MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by altruios | 2025-10-27 20:29:07+00:00
> As the sequence as a whole gets larger, the run length needed to end it also gets longer, and thus the probability gets smaller. The result should be something like a geometric sequence with a finite sum.

This is true.

But it would still halt. Infinity is weird like that. To be clear, I mean the sequence of coin flips where the total value of heads/tails is 2:1.

The probability of having a 2:1 ratio of heads/tails - at some point - in an infinite sequence of fair flips is 1, is it not?

The anti-hydra may have a bias, and only if that bias is against the halt condition do we have a case where we can conclude that the anti-hydra does not halt.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-27 20:29:11+00:00
You just have to wrap your mind around jq. It's a) functional, b) has pervasive generators and backtracking. So when you write `.a[].b`, which is a lot like `(.a | .[] | .b)` what you get is three generators strung together in an `and_then` fashion: `.a`, then `.[]`, and then `.b`. And here `.a` generates exactly one value, as does `.b`, but `.[]` generates as many values as are in the value produced by `.a`. And obviously `.b` won't run at all if `.a` has no values, and `.b` will run for _each_ value of `.a[]`. Once you begin to see the generators and the backtracking then everything begins to make sense.
by thom | 2025-10-27 20:29:44+00:00
Give me this, but with a very efficient, opinionated path to put models into production. Give me accessible PM and customer friendly documentation about features and model choices at every stage. Make it reusable and easy to modify. Make it robust and scalable at inference time, with metrics and dashboards tracking performance over time. This seems like optimising the bit that's already fun, but I see a lot of value in hand-holding a department through all the stodgy boring bits and getting high quality analysis repeatably into customer hands.
by StickTIGLiIon4 | 2025-10-27 20:29:50+00:00
Yeah, fair enough. Two car batteries in series is even better. Not easy on the batteries, but it will get the jeep out of the bush.

You can also make your own stick electrodes from coathanger wire tightly wrapped in paper.

I couldn't tell you how many pairs of sunglasses you should parallel to protect yourself...

This rig, on the other hand, is something you could pack into just about any plant and fix something with without raising any eyebrows. If you have $5,000 to spend, that is. Super handy for small jobs in hard to access places.
by emtel | 2025-10-27 20:29:56+00:00
The best current lower bound for BB(6) is 2↑↑2↑↑2↑↑9 (google "Knuth Up Arrow" if this makes no sense), a number so inconceivably large it gives me the willies.

In particular, this means that in going from BB(5) to BB(6), you have already crossed the line where the actual busy beaver TM can no longer be simulated step by step in the lifetime of our universe (or a googol lifetimes of our universe for that matter).

It really is mind bending how fast this function grows.
by tsoukase | 2025-10-27 20:30:28+00:00
My takes as a neuroscientist:

1) defining intelligence is very difficult, almost impossible. Much more the artificial one

2) there are many types of human intelligence. Verbal is one of them and the closest to comparing with LLMs

3) machines (not only LLMs but all, like robots) excel where humans are bad and vice versa due to their different background, without exception. Comparing the two is totally meaningless and unfair for both. Let's have both complement the other.

4) AGI remains a valid target but we are still very far from it, like in other ones, as control the DNA and treat arbitrary genetic diseases, solve the earth resource problem and harness other planets, create a near perfect sociopolitical system with no inequality. Another Singularity is added in the list

5) I am impressed by how far a PC cluster has come up through "shuffling tokens" but on the other side I am pessimistic of how further it can reach having finate input/training data.
by jdxcode | 2025-10-27 20:30:33+00:00
that's fair. The DX of hk is a much harder problem since it will always require a decent amount of customization to fit into a project. I will be improving this though.

I'd probably say hk is the most challenging pre-commit manager to setup compared to its peers. That said, it's also the only one that can run hooks in parallel safely and deal with partially staged files where the others don't bother with these problems.

At least right now hk is good for folks that want the fastest and don't mind a bit of effort. Hopefully I can improve that and make it the best all-around.
by lawn | 2025-10-27 20:30:36+00:00
The Tesla dilemma:

Fire Musk and Tesla gets valued for what they are, and stock will plummit.

Keep Musk and continue the downward trajectory where inevitably reality will catch up with the stock and it will plummit.

Short-term there's and argument for keeping Musk but long-term getting rid of him is likely better.

But there doesn't seem to be a way to avoid massive pain mid-term either way.
by filleduchaos | 2025-10-27 20:30:38+00:00
I fail to see how that's particularly relevant, considering that this discussion started with the implication that ECS specifically is a neat fad that Bevy users will eventually get bored of.

And again, I am not sure what exactly people are expecting of a game engine that started development in 2019. Development of Tiny Glade itself started less than three years after Bevy's first commit, which was an obvious factor in Pounce Light building a custom renderer.
by stephendause | 2025-10-27 20:30:49+00:00
This is total speculation, but my guess is that human reviewers of AI-written text (whether code or natural language) are more likely to think that the text with emoji check marks, or dart-targets, or whatever, are correct. (My understanding is that many of these models are fine-tuned using humans who manually review their outputs.) In other words, LLMs were inadvertently trained to seem correct, and a little message that says "Boom! Task complete! How else may I help?" subconsciously leads you to think it's correct.
by burkaman | 2025-10-27 20:31:32+00:00
That would be much worse for passengers who can normally just sleep through the whole thing, it would take much longer to do the transfer, you'd need a larger and more complex ferry with bathrooms, seating, luggage storage, and more staff to deal with the guests, you'd need to deal with scheduling issues (what if you get to the other side and the train isn't there yet?).

I have taken this train and it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am, get them and all their stuff out and onto the ferry, and then do it all in reverse on the other side. It would add at least an hour to the trip if not more.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-27 20:31:52+00:00
>Interest rates only go down to stimulate growth

The Fed targets price stability and employment, not growth.

Of course that is largely correlated with stimulating growth as a derivative of that, but certainly not "only" to stimulate growth. For example, the current cutting cycle has far more to do with inflation that it does growth. The Fed's primary concern currently is growth accelerating into more inflation.

There are other reasons for cutting as well. For example, funding stress. Repo funding stress caused an interest rate pivot not too long ago (and repo funding stress is rising once again, which will be a factor in the current rate decisions.)
by pasteldream | 2025-10-27 20:32:36+00:00
> people are far kinder than you may think

Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People are harsh, and how much grace they give you has more to do with who you are than what you say.

That aside, the worst problem with LLM-generated text isn’t that it’s less human, it’s that (by default) it’s full of filler, including excessive repetition and contrived analogies.
by michaelmarkell | 2025-10-27 20:33:09+00:00
Not really. Take for example:

item, date, price

abc, 01/01/2023, $30

cde, 02/01/2023, $40

... 100k rows ...

subtotal. $1000

def, 03/01,2023, $20

"Hey Claude, what's the total from this file? > grep for headers > "Ah, I see column 3 is the price value" > SUM(C2:C) -> $2020 > "Great! I found your total!"

If you can find me an example of tech that can solve this at scale on large, diverse Excel formats, then I'll concede, but I haven't found something actually trustworthy for important data sets
by jonp888 | 2025-10-27 20:33:13+00:00
It was trains from Hamburg to Copenhagen used to run on the Fehmarn Ferry until the line was shut for reconstruction, they now run via Padborg.

The Snalltaget sleeper train from Berlin to Malmo used to run on the ferry from Sassnitz to Trelleborg avoiding Denmark altogether, that stopped because the ferries don't run on that route any more, and the train also runs via Padborg.
by foxfired | 2025-10-27 20:33:16+00:00
Earlier this year, I used AI to help me improve some of my writing on my blog. It just has a better way of phrasing ideas than me. But when I came back to read those same blog posts a couple months later, you know after I've encountered a lot more blog posts that I didn't know were AI generated at the time, I saw the pattern. It sounds like the exact same author, +- some degree of obligatory humor, writing all over the web with the same voice.

I've found a better approach to using AI for writing. First, if I don't bother writing it, why should you bother reading it? LLMs can be great soundboards. Treat them as teachers, not assistants. Your teacher is not gonna write your essay for you, but he will teach you how to write, and spot the parts that need clarification. I will share my process in the coming days, hopefully it will get some traction.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-10-27 20:33:37+00:00
Having wrangled many spreadsheets personally, and worked with CFOs who use them to run small-ish businesses, and all the way up to one of top 3 brokerage houses world-wide using them to model complex fixed income instruments... this is a disaster waiting to happen.

Spreadsheet UI is already a nightmare. The formula editing and relationship visioning is not there at all. Mistakes are rampant in spreadsheets, even my own carefully curated ones.

Claude is not going to improve this. It is going to make it far, far worse with subtle and not so subtle hallucinations happening left and right.

The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This works pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan fiction or emulating someone's voice.

It is not a basis for getting correct spreadsheets that show what you want to show. I don't want my spreadsheet correctness to start from a random seed. I want it to spring from first principles.
by helenapankov | 2025-10-27 20:34:35+00:00
Note: I am the core author, would be grateful for feedback and happy to answer questions. The landing page at the main URL has a detailed motivation for the project.

It's not something currently backed broadly, but a flexible, quick-feedback way to navigate the landscape of AI infrastructure demands—an experiment from me and early internal supporters at Google DeepMind.

Current frameworks solidified around abstractions that are growing increasingly inadequate for the new demands of multimodal, streaming, stateful, long-running applications. Action Engine aims to be a common building block for these new kinds of applications, without imposing rigid abstractions or heavy dependencies, adapting to applications.
by duxup | 2025-10-27 20:34:36+00:00
I worked at a big corp for a long time.

Then I moved to a small company.

I'm convinced that you can't ever get much done outside high trust environments, you just can't. The bureaucracy eventually takes over, managers generally wall things off, keep things secret, erode trust, new people can't even navigate the bureaucracy are so far from effecting change, new ideas just DOA.

Not to say big companies or big projects can't make money / be well adopted, but you want to really do change, try new things sometime this century? ... need high trust.
by kingnothing | 2025-10-27 20:35:13+00:00
Nanit is horrible spyware. Do not buy their products.

If you have a router that lets you inspect data flowing out, you'll be astonished at what your little Nanit cam exfiltrates from your home network. Even if you don't pay for their subscription service, they still attempt to exfil all of the video footage caught on your camera to their servers. You can block it and it will still work, but you shouldn't have to do that in the first place if you don't pay for their cloud service.

Stay away if you value your privacy.
by inejge | 2025-10-27 20:35:13+00:00
> The $50 million punishment feels so insubstantial

It's potentially quite a bit more. TFA mentions another two penalties: "three times the total benefits that have been obtained and are reasonably attributable" (~2.5 million customers times $40+ for the difference in subscrptions times three is $300 million), or "30 per cent of the corporation’s adjusted turnover during the breach turnover period" if the preceding can't be reasonably calculated (I'm not going to dig through Microsoft's financial statements, but it's probably substantial.) The greatest of three is taken.

If you still think it's pocket change, the point of fines is not to bankrupt the company, but to lead them to less shitty behavior by disincentivizing the alternative. It takes a persistent effort and time.
by manquer | 2025-10-27 20:35:38+00:00
I should have been clearer - profit maximization above all else as long it is mostly legal. Neither profit or profit maximization at all cost is nature of everything .

There are many other entity types from unions[1], cooperatives , public sector companies , quasi government entities, PBC, non profits that all offer insurance and can occasionally do it well.

We even have some in the US and don’t think it is communism even - like the FDIC or things like social security/ unemployment insurance.

At some level government and taxation itself is nothing but insurance ? We agree to paying taxes to mitigate against variety of risks including foreign invasion or smaller things like getting robbed on the street.

[1] Historically worker collectives or unions self-organized to socialize the risks of both major work ending injuries or death.

Ancient to modern armies operate on because of this insurance the two ingredients that made them not mercenaries - a form of long term insurance benefit (education, pension, land etc) or family members in the event of death and sovereign immunity for their actions.
by phpnode | 2025-10-27 20:35:47+00:00
the issue with JSONPath is that it took 17 years for it to become a properly fleshed-out standard. The original idea came from a 2007 blog post [0], which was then extended and implemented subtly differently dozens of times, with the result that almost every JSON Path implementation out there is incompatible with the others.

[0] https://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-27 20:36:00+00:00
Same email here. My plan renewed in May. Absolutely no advertising that I could keep my "classic" plan. It seemed like the only choice was $129 or the highway.

I just did the steps described in[0] to convert back to the "Classic" plan. Microsoft says my plan will renew in May for $99, but I'm not getting the $15 of the $30 I was forced into paying in May back. I've never used any of the Copilot "features". I'd rather have my renewal discounted by $15 to $30.

As I said in another comment: We need a US class action. It will only enrich the lawyers but it might serve as some type of deterrent to Microsoft. Maybe. Probably not.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722444
by chucky_z | 2025-10-27 20:36:05+00:00
From my literal conversation I'm having right now, 'try to run one big cluster to capture everything' is our active state. I've brought up federation a bunch of times and it's fallen on deaf ears. :)

We are probably past the size of the entirety of fly.io for reference, and maintenance is very painful. It works because we are doing really strange things with Consul (batch txn cross-cluster updates of static entries) on really, really big servers (4gbps+ filesystems, 1tb memory, 100s of big and fast cores, etc).
by tonymet | 2025-10-27 20:36:26+00:00
I hope this improves rigor and common sense around winter driving in the USA. In Eastern Europe, drivers care more about tires, angility and driver skill. In the USA , drivers rely on large 4wd vehicles with high clearance for snow and ice driving. I’ve seen way too many issues with large clumsy vehicles losing control due to poor tires .

I hope Waymo shares more solutions for winter driving to debunk a lot of the marketing for winter activity driving in the USA
by kaspermarstal | 2025-10-27 20:37:05+00:00
So cool, I hope they pull it off. So many people use Excel. Although, I always thought the power of AI in Excel would come from the ability to use AI _as_ a formula. For example, =PROMPT("Classify user feedback as positive, neutral or negative", A1). This would enable normal people (non-programmers) to fire off thousands of prompts at once and automate workflows like programmers do (disclaimer: I am the author of Cellm that does exactly this). Combined with Excel's built-in functions for deterministic work, Claude could really kill the whole copy-pasting data in and out of chat windows for bulk-processing data.
by btown | 2025-10-27 20:37:08+00:00
From the signup form mentioning Private Equity / Venture Capital, Hedge Fund, Investment Banking... this seems squarely aimed at financial modeling. Which is really, really cool.

I've worked alongside sell-side investment bankers in a prior startup, and so much of the work is in taking a messy set of statements from a company, understanding the underlying assumptions, and building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding, 3-statement models that not only adhere to standard conventions (perhaps best introed by https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/build-integrated-3-... ) but also are highly customized for different assumptions that can range from seasonality to sensitivity to creative deal structures.

It is quite common for people to pull many, many all-nighters to try to tweak these models in response to a senior banker or a client having an idea! And one might argue there are way too many similar-looking numbers to keep a human banker from "hallucinating," much less an LLM.

But fundamentally, a 3-statement model and all its build-sheets are a dependency graph with loosely connected human-readable labels, and that means you can write tools that let an LLM crawl that dependency graph in a reliable and semantically meaningful way. And that lets you build really cool things, really fast.

I'm of the opinion that giving small companies the ability to present their finances to investors, the same way Fortune 500 companies hire armies of bankers to do, is vital to a healthy economy, and to giving Main Street the best possible chance to succeed and grow. This is a massive step in the right direction.
by RajT88 | 2025-10-27 20:37:24+00:00
Having read what's in the public domain from the hearings, I'm having trouble squaring these two things:

> there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us.

> so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.

Why isn't the first one exactly what you're complaining about in the second statement? Have I missed something?
by rck | 2025-10-27 20:37:32+00:00
Yeah it looks like about 1500 grants:

https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...

But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
by jonahx | 2025-10-27 20:37:52+00:00
> Why would you do this?

Performance and re-use are two possible reasons.

You may have a command sub-routine that is used by multiple higher-level commands, or even called multiple times within by a higher-level command. If the validation lives in the subroutine, that validation will be called multiple times, even when it only needs to be called once.

So you are forced to choose either efficiency or the security of colocating validation, which makes it impossible to call the sub-routine with unvalidated input.
by eric-burel | 2025-10-27 20:37:53+00:00
My understanding is that it can upgrade to an SSE connection so a persistent stream. Also for interprocess communication you usually prefer a persistent connection. All that to reduce communication overheads. The rationale also is that an AI agent may trigger more fine-grained calls than a normal program or a UI, as it needs to collect information to observe the situation and decide next move (lot more get requests than usual for instance).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-27 20:37:56+00:00
> don't think thats true at all...

Its all speculation, so it's not really going to be true or false until it happens (or the economy recovers without a crash).

Listing tech companies who have all pledged into AI certainly isn't reassuring me otherwise, that's for sure

>Tech companies will rise into unfathomably rich while the countries inability to tax foreign revenues will lead to the collapse of the nationstate.

So, we're going to crash but the tech companies will be okay for a little longer? Sure, we can phrase it that way.
by mdasen | 2025-10-27 20:38:03+00:00
Since 2017, Louden County housing prices have gone up 59% according to Zillow. To put that in perspective, NYC is up 24%, LA up 56%, Chicago up 28%, SF up 7%, DC up 10%, Boston up 29%, Atlanta up 48%.

Ashburn, which is where the majority of the data centers are in Louden County, is up 56% so even when you look at a smaller area around the data centers, it doesn't seem to have harmed property values.

Even if you look at mansions on an acre of land a couple houses down from a data center, it looks like they've gone up in value at least as fast the average for both Louden County or Ashburn (https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/44335-Oldetowne-Pl-Ashbur... this place I randomly looked up is up around 70% according to Zillow).

It doesn't look like it's impacted housing prices negatively. That doesn't mean it doesn't impact how some people care about their homes. Some people might prefer to pay higher taxes than look at a data center across the street. But it isn't economically hurting residents. Their property taxes are very low, they have the highest median income in the US, and their property values are going up faster than most.