MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reify | 2025-08-24 17:01:21+00:00
And who can afford these marvels of the medical world?

As far as I am concerned, mass testing of anything is a total failure. Specifically; Autism, ADHD and colorectal cancer and prostate cancer and all the other things these quacks test for..

The money should be spent on those poeple who need it most.

Not some 30 year old, who has been told he has a cancer gene, and might get cancer when he is in his 60's. Then it turns out, that 30 years later that same person does not get cancer at all.

The wonders of useless marvels of the medical world!

I get innundated with the constant shit testing kits I get in the post, from parts of our privatised NHS.

There are two letters and packages I get. Its either;

Dear sir, shit in this test tube bottle and send it back to us

Sure thing! We will let you will know if you have cancer in a few weeks.

OR

Dear sir, make an appointment with a nurse to poke a camera up your arse to look for polyps.

However, the thing is, after you make the appointment, you have to start a course of Laxatives, so that the nurse who is going to jam a camera up your arse is not visually impeded by shit lodged in your colon.

We will also help you to live an extra 6 months if you test positive. You will be given a new nuclear fallout radiation therapy machine and take nuclear warheard drugs to kill the cancer.

It will feel as if the treatment is worse than the cancer, but hang on in there, remember you get an extra 6 months to live.

we wont be able to save your life. but you will definitely know you might die of cancer, and you and your family, will suffer extreme mental anxiety and stress for the rest of your short life.

Rather than get cancer and die within a few months, the suffering of knowing your will die of cancer will go on for an age.

I like the idea of dying naturally, with cancer or not
by beefnugs | 2025-08-24 17:01:49+00:00
"At one point we tried “improving” the prompt with Claude’s help. It ballooned to 1,500 words. The agent immediately got slower and dumber. We went back to 103 words and it was back on track."

Isn't this the exact opposite of every other piece of advice we have gotten in a year?

Another general feedback just recently, someone said we need to generate 10 times, because one out of those will be "worth reviewing"

How can anyone be doing real engineering in such a: pick the exact needle out of the constantly churning chaos-simulation-engine that (crashes least, closest to desire, human readable, random guess)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-24 17:02:47+00:00
>So this has nothing to do with "getting things wrong" and everything to do with why they get things wrong.

We don't know how or why it gets things wrong. The LLMs are a black box. There are infinite ways it can get something wrong, so you cannot base your reasoning off of this simply because you don't know HOW it got things wrong. It may be similar to the way humans get things wrong or it may be different.

>This behavior demonstrates a fundamental lack of conceptual understanding of the world and points at rote memorization in the general case. Maybe LLMs develop a more conceptual understanding of a certain topic when they've been benchmaxxed on that topic? I don't know, I'm not necessarily arguing against that, not today anyway.

False. The LLM could be lying right? We don't know if these things are lying or if they lack actual understanding.

>But these errors are a daily occurrence in the general case when it comes to any topic they haven't been benchmaxxed for - they certainly don't have a conceptual understanding of cooking, baking, plumbing, heating, electrical circuits, etc.

You're failing to look at the success modes. Unlike the failure modes, if it succeeds in answering a prompt for which NO TRAINING data exists we know for a fact it used reasoning and it understood what it was being asked. We don't know what happened if it's a failure BUT we do know understanding and reasoning occured if it was NOT a failure mode ON a prompt with zero training data.

How?

Because of probability. There are two possible ways to get an answer correct. Random chance. Or reasoning. We know the number of incorrect answers far out number the number of correct answers.

Therefore from logic we know that LLMs MUST use reasoning and understanding to arrive at a correct answer. The logic follows from probability.

Now this does not mean the LLM does not lie, it does not mean that the LLM is consistently understanding a concept, it does not give it the same conceptual style of thinking that a human does.

But we do know that journey from prompt A to response B on a prompt and response pair that did not exist in training data, we know that reasoning and understanding happened in this gap. This fits our colloquial logical understanding of the world, of probability, and of the definition of the words reasoning and understanding.

The issue we face now is how do we replicate that gap consistently.
by arcticbull | 2025-08-24 17:02:56+00:00
> This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:

I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.

> Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?

That's happening about as fast as seawater extraction. There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the environmental price.

Regardless fuel costs for nuclear plants are roughly zero, about $0.0015/kWh, and there is more than enough uranium on land. And of course reprocessing spent fuel is a totally viable solution; most of France's uranium is closed loop. The entirety of the cost is in building and financing, which can be solved with policy changes.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-24 17:03:14+00:00
> I am the youngster volunteer at a local demonstration garden. The elder volunteers in their 70s are all very sharp. They usually don't stop until arthritis or back problems force them to stop. But their minds are agile, and they are all very social, cooperative, and upbeat.

Okay, ask the obvious question. Isn't that a perfect candidate for causality to go the other way? Anybody with basically any mobility or serious health problems is less likely to go out gardening, so of course you only see healthy people out gardening. (To be fair, I would expect that it is good for you and helps people stay healthy, but I would expect the selection effects to be a stronger explanation for what you're observing.)
by londons_explore | 2025-08-24 17:03:20+00:00
Half arsed fsync is all I want.

I am happy to lose 5 or 10 seconds of data in a power failure. However I'm not okay with a file becoming so corrupted that it is unmountable when the power recovers.

Half arsed fsync provides exactly that - and considering you get way more performance this seems like a good tradeoff.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-24 17:03:45+00:00
> Isn't political correctness just politeness ?

Maybe in theory, but in practice the cause has been subverted by both the professionally-offended who use offense to advance their own agenda or just seek attention, as well as those who want to virtue-signal by banning/shunning things that no reasonable person has a problem with. Both feed off each other while making things harder for reasonable people of any race/gender/sexual orientation.

> "I want to be a jerk"

I'd like to seriously understand who would be offended by the Git master branch being called "master" for example, especially since I don't believe the word in this context has any reference to slavery (but even if it did, I'd argue historical meanings of words are a good reminder to humanity of the horrible things we're capable of and to ensure we don't do those again).
by didibus | 2025-08-24 17:03:47+00:00
> When people did resume work on the same day, it took an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48 sec.).

From the Gloria Mark paper: https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf

That's the paper source. And the researcher when interviewed verbally gave a slightly different number in the same ballpark of 23 minutes and 15 seconds instead of 25 minutes and 26 seconds.
by orwin | 2025-08-24 17:04:14+00:00
I think you're confusing general power usage peak with residential usage peak. Or maybe you're talking about what you've learned 20 years ago (or Australia industry is 20 years late).

As AC use increased, industry switched from oil to electricity, coal to electric arc, and as power grid stabilized, peak usage shifted a lot in the last ~20 years. That's why summer/winter time do not make sense anymore and a lot of European countries are talking about not switching anymore.
by ur-whale | 2025-08-24 17:04:32+00:00
> A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media.

What does "accurate media" mean?

The fact is, there strictly isn't and strictly never was any such thing.

In fact, it is absolutely impossible to attain something like this.

The moment something gets transcribed, it ceases to be objective and therefore, there never isnt any such thing as "accurate" news.

Any student of history learns this in their first semester.

> They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age

LOL, it was far, far worse before the information age.

True, there was far fewer "official" versions of what actually goes on in the world, but it doesn't mean they were in any way accurate or any less manipulative.

All it takes to check that is to hop from one so-called "free country" to another an compare two mainstream newspapers describing the same event.

The only way you can get a bit close to the actual truth of what's happening is by reading all the opinions, especially the diametrically opposed ones and try to form your own.
by hollerith | 2025-08-24 17:04:48+00:00
But tennis probably does not have amazing health benefits. You are criticizing comments here for perversely rejecting the amazing health benefits where I see them more as pointing out that it is irrational to conclude that just because there is a correlation between playing tennis at least twice a week and living longer that making yourself play tennis twice a week will cause you to live longer. Correlation does not imply causation.

What is true is that if you are the kind of person who can learn to play tennis well enough that it becomes fun, then you are likely to live a lot longer than if you are the kind of person who cannot do that because either your eyes, brain, your muscles or your cardiovascular system do not function well enough. For example, tennis sucks if your eyes and your brain does not work well enough for you to be able to learn to reliably hit a ball going very fast with the center of the racket, which a lot of people (and even a lot of people in the prime of their life) cannot ever learn to do.
by brookst | 2025-08-24 17:04:49+00:00
It’s really not. AI, like every other tech advance, was largely created by enthusiasts carried away with what could be done, not by top-down design that included all best practices.

It’s frustrating to security people, but the reality is that security doesn’t become a design consideration until the tech has proven utility, which means there are always insecure implementations of early tech.

Does it make any sense that payphones would give free calls for blowing a whistle into them? Obvious design flaw to treat the microphone the same as the generated control tones; it would have been trivial to design more secure control tones. But nobody saw the need until the tech was deployed at scale.

It should be different, sure. But that’s just saying human nature “should” be different.
by ec109685 | 2025-08-24 17:05:11+00:00
It’s clear if what Comet was doing was safe, Chrome would already have implemented it.

The browser is the ultimate “lethal trifecta”: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

Giving an LLM’s agentic loop access to the page is just as dangerous as executing user controlled JavaScript (e.g. a script tag in a reddit post).
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 17:05:29+00:00
Sure if you want increase your tax base, step one is to be attractive to people with money.

But healthcare, education, and entertainment are not exclusive to rich people, they're industries that everyone enjoys and can take part in. The doctors, actors, professors, students, athletes, researchers, who come from around the world to live and work in Pittsburgh are not "the rich". They have money, but they're still just regular people.

For example the students who come to Pittsburgh for an education are not wealthy, but they are flush with cash from the government and lenders. They are attracted to Pittsburgh not because it's a good place for the rich, but because it's a good place for students.

Incidentally, good places for students are also good places for the rich. So I agree, rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich.

> That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure.

Did you miss the part where Pittsburgh is thriving? Cleveland is doing okay. Bethlehem is booming. Youngstown... not great but moving in a good direction.
by picafrost | 2025-08-24 17:05:43+00:00
I don't understand your post. Europe absolutely spent many years phasing out nuclear energy while rationalizing that increased gas imports from Russia was good because trade will make us friends [0]. The data supports this (though obviously does not capture the political discourse around Russian gas reliance). I am in agreement that the current, post-Ukraine invasion policy is good.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-08-24 17:06:30+00:00
My home airport is MCO - Orlando - where most travelers are either infrequent fliers, flying with families and international vacationers. I use every hack that’s available not to be caught up in that and we fly a lot.

This includes - Clear, TSA, status for priority check in, lounge access and status for earlier boarding so I can already be situated in my seat with my luggage if I just have carry on.

In ATL, my former home airport it’s not as bad because you have more business travel.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-24 17:06:42+00:00
Exactly - electricity demand is surging NOW due to datacenter/AI use, and all signs are that this increased demand will continue to grow.

Nuclear is a decent option, but it takes years to bring new capacity online.

There's nothing wrong with investing in nuclear that'll come online in 5+ years time, but at the same time the government should also be green lighting all projects capable of adding capacity more quickly.
by ForceBru | 2025-08-24 17:07:20+00:00
Is the Wasserstein distance useful for parameter estimation instead of maximum likelihood? BTW, maximum likelihood basically estimates minimum KL divergence. All I see online and in papers is how to _compute_ the Wasserstein distance, which seems to be pretty hard in itself. In 1D, this requires computing a nasty integral of inverse CDFs when p!=1. Does it mean that "minimum Wasserstein estimation" is prohibitively expensive?
by bawolff | 2025-08-24 17:07:27+00:00
If you had a power failure between when the transaction was queued and the sqlite transaction was comitted, no amount of fsync will save you.

If that is the threat you want to defend against this is not the right setting. Maybe it would reduce the window for it a little bit, but power failures are basically a non existent threat anyways, does a solution that mildly reduces but not eliminate the risk really matter when the risk is negligible?
by toast0 | 2025-08-24 17:07:31+00:00
Assuming you build desktop software; you can build it on a beastly machine, but run it on a reasonable machine. Maybe local builds for special occasions, but it's special, you can wait.

Sure, occasionally run the software on the build machine to make sure it works on beastly machines; but let the developers experience the product on normal machines as the usual.
by snet0 | 2025-08-24 17:07:36+00:00
> Instead they believe model alignment, trying to understand when a user is doing a dangerous task, etc. will be enough.

Maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding, but I feel like hoping that model alignment and in-model guardrails are statistical preventions, ie you'll reduce the odds to some number of zeroes preceeding the 1. These things should literally never be able to happen, though. It's a fools errand to hope that you'll get to a model where there is no value in the input space that maps to <bad thing you really don't want>. Even if you "stack" models, having a safety-check model act on the output of your larger model, you're still just multiplying odds.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-24 17:07:46+00:00
The vast majority of people believe what the government tells them, and the government tells that that Covid is no longer happening and you have nothing to worry, everyone has returned to work, and masking is now only something that criminals use to hide their identity.

We also live in a world where companies believe its perfectly fine to capture biometric data without disclosure or consent, despite the laws in many places saying directly to the contrary, and you don't have a choice because they fired all the cashiers.

When you bring it up they say, that's 15 levels above me (the store manager) we don't have a choice, its all up to corporate, this isn't happening, oh that green border it is, I'll make sure to forward your feedback to corporate (I won't buy anything from you, or come to your store if you do this).

The companies involved are running not on profit from sales, but rather from something else. I wonder what that could possibly be. This is what happens under monopoly, and this is how monopoly fails.

Is the company one of those companies who have been silently nationalized? Do they run on laundered promises from government instead? (money-printing).

This seems likely given they aren't changing their direction despite drops in sales.
Show HN: I built Mix – an opensource, local agent for multimodal tasks
by sarath_suresh | 2025-08-24 17:08:21+00:00
Mix is an open-source, local agent for multimodal claude code. Claude code users will feel at home.

- Uses ffmpeg and local apps like blender instead of clunky cloud based editors - All project data is stored plain text and native media files - absolutely no lock-in. - The backend is an HTTP server, meaning that the frontend is just one of possible clients. - - Our SDK with stdio interface (similar to claude code SDK) is launching soon.
Show HN: VoNote – AI Conversation Recorder for iOS
by zachperkel | 2025-08-24 17:08:21+00:00
I built this to solve a problem I faced every day at work. I needed a labelled transcript of who said what (including their actual name) for in person meetings, and existing tools would only divide up when different people spoke. This app just requires you to label the speaker once (maybe twice if it’s a poor quality recording) and learns more over time. Then it will automatically label them in all your recordings!

Also made a RAG AI search agent that can dig up anything from your recordings and summarize for you. Try it out and let me know what you think! Looking for feedback.
by ajoseps | 2025-08-24 17:08:54+00:00
One difference with renewables and traditional fuel sources is that once renewable infrastructure is built you don’t need to continually import from another country. Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.

The UK does still need to build more on shore nevertheless.
by nh2 | 2025-08-24 17:09:45+00:00
From this (linked https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous), does anybody understand EXTRA?

> EXTRA provides additional durability if the commit is followed closely by a power loss.

means?

How can one have "additional" durability, if FULL already "ensures that an operating system crash or power failure will not corrupt the database"?

Is it that FULL only protects against "corruption" as stated, but will still lose committed transactions?

It seems so from the points on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58113560/during-power-lo...

Which is also quite nasty. I want my databases to be fully durable by default, and not lose anything once they have acknowledged a transaction. The typical example for ACID DBs are bank transactions; imagine a bank accidentally undoing a transaction upon server crash, after already having acknowledged it to a third-party over the network.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-24 17:10:20+00:00
> Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting?

The only storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro, and the cost for that is not "plummeting" at all because it's built out. Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. The gap must be made up by either peaker natgas plants (which are costly, non-renewable and emit some carbon dioxide) or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-24 17:11:54+00:00
No, it is not comparable. Not at all.

Apart from the blatant qualitative difference, you can't dismiss the context of the holocaust. The intent of displacement and genocide matters, it's not the marking of people per se.

If you can't help yourself and absolutely must use a Nazi reference, a DNS block list is closer related to a book burning, than the planned, industrialized murder of millions of people. But really, censorship isn't the defining characteristic of the Nazi terror, so unless you explicitly want to invoke the topic of ethnic cleansing, I strongly suggest you look elsewhere.
by dhorthy | 2025-08-24 17:12:04+00:00
Hmm what sorts of advice in the last year are you referring to? Like the “run it ten times and pick the best one” thing? Or something else?

I kind of agree that picking from 10 poorly-promoted projects is dumb.

The engineering is in setting up the engine and verification so one agent can get it right (or 90% right) on a single run (of the infinite ish loop)
by numpad0 | 2025-08-24 17:12:29+00:00
You can have such names as Amélie or Jürgen or Ольга or 𠮷野 or 鎮󠄁 and have them displayed on account management screens, you just can't use it for login IDs because there are no guarantees that those blobs can be reproduced in the future or be consistent with what it was at time of entry.

Unicode is that bad.
by glynnormington | 2025-08-24 17:12:33+00:00
Did you see this helpful link: https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/. According to that usage of "test harness", it's not the same as a unit test. It's a way of driving code manually to explore different usages and to recreate certain kinds of bugs. It is used to complement unit tests.
by matt_s | 2025-08-24 17:13:02+00:00
Syntax of things I don't remember or care about, like regexes in language X or Y. Syntax of things I used to know but I'm not up to speed on the latest versions. For example, using tailwind, I can just describe in english what I want to happen with page elements and for the most part AI gets the code right, sometimes its wrong and I need to debug.

A common argument I hear about AI is "I could just write it faster myself", well I know CompSci and general info about a lot of software things but it would take hours of getting up to speed on areas I'm not an expert in to be productive. I can just delegate that to AI and get mostly correct outputs, this is okay with me and faster than what I could do.

I think the cost is going to catch up with the AI companies running the models (not the companies building products that call AI APIs) and that is when the bubble will burst. They will need to keep increasing costs and at some threshold, fewer and fewer developers in an organization will have licenses because it may become unaffordable.