MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csense | 2025-08-16 17:00:08+00:00
> one might think of pumping it “up”, but really the only hard work is producing the pressure difference P_feed - P_permeate or so — water is buoyant to an extent that almost exactly negates its weight

If you package the permeate in a balloon (hopefully a very strong one!) and let the balloon rise to the surface, buoyancy is very relevant.

If you instead pipe it -- to simplify the analysis, let's say it's going straight up a vertical chimney to the surface -- it doesn't seem like buoyancy is relevant.

Take a vertical water-filled pipe sealed at the bottom and open to the air on top. The water N meters from the top of the pipe will be the same pressure as N meters inside the ocean -- even if the pipe's nowhere near an external body of water! A water column self-pressurizes due to the potential gradient of Earth's gravity.

Now put the bottom of the pipe at the bottom of the ocean, you can unseal it and stick a pump on it.

You put 1 kg of water into the pipe N meters below the surface. You take 1 kg of water out at the surface. And repeat in a cycle. Some part of the system has to be doing enough work to lift 1 kg of water N meters per cycle. That work has to come from the pump -- where else could it come from?

I'm skeptical of any notion that water "floats" to the surface of the pipe "for free"!
by ajkjk | 2025-08-16 17:01:42+00:00
I feel like Apple has historical been good at taking things that are "good ideas but everyone is doing the execution so badly they haven't really caught on" into the "everyone uses it all the time" category (eg ipod, iphone, airpods). Certainly smart home stuff is kinda in the first category right now, like you said. Perhaps they believe they can give them the same treatment? It seems kinda plausible to me: there's no reason smart home stuff couldn't be a really good, seamless experience.
by m4nu3l | 2025-08-16 17:02:46+00:00
The marginal value of natural resources decreases with quantity, and natural resources would only have a much smaller value compared to the final products produced by the AI systems. At some point, there would be an equilibrium where tier 1 wouldn't want to increase it's consumption of natural resources w.r.t. tier 2 or if they did they'd have to trade with tier 2 at a price higher than they value the resources. I have no idea what this equilibrium would look like, but natural resources are already of little value compared to consumer goods and services. The US in 2023 consumed $761.4B. of oil, but the GPD for the same year was. $27.72T

There would be another valid argument to be made about externalities. But it's not what my original argument was about.
by yojo | 2025-08-16 17:02:55+00:00
If a candidate doesn’t ask clarifying questions that lead them to an understanding of QPS, storage requirements, and throughput considerations, that’s a mark against.

At that point, if you want to see them design a distributed system with all the bells and whistles, you should stop them, tell them the kind of traffic they need to handle, then let them go again.

If they persist in designing a system that cannot handle the specified load, they have probably failed the interview.
by mattw1810 | 2025-08-16 17:03:28+00:00
On the whole GPT-4 to GPT-5 is clearly the smallest increase in lucidity/intelligence. They had pre-training figured out much better than post-training at that point though (“as an AI model” was a problem of their own making).

I imagine the GPT-4 base model might hold up pretty well on output quality if you’d post-train it with today’s data & techniques (without the architectural changes of 4o/5). Context size & price/performance maybe another story though
by corimaith | 2025-08-16 17:04:16+00:00
Well clearly America has decided that costs of the reserve currency outweight\ the benefits conferred. Many other countries after all manage large debts but also confer the advantages of a surplus economy.

>mercy of lenders due to foreign-currency issued debt (i.e., South America and the IMF).

Countries come to the IMF when nobody else want to lend to them. It's that or national insolvency. That obviously means some harsh and politically unpopular reforms need to made with spending if they want to restore confidence with everyone else. The IMF is a useful scapegoat that diverts the heat from government to make the actions it needs to make.

Nobody is forced to go the IMF, yet despite all the critique, people are still going to them today. In fact the alternatives like China are alot harsher now in their debt relief terms when they realised how many of their lending projects were failing. It's a bit ironically actually when they realise themselves why debt to troubled countries tends to come with stipulations.
by yks | 2025-08-16 17:04:27+00:00
In practice the tier 1 has the tech and know-how to convince the tier 2 to remain cooperative against their own interests. See the contemporary US where the inequality is rather high, and yet the tier 2 population is impressively protective of the rights of the tier 1. The theory that if the tier 2 has it way worse than today, that will change, remains to be proven. Persecutions against the immigrants are also rather lightweight today, so there is definitely space to ramp them up to pacify the tier 2.
by neurostimulant | 2025-08-16 17:04:50+00:00
> why would we hide in shady jurisdictions… if we've got nothing to hide?

> we operate proudly in the united states. protected by the constitution — not offshore shell games.

> no backdoors. no stored data. even if they ask, we've got nothing.

> we don't dodge the law — we built tech that doesn't need to.

https://vp.net/l/en-US/about
by lotsoweiners | 2025-08-16 17:05:02+00:00
> Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more

Why do the rest of humanity even have to participate in this? Just continue on the way things were before without any super AI. Start new businesses that don’t use AI and hire humans to work there.
by bevr1337 | 2025-08-16 17:05:04+00:00
Thanks for sharing your experience.

A different one, but the spotted lanternfly finally found my grapes. I'm at a total loss for how to protect them. The local university is studying oils and sprays, but they don't have any guidance yet.

The wheel bug is the first predator to realize the lantern fly is a tasty morsel. I hope we can continue coaching other insects to eat the invasives.
by 0xFEE1DEAD | 2025-08-16 17:05:06+00:00
On one hand, it's super impressive how far we've come in such a short amount of time. On the other hand, this feels like a blatant PR move.

GPT-5 is just awful. It's such a downgrade from 4o, it's like it had a lobotomy.

- It gets confused easily. I had multiple arguments where it completely missed the point.

- Code generation is useless. If code contains multiple dots ("…"), it thinks the code is abbreviated. Go uses three dots for variadic arguments, and it always thinks, "Guess it was abbreviated - maybe I can reason about the code above it."

- Give it a markdown document of sufficient length (the one I worked on was about 700 lines), and it just breaks. It'll rewrite some part and then just stop mid-sentence.

- It can't do longer regexes anymore. It fills them with nonsense tokens ($begin:$match:$end or something along those lines). If you ask it about it, it says that this is garbage in its rendering pipeline and it cannot do anything about it.

I'm not an OpenAI hater, I wanted to like it and had high hopes after watching the announcement, but this isn't a step forward. This is just a worse model that saves them computing resources.
by jmclnx | 2025-08-16 17:05:23+00:00
Yes and will give China a tremendous lead in the Drug Industry. I hope people in the US will not mind having to source their Drugs from China in say 10 years.

This will kill the US pharma industry, which is one of the few Industries that has been growing a lot in the past few years.

Xi thanks RFK jr and Trump for yet another Gift.
by Zigurd | 2025-08-16 17:05:25+00:00
After I wrote that, I almost immediately regretted that I hadn't used price earnings ratio rather than stock price as the indication that investors don't have confidence that Adobe can continue to extract rent, even though I wouldn't bet against Adobe, I wouldn't short them.

Kind of remarkable how low the price earnings ratio is compared to magnificent seven stocks. Only Google gets stuck with a similarly pedestrian price earnings ratio.
by appease7727 | 2025-08-16 17:05:35+00:00
Because it would cost money to upgrade our financial infrastructure and processes.

Americans aren't opposed to it. Like so many problems with America, our institutions are simply opposed to anything other than maximal profit extraction at any and all costs.

Americans are, however opposed to the kind of national ID system you'd want for this kind of national banking scheme. For some reaon, they think it's more private or secure to use a 9-digit number assigned at birth.
by ralusek | 2025-08-16 17:05:49+00:00
The real jump was 3 to 3.5. 3.5 was the first “chatgpt.” I had tried gpt 3 and it was certainly interesting, but when they released 3.5 as ChatGPT, it was a monumental leap. 3.5 to 4 was also huge compared to what we see now, but 3.5 was really the first shock.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-16 17:05:52+00:00
Yes this is more and more true of any car. And yes I'm assuming you can handle at least routine maintenance and repairs yourself. My newest is a W211 which is about 20 years old now. Reliable drivetrain, pretty easy to work on overall, most electronic systems can be at least read if not managed by a generic scan tool such as a YouCanic.

You can find them cheap enough so that if they have a major failure you just scrap it and find another one. If they last a few years, you have a comfortable solid car for way less than making payments and depreciation on a new one.
by starkparker | 2025-08-16 17:06:10+00:00
I remember working on POS for a non-porn industry also shut out by payment processors, and the increasingly obtuse hoops and loopholes they had to navigate were wild to hear about after working in more traditional SaaS and eCom. Reverse ATMs, cash-to-crypto, cash-to-barter, all different state-to-state and between nations. This shit is hard when you're arbitrarily frozen out of access. Really made me rethink how I pay for things, especially at in-person retail.
by koromak | 2025-08-16 17:06:13+00:00
Does anyone truly understand all the little edge cases with CSS?

I've write tons and tons of CSS, have done for a decade. I don't sit and think about the exact interactions, I just know a couple things that might work if I'm getting something unexpected.

I don't really see it possible to commit that to memory, unless I literally start working on an interpreter myself.
by dash2 | 2025-08-16 17:06:46+00:00
I'm not sure about the assumption that science is context-free. Maths maybe, but a lot of practical science has tons of unformalized contextual knowledge that is "handed down" by practitioners. It's one reason why replication can be so hard.

OTOH, I also think a lot of science is like 1% inspiration, 99% very mundane tasks like data cleaning. So no reason the AI can't help with that. And scientists write terrible code, so the bar is low :-)
by mdavid626 | 2025-08-16 17:06:52+00:00
I disagree. I generally understand the problem a "split-up" database brings to the table. This is how people designed things in the last many decades.

What I propose is to leave this design behind.

The split up design fits modern use cases much better. People want all kind of data. They want to change what data they want rather often.

"One" database for all of this doesn't really work -- you can't change the schema since it's used by many applications. So, you'll stuck with a design coming from a time when requirements were probably quite different. Of course, you can make some modifications, but not many and not fundamental ones.

In the split-up design, since you're not sharing the database, you can do whatever you want. Change schema as you see fit. Store data in multiple different forms (duplicates), so it can be queried quickly. The only thing you have to keep is the interface to the outside world (department etc.). Here you can use eg. versioning of your API. Handy.

The 90's are over. We don't have to stick to the limitations people had back then.

Yes of course, data not being up-to-date in every system can be a problem. BUT business people nowadays tend to accept that more, than the inability to change data structures ("we can't add a new field", "we can't change this field" etc.).
by arush007 | 2025-08-16 17:07:03+00:00
I was very obsessed with hiring great people for my company. The last two of my startups failed pretty much because of having a bad team, ignoring things about people at the start. I’m trying to solve this problem. If you have faced this in your work, it would be very helpful if you could help me shape a solution for this. Its pretty obvious for the first few people : hire friends, or friends of friends or through personal referrals. But things start taking a different turns after a point of like a series A or seed round when you start hiring rapidly to scale operations. Controlling the quality of people becomes a problem. And not doing that leads to a sinking ship. I talked to a few people. I realised that companies find it hard to find great people, remove the noise from the process and finally hire the right ones.
by password4321 | 2025-08-16 17:08:21+00:00
I've never upgraded to a real video editor so I wind up relying on ffmpeg after using one of free ones (if I make any tweaks at all instead of just cutting to a segment). It looks like most projects on GitHub are interested in reading markers rather than generating the FCPXML.

Interesting point on your demo video re: importing from YouTube and enabling hardware acceleration with h_264videotoolbox for the conversion.

Now you just have to find a good search term, pull down the most viewed videos and use YouTube's "most replayed" graph with AI-powered cleanup on where to cut to create an automatic best-of aggregator!
by scarecrowbob | 2025-08-16 17:08:36+00:00
Yeah, I agree.

This is largely why I (almost 50, and who likes doing casual electrical work and has tools and knows some things) don't try to get into that trade.

If I have to start making money again, I might go into something like low-voltage install where there's not any licensing and my network admin and electronics skills might help.

I enjoy electrical install work- I put a solar power system up in the off grid cabins where I live- not big (4kw panels, 6kw inverter, 15kwh battery), but it has been fun wiring in a panel and placing outlets in the shacks.

What doesn't sound fun is 4 years of $20/hr work working for who the hell knows.
by gregoryl | 2025-08-16 17:08:53+00:00
Rider; however that's on a Windows work machine. We are a solid way to getting a linux/mac dev env going; maybe 30% is netstandard2.0, 10% is net9, the remainder net472 (including an old school non-sdk web app on IIS). Maybe ~ million LOC in its 14 year lifespan.

My personal dev is shifting to Rust.
by pron | 2025-08-16 17:09:25+00:00
> It's the opposite, because for defer you need to be proactive and do it every time, but destructors are going to do the right thing and work

No, it's the opposite, because with defer you always see all the operations that are happening, while with destructors you have to be proactive and every time check what operations are done in your methods.

Look, I've used destructors a lot for many, many years (and still do, as it's not always up to me), they have pros and cons, some people really like them, some don't, and it's okay. It's not like there's some universal truth here or empirical data that strongly favours one side over the other.

> You might want to try it out, it would probably help with all these misunderstandings.

Thank you for your suggestion, but being one of the most foundational pieces of C++ software in the world, I think we've got it covered.
by olddustytrail | 2025-08-16 17:09:49+00:00
Yes, the problem really stems from the fact that git "understands" text files but not really anything other than that, so it can't really make a good diff between say a jpeg and its updated version, so it simply relies on compression for those other formats.

It would be nice to have a VCS that could manage these more effectively but most binary formats don't lend themselves to that, even when it might be an additional layer to an image.

I reckon there's still room for better image and video formats that would work better with VCS.
by dahart | 2025-08-16 17:10:38+00:00
Not necessarily true; this depends entirely on which music notation you’re talking about. Chord charts handle simultaneous pitches easily using a 1D flow of text along the timeline. Most music notations, including standard staff notation, use a layout that has a primary linear time axis, with lines that wrap, just like written text. Staff notation is different, but not that different from text. You can think of pitch as a secondary embedded dimension, but it’s certainly not necessary. You can also notate pitches and pitch combinations symbolically. The resulting audio, whether spoken or played musically, is 1-dimensional (in time) with respect to an idealized single point listener. So at some level, using anything more than one dimension is a type of feature expansion - it’s useful for notation and control, but adds new dimensions that are over-specified and unnecessary to the final result.
by tfourb | 2025-08-16 17:10:51+00:00
You misunderstand my point. The juxtaposition is not between "individual" and "collective" liberties. That's a bit of a separate argument. It is about "your" liberty vs. "mine". You might feel that a ban on guns might limit your liberty. But giving you a gun limits my liberty, because I would feel threatened and unable to express myself fully in a society where I would have to assume that random people on the street carry guns.

It's about your individual liberties limiting someone else's personal liberties. Nothing collective about it. But in public discourse, it is always the liberties that powerful people benefit from disproportionately that are framed as "good". I.e. when there was a concerted push by black liberationists in the US to form armed militias, gun laws were tightened. Now that gun ownership is interpreted mostly as a right valued by disgruntled white people, it is expanded.

Same with equating of control over money and liberty. We live in an age of almost unparalleled wealth accumulation in the hands of the few. I'm sitting on my local council and I can tell you that if we have to increase the fees for school lunches due to low tax revenues, there is nothing "collective" about the ramifications. It will directly and forcefully impact a relatively small number of individual children, whose parents will have significantly (for them) less disposable income as a result, severely limiting their liberty to afford their children a decent start to life.

It is beside the point if I think that someone can or can't make good decisions about the use of their own money. Even if I assume that they'd make much more profit if they invest it on their own, I'd still argue that a healthy society should be based around the principle of solidarity and a wholistic view of individual freedoms, and not just advance the advantage of a select few that have the means to push for their favorite liberties to be prioritized over everyone else's.
by jdoliner | 2025-08-16 17:11:21+00:00
I feel like I see these two opposite behaviors. People who formed an opinion about AI from an older model and haven't updated it. And people who have an opinion about what AI will be able to do in the future and refuse to acknowledge that it doesn't do that in the present.

And often when the two are arguing it's tricky to tell which is which, because whether or not it does something isn't totally black and white, there's some things it can sometimes do, which you can argue either way about that being in its capabilities or not.
by mansa10 | 2025-08-16 17:11:26+00:00
Same problem in Denmark with our banks.

Our popular QR payment system, known as MobilePay, is owned by banks that have a financial interest in letting payments continue to process via visa/mc cards underneath, as they get a big interchange fee from reusing the legacy payment system. (around 0,2% interchange on a typical danish visa transaction).

In the past, we had a popular nationally owned cheaper safeguard against foreign payment monopolies in the form of Dankort, a local visa/mc alternative, but the company operating Dankort (NETS) has been sold by our gov+danish banks to an american equity firm, further removing any incentive for danish banks to not just quietly force visa/mc on everyone, so Dankort is now slowly dying.

The rent seeking is made even more perverse by the EU PSD2 legislation from 2018 that makes it illegal to forward payment fees onto shoppers, which removes all the textbook consumer behavior (judging price vs quality) from the equation. That law has created a situation where shoppers use whatever payment method their bank hands out to them and merchants are forced to blindly accept whatever shoppers use and pay up the fees which goes back to the same banks that decided what to give shoppers in the first place.

End result of this is that the banks best move is to push visa/mc, make everything seem hard to change & confuse politicians. Systems like Pix give me hope but I don't believe the existing system can be saved, it needs to be replaced by a new actor, aggressively supported at EU or national level, probably both.
by buybackoff | 2025-08-16 17:12:11+00:00
The picture says "enamel-mimicking" and the text says "protective coating that mimics the structure and function of natural enamel", so it looks like a protective layer, not true repair. I've been using a paste with novamin lately, it also creates a protective layer and is also marketed as "repair". I like it and feel some heat when it contacts with teeth, so the chemical reaction must be working. But the marketing leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-16 17:12:25+00:00
I think "How randomness improves algorithms" makes it sound kind of mystical and paradoxical.

Instead we could say "we know shortcuts that work for most values in a population, but we don't know how to figure out which values without expensive computation" and that's not very mystical or paradoxical.

And using random sampling is now the obvious way to deal with a situation. But it's not random doing the work, that's an implementation detail of how you do the sampling.

It very well can be that there isn't another obvious way to iterate through the sample space that isn't a disaster. Maybe bad values are clumped together so when you retry on failure you retry a lot. But if that's the case, there might also be a better way to sample than random - if bad values are clumped then there may be an intelligent way to sample such that you hit two bad values in a row less often than random.

My question is if that's what's being referred to as 'derandomizing' - taking one of these algorithms that uses random sampling and sample more intelligently. Or if they instead mean using what they learned from the (so-called) probabilistic algorithm to go back to a more traditional form.