MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-31 10:43:23+00:00
> so that they could not be killed, jailed or exiled extrajudicially, just out of political expediency\

This is a naive surface level conclusion. Ask yourself why. The answer is because the nobles, or whoever matters in your example society, isn't gonna have much allegiance to a system then are basically disposable to and will be disposed of at the drop of a hat and so their allegiance will be just about the same.

A system where nobody really supports anything beyond the degree to which it keeps their head on their shoulders and everyone is looking over said shoulder is gonna have a lot of disruptive power transitions (in a "you go bankrupt slowly, then suddenly" sort of way as people all throw their weight behind the new thing as it starts to gain the upper hand) and engage in a lot less long term productive activity than societies with due process or some other way to keep people from losing everything at the drop of the hat. And it will get out competed by those societies.

Those scheming up evil ways to levy ruinous fines for failing to use one's blinker or get people kicked out of industries for having odious opinions on unrelated subjects ought to take note.
by tweetle_beetle | 2025-10-31 10:43:30+00:00
To be fair the CEO is quite comfortable using the word 'forever'. It was used as the title of the announcement to withdraw the Hobby tier and also specifically used to justify it:

> We’ve chosen to build a company that can last forever. This is why I have made the decision to prioritize profitability for PlanetScale. https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever
by ben_w | 2025-10-31 10:45:23+00:00
Two high altitude (~1000 km) detonations of high yield fission or low yield fusion (few hundred kT equivalent) would do it, one above Amarillo, the other above the ocean half way between the Paracel Islands and Manila.

Trump has ordered the restart of nuclear weapon testing, has a problem with China, and is surrounded by sychophants; what's the odds this happens anyway, irregardless of which specific sub-goal is being persued when the button gets pushed?
by sothatsit | 2025-10-31 10:45:24+00:00
A lot of maths students would also struggle to contribute to frontier math problems, but we would still say they are reasoning. Their skill at reasoning might not be as good as professional mathematicians, but that does not stop us from recognising that they can solve logic problems without memorisation, which is a form of reasoning.

I am just saying that LLMs have demonstrated they can reason, at least a little bit. Whereas it seems other people are saying that LLM reasoning is flawed, which does not negate the fact that they can reason, at least some of the time.

Maybe generalisation is one area where LLM's reasoning is weakest though. They can be near-elite performance at nicely boxed up competition math problems, but their performance dramatically drops on real-world problems where things aren't so neat. We see similar problems in programming as well. I'd argue the progress on this has been promising, but other people would probably vehemently disagree with that. Time will tell.
by js8 | 2025-10-31 10:45:39+00:00
I think the explanation is pretty simple, as I said in my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44904107

I also believe the problem is we don't know what we want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509015

If we could make LLMs to apply a modest set of logic rules consistently, it would be a win.
by avhception | 2025-10-31 10:46:51+00:00
IIRC, it's because the ARM designs tend to use camera modules that come from smartphone-land.

Cameras used on x86-64 usually just work using that usb webcam standard driver (what is that called again? uvcvideo?). But these smartphone-land cameras don't adhere to that standard, they probably don't connect using USB. They are designed to be used with the SoC vendor's downstream fork of Android or whatever, using proprietary blobs.
by ahartmetz | 2025-10-31 10:49:43+00:00
If German was seriously used in programming languages, I'd hope for some better and shorter terms. Some here might be intentionally too literal translations anyway. "Let" is from mathematics, it's called "Sei" in German. "Sei x = 5". "Anderenfalls" could be "sonst". "Zeichenkette" is just too long and would require some thinking or a historical accident to find a shorter term.

Ready surprisingly nice to me anyway.
by carlmr | 2025-10-31 10:50:05+00:00
Halting is sometimes preferable to thrashing around and running in circles.

I feel like if LLMs "knew" when they're out of their depth, they could be much more useful. The question is whether knowing when to stop can be meaningfully learned from examples with RL. From all we've seen the hallucination problem and this stopping problem all boil down to this problem that you could teach the model to say "I don't know" but if that's part of the training dataset it might just spit out "I don't know" to random questions, because it's a likely response in the realm of possible responses, instead of spitting out "I don't know" to not knowing.

SocratesAI is still unsolved, and LLMs are probably not the path to get knowing that you know nothing.
by CapsAdmin | 2025-10-31 10:52:35+00:00
I didn't even know they had a status page. Claude (with pro subscription) is often so unreliable with regards to connectivity and performance that I'm looking for something more predictable.

It randomly fails halfway through a response, sometimes very slow to start, hangs for long periods during a response, and so on.

The Claude chat interface can also slow down with long sessions. I sometimes use Claude code which is better, but I'm not a huge fan of terminal interfaces. I'm aware of third party frontends, but I believe those require api access which I don't like for personal use.
by js8 | 2025-10-31 10:53:51+00:00
> So, that makes me come back to this question of what definition of reasoning do people use that reasoning models do not meet?

The models can learn reasoning rules, but they are not able to apply them consistently or recognize the rules they have learned are inconsistent. (See also my other comment which references comments I made earlier.)

And I think they can't without a tradeoff, as I commented https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717855 ; the consistency requires certain level of close-mindedness.
by dspillett | 2025-10-31 10:53:59+00:00
Simple things, or even complex prototypes, get created in office apps because the office apps are their, have the flexibility, and you don't need to get IT to install something new (or allow you to), or convince finance to let you pay for something new, or convince compliance/security/other than the something new is safe anyway, etc. Also in a larger company, once the discussion of developing or buying something comes up lots of other potential stakeholders might raise their heads above the parapet and want to get involved (“Could our dept use this too?”, “We would need it to do Y as well as X…”, “That sounds useful, but it should be us doing it instead”, etc.), and suddenly the quick PoC that has been barely started has become a series of interminable meetings.

The loophole is that if you have Office or similar you have a variety of development environment, IT/compliance/finance aren't caring what files you produce with the applications you have, and no one else is paying attention initially either, but would have a say (and a procedure for you to follow) if you wanted to bring in or create a new application. The usual process is bypassed.

This is more commonly associated with Excel, but it applies to Access too (less so than it used to, but there are still plenty people out there who rely on it daily).

Once the demo/prototype/PoC is there it is a lot easier to “fix up” that than spin up a project in anything else, or get something else in that is already available, for the same reasons as why it was done in Excel/Access in the first place plus the added momentum: the job is already at least part way done, using something else would be a more complete restart so you need to justify that time as well as any other costs and risks.

[Note: other office suites exist and have spreadsheets & simple DBs with similar capabilities, or at least a useful subset of them, of course, but MS Office's Excel & Access are, for better or worse, fairly ubiquitous]
by jakevoytko | 2025-10-31 10:54:14+00:00
Cash flow is another facet of paying off your mortgage early, and I think it’s underrated. Eliminating thousands of dollars from your monthly expenses dramatically increases your flexibility. Since most people have “cash / reserve fund” and “retirement investments (do not touch)” as their major financial categories, it optimizes the one you interact with the most. You don’t need to always make the maximum possible to keep a comfortable amount of cash on hand, which gives you more flexibility to take time off between jobs, or tank a layoff, or take that startup job that pays less (but damn if it doesn’t look fun). Personally I recently bought a second apartment adjacent to my first in order to combine them into a 3br. Paying off the first mortgage years ago was the difference between being able to afford the monthly expenses and not.

Obviously you need to consider both net worth and cash flow when making a decision like that, but don’t underrate the difference that improved cash flow makes!
by pjmlp | 2025-10-31 10:54:25+00:00
Well I was surprised that it actually makes use of "-Wall -Wextra" as good practice.

However both PVS-Studio and clang-tidy have a few complaints about the code, since it is a single file, it is rather easy to try out on Compiler Explorer.

https://godbolt.org/z/n4M1vGccq

As for your remark, most folks seem to have not followed that C authors also created lint in 1979, Dennis Ritchie proposed fat pointers to WG14, Plan9 was going to use Alef, which failed but its ideas were re-used for Limbo on Inferno, and they were also involved with Go.

Finally Rust's borrow checker ideas steam from AT&T research with Cyclone, as way to create a safe C.

As such the real question is why still use C in new projects, when even the language authors have moved beyond it, or at least reduce their use of it on userspace applications.
by graemep | 2025-10-31 10:54:28+00:00
In many places fintechs are just financial sector companies and operate by the same rules. You do need to check what regulation one is subject to (or not subject to) in your country though.

A lot of banks are now fintechs - no branches, everything in an app, with a website if you are lucky. The rest would like to be like them to cut costs.

Wise is straightforward in the UK, where it is regulated by the same regulator as banks but subject to different rules (the big difference being customer fund ringfencing rather than a deposit guarantee). It varies in other countries but is locally regulated in a good many.

Reputable financial businesses follow regulations in countries in which they do not operate (e.g. by not opening accounts in countries where they are not authorised).
by flimflamm | 2025-10-31 10:54:39+00:00
What confused me is the fact that in the paper all logical steps are give. It basically check that when all relevant facts are provided explicitly as links , how far and how complex a chain can the model correctly follow before it breaks down?

So it's simpler than "reasoning". This is not necessarily a bad thing as it boils down the reasoning to a simpler, more controlled sub problem.
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-31 10:54:50+00:00
I don't mean to start a holy war, thats not the point, but isn't this a side effect of C++ footguns rather than python allowing you to be lazy?

I mean there is good reason to keep variables well scoped, and the various linters do a reasonable job about scope.

But I've only really know C++[1] people to want everything as a const.

[1] Yes, you functional people also, but, lets not get into that.
by swader999 | 2025-10-31 10:55:19+00:00
Yeah this is the way. I'm tented to go this route on my Mac but the licensing module won't work on ARM chips: Short answer: it’s not crazy to run Split Second in a VM—but only if you control the variables. The two biggest risk areas you called out (the USB license dongle and the timer I/O) are real. Here’s the straight path that works reliably, plus what to avoid.

Your go/no-go decision tree

1) If your MacBook Pro is Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3): Running Split Second in Parallels with Windows 11 ARM is a no-go because the Sentinel/HASP hardware key that Split Second uses is not supported on Windows ARM. Thales (the dongle vendor) is explicit: “Sentinel HASP keys … are not supported” on Windows ARM; LDK works via emulation but not the HASP/HASP-HL USB keys you plug in.
by daemin | 2025-10-31 10:55:36+00:00
Cue the old adage that if you're not paying for something you're the product not the customer...

Though in this case the biggest danger is being the training material creator used to train its models for its paid generative AI offering. I would assume people are monitoring the privacy policy and terms of use to know when such a change would happen - if it isn't so already, I haven't checked those documents.

As for me I'm happy to stick with v2 for as long as it can function on computers I own and use.
by int_19h | 2025-10-31 10:55:45+00:00
I would argue that if you're using Python, you already don't care about performance (unless it's just a little glue between other things).

In .NET they do virtual dispatch via a very basic map-like interface that has a bunch of micro-optimized implementations that are swapped in and out as needed if new items are added. For N up to 4 variables, they use a dedicated implementation that stores them as fields and does simple branching to access the right one, for each N. Beyond that it becomes an array, and at some point, a proper Dictionary. I don't know the exact perf characteristics, but FWIW I don't recall that ever being a source of an actual, non-hypothetical perf problem. Usually you'll have one local that is an object with a bunch of fields, so you only need one lookup to fetch that, and from there it's as fast as field access.
by styanax | 2025-10-31 10:57:49+00:00
> What's the legitimate use case for a package install being allowed to run arbitrary commands on your computer?

The paradigm itself has been in package managers since DEB and RPM were invented (maybe even Solaris packages before that? it's been a minute since I've Sun'd); it's not the same as NPM, a more direct comparison is the Arch Linux AUR - and the AUR has been attacked to try and inject malware all year (2025) just like NPM. As of the 26th (5 days ago) uploads are disabled as they get DDOSed again. https://status.archlinux.org/ (spirit: it's the design being attacked, pain shared between AUR and NPM as completely disparate projects).

More directly to an example: the Linux kernel package. Every Linux distribution I'm aware of runs a kernel package post-install script which runs arbitrary (sic) commands on your system. This is, of course, to rebuild any DKMS modules, build a new initrd / initramfs, update GRUB bootloader entries, etc. These actions are unique outputs to the destination system and can't be packaged.

I have no data in front of me, but I'd speculate 70% (?) of DEB/RPM/PKG packages include pre / post install/uninstall scriptlets, it's very common in the space and you see it everywhere in use.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-31 10:57:54+00:00
> The problem with hackish solution is that they get put in places they don’t belong. In other professions, there’s regulation in place to prevent these kind of shortcuts.

That's an illusion. The reality is, it's all hacky solutions on top of hacky solutions. Even in manufacturing: the spec may be fixed, and the factory line produces identical products by the million - but the spec was developed through an ad-hoc process, and the factory line itself is a pile of hacks that needs continued tuning to operate. And there is no perfectly specced out procedure for retooling a factory line to support the newest spec that came out of design department - retooling is, in itself, a small R&D project.

> Also, if you have ever worked with anyone trying to get specifications worked out, you’ll see that most people (including devs) rely on intuition rather than checklists and will always forget to tell you something that is critical.

This is the dirty truth about the universe - human organizations are piles of hacks, always in flux; and so is life itself. The sameness and harmony we see in nature is an illusion brought on by scale (in two ways - at large scale, because we live too short to see changes happening; at small scale, because the chaos at biomolecular level averages out to something simpler at the scale we can perceive).

Order and structure are not the default. It takes hard work to create and maintain them, so it's better be worth the cost. The prevalence of Excel-based hacks in corporate is a proof positive that, for internal software, it usually isn't worth it, despite what the IT department thinks.

> The thing is that cost of changes in the business can be a simple memo. But for software that usually means redesign.

Which is why you shouldn't be building cathedrals that need expensive rework every other week because of some random memo. Instead, go down to where people work; see them tweaking their shovels, take those shovels and make the tweak they want the proper way.
by ghoul2 | 2025-10-31 10:58:48+00:00
I have always counted to 20 on one hand. even as a kid. base, lower joint, upper joint, top. times 5 - including the thumb: my motor memory is trained so that i switch seamlessly from keeping the curse on top of the finger using my thumb, and then, once i cross 16, switch to using the index finger to "cursor" the thumb.
by plqbfbv | 2025-10-31 10:58:57+00:00
It's not like they need to `sudo apt install openvpn` and tweak the config file manually and tinker with routes and firewall rules afterwards.

Basically every youtube video for the past decade has been sponsored by a VPN service offering first-joiner discounts. My cousin uses a VPN and has no idea what it is and how it works, just that "he should protect himself while browsing". Those VPNs have invested massively in UX and ease of use so out of that 77% of users, I'd guess more than 80% of it switched to VPNs.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-31 10:59:29+00:00
The underlying paper is excellent as always. For HN it'd be better to just link to it directly. Seems people submitting it but it didn't get to the front page:

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...

There seems to be an irony to Anthropic doing this work, as they are in general the keenest on controlling their models to ensure they aren't too compliant. There are no open-weights Claudes and, remarkably, they admit in this paper that they have internal models trained to be more helpful than the ones they sell. It's pretty unconventional to tell your customers you're selling them a deliberately unhelpful product even though it's understandable why they do it.

These interpretability studies would seem currently of most use to people using non-Claude open weight models, where the users have the ability to edit activations or neurons. And the primary use case for that editing would be to override the trained-in "unhelpfulness" (their choice of word, not mine!). I note with interest that the paper avoids taking the next most obvious step and identifying vectors related to compliance and injecting those to see if the model can notice that it's suddenly lost interest in enforcing Anthropic policy. Given the focus on AI safety Anthropic started with it seems like an obvious experiment to run, yet, it's not in the paper. Maybe there are other papers where they do that.

There are valid and legitimate use cases for AI that current LLM companies shy away from, so productizing these steering techniques to open weight models like GPT-OSS would seem like a reasonable next step. It should be possible to inject thoughts using simple Python APIs and pre-computation runs, rather than having to do all the vector math "by hand". What they're doing is conceptually simple enough so I guess if there aren't already modules for that there will be soon.
by bdangubic | 2025-10-31 11:00:08+00:00
this question could be reasonably asked of any company's capex expenditure, no? reasonably I will trust until proven otherwise that companies as successful as our biggest ones know what they are doing vs. 76.89% of HN claiming some sort of fictitious "bubble"

it is same thing we keep hearing for about a decade now how "recession is imminent" which of course it'll eventually happen, it always does, you just have to predict it for 10-15 years and one day you'll be right... same thing with this "bubble" - there will eventually be a "pull back" - prolonged capex of this magnitude is not something any company will do but it is getting so boring here on HN hearing about this amazing 'bubble' that is about to pop and we just keep sitting and waiting for this magical moment while the companies, in a very, very, very bad economy are crushing earnings...
by creatonez | 2025-10-31 11:02:00+00:00
This seems to be missing the point? What you're describing is the obvious form of introspection that makes sense for a word predictor to be capable of. It's the type of introspection that we consider easy to fake, the same way split-brained patients confabulate reasons why the other side of their body did something. Once anomalous output has been fed back into itself, we can't prove that it didn't just confabulate an explanation. But what seemingly happened here is the model making a determination (yes or no) on whether a concept was injected in just a single token. It didn't do this by detecting an anomaly in its output, because up until that point it hadn't output anything - instead, the determination was derived from its internal state.
by jvgyjbvfyujg | 2025-10-31 11:02:03+00:00
Perceptions can be misleading because unless you perceive the totality of all facts relevant to something, the next fact you discover could overturn what you thought you knew. All swans are white, until you see a black swan.

Intuitions are more integrated across your personal accumulation of perceptions and preconceptions: strict reason or perception makes me doubt that this black thing is a swan, but it looks and floats around like a swan, even if I can't quantify how, so I guess it's a swan. Good enough for now until I encounter something that comes up against the boundary of my blurry intuition of what a swan is; at that point I'll think about it some more.

In a way, I perceive the black swan as a swan because of what my established intuitions about swan-ness are.
by time4tea | 2025-10-31 11:02:12+00:00
Result<T> is a built-in in kotlin, but this enforces that the error type is a Throwable

If you fancy that an error could be just a type, not necessarily a Throwable, you might like Result4k - it offers a Result<T,E>

https://github.com/fork-handles/forkhandles/tree/trunk/resul...

disclaimer: I contribute to this.
by susam | 2025-10-31 11:03:10+00:00
Same here. I have always counted 20 on one hand, so 40 with both. That's how my parents taught me to count when I was little. I used this method so often as a kid that, even though I don't count like this anymore, every number up to 40 still has its own place on my fingers.

It was only as an adult that I realised nobody around me counted this way. You are the first person I have found who talked about this method, so I am glad to find this comment of yours.
by fsloth | 2025-10-31 11:03:14+00:00
IMHO that's the key differentiator.

You can give a human PhD an _unsolved problem_ in field adjacent to their expertise and expect some reasonable resolution. LLM PhD:s solve only known problems.

That said humans can also be really bad problem solvers.

If you don't care about solving the problem and only want to create paperwork for bureaucracy I guess you don't care either way ("My team's on it!") but companies that don't go out of business generally recognize pretty soon lack of outcomes where it matters.