MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2025-10-19 12:31:23+00:00
Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product management has become an imposter role, a side door into tech companies for people who can't contribute to the sales, financial, or technical parts of the business. They would just be bloat if that was where it stopped, but these imposter roles task themselves with making important decisions, at the company's expense.

Like the author, I've found some success in forcing accountability, to the point that imposters hand off decisions to someone who can legitimately navigate to a solution. A lingering problem is that business decision making isn't about one-time decisions, it's about decision making rate. As long as poor decision makers can retain their position in the critical loop, they will impede the ability of the business to function. The solution is building the organization around accountability and consequences for misallocating the company's resources: setting up a system where the organization tends towards competent decision makers gaining influence, and incompetent decision makers losing influence or leaving.
by metalman | 2025-10-19 12:32:12+00:00
the archiological.work in Turkey is upending a great deal of unfounded assumption regarding the development of technology and culture, and not by some lttle margin either, the sites there predate, by many millenia, anything else, with very strong evidence for ritual, clan based religious/cultural practices useing animal and human characters that are recognisable, here, 10000 years later. The scale in time and space of the evidence in Turkey, strongly points to a much older cultural practice that has left traces yet to be connected in an unequivicable fashion. As to oral traditions, then work done with austrailian peoples demonstrates a continuity of storys surviving the divergence of language groups as long as 15000 years ago or more, and as always, austrailian cultural practice shows continuilty on a time scale only seen in a few other places in africa, 10's of thousands of years rather than the much more modest timelines seen elsewhere
by theandrewbailey | 2025-10-19 12:35:17+00:00
HAProxy is primarily used as a load balancer. (HA = high availability) The feature sets of it and Nginx have lots of overlap (including reverse proxy), but HAProxy does not serve pages (aside from error pages), so you will need Nginx or another real webserver somewhere.

I use HAProxy to terminate TLS and HTTP/3, route to other webservers based on subdomain, and reverse proxy/cache. I'm 100% sure Nginx can do all that, though.
by card_zero | 2025-10-19 12:37:53+00:00
Those are all about fallibility, really, and encouraging criticism. The opposites:

* possible holes in the argument/narrative are presented

* difficult feats like reading minds are admitted to be difficult

* possibly misleading words are hedged

* unimpassioned thought is encouraged

* sources are given (so claims can be checked or researched)

This is all compatible with being totally biased, in the point of view you actually present amid all this niceness. (Expressing fallibility is also an onerous task that will clutter up your rhetoric, but that's another matter.)

Uh, but I could be wrong.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-19 12:38:17+00:00
Even if we assume that "update themselves as they work on a problem" is vital for AGI (not proven, it's just an assumption), then what stops us from just giving an LLM an "update itself" tool call?

As the most naive implementation: the LLM just collects the relevant training data, and then runs PEFT on itself. Then it tests the tuned version of itself to see whether the tune was any good and is worth retaining.

Sure, that naive approach would require an LLM to be good at assembling training sets, and validating performance gains, and it would be very computationally expensive. But none of those things would somehow make it not-an-LLM-anymore.
by jefftk | 2025-10-19 12:39:37+00:00
> We are (still) firmly in the sequencing by synthesis era.

It really depends what your goals are. At the NAO we use Illumina with their biggest flow cell (25B) for wastewater because the things we're looking for (ex: respiratory viruses) are a small fraction of the total nucleic acids and we need the lowest cost per base pair. But when we sequence nasal swabs these viruses are a much higher fraction, and the longer reads and lower cost per run of Nanopore make it a better fit.
by AJRF | 2025-10-19 12:40:06+00:00
I made this site, and I am not wedded to the idea that smart phones are the only reason these trends started to turn weird.

I try to say as much on the site - and while maybe I place a lot of blame on the relationship between the iPhone -> Increased adoption of internet usage -> Social Media usage going up == lots of detrimental effects I think you've an interesting thread i'd like to pull.

Do you have any more information or reading I can do on this and I can add it to the site?

Something changed between 2007 and now, there is just too much evidence to support that, and I think there is a very strong claim Smartphones are a very large contributing factor, but as you will be aware, the causes are very hard to extract.
by fulafel | 2025-10-19 12:40:16+00:00
This seems cool:

> Hardware-enforced privacy

> A core principle of Coral NPU is building user trust through hardware-enforced security. Our architecture is being designed to support emerging technologies like CHERI, which provides fine-grained memory-level safety and scalable software compartmentalization. With this approach, we hope to enable sensitive AI models and personal data to be isolated in a hardware-enforced sandbox, mitigating memory-based attacks.
by nobleach | 2025-10-19 12:40:49+00:00
I'm on that same journey. 8 months ago, I was sitting at my desk and all of a sudden my left ear just went out. The ringing was there. I figured the same that it was wax. I've always had wax issues with that ear that require a doctor's office visit. (trying the home kits has only made it worse!) But this time the doctor came in, looked in the ear and said, "there's no wax at all in that ear". What followed sounds much like your journey. Visits to ENT, CT Scans - waiting on an MRI to ensure there's no tumor... All the while I went from having great hearing to having to say, "say that again" all the time.
by weavejester | 2025-10-19 12:41:11+00:00
I'm fully on board with improving compilers. My issue is that you compare the current state of (some) dynamically-typed languages with a hypothetical future state of statically-typed languages.

You use `req.cookies['token']` as an example of a subtle bug in JavaScript, but this isn't necessarily an inherent bug to dynamic typing in general. You could, for example, have a key lookup function that requires you to pass in a default value, or callback to handle what occurs if the value is missing.

req.cookies.get('token', () => { throw new AuthFailure("Missing token") })
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-19 12:42:46+00:00
> - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl

What do you mean with "now"? If you've ever been in a competitive industry before, you're already used to the random DDoS, and if you've published a moderately successful website, you've dealt with misbehaving scrapers/user-agents too, like the ones that get stuck and get requesting random 100 URLs per second for weeks.

I'm guessing you're alluding to AI scrapers, but are they really that different from what we've already learnt to deal with on the public internet?
by occamschainsaw | 2025-10-19 12:45:08+00:00
There’s a fascinating story about S Chandrasekhar (of Chandrasekhar limit fame) driving 100 miles to teach him every week. Teaching two students, the professor got a Nobel prize and the two students got a Nobel prize.

“ One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class -- T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang -- won the Nobel Prize in physics.”

Source: https://chronicle.uchicago.edu/951012/chandra.shtml
Show HN: Syna – Minimal ML and RL Framework Built from Scratch with NumPy
by sql-hkr | 2025-10-19 12:45:23+00:00
Hello HN,

I built Syna to understand how modern ML frameworks like PyTorch actually work — from the ground up.

It’s a minimal, define-by-run (dynamic graph) framework inspired by DeZero, written entirely with NumPy. Unlike most libraries, Syna includes a basic reinforcement learning module right inside the same framework — no separate packages.

It’s not about speed or GPUs — it’s about clarity, simplicity, and learning the internals of machine learning. Great for students, educators, and anyone curious about what’s really happening under the hood.

GitHub: https://github.com/sql-hkr/syna

I also built a web app that visualizes how neural networks learn in real time — perfect for beginners exploring training dynamics:

GitHub: https://github.com/sql-hkr/xor Demo: https://sql-hkr.github.io/xor/

Happy hacking!
by rwmj | 2025-10-19 12:45:32+00:00
They're elegant at first glance, it's just the attack surface of "exec this other program" turns out to be enormous. eg. You wouldn't necessarily think that you'd have to clean out all environment variables, but what if your program is linked to some library that tries to parse some obscure environment variable and that parser has a bug. And the list goes on.

The alternative is sending messages to daemons, but as it turns out, the attack surface of those is pretty large too, albeit not as large as setuid.

The whole "do some work on my behalf with elevated privs" is not exactly a solved problem in Unix.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-10-19 12:45:59+00:00
> it integrates seamlessly with JupyterCAD, JupyterLab’s extension for creating and manipulating 3D models.

Today I learned... Jupyter has an extension for 3d modelling.

Can anyone comment on this extension?

https://github.com/jupytercad/JupyterCAD
by amelius | 2025-10-19 12:46:09+00:00
> Summary (from the article)

* OpenAI researchers claimed or suggested that GPT-5 had solved unsolved math problems, but in reality, the model only found known results that were unfamiliar to the operator of erdosproblems.com.

* Mathematician Thomas Bloom and Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis criticized the announcement as misleading, leading the researchers to retract or amend their original claims.

* According to mathematician Terence Tao, AI models like GPT-5 are currently most helpful for speeding up basic research tasks such as literature review, rather than independently solving complex mathematical problems.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-19 12:48:57+00:00
That's what I'm saying, they're not basically gone, they are coming back because of idiocy. We already cured them before AI, and now that we have AI they are returning. So AI can't even help us manage diseases we already cured, what hope does it have for curing new diseases? Any treatment or vaccines discovered will not be used to cure diseases, they will be politicized, leveraged, and dangled over our heads, priced just out of reach for those who need it most, weaponized and rationed to make us desperate.

The question isn't whether AI amplifies science, it's whether AI amplifies science more than it does stupidity. If all we are doing is inventing ways for the people who are making measles come back to become more stupid and more powerful, it won't matter that AI cures anything.

AI would be better tasked at telling us how to prevent measles from coming back and how to make insulin cheaper, than to tell us how to cure new diseases.
by savrajsingh | 2025-10-19 12:49:01+00:00
Check out https://mynucleus.com -- we do whole-genome DNA sequencing from a cheek swab for about $500 (use code savraj10 for 10% off), so no blood drawn as in this example. We also give you your risks for over 2k diseases and, if your partner does the test, predict outcomes for your future kids. Alexis is one of our investors and we have a big announcement coming next week! We also allow download of all raw data and are SOC2 + HIPAA compliant.
by heyjamesknight | 2025-10-19 12:49:12+00:00
The multimodal architectures I’ve seen are still text at the layer between modalities. And the image embedding and text embedding are kept completely separate. Not like where your brain where single neurons are used in all sorts of things.

Yes, they can generate images from images, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get anything meaningful without human instruction on top.

Yes, serialized one dimensional strings can encode anything. But that’s just the message content. If I wrote down my genetic sequence on a piece of paper and dropped it in a bottle in the sea, I don’t need to worry about accidentally fathering any children.
by mkp0 | 2025-10-19 12:50:27+00:00
If I recall correctly, the better form of bimodal stimulation was found by Susan Shore et al.[1][2][3]. Lenire created a quick and dirty version and got it approved, while Shore's device is still stuck in limbo.

If it ever gets approved, it should be considerably better than Lenire, but it's sure taking its time.

A HN user said they'd provide specs to reproduce such a device, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43920360

[1] https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/7229... [2] https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/scitranslmed.aal3175 [3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
by lsllc | 2025-10-19 12:50:38+00:00
When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile.

Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage.

I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
Ask HN: Will Biotech Have Its "Arduino Moment"?
by Gooblebrai | 2025-10-19 12:52:19+00:00
Software became democratised when anyone with a laptop could build and ship products from home. Hardware followed with the rise of Arduino, 3D printing, and accessible PCB manufacturing. Suddenly, physical prototyping was something individuals could do on their own.

Biotech, though, remains mostly confined to labs and institutions. Even simple experimentation with cells, genes, or tissues demands controlled environments, certifications, and expensive equipment.

Do you see that ever changing? Is there a future where biology becomes as hackable and open as code or circuits? Where individuals are able to safely experiment, learn, and build biological systems from a small setup at home? Or will the inherent complexity and regulation of living matter keep biotech permanently out of the "maker" domain? Thoughts?
by derriz | 2025-10-19 12:52:50+00:00
I know what you mean - took me a while too. I understood what it does, how the parameters affect what it does and the mechanics of it, but struggled to "hear" it.

I even bought a cheap $25 Behringer guitar compressor pedal to see what I was missing but it didn't help - later I realized that my guitar playing isn't repeatable enough. So this isn't the way to go.

What made it click was due to an accidental mistake in my normal workflow - I recorded some DAW-less techno jam stuff using GarageBand (normally I just copy the wavs from my little Tascam). While playing back, I noticed that there's a master compressor and I started fiddling with it. With repetitive music like Techno and House, the difference between no compression and full compression suddenly becomes very apparent (although still somewhat subtle compared to other FX commonly used in music production). Also it helped that my recording had no compression on it - comprising just a raw drum machine and mono-synth.
by resoluteteeth | 2025-10-19 12:55:06+00:00
I disagree. There is no way to interpret "GPT-5 just found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdos problems" as saying something other than GPT-5 having solved them.

If it just found existing solutions then they obviously weren't "previously unsolved" so the tweet is wrong.

He clearly misunderstood the situation and jumped to the conclusion that GPT-5 had actually solved the problems because that's what he wanted to believe.

That said, the misunderstanding is understandable because the tweet he was responding to said they had been listed as "open", but solving unsolved erdos problems by itself would be such a big deal that he probably should have double checked it.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-19 12:55:27+00:00
The Chinese are one step ahead of our "leadership".

Without effective regulation and oversight, "stablecoins" could easily be fraudulent. It's impossible to know for sure but with every financial incentive in favor of it, only a fool would bet otherwise.

Next up --- the Chinese have worked out that a trade war is simply unwinnable --- any concessions will be met by more demands so why play along at all?

And by extension --- "America First" isn't about making America great again but rather making it easy for entrenched interests to profit from it's demise.

With our current trajectory, all the Chinese have to do is stay the course and wait --- for us to surrender and declare victory.
by mmorse1217 | 2025-10-19 12:55:54+00:00
Your comment motivated me to also comment :) I agree: Bézier curves and b-splines have a lot of rich geometry baked it, so it makes sense to use it, especially if you can avoid second derivatives. I think I misunderstood your comment about the extra control point work to find an initial guess. It looks like we’re saying something pretty close though: you can split the curve smartly to remove the single crossing in this case, which skips all the recursion that I’m suggesting, which is probably better.

Yes the real trouble is true optimality guarantees. I remember that there were edge cases of the above approach needed that a lot of subdivision steps to succeed for general degree curves, so it might end up worse than a more rigorously justified approach in these cases.
by mentalgear | 2025-10-19 12:56:30+00:00
Another instance of openAI manipulating results to prolong their unsustainable circular hype bubble.

The inevitable collapse could be even more devastating than the 2008 financial crisis.

All while so vast resources are being wasted on non-verifiable gen AI slob, while real approaches (neuro-symbolic like DeepMind's AlphaFold) are mostly ignored financially because they don't generate the quick stock market increases that hype does.
by hgs3 | 2025-10-19 13:01:09+00:00
> The ability to edit it using the CLI

This perplexes me. Lua was conceived as a configuration language and the whole point of a configuration language is you edit a config file. Trying to abstract this away behind a CLI seems like it misses the ethos of Lua.

It’s also a tad strange that a package manager designed for Lua isn’t written in Lua. Presumably Lua developers already have Lua installed, know Lua, and would more likely contribute to a project written in Lua.
by bitcurious | 2025-10-19 13:01:48+00:00
> You're arguing that "Black" is an identity in the US because the people thus identified share a common history within the US, even though their ancestors originated from different regions and cultures before they were enslaved and shipped to North America. Yet in the next paragraph you argue that "White" is not a valid identity, because their ancestors originated from different regions and cultures, even though they share a common history within the US. How do you reconcile this double standard?

The ethnic, cultural, linguistic, familial, etc., identities of enslaved people in America were systematically and deliberately erased. When you strip away those pre-American identities you land on the experience of slavery as your common denominator and root of history. This is fundamentally distinct from, for example, Irish immigration, who kept their community, religion, and family ties both within the US and over the pond. There’s a lot written about this that you can explore independently.

I’m not actually a fan of “Black” in writing like this, mostly because it’s sloppily applied in a ctrl+f for lower case “black”, even at major institutions who should know better, but the case for it is a fairly strong one.
by crims0n | 2025-10-19 13:01:59+00:00
13 years ago?! Where does the time go. Unfortunately my original Pebble band deteriorated, but I did charge up my Pebble Time and it seemed to be working, will give it a sync for old times (pun) sake. I have a Pebble 2 Duo in route, I wasn’t much of a programmer 13 years ago so looking forward to doing some development on it (in C no less!).
by somenameforme | 2025-10-19 13:02:12+00:00
It's an interesting little nugget of evidence in favor of the simulation hypothesis. We're currently living through the first era in humanity's history where there will be enough raw information to create a workable global level simulation once that data is decrypted. Pair that with the fact that we're living through such a huge inflection point in history (birth of the internet, humanity becoming a multiplanetary species, and more) and you have a time where people both (1) can and (2) will want to simulate/experience. It's quite interesting.

I'm still convinced that the simulation hypothesis is just religion for the atheist or agnostic, because if it turns out that it's correct and one day you 'wake up' only to find that it was all a simulation, well how do you know that isn't now also just another simulation? It's a non-theory. But I find this some quite compelling circumstantial evidence in favor of this non-theory. Because an arbitrary number of individuals may be able to experience "this" era throughout our species' future, yet only one group will be the one that gets to actually live it, and that group will ostensibly be orders of magnitude smaller than the sum total of all that will later 'experience' it. Statistically you're rather more likely to belong to the simulation group than the real, if these assumptions are correct.
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