MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whymauri | 2025-08-24 18:47:08+00:00
I used to work at a drug discovery startup. A simple model generating directly from latent space 'discovered' some novel interactions that none of our medicinal chemists noticed e.g. it started biasing for a distribution of molecules that was totally unexpected for us.

Our chemists were split: some argued it was an artifact, others dug deep and provided some reasoning as to why the generations were sound. Keep in mind, that was a non-reasoning, very early stage model with simple feedback mechanisms for structure and molecular properties.

In the wet lab, the model turned out to be right. That was five years ago. My point is, the same moment that arrived for our chemists will be arriving soon for theoreticians.
by mkleczek | 2025-08-24 18:47:13+00:00
That way you increase contention and harm scalability. In sqlite it does not matter as writes are single-threaded anyway. But in other DBMSes it does. What's more: in PostgreSQL you increase bloat as every update creates a new row version.

Most of the times the solution is not pre-aggregation but proper indexes on foreign key columns (missing fk indexes is one of the most common mistakes in RDB design).
by kasey_junk | 2025-08-24 18:47:50+00:00
When I looked into the stats for cpd it was a mess. They got in trouble for monkeying with the stats, so they are already suspicious.

But by their numbers stop rates went way up for the 10 years between 2014-2024. But that was during the period when traffic stops were a primary strategy for crime prevention, that is the pretextual stops they got in trouble for.

Sadly, there was no checkbox for the officer to mark if it was a pretextual stop or not for study purposes.

I could probably isolate by stop location to some degree if I really wanted to do some digging. Maybe I can nerdsnipe ‘chaps into doing it for me.
by gruez | 2025-08-24 18:48:43+00:00
>No, it's not "kind of" in legal sense. Genaral information and specific threats are treated differently under the law.

That argument doesn't really make sense considering illegal streaming sites are allowing you to commit a crime immediately. The "general information" equivalent for copyright infringement would be something like a wikipedia article on how torrents work. Moreover if your objection is over the fact that hit-for-hire is violence and illegal streaming sites isn't, what do you think about sites offering other sorts of non-violent crime? DDoS or doxing for hire, for instance? Should the authorities be able to get an injunction against such sites?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-24 18:48:55+00:00
Making all the Nike child labor jokes already did that. Nike and the joke tellers put in the work to push us back a hundred years when it comes to caring at all about others. When a little girl working horrible hours in a tropic non-air-conditioned factory is a societal wide joke, we've decided we don't care. We care about saving $20 so we can add multiple new pairs of shoes a year to our collection.

Your comment just shows we as a society pretend we didn't make that choice, but we picked extra new shoes every year over that little girl in the sweatshop. Our society has actually gotten pretty evil in the last 30 years if we self reflect (but then the joke I mention was originally supposed to be a self reflection, but all we took from it was a laugh, so we aren't going to self reflect, or worse, this is just who we are now).
by godelski | 2025-08-24 18:50:17+00:00
> running without slack means every bump in the road

I think you ran into maybe a good analogy here (spitballing). To go fast on a bumpy road you need slack, in your shocks. You have to absorb those bumps. But if you have no shocks you just rattle apart.

Sure, a rally car isn't as fast as nascar, but which environment are you in? Super smooth road with only left turns and is built to allow you to go as fast as possible? Or literally anything else.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-24 18:50:31+00:00
One of the biggest uses of residential energy is heating/cooling. Especially in winter months where PV generation is significantly lower (I have seen numbers of 2-5x summer generation), having "free" heat could be quite valuable.

Now, do the economics shake out for storing heat to deliver in winter? No idea, but the idea is not far fetched. Outside of bitcoin mining, there are few uses which can soak up the increasing glut of midday PV generation. Anything that can seasonally store that (even at terrible efficiencies) is valuable. What is going to be the most economic option? No idea. My personal bet is iron-air batteries, but there are a lot of contenders in the space that are competing for widespread adoption.
by georgemcbay | 2025-08-24 18:51:45+00:00
Far be it from me to defend Y Combinator or VCs in general but IMO the situation is a bit different because of the monopoly (or at least duopoly) power that Apple and Google hold as gatekeepers over the only practical way to sell to iOS and Android device users.

Of course, I'd also assume most or all the people associated with YC were part of the "fire Lina Khan because our whole business model is actually just taking advantage of FAANG acquihire panic" squad, making them hypocrites (in a slightly different way) for helping to prop up these monopolistic gatekeepers and then acting put upon by the results of that.
by lanstin | 2025-08-24 18:52:34+00:00
It isn’t worth it. Mostly financial transactions are done via append only ledgers, not updating; two phase auth and then capture; a settlement process to actually move money, and a reconciliation process to check all the accounts and totals. Even without DB corruptions they have enough problems (fraud and buggy code) with creating money and having to go back and ask people to more money or to give them more money so they have those systems in place any ways.
by ensignavenger | 2025-08-24 18:54:34+00:00
If you think 3% is too much, there are plenty of other payment processors... the thing is, most of that 3% is not set by the processor (or kept by them) but is set by the card networks. It is the card networks that should be targeted by antitrust laws.

If there anyone could make an App Store, then we would have a better idea of what the market rate for app stores should be.
by jelder | 2025-08-24 18:54:40+00:00
Except, no it doesn’t.

In the case of a pull request, I am not about to trust some LLM that has no business context and can only pretend to guess at the “why” of a change.

To understand the “what” of a change, you have to actually read the code. This doesn’t belong in the pull request description most of the time.
Show HN: FilterQL – A tiny query language for filtering structured data
by genshii | 2025-08-24 18:55:01+00:00
Hey all, I just released v2.0.0 of FilterQL, a query language and TypeScript library. This version adds support for Operations, which allow you to transform the data after filtering.

If you think this would be useful in a project you're working on, give it a try and let me know what you think!
by gruez | 2025-08-24 18:55:16+00:00
>DNS resolution is absolutely not the same as advertisement (and murder not the same as copyright infringement.....). You only deal with DNS after forming the intention to go somewhere. DNS is meant to be impartial infrastructure. Since DNS blocking can be done completely opaquely (to most people anyway), it's more like gaslighting, really. I don't think most people want some entity to covertly define their reality.

That just seems like nitpicking over the blocking mechanism. Your objections might apply for DNS level blocking, but not for SNI or ip blocking. Moreover DNS level blocking is far easier to bypass than the latter methods, so your objections against DNS blocking (because it's "gaslighting" or whatever) actually would force the government/ISPs to employ more effective blocking technologies.
by kaiokendev | 2025-08-24 18:55:22+00:00
> It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts.

But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...
by belorn | 2025-08-24 18:55:54+00:00
We can hope/pray/predict that prices will go down in a year or two. I have yet to see any politician or providers give that promise. The government have approved new grid stability power plants (based on natural gas), and those have both investment costs and operational costs that the government want consumers to pay for in the next decade/s. In addition, the hydro power plants that already exist and was built during the 20th century need to either be refitted or removed in order to comply with EU environmental standards (and prevent mass extinction of several endangered species). That will also increase costs for grid stability for the next several decades. On top there are plans for new transmission to even out the difference between the north and south part of the country, and those are predicted to take a decade or so to build. They are not short term projects with short term price hikes.
by master_crab | 2025-08-24 18:56:23+00:00
If I can avoid Double NATing, I do because it tends to degrade network performance and can have interesting characteristics on some inbound traffic (although that depends on the use case).

But the third option honestly isn’t recommended enough. DoD space is rarely routable, and if you are on a private network already, even moreso. It’s also less common than RFC1918.

However, there is one caveat. Some large corporates do use it for just the same reason. Even though it is rarer than 10 or 172 space, you’d be surprised how many large orgs do run DoD internally.

(Disclaimer: I use DoD space for my travel router at hotels)
by nicce | 2025-08-24 18:57:10+00:00
By looking the list of negative sides of DNS over TLS (DoT) in there, this project seems to list artificial problems, which makes me want to avoid the whole project. Maybe there are real benefits on using this protocol, but they should not make the list of problems looking longer than it actually is.

The project especially lists the problems of TLS. TLS is one of the most understood, tested, and well-defined protocols that can be abstracted away in implementation level. Nothing also prevents forcing TLS 1.3 which removes most of the described other problems.

This especially sounds odd:

> Questionable practical benefits over DoH

But DoH brings the full TLS stack and also the HTTP stack as well? At the same time the project complains about increased attack surface in DoT, but DoH just extends it even more.

If I also look the DoH list, there is

> Requires TCP

But just few lines befeore, they say that DoH supports HTTP/3 which is UDP.

E.g. Android has supported it 3 years already:

https://security.googleblog.com/2022/07/dns-over-http3-in-an...
by logicchains | 2025-08-24 18:57:35+00:00
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 18:58:04+00:00
Oof, I don't think I could be successful at a place like that. Only 6-ish hardcore-productive hours of coding per week would make me sad. I would want to invert your arrangement: I'm in the office Monday to answer questions and interact with people, and Tues-Fri I'm at home doing deep work.

(I know that's unrealistic. But that would be my ideal.)
by nxobject | 2025-08-24 18:58:11+00:00
As someone whose college papers always went through multiple drafts, I genuinely hope that the "joy" the author feels doesn't get in the way of teaching writing skills.

And, as someone who got paid minimum wage to proctor tests in college, I couldn't keep a straight face at this:

> The most cutting-edge educational technology of the future might very well be a stripped-down computer lab, located in a welcoming campus library, where students can complete assignments, by hand or on machines free of access to AI and the internet, in the presence of caring human proctors.

I think the author's leaning heavily on vibes to do the convincing here.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-24 18:58:24+00:00
Defence in depth means you have more than one security control. But the LLM cannot be regarded as a security control in the first place; it's the thing you are trying to defend against.

If you tried to cast an unreliable insider as part of your defence in depth strategy (because they aren't totally unreliable), you would be laughed out of the room in any security group I've ever worked with.
by benbreen | 2025-08-24 18:58:33+00:00
Exactly, this is the reason why I struggle with this sort of solution to the problems we are all facing in education currently. On the surface it seems to make sense, but the blue book exam is entirely artificial and has basically no relationship to real world skills (subconsciously, even the quality of student handwriting handwriting could influence how graders assess blue books). Even leaving AI aside, anyone writing anything nowadays is using Google and Wikipedia and word processors, so why constrain those?

Oxford and Cambridge have a "tutorial" system that is a lot closer to what I would choose in an ideal world. You write an essay at home, over the course of a week, but then you have to read it to your professor, one on one, and they interrupt you as you go, asking clarifying questions, giving suggestions, etc. (This at least is how it worked for history tutorials when I was a visiting student at an Oxford college back in 2004-5 - not sure if it's still like that). It was by far the best education I ever had because you could get realtime expert feedback on your writing in an iterative process. And it is basically AI proof, because the moment they start getting quizzed on their thinking behind a sentence or claim in an essay, anyone who used ChatGPT to write it for them will be outed.
by xbmcuser | 2025-08-24 18:58:33+00:00
If all vehicles in the US were electric US total Electricity demand would rise from about 4,000 TWh to only 4,800 TWh. That’s it. And this is exactly why the U.S. risks losing both the trade war and the AI race to China.

China is going all-in on electrification, and that alone gives it a massive efficiency edge. Layer on top the fact that renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper every year, and the advantage compounds exponentially.

Take heavy equipment as an example: a Caterpillar machine might cost $10 million, while the Chinese electric equivalent is just one-fifth the price and burns only a third of the energy. That’s already nearly half the cost compared to diesel or gas-powered machines before you even count lower maintenance and fuel savings.

The math is simple: electric wins. And renewable compound the victory
by conradev | 2025-08-24 18:58:55+00:00
Yeah, Form Energy exists to basically disprove this:

Batteries will still be too expensive to arbitrage these seasonal differences effectively. Thermal electricity storage is orders of magnitude cheaper for storage, but worse at daily cycling

Form, like the authors, agrees that Lithium-ion is great for intra-day cycling and not suitable for is seasonal storage. Unlike the authors, Form believes it can engineer chemical storage with the requisite properties. Form’s batteries have something like 10 days of capacity relative to the size of their inverters.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-24 18:59:06+00:00
Mission Data Files (MDFs), sometimes also referred to under the broader term Mission Data Packages (MDPs) or Mission Data Loads (MDLs) are required for every mission, and they have to come from facilities within the United States. Currently from the U.S. Reprogramming Laboratory (USRL) at Eglin.

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2023/01/20/bae-systems-receive...
by enether | 2025-08-24 18:59:54+00:00
It's neither. Only the thumbnail background is AI generated.

The look of the page -- that's Substack's default UI, you can't control it too much. The other images are created by me.

I'm simply curious what parts give that "cheap" look so I can improve. On Reddit I've had massive amounts of downvotes because they guess the content is AI, when in fact no AI is used in the creation process at all.

One guess I have is the bullet points + bolding combo. Most AIs use a ton of that, and rightly so, because it aids in readability.
by mlpoknbji | 2025-08-24 19:00:47+00:00
The commenters lamenting this trend presumably have not given a takehome assignment to college students in recent years. The problem is huge and in class tests are basically the only way to test if students are learning. Unfortunately this doesn't solve the problem of AI assisted cheating on in-class exams, which is shockingly prevalent these days at least in STEM settings.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-24 19:01:07+00:00
Until 3 years ago, we flew out of ATL and only occasionally and only domestically. So our default choice was of course - just fly Delta.

After all of the stars aligned around mid 2021, we moved to Orlando and started flying more.

Our default choice is still to fly Delta domestically because of familiarity, status, lounge access and we don’t mind a layover in ATL since it is our former home, familiarity and lounge access - Delta has nine lounges in ATL.

If we really just want to get somewhere without layover. I will look on flights from -

https://flightsfrom.com/{Airport code}

And see what airline has a non stop flight. The only airline I refuse to fly domestically is Southwest because of non reserve seating until next year.

But it’s rare that we will choose an airline that’s not Delta.

Internationally, we prefer Delta or SkyTeam airlines like Virgin or AirFrance.

We don’t shop based on price, the only time we compare flights is for convenience, we don’t fly first class or anything. But we just don’t like the hassle of flying airlines besides Delta.

Of course if we lived in an AA or United hub, it would be different. So substitute Delta for airline where you have status and/or a cobranded credit card that gives you some minor convenience.
by yonatan8070 | 2025-08-24 19:01:10+00:00
Game companies already collect heaps of data about players, which mechanics they interact with, which mechanics they don't, retention, play time, etc.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to take this data over multiple games, versions, and genres, and train a model to take in a set of mechanics, stats, or even video and audio to rate the different aspects of a game prototype.

I wouldn't even be surprised if I heard this is already being done somewhere.
by znort_ | 2025-08-24 19:01:30+00:00
in this case, no. it's a client game and performance isn't at all critical, so the state and loop could be trivially handled by a regular js function. if at some point a server architecture was desired, it would be trivial to host that function on node.

my take: as a backend developer he was fixated with the idea of having a server no matter what (if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail), and as go was his main language he just went with that. then he figured out it didn't really have a point, but instead of just translating that simple logic to js he overengineered the whole thing and overcomplicated his design and build process by transpiling to wasm.

there are some bugs, though. i just won a couple of matches at escoba (very nice little game, i hadn't played this for ... decades!) and the game state wasn't properly reset for the next. that's probably the llm ...
by QRY | 2025-08-24 19:01:54+00:00
When does a woodworker cease to be one? When he uses a handsaw? A circular saw? A sawmill?

> When a tool blurs the line between who performed the task

Who saws the wood? He who operates the tool, or the tool performing its function? What is the value of agency in a business that, supposedly, sells product? Code authorship isn't like writing, is it? Should it be?

Or is the distinction not in the product, but in the practice? Is the difference in woodworking vs lumber processing?

Or is it about expectation? e.g. when we no longer expect a product to be made by hand due to strong automation in the industry, we prepend terms such as "hand-made" or "artisanal". Are we currently still in the expectation phase of "software is written by hand"?

I have no dog in this race, really. I like writing software, and I like exploring technology. But I'm very confused and have a lot of questions that I have trouble answering. Your comment resonated though, and I'm still curious about how to interpret it all.
by i_dont_know_ | 2025-08-24 19:02:18+00:00
I feel like these kind of things push us as a society to decide what exactly the purpose of school should be.

Currently, it's been a place for acquiring skills but also a sorting mechanism for us to know who the "best" are... I think we've put too much focus on the sorting mechanism aspect, enticing many to cheat without thinking about the fact that in doing so they shortchange themselves of actual skills.

I feel like some of the language here ("securing assessments in response to AI") really feels like they're worried more about sorting than the fact that the kids won't be developing critical thinking skills if they skip that step.

Maybe we can have
by btbuildem | 2025-08-24 19:02:19+00:00
The city where I live estimates that we lose somewhere between 25% and 30% of drinkable water to leaky infrastructure.

We've had something close to a drought this summer -- unseasonally long periods without rain. You can see the young trees on the streets and trees in the middle of large parks suffer from it - wilted leaves and leaves dropping earlier than usual. BUT, large old trees seem to be thriving - full canopies, lush, firm leaves.

I've been suspecting the big street trees do so well because they benefit from the dilapidated state of our water delivery infra. It's nice to read of a study that confirms my amateur observations and musings.
by mlloyd | 2025-08-24 19:02:23+00:00
There are also many subskills not worth learning to some people. Sometimes traversal is what's needed and not understanding. (Though I'm never going to knock gaining more understanding)

Tools allow traversal of poorly understood, but recognized, subskills in a way that will make one effective in their job. An understanding of the entire stack of knowledge for every skill needed is an academic requirement born out of a lack of real world employment experience. For example, I don't need to know how LLMs work to use them effectively in my job or hobby.

We should stop spending so much time teaching kids crap that will ONLY satisfy tests and teachers but has a much reduced usefulness once they leave school.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-24 19:02:56+00:00
> A while back we looked into upgrading one of the computers to Windows Vista. By the time we added up the money it would take to buy new licenses for all the software, it was going to cost $50,000 or $60,000 [£38,000 to £45,000]

I wonder if at some point virtualizing, and potentially adding a modern control layer on top of their current machines is a potential path forward.
by bootsmann | 2025-08-24 19:03:00+00:00
Because the people writing the laws within the EU are also acutely aware that phrasing this ban too broadly constrains freedom of speech. The way the ban is handed is walking the fine line between impinging freedom of speech and denying a enemy state from waging an information war. Romania had to rerun an election due to Russian inference, this isn’t just a phantom the EU made up to censor opinions it doesn’t like.