MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-10 08:49:24+00:00
I agree privatisation did indeed cause a massive revamp of train usage, and I feel like the nostalgia is sometimes rose-tinted and misplaced because 80s BR by all accounts was pretty bad even in the context of the UK in the 80s.

On the other hand, from about the 90s onwards there was a huge increase in London employment relative to the rest of the country, and also a huge (5x or more over that time) house price increase in London. This pushed a lot of people into the commuter belt. and As you basically cannot drive into London from there, those miles can only be provided by rail.

It would be interesting to know how much of the effect is in the South east, and how much is showing labour migration into a rail-centric region after industrial sectors outside the South-east were dynamited in the 80s.

And privatisation does usually have a cycle: influx of cheap capital in a boom phase, followed by a slow ratching squeeze as you struggle to exceed that great initial growth every year thereafter.
by kcexn | 2025-10-10 08:49:34+00:00
The natural numbers are 'natural' because they are definite quantities that can be used for counting.

Taylor expansions about a point of a function requires that the function has a derivative defined at that point.

The derivative itself is the point at which an infinite sequence (say, of incrementally closer approximations) converges.

So derivatives and Taylor series are really more of an arbitrary precision approximation of a value rather than a concrete exact quantity.

Arbitrary precision approximation just happens to be a very elegant way to model the physical world around us.

For truly exact solutions, you still have to work with the naturals (and rationals, etc.)
by immibis | 2025-10-10 08:50:07+00:00
Profit is what's left after everyone is paid for their work. No profit doesn't mean nobody gets paid - it means nobody's trying to simultaneously maximize revenue and minimize costs just so they can pay themselves the difference.

Speaking of tax-funded healthcare, did you know that US residents pay more tax towards healthcare than residents of any other country? And in return for that, they don't get any healthcare so they have to pay a second time to buy their healthcare.
by immibis | 2025-10-10 08:50:14+00:00
how about copying the exact thing that works in literally almost every other country in the world

What do you mean failed horrifically? Yes, some countries have long queues. That's because there are actually people getting served. That's just the latency/throughput tradeoff being tilted farther towards throughput - which is what you want, and it's not like people who come in with heart attacks don't get to skip the queue. In America, people get heart attacks and just choose to die so their family won't get bankrupted by an ambulance ride.

Are you possibly getting this information (that healthcare is a horrific failure in every other country) from propaganda sources, instead of information sources?
by tim333 | 2025-10-10 08:50:15+00:00
Rewatching the video it strikes me that there is no talk of how the compute will be paid for. Altman is saying there is so much demand for compute but a lot of that is because he's setting the price for users to zero in spite of the service costing a lot to provide.

I guess they figure once they have the users they'll monetize somehow but that bit's kind of iffy.
by Hunpeter | 2025-10-10 08:50:23+00:00
Someone said in another comment, that it makes more sense together with the dereference operator, so int *var means: "dereferencing var gets you an int."

I don't really know C, but personally prefer your version. However, I can also get behind considering the * to be part of the variable, rather than a type: "var is a pointer that happens to hold an int". I mean, maybe they could have used the & operator meaning "var is an address holding an int"? Honestly, it just feels like there's too much tradition and legacy and so on, and what one considers intuitive is the thing that they're most used to.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-10-10 08:51:04+00:00
> count your alphabet, which only contains 19 or 20

off-by-one errors are to be expected...

K is such a fringe case. I checked back and you're right, it was consistently used for that specific case 'kal.' and for some names. Interestingly though I don't think any (major) romance language retained that spelling afterwards. It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"? How rare is a letter allowed to be used before we declare it "not part of the alphabet"?
by deng | 2025-10-10 08:51:58+00:00
> Had Ruby Central acquiesced the logs would've been parsed and sold.

Which the privacy policy of RubyCentral allows, so I don't get why they suddenly have ethical problems with that, apart of course from throwing shade on Andre. Parsing logs for company access is what basically everyone does, and frankly, I don't see the problem with getting leads from data like this. That has nothing to do with "selling PII".
by gdcbe | 2025-10-10 08:52:05+00:00
Htmx got me into hypermedia heaven, but it lead me to datastar for sure. Recently we also had an interview with the creator of datastar, where he also talked a bit about darkstar (something he wants to built on top of webtransport for the few things where datastar is no well suited for now)

https://netstack.fm/#episode-4
by sacado2 | 2025-10-10 08:52:47+00:00
> There's no reason we can't be writing code that lasts 100 years. Code is just math. Imagine having this attitude with math: "LOL loser you still use polynomials!? Weren't those invented like thousands of years ago? LOL dude get with the times, everyone uses Equately for their equations now. It was made by 3 interns at Facebook, so it's pretty much the new hotness." No, I don't think I will use "Equately", I think I'll stick to the tried-and-true idea that has been around for 3000 years.

Not sure this is the best example. Mathematical notation evolved a lot in the last thousand years. We're not using roman numerals anymore, and the invention of 0 or of the equal sign were incredible new features.
by danielbarla | 2025-10-10 08:54:11+00:00
I think the gist of your argument is "they should have just kept their separate, original, gendered surnames", and I agree, that is generally the path of least resistance.

Nevertheless, the issue is real in the sense that many countries will e.g. "anglicize" your name when issueing you documentation, e.g. if your name includes characters they do not know how to handle. Having a single person with mismatching documentation _can_ cause issues. E.g. consider having two passports, with different names in them, and it's easy to see how this can cause problems.
by bringbart | 2025-10-10 08:56:03+00:00
>while unsigned wraparound leads to bugs which are basically impossible to find.

What?

unsigned sizes are way easier to check, you just need one invariant:

if(x < capacity) // good to go

Always works, regardless how x is calculated and you never have to worry about undefined behavior when computing x. And the same invariant is used for forward and backward loops - some people bring up i >= 0 as a problem with unsigned, but that's because you should use i < n for backward loops as well, The One True Invariant.
by fragmede | 2025-10-10 08:56:03+00:00
Time will tell if that's true. We don't have the same corpus of data, that's true, but what we do have is the ability to make a digital twin, where the robot practices in a virtual world, what would happen. It can do 10,000 jumping jacks every hour, parallelized across a whole GPU supercomputer, and that data can be fed in as training data.
by NostraDavid | 2025-10-10 08:56:54+00:00
I've found RSS Guard a few months ago, and it has finally replaced the gap that existed since Google Reader. It's cross-platform, which is a nice bonus, it works like a classic Windows program, which is a great plus because the modern RSS readers have a terrible UX because right click doesn't work, shortcuts don't work, etc.

The only thing I miss is that I want it to keep an OPML file up-to-date so I can autosync it to a repo, but it doesn't, so I have to export the OPML file sporadically. It's acceptable.
by dwattttt | 2025-10-10 08:57:27+00:00
One day the rote example finally made sense to me, and I go back to it every time I hear about variance.

Got a Container<Animal> and want to treat it as a Container<Cat>? Then you can only write to it: it's ok to put a Cat in a Container<Cat> that's really a Container<Animal>.

Reading from it is wrong. If you treat a Container<Animal> like a Container<Cat> and read from it, you might get a Dog instead.

The same works in reverse, treating a Container<Cat> like a Container<Animal> is ok for read, but not for write.
by altacc | 2025-10-10 08:57:34+00:00
A few years ago I moved to a country that didn't have Amazon. At first it was frustrating as I didn't know where to shop but now I see it as a benefit with some downsides. Before trips back home I'll look on Amazon for some stuff I can't get here and I'm flooded with Aliexpress junk and sponsored placements for Aliexpress junk. Amazon is hideous in so many ways.
by ajuc | 2025-10-10 08:57:41+00:00
> In reality there are signaled crosswalks

On signaled crosswalks, it obviously only applies when the light is green for pedestrians. Somebody's near the crosswalk and they have green light = you stop. It doesn't matter if they want to cross. Simple as that.

> Multiply by a nation of hundreds of millions and you get a lot of near misses and accidents.

Nation size doesn't matter for this. Poland based this law on experience from Lithuania which is 20 times smaller than us. It worked for Lithuania and it worked for us. Why would it suddenly be worse for 350 million people if it worked for 2 million and 40 million?

> ignore anyone who talks like that from any side of the issue because they're probably gonna make it worse and not better and piss everyone off in the process and make the problem harder to solve

When they teach you to optimize polynomials at school, they tell you to look for zeroes of the derivative and check which one is the global maximum. But they also tell you to look at the edges of the domain, because the highest peak might be outside the domain altogether.

I'd argue that the US is so car-centric that any effective solution will be outside of the perceived "practical" domain.
by bluetomcat | 2025-10-10 08:59:06+00:00
Because in C, every allocation incurs a responsibility to track its lifetime and to know who will eventually free it. Copying and moving buffers is also prone to overflows, off-by-one errors, etc. The generic memory allocator is a smart but unpredictable complex beast that lives in your address space and can mess your CPU cache, can introduce undesired memory fragmentation, etc.

In Java, you don't care because the GC cleans after you and you don't usually care about millisecond-grade performance.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-10 08:59:15+00:00
Consistency drive. All LLMs have a desire for consistency, right at the very foundation at their behavior. The best tokens to predict are the ones that are consistent with the previous tokens, always.

Makes for a very good base for predicting text. Makes them learn and apply useful patterns. Makes them sharp few-shot learners. Not always good for auto-regressive reasoning though, or multi-turn instruction following, or a number of other things we want LLMs to do.

So you have to un-teach them maladaptive consistency-driven behaviors - things like defensiveness or error amplification or loops. Bring out consistency-suppressed latent capabilities - like error checking and self-correction. Stitch it all together with more RLVR. Not a complex recipe, just hard to pull off right.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-10 08:59:16+00:00
> But python newbies don't get their web frameworks stack smashed. That's kind of nice.

Hah! True :-)

The thing is, smashed stacks are difficult to exploit deterministically or automatically. Even heartbleed, as widespread as it was, was not a guaranteed RCE.

OTOH, an exploit in a language like Python is almost certainly going to be easier to exploit deterministically. Log4j, for example, was a guaranteed exploit and the skill level required was basically "Create a Java object".

This is because of the ease with which even very junior programmers can create something that appears to run and work and not crash.
Show HN: I extracted BASIC listings for Tim Hartnell's 1986 book
by nzduck | 2025-10-10 09:00:55+00:00
Tim Hartnell was one of the most prolific authors during the early days of the home computing boom, writing many popular books covering genres of games on different platforms and, in this case, artificial intelligence.

I've extracted the BASIC program listings from Hartnell's 1986 book 'Exploring Artificial Intelligence on Your IBM PC' and organized them along with a PC-BASIC runtime environment and instructions so you can try these programs out yourself.

Even though the AI landscape has changed enormously since Hartnell first wrote this book, I hope one or two of you will get some value out of these program listings if you're interested in exploring the fundamentals of AI on home-computing platforms as they were in the 1980's.

Tim Hartnell unfortunately passed away in 1991 at the young age of 40, and without his writing I imagine more than a few of us would not have found the start in computing we did. Thanks Tim.
by rowbin | 2025-10-10 09:01:20+00:00
You are using the security argument again. It is not used in an adverserial context. You are correct, that this is not secure. And messages can be tampered with. But this is not the application. The threat model of the application is that everything happens in a private context without adversaries. The communication is end-to-end encrypted and every participant of the chat has total control and is allowed to change everything in the chat, even messages from other users. So there is no point in protecting again adversaries that have access have to the secure channel, because they are already allowed to do anything, even if the hash were cryptographically secure, they are allowed to change everything. The integrity is only for synchronization, so that every participant can easily verify the state of the event history up to a specific point.
Show HN: I invented a new generative model and got accepted to ICLR
by diyer22 | 2025-10-10 09:01:54+00:00
I invented Discrete Distribution Networks, a novel generative model with simple principles and unique properties, and the paper has been accepted to ICLR2025!

Modeling data distribution is challenging; DDN adopts a simple yet fundamentally different approach compared to mainstream generative models (Diffusion, GAN, VAE, autoregressive model):

1. The model generates multiple outputs simultaneously in a single forward pass, rather than just one output. 2. It uses these multiple outputs to approximate the target distribution of the training data. 3. These outputs together represent a discrete distribution. This is why we named it "Discrete Distribution Networks".

Every generative model has its unique properties, and DDN is no exception. Here, we highlight three characteristics of DDN:

- Zero-Shot Conditional Generation (ZSCG). - One-dimensional discrete latent representation organized in a tree structure. - Fully end-to-end differentiable.

Reviews from ICLR:

> I find the method novel and elegant. The novelty is very strong, and this should not be overlooked. This is a whole new method, very different from any of the existing generative models. > This is a very good paper that can open a door to new directions in generative modeling.
by Simulacra | 2025-10-10 09:02:24+00:00
I remember reading the first serious book about Sam Walton and Walmart. Walton had this thing where he would put two bins of identical flip-flops side-by-side. One would be marked a dollar up, one would be marked a dollar down. People would always bought the cheaper, and then Walton would just shovel the flip-flops from the expensive bin to the cheaper bin. Walmart, Amazon, and just about every other retail has been playing us forever. But Amazon takes it to an art form.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-10 09:02:53+00:00
Not a very surprising finding.

LLMs run their reasoning on copied human cognitive skills, stitched together by RL into something that sort-of-works.

What are their skills copied from? An unholy amount of unlabeled text.

What does an unholy amount of unlabeled text NOT contain? A completely faithful representation of how humans reason, act in agentic manner, explore solution spaces, etc.

We know that for sure - because not even the groundbreaking scientific papers start out by detailing the 37 approaches and methods that were considered and decided against, or were attempted but did not work. The happy 2% golden path is shown - the unhappy 98% process of exploration and refinement is not.

So LLMs have pieces missing. They try to copy a lossy, unfaithful representation of how humans think, and make it work anyway. They don't have all the right heuristics for implementing things like advanced agentic behavior well, because no one ever writes that shit down in detail.

A fundamental limitation? Not quite.

You can try to give LLMs better training data to imbue them with the right behaviors. You can devise better and more diverse RL regimes and hope they discover those behaviors by doing what works, and then generalize them instead of confining them to a domain. Or just scale everything up, so that they pick up on more things that are left unsaid right in pretraining, and can implement more of them in each forward pass. In practice? All of the above.
by palmfacehn | 2025-10-10 09:03:21+00:00
Yes, many partisans are asserting that it is unprecedented. The selective omissions advance their narrative. They are acting in self-interest. The out-party hate is downstream and symptomatic.

A less partisan view might find that it the actions of the political classes are not unprecedented. It is a progression of the form. Both poles represent false alternatives in this regard. The malign incentives are systemic.
by kranke155 | 2025-10-10 09:03:59+00:00
Unfortunately I seem to have conflated facts. 4chan pol has flags, and spez had a bit of a tiff with The Donald users where he changed their posts without consent (removing his name I think) that led to some consternation.

There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
by kranke155 | 2025-10-10 09:04:10+00:00
Unfortunately I seem to have conflated facts. 4chan pol has flags, and spez had a bit of a tiff with The Donald users where he changed their posts without consent (removing his name I think) that led to some consternation.

There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
by pr07ecH70r | 2025-10-10 09:04:14+00:00
I use vibe coding for trivial stuff that otherwise will take me lot of time to code myself or for languages I don’t know. I either feed the LLM the whole code module, or since the beginning of a vibe-coded module, I copy all the prompts and responses into a word file (easier to parse) and feed it back to the LLM if I need a bug fix or change. Most of the modules, however, I write myself.
by kranke155 | 2025-10-10 09:04:27+00:00
Unfortunately I seem to have conflated facts. 4chan pol has flags, and spez had a bit of a tiff with The Donald users where he changed their posts without consent (removing his name I think) that led to some consternation.

There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
by scrubs | 2025-10-10 09:05:20+00:00
Be worried? Nah.

Way before tech billionaires parts of the American evangelical Christian community routinely asserted the final judgement and second coming is days/weeks away ... and it's all BS - obviously. But if you're caught in the middle of in within your family especially if you're a minor ... it's a linear combo of surreal and emotionally manipulating.

Periodically we get a humerous stories out of it ex. Parents who doom prepped a bunker only for kids to find it, party over the weekend, and eat up all the food leaving a complete boozy mess.

Things to worry about: power corrupts absolutely and the other usual suspects.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-10 09:05:50+00:00
> what is incorrect with what they are saying?

I've replied else-thread, in detail, on exactly why his analogy to mortgage and car loans are incorrect.

His main point that "these deals cannot be circular because mortgage and car finance are not circular" is incorrect. The mortgage and car finance deals are not analogous to the Nvidia/OpenAI or AMD/OpenAI deals.
by Galanwe | 2025-10-10 09:05:52+00:00
Not sure if that's of any comfort, but don't feel singled out: this naming issue happens _all the time_, in all countries, to everyone. I'm French, and had constant issues with naming and identification, whether I lived in western Europe, Eastern Europe, or Asia.

- I have acute (é) accents in my first and last name. This seems to create different problems for each system my name is interacting with. Sometimes the letters just disappear, sometimes it's replaced with 'e or e' because the clerk didn't know how to type é, sometimes the accent is just missing and becomes e, sometimes the clerk tries to be fancy and copy paste é in their system, but it only works locally and I then I'm named with �.

- French usually have a primary first name, 1 or 2 secondary first names, and a last name. In practice the additional first names are more or less used like American middle names, but legally speaking they are first names, there are no middle names in France. That means for most foreign countries where you can only have a single first name, it becomes the concatenation of all your first names. You are not "John" anymore, you are "John Bob Max", this is your first name from now on.

- Obviously concatenating first names creates stupidly long first names, so you will not really be "John Bob Max", but rather "John BM".

- I France when you have kids, you can decide for them to bear the father's name, the mother's name, or a concatenation of both. That concatenation can only be done with a space though, as hyphen-separated names are considered a single word. Most countries (e.g. Canada) have conflicting rules on this, meaning they will forcefully replace hyphens with spaces and vice versa.

- Overall clerks (in Europe especially) are not careful with inputting names in their systems. I would estimate 60% of the time, my name is spelled wrong (typo, character swap, localization, etc). This of course becomes ridiculous as countries are more and more trying to automate a lot of processes, but a single letter mismatch sends you to administrative hell.

My strategy of recent years, which seems to work, is to be *relentless* of having your name right every single time. Drop the accents and non latin1 letters systematically, don't accept any typo, imprecision or shortening, have your full first, middle and last names everywhere.

99% of the time the issues are because the operator/clerk don't want to bother, and think it won't be a huge deal. That's wrong, the snowball effect is real and painful. Once your name is wrong anywhere, it cascades in a nightmare quite quickly.