MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2025-10-15 03:46:01+00:00
Consecutive linked list nodes can occur when you bump allocate them, and in particularly if you have a copying garbage collector which ensures that bump allocation takes place from blank slate heap areas with no gaps.

Idea: what if we implement something that resembles CDR coding, but doesn't compact the cells together (not a space-saving device). The idea as is that when we have two cells A and B such that A->cdr == B, and such that A + 1 == B, then we replace A->cdr with some special constant which says the same thing; indicates that A->cdr is equivalent to A + 1.

Then, I think, we could have a very simple, stable and portable form of the trick in the article:

while (node) { value += node->value; if (node->next == NEXT_IS_CONSECUTIVE) next = node + 1; else next = node->next; node = next; }

The branch predictor can predict that the branch is taken (our bump allocator ensures that is frequently the case), and go straight to next = node + 1. When in the speculatively executed alternative path, the load of node->next completes and is not equal to the magic value, then the predicted path is canceled and we gret node->next.

This doesn't look like something that can be optimized away, because we are not comparing node->next to node + 1; there is no tautology there.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-15 03:47:10+00:00
I intentionally chose not to comment on the politics, and I won’t here either. Please respect that.

My comment only addressed the possible failure to understand the importance, and controversy, of this work and publishing exclusively on social media. Important and controversial things should not be entrusted to social media.

I say this as a former AP photo stringer, who has been in handcuffs, forest fires, and shoot outs in that job. My concern is, genuinely, that socially relevant documentary work needs to be held outside of social media for this exact reason.
by drcxd | 2025-10-15 03:47:25+00:00
Agreed. I also have to check if it has implemented the idea correctly.

If my workflow is;

1. Write documentation so that the problem and even the solution to the problem is well explained. 2. Instruct coding agents to work as the document described. 3. Check its if its implementation is correct, and improve its implementation if necessary.

I feel the experience is not as good as me implementing the solution myself, and it may even take more time.
by eslaught | 2025-10-15 03:47:57+00:00
To me it's interesting that (a) most people die of old age, and (b) the leading cause of death is essentially preventable (heart disease being highly lifestyle related) or else plausibly curable in the future (I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime).

That was very much not the case historically; you can Google numbers yourself but the percentage of childhood deaths prior to modern medicine was truly shocking.

It also seems to indicate that, with some thought and care, a meaningful impact (both at individual and societal levels) is possible by altering our lifestyles to be healthier.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-15 03:48:47+00:00
Note to author, don't get ahead of yourself...

This take seems to make some huge assumptions: Google is going to take direct interest in content creation; that fake content untethered from any reality will interest viewers; that fake content can reliably approximate a very large world of distributed points of view; that training data has a long shelf life; that developing idea and writing content is not relevant to content creation; that audiences won't care if they never see those like themselves in content ever again; that past training data can account for news; and many more related contingencies.

Where AI is really valuable to content creation is reducing costs of production for a large diffuse network of creators, not eliminating the creators.

AI has no ideas, If what it's going to do is soak up existing work of actual people and regurgitate or recontextualize others work at drastically lower costs of production, eclipsing that real work, then it is going to be regulated out of the picture, either by law, or due to complete poisoning of its sources.

I suspect that Google will be driven to reduce its percentages or/and subsidize the tools that assist creators, and that ad revenue per view will deflate as content becomes more provisional and narrowly focused to viewers sharply decreasing attention spans. And as costs of production decrease, the share commanded by novel embedded sources of capture will rise, due to necessity of original real-world content for both training and for the substance of programming.

Parallel to these shifts, OG content capture is going to progress approaches and systems for watermarking that ensure the piper gets paid.

The net effect might be an overall shrinking space of truly original, real-world relevant content... To put this another way, the rise of AI will produce a paradoxical return to the times before youtube, and ultimately completely different paradigms for content capture and distribution. Google's first concern should be that its AI business plans will obviate YouTube— and in this light it seems obvious and expected that removing the "you" obviates the tube.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-15 03:48:58+00:00
This seems like a clear selection bias. One of the reasons, and probably the main one, that public schools are awful is because a very small number of highly disruptive kids can completely ruin the education of an entire class of other kids. Public schools generally have no way to get rid of these children and their parents also generally don't care. These are also of course the kids that are going to score abysmally on any sort of standardized score.

By contrast at these schools for military kids, behavioral or academic problems can have direct and serious consequences on the parents and end up having the bump into issues with their command. There's going to be an overall greater degree of focus on discipline in the school, as well as the households, and so on. In many ways the most surprising thing is that the overall difference is only about 10%.

EDIT: As mentioned elsewhere, you also know that the parent(s) in these households are going to have minimum of IQ that's higher than the normal minimum since that's a prerequisite for enlistment. So you're getting a rather overt selection bias there.
by kstenerud | 2025-10-15 03:50:43+00:00
Like everything, it depends on the person. If they're slimy, then of course the straight-talker types will hate them.

But I've worked with a number of great sales people and teams, who actually care about improving customers' lives with our products.

Our collaborations have been great because they're a fountain of insight into how customers view and use our products, which helps us streamline existing products and come up with new and better ones. It becomes a virtuous cycle.

Without them, you're stuck in a "better mousetrap" problem.
by houseworth | 2025-10-15 03:51:18+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been thinking about the actual use-case for sub agents and how they could solve problems I run into doing day-to-day dev. I have 6 use cases but built three of them so far and have some good results testing so far.

When Claude searches my codebase or analyzes a big git diff, my context window fills up with thousands of tokens of crap that the master instance almost never needs. After a couple of these operations, I'm basically starting over because there's no room left for actual work.

I built specialized sub-agents that run in their own contexts and return condensed summaries instead of dumping everything into my main conversation.

house-research: Searches codebases/docs and returns condensed findings with file:line references instead of dumping full file contents into your context. house-git: Analyzes diffs and commits, returns impact summaries grouped by severity instead of raw git output.

house-bash: Runs commands and parses output for key info (pass/fail counts, relevant errors) instead of flooding your context with full logs.

Three I haven't done yet: house-mcp (mcp), house-vision(screenshots), house-data(data queries)

Results: 90-95% token reduction on heavy operations. My master instance stays focused on implementation instead of getting clogged with search results and logs.

What operations eat your context that I should build agents for?

One time install with CC: Clone https://github.com/houseworthe/house-agents. Detect my OS and copy the .claude directory to my current project. Verify all three agent files exist in .claude/agents/ directory. List available sub-agents to confirm they load. Test house-research by finding TODO comments.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-15 03:51:44+00:00
I don't think you're looking at this the right way.

I would say that the training programs illustrate that the military generally treats its workforce as the result of external factors. Someone else decides who will be in the military, and the military has to figure out what to do with them.

Companies usually see things very differently. They feel free to say that they won't train because they want to hire someone who's already trained. If that approach doesn't work well, they can put even more effort into searching for The Ideal Employee and taking advantage of the fact that, if you ignore the time you spent searching for him, his time-to-become-productive is so low.
by drnick1 | 2025-10-15 03:52:22+00:00
For people without a viable alternative such as transferring their funds to a bank that does not require Google/Apple certified devices, this seems to be the way. The second phone does not even need to have a SIM card in it, except perhaps during set up. That phone does not leave home and is ideally be powered off with its battery removed when not in use. Everything else can be done on a free device, ideally using FOSS apps. Ideally again, this means no Facebook, no Whatsapp, no IoT crapware.

Luckily, here in the U.S. this is still possible. I run Graphene on a Pixel without Play Store compatibility layer and everything just works. Most of my apps come from F-Droid, with the notable exception of Whatsapp, for which a standalone APK is available. Unfortunately, it is proving difficult to get rid of Whatsapp entirely because of friends and family.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-15 03:53:25+00:00
The military training programs have exactly one goal and that is to train. They have the ability to set their standards and enforce them ruthlessly. Public schools have many goals besides education, have to keep their students (and more importantly the parents of those students) happy, and have no ability to select their students and very little ability to fail them out and remove them, and can be sued for anything at any time. It's pretty clear why military training is superior.

As for software, I have never heard the military or government accused of being good at building it, so I don't really see your point there.
by inemesitaffia | 2025-10-15 03:57:19+00:00
>wasting NASA funding to do it.

You'll note SpaceX has spent more than NASA on this vehicle.

I'm sure they can have their money back if they want. (Oh no they can't. SpaceX has hit all the milestones and got milestone payments)

>The refueling requirement is a consequence of the design

Seems you don't know this is true for Blue Origins Blue Moon too. The other moon lander

>SLS can reach the moon from the earth

Wrong wrong wrong. TLI

>Starship can't reach the moon on a signel flight

Starship can reach anywhere SLS can if you treat it like SLS

>$29 billion

SpaceX got about $2 billion or so. When do they get the remaining $27 billion?

>still hasn't achieved orbit

This is nonsense. SpaceX has hit orbital velocity.

>What's obvious to me, and maybe not everyone here, is the design of Starship is optimized for LEO, not deep space missions.

If you look well, you'll see the vehicle can be configured for different missions.

I don't know how many times I'll have to tell people the NASA contract is for HLS, not Starship. i.e you haven't seen the lunar vehicle launch once.

>more expensive than SLS

Can't happen either operationally or lifetimewise
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-10-15 03:58:21+00:00
I wish I had known about this site when I was writing [1]. If we use warranties as our expected lifecycle, this lets me drop down from $5 per TB-year of storage down to almost $2 per TB-year. What immense savings compared to the cloud!

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-...
by ecshafer | 2025-10-15 03:58:58+00:00
In about 2004, height of the Florida housing bubble. I stayed with my cousins in a housing development and I watched over the course of a week as this construction company built an entire street of homes. I was wildly impressed because I never see that in the north. They basically had the the foundations poured and then each lot like an assembly line each stage of the crew working. The framers working, then the guys putting up walls, then the roofers, then the plumbers. It was impressive. But I think that only works when you are building 1000 homes.
by cwnyth | 2025-10-15 04:00:12+00:00
Well...as the Master says:

The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
by Apes | 2025-10-15 04:00:16+00:00
I don't think there's a silver bullet coming within our lifetimes.

There's no single points of failure: as you get older, everything just starts wearing out and failing.

If you cure heart disease and cancer, then others will just take their place: strokes, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's disease, falls.

And even if you do extend your lifespan, the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
by legitster | 2025-10-15 04:00:37+00:00
I can appreciate your appreciation for desert life, but this is a fairly small piece of land out of a region that has some of the least biomass per acre in the country. This is not going to displace and biodiversity than a truck stop in the same location would.

More to the point, if we can't build a solar plant here then we're never going to build one in this country, let alone the rare earth mines or anything else we would need for a green transition.
by mzl | 2025-10-15 04:01:01+00:00
Very nice project. Do you have some statistics for how long it takes to solve the harder instances for different solvers? One thing to note for that, is that I saw the default parallelism of 4 in the run file. OR-Tools CP-SAT works best if it is given at least 8 threads to work with.

Have you considered using records for some of the data definitions? For example, a record `(row: int, col: int, piece: Piece)` for pre-placed pieces to avoid having .1, .2 and so on in the models. If you are concerned with the size of the data files, one way to handle that is to have the data as a list of tuples that are mapped via a function from a tulle to the record.
by dbeardsl | 2025-10-15 04:02:21+00:00
That’s fair, it’s not ok to pretend desert has no life worth protecting.

However, there is a lot of it, and as far as impacted animals per acre, it’s got to be near the bottom. Thus of all the places to locate big solar projects, huge expanses of low life density flat land with lots have sun seems like it would minimize the harm.
by alex1138 | 2025-10-15 04:03:34+00:00
Usual endless whinging that goes on in HN comments

I'm an Israel supporter but I think the way these companies just hand waive is endlessly infuriating. Whether it's this or Youtube removing covid "misinformation" or other things (from actual experts) - hey, we never have to explain anything to you; "violates our community standards" suffices as an explanation (but, god help you if you actually report things that need to be taken down, for very good reason - then, suddenly, it DOESN'T violate ANY of our community standards!)

They should all be in prison, most likely
by smogcutter | 2025-10-15 04:04:49+00:00
Even bending over that far backwards to find a useful example comes up empty.

Those kinds of emails are so uncommon they’re absolutely not worth wasting this level of effort on. And if you’re in a sorry enough situation where that’s not the case, what you really need is the outside context the model doesn’t know. The model doesn’t know your office politics.
by visarga | 2025-10-15 04:05:00+00:00
I don't think "replaced" is a good word here.. augmented and expanded. With AI we are expanding our activities, users expect more, competition forces companies to do more.

But AI can't be held liable for its actions, that is one role. It has no direct access to the context it is working in, so it needs humans as a bridge. In the end AI produce outcomes in the same local context, which is for the user. So from intent to guidance to outcomes they are all user based, costs and risks too.

I find it pessimistic to take that static view on work, as if "that's it, all we needed is invented", and now we are fighting for positions like musical chairs
by bobbiechen | 2025-10-15 04:05:37+00:00
That's interesting - I had seen some news articles reporting that some Chinese pig butchering scammers were encouraging others to target foreigners only, and exclude the mainland Chinese. Like this one: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/chinas-acquiescence-to...

It's reminiscent of stories about Russian malware doing nothing on machines with Cyrillic keyboard layouts.
by Arainach | 2025-10-15 04:07:30+00:00
No software is "easy to inspect". Only a tiny fraction of users will ever even try. When things are inspected and problems are found, you need a way to revoke the malicious bits. You'll never notify everyone, which is one of the roles app stores play.

You trust hardware and software by establishing boundaries. We figured this out long ago with the kernel mode/user mode privilege check and other things. You want apps to be heavily locked down/sandboxed, and you want the OS to enforce it, but every time you do you go up against the principles of open source absolutists like the FSF. "What do you mean my app can't dig into the storage layer and read the raw image files? So what if apps could use that to leak user location data, I need that ability so I can tell if it's a picture of a bird"

For sensitive information - such as financial transactions - the rewards for bad actors are simply too high to trust any device which has been rooted. The banks - who are generally on the hook if something goes wrong, or at least have to pay a lot of lawyers to get off the hook - are not interested in moral arguments, they want a risk-reduced environment or no app for you - as is their right.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-15 04:07:57+00:00
The article addresses selection bias, but it doesn't do justice to just how strong that bias is. The military tests all enlistees, and the cutoff is an IQ of around 92 (https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-il...). If a public school could immediately exclude its dumbest 30%, things would look quite a bit different.
by adastra22 | 2025-10-15 04:08:46+00:00
Nope, I mean it in the first sense. That happened with the GeForce 256 in 1999, and shader registers (the first programmable vector math) were introduced with the GeForce 3 in 2001. Before that 3D graphics accelerators -- the term GPU had not yet been invented -- simply handled rasterization of triangles, and texture look-ups. Transformation & lighting was handled on the CPU.
by al_borland | 2025-10-15 04:09:47+00:00
Nothing says “Human” Resources like automated firings.

I would hope if I had an unexcused absence my boss would be calling to make sure I was alive, and not just wait for the robots to fire me so it’s no longer his problem.

Of course I’m looking at this from a white collar position with 20 years in a company. Maybe for high turnover warehouse positions where a lot of people simply stop showing up, it’s a different story. I can’t see anyone caring about doing a good job when the company cares so little about the humans who work there. It’s quite dystopian.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-15 04:10:30+00:00
Yep, but notice how that article is about Kokang in Myanmar as well.

Cambodia continues to have scam centers targeting Putonghua speakers (including PRC nationals), but there hasn't been a similar crackdown on such activities due to Chinese pressure.

The crackdown in Kokang happened after China flipped to supporting the Tatmadaw against the Northern Alliance [0] and India began peeling historically India-aligned members of the alliance like the KIA and the Arakan Army back into Indian orbit [1].

P.S. Circa 2 years ago, a large portion of Chinese in SF Chinatown became Kokang and Cambodian Chinese. Bamar, Kuki-Zo, and Kachin Myanmarese primarily reside in Daly City, Ingleside/Outer Mission, and Oakland/East Bay.

SF has a lot of Asian and Latiné subcultures and communities - it's kind of insane how underdocumented it is under the guise of "Asian" and "Latino"

[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2025/too-little-too-late-china-steps...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-extends-unp...
by kevinfiol | 2025-10-15 04:10:59+00:00
> I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.

It was almost certainly Trump's intent to overturn the results of the 2020 election. I do not see why else he and his personal lawyers would go through such convoluted efforts to do all of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

Trying to intuit Trump's state of mind is always a funny game that is played when discussing whether or not he lost the 2020 election, but you often end up with two possibilities: 1. Trump is a sane person who is lying about the results of the 2020 election to rile up his base (very plausible) or 2. Trump is a delusional person who willfully ignored the advice of his Vice President and Attorney General (less plausible, but even more highly concerning given this person was voted into office twice).
by drnick1 | 2025-10-15 04:11:03+00:00
I think that supporting Android as a free platform is a sensible choice. Android has benefited from more than a decade of development by Google, Samsung, and others and provides a polished experience and thousands of apps people actually want to use (and many excellent FOSS options too). AOSP is already "free software" and starting from scratch with Linux would make very little sense at this point. The FSF is right to focus on what matters here, which is hardware on which to run free Android.
by Gibbon1 | 2025-10-15 04:11:26+00:00
People whose metabolic reserve is low often die when you stress them.

I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this.

"The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month"

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/49...

Like the Grapes of Wrath where the family starts out for California and the grandparents both die on the way.