MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teiferer | 2025-10-04 09:24:11+00:00
> Currently, we can’t just assume that these AI models are totally right,

Why could we ever assume that?

> but the notion that it could be right took the guesswork out of our next steps,

Devils advocate here. Couldn't this just be a severe case of confirmation bias? You take 100 such cases, ask AI "how does it work?" and in 99 of those, the answer is somewhere on the spectrum between "total nonsense" and "clever formulation but wrong". One turns out to be right. That's the on we are seeing here, getting confirmed in the lab. That doesn't actually mean AI reduced the time by 75%.

A broken clock is also correct twice a day. We wouldn't say we have invented a clock that works without energy, sure it's wrong sometimes, but when it's correct, it's awesome! No, it's just a broken clock that's wrong most of the time.

I would also love to see that with "generative AI" we have discovered some helpful magic, but as long as we are not honest about those details (which would include publishing and owning up to mishaps), this is all just riding a hype train.
by tim333 | 2025-10-04 09:24:21+00:00
I've followed the human level intelligence stuff for about 45 years, back before it was called AGI and the basic thesis is kind of anti religious. It's that human intelligence is basically the result of a biologically constructed computing device, not some god given spirit, and as human built computing devices continue their Moore's law like progression they will overtake at some point.

It's been true and kind of inevitable since Turing et all started talking about it in the 1950s and Crick and Watson discovered the DNA basis of life. It's not religious, not a mania, not far fetched.
by Arch-TK | 2025-10-04 09:24:37+00:00
Somewhat unrelated: Do you think the UK government and Google have the same PR team?

Thought: Maybe we can organise and collectively hire this PR team to get Google, other big tech, and our governments, to look bad... And get shit done that way... If 2025 is the year of the PR spin, surely the only counter-measure is counter-spin?

Edit: Hold on, I think I just re-invented the concept of a political party.
by silverliver | 2025-10-04 09:27:33+00:00
> We know exactly how to do these things digitally. Many European countries have had stored-value payment schemes in the 90s. Japan still does today.

But how do they prevent people double spending the same amount? Say someone has 100$ and boards on a plane. During the trip, this person buys a bag of potato chips sold for 90$. At the same time, his bank account is automatically charged 90$ for a bill.

With credit cards, handling this case is baked into the system. As far as I am aware, direct debt has no equivalent.
by t43562 | 2025-10-04 09:28:24+00:00
I'm experiencing that shock now. Can't create a global instance of my self-made heap datastructure. I'm longing for C memory management at the moment - it seems a tiny price to pay.

Now I learn that linked lists aren't possible and one has to use some, frankly, bullshit scheme to pretend to have them. IMO the documentation isn't really preparing people for the new reality of what can be done and how to do things.
by sylware | 2025-10-04 09:28:58+00:00
It is sort of obvious and 101: with a heavy technical context "not spoken explicitely", LLMs fail hard and they end up trolling. Usually they completely miss the point, that in a row, like here.

Let's start over for microsoft GPT-6.

It all depends on the program: if it does not need more than a conservative use of the ISA to run at a reasonable speed on targeted hardware, it should not use anything else. Those people tend to forget that large implementations of RISC-V will probably be heavy on machine instruction fusion.

In the end, adding 'new machine instructions' is only to be though about, after proper machine instruction fusion investigation.

They are jumping the gun way too easily on 'adding new machine instructions', forgetting completely about machine instruction fusion.
by atombender | 2025-10-04 09:30:38+00:00
That's not why coal tar works.

Coal tar is technically carcinogenic, yes, but no study has found any association with cancer when used topically in low doses [1].

Coal tar's mechanism of action is thought to be carbazole, an aryl hydrocarbon. It is assumed to work through binding to the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, a relatively newly discovered immune cell regulator. Tapinarof (Vtama) is a new medication that also works on ArH and is really effective at reducing inflammation.

Coal tar was also used together with UVA light and psoralen (a light-sensitizing medication) to treat skin diseases like psoriasis, a protocol called Goeckerman therapy that's no longer commonly practiced. This combination does carry the risk of cancer, but it's probably due to the UVA and not the coal tar.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...
by surrTurr | 2025-10-04 09:30:48+00:00
> launch new sora update

> enable generating ghibli content since users are ADDICTED to that style

> willingly ignore the fact that the people who own this content don't want this

> wait a few days

> "ooooh we're so sorry for letting these users generate copyrighted content"

> disables it via some dumb ahh prompt detection algorithm

> dumb down the model and features even more

> add expensive pricing

> wait a few months

> launch new model without all of these restrictions again so that the difference to the new model feels insane
by lysecret | 2025-10-04 09:31:42+00:00
Ok so after watching the latent space pod and going through their docs my understanding of what they are doing:

- solve it is mostly an approach less so an app they also build some Jp notebook style ide with branching and deep chat integration + a stateful vm which looks neat though

- my definition of the philosophical approach is: don’t let ai ever generate code you don’t understand be there every step of the way and build things “bottom up” in a very incremental way (basically exactly how Jp notebooks have always worked)

Now my view on the philosophy I actually don’t think I agree. With Claude code and codex I feel like my preferred development flow is “top down” to declare what you want on a high level and then let ai build some complete construct (making sure everything is type safe) and then dig in and understand this construct and iron out all of the details. I don’t think I need to understand fully each intermediate result.

I absolutely fundamentally agree that every line of the final output has to be fully understood and signed off by you.

Honestly, their videos and posts are very difficult to understand so if I misunderstood something I’m super happy to be corrected. I have high respect for the team and it’s nice to see theme excited.
by pjjpo | 2025-10-04 09:31:45+00:00
I wonder if this proposal suffers an because of Python's extremely generous support period and perhaps the ship has sailed.

- lazy imports are a hugely impactful feature

- lazy imports are already possible without syntax

This means any libraries that get large benefit from lazy imports already use import statements within functions. They can't really use the new feature since 3.14 EoL is _2030_, forever from now. The __lazy_modules__ syntax preserves compatibility only but being eager, not performance - libraries that need lazy imports can't use it until 2030.

This means that the primary target for a long time is CLI authors, which can have a more strict python target and is mentioned many times in the PEP, and libraries that don't have broad Python version support (meaning not just works but works well), which indicates they are probably not major libraries.

Unless the feature gets backported to 2+ versions, it feels not so compelling. But given how it modifies the interpreter to a reasonable degree, I wonder if even any backport is on the table.
by prmph | 2025-10-04 09:31:53+00:00
One thing about scope hoisting in JS is that it allows to simulate some aspects of functional programming, where the the order of execution does not necessarily math the order of declaration. I use this all the time to order code elements in a file in order of decreasing importance.

I wish there was explicit support for this though, maybe with a construct like <exression> where <antecedent>, etc, like what Haskell has, instead of having to hack it using functions and var
by SkiFire13 | 2025-10-04 09:32:39+00:00
There haven't been any serious proposals yet, but some ideas have been floating around from time to time. For example this blog post has some ideas that might allow them https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2024/03/04/bor...

The hardest problems I think is that this requires a fundamental change to the language that something might be already borrowed just by existing. It also likely needs to introduce a notion of "stable" places that will not move when you move a prefix of them, e.g. to allow moving a `Box` holding self-referential data. In other words, there's a lot of bikeshedding to do.
by jaza | 2025-10-04 09:33:22+00:00
This was before my time, but older folks have told me that in the early days of credit cards here in Australia (70s and 80s), for larger purchases at department stores (which were virtually the only merchants who accepted credit cards back then), it was common for the checkout person to phone your bank to get authorisation for the transaction, before you could walk out the door with the merchandise.
by thrance | 2025-10-04 09:34:26+00:00
You have an incorrect reading of history and economy. Basically none of the wealth and comfort we (regular people) enjoy were "gifted" or "left over" willingly by the owner class. Everything had to be fought for: minimum wage, reasonable weekly hours, safe workplaces, child labor, retirement, healthcare...

Now, ask yourself, what happens when workers lose the only leverage they have against the owner class: their labor? A capitalist economy can only function if workers are able to sell their labor for wages to the owner class, creating a sort of equilibrium between capital and work.

Once AI is able to replace a significant part of workers, 99% of humans on Earth become redundant in the eyes of the owner class, and even a threat to their future prosperity. And they own everything, the police and army included.
by shiandow | 2025-10-04 09:35:11+00:00
I don't quite understand why they forbid this from being used in functions.

I mean I get why that makes the most sense in most scenarios, but it is not as if the problem of having to choose between declaring dependencies up front or deferring expensive imports until needed does not happen in functions.

Take for instance a function that quickly fails because the arguments are incorrect, it might do a whole bunch of imports that only make sense for that function but which are made immediately obsolete.

It feels like it is forbidden just because someone thought it wasn't a good coding style but to me there is no obvious reason it couldn't work.
by tim333 | 2025-10-04 09:35:57+00:00
There's been fighting over Crimea for years. It doesn't ring true as a cause of new behavior.

One thing that is new though is Russians waiting in mile long lines for petrol while they watch their refineries explode. Moscow may be trying to widen the war as a domestic distraction from that not looking good.

At least if they mix it up with NATO they can say sorry we're in a war with NATO rather than the embarrassment of we picked on a country 1/4 our size and now they are beating us.
by jfyi | 2025-10-04 09:37:38+00:00
Given my skillset at age 22? Yeah, I'll take 1995. I was old enough to grow up hearing how great the world was going to be if I learned computer programming just to enter the job force at the start of the dotcom bubble burst. 1995 would have been a major upgrade.

Also, knocking that almost decade off my birthday would assure that I spent most of my adult life with the luxury of thinking that energy didn't have negative externalities that were being forced on later generations.

We had Chomsky-esq "any major world power is kind of fascist if you think about it" instead of literal talk by politicians about putting people in camps if they don't like your diet or country of origin.

TV was pretty bad I guess but music was great and I read more back then.

There was a lot of huffing and puffing about gang violence. I grew up on the street the local gang named themselves after and it only marginally touched my life at all.

Housing was dirt cheap, food was dirt cheap, gas was dirt cheap. There was undeveloped land everywhere around the city I live in and it gave a general sense of potential.

What exactly was so bad about the 90's?
by sylware | 2025-10-04 09:37:48+00:00
Come on, what was to be understood is to 'stick to the core ISA' as much as possible.

I had to clarify the obvious: if a program does not need more than a conservative usage of the ISA to run at reasonable speed, no hardcore change to the hardware should be investigated.

Additionnally, the 'adding new machine instructions' fan boys tend to forget about machine instruction fusion (they probably want they names in the extension specifications) which has to be investigated first, and often in such niche cases, it may be not the CPU to think about, but specialized ASIC blocks and/or FPGA.
by thrown-0825-1 | 2025-10-04 09:40:00+00:00
Current US admin is pro grift, bribery, and embezzlement.

Crypto is a just a tool that enables that. They have no interest whatsoever in democratization, self-custodial finance, or frictionless payments across borders for anyone but themselves.

Direct p2p payments a "hard problem" because it directly contradicts what we consider to be one of the central pillars of national sovereignty, control over your national currency.

Crypto as a whole is in denial about this because there is no path forward without expecting nations to either give up one of their most effective levers of control, or expecting them to turn a blind eye to external actors eroding that control in real time.
by binarymax | 2025-10-04 09:40:14+00:00
The way I think about rust is this: you can experience the pain up front while you’re getting your program to compile, or you can experience pain later during runtime in random unpredictable ways. Rust is the former. It takes time to learn how to reduce the up front pain, but I’m so much more confident in the end result.

I say this having years of coding background in languages like C, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.
by rafaelmn | 2025-10-04 09:41:31+00:00
I wouldn't even put C# in there - minute builds are like nothing unusual, and my only experience with Java is Android but that was really bad too.

They aren't C++ levels bad, but they are slow enough to be distracting/flow breaking. Something like dart/flutter or even TS and frontend with hot reload is much leaner. Comparing to fully dynamic languages is kind of unfair in that regard.

I did not try Go yet but from what I've read (and also seeing the language design philosophy) I suspect it's faster than C#/Java.
by tonmoy | 2025-10-04 09:41:51+00:00
Most EVs these days can recharge 300ish miles in 15 mins, but 99% of the time I don’t even have to drive anywhere to refuel as it get recharged overnight in my garage. EVs are waaay more efficient in terms of MPGe so at least for me it is less half in terms of cost to refuel compared to petrol not even considering the external cost of emitting CO2
by jibal | 2025-10-04 09:45:09+00:00
Equating realism to pessimism is intellectually dishonest.

I'm at an age where many of my friends have died and many more soon will. Even in the most optimistic scenario this technology will not become normalized in my lifetime--and if it does become normalized there will be many undesirable consequences. In any case, global warming will destroy human civilization and this technology will die with it.
by willtemperley | 2025-10-04 09:45:30+00:00
CF: No criminal convictions I know about. No reason to distrust yet. Most controversies seem to be about providing services to political organisations.

GCP: Earth Engine is quite good, but Google have multiple criminal convictions. As a repeat offender they should be avoided at all costs. They are just so exceptionally good at manipulating people, markets and academia it's genuinely terrifying.

Azure: Microsoft still don't take security seriously. They're just a bit bumbly, not really smart enough to be as terrifying as Google.

AWS: Pretty useful, annoying to use, distrust because I can't bear Amazon's use of dark patterns in consumer products.
by citrin_ru | 2025-10-04 09:46:08+00:00
> be, before C and C++ took over the zeitgeist of compilation times.

I wouldn’t put them together. C compilation is not the fastest but fast enough to not be a big problem. C++ is a completely different story: not only it orders of magnitude slower (10x slower probably not the limit) on some codebases compiler needs a few Gb RAM (so you have to set -j below the number of CPU cores to avoid OOM).
by spwa4 | 2025-10-04 09:46:14+00:00
No. It isn't. Here's what happened to all the micropayments network platforms that competed with the internet:

The gatekeepers (telecoms) first decided they were going to publish things themselves too, which had zero success, then to pay themselves more than anyone on the platform, then when that still didn't work they kicked everyone else off the platform with various excuses (porn, crime, getting money from outside the platform, promoting non-sanctioned shows, ... the big thing that was successful were mail and chatrooms)

The problem is that these companies were always willing (after a short while) to damage the economics of the infrastructure as a whole, just to increase their own share (for example per-email charges). Eventually they had close to 100% ... of nothing.

And the irony is that because of these companies constantly trying to move into content and apps, destroying their own system more and more by crude attempts to force people into their content the only thing that remains of these systems ... is publishers. They couldn't really improve their apps, since that cost them money. They quickly discovered to use money as a way to avoid friction on their apps ... and then no business leader ever approved removing friction anywhere.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL
by jansan | 2025-10-04 09:46:22+00:00
> That's great, but the writing is still on the wall if Toyota doesn't get serious about electric cars.

It seems they know what they are doing. Toyota is a very profitable car manufacturer, with profit in 2024 more than Tesla and Volkswagen combined. Unlike Nissan, the maker of the best selling EV of all time, who is struggling very hard.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-10-04 09:46:55+00:00
> It is not realistic - we are consuming way more than any of the previous generations

That's not true. At least not true on all metrics. Energy consumption is down on 30 years ago, for example.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

Mat and protein consumption peaked around 20 years ago too.

> Poverty is at an all time low and steeply dropped since the last century. We are curing diseases, people are living long. What's the pessimism about?

It's not pessimism, it's reality. The ruling class are demanding we reduce consumption while increasing and flaunting theirs. That's just what is. If you're denying that or think it's pessimism I really don't know what to tell you.
by eightforth | 2025-10-04 09:47:40+00:00
Strategically, it was a positive move for Israel to bomb the Hamas leadership in Qatar as they met to consider how to work a proposed ceasefire to their advantage. Keep in mind that the complete destruction of Hamas is in the best interests of both Israel and the Palestinian people, and the US of course isn't going to do anything to stop them on this course of action as it benefits them too.
by ben_w | 2025-10-04 09:48:04+00:00
Not even an overall error rate is helpful: it's fine to make a huge number of incorrect guesses when your goal is R&D and the payoff from the few correct guesses covers the expense of the incorrect ones.

For example, engineers also warned the launch pad wasn't suitable for the first test flight, those enineers were correct, it didn't matter as much as it would have for e.g. a Saturn V or a Space Shuttle launch because Starship was (and still is) a test flight of a shockingly cheap unmanned vehicle.

That said, if the people currently raising alarm over Kessler cascade risks are correct, that would be an example of something essentially unsurvivable for Starlink and similar constellations.

Musk gambles when he thinks the expected return is positive; you can do that while winning hardly any bets, let alone loosing hardly any. What you have to avoid fooling yourself over are the odds, the costs, and the rewards, and I do think Musk is fooling himself about political costs if nothing else.
by Woodi | 2025-10-04 09:48:28+00:00
> [..] The CEO, CFO, and CTO are aligned: money now!

"Aligned" :)) The IT terminology FTW! Very very realistic description. Of not delivering value to customers.

Was this a case in this RH breach ? Maybe. But just putting multiple "repos" and other client stuff in same place is modern IT insanity.

At least they could put that Navy stuff somewhere else. Resonable idea, right?
by microtonal | 2025-10-04 09:48:50+00:00
Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!

I am not sure it's the quality, it's more that it's optimized for dopamine shots. Heroine is highly addictive, but I think that few people would argue it's a quality drug.

Recently there was a TV item that was filmed (in NL) just before the broad adoption of mobile phones (not smartphones). People looked so much more relaxed and more oriented towards others. I am happy that until my 18th or so mobile phones were not really a thing and that smartphones were not a really a thing until I was 25-27. I was an early adopter of smartphones, but I don't think we realized how addictive and destructive social media + smartphones would become.

The early internet was very cool though. Lots of info to be found. A high percentage of users had their own web page. A lot of it was pretty whacky/playful. Addictive timelines etc. had not been invented yet.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-10-04 09:49:54+00:00
Isaacson isn’t an objective biographer. He needs access to continue pumping out more work, and he won’t get access if he doesn’t show his subject in a positive light.

I don’t doubt these anecdotes that show the guy’s intuition was correct in a few cases. I’d be interested to know when it was wrong.

For example, he had an intuition that his engineers could build full self driving in 12 months 10 years ago. And every 12 months he’d show up promising that it would be ready for real for real in 12 months. Nah bro, he was just lying to pump up the stock price. Yeah, maybe. Or his intuition was just wrong.

He’s exceptionally good at taking credit for work done by others. SpaceX is the classic example, but him playing Path of Exile claiming to have reached the maximum level possible when actually he was taking credit for someone else playing on his behalf is another good example.
by sublimefire | 2025-10-04 09:51:00+00:00
Car companies would benefit from hiring thieves in the dark web. There were always toolkits on sale as well. So they could just investigate what is being done to steal the cars and patch it. I suppose a good bounty program would help as well as the tech savvy thieves would have a choice to get a bug bounty instead of ganging up with other criminals. Sort of divide and conquer.
by thrown-0825-1 | 2025-10-04 09:52:01+00:00
Your question is unclear.

Denial about what national sovereignty means in regards to currency controls and what that means for crypto orgs who want to operate in the stable coin or off ramp space?

Plenty of examples of orgs either failing or entirely abandoning their crypto "principles" like privacy and decentralization just to get rubber stamped by various regulatory agencies.