MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-30 12:55:05+00:00
> That's why an LLM (I tested this on Grok) can give you a summary of chapter 18 of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but cannot reproduce a paragraph from the same text verbatim.

Unfortunately, the reality is more boring. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/frankenstein/chapter-18 https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/frankenstein/chapter-... https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/frankenstein/sparklets/ https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/frankenstein/section9/ https://www.enotes.com/topics/frankenstein/chapter-summaries... https://www.bookey.app/freebook/frankenstein/chapter-18/summ... https://tcanotes.com/drama-frankenstein-ch-18-20-summary-ana... https://quizlet.com/content/novel-frankenstein-chapter-18 https://www.studypool.com/studyGuides/Frankenstein/Chapter_S... https://study.com/academy/lesson/frankenstein-chapter-18-sum... https://ivypanda.com/essays/frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-ana... https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/frankenstein/chapter-18-... https://carlyisfrankenstein.weebly.com/chapters-18-19.html https://www.markedbyteachers.com/study-guides/frankenstein/c... https://www.studymode.com/essays/Frankenstein-Summary-Chapte... https://novelguide.com/frankenstein/summaries/chap17-18 https://www.ipl.org/essay/Frankenstein-Summary-Chapter-18-90...

I have not known an LLM to be able to summarise a book found in its training data, unless it had many summaries to plagiarise (in which case, actually having the book is unnecessary). I have no reason to believe the training process should result in "abstracting the data into more efficient forms". "Throwing away most of the training data" is an uncharitable interpretation (what they're doing is more sophisticated than that) but, I believe, a correct one.
by half0wl | 2025-10-30 12:55:11+00:00
I've been here. Taking a vacation never helped, because I'd be stressed during the vacation thinking about "work" in an active manner.

What really helped me was fully disconnecting and shifting my mindset to think about work passively: I don't forbid myself from thinking about my work, but I do not action on it. Instead, I keep a physical scratchpad and write ideas and thoughts down continuously. This helps me refactor my perspective and shift it from "active building" to "passive expansion".

I've come to realize burnout is a function of expectation mismatch, and I think of it from thermodynamics perspective. Burnout operates like a pressure differential system where the gap between internal expectations and external reality creates unsustainable energy expenditure. In a closed system, energy imbalance leads to heat loss or system failure. Similarly, when your mental model of "what should be happening" constantly fights against "what is happening," you're burning cognitive energy just to maintain equilibrium.

The passive approach allows me to transform that pressure into potential energy. Instead of forcing immediate resolution (active building), you're allowing ideas to exist in a low-energy state (passive expansion). This mirrors how heat dissipates naturally rather than through forced cooling - it becomes a capacitor, storing energy for later use rather than demanding immediate conversion.

So the answer, for me, is "disconnect from doing while staying connected to thinking". This helps me recover much more efficiently, while keeping myself sharp and free of expectations of doing anything.
by pcaharrier | 2025-10-30 12:56:07+00:00
>This may, then, be an example of technically permissible pay-to-play—in line with the technically permissible destruction of the East Wing, and the technically permissible payment mechanism for the project. None of these seem like they should be allowed in a representative democracy made up of three coequal branches. And yet, somehow, they probably are.

It's in the second to last paragraph, but I thought this seemed like a pretty significant and interesting concession.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-30 12:56:17+00:00
I think it'll be Google and effectively Microsoft -- OpenAI is already so partnered with Microsoft, and if OpenAI messes up financially, Microsoft will end up bailing it out in exchange for majority ownership. So yes the music may stop playing but that doesn't mean OpenAI disappears, but maybe Sam does.

Unless there are antitrust concerns, but that's hard to see because Google is competition and Anthropic will probably remain the third more niche player.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-30 12:56:24+00:00
Unfortunately the software deployed on top of them will.

So you either:

1) postpone all your updates for years until a bad CVE hits and you need to update or some application goes end of life and you’re screwed because updating becomes a massive exercise

2) do regular updates and patches to the entire stack, including Linux, in which case, you’re in the same position you were before with running on the stack rot treadmill

So you might’ve moved the rot to a different place, but I don’t know if you’ve reduced any of it. I’ve owned stuff deployed off of vanilla VMs and I actually found it harder to maintain because everything was a one-off.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 12:56:42+00:00
> have https but that was more of a vanity from what I remember

It has a functional difference as well, lots of new client-side features (like webcrypto) only work on "Secure Origins" which .onion isn't, but websites behind TLS are. So if you wanna deploy say something that encrypts/decrypts something client-side on .onion, you unfortunately need TLS today otherwise the APIs aren't available.

Of course browsers could fix this, but I don't think they have any incentives to do so. I guess Tor Browser could in fact fix this, and maybe they already do, but it'd be a patch on top of Firefox I think, something they probably want to do less off, not more.
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-10-30 12:56:55+00:00
Eg. I'm pretty optimistic about some of the Chinese exoskeleton startups I've seen. If you can keep people mobile, living at home and avoid falls they will make a huge difference.

Not to mention self driving vehicles allowing for more independence in old age.

Sign me up.

Pensions are an insane ponzi scheme but I'm somewhat optimistic that dignified aged care is a problem that can be solved.

However there is no denying sacrifices will have to be made.
by oceanplexian | 2025-10-30 12:57:19+00:00
It's not really impressive to me in absolute terms that GCP grew by 34% because it's still in last place behind Azure. I worked with all three major CSPs at a past company and Google, by far, had the worst support, the worst network, the most issues, and at the same time they were the least willing to build custom features for us while Azure and AWS would constantly fight for our business.

IMHO I think Microsoft is a lot closer in terms of creating a real business around AI because they understand Enterprise customers. In fact they were first to offer private OpenAI deployments with AuthN/AuthZ that you could drop in your own VPC and the ability to handle sensitive data while everyone else was handing out API keys off a public endpoint like a startup. Don't get me wrong Google has had some okay technology (i.e. Gemini 2.5 is middle of the pack) but they seem like a very consumer-oriented company and don't seem to know how to market them.
by Brendinooo | 2025-10-30 12:57:32+00:00
To the extent that I'm trying to make a point, I think this supports it!

> By the time Richilde is fifteen, she is an orphan and the new Countess. Her dying mother warned her to be virtuous and never use the mirror for frivolity

This is something that would be a lot harder to synthesize in a world where mirrors are abundant, and the link between self-reflection and vanity is strong here.
by jraph | 2025-10-30 12:57:33+00:00
Nothing there supports there were a significant number / more than a minority of people against systemd in Debian outside Ubuntu, which was the extraordinary claim I was (implicitly) complaining against.

I see the convincing arguments against systemd, mostly wrt to the support of the FreeBSD kernel in Debian. I wasn't familiar with them, it's interesting, thanks.
by mpalmer | 2025-10-30 12:57:55+00:00
> Why waste time having fun or learning?

yeah definitely no learning happening here

> You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing.

and then...spend it on something nice?

> This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts.

This is a super reactive take speaking from no experience whatsoever. My own parents did something like this for us when we were in elementary/middle school and it taught me restraint in spending, not the opposite.
by Someone | 2025-10-30 12:58:44+00:00
Is syscall a public API on iOS? In the end, you have to call that to get anything on the screen?

Looking at unistd.h, it seems marked as

__OS_AVAILABILITY_MSG(ios,deprecated=10.0,"syscall(2) is unsupported; " "please switch to a supported interface. For SYS_kdebug_trace use kdebug_signpost().")

and syscall numbers seem wrapped by

#ifdef __APPLE_API_PRIVATE

in *<sys/syscall.h>
by bediger4000 | 2025-10-30 12:58:55+00:00
I get the sense that something unspoken is behind this. I can't tell if TP-Link (US company) is too close to TP-Link (Chinese company), or the router software is full of exploitable bugs, or router software is backdoored, or the hardware is backdoored. Installing OpenWrt solves router software problems, nothing short of disposal solves hardware backdoors. I'm discounting oligarchal shakedown because it doesn't fit the Tiktok model. TP-Link isn't big enough, it doesn't threaten any US oligarch, and there hasn't been any Kabuki theatre blustering from Trump himself.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-10-30 12:59:05+00:00
> My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century i.e. it's a fabrication

Could you outline the key ways in which it differs? And say why that suggests the language was later "fabricated?"

> I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.

If you won't entertain the notion that I'm a native speaker could you amend your definition of "native speaker" or explain what differentiates me from the native speakers whose complaints you referenced previously? And could you let us know where we can read about their complaints?

> Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither.

Of course you understand that the "protestant community" is not an homogenous group with shared views and opinions on these things. The reason that question is on the forms is because of historical discrimination against Catholics and the need to quantify heritage issues in order to avoid such discrimination forwards.

One protestant might feel embarrassment, another might feel pride, and another might not care at all. Suggesting there's a unified view from "the protestant community' is disingenuous.
by rldjbpin | 2025-10-30 13:00:38+00:00
either conda is that old now or it seems a bit of a hyperbole.

haven used it personally, uv is quite fast and nice to work with at first. definitely nice if you work in a team that fully utilise its potential. however, there felt a lot of parallels with the node.js universe and switching to .venv / localized environments bloats up the system when you work with a boilerplate env that is the same across projects.

the additional files generated are also less human-readable compared to a requirements.txt and the workflow felt a bit more involved for individual users imho. it definitely has a place in the ecosystem, but personally don't find it ready to replace everything else yet.
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-10-30 13:02:17+00:00
Author here. I am aware of the excessive simplicity, but the 60/30/10 thing is deliberately unsophisticated to make it easier to apply and easier to reason about. My goal in writing this is less about hustle culture and more to consider the asymmetry of our own initiatives: everything matters in different ways, with varying degrees of cascading effects, with varying levels of immediate accessibility. I find this paradigm an effective means of considering what I have going on.
by floundy | 2025-10-30 13:02:22+00:00
>Done right this could set them up for life and make them millionaires with virtually no effort by the age of 30

This seems hyperbolic. Given that money doubles in roughly 10 years at a 10% rate of return, if kiddos are 10 years old they get two doublings by 30. To be a millionaire by 30 requires a present value investment of $250k per child.
by simiones | 2025-10-30 13:02:26+00:00
Even that is not necessarily true. The output of the LLM is not "Blue". It is something like "probability of 'Blue' is 0.98131". And it may well be 0.98132 for the other question. Certainly they only talk about the internal state in 1 layer of the LLM, they don't need the entire LLM values.
by throw0101c | 2025-10-30 13:02:36+00:00
> In what way would they be horrifying?

When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul it was said he killed one million people and enslaved another million, and was celebrated for it. The actual numbers may not be accurate, but the sentiment probably was.

Moral relativism aside, would you like to live in a society where killing civilians during war and enslaving survivors were both acceptable?

Or how about the the abandoning of unwanted babies:

* https://academic.oup.com/book/6954/chapter-abstract/15122509...

* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15d74av/how_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columna_Lactaria
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 13:02:39+00:00
People keep saying that, but haven't we learned already that eventually Tailscale gets bought, then priorities change, then they make incompatible changes because they're need to grow, and headscale either can't keep up, or gets pushed away by Tailscale themselves, and we're back to using $TailscaleCompetitor who promises to not do the same thing.

Just don't rely on centralized for-profit entities, rely on stuff produced by non-profits and foundations, that you know isn't gonna screw you over as soon as they need money.
by taneq | 2025-10-30 13:03:01+00:00
I’ve never posted a question to S.O. My infuriation is entirely gratuitous. So many times I’ve found a polite, well worded question asking exactly what I need answered, only to see it closed as off topic (and we’re talking “question about preg_match() on the PHP stackexchange” type question) or for some condescending asshole to mark it as duplicate, linking a mostly unrelated and far simpler question with no further indication why this might be at all the proper response.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-10-30 13:03:27+00:00
This mental model is also in direct contradiction to the whole purpose of the embedding, which is that the embedding describes the original text in a more interpretable form. If a piece of content in the original can be used for search, comparison etc., p much by definition it has to be stored in the embedding.

Similarly, this result can be rephrased as "Language Models process text." If the LLM wasn't invertible with regards to a piece of input text, it couldn't attend to this text either.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-10-30 13:03:30+00:00
It is how DirectX works. The call to present that ends the stream of the commands to the GPU and tells it to render causes the CPU to be stalled waiting for this to be possible. This causes a backpressure into the game engine as the next simulation can't start or at the very least the next frame can't be started to be processed until it returns. It has been used by GPU makers to frame pace games as well to avoid stuttering.

So its not just some games, its all games its part of the core of how DX works.
by roxolotl | 2025-10-30 13:04:34+00:00
To be honest as someone who's built a dozen dice rolling and dming tools for myself I've recently switched mostly back to paper. There's just something really nice about rolling physical dice on a physical table while flipping through physical books and notes. It's super cumbersome and I don't think there's anything wrong with using digital tools. I play most of my games over a digital tabletop since those I play with aren't near by.
by criddell | 2025-10-30 13:04:41+00:00
Two things I suspect I'll miss from Evernote is their web clipper and their OCR.

Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.

Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.
by Joker_vD | 2025-10-30 13:04:45+00:00
> Leaving the handling of the loop to the method allows us to add behaviour to loops that are controlled by the object and not by the user. This is a nice way to add side-effects.

No, it's an absolutely horrible way to "add side-effects" which, usually, is already a horrible idea in its own right.

> Asking an object to iterate over itself allows objects to develop interfaces that dictate how to iterate.

That's true in pretty much any language? And since you need to know which iteration interface you need to use, it's not that much of an advantage.

> And now, when I see: `10.times { |i| puts "i = #{i}" }` I do not see a loop anymore.

Yeah, because it's not a loop: it may or may not run that block 10 times. Seriously, when a programmer's intention is "run something 10 times", the resulting expression arguably should not be "send that something to someone who, hopefully, will execute it 10 times".
by latexr | 2025-10-30 13:05:09+00:00
> This is a super reactive take speaking from no experience whatsoever.

You have no idea what my experience is, please don’t assume.

> My own parents did something like this for us when we were in elementary/middle school and it taught me restraint in spending, not the opposite.

I’m glad it worked out for you. Truly. But don’t assume your experience is universal, because I unfortunately know for a fact it’s not. Also, the argument isn’t that it causes unrestrained spending, that’s not what financial dude bros are about. Excessive restraint in spending can also lead to unhappiness and an unhealthy attachment to money.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-30 13:05:16+00:00
Discussion on original source of summary (637 points, 28 days ago, 287 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451527

Ars (29 points, 17 days ago, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571950
by bonzini | 2025-10-30 13:06:15+00:00
> What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

For unit vectors the cosine of the angle between them is a1*b1+a2*b2+...+an*bn.

Each of the terms has mean 0 and when you sum many of them the sum concentrates closer and closer to 0 (intuitively the positive and negative terms will tend to cancel out, and in fact the standard deviation is 1/√n).
by perihelions | 2025-10-30 13:06:44+00:00
This follows in the wake of some fast-moving developments in the nuclear-war field. If you haven't been following it: on the one hand, the US leadership is championing a trillion-dollar space-based missile defense for, quote, "forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland"—i.e. upending "Mutually Assured Destruction"[0,1]. In response (not an immediate response—this has been going back-and-forth since the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002), Russia just days ago test-flew a *nuclear-powered* subsonic cruise missile for 14,000 kilometers[2,3]. That machine's intended for delivering nuclear weapons to the US, in a way that putatively sidesteps the current ideas for missile defenses.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/m... ("Golden Dome missile defense system could cost over $1 trillion")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s... ("Golden Dome (missile defense system)")

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russia-tested-new-nuclea... ("Russia tested new nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile")

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik ("9M730 Burevestnik")
by krapp | 2025-10-30 13:07:38+00:00
Do you understand the concept and purpose of the military industrial complex?

It is, in no small part, a capitalist enterprise. War is a means of projecting imperialist power, but also justifying military contracts and expenditure. It is a self-perpetuating, self-justifying machine that demands constant growth, so we must do that. We can't not do that.

And since the current regime (and half the country) considers the domestic population to be as much an adversary as any foreign one, we're going to reap the home soil. This is just American imperialism turning on itself, as imperialism inevitably must.
by throw0101c | 2025-10-30 13:07:59+00:00
> The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.

Other countries were able to successfully develop with less authoritarianism than China (Japan did it twice: Meiji Restoration and post-WW2), and were able to move to more democratic systems.

See the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell for various case studies on what works and what doesn't:

* https://profilebooks.com/work/how-asia-works/

* https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-asia-works-success-and-fail...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144575-how-asia-works
by pansa2 | 2025-10-30 13:08:02+00:00
> But Python also looks up methods at runtime. Does that mean Python also does message passing? Not quite.

I don't think Ruby's "message passing" is fundamentally different from Python's "method calls". Ultimately, both languages implementations are very similar: both look up methods by name in a hash table and then call them.

IMO "message passing" is just an alternative metaphor for what Ruby does when you type `object.name`. The metaphor fits Ruby but not Python, because the languages do three things differently:

- Ruby only looks for `name` in `object.class` (and its superclasses), whereas Python first looks in `object` itself

- If Ruby finds `name`, it's guaranteed to be a method whereas in Python it could be a different kind of value

- Ruby immediately calls the method once it's found, whereas Python (generally) doesn't - instead it returns a binding to be called later

This means that in Ruby, `object.name` is always calling a method defined on `object.class`, with `self` set to `object`. That can be re-interpreted as "sending a message" to `object.class`.

In Python, `object.name` is a more general value lookup - maybe the result will be callable, maybe not.
by matt_s | 2025-10-30 13:08:07+00:00
If you look back at the dot com era, hardware companies did survive but weren't the financial "winners". Cisco is an example and a good comparison is Amazon - their bread and butter now is ecommerce, they dominate it and that was borne out of that bubble.

Alphabet also has massive market share with YouTube, solid cloud offerings, Waymo which already has driverless/unsupervised robot taxis and their old standby search which is morphing more into more AI answers when you throw questions in your browser.

Alphabet's P/E ratio is lower than the S&P 500's. Some may argue the S&P is mostly being held up by Tech and AI related companies so stock in Alphabet could be seen as undervalued and NVDIA as overvalued.

Hardware almost always ends up getting commoditized so investing in hardware companies for the long haul does carry maybe more risk than mainly software companies.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-30 13:08:18+00:00
Seems kinda obvious why they wouldn’t want to be a commodity.

It’d lead to direct comparisons between clouds (as someone who had estimated moving legacy work loads it’s a shit load of work to get a reasonable “drive away” price for one of them and the work is duplicated to do it for the other).

If they are truly commodities then than goes away as does their margins to large degree - none of them want that.