MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-28 11:05:05+00:00
Sutton's alternative to LLMs is RL obviously, I mean duh. He says an alternative theory for the foundation of intelligence is "sensation, action, reward", that animals do this throughout their lives and that intelligence is about figuring out what actions to take to increase the rewards.

Well I have a problem with that, with all respect to Richard Sutton who is one of the AI gods. I don't think his Skinnerian behaviourist paradigm is realistic, I don't think "sensation, action, reward" works in physical reality, in the real world: because in the real world there are situations where pursuing your goals does not increase your reward.

Here's an example of what I mean. Imagine the "reward" that an animal will get from not falling down a cliff and dying. If the animal falls down the cliff and dies, reward is probably negative (maybe even infinitely negative: it's game over, man). But if the animal doesn't fall down the cliff and die, what is the reward?

There's no reward. If there was any reward for not falling down a cliff and dying, then all animals would ever do would be to sit around not falling down cliffs and dying, and just increasing their reward for free. That wouldn't lead to the development of intelligence very fast.

You can try to argue that an animal will obtain a positive reward from just not dying, but that doesn't work: for RL to enforce some behaviour P, it is P that has to be rewarded, not just being alive, in general. Deep RL systems don't learn to play chess by refusing to play.

For RL to work, agents must constantly maximise their reward, not just increase it or just avoid it going negative-infinite. And you just cannot do that in the physical world because there are situations where doing the wrong thing kills you and doing the right thing does not increase your reward.

Digital RL agents can avoid this kind of zero-gains scenario because they can afford to act randomly until they hit a reward, so e.g. an RL chess player can afford to play at random until it figures out how to play. But that doesn't work in the real world, where acting at random has a very high chance of killing an animal. Imagine an animal that randomly jumps off cliffs: game over, man. In the real world if you chase reward without already knowing where it comes from, you better have a very large number of lives [1].

So reward is not all you need. There may be cases where animals use a reward system to guide their behaviours, just like there are cases where humans learn by imitation, but in the general case they don't. It doesn't work. RL doesn't work in the real world and it's not how animals developed intelligence.

__________________

[1] Support for the theory that all animals are descended from cats?
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-09-28 11:05:28+00:00
Would you rather hear about being too poor to go anywhere else? I'm from Indiana, lived there until I was 35 and family still lives there.

"Too tired" is an apt descriptor, though. "Too Poor" or not having opportunities is generally good too, but you likely wouldn't see all of that while driving through. Most people just live there because they were born there and their lives are there. "why would you move here??" isn't an unusual question.
by drysine | 2025-09-28 11:07:51+00:00
>which is likely correct

Why do you think that?

>almost requires us to also believe

That's easy. Russia deliberately targets civilians, but being totally inept, misses and hits different civilians.

>of which the evidence is scarce

Is it?

Have a look at this one, where Russia hit Ukrainian MLRSes in a night strike.[0] Western media reported that as inhuman and savage Russians destroying a shopping mall.[1] The mall indeed suffered but only because the Ukrainians parked MLRSes next to it. Ironically the Ukraine itself provided the evidence of that by distributing video where they talk about the mall but incidentally show destroyed MLRS (the other one got evaporated).[2]

[0] https://t.me/aleksandr_skif/3150

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/world/europe/russia-ukrai...

[2] https://t.me/ASupersharij/28133
by latexr | 2025-09-28 11:08:35+00:00
> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek.

They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.

> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek

No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.

And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
by nromiun | 2025-09-28 11:08:58+00:00
I actually looked at all the alternatives listed by the author. Here is the problem: none of them are competitive with Cloudflare. With Cloudflare you don't even need to provide a credit card, just setup with your website and it is "free" for lifetime.

They might pressure you to switch to paid plans if you start getting PBs of traffic, but until that point they will deliver your content for free. It is a huge advantage. Specially when you consider the egress pricing of major cloud providers.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 11:10:44+00:00
> The fluidity on a mobile device? It's fantastic.

Said more about it here[0] already, but the game works perfectly on a foldable and takes the folding/unfolding in stride, without breaking a sweat. You can also see it on desktop by resizing your browser window to change size and aspect ratio (it's probably the same code paths handling it anyway).

Given how almost all mobile and web games I played manage to get this scenario wrong in some way, I applaud the authors for making all the right choices.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403407
by a5c11 | 2025-09-28 11:10:46+00:00
Unless you have a physical switch, you can't trust that a toggle button will actually disable or enable a feature. It wouldn't be the first time UK government tried to push some sort of backdoor. It isn't particularly difficult (from the OS's manufacturer perspective) to tell the user: "sure bro, this gov app doesn't access your location or mic xD".
by tasuki | 2025-09-28 11:11:26+00:00
> Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.

Nah, they aren't the most important (you can do without), not are the usual ones particularly difficult to learn.

Source: I'm a European 4 Dan.

(To expand on this: if you're a beginner, joseki don't matter. When you become a strong player (several of my friends are professional players), joseki is something you can usually come up with, or you come up with a similarly good non-joseki move, which is also ok. Practically, the game is usually decided in middle game fighting.)
by tedzards509 | 2025-09-28 11:12:48+00:00
GPT 5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro are usually unable to write compiling Typst code, getting it confused with Markdown. Claude Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4 manage to produce compiling Typst code more often than not, but is far from being able to follow instructions.

I assume there is just next to no Typst code on the internet as of their training and the similarities to MD + MathJax result in LLMs hallucinating Typst syntax, often using `#` for headings or `\` and `{ ... }` in math mode.

Therefore, I must say that LLMs are more of a hindrance than help when writing Typst code. The syntax is nice enough though that I can fully understand that writing something oneself is very simple once you understand the concepts (content as a type; `show:` vs `show [rule]:` vs `set`; control flows with `if`, `for`, `while`). And for any questions there is an active discord channel with helpful real people.
by dijit | 2025-09-28 11:13:26+00:00
That's the previous generations of AI which has been rebranded to "machine vision" and "machine learning" rather than "AI" due to the numerous hype crashes making the term AI unpalatable for a generation.

It's materially different than "Generative AI" which is the current trend of AI hype, which is what I think the "AI" in the title is referring to.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-09-28 11:13:33+00:00
I don’t know if you didn’t read or didn’t believe what the other poster said about Atlantic Airways, that they have the equipment to manage the fog and the ability to refuel in Iceland and therefore can try again the same day if necessary. The implication being that SAS have neither - that’s presumably the ”reason they choose to do what they do”.

It’s not unreasonable to think that Atlantic Airways, being a Faroese airline, are better equipped than others to get people to the Faroe Islands.
by patrickkidger | 2025-09-28 11:13:33+00:00
I think so!

I've not tried a couple of things you mention (e.g. background images) but e.g. for dynamic placing there are libraries like https://typst.app/universe/package/meander

The core of Typst is a pretty featureful well-thought-out FP language. This makes expressing libraries for any piece of functionality very pleasant.
by Arch-TK | 2025-09-28 11:13:39+00:00
I don't think it shows much.

It's one anecdote. In the hierarch of significance this is below even the "one published paper" level which you certainly should also ignore even if you know enough to interpret the paper.

It's really good she lived for 50 years with an kidney transplant. But it is a massive stretch to say that she willed herself to last that long.
by easyThrowaway | 2025-09-28 11:14:11+00:00
The extremely effective general strike that happened in Italy of a few days ago didn't start from academia, but dock workers in Genoa. Grumpy, robust, very left-wing dock workers.

The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you.

Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals.

I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.
by JimDabell | 2025-09-28 11:15:08+00:00
> I can appreciate that many find Zitron’s angry energy grating, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous

I think it is. If you read this article, for instance:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/

You will find that he vacillates between “this shit doesn't impress me even a little”; “everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous”; and “I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters”.

This is not an honest opinion. He considers his enemies both too strong and too weak, depending upon whether he wants to make you feel like they are pathetic or scary. He’s just saying whatever he thinks will make people angry at something he hates.
by drysart | 2025-09-28 11:15:17+00:00
Oh they know about multithreading. The problem is Microsoft's commitment to backward compatibility -- the Explorer COM interfaces that third-parties can build shell extensions on are all old enough to be from an era when 99% of users never used Explorer to browse anything on a network so their being synchronous didn't matter, and also from an era when asynchronicity wasn't common and was poorly supported by compilers and when PCs had low enough specs that it didn't make sense to spend the resources to provide asynchronous shell APIs.

And because Explorer continues to support those interfaces today, that means if anything integrates with the shell via those interfaces, Explorer ends up with lots of operations that are forced into being synchronous. You can avoid some of it by being extremely selective about what sorts of shell extensions you let be installed.
by procaryote | 2025-09-28 11:15:22+00:00
I like the type hints. The're not perfect and they've changed a lot between versions, but they really help catch issues early that you'd usually need to write unit tests for. Adding type hints is easier than writing those unit tests.

Then you can focus your tests on more interesting things

You just need to set your build up to actually do the checking as type hints by default are just documentation
by chrisurf | 2025-09-28 11:16:48+00:00
A few months ago, I had one of those “oh no” moments. I was deep in IaC (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes—you know the drill) when it struck me: we’re drowning in YAML, yet still babysitting our infrastructure. Every change felt brittle, every deployment required a human in the loop.

At the same time, AI agents were exploding. They were writing code, fixing bugs, reasoning about systems. And I thought: what if IaC isn’t the future at all? What if the future is IaA—Infrastructure as an Agent?

That’s why I built infragent.com.

It’s a community-driven platform to discover and share Infrastructure Agents—autonomous or semi-autonomous software entities that bridge human intent and machine execution to manage cloud and on-premises environments. Powered by AI, ML, and advanced reasoning, they align infrastructure behavior with high-level goals, dynamically generate and execute code, and enforce governance across systems. Instead of scripting endless automation, we can imagine agents that: interpret intent, optimize resources, embed security and compliance, collaborate across systems, enable real-time monitoring and remediation, and align infrastructure with business goals—not just configs.

This is bigger than just another DevOps tool. It feels like the paradigm shift after IaC. First came imperative scripts, then declarative IaC, and now… "agentic infrastructure".

I’m running this platform from Switzerland, where reliability isn’t just a goal—it’s a tradition. Right now, infragent.com is just a place to find, share, and explore open-source GitHub projects that push this new frontier. But my vision is that it becomes the global hub where engineers, DevOps teams, and curious builders gather to shape the future of infrastructure.

I know this is early. The tech is raw. Some of it will fail. But the trajectory is clear: infrastructure is becoming intelligent, autonomous, agentic.

If this resonates with you—if you’ve built something, or stumbled across a repo that feels “agentic”—please share it on the platform. If you just want to watch, that’s fine too. But I’d love for the HN community to help shape this future.

https://infragent.com

Because the way we build, operate, and think about infrastructure is being rewritten—share it and be part of the movement.
by closewith | 2025-09-28 11:17:20+00:00
> Rice isn't exactly a staple food in the UK.

Rice is now very much a staple food in the UK.

> And you can still have efficient food production in the UK, it's just that small artisanal "under 100 food-miles" farming is inefficient.

Economically inefficient, but diversity of local supply in a key factor in food security, and as a hopeless food insecure country, the UK should be diversifying as much as possible, especially to crops that will thrive in the coming climate.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 11:18:17+00:00
I believe the vendor here produces both the device and the panels being plugged into it, and while they also supply other vendors' panels, they seem concerned primarily with customers who buy all components from them and then experience this failure.

I agree the labeling is an issue here, but the solution must come from the wider industry or regulatory bodies; the alternative is for vendors to switch to their own pseudo-units to internalize the math, which would not be good for customers either - think "ACME Generator2000 accepts up to 4 Power Units of input; each ACME SuperEco Panel supplies 1 Power Unit, or 1.5 Power Units if you're in Canada...".

Saving users from having to do a little thinking to not brick their device is a tried-and-true excuse for vendor lock-in in our industry :).
by gpderetta | 2025-09-28 11:20:15+00:00
AKA the multiple comparison problem, AKA the look elsewhere problem, AKA the green jelly bean problem [1].

Edit: they looked at 17 cancers and one effect was significant. Is this exactly the jelly bean scenario?

Edit: reading the paper now. There are overall results that are probably more interesting.

[1] https://xkcd.com/882/
by perching_aix | 2025-09-28 11:22:22+00:00
> It also fundamentally rejects there being an objective reality, which also rejects the possibility of disagreeing on something but still believing common ground to be possible to be found. Which I personally see as one of the biggest reasons why people become less and less willing to allow differing opinions to exist at all.

That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to. In the interpretation I was referencing, objective reality is assumed to exist, but people are bound to at best asymptotically approach understanding it, yet never be able to fully do so. This also does keep the door open for a common ground to be found, so much so that it even covers the possibility of that not yet existing.

I do identify problems with it though as well. For example, the mere idea of lying becomes fairly challenging to represent in this model (though I'd say not impossible). But yeah, this is the framing I identified to necessarily underpin this claim, if I want to give it any fighting chance at all.
by hinkley | 2025-09-28 11:24:33+00:00
The UK is trying to reestablish tidal marshes to control storm surges which will only get worse with climate change.

I’m sure there are some scenarios where rice fields could be added as additional depth to this buffer, via farm subsidies. It doesn’t matter if it’s profitable, if it’s nearly profitable and it reduces damage from ten, twenty, or even fifty year storms. You can divert money from remediation into prevention.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-28 11:27:43+00:00
Python's dynamic nature can make it quite difficult to express some things correctly. That, or the type checkers have issues when it comes to understanding what would be considered safe in other languages. Years ago when I knew far less about types and programming, I never had such problems in for example Java. It was sometimes stupid, but I always found a way to express things. Although it could also be, that I merely want more out of inference and and safety. For example recently I wanted a pipeline of steps, but the steps could have any input and output type, as long as that type aligns with the previous step's types and the type checker should also know what the final output type is, and I additionally wanted it to work so that I don't have to add all the steps at once, so that I can construct the pipeline step by step. Tried for hours, but didn't find a working solution that type checks. Also tried with the help of LLMs, which gave superficially looking great code for this, but then there was always some type error somewhere, and they struggled to fix that. Ultimately, I gave up on the type checking between steps and output type of the pipeline, as I realized, that I invested hours into something that might be impossible or way waaay too much work for what I get from it. I would not have spent any time on this without type annotating and would have simply gone with a dynamic solution.
by charcircuit | 2025-09-28 11:28:49+00:00
Yes, I see great potential in injecting your AI into the enemies communication system. Being able to have an AI try and persuade your enemy to do things in your favor, confuse them, or censor information all processed in real time and potentially at scale of the enemy's entire army is very powerful. It could even take a passive role and serve as pure intelligence gathering of the current state of things.
by drysart | 2025-09-28 11:29:29+00:00
On Windows they are significantly different; it's not just a matter of sharing a page of memory (though you certainly can do that if you want), because on Windows basically every kernel-provided cross-process object must be a fully securable kernel object that you can attach ACLs to, and the kernel has to be in the middle of operations to enforce those access controls (in order to conform to the old DoD TCSEC orange book requirements for mandatory access security).
by fidotron | 2025-09-28 11:30:20+00:00
> HP's HP-UX hardware being an exception since they just sloppily hacked in standard ATI cards / which means you wouldn't get the extra benefits of running a GXT6500 on AIX as you would with a FireGL X3 on HP-UX. HP probably had the lowest share of the UNIX CAD market so they probably felt little need to invest much R&D: not to mention HP can't make a proper enterprise workstation or server ANYWAYS.

As the kids say: LOL.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-28 11:30:27+00:00
Making Hard Decisions to resolve larger disputes involving multiple people – this is usually a mistake because large disputes are often really hard to understand (so you usually end up picking a side, with that being the wrong side), and they normally fall into one of a handful of archetypes: it's better to analyse them from the archetypal perspective, then take action based on that.

Believing that those who behave in Certain Ways have good intentions. (I've fallen afoul of this, too.) There are certain behaviours that, despite appearing benign or even benevolent (especially when considered together with the actor's explanations), have ime a 100% "actually that was malicious" rate. These are quite sophisticated bad actors, and I'd rather they don't know the tells I've identified, but one of the tells involves the charismatic weaponisation of "cancel culture" by abusers, with part of the tell being to wield "the people's" authority (for some value of "the people") to attempt to modify the composition of a moderation team. (I haven't seen the complete tell in this situation, so there are still benign explanations: this just explains my bias in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403417.)

An impedance mismatch between the behaviour of the new moderator, and the behaviour expected by the community. For example: erring too heavy-handed, or too hands-off; mistaking banter for abuse, or abuse for banter.

Not speaking truth to power. In most BDFL-type collaborative projects, the founder guy turns out to be really ill-suited for the role, in one important respect. (Examples: Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Andreas Kling.) In many cases, an intervention can resolve this, and save the organisation for a time (e.g. the 2018 Kernel Maintainer's Summit: https://lwn.net/Articles/769117/); in other cases, the organisation heads down the road to irrelevance (e.g. the FSF). (This is of course not the only kind of situation where you'd want to speak truth to power.)

Speaking truth to power undiplomatically. Power is still power: if you suspect the guy in charge is going to take your intervention badly, raise your concerns to the court jester. If you suspect the guy in charge is a bad actor, tread carefully.

Attempting to use an ethical philosophy not conductive to moderation. These include "let's let everyone do everything not illegal!", "if you have anything good to say about bad people, you're a bad person!", "those who disagree with me are bad actors", "can't we all just get along?", "I want to make sure I'm temp-banning the right person before taking action", "it doesn't matter if I'm temp-banning the right person", "people should follow the rules", "people can ignore the rules if they have a good reason", "we don't need lots of rules", "we should design rules that work for every situation", and "we should rely on moderator judgement".