MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-28 15:59:45+00:00
Random strong antibiotics are not a good idea. One could estimate the possible condition, then estimate the most targeted safe antibiotic, and take its full course correctly. Also, sometimes it's not a bacterial infection, and can be a viral/amoebic/parasitic/worm or in rare cases a fungal infection.

For example, in a specific case, for acute intestinal pain, amoxicilin with clav was being advised, but the etiology+location+correlations suggested that mere metronidazole alone would suffice, and it did. It's case by case.
by hollerith | 2025-09-28 15:59:57+00:00
People like to criticize secure boot around here, but it prevents these kinds of infections (provided of course there are no vulnerabilities in the implementation of secure boot).

Yes, in theory it is possible to prevent these kinds of infections without resorting to secure boot (e.g., by insisting that all the suppliers of components of the motherboard start designing components that cannot be pwned) but so far all the computers you have actually been able to buy that are immune to these kinds of infections achieve that immunity with secure-boot technology.
by hedora | 2025-09-28 16:00:21+00:00
Behavioral ads transfer revenue away from publishers and to spam sites and the ad platform (google).

Targeted ads are definitely better for the publisher, but hard to automate (the matchmaking between publishers and advertisers is less automated), but the percentage of ad spend that goes to the publisher is much higher, and the quality of each ad impression is higher.

There’s some win for targeting on the margins, where there’s no good place to buy ads.

Also, there’s an infinite inventory of targeted ad slots (like invisible windows displayed by malware or redirect spam), which could be better than display ads, where you might not be able to spend your marketing budget, at least in theory.
by quatonion | 2025-09-28 16:00:33+00:00
This is really interesting. I always wondered how it works.

Couple of years ago I did some experiments using a surrogate for attention using a feed forward network (MLP) to avoid the quadratic explosion.

It worked but had problems at the time, and my mind wasn't really in it.

This has dug it back out again with the benefit of time and additional insights.

So now I'm thinking, you can use a lot of the insights in the work here, but also shoot for a full linear scaling surrogate.

The trick is to use the surrogate as a discriminator under an RL regime during training.

Instead of just applying better/faster math and optimizations alone, have the model learn to work with a fundamentally better inference approach during training.

If you do that, you can turn the approximation error present in the FFN surrogate inference method into a recovery signal encoded into the model itself.

I haven't tried it, but don't see a reason it shouldn't work. Will give it a go on a GPT-2 model ASAP.

Thanks again for the awesome article.
by emporas | 2025-09-28 16:00:50+00:00
>[..] to first metabolic cycles, cells, multi-purpose genes, modular development genes, etc.

One example is when cells discovered energy production using mitochondria. Mitochondria add new capabilities to the cell, with (almost) no downside like: weight, temperature-sensitivity, pressure-sensitivity. It's almost 100% upside.

If someone tried to predict the future number of mitochondria-enabled cells from the first one, he could be off by 10^20 less cells.

I am writing a story the last 20 days, with that exact story plot, have to get my stuff together and finish it.
by dpflan | 2025-09-28 16:01:07+00:00
I think this would benefit from examples of including coding assistants in the stages enumerated; how can the agent be included in each stage? I've seen posts about successful collaboration with agents at say Google, where there is tons of upfront work among humans to agree on design, then work with the agent to build out parts of the project and ensuring thorough test suites are included.

Does including an agent at each stage of this cycle mean "context engineering"? Is this then just more text and assets to feed in at each stage of LLM ussage to provide the context for the next set of tokens to generate for the next stage of the cycle? Is there something deeper that can be done to encode this level of staged development into the agent's weights/"understanding"? Is there an established process for this yet?

- Specification

- Documentation

- Modular Design

- Test-Driven Development

- Coding Standard

- Monitoring & Introspection
by libraryofbabel | 2025-09-28 16:01:07+00:00
I don’t disagree with your point. The earth is pretty special as the only known location for intelligent life. However:

1) Most people haven’t internalized at all how big and empty and terrifying the universe is. This is a rhetorical device to make that point.

2) Carl Sagan also famously said “We are a way for the universe to know itself” so I think you may be straw-manning his overall position just a little bit here.
by senordevnyc | 2025-09-28 16:01:12+00:00
Except it’s not been five years, it’s been at most three, since approximately no one was using LLMs prior to ChatGPT’s release, which was just under three years ago. We did have Copilot a year before that, but it was quite rudimentary.

And really, we’ve had even less than that. The first large scale reasoning model was o1, which was released 12 months ago. More useful coding agents are even newer than that. This narrative that we’ve been using these tools for many years and are now hitting a wall doesn’t match my experience at all. AI-assisted coding is way better than it was a year ago, let alone five.
Ask HN: How do you share info within podcasts?
by m-hodges | 2025-09-28 16:01:18+00:00
I frequently find myself wanting to share information surfaced in a podcast, usually a 1 - 3 minute bit from an episode. I'm not naive enough to think friends or random people on the internet will sit through the hour I just sat through, but I don't have a great way of sharing. My current method is to use Overcast,¹ which allows you to clip up to 90 seconds from an episode and export with a deep link to a timestamp. But that also feels clunky. What are other tactics for clipping, or transforming to other mediums (text??) that facilitate better sharing?

¹ https://overcast.fm
by abrichr | 2025-09-28 16:01:26+00:00
> While the LLMs get to blast through all the fun, easy work at lightning speed, we are then left with all the thankless tasks: testing to ensure existing functionality isn’t broken, clearing out duplicated code, writing documentation, handling deployment and infrastructure, etc.

I’ve found LLMs just as useful for the "thankless" layers (e.g. tests, docs, deployment).

The real failure mode is letting AI flood the repo with half-baked abstractions without a playbook. It's helpful to have the model review the existing code and plan out the approach before writing any new code.

The leverage may be in using LLMs more systematically across the lifecycle, including the grunt work the author says remains human-only.
by nebezb | 2025-09-28 16:02:34+00:00
> But 1 is smaller than 9, so file-10.txt should be first in alphabetical order. Everyone understands that, and soon people learn to put enough leading zeros if they want their files to stay sorted the way they like.

No. Not “everyone understands that”. Natural sort happens in real life and everyone understands that. Only those who understand ASCII — not the average user of graphical file managers — will deduce the reason for your definition of “alphabetical order”.

> Now that I know what the issue is, I can solve it by renaming the files with a consistent scheme.

Intensely ironic given the previous suggestion.
by pmontra | 2025-09-28 16:02:40+00:00
In my case yes, because back in the 90s I had to write Word files at work, when I had to write something. More recently because I write inside any tool my customers are using and in md files for myself.

Obviously none of my customers nor myself are writing academic papers. If we did maybe we would be using LaTeX, but the chances to have to write papers in normal companies are slim.
Show HN: Diny – Git diff commit messages
by dinodanci | 2025-09-28 16:02:51+00:00
Hi everyone,

I built a CLI tool called *diny* that generates Git commit messages directly from your staged changes.

- It runs `git diff` and filters out noise like lockfiles, build artifacts, and binaries. - From the cleaned diff it suggests a clear commit message. - You can confirm or refine the message before committing.

Key points: - No setup or API keys required. - Lightweight, local-first workflow. - Supports different lengths and styles (short, normal, long; conventional or simple). - Built in Go with Cobra for a familiar CLI experience.

Repo: https://github.com/dinoDanic/diny
by sagarm | 2025-09-28 16:03:05+00:00
I had my own set of keys and combinations I wanted to hit while mousing, mostly space and cut/copy/paste. I just made sure I had those on a layer activated by my left thumb on my left hand.

My layout would not work for you since I put navigation on the right hand (close to where it would be normally), but do whatever works for you.

Personally I use navigation keys much more on my split because they're right under my fingers. Having VIM movement keys everywhere is quite nice.
by jsmith99 | 2025-09-28 16:03:32+00:00
> lack in-depth knowledge of your business, codebase, or roadmap

So give them some context. I like Cline's memory bank approach https://docs.cline.bot/prompting/cline-memory-bank which includes the architecture, progress, road map etc. Some of my more complex projects use 30k tokens just on this, with the memory bank built from existing docs and stuff I told the model along the way. Too much context can make models worse but overall it's a fair tradeoff - it maintains my coding style and architecture decisions pretty well.

I also recommend in each session using Plan mode to get to a design you are happy with before generating any code.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-28 16:03:49+00:00
Maybe the benefit of only ever dealing with extremely sketchy places for phone stuff is that they already know I won't give them information to unlock my phone so they never ask. Either the repair can be effected without, or I don't want it done. "Is it OK to wipe this phone?" is also an acceptable question, and sometimes the answer might even be "Yes".
by antononcube | 2025-09-28 16:04:00+00:00
Ah, yes, Raku's "LLM::Graph" is heavily inspired by the design of the function LLMGraph of Wolfram Language (aka Mathematica.)

WL's LLMGraph is more developed and productized, but Raku's "LLM::Graph" is catching up.

I would like to say that "LLM::Graph" was relatively easy to program because of Raku's introspection, wrappers, asynchronous features, and pre-existing LLM functionalities packages. As a consequence the code of "LLM::Graph" is short.

Wolfram Language does not have that level introspection, but otherwise is likely a better choice mostly for its far greater scope of functionalities. (Mathematics, graphics, computable data, etc.)

In principle a corresponding Python "LLMGraph" package can be developed, for comparison purposes. Then the "better choice" question can be answered in a more informed manner. (The Raku packages "LLM::Functions" and "LLM::Prompts" have their corresponding Python packages implemented already.)
by user982 | 2025-09-28 16:04:20+00:00
Chapter 2:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Chapter 13:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Chapter 25:

In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.
by zweifuss | 2025-09-28 16:04:30+00:00
You mean file9 before file10?

I have some beef with microsoft, that you can only change this at the Computer level, not per user (see registry key below). Also they call it natural sorting for users, but logical sorting internaly. Unify your termini!

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoStrCmpLogical"=dword:00000001
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-28 16:04:38+00:00
Actually, it's far closer to the truth than you may think.

France? Their debt is killing their country and causing escalating political crises.

Germany? Energy costs are killing their competitiveness. Hard to compete with energy costs of $0.44 per kWh on average; before labor costs.

Italy? Need I say more? Their economy is notoriously stagnant.

The remaining 24 EU countries make up less than 50% of the EU's GDP. Meanwhile, US and EU GDP went from almost 1:1 in 2008, to 1:0.65 and still declining.

To give you a sense of how severe Germany's problems are, the US state of Mississippi is almost ready to pass Germany's GDP per capita.
by shredprez | 2025-09-28 16:04:52+00:00
I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless.

The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more time on the part I personally enjoy, architecting the build and testing the resultant experience.

> While the LLMs get to blast through all the fun, easy work at lightning speed, we are then left with all the thankless tasks

This is, to me, the root of one disagreement I see playing out in every industry where AI has achieved any level of mastery. There's a divide between people who enjoy the physical experience of the work and people who enjoy the mental experience of the work. If the thinking bit is your favorite part, AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting. But if you like the doing, the typing, fiddling with knobs and configs, etc etc, all AI does is take the good part away.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-09-28 16:04:55+00:00
The problem is that Google operates both the buy side and the sell side of the monopoly-scale ad platform. They're the only party in the transaction who sees what both parties are willing to pay (imagine on eBay knowing what everyone's max bid was), and sets the algorithm to maximize their take from all parties.

They've already lost the case with this, and are currently trying to prevent what needs to change: Google must be forced to divest large portions of its ad business to reintroduce competition in the marketing space.
by Retric | 2025-09-28 16:04:55+00:00
No, a single screen is a massive upgrade over using stacks of paper.

People vastly prefer digital dictionaries over paper dictionaries because you can more quickly find stuff. And that’s with dictionaries in alphabetical order.

Stacks of paper suck, there’s some potential utility in a space ship for all the redundancy around independent tablets you can hand someone. That’s something that regularly happens on the show and kind of makes sense, but is more a visual reference for the audience. Which is where stacks of tablets shine, the viewer can easily follow what their doing even if you can’t see the screen.
by ranger_danger | 2025-09-28 16:05:08+00:00
Not only did Apple and Google divebomb their sales, but Nokia's own hardware was plagued with bugs and comparatively inadequate features, like small displays and slow CPUs.

MS would later re-sell Nokia to HMD in 2016, who still release some feature-phones, including ones running an "S30+" OS that has nothing to do with Symbian.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-09-28 16:05:20+00:00
Great job, Vicente and Michael!

* I love the writing, it's witty and poignant

* I was impressed that WASD controls worked with my keyboard set to Dvorak :)

* Unfortunately have to second the comments about nausea; the oddly paced camera (it feels like it is panning through molasses then suddenly accelerates to switch views) is probably responsible, I'm guessing the "overshoot view then correct" "feature" is also a factor. Additionally seconding the comments about allowing the camera to follow the mouse (if feasible somehow while not losing cross-form-factor support) would go a long way to help here as well.

* The font that shows you where you are is cute in an orientalist sense, but imho it is very difficult to read (even knowing what it says from context clues and previous hints)

* Not a criticism but it is odd to have jumping when there is no mechanism that uses it in-game

* 99.99% a me problem: I had a hard time with spatial awareness and a difficulty building a mental map of the world and my best guess is that it's because I personally found the default field of view to be too "zoomed in".
by hedora | 2025-09-28 16:05:29+00:00
There’s an argument that firms will compete to get better performance per dollar spent.

Having said that, look at all the evidence of platform fraud, auction fraud and click fraud that came out during the Google trial.

They control most of the signals that come back to the groups paying for ads, and every level of the system that generates that signal (inside and outside of Google) is designed to defraud the advertiser (and advertising firms).
by esseph | 2025-09-28 16:05:29+00:00
I believe this depends on the intent of your connection!. The first sentence of your last paragraph: "For read-heavy, reconnectable workloads" - A-ha!

From my stance, and where I've used mosh has been in performing quick actions on routers and servers that may have bad connections to them, or may be under DDoS, etc. "Read" is extremely limited.

So from that perspective and use case, the "huge downside" has never been a problem.
by lysace | 2025-09-28 16:05:34+00:00
7% is the app store revenue.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/apple-says-eu-represents-7...

> Apple says EU represents 7% of global App Store revenue

Europe (not EU, but close enough) represents about a quarter of the total Apple revenue. (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-how-apple-makes-its...)
by zahlman | 2025-09-28 16:05:52+00:00
> Well, apparently all these operating systems have decided that no, users are too dumb and they cannot possibly understand what alphabetical order means. So when you ask them to sort your files alphabetically, they don’t. Instead, they decide that if some piece of the file name is a number, the real numerical value must be used.

Well, no. You don't actually ask them to sort in alphabetical order. You ask them to sort "by name", and that is up to their interpretation. And they choose the interpretation that (per their reasoning, and possibly some actual data) seems most likely to correspond to what the user wants.

Maybe future versions of those OSes will add a rule that says that if any of the number groups have leading zeros then it reverts back to actual alphabetic order. Or maybe they'll give you configurable options. (Maybe some of them already do.)
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-28 16:06:12+00:00
> By following this logic you should have predicted Moore’s law would halt every year for the last five decades. I hope you see why this is a flawed argument. You prove too much.

I do think it's continually amazing that Moore's law has continued in some capacity for decades. But before trumpeting the age of exponential growth, I'd love to see plenty of examples that aren't named "Moore's law": as it stands, one easy hypothesis is that "ability to cram transistors into mass-produced boards" lends itself particularly well to newly-discovered strategies.

> So I wouldn’t bet on exponential growth in AI capabilities for the next 10 years, but I would consider it very foolish to use pure induction to bet on growth stopping within 1 year.

Great, we both agree that it's foolish to bet on growth stopping within 1 year. What I'm saying that "growth doesn't stop" ≠ "growth is exponential".

A theory of "inertia" could just as well support linear growth: it's only because we stare at relative growth rates that we treat exponential growth as a "constant" that will continue in the absence of explicit barriers.
by westurner | 2025-09-28 16:07:29+00:00
"Effect of Mg incorporation on the properties of PCL/Mg composites for potential tissue engineering applications" (2024) https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/materials/articles/10.3... ... ( citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1104751989757627663... ) :

> Abstract: [...] The findings demonstrated that adding Mg influenced PCL’s mechanical and thermal properties. The mechanical test results showed that the tensile strength of 15% Mg composite filaments improved by around 10% compared to the neat PCL filaments. However, the elastic modulus decreased by around 50% for the same composition. The thermal study revealed a significant reduction in the degradation temperature from above 400°C for pure PCL to around 300°C for PCL/Mg composite having 15% Mg. Additionally, the weight loss during in vitro degradation showed that the presence of Mg had significantly increased the degradation rate of composite samples. Also, Mg incorporation influences cell adhesion, with better attachment observed for 10% Mg 3DP samples. Overall, PCL/Mg composites offer a solution to overcome the limitation of low thermo-mechanical properties typically associated with the PCL
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-09-28 16:07:37+00:00
There’s no exponential improvement in go or chess agents, or car driving agents. Even tiny mouse racing.

If there is, it would be such nice low hanging fruit.

Maybe all of that happens all at once.

I’d just be honest and say most of it is completely fuzzy tinkering disguised as intellectual activity (yes, some of it is actual intellectual activity and yes we should continue tinkering)

There are rare individuals that spent decades building up good intuition and even that does not help much.
by perching_aix | 2025-09-28 16:07:58+00:00
Crappier being an opinion of course.

As for what people are buying and not buying, according to statcounter [0], the smartphone market in the EU is a third Apple, a third Samsung, and then the final third is a scattershot of other Android devices, primarily Xiaomi.

This is in contrast with a 57.27% foothold in the US. It's a different world.

To put it into perhaps an even more grappling perspective, that whole green bubble vs blue bubble thing? I've first heard of it only just a few years ago from Marques Brownlee on YouTube. Never encountered it in real life prior or since.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe