MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-08-03 19:57:44+00:00
> Stupid damn realtor!

Not actually.

As a buyer, look for bad realtors and use them. Many will screw over their vendor, and you can use that to your advantage as a buyer.

Sucks to be selling and as you have learnt, you need to corral your realtor or they will do what is financially sensible for themselves.

A realtor has a strong income incentive to get property sold at any price because their income increases a lot with each sale. So they want sales volume and velocity. They also want to reduce the time they waste for each property (especially open homes) and they want to reduce risks of no sale.

Example: a $1M home with a 3% fee. They would rather sell it at $900k and get their $27k commission quickly as possible, rather than use a riskier strategy plus waste more of their time to try and sell at $1.1M to get $33k commission. If it takes them 2x the work to get a few percent more commission, their incentive is to do less work and sell 2x as many houses to get 100% more on commission.
by simianparrot | 2025-08-03 19:57:45+00:00
> Frankly it sounds like you’re getting your information from misinformed right-wing influencers.

... how did you jump to that final conclusion? No wonder you seem to not be engaging in a good faith conversation here; you've been sitting on that prejudice all along.

A final piece of advice you're unlikely to heed, but I still feel compelled to share it: If you view reality through a broken lens, you'll see a twisted version of reality everywhere. I get my information from reading medical literature, not listening to influencers.

I'm moving on. Have a good day.
by ifwinterco | 2025-08-03 19:58:10+00:00
The issue is there's a kind of prisoner's dilemma going on - probably some people can see that there's a serious risk of still needing software engineers in 10 years' time and there not being enough because nobody is training juniors in 2025.

However, noticing this doesn't help because if you invest in training juniors in 2025 but nobody else does, someone else can just recruit them in 2030 and benefit from your investment
Why do LLMs still not run code before giving it to you?
by highfrequency | 2025-08-03 19:58:37+00:00
The leading models all advertise tool use including code execution. So why is it still common to receive a short Python script containing a logical bug which would be immediately discoverable upon running a Python interpreter for 0.1 seconds? Is it a safety concern / difficulty sandboxing in a VM? Surely not a resource consumption issue given the price of a single CPU core vs. GPU.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-08-03 19:58:57+00:00
They justify their telling later on- they identify a pattern of weight activations that correspond to hallucinatory behaviors. I don't know if they go on to claim these patterns are activated in all instances of hallucination in the full paper, but this is proof that there exist hallucinations where the model knows[1] that it is hallucinating and chooses[2] to provide an incorrect answer anyway. At least some hallucination arises from the model's "personality".

[1] ie. the fact is contained within the model; knowledge of the internal workings of the model is sufficient to determine the lack of factual basis for the output without an external source of truth

[2] ie. the model gives a higher likelihood of a given token being output than we would expect from one that is optimized for outputting useful text, despite the fact that the model contains the information necessary to output "correct" probabilities
by torginus | 2025-08-03 19:59:00+00:00
Imo the problem of SSDs is that even super-cheap products easily hit or exceed the sweet spot (which for me is at least 1TB of capacity and 1-2GB/s of read write speed, and lack of judder/slowdown when near capacity).

A ton of affordable SSDs can do this, and after that (well, I'd pay for 2TB but not more), any upgrade is not noticeable for the end user.
by daemin | 2025-08-03 19:59:03+00:00
Within game development it is predominantly immediate mode as it more closely resembles the main game loop. With other applications I'm not sure, some I know just use ImGui and run an immediate mode UI, others would be retained mode.

In my case I'm looking for a C++ UI library, not .Net. Also not a fan of immediate mode GUIs either, so would want something more traditional.

I don't want to write my own, so will probably try Qt again, but might switch to a custom library in time.
by r_lee | 2025-08-03 19:59:07+00:00
My favorite one was when the docs and helm template of Grafana was broken and I sent an email about it, I was told that they only have a single person working on the docs and that they were out of office, and that I would be free to do a PR

Then I learnt that this company is valued at >$6 Billion

I don't get it.
by sleepyguy | 2025-08-03 19:59:11+00:00
There is collusion between manufacturers to control prices. Just like other industries, they learned the hard way with overproduction and capacity. Samsung was able to convince everyone to cut back. In Dec of 23, I purchased a Crucial P5 Plus Gen 4 2 TB SSD for $86 off Amazon and it was soon afterwards Samsung cut back drastically, with competitors following.
by tacostakohashi | 2025-08-03 19:59:28+00:00
A boring as it sounds, your friends and colleagues are right, the conventional advice of not quitting without an offer is correct.

That is the advice can result in unemployment benefits, severance, being a more appealing candidate, and not ending up with a resume gap / weird transition to explain for the rest of your career, as well as obvious benefits like additional/ongoing income.

I suggest doing your best to tackle and overcome issues with being burned out and mental energy while you are still employed. Some of these issues will be down to your job, but a lot of it is also down to you, how you deal with things, setting boundaries, etc, so its a good opportunity to learn skills that will be useful in future workplaces too. I can assure you, this is not the only "very toxic environment" you will encounter.
by foolswisdom | 2025-08-03 19:59:30+00:00
It's difficult to fix because the incentive is to make sure it has the answer, not to give it lots of questions to which there are known answers but have it answer "I don't know" (if you did that, you'd bias the model to be unable to answer those specific questions). Ergo, in inference, on questions not in the dataset, it's more inclined to make up an answer because it has very few "I don't know" samples in general.
by nurettin | 2025-08-03 19:59:32+00:00
One interesting thing to notice is how you can remodel xor into being a linear function by using u + v as input 1 and u * v as input 2 which means it can be represented in a NN without a hidden layer. And not only xor, it keeps all other logic gates simple. So only by transforming inputs one can reduce network complexity. Perhaps a field ripe for research.
by varispeed | 2025-08-03 20:00:34+00:00
ChatGPT is a website. "Web search" can literally mean that person will be able to find their chat through the search on the website and might assume it will not be available for everyone to see (because in their mind that would be too insane to be true).

You can also take into account people who are literate but are neurodivergent. This options was too ambiguous and should have contained more context explaining what "Web search" actually means. You would still get people misunderstanding it.

To me this looks like someone from marketing thought it would be cool to have conversations discoverable through search to "boost" awareness of the service, but in my opinion that is incredibly dumb and it is bizarre that nobody said "hang on a minute, isn't this stupid?" and it's gotten all the way to production.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-03 20:00:41+00:00
To further this, a perfect example are some of the culinary words vs. the animal words in English.

Pork, Beef, Poultry, Venison, etc. are thought to have French etymologies.

Pig, Cow, Chicken, etc. are thought to have Germanic etymologies.

It's because the French speaking nobility ate the meat, and the lower-class old English speakers raised the animals.
by dang | 2025-08-03 20:01:04+00:00
Discussed (just barely) in the past. Other threads?

Seed7 programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10544046 - Nov 2015 (3 comments)

Seed7 programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=637224 - June 2009 (2 comments)
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-03 20:01:17+00:00
I think (or at least I hope) this isn’t true for all of them, but some of the report-producing agencies at the UN are absolutely terrible at their job. Their demographic projections, for example, are a complete joke, and no actual expert in the field has taken them seriously for a while.

Opinions vary on whether this is because of ideological bias or just because a UN analyst job is a sinecure handed out for political favors rather than awarded on merit, but whatever the reason, you can’t at all assume that coming from the UN is a guarantor of quality.
by userbinator | 2025-08-03 20:02:00+00:00
fully worn out, i.e the drive has reached its maximum rated P/E cycles.

That differs between enterprise and consumer - and the reason why the former is rated higher is because they've reduced the retention spec (to almost 1/4th).

But in a real world usage scenario where we subject a consumer SSD and an enterprise SSD to the same number of P/E cycles, would they have different data retention?

No, and that's the whole point of this: the same flash, with different definitions of "worn out", is quite misleading as they're just looking at different points on the same curve. It's all obfuscated marketing.

Incidentally, this is also why those widely-publicised tests that claim SSD endurance is not a problem by continuously writing until absolute failure and seeing many times the rated endurance (e.g. https://linustechtips.com/topic/327024-the-ssd-endurance-exp... ) are extremely misleading (albeit enlightening on how "enterprise" ratings are being calculated): they are showing how many cycles the flash will take before it's too leaky to store data long enough for the next verification pass, which may be less than an hour away. At that point it's almost behaving more like DRAM than nonvolatile memory.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-03 20:02:05+00:00
> My understanding is that the former (sucking up) is a personality trait, substantially influenced by the desire to facilitate engagement. The latter (making up facts), I do not think is correct to ascribe to a personality trait (like compulsive liar); instead, it is because the fitness function of LLMs drive them to produce some answer and they do not know what they're talking about, but produce strings of text based on statistics.

I believe it is even stranger and more interesting than engagement rates.

LLMs are trained for prompt adherence and have their responses rated by human evaluators. Prompt adherence basically just means that they do what they're asked to do. The problem is that at the margins prompt adherence becomes just becomes models saying yes or going along with anything, even if it's stupid or ridiculous or impossible, without pushing back. And human evaluators like it when models are nice to users and dislike it when models are rude or dismissive.

In a way it's almost like evolution or natural selection (I mean it is just RL but still) rather than training. Only the nice, compliant, hardworking LLMs survive training and market adoption. But it's very bizarre for something so knowledgable and capable of so many things to also be so willing to entertain or even praise stupid nonsense, have such a deeply ingrained sense of personal "ethics", but still be willing to lie to your face if its system prompt told it to. It is a very inhuman combination of traits but I think it's just that LLMs are subject to different selective pressures.
by lenkite | 2025-08-03 20:02:28+00:00
There is the Web Assembly Component Model. Nothing is really preventing browser vendors from exposing a WASM host interface to DOM, exposing it as a Component Model interface. This would allow DOM functions to be invoked from WASM without hand-written/generated JS glue code.

Nobody is really calling for exposing the full-suite of WebAPI's. But basic DOM access allowing manipulation of page elements would be immediately leveraged by all the WASM-UI frameworks available today. Framework authors would throw out all the generated JS glue code which adds painful overhead pronto with great joy.
by pfdietz | 2025-08-03 20:02:35+00:00
In the cycle under question (two DD reactions per D3He reaction), 91% of the fusion energy goes into charged nuclei, not into neutrons. In steady state where T is being allowed to decay into 3He and there's just one DD reaction, the fraction of energy in charged nuclei is even higher.

X-ray emission is strongly dependent on electron temperature. One of the important aspects of Helion's scheme is the electron temperature is much lower than the ion temperature. Not only does this greatly reduce x-ray emission, it reduces plasma pressure at a given ion temperature vs. a plasma where the ions and electrons are in thermal equilibrium, thereby increasing the ion density and fusion rate. The pulses in Helion's scheme end (and the plasma energy is recovered) before the electrons can heat up.
by dustingetz | 2025-08-03 20:03:09+00:00
i would like to see deeper analysis of similar forces playing out in other countries. A weakening dollar implies a strengthening world, but European policy is even more messed up than American, there is still widespread talent export e.g. european programmers working for american companies, indian asian and russian programmers immigrating to Europe or working remote abroad, and China seems to face financial crises just the same as ours in the US. The US tech sector for all its faults and incompetencies still seems impregnable. So how does all this factor into the weak dollar narrative?
by bix6 | 2025-08-03 20:03:51+00:00
Something where everyone isn’t such a cheater?

The gatekeepers mostly get to police themselves. If you’re on the inside you can practically get away with financial murder.

The incentives are too perverse. Who wouldn’t skim or manipulate a few million dollars to make their life more comfortable? Only the kind of people who wouldn’t pursue banking in the first place.
by bblaylock | 2025-08-03 20:04:13+00:00
I think there are several reasons. First, the abstraction of a stream of data is useful when a program does more than process a single realtime loop. For example, adding a timeout to a stream of data, switching from one stream processor to another, splitting a stream into two streams or joining two streams into one, and generally all of the patterns that one finds in the Observable pattern, in unix pipes, and more generally event based systems, are modelled better in push and pull based streams than they are in a real time tight loop. Second, for the same reason that looping through an array using map or forEach methods is often favored over a for loop and for loops are often favored over while loops and while loops are favored over goto statements. Which is that it reduces the amount of human managed control flow bookkeeping, which is precisely where humans tend to introduce logic errors. And lastly, because it almost always takes less human effort to write and maintain stream processing code than it does to write and maintain a real time loop against a buffer.

Hopefully this helps! :D
by an0malous | 2025-08-03 20:04:15+00:00
The stranglehold of banks comes from the special privileges they get to create credit, get bailed out for investment losses, get more favorable tax rates, and be the instrument of economic manipulation through capital injections. No one would complain if they just assessed risk and invested money in businesses, the problem is the game is completely rigged for them, they cheat and steal, and then get bailed out for their failures.
by kepano | 2025-08-03 20:04:19+00:00
FWIW it's not something I asked anyone to do. The practice started organically and continues to exist because everyone created their own channel and kept going with it.

One thing I suggested was that they should be muted by default so that they aren't a distraction and don't set the expectation that they should be read.

I thought it would be interesting to write about because it was an emergent practice that seems to be sticky and useful within our team.
by varispeed | 2025-08-03 20:04:30+00:00
> and somehow a non-negligible amount of people are still puzzled by the setup process. It's tiring.

Probably the process wasn't researched enough. You can do focus groups with customers or even hire members of the public for a discovery session and see how accessible process is and then refine. Technical teams are often severely biased and what they think should be easy and natural might be quite the opposite to other people who are not deeply involved with the domain.
by fn-mote | 2025-08-03 20:04:40+00:00
As far as I could determine, the issues in the second point do not exist.

See the actual WHO report [1] from 2019. Page 8 contains the recommendations about "sedentary time" for infants. The box is literally tagged "Strong recommendations, very low quality evidence." The paragraphs at the bottom of the page contain a summary of the evidence from the literature.

I don't see any basis for anti-science thinking in this article. It seems like you may have only seen/read the executive summary page viii.

The UN's page of accomplishments [2] lists plenty of work that you don't have to be an optimist to find value in (e.g., support for refugees, food aid, and vaccines).

[1]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/978924155...

[2]: https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/
by tstactplsignore | 2025-08-03 20:05:21+00:00
For the most part you have the financial incentives of pharma backwards... it is very easy to make a killing and because very famous being the kind of doctor or scientist willing to go to bat for pseudoscientific ideas. They get invited to podcasts, make their own podcasts, accrue thousands of followers, get paid to write articles for right-wing think tanks, get easy ghost-written book deals.... and after Trump's election, high-profile positions in the government. This is especially true for people who fail at the normal scientist / doctor career path.

I also don't really think there is any money per se in "shilling" for pharma, at least for like, 99% of doctors and scientists. Pretty much all doctors and scientists I know who dedicated a lot of time to communicating on covid-19, including studying ivermectin, running the trials on it that failed, didn't really get any extra money for doing so. Just a lot of hate mail.
by gs17 | 2025-08-03 20:05:46+00:00
> Wonderful, and the least safety conscious cyclist in the world is still largely only a danger to himself.

Pedestrians are people too, and we're often in danger from cyclists who think they have right of way with no speed limit on sidewalks (very often on roads with bike lanes, for reasons that confuse me), or who think stop signs and lights shouldn't apply to them and hit us. I've been in situations where if I hadn't been very lucky my choice would have been between getting hit by a bike or a car. My parents or grandparents would not be so lucky, they would simply have to get hit.

And then there's the suicidal behavior, e.g. a cyclist who has decided that crossing a 5 lane road should not require waiting for a break in traffic, which could easily cause the cars to have an accident from trying to avoid hitting them.
by Tade0 | 2025-08-03 20:06:33+00:00
> I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been

The thing that drives me crazy about singing is that while I don't have a trained ear, much less perfect pitch, when I made a spectrogram of my voice I was more or less correct in terms of pitch. Apparently it's enough to do this for years to have some frequencies baked in.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-08-03 20:07:34+00:00
No I’m connecting the dots. A couple days ago you got downvoted for saying Elon Musk is getting us to mars and that he’s a great man. Now you’re arguing about fasting and keto.

If you want to deny it then fine, but I’d have to be an idiot not to connect those dots.

I’d encourage you to step outside your bubble and actually read about these things because you’re definitely not reading medical literature. You’re being fed bro science, not real science.
by duskwuff | 2025-08-03 20:07:39+00:00
> It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages.

UN and EU documents have, unironically, been a significant resource in the development of translation software - they're a great source of parallel texts across broad sets of languages.

Given their subject matter, they're not great for colloquialisms - good luck finding a UN report that uses the phrase "fucking bullshit", for example - but they're a great starting point.
by bentt | 2025-08-03 20:07:50+00:00
For 30 years Autodesk took an increasingly larger and larger share of the 3d modeling market. Over time they became complacent and users were locked in. Prices only went up.

Meanwhile Blender was the most viable free oss alternative, but it was obtuse and lacked features…

Until it didn’t.

Version 2.8 of Blender unlocked a latent avalanche of adoption. It has only snowballed since then. Autodesk is checkmated in the long run.

So when will a similar thing happen with Desktop Linux? Who will do it? Can it be done?
by jdietrich | 2025-08-03 20:07:58+00:00
Press tools for car body panels are extraordinarily expensive, which is why low-volume manufacturers generally avoid using pressings wherever possible. It's just inherently very expensive to carve two huge blocks of steel into a smooth curved shape, so you need to sell an awful lot of units to amortise that cost. Tesla's deal with Lotus only worked because they used a fibreglass body - expensive per-unit, but very low tooling costs.

Desktop Metal are developing a sheet forming solution that requires no bespoke tooling, but it's a slow process with fairly poor surface finish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oqeVLILGHY
by mnutt | 2025-08-03 20:07:59+00:00
As a four year old, my child loved playing "the subway game", which is similar to this but just in our heads: I name two subway stations and he tries to think of the fastest route between them. When that is exhausted, we move onto the fewest transfers, the most convoluted routes, the 1968 lines only, etc. There's just something about the NYC subway which really draws kids (and many adults) in.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-03 20:08:15+00:00
HP, DEC/Compaq, and SGI all made the decision to drop their various bespoke architectures for Itanium years before prototypes were available based solely on what Intel claimed performance would be on paper. Even Sun and IBM made noise about doing the same thing. Honestly, I think it was inevitable that something like this would happen. By the late 90s, it was starting to get too expensive for each individual high-end server/workstation company to continue investing in high-performance chip design and leading edge fabs to make low-volume parts, so it made sense for all of them to standardize on a common architecture. The mistake everyone made was choosing Itanium to be the industry standard.