MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by schneems | 2025-08-27 03:20:28+00:00
The interesting thing here is that it breaks assumptions that to be "alpha" you MUST dominate to win. Even if within only these parameters, it suggest there are conditions where being "nice" isn't just a nebulous ethical thing, but it's an optimal conflict strategy.

I think it carries two different messages to two different groups. If you're a "lets all be friends" type, then it's important that you also guard the resources that allow you to be nice. Being provokable isn't "being mean" its the thing allowing you to be nice. If you're a "take advantage of the rubes" type, it's a hint that there might be metaphorical money left on the table by being too greedy.

> not meant to explain all and everything.

That it's not true ALL the time, is less interesting than the fact that it's true some of the time. At least to me.
by kazinator | 2025-08-27 03:21:20+00:00
> Because it is difficult to assume what the best encoding will be for any given workload, database systems should dynamically choose encodings based on storage and workload characteristics.

It would be better just to take the storage requirement on the chin and not add a gratuitous variation in encoding which will bite you on the ass somehow (or someone else).

As much as possible, pick one way of doing one thing. Your stuff already has thousands of things to do. Each time you do something in two or more ways, you add combinations between that and surrounding things being done in two or more ways.
by jeffbee | 2025-08-27 03:22:03+00:00
Much of the article seems to be discussing the advantages of using time as the major dimension, without using the word "major". But an alternative to switching the major dimension would be to arrange the data along a Hilbert curve in 4 dimensions, giving good locality of access for range scans in time or geographical coordinate. That seems like it would also offer better compression from delta coding, since with better locality you should also enjoy smaller deltas.
by godelski | 2025-08-27 03:24:10+00:00
Thanks for sharing. I think we're seeing a lot of the same thing occurring in these comments. :(

You'd probably be interested in my main comment too[0]. The signal has always been a terrible candidate for alien communication. Classic conspiracy problem where people become fixated on one aspect while ignoring all others.

Like Carl Sagan said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary science". It's sad but I think a lot of people just have these deep misunderstandings of what science actually is and how it works. There's also the really unfortunate human bias in how we read people in positions of authority[1]. Science makes you second guess and forces you to consider everything probabilistically. Nuance and detail dominate. Hard truth is that the world is noisy and figuring things out is hard.

But I think one of the most important things I have learned in life is that truth has a lower bound in complexity while lies don't. You should make things as simple as possible but to make simpler requires losing accuracy. Just because something can't be explained to a layman doesn't mean the person doesn't understand it, it means the topic is complex. Simplicity only ends up coming after a lot of work and dealing with the complexities.

To get side tracked a little, I have a proposal for a great filter: complexity. Any naturally evolved civilization is likely to have brains that preference simplicity and push against complexity. It's natural because complexity simply requires more computational power and that'd be a poor evolutionary strategy. You want enough to get the advantage but nor more. So when these civilizations advance they are likely to get to a point where the system they have created is far more complex that their brains can naturally handle. I think humans are in such a situation right now. No one person can understand the complexities of current issues be that from Global Warming to Geopolitics. We can do these things collectively but not individually. It's absolutely amazing what we've been able to accomplish, but I think if we're to continue we'll also have to recognize how incredible these accomplishments actually are. So the great filter is not some concrete event like Nuclear War or Global Warming (things that there's a good chance those civilizations also face), but the more abstract filter of abstraction itself. Eventually a civilization needs to cross the bridge from where its people can understand enough to navigate major problems of their world to one they aren't. Just seems unlikely brains would evolve fast enough to keep pace, since it is easier to create complexity than to understand it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034860

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45000418
by zywoo | 2025-08-27 03:24:34+00:00
My child was just saved by AI. He suffered from persistent seizures, and after visiting three hospitals, none were able to provide an accurate diagnosis. Only when I uploaded all of his medical records to an AI system did it immediately suggest a high suspicion of MOGAD-FLAMES — a condition with an epidemiology of roughly one in ten million. Subsequent testing confirmed the diagnosis, and with the right treatment, my child recovered rapidly. For rare diseases, it is impossible to expect every physician to master all the details. But AI excels at this. I believe this may even be the first domain where both doctors and AI can jointly agree that deployment is ready to begin.
by dluan | 2025-08-27 03:26:52+00:00
Most people tend to be good at extrapolating in incomplete info games, and depending on the risk aversion culture of whatever situation you're in, this means that most people will react defensively.

You learn this so vividly in Silicon Valley particularly with VCs, where staying mum is almost always the best strategy. VCs act as little reactive microprocessors dealing with too many signals, and the less information you give them the easier it is for them to arrive at a decision or strategy. Instead, there's a bias for founders to do the opposite when raising (or salesmen when closing), which is to overshare information thinking there's just one more bit of data that they can provide which will unlock the magical outcome they want. It's a habit of smart but otherwise inexperienced people fall into a trap of in negotiations.

There's tons of other competing externalities too like emotion and market signalling and stuff (eg repeated n-person incomplete games), but if you removed all of that just boiled it down to strategic decision making, this is what game theory teaches us.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-08-27 03:28:00+00:00
Fully agree.

I feel like anything relevantly practical is denied investment.

But when it comes to anything flashy and hip, a train of dump trucks filled with cash couldn’t deliver money as quick as the VC dollars that flow into to startups with no business model and no hope of being profitable…

Yeah, I get that startups should invest profits and not actually make profits for a while… But when they’re on their 4th round of funding with thousands of employees… shouldn’t they at least try to be a bit more financially responsible?
by UltraSane | 2025-08-27 03:28:16+00:00
"But do you really feel you are conversing?"

Yes. For topics with lots of training data like physics Claude is VERY human sounding. I've had very interesting conversations with Claude Opus about the Boltzmann brain issue and how I feel that the conventional wisdom ignores the low probability of a BBrain having a spatially and temporally consistent set of memories and how the fact that brains existing in a universe that automatically creates consistent memories means the probability of us being Boltzmann brains is very low. Since even if a Boltzmann brain pops into existence its memory will be most likely completely random and completely insane/insensate.

There aren't a lot of people who want to talk about Boltzmann brains.
by TheRoque | 2025-08-27 03:28:22+00:00
Moreover, I find it ironic that website owners will gracefully give AI companies the power to identify what is "good" data and what is not. I mean, why would I do the work for them and identify my data as AI, so that they would ignore it ? "yes please, take all my work, this is quality content, train on it, it's free !" that's what it sounds like
by andai | 2025-08-27 03:28:23+00:00
Here is the paper in question:

Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance

https://db.in.tum.de/~freitag/papers/p29-neumann-cidr20.pdf

Section 3.1 covers string handling.

This article (also linked from tfa) explains German strings in more detail.

https://cedardb.com/blog/german_strings
by schneems | 2025-08-27 03:29:44+00:00
Nothing about your these words reads as constructive to me:

> This is absolutely infuriating for me to see: People keep posting shit like "do it right or i will kill a puppy, you can get bitcoin if you are right" then never any testing where they change one word here or there and compare what does and doesn't work vs the dumb shit they are saying

It doesn't seem like your goal was to convey feedback in a way that was digestable, nor was in a way that was satisfiable (my previous critique).
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-27 03:29:46+00:00
Meanwhile Android has been struggling and struggling to get auracast into good shape. Some recent coverage of the mess in the Pixel ecosystem: https://www.androidauthority.com/auracast-on-pixel-mess-3588...

I'd love to know what Android can do. Bidirectional audio of moderately ok quality would be great. Stereo would be great. Not mentioned in the article but <=60ms audio would also be good. It seems so unfortunate that non-rubbish audio continues to require proprietary usb based transceivers. I'm not super thrilled that BLE is 32kHz, seemingly a bit shy of actually good (but pretty ok for most use).
by rudderdev | 2025-08-27 03:30:41+00:00
Too much marketing speak without the demo. I have read this long article and did read some more related content on the internet, so let me summarize it for you.

With Neuralink,

- Noland can control cursor of his computer - He can schedule calendar meetings - He can control his purifier, television, etc. - He can play games like mario kart

I could only find this demo on the internet where Noland plays chess - https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1ypJdkXjaLNGW
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-08-27 03:32:11+00:00
Yeah, but how does one get a business loan, with real stuff at stake, when VCs are burning money like there’s no tomorrow?

I especially dislike the way VC funded startups use VC dollars to effectively be a “loss leaders” for years to choke out the rest of the market.

Who wants to risk their own capital or privately pooled funds against THAT?
by Johnny555 | 2025-08-27 03:32:12+00:00
>A four-justice majority agreed. They emphasized that digital search warrants must be precise, listing exactly what investigators are seeking and explaining why those specific data types or timeframes are relevant

How do they limit the police to what was in the warrant? How do they prevent them police from searching the entire phone, and if they find something else incriminating, use parallel construction to find other evidence that justifies a warrant for a broader phone search? "We didn't find anything in our initial phone search, but now we have an informant that told us to look at his email in November last year"
by godelski | 2025-08-27 03:33:27+00:00
> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

Space big + speed of light is too slow. Sprinkle in a little "suns are fucking loud as shit" but the first two are more than enough to explain all of it. Not to mention the million other factors that make transmitting a viable signal across interstellar distances an incredibly challenging problem.
by sgtwompwomp | 2025-08-27 03:33:57+00:00
Yup, this is a case where you always want an agent to do that step. So in the prompt you just say “do a focused_action to select the search result with John”, and then the pathfinder agent will cache in it’s memory to delegate that step to a mini computer use agent, just for that particular task.

After the focused action is done, it’ll go right back to deterministic!
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-27 03:34:42+00:00
It's not, but what's happening in DC is already more than that - they've begun operating mobile armed patrols of residential neighborhoods. See https://www.reuters.com/pictures/scenes-dc-federal-agents-na... for pictures; in particular, note the masked paramilitary goons casually strolling by a shop (https://www.reuters.com/resizer/v2/U7NNOHI5RRMCNE33UNDIWCP3H...).

Like, are they going to start shooting people? Probably not, probably it will go the same way as the LA invasion where the troops just kinda slink away after Trump gets distracted and Stephen Miller kidnaps all the immigrants he was looking for. But what happens if the Chicago PD tries to obstruct some operation or another on a day Trump got up on the wrong side of the bed?
by suggestion | 2025-08-27 03:34:44+00:00
There isn't one because a sprained ankle is a binary diagnosis.

One of the biggest problems with psychiatry is that every diagnosis is a spectrum, and over time it's become more and more obvious that the boundaries for what is considered "neurotypical" are way too narrow.

Depression being a chemical imbalance was a complete lie to sell more medication, and how prolific this type of occurrence is within the industry is not hard to see.

At the very least, a plurality of phycological diagnoses are manifestations of physical behavior: diet, exercise, exposure to sunlight, etc

We're so overprescribed on medications to try to feel a certain way within far too narrow of a spectrum.

Why do you presume that there has to be an equivalent to a sprained ankle? Maybe the answer to your question is yes, only the catastrophic is worth addressing.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
by xyzzy123 | 2025-08-27 03:34:52+00:00
It's great to have a safe options - and it would have been great if the default had been safe.

I think many people are annoyed with ReDos as a bug class. It seems like mostly noise in the CVE trackers, library churn and badge collecting for "researchers". It'd be less of a problem if people stuck to filing CVEs against libraries that might remotely see untrusted input rather than scrambling to collect pointless "scalps" from every tool under the sun that accepts a configuration regex - build tools, very commonly :(

Perhaps you can stop this madness... :)
by marshray | 2025-08-27 03:35:26+00:00
The most horrifying aspect of the hypothesis as depicted in the Dark Forest book is that it was simply the job of a low-level bureaucrat to identify "low-entropy entities which lack the hiding gene" within their region of the galaxy and allocate a basic bottom-shelf munition to "cleanse" it.

However, humans were aware of this possibility and had spent centuries reorganizing the solar system to have a measure of resilience to it. So, to humanity's great credit, he had to go get permission from his supervisor for to deploy a next-tier solution.

"Why would anyone travel across town (i.e., the galaxy) just to step on an anthill?" We have a whole industry dedicated to exterminating any other life that invades "our" living space. It's considered an unremarkable necessity.
by semiquaver | 2025-08-27 03:35:58+00:00
> Regolith attempts to be a drop-in replacement for RegExp and requires minimal (to no) changes to be used instead

vs

> Since Regolith uses Rust bindings to implement the Rust Regex library to achieve linear time worst case, this means that backreferences and look-around aren't available in Regolith either.

Obviously it cannot be a drop-in replacement if the regex dialect differs. That it has a compatible API is not the only relevant factor. I’d recommend removing the top part from the readme.

Another thought: since backreferences and lookaround are the features in JS regexes which _cause_ ReDOS, why not just wrap vanilla JS regex, rejecting patterns including them? Wouldn’t that achieve the same result in a simpler way?
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-27 03:36:02+00:00
>the kneecaping of public transit projects

Is this the thing about California high-speed rail? I looked into that when it came up on HN the other day, and concluded that Musk had basically nothing to do with the failure of that project. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299460

So -- Do you have actual solid evidence to defend this "kneecaping of public transit projects" claim? Or shall I assume that the rest of your claims are also liable to be based on half-truths and internet rumors?

Because from my POV there appears to be no end of BS floating around the internet about Musk: https://www.snopes.com/collections/musk-rumors-collection/

In any case, I'm not "defending" Musk in the sense of saying he's a good person. I'm just saying people should try to see him accurately. If you judge people negatively for giving you any information that challenges your worldview, I'd say you're basically admitting that your worldview isn't likely to be very accurate. You can persuade yourself of anything you like, if you're selective in the evidence you admit.
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-27 03:37:32+00:00
> It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.

> There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.

You're right with the timeline that the initial rumors didn't start with the A-12 radar tests, but they were reinforced by it. Initially, Project Mogul's crash of the balloon array triggered the rumors, but it's not as fancy and couldn't be interpreted as an "alien spaceship", even at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul
by HumanOstrich | 2025-08-27 03:37:46+00:00
Your take on complexity as a filter reminded me of a fascinating paper I read. You might find it interesting because it claims that evolution does tend to favor simplicity, except when under a certain kind of pressure.

The paper is titled "Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasitism: evolution of complex replication strategies" and you can find it at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210441
by rc5150 | 2025-08-27 03:39:03+00:00
The unfortunate part is that your first thought went to return on investment rather than the humanitarian angle, which I think is the common perspective; optics and money.

Then there's the pessimists, like me, wondering how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-27 03:39:12+00:00
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

... It's not exactly inviting the people in who have the money to pay a citizenship paperwork fee or a lawyer, is it? When our laws drift from our principles, what are we to do?

In any case, no, the President violating the civil service act by arranging to have non-political appointees removed doesn't herald the end of democracy. It might herald the end of the rule of law. Because there's certainly a critical mass of people who are tired of following the laws, I think we could both agree. And if the president is also not interested in following the laws... Laws are just paper if no one follows them.

And, I suppose, that could herald the end of democracy.

Best of luck out there.
by Bence_csm | 2025-08-27 03:39:30+00:00
Have you ever used body wash to wash your hair—or shampoo as a body cleanser—just to save time? While they might seem similar, shampoo and body wash are formulated differently. Using the wrong product can lead to dry skin, frizzy hair, and irritation. Let’s break down the differences based on ingredients, purpose, and why you shouldn’t mix them up.
by betterhealth12 | 2025-08-27 03:39:44+00:00
What are your thoughts on this being solved by the negative of the situation? So, instead of having to vet every single stream, tweet etc to check if it's legit, basically the idea is that you shouldn't "trust" what you are seeing unless it's explicitly endorsed via a signature from the original creator.

Obviously, if it's coming from their official channels the "signature" can be more obvious, but a layer that facilitates this could do a lot of good imo.
by sebast_bake | 2025-08-27 03:40:04+00:00
Modern software is actually quite good, but it depends on who the customer is.

In this case, the enterprise/IT/security people “give a shit” about things like ease of rollout/management, and unfortunately they don’t care about usability/performance for the end user.

At the end of the day, they’re the ones paying… I expect the software they’re paying for is actually quite good in terms of satisfying their needs.
by SiliconGen | 2025-08-27 03:40:56+00:00
I had no frontend or backend experience, and still don’t fully understand Next.js. But after one week of pair programming with Claude, I built a working site: https://geministorybook.gallery/ .

Key takeaways:

Push back on AI defaults (designs tend to look the same).

Use tools (Playwright MCP, ASCII sketches) for UI/UX iteration.

Context is critical: one feature at a time, document outcomes.

For me, the big shift was: code is cheap; clarity and iteration are what matter.
by suggestion | 2025-08-27 03:41:31+00:00
Nearly all of it, because that's the case for the overwhelming majority of the social sciences.

When you do not have an objective metric to measure, prove, or hypothesize (as in physics, chemistry, etc), you're basically doing statistics on whatever arbitrary populations and bounds you choose with immeasurable confounders. That's why the replication crisis and p hacking are intrinsic properties of the social sciences
by bawolff | 2025-08-27 03:42:53+00:00
Well this sems true, i think it incorrectly models why people do the things they do.

Re politics and work

Yes, talking politics at work is mindnumbingly stupid. However i think the gain people get from it is that people who deeply care about politics tie it to morality. Talking about it at work is an expensive signal about your beliefs. To some people there is a lot of value in this.
by betterhealth12 | 2025-08-27 03:45:01+00:00
@knicholes & @pil0u - I am working on a system that would prevent this exact same scenario. I appreciate the docs write up, given that you were personally impacted by this and are passionate about it, I'd love to speak.

I feel like the scale at which this is happening cross-internet must be staggering but because this is small-scale and un-reportable theft - who would the average person even go to, if they willingly sent the money, and they'd also have to get over the embarrassment of having fallen for it.

What really got me thinking about the scale of this is watching the deepfake discussion at 1:51:46 in this video (at 1:52:00 he says his team spends 30% of their time sorting through deepfake ads, to the extent he had to hire someone whose exclusive job is to spot these scam videos and report them to FB etc):

https://youtu.be/JMYQmGfTltY?si=ntuDgXuhMYj2fh5z&t=6706
by colinwilyb | 2025-08-27 03:45:13+00:00
It sounds like you're describing sites with a userbase that displays unexpected behaviors compared to expectations from visitors. A business would call this institutional knowledge and company culture. In a friends group it would be called group dynamics.

2chan, 4chan, and similar seem to be a perfect example. Users rapidly creating original content, riffing on previous posts, and introducing new content is like a factory that accidentally creates a viral meme through trial and error.

What are you trying to understand by asking this question?