MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-18 22:55:56+00:00
> But Nanopore sequencing is still far from perfect due to its high error rate. Any clinical sequencing is still done using sequencing by synthesis (at which Illumina has gotten very good over the past decade).

There is no reason for Nanopore to supplant sequencing-by-synthesis for short reads - that's largely solved and getting cheaper all the while.

The future clinical utility will be in medium- and large-scale variation. We don't understand this in the clinical setting nearly as well as we understand SNPs. So Nanopore is being used in the research setting and to diagnose individuals with very rare genetic disorders.

(edit)

> We are not “in the nanopore era of sequencing”. We are (still) firmly in the sequencing by synthesis era.

I also strongly disagree.

SBS is very reliable but it's common (if Toyota is the most popular car, does that mean we're in the Toyota internal combustion era? Or can Waymo still matter despite its small footprint?).

Novelty in sequencing is coming from ML approaches, RNA-DNA analysis, and combining long- and short-read technologies.
Using AI For Longhaul network latency
by tenywan | 2025-10-18 22:56:01+00:00
Howdy, has anyone explored how to build a layer of orchestration using AI across tooling and database with the goal of assessing discrepancies between geographical data and latency. I recently built a prototype as demo’s here https://dimaggi.com and was curious as to how this could be extended to intrametro networks.

Thanks.
by imglorp | 2025-10-18 22:56:05+00:00
I agree with all your points and my only suggestion is there is such a thing as "more trustworthy" and we should try to maximize that where we can, as tech people.

Absolutely we can distance blockchain from cryptocurrency to reduce the scam affiliation for lay people. There are chains for that purpose, even. In fact you would wrap this in a more usable UX hopefully.
by zahirbmirza | 2025-10-18 22:56:45+00:00
I believe that the more populist layer of the www became social media apps. Hosted LLMs (claude, chatGPT etc) are going to become the popular source of information and therefore narrative. What we must remember is that we should retain control of our thoughts, and be aware of how we can share them without financially interested parties claiming rights to their use or abuse. I am trying to solve some of these problems with NoteSub App - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 - but have yet to overcome the real issue of how we can stop the middleman keeping the loop closed with him in between.
by eth0up | 2025-10-18 22:56:51+00:00
I wonder if you might advise me. I'm presently using yt-dlp with python selenium to expose censorship of comments, analyzing triggers and exposing the multi-universe false presentation of public discourse falsely presented by shadow-banning, url manipulation, mobil vs desktop and cookie or login status.

People are literally seeing different realities of serious (sometimes) discourses. Additionally, Shadow-banned commenters see their comments in the thread but no one else does.

I'm analyzing both yt-side and channel-operator side censorship and its arguable effects on society.

There's more, but my comment will become grayed out soon so not really worth saying more.
by ThomasPw | 2025-10-18 22:56:56+00:00
Hamas people do not look starved. Other videos. over the last several days, do not show people looking starved Gaza people said to be returning to Gaza do not looked starved?

Have been several media articles about supposedly starved children and later its found they have some other condition

Also saw an article about how Hamas used the arm band method... the article claimed was a non standard method and had been shown to be not as reliable as other starvation methods. Maybe there is pockets of stavevation?
by throwawaymaths | 2025-10-18 22:57:40+00:00
gleam's 1/0 = 0 is crazy just because the author doesn't want there to be any raises anywhere. problem is, in many real world scenarios 0 is used as a sentinel value that doesn't "just" mean 0. iirc reading somewhere (in a non gleam system where 1/0 = 0) there was a system where everyone woke up to having zero shares because a 0 share tx was posted to everyone's trading endpoint, and a zero share tx means "zero the account".
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-18 22:57:53+00:00
> That's a prevalent misconception even in the scientific community. Sure, each read has 1% incorrect bases (0.01). But each segment of DNA is read many times over. More or less 0.01^(many times) ≈ 0 incorrect bases.

That's true in targeted sequencing, but when you try to sequence a whole genome, this is unlikely.
by jdboyd | 2025-10-18 22:58:00+00:00
> These aren’t complex proprietary standards,

They aren't proprietary, but they are complex standards, and sometimes somewhat incomplete. AES67, for instance, is somewhat crippled by not having a control plane (for that you need AES70, not well supported, or various NMOS standards). AVB requires special network switches.

Behringer doesn't really refuse to support standards. They offer Dante and MADI cards for their X32 and Wing mixers. They have AES50 built in as well. I think StageConnect and UltraNet are intended to be a cheaper/simpler/more limited alternative for people who don't need the full physical range and flexibility of Dante.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-10-18 22:58:48+00:00
That's a good clarification. I read through some of that link, and it does look relatively benign - Meta & Google pixels might see when you buy a kit but nothing more, but on page 21 they directly leaked genetic information to Microsoft via their Clarity tracker. Not intentionally maybe, questionable if it can be linked to a person specifically instead of just an advertising ID but they did leak that. I think the lawsuit says that even disclosing whether a person has undergone genetic testing is in violation of GIPA, so the information they sent to all 3 is enough to violate that.

I don't have any evidence they're selling anything but that lawsuit shows pretty sloppy behaviour for a company that should be thinking very deeply about privacy. I guess that's about what you said though :)
by godelski | 2025-10-18 22:59:48+00:00
> I don't know exactly where that point is, but it's certainly not when the toaster is making zero decisions.

And this is the crux of my point. Our LLMs still need to be fed prompts.

Where the "decision making" happens gets fuzzy, but that's true in the toaster too.

Your run of the mill toaster is a heating element and a timer. Is the timer a rudimentary decision process?

A more modern toaster is going to include a thermocouple or thermister to ensure that the heating elements don't light things on fire. This requires a logic circuit. Is this a decision process? (It is entirely deterministic)

A more advanced one is going to incorporate a PID controller, just like your oven. It is deterministic in the sense that it will create the same outputs given the same inputs but it is working with non-deterministic inputs.

These PIDs can also look a lot like small neural networks, and in some cases they are implemented that way. These processes need not be deterministic. You can even approach this problem through RL style optimizations. There's a lot of solutions here.

When you break this down, I agree, it is hard to define that line, especially as we break it down. But that's part of what I'm after with robotresearcher. The claim was about task performance but then the answer with a toaster was that the human and toaster work together. I believe dullcrisp used the toaster as an example because it is a much simpler problem than playing a game of chess (or at least it appears that way).

So the question still stands, when does the toaster make the toast and when am I no longer doing so?

When is the measurement attributed to the toaster's ability to make toast vs mine?

Now replace toasting with chess, programming, music generation, or anything else that we have far less well defined metrics for. Sure, we don't have a perfect definition of what constitutes toast, but it is definitely far more bound than these other things. We have accuracy in the definition, and I'd argue even fairly good precision. There's high agreement on what we'd call toast, not toasted bread, and burnt bread. We can at least address the important part of this question without infinite precision in how to discriminate these classifications.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-10-18 22:59:55+00:00
I agree neither I nor my ideas are very smart.

Think like Zuck on a private island. The thing that matters to you is economic output that is available for you to direct and consume. From a certain point of view, everything else is just resources spent for no benefit - inefficiency. Naturally you need some other people because a) the unit of human survival is a community and b) status remains the ultimate good and that is unlikely to change.

My working definition of AGI is when humans and robots become roughly fungible.

The structure of the economy seriously changes with the introduction of a robot slave class.

You can cut out the middleman in terms of production. At a certain point it stops making sense to think about things in terms of money because robots don't need to be paid. You have to think about the inputs you have and the goods and services you want them to produce for you.

It's pretty rational to start asking questions about "what's the desired human/robot ratio" under these circumstances.

The only political questions that matter become "who controls the robots" and "who controls the land", but perhaps they become the same question.
by jdboyd | 2025-10-18 23:01:01+00:00
I agree that 15m is somewhat short, but I think this is intended to offer a lower cost offering, but be an alternative the the other networks they already support.

I for one am eager for audio networking standards to become more accessible. My biggest hopes would probably have been for a control plane protocol for AES67 to gain critical mass and force Dante and Ravenna to support it, but in the mean time this could be a nice alternative for some use cases as well.
by orwin | 2025-10-18 23:01:55+00:00
Is this quality caused by an improvement in the LLM, or is it caused by a better inference engine? Because i use Claude code, clearly Sonnet 4.5 is way ahead of Sonnet4 (and much better than Codex Imho), but the reason it's more helpful is that it is better at web search (which, to be clear, is not from LLMs), and has a better inference engine for sure (which avoid painfull loops), and do not silently ignore its context when it find an incoherence.

It seems the improvements have nothing to do with AGI, a better inference engine is nice but i mean, i could run prolog program 30 years ago. To me, most of the improvements i've noticed do not fill me with the belief AGI is 3 years away. Worse, i now think that while LLMs will be usefull for AGI, like perceptron will be, clearly tehy won't be the base.

I'm no expert to be clear: i've only worked professionnally with perceptrons for OCRs, and only 6 months, 10 years ago, so my opinion have no real value, but it's a datapoint for people who are experienced with the subject.
by drfuchs | 2025-10-18 23:04:32+00:00
Typical TOPS-20 and VMS hardware of the time would have less than a gigabyte of spinning disk space, to be shared among many dozens of users. Full copies of files were saved, and there were strict per-user disk allotments. Creating Generation 2 of a file would mark the Generation 1 version as deleted. When you ran out of allotment during execution, the OS would pause your program and give you the chance to issue an Expunge command to really recycle all (or a subset) of the deleted files, and then you'd just Continue the paused process. Similar to desktop "Trash" folders where deleted things go, and that you may have to Empty once in a while.
by BoppreH | 2025-10-18 23:04:33+00:00
Yes, with the caveat that I'm assuming generics here. I'm working on a language where you can have:

def add(a, b): return a + b add(1, 2) # Works add('a', 'b') # Works add(1, 'b') # Type error!

So changing one line should never break things outside its "light cone" (call stack + reachable data structures).
by simondotau | 2025-10-18 23:04:44+00:00
> A toaster has feedback control over its temperature, time control over its cooking duration

Most toasters are heating elements attached to a timer adjusted by the human operator. It doesn’t have any feedback control. It doesn’t have any time control.

> I simply can't make toast without a toaster

I can’t make toast without bread either, but that doesn’t make the bread “responsible” for toasting itself.

> She does not understand how her toaster works.

My mum doesn’t understand how bread is made, but she can still have the intent to acquire it from a store and expose it to heat for a nominal period of time.
by mk_stjames | 2025-10-18 23:06:26+00:00
The System on Module board is an Inforce 6601 SOM. [0]

It uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and they provide prebuilt Ubuntu Linaro distros for it, preconfigured for the board.

The camera manufacturer likely just tossed it straight in as configured and thus didn't know how the full disk encryption was setup.

This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave this project to some undergrad engineering students who've never designed a commercial product before and had no price target and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system inside it for merely taking some HD video and stills triggered by some external wiring and saving them to an SD card'.

See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device ever manufactured.

[0] https://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-rugged-com-runs-linux-or-androi...
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-18 23:06:38+00:00
> The brochures always showed it next to a completely non-sterile laptop

This can be done in the field (read near a lot of dirt). This does not require sterility at all. The main problems with this are keeping your prep clean (which is different from sterile; primarily involves not getting bubbles where they shouldn't be etc.) and temperature/salt handling.

> These are by no means a new product. I think the early prototypes for these possibly predate the microUSB plug. > You probably should be wiping the package with disinfectant, use DNA-cides as needed, or follow whatever bioscience people consider the basic common sense hygiene standards.

The consumable product is what needs to be stored carefully. Its delivered DNA-free; no disinfectant is needed. It's actually hard for accidental DNA to be introduced at the sequencing step; that would usually reflect poor practices earlier on.
by metehankasapp | 2025-10-18 23:06:49+00:00
I built AI Hair Styler to remove the “what if I cut or dye my hair?” anxiety. With one clear selfie, you can preview 17 hair types (bob, pixie, bangs, curls, etc.) and 18 colors on your own face in seconds. What’s different: realistic edges & lighting (no plastic filter look), HD save, and in-app photo tips so results look natural. Most people get to a look they love in under 10 seconds. I’d love your feedback—what styles or shades should we add next? If you try it, please share a screenshot and tag us on X. https://x.com/5stellix8
by bigyabai | 2025-10-18 23:07:23+00:00
That, but unironically. You're not "fighting the man" in this arena. You are a gladiator fighting for the man. Threatening to leave by joining progressively less-popular centralized social media is a war of escalation you literally cannot win. It is wholly zero-sum.

It's as true for Twitter as it is for Bluesky as it is for Substack as it is for Hacker News. If you've invested your identity into any of these sites, you ought to realize that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Negotiation is all for naught, you either own your words or you don't.
by omnicognate | 2025-10-18 23:07:49+00:00
That's a more realistic defense of the remark than "it was a joke". A CEO ought to be a little more circumspect when talking about the future performance of the $150bn company he runs, though.

But we live in the era of Elon Musk, so what the hell. I'm going turn my belly button fluff into infinite gold next year. Can I have a few billion?
by cultofmetatron | 2025-10-18 23:07:57+00:00
water electrolysis is mind numbingly inefficient + you still have the hydrogen embrittlement problem. Additionally, you then also need a hydrogen fuel cell which relies on some pretty expensive materials like paladium. Lithium ion batteries already are a better fit for small scale grid storage since all you need is the battery and a power management system. Sodium even if its not as good as lithium for density will still be a much better fit for the vast majority of use cases than electrolysis from a maintence and power efficiency perspective.
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-18 23:08:46+00:00
To me, Lazarus is the golden standard of IDEs, because Lazarus is built in Lazarus and the author really knows how to dogfeed his own product. So many examples and tutorials, it's really awesome for teaching kids how to make programs.

I mean, it's really an IDE similar to what we were used to later with Microsoft Visual Studio, when it had integrated tagging, search, help, API docs, widget examples and libraries etc.

Every time someone tries to tell me what an IDE is, I say nope, that's not an IDE because nothing is integrated there. Xcode could be argued is an IDE (still) but it's a painful one in comparison with Lazarus.

But what do I know, I am so stubborn that I build my own UI frontend framework in Go for the last 6 months because I refuse to go back to the JS world. Hopefully at some point I can make an IDE with that, but who knows how much timd I need for that...
Ask HN: Should I open source my video game?
by zadkey | 2025-10-18 23:11:15+00:00
I've been working on and off on a video game in C# and raylib for a while.

It's like a vampire survivors like game. There are no true art assets. Everything is text. That and 32 colors and no mouse. In a sense, retro. Having fewer colors made it easier to decide what color to use.

Anyway, I've worked on it on and off for well over a year now. At this point, my passion and inspiration has left me. Maybe with time and resources I could finish it. But working in the shadows as a solo dev with no support isn't very fulfilling. (maybe that's the issue? would love to hear from others)

Right now it's complete enough to be considered a game. There's choice of characters, races, attributes, leveling up, spells, music, sound effects, enemies that spawn, and the framework for designing waves of enemies.

It could still use actual levels (instead of a just a big open grassy area), score, and unlocks.

It also includes a little bit of a tool chain for designing 'assets' (C# classes and methods that overlap text from raylib) and exporting files that and be used and included.
by kace91 | 2025-10-18 23:11:44+00:00
Semi related question: does anyone have experience introducing proper financial data handling (ledgers or other alternatives) in a fintech _after the fact_ ?

As in, fixing things during a scaleup phase when business has been working for a while and the original improvised systems are breaking, but you can’t stop business to repair.

Currently undergoing a similar project and would really appreciate any resource thrown my way, both purely technical and/or for interfacing with accounting people with no hybrid roles to bridge the domain gap.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-10-18 23:12:51+00:00
All those things you described are proxies to control resources and produce security. The money, the attention, the influence etc. Yes, structurally those things become less important if there are fewer people.

But it doesn't matter! People are unpredictable and difficult. You don't meet most of them anyway!

You don't need to think about money in the same way anymore if you can produce the goods and services you need directly, using land, productive capital and robots that are approximately as capable as humans.
by doodlebugging | 2025-10-18 23:13:40+00:00
It would likely have been done using a mold similar to the ones in this article about Roman breadmaking in Pompeii. [0] This story did make it to HN a couple or three years ago, maybe longer, and has been updated since.

[0]https://tavolamediterranea.com/2018/06/14/baking-bread-roman...

There's some bullshit about no part of the website being reproduced, etc at the bottom of the article but I ignored it since they posted it online where anyone can read it and they mentioned earlier traffic from HN so I'm sure they're totally okay with us abusing their materials, maybe as long as we all purchase something from their shops. /s
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-18 23:15:38+00:00
I don’t think this holds up to higher order thinking. On the surface, sure that makes sense.

But then who left to look at the recruitment ads if the quality of the content, comments, and community degrades enough that everyone stops coming?

All I know is that pretty much nobody here knows enough about the whole picture to have a meaningfully informed opinion. So a lot of these opinions are going to be driven by their imagination of the whole picture.
by bigtunacan | 2025-10-18 23:16:02+00:00
Fixnum#times isn’t a great example, I only used it since the parent used it to illustrate their confusion and quite frankly a concrete useful example is to complex for this format.

ActiveRecord has changed a lot over the years, but as an example in the original ActiveRecord you used dynamic finders. None of the finder methods existed initially, but if you passed a message to an active record object for a non existent method rather than fail it would determine if that should be a method and then it would build and persist a method to the process for future calls.

It allows for some really interesting and powerful applications in horizontally scaling as well.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-18 23:16:20+00:00
This seems to be a widespread practice lately, so there must be something going on here. Aside from the balance sheet/accounting angle...

Maybe they don't want to securitize their core assets and introduce a new favored class of investor. Ex: If they are securitizing their AI data centers as part of the initial capital raise, those investors would be higher up the capital stack. They would get the datacenter in a theoretical bankruptcy before the bond/equity holders got their cut of the liquidation. Intel securitized their new fab builds with Brookfield and Apollo and, as a shareholder at the time, it didn't feel great. No idea what the precedent is regarding Meta by the way, just a thought.

Maybe they think that the lenders are a bit "overzealous", and they want to push the risk of things like write down on GPU racks entirely onto external parties who are apparently all too happy to take the risk.

I'm guessing it's a mix of both, combined with the fact that we're seeing some copy and paste thinking. This is proving to be a way to get fast access to the huge private credit market. I would assume there must be some very wide deal flow pipes cranking currently, so why not tap into them if the demand is there in the other end.
by sfpotter | 2025-10-18 23:17:39+00:00
This is quite a complicated approach that misses out on most of the basic numerical and geometric methods that will make the problem simpler. I would recommend looking outside of recent SIGGRAPH papers. Brushing up on the basics of Bernstein polynomials, B-splines, and rootfinding methods will lead you to develop simpler algorithms which are likely faster.
by bayareapsycho | 2025-10-18 23:17:52+00:00
The funniest thing about events like this is that they're targeted pretty much exclusively to men, but there are plenty of women who'd be more than happy to fish in a pod full of rich guys

So the poly chicks who are running this thing are really just gatekeeping a bunch of rich simps. The "serious" monogamous women have to be kept out or they'll lose their clientele pretty quick