MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matsemann | 2025-09-27 19:21:19+00:00
It still happens, actually. Only a few years ago it was extra wet and warm at some mountain passes here, so it grew more mushrooms than normal, and that mushroom absorbs cesium-137 from the ground, which then ends up in the reindeer in bigger concentrations. Just checked, and it went from 201 becquerel per kg meat to 1301 the next year. In 2019, more than 30 years later.

Still below limits for what can be sold and eaten here (3000), but shows how big the fallout was that it still shows up decades later.

It's not easy being a reindeer, the populace where I live recently had to be killed and burned due to a prion disease.
by mindcrime | 2025-09-27 19:21:20+00:00
1. Do I believe other life has existed, does exist, and/or will exist elsewhere in the universe? Yes, with pretty close to 100% confidence.

2. Do I believe other intelligent life forms visit earth in their flying saucers, abduct people, anal probe them, abduct and slaughter cows, build pyramids, and - apparently - crash often? No, not really. I mean, I can't rule it out, but my personal subjective Bayesian prior towards this notion would probably be something like 0.001 or so. But that's actually up from years past, as we learn more about more possibly inhabitable planets that are closer to Earth than was previously known, etc.

Basically both of my positions boil down to the same factor: the size of the universe. It seems to me that the universe is too damn big to not have other intelligent life. But also, it's so big that the other intelligent life is likely to be too far away for us to have any interactions with them.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-27 19:21:25+00:00
The Graph. Infinite, computational, abstract. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the transforms. Time shifting through memory cells.

What did they look like? Tesseracts, polytopes? Stellahedron?

Were there monadic isomorphs, residual projecives? Both?

Did continuations self-order? Into simplexes?

I kept dreaming of an endless world of prime beings, I thought I'd never see.

And then,... one day,... I got in...
by bob1029 | 2025-09-27 19:21:47+00:00
The controls are the only gripe I have with this amazing work.

If I was in Unity, I would address this issue by manually placing a bunch of virtual cameras in the world and using cinemachine to blend between them. The size of this world is small enough to justify manual placement and configuration of each. You could also just focus on the complex areas and let the default follow cam handle the rest.
by alsosprachben | 2025-09-27 19:22:25+00:00
I haven’t seen anyone yet comment on the design constraint that SSH uses a lot of separation in its multiplexing for the purpose of sandboxing/isolation. Would want transport to be as straightforward as possible. SSH needs to be the reliable, secure tunnel that you can use to manage your high performance gateways. It has a lot of ways to turn things off to avoid attack surface. HTTP protocols have a lot of base requirements. Different problems.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-27 19:22:26+00:00
> You legitimated Hamas when Starmer recognised a Palestinian state

Nope. Palestine isn't Hamas.

> Sounds more like you're "dehumanising the entire Palestinian people" by calling them a dog...

"No u?" I didn't call anyone a dog, I used a metaphor to illustrate a situation.

> Hamas' literal goal — which you've conveniently decided to avoid commenting on — is the yada yada yada

Yeah because I'm not talking about Hamas. And honestly I haven't seen a single reasonable word in your comment this far so I don't think I'll be reading any further.

Oh wow haha you've even got all the "anti-Semitic" buzzwords in there. You know the UN has recognised the genocide? Is there a genocide taking place in Ukraine? Why do you equate these things?

Sorry, don't even answer that, this exchange will go nowhere. But I'm glad you wasted your time
by LeftHandPath | 2025-09-27 19:23:50+00:00
This tracks very well with my experience... Too much time in a cubicle away from windows -- say, just for a week -- and my vision gets noticeably worse. A few days away from the screen, like a week on the lake, and it gets much sharper.

I'd be inclined to agree with him that it can be prevented and maybe even reversed.
by blagie | 2025-09-27 19:24:16+00:00
Bad DRM led to Napster led to Netflix lead to a fragmentation of services led to a resurgence of piracy.

Similar thing happened with music, only rather than piracy, it landed on legal / free (e.g. Youtube). Youtube is just starting to do the consumer-unfriendly thing (but it's got a long ways to go before piracy comes out competitive).

Similar in books.

I'll mention: A lot of these are consumer-unfriendly in some ways (e.g. Netflix DRM), but friendly in others. $20/month for all the movies you can watch beats piracy.
by drdaeman | 2025-09-27 19:24:16+00:00
My point is that the term “safe” is not a good one. In context of the article it erodes the scope of what MCP is and what it does (bringing way more stuff into the picture) and misattributes issue.

MCP safety is stuff like access controls, or lack of vulnerabilities on the protocol level (stuff like XML entity bombs). Software behavior of what MCP bridges together is not MCP anymore.

People discovering and running malware believing it’s legit is not a MCP problem. This line of thought is based on that “P” stands for “protocol” - MCP is interface, not implementation. And it’s humans who pick and connect programs (LLMs and MCP servers), not technology.
by aklemm | 2025-09-27 19:24:26+00:00
Man I went straight for psydub info. Back about 5 years ago I stumbled onto so some really interesting “psydub” playlists on Spotify with very strange song names and I thought I’d really found something good. Then poof! they disappeared one day and nothing labeled “psydub” seems to hit the mark and I don’t know what the hell that stuff was that disappeared.
by bitwize | 2025-09-27 19:24:26+00:00
That would be interesting, because the modern thinking goes that modern wolves are as different from wolves around the time of the wolf-dog split as modern dogs are. So if there was recent wolf interbreeding in the husky lineage, it's a different kind of wolf than what the first dogs were descended from. They're all very similar animals, so it may only show up on DNA tests, but there may be a sort of genetic timestamp showing when the last wolf admixture was that's visible on a DNA test.
by arbirk | 2025-09-27 19:24:46+00:00
I suspect there is a substantial first mover disadvantage right now. The extreme investments will not be profitable, leading to the bubble bursting at some point in the not so distant future. This will lead to short term price increases for inference and slower innovation in a period, the tech will emerge more mature and stable etc.

As one who clearly see the huge potential of this tech this is an interesting outlook; make sure to make your products resilient to changing vendors and price hikes and it will probably be fine.

Side note: Google seems to be playing the long game..
by alephnerd | 2025-09-27 19:26:04+00:00
> Smart new grads generally go where the money is, and for the last 20 years that has meant either finance or big data firms

Software TC has outpaced high finance for almost 15 years now, especially for the kinds of candidates who had the option between the two.

I went to one of those universities where CS grads had the option between being a Quant at Citadel, an APM at Google, or an SWE working on an ML research team. Most CS students chose 2 and 3 because the hours worked were shorter than 1 and the hourly wage and TC was largely comparable.

> may have no interest in real technical progress.

Hard to make technical progress as (eg.) a cybersecurity company when most CS programs do not teach OS development beyond a cursory introduction to systems program, and in a lot of cases don't introduce computer architecture beyond basic MIPS.

The talent pipeline for a lot of subdisciplines of CS and CE has been shot domestically for the past 10-15 years when curricula were increasingly watered down.
by gregfjohnson | 2025-09-27 19:26:06+00:00
There is this wonderful concept of "flow state", which I'm sure most of us are familiar with. It was originated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Many of us in this thread (and Linus's essay quoted in OP) are referring in various ways of getting into the flow state while programming.

Something I learned late in the game as a programmer is how beautiful it is when multiple people somehow sync up and get into a flow state together. It is like a choir, where everyone is somehow elevated and together they achieve a lovely unity. Or a sports team where all of the players are locked in, seemingly reading each others' minds, and getting to some amazing transcendent place together. The book "The Boys in the Boat" describes this phenomenon beautifully. When all nine members of the team achieve this sort of locked-in unity, the boat just flies across the water.

In software, there are times when ideas seem to pass with electricity from person to person. People immediately build upon the thoughts of others. Ideas seemingly come from nowhere, a synthesis of the conceptual pieces held by each of the team members. You realize that some wonderful new way of doing things has emerged from the dialog, and no one person could have possibly gotten there on their own.

There is a wonderful old-fashioned phrase that describes this: "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts."
by ben_w | 2025-09-27 19:26:51+00:00
It may or may not be a parallel, we can't tell at this time.

LLMs are definitely actors, but for them to be method actors they would have to actually feel emotions.

As we don't understand what causes us humans to have the qualia of emotions*, we can neither rule in nor rule out that the something in any of these models is a functional analog to whatever it is in our kilogram of spicy cranial electrochemistry that means we're more than just an unfeeling bag of fancy chemicals.

* mechanistically cause qualia, that is; we can point to various chemicals that induce some of our emotional states, or induce them via focused EMPs AKA the "god helmet", but that doesn't explain the mechanism by which qualia are a thing and how/why we are not all just p-zombies
by freedomben | 2025-09-27 19:27:28+00:00
Surely not, but it still seems wrong to blame the NFL for something they objectively had no involvement in.

I am glad we're learning more about this and I do think changes are needed, but let's not forget that medical progress takes time. If the NFL was trying to ignore it then I'd be for grabbing the pitchforks, but they are not doing that. We can't reasonably retroactively crucify them for something nobody knew at the time
by airstrike | 2025-09-27 19:27:34+00:00
Bolsonaro's policy choices regarding the Amazon likely meaningfully contributed to this issue by allowing "ideal conditions" to accumulate in the years that preceded. If anything, this helps confirm it rather than absolve him.

Naturally other issues like El Niño and factors outside of Brazil also play a role, but it stands to reason this would not have been as tragic had he not been elected president.
by sunscream89 | 2025-09-27 19:27:52+00:00
They’ve been here along with us for ten thousand years. Don’t be spooked by them.

It is the humans you should fear.

It’s funny because I haven’t only been contacted by people of one race of beings.

I also know that a huge population of humans (~500,000) can move around in our minds and make us trip balls in our own heads. It’s like the CIA Stargate report only not cargo cult. Power is real.

So in my 20s I was a psychonaught and I had these dream stories of which I have written much (offline.) and these were the stories of those “lizard” peoples who live very far off, some 35,000 light years to their hub of civilization (a toroidal doughnut around the galactic core). And tbh, these are all fantasy to me, though in this story some crashed here on a piratical escape and made themselves disappear (edited something of themselves into variously favored lines of Man.) they had to disappear because if who ever was looking for them found Earth their play palace, they would plunder it for their own fun or profit.

The only sacred left anywhere in this universe is the taboo against being the ones who desecrate a natural wonder. All else is fodder for power (among those.)

The second came as I am prominent among Powers and of these I have discussed quite a lot.

America is so corrupt and treacherous there will unlikely be a significant revelation on their part in our lifetimes.

To those visiting “greys”, ten years is like last week.

Those hellfire missiles are a psyop on Americas own government to spend in preparations for more enemies without.

America’s enemies are within.
by httpsoverdns | 2025-09-27 19:28:25+00:00
I just tried it out because of the discussions on this thread, and I got to say I land squarely on the side of this is neat, but it is not artistry. Every little thing I generated sounded like things I've heard before. I was trying hard to get it to create something unique, using obscure language or ideas. It didn't even get close to something interesting in my opinion, every single output was like if you combined every top 40 song ever made and then only distilled out the parts relevant to certain keywords in a prompt.

These tools will probably be great for making music for commercials. But if you want to make something interesting, unique, or experimental, I don't think these are quite suited for it.

It seems to be a very similar limitation to text-based llms. They are great at synthesizing the most likely response to your input. But never very good at coming up with something unique or unlikely.
by wat10000 | 2025-09-27 19:29:45+00:00
It’s just not feasible, unless your plan is not to change anything at all.

When you have apps doing things like relying on values in uninitialized memory, literally any change anywhere can potentially break them.

A company like Microsoft that cares about compatibility will test third party apps to try to catch this sort of thing, but there’s only so much testing you can do. It’s not feasible to test games from two decades prior so throughly that you’d notice that one particular vehicle never spawns.
by bitwize | 2025-09-27 19:30:12+00:00
If your job is your passion, and your downstream customers give you freedom to treat it as such, it can be fun.

The fun gets sucked right out of it when you have people breathing down your neck waiting for your output, are very particular about what they expect from it in a way that doesn't align with your creative values, etc.

Not all of us have a Lord Saatchi willing to bankroll whatever our brains fart out and call the result brilliant (likely to pump up its value to buyers). Matter of fact, that may just be what ZIRP-era VC can be conceptualized as: business model "Uber for Lord Saatchi-style patronage in tech".
by archagon | 2025-09-27 19:30:16+00:00
I have the opposite problem. My Bluesky (and Mastodon) feeds have gotten so active that I have a hard time catching up these days. And Twitter seems to be mostly full of bloviating narcissists who are addicted to feeling like “influencers” of the unwashed masses, not co-equal participants of public discussion.

More broadly, Twitter’s problem is that it carpet bombed the bridge with a substantial portion of its intelligent population. I’m pretty sure half the tech, game dev, and research people I follow on Bluesky/Mastodon will not return under any circumstance, myself included.
by ml- | 2025-09-27 19:30:18+00:00
The idea came from me wanting a curated up to date list for myself. I thought the alternatives are/were outdated, poorly maintained and/or pay-to-rank. When ratebeer shut down earlier this year I thought I might as well offer this as a potential replacement for the venue listings.

The data is initially crowd sourced, or researched by me when I'm bored. Keeping things updated is done with various automated (and some manual) alive checks for each venue.

I know you're right about the landing page. Would be nice to show the closest venues or locations there immediately, but I absolutely loathe pages that ask for positional data right off the bat (could do some geoip stuff maybe).
by zamadatix | 2025-09-27 19:30:24+00:00
As mentioned, the same is said of the main product line these days. There they've gone a long way up in TCO without an equivalent feature/performance differentiation over the competition to show for it. They can't all be the non-competitive ones the average non-k12 student is supposed to avoid looking at each time the conversation is brought up. Either the main line needs to become hyper competitive again or the accessory lines can take the role, just not "neither".

I think the Pico 2 and maybe compute module variant (depending on sub-niche use case) are still competitively interesting in their own right, but feel the rest are largely help up by the brand name at this point and I wonder how much of the revenue those add up to (Pico in particular, since its market is in the cup of coffee range).

Of course the brand value will hold things for many years to come (how many have 3 pis in a drawer just because the new one comes out and folks still buy it on name before thinking if it's worth it?) so they've got plenty of time to strike gold again for now.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-09-27 19:30:34+00:00
I believe it is highly likely. To believe otherwise is just arrogant and unrealistic.

There are trillions of galaxies in the universe. A typical galaxy like the Milky Way has hundreds of billions of stars. We know it is quite common for a star to have multiple orbiting planets.

The odds that one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy is home to the only intelligent life in the universe is essentially zero.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-27 19:30:37+00:00
"A new study published in Integrative and Comparative Biology suggests that scientists are leaving X (formerly known as Twitter) in significant numbers due to its declining professional value."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40637733/

See also: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0

Co-author Shiffman recommended Twitter in 2012 and 2013

https://davidshiffmancv.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Shiff...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0435

He even required his students at ASU to use Twitter as recently as 2023

https://davidshiffmancv.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Shiff...
by srid | 2025-09-27 19:30:44+00:00
Hi Hexa,

You were also the moderator at the time I was banned <https://srid.ca/nixos-mod> for political reasons. While you are here, would you care to be transparent[^1] as to why you got me and https://nixos.asia banned from Lobste.rs?

https://x.com/sridca/status/1751586241110519837

---

[^1]: As Robert, a SC member from OP, notes:

> The SC has tried to work with the moderation team to understand moderation decisions and steer towards more objective moderation behavior, with the goal of making moderation fair and respectable, which feeds back into making moderation work easier. Nonetheless, we have continued to observe moderation not based on the Code of Conduct, but opinions and interpersonal tradeoffs (to put it nicely).

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-th...
by lomase | 2025-09-27 19:31:07+00:00
So you are not only stating than a LLM can replace a book. Directly you are saying that it is an axiom.

It is so self evident true that you don't even need to reason about it.

That LLMs can replace a book is a fundamental truth of the universe like the euclid postulates or like 1=1.

Well then there is no way to continue the conversation, because by definition axioms can't be false.
by gruez | 2025-09-27 19:31:29+00:00
>The only way to retake control from Big Tech is to quit Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, LinkedIn (and many others) cold turkey. Install Linux, use a custom ROM on your phone, use Signal, learn about self-hosting.

This all-or-nothing approach isn't really feasible for the average normie and probably alienates more people than it manages to convert. You can get most of the benefits by switching to privacy-preserving apps (eg. whatsapp -> signal), using browsers with adblock when a proprietary service doesn't have alternatives, and enabling privacy settings. "Install Linux, use a custom ROM [...] learn about self-hosting" is the equivalent of living off the grid with no social security number to the average normie.
by airstrike | 2025-09-27 19:31:44+00:00
I think any comment about an AI bubble needs to start by defining who the players are and how it affects them differently.

AI foundries, Nvidia, the hyperscalers, enterprise buyers of AI, consumers, the US, China, the rest of the world, startups, investors, FOSS, students, teachers, coders, lawyers, publishers, artists... each stand to win or lose in profoundly different ways.

Otherwise we all end up talking past each other.
by xpe | 2025-09-27 19:31:55+00:00
And cosmic rays could cause bit flips, causing a patient record to have an undetectable error, leading to a surgeon removing the wrong kneecap.

I’m exaggerating to make a point here. If one builds a threat model, one can better allocate one’s attention to the riskiest components.

All of us operate in an uncertain world. Flattening this into “it is all a mess” isn’t useful.

Saying “machines are dangerous” or “we all die sometimes” isn’t fitting after Randall is maimed and pulverized from a preventable industrial accident where the conveyer belt dragged him into a box forming machine. Randall should not wear long sleeves. Randall should not have disabled the “screaming means something has gone wrong” sensors. Randall should not run the system at 5X speed while smoking meth.
by airstrike | 2025-09-27 19:35:04+00:00
> Even my moderate view, though, is premised on the assumption that A.I. will continue to advance up the steep part of the sigmoid curve for a while before hitting one or another physical constraint that creates a new inflection point and slows advances further.

I feel like we've pretty much already hit a fundamental barrier in compute that is unlikely to be overcome in the near future barring a profound, novel algorithmic approach or an entirely novel computing model.
by an0malous | 2025-09-27 19:35:12+00:00
No they did not, from the link I shared:

> The mean power is 46%, which implies that only half of the results would be replicated in exact replication studies. The success rate in actual replication studies is often lower and may be as low as the estimated discovery rate (Bartos & Schimmack, 2020). So, replicability is somewhere between 12% and 46%. Even if half of the results are replicable, we do not know which results are replicable and which one’s are not. The Chapter-based analyses provide some clues which findings may be less trustworthy (implicit priming) and which ones may be more trustworthy (overconfidence), but the main conclusion is that the empirical basis for claims in “Thinking: Fast and Slow” is shaky.
by saghm | 2025-09-27 19:35:12+00:00
> Bevy is trying to be best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine

You're the only one saying this. No one else, including the person working on the project that you originally responded to, have claimed this is their sole goal to the inclusion of everything else. It's hard to tell if you think they literally don't care about anything else but are choosing their actions poorly, or if you think that they have the wrong priorities and should change them, or if you just didn't really stop to consider that maybe your assumption about what you're saying they're trying to do is incorrect and haven't read what I'm saying closely enough to understand that no number of examples of other things that happen to fit what you're saying is relevant if you aren't able to establish why anyone else should agree that it applies here in the first place.