MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-09-04 02:05:55+00:00
> Lots of chemists and physicists like to talk about computation without having any background in it.

I'm confused. Physicists deal with computation all the time. Are you confusing computation with programming? There's a big difference. Physicists and chemists are frequently at odds with the limits of computability. Remember, Turing, Church, and even Knuth obtained degrees in mathematics. The divide isn't so clear cut and there's lots of overlaps. I think if you go look at someone doing their PhD in Programming Languages you could easily be mistake them for a mathematician.

Looking at the authors I don't see why this is out of their domain. Succi[0] looks like he deals a lot with fluid dynamics and has a big focus on Lattice Boltzmann. Modern fluid dynamics is all about computability and its limits. There's a lot of this that goes into the Navier–Stokes problem (even Terry Tao talks about this[1]), which is a lot about computational reproducibility.

Coveney[2] is a harder read for me, but doesn't seem suspect. Lots of work in molecular dynamics, so shares a lot of tools with Succi (seems like they like to work together too). There's a lot of papers there, but sorting by year there's quite a few that scream "limits of computability" to me.

I can't make strong comments without more intimate knowledge of their work, but nothing here is a clear red flag. I think you're misinterpreting because this is a position paper, written in the style you'd expect from a more formal field, but also is kinda scatterd. I've only done a quick read, -- don't get me wrong, I have critiques -- but there's no red flags that warrant quick dismissal. (My background: physicist -> computational physics -> ML) There's things they are pointing to that are more discussed within the more mathematically inclined sides of ML (it's a big field... even if only a small subset are most visible). I'll at least look at some of their other works on the topic as it seems they've written a few papers.

[0] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XrI0ffIAAAAJ

[1] I suspect this well above the average HN reader, but pay attention to what they mean by "blowup" and "singularity" https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/navier-stokes-equations/

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_G6FZ6YAAAAJ
by neffy | 2025-09-04 02:06:01+00:00
No, it´s really not - it's exactly what they are. Multi-dimensional pattern matching machines, using massive databases put together from resources like stack overflow, Clegg's (every cheaters go to for assignment answers, massive copyright theft etc.). If that wasn´t the case, there wouldn't be jobs right now writing answers to feed into the databases.

And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this material is paywalled or blocked from search engines. It´s less useful when you look at code examples that mix different versions of python, and have comments referring to figures on the previous page. I´m afraid it becomes very obvious when you look under the hood at the training sets themselves, just how this is all being achieved.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-04 02:07:40+00:00
>What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.

> You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself.

If that's what it means, I don't think it makes sense, because the point of taking away the money was to reduce the ability of the rich to unduly control and influence others. If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-04 02:07:53+00:00
A less urban but not rural part of California.

I do tend to shop at low-margin places like WinCo Foods. There's also an auction house I buy big ticket items from. Both charge credit card fees. I've never seen a gas station anywhere in the US not charge extra for credit cards, and most also charge extra for debit cards. The DMV also charges a fee. I don't know if Grocery Outlet charges a fee, but I do shop there too.

Also, pretty much every recurring charge I have, e.g. from T-Mobile, Comcast, and my water supplier and mortgage processor all charge credit card fees, if I use a card instead of ACH transfers.
by Straw | 2025-09-04 02:07:59+00:00
This is utter nonsense.

There's a formal equivalence between Markov chains and literally any system. The entire world can be viewed as a Markov chain. This doesn't tell you anything of interest, just that if you expand state without bound you eventually get the Markov property.

Why can't an LLM do backtracking? Not only within its multiple layers but across token models as reasoning models already do.

You are a probabilistic generative model (If you object, all of quantum mechanics is). I guess that means you can't do any reasoning!
by crooked-v | 2025-09-04 02:09:52+00:00
I think it's a reference to awards miles/points... but that's definitely not "for free", you're paying for it with the 2%-3% markup imposed by the merchant processing companies and at the baseline just getting that same amount back on the other side. With that said, with some careful finagling you can get outsized value out of it, especially for flight or hotel upgrades.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-09-04 02:10:30+00:00
> It is not an issue of speech, but whether the grant implements the goals the administration has.

Oh yes? And what goals are those, exactly?

> regarding discrimination against Jewish students and faculty

It's funny that you make this assertion, because, and this is a quote:

> Nowhere in the April 3 Letter did the government ... identify any specific instances of antisemitism on Harvard's campus, or ... specify how Harvard failed to respond to any such acts of antisemitism in a way that violated Title VI.

and then we can quote

> Once again, nowhere in the April 11 Letter did the government ... identify any specific instances of antisemitism on Harvard's campus, or... specify how Harvard failed to respond to any such acts of antisemitism in a way that violated Title VI.

and then we can quote

> The April 14 Freeze Order ... also did not identify any specific instances of antisemitism on Harvard's campus or specify how Harvard’s actions violated Title VI.

and then we can quote

> Once again, nowhere in the May 5 Freeze Order did the government ... identify any specific instances of antisemitism on Harvard's campus, or ... specify how Harvard failed to respond to any such acts of antisemitism in a way that violated Title VI.

and then we can quote

> There is no obvious link between the affected projects and antisemitism. By way of example (although by no means an exhaustive list), Defendants have ordered immunologists overseeing a multi-school tuberculosis consortium to immediately stop research, a researcher at the Wyss Institute to halt his development of an advanced chip designed to measure NASA astronauts' radiation exposure during the upcoming Artemis II mission to the moon, and another Wyss Institute scientist, a recipient of the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, to cease his research into Lou Gehrig’s disease. Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs have begun the process of cutting funding for research into, among other life-saving measures, "a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized."

Surprising to say the least that these projects are not "goals the administration has".
by asciimike | 2025-09-04 02:11:30+00:00
I'll bring up a cool additional option in this space: https://gaggimate.eu/

Less fully featured, but more open (Gaggiuino became closed source post people profiting off the OSS).

I'll also pitch another fun OSS project I sponsored a few years back to build an OSS pressure sensor and 0.1g scale: https://github.com/rhit-coultabm/Consistent-Cups-Espresso-Ac...

Since then it looks like Decent has OSS'ed the DecentScale: https://github.com/decentespresso/openscale
by edoceo | 2025-09-04 02:13:01+00:00
Typically they start with something like: by using this $SERVICE you AGREE to blah-blah-blah ($X)

If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar.

The terms might be shit. But if you agree to shit terms you should be bound by shit terms. In the olden days: "I gave my word as a gentleman and a scholar" or "a deals a deal, even with a dirty dealer"[0].

Going back on a deal is not ethical; end of.

[0] I think it from Futurama.
by localbuilder | 2025-09-04 02:13:02+00:00
> There’s one issue with this, you’ll have to be careful to keep the “N – 1” interactions updated whenever you make some changes because you will be “simulating” something that will never happen again in your agent.

This is the biggest problem I've encountered with evals for agents so far. Especially with agents that might do multiple turns of user input > perform task > more user input > perform another task > etc.

Creating evals for these flows has been difficult because I've found mocking the conversation to a certain point runs into the drift problem you highlighted as the system changes. I've also explored using an LLM to create dynamic responses to points that require additional user input in E2E flows, which adds its own levels of complexity and indeterministic behavior. Both approaches are time consuming and difficult to setup in their own ways.
by glenstein | 2025-09-04 02:13:03+00:00
>Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process

I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses.

I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.
by fsckboy | 2025-09-04 02:13:11+00:00
>There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another.

what's it like to be a human?

"There's no "whats its like to be a human". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another." -- anon-3988

it does?
by LMMojo | 2025-09-04 02:13:13+00:00
I have a Mobiscribe, which is about this same size. I would like something closer to Letter size, but the smaller size is really handy for handheld use. I can easily hold the Mobiscribe in the palm of my hand and do work (typing on a keyboard, working a screwdriver, pounding my head against a wall) and not have to worry about fumbling my Mobiscribe. Do I think the price point on this Remarkable device is correct? Nope. I wouldn't buy it at this price.
by la64710 | 2025-09-04 02:13:59+00:00
AI taking jobs is the biggest bullshit and hype the world has ever seen that been pushed by the likes of Salesforce etc to tell their customers: Look out AI product is so good that we used it ourselves to cut our own workforce. And inside the company walls they whisper to each other : our AI product is such crap that it is really useless and the only way to sell it is to credit our AI for tha layoff and hiring freeze we are doing anyway.
by bbkane | 2025-09-04 02:14:57+00:00
Looking forward to the second blog!

As a side project, I'm writing a CLI to tie environment variables to project directories ( https://github.com/bbkane/enventory ) and share env vars between projects with a "reference" system. Similar to direnv but in a central SQLite DB.

See https://github.com/bbkane/enventory/tree/master/dbdoc for how the schema looks, but it's a few tables with foreign keys to each other to support the "reference" system.

Unfortunately those foreign keys mean I don't have a way to "undo" changes easily. So instead I added a confirmation prompt, but I'd still like that undo button.

Hopefully in subsequent blog posts you can follow up on your "Model an example domain of sufficient complexity" TODO and make this a bit less abstract (and hopefully more understandable) to me.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-04 02:15:35+00:00
Yep. For some reason everyone assumes that jobs in the US live in a closed system. In reality, things that can be moved abroad to save 20% of costs will be moved this way or the other.

I don’t know why everyone remembers how the manufacturing went to China, and at the same time forgets about it when we are talking about office jobs.
by geoduck14 | 2025-09-04 02:15:43+00:00
>Myself and some other people pay their cards off every month but that isn't the norm. Many people keep a balance

I've heard this statistic a lot, but I haven't seen any recent evidence it is true. I used to work for a bank, and our Credit Card holders would (mostly) pay off their balance every month.

We called them Transactors vs Revolvers. 85% of our CC were Transactors, and some of them would pay down multiple times a month
by Aurornis | 2025-09-04 02:15:43+00:00
I don't think it's as big of a factor as the parent comment, but I witness a lot of extremely weird DEI related hiring things in 2020-2022.

C-level executives would flag certain job openings as only eligible for women or minorities. I clearly remember a meeting where our CTO declared that he had rejected an extremely qualified male candidate because "we have enough of those".

When some people complained they started hiding the details, but it was still obvious. There would be hiring rounds where the only candidates coming from HR were dozens of women for a specific role. After interviewing all of them and giving several second chances we couldn't find anyone qualified in that batch of candidates, so there was a very tense meeting where we were heavily pressured to just pick one.

You could tell a lot of the candidates involved in this process were catching on and/or being pandered to and they really didn't like it either.
by quantummagic | 2025-09-04 02:16:02+00:00
What if the causation had simply been that he enjoyed cereal for breakfast?

In either case, the results are the same, he's eating cereal for breakfast. We can know this fact without knowing the underlying cause. Many times, we don't even know the cause of things we choose to do for ourselves, let alone what others do.

On top of which, even if you think the "cause" is that the doctor told him to eat a healthy diet, do you really know the actual cause? Maybe the real cause, is that the girl he fancies, told him he's not in good enough shape. The doctor telling him how to get in shape is only a correlation, the real cause is his desire to win the girl.

These connections are vast and deep, but they're all essentially the same type of knowledge, representable by the same data structures.
by mercutio2 | 2025-09-04 02:17:06+00:00
Can you point to these studies?

Anyone who gives a 3% discount for cash will get cash from me, but I already have all my money in index funds. The effort to maximize points is “use this credit card, get the cash back”.

It’s really not that much effort, for rich people with excellent credit. It is of course a hugely regressive system, but that wasn’t the argument you made.
by al_borland | 2025-09-04 02:17:34+00:00
Remember that the credit card companies wouldn’t offer points if they weren’t profitable. People tend to spend more on a credit card than they do with cash, and it’s not enough to make up with points.

I’m generally a pretty responsible credit user. I pay the whole bill each month and never paid a dime in interest. But I’d be lying if I said I never justified a slightly larger purchase that I would have otherwise made by calculating the “discount” from the points. Doing this just one time on a modestly large purchase can effectively negate all the points you might earn in a given year.

I found even moving to a debit card helped in two ways. One, the point game goes away. But I think more importantly, when spending on a debit card you see the balance go down, so there is an instant and clear impact of the expense. With a credit card the number goes up, and you have to invert it and do the math in your head to feel the expense in the moment, which most people don’t do. And when people look at their bank balance at it hasn’t moved, they think they still have that money to spend. It’s subtle, you might not realize it, but those are the games they play. I’ve probably saved more money from simply spending less, than I would make in points.

I do keep one credit card around that I use for my recurring online payments. These are set it and forget it, so the psychology plays less of a role, as far as I can tell. And I review all the stuff on that recurring list on a regular basis to keep it lean. I have to spend $5k to make $100 in points. Who cares? It’s a lot easier to trim $200 or even $500 out of $5k in terms of spending, if I’m really looking to maximize my savings. Not to mention, the points aren’t cash in your pocket, they are an excuse to spend even more.

Let’s say I have points to get a free flight. Great, now I’m also spending money out of pocket on a hotel, meals, entertainment, etc. That “free” $600 plane ticket actually costs $5k in other expenses, but it’s ok, because we’re earning $100 more in points for spending that $5k.

It’s a trap. It’s subtle, it might feel like a win, but they’re coming at you from several different angles. It’s not just about the people paying interest on their balance. They make about as much on the interchange fees from high volume users as they do from those interest payments. Those points are also a trick to get you to swipe more to boost their interchange fee profits.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-09-04 02:17:48+00:00
The idea is kind of cool, but just doesn't seem useful enough to justify a very expensive dedicated device. For the same price you could buy both an ipad, a matte screen protector, and a real notepad and pen. The ipad does all of the tech significantly better, and the physical notepad is a more enjoyable physical writing experience.

The product seemed to be mostly aimed at tech bros with more money than they know what to do with.
by decimalenough | 2025-09-04 02:18:04+00:00
The "standard" in question here is NTT Docomo's Osaifu-Keitai, which is used only in Japan and requires both licensing and a special flavor of Sony's Felica chip:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai

I can't really fault Android manufacturers for not wanting to pay extra for every phone in the world to get a bit of proprietary tech that's completely useless outside Japan.
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-04 02:18:57+00:00
Over the years, a few devs have temp soft bricked cams, requiring various non-standard methods to restore them to working order. I think all attempts succeeded so far! I don't think any permanent physical damage has been triggered by devs. It is definitely a real risk, but we try to work with the OS when possible, and the OS was written to try to make these things hard.

I don't think I'd want to learn the ropes on a cam too expensive to psychologically say goodbye to. Maybe save that for the second port.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-04 02:19:09+00:00
This understates the complexity of the problem. I have built a career modeling/learning entity behavior in the physical world at scale. Language is almost a trivial case by comparison.

Even the existence of most relationships in the physical world can only be inferred, never mind dimensionality. The correlations are often weak unless you are able to work with data sets that far exceed the entire corpus of all human text, and sometimes not even then. Language has relatively unambiguous structure that simply isn't the norm in real space-time data models. In some cases we can't unambiguously resolve causality and temporal ordering in the physical world. Human brains aren't fussed by this.

There is a powerful litmus test for things "AI" can do. Theoretically, indexing and learning are equivalent problems. There are many practical data models for which no scalable indexing algorithm exists in literature. This has an almost perfect overlap with data models that current AI tech is demonstrably incapable of learning. A company with novel AI tech that can learn a hard data model can demonstrate a zero-knowledge proof of capability by qualitatively improving indexing performance of said data models at scale.

Synthetic "world models" so thoroughly nerf the computer science problem that they won't translate to anything real.
by moduspol | 2025-09-04 02:19:52+00:00
Perhaps, although there are multiple “2% on everything uncapped” that are pretty easy to get with no annual fee. Set up automatic payments and you’re golden.

Still wouldn’t recommend them for anyone who’s not particularly good with money, but 2% back for almost no effort is a pretty good trade-off. Keeping track of rotating quarterly bonuses? Yeah—-then it’s worth thinking about ROI of your time.
by tezza | 2025-09-04 02:21:21+00:00
“Where is the shovelware?”… It’s Coming!

Changing domain to writing and images and video you can see LinkedIn is awash with everyone generating everything by LLMs. The posting cadence has quickened too as people shout louder to raise their AI assisted voice over other people’s.

We’ve all seen and heard the AI images and video tsunami

So why not software (yet but soon)??

Firstly, Software often has a function and AI tool creations cannot make that work. Lovable/Bolt etc are too flakey to live up to their text to app promises. A shedload of horror debugging or a lottery win of luck is required to fashion an app out of that. This will improve over time but the big question is, by enough?

And secondly, like on LinkedIn above: perhaps the standards of the users will drop? LinkedIn readers now tolerate the llm posts, it is not a mark of shame. Will the same reduction in standards in software users open the door to good-enough shovelware?
by WillDaSilva | 2025-09-04 02:21:44+00:00
I was able to get a Pasmo card as an alternative to Suica, and it was rechargable with cash. I also did the same with an Icoca card. I didn't need a Japanese address in either case. I just bought the cards from machines at a couple of the larger metro stations. They could be reloaded with cash at any metro station.
Show HN: Tally, but with Lead Attribution
by hankor | 2025-09-04 02:21:55+00:00
Built a side project called INFORMS, basically forms + lead attribution.

I noticed marketers spend $$$ on ads but still can’t answer the basic: “Which channel brought this lead?” With INFORMS, every form submission comes with the user’s journey and source out of the box. No GA setup, no tagging headache.

Curious what folks here think.
by keeda | 2025-09-04 02:22:36+00:00
Also offshoring, which ramped up after COVID, probably because companies realized remote work can work at scale.

> 25% musk (getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping)

That was just a signal to the rest of the capital class that the labor class had gotten too big for their britches and needed to be shown their place. Twitter and all other companies that followed his lead have devolved into toxic cultures due to fewer staff being burdened with more work and asked to "be scrappy" and "do more with less."
by OJFord | 2025-09-04 02:22:46+00:00
I don't need this to be minimal, I'd love it to be the one true solution, niche requirements excepted.

I'm currently still using vim pack with git submodules because I can't be bothered to trawl through tens of GitHub projects to work out what's the best supported / most liked / currently recommended third-party nvim package manager.