourced people working on something. The quality is so poor though its not worth it.

My current org nuked their contract w HCL after 2 years because how shitty they are and now everything is back onshore. Millions wasted lol. Corporations are so silly sometimes.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-08-29 01:17:44+00:00
You’re a better man than I, because the clientele has definitely ruined some brands for me.

Every time I see a car zipping in and out of lanes at 90 mph with no turn signal, it’s a BMW.

And similarly for the boomers with goatees and USA tees with Corvettes.

And similarly for Camaros with aftermarket exhausts that seem to exist for no reason other than irritating your neighbors.

I don’t want to be associated with that.

I know it’s shallow, but then again, so am I…
by pstuart | 2025-08-29 01:20:28+00:00
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I don't like the twitter case and think it was a mistake. Not as bad as the case that drove Aaron Swartz to suicide (under the Obama admin).

But to lecture on the propriety of the prosecution and declare that it was "weaponized" is a stretch. The feds have made plenty of bad decisions across both sides of the aisle, and their intentions should always be worthy of scrutiny.

The DOJ (and every other federal agency) is being gutted of anyone who does not swear fealty to Donald Trump (the person, not the office) -- that's weaponization.

I'm happy to call out each and every mistake the Biden admin does, but it's almost quaint in comparison to what his successor is doing. We've moved well past the "both sides" debate -- what is happening now is fascism and un-American to it's core. So yeah, boo hoo about the twitter case.
by positron26 | 2025-08-29 01:21:29+00:00
It's sort of a symptom of our poor mechanisms to create signalling and movement. We evolved to operate at the level of troops of baboons and, without utilizing the more potent capabilities of the trained mined, those mechanisms fail at the internet scale.

People often "believe" things as a means of signalling others. Deeply held "beliefs" tell us where the troop will go. Using these extremely compact signals helps the group focus through the chaos and arrive at a fast consensus on new decisions. When a question comes up, a few people shout their beliefs. We take the temperature of the room, some voices are more common than others, and a direction becomes apparent. It's like Monte Carlo sampling the centroid and applying some reduction.

This means of consensus is wildly illogical, but slower, logical discussion takes time that baboons on the move don't have. It's a simple information and communication efficiency problem. We can't contextualize everything, and contextualizing is often itself a means of intense dishonesty through choosing the framing, which leads to intense debate and more time.

Efficiency and the prominently visible preservation of each one's interests in the means of consensus are vital. I don't think we have reached anything near optimum and certainly not anything designed for internet scale. As a result, the mind of the internet is not really near its potential.
Ask HN: Job market for Staff/Director tech roles barren?
by treyfitty | 2025-08-29 01:21:59+00:00
I’ve been through internship recruiting in 2007,2008, changed jobs just before Covid, and periodically submitted my resume from time to time. I have a job, and I’m not desperate, but the past 6 months have been 0% conversion to initial screen. Literal 0. Maybe 10 resume submissions per month, a few tweaks to my resume each month… but nothing. Is it just me?
by UltraSane | 2025-08-29 01:22:06+00:00
I honestly feel that Trump's cult of personality is somewhat unique and largely a result of decades of mystique building like his books "Art of the Deal" and The Apprentice. I don't think he would ever have been elected in 2016 if not for The Apprentice. It will be hard for other people to replicate. JD Vance definitely can't do it.
by gnabgib | 2025-08-29 01:22:30+00:00
(1989) Popular in

2017 (81 points, 28 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15399028

2017 (134 points, 39 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852734

2014 (54 points, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728084
by beeflet | 2025-08-29 01:22:49+00:00
Something that often isn't brought up in these arguments is that the utility of any organism isn't linear with the number of organisms.

10^100 shrimp is like many planets worth of life, but if it's all the same type of shrimp then what does it matter. I certainly would sacrifice a person for TWO shrimp if they were the last two shrimp on earth.
by avgguythanks | 2025-08-29 01:23:03+00:00
Error HTTP 451 2025-08-29 01:21:44 UTC Unavailable For Legal Reasons What happened? In response to a legal order, Cloudflare has taken steps to limit access to this website through Cloudflare's pass-through security and CDN services within the United Kingdom. Find more information about the order, the party that requested it, and the authority that issued it here. Learn more about Cloudflare's approach to blocking orders in our Transparency Report on Abuse Processes here. Performance & security by Cloudflare
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-29 01:24:47+00:00
It’s an unpopular opinion in the current environment but it’s the program that allows international talent to connect with local capital that creates all the jobs in tech.

Nearly half the unicorns in the country were found by foreigners living in the country. https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...

The biggest problem right now is that there is no distinction between companies replacing Americans labor with cheap labor and entrepreneurial talent that creates jobs. Everyone is on the same visa.
by const_cast | 2025-08-29 01:25:22+00:00
Because you don't buy insurance, you're essentially assigned it. There is no insurance marketplace. And no, healthcare.gov does not count.

These companies act in lockstep and the service is socialized - you pay for everyone else. Its the most shitty approach imaginable to healthcare.

You get all the greed and ass fucking of private healthcare, with all the choice (or lack thereof) of huge socialized medicine. And, cherry on top, the private sector has WAY less rules than the public sector.
by robocat | 2025-08-29 01:25:47+00:00
> but rather to "maintain your business."

If banks want to keep a customer, you might think the most important thing is to just not annoy or screw over their customers.

Why do they continually treat good customers like shit? I'm in New Zealand and my bank just continuously pisses me off. I don't want any upsell (the arseholes tried to upsell insurance when I got a credit card the other day). I've got a six figure facility at risk (US:HELOC?) and my bank's security practices are shockingly bad (we're way too trusting in New Zealand). Little things like access blocked from oversees for a month (phone banking was theoretically available but I couldn't call international so it wasn't). Aside: I would like to block phone banking because it feels so insecure. I've been looking for a better bank, but I wouldn't get the same mortgage facility, soooooooo I'm kinda stuck (maybe that's the reason they don't need to be good to customers).

Mitchell kept getting annoyed by the bank's activities. They wanted him as a customer but their internal systems didn't know how to make it easy for him. Systems with negative impacts are too common even when you're the guy making them money...