MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Centigonal | 2025-09-28 05:04:00+00:00
> Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course.

Typically, after a kidney transplant, patients are instructed to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. This is to reduce the risk of the patient's body rejecting the transplanted organ. Your family member was just straight up lucky that her body didn't reject the organ, even without any immunosuppression.

One thing that's fascinating to me is that most immunosuppressant drugs used today hadn't yet been discovered in the early 60s! AFAIK, all they would have had was prednisone, prednisolone, and azathioprine. Back then, a kidney transplant aided by these drugs would have been as new and revolutionary as the Hepatitis C cure or the triple-drug therapy for cystic fibrosis is today.
by bruce511 | 2025-09-28 05:04:09+00:00
I guess it kinda depends on what you mean by "cultural weight". Alphabet characters just make words, periods et al are just punctuation.

@ is somewhat different. It's not punctuation. It's not a letter. It's a symbol, used primarily as an abbreviation, like %. But while % is universal, @ is more regional.

Sure, these days it's part of email addresses. But it has a long history of meaning others things. And it's been used in different ways in different places and times. Growing up in the 80s, it was on my keyboard, but I had no idea what it was for.

If one takes "culture" here to span time, rather than location, then perhaps the argument makes more sense.
by rramadass | 2025-09-28 05:04:48+00:00
Important article particularly for us folks who sit in front of Computers for most of our waking hours.

Key points:

he says that working on our vision has the power to transform how we think, feel and function. In fact, our vision is so fundamental to our health and wellbeing, Appelbaum describes it as “the new microbiome”.

“But vision is so much more complex. It’s how our brain processes, organises and stores the information coming through the eyes.” He adds: “Vision is a direct reflection of brain function.”

We have to focus on the Whole Organism rather than just the Vision part i.e. stop overloading the Visual System, sync our Circadian Rhythms with the day/night diurnal cycle and understand/use Visual Technology (eg. Nits) properly.

Some relevant articles/videos;

1) Myopia: A Modern Yet Reversible Disease by Todd Becker - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Efg42-Qn0 This explains how to use Hormesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis) to cure myopia.

2) How Hormesis Works: The Biology of Beneficial Adaptation to Stress by Todd Becker - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDm_guQfESA

3) How optimizing Circadian Rhythms can increase Healthy Years by Sachin Panda - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fciGNBN0nKM Gives a practical 6-step process to sync our circadian rhythms; the visual system is key here.

4) The Circadian Code by Sachin Panda - https://www.drmattwardley.co.uk/the-circadian-code-prof-pand... and https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/book-review-circadian-code-sa...

5) Brightness levels & Nits explained - https://www.beetronics.co.uk/support/blog/screen-brightness-...
by LoganDark | 2025-09-28 05:05:30+00:00
Reverse engineering is not only deriving source code from an executable. Reverse engineering is figuring out what resulted in any given solution. This could be the source code that resulted in a given executable, or it could be the design decisions, considerations, and reasoning behind some given source code. You can go even further and reverse engineer those requirements to guess at the problems they were meant to solve, and so on and so forth. Reverse engineering is literally just going backwards: from machine code to source code, from source code to ideas and thoughts, from ideas and thoughts to the inciting problems or even more fundamental things. You can also reverse from further in the other direction, i.e. reverse a binary from a desired output (superoptimization!), reverse the desired output from the result of a calculation involving it (hello password cracking), etc.

Though password cracking is not necessarily the best example, some (very bad!) hashing algorithms can actually be reversed that way. Figuring out the reverse is, reverse engineering. You would reverse engineer the algorithm to figure out how to create a collision that way. Same as superoptimizers sort of reverse engineer the behavior you want to come up with a very efficient implementation. I'm using the term reverse engineer a bit loosely there but you get the point. It has nothing to do with source code really, you can just as easily reverse engineer physical objects. Or artwork. Or the psyche.

So yes, you can reverse engineer source code to understand on a deeper level how it works. Sometimes reading it over once or twice is enough for this, sometimes even reading the API documentation or observing behavior is enough, but sometimes you have to do a bit of thinking and/or testing to fully understand it.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-28 05:11:39+00:00
I learned C++ before learning python as well and python felt like a breath of fresh air.

At first I thought it was because of the lack of types. But in actuality the lack of types was a detriment for python. It was an illusion. The reason why python felt so much better was because it had clear error messages and a clear path to find errors and bugs.

In C++ memory leaks and seg faults are always hidden from view so EVEN though C++ is statically typed, it's actually practically less safe then python and much more harder to debug.

The whole python and ruby thing exploding in popularity back in the day was a trick. It was an illusion. We didn't like it more because of the lack of typing. These languages were embraced because they weren't C or C++.

It took a decade for people to realize this with type hints and typescript. This was a huge technical debate and now all those people were against types are proven utterly wrong.
by paulrusso | 2025-09-28 05:12:23+00:00
Hey! I've received this feedback from a few different people, and I agree with it. The latest version of Blots (0.8.0) changes the behavior of broadcast comparisons. Now, comparisons are applied to each element in the list, producing a new list of booleans. As you pointed out, this better matches the broadcasting behavior of arithmetic operators:

``` [1, 2, 3] * 10 // [10, 20, 30] [10, 20, 30] + 2 // [12, 22, 32] [4, 5, 6] > 3 // [true, true, true] [1, 2] == [2, 2] // [false, true] ```

In addition, I’ve added both `all` and `any` as built-in functions. These can be used to achieve the same result as the previous broadcasting behavior:

``` [4, 5, 6] > 4 into all // false [4, 5, 6] > 4 into any // true

// alternatively: all([4, 5, 6] > 4) // false any([4, 5, 6] > 4) // true ```

Thanks for the feedback!
by rapjr9 | 2025-09-28 05:12:47+00:00
Isn't the training most of the cost? In which case the current models could have a very long lifetime even if new models are never trained again. They'll go gradually out of date, but for many purposes will still be useful. If they can pull new info from the web they may stay relevant for decades. It's only if running the chatbots is not cost effective that everything halts and my understanding is that the cost of that is lower relatively. Even now, older models are still being used. Also, performance optimizations seem likely to soon reduce the need for data center build out and reduce costs. Seems too soon to say where this is all going. Who even knows if the GPU chips will improve dramatically or if something else (more AI optimized processor architectures) will replace them? It's true that right now it looks like a bubble, but the future is still very much in flux, and the value of the models already created may not disappear overnight.
by layman51 | 2025-09-28 05:13:16+00:00
I personally became suspicious about this article being written with the help of LLMs when I read, "Day after day. Week after week." This is pretty far down in the article, but it felt weird to read this because it was near the end of that paragraph that its in. It felt repetitive, and then the paragraph right after that has the classic LLM pattern where they write, "it's not just X, it's Y."
by boris | 2025-09-28 05:18:44+00:00
> We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient.

I wonder if these new shoes have the same affect on natural (i.e., non-paved) surfaces? Plus, they all look quite high off the ground (probably all those plates and foam need space) and that doesn't help with stability when running over rocks, etc.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-28 05:19:25+00:00
Older GPUs had nowhere near enough memory to be really interesting for big data crunching.

Now however, the biggest limit for AI workloads is GPU memory capacity (and bandwidth). The billions invested are going into improving this aspect faster than any other. Expect GPUs with a terabyte of ultra-fast memory by the end of the decade. There are lots… and lots… of applications for something like that, other than just LLMs!
by sahila | 2025-09-28 05:19:52+00:00
> they only collapse when nearly everyone is finally convinced they never will

I get that rationale in some bubbles as that means people are not parking their money as cash where they can buy the dip and support the market (tell me if I'm widely off). But I think this case is different because there's actually VAST sums of money being spent in AI by some very big players who will need an return.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-28 05:20:52+00:00
> car

As sister comment points out, civil forfeiture is one. Your car being involved in a criminal investigation and getting saved for perpetuity as evidence would be another.

Funnier examples: let's say it's a self driving car, as you proudly admire your brand new car delivered car, firmware is overwritten by error and is sent to another home, who also closes the delivery. Factory management software is buggy as hell and your car got reassigned some random info of another lost car, but marked as delivered to you anyway, so the burden of proof is now on your side.

You might be fighting that car maker in court for the rest of your life without ever seeing any compensation or getting back "your" car.

> mortgaged home

If it's mortgaged it's just not yours in the first place. I'm sure you have clauses in your loan contract detailing how the loaner can unilateraly decide that circumstances changed, you're now too much of a risk, and request near inmediate full repay of the rest of loan or else they liquidate the property.

Land laws have also their funnier clauses, where someone squatting your property for a decade can request legal ownership, depending on the local arrangements.
by user_7832 | 2025-09-28 05:21:13+00:00
(Old man shouting at clouds rant incoming)

I think it's kinda ironic (in a more meta Alanis Morissette way) for such an article that has interesting content to default to have an LLM write it. Please, I request authors - you're better than this, and many people actually want to hear you, not an LLM.

For example, what really is the meaning of this sentence?

> These aren't just storage slots for data, they're the learned connections between artificial neurons, each one encoding a tiny fragment of knowledge about language, reasoning, and the patterns hidden in human communication.

I thought parameters were associated with connections, is the author implying that they also store data? Is the connection itself the stored data? Is there non-connective information that stores data? Or non-data-storage things that have connectivity aspects?

I spent a solid amount of time trying to understand what was being told, but thanks to what I would call a false/unnecessary "not just x but y" troupe, I unfortunately lost the plot.

IMO, a human who's a good writer would have a sentence that's clearer to understand, while non advanced writers (including me, almost certainly) would simply degrade gracefully to simpler sentence structure.
by naet | 2025-09-28 05:23:16+00:00
I once had to migrate a good number of web properties off of Cloudflare for a client. They were an agency that had used it as a go-to for many years and many clients, until the CEO of the company stated publicly that they would no longer use cloudflare as a political thing (there had been a news story that Cloudflare was providing ddos protection for some Nazi websites and refused to take them down, or something similar enough).

My takeaway was basically that people use Cloudflare a lot because it is a strong service with a ton to offer at a very low price point. It's a bit like gmail - just very convenient and offers a lot for free or very cheap. Switching at that scale made a significant increase in their monthly bill.

I do applaud people who go out of their way to create alternatives to major services like cloudflare, gmail, chrome, etc. As an individual it can be hard to do though, or at least not always the path of least resistance.
by Centigonal | 2025-09-28 05:24:14+00:00
For people who want to dig deeper: The fancy ML term-of-art for the practice of cutting out a piece of a neural network and measuring the resulting effect on its performance is an ablation study.

Since around 2018, ablation has been an important tool to understand the structure and function of ML models, including LLMs. Searching for this term in papers about your favorite LLMs is a good way to learn more.
by kqr | 2025-09-28 05:25:03+00:00
I disagree. For very high level play, yes, opening theory matters. For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.

This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game. In most strategy games, "macro" (large scale logistics) is what determines winners at all levels of play, and then at higher levels where logistics skills are similar, small-scale tactics start to discriminate winner from loser. In low-level go, you'll find "micro" (small-scale battle tactics) determine the outcome of most games.

This is because of the "teleporting" you mention. When the opponent can materialise units and start a battle anywhere they want -- including inside your base -- small-scale tactics becomes important. (I once read the analogy that "if you were able to drop a siege tank into the opponent's main base at the start of the game, micro would end up determining low level StarCraft games too" -- only players that excel at local tactics would survive to see the end game with any base worth mentioning.)

For each hour of training, exercises in reading and local tactics is what will improve your rating the most. At least for the 20 or so first grades. Someone who is good at reading will obliterate all positions of someone who only knows the more subtle aspects.
by nenenejej | 2025-09-28 05:29:48+00:00
It can be sort of both. What you need is more housing built at affordable prices. But dont oberbuild. In that situation housing should act as store of value to avoid inflation loss, but not something that you get rich buy borrowing and buying up dozens.

You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the for people sense) in allocating land and building housing. Ideally dense housing.
by txrx0000 | 2025-09-28 05:30:21+00:00
A description of the taste of chocolate must contain some information about the actual experience of eating chocolate. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible for both the reader and the author to understand what the description refers to in reality. The description wasn't conceived in a vacuum, it's a lossy encode of all of the physical processes that preceded it (the further away, the lossier). One of the common processes encoded in the dataset of human-written text is whatever's in the brain that produces consciousness for all humans. The model might not even try to recover this if it's not useful for predicting the next token. The SNR of the encode may not be high enough to recover this given the limited text we have. But what if it was useful, and the SNR was high enough? I can't outright dismiss this possibility, especially as these models are getting better and better at behaving like humans in increasingly non-trivial ways, so they're clearly recovering more and more of something.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-28 05:31:15+00:00
It is a FOSS, complaining about proprietary APIs, because there is this dissonance between communities.

Game developers care about IP, how to make it go beyond games, getting a publisher deal, gameplay, the proprietary APIs is a set of plugins on a middleware engines in-house or external, and done it is.

Also there is a whole set of companies whose main business is porting games, where is where several studios got their foot into the door before coming up with their own ideas, as a means to get experience and recognition in the industry, they are thankful each platform is something else.

Finally anyone claiming Khronos APIs are portable never had the pleasure to use extensions or deal with drivers and shader compiler bugs.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-28 05:32:05+00:00
This is a naive realization. When type checking is used to the maximum extent they become as just as important as unit testing. It is an actual safety contribution to the code.

Many old school python developers don't realize how important typing actually is. It's not just documentation. It can actually roughly reduce dev time by 50% and increase safety by roughly 2x.
by KK7NIL | 2025-09-28 05:32:06+00:00
> This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game.

No, it isn't. As a decent chess and go player I can tell you that they're both just tactics until you approach the master/dan level. And what is strategy if not just a longer form of tactical play?

At the end of the day, strategic play is just play that sets up tactics later on.

Or, to quote Fischer: "Tactics flow from a superior position"
by didericis | 2025-09-28 05:33:41+00:00
I agree the standard for mathematical notation is latex, but it’s only needed for fairly limited parts of a document. It makes more sense to me as something you’d use in snippets like `$\sum_{n=1}^{10}n$` than something that should control the whole document.

Markdown and mathjax is imo way more web friendly than a full latex document and avoids distracting/unnecessary aspects of latex.

As for publisher support, that’s what frustrates me most: html was specifically designed for academics at cern to publish and link documents. Instead of using an html friendly format like markdown, publishers demand a format designed for printing content to a physical piece of paper. So now html is used for almost everything except academic papers, and academic papers are all pdfs submitted to journal or preprint severs with no links.
by mindslight | 2025-09-28 05:36:19+00:00
Common relays don't handle 150VDC, and I'd spec the voltage even higher even though one would think the voltage rating has more to do with arc interruption rather than creepage while off. Also a microcontroller is complete overkill, draws too much current to be easily powerable by the solar panel side, and adds complexity for something to go wrong. A simple analog comparator suffices.

The standard answer for overvoltage protection is a crowbar circuit + fuse, and I think that's what I'd aim for rather than a relay. The problem with DIYing that is knowing the input capacitance of the Delta and finding out whether it has any other problems with its input being abruptly shorted.
by araes | 2025-09-28 05:36:36+00:00
From qingcharles post earlier, three people with abeto.co (https://abeto.co/). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397933

> https://xcancel.com/abeto_co

> https://xcancel.com/vlucendo

> https://xcancel.com/michaelsungaila

> https://kevincolombin.bandcamp.com/
by indolering | 2025-09-28 05:36:55+00:00
The actual scientists have a much more limited outlook on the potential impact of this line of research, but The Economist's headline does not. This sort of hyperbole is very Freakonomics and will be used by people who really like the sun as evidence that it's better to not wear sunscreen.

It's gross to see them weighing in on this topic at all.
by MrCroxx | 2025-09-28 05:37:24+00:00
Hi, foyer's author here. Page cache and swap are indeed good general proposed strategies and continuously evoluting. There are several reasons why foyer manages memory and disk control by itself rather than directly utilizing these mechanisms:

1. Leverage asynchronous capabilities: Foyer exposes async interfaces so that while waiting for IO and other operations, the worker can still perform other tasks, thereby increasing overall throughput. If swap is used, a page fault will cause synchronous waiting, blocking the worker thread and resulting in performance degradation.

2. Fine-grained control: As a dedicated cache system, foyer has a better understanding than a general proposed system like the operating system's page cache of which data should be cached and which should not. This is also why foyer has supported direct I/O to avoid duplication of abilities with the page cache since day one. Foyer can use its own strategies to know earlier when data should be cached or evicted.
by supermatt | 2025-09-28 05:38:26+00:00
I just had solar installed at my property and am producing more than I can store in the grid (rural lines restricting how many kW).

I was considering picking up an old leaf (or 2) as some buffer storage, so I can continue to feed excess energy into the grid during low solar periods.

Does anyone have experience of using a leaf in this way? Anything I should look out for when sourcing one?
by bubblyworld | 2025-09-28 05:39:52+00:00
I love Go and have played it a lot in person, but I always struggle to get games online, even on OGS. Feels like the online community is very small compared to chess (which is now my boardgame of choice, basically for this reason). Has this changed? Are there better sites now where a beginner can find matches without waiting half an hour or more?
by staplung | 2025-09-28 05:42:05+00:00
The last of the Vela satellites were shut down in 1984 or 1985 (I've found conflicting sources on this) but in any case, before Chernobyl (April, 1986). They were replaced by other systems of course but as others have pointed out, those were never designed to detect fallout. Bhangmeters look for a characteristic double-flash of light from atmospheric nuclear detonations.
by MountDoom | 2025-09-28 05:43:10+00:00
Electronics is electronics. But the weight trade-offs for anything that walks or drives on the ground aren't as severe as for drones, so you could presumably provide EM shielding and light armor more easily.

At the same time, terrain is just harder and slower to navigate, it's easier to erect barriers, and humans are better at spotting eye-level threats. There's a reason why murder-drones are common on the battlefield, and murder-humanoids aren't.
by edgineer | 2025-09-28 05:44:05+00:00
Maybe it's worse with ICE cars--more parts, many considered wear items, that are difficult to get to to inspect. It could be hard to tell if the seller recently changed the oil and filters after never changing them. Transmission, alternator, etc. could have issues only intermittently.

Should be easy to see HV battery health, charge to 100% and check remaining range reported. Drive unit/other battery issues seem pretty rare and I'm not sure they're correlated with driving behavior, though I could be wrong.
by Leftium | 2025-09-28 05:44:15+00:00
I just copied the title verbatim from the original Show HN: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/44302416

In case you also have a problem with not using the original HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44302416

(I think the first link is easier to read (CSS/formatting/dark mode), slightly more compact, and contains a link to the original HN post. It's also simple to recreate the HN link manually by inspecting the ID.)