MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-02 22:00:31+00:00
I don't think it's a computer science claim to begin with. To my knowledge nobody has ever broken 256-bit AES, but that's not the part of the system that fails. There are two things that prevent it from working in practice:

The first is that "us" would be something like "governments in the US"; but then that's too big of an organization to sustain as free from compromise. There are tens of thousands of judges in the US, well over a million police and military. All it takes is one of them to be corrupt or incompetent or lazy and the bad guys get to use the skeleton keys to everything in the world, which can unlock secrets worth billions or get people killed. And that's assuming they only compromise the authorization system; if they actually gets the keys it's practically armageddon.

And the second is that it's not just one government. If the UK makes Apple and Google build a system to unlock anybody's secrets, is Australia not going to want access? Is China? Let's suppose we're not going to give access to Russia; can the fallible humans operating this system fend off every attack once the FSB has been ordered to secure access by any mean necessary?

It's a system that combines many points of compromise with an overwhelming incentive for everyone from state-level attackers to organized crime to break in and severe consequences when they do.
by crawshaw | 2025-09-02 22:00:34+00:00
> All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents

The model leaders here are OpenAI and Anthropic, two new companies. In the programming space, the next leaders are Qwen and DeepSeek. The one incumbent is Google who trails all four for my workloads.

In the DevTools space, a new startup, Cursor, has muscled in on Microsoft's space.

This is all capital heavy, yes, because models are capital heavy to build. But the Innovator's Dilemma persists. Startups lead the way.
by thayne | 2025-09-02 22:01:05+00:00
> “Google is permitted to pay browser developers, like Apple,” he said in the decision. However, the partner company must promote other search engines, offer a different option in various operating systems or in privacy mode, and are allowed to make changes to the default search settings annually, Mehta wrote.

From https://archive.is/GJWPP#selection-1579.0-1579.309

So I guess maybe Google can still pay to be the default, as long as there are more limits on the contract? But I suspect those limits are going to result in lower payments.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-02 22:01:37+00:00
I'm not too familiar with Python async. The only time I used it was to get stderr and stdout out of a subprocess.run() separately. I think anyone using it for performance reasons is insane and should just switch to a more performant language.

Anyway I think the main difference is that in Python you control the event loop whereas in JS there's one fixed event loop and you have no choice about it.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-02 22:01:53+00:00
> They're extremely intertwined and often practically the same thing.

Well, no? You can have a valid status but without right to work. For example, B1/2 or F-2 visas.

> They become an "illegal migrant" for continuing to work to pay for groceries and rent while not having a lawful status allowing such activity.

This is not true. Working without authorization is simply that: unauthorized employment. By itself it does not lead to become an illegal immigrant. However, it can jeopardize future changes in status, etc.

> Good job showing your true colors.

What?

> I know of people that struggled in this exact scenario in the 90s and 2000s, and I was only a child at the time.

Which are what?

> Maybe we should have passed that immigration bill the orange man said no to which would have actually funded processing the workload.

Biden could have done it during his term in 2020-22: he had both the senate and the house. Yet, he didn’t. It’s extremely naive to think that lack of reform is due to Trump. No party is interested in changing the status quo. Especially, if you consider how anti illegal immigration the Democratic Party was pre 2021 or so (enough to watch Bernie’s interviews pre 2020).
by ericmay | 2025-09-02 22:01:59+00:00
Regarding Paris it’s probably a matter of convenience too. Why not sign on to all this stuff if you’re going to build solar anyway to reduce your commodity dependency exposure as you prep for Taiwan?

You can think about this as if China had access to the same oil reserves or oil markets as the US does, would they behave differently? Absolutely.

Separately I think eliminating pollution is more along the lines of their country just doing good things for their people. Climate change stances and whatnot I don’t think are the same, nor are the intentions.
by sothatsit | 2025-09-02 22:02:39+00:00
I have noticed it hallucinating links when it can't find any relevant documentation at all, but otherwise it is pretty good. And yes, I do check them.

The type of search you are doing probably matters a lot here as well. I use it to find documentation for software I am already moderately familiar with, so noticing the hallucinations is not that difficult. Although, hallucinations are pretty rare for this type of "find documentation for XYZ thing in ABC software" query. Plus, it usually doesn't take very long to verify the information.

I did get caught once by it mentioning something was possible that wasn't, but out of probably thousands of queries I've done at this point, that's not so bad. Saying that, I definitely don't trust LLMs in any cases where information is subjective. But when you're just talking about fact search, hallucination rates are pretty low, at least for GPT-5 Thinking (although still non-zero). That said, I have also run into a number of problems where the documentation is out-of-date, but there's not much an LLM could do about that.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-02 22:02:48+00:00
This is all factually accurate. If you're a renter, see if your utility offers a community solar option. This enables you to get economic savings and exposure to solar without installing a system yourself. If you're a homeowner, in many cases, the return on investment (depending on installation cost) is under 10 years (after which your power is free for the life of the system, which will exceed 25 years). It should be compared to a bond return/investment (assuming cash purchase vs financing or a lease).

https://seia.org/initiatives/community-solar/
by rmonvfer | 2025-09-02 22:02:50+00:00
I’d like to add: keep some kind of development documentation where you describe in detail the patterns and architecture of your application and it’s components.

I’ve seen incredible improvements just by doing this and using precise prompting to get Claude to implement full services by itself, tests included. Of course it requires manual correction later but just telling Claude to check the development documentation before starting work on a feature prevents most hallucinations (that and telling it to use the Context7 MCP for external documentation), at least in my experience.

The downside to this is that 30% of your context window will be filled with documentation but hey, at least it won’t hallucinate API methods or completely forget that it shouldn’t reimplement something.

Just my 2 cents.
by dspillett | 2025-09-02 22:03:47+00:00
> Just to create document fragments?

Largely, I think. Though I've not got around to actually using them yet myself, so take my understanding with a pinch of salt.

Compared to doing that with non-displayed HTML tags outside a template there are performance benefits (the parser deals with it differently knowing it isn't intended to be an active bit of DOM yet) and convenience benefits (IIRC the contents are not going to be picked up by querySelector/querySelectorAll).

Compared to building document fragments in JS they can be a lot more convenient to create and edit, and keep your design and code less tightly coupled (so a designer on your team who doesn't want to touch JS (or who you don't want messing with your JS!) can easily play with them to a certain extent). Other methods to achieve the same separation may involve an extra build step in deploying your work.
by nine_zeros | 2025-09-02 22:03:48+00:00
> They don't care about the climate, but will happily play the optics

It is not just optics or energy independence. There is a genuine effort to reduce pollution. People forget in 00s media used to bash the smog in China. It was an unlivable air. They truly wanted to transform it - it just so happens that renewables solve a lot of problems simultaneously.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-09-02 22:04:18+00:00
I see two of nineteen investors were also invested in FTX (Insight and Ontario teachers). With hindsight that's a bad investment although they probably recovered their money here so probably not their worst. Does this actually tell you they are stupid or insane?

I think that's one possible interpretation but another is that these funds choose to allocate a controlled portion of their capital toward high risk investments with the expectation that many will fail but some will pay off. It's far from clear that they are crazy or stupid.
by pydry | 2025-09-02 22:05:13+00:00
"Middle of the road" politics will only become popular again if it stops being broken, corrupted and co-opted.

It doesnt seem to want to fix itself, either.

So, more extremism is inevitable.

Far right extremism will prevail though. As the plutocracy gradually gives up on "moderate liberal" politics it will throw its weight behind the far right.
by boris-potapov | 2025-09-02 22:05:14+00:00
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

Remote: Yes (hybrid is also possible)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Java, Kotlin, Docker, Kubernetes, SQL, NoSQL, Azure, Python, Haskell, Elixir

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jdTTxZmQHj8yxPau1I-voOJ2...

Email: borispotapov98@gmail.com

Backend engineer with experience building and evolving microservices and distributed systems. Passionate about exploring new approaches, prototyping quickly, and turning ideas into stable solutions. Worked with high-volume data (40M+ records, 450+ req/sec) and streamlined architectures. Interested in developer tools and emerging technologies that help products move faster.
by JadeNB | 2025-09-02 22:05:20+00:00
I think that, to be frank, it's a combination of (1) a curriculum developed before it was clear how ubiquitous linear algebra would become, and (2) the fact that it's a lot easier to come up with a standardized assessment for algorithmic calculus than for linear algebra, precisely because linear algebra is both conceptual and proof-based in a way that has been squeezed out of algorithmic calculus.

(I use algorithmic calculus to describe the high-school subject, and distinguish it from what in American universities is usually called "analysis," where one finally has the chance to make the acquaintance of the conceptual and proof-based aspects squeezed out of algorithmic calculus.)
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-02 22:05:55+00:00
> And they onboarded more coal plants in 2024 than any time in the prev 10 years:

Which is a statistic missing the forest for the trees.

In 2025 the Chinese coal consumption has in absolute terms decreased while they have kept building.

New built renewables are able to both absorb all new demand and reduce coal usage.

Sure, it would be better to not build coal plants sitting idle and instead spend the money on renewables and storage.

Through selectively quoting facts you make it seem like China is expanding their coal usage which is incorrect.
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-02 22:05:59+00:00
The mask thing is a lie. There's plenty of contradictory statements in news media that the mouth covers that people had were absolutely useless and for show but "looking compliant" was the important part. They went back and forth on the N95 one.

You just repeated the propaganda so much that you're not able to interact with reality.

The rest is just ramblings.

Not even the politicians that screwed you over followed their theater.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-09-02 22:06:10+00:00
That Searlesque syntax/semantics dichotomy isn't as clear cut as it once was. Yes, programs operate syntactically. But when semantics is assigned to particular syntactic structures, as it is with word embeddings, the computer is then able to operate on semantics through its facility with syntax. These old standard thought patterns need to be reconsidered in the age of LLMs.
by speff | 2025-09-02 22:06:16+00:00
Elden Ring is currently $15 cheaper on GameBillet compared to Steam[0] - it even comes with a Steam activation key. If Valve did the same thing, sites like isthereanydeal.com wouldn't really have as much of a purpose.

[0]: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/elden-ring/info/
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-02 22:06:23+00:00
> Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.

Class actions, as an alternative to the normal direct action lawsuits, are an accommodation in the legal system for economy of justice; a class that is too diverse in how they are situated with respect to the issues raised (which is a more accurate summary than the article’s “too large” for Amazon’s argument) negate that function.

I’m not saying the court ruled incorrectly on Amazon’s argument, just that the article is misleading on what the argument actually is.
by everforward | 2025-09-02 22:06:44+00:00
In a narrow view, this is true, but from a wider viewpoint Microsoft has few competitors in the "one stop shop for your big business needs" sense.

Google has made some progress here, but doesn't seem interested in a bunch of important spaces (e.g. they have Docs, but don't have anything like Active Directory or Sharepoint that I know of).

Microsoft is also often the default vendor, since virtually every big company has contracts with them for Windows and Office (at least) already.
by Sammi | 2025-09-02 22:07:17+00:00
That seems to be a strongly held position of Rich himself. He really really wants people to default to ssr with hydration, which they can only deliver with Sveltekit. The new direction they have with a new simpler rpc-like way of loading data that replaces the existing load functions, does seem like they are working in the direction of making Sveltekit simpler to work with. They don't seem like they are trending in a direction of deeper integration with one hosting vendor. Also they've always had one single abstraction for integrating with hosting options, which gives all hosting options a level playing field.
by larodi | 2025-09-02 22:07:46+00:00
I didn't say one does not to discover the causal relationships, but once discovered, such relationships can be explored and followed and _inferred_ on in a very syllogistic manner. My comment was really about the proposal in the article.

On the other hand, what we seem to have with LLM models, and the transformer approach in particular, is a sort of probable statistical correlation, calculated by brute-forcing and approximation (the gradient descent). So this is not true causation also, it becomes one only after a human observes it and agrees it follows certain causality.

/Not sure whether I can state that it is also material but in another non-logical sense, perhaps would sound nonsensical, but the apparent logical structure in the LLM production rather emerges from training patterns, not from explicit logical operations./

There's nothing wrong having a graphical structure which models causality, and of course - this needs to be discovered first. But then we have LZW/Sequitur using very brute-force way in order to find the minimal grammar for compressing certain data lossless-ly, thus discovering some logical structure (and correlation), but this is not yet causation. Indeed finding patterns != finding causal relationships.

My gut feeling is we want something that would result in a correct PROLOG-like set of inference rules, but based on actual causality, not conflating correlation. And then this - for a larger corpus - world's knowledge, but we don't have the means (yet) to figure out the correlation, even though approaches exist for smaller corpus.

It is perhaps the gradient descent and the fact that this composition of tensor algebra is differentiable that is the ingenious thing about the ML we deal with now, but everyone is dreaming of some magic algo which would allow finding the causation so that it results in non-probabilistic graphical model, or at least a model that we can follow the stochastic branching on in a observable manner.

It is indeed ingenious to fold multi-dimensional spaces, multiple times, in order to disambiguate the curvature of bunny's ear from the one of bear's ear. But it just does not feel right to do logic and causation by means of differential calculus and stochastic structures.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-09-02 22:08:08+00:00
It is satisfying to learn a "hard" skill like fast touch typing, effective stick-shift driving, playing musical instruments etc. I think really fast mental arithmetic is in the same category.. a skill practiced through much repetition and real motivation. It doesn't necessarily mean a smarter brain.

People will get good at something. In the modern distract-o-verse, perhaps few can muster the concentration any more to sit through a cerebral slow-paced movie, or read a whole book, or even a long well-written article without skimming (or, I suppose now, asking an LLM to summarize it in bullet form). But possibly today's crowd is good at filtering an amount of information noise that would have made past generations' heads explode.

And a physical skill that they have, that I with some of the old skills never will, is really effective interaction with smartphone app type UIs. I find them frustrating, and flee to the more traditional world of web interfaces on a big screen with keyboard and mouse. But I can see that younger folks don't really need those any more.
by chrisco255 | 2025-09-02 22:08:43+00:00
Before you drop a trillion dollars, you do a cost benefit analysis and you factor for switching costs, the unique geography and population distribution of the U.S. the expected lifespan of solar panels, the battery install capacity necessary to facilitate nighttime and 100 to 1000 year weather event emergencies, the capacity to keep the grid online in the event of a world war, the cost to install HV lines to transport from solar hubs, etc.

You don't dogmatically order $1 trillion of something and sacrifice a functional independent, diverse, weather resilient, geographically distributed energy grid thats served the nation that invented the light bulb for over 125 years, because you read a clickbait headline about China.
by docmars | 2025-09-02 22:08:54+00:00
I encourage everyone to apply the same reasoning to both sides, not just the one they dislike.

On the other hand, some really just want a gas stove, incandescent light bulbs, and air conditioning. Others just want to film their waiter getting their pronouns wrong live on TikTok so they get in trouble. Are these liberties too much to ask?

There's a certain irony in that each side views these scenarios as equally "bad", but for those in the middle, we'll let common sense decide.
by gruez | 2025-09-02 22:08:59+00:00
...or megacorps have functional legal departments to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff. Of the cases they actually get sued for, there's enough complexity and genuine question of law that they can't straightforwardly prosecuted. There's a reason why basically all states had to pass bills to reclassify gig work companies, rather than winning slam dunk cases with years of back pay.

In cases companies megacorps are clearly breaking laws, they're appropriately fined. eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767461

Maybe all of this basically cashes out to "the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change" to you, but to me this looks like a functioning legal system where defendants actually have a fair chance of winning.
by SabrinaJewson | 2025-09-02 22:09:35+00:00
English alternatives like “The staff enjoyed it later” or “The staff had the pleasure of eating it later” I would expect come across more euphemistic than normal to the average English-speaking viewer. So the question is whether the original was intentionally trying to come across euphemistic, or whether the original was using formal/polite language solely because of its position as being on TV.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-02 22:09:36+00:00
We had those tweaks. They got pulled back because they're inconvenient for capital owners. The fundamental problem is one of class divide: if you can draw a line between people helped by a policy and those harmed by it, and and power is concentrated on one of those sides, then they'll get their way eventually. Money is power. Therefore, if there's a policy that people with more money prefer then eventually that policy will be law. No amount of "keeping money out of politics" can get around this. You don't have to call it socialism if you don't want to, but if you want to be able to run a democracy that operates to the benefit of its people then the only way to make that stable is to enact whatever policies you need to ensure that a wealth gap and subsequent class divide doesn't form. A simple way to do that with minimal changes is to enact steep redistributive taxes that effectively cap individual wealth, and therefore individual influence gained through the market. An individual can still have power to change the world, but only through the democratic process. You still have money and a profit motive, but it can't get blown out to extremes. Basically put the economy through a sigmoid function. Market signals still work, but get weaker at high values, resulting in less extreme fluctuations and concentration of wealth.
by bluedevilzn | 2025-09-02 22:10:17+00:00
I moved from Canada to California for a new job with a mid six figure salary.

I had a very difficult time finding a place to rent as I had no credit score. Only places that were available without credit score was a room to share. That was not an option with a cat, wife and kids.

Finally, I found a place that was willing to accept the entire year's rent up front. Moving such a large amount of money from Canada to US had its own set of hurdles.

Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and Canadian driver's license were not acceptable proof of ID for the dealer.

On the flip side, my long history with Amex in Canada was ported over. So, they quickly set me up with very high limit credit cards.

We already live in social credit but I fear the ones maintained by companies might be better for the consumer.
by robocat | 2025-09-02 22:10:33+00:00
Perhaps AI would usually suggest childish or uneducated spelling mistakes.

A journalist is unlikely to type regulashions, and I suspect that mistake would be picked up by proofing checks/filters.

Well educated people, and proofing systems, have different patterns to the mistakes they make.

Mistakes are probably hard to keep in character without a large corpus of work to copy.

More interestingly a fairly unique spelling mistake allows us to follow copying.

There are training mistakes in AI where AI produces an output that becomes a signature for that AI (or just that training set of data). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031375 (thread about "Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6"

Unclosed parens to prove I'm a Real I)