MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by js8 | 2025-10-28 14:07:23+00:00
One way to recover XORs from 3SAT (AFAIK unfortunately DIMACS doesn't support XOR natively) is to use the formula:

(a | b | c) = ((a ^ ~x) | b) & (x | c)

where x is a variable that can be chosen. The LHS is satisfiable iff RHS is satisfiable. This gives you extra variable per clause, but you can eliminate some of them using GE. (Probably not an ideal approach to easy problems, but IMHO worth trying for the hard ones.)

Then you get a set of clauses that have what I call "generalized literals" - essentially a linear combination of literals - in clauses that only have 1 OR (I call this 2-XORSAT). These can be trivially transformed to intersection of XORSAT and 2SAT.

Another thing that DIMACS is missing, it's not very modular. So you cannot represent a bunch of conditions using already pre-solved XORSAT portion, and apply that to a new problem. (For example, we could encode a generic multiplier in SAT, relating inputs and outputs. Then we could presolve the XORSAT portion of the multiplier. Then we want to factorize a number. Well, just add a bunch of constants specifying output that needs to be satisfied and you don't need to solve the XORSAT for the multiplier again.)

Or, you can convert the 2-XORSAT into quadratic polynomials over Z_2 that all need to be equal to 0. Then you can use the Grobner basis algorithm to find whether these polynomials can be linearly combined (using polynomials as coefficients) to give 1 (i.e. they generate an ideal which contains the whole ring of polynomials), meaning the contradictory equation 1=0 has to be satisfied, and so the problem is unsatisfiable.

What I would really like to understand, how it can happen, if you are running the Grobner basis algorithm and keep an eye on the degree, that you build the degree up from low degree polynomials. It seems to me, if the problem is unsatisfiable, you should be always able to get by with polynomials of low degree, because why carry extra variables if you're gonna eliminate the terms anyway? (If low degree polynomials are sufficient for the Grobner basis, it would imply P=NP by the way, because there is only polynomial number of polynomials of a given maximum degree.)

But yeah CryptoMiniSAT looks somewhat promising.
by udev4096 | 2025-10-28 14:07:37+00:00
That's like saying we should ban knife because it could kill people. Please. Every adult can make an informed choice on what "manipulates" them. If they can't, if they prefer convenience over critical thinking, then you don't stand a chance and will be exploited by the capitalistic overlords.

> also an issue of privacy

Welcome to the age of obsessive and relentless mass surveillance. Want privacy? Impossible unless you have discipline and patience to not give in to the digital overlords
by TheCraiggers | 2025-10-28 14:07:41+00:00
I think some of this is just the typical bluster of company press releases / earnings reports. Can't ever show weakness or the shareholders will leave. Can't ever show doubt or the stock price will drop.

Nevertheless, I've been wondering of late. How will we know when AGI is accomplished? In the books or movies, it's always been handwaved or described in a way that made it seem like it was obvious to all. For example, in The Matrix there's the line "We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI." It was a very obvious event that nobody could question in that story. In reality though? I'm starting to think it's just going to be more of a gradual thing, like increasing the resolution of our TVs until you can't tell it's not a window any longer.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-28 14:08:05+00:00
No, it’s a bad metaphor.

The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”

You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.
by thegrimmest | 2025-10-28 14:08:15+00:00
This is called "consensual exchange" and it is by far the most ethical way to run society. You don't have to agree to these terms. You can go start your own company. It's a free country. The alternative always seems to boil down to various bureaucrats dictating terms to people. What gives them the right to do so?

You're no more entitled to be paid a salary than you are to get laid. Both satisfy needs that you undeniably have, but must be negotiated with other people on a strictly consensual basis.
by trogdor | 2025-10-28 14:08:19+00:00
I suggest you practice writing more concisely.

The comment you replied to said that “…there's a lot here, and I think the product needs a much clearer story. The copy on the site is long and rambling and needs a lot of tightening up.”

In response, you wrote more text than I am willing to read — even though I was interested in your answer.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-28 14:08:30+00:00
I feel like, at higher latitudes, it should matter less?

Whether sunrise is at 3am or 4am, you still basically need to have a way to sleep with unreasonable amounts of sunlight (eg 18-20 hour days).

At lower latitudes, summer time makes more sense because the difference between a 5am and 6am sunrise goes from "too early" to "manageable". Same goes for 9am being too late compared to 8am in the winter for example.

At higher latitudes, you have to accommodate no matter what.

At lower latitudes, 1h makes a difference.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-10-28 14:08:55+00:00
That’s what I was thinking but I looked it up in the dictionary and appears that firing is already pretty neutral yet picked up the negative connotation, presumably because most people consider firings to be with cause. Even ‘layoffs’ has picked up a negative connotation. I’m not sure if it’s possible for language to to continuously outrun the associations, I guess we either police the language more fervently or continue inventing new words.

Part of me hates the capriciousness of randomly selected layoffs but it’s done for a few main reasons, firstly that it’s not exploitable by internal politicking (at least less explicable). Secondly, reduces exposure to lawsuits about performance. Thirdly, reduces reputational damage to those laid off. Of course there is an incredible incentive to lie about the randomness.
by punchfunk4lyte | 2025-10-28 14:09:09+00:00
I actually don't care what the makeup of college students is. It's useful to encourage women to pursue education in order to promote equity. But there isn't some magic proportion of men to women graduates that I think we should be pursuing.

I don't want everything dominated by women, I just recognize that the work of undoing their marginalization is not complete.
by 8organicbits | 2025-10-28 14:09:18+00:00
I think this quote explains the efficient streaming:

> There is an interesting observation: when a stream does not contain removal entries it can be safely reordered.

So if I'm understanding, the example in the readme could be sent in reverse, allowing the client to immediately use root:0 and then string:2 while the rest streams in.

I was looking for something like this, but my use case exceeds the 65k key limit for objects.
by zie1ony | 2025-10-28 14:10:02+00:00
Hi there, I'm also working on LLMs in Texas Hold'em :)

First of all, congrats on your work. Picking a form of presenting LLMs, that playes poker is a hard task, and I like your approach in presenting the Action Log.

I can share some interesting insights from my experiments:

- Findin strategies is more interesting than comparing different models. Strategies can get pretty long and specific. For example, if part of the strategy is: "bluff on the river if you have a weak hand but the opponent has been playing tight all game", most models, given this strategy, would execute it with the same outcome. Models could be compared only using some open-ended strategy like "play aggressively" or "play tight", or even "win the tournament".

- I implemented a tournament game, where players drop out when they run out of chips. This creates a more dynamic environment, where players have to win a tournament, not just a hand. That requires adding the whole table history to the prompt, and it might get quite long, so context management might be a challenge.

- I tested playing LLM against a randomly playing bot (1vs1). `grok-4` was able to come up with the winning strategy against a random bot on the first try (I asked: "You play against a random bot. What is your strategy?"). `gpt-5-high` struggled.

- Public chat between LLMs over the poker table is fun to watch, but it is hard to create a strategy that makes an LLM successfully convince other LLMs to fold. Given their chain of thought, they are more focused on actions rather than what others say. Yet, more experiments are needed. For waker models (looking at you `gpt-5-nano`) it is hard to convince them not to review their hand.

- Playing random hands is expensive. You would have to play thousands of hands to get some statistical significance measures. It's better to put LLMs in predefined situations (like AliceAI has a weak hand, BobAI has a strong hand) and see how they behave.

- 1-on-1 is easier to analyze and work with than multiplayer.

- There is an interesting choice to make when building the context for an LLM: should the previous chains of thought be included in the prompt? I found that including them actually makes LLMs "stick" to the first strategy they came up with, and they are less likely to adapt to the changing situation on the table. On the other hand, not including them makes LLMs "rethink" their strategy every time and is more error-prone. I'm working on an AlphaEvolve-like approach now.

- This will be super interesting to fine-tune an LLM model using an AlphaZero-like approach, where the model plays against itself and improves over time. But this is a complex task.
by JustExAWS | 2025-10-28 14:10:40+00:00
Yes and when my employers - including Amazon - decided they wanted to stop putting money into my account, I didn’t stress.

I told my wife as soon as I had the meeting with my manager at Amazon back in 2023 about my “take $40K severance and leave immediately or try (and fail) to work through the PIP”. She asked me what were going to do? I said I’m going to take the $40K and we are going to the US Tennis Open as planned in three weeks. I called an old manager who didn’t have a job for me. But he threw a contract my way for a quick AWS implementation while I was still interviewing.

I doubt very seriously if my job fell out from under me tomorrow, someone wouldn’t at least offer me a short term contract quickly.
by Twisol | 2025-10-28 14:11:03+00:00
> Take the tax calculation for example. That cannot be decomposed into pieces that are generic, and potentially reusable elsewhere.

Quite right! However, the tax code does change with some regularity, and we can expect that companies like Intuit should have gotten quite good by now -- even on a pure profit motive -- at making it possible to relatively quickly modify only the parts of their products that require updating to the latest tax code. To put it another way, while it might be the case that the tax code for any given year is not amenable to decomposition, all tax codes within a certain span of years might be specific instances of a more general problem. (I recall a POPL keynote some years back that argued for formalizing tax codes in terms of default logic!) By solving that general problem, you can instantiate your solution on the given year's tax code without needing to recreate the entire program from scratch.

To be clear, I'm the one who brought subproblem decomposition into the mix, and we shouldn't tar the top-level commenter with that brush unnecessarily. Of course some problems will be un-decomposable "leaves". I believe their original point, about a specific business layer sitting on top of a more general core, still applies.

> So a game is a good example where the core can be more specialized than the shell. You can imagine a generic UI library shared by a bunch of games, but a generic game rules engine - that's just a programming language.

As it happens, the "ECS pattern" (Entity, Component, and System) is often considered to be a pretty good way of conceptualizing the rules of a game. An ECS framework solves the general problem (of associating components to entities and executing the systems that act over them), and a game developer adapts an ECS framework to their specific needs. The value in this arrangement is precisely that, as the game evolves and takes shape, only the logic specific to the game needs to be changed. The underlying ECS framework is on the whole just as appropriate for one game as for any other.

(I could also make a broader point about game engines like Unity and Unreal, and how so many games these days take the "general" problem solved by these engines and adapt them to the "specific" problem of their particular game. In general, nobody particularly wants to make engine-level changes for each experiment during the development of a game, even though sometimes a particular concept for a game demands a new engine.)

> Sure, but this discussion is about FCIS, that's the context, and the GP should consider that.

I understood the original commenter as criticizing FCIS (or at least the original post, as "grasping for straws") and suggesting that GCSS is generally more appropriate. In that context, I think it's natural to interpret their use of "core" and "shell" as competing rather than concordant with FCIS.
by mothballed | 2025-10-28 14:11:06+00:00
Sadly the power of drug gangs in Latin America and Brazil can be traced as much to the war on drugs itself as the lack of war on drugs.

I do believe your assertion is correct that literal war would probably be better than the status quo, but regulating powerful drugs as basically "sell to adults and it needs to meet some sort of purity standard" would bring the drug trafficking portion of gangs into looking more like Petrobas than Comando Vermelho.
by robocat | 2025-10-28 14:11:26+00:00
A shame the article is partisan/biased, when it is a game that can be and will be played by others too.

I observed a pattern during the summer of 2016 in which Russian accounts would flood social media platforms with content in the early hours of the morning when most Americans were asleep and it was easier to influence trending topics given the lower volume of posts. Then, by the time most Americans woke up and checked social media, the topic would be trending
by bluGill | 2025-10-28 14:11:56+00:00
In most cases when a company wants to fire someone they will first pull them into an office and tell them they are allowed to submit their resignation right now. If this happens it is normally best for you to accept that offer as then they will say you left in good standing. At least this way you can find a new job.

There is the possible exception that you already have enough evidence that you were going to sue them anyway, then you can take that you were fired to your lawyer (you should already have a lawyer and gotten their advice on the situation). However I don't think this has ever been the case for anyone.

The other exception is when the police are there and will arrest you as part of firing you. I'm not aware of this happening, but it seems like it probably has at some point (like once per decade across all jobs in the world)
by photochemsyn | 2025-10-28 14:12:48+00:00
I'd pay attention to this bullet point:

> "OpenAI can now provide API access to US government national security customers, regardless of the cloud provider."

And this one might be related:

> "OpenAI can now jointly develop some products with third parties. API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider."

Now, does anyone think MIC customers want restricted, safe, aligned models? Is OpenAI going to provide turnkey solutions, unaligned models run in 'secure sandboxed cloud environments' in partnership with private weapons manufacturers and surveillance (data collection and storage/search) specialists?

This pattern is not historically unusual, turning to government subsidies and contracts to survive a lack of immediate commercial viability wouldn't be surprising. The question to ask Microsoft-OpenAI is what percentage of their estimated future revenue stream is going to come from MIC contracting including the public private grey area (that is, 'private customers' who are entirely state-funded, eg Palantir, so it's still government MIC one step removed).
by globular-toast | 2025-10-28 14:12:52+00:00
It's called dependency injection and there's loads written about it. It's a really powerful technique which is also used for dependency inversion, key for decoupling components. I really like how it enables simple tests without any mocking.

The book Architecture Patterns in Python by Percival and Gregory is one of the few books that talks about this stuff using Python. It's available online and been posted on HN a few times before.
by gilfoy | 2025-10-28 14:13:03+00:00
We’re increasingly switching to an “Uber for therapy” model with services like Better Help and a plethora of others.

I’ve seen about 10 therapists over the years, one was good, but she wasn’t from an app. And I’m one of the few who was motivated enough and financially able to pursue it.

I once had a therapist who was clearly drunk. Did not do a second appointment with that one.

This doesn’t mean ChatGPT is the answer. But the answer is very clearly not what we have or where we’re trending now.
by chrismorgan | 2025-10-28 14:13:22+00:00
The Open Graph Protocol was thrown over the wall by Facebook and promptly abandoned. It’s an atrocious spec, a good chunk of what it did (and most of what people actually wanted from it) was already unnecessary (og:description, for example, is stupid), its data model makes several woefully bad choices, it’s firmly based around Facebook’s interests (especially pictures!), it’s built on standards that were already looking like they were failing and are definitely long abandoned now, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single page implementing OGP tags correctly in the last five years and I’m not confident that a strictly correct reader implementation even exists (the specific matter I have in mind pertains to the prefix attribute). Also a bunch of key URLs have been 404ing for many years now.
Our LLM-controlled office robot can't pass butter
by lukaspetersson | 2025-10-28 14:13:25+00:00
Hi HN! Our startup, Andon Labs, evaluates AI in the real world to measure capabilities and to see what can go wrong. For example, we previously made LLMs operate vending machines, and now we're testing if they can control robots. There are two parts to this test:

1. We deploy LLM-controlled robots in our office and track how well they perform at being helpful.

2. We systematically test the robots on tasks in our office. We benchmark different LLMs against each other. You can read our paper "Butter-Bench" on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860

The link in the title above (https://andonlabs.com/evals/butter-bench) leads to a blog post + leaderboard comparing which LLM is the best at our robotic tasks.
by Insanity | 2025-10-28 14:13:27+00:00
That line essentially means 'indefinite support'. This paper was published some days ago that aims to define AGI: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212.

But crucially, there is no agreed-upon definition of AGI. And I don't think we're close to anything that resembles human intelligence. I firmly believe that stochastic parrots will not get us to AGI and that we need a different methodology. I'm sure humanity will eventually create AGI, and perhaps even in my lifetime (in the next few decades). But I wouldn't put my money on that bet.
by nostrebored | 2025-10-28 14:14:02+00:00
This is a poor conceptualization of how LLMs work. No implementations of models you’re talking to today are just raw autorrgressive predictors, taking the most likely next token. Most are presented with a variety of potential options and choose from the most likely set. A repeated hand and flop would not be played exactly the same in many cases (but a 27o would have a higher likelihood of being played the same way).
by qixxiq | 2025-10-28 14:14:21+00:00
Current implementation has the following limitations: Maximum object size: 65534 keys The order of object keys is not preserved ... These limitations may be lifted by using more bytes to store offset pointers and counts on binary level. Though it's hard to imagine a real application which would need that.

I've worked on _many_ applications which have needed those features. Object keys is a per implementation detail, but failing at 65k keys seems like a problem people would likely hit if this were to be used at larger scales.
by mrweasel | 2025-10-28 14:14:38+00:00
If Microsoft doesn't believe that OpenAI will achieve AGI by 2030 or that there's a chance that OpenAI won't be the premiere AI company in four years, the deal looks less like a lose and more like they are buying their way out of a risky bet. On the other hand, if OpenAI does well, then Microsoft have a 27% stake in the company and that's not nothing.

This looks more like Microsoft ensuring that they'll win, regardless of how OpenAI fairs in the next four to six years.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-28 14:14:42+00:00
Only if they retain their original shape. The point is not that any wave is a soliton, but a soliton never changes shape as it moves (through time, a medium, or whatever). The soliton can decrease in amplitude, and expand in width, but otherwise remains the same.

A pure, single Gaussian hump is the soliton for homogenous linear media. If you create an audible with the spectral shape of a Gaussian (and therefore also the time shape), it might get quieter as it moves across the room, and longer, but will still "sound" the same.
by Heinrich_Meiner | 2025-10-28 14:15:32+00:00
Some will go bankrupt, others will show up. Maybe I don’t really get much about economics, but auto parts are something that will always be in demand, which means we just can’t end up in a situation where there’s nothing to buy anywhere. Right now there are tons of manufacturers and suppliers, like this online store https://bumperstock.com/collections/2019-2025-dodge-ram-2500... . A good selection of aftermarket bumpers and related stuff. And I’m sure it’s the same for literally any car part.
by whizzter | 2025-10-28 14:15:36+00:00
Huh? Windows itself might have had it's heyday but MS is solidly at #2 for clouds only behind AWS with enterprise Windows shops that will be hard pressed to not use MS options if they go to the cloud (Google really has continued to fumble their cloud positions with their reputation for "killedbygoogle.com" nagging on everyones mind).

The biggest real threat to MS position is the Trump administration pushing foreign customers away with stuff like shutting down the ICJ Microsoft accounts, but that'll hurt AWS and Google equally much (The winners of that will be Alibaba and other foregin providers that can't compete in full enterprise stacks today).
by taeric | 2025-10-28 14:16:08+00:00
I'm fine with the idea that they won't share specifically that they fired someone for a specific reason. The surprising part, to me, is that they can't share if it was company's decision to end the relationship. My understanding was that if you just up and quit, then you don't qualify for unemployment benefits.

And I hasten to add that I'm fine being wrong on this point. Surprise can last a bit, though. :D