MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mandevil | 2025-09-04 20:43:53+00:00
So, in the Cold War, when NATO would do conventional war games, they almost always lost. (1) At some point or another NATO ran out of troops and a Soviet tank army Operational Maneuver Group broke through and there were no NATO forces left to stop them.

At that point it becomes a political question: will the NATO political leaders (most importantly West Germany) allow the use of nuclear weapons on their own territory, killing their own civilians? (2) Some people thought that 'neutron bombs' were destabilizing because they made it more likely that, under those circumstances, the West German government would say "yes, let's go nuclear" and then that would lead to an escalation chain and pretty quickly it's Dr. Strangelove. (That all depends on the idea that a conventional NATO-Warsaw Pact war was even possible, which I'm not sure is true.)

But that's why some people made it such a big deal, they thought that a bomb that had almost no fall-out might lead to nuclear weapons use, it's the political not engineering consequences of deployment that worried them. The engineering is not the constraint, in fact it's actually barely easier to build one.

1: Looking at the capabilities that the Soviet Army was supposed to have, not necessarily the capabilities that they actually had, the Soviet Army should have crushed NATO conventionally from anytime ~1950 on. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine reminds us, armies are not always actually at the level they claim to be.

2: The French- who were sort of in and sort of out of the NATO command structure- answer to this question was the Pluton missile which was not capable of reaching East Germany, could only hit targets in West Germany (from bases in France- it was a mobile missile that could theoretically drive into West Germany, but... come on now). So they had the ability to engage targets in West Germany, and there was no question of their political leaders: they were 100% totally willing to nuke Germany rather than let Soviet troops conquer their country.
by wredcoll | 2025-09-04 20:44:05+00:00
> For business running the same code on their 1 node instead of N is not a replacement, because their counterparty has no reason to trust whatever is running on that 1 node

I mean, why are you doing this kind of business with someone where you can't even trust that?

Aside from that, block chains only provide trust if they're meaningfully decentralized. These hyper specific b2b ones seem unlikely to pass that test. Exactly who all is running verifier nodes?
by fraserharris | 2025-09-04 20:44:13+00:00
I majored in Engineering Physics with an EE focus. Our classes were scheduled so we took the dependent math courses a semester before the relevant EE topics (ie: learned Laplace & Fourier transformations before circuit analysis). The EE majors all took the related math & EE courses simultaneously and visibly struggled, with every class we took together having a bimodal grade distribution.
by krrishd | 2025-09-04 20:44:19+00:00
The status quo of cross-border, bank-to-bank money movement today is actually somewhat decentralized:

- SWIFT is really just a messaging protocol between a distributed, decentralized set of global banks that are all passing messages/money between each other. Your SWIFT wire might pass through an arbitrary number of correspondent banks, sort of like a flight route with multiple stops, until it reaches its destination.

- Consequently: money moves slowly (up to 5 days), is expensive to move (variable fees assessed either to the payor or payee, by every bank in the chain), and there is an indeterminate amount of manual ops burden, multiplied by every bank in the chain.

- As another commenter points out - services like Wise really just use massive amounts of liquidity spread out globally to try to minimize the number of true, bank-to-bank cross-border settlements required to get low-value payments from A -> B internationally.

Ironically, I think the great accomplishment of stablecoins is its "centralizing" of cross-border money movement into a single ledger -- reducing it to a "book transfer" of sorts -- where getting all the world's money to pass through a single ledger would otherwise be a very difficult (probably intractable) challenge _if it were not for_ the permissionless-ness + global neutrality of the blockchain that is tasked with doing so.

(I wrote about this in a slightly longer post here: https://text-incubation.com/The+great+irony+of+stablecoin)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-04 20:44:23+00:00
> If something can be accomplished on the blockchain, which requires N nodes, a business can probably replicate that same objective with less than N nodes because they don't have to pay the cost of verifying that nodes are acting honestly. This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business.

This is missing something important, which we can see by considering one of the major problems merchants want to solve right now.

The credit card companies charge them ~3% and then give ~1% back to the customer, implying that there is a ~2% net gain to be had by cutting out the middle man. So why hasn't this happened? Because the alternative with the lower fees is ACH, but customers are less willing to give out their bank account number than their credit card number to a random small business.

This is the easy case for some centralized service to fix it, right? Have some large trustworthy company take the customer's bank account info and transfer the money to the merchant for a very small processing fee. But this is the part where your assumption falls through. Once the merchant has signed up for this, the payment processor is the only one with the customer's payment info. In other words, it's hard to switch, and then the payment processor can charge higher fees (eroding the benefit) and the high switching costs also cause the market to consolidate. And because you're tied to a single payment processor, when their fraud AI has a false positive they can erase your business overnight by locking you out and not answering the phone.

Now suppose you don't have a centralized system. Instead, the customer acquires a store of value (Bitcoin, stablecoin, something else) however they want. Customer A can get it from Coinbase, Customer B can get it from Stripe, Customer C can get it by selling something on eBay and accepting it as payment, and the merchant doesn't have to do business with any of these third parties to accept payments from customers who do, because they all support the same transfer medium.

Now you have a competitive market. Currently a new payment processor has to earn the trust of a large enough percentage of the general public for merchants to be willing to use them; a new exchange would only need the trust of enough people to be doing enough business to cover their costs, a far lower threshold. If a merchant wants to switch payment processors or has a dispute with one of them, their own customers wouldn't have to do anything different because the means customers use to convert dollars to tokens is independent of the means merchants use to convert tokens to dollars.

> Someone has to pay those costs for the N nodes on the blockchain - who will it be?

That's the boring question. The interesting question is, can you have a blockchain with lower fees than payment processors currently have? And the answer appears to be yes, e.g. the transaction fee for Bitcoin Cash is around a penny.
by dadoum | 2025-09-04 20:44:25+00:00
> Europe can never compete in each wave of tech (mainframe > pc > internet > mobile > social > AI > etc.)

I would not dismiss the contribution of European companies to each one of this domains so quickly though. Especially on the mobile side, there was a time where Nokia/Siemens/Ericsson/Alcatel were big names in that industry.
by glenstein | 2025-09-04 20:45:40+00:00
>Not that it would offer any secret truths, but the ability to "sense" where objects are roughly, in 3d space, with low resolution and large margins of error, and narrow directionality... most of the people reading this comment would agree that they know what that feels like if they thought about it for a few seconds.

I don't think that's quite right. It's convenient that bats are the example here, because they build out their spacial sense of the world primarily via echolocation whereas humans (well, with some exceptions), do it visually. Snakes can infer directionality from heat signatures with their forked tongue, and people can do it with a fascinating automatic mechanism built into the brain that compares subtle differences in frequency from the left and right ears, keeping the data to itself but kicking the sense of direction "upstairs" into conscious awareness. There are different sensory paths to the same information, and evolution may be capable of any number of qualitative states unlike the ones we're familiar with.

Some people here even seem to think that consciousness is "basic" in a way that maps onto nothing empirical at all, which, if true, opens the pandoras box to any number of modes of being. But the point of the essay is to contrast this idea to other approaches to consciousness that are either (1) non-commital, (2) emphasize something else like "self awareness" or abstract reasoning, or (3) are ambiently appreciative of qualitative states but don't elevate them to fundamental or definitional necessity the way it's argued for in the essay.

The whole notion of a "hard" problem probably can be traced to this essay, which stresses that explanations need to be more than pointing to empirical correlates. In a sense I think the point is obvious, but I also think it's a real argument because it's contrasting that necessity to a non-commmital stance that I think is kind of a default attitude.
by jsiepkes | 2025-09-04 20:46:27+00:00
I wouldn't say it was rubbish, but I will say I was disappointed with it (as a life long XCOM fan). Primarily because the microgame (tactical squad based combat) was good but the macro game (the strategical game in the world overview) was weak. Base building was basically non-existent compared to the original XCOM games. Instead you stumbled across existing bases and "build" on of 3 facilities in them. The research tree was weak. A DLC introduced the "shooting down UFO's"-mechanic but overall all of the DLC was just focused on more different enemies and story lines and did very little to improve the worldview game.
by zahlman | 2025-09-04 20:46:47+00:00
> Less customer service employees at call centers, replaced by lengthy, egregiously pedantic AI systems.

Is this actually worse than being on hold forever to talk to someone following a script?

> Some fast food places are replacing employees with an AI drive through.

What, as in it transcribes your order with Whisper and tries to upsell you through ChatGPT? One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle, I guess. The kiosks inside the store might be vibe-coded now but at least I get a traditional UI that lets me specify things directly (even if the kitchen staff will ignore most requested customizations).
by IshKebab | 2025-09-04 20:47:05+00:00
In my experience aallll of these fancy "we can measure things that sound impossible" papers come with the asterisk "in perfect lab conditions".

> “The signal is very sensitive to the environment, so we have to select the right filters to remove all the unnecessary noise,” Bhatia said.

AKA "it barely works and we had to filter the signal to the gills to get anything at all".

It's a really impressive tech demo but the article is selling it as if this might actually work in the real world and it clearly won't.
by hrdwdmrbl | 2025-09-04 20:47:14+00:00
Blockchain people have always hated chargebacks, but any successful payment rail needs a system for dispute resolution.

I run e-commerce business and I’ve received bullshit chargebacks before. But I’m also a consumer and I’ve filed legitimate chargebacks before.

Related: I’ve also had my bank send money to the wrong place before.

There must be some means of reversing transactions in some cases. Some arbitration mechanism. Some dispute resolution procedure. Some means of doing escrow.
by fsckboy | 2025-09-04 20:48:04+00:00
>in Europe you can wire money across borders for free

do you mean "electronic funds transfer"? because "wiring" is an old school thing that uses Telex machines and and gets processed by people and I would doubt it carries no fee. (It's probably been modernised so that people handle virtual slips of paper, but it very much carries the feel of an "order on a slip of paper" type of transaction and is far from instantaneous.)

I'm genuinely asking, I only know about the US systems where electronic funds transfer is known as ACH which is an automated clearing house, and wiring is called wiring. From the US, I can wire to European banks. I can't ACH.
by abustamam | 2025-09-04 20:49:20+00:00
That's interesting. I really enjoy playing video games, when I have time. There are games that I objectively find fun, like recently, Clair Obscur Expedition 33. But oftentimes I'd play with my full attention, trying to absorb the beauty of the world and the music, and then I take my phone out during a loading screen and now I'm "second-screening" with my news feed or HN. And I'm still enjoying the game itself, but I feel like I'm robbing myself of the experience because I am not giving it my full attention.

I try not to second-screen when watching movies or TV, and I'm pretty good at it. I know it's a very common thing for people to do these days and it honestly kinda bugs me because at least for me, TV and movies are a shared experience, but video games, at least the ones that I play, are almost always solo experiences.

Anyway, I feel like I just diagnosed myself with ADHD in writing this comment.
by lukevp | 2025-09-04 20:50:18+00:00
“I’d like 2 cheeseburgers, and 4 fries. No mayo or mustard. Actually make one of them a double, and one with bacon. Oh how much if I make the first a combo?”

You think this conversation could be handled with the tech of 4 years ago? Siri can’t even turn off the lights and tell me a joke in the same request. Humans do not deliver all information in order (eg. The all the instructions refer to the burgers not the fries, but you only know that because you understand the essential nature of fries and what they typically include). That’s what AI in the drive thru is for.
by Liron | 2025-09-04 20:50:31+00:00
Let me help explain whether blockchains are useful or not: They're not.

The US gov let Circle be a less-regulated bank than other banks. This is called "regulatory arbitrage". You can take advantage of it by checking the box that you have a "blockchain".

Stripe noticed "wow, things labeled blockchain are nice for some people to use" because of this dumb inconsistent banking regulation situation.

Stripe doesn't mention that the underlying tech is impotent, they just have to play along, and here we are.
by the_gastropod | 2025-09-04 20:50:39+00:00
I think "regulatory arbitrage" still fits here, though maybe not in the sense people assume. The GENIUS Act and MiCA don't eliminate arbitrage. They codify it. Stablecoins are now regulated under frameworks that look very different from those governing banks, payment networks, or money market funds. That difference is the arbitrage.

And crucially, the reason to use crypto rails here is a legal one, not a technical one. There's no throughput, cost, or reliability advantage over existing centralized systems. Quite the opposite. What crypto offers is access to a regulatory regime designed through heavy industry lobbying, one that e.g. doesn't even require full 1:1 low-risk asset backing. That would never fly in traditional finance.

None of this implies illegitimacy. Regulatory arbitrage can be perfectly legal. But it does mean the uptake isn't about technological superiority. It's about governments creating a parallel rulebook after sustained lobbying pressure. That distinction seems important to keep in mind.
by SJMG | 2025-09-04 20:51:42+00:00
Totally agree. The pessimist in me says that part of this is unavoidable. Our tools specialize so that we can direct our limited resources elsewhere, as a consequence of delegating those particular abilities atrophy in us.

Not being able to organize information, create a synthesis, or express yourself in less-likely-than-a-LLM terms is going to have detrimental effects. I think not only will it lead to insane, horse-blinder level, hyper specialization, but it will flatten entire segments of the human experience.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-09-04 20:54:13+00:00
Nuclear winter requires two things.

1) Big bomb. The mushroom cloud must go up to above the maximum altitude for rain.

2) Soot. You need a city or the like underneath the bomb to produce a bunch of soot to get lifted into the sky.

Either one by itself (we've seen really big bombs, but they're not dropped on places that will make a bunch of soot, Saddam's oil fires created enough soot but nothing lifted it above the rain, the bombs on Japan weren't big enough to lift the crud above the rain) has little effect.
by taylodl | 2025-09-04 20:54:43+00:00
> But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a <div>?" it's your place.

Ain't that the truth! That's why I avoid SO if I can - it's like looking for a needle in a shit pile: even if you find what you're looking for you still need to clean up; and if you don't find what you're looking for...
by themafia | 2025-09-04 20:54:45+00:00
> Is this actually worse than being on hold forever to talk to someone following a script?

Yes. It means that common or sudden issues with the provider are not understood internally and huge amounts of customer time becomes wasted on a system with an out of date understanding of the service.

> as in it transcribes your order with Whisper and tries to upsell you through ChatGPT

Essentially. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfz2EtWWPcQ

> One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle

I'm always amazed at this logic. It makes me wonder if you either have an incredible amount of free time or you don't rely on any service provided to you with a vehicle, or are you just not considering them when pondering this way openly?

> at least I get a traditional UI

That has almost no accessibility for the disabled or has accessible functionality that's terribly tacked on as an afterthought.
by raincole | 2025-09-04 20:54:48+00:00
> a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent.

Stablecoin is not a technology. It's an excuse. An excuse to do what banks do while not being regulated like a bank or using the infrastructure banks use. Similar to how Airbnb is not a technology but an excuse to do what hotels do without hotel's license.

So it makes no sense to compare it to database, a technology.

Will this excuse work? Banking is a heavily regulated field so it's less likely than Airbnb, but it's ultimately up to lawmakers.
by dpflan | 2025-09-04 20:54:57+00:00
Here is another take on visualizing transformers from Georgia Tech researchers: https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/

The Illustrated Transformer: https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/

Sebastian Raschka, PhD has a post on the architectures: https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/from-gpt-2-to-gpt-os...

This HN comment has numerous resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35712334
by inetknght | 2025-09-04 20:55:18+00:00
> What is "it", if not truth?

There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.

Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.

Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.

Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-04 20:55:44+00:00
> it means "nobody but us can actually use the backdoor". Ironically, the Juniper PKRNG backdoor --- I assume it was Chinese --- is also a NOBUS backdoor!

Except that it was intended to be "nobody but the us (i.e. the NSA)" and now you've got China using it.
by keeda | 2025-09-04 20:56:16+00:00
Simply pointing to large absolute numbers does not address the fact that all this was brought up during the trial, and it was shown that even Microsoft -- the largest, richest company in the world, with all that data and multiple billions of dollars -- could not compete meaningfully with Google.

The ruling has many data points showing those absolute numbers are meaningless compared to the scale of Google. If you want to talk money, MSFT was willing to offer Apple more than 100% of their ad revenues but still could not get the deal because Google could pay so much more. If you want to talk data, some of the findings:

- Thirteen months of user data acquired by Google is equivalent to over 17 years of data on Bing

- (98.4% of unique phrases seen only by Google, 1% by Bing; 99.8% of tail queries on Google not seen at all by Bing)

- "The disparity is even more pronounced on mobile. There, Google receives nineteen times more queries than all of its other rivals put together"

The idea that Microsoft simply decided not to "try hard enough" is countered by the fact that the court found that they did try and still failed, which was actually key proof that Google ran an anti-competitive monopoly.

You're welcome to disagree with the courts' findings, but ideally you'd do so after considering all the evidence that turned up at the trial ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by algo_lover | 2025-09-04 20:56:32+00:00
But with multiple parties involved, who has the rights to read and write to the postgres instance? How do we make sure transactions were not forged? How do we know data at rest is not being tampered with?

Blockchain solves that. Newer blockchain protocols especially an L1 is much faster, easier on the environment, and provides all the immutability, transparency, and traceability benefits.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-04 20:56:39+00:00
If you contrast vision and hearing, vision is about things with spatial extent (the 2-D/3-D scene you are looking at), and I think the subjective experience of visual attributes like color comes directly from that - color being fundamentally a spatial attribute that differentiates surfaces (as you scan your eyes around), with this providing a common base quale of experiencing any color - the experience of a sensed attribute that changes, or not, as we scan a scene.

In contrast, hearing is a temporal sense primarily about temporal sequences of changing patterns of sensed frequencies, and we experience this as sensed attributes that change, or not, over time (and which may surprise us, or not, by matching previously experienced temporal sequences).

I think echolocation is more like vision in this regard, perhaps more like the flashlight example, but an input that varies spatially rather than temporally.
by p1mrx | 2025-09-04 20:57:00+00:00
"In 2024, we increased our 24/7 CFE percentage from 64% to 66%, and nine out of 20 grid regions with Google-owned and -operated data centers achieved at least 80% CFE."

Look at those numbers. 100% still is a very ambitious goal. Currently 0 global customers are buying 24/7 carbon free power from the grid, and even getting from 0 to 1 will require a lot of boots on the ground building real infrastructure. Afterwards, getting from 1 to [everyone] is just a matter of scale.

Even the "lazy" strategy of buying up capacity from existing nuclear plants requires outbidding the existing customers (if the law allows it), and only works in regions where nuclear plants actually exist.