MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Topfi | 2025-10-14 21:24:00+00:00
There are a lot of counterarguments I could bring up, but just of the top, plainly, just because people use LLMs as therapists, lawyers, doctors, deities, doesn't make LLMs such.

My personal believes (we should not rely on models for such things at this stage, let's not anthropomorphize, etc.) to one side, let me ask, do you think if I used my friend Steve, who is not a lawyer but sounds very convincingly like one, to advice me on a legal dispute, that should be covered by attorney client privilege?

Cause, even given the scenario that LLMs suddenly become perfectly reliable enough to verifiably carry out legal/medical/etc. services to a point where they can actually be accepted into day-to-day practice by actual professionals and the companies are willing to take on the financial risks of any malpractice for using their models in such areas (as part of enterprise offerings for an extra fee of course), that still wouldn't and shouldn't mean that your run-of-the-mill private ChatGPT instance has the same privileges or protections that we afford to e.g. patient data when handled digitally as part of medical practice. At best (again, I dislike anthropomorphizing models, but it is easier to talk about such a scenario this way), a hypothetical ChatGPT that provides 100% accurate legal information would be akin to a private person who just happens to know a lot about the law, but never got accredited and does not have the same responsibilities.

Again though, we are far from that hypothetical anyways, "people" using LLMs that way does not change this fact. I know, unfortunately, there are people who are convinced that current day LLMs have already attain Godhood and are merely biding their time and that doesn't become real either, just because they act according to their assumptions.

I really struggle to understand, nor do I see any cogent arguments across this comment section why current day LLMs in such a scenario should be treated differently to e.g. a PKM software or cloud hosted diary and afforded the same legal protections (or lack thereof depending on viewpoint, personal stance and your local data privacy laws).
by nostrademons | 2025-10-14 21:24:05+00:00
The low-income story gets most of the airtime because most people are not interested in reading about how rich people are struggling, but there was also a significant decline in affluent districts as well. See eg. this Boston Globe article about how even the top districts in the state (which itself is historically the top in the country) are using poor instructional methods:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/10/metro/reading-skills-...

https://archive.is/epEe5

I grew up near most of these districts, and and my mom taught in one of them. I was shocked at how low MCAS Reading scores have fallen. I was the first class to take them; it's not a hard test, and it's reportedly gotten even easier in the 30 years since I took it. And yet 30% of students in affluent districts can't pass them.

Also we encountered this personally when hiring a babysitter for our kids. She was a college junior, grew up in an adjacent city with $2.5M average house prices, was otherwise great with the kids. She struggled to get through The Lorax - my kindergartner could read it better than her.
by jacobr1 | 2025-10-14 21:24:08+00:00
Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue: "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime. But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles, usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in terms of transite miles) does happen. I can intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a way that it is hard to do with public transit, viscerally.
by c0nsumer | 2025-10-14 21:24:44+00:00
> The macOS-specific functionality in this very post has been available for years.

Can you provide a reference? From what I can see this dissection was only added about five months ago: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/commit/389f6356c9d5...

(And just hit release with 4.6.0.)

And I know with certainty that it did not work when I wrote my previous blog post about this, back in 2021.

So, from what I can see, the specific functionality to dissect Darwin metadata in pcapng captures, from macOS' tcpdump, has not been "...available for years.".
by bbor | 2025-10-14 21:24:53+00:00
I mean, I included a disclaimer... But regardless, you appear to be wrong on both counts (or at least contradicting Wikipedia):

1. "The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with OTHER MATTER and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

2. "A dwarf galaxy is a small galaxy composed of ABOUT 1000 up to several billion stars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_galaxy

Darn astrophysics majors being confident about astronomy! ;)
by echelon | 2025-10-14 21:25:03+00:00
The best systems are hybrid electronic + paper.

A machine prints your ballot with your choices in large, human-readable font. You can read it before you drop it in the submission box.

A QR code on the same page digitally encodes your choices.

You can get near-immediate results after the election, and everything can be perfectly audited and accounted for.
by gregwebs | 2025-10-14 21:25:08+00:00
The recent move away from phonics has been disastrous, and states that are using phonics now are seeing better results.

> Some have called it the “Mississippi miracle” ...

> A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana’s improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021.

I would be interested to know more about the approach with literacy coaches. I donate to a charity that does 1 on 1 reading tutoring: https://readingpowerinc.org/

If we cannot as a society teach our children how to read, something is very wrong and we need to invest heavily in fixing it.
by thelastgallon | 2025-10-14 21:25:23+00:00
The article misses the most important point. Its not just the numbers, but whats preventable/actionable vs whats not. One of the easiest things (and the #1 cause) that we can work on is automobile accidents: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for people aged 5–22, and the second most common cause for ages 23–67

Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable. Sure, we can do lifestyle changes, but eventually old people have to die of something and its in one of those buckets anyways.
by Ancapistani | 2025-10-14 21:25:35+00:00
Ugh - OK, I'll wear my politics on my sleeve in this thread.

I'm not a member of either major party, or any of the minor ones for that matter. I describe myself as an anarchist but practically speaking I'm a pragmatist. I grew up in a red state, so my "red mask" is higher quality than my "blue mask", but objectively I share about the same amount with each of them.

From where I sit the only thing that has changed is that Trump's administration isn't keeping up appearances. They're doing openly what every other administration in my lifetime has done behind closed doors.

I'll break down the rest and respond piece by piece:

> Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian

Agree. No notes.

> who previously tried to manipulate an election

I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.

> became president,

Yep. I've seen no compelling evidence of organized fraud in any of our recent elections that I've analyzed, either, so I assume he was rightfully elected.

> and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from,

A couple of points here.

First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.

This isn't the first time this has happened; there are many parallels to Lincoln in Trump's rise. JFK was somewhat similar as well.

We won't know how Trump's second term will end up until we're through it. In retrospect, I was almost as rabidly "anti" during the Clinton and Obama years as I see many people here express about Trump. In hindsight, while I strongly dislike the man, I'd take Clinton over any options we've had since.

> bought a voting machine company.

Yep. I believe the real question should be: do we want to allow a single company or individual this level of influence over our electoral process?
by devmor | 2025-10-14 21:25:40+00:00
At this point my knowledge probably pales in comparison to skimming some Wikipedia articles, but my understanding is that there is just so much dark matter concentrated in these halos and inter-galactic structures of it that the gravitational effects of baryonic matter are negligible in comparison.

I believe dark matter comprises something like 80-85% of all matter in the universe.
by spiffytech | 2025-10-14 21:26:28+00:00
Don't forget that the SQLite team is working on their own multi-writer mode that blows BEGIN CONCURRENT' out of the water: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34434025

Though this stuff moves slowly (that announcement was almost 3 years ago!), so I'm glad to see Turso giving us options today.
by aydyn | 2025-10-14 21:26:41+00:00
In this case, Ofcom's stated goal (which I admit may be different than their actual goal) is to get overseas companies to comply with their rules.

I think you may be giving them too much credit. You're essentially saying that their real goal is to get an ISP block and everything they are doing now is performative to get to that real, unstated goal.

On the other hand I may be underestimating them as, to me, they just seem like power-tripping troglodytes.
by nradov | 2025-10-14 21:26:54+00:00
Exactly because of the fourth power low, almost all of the road damage comes from the heaviest vehicles: class 7 and 8 trucks as well as buses etc. Even the heaviest passenger vehicles are negligible by comparison. And the weight of semi-trucks hasn't been "ever increasing": normal maximum weight has been fixed at 80,000 pounds for decades.

In some areas the roads are shit due to weather conditions, mainly frost heaves. This has little to do with vehicle damage.
by estearum | 2025-10-14 21:27:19+00:00
What someone “wants” is a complicated question.

People “want” all sorts of conflicting and even mutually exclusive things.

It would be just as true to say people “want” in-depth, factual understanding of things that are relevant to their lives.

The real optimization function is what you say later on: eyeball time.

Eyeball time, as anyone with a social media account can tell you, is hardly related to what a person comprehensively wants though.
by bitpush | 2025-10-14 21:27:38+00:00
“The next evolution of SQLite”

How? The whole point of trademark is to avoid confusing users that an alternate product is the same as the original product.

By explicitly saying "Next evolution of SQLite", or "A fork of SQLite", or a "Better SQLite" .. all of this is saying our product is distinct and different from SQLite.

If the fork were called "nue-sqlite" or "sqlitest" or "fastsqlite", there's an argument to be made.
by fsflover | 2025-10-14 21:27:41+00:00
> I didn't see many discussions about donating to foss software or smth in there.

There are many ways to help FLOSS with donation. Apart from directly donating to projects you're passionate about (e.g., https://qubes-os.org, https://debian.org, https://joinmastodon.org/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42157556), you can support NGOs promoting free software in general (e.g., https://fsf.org, https://eff.org).

> how we can change the fact that foss isn't used by most people

1. Use it yourself, get experience with it and suggest it to other people when it fits their use case, offer support to your friends and family.

2. Support FLOSS development in any way you can (including documentation and finding bugs).

3. Support and promote commercial companies whose services are related to development of free software (e.g., https://puri.sm and http://system76.com).

4. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/support-the-freedom-ladd...

5. Sign petitions like this one: https://publiccode.eu.

6. Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9307255

> I genuinely want to ask you what brings you hope in there.

I regularly read hacker news and I'm constantly impressed by things people achieve with free software and how much FLOSS grows.

A few example topics which brought joy to me:

Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580682)

Creation of a true GNU/Linux phone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656355)

PeerTube: Free software to take back control of your videos (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445497)

Ask HN: How do I give back to people helped me when I was young and had nothing? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268448)

Precursor, a mobile open-source electronics platform for developing secure apps (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24527846)
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-14 21:27:49+00:00
Small focused (local) model + tooling is the future, not online LLMs with monthly costs. Your coding model doesn't need all of the information in the world built in, it needs to know code and have tools available to get any information it needs to complete its tasks. We have treesitter, MCPs, LSPs, etc - use them.

The problem is that all the billions (trillions?) of VC money go to the online models because they're printing money at this point.

There's no money to be made in creating models people can run locally for free.
by Loughla | 2025-10-14 21:27:50+00:00
8 or 10 year loan. Then you roll that remainder into the next loan when you get another car.

It's absurd, to be honest. We financed our last vehicle, because we got a price discount via financing. The FIRST payment term they brought us was 8 years. And this was for a 19k vehicle.

People aren't looking at the terms, they're just looking at the payments. They're paying more for cars than they are for houses, monthly. I don't get it.
by jacobr1 | 2025-10-14 21:27:51+00:00
That is the technicality here. Bullshit is getting spewed, but in most cases, direct falsehoods aren't gett reported. If you quote someone saying something untrue, the paper didn't present a falsehood, same with bias, omission, emphasis and misleading narratives or framings. If you avoid stating facts and just cite sources, you can maintain, that the media outlet didn't lie. But only in the limited technical sense of direct commission.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-10-14 21:28:02+00:00
>I always take skeptics seriously, because what is the alternative? We stop asking questions?

This is the crux of my argument. Of course we don't stop asking questions and you know it. It really bothers me when people argue like this in bad faith. What needs to be pointed out is there is a difference between educated people doing research (aka 'askign questions') and people with no experience spouting nonsense. 99.99% of what I hear from "skeptics" is the latter. Millions of Americans now listen to podcasts, comedians, youtubers, and other sources who lack the basic education to even understand a medical study, let alone conduct actual research. Actual science is 'asking questions'. Modern skepticism is 99.99% of the time not actual science.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-14 21:28:02+00:00
> Watching x amount of quality videos and reading x amount of quality written works is surely better than just reading x amount of quality written works

Why surely?

The reason I'd push back on that simplification is it's much easier to simply absorb--without engagement--information from video. The struggle that comes with reading not only measurably increases retention. It also increases the chances that you're going to notice you're not dealing with a quality source.

There are far fewer dumbfuck textbooks on almost any topic than negatively-informative videos on YouTube, for example.

> I could read a 200 page academic work and if the work is poorly written then I haven't gained much

Could you give an example? Not of a work that's wrong. Just poorly written.

Plenty of classical sources are, by modern standards, incredibly poorly written. Yet there isn't a substitute for reading the originals.

One can learn from videos as well as from written sources. But it's harder to do right. Easier to do wrong. And you'll have put yourself in a silo from experts, who tend to communicate via and thus reference writing.
by RajT88 | 2025-10-14 21:28:22+00:00
Make no mistake, I am very excited for this weekend's broadcast.

When I am away from home for extended periods, I like to watch Sven to get a taste of home. It's especially nice for after I return from travel and want to unwind.

PSA: There's full broadcasts of Svengoolie up on Archive.org! Some uploaded by the man himself! ETA: A lot more than I realized; the last ~year some fellow has been recording and uploading them regularly.
by rayiner | 2025-10-14 21:28:23+00:00
> Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it.

There is actually no change in reading scores before covid if you adjust for demographic change in the student population: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/reading/student-group-.... Scores for white, black, and hispanic students went up consistently from 2000-2012 then stayed flat until 2020. The drop came only after covid.
by londons_explore | 2025-10-14 21:28:28+00:00
Buy in bulk from the Shenzhen markets and sellers will be pretty clear that you're getting a clone, and will give you samples of that specific clone so you can QA your product with them. (Some popular devices have multiple clone suppliers).

I now always buy clones where possible - whilst not all features are implemented and some specifications won't be met, the devices seem to match the original for reliability, and sometimes even come with their own cloned modded datasheet.
by lumost | 2025-10-14 21:28:54+00:00
To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts.

Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-14 21:28:59+00:00
> Nearly all systems have the ability to call libraries written in C. This is not true of other implementation languages.

From section "1.2 Compatibility". How easy is it to embed a library written in Zig in, say, a small embedded system where you may not be using Zig for the rest of the work?

Also, since you're the submitter, why did you change the title? It's just "Why is SQLite Coded in C", you added the "and not Rust" part.
by ncruces | 2025-10-14 21:29:51+00:00
The idea behind Litestream is that you have a “primary” which has the SQLite database on a local disk, and you use Litestream to replicate it asynchronously to (e.g.) object storage.

What's in object storage is not an SQLite file, but enough information to restore your SQLite file at various points in time. The way it's stored is optimized for frequent incremental updates and less frequent point restores.

The lightweight read replicas VFS allows you open an SQLite database read-only directly from the data in object storage, without having to first do a point restore, downloading all the data, and creating a local copy of the database.

You “stream” the data directly from object storage as needed, get a consistent view of it, and can query it while the “primary” is concurrently updating it.

It works, but SQLite kinda expects data to be local and low latency, which this might not be.

SQLite has a page cache, which you can use, but everytime there is a write, the entire cache is dropped.

Which means if you poll for updates regularly (which for various reasons you have to) you'll get frequent latency spikes.

One way to improve this is to add a page cache that has an understanding of which pages have changed and which have stayed the same. Prefetching would help to, but SQLite is really unhelpful there.

This is the piece I'm still missing. The rest mostly works already with Litestream v0.5.1.
by SchwKatze | 2025-10-14 21:30:00+00:00
TursoDB aims to be fully compatible with sqlite, so files you create with tursodb can be read by sqlite and vice-versa. Like sqlite, turso is in-process, so it runs alongside your application, which is quite different from postgres' client-server architecture.

The only think turso has in common with postgres is mvcc, which is a rather standard concurrency control model across modern databases. Idk if I answered your question :)
by bradfa | 2025-10-14 21:30:04+00:00
Imagining the tool is like a college intern helps me. It has no idea how the real world works. It blindly follows things it previously found online. It’s great at very common boilerplate coding tasks. But it’s super naive and will need hand holding or you to provide a huge amount of context for it so it can operate on its own.

I’m still very much learning how to give it good instructions to accomplish tasks. Different tasks require different types and methods of instruction. It’s extremely interesting to me. I’m far from an expert.
by pm2222 | 2025-10-14 21:30:16+00:00
These points strike me:

Safe languages insert additional machine branches to do things like verify that array accesses are in-bounds. In correct code, those branches are never taken. That means that the machine code cannot be 100% branch tested, which is an important component of SQLite's quality strategy. Rust needs to mature a little more, stop changing so fast, and move further toward being old and boring. Rust needs to demonstrate that it can do the kinds of work that C does in SQLite without a significant speed penalty.
by omnicognate | 2025-10-14 21:30:28+00:00
It's a poor choice of phrase if the purpose is to illustrate a false equivalence. It applies to AI both as much (you can kill a process or stop a machine just the same regardless of whether it's running an LLM) and as little (you can't "turn off" Facebook any more than you can "turn off" ChatGPT) as it does to any other kind of software.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-10-14 21:30:36+00:00
One reason: they make promises on behalf of the engineering team without their consent, in order to close sales. These promises become the engineering team's responsibility to manage from there. And the salesperson gets a bonus for closing the sale, instead of being punished as the engineering team is (by having to work overtime as a result, or by having to work on items that are less relevant to their career goals, etc.)

Another reason: most engineering workers aren't given revenue sharing bonuses, but sales people are for selling the product of the engineering team's work, which breeds resentment. (A little like a line cook resenting tips given to a server, if not shared with the kitchen.)