MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-21 03:29:07+00:00
I think it’ll become an add on to an annual physical blood panel for the 50+ age cohort. Volume might push prices down faster.

I paid the $950 rate (it’s occasionally discounted to $800, such as now until the end of the year, and you might be able to use FSA/HSA funds depending on plan administrator) and thought it was worth it (to detect potentially asymptomatic early stage cancer).

(no affiliation)
by me_vinayakakv | 2025-10-21 03:29:21+00:00
Yeah. But I think one problem could be if this list is very large and overflows the context.

I was thinking giving the LLM a tool `(query: string) => string[]` to retrieve a list of matching labels to check if they already exist.

But the above approach sounds similar to OP, where they use embeddings to achieve that.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-21 03:29:31+00:00
LISA: Dad, did you read “Gravity’s Rainbow” yet, the Thomas Pynchon masterpiece? He’s what I want to be when I grow up — a famous literary recluse. Just imagine being speculated about by the most consequential people in the world: English literature grad students.

HOMER: Sweetie, I really wanted to read it. But you know I don’t like to read. My eyes get so tired going right, right, right, then, ugh … left. Plus from the title I thought “Gravity’s Rainbow” would be about Skittles. It didn’t seem to be, so I took a break about halfway through.

LISA: You made it halfway through the book?

HOMER: Halfway through the first line.

LISA: OK, I thought you might struggle with it, so I got you a pop-up version too.

HOMER: Sorry, pop-up books are way too hard. If something’s going to pop up at me it better be from a toaster. Plus you have to figure out how to get the pages to lie back down flat again. I’m no engineer.

LISA: I thought you were a nuclear engineer.

HOMER: That’s more about pushing buttons. Or not pushing buttons. I can’t remember which. So if you had to choose a passage from the book to appear in The New York Times, what would it be?

LISA: It would have to be this quote about power in America: “All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few …”

HOMER: Interesting. Did you know there’s a green Skittle? Do you think this Pynchon guy knows what it tastes like?

https://archive.ph/rtL5Q
by bcantrill | 2025-10-21 03:31:04+00:00
I don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
by vietvu | 2025-10-21 03:32:18+00:00
I heard this opinion a lot recently. Codex is getting better, and Claude is getting worse so it's must happen sooner or later. Well, it's competition so waiting for Claude to catch up. The web Claude Code is good, but they really need to fix their quota. It's unusable. I would choose a worse model (maybe at 90%), but has better quota and usable. Not to mention GPT-5 and GPT-5-codex seems catch up or even better now.
by arjie | 2025-10-21 03:34:40+00:00
It's all right. Wikipedia was a magical device for its time, and it's still a great aggregator of information. It will probably last forever as such a link aggregator. Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap so it makes sense for Wikipedia to be Yet Another Source into the read-time curator. And the existence of a source database like Wikipedia makes many of these tools work a lot better.

People rightfully get upset about individual editors having specific agendas on Wikipedia and I get it. Often that is the case. But the chat interface for LLMs allows for a back and forth where you can force them to look past some text to get closer to a truth.

For my part, I think it's nice to be part of making that base substrate of human knowledge in an open way, and some kinds of fixes to Wikipedia articles are very easy. So what little I do, I'll keep doing. Makes me happy to help.

Some of the fruit is really low-hanging, take a look at this garbage someone added to an article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
by 201984 | 2025-10-21 03:36:09+00:00
Pretty neat idea, but it evaluates the lzcnt instruction incorrectly, so it's possible others are wrong too. If you have access to a real x86_64 processor, you're probably better off just using it, and then you get the power of a full debugger with breakpoints in gdb.

Also, the "Guides" button and the "embed on your website" link on the main page are broken.
by musicale | 2025-10-21 03:36:42+00:00
macOS is (a) Unix (officially even!) and inherits many of its features and issues.

To Apple's credit though they seem to be using a memory-safe language (Swift) for new code and libraries (at least at user level) and may be rewriting old code as well, and they have also added MIE/EMTE to Apple Silicon. They also ship clang/clang++ with support for -fbounds-safety and -fsanitize=address.

Objective-C also supports Automatic Reference Counting, which helps with memory management. (Apple also implemented a garbage collector for Objective-C 2.0, but abandoned it in favor of ARC. I am aware that reference counting is technically a form of garbage collection.)
by wyre | 2025-10-21 03:38:55+00:00
I think I agree here. I don't have all the numbers, but I'm under the impression that OpenAI spend is much higher than their competitors, with Meta trailing behind them. I don't think Anthropic or Xai is spending nearly as much as OpenAI, yet ChatGPT performance is not scaling with spend. Their moat seems to be entirely based on having the most users.
by linksnapzz | 2025-10-21 03:40:18+00:00
See...there's the thing; dynamic linking was originally done by Unixen in the '80s, way before Linux, as a way to cope w/ original X11 on machines that had only 2-4MB of RAM.

X was (in)famous for memory use (see the chapter in the 'Unix-Hater's Handbook'); and shared libs was the consensus as to how to make the best of a difficult situation, see:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-21 03:40:35+00:00
A good chunk of Rust code often ends up linking in a C/C++ library where it’s still a concern (and this is ignoring that unsafe Rust is actually harder and more unsafe than C currently).

More importantly there’s millions if not billions of existing lines of C/C++ not least of which is the VMs for “memory safe” languages like Java. There’s huge value add in automatically adding security for a fractional CPU cost since the world won’t be rewritten into Rust anytime soon.
by gpm | 2025-10-21 03:41:21+00:00
> Ada has had memory safety for decades

Only with spark (i.e. formal verification). Which similar to other projects of this age (e.g. Rocq/How the compcert C compiler was implemented and proved correct) seems not to be low enough friction to get widescale adoption.

> not to mention Lisp, Java, etc. if you can live with garbage collection.

Like I said, high level languages that won't benefit from this at all have existed for ages... and the majority of software is written in them. This is one of the stronger arguments against it...

> But the Linux kernel (along with lots of other software which we would like to be reliable) is still mostly written in C, for better or worse.

Fil-C shows this can be solved at the software layer for things in this category that can afford the overhead of a GC. Which does mean a larger performance penalty than the hardware proposal, but also more correctly (since hardware changes can never solve unintended compilations resulting from undefined behavior).

The linux kernel is probably an example of an actual long tail project that would benefit from this for a reasonably long time though, since it's not amenable to "use a modified C compiler that eliminates undefined behavior with GC and other clever tricks" and it's unlikely to get rewritten or replaced with a memory safe thing quickly due to the number of companies collaborating on it.
by vacuity | 2025-10-21 03:41:23+00:00
See also Barrelfish for a multikernel research implementation. I think fos also qualifies.

> Personally, I would never agree to give up SMP CPU coherency. Multiprocessor systems are hard enough to debug with hardware cache coherency that adding in entirely new unpredictable non-deterministic behaviour would lead to more developers losing the rest of their hair prematurely. And it would likely introduce an entirely new class of security issues that nobody ever imagined that would require even worse performance draining software workarounds.

What are you envisioning is the alternative hardware (or is it software?), and why? I assume this is referring to some mechanism for multikernel support that doesn't rely on cache coherence. It seems like there are probably alternatives to full cache coherence that would be neutral, or better, after experience. You didn't provide substantive evidence, but on the other hand, at least multikernels on unmodified hardware seem promising.
by ghaff | 2025-10-21 03:41:25+00:00
Mind you, California cost of living was on the high side even in the nineties even relative to at least modestly expensive areas like the Boston area suburbs--there was really very little tech in Boston proper at that time.

But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary.

Some people made a lot of money when dot-com hit. A lot also got wiped out and ended up leaving the industry.

I never had the highs or lows. I was probably making something south of $100K in the late 90s.
by teunlao | 2025-10-21 03:41:46+00:00
Been using both daily for three months. Different tools for different jobs.

Claude Code has better UX. Period. The permission system, rollbacks, plan mode - it's more polished. Iterative work feels natural. Quick fixes, exploratory coding, when I'm not sure exactly what I want yet - Claude wins.

Codex is more reliable when stakes are high. Hard problems. Multi-file refactors. Complex business logic. The model just grinds through it. Less hand-holding needed.

Here's the split I've landed on - Claude for fast iteration tasks where I'm actively involved. Codex for delegate-and-walk-away work that needs to be right first time.

Not about which is "better" - wrong question. It's about tooling vs model capability. Claude optimized the wrapper. OpenAI optimized the engine.
by sema4hacker | 2025-10-21 03:41:48+00:00
If a physical weapon is sent across a border to attack and disrupt something in another country, is that an act of war? Is a cyber attack by one country on the assets of another essentially the same thing? If so, what retaliation is justified? If not, what's the limit on how far and wide cyber attacks can be attempted? Seems like cyber attacks might easily be escalated to the point of causing actual warfare.
by cobbal | 2025-10-21 03:42:24+00:00
Which part of that sentence do you think is hyperbole?

> Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14,051,750 (uncertainty interval 8,475,990-19,662,191) additional all-age deaths, including 4,537,157 (3,124,796-5,910,791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
by zenmac | 2025-10-21 03:42:50+00:00
There seems to be a common theme here. Some project gets traction, it works very well. Then they got VC money and the project turn to crap for the community. Not all VC project, but seems to be common theme. I also aware that devs need funding to keep a project going for the long run. Are there any better alternatives for funding now days?
by transpute | 2025-10-21 03:43:34+00:00
Is there a comparison of memory tagging designs for different architectures (POWER, SPARC, CHERI/Morello, Arm MTE/eMTE, Apple MIE, x86, RISC-V)? e.g. enforcement role of compiler vs. hardware, opt-in vs mandatory, hardware isolation of memory tags, performance impact, level of OS integration?
by musicale | 2025-10-21 03:45:49+00:00
> Fil-C shows this can be solved at the software layer for things in this category that can afford the overhead of a GC.

Mainline clang and g++ are also getting better with things like -fbounds-safety and -fsanitize=address. As I understand it, they typically have some overhead, but I'm willing to accept that overhead to have a kernel, web browser, etc. without memory errors. The decision that memory safety is too costly seems to have been made when CPUs were orders of magnitude slower than they are today. Hopefully hardware support will reduce the overhead to negligible proportions and enable memory safety as a default rather than an esoteric add-on or proprietary feature.
by lukeschlather | 2025-10-21 03:46:13+00:00
I'm copy-pasting something that is intended to be copy-pasted into a terminal and run. The first tool I'm going to reach for to base64 decode something is a terminal, which is obviously the last place I should copy-paste this string. Nothing wrong with pasting it into ChatGPT.

When I come across obviously malicious payloads I get a little paranoid. I don't know why copy-pasting it somewhere might cause a problem, but ChatGPT is something where I'm pretty confident it won't do an RCE on my machine. I have less confidence if I'm pasting it into a browser or shell tool. I guess maybe writing a python script where the base64 is hardcoded, that seems pretty safe, but I don't know what the person spear phishing me has thought of or how well resourced they are.
by superbowl | 2025-10-21 03:46:21+00:00
Good listen. Tldr: the markets are amoral and, morality aside, our circumstances aren't that bad. Also there's a bunch of fomo around AI and all the major AI companies are listed in the US.

It didn't mention an idea I've heard recently: passive investing blindly adds to the market, eg https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/02/29/a...
by bdangubic | 2025-10-21 03:46:28+00:00
100% you are an outlier. I doubt there are many people than are “HN addicted” whereas X/Insta/TT/Snap… addictions are very, very real…

I quit all social media years ago and it took a long time to fully rid myself of it, I kept re-installing apps etc. HN I load few days per week but mostly to read stories and from time to time comments. Never found HN to be in any way a “social” place that made me want to go back to read people’s comments
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-10-21 03:47:39+00:00
The grid actually already has a fair number of (non-software) circular dependencies. This is why they have black start [1] procedures and run drills of those procedures. Or should, at least; there have been high profile outages recently that have exposed holes in these plans [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
by kI3RO | 2025-10-21 03:48:55+00:00
The builtin pager doesn't have an END shortcut...

it's useless without such a small thing.

edit: [n] G Go to the very bottom of the output. If n is present, goes to that line

Oh capital G. What an intuitive keyword source:https://docs.rs/minus/latest/minus/#standard-actions
by ggm | 2025-10-21 03:48:55+00:00
I suspect this is a "what you bring to it" situation. X/Twitter is designed to hook you into repetitive patterns. This place, thats almost an anti pattern.

A decade or so back in the context of "too much email" some friends and I discussed if we were all rationed to one email a day, what we'd do, and if it was one a week (this is to lists) what we'd do..
by sailingparrot | 2025-10-21 03:50:17+00:00
But you are missing the causal attention from your analysis. The output is not the only thing that is preserved, there is also the KV-cache.

At token 1, the model goes through, say, 28 transformer blocks, for each one of those block we save 2 projections of the hidden state in a cache.

At token 2, on top of seeing the new token, the model is now also able in each one of those 28 blocks, to look at the previously saved hidden states from token 1.

At token 3, it can see the states from token 2 and 1 etc.

However I still agree that is not a perfect information-passing mechanism because of how those model are trained (and something like feedback transformer would be better), but information still is very much being passed from earlier tokens to later ones.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-21 03:51:30+00:00
Popular in:

2023 (161 points, 151 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017239

~2022 (50 points, 16 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832433

2021 (198 points, 207 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27306742
by ggm | 2025-10-21 03:52:02+00:00
The non-invasive followup for people with positive test results would knock out a lot of the false-positives. At least, thats what I understand of "the usual result of a positive test result for a serious illness, is that a repeat test does not confirm it"

That said, at what level of risk of follow up diagnostic would you baulk? Any procedure which requires a general is bad news, and if you are over 70 its a lot more bad.
by typpilol | 2025-10-21 03:52:13+00:00
Every since 4.5, I can't get Claude to do anything that takes a while

4.0 would chug a long for 40 mins. 4.5 refuses and straight up says the scope is too big sometimes.

My theory is anthropic is super compute constrained and even though 4.5 is smarter, the usage limits and it's obsession with rushing to finish was put in mainly to save their servers compute.
by Hasnep | 2025-10-21 03:52:39+00:00
You'd just do the same thing you do in any language, you parse the incoming data into a format that's more idiomatic, e.g. in Gleam

type Record { NShares(n: Int) ZeroTheAccount() } fn parse_record(n: Int) -> Record { case n { 0 -> ZeroTheAccount() _ -> NShares(n) } }

Then you don't have to worry about mixing up the two :)
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-21 03:54:47+00:00
There aren’t some kind of magic levers inside of the building. To perform an insurrection you need military support. Do you think all of the people involved were just so dumb that they thought they could take over by simply being inside the building? The reality candidate where they intended to delay the proceedings by protesting on site makes massively more sense. Certainly one can disagree with the method there and say it wasn’t appropriate, but there is a lot of hysteria over it and I don’t really get why people are sucked in by it.
by babl-yc | 2025-10-21 03:55:11+00:00
I don't expect the majority of tech companies to want to run their own physical data centers. I do expect them to shift to more bare-metal offerings.

If I'm a mid to large size company built on DynamoDB, I'd be questioning if it's really worth the risk given this 12+ hour outage.

I'd rather build upon open source tooling on bare metal instances and control my own destiny, than hope that Amazon doesn't break things as they scale to serve a database to host the entire internet.

For big companies, it's probably a cost savings too.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-21 03:55:57+00:00
> What if the hallucinations that matter aren’t those from the AI, but the humans who are hallucinating that AI is intelligent, conscious, creative, or even competent at what it does?

Yes, to me there's a constant theme of LLM "AI" discussions, where a bunch of humans are trusting too much in a subconscious bias which has, after many good years, become problematic. A kind of pareidolia of conversations and minds, rather than pictures and faces.

The same process that makes people think "Bot talking to me, Bot is a real mind in silicon" can be trivially twisted to fit a "conversation" with Count Dracula, blood-thirsting lord of the night, locked in a coffin with a laptop. The difference is people have more mental-armor against thinking Dracula could be real.
by ghaff | 2025-10-21 03:56:23+00:00
Bryan,

I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.
by tombert | 2025-10-21 03:56:56+00:00
Not sure if this applies to Postman specifically, but I think a lot of software projects start out largely as hobby projects, and might not have even had an ambition of making serious money out of it, and as such there's no reason to be hostile to the community.

Then a VC fund gives these developers a dumptruck full of money and expect returns immediately afterward. Something like Postman likely doesn't make a ton of money unless they're doing something anti-consumer like selling data.
by emptyhandeddev | 2025-10-21 03:57:36+00:00
a) Simplified Chinese

b) Traditional Chinese

c) 楽 is a variation of 樂, which is now widely used in Japanese Kanji but deprecated in Traditional Chinese.

Note:

A variation means some people write 樂 as 楽 in ancient China, but not widely adopted.

Kanji is a Japanese word, means "Chinese Character".
by vscode-rest | 2025-10-21 03:58:25+00:00
The REST Book extension was made by a VS Code dev and does a decent enough chunk of what is needed, at least for simple use cases.

Handy Dandy Notebook as well, but that requires some reformulation to get everything in terms of standard curl/node/python/etc commands. (whether that’s better or worse than a custom http dsl is a matter of some debate)
by krackers | 2025-10-21 03:59:17+00:00
Calling pthread_cond_signal without acquiring mutex can lead to lost wakeup. And of course you can't really acquire a mutex in an async signal safe function like interrupt handler.

Without the signaling thread acquiring a mutex, you might end up signaling after T2 has checked the boolean, but before it has called cond_wait.

But this can be solved by processing the async signal in a deferred manner from some other watcher thread
by throwaway127482 | 2025-10-21 04:00:31+00:00
Conspiracy theory: that explanation is a lie, and the real reason for the delay is that it helps hide the fact that there isn't a unique image mapped to each pixel. If you click two pixels very close together, it shows the same image, but slightly shifted to exactly match your pointer. If the images were displayed immediately, it would be much more obvious what's going on.
by mk89 | 2025-10-21 04:00:58+00:00
This is an assumption.

Reality is, though, that you shouldn't put all your eggs in the same basket. And it was indeed the case before the cloud. One service going down would have never had this cascade effect.

I am not even saying "build your own DC", but we barely have resiliency if we all rely on the same DC. That's just dumb.
by alpb | 2025-10-21 04:01:00+00:00
Indeed. No disrespect to Justin (great person) or any of the engineers who were sacked but Corey's post here is basically "here's someone who was sacked, and here are several other layoff news". AWS is really big organization. Several orders of magnitude bigger than people who were remote/refused to RTO. Organizations like this survive these brain brains.
by rafabulsing | 2025-10-21 04:01:25+00:00
I don't know, I really don't feel like it is. I think it's pretty clear that the choice of "unhappiness"/"sadness" is to clearly put it in opposition to the popular "money doesn't bring happiness" cliche, not out of some absolute claim on the magnitude of the suffering the lack of money could bring (so, merely sadness, but not agony, desolation, suffering, or any other stronger negative emotion one could choose).

It just makes the propositional logic of the sentence clearer:

X might not imply Y, but !X implies !Y