MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timschmidt | 2025-10-07 12:48:01+00:00
Having worked in Science, "we don't know yet" is exactly the response I expected to hear from Science leaders. It's what the scientists I worked with said often, even about subjects they were legitimate experts in. One comes to expect the familiar.

Which is why "it couldn't be a lab leak" struck me like a ton of bricks when it was said.

My immediate response was "that's not science, he's not speaking like any scientist I know, and I know a few hundred."

My position in Science, as support personnel working on software related to funding requests, grants, research collection, and reporting, for nearly a decade, left me in that moment with a distinct feeling that the difference in communication was about protecting funding, reputations, positions, etc. Scientists are not dummies, and their communications with political agencies are very politically aware. I can see a scenario in which, to preserve public confidence in Science(TM) such false confidence might be presented. Gave me the heebie jeebies.
by gorbypark | 2025-10-07 12:48:51+00:00
I only ever use a VPN to access region blocked content and the occasional "linux iso" torrent..I tried Mullvad first, but they just don't play the game of cat and mouse with the streaming providers and all their IPs are pretty much blocked. I have about a 95% success rate with NordVPN (except for Amazon Prime video which have some sort of wizardry and always are able to detect VPNs).

It's a shame because Mullvad has a deal with Tailscale where you can sign up for Mullvad through Tailscale and use any of their servers as a Tailscale exit node. It's super slick and nice since Tailscale has really decent apps for nearly everything (even Apple TV, etc) and I already have a decently sized Tailnet of all my devices / ssh accessible things.
by topdrops66 | 2025-10-07 12:49:26+00:00
Artificial Intelligence is taking over many aspects. In 2025 Generative AI tools are empowering everything from content creation to building software, from creating an image to making a presentation.

Generative AI tools are a part of human life now, if you are wondering how and which best AI tools are actually useful, here you go! Go through the list of top generative AI tools you can use in 2025.

https://topdrops.in/ultimate-list-of-the-best-generative-ai-...
by piltdownman | 2025-10-07 12:50:02+00:00
I mean the very existence of the New Statesman/Atlantic refutes that argument fairly roundly. The real issue is that these public intellectuals were generally lowering themselves to the chat show circuit in order to plug books, and allow pot-shots to be taken at their positions by the mid-brow iconoclasts that constituted American audiences and opposition figureheads at the time.

Nowadays the (ersatz) equivalents that come to mind are generally plugging away on Youtube Shorts, Podcasts and monetised platforms in lieu of structured debate or moderated talk show punditry - e.g. Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry and Dawkins on the 'academic' side. This has changed the consumption, the engagement, and often the context depending from what angle you consume the soundbite.

The ones on the 'political' side as neocons I barely dare to mention like George Galloway, Douglas Murray etc... so as to avoid sullying Hitch's reputation by mentioning it in the same contexts as advocates of Great Replacement and other Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.
by mrbonner | 2025-10-07 12:50:06+00:00
What about YouTube? I was watching a cooking show there with my kids the other day when, out of nowhere, an ad popped up, something about a jacket called “Bear” something. A man in the ad was trying to unzip his jacket, but his awkward, jerky movements looked shockingly inappropriate to the woman standing behind him. It was horribly embarrassing for the whole family, and to make matters worse, the ad blasted at twice the volume of the show we were watching.

Whatever the product is, they will never have me as a customer.
Nobody Talks about Failure
by logotype | 2025-10-07 12:50:24+00:00
You always tend to hear success stories. Let's hear some of the failures. The dark side of SF startup culture.

How I failed: Applied to YC with the same idea for 4 years. Never reached the interview stage. Got fed up, told YC to fuck off and cried in the bathtub. Will never apply again. Didn't give up on the business though, and it's generating profit to this day, mostly passively since I work on other startups these days. I guess there is a "secret" to getting funding, but I have never been able to figure it out.
by Jlagreen | 2025-10-07 12:51:16+00:00
On huge GPU clusters running inferencing the utilization of GPUs is key.

Imagine you have 1 million GPUs and you have 99% utilization of theoretical performance in the system with inferencing. That would mean 10k of GPUs are basically idle and draw power. You could now try to identify which ones are idle but you won't find them because utilization is a dynamic process so while all GPUs are under load not all are running 100% performance beause of interconnects and networking not providing data fast enough so your whole network becomes a bottleneck.

So what you need is a very smart routing process of computation requirements on the whole cluster. This is pure SW issue and not HW issue. This is the SW Nvidia has been working on for years and where AMD is years behing.

This is also why Jensen is absolutely right to say that competitors can offer their chips for free because Nvidia's key in TCO performance is the idea of one giant GPU so SW and networking allowing for highest utilization of a data center. You can't build a GPU the size of 1 million GPUs so you have to think of the utilization problem of a network of GPUs.

In the real world utilization rates are way below 100% so every % better of utilization is way more worth than the price of single GPUs. The idea here is that the company providing 2-3x higher utilization can easily ask for like 5x higher pricing per chip and will still deliver a better TCO.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-07 12:52:13+00:00
The real problem isn't curtailment but misaligned incentives that subsidize curtailment. In short, wind providers are being payed royally (many billions) to NOT produce wind energy. There's no incentive for them to be more efficient. Worse, because of the incentives, energy companies are just installing wind wherever they can without regard for the local infrastructure and demand. They get guaranteed pricing regardless of whether their energy is used. Not their problem if they have to throw double digit percentages of their energy away. They get paid anyway.
by LelouBil | 2025-10-07 12:52:30+00:00
I don't write Rust often, and I think part of the issue is that the async/await style is encouraging you to write code that looks a lot like synchronous code, and so it makes it really easy to forget that your code is cancelable at any await point.

I'm sure experienced async Rust programmers always have this things in mind, but Rust is also about preventing these kinds of missable behaviour, be it via the type system or otherwise.
by gambiting | 2025-10-07 12:52:56+00:00
>>Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints

Well yes, obviously - it's an indespensible tool in any arsenal, I just cannot fathom(as a C++ low level engineer) how someone can be a professional programmer where they are paid for their job and they don't know to use a debugger even to just do a basic pause and step through flow. But then again I don't work with any python programmers, so maybe that's why.
by onraglanroad | 2025-10-07 12:53:08+00:00
> Europe is so poor compared to other first world countries.

By GDP per capita, 7 of the top 10 countries in the world are European.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Given this fact, will you now question your priors, or try to find a new justification for them?
by Telemakhos | 2025-10-07 12:53:30+00:00
Google.

For a while, Google gave you good boy points for including microformats, and they still offer tests and validators [0] to tell you what the crawlers get out of your page. Supposedly microformats would not just give you better SEO ranking but also help Google connect people (like the fediverse) to accounts, so that you could surface things relevant to person by searching for the person.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
by wseqyrku | 2025-10-07 12:53:41+00:00
> I intentionally don’t use the memory

What makes you think if you turn it off it actually turns off? Though they don't need to do that, the entire conversation is already indexed. It's how they provide search in the first place, but it's not just for you.

The whole thing about scale and billion dollars data centers are not just to provide personal assistance for everyone, they can already do that just fine. But they need it only if they want to fit that entire said index in a single chat context.
by arethuza | 2025-10-07 12:54:07+00:00
Many years ago I used to work with a very senior project manager from Scottish Nuclear who was responsible for Torness - he had some great stories about various accident scenarios they considered. One was that the refuelling machine would fail causing it to act like a gun shooting irradiated fuel rods into the sky - every time I go past Torness on the train I check for flying fuel rods....
by conartist6 | 2025-10-07 12:56:02+00:00
Sounds like they feel you're making useless work for them. Not saying they reacted well of course, but if they haven't published in five years then you have to imagine that improving their publishing flow could not be any lower of a priority. Obviously whatever is shipped five years ago was secure or someone would have noticed my now.

I also think attestation is bullshit. It's what I would call "security theater" like paying $5 for a blue check mark.

Whether a package has this particular check mark has almost nothing to do with whether its security practices are sufficient to keep you safe. At that point the attestation check mark actually harms security by welcoming complacency where there is still not sufficient operational safely to justify complacency.
by ATiredGoat | 2025-10-07 12:56:21+00:00
Something vast is stirring within the depths of The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge. This weekend marks the arrival of the largest update ever, an expansion that will plunge adventurers deeper into the forgotten heart of the world. The last thousand rooms have woven together the twisted echoes of Cindralith’s haunted farmlands, the flickering candlelit halls of the Inner Sanctuary, and the desecrated altars of the Church of Our Lady. From the ghostly preacher who condemns trespassers in the name of a silent God, to the wind-swept plains where portraits of fallen angels rot in their frames, every corridor has grown darker, every whisper heavier. The player will pass from the fog-laden outskirts into places where the earth itself remembers sin, where old faiths collapse and strange lights breathe in the ruins. And yet, amid the decay, there are glimmers of revelation. The Withered Light still flickers in glass-filled chambers where reflections speak your name; the Shadow Veil still murmurs secrets from beyond the mortal coil; and deep beneath Cindralith, the echoes of prayers long unanswered drift through broken sanctuaries. This update will not merely add new rooms; it will connect them, binding every region into a living tapestry of dread and discovery. The sense of scale, of quiet revelation through ruin, reaches its most haunting form yet. Those who have wandered the Labyrinth before will find themselves returning to familiar ground only to realize that everything has changed, that every path now leads somewhere new, somewhere deeper. This is the turning point, the descent into the unwritten dark.
by estearum | 2025-10-07 12:57:04+00:00
IMO while the debate around COVID's origin is interesting, it's pretty much definitionally a waste of time.

1) We'll never actually know the answer

2) Even if we did, it wouldn't change anything about what we ought to do

There's no way China would be "punished" for something if it was a lab leak, and there's no way that [the actually dangerous end of] GoF research is a good risk-reward tradeoff anymore in light of instant mRNA vaccines.

Every breath spent pointing fingers on origin is another breath not spent on the remediations we have to do no matter who's responsible.
by Jlagreen | 2025-10-07 12:57:37+00:00
All Tech companies including OpenAI have initiatives for their own chips. Nobody talks about Intel.

Tech companies have the following options:

1. Buy Nvdia high performance stack with stable and fast support and deploy your SW developers to quickly get started

2. Buy AMD whatever stack and deploy your SW developers to make a lot of ground work

3. Develop and deploy your own chips and use your SW developers to make your SW from scratch but exactly as you need it

The only reason they might go with No. 2 is if AMD gives them the HW more or less for free but maybe even then will mix 2 + 3 if they don't want 1. And AMD deal is showing exactly this, AMD has to give free quity to get a customer for their HW.

What people don't get, who in their right mind would switch from one vendor lock-in to another with the difference on investing SW development into the 2nd???? The resources spend on AMD will bind customers to AMD. It doesn't matter if RoCm is open source as long as it runs only on AMD. If RoCm would run on any AI chip (including Nvidia) then we would have a case of an interesting switch but then the question comes up, why buy AMD if RoCm doesn't require it?
by mathieuh | 2025-10-07 12:57:50+00:00
I frequently (basically every conversation) have issues with Claude getting confused about which version of the file it should be building on. Usually what causes it is asking it do something, then manually editing the file to remove or change something myself and giving it back, telling it it should build on top of what I just gave it. It usually takes three or four tries before it will actually use what I just gave it, and from then on it keeps randomly trying to reintroduce what I deleted.
by elmerfud | 2025-10-07 12:58:03+00:00
This is another, in a long line of similar articles that I've read throughout the decades, that totally misunderstands the issue. Their premise that mass surveillance undermines or is incompatible with democracy is fundamentally flawed and shows a fundamental misunderstanding.

A secretive government that seeks to keep what it does and the information it collects private is what undermines a democracy. The phrase, "it's not the camera it's the database" really sums up this idea. It's this kind of secrets that are kept about the public which are the problem. When the default position of the government is that any information it collects is secret and private and you must go through an onerous process to request public records, that is the problem. When those public records request get denied by default because it is classified or it is potentially sensitive information. That is where the problem comes in.

Because when your default position is that all information collected by the government is freely available and any databases it's stored in and any search tools that government employees have are accessible to the public at any time for no cost, this changes what we consider as what is acceptable information for the government to collect and retain. This doesn't exclude the idea of extremely limited circumstances where highly sensitive information can be classified for a time, but those times should be short and reasonable.

When you hear the argument of, we have to keep this information secret because we don't want the criminals to know that they're being investigated. Do we have a presumption of innocence in this country? Because if we do then that would support the default position of you absolutely want to know when free people's are being investigated. If the goal is to stop criminal activity, then having this information be public on who is being investigated and what they're being investigated on serves that purpose.

What we should be saying no to is the government keeping secrets from its citizens. The rest will work itself out.
by aquir | 2025-10-07 12:58:12+00:00
I don't use streaming service so I was not aware that this is still a thing! Back then (20 years) ago when we had a cable television I can remember how much I hated that my wife wanted to sleep to the TV but I always got waken up by the much-much louder ads! I would like to be a fly on the wall to hear the meeting when they discussed this law...it's a shame how someone/a company can be driven by money this much.
by trollbridge | 2025-10-07 13:00:16+00:00
For a bit of background, this report concerned a problematic IT system that was incorrectly sending life-ruining fines to people for not meeting their requirements to apply for so many jobs, accept jobs, etc. whilst on government assistance. The fines came in the form of a judgment debt so people would literally have a debt bailiff show up and start carting their property away. Due to a seriously flawed IT system, this even happened to people who weren't on any government benefits at all.

So, a report gets commissioned that a company like Deloitte gets paid $440k for, and then they cheat and use AI to generate it, complete with more errors. Imagine what would happen if they retained Deloitte next to build the system. I foresee another repeat of the Fujitsu Royal Mail scandal.
by account42 | 2025-10-07 13:00:28+00:00
It's more that modal alerts are easier to reason about. With some other kind of notification you'd need to think about what the user should or should not be able to do until the alert condition is dealt with and what the consequences of dong it without dealing with the alert should be. It's generally easier to make the user deal with the special condition now so that the rest of the code can assume it either doesn't apply or has been dealt with.
by adrian_b | 2025-10-07 13:00:28+00:00
I do not think that it is certain that China supports more its key industries than USA, even if that is frequently claimed, but without any supporting numbers.

During the last few decades, I have almost never heard about a big US company making any big investment, like a new factory, or even just a new HQ, except after receiving very substantial state aids in the form of various kinds of tax reductions.

In many parts of Europe this kind of aid that is received in USA by most big companies would be labelled as illegal state aid and forbidden.
by leoedin | 2025-10-07 13:01:10+00:00
> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth.

Is this really true in the UK? Electricity production in the UK peaked in 2005. It's down 20% on that today. The issue here is that in 2005 electricity was primarily produced in large power stations reasonably close to where it was consumed, while in 2025 it's increasingly produced in locations far from population centres. The actual ability of the grid to deliver power to the last mile isn't really a problem. The problem is that most of the houses are in the South, and increasingly large amounts of generation are in the North.
by tymonPartyLate | 2025-10-07 13:01:57+00:00
Interesting tech choices. I am also always on the hunt for React alternatives. But the lack of type safety and static analysis usually leads to brittle templates. Stuff that could be expressed in verifiable code, is compressed in annotations and some custom markup. You need to manually re-test all templates when you make any change in the models. How do you deal with that?

Btw, very cool project. Deployments for simple projects are a huge time sink.
by trollbridge | 2025-10-07 13:02:26+00:00
Yep. War is one of those things where it doesn't matter how much subcontractor B is yelling at subcontractors C on the phone and telling them to lie about their names.

I used to tell the prime contractor to just be honest. They couldn't even do that. Most of my business now comes from clients of A who have been burned badly and now physically meet the person who will actually be doing the work.
by bluGill | 2025-10-07 13:02:40+00:00
I know of about 7 different libraries, 5 of them private to my company (of which 4 are not in use). Every one takes a fundamentally different approach to the problem.

> Feet to meter cubed and you get m³, and the library will throw a compile error if you try to assign it to anything it doesn't work with (liters would be fine, for example)

Liters would not be fine if you are using standard floating point values since you lose precision moving decimal points in some cases. Maybe for your application the values are such that this doesn't matter, but without understanding your problem in depth you cannot make the generic statement.

I could write books (I won't but I could) on all the compromises and trade offs in building a unit type library.
by sib | 2025-10-07 13:02:59+00:00
Interestingly, Gemini agrees with me:

>>In the context of cars:

>>"Fast" refers to top speed. A fast car has a high maximum velocity. It can cover a great distance in a sustained manner once it reaches its peak speed. Think of the Bugatti Chiron or a Koenigsegg, which are famous for their incredibly high top speeds.

>>"Quick" refers to acceleration. A quick car can get from a standstill to a certain speed (often 0 to 60 mph or 0 to 100 km/h) in a very short amount of time. This is about how rapidly the car can change its velocity. Modern electric vehicles, like the Tesla Model S Plaid or the Lucid Air Sapphire, are prime examples of exceptionally quick cars due to the instant torque of their electric motors.
by deltarholamda | 2025-10-07 13:03:04+00:00
>because the manufacturing infrastructure of Europe was decimated after some pretty intense warfare

Exactly this. The US coasted as the last major economy standing for a very long time, and we built our expectations upon this very temporary quirk of geopolitics.

Our economy may seem like it's thriving to some, but the fact remains that an economy that does not make things is in trouble. You may be able to make a lot of money by moving money around, but that is not viable long-term. Big Fortune 500 corporations may add a lot to the GDP of a nation, but a big F500 corporation is not going to sponsor your local Little League team.

The GP is right, in the narrow aspect of "businesses need to adapt and evolve", but what we moved to in the US is very heavy on the service side. There is a cost to this; there is a cost to everything. It's showing up now in some surprising places, such as high-end chip manufacturing. We let all of that go to Taiwan (Ricardian comparative advantage!), and now all we have is Intel, which has been coasting on inertia for more than a decade.
by n8henrie | 2025-10-07 13:03:41+00:00
My most recent septic patient had literally zero SIRS criteria, and I strongly did not suspect a bacterial source of infection. Isolated hypotension, nothing else. Said she felt great and asked to go home To date she's grown out GPCs on 8/10 blood cultures. Sepsis actually is hard. Also, it sounds like a bacterial source was not suspected in this case (and was validated by the cultures being negative and the autopsy), so AFAICT this was not sepsis.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-07 13:04:24+00:00
> System fonts were initially created for legibility at certain screen resolutions, for dot-matrix printers, etc.

I think you’ve gotten mixed up between the system-ui font and the browser default font.

The system-ui font is modern. It was only added to CSS about ten years ago. It’s not Times New Roman. It wasn’t designed for dot matrix printers.

Everybody else here is talking about something that fits in with the rest of the system. You seem to be talking about something from the early 90s.