MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eirikbakke | 2025-09-04 14:00:14+00:00
Humans require a _lot_ less training data to become, for instance, fluent in English. If a given AI algorithm needs to be trained on the entire Internet to accomplish the same, then it seems safe to assume that the data has not really been "mined out".

Generating more training data from the same original data should not be fundamentally problematic in that sense.
by mejutoco | 2025-09-04 14:00:15+00:00
Funny, I do the same. Additionally, one can define a json schema for the output and try to load the response as json or retry for a number of times. If it is not valid json or the schema is not followed we discard it and retry.

It also helps with having a field of the json be the confidence or a similar pattern to act as a cut for what response is accepted.
by grimre4p | 2025-09-04 14:00:19+00:00
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Serac Group is a UK-based technology company leading the digital transformation of the property, planning, and local government sectors. Through our suite of platforms—including SeracTech, Ibex, Planda, and our upcoming launch Rafter—we are reshaping the future of property data, planning intelligence, and civic technology. We are one of the largest providers of AI and backend software to local government in the UK, supporting over 270 councils in managing planning applications. Our strategic partnership with Idox PLC helps us deliver scalable solutions across both public and private sectors.

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by zdragnar | 2025-09-04 14:00:37+00:00
I'm not who you asked, but my family and one of my friends were all the same.

My mom sees halos around lights at night, so much so that she can't drive after sunset. Her eyes are so dry that she gets plugs inserted into her tear ducts to help retain moisture.

My friend who had it done also has severe dry eyes, to the point that he constantly uses eye drops.

In all four cases I know of, the good vision only lasted a few years. Eventually, glasses will be needed again to keep 20/20 vision.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-04 14:00:42+00:00
You should have loved electrical engineering, but you should also have loved software engineering. It's just that the software side of your education leap-frogged straight over the fundamentals and into hacking on cutting-edge completed systems at the very beginning, which suited your desired learning style much better.

There are plenty of "applied" electronics technician or electrician's apprenticeship programs that are more like your software education. Take an induction motor, a variable frequency drive, a few sensors, and a programmable logic controller, and hook them together according to the manufacturer's instructions, and you can be off to the races operating a pump or a conveyor on day 1. But will you understand how the insulated gate bipolar transistors and filters in that variable frequency drive turn the rectified high-voltage DC bus into three-phase AC that generates a rotating magnetic field and induces a current in the motor armature? No, you don't need to know any of that to make the pump work.

You wrote:

> I couldn’t imagine ... a toy CPU implemented in SystemVerilog being ... useful

No, it's really not, but your work on real CPUs depends on registers and combinatorial logic and ALUs and MMUs. End users can typically just download Python and treat everything behind the screen as a black box, but if you really want to call what you're doing "engineering" or a "science", then developing an understanding for what happens behind the curtains is incredibly useful. If you've implemented a toy 8-bit CPU with load, store, compare, jump, and a few basic math instructions, you can write some assembly or a toy interpreter for it and you will have an understanding of how real CPUs work that can enable you to write better code later. Add some interrupts to that CPU and build a multitasking operating system, and you'll understand parallelism better.

All of modern technology is a pyramid. At the point of that pyramid is just a single doped semiconductor with a P-N junction. We build that junction into transistors, and transistors into gates, and gates into CPUs, and on those CPUs we execute assembly, and we write low-level languages that compile into assembly, and build operating systems and syscalls with those low-level languages, and access those systems with high-level languages, and connect those computers together with networks, and write applications that operate on those networks, and at the broad base of the pyramid there are billions of people using those applications.

In 2025, no one human brain comprehends the full stack anymore, we all become our own individual bricks in a particular layer. But to do the best work at any point in the pyramid, you ought to know a bit of how it works above and below you!
by aps_ab_sec | 2025-09-04 14:01:29+00:00
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by jfengel | 2025-09-04 14:01:45+00:00
I'm actually kind of surprised it's that high. That's what asymmetric warfare means: you can't tell the fighters from the civilians.

If Hamas put on uniforms, the number would be much higher. The war would also have ended a long time ago -- and not in their favor.

That does not excuse Israel's own war crimes, which are indeed egregious. Israel has obligations, both moral and under treaty, that it is violating.

But I think it's important to consider the framing of this article. The implication is that Israel detaining exclusively "fighters" is easy, but in fact it's not possible.

I'd love to see a convention on asymmetric warfare, parallel to the Geneva Conventions. What are the obligations of a first-world country fighting a much smaller force who is not bound by the existing conventions? Obviously more than Israel is engaging, but I don't think most people would agree to fight solely along Geneva Convention lines, either, when faced with such an opponent.
by shagie | 2025-09-04 14:01:49+00:00
This is one that I've poked at... and surprised by.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68af64ca-b6bc-8011-b00b-0e8050c075...

The two images are the rules and the screen shot of box 1 (upper left) in https://sudokupad.app/l310pkxn5d

A human solving it is at https://youtu.be/7etaXRyE3QY (you may want to jump to the rules or the solve if you're not as interested in the community goings on).

Also https://github.com/SakanaAI/Sudoku-Bench https://sakana.ai/sudoku-bench/ (Cracking the Cryptic on AI https://youtu.be/JdHSSNKuIzU )
by mrtimo | 2025-09-04 14:01:49+00:00
I agree with this 100%. The creator of duckdb argues that people using pandas are missing out of the 50 years of progress in database research, in the first 5 minutes of his talk here [1].

I've been using Malloy [2], which compiles to SQL (like Typescript compiles to Javascript), so instead of editing a 1000 line SQL script, it's only 18 lines of Malloy.

I'd love to see a blog post comparing a pandas approach to cleaning to an SQL/Malloy approach.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFUZlNQIndo [2] https://www.malloydata.dev/
by ritchie46 | 2025-09-04 14:02:14+00:00
He means that he wants our Rust library as easy as our Python lib. Which I understand as our focus has been mostly on Python.

It is where most of our userbase is and it is very hard for us to have a stable Rust API as we have a lot of internal moving parts which Rust users typically want access to (as they like to be closer to the metal), but has no stability guarantees from us.

In python, we are able to abstract and provide a stable API.
by txrx0000 | 2025-09-04 14:02:55+00:00
Materialism is indeed on shaky ground, but the ground shakes everywhere else, too.

The problem of consciousness has no real solution. A quick way to demonstrate this is via the simulation hypothesis. Consider the following for yourself in first person:

It's impossible to know for certain whether I am in a simulation until I wake up outside of it. Not having observed any evidence of being inside a simulation (probability=0) doesn't necessarily mean I'm certainly in base reality. It could be that the evidence just hasn't been observed yet. And even then, it's impossible to know whether that outer world is a simulation until I wake up in the outer-outer-world, and so on.

That is to say, if my definition of real equals my consciousness equals my existence, I'm really saying that consciousness/reality/existence is a self-defining thing.

Descartes' cogito had unexamined metaphysical convictions. "I think, therefore I am" is not compatible with consciousness because rationality has consciousness as a dependency. If I think back on my entire conscious experience as a timeline, I was conscious before I was rational. I had to derive rationality from experience, not the other way around.

Now I throw away those convictions. "I think" means the same thing as "I am", and "therefore" is a decorative force of habit rather than a reference to logic. In which case, "I think, therefore I am" is the same as: I observe that I observe.

Is the same as: I observe.

Is the same as: I am.

There is no certainty beyond this, only convictions. Even if I'm truly a human brain in a matter-based world, the world would still appear uncertain to this brain in this way.

"A scientist rejecting consciousness is not that different from a nun accepting god in this regard. Neither of them are fully honest with themselves and the world."

That's what I find myself thinking as I take a materialist stance and assume that this is base reality and other people are real in the same way that I am. This appears to fit all of my observations the best, so far, after all.

// end of monologue

And here's my pitch, from me to you:

Let's be provisional materialists together. You can't know if it's the ultimate truth but you can make the correct predictions more often and not be alone while doing it.
by JohnKemeny | 2025-09-04 14:03:07+00:00
I travel a lot and bring it on the plane. It has thousands of pages of handwritten notes, and hundreds of text books and papers.

In the airport or on the plane, I download papers I want to read or have to review.

On touchdown, my reviews are synced and I can send the annotated paper by email.

It does a bit more than a literal notepad.
by dfawcus | 2025-09-04 14:03:19+00:00
Yeah - there was a massive filtering of the students between the 1st year entry, and the second year at my Uni. Largely down to people unable to handle the (not terribly) complex maths at that stage.

I knew a number of folks in the first year who were very good at practical electronics, having come in from a technician side, but simply gave up due to the heavy maths load.

It got more complex when doing Control Theory, what with Laplace and Z transforms, freq domain analysis, and the apocryphal Poles and Zeros.

Further culling ensued at that point.
by owenbrown | 2025-09-04 14:03:57+00:00
The article makes a serious math error early on.

The author’s math considers how mines would be distributed if mines were distributed to the empty squares after reaching that board state.

This is wrong.

This is classic Monty Hall Problem. The author is doing the equivalent of saying “there are two doors left, so the odds are 50 / 50 that the prize is behind either door.

It invalidates all of the numbers after this point.
by causal | 2025-09-04 14:04:04+00:00
This article discusses attention in a very immediate sense, but I think most of the points also apply to long-term attention.

Our behaviors are determined by habit far more than anything, willpower is seldom enough to result in behavioral patterns over time. Even things like the career we chose become habit; pivoting from technology to horticulture will not happen if you cannot change your daily habits to go from thinking about technology to thinking about horticulture.
by wildzzz | 2025-09-04 14:04:46+00:00
That's definitely an unfortunate part of EE, the hardware required to design hardware is expensive. CS requires a laptop and maybe some time on a server or a big GPU cluster, expensive to own but very cheap to rent.

I think the explosion in availability of inexpensive microcontrollers and FPGA dev boards have made it much easier for people to get into hardware design without spending a ton of money. This has also made it cheaper to buy high end test equipment, you don't need to buy a $3k Keysight oscope when a cheap Chinese USB oscope works just as well with plenty of features built-in for free. Obviously a proper academic or corporate research lab is going to be a lot different than a well-equiped hobbyist lab but the difference is not as stark as you'd imagine.
by funksta | 2025-09-04 14:06:55+00:00
Hi, hyperpaper creator here– sorry it didn't work for you :(

Just curious if there were any problems specifically with the planner, or if it was just the fact that the rM really didn't work for you at all? Always looking to improve it and fill in any gaps in the product.

Also when did you try it? Because I will admit the first version was definitely clunky
by pembrook | 2025-09-04 14:07:15+00:00
China is communist in name only. In fact they are the most capitalist major country on earth right now.

Government spending makes up a smaller % of Chinese GDP than in the US, so definitionally their economy is more privatized than the US economy. China is at 33%, US at 36%, Europe is at 50%.

For every Jack Ma, there's a million other Chinese businesses flourishing in every niche imaginable with very little oversight from the CCP.
by gruez | 2025-09-04 14:07:22+00:00
>Basically large tech companies have the deep pockets to push up prices at electricity auctions. But why bid in public when you can do those deals in private.

Public utilities can't do the same? Moreover if the implication is that large tech companies are somehow getting great prices at the expense of residential users, what does that mean for the electric generators on the other end of this transaction? Why are they leaving money on the table by selling to large tech companies for cheap?
by impure-aqua | 2025-09-04 14:07:24+00:00
I do not think determinism of behaviour is the only thing that matters for evaluating the value of an abstraction - exposure to the output is also a consideration.

The behaviour of the = operator in Python is certainly deterministic and well-documented, but depending on context it can result in either a copy (2x memory consumption) or a pointer (+64bit memory consumption). Values that were previously pointers can also suddenly become copies following later permutation. Do you think this through every time you use =? The consequences of this can be significant (e.g. operating on a large file in memory); I have seen SWEs make errors in FastAPI multipart upload pipelines that have increased memory consumption by 2x, 3x, in this manner.

Meanwhile I can ask an LLM to generate me Rust code, and it is clearly obvious what impact the generated code has on memory consumption. If it is a reassignment (b = a) it will be a move, and future attempts to access the value of a would refuse to compile and be highlighted immediately in an IDE linter. If the LLM does b = &a, it is clearly borrowing, which has the size of a pointer (+64bits). If the LLM did b = a.clone(), I would clearly be able to see that we are duplicating this data structure in memory (2x consumption).

The LLM code certainly is non-deterministic; it will be different depending on the questions I asked (unlike a compiler). However, in this particular example, the chosen output format/language (Rust) directly exposes me to the underlying behaviour in a way that is both lower-level than Python (what I might choose to write quick code myself) yet also much, much more interpretable as a human than, say, a binary that GCC produces. I think this has significant value.
by therealcamino | 2025-09-04 14:07:32+00:00
I had a CS professor as an undergrad who would teach a couple of advanced seminars in his own research area. His approach to those simplifications was to announce, "I'm going to lie to you now, but just go with it and I promise that later we're going to learn the real truth." I liked that as a compromise, to make some practical progress, but not to mistake the simplification for full understanding. (And he wasn't rigid about it -- if somebody would ask a deeper question he'd happily answer it to some level and then get on with his plan.)
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-04 14:07:35+00:00
There is limit to the "power" of concentration and what things it can help achieve. If meditation could help unravel the secrets of the universe, it would have helped the meditator reveal that the hardware responsible for consciousness is actually composed of neurons. All meditation might help is to remove the fog from the hall of mirror that is consciousness. To know more about the universe, one has to experiment on it and meditation can't do that.
by fenomas | 2025-09-04 14:07:41+00:00
Puzzles like that one have always seemed dishonest to me. It only makes sense if you start from the conclusion that it's meant to illustrate Bayes rule, and then work backwards to the assumption that the predicate "boy born on a Tuesday" is supposed to be independent of who's being asked about.

But in plain English, ".. At least one of them is a boy born on Tuesday" suggests the speaker is giving a fact that was chosen because it's true of the person spoken about - like if the kids were both chosen on Thursday then that would be the day named. And read that way, the Bayes illustration doesn't stand and the "correct" answer makes no sense.

To make it honest, it should really be worded like: "Mrs. Chance has two children of different ages. You ask whether at least one of them is a boy born on Tuesday, and you are told yes. What is the probability that both of them are boys?" Or am I missing something?
by tooheavy | 2025-09-04 14:07:57+00:00
I'm open to there being something in reality that explains being someone or a specific person. Having a specific location in reality raises the question of how it came to be and what are the possibilities or limits - it's a piece of unexplained information that suggests more information and explanation is needed. Saying it is meaningless or assumed actually appears to not explain anything. But I would have to think about it more.
by mrala | 2025-09-04 14:08:18+00:00
You seem to be missing the point entirely.

1. The bill shown for July 2024 was for about $100, which includes $65 of supply charges.

2. The bill for July 2025 was for about $129, with supply charges of $84.

3. Despite actual usage being lower for July 2025, the total cost increased by 29%.

The point being raised is that energy costs are higher for individuals because the cost of building infrastructure to support data centers is being subsidized by individuals. Even if her bill was for $65, it is inconsequential to the main point. I don’t understand why people make comments like yours other than to muddy the waters and obfuscate the issue. Or truly failing to understand what is being communicated due to some bias or ideology. A sad microcosm of what passes for discourse in our time.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-04 14:08:31+00:00
Drug addicts, patients and recreational users start to increase the dosage and chase the high.

Others don't chase the high at all, but remember the state of mind and simply tune their brains to respond with said high on command whenever the chemistry in the brain fulfills the conditions, which can happen without taking the drug at all.

I don't see a loop there; I see different levels of awareness, consciousness and needs.

It's also what I think when I hear Hofstadter or (high-)functioning people talking about being "strange loops". ... use some of your opportunities, peace of mind and resources to sue people (you can probably come up with entire lists...) and the "strange loop" will break immediately.

Some people edge for days, others had to use various toys and stimuli before getting off since youth.
by wrsh07 | 2025-09-04 14:08:48+00:00
Something many people refuse to believe is that "understanding your users" doesn't have to be nefarious or about serving ads.

It's important to realize that key assumptions your app makes (nobody is accessing my b2b saas app from a phone) are incorrect. It's important to understand user workflows.

There are higher touch ways to do this (user research is great!), and you should let users opt out, but someone trying to improve the user experience also needs to understand how users are defying their expectations
by necovek | 2025-09-04 14:09:16+00:00
While I agree with that, this is the reason I doubt the claim in the article that "wheel" (including the axle connection) was only invented "once" — there is no support for it in the article.

As all of these technologies come into existence, some "inventions" become inevitable.

Sure, maybe a wheeled cart was constructed in one place first by 20 or 50 years, but we are talking about a time where knowledge did not travel far or fast. We had independent discoveries of the same thing in 19th century that were spread out by 20 years, I'd think it was even more 3500 BC.
by julianozen | 2025-09-04 14:09:44+00:00
Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired.

I wish they had managed to keep Arc around. It's a product I'd glad pay for, and it seems like maybe there are enough fans that subscriptions could've supported a smaller team. Hopefully Atlassian doesn't kill it after 5 months
by RandomBacon | 2025-09-04 14:09:58+00:00
I like the idea of vehicles with an electric drivetrain, but I mostly drive a pickup truck and do truck things with it (tow things long distances).

Something like the "new" Ramcharger (2026?) is perfect for me. It is a plug-in hybrid with an electric drivetrain, with a V6 generator for adding range.

Build more vehicles like that please. Ideally something with Toyota's reliability.