MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nadalishhh | 2025-09-25 00:44:59+00:00
Your 2D bitmap example perfectly illustrates the fundamental limitation! The exponential state explosion you encountered (needing 2^32 states for patterns separated by randomness) is precisely why classical Markov chains became intractable for complex dependencies.

What's fascinating is that transformers with attention don't actually escape the Markov property - they're mathematically equivalent to very high-order Markov chains where the entire context window forms the "state." The breakthrough wasn't abandoning Markov chains, but finding a parameterized way to approximate these massive state spaces through learned representations rather than explicit enumeration.

Your observation about inevitably trending toward attention-like mechanisms is spot-on. The attention mechanism essentially provides a tractable approximation to the astronomically large transition matrices that would be required for a classical Markov chain to capture long-range dependencies. It's a more elegant solution to the same fundamental problem you were solving with skip states.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-09-25 00:45:16+00:00
My favorite one thus far has been:

> was there a US president named Bob, Robert, or who went by either?

> No U.S. president has ever gone by Bob or Robert as their common or official name. The closest case is James A. Garfield (20th president), whose full name was James Abram Garfield — no Robert in there

Why is James A. Garfield the closest???? What metric are we using for this comparison, lol
by nadalishhh | 2025-09-25 00:45:27+00:00
Exactly right on the mathematical equivalence! Your clarification of the Markov property is crucial - the conditional independence given the present state is what defines it, regardless of how complex that state representation becomes.

The key insight you raise about attention is particularly important: it doesn't violate the Markov property, it just enables a vastly more sophisticated state representation. Classical n-gram Markov chains use simple discrete states, while transformers use high-dimensional continuous representations that can encode exponentially more information about context.

This perspective helps bridge the conceptual gap many people have. When they think "Markov chain," they often picture simple state transitions, but mathematically, LLMs are just Markov chains with astronomically complex states. The attention mechanism is the computational trick that makes these complex states tractable - it's not changing the fundamental probabilistic structure.
by kragen | 2025-09-25 00:45:31+00:00
No, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I switched over completely—at first AltaVista still had better coverage.
by Poomba | 2025-09-25 00:46:11+00:00
[update] just signed up and very curious where the data comes from? I managed to find businesses that use Github which is incredibly useful for me. It is missing some Javascript frameworks like NextJS but i think thats not a big deal…

Where does the technographic data come from? Is it scraped from websites? Or are you relying on another 3rd party source?

Is there anyway to get some trends data like how Builtwith has trend insights on how many of the top 100k websites use something like NextJS over time?
by ggm | 2025-09-25 00:46:30+00:00
From the abstract, its the inherent noise. So it's going to be some variance of monte carlo random approaches, or simulated annealing where "beneficial noise" helps find a useful optimum better than the others found so far.

(not a mathematician, and happy to be shot down in flames)

Since most systems looking at generalised QC want to minimise noise, and it's only the systems which do Quantum Annealing which "work" right now, I'd say this is a niche use case which will make a lot of money, right up to the point the cost of the machine drops so everyone does it, and then the market is back where it needs to be: equally available to all players, at least "all players who can afford time on a QC which does QA"
by mikert89 | 2025-09-25 00:47:10+00:00
You dont have to create a billion dollar company. Especially after raising VC and failing, its much clearer how to build a business. Very reasonable to think a smart hard working person can build a company making 1M a year. Life owning a company that makes even a moderate amount is 1000x better than a career. I think your analysis is outdated
by smcin | 2025-09-25 00:47:17+00:00
No, the previous admin's FBI did [0]. But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008235322/https://www.ic3.g...
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-09-25 00:48:09+00:00
Or give you results that are completely unrelated and even try to convince you that what you’re trying to search doesn’t exist.

Studied with a guy from old Soviet Union, they were educated in a way that every modern invention had a Soviet inventor.

ChatGPT can create an individualized reality and truth for everyone depending on which advertiser’s target demographic they fit in.
by rurp | 2025-09-25 00:48:18+00:00
I'd say it's practically guaranteed. It would be wildly unprecedented to not follow up the amount of hype and fundraising in the LLM AI industry without a massive amount of enshittification following it.

Even if improvements continue for years we might already be near the peak of LLM usefulness because all of greedy and abusive dark patterns are sure to follow once the manic land grab settles down.
by itsolidude | 2025-09-25 00:48:27+00:00
Hey guys

This little gimmick is more a product of anger than anything else.

I really struggled coming up with good domain names because every time I manage to come up with a good one, it ends up being taken or being on sale for 400 quadrillion dollars. So the next logical step for me was to try the LLM-Domain-Generators provided by some domain providers.

The problem with those is, that they were always so very generic and also often lock you in on one specific seller. At that point I've had enough and sat down for one weekend and made the Frankenstein wonetic.com

Originally I thought that this would be an easy task but BOY was I wrong. LLM's really suck at being creative so I had to come up with some clever ways to formulate "creativity" with confidence scores / Vowel counts etc.

This "formulating" took roughly 80% of the effort put into this site.

Anyways. It's 100% Free and lets you customize domains from many advanced options I've put in there. (Custom TLD's, Generation Algorithms, Tones etc.). It will only display AVAILABLE domains and compare the best prices so you get a good deal on it too. Have fun!

PS: Depending on how much people like this, I will also add an option to check if the domain names have free social media handles.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-09-25 00:48:29+00:00
I think the situation is:

Old situation: "Android drivers" are technically Linux drivers in that they are drivers which are built for a specific, usually ancient, version of Linux with no effort to upstream, minimal effort to rebase against newer kernels, and such poor quality that there's a reason they're not upstreamed.

New situation: "Android drivers" are largely moved to userspace, which does have the benefit of allowing Google to give them a stable ABI so they might work against newer kernels with little to no porting effort. But now they're not really Linux drivers.

In neither case does it really help as much as you'd hope.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-25 00:49:08+00:00
> majority of enterprise software now (including and starting with Microsoft teams) outright say do not support firefox

Teams has explicitly supported Firefox for a while now https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-clien... but the problem is "there's always another site that doesn't work right". Firefox usage share got too low, so places just check Chrom* and Safari work with the new feature and ship (sometimes not even the latter, if they don't care about mobile as much).
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-25 00:50:14+00:00
> "I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer.

Taking this approach with skilled people paid to think can easily be interpreted as being dictatorial and often stifles future contributions.

> Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice.

This implies a rigid hierarchical structure, one lacking collaboration. Again, this approach might work with assembly line workers but won't fly more than once or twice with people paid to solve problems.

> In that case, it's your duty as the leader to play the dictator and impose order.

And it will be soon your duty to find people to backfill those who have better opportunities to pursue.

> If it happens though, don't forget to re-establish trust with your team members and make sure they understand the circumstances that led you to act in that way.

There is no "re-establishing trust with your team" when this form of "leadership" is employed. Once trust is broken, the only employees who remain are those with no better options.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-25 00:50:19+00:00
It's blindingly obvious except to the wilfully ignorant that in order for argentina to survive milei or someone like him must succeed. The same thing is true with totally different circumstances for El salvador.

A less severe version of this problem is being faced by trump. He's being forced to rely on ambitious growth forecasts to justify his One big beautiful bill and increasing the deficit because of political considerations. I actually have sympathy for Elon Musks frustration.
by ryukoposting | 2025-09-25 00:51:00+00:00
Same shit, different screenshot. The most irritating part is that other folks can't reliably reproduce results like those shown in the screenshot. Yet, I can think of countless examples of this happening to me. My guess is that it's highly beneficial to Google to barf out walls of poor-quality ads when it knows nothing about you. I can't be sure why, but there's a pattern.

When you look for my (somewhat obscure) company's app on the Play store, the first result is always a sponsored listing for some totally unrelated app.

About a year ago, I googled "silverfast" (film scanning program) on a fresh Windows installation not connected to me in any way, and I got several ads for scammy scanner software before the program I was looking for showed up.

When I watch youtube videos from obscure creators while logged out, I routinely get AI-generated ads for random stuff. The funniest one was deepfaked Chuck Norris emphatically telling me I should feed my dog carrots. Yet, when I watch a video from a big YouTube channel under the same conditions, I get ads from major household brands.

My guess is that there's three things happening. 1) More moneyed advertisers have more refined targeting constraints, that implicitly filter out ill-defined user profiles. 2) Google feels the need to do a better job of targeting for advertisers who pay them more. 3) In the absence of a well-defined user profile, Google shotguns a bunch of low-cost ads at you to try to build a profile. Just guesses.
by skydhash | 2025-09-25 00:51:15+00:00
Netwok

- TCP/IP

- DNS

- TLS

- URL

- And a lot of RFCs

Sysadmin

- Unix

- Webserver (Nginx, Caddy,...)

- Services (Daemons) and logs

Programming

<Any popular language>

Basically there's only three ways to have dynamic content. Either your program is an HTTP server (Java, Node.js,...), it's a script or a program that a server execute (PHP, CGI perl), or it's a program that talks to a web server using FastCGI (and variants).

Databases

HTTP is stateless, so anything useful should be persisted somehow. Go with SQL (MySql, Postgres,...) and then add whatever you fancy.

---

So basically the same thing you needed circa 2010 and earlier. Anything new is something old with a new interface.
by dcreater | 2025-09-25 00:51:27+00:00
For people who took a second to get this (like me), @fijiaarone means it is.

And I concur - in this AI hypecycle more than ever it seems to be about how can peacock the best. Its neck and neck with the crypto hypecycle a few years ago for the incidence rate of vaporware and snake oil. Sure there are some legit founders building meaningful product but they seem to be a small minority.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-09-25 00:52:26+00:00
Blocking screenshots for certain apps has been like "someone drowned in a lake -> block access to the lake".

The only thing it helps in is helping banks close the tickets when you inform them of a bug and they ask for screenshots and you tell them you can't because their app doesn't allow it, so "… closing this ticket since we received no further input from the customer. Please feel free to reply if you need anything else."

They never tell me to take a photo from another app and I never volunteer to do that because if they reply like this I know they are not going to work on the bug.
by michaelteter | 2025-09-25 00:52:45+00:00
This is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well.

And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go.

What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.
by a_r_cheraghi | 2025-09-25 00:52:48+00:00
I’m building LifeToy.ai, starting with Bearie — a plush toy that talks with kids in real time through AI voice-to-voice.

The goal: give children an empathetic, playful companion that listens, responds, and helps with language, emotions, and everyday routines.

On the tech side: it’s low-latency realtime voice-to-voice (<500ms) built on STT → LLM → TTS, wrapped in a safe, parent-controlled flow. The vision is to make toys feel alive — not screen-based, but warm, safe, and interactive.

I’d love your thoughts: • What do you think about AI companions for kids? • What concerns would you raise as parents, builders, or educators? • What features would make this truly valuable?

If you’re curious, you can sign up for early access here: lifetoy.ai/early-access
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-25 00:53:02+00:00
The socialist policies were ruining the country so much that taking any other course of action would be suicide. He's actually doing a great job in restoring sanity but unfortunately that takes time.

In this case it's the currency controls which artificially makes the peso more valuable against the dollar. It's an awful way to hide how badly you are actually doing. But apparently it was politically impossible for him to deal with it until now. His mistake was of course not doing so earlier.

He is an odd fellow for sure but labeling him as a delusional libertarian is very unfair.
by johnfn | 2025-09-25 00:53:02+00:00
Can anyone reproduce this? When I search "Midjourney", I get an ad for Midjourney (from Midjourney), followed by Midjourney, the site. After that, I get the Midjourney Discord, the Midjourney subreddit, the Midjourney Wikipedia page, and then (inexplicably), another Midjourney ad.

That seems about as good as it could be.

Edit: I guess I should say that I do agree that the quality of Google Search is pretty poor these days, so I directionally agree even though I can't reproduce this issue. Still, it's interesting to see how much our searches differ. I can't imagine what algorithm in Google decided to give me great results and you trash.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-25 00:53:24+00:00
They're 30+ million lines of code to cover the feature set, but monetization is tough and security/feature churn is constant. It's also nearly meaningless to start small - either you build everything or you don't.

This is just Chromium with some patches though, the problem with these kinds of things is it's small groups that tend to lose interest.
by kentonv | 2025-09-25 00:54:58+00:00
I should clarify, lack of proper language-level support for async programming wasn't the only problem CORBA had. Its main problem was that it was just massively overcomplicated and tried to do way too much. It went way beyond just being a protocol, it specified "object resource brokers" and such.

But it did also make the mistake of being designed around synchronous calls, only adding an async mode later on, and when it did add async, it was excessively complex to use, due in part to the missing language features.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say it was "unsound". Excessive complexity isn't really a matter of soundness. So I assumed you were referring to the more general criticism that has historically been raised against RPC, which is that trying to make network calls look like local calls hides important details which distributed applications must handle, like latency and network instability. My argument is that asynchronous programming, promise pipelining, and exceptions largely solve these issues just fine, and practical experience backs this up.
by edoceo | 2025-09-25 00:56:37+00:00
This is too flippant.

YC is so early on some of these deals that the primary gauge is team - which means personality of founders. Very hard to measure remotely.

I'm in a group, not as big or famous, that does early checks. We're 95% remote. IME, it's so hard to make those judgement calls through web-cam.

Agreed that founder focus is a big factor and that life gets in the way (of deals). However, if you don't like YC conditions there are 100s of other places to (attempt a) raise.
by stevage | 2025-09-25 00:56:53+00:00
Sports betting is one of those things that sounds kind of harmless in the abstract, and like something that consenting adults should be allowed to do. But in practice, it causes enormous harm, both by draining the meagre resources of the people who get addicted to it, and by changing the nature of the sports in ways that make them less enjoyable for everyone who isn't betting.
by tangotaylor | 2025-09-25 00:57:08+00:00
We’ve been using X Elite Snapdragon laptops (Thinkpad T14s and Yoga Slim running Ubuntu’s concept images) to build large amounts of ARM software without the need for cross-compiling. The hardware peripheral support isn’t 100% yet (good enough) but I’ve been impressed with the performance.

ARM seems to be popular in the server space and it’s nice to see it trickling down to the PC market.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-25 00:58:08+00:00
Wait long enough and it seems like almost any company tries anything to increase its bottom line, but the main difference between ChatGPT and Google is at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them from ever getting to that point... but it'll go farther than "here's search, we pay for it via adtech".

Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.
by drooby | 2025-09-25 00:58:23+00:00
Do we know what his exact testimony was in this case?

You realize it's also possible for a judge to be wrong. Why are we just assuming that the judge's opinion trumps the expert witnesses opinion on how to properly review the literature?

here were the expert defendant witnesses:

These are the five general causation experts for plaintiffs in the Tylenol MDL:

Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, MD, PhD, is a leading expert in the field of environmental health science. Dr. Baccarelli is Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University. His research focuses primarily on exploring the chemical and molecular links between human disease and exposure to certain drugs or chemicals. He has published over 600 articles, if you can imagine. Dr. Baccarelli is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and he is also President of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology Dr. Robert Cabrera, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Cabrera is a molecular & cellular biologist and his expertise and research focuses on chemical causes of birth defects during embryonic development.

Dr. Eric Hollander, MD, is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Hollander has been the primary investigator in numerous federal grant studies on the causes of autism. These have included several major studies on autism causes funded by the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hollander has published hundreds of scientific articles on autism and edited over 20 medical textbooks including Autism Spectrum Disorders (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2017), and the Textbook of Autism Spectrum Disorders (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2011).

Dr. Stan G. Louie is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at the University of Southern California. Dr. Louie’s current research and work focuses on the testing and development of new drugs for inflammatory diseases, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Brandon Pearson, PhD, is a neuroscientist and toxicologist and currently an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University. Dr. Pearson is an expert in neurotoxicology, epigenetics, and cell biology and he is currently involved in laboratory studies focusing on genetic and environmental factors causing autism. Dr. Pearson has never previously testified as a litigation expert but was compelled by a sense of moral duty to provide his expertise in this case.

.....

and heres the judge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Cote

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Mary's College in 1968 and a Master of Arts in history from Columbia University in 1969, after which she taught U.S. history, world history, and African-American history at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a school in Manhattan. Cote then attended Columbia Law School, where she was Notes & Comments Editor of the Columbia Law Review, and she received her Juris Doctor in 1975.[3]
by Baeocystin | 2025-09-25 00:58:34+00:00
Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-09-25 00:58:51+00:00
Hey, things have improved. Once in a while still I find a website that intercepts right click with an alert box: "This website's content is COPYRIGHTED!"

On the other hand, making text unselectable in an app is more annoying. In a browser I can bore through the div soup to find the text element, but in an app it's just a big "fuck you."

Halfway in between is an electron app like Spotify which, as far as I can see, disables text selection.