MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by user2722 | 2025-10-27 21:22:53+00:00
Indeed. Conflicting info.

NOTE: I did NOT read the article.

If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.

We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
by randerson | 2025-10-27 21:22:56+00:00
Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF).

The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires. Most high performance cars come with summer tires. I live in a wealthy area where I often see new cars in parking lots wearing summer tires in winter, probably relying on electronic nannies to mask the lack of grip in normal driving.
by strbean | 2025-10-27 21:23:36+00:00
Also 3) intrusion detection.

It's obvious to the owner and the whole world that an intrusion has occurred if the door is sawed open or the lock is cut off. It's nice to know your home has been broken into vs. some of your jewelry is gone and you don't know whether to blame your teenager, a relative, someone who did work on your house since you last checked, etc.
by rileymat2 | 2025-10-27 21:24:12+00:00
> "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?

I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-27 21:24:28+00:00
> HN has a base of strong anti-AI bias

Quite the opposite, actually. You can always find five stories on the front page about some AI product or feature. Meanwhile, you have people like yourself who convince themselves that any pushback is done by people who just don't see the true value of it yet and that they're about to miss out!! Some kind of attempt at spreading FOMO, I guess.
by paulsutter | 2025-10-27 21:24:59+00:00
If I'm reading that right, it looks like "do not and will not ... operate any programs... in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws"

Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand

> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
by lionkor | 2025-10-27 21:25:17+00:00
Not OP but using LLMs in any professional setting, like programming, editing or writing technical specifications, OP is correct.

Without extensive promoting and injectimg my own knowledge and experience, LLMs generate absolute unusable garbage (on average). Anyone who disagrees very likely is not someone who would produce good quality work by themselves (on average). That's not a clever quip; that's a very sad reality. SO MANY people cannot be bothered to learn anything if they can help it.
by mikeyouse | 2025-10-27 21:26:20+00:00
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/154584-ig-audit-of-irs-ac...
by btown | 2025-10-27 21:26:48+00:00
Completely understand the sentiment, but it doesn't apply here, because what's being generated are formulas!

Standardized 3-statement models in Excel are designed to be auditable, with or without AI, because (to only slightly simplify) every cell is either a blue input (which must come from standard exports of the company's accounting books, other auditable inventory/CRM/etc. data, or a visible hardcoded constant), or a black formula that cannot have hardcoded values, and must be simple.

If every buyer can audit, with tools like this, that the formulas match the verbal semantics of the model, there's even less incentive than there is now to fudge the formula level. (And with Wall Street conventions, there's nowhere to hide a prompt injection, because you're supposed to keep every formula to only a few characters, and use breakout "build" rows that can themselves be visually audited.)

And sure, you could conceivably use any AI tool to generate a plausible list of numbers at the input level, but that was equally easy, and equally dependent on context to be fraudulent or not, ever since that famous Excel 1990 elevator commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOO31qFmi9A&t=61s

At the end of the day, the difference between "they want to see this growth, let's fudge it" and "they want to see this growth, let's calculate the exact metrics we need to hit to make that happen, and be transparent about how that's feasible" has always been a matter of trust, not technology.

Tech like this means that people who want to do things the right way can do it as quickly as people who wanted to play loose with the numbers, and that's an equalizer that's on the right side of history.
by rat87 | 2025-10-27 21:27:36+00:00
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened. From your wiki link

> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.

> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."

The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
by Yizahi | 2025-10-27 21:28:07+00:00
We just went from absurdly insanely hard task, to a task I'd guess a thousand times harder. A communicator and observer probe is almost impossible enough, but to additionally preserve biological tissue for thousands of years in space is even harder than sending pure robot. And then terraforming part is just orders of magnitude harder than that. Communicator probe would be a few thousand tons maybe and packing maybe a few megawatts of onboard power. Lets be generous and give them a thousand times more - a few gigawatts, provided they are magic aliens and stuff. What can you terraform on a few gigawatts? Raise a temperature in a ten meter circle by one degree? Produce a few cubic meters of something from atmosphere? To terraform one would need a giant fleet of giant vessels, all fine tuned for some processes, and then they will work for millennia to change planet a tiny bit. We would notice that kind of operation in the Solar system.

I love LeGuin, Reynolds, and other, sci-fi is practically 90% of what I'm reading. But come on, the whole interstellar stuff is always predicated on very very optimistic assumptions and eventually magic.
by lionkor | 2025-10-27 21:28:10+00:00
But isn't this only fine as long someone who knows what they are doing has oversight and can fix issues when they arise and Claude gets stuck?

Once we all forget how to write SUM(A:A), will we just invent a new kind of spreadsheet once Claude gets stuck?

Or in other words; what's the end game here? LLMs clearly cannot be left alone to do anything properly, so what's the end game of making people not learn anything anymore?
by HiPhish | 2025-10-27 21:28:52+00:00
> email.bulkSend(generateExpiryEmails(getExpiredUsers(db.getUsers(), Date.now())));

What makes it hard to reason about is that your code is one-dimensional, you have functions like `getExpiredUsers` and `generateExpiryEmails` which could be expressed as composition of more general functions. Here is how I would have written it in JavaScript:

const emails = db.getUsers() .filter(user => user.isExpired(Date.now())) // Some property every user has .map(generateExpiryEmail); // Maps a single user to a message email.bulkSend(emails);

The idea is that you have small but general functions, methods and properties and then use higher-order functions and methods to compose them on the fly. This makes the code two-dimensional. The outer dimension (`filter` and `map`) tells the reader what is done (take all users, pick out only some, then turn each one into something else) while the outer dimension tells you how it is done. Note that there is no function `getExpiredUsers` that receives all users, instead there is a simple and more general `isExpired` method which is combined with `filter` to get the same result.

In a functional language with pipes it could be written in an arguably even more elegant design:

db.getUsers() |> filter(User.isExpired(Date.now()) |> map(generateExpiryEmail) |> email.bulkSend

I also like Python's generator expressions which can express `map` and `filter` as a single expression:

email.bulk_send(generate_expiry_email(user) for user in db.get_users() if user.is_expired(Date.now())
by counters | 2025-10-27 21:28:53+00:00
Eh, it's a pretty big distinction weather-wise. Extreme Western New York and the Tug Hill plateau are all susceptible to somewhat frequent lake effect snow. Given the right time of year and wind fetch, you can see narrow convective / lake-effect snow bands from the Finger Lakes. But broadly speaking the actual annual expected snow and the phenomenology of the storm systems that produce that snow are very different over the rest of the state.
by pron | 2025-10-27 21:28:54+00:00
They wouldn't have had better performance, though. There is no significant performance penalty we're paying, although there's a nuance here that may be worth pointing out.

There are two different usecases for coroutines that may tempt implementors to address with a single implementation, but the usecases are sufficiently different to separate into two different implementations. One is the generator use case. What makes it special is that there are exactly two communicating parties, and both of their state may fit in the CPU cache. The other use case is general concurrency, primarily for IO. In that situation, a scheduler juggles a large number of user-mode threads, and because of that, there is likely a cache miss on every context switch, no matter how efficient it is. However, in the second case, almost all of the performance is due to Little's law rather than context switch time (see my explanation here: https://inside.java/2020/08/07/loom-performance/).

That means that a "stackful" implementation of user-mode threads can have no significant performance penalty for the second use case (which, BTW, I think has much more value than the first), even though a more performant implementation is possible for the first use case. In Java we decided to tackle the second use case with virtual threads, and so far we've not offered something for the first (for which the demand is significantly lower).

What happens in languages that choose to tackle both use cases with the same construct is that they gain negligible performance in the second use case (at best), but they're paying for that negligible benefit with a substantial degradation in user experience. That's just a bad tradeoff, but some languages (especially low-level ones) may have little choice, because their stackful solution does carry a significant performance cost compared to Java because of Java's very efficient heap memory management.
by MattGaiser | 2025-10-27 21:29:16+00:00
Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends.

Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody.

I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
by lionkor | 2025-10-27 21:29:32+00:00
I use AI every day. Without oversight, it does not work well.

If it doesn't work well, I will do it myself, because I care that things are done well.

None of this is me being scared of being replaced; quite the opposite. I'm one of the last generations of programmers who learned how to program and can debug and fix the mess your LLM leaves behind when you forgot to add "make sure it's a clean design and works" to the prompt.

Okay, that's maybe hyperbole, but sadly only a little bit. LLMs make me better at my job, they don't replace me.
by mckn1ght | 2025-10-27 21:29:40+00:00
Yeah, it's different, I was thinking about a time I needed to combine to separate repos into one. To do that, you clone one of them, then add a remote to the other one, fetch that, and `pull --rebase` or similar, and you'll replay all of the first's commits on top of the second's. I can't remember what I was thinking about the subdirectories, I guess they'd already have to be organized that way in the various repos to avoid conflicts or smushing separate sources together.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-10-27 21:29:42+00:00
Reality: the trump admin has shown that the law doesn't matter in the short term. If they think it's "DEI" they'll find a way to yank funding/make an example out of an organization agreeing to this. Even if they're legally in the wrong.

Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
by smithkl42 | 2025-10-27 21:30:10+00:00
I'm not sure we're looking at the same industry. Overall, insurance company profit margins are in the single digits, usually low single digits - and in many segments, they're frequently not profitable at all. To take one example, 2024 was the first profitable year for homeowners insurance companies since 2019, and even then, the segment's entire profit margin was 0.3% (not 3% - 0.3%).

https://riskandinsurance.com/us-pc-insurance-industry-posts-...
by tacticalturtle | 2025-10-27 21:30:19+00:00
> This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure."

What is this take based on?

How likely are the cuts due to overhiring for projects that are being axed, vs for projects that are continuing with automation?

And no offense to Ms Canaves, but why is an “eMarketer analyst” being called on to explain Amazon hiring decisions relating to their progress in AI?
by nsagent | 2025-10-27 21:30:26+00:00
Agree that the snarky reply doesn't help, but the quotation isn't really skewed (though it is a paraphrase). It comes from an internal memo that leaked in 2018 that states:

Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.

This comment [1] linked to an article [2] with the leaked memo.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721016

[2]: https://techthelead.com/incendiary-leaked-memo-facebook/
by prmoustache | 2025-10-27 21:30:39+00:00
No, sometimes it is just Spanish football as for everything behind Cloudflare. Which is the case for this blog being blocked right now and redirecting to another page:

"El acceso a la presente dirección IP ha sido bloqueado en cumplimiento de lo dispuesto en la Sentencia de 18 de diciembre de 2024, dictada por el Juzgado de lo Mercantil nº 6 de Barcelona en el marco del procedimiento ordinario (Materia mercantil art. 249.1.4)-1005/2024-H instado por la Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional y por Telefónica Audiovisual Digital, S.L.U. https://www.laliga.com/noticias/nota-informativa-en-relacion..."
Show HN: Easily visualize torch, Jax, tf, NumPy, etc. tensors
by HardikVala | 2025-10-27 21:30:57+00:00
hey hn, wrote a python library for myself to visualize tensors. Makes learning and debugging deep learning code so much easier. Works seamlessly with colab/jupyter notebooks, and other python contexts. It's built on top of the graphics backend, chalk (https://chalk-diagrams.github.io/).

why?

Understanding deep learning code is hard—especially when it's foreign, because it's hard to imagine tensor manipulations, e.g. `F.conv2d(x.unsqueeze(1), w.transpose(-1, -2)).squeeze().view(B, L, -1)` in your head. Printing shapes and tensor values only get me so far. tensordiagram lets me quickly diagram tensors.

Other python libraries for creating tensor diagrams are either too physics and math focused, not notebook-friendly, limited to visualizing single tensors, and/or serve a wider purpose (so have a steep learning curve).
by mceoin | 2025-10-27 21:31:01+00:00
I second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15% of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.

The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".

This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.

For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance.

Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!
by bitwize | 2025-10-27 21:31:20+00:00
I invented this pattern when I was working on a small ecommerce system (written in Scheme, yay!) in the early 2000s. It just became much easier to do all the pricing calculations, which were subject to market conditions and customer choices, if I broke it up into steps and verified each step as a side-effect-free, data-in-data-out function.

Of course by "invented" I mean that far smarter people than me probably invented it far earlier, kinda like how I "invented" intrusive linked lists in my mid-teens to manage the set of sprites for a game. The idea came from my head as the most natural solution to the problem. But it did happen well before the programming blogosphere started making the pattern popular.
by nxobject | 2025-10-27 21:31:54+00:00
> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.

It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
by devmor | 2025-10-27 21:32:16+00:00
This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve?

A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 21:32:27+00:00
> On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.