MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simianparrot | 2025-08-31 12:47:16+00:00
And evolution eventually led to mammals with complex brain plasticity and an almost _unreasonably_ long and fragile childhood that allowed in-generation transmission of lessons and knowledge bypassing the traditional, heavily trial and error -based approach of just gene transmission and instinctual knowledge.

I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-31 12:48:12+00:00
A friend had kidney failure and now has one of her husband's kidneys. It's really striking how much the immunosuppression sucks (a lot!) versus how much dialysis sucked (far more) for the period between her diagnosis and them being able to perform a transplant.

The US has a problem where there are a bunch of outfits whose income is derived specifically from dialysis, so for them transplants are bad business. Sure, the patient will (statistically) have a longer life and enjoy higher quality of life, but their income will be reduced so...

This results in a rather... muted endorsement of qualitatively better outcomes and where there's obviously also going to be an ethical component I'd say that's undesirable.

We all die. People with kidney disease die significantly sooner statistically if they do not receive a transplant, so this is the sense in which I mean saving a life.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-08-31 12:48:25+00:00
It's like candy - so tasty that you can't stop eating it until you're diabetic and obese. People will absolutely structure their diets to make them "worse" (less tasty) because they want, at a higher level than their taste buds want sugar, to stay healthy.

A trillion dollar industry exists to profit off of gluing eyeballs to screens. Making the device other than what this industry designed it to be is not self-sabotage, it's self-interested!

Read "Supernormal Stimuli" by Barrett for some other examples of this phenomenon.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-31 12:49:52+00:00
> People fall for scams all the time, and that doesn't change just because it's now "on a computer".

But that's exactly the issue. You won't prevent someone from wiring money to Nigeria by restricting what apps they can install on their phone while allowing the official bank app which supports wire transfers.

If someone is willing to press any sequence of buttons a scammer tells them to then the only way to prevent them from doing something at the behest of the scammer is to prevent them from doing it at all.

But that's hardly practical, because you're going to, what? Prevent anyone from transferring money even for legitimate reasons? Prevent people from reading their own email or DMs so they can't give a scammer access to sensitive ones?

The alternatives are educating people to not fall for scams, or completely disenfranchising them so that they're not authorized to make any choices for themselves. What madness can it be that we could choose the second one for ordinary adults?
by XorNot | 2025-08-31 12:49:58+00:00
More over, babies can clearly grow from limited cells to "young" versions of fully differentiated human tissues. Which means from some initial stock, you can replace the vast majority of the bodies cells with younger versions - i.e. with plausible, attainable technology we would generally expect to be able to grow immunologically identical replacement organs and major tissues. That definitely is an engineering problem, more then anything else.

The only truly troubling one is the brain, and we're very much not sure if it actually is one or for example, suffers degradation from the degradation of the body its attached to - likely both - but we also know that the brain is not a static structure, and so replacement or rejuvenation of key systems would definitely be possible (certainly finding any way to protect the small blood vessels in the brain would greatly help with dementia).
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-31 12:50:25+00:00
A lack of nuance about this kind of thing is part of what enrages me when ChatGPT tries to tell be a planned change or design is going to be “elegant” or “simple”. It’s like… maybe yes, maybe no, but those are not binary terms and throwing them around like that makes it sound like an enthusiastic intern sucking up to his sensei rather than a digital brain whose thoughts are formed by having ingested billions of lines of real life code.
by smallerfish | 2025-08-31 12:50:42+00:00
Some background on Buzz for others: Buzz was a tragic case of not using version control. Apparently the author had a hard drive die, and his only copy of the source control went with it.

It had a unique routing UX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeskola_Buzz#/media/File:BuzzS...) that allowed you to chain sources and effects using a graph. Bitwig has a similar idea in The Grid (https://www.bitwig.com/the-grid/), though that's limited to just one track; Buzz did this for the entire composition.

There was at least one rewrite attempt, and there are various clones (Aldrin) but they never quite made it.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-31 12:54:17+00:00
Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.

Now the 2015 oil crash is something I could talk a lot about. I'll try not to turn this into a wall of text.

In Obama's last term he faced a hostile Congress and wanted to pass some wind and solar rebates [2]. The deal he made with the Republican controlled Congress was to lift the ban on exporting crude oil in exchange for the renewable subsidies. This happened in 2015.

So why were crude oil exports banned? This happened about 40 years earlier during the OPEC oil crisis. As an aside, net crude oil exports stand at about ~3M barrels per day. Pretty much all production increases since have been for the export market. US domestic oil consumption has remained relatively stable, despite population increases.

In 2015, OPEC in general and Saudi Arabia in particular crashed the oil market by ramping up production. You can see this here [3]. Saudi Arabia in particular increased production by ~1M bpd in a short period of time. A lot of people think this was to crush the fracking industry, which was heavily in debt. I personally don't buy this explanation because as soon as the price recovers, someone else will buy their assets out of bankruptcy and you're back when you started.

I think it was punishment for lifting the crude oil export ban.

A whole bunch of oil producers and services companies did file for bankruptcy [4] and this whole incident set the stage for what later happened in 2017-2018 and 2020 where Trump basically screwed the energy sector multiple times.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35136831

[3]: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/35226/opec-persian-gulf-regi...

[4]: https://graphics.wsj.com/oil-bankruptcies-tracker/?gaa_at=ea...
by henrebotha | 2025-08-31 12:54:37+00:00
Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-31 12:55:04+00:00
The kind of solution that scales as "O(n) effect with the number of people involved", but isn't broadly implemented? It's usually at least O(n log n) on the effort required to actually involve those people. This vital input is the source of piss poor scaling in practice.

Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does just that, and the implementation difficulty ramp up gets brutal quickly. It's simple to suggest and hard to execute.

Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they offer good sublinear scaling on many of the inputs. They're extremely hard to develop, but they're often well worth it, because the implementation scales in a way those "simple" solutions don't.
by ecb_penguin | 2025-08-31 12:55:07+00:00
There's also no reason to believe the opposite is the case.

> Like I don't know what the point of this argument is

The point of the argument is to stop people like you from making declarations about what is possible without any evidence

> Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out

Can you show me where anyone said we shouldn't find out?

> because it looks very possible

There's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case
by doublerabbit | 2025-08-31 12:55:43+00:00
One of the big investment banks use TCL/TK, for real-time e-trading. Source my last gig.

The "important software" are normally kept behind NDAs, so you never hear about their uses. TCL was also used on the Mars Rover.

Take a look for yourself: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl
by rpdillon | 2025-08-31 12:56:25+00:00
This is a a microcosm of so much addiction, at least in my experience. Friction really matters in giving your mind a moment to pause and consider. I think adding friction by getting a less capable phone is a great technique, similarly to how I'd hide the candy/alcohol/TV remotes if folks in the house are addicted. It doesn't remove the opportunity, but it makes it tougher.
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-31 12:57:07+00:00
Not quite to the level of explain, but what one only needs is an excellent liver. This is mostly a matter of yet unknown genetics. We know a few variants where different variants of classes of lipids are made reducing the risk for cardiovascular disease...

If you have a bad one like myself, you go decent diet and still have metabolic syndrome by 20. (No diabetes at least. Yet.)
by rsanek | 2025-08-31 12:59:08+00:00
After I bricked my pro max in the sauna last month, I bought a used 13 mini to test out how using a much smaller phone would be. Learnings after a ~month so far is that, it's not much less distracting and the tiny battery + poor perf are real limitations when travelling. Going to buy the new pro max when it comes out next month.
by menix | 2025-08-31 13:00:04+00:00
The latest Model Context Protocol introduces Output Schema: agents now know the exact data structure a tool will return before calling it.

This eliminates the "print-and-inspect" pattern where CodeAct agents call tools just to discover what data they get back. Instead of multi-step exploration, agents can write complete, precise programs from the start.

What's new: Tools declare their output schemas upfront

What's better: Agents plan complete execution paths instead of reactive discovery

Now supported in Hugging Face smolagents.
by XorNot | 2025-08-31 13:00:44+00:00
You can't invoke thermodynamics, because thermodynamics doesn't work that way - the Earth is not a closed system. The sun continuously imparts a stupendous amount of energy to the planet, sufficient to allow the entire biosphere to continuously replace itself.

Thermodynamics is not a limit on an intelligent agent reconfiguring atoms on Earth for the next several billion years.
by Borealid | 2025-08-31 13:00:56+00:00
The burden of proof of infringement is on the plaintiff in either case.

If you have an obscure patent nobody has ever heard of, you can win the suit by showing that the defendant had the same idea you did - you don't need to show their work derives from yours.

If you have an obscure song nobody has ever heard (or even an unpublished one!) you are going to have a difficult time proving infringement for a similar riff.

Perhaps you're most familiar with litigation around very famous songs, like the Under Pressure / Ice Ice famous case? In those cultural-saturation cases the court may make the assumption that the later party could have been exposed to the work of the earlier one, but that is not the case universally.
by ImPleadThe5th | 2025-08-31 13:01:04+00:00
Sounds like 2 devices is the solution for you.

I'm considering this phone because I'd like to box my media consumption to when I'm at home (at my desk). I however still need a device with Whatsapp + Authenticator to go about my day to day life.

Honestly if I could get one of those not taking paperwhites with a sim, Whatsapp and my authenticator app I would just run that.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-31 13:01:45+00:00
When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building.”

Kid manipulated ChatGPT, already tried suicide once, and ignored all the suggestions to get help from ChatGPT.

ChatGPT isn't perfect. But it clearly isn't designed to encourage suicide like the title of this clickbait article suggests.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-31 13:02:49+00:00
In hindsight this convention seems weird to me by the way. I didn't question it for the decades I was paid money to write C, but after adopting Rust it jumped out more that it's weird how monocase the C and C++ standard libraries are.

Maybe there's a reason I'd never run into, but this seems like a missed opportunity. Even if I have no idea what Goose is, I can see it's a type, that seems like a win.
by zug_zug | 2025-08-31 13:03:57+00:00
This is sort of all just a reframing of existing technologies.

Span = an event (which is bascially just a log with an associated trace), and some data fields. Trace = a log for a request with a unique Id.

A useful thing about opentelemetry is that there's auto-instrumentation so you can get this all out-of-the-box for most JVM apps. Of course you could probably log your queries instead, so it's not necessarily a game-changer but a nice-to-have.

Also the standardization is nice.
by a_imho | 2025-08-31 13:03:58+00:00
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.

I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.
by Zigurd | 2025-08-31 13:04:22+00:00
I can only speculate as to what they were thinking when they wrote those specs. Evidently they didn't trust network operators, or they thought that they were avoiding potential attack surfaces.

In addition to the privacy and policy and justice problems with LI, this exploit points to law enforcement agencies as the weak link. There are too many law-enforcement agencies that can initiate intercepts from systems that lack oversight and coordination.
by torginus | 2025-08-31 13:05:06+00:00
From the article:

Consider the challenge of defending vast territories against cruise missiles. Conventional systems, like Patriot PAC-3 and NASAMS batteries, typically cost millions of dollars per installation. So we asked ourselves a simple question: What if we could create a forcefield of low-cost drones to intercept cruise missiles worth millions?

The concept seemed absurd at first, even to our team—the overmatch appeared too extreme. But we stripped the problem again to its fundamentals. Cruise missiles are fast, but they follow predictable flight paths. If we could accurately determine that flight path using two ground-based IR passive sensors (what we called Wide-Area Infrared System for Persistent Surveillance, or WISPs), we wouldn’t need expensive targeting systems on the interceptor itself.

We modified our Anvil drone to carry no sensors at all—the drone would simply position itself in the projected path of the incoming missile, aligning with where the missile would pierce our virtual “force field.” Despite the initial skepticism, we demonstrated the concept successfully, destroying a target that could fly an order of magnitude faster than our interceptor.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-31 13:05:31+00:00
> They explicitly don't support installing any software not provided by their "app stores".

Most Linux distributions don't prevent you from installing third party software at all. You download something, you set the execute bit, it runs.

Users are wary of doing that with software from untrusted sources because, obviously, you're then placing your trust in whoever provided the software instead of the distribution's packaging team. But the OS won't stop you if that's what you want to do, and sometimes you do trust the source of the software.

> Despite those policies, or perhaps because of them, botnets of Linux servers are common.

Botnets of Linux servers are common because some people operate them without security installing updates (common with WordPress), and then attackers exploit known vulnerabilities in the unpatched software.

But "locked" phone platforms regularly discontinue security updates for devices that are still in widespread use. Locking the device doesn't solve that problem at all, and in fact makes it worse because then if the OEM doesn't patch it nobody else can do it either.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-31 13:05:33+00:00
Reproduction is not physically special. If it is physically possible to create a new organism with a longer lifespan than its parent (which it is), then it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism. This may be impractical, but we cannot prove that no organism can live ≈forever, because it's not a physical impossibility. (Assuming a source of power remains present: it looks like the universe won't last forever, so we can trivially assert that no organism can live forever.)
by alexyucw | 2025-08-31 13:06:04+00:00
Quick clarification on how MonoGuard differs from existing tools:

Most dependency tools (npm audit, syncpack, etc.) focus on immediate issues - version conflicts, security patches, etc. MonoGuard looks at the bigger picture: is your monorepo architecture actually healthy?

Think of it as the difference between a health checkup vs. architectural assessment. We're not replacing your existing tools, we're adding the strategic layer on top.

Perfect for teams with 10+ packages who want to catch architectural debt before it becomes expensive to fix.
by postquantumfax | 2025-08-31 13:06:11+00:00
This isn't a red herring at all. This is DNS resolution and client PKIX implementation. You could fix your whole network to not import anything from outside, ban all BYOD, etc, or you could fire ICANN clowns who think they need to make changes to the reserved list because, why? Money, corruption, self importance?

HN is full of people from SaaS startups who in essence want to buy the perfect 900 number. But DNS and delegation goes far deeper than selling one name for $20 and going to other $20 names to store your code and email at other SaaS providers.
by the_gastropod | 2025-08-31 13:06:36+00:00
The U.S. has no official language, and no one who moves here is required to learn English. Especially in NYC, where so many neighborhoods predominantly speak a language that is not English (Brighton Beach, Sunset Park, Flushing, Chinatown, etc.)

Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
by philzook | 2025-08-31 13:06:42+00:00
Yeah, using `<=` in this way is pretty sinful.

My maybe inaccurate understanding of recursive CTEs was that they only allow linear occurrences of the recursively defined relation in the query and do not allow many mutually recursively defined relations. These might be per implementation restrictions. These are pretty harsh restrictions from a datalog perspective. I should explore what Postgres offers more. It's just so easy to try stuff out on sqlite.
by ot | 2025-08-31 13:07:56+00:00
Not a L1/L2/... cache flush, but a store buffer flush, at least on x86. This is true for LOCK instructions. Loads/stores (again on x86) are always acquire/release, so they don't need additional fences if you don't need seq-cst. However, seq-cst atomics in C++ lower stores to LOCK XCHG, so you get a fence.
by kevinmchugh | 2025-08-31 13:09:03+00:00
In no particular order: LLMs seem, for some reason, to be worse at some languages than others.

LLMs only have so much context available, so larger projects are harder to get good results in.

Some tools (eg a fast compiler) are very useful to agents to get good feedback. If you don't have a compiler, you'll get hallucinations corrected more slowly.

Some people have schedules that facilitate long uninterrupted periods, so they see an agent work for twenty minutes on a task and think "well I could've done that in 10-30 minutes, so where's the gain?". And those people haven't understood that they could be running many agents in parallel (I don't blame people for not realizing this, no one I talk to is doing this at work).

People also don't realize they could have the agent working while they're asleep/eating lunch/in a meeting. This is why, in my experience, managers find agents more transformative than ICs do. We're in more meetings, with fewer uninterrupted periods.

People have an expectation that the agent will always one-shot the implementation, and don't appreciate it when the agent gets them 80% of the way there. Or that, it's basically free to try again if the agent went completely off the rails.

A lot of people don't understand that agents are a step beyond just an LLM, so their attempts last year have colored their expectations.

Some people are less willing to attempt to work with the agent to make it better at producing good output. They don't know how to do it. Your agent got logging wrong? Okay, tell it to read an example of good logging and to write a rule that will get it correct.
by Nursie | 2025-08-31 13:09:53+00:00
Adults would choose a locked-down, secure phone for themselves.

Arguably they already do and the numbers wanting an open phone are relatively trivial and the market ends up the way it has.

I do these days, happily, and I speak as someone who owned a Neo Freerunner and an N900. My phone is far too important as a usable, stable device to want to fuck around treating it as an open platform any more.
by Retr0id | 2025-08-31 13:10:27+00:00
Have a persistent "developer mode" flag.

When the device is being set up for the first time, ask the user if they want to enable developer mode. Make the warnings as scary as you like. When the device is booting, display a prominent "developer mode enabled" message. But, once the device is booted, there should be no way for apps to query developer-mode status, to prevent discriminatory apps.

The only way to toggle the flag after setup would entail a full factory reset of the device. You could go one step further and have it be a fully permanent flag, in efuses.