MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bell-cot | 2025-10-08 15:27:51+00:00
> have we actually benefitted in any way from these two centuries of military theory?

"How to win" theories - when correct - favor those with the motivation to take them seriously, and the smarts to apply them correctly. I hope that overlaps nicely (in Venn diagram terms) with your "we".

Plausibly, some wars have been prevented by military theory - because a nation analyzed their situation, and decided that starting a war would be a bad move.

> If anything, it seems to me that wars are less decisive, more prolonged and often more deadly than they've been in Clausewitz's time.

That's somewhat an effect of our larger nations and populations, the industrialized basis of modern warfare, and how heavily modern "get firearms, dig in" military technology favors the defense. BUT - pre-Clausewitz wars could also run a very long time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Year%27s_War or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Year%27s_War or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars or ...

> If we treat kinetic warfare as a game...

Human "games" are generally balanced, or darn close. Vs. very few modern wars were started by anyone who thought things were nicely balanced.

> ...should we not see about changing the rules...

If you mean military tech or practices aimed at cutting such harm - 'most every modern military is forever working on that.* If you mean treaties banning land mines, or napalm, or nerve gas, or whatever - when well done, those can be quite useful. But in game terms, they are (at most) just changing the costs (in economic, human, and political terms) of making a "break the treaty" move.

*Edit: Unfortunately, they're also working on some conflicting goals - like "require even more firepower for our enemies to defeat" and "apply even more firepower, to defeat our enemies".
by mikepurvis | 2025-10-08 15:28:02+00:00
I'm not a very experienced Rust person, but I suspect the buffer reuse concern could be resolved with a tiny custom allocator, so semantically it's a new buffer on each iteration of the loop, satisfying the borrow checker, but the allocation is free. There are a number of bump/arena/slab allocators that do this, like bumpalo, but it would also be possible to write a small custom one specifically geared toward "just continually reuse this exact pointer".

Anyway, I don't mean to nitpick; I know that what's given in TFA are high level examples representing broader classes of concerns, but I thought this one in particular was interesting for having some decent alternatives.
by dcrazy | 2025-10-08 15:28:09+00:00
> the value of an exchange is other people are looking there when they want to buy and sell and so it would be hard to get enough traders if the company doesn't want to list with you.

Doesn’t regulation NMS make this significantly less relevant? A stock trading on an exchange where it isn’t listed is going to trade at the same price as everywhere else, modulo however long it takes to arbitrate the price between the exchanges.

Also, I too am struggling to understand posting a trade of an unlisted stock to an exchange. This sounds pretty similar to a dark pool?
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-08 15:28:23+00:00
I think you’re making my point without realizing it.

If you are skeptical but also not willing to place a bet, you shouldn’t say “AI is overvalued” because you don’t actually believe it. You should say, “I think it might be overvalued, but I’m not really sure? And I don’t have enough experience in markets or confidence to make a bet on it, so I will go with everyone else’s sentiment and make the ‘safe’ bet of being long the market. But like… something feels weird to me about how much money is being poured into this? But I can’t say for sure whether it is overvalued or not.”

Those are two wildly different things.
by Arch-TK | 2025-10-08 15:28:28+00:00
The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a whole USB stack as part of your application. As a development board I would rather go with one of those STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can add that yourself, and you get a debug adapter.
by Manuel_D | 2025-10-08 15:28:43+00:00
> You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that.

No, it largely does not. Most European countries at this point, if they do permit blockers at all, only permit it as part of a clinical study, not as routine treatment for gender dysphoria. This excludes all but a slim minority of (if any) patients. Pointing out that it's still legal as part of experimental trials is a nuance that doesn't affect the >99% of patients that aren't part of a trial, and thus cannot be prescribed these substances.

Your linked publication doesn't actually interview patients who've worked with clinicians or otherwise try and dig into real-world evidence about what this clinical practice does. It's just one author postulating her opinions as fact, with no effort to back up her claims with evidence.
by arcbyte | 2025-10-08 15:29:14+00:00
Unilateral amendment might be a bit of a misnomer because its basically a new contract that your continued use implicitly accepts. There is never any retroactive term change. If they unilaterally change the notice period to 12 months and you reject, you would have to give your of rejection but it would be under the 6 month term because you are not accepting the new contract.

Unless there are other provisions for unilateral changes for contracts in the termination period, no new terms would apply to your final 6 months.
by sneak | 2025-10-08 15:29:16+00:00
I read the agreement for ID.me and it’s atrocious. It requires that I “voluntarily” waive civil rights. I don’t want to use the service.

There is no other way to log into IRS.gov.

You can’t watch YouTube without a Google account.

You can’t be in the parent group chat without agreeing to the Meta TOS for WhatsApp.

The list goes on.
by Pxtl | 2025-10-08 15:29:21+00:00
I generally buy index funds but I put some into AMD a while back as the "less-AI-part-of-tech". Will probably get out of that as they've been sucked into that vortex and shift more into global indexes instead of CAN/USA.

I'll leave shorting to the pros. The whole "double-your-money-or-infinite-losses" aspect of shorting is not a game I'm into.
by spencerflem | 2025-10-08 15:29:22+00:00
I think you might appreciate this talk, which uses a micro kernel to do a lot of the ideas you’re talking about.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-sessions/...

This could even allow resetting the state of the computer back in time so you can pick up exactly where you left off, or undo away mistakes regardless of app, etc.

Definitely some privacy concerns but for a self ran open source thing I think it could be really cool
by alphazard | 2025-10-08 15:29:22+00:00
The most important thing is eliminating the annual deficit. That sends more of a signal about the future of the country and it's currency than the total amount of debt.

How it gets done is separate from that. Given that the only demographic that can comfortably weather a recession is also starting to collect social security, paid for by younger generations who would be meaningfully affected by a recession, "old people are scamming us" may actually be an effective message.
by elfenleid | 2025-10-08 15:29:29+00:00
Totally get what you're saying! Having Claude manually call memory tools mid-conversation does feel intrusive, I agree with that, especially since you need to keep saying Yes to the tool access.

Your approach is actually really interesting, like a background process watching the conversation and deciding what's worth remembering. More passive, less in-your-face.

I thought about this too. The tradeoff I made:

Your approach (judge/watcher): - Pro: Zero interruption to conversation flow - Pro: Can use cheaper model for the judge - Con: Claude doesn't know what's in memory when responding - Con: Memory happens after the fact

Tool-based (current Recall): - Pro: Claude actively uses memory while thinking - Pro: Can retrieve relevant context mid-response - Con: Yeah, it's intrusive sometimes

Honestly both have merit. You could even do both, background judge for auto-capture, tools when Claude needs to look something up.

The Grammarly analogy is spot on. Passive monitoring vs active participation.

Have you built something with the judge pattern? I'd be curious how well it works for deciding what's memorable vs noise.

Maybe Recall needs a "passive mode" option where it just watches and suggests memories instead of Claude actively storing them. That's a cool idea.
by janderson215 | 2025-10-08 15:29:33+00:00
As an American currently in Germany, the food situation is soooo much better here and they would do well to not allow incorrect or misleading labels on consumer products. I understand what you’re saying about censorship, but this is a pretty weak example, IMO. We had something similar in the US with attempts to ban the word “milk” from “almond milk” [0]. Are there other examples that are more egregious?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/almond-milk-can-keep...
by film42 | 2025-10-08 15:30:19+00:00
I have a feeling this is IBM dipping their toes into the water of Postgres after seeing Databricks acquire Neon and Snowflake acquire CrunchyData. Won't be surprised if IBM acquires them next year. It makes a lot of sense and I wish everyone the best of luck.

From the outset, CockroachDB has a "just scale it up" product, an open-source presence, a serverless product with pricing similar to DSQL from AWS, and enterprise support. There is a lot to work with there if you're IBM.
by throwway120385 | 2025-10-08 15:31:03+00:00
> mental shackles of subordination to psychological abusers and manipulators that are constantly pushing the idea that state's rights are subsumed to federal rights

Wow. The inter-state commerce clause is a real thing and it does give the federal government broad lattitude to regulate "commerce" across state lines. Commerce seems to entail the flow of both goods and services. We are in this situation because people at the state level decided, democratically, that some decisions should be made federally so as to avoid a huge patchwork of differing laws. To put it bluntly, I don't want to have to carefully review and compare Oregon state law with say Texas state law before I undertake any travel lest I accidentally commit a felony in Texas by doing something that isn't against the law in Oregon, and that's a really good reason to try to limit the differences between the two. If you don't, you'll necessarily chill travel and commerce across state lines because those differences will present a huge barrier to entry and create a big suck on peoples' time and attention.

> These United States, and after the Civil War the de fact illegitimate federal government called itself The United States

This is getting into Soverign Citizen type reasoning.
by NoGravitas | 2025-10-08 15:31:31+00:00
> I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a bad idea -- namely "the ability to keep your everything permanent."

Not only that, but also having a globally (eventually) consistent view of every conversation from every server. Unlike the "message passing" model used by email and ActivityPub, this means that every server has to carry all the traffic of the whole network (i.e., to be prepared to be a centralized service for the whole world). This is the main reason ATProto is mostly centralized - every alternative server has to be global scale, and who wants to bother with that just to show exactly the same content that Bluesky Inc does?
by elijahcarrel | 2025-10-08 15:31:42+00:00
Makes sense and thank you for explaining and improving the article! Apologies for jumping to conclusions. It might be worth adding a tidbit directly to the article on why Exchange couldn’t be updated and how it was irrelevant to the “solid” infrastructure (I.e. something like “while Exchange was sorely out of date due to the hassle and cost of upgrading, the underlying infrastructure of the in-house servers it ran on was solid”), but defer to you and other folks here. If I’m the only who was bothered by that then the fault is mine!
by lunias | 2025-10-08 15:33:15+00:00
I'd be very surprised if this ever gets fixed. I think it's more likely that people just increasingly communicate through different channels as our "phones" become less and less useful as phones. The only people that I regularly talk to on the phone are my parents. Almost every inbound call I receive is spam, but they all get auto-screened and blocked. If you call me and you're not in my phone, I will not pick up. You can leave a message w/ the AI (and then I probably still won't pick up).
by paddleon | 2025-10-08 15:33:15+00:00
and one more time, sorry, you triggered a rant.

if you can't count on your troops to be disciplined enough to follow your rules of engagement, how can you count on their discipline to follow your other orders? If you cannot show them that you are also disciplined, how do you expect them to maintain their respect for you as a leader?

If you don't have honor, what are you fighting for? Troop moral is what wins wars.

what's worse than death? Not having anything worth living for.

very very few people find honor in being the most evil person. And those few who do make very bad leaders; you either avoid having them in your armed forces or you limit their impact.

If one of your squadmates is an "I'll do anything to win" person, how can you trust them not to ditch you if that is their best survival option? Prisoner's dilema situations are common in battle

I encourage you to visit a US military cemetery. You will sometimes see shrines to the military virtues. Courage, honor, pride, family, discipline all rank pretty high.
by lgregg | 2025-10-08 15:33:34+00:00
Yeah, but that isn't really an apples to apples comparison. Texas for example had ~400 heat deaths in 2024 depending on where you look but in 2023 it was 334 or 563 depending on your criteria [1].

>But I want to put it into perspective. In 2024, ~62,800 people in Europe died to heat-related events.

Most of these deaths are not because of electrification but the fact that homes are built out of bricks and mortar and become ovens with heat waves that get hotter each year and ~10% to ~20% [2] of homes in Europe have air conditioning meanwhile ~95% [3] of homes have air conditioning. Your apples to oranges comparison mostly shows how Europe is generically unprepared for climate adaption (specifically heat resilience) and has nothing to do with electrification stability.

[1] https://www.texasenvironment.org/news-room/heat-related-deat... [2] It's all over the place some places like UK are around 5% adoption while southern Europe can be close to as much as 95% adoption. [3] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/...
by atrudeau | 2025-10-08 15:33:34+00:00
Very cool to see the effectiveness of recurrence on ARC. For those interested in recurrence, here are other works that leverage a similar approach for other types of problems:

Language modeling:

Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05171

Puzzle solving:

A Simple Loss Function for Convergent Algorithm Synthesis using RNNs https://openreview.net/pdf?id=WaAJ883AqiY

End-to-end Algorithm Synthesis with Recurrent Networks: Logical Extrapolation Without Overthinking https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05826

Can You Learn an Algorithm? Generalizing from Easy to Hard Problems with Recurrent Networks https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/file/3501672ebc68a...

General:

Think Again Networks and the Delta Loss https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11816

Universal Transformers https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03819

Adaptive Computation Time for Recurrent Neural Networks https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08983
by pron | 2025-10-08 15:34:07+00:00
Indeed, I successfully use LLMs for research, and they're an improvement because old-school search isn't very reliable either.

But as to the 80-20 tradeoff on other tasks, the problem isn't that the tool is wrong 20% of the time, but that it's not trustworthy 100% of the time. I have to check the work. Maybe that's still valuable, but just how valuable that is depends on many factors, some of which are very domain-dependent and others are completely subjective. We're talking about replacing one style with another that is much better in some respects and much worse in others. If, on the whole, it was better in almost all cases, that would be one thing (and make the investment safer), but reports suggest it isn't.

I've yet to try an LLM to learn a new codebase, and I have no doubt it will help a lot, but while that is undoubtedly a very expensive task, it's also not a very frequent one. It could maybe save me a week per year, amortised. That's not nothing (and I will certainly give it a try next time I need to learn a new codebase), but it's also not a game-changer.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-08 15:34:36+00:00
I agree, all of the questions you pose would be fine by me and wouldn't immediately put me on the defensive.

Any variety of "what is your spiritual belief" would get me to clam up, though, for the reasons I said.

There's also another factor that, if the health care provider in front of me isn't someone I already know pretty well, I'd assume that they're asking as a prelude to some sort of effort to evangelize to me or condemn me because in any other setting, that question is almost always such a prelude. Rightly or wrongly, it would make me suspicious of and on guard with the health care provider.
by Pxtl | 2025-10-08 15:34:37+00:00
I can't think of any tech with this kind of crazy yearly investment in infrastructure with no success stories.

Maybe it's because I find writing easy, but I find the text generation broadly useless except for scamming. The search capabilities are interesting but the falsehoods that come from LLM questions undermine it.

The programming and visual art capabilities are most impressive to me... but where's the companies making killings on those? Where's the animation studio cranking out Pixar-quality movies as weekly episodes?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-08 15:34:40+00:00
"And from your IP log, they can easily get the host names if they want them."

And each IP may have multiple hostnames associated with it, requiring more work to determine which one was accessed by the internet subscriber

The VPN also has an IP log for jqpabc

If someone wants to explore jqpabc's "sensitive traffic", it's even easier than asking his ISP. Because jqpabc uses a third party VPN, we just subpoena the VPN and they start logging, unbeknownst to jqpabc

Because the VPN uses a third party DNS cache that sends EDNS client subnet and does not encrypt DNS traffic to authoritative DNS servers, we can also get logs from those servers as well as jqpabc's general location

And of course jqpabc sends plaintext SNI so we have another source of hostnames that he has visited, in addition to plaintext DNS
by lm28469 | 2025-10-08 15:34:51+00:00
Where is all the productivity ? Everyone says they became a 100x employee thanks to LLMs yet not one company has seen any out of the ordinary growth or profit besides AI hyped companies.

What if the amount of slop generated counteracts the amount of productivity gained ? For every line of code it writes it also writes some BS paragraph in a business plan, a report, &c.
by Epa095 | 2025-10-08 15:35:01+00:00
It does not really make a big difference if the pensioner saved 100k while working and put it in their couch, or if they payed it in ekstra taxes which got saved by the government, or if the government presses new money.

The important part is how large fraction of the population work, not where the money for the remaining fraction comes from. Money is only a representation of value, value created by the working fraction.
by DrSiemer | 2025-10-08 15:35:20+00:00
Exactly this. In the early days of image generation I once spent about 9 hours carefully remastering a generated image until I was happy with the result.

Are those hours completely without value, because I used genAI during most of them? It involved a LOT of consideration and a few pretty tough choices. But because I didn't do my 10.000 hours, and it's sad for those that did, I'm not allowed to create this way?

Whatever, I'm still putting it on my wall. It means more to me than most "legit" art does.
by simonw | 2025-10-08 15:35:25+00:00
This works really well already. You can fire up something like Wispr Flow and dump what you're saying directly into Claude Code or similar, it will ignore the ums and usually figure out what you mean.

I use ChatGPT voice mode in their iPhone app for this. I walk the dog for an hour and have a loose conversation with ChatGPT through my AirPods, then at the end I tell it to turn everything we discussed into a spec I can paste into Claude Code.
by damnesian | 2025-10-08 15:35:33+00:00
Accelerating AI is going to require some overhead that walmart most likely is not anticipating. It seems like many companies weren't anticipating it, which you see when a company adopts AI, use it as an excuse to let people go, then re-hire them when it's clear AI needs human guidance. Walmart has done a lot in meatspace to pare logistics down to the minumum, but clearly under management that was more progressive than those in charge now who seem to be coasting on past achievements, enshittifying aspects of the business where they want to see more profits. I can only imagine this is going to be messy.
by elfenleid | 2025-10-08 15:35:58+00:00
That's a great point! And also works really well for shared context between claude instances, for example, we use that for our business model in the company, all business rules and model is stored as memories in a central redis that the mcp connects to. The way that memories are stored are specific to a folder or global (similar to CLAUDE.md home directiory), but with this approach you can have an external redis where multiple claudes read and write into as a shared almost hive like memory.
by tiendil | 2025-10-08 15:36:13+00:00
Hi! I work on an open-source news reader that automatically tags articles (LLMs are involved).

Based on my experience, I wrote a post about the challenges of automatic tagging and my approach to overcoming them. I think it might be interesting for people who are into automatic knowledge organization, like me.

I would be happy to hear your thoughts on the topic!
by libertine | 2025-10-08 15:36:17+00:00
> The interesting and exciting thing about China and Asia in general is that it does not suffer from the diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse that the whole "west" has been subjected to for many generations now, but especially post WWII.

Hold on a second, China and Asia in general don't suffer from diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse, since when?

China doesn't even acknowledge its own Historical events, and this has been a recurring pattern of diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse. Should we even address Russia goofy propaganda of mystical creatures?

Why should it be expected that everyone shouldn't be cautious of claims coming from a place where Historical revisionism is part of their culture?

Have you even checked the rates of fraudulent paper submissions?