MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lazyasciiart | 2025-09-26 18:41:25+00:00
> What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of this action, based on past experience and checking what happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?" [0]

I’ve tried exactly this and it was shocking to me that even when faced with examples of themselves failing to do something, people would just willingly go on the record with this:

Lindsay: Well, did it work for [us last time]? Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work [this time].
by gilleain | 2025-09-26 18:41:25+00:00
Well, figure a) shows a ribbon representation of the fold (as helices and strands) of the protein 7QSW (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/entry/pdb/7qsw) which is RubisCO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO), an plant protein that plays a key role in photosynthesis.

The different colours are for the predicted and 'real' (ground truth) models. The fact that it is hard to distinguish is partly the - as you point out - weird colour choice, but also because they are so close together. An inaccurate prediction would have parts that stand out more as they would not align well in 3D space.
by Bender | 2025-09-26 18:41:42+00:00
It could be the URL you are submitting has a canonical reference to the original site in the HTML. This addon [1] will highlight that in Firefox or one can view the HTML source. HN will use the canonical reference. If it's not that then we would need more details.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canonical-lin...
by jltsiren | 2025-09-26 18:42:12+00:00
Taxpayer subsidies to domestic entities should also be explicit.

Public sector organizations should focus on their operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the price of the foreign option. If politicians want to subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an appropriate budget.
by zubzubi | 2025-09-26 18:42:42+00:00
Yes I'm already doing this manually with Reason. I'll compose something that's quite bare bones, export the audio and run it through Suno, asking it to cover and improvise with a specific style, then when I have something I like, I split that into stems, import some or all of these to Reason and then reconstruct and enhance the sound using instruments in Reason, mostly by replaying the parts I like on keyboard and tweaking it in the piano roll. Often I get additional inspiration just by doing that. Eventually I delete all the tracks that came from Suno stems when I've finished this process.

That way I get new musical ideas from Suno but without any trace of Suno in the final output. Suno's output, even with the v5 model, is never quite what I want anyway so this way makes most sense to me. Also it means there's no Suno audio watermarking in the final product.
by vmg12 | 2025-09-26 18:43:35+00:00
> It seems you're implying that since being a billionaire is not 100% heritable, it must be a result of individual merit

Nope, another strawman, I never claimed it was 100% merit. You claimed that wealth is purely heritable which is easily proven false by observing reality.

> sociopathy

So your claim is that sociopathy is more important for getting rich than skill?

> right place right time

Choosing the right business to build given the state of the world is a skill. Business requires luck the same way poker requires luck, and let me tell you, if you play poker vs a skilled player you will lose a lot of money.
by SpicyUme | 2025-09-26 18:44:02+00:00
There are some variable pickup transit services, but you may not see them because of when/where they go. I know around me there are zones where you can call for pickup and they use small shuttle buses. I think they drop of within the zone or at other bus stops, but I haven't used the service so I'm not sure.

My preferred way to solve bus lane reliability would be to shut down streets or lanes to only allow buses.
by foobarian | 2025-09-26 18:44:11+00:00
In the couple of instances I experienced this, the problem is that the system is like the proverbial elephant that a bunch of blind people are familiar with through touching the parts they are next to; but the complexity is in the relationships in-between.

There needs to be a person who will take charge and learn/document the whole system, except people who work on it are overloaded and too exhausted to take this on. And management doesn't necessarily have the insight or incentive to make this happen. It's an interesting phenomenon.
by garciasn | 2025-09-26 18:44:38+00:00
Since the time I was 15 or 16, I have been regularly targeted by loss prevention as a potential threat. To this day, 30y later, it's become a running joke w/my kids about when we'll be 'bothered', stopped, or outright harassed by employees (plain clothed or uniformed) for doing nothing other than shopping in a way that is somehow different than they expect.

I have never shoplifted, but yet, here we are. While it's a mild annoyance to be stopped and asked if I need any help by two retail employees alongside a uniformed LPP (I refuse to call them officers) or asked to produce a receipt--even if we're just browsing to kill time and I didn't buy anything, now I may be pursued by a fucking drone because some algorithm or human operator has decided I'm somehow doing something they don't like?

I am genuinely terrified.
by Agingcoder | 2025-09-26 18:45:02+00:00
I love your answer.

It’s honest, and actually typical of this kind of problem space where what’s possible exceeds what was expected.

It reminds me of what coders did with older atari st machines to achieve overscan and a whole bunch of other tricks. The manuals explicitly stated that some things were not possible or would cause machine resets … except that there was a way.
by samuelg123 | 2025-09-26 18:45:25+00:00
I think Siri has always been criticized, likely because it has never worked super well and it has the most eyes (or ears) on it (iPhones still have 50% market share in the US).

And now that we have ChatGPT with voice mode, Gemini Live, etc which have incredible speech recognition and reasoning comparatively, it's harder to argue that "every voice assistant is bad" still.
by themantalope | 2025-09-26 18:45:58+00:00
Haha, I’m also an IR with AI research experience.

My view is much more in line with yours and this interpretation.

Another point - I think many people (including other clinicians) have a sense that radiology is a practice of clear cut findings and descriptions, when in practice it’s anything but.

At another level beyond the imaging appearance and clinical interpretation is the fact that our reports are also interpreted at a professional and “political” level.

I can imagine a busy neurosurgeon running a good practice calling the hospital CEO to discuss unforgiving interpretations of post op scans from the AI bot……
by systoll | 2025-09-26 18:46:44+00:00
I don't disbelieve you but… where?

I don't think I’ve ever heard it used like that, and in trying to find any example other than the page we’re commenting on, I’ve only found counterexamples.

Whether it’s wikipedia’s 'Glossary of Chess Problems' or OzProblems or 'Sam Loyd and his chess problems' from 1913, they’re all using 'legal' as synonymous with 'reachable'.
by lesuorac | 2025-09-26 18:47:04+00:00
Wonder if `\00` is handled different between them. Not sure how to run the rust version but my md5sum seems to care how many null bytes there are.

echo -e "\00" | md5sum 8f7cbbbe0e8f898a6fa93056b3de9c9c -

echo -e "\00\00" | md5sum a4dd23550d4586aee3b15d27b5cec433 -
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-09-26 18:47:51+00:00
> Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week?

Residencies? Yeah. The guy who came up with the US' system for medical residency was high on cocaine pretty much constantly and expected everyone to perform at his level.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
by mmgeorgi | 2025-09-26 18:48:27+00:00
Those laws were themselves a direct consequence of imperialism. Without the empire there would have been no Commonwealth migration to legislate about. Public opinion might explain why the laws were tightened, but it’s irrelevant to the causal chain.

Speaking of causality, Kirkegaard did not perform any kind of causal inference, so his analysis is based on correlation only, not on identified causal effects. He compares group averages and finds correlations with outcomes like employment or fiscal contribution, but that’s descriptive statistics. There are no counterfactuals, no identification strategy, and no attempt to separate selection effects, institutional factors, or assimilation dynamics. In other words, it’s not causal evidence — just patterns that he interprets as if they were.
by Bajusz15 | 2025-09-26 18:48:39+00:00
Beacon solves a problem for self-hosters, homelab users. It's an open-source agent that makes it easy to deploy apps and monitor devices (like Raspberry Pi) without the overhead of traditional tooling. Forget bloated stacks like Jenkins, Opensearch, Grafana, or Datadog — Beacon is a single ~15 MB Go binary that: * Automatically deploys new releases from Git tags * Monitors endpoints, ports, and system metrics with custom commands * Forwards logs from files, Docker, and commands

Note: Beacon is currently in Beta — APIs, configs, and features may change as it evolves. Feedback and contributions are welcome! Source: https://github.com/Bajusz15/beacon
by vixen99 | 2025-09-26 18:49:28+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/b8c02080-a290-4af7-9702-03230aa9c...

"Hackers obtained the details of tens of millions of British voters in a “complex cyber attack” on the Electoral Commission that went undetected for more than a year, the elections watchdog admitted on Tuesday. The body said “hostile actors” first breached its network in August 2021, gaining access to its file-sharing and email systems and obtaining copies of the electoral register, but “suspicious activity” was not identified until October 2022."

Of course such a thing will never happen in relation to Digital ID Cards, will it?
by aanet | 2025-09-26 18:49:29+00:00
Not here to comment on the _content_ of the blog post...

Just wanted to say the blog post design looks super nice. Beautifully laid out, very readable typography, clear graphics, approachable design with a welcoming UX, footnotes in the side, etc.

Anybody know how this is designed / styled? (I can see three.js being used, along with katex.js - but don't know more details)

Thanks
by Spivak | 2025-09-26 18:49:29+00:00
According to research, yes. Children who are taught to read by "guessing" are demonstrably worse readers, even when evaluated years later. I don't think there's much of a battle going on outside of the effort it takes push the fix out everywhere.

Is anyone left defending the thoroughly flawed system? I doubt there's very much pride wrapped up in it. The folks who invented the whole word system meant well. The biggest factor is probably the fact that there isn't a giant corporation whose quarterly profits depends on selling the materials for and teaching the flawed system for their income. Amazing that.
by xp84 | 2025-09-26 18:49:34+00:00
As a vocal critic of Siri, I can give you a number of reasons we hate it:

1. It seems to be actively getting worse. On a daily basis, I see it responding to queries nonsensically, like when i say “play (song) by (artist)” (I have Apple Music) by opening my Sirius app and putting on a random thing that isn’t even that artist. Other trivial commands are frequently just met with apologies or searching the web.

2. Over a year ago Apple conducted a flashy announcement full of promises about how Siri would not only do the things that it’s been marketed as being able to do for the last decade, but also things that no one has seen an assistant do. Many people believe that announcement was based on fantasy thinking and those people are looking more and more correct every day that Apple ships no actual improvements to Siri.

3. Apple also shipped a visual overhaul of how Siri looks, which gives the impression that work has been done, leading people to be even more disappointed when Siri continues to be a pile of trash.

4. The only competitor that makes sense to compare is Google, since no one else has access to do useful things on your device with your data. At least Google has a clear path to an LLM-based assistant, since they’ve built an LLM. It seems believable that android users will have access to a Gemini-based assistant, whereas it appears to most of us that Apple‘s internal dysfunction has rendered them unable to ship something of that caliber.
by IAmBroom | 2025-09-26 18:49:45+00:00
And that three-copy tradition goes back to "indenture contracts" of the 14th century, at least.

The phrase "indentured" means "cut into sharp pointy teeth" (a zig zag pattern). The contract is written out in triplicate by hand on a large sheet. Being hand-cut after the whole document is signed, it is hard to perfectly replicate that cut. Additionally, someone would write "A BIG LATIN WORD" over the area to be cut, so to forge the other piece(s) you have to recreate the demi-penstrokes plausibly.

When two copies don't match, someone is lying. The essential third copy is stored at the Notary Office, which tells you whom is lying.

"Indentured servants" were bound by such a contract.
by tummler | 2025-09-26 18:50:06+00:00
This is similar to what I do. There are all kinds of useful ways to incorporate AI into the music production process. It should be treated like a collaborative partner, or any other tool/plugin.

It shouldn't be a magic button that does everything for you, removing the human element. A human consciously making decisions with intent, informed by life experience, to share a particular perspective, is what makes art art.
by LexiMax | 2025-09-26 18:50:16+00:00
> It's so popular because it's the only data structure that is easy to use in C.

Is this reasoning really true? A quick search reveals the availability of higher-level data structures like trees, flexible arrays, hashtables, and the like, so it's not as if the linux kernel is lacking in data structures.

Linked lists have a few other advantages - simplicity and reference stability come to mind, but they might have other properties that makes them useful for kernel development beyond how easy they are to create.
by edbaskerville | 2025-09-26 18:50:17+00:00
The Bayesian results will depend on the prior. They use a uniform distribution over # tanks produced, in the limit of the distribution's maximum -> infinity. Is that reasonable? Something more constrained might be better, maybe a gamma-Poisson prior with gamma mean based on some plausible estimate of production rate.

(The frequentist/Bayesian estimates should converge as you collect more observations.)
by cs702 | 2025-09-26 18:50:26+00:00
TL;DR: The OP notes that we currently use all sorts of tricks of the trade, including applying normalization layers, to keep unit values in DNNs from getting too large or too small when we train them. Keeping unit values from getting too large or small prevents numerical underflow/overflow, and also helps speed up learning by keeping the magnitudes of updates small in relation to weights. The OP proposes that we should constrain weights to be in sub-manifolds with unit condition number[a] at each layer, and that we should modify/design SGD algorithms to work well within those manifolds.

I find the idea compelling, but it's too early to know if it will work well at scale, you know, with large models, in the real world.

--

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condition_number

--

EDIT: On the other hand, yesterday I saw a paper about doing basically the opposite, letting unit values in DNNs get as big or small as they need to get... by mapping them to complex logarithms and keeping them in that domain: https://openreview.net/forum?id=SUuzb0SOGu . I also found this opposing idea oddly compelling, but I don't know how well it works either, because it hasn't been tested at scale.
by latexr | 2025-09-26 18:50:40+00:00
You’re comparing transitory conversations on a forum to a project with proven negative impact which was banned in multiple countries, and serious investigative journalism to teenage gossip, while ascribing twisted motivations to strangers on the internet.

That you would start from the assumption that someone’s motivation for a comment is not their opinion but a desire to farm meaningless internet points is bizarre. I have no idea if that’s how you operate—I don’t know you, I wouldn’t presume—but I sincerely hope that is not the case if we ever hope to have even a semblance of a productive conversation.
by milesvp | 2025-09-26 18:51:08+00:00
I've thought about this a lot, and wonder if the last mile problem could be lessened with an uber style pickup you suggest. I have a civil engineer relative who follows this stuff better than I do, and he says all the pilot programs he's seen (in the US) tend to be wildly unprofitable.

That said, I think that some program like this is essential to bootstrapping a really good transit system. The last mile problem really does stop a lot of would be commuters and is a huge, largely hidden cost, in regional transit planning. You could have fewer, more reliable trunks, that can run less reliably after core commuting hours, all because you have ways of alleviating the pain associated with difficulty getting to out of the way places. This allows people to make life decisions that they might not otherwise be able to make. And once you have a solid core, you can continue to grow it, by continuing to encourage long term ridership. Couple this with increasingly aggressive zoning changes to allow for density, and I think you could really grow out a transit system in 10-20 years.

But this is a fantasy of mine. It would likely be wildly unpopular to run an unprofitable program long enough to make all of this possible, and would probably only work in regions that have the potential for good transit anyways. You'd also need a large cohort of YIMBYs, that while currently growing in many regions, aren't guaranteed to still vote that way in a decade when they have more to lose.
by cdrini | 2025-09-26 18:51:08+00:00
I would say too soon to tell. There has been an uptick in ebook slop, but I'm not sure if it's impacted the homogeneity of literature, because I don't think anyone is reading ai ebooks. It's not enough for it to exist to impact culture, it has to be being consumed.

Music is a uniquely interesting case, since music has a much lower barrier of entry to consume.
by trod1234 | 2025-09-26 18:51:49+00:00
Doesn't this inherent problem just come down to classic computational limits, and problems that have been largely considered impossible to solve for quite a long time; between determinism and non-determinism.

Can you ever expect a deterministic finite automata to ever solve problems that are within the NFA domain? Halting, Incompleteness, Undecidability (between code portions and data portions). Most posts seem to neglect the looming giant problems instead pretending they don't exist at first, and then being shocked when the problems happen. Quite blind.

Computation is just math, probabilistic systems fail when those systems have a mixture of both chaos and regularity, without determinism and its related properties at the control level you have nothing bounding the system to constraints so it functions mathematically (i.e. determinism = mathematical relabeling), and thus it fails.

People need to be a bit more rational, and risk manage, and realize that impossible problems exist, and just because the benefits seem so tantalizing doesn't mean you should put your entire economy behind a false promise. Unfortunately, when resources are held by the few this is more probabistically likely and poor choices greatly impact larger swathes than necessary.
by Rooster61 | 2025-09-26 18:51:57+00:00
You could easily incorporate some of the jokers from Balatro. Just use a coin flip (or a shuffled Ace-Deuce stack) to represent binary numbers. Then just index whatever jokers from Balatro work with a standard deck and do a random lookup when you buy one with tokens.

You'd of course need to adjust the difficulty scale, but I think that's a good bit more variety than plain Solatro.
by Aunche | 2025-09-26 18:52:05+00:00
Modern MBA videos are like ChatGPT. They sound reasonable when he's talking about something you don't know, but you'll notice him getting basic facts wrong in topics that you're familiar with. For example, he diagnoses the growth of public storage as people from single family homes to apartments in big cities and having no place to store their things, citing that America's urbanization rate has increased. However, the increased urbanization was actually driven by the growth of suburbs and actually, home sizes actually significantly increased during that period.
by robots0only | 2025-09-26 18:52:18+00:00
so their way to differentiate against frontier labs is to try writing research blog posts (not papers). It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't think that anyone serious about developing frontier models would be putting anything useful out there for others. We already see this with all the incumbents -- Google, OAI, Anthropic, xAI, DeepSeek and other chinese labs.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-09-26 18:52:47+00:00
Yes, they're empty, but it's also a catch 22 because it takes urbanization, frequent bus services, and a lot of time for people to adjust to it. Anyone who spent enough time in Europe can tell you about how efficient, convenient, and efficient a bus network can get. Also, most people go to work, so buses tend to be very busy in the morning and at shift changes etc.

It's not magic though, there are a lot of places where buses simply will not work and we need to find better ways to improve mobility. I don't have the slightest idea how, it's a generational effort.
by danabramov | 2025-09-26 18:52:52+00:00
That’s correct. PLC is being split into an independent entity but that is ongoing: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org

It’s worth noting that PLC can’t fake your data because each edit is recursively signed. So you can verify a chain of updates. However, PLC can in theory deny you service or ignore your updates.
by fair_enough | 2025-09-26 18:54:30+00:00
You're right if you're only looking at peak sequential throughput. However, and this is the part that the author could have emphasized more, the impressive part is their strategy for dealing with disk access latency to improve random read throughput.

They shard the data as you might expect of a RAID, 5, 6, etc array and the distributed parity solves the problem of failure tolerance as you would expect and also improves bandwidth via parallelism as you describe.

The interesting part is their best strategy for sharding the data: plain-old-simple random. The decision of which disks and at which sectors to shard the data is done at random, and this creates the best change that at least one of the two copies of data can be accessed with much lower latency (~1ms instead of ~8ms).

The most crude, simple approach turns out to give them the best mileage. There's something vaguely poetic about it, an aesthetic beauty reminiscent of Euler's Identity or the solution to the Basel Problem; a very simple statement with powerful implications.
by indigodaddy | 2025-09-26 18:55:23+00:00
General statistical question. If we say extend the coin flip example distribution to say 10B times. Should/would we expect to see a streak of 100 or even 1000 in the distribution somewhere? Intuition alone tells me probably not for 1000 but a smallish chance for 100 (even if 10B in a row i would think a streak of 100 would be unlikely)