MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andy99 | 2025-10-30 00:21:45+00:00
I agree that next word prediction, while technically correct, doesn’t capture the full nature of what LLMs are optimized for. And the article gets it wrong. In fact they’re optimized for sycophancy and human preference, to produce plausible feel good slop that looks good and makes you read it uncritically, the high fructose corn syrup of reading.

So things like brainstorming or summarization actually give horrible results optimized to make you feel smart and not to help you learn or critically appraise anything.

OTOH, for most actual facts, I think LLMs are pretty good and continue to get better (as long as you’re asking direct questions about a real thing).

So yeah they’re not just next word predictors, even if that describes how they work; they’re something much more insidious that has been optimized by world experts to be more convincing than you, whether right or wrong. If your boss is citing LLMs you’ve already lost, just move on.
by tmtvl | 2025-10-30 00:21:46+00:00
There are soundtracks I listen to outside of their games: Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Chrono Trigger, Shadowgate,... but Minecraft would be way near the end of the list. The music is too generic to be worth the attention, yet too present to work as ambiance. It kinda reminds me of Silent Hill's soundtrack.
by Mistletoe | 2025-10-30 00:22:26+00:00
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Adults With Alcohol Use Disorder

Results

Forty-eight participants (34 [71%] female; mean [SD] age, 39.9 [10.6] years) were randomized. Low-dose semaglutide reduced the amount of alcohol consumed during a posttreatment laboratory self-administration task, with evidence of medium to large effect sizes for grams of alcohol consumed (β, −0.48; 95% CI, −0.85 to −0.11; P = .01) and peak breath alcohol concentration (β, −0.46; 95% CI, −0.87 to −0.06; P = .03). Semaglutide treatment did not affect average drinks per calendar day or number of drinking days, but significantly reduced drinks per drinking day (β, −0.41; 95% CI, −0.73 to −0.09; P = .04) and weekly alcohol craving (β, −0.39; 95% CI, −0.73 to −0.06; P = .01), also predicting greater reductions in heavy drinking over time relative to placebo (β, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.71 to 0.99; P = .04). A significant treatment-by-time interaction indicated that semaglutide treatment predicted greater relative reductions in cigarettes per day in a subsample of individuals with current cigarette use (β, −0.10; 95% CI, −0.16 to −0.03; P = .005).
by nostrebored | 2025-10-30 00:22:48+00:00
In almost 100% of cases I've seen this, people are convinced that they are going to go for a multi-cloud situation and using any value added service is "lock-in". The amount of times I've seen the migration scenario play out favorably for people has been absolutely ZERO.

Meanwhile, I've seen huge companies successfully complete cloud->cloud migrations in less than a year, as long as they use the value added services of the other cloud.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-30 00:23:17+00:00
AI is never right.

It’s also never wrong.

LLMs bullshit us, in the truest sense: there’s no distinction between right and wrong, no investment in being correct, no remorse or embarrassment whatsoever when wrong.

They don’t really deserve to be called “right” when they spit out words that happen to be. They aren’t “wrong” when they spit out words that happen to be. They don’t care so we shouldn’t project these higher notions onto them.

It’s worthless empty air either way. Prose with the value bargained down to the average of all prose.
by imoverclocked | 2025-10-30 00:23:32+00:00
Anecdata: I have a plot of land in the Santa Cruz Mountains and half of it has redwood coverage and the other half is sparsely covered by much smaller species. On hot days I can go to the redwood half and get an easy 10F temperature drop.

Shade is part of the equation and so is retaining water. Once I was introduced to the idea of check dams and their role in water conservation, I started noticing how the redwoods often build their own on hilly terrain.

The landscape in a forest can be quite complex and rich.
by rayiner | 2025-10-30 00:23:36+00:00
As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%. Those are all the industries in green. These are small differences in a study that’s not well designed to begin with.

The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.
by n8cpdx | 2025-10-30 00:24:02+00:00
Be on the look out, I had really bad semaglutide side effects and had to stop. Thought microdosing would help, but the side effects just ramped up more slowly, culminating in what I assume was gastroparesis (my food just stopped digesting for over a day and I couldn’t eat despite being hungry and depleted, not to speak of the rest of the digestive process).

I also had drastically degraded (increased) resting heart rate, (decreased) heart rate variability, and exercise intolerance - a normal easy run started to make it feel like my heart would explode and gave me palpitations. Off it, I can run a 5K and beyond no problem, if my knees cooperate.

Food noise came into the picture much worse than baseline after I stopped, although it did eventually come down and I’ve been able to start losing weight again after a few months off. Berberine seems to help, at the expense of giving me nausea like semaglutide, but no other side effects.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-10-30 00:24:45+00:00
Regarding your Global Forest Watch source I recommend to look below the tagline. The numbers that you picked have very specific meaning and the same page says that most of the loss (ca.75%) was due to wildfires and it grew more forest than it was lost due to logging. When including the loss for wildfires, the total balance is negligibly negative.

Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River and won’t export it.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-30 00:24:52+00:00
This comment is pithy, but I reject the sentiment.

In 2025, the overall developer experience is much better in (1) Rust compared to C++, and (2) Java/DotNet(C#) compared to Python.

I'm talking about type systems/memory safety, IDEs (incl. debuggers & compilers), package management, etc.

Recently, I came back to Python from Java (for a job). Once you take the drug of a virtual machine (Java/DotNet), it is hard to go back to native binaries.

Last, for anyone unfamiliar with this quote, the original is from Winston Churchill:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-30 00:25:52+00:00
"They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit."

1) Nope, they are focused on taking advantage of customer lock-in to raise prices, while reducing operating expenses to increase cash flows. There may be some initial reinvestment to increase surplus of its users, before raising prices substantially. 2) "recoup the cost of investment+ profit"? Yeah lets see if that pans out. The acquisition price is assumed to be under a going-concern basis in perpetuity, if they muck things up with the choices they make the acquisitions have a limited life to increase and capture those cash flows to deliver a positive NPV investment. The demand for the firms products are not perfectly inelastic w.r.t to price.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-30 00:26:54+00:00
I grew up in a structural and civil engineering family. My issue is that there is no path to "professional engineer" or "architect" in software, which as a Hammurabi old, makes me suspect of the entire profession. I am involved in software dev, and I would never call it engineering. This might be niche semantics, and yet it feels very important to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
by strcat | 2025-10-30 00:27:55+00:00
Eylenburg's site is focused on privacy and security for the comparisons. GrapheneOS is the only privacy and security hardened OS included in the Android-based OS comparison. None of the other operating systems listed in that comparison keep up with Android privacy/security patches or provide significant OS level privacy or security improvements. Many GrapheneOS features aren't listed by the table or are grouped in huge generic categories such as "Hardened system components". An example of a major privacy feature not listed by the table is closing the leaks in Android's standard VPN lockdown mode. GrapheneOS fixes all 5 of the known outbound leaks in VPN lockdown mode, CalyxOS partially fixes 1 of them and the others don't touch this since that's not their focus. It's a privacy and security focused site comparing an OS focused on improving those in the OS layer to ones which mostly aren't.

Operating systems lagging far behind on privacy and security patches are definitely quite bad when it comes to security. For example, the official releases of /e/ for the Pixel 7 are still based on Android 13 and do not include any of the Pixel kernel, driver of firmware patches released from October 2023 and later. Eylenburg's table doesn't put much emphasis on this since it's contained within a couple rows which do not adequately communicate how delayed the updates are and how much that matters.

In addition to the official Android and OEM privacy/security patches, there are also major privacy and security improvements in each major Android release. Android also doesn't backport most Moderate and Low severity patches which are no longer given CVE assignments. Most privacy patches are considered Moderate or Low severity if at all. Many privacy improvements also aren't considered to be bug fixes since they're improvements to the intended design of the system. Only bug fixes considered to have a High or Critical severity security impact are backported. The comparison table could cover a bunch of standard Android privacy/security improvements to emphasize the importance of keeping up with the only actual LTS branch.
by pton_xd | 2025-10-30 00:28:44+00:00
Anecdotally I've experienced something similar.

After I started committing, really committing to consistently working out, a lot of other things fell into place more or less automatically. I stopped drinking, started eating very cleanly (I became ravenously hungry; junk food and sweets aren't appealing anymore), and stopped spending as much time on gaming. I know your broader point is about leaning into discomfort, but specifically leaning into exercise seems to bring extra benefits. Exercise is medicine, as they say.
by geocrasher | 2025-10-30 00:28:47+00:00
LLM's follow the old adage of "Garbage In, Garbage Out". LLM's work great for things that are well documented and understood.

If you use LLM's to understand things that are poorly understood in general, you're going to get poor information because the source was poor. Garbage in, Garbage out.

They are also terrible at understanding context unless you specify everything quite explicitly. In the tech support world, we get people arguing about a recommended course of action because ChatGPT said it should be something else. And it should, in the context for which the answer was originally given. But in proprietary systems that are largely undocumented (publicly) they fall apart fast.
by strcat | 2025-10-30 00:28:49+00:00
Eylenburg's site has comparisons between a bunch of different types of software and services with a significant focus on privacy and security rather than aesthetic customization features, etc.

For the Android comparison, GrapheneOS is the only privacy and security hardened OS included in the comparison. DivestOS used to be included before it was discontinued. An OS not including Google Mobile Services and branding itself as private based on that is a much different thing than a privacy and security hardened OS. Which other Android-based hardened OS could be included in the comparison?

None of the operating systems listed in the comparison include app accessible root access. Giving unconstrained root access to a huge portion of the OS including the application layer including a GUI application for managing firewall rules is not a well secured to implementing it. Managing firewall rules is entirely possible to implement while following the principle of least privilege and not substantially reducing OS security. In fact, Android has standard support for it and all of the operating systems included in his comparison rely on it if you want to do fine-grained traffic filtering.

RethinkDNS is a good example of an app providing support for local filtering via the VPN service app feature without losing the ability to use a VPN. RethinkDNS supports using a WireGuard VPN or even multiple chained WireGuard VPNs while doing local filtering of both DNS and arbitrary connections. It can filter connections based on the results of filtered DNS resolution. That's the approach that's used by Android so that's inherited by every OS in the comparison.

GrapheneOS is the only OS that's listed fixing all of the leaks for standard VPN lockdown feature which is needed to prevent leaks for firewall apps including RethinkDNS based on the VPN service app feature. That's not listed by the table, although it could be and it would make sense for someone to file an issue proposing listing it. Many GrapheneOS privacy and features are not listed by Eylenburg's comparison and a lot of what's listed are under huge categories such as "Hardened system components".
by pms | 2025-10-30 00:29:08+00:00
I don't think it's about the US in its entirety, nor ads, but Republicans and Elon Musk have become very skilled at exerting political influence in the US [1] and Europe [2] through social media in ways the public isn't really aware of:

[1] https://www.techpolicy.press/x-polls-skew-political-realitie...

[2] https://zenodo.org/records/14880275
by fHr | 2025-10-30 00:29:21+00:00
can't believe it's 2025 and some still need to go to some place to vote. I can vote since I can remember(at least 20 years) by mail for anything, we also vote multiple times a year(4-6 times), we just get 1 Month before the things to vote by mail and then mail in back votes. Hope we can soon vote online to get rid of the paper overhead.
by II2II | 2025-10-30 00:29:21+00:00
I live in Canada, which is similar to the US in this regard, and I can't believe how enslaved we are to the private automobile.

If you want the freedom to move across vast amounts of open nature, then yeah the private automobile is a good approximation for freedom of mobility. But designing urban areas that necessitate the use of a private vehicle (or even mass transit) for such essentials as groceries or education is enslavement. I don't buy the density argument either. Places that historically had the density to support alternative modes of transportation, densities that are lower than they are today, are only marginally accessible to alternative forms of transportation today. Then there is modern development, where the density is decreased due to infrastructure requirements.
by spacechild1 | 2025-10-30 00:29:38+00:00
Except they regularly make up quotes and sources. Once ChatGPT gave me a "quote" from the Qt6 docs to support a particular claim; however, I was sceptical and looked at the link. ChatGPT not only made up the quote, it actually said the opposite of the linked docs. Not to mention that sometimes the links themselves are just hallucinations.
by ineedasername | 2025-10-30 00:29:53+00:00
“I am skeptical of the idea that this method of intentionally leaning into discomfort only works for some minuscule abnormal subset of people that are just wired differently”

That may be the aspect of this line of thinking that’s not clear then: it doesn’t work for anyone. At least, in so far as the free will is illusory, it is a hallucination that such people have that they made such decisions, and stuck to them. It’s the demon hand syndrome, the person hallucinating a rationale for its motion.
by hunter2_ | 2025-10-30 00:30:04+00:00
Interesting. To be fair, the same could be said about much of the human activity there (at least as many armchair electricians than licensed ones, who do know a lot, but not everything). Although I suspect the 5% of bad advice is quite different... probably code-compliant but non-functional for the LLM, and functional but not code-compliant for the unlicensed humans.
by wfurney | 2025-10-30 00:31:24+00:00
Interesting you say that, I had an instinctual reaction in that vein as well. I chalked it up to bias since I couldn’t think of any concrete examples. Something about the webpage being so nice made me think they’ve spent a lot of time on it (relative to their product?) Admittedly I’m nowhere close to even trying to understand their paper, but I’m interested in seeing what others think about it
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-30 00:31:26+00:00
> Yes, but when you compare treatments A vs B for trial 1, and then B vs C for trial 2, and then C, vs D for trail 3, you might not get the same results as comparing A vs D, especially when there may have been other changes in between the three trials (different ages, lifestyles etc).

That's not what happens.

Is this just a hypothetical?

Everything will be compared to one standard of care, or perhaps two which will have been compared to each other. If a new treatment is much better, then it will become standard of care.

Trials cost a lot of money, so they are conducted rationally.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-30 00:31:33+00:00
First of all, you can only verify the informations correctness if you know fairly much about the topic. Did you know that Sweden lost the battle of Pultava, because syfilis was affecting Charles XII’s brain? If you don’t believe me, I’m pretty sure I can gaslight some model or another to agree with me. That you cannot do with a peer-reviewed journal and even less so with a respected book on the subject.

Better LLM or even internet forums are more useful you know about the subject. You can use them for sparring, testing theories and just for fun, but you shpuld not use them to learn about a subject. For that you need a book and some practice, maybe a lecture or two won’t hurt. Of course there is nuance to this, but in general they just are not trustworthy and will most likely never be.
by fizlebit | 2025-10-30 00:31:38+00:00
It looks from the public writeup that the thing programming the DNS servers didn't acquire a lease on the server to prevent concurrent access to the same record set. I'd love to see the internal details on that COE.

I think when there is an extended outage it exposes the shortcuts. If you have 100 systems, and one or two can't start fast from zero, and they're required to get back to running smoothly, well you're going to have a longer outage. How would you deal with that, you'd uniformly across your teams subject them to start from zero testing. I suspect though that many teams are staring down a scaling bottleneck, or at least were for much of Amazon's life and so scaling issues (how do we handle 10x usage growth in the next year and half, which are the soft spots that will break) trump cold start testing. Then you get a cold start event with that last one being 5 years ago and 1 or 2 out of your 100 teams falls over and it takes multiple hours all hands on deck to get it to start.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-30 00:31:41+00:00
But there is a constitutional right to equal protection under the law. So while a state can say "everybody can incorporate" or "nobody can incorporate" without scrutiny, there are some pretty hash restrictions on rules that say some people can incorporate and others can't, especially if those restrictions look like they are written to be retaliatory against someone who pissed off the government.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-30 00:31:56+00:00
Thanks for the well thought response friend :)

You made some really good points. But here is my follow up: With /etc/hosts, there is no need to complicate things, for example:

10.0.0.1 sql.app.local storage.local lb.corp.net

This line could be present on every host on every network, everywhere. The only thing that should matter in my opinion is that the name portion needs to be very specific. Even if you have NAT, SNAT, etc..., /etc/hosts is only relevant to the host attempting to resolve a name, it already knows what name to use.

So long as you have one big-and-flat /etc/hosts everywhere, you just have to make sure that whenever you change an IP for a service, the global /etc/hosts reflects that change. and of course the whole devops tests, reviews,etc... ensure you don't screw that up.

Back in the day, this was a really bad idea because the problem of managing /etc/hosts at scale wasn't solved. But it is just a configuration file for which IaC is best-suited.

DNS on the other hand is a complex system that has hierarchies, zones, different record types, aliases, TTLs, caches, and more. in a closed private network, is DNS really worth it when you have already invested in IaC?
by strcat | 2025-10-30 00:31:59+00:00
APEX modules are open source components of AOSP. See https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/modules/. Those modules include a lot of other AOSP code beyond what's directly in packages/modules too.

Google began shipping Google builds of the APEX modules via the Play Store to work around non-Pixel devices not shipping the latest monthly, quarterly and yearly OS releases. For Google Mobile Services devices, many of the APEX modules are required to be the official Google builds from the Play Store. The changes to APEX modules are released as part of the quarterly and yearly AOSP releases.