MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trws | 2025-09-23 23:15:24+00:00
I liked the article. I saw your PS that we added it to the working draft for c++26, we also made it part of OpenMP as of 5.0 I think. It’s sometimes a hardware atomic like on arm, but what made the case was that it’s common to implement it sub-optimally even on x86 or LL-SC architectures. Often the generic cas loop gets used, like in your lambda example, but it lacks an early cutout since you can ignore any input value that’s on the wrong side of the op by doing a cheap atomic read or just cutting out of the loop after the first failed CAS if the read back shows it can’t matter. Also can benefit from using slightly different memory orders than the default on architectures like ppc64. It’s a surprisingly useful op to support that way.

If this kind of thing floats your boat, you might be interested in the non-reading variants of these as well. Mostly for things like add, max, etc but some recent architectures actually offer alternate operations to skip the read-back. The paper calls them “atomic reduction operations” https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p31...
by ironman1478 | 2025-09-23 23:16:24+00:00
There isn't really a good solution here. A precedent for banning speech isn't a good one, but COVID was a real problem and misinformation did hurt people.

The issue is that there is no mechanism for punishing people who spread dangerous misinformation. It's strange that it doesn't exist though, because you're allowed to sue for libel and slander. We know that it's harmful, because people will believe lies about a person, damaging their reputation. It's not clear why it can't be generalized to things that we have a high confidence of truth in and where lying is actively harmful.
by CSMastermind | 2025-09-23 23:16:56+00:00
Why wouldn't you buy it?

The Twitter files showed direct communications from the administration asking them ban specific users like Alex Berenson, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Andrew Bostom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/twitter-files-10th-i...

Meta submitted direct communications from the administration pressuring them to ban people as part of a congressional investigation: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/27/did-bidens-white-ho...

It would be more surprising if they left Google alone.
by dctoedt | 2025-09-23 23:17:32+00:00
FTA: The misuse of antibiotics was a big reason for the rise — unfinished or unnecessary prescriptions that didn’t kill the germs made them stronger.

Not my field, but IIRC this is misleading: When an unfinished or unnecessary antibiotic doesn't kill all the germs, an unintended consequence is that the antibiotic "clears the field" for the surviving (and, ipso facto, more-survivable) germs to reproduce and spread — thus strengthening the remaining germ population.
by wiredpancake | 2025-09-23 23:17:42+00:00
If by "evidence" you mean correlation.

There is a correlation about mothers taking acetaminophen leading to Autism. There is also a correlation about mothers drinking water and it leading to Autism.

Doesn't mean its the right connection. Effectively every first world mother in the past few decades has taken acetaminophen whilst pregnant, given its one of the only possible pain medications allowed, yet we don't see 99% Autism rates.
by cynicalkane | 2025-09-23 23:17:57+00:00
This is typical of Covid conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorists of any sort: one or two papers on one side prove something, but an overwhelming mountain of evidence on the other side does not prove something. The theorist makes no explanation as to how a planetful of scientists missed the obvious truth that some random dudes found; they just assert that it happened, or make some hand-waving explanation about how an inexplicable planet-wide force of censors is silencing the few unremarkable randos who somehow have the truth.

The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data.

But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want.

As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination.

I did not read the second paper.
by epakai | 2025-09-23 23:18:16+00:00
We read the history, a lot of it rhymes. Conservatives failed, and exchanged their values for a populist outsider to maintain power (see Franz von Papen). The outsider demeans immigrants and 'sexual deviants'. The outsider champions nationalism. He pardons the people who broke the law to support him. Condemns violence against the party while ignoring the more common violence coming out of the those aligned with the party. Encourages the language of enemies when discussing political opponents and protestors.

Nazi has a lot more connotations than genocide. I'm not sure it is worth nitpicking over. Even if you tone it down to Fascist or Authoritarian there will be push back.
Show HN: BX Live Server – VS Code live reload with embedded preview
by th3mailman | 2025-09-23 23:18:43+00:00
Hello HN, a quick share from my weekend project. TBX Live Server is an extension that bakes a browser-like webview right into VS Code, keeps multiple servers in sync, and reloads on the fly. Developers can run parallel environments, toggle ports per workspace, and stay in the editor while testing. In the last 24 hours it picked up 19 new downloads and 2 stars, so early adopters seem to be finding it useful.

Repo: http://github.com/TheMailmans/vscode-inline-live-server Marketplace install: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Thinkbac... Happy to answer questions or hear what workflows you’d like to see supported next.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-09-23 23:18:56+00:00
> Kitty terminal can essentially replace a big part of a linux desktop environment, if you want it to. It's infinitely customizable AND has own opinions at the same time.

i'm interested in this idea. can you expand on that? what functionality are you replacing? i don't currently use a DE and i get along pretty well doing most of my work in alacritty and firefox-esr. occasionally i drop into pcmanfm if i need a visual file browser, and i use feh to preview images.
by skayvr | 2025-09-23 23:19:26+00:00
My progression has been st -> kitty -> ghostty. I wanted to love st, but found too many unpolished corners. Kitty was great, but it felt like the exact opposite of st. Very large and opinionated. ghostty, at least originally, was new and something between st and kitty. With claude code I wonder where the landscape of personalized software will land. st and others may be on to something in this era.
by bwfan123 | 2025-09-23 23:19:51+00:00
As an older person, I found these agreeable too and well articulated.

I could put the nine bullets into 2 broad buckets.

1) and 6) pertain to being in the ego - but one that is principled, seeking clarity of cognition and be willing to correct self-deception. truth and intellect.

2), 3), 4), 5), 7), 8) and 9) pertain to awareness, being in the here and now, dissolving of the ego, universal consciousness, truth and happiness.

The first bucket posits an ego but one that is principled, and the second bucket seeks to dissolve the ego and attempt to tune into the cosmic energies. yin and yang.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-09-23 23:20:11+00:00
Everybody here is strangers online, so I think grains of salt are reasonable all around. That said, I'm not sure that people-who-were-banned deserve above average scrutiny. Anecdotally, a lot of the RubyGems maintainers were banned a week ago. It seems really unfair to distrust people _just_ because a person-in-control banned them.
by eig | 2025-09-23 23:20:31+00:00
I'm not too impressed with this article since it doesn't really give a definition for computing, just picks a few similarities between what we see as computing (in the practical sense) and what cells do.

It's a shame because there *has* been a lot of deep work done on what kind of computer life is. People often use the Chomsky Hierarchy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy) to define the different types of computer vs automata. Importantly, a classical Turing machine is Type-0 on the Chomsky Hierarchy. Depending on what parts you include from a biological system, you could argue it's anywhere from Type-0 to Type-4.

Interestingly, the PhD thesis of well-known geneticist Aviv Regev was to show that certain combinations of enzymes with chemical concentration states are enough to emulate pi-calculus, and therefore are Turing machines! https://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/proceedings/psb01/regev....
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-23 23:20:45+00:00
> Not that that would necessarily make sense in practice, but in theory Markov chains have enormous expressive power.

Right - but this feels like being half-way between transformers and lookup tables; the latter have enormous expressive power too, as long as you're willing to handle even more state. I'm curious what else could be put on that spectrum, and where. Maybe there's something weaker than transformers, but good enough for practical applications, while being more resource-efficient?

Related thought: understanding and compression seem to be fundamentally the same thing.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-23 23:20:59+00:00
To clarify, it depends on where you are. In the US, federal land comes in different tiers of protection. National Parks are tourist destinations, generally requiring you to stay on trail, take nothing, leave nothing, etc. National Wilderness Areas allow you off trail, but no motor vehicles. National Forests allow a pretty varied level of recreational usage, often including non-commercial rockhounding, and may allow off-road vehicles (depends on the forest), and then Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land is basically a free-for-all, allowing pretty much any recreational activity and even commercial activity with the appropriate permits.

Out here in the west, you'll find a LOT of land in all 4 categories, not to mention state-level parks, which at least here in California allow some rockhounding near streams and beaches.
by braiamp | 2025-09-23 23:21:24+00:00
> But I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work

It actually does work. You need to remove ways for misinformation to spread, and suppressing a couple of big agents works very well.

- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07524-8 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1... - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3479525 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11864

Obviously, the best solution would be prevention, by having good education systems and arming common people with the weapons to assess and criticize information, but we are kinda weak on that front.
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-23 23:21:54+00:00
I agree with both of your points.

My point is that you can't rely on the goodwill of corporations when you're building the commons. They will happily wall off the commons you and others cultivated for themselves. They need to be incentivized into being good citizens instead of just mooching.

Maybe if companies were incentivized to give back to FreeBSD, it could be a viable competitor to Linux when it comes to hardware and standards we've taken for granted for the last two decades. That's a world I'd rather live in.
by system7rocks | 2025-09-23 23:21:55+00:00
We live in a complicated world, and we do need the freedom to get things right and wrong. Never easy though in times of crisis.

Silver lining in this is the conversation continued and will continue. I can see governments needing to try to get accurate and helpful information out in crisis - and needing to pressure or ask more of private companies to do that. But also like that we can reflect back and go - maybe that didn’t work like what we wanted or maybe it was heavy-handed.

In many governments, the government can do no wrong. There are no checks and balances.

The question is - should we still trust YouTube/Google? Is YouTube really some kind of champion of free speech? No. Is our current White House administration a champion of free speech? Hardly.

But hopefully we will still have a system that can have room for critique in the years to come.
by sensanaty | 2025-09-23 23:22:28+00:00
I'm the owner of some of my work projects/repos. I will absolutely without a 2nd thought close a 20k LoC PR, especially an AI generated one, because the code that ends up in master is ultimately my responsibility. Unless it's something like a repo-wide linter change or whatever, there's literally never a reason to have such a massive PR. Break it down, I don't care if it ends up being 200 disparate PRs, that's actually possible to properly review compared to a single 20k line PR.
by leetcrew | 2025-09-23 23:23:22+00:00
I'm inclined to agree, this was a weird read. after the first few no's, there was definitely an opportunity for alexei to make it clear to anna that she was always welcome, but he was going to stop inviting her every single time.

this kinda ties into a more general blind spot for nerds on the internet. there's no obligation for people to include you in their personal lives (or vice versa) just because you vaguely know them. if someone chooses to do so and you want it to continue, you gotta reciprocate somehow.
by asdlfaglkj | 2025-09-23 23:23:26+00:00
1. An LLM is absolutely a Markov chain. That is not meant to dismiss that they are a remarkable feat of generating and compressing the representation of really cool Markov chains.

2. Because they are Markov chains, their skill ceiling is bounded by whatever the skill ceiling of Markov chains happens to be. What LLMs demonstrate is that the skill ceiling of Markov chains is higher than previously understood.

3. If the skill ceiling of Markov chains is high enough, then one could take over some or all of someone's job.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-23 23:23:35+00:00
These policies were put in place because the anti-vax and election skepticism content was being promoted by military intelligence organizations that were trying to undermine democracy and public healthy in the US.

The US military also promoted anti-vax propaganda in the Philippines [0].

A lot of the comments here raise good points about silencing well meaning people expressing their opinion.

But information warfare is a fundamental part of modern warfare. And it's effective.

An American company or individual committing fraud can be dealt with in the court system. But we don't yet have a good remedy for how to deal with a military power flooding social media with information intentionally designed to mislead and cause harm for people who take it seriously.

So

> I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work

it seems to have been reasonably effective at combating disinformation networks

> It just causes the ideas to metastasize

I don't think this is generally true. If you look at old disinformation campaigns like the idea that the US faked the moon landings, it's mostly confined to a small group of people who are prone to conspiracy thinking. The idea of a disinformation campaign is you make it appear like a crazy idea has broad support. Making it appear that way requires fake accounts or at least boosters who are in on the scheme. Taking that away means the ideas compete on their own merit, and the ideas are typically real stinkers.

[0] https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/167919/20240727/u-s-ad...
by tux3 | 2025-09-23 23:24:02+00:00
This blog sent me into a memory models rabbit hole again. Each time I end up feeling like I'm finally starting to get it, only for a 6 line litmus test with 4 loads and 2 stores to send me crashing back down.

It makes me feel a little better reading about the history of memory models in CPUs. If this stuff wasn't intuitive to Intel either, I'm at least in good company in being confused (https://research.swtch.com/hwmm#path_to_x86-tso)

I actually knew about fetch_max from "implementing" the corresponding instruction (risc-v amomax), but I haven't done any of the fun parts yet since my soft-CPU still only has a single core.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-23 23:24:09+00:00
This is just a tragedy of the commons situation.

Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them. They naturally want to pull the ladder up.

But if you just let them, then there's 0 new homes being built in the US. And then the economy implodes.

We have to toe a line necessarily. If you just allow the tragedy of the commons to happen 100%, then everyone loses. Everyone, including those who benefit.

Its like feudalism. Feudalism seems like a fantastic idea if you're a feudal lord. But... Its actually not. No, you lose too.

Imagine how much richer those feudal lords could have been had they not impeded the progress of Europe for hundreds of years.
by nevinera | 2025-09-23 23:24:11+00:00
Well, there's more information out and it seems pretty.. damning. I wasn't convinced by "power grab", but "economic pressure from our sole remaining major sponsor" is _way_ more believable, and the chain is events is getting fairly clear. Check out Joel's explanation for a coherent delve into the events: https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/

Now I just have to hope the fallout from this includes a less centralized replacement for the tools I'm used to - I haven't found anything solid yet, but I imagine andre will be examining this problem space with rv now.
by drdeca | 2025-09-23 23:24:12+00:00
“just”?

If you include the entire past history as part of the state, then any stochastic process becomes a Markov process.

Any computer program (without network stuff or inputs for a time (assume your computer has a true RNG module)) you could run is a Markov process. Just say that your state space is the space of possible ways the memory of the computer can be.

Saying that the LLM is “just” a Markov process seems to be doing something a bit weird with that “just”.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-23 23:24:14+00:00
> When you look at the nature of DNA, it does more than simply act as code.

> It can edit and self-modify, self-assemble, self-replicate, it can turn genes on and off

Unless my knowledge of biology is very outdated or incomplete, all of those things you cited are done to DNA. They don't happen spontaneously.

DNA doesn't self-replicate, a whole bunch of enzymes come and actively copy it. Genes don't spontaneously turn on and off, some enzyme comes and attaches or removes a methyl group. DNA doesn't self-assemble, it is actively coiled around histones to form nucleosomes. Bacteria have a huge variety of enzymes for manipulating native and foreign DNA, they have their own CRISPR mechanisms.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 23:25:19+00:00
I add the MCP server (https://ui.shadcn.com/docs/mcp)

Then I instruct the coding agent to use shadcn / choose the right component from shadcn component registry

The MCP server has a search / discovery tool, and it can also fetch individual components. If you tell the AI agent to use a specific component, it will fetch it (reference doc here: https://ui.shadcn.com/docs/components)
by simne | 2025-09-23 23:25:30+00:00
Well, I seen one suggestion for probable nearest future of AI, to stop on GPT-4 level, but distill and use optimizations like switch to FP8 for faster speed.

So basically idea, model with very same capabilities, but distilled and optimized to have less size and faster inference.

I cannot promise 100x speedup, but I think 10x is very real.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-09-23 23:26:06+00:00
>It massively amplified the nuts. It brought it to the mainstream.

>COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.

In theory, I agree, kind of.

But also - we were 10+ months into COVID raging in the US before Biden’s administration, the administration that enacted the policies the article is about, came to be. Vaccine production and approval were well under way, brought to fruition in part due to the first Trump administration. The “nuts” had long been mainstream and amplified before this “silencing” began. Misinformation was rampant and people were spreading it at a quick speed. Most people I know who ultimately refused the vaccines made up their minds before Biden took office.
by plorkyeran | 2025-09-23 23:26:32+00:00
We know very little about what happened between Shopify and Ruby Central. They said that they made no progress towards satisfying Shopify’s demands until they were 24 hours from the deadline, but not what those demands specifically were or why they failed to do anything. It’s possible that what they panickedly did at the last second wasn’t actually what Shopify had intended.
by ironman1478 | 2025-09-23 23:26:34+00:00
It's interesting you say that, because the government is saying Tylenol causes autism in infants when the mother takes it. The original report even says more verification is required and it's results are inconclusive.

I wouldn't be surprised if some lawsuit is incoming from the company that manufactures it.

We have mechanisms for combatting the government through lawsuits. If the government came out with lies that actively harm people, I hope lawsuits come through or you know... people organize and vote for people who represent their interests.
by godelski | 2025-09-23 23:26:37+00:00
I just want to say, what a dream. To have wealth and be able to create projects for the sake of going the projects. To not have to make the concessions of quality for profits.

There's an old Knuth quote:

> In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

And I think we're seeing more and more that these projects made with love are successful. That without the hyper fixation on money we can build good projects that make big changes in a world.

In some sense I'm a bit envious of Mitchell but truthfully these types of things make me more question how we've constructed our society and economy. It shouldn't require one to start with wealth to be able to build things that have such an impact. What needs to be changed where we can live up to what Knuth proclaimed. I'm sure all of us have had experiences where were we given the time (and usually not much) we could make things so much better. But we make many sacrifices when we rush. Which leads to more good advice by Knuth

> If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

At what point do we push back? We see that the people we really look up to did things so differently. Knuth himself expressed how detail obsessed he was, and such a claim is common among the grey breads. Of course, things change, but are we creating a world with no wizards? Are we creating a world where we reward people for solving problems and making our lives easier? Or are we just maximizing some score of a pointless game?

I'd love to live in a world with a thousand more Mitchells, following their passions without the burden of needing to justify decisions to a board who has no interest in quality. How do we create that world?

Like you said, what a legend. But, how do we make more legends?