MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2025-10-16 13:48:32+00:00
Look through any of the single cell atlas papers that are published all the time and you'l see slightly different methods, called machine learning in the past, AI now, used to achieve exactly the same thing. Every form of AI has been continuously produced new results like this throughout the history of genomics.

The reason you are reading about this is because 1) Gemma has a massive massive PR budget, whereas scientists have zero PR budget, 2) it's coming from Google so it's not the traditional scientists and you know Google and when they publish something new, it's makes it to HN.

I don't see any reason to be excited by the result here. It is a workaday result, using a new tool. I'm usually excited by new tools, but given the source, it's going to take a lot of digging to get past the PR spin, so that extra needless work seems exhausting.

Facebooks's proteins language modelling, followed by Google's AlphaFold, did have really new and interesting methods! But single cell RNA models have been underwhelming because there's no easy "here is the ground truth" out there like there is for proteins. We won't know if this is a significant advancement until years of study show which of the many scRNA foundation models make better predictions. And there was a paper about a year ago that poured a ton of cold water on the whole field: replacing models with random weights barely changed the results on the very limited evaluation sets that we have.
by ux266478 | 2025-10-16 13:48:49+00:00
Math is great and should be well studied by programmers, but in general I oppose this idea. Mathematicians define things the way they do because they have neither flip-flops nor do they have a defined execution method as part of their foundational system. These two things radically change the interaction we have with any given formal system put on top of it.

> Functions map members of a set A to members of a set B.

> Something that has side effects all over the place should just not be called a function

Leibniz defines functions as a quantity that depends on some geometry like a curve. Bernoulli later defined it as a quantity that results from a variable. The latin word "functio" means process, not implying a mapping but an arbitrary sequential performance. Mathematicians are prone to taking words from elsewhere, either twisting their meaning or inventing wholly new meaning out of thin air, all according to their whimsy for their own particular needs. I do not think a reasonable case can be made to assert we have to respect ZFC's narrow conception of a function when we do not live in a ZFC world.
by throw0101d | 2025-10-16 13:49:12+00:00
> Air conditioning: In 1851, Dr. John Gorrie invented a machine to cool air, which laid the groundwork for modern air conditioning and refrigeration

And modern cooling was invented by Carrier, with the original use case to actually control humidity to help the publishing/newspaper industry:

> On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented what is perhaps the most significant document ever prepared on air conditioning – Rational Psychrometric Formulae – at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the "Magna Carta of Psychrometrics."[8][9] This document tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carrier

The idea of temperature (first in cinemas and theatres) came later. People under-estimate how much humidity control is needed for comfort: many building codes are adding language to have a standalone whole house dehumidifier.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-16 13:49:17+00:00
Profits, unreasonable expedience, nor CYA medicine shouldn't be the driving forces. Evidence-based medicine should start with knowing what characteristics or which pathogen it is before dispensing medication. There's only so many prescriptions of a certain class of antimicrobial that can be written before a pathogen evolves, and then it's ICU DoLR time. And then there's the other side-effects: overprescription of Cefdinir for average strep cases has shown to lead to greater risk of infection by resistant C. diff. Microbiome upsets by killing off healthy GI critters too.

While delaying prescriptions campaigns like US CDC may be holistically helpful to discourage some overprescription abuse, it doesn't address the lack of sufficient rapid, systematic, integrated clinical pathological screening and surveillance.

For maximum human benefit, I think essential medical testing services should have a nationwide option provided at minimal costs for anyone including those without health insurance. Some things shouldn't be completely privatized because of the perverse incentives created, like private equity buying up rural hospitals decimating local care options to favor air ambulance services they also own.

I think we can and must do things better and smarter to reduce individual and aggregate harm.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-10-16 13:49:39+00:00
Think of them like units of measurement. `°C` is a type, distinct from `°F`, and also distinct from `kilometer`, but all those are just `float` in Python's numeric types. You want separate types because they're not interchangeable. Sometimes two types are subtypes of the same parent type, `°C` and `°F` are subtypes of some generic `temperature` type, `kilometer` is a subtype of `distance`, etc. Types with the same supertype can be converted between one another, but unrelated types can't be. There's no meaningful way to convert `50.3km` into `°C`, even though both are just `float`s.
by matt-p | 2025-10-16 13:50:03+00:00
"The UK doesn't even allow end-to-end encryption" thats 100% not true, just completely false.

"has some Draconian surveillance laws", sure and what EU countries don't - you must be joking?

"I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant" The GDPR is retained in domestic law, it's literally the exact same situation as before brexit.
by silveraxe93 | 2025-10-16 13:50:07+00:00
Then don't? I don't think it's a valid complaint at _all_.

It's totally fine to just pick one tool (chatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and just use whatever the best default they allow you to use. You'll get 90% of the benefits and not have to think at all.

AI is new and developing at breakneck pace. You can't complain that you want to get bleeding edge without having to do research or change workflows. That's already unrealistic for "normal" fields. It's absurd to expect for AI.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-10-16 13:50:14+00:00
Who cares what you think is insane. That's the way people think and talk in Europe, and it makes sense. Maybe in the UK people think of Russia when someone talks about Europe but certainly no one does that in the EU. In this case, it makes a lot of sense not to include the UK (or Russia) because people looking for alternatives to US cloud providers for legal reasons are going to have the same or even more concerns about the UK (viz., Russia).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-16 13:50:17+00:00
And while you are being sarcastic, this is the Right Way to use queues.

Upload file to S3 -> trigger an SNS message for fanout if you need it -> SNS -> SQS trigger -> SQS to ETL jobs.

The ETL job can then be hosted using Lambda (easiest) or ECS/Docker/Fargate (still easy and scales on demand) or even a set of EC2 instances that scale based on the items in a queue (don’t do this unless you have a legacy app that can’t be containerized).

If your client only supports SFTP, there is the SFTP Transfer Service on AWS that will allow them to send the file via SFTP and it is automatically copied to an S3 bucket.

Alternatively, there are products that treat S3 as a mountable directory and they can just use whatever copy commands on their end to copy the file to a “folder”
by leavenotracks | 2025-10-16 13:50:19+00:00
That's them - it seems every now and again their set-up goes down, hopefully it's just a blip. I signed up to Librem One ages ago on the basis that I was supporting a company trying to do good things. But they do seem to be getting flakier and flakier with time. Maybe it's time to roll e-mail on my own domain.
by j4coh | 2025-10-16 13:50:30+00:00
You've misquoted by turning "Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong or at least incomplete" into "Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong" in order to lecture me that saying only that he's frequently wrong is overstating things, and that I should have said incomplete. Which I did - in the non-misquoted version. But of course, you don't need my participation to have debates with imaginary versions of people in your head so I'll leave you to it.
by mekoka | 2025-10-16 13:50:50+00:00
Mindless appeal to authority? I don't think that's how the fallacy really works. It's pretty much the authority that seems to disagree with your sentiment, that is if we can agree that Torvalds still knows what he's doing. Him not sharing your skepticism is a valid argument. The point being that instead of giving weight to our distant feelings, maybe we could just pause and be more curious as to why someone with much closer involvement would not share them. Why should we care more about the opinions of randos on hn?
Show HN: HotDish Planner big meals so dishes finish hot
by DakotaBuilds | 2025-10-16 13:51:14+00:00
Small web app for timing big meals.

How it works: – Add dishes (prep + cook minutes) – Set serve time – Get start times so everything finishes hot together

Free. Pro ($5/year): smart alarms + live countdowns, save/load plans, compact print layout.

Feedback welcome! (HN: DakotaBuilds)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-16 13:51:14+00:00
> Would they delay their rollout over the capital costs of a few thousand $60,000 Jaguars?

Yes. Google, better than many others, gets scaling economics.

(And the cost is likely $100+ thousand per vehicle, after sensors and compute, with costs rising rapidly if you try and order too many too fast due to supply-chain bottlenecks nobody has bothered optimizing yet.)
by pbasista | 2025-10-16 13:51:31+00:00
I would consider that to be a misinterpretation. The whole project did not fall apart because Hector Martin left. But as with any project where the leaders depart, it definitely got slower.

The argument was originally about merging some Rust code into some parts of the Linux kernel if I remember correctly. It did not involve Linus Torvalds directly. Rather, the respective maintainers of those specific parts were unwilling to merge some Rust code, mostly because they did not know Rust well and they did not want to acquire the responsibility to maintain such code.
by alnwlsn | 2025-10-16 13:52:23+00:00
Our best answer might be film. Some of it has already survived 80 years. (Micro)film is supposed to last something like 500 years, and it's what Github picked for their Arctic Code Vault. I was curious one time so I looked into it, but it seems like most effort is on converting microfilm to digital, not the other way around.

Anecdotally, the stuff my grandpa filmed on Super-8 is still in nearly perfect condition 65 years later. But most of his 16mm stuff from just a few years earlier than that has vinegar syndrome, so it's not "just film it and you're good"
by djoldman | 2025-10-16 13:52:25+00:00
Apologies.

What I mean to highlight is that although a mistake in filing may lead to the IRS rectifying the mistake by sending/requesting the error balance, there are other possible effects, including civil and criminal liabilities.

This is undesirable. As mentioned in many comments here, the vast majority of filers, especially those with one employer and no substantial investment income, should not be required to file their taxes and instead the IRS should communicate the calculation result and ask if the filer disagrees.

This is a classic problem related to the "you slice, I choose" false dichotomy[0]. Essentially, even assuming it costs zero time to fill out and file a tax return, any mistake at all could lead to a negative consequence to filer.

As an aside, always choose to choose and not to cut the cake :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_cake-cutting
by ux266478 | 2025-10-16 13:52:31+00:00
A tuple in ML is a product type of ( t * t ...)

OCaML has tuples like all the other MLs. Thus given a function f with a signature (int * int) -> int, invocation is written as something like:

f (1, 2)

So yes, they do accept tuples. This isn't weird, and is the standard way to write a multi-argument function in most of the ML family. In the 5th stage baudrillardian mess that OCaML has become in 2025 it might be weird since at some point they added implicit currying to the language and that became the default idiom. But personally I hate implicit currying and avoid it whenever possible.
by xnx | 2025-10-16 13:52:39+00:00
The linked article is bad. It would've been better to link to the official announcement or page (https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk):

"select boroughs in London, including Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Royal Borough of Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Islington, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Redbridge, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth, City of Westminster, and the City of London."
by noahmasur | 2025-10-16 13:53:06+00:00
Some tax forms like NY State fill-in forms have some scripted functionality that requires Adobe Acrobat to work, and they block rendering from other PDF programs. Even worse, once you've filled in the form, their PDF then blocks Acrobat from exporting to a normal PDF (the way you can save a print preview to a PDF for later) and so the only way you can get a real PDF of it is to print it directly and then scan it back to your computer.
by aw1621107 | 2025-10-16 13:53:27+00:00
> Only if you primarily work with `cargo` and want to interact with C from Rust.

In what way(s) does Rust's C interop depend on cargo?

> The other way around has far less support and `rustc` does not standardize the object generation.

I believe in this context the understanding is that you're going to be using `extern "C"` and/or `#[repr(C)]` in your Rust code, which gives you a plain C interface. I think attempting to use "raw" Rust code from other languages is a rare phenomenon, if it's even attempted at all.

> This is actively preventing projects like `systemd` to adopt Rust into their project as an example.

Could you point out specific instances from that thread? From a quick glance I didn't see any obvious instances of someone saying that using Rust from C is problematic.
by sva_ | 2025-10-16 13:53:37+00:00
I think you misunderstood the study in Pakistan.

> The injector injects 3 ml and keeps 2 ml (the scale) as injection fee.

Heroin users will first inject the drug, then immediately draw blood back into the syringe and then reinject that, to accomplish a kind of mixing the drug with the blood in the syringe. The study claims that people leave some of that blood/drug mix in the syringe as a fee.
by sybercecurity | 2025-10-16 13:53:40+00:00
Most people will see this as unfair and it will distort economic measurement by doing alway with price signals. I would think the blowback will be about the abuse that can (likely will) happen.

"I see based on your social media posts you have a family member in hospice. Now you're buying a airline ticket to their city. You must really want to see them so I'm guessing you'll pay a 100% markup..."
by rwmj | 2025-10-16 13:53:54+00:00
The Amstrad PCW word processor was also very widespread in UK offices, and that used 3" disks so there must be tons of letters, interoffice memos and other office documents out there in that format. Of course that's only half the problem, the other half is that it used a very strange word processor called Locoscript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW)
by candiddevmike | 2025-10-16 13:54:05+00:00
Idk, I wouldn't consider adult swim and friends brain rot. Whereas kids these days celebrate brain rot ("Italian brain rot", specifically). I see this as part of the larger anti-intellectualism gripping our species and really dislike it. A lot of these kids are glued to screens and are fed just a constant stream of ads and algorithmic shit while forming parasocial relationships with fake personalities.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-16 13:54:09+00:00
A good case study for these kinds of multi-generation missions are colonies and outposts. Especially the "put some settlers on an empty island to establish a claim" kind of colony. In that case the most obvious thing to do for each new generation is to continue living there, which aligns well with the goal of the mission. Even if they eventually demand independence the goal that the island doesn't fall into the hands of the French is still met, so that's at least partial success.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-10-16 13:54:22+00:00
It is true because a cryptosystem is by definition not end-to-end encrypted if a third party can read the plaintext, and that's exactly what UK law mandates.

> "I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant" The GDPR is retained in domestic law, it's literally the exact same situation as before brexit.

That's not the stance of legal scholars and judges in the EU, for the same reasons as there are doubts that US companies can be GDPR compliant. Let's just say that the alleged GDPR compliance hasn't been tested in court yet and is a legal gamble. Whether a EU company is willing to take that gamble or not depends on many factors and is up to them, of course.
by artpar | 2025-10-16 13:54:42+00:00
If I am reading you correctly, you captured the whole essence of agent4.

So it does the first pass (based on your goals) makes memories (and these are local)

Now you tell the agent you want to do this repeatedly, so it will make a workflow (these workflows are saved on server, currently all public for now but we are working out permissions/group based access) for you based on these memories and interactions.

The problem is many times that the agent thinks is stable isn't really, so there a feedback loop for the agent to test out the workflow and improve them. (its basically claude code/codex sitting in the browser)

Workflow details are appended to prompt based on user query match/opened tabs match.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-10-16 13:54:47+00:00
I can tell you that writing Java GUI applications is hell. You have the following libraries:

AWT - still actually under-pining the others, but very ugly to work with

Swing - basically runs on top of AWT, with the same design model, plays badly with it. Is hard to write in a testable way, is prone to embedding business logic in UI components

JavaFX - all the worst parts of business Java with all the worst parts of XML and also the worst parts of a game engine. Now you need to care about 'adding a scene to a stage'.

The principle core technology that made Java good was applets. Since they were killed by mobile, the reason for delivering a Java app is functionally zero. You will need to ship a JVM which you need to update alongside your app.

Java is a great back-end development language and a really poor GUI language.

These days you should either ship an Electron app or native code.
by munksbeer | 2025-10-16 13:55:02+00:00
"instead of the slop that came out."

This "slop" reads perfectly fine to me, and obviously a lot of others, except those who have now been conditioned to watch out for it and react negatively about it.

Think about it, why react negatively? The text reads fine. It is clear, even with my usual lack of attention I found it engaging, and read to the end. In fact, it doesn't engage in the usual hubris style prose that a lot of people think makes them look smarter.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-10-16 13:55:13+00:00
modern hdds should not be stored powered down.

they should be spinning most of the time in indle to lubricate things.

or so I've heard.

i have my nas setup as such and have 10y drivers with constant success (they move from main to spare after 5y). i also aim for the 30w amd cpu (which drawn around 5w in idle)

for drivers i spend $300 every 5yr on new ones, so i can keep growing and renewing. and is a pretty low cost considering cloud alternatives.
by goku12 | 2025-10-16 13:55:27+00:00
Fair as in fairness. An alternative that plays fairly with me by respecting my rights as a consumer. And yes, I agree that there are multiple alternatives. The problem is that they are not viable yet. Most of them are buggy and missing crucial features. Even if those were resolved, we'll still have holdouts like banking apps, transportation apps, shopping apps, etc that rely on platform attestation and geolocking (worthless and harmful features, IMO). The question is, how do we take them mainstream? Their situation is like those of the Linux and the BSDs of the late 90s till 2010. The platforms are not popular enough to garner attention and support from service providers.

The only solution to this market share problem is for a bunch of us to just dive right in by adopting them, put up with all the inconveniences for a while (a long while), convince everyone we can to adopt it by pretending that it's the cool new trend and then complain to every organization, agency and government that they are discriminating against us by not supporting our platform. At some point, everyone will take it up. Hopefully!
by lenerdenator | 2025-10-16 13:55:50+00:00
I still remember everyone talking about how Android was so much better because it was "open source". And for a while, that was true. Now it's just a free gateway into having your freedom has a user taken from you, because no one ever bothered to make Android an actual FLOSS community like Linux and many programming languages are.

You need to have an actual ethos behind these things. You need to have an actual foundation organization behind these things like the PSF, FSF, or Linux foundation that drives the development, not corporate overlords who have a profit motive.

The people involved need to understand that they're not going to create untold amounts of value that can be measured monetarily. At best you might get hired as a fellow for a while and get to draw some money from donations. Linus only got rich because some very generous people offered him shares after they built a company on his project.
by emn13 | 2025-10-16 13:56:01+00:00
I mean, reliably tracking ownership and therefore knowing that e.g. an aliased write must complete before a read is surely helpful?

It won't prevent all races, but it might help avoid mistakes in a few of em. And concurrency is such a pain; any such machine-checked guarantees are probably nice to have to those dealing with em - caveat being that I'm not such a person.
by al_borland | 2025-10-16 13:56:13+00:00
What I see as the challenge for open-source is organization and incentives. It’s hard to find good people who want to volunteer their time to create the less fun and glamorous parts of the puzzle. There needs to be someone directing the talent pool and incentives to do hard and otherwise unrewarding work.

I think this is the same thing that holds back desktop Linux. There aren’t a lot of people willing to do that last 10% to make it really great for the average user. Instead we have a dozen different package managers, that average users simply don’t care about.
by mayki | 2025-10-16 13:56:36+00:00
Curious about how you handle clause level parsing when clauses are highly context dependent (e.g., indemnity linked to limitation of liability, or IP ownership tied to subcontractor terms).

Also how do you approach cross referencing between clauses? A lot of “AI contract analysis” tools I’ve seen tend to miss dependencies like “subject to Section 10(b)” or misinterpret defined terms.

Is your model resolving definitions and references in a structured graph, or relying purely on token level embeddings?