MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcusverus | 2025-10-18 22:17:20+00:00
> Your citations don't really support your claim well, since the sections you quoted don't mention traits or roles much at all.

The sections do mention roles very clearly. If you're not capable of making these basic connections, it's no wonder that you're confused.

For chimps:

> At the core of social structures are males, which patrol the territory, protect group members, and search for food

Male roles: Patroller of territory, protector of group members.

For Orangutans:

> One to several resident female home ranges are encompassed within the home range of a resident male, who is their main mating partner.

Female roles: harem member. Male Roles: Alpha, Harem haver

For Gorillas:

> Troops tend to be made of one adult male or silverback, with a harem of multiple adult females and their offspring.

Female roles: harem member. Male Roles: Alpha, Harem haver

If roles weren't based on sex, a female Chimp would be just as likely to patrol territory, and a female gorilla would be just as likely to be an alpha with her own harem. The fact that these roles are only filled by males indicates that they are sex-based roles.

> Evolutionarily, humans are equally related to patriarchal chimpanzees and matriarchal bonobos

You've lost the plot. For bonobos to be matriarchal implies male and female traits/roles, which obviously supports my argument.

> I personally think it should be resisted as resisting our basic impulses is generally considered more enlightened or noble and the world already has enough idiots who will try to put others in a box and claim some sort of evolutionary justification.

Telling the truth is a good thing, actually. Encouraging people to understand their nature is good. Lying to people about their nature is bad. Encouraging people to misunderstand their nature, which will inevitably lead to them making life decisions based on lies, is bad. Borderline evil.
by Retric | 2025-10-18 22:17:21+00:00
> There would need to be (1) an existing valid contract,

Your (1) is false. You can damage a business relationship that doesn’t involve a signed contract.

“Tortious interference with business relationships occurs where the tortfeasor intentionally acts to prevent someone from successfully establishing or maintaining business relationships with others.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
by GistNoesis | 2025-10-18 22:18:05+00:00
I have written some gist to illustrate the approach I suggest. The code run but there may be bugs, and it don't use the appropriate optimizer. The purpose is to illustrate the optimisation approach.

https://gist.github.com/unrealwill/1ad0e50e8505fd191b617903b...

Point 33 "intersection between bezier curve with a circle" may be useful to find the feasible regions of the subproblems https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/#introduction

The approach I suggest will need more work, and there are probably problematic edge cases to consider and numerical stability issues. Proper proofs have not been done. It's typically some high work-low reward situation.

It's mostly interesting because it highlight the link between roots and local mimimum. And because it respect the structure of the problem more.

To find roots we can find a first root then divide the polynomial by (x-root). And find a root again.

If you are not mathematically literate, it'll probably be hard to do the details necessary to make it performant. But if you use a standard black-box optimizer with constraints it should be able to do it in few iterations.

You can simplify the problem by considering piece-wise segments instead of splines. The extension to chains of segment is roughly the same, and the spatial acceleration structure based on branch-and-bound are easier.
by bsdetector | 2025-10-18 22:18:19+00:00
A ship approaching a sun will see the objects on the far side illuminated fully, but objects on the near side will be illuminated only on a thin edge, like a crescent moon, because they're looking at the 'back' side of the objects.

By sending out a pulse of light they could not just light up the ship-facing side of objects but also determine their precise location and velocity. Seems like something you'd want to do to not waste your thousand-year mission by accidentally colliding with a dark object.

The Wow! signal could be just such an event.

Aliens might use some type of scanning beam rather than a big flash, but I doubt we have the 1977 data to differentiate between a beam scanning our area and a solar-system-wide flash.
by prisenco | 2025-10-18 22:19:16+00:00
I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself.

If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model.

Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again.

I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.
by p1esk | 2025-10-18 22:22:33+00:00
I don’t really use LLMs for coding - I still enjoy doing it myself. I use them for brainstorming ideas, reviewing papers (I’m a researcher), practical questions (e.g. how to replace a cooling bypass valve in my car), or curiosity questions (e.g. estimate 0-60 mph time for Starship).

And I don’t really have any need for agents yet (though I’m sure this will change in a couple of years). I pay 20$/mo each for Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

I’ve been playing with language models since ~2014, and I estimate the quality jump from gpt4 to gpt5 to be similar to the gpt3.5 to gpt4 jump. In 5 years we gradually went from almost useless to somewhat useful but unreliable, to incredibly useful and reliable.
by tamimio | 2025-10-18 22:22:53+00:00
I loved it all, software and hardware, thanks for sharing it!

> I had never done any PCB design before and downloaded KiCAD with no idea how it worked.

I saw similar lines among many people who designed great things, take a note, companies, just because an engineer doesn’t have 10y of experience in XYZ doesn’t mean they won’t do great in the job.
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 22:23:04+00:00
Why in the everloving cosmic fuck did he not tell them? In a great many circumstances what he did is a crime. Nobody's coming after him on this but if this was me I would paper the everloving fuck out of what I did so there wasn't even a possibility that the owner of the account had any uncertainty as to what happened.

I don't know what happened with "the repos", is why I haven't offered an opinion about it. I have a professional interest in stories about people gaining unauthorized access to accounts. I assure you, the law doesn't weigh one party's transgression against the other the way you suggest it should.
by withinboredom | 2025-10-18 22:23:47+00:00
Hmmm. Not really. Yes, everything is a mix, but for applications, it very much is on the read-heavy side. Think about how many queries you have to do just to display an arbitrary page. You might, maybe, just maybe, net 2-3 writes vs. hundreds of reads. If that starts to balance out, or even flip, then you probably need to rethink your database as you start to exit traditional db usage patterns. But <30% writes is not write-heavy.
by optionalsquid | 2025-10-18 22:24:14+00:00
It's cool that nanopore technologies are getting this affordable, but keep in mind that these technologies (to my knowledge) still have very high error rates compared older sequencing techniques. Both in terms of individual nucleotides (A, C, G, and Ts) being misread, but also in terms of stretches of nucleotides being mistakenly added to or removed from the resulting sequences (indels).

So, yes, you can sequence your genome relatively cheaply using these technologies at home, but you won't be able to draw any conclusions from the results
by greazy | 2025-10-18 22:24:16+00:00
I sequences my genome about 10 year's ago using illumina platform for ~1200AUD. We used a university sequencing facility. They were happy to extract and sequence the dna using a shotgun approach. Depth was 5x and I think we achieved about 90% coverage. It was just for fun.

The issue with this approach is that you'll receive raw data that needs to be processed. Even after processing you'll need to do further analysis to answer your questions. After all this, I'd be suspicious of the results and seek a medical councellor to discuss and perform further tests.

I'd advise on thinking what questions you want answered. 'Sequencing your genome' sounds amazing but imo you're better off with seeking accredited tests with acrionable results.
by mmorse1217 | 2025-10-18 22:24:39+00:00
Hey, thanks for the nice post. I really enjoyed reading it; it’s good see this kind of thing on the front page.

Since you’re interested in doing this on GPU, an approach that might be interesting to you (although not necessarily more efficient) would be to leverage the intrinsic properties of Bezier curves to feed a near-optimal initial guess to Newton. Some useful facts about Bezier curves: i) Bezier control points form a convex hull of the curve they define ii) Bezier curves defined on [0,1] can be split into two bezier curves, each defined on [0,t] and [t,1] that define the same curve, with a tighter control polygon. iii) This Bezier curve splitting can be done using repeated linear combinations of Bezier control points, so you can skip evaluating Bernstein polynomials directly. iv) there is a mapping from Bezier control points to their corresponding value in the [0,1] parameter space (the term for this for B-Splines is greville abcissae, I’m not sure that there is an explicit name for the equivalent for Bezier curves, but basically the preimage of control point b_i of a degree d curve is i/d, i=0,…,d+1).

These things together sort of imply an algorithm: 1. Subdivide the Bezier curve c into 2 or 3 curves c_1, c_2, c_3 2. Find the closest control point b_j to the target point x 3. Choose the curve c_i corresponding to b_j: this subcurve contains the closest point to x 4. Go to step 1 and repeat this loop several times with c = c_i 5. Then, compute the preimage of the closest control point b_j to x on c (j/d plus some shift and rescaling). This value, t’, will be the initial guess to Newton’s method. 6. Solve for the closest point on the selected subcurve c to x with Newton’s method; this should converge in very few steps because your initial guess is so good, quadratic convergence, blah, blah blah.

The break-even point for this kind of algorithm vs. a derivative based algorithm is very unclear on CPU. But, for GPU, I think the computation can be structured in an architecture friendly way; since computing the euclidean distance between x with all control points and the bezier curve splitting can written in a vectorizable manner, you will probably see a decent speed up. I’ve only really worked with CUDA though, so I’m not sure if this idea maps very cleanly to GLSL.

Here’s an example of the algorithm above for CPU if you are interested: https://github.com/qnzhou/nanospline/commit/5ac97722414dbc75...
by do_not_redeem | 2025-10-18 22:26:06+00:00
They aren't doing it with the intent to damage his business. They're just doing something they would have done anyway.

You can't claim tortious interference just because someone throws a wrench in your business plans. Sanborn has about as much of a case as Microsoft has against Linus Torvalds for creating Linux and hurting their sales of Windows. (I'll give you this one for free: none.)
by joe_the_user | 2025-10-18 22:27:37+00:00
The thing is, the example of the "march of nines" is self-driving cars. These deal with roads and roads are interface between the chaos of the overall world and a system that has quite well-defined rules.

I can imagine other task on a human/rules-based "frontier" would have a similar quality. But I think there are others that are going to be inaccessible entirely "until AGI" (or something). Humanoid robots moving freely in human society would an example I think.
by psheals | 2025-10-18 22:29:17+00:00
The biggest risks don’t always hit the smallest companies first.

History is filled with giants who thought they were too big to be disrupted — until the shift had already happened.

Search changed the landscape once. Now, LLMs are rewriting the map entirely. Visibility isn’t guaranteed.

▪ This isn’t about innovation hype. ▪ It’s about survival signals that too many boardrooms are ignoring.

When giants ignore the shift, they don’t stumble — they fall hard.

Read the full article:
by righthand | 2025-10-18 22:29:39+00:00
> I don't care about blogspam, but a lot of YouTube content clearly costs money to make.

By the time the video is uploaded to Youtube, for the creator is a sunk cost. What most of your Youtube ad view generated money goes to is the hosting on Google’s end, not the creator. It’s a false belief that 99% of Youtube creators will go extinct if you use an ad blocker, because it’s a post pay system.

This is only really true for successful channels not most Youtube content. The ad blocker hurts Google more than YT creators.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-18 22:30:35+00:00
I don't know. Do programming languages really make that big of a difference, other than with developer unhappiness and talent scarcity when hiring?

I think how many quality devs you can hire with that language is really the only question that matters 90% of the time (ballparking), so long as the language is designed for that use case, like don't use assembly to write a production webapp.

I don't know many devs that code with Ruby, I know of more devs that code in rust and Go which are newer by at least a decade? so the question of what actual benefits it has is important.

For Go, it makes it hard to mess up error handling and easy to deploy your apps since it's all a static blob, but memory footprint and optimization can be challenging at times. For rust, it takes a long time to do things, so fast shipping timelines might not be a good fit. For Ruby, does it have anything that makes it more secure, faster to code with,resilient to failure, easier to scale,etc...? I don't think anyone answered that here.

What can it do _better_ that the other languages you listed can't or can't as well?
by withinboredom | 2025-10-18 22:31:23+00:00
To add to that. My son got his phone caught in a reclining chair without realizing it. The fact that the phone bent in half instead of destroying the chair is a nice bonus. Replacing the phone was cheap, replacing a chair would not have been — yes, both are insured, but replacing/repairing a chair takes a hell of a lot longer.
by DocTomoe | 2025-10-18 22:31:29+00:00
If bias can only be seen by a minority of people ... is it really 'AI bias', or just societal bias?

> “In one of the experiment scenarios — which featured racially biased AI performance — the system failed to accurately classify the facial expression of the images from minority groups,”

Could it be that real people have trouble reading the facial expression of the image of minority groups?
by greazy | 2025-10-18 22:31:49+00:00
With the recent R10 flow cells the error rate has improved. The basecalling models have also been steadily improving and therefore reducing the error rate.

For assembling a bacterial genome the consensus error rate is as low or in some cases better than Illumina.

Nanopore platform has its usecases that Illumina falls short on.

> So, yes, you can sequence your genome relatively cheaply using these technologies at home, but you won't be able to draw any conclusions from the results

Agreed, any at home sequencing should not be used to draw any conclusions.
by andrepd | 2025-10-18 22:32:01+00:00
Well I don't know what to say, except that this is obviously, trivially, not true. The LLM will plain make up links that don't exist, or at least "summarise" an existing link by just making stuff up that is tangentially (but plausibly) related to the link. It's impossible to have used LLMs for this purpose for more than a quarter of an hour and not have seen this.
by lawmike | 2025-10-18 22:32:30+00:00
I’ve been working on WearView (https://www.wearview.co/), a tool that uses AI to turn flat-lay product photos into realistic on-model images.

It made me wonder how much of fashion photography can or should be automated. High-end brands still rely on studio shoots for lighting, fabric texture, and human realism, but diffusion models are getting closer every month.

For those in photography, fashion, or AI: • Do AI-generated model shots feel like a real replacement or just a shortcut? • What parts of studio work are hardest to replicate? • How might this change creative jobs in fashion and e-commerce?

I’d love to hear how others see the future balance between AI imagery and traditional photography.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-18 22:32:33+00:00
I wouldn't present it to them as "these config files are the same thing as Lua but without loops", but instead "these are config files and they have the same syntax as the Lua records we just learned about". And I would prefer that over "these are config files and they have a different syntax as the Lua records we just learned about." Although I can see merits on discussing that syntax differences exist between languages, that tends to overwhelm people learning their first language.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-18 22:32:47+00:00
> Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include:

These two seem like the same problem:

> moderation

> spam

You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. But we kind of already have that. Make likes public (what else are they even for?). Then show people posts from the people they follow or that the people they follow liked. Have a dislike button so that if you follow someone but always dislike the things they like, your client learns you don't want to see the things they like.

Now you don't see trash unless you follow people who like trash, and then whose fault is that?

> which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl

This is a completely independent problem from spam. It's also something decentralized networks are actually good at. If more devices are requesting some data then there are more sources of it. Let the bots get the data from each other. Track share ratios so high traffic nodes with bad ratios get banned for leeching and it's cheaper for them to get a cloud node somewhere with cheap bandwidth and actually upload than to buy residential proxies to fight bans.

> good faith verification

> posting transparency

It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again and in particular they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see instead of a bunch of spam from anons that nobody they follow likes.
by xp84 | 2025-10-18 22:33:35+00:00
I think we will, but I’m cringing harder and harder these days because my “clients” (friends and children) are often bringing me problems that are just unsolvable due to all the guardrails put up “for our protection.” For instance, “my iPhone says it’s full”

looks at storage stats

40GB worth of “System Data” and 20GB of Safari “Documents and Data” - zero visibility as to what it is let alone simple controls to get rid of it in a reasonable way. On a real computer, that’s the kind of thing an admin has ultimate authority over. Now, especially on phones, you may as well be a call center tech saying “Well, I guess you can erase the entire phone and don’t restore a backup?” because that’s the only guaranteed fix for most problems.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-18 22:34:38+00:00
Define what you are talking about if you want to put your stake in the ground so people can respond. What is masculinity as it is commonly understood?

I believe men should be willing to fight for the group. Republicans think it should be every individual for themselves. I believe in myself enough I don't need to surround myself with the same religion/race as me. Republicans are afraid they will be replaced. I believe men should be able to have sex, and that birth control should be legal so they can do that. Republicans don't believe that. I believe in hanging out with my bros. Republicans love to hang out with pretend bros by listening to podcasts.

I believe I should be self sufficient and shouldn't need a surrogate mother to take care of me. So I do my own laundry, I cook, I clean. Like a real grown adult human. I believe enough in myself enough I don't need to sequester my partner away from the world and keep them at home.

These are like THE defining masculine traits. Protect others. Secure in yourself around others. Having sex. Being engaging enough to hang out with. Be self sufficient. Confident enough of yourself not to be jealous/overprotective of your partner or need to keep them hidden away at home. Republicans have none of these.

I live in a red state. All the REAL men (forresters, park rangers) are dems. Now the short guy rolling coal in his ridiculous truck, sure, he's a republican. The cop wearing a bulletproof vest while on duty in my tiny mountain town, sure, he's a republican. I guess that's the masculinity the right talks about. The appearance of masculinity. Not ACTUAL, lived, legit masculinity.
by DocTomoe | 2025-10-18 22:35:06+00:00
Why buy a new car? Less TÜV trouble, less mechanical problems, and as stupid as it sounds: I work in an environment in which the age of the car is a factor in determining seriousness as a business partner.

But even if these were not factors: I'd rather no buy an used EV car, because I'd rather not have a vehicle that has its battery die immediately after me buying it with no manufacturer guarantee. An ICE vehicle doesn't do that after three years - I just fill up the gas tank, and off I go.
by jonahbenton | 2025-10-18 22:36:18+00:00
The answer is probably a high level LLM supported agentic spec driven development workflow. A low level version of this can kind of be accomplished interactively with the cloud specific MCPs- noting that each major infra component has its own MCP exposing the complete API surface of that component. The prompts that could drive component interrogation (to get current state, which would no longer live in a TF state file in S3) and then would drive updates and changes would themselves need to be generated, hence the higher level agentic function. Driving the agentic prompt gen would be a spec driven workflow. You would maintain the natural language spec and would conversationally arrive at spec updates that would lead to proposed infra changes for approval.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-18 22:36:29+00:00
> can even be formed from (and treated similarly to) lambdas

They are also used to create lambdas (even the shorthand stabby-lambda syntax desugars to a call to Kernel#lambda with a block.)

> Ruby does separately have callcc for more precise control over stack unwinding, although it’s a little known feature.

callcc is included in CRuby but has been sidelined from Ruby as a language separate from CRuby as an implementation for a while, with Fibers understood to cover the most important use cases for callcc.
by drweevil | 2025-10-18 22:36:30+00:00
>How do we share life without enriching billionaires?

Indeed, How can we live life without enriching billionaires? You can’t even get sick without doing so. And that is the problem with this late stage capitalism. Every aspect of our lives is subject to exploitation, and it has become difficult to opt out. As a result, the share of our total wealth owned by the richest keeps growing. (https://inequality.org/article/billionaire-wealth-concentrat...)