MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PhearTheCeal | 2025-09-12 18:37:46+00:00
Are you sure this isn't just an example of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect?

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
by xtracto | 2025-09-12 18:37:57+00:00
I'm very late to this thread, because I just didn't have anything I felt was valuable. But now i have.

At first I also had thr reaction of thinking "he asked for it" , and all that schadenfreude feeling.

However, now I think it was a great loss and hope the killer gets the whole extent of the law.

See, in a society that is tending more and more to the extremes, polarization and radicalism, we NEED people to TALK.

Being from outside of the US, I don't know the ideas this guy was spewing; However, from what I've read, what he did was basically talking and debate. We need that. We need to be open to talk ideas, even if we dont agree. Where are we when someone who speaks his mind gets killed for that?

I am socialist and anti-US-imperialism in general, but I tend to frequent r/conservative and r/ccw and even patriots.win subteddits. Because im interested in a different point of view.

I get sad that most posts in r/conservative block externals, as I would love to interact in some of the posts. But... after this guys assassination... I dont blame them. People should feel safe to talk and discuss their ideas.

I'm to stupid to be able to debate against this guy, or the other guy.that speaks too fast and always looks angry (anti abortion American dude). But ... why isn't someone smarter and with opposing views debating them?. We need it.
by sriram_malhar | 2025-09-12 18:38:36+00:00
Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come up with a new concept. Now it seems to require more and more collaboration.

That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...
by efeqasfcadvxcv | 2025-09-12 18:39:47+00:00
That changes nothing. And you can use it as a currency. Declaring it an asset is irrelevant. You can call Bitcoin a cryptocurrency, an asset, a currency, a scam, it doesn't effect Bitcoin in any way. Bitcoin doesn't care. Its sole purpose is as an incorruptible, debasement and censorship resistant ledger native to the public internet.

Of course this all redefines exactly what a currency or an asset IS. Is Gold a currency? Is it an asset? is it both? Its semantics. Both gold and bitcoin can be exchanged for goods and services.

Most assets will not keep going up forever in Bitcoin terms. Maybe no asset will, on long enough time scales. Most assets are plummeting in price considerably in Bitcoin terms. Today it takes 6-figure units of dollars to buy one unit of Bitcoin. On to 7 and 8, and more. Eventually, you will not be able to exchange ANY amount of fiat for Bitcoin.

You are free to ignore Bitcoin for then next 10 years, like most folks on HN have done for the past 10.
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-12 18:39:50+00:00
Without putting my weight behind them, here's some counterarguments:

- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway

- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs

- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.
by kbrkbr | 2025-09-12 18:40:08+00:00
I could not agree more. I am on my second try to master mathematics (30 years after the first), and I can see, understand and appreciate mathematics mainly from the constructive standpoint.

Nothing wrong with classical mathematics, as also used in this roadmap. Having axioms and drawing logical conclusions or searching proof does just not click for me.

Give me 0: N and suc: N -> N and I see how to construct stuff. Induction makes sense right away as a case distinction on those two constructors.
by 76SlashDolphin | 2025-09-12 18:40:10+00:00
It is possible thay a malicious MCP could poison the LLM's ability to classify it's tools but then your threat model includes adding malicious MCPs which would be a problem for any MCP client. We are considering adding a repository of vetted MCPs (or possibly use one of the existing ones) but, as it is, we rely on the user to make sure that their MCPs are legitimate.
by nickff | 2025-09-12 18:40:14+00:00
I agree with you on both counts, but I'm not sure I would count on any president post-GWB to actually defend Taiwan. Nobody seems to have put much behind the Minsk Agreement. Even if they did, I'm not sure how long that would last if nobody else supported them. Can you imagine any of the (mostly european) countries which cry so loudly about Ukraine (while unwilling to commit forces), actually sending meaningful support to Taiwan?
by samiv | 2025-09-12 18:40:15+00:00
The LC interviews are like testing people how fast they can run 100m after practice, while the real job is a slow arduous never ending jog with multiple detours and stops along the way.

But yeah that's the game you have to play now if you want the top $$$ at one of the SMEGMA companies.

I wrote (for example) my 2D game engine from scratch (3rd party libs excluded)

https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator

but would not be able to pass a LC type interview that requires multiple LC hard solutions and a couple of backflips on top. But that's fine, I've accepted that.
by ajross | 2025-09-12 18:41:12+00:00
> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin

Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.

We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.

[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
by tracker1 | 2025-09-12 18:41:22+00:00
My understanding is that the workers are actually contractors and not direct employees of Samsung and were left to make their own Visa arrangements and instead of getting the correct Visas to be able to actually work in the US, they used business travel (B-1) Visas which are supposed to be for temporary travel in order to enter the US for a maximum of 6 months.

This was reported in other articles on the situation... it was clearly missing from the article I was referencing which changes the context to place a shift in narrative.
by more_corn | 2025-09-12 18:41:48+00:00
Specifically: “releasing the accelerator pedal should not decelerate the vehicle to a complete stop.”

Every electric car I’ve driven needs brake pedal engaged to bring it to a complete stop. Regenerative braking seems to disengage at ~5mph.

I honestly see no safety reason for this, but they’re not banning one pedal control they’re specifically saying it can’t bring the vehicle to a complete stop.

I would actually think there’s a safety argument for the reverse. In absence of an active driver shouldn’t the vehicle slow and eventually stop?
by basfo | 2025-09-12 18:42:20+00:00
It’s strange that you can patent gameplay mechanics. After all, gameplay mechanics are what define a genre.

It’s like in literature if someone could patent the idea of a detective investigating a murder.

How could the "pokemon-like" genre even exist if you couldn’t create a game that uses “summoning and battling characters”?

Even worse, that description alone applies to multiple genres... JRPGs, or even fighting games with multiple characters (something like Marvel vs. Capcom) could fit that description.

I can understand intellectual property rights for very specific technical implementations (for example, the raycasting technique used in Wolfenstein 3D) but you shouldn’t be able to patent the concept of the first person shooter itself. That feels more like restricting freedom of expression.
by intalentive | 2025-09-12 18:42:58+00:00
"Hey, fascist! Catch!", "Bella ciao" and three arrows are all antifascist. I would assume that the shooter is motivated by antifascist political ideology at odds with Kirk's political ideology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Arrows

The groypers are not antifascist, so the reported symbolism doesn't add up. If there's evidence of the shooter being a groyper, then I'm curious to see it.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-12 18:43:17+00:00
> Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions

There are still some qualitative differences: With sanctions, you'll know something dodgy has occurred when you find a pallet of My Little Putin dolls traveling through the port, you don't need to call up a bunch of lawyers and accountants.

That said, I readily admit that oil is a lot more disguise-able and fungible.
by js2 | 2025-09-12 18:43:30+00:00
It seems like they're being pragmatic, not haughty:

> "The tz database is not authoritative, and it surely has errors. [...] Errors in the tz database arise from many sources: Sometimes, different people in the same city maintain clocks that differ significantly. [...] Even if the time is specified by law, locations sometimes deliberately flout the law. [...] Any attempt to pass the tz database off as the definition of time should be unacceptable to anybody who cares about the facts."

https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#accuracy
by wyager | 2025-09-12 18:43:37+00:00
Leetcode with no prep is a pretty decent coding skill test

The problem is that it is too amenable to prep

You can move your score like 2stddev with practice, which makes the test almost useless in many cases

On good tests, your score doesn't change much with practice, so the system is less vulnerable to Goodharting and people don't waste/spend a bunch of time gaming it
by HEmanZ | 2025-09-12 18:45:11+00:00
What do you think an alternative is for someone who:

1. Has a technical system they think could be worth a fortune to large enterprises, containing at least a few novel insights to the industry.

2. Knows that competitors and open source alternatives could copy/implement these in a year or so if the product starts off open source.

3. Has to put food on the table and doesn’t want to give massive corporations extremely valuable software for free.

Open source has its place, but it is IMO one of the ways to give monopolies massive value for free. There are plenty of open source alternatives around for vector DBs. Do we (developers) need to give everything away to the rich
by Qem | 2025-09-12 18:45:11+00:00
Probably closer to the first situation. It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community. When I started working with GIS at work, expensive ESRI products were default in this market, a la matlab in another field. Most coleages of mine had not heard about QGIS. Now QGIS is ubiquitous. It did to ArcGIS and its countless paid add on modules what scipy/numpy did to matlab.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-09-12 18:45:46+00:00
100%. I just went through an interview process where I absolutely killed the assignment (had the best one they'd seen), had positive signal/feedback from multiple engineers, CEO liked me a lot etc, only to get sunk by a CTO who thought it would be cool to give me a surprise live test because of "vibe coding paranoia". 11 weeks in the process, didn't get the role. Beyond fucking stupid.

This was the demo/take-home (for https://monumental.co): https://github.com/rublev/monumental
by yepitwas | 2025-09-12 18:45:48+00:00
> By law, no more than 15% is going to the insurance company (which isn't just profit, that covers all the administrative costs of running the plan).

I'm aware of two huge exceptions that are large enough to make this basically not-true.

1) This doesn't apply when they're administering a self-funded plan, like most plans provided by large companies. This represents a giant chunk of US health insurance.

2) This doesn't apply to new plans (I believe in the first two years of operation). I admit I've not looked into it, but I'd be shocked if this isn't being gamed such that a fairly high proportion of plans that aren't excluded by #1, are always "new" and so not subject to those limits.
by kldg | 2025-09-12 18:46:18+00:00
This is a very neat design; it's quite complicated, but I don't see anything particularly unnecessary. I use DPI scaling, so I was impressed because it's something I tend to have a hassle with in testing frontends which need to be aware of dimensions of objects and calculate where the user's cursor is. The "close all" button in window manager is pretty good.

This will be good to study from, if nothing else for me personally. I appreciate that it's almost wholly unobfuscated.
by larsiusprime | 2025-09-12 18:46:24+00:00
I work in the mass appraisal space, and I use QGIS all the time. The professional alternative is ESRI's ArcGIS.

A lot of shops I know (private and public) will use ArcGIS still, but I'm noticing an increasing number of people (particularly younger researchers/analysts) who are exclusively using QGIS.

QGIS is powerful and full featured, but it is admittedly a bit rusty around the edges, especially when working with very large datasets. If they keep working on fixing some of the sharpest edges I think it will go on to have a good future. Just in the past few years I've noticed significant improvement.

In many ways it feels like Blender -- long ignored and dismissed, but slowly but surely improved over time, and then suddenly became quite a big deal.
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-12 18:46:59+00:00
> Wouldn't a properly-implemented greedy algorithm use as many coins as possible of a given large denomination before dropping back to the next-lower denomination?

Yes, and it won't work on the problem described. The greedy algorithm only works on certain sets of coins (US coin denominations are one of those sets), and fails in at least some cases with other coin sets (as illustrated in the bit you quoted).
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 18:47:10+00:00
Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.

Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.

To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-12 18:47:24+00:00
> It's not all about labor cost

Agreed. But do not underestimate how high corporate taxes and employer taxes are in Western Europe versus the CEE.

> For example some big companies opened large offices in Germany not because labor there is cheaper or smarter, but because they're the biggest regulator in Europe so hiring a lot of people there is a good way to gain political favoritism at EU level

Not in my experience. We can open a 20 person sales office and hire an outside GovRel consultancy to manage that.

> But yeah, if you want bang for the buck workers that take Jira tickets as input and churn out git commits, you can't beat eastern Europe

In my industry (cybersecurity, enterprise SaaS, DevTools), the ecosystem is largely clustered in Czechia, Romania, and Poland because of Sevices and IT specific FDI policies back in the 2000s and 2010s to attract those kinds of investments.

You can't find hundreds of engineers with internal knowledge of K8s internals or windows internals from an offense standpoint the same way you can in the CEE countries I listed.

At this point, the entire cybersecurity, DevTools, and Enterprise SaaS ecosystem is clustered in (no ranking) Israel, India, Poland, Romania, and Czechia.
by non_aligned | 2025-09-12 18:48:16+00:00
I have no regrets. My point is that it's easy to have regrets if you build your self-worth around the company and your impact there. That's the part that's almost always too ephemeral to matter.

The secret is that the "crazy hours" tricks works best in a normal company, because your contributions stand out. If you're in a place where everyone is expected to work 9-9-6, you're not getting ahead, you're just keeping up until you burn out.
by nonameiguess | 2025-09-12 18:48:25+00:00
This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem. It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid.

To be clear, the book is fiction, but struggle sessions and beating physicists to death is not.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 18:48:45+00:00
That is what people miss about interviews. Often when you interview you don't have reasonable leads on any other job and so you don't feel like there is a choice since you likely need a job (unemployment rarely pays as well as a job). However interviews are not only about the company deciding if they will hire you, they are also about do you want to work there and convincing you to take the job if one is offered.

So make sure you use those "do you have any questions" time to ask questions! What is it really like to work there. How much notice do you need to give before taking vacation? Do they really give pay raises? How often do they lay people off? What is the dress code? Do they let you take time for your kids school activities? And so on - these questions should be things that are important to you - find out.

In the best cases the interview is only about convincing you to take the offer - generally because someone who you worked with at a previous job said "hire this person" and they trust that person enough to not need any other interview. So keep your network open.
by lucideer | 2025-09-12 18:48:45+00:00
This will be true in some interviews, but not in all.

I'm generally against using leetcode in interviews, but wherever I've seen it used it's usually for one reason & one reason alone: known dysfunctional hiring processes. These are processes where the participants in the hiring process are aware of the dysfunction in their process but are either powerless or - more often - too disorganised to properly reform the process.

Sometimes this is semi-technical director level staff leveraging HR to "standardise" interview techniques by asking the same questions across a wide range of teams within a large corp. Other times this is a small underresourced team cobbling together interview questions from online resources in a hurry, not having the cycles to write a tailored process for themselves.

In these cases, you're very likely to be dealing with a technical interviewer who is not an advocate of leetcode interviewing & is attempting to "look around" the standardised interview scoring approach to identify innovative stand out candidates. In a lot of cases I'd hazard even displaying an interest in / some knowledge of solvers would count significantly in your favour.
by dmoy | 2025-09-12 18:48:48+00:00
The major difference between software devs and lawyers, surgeons, and civil engineers is that the latter three have fairly rigorous standards to pass to become a professional (bar, boards, and PE).

That could exist for software too, but I'm not sure HN folks would like that alternative any better. Like if you thought memorizing leetcode questions for 2 weeks before an interview was bad, well I have some bad news.

Maybe in 50-100 years software will have that, but things will look very different.
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-12 18:49:19+00:00
Which is why the US pretty much immediately leaned into the laser guided rocket pods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon...

About $22k before we even ramp up production. Any NATO aircraft can carry a large loadout of them, and they turn any long distance, slow moving drone into target practice.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-12 18:49:23+00:00
You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.

Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025

US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
by margarina72 | 2025-09-12 18:49:35+00:00
long time vim user, doomemacs was my door into emacs's world and I don't regret it, it is a wonderfull tool but compared to vim, you need a good config - it's really to barebone out of the box. Doomemacs (or similar) are doing a great job at getting you started. Orgmode was really was kept me inside of emacs.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-09-12 18:49:39+00:00
It's not "pure click bait" for anyone that has followed along with the crypto community since the early days. This is basically an official stake in the heart for anyone that even loosely held on to the original ideals behind crypto.

Crypto is increasingly no different than traditional banking in anyways that are beneficial, and remains different in ways that can only be harmful to the individual (market manipulation, wild speculation, lack of institutional regulation) etc.

I don't know how anyway remotely interested in decentralized crytpocurrencies can see this as "click bait".
by bilbo0s | 2025-09-12 18:50:13+00:00
It's clearly a talent grab. Where talent = creativity.

Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.

But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.

Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.

Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.