MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dfsegoat | 2025-10-30 18:12:25+00:00
To put some numbers to trying to develop a single therapy (where candidates etc. will fail as you try them)

- Plan to sink $180-500M+ just in R&D

- Factor in failures, regulatory, clinical, recruitment, phase 1/2 trials and you arrive very quickly around $1.3-2.1 BILLION USD per therapy approved.

...there is a 90% chance that you will spend that $1B+ - and it will fail completely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00043-x

https://greenfieldchemical.com/2023/08/10/the-staggering-cos...
by cestith | 2025-10-30 18:12:33+00:00
UDP doesn’t back off sending for congestion. How reliable is that?

UDP over the network does not on its own guarantee packet retries or proper delivery order. How reliable is that?

UDP on Linux to localhost or hair-pinned between two public IPs on the same host can result in reordered packets when the kernel is busy with a lot of traffic or the CPU is context switching enough. It happens when a UDP queue is handled by a certain core and gets swapped to another. I’ve had to set up two machines with a cable between them because the ordering is actually more stable than over localhost. A colleague is working on a kernel patch to bypass part of the UDP stack to restore proper ordering, which will probably need to be maintained in-house or at least hidden behind a kernel config knob upstream since this reordering is considered acceptable under the guarantees for UDP. How reliable is that?

So, yeah, you can say UDP is reliable but compared to TCP or QUIC it actually really isn't.
by 8note | 2025-10-30 18:12:35+00:00
> I'm willing to bet that LLMs are also just as good at coming up with the right ffmpeg or imagemagick commands with just a vague notion of what is wanted.

they are. ive only used ffmpeg via llm, and its easy to get the LLM to make the right incantation as part of a multi-step workflow.

my own lack of understanding of video formats is still a problem, but getting ffmeg to do the right thing only takes a vague notion
by nirava | 2025-10-30 18:12:59+00:00
bad take. your perpetual license was swapped under your nose for a freemium thing designed explicitly and specifically to get you to start paying subscription. that's the exact opposite of why I bought this software in the first place.

also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2
by cool_man_bob | 2025-10-30 18:13:16+00:00
Meh, I feel we’re entering an era where only the elite will be able to realistically check authoritarians, and they will just be lesser

Think more of the earlier end of medieval era, where the peasant class was mostly incapable against feudal armies, even in many cases with massive numbers on their side.

There’s an entire surveillance state, eyes everywhere, gait recognition, massive intelligence networks all at a scale unimaginable by kings and dictators of the past.
by spiderice | 2025-10-30 18:13:33+00:00
Pixelmator somewhat fits that (minus the half-assed part). Pixelmator is, at least for now, pay once. And given Apple's size I don't see them trying to squeeze customers for Pixelmator subscriptions. It definitely isn't a full vector program at the level of Illustrator/Affinity. But for a lot of people it probably has powerful enough vector editing.
by rolph | 2025-10-30 18:13:39+00:00
that was the start of it. the offset otic openings result in differential arrival times of the acoustic peaks, thus phase differential.

neurosynaptically, there is no phase, there is frequency shift corresponding to presynaptic intensity, and there is spatio-temporal integration of these signals. temporal integration is where "phase" matters

its all a mix of "digital" all or nothing "gates" and analog frequency shift propagation of the "gate" output.

its all made nebulous by the adaptive, and hysteretic nature of the elements in neural "circuitry"
by adornKey | 2025-10-30 18:14:00+00:00
This subject has bothered me for a long time. My question to guys into acoustics was always: If the cochlea performs some kind of Fourier transform, what are the chances, that it uses sinus waves as a base for the vector-space? - if it did anything like that it could just as good use any slightly different wave-forms as a base for transformation. Stiffness and non-linearity will for sure take care that any ideal rubber model in physics will in reality be different from the perfect sinus.
by kristjansson | 2025-10-30 18:14:05+00:00
It was way too easy for the venv to be the only artifact of the process used to produce it. pip install, hit a bug, install some other dep, another bug, oh this one needs to be downgraded, and so on until it works. Without more effort to memorialize / remember the steps, deleting the venv destroyed the work to create it.

uv, in addition to its raw speed, is very clever to record things in pyproject as the user interacts with it.
by zparky | 2025-10-30 18:14:13+00:00
yeah its pretty funny, i wonder if they prompted the llm to put as many emojis in as possible:

<edit> forgot hn doesnt show emojis, so ill just link to the paragraph: https://github.com/st-tech/ppf-contact-solver?tab=readme-ov-...

8 emojis in 2 sentences, lol
by phil21 | 2025-10-30 18:14:17+00:00
Then we should start selecting strong willed individuals who do not fit into the “normie” path as those we uphold and show to be role models and examples.

Instead we collectively shit on them and force them into the most useless lifestyles ever devised - effectively pushing paper on rigid schedules or they don’t get to eat.

I’ve thought about this one quite a bit. The world has narrowed a whole lot to define acceptable behavior and who is allowed a seat at the table.

Almost all those “strong willed” individuals of the past who actually built things had lifestyles that would have gotten them entirely shunned from society today.

It’s not impossible but even compared to 30 years ago it’s an entirely different world for such folks. The way I “came up” in life would not be possible today due to the gatekeepers of “respectable society”.

Needing drugs to fit into that incredibly narrow and basic framework of a life should be of no surprise to anyone. Only a few of incredible luck and willpower and probably even naivety will survive that filter.

This whole topic is the epitome of “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome” - entirely predictable, and it’s what society seems to want.
by sharkjacobs | 2025-10-30 18:14:48+00:00
> He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally.

This is the quintessential aphantasic experience. I still struggle to believe that other people "see" things in their heads.
by Retric | 2025-10-30 18:15:06+00:00
Round trip efficiency on hydrogen is horrible. Local hydrogen production could make sense because importing fuel into remote off grid communities is extremely expensive.

Rather than building 10x as much solar in the north + battery systems + winter hydrogen storage etc long distance HVDC to cities and the surrounding grid just makes so much more sense. Even better because the state is huge and the population is tiny they can go nearly 100% hydro.

Where batteries could be useful is operating those long distance power lines at nearly 100% 24/7 then load shifting via batteries to match local demand.
by mattmaroon | 2025-10-30 18:15:18+00:00
Eh, the political problems are also oversold. The original mRNA vaccines showed great efficacy and there was no way to know the virus would mutate so rapidly, or that in doing so it would dull the effectiveness, or that transmission rates weren’t significantly reduced by vaccination, or that the effects of the vaccine would diminish relatively rapidly, etc.

It actually was plausible for a time that vaccines could create herd immunity and thus mass vaccination was highly desirable. You’re retconning today’s knowledge onto politicians of five years ago. Knowing what we know now about the vaccines, yeah, it was a bad move, but it was reasonable at the time.
by popcar2 | 2025-10-30 18:15:28+00:00
Uhhuh. I think anyone in the tech field can immediately tell where this is going, and I'm not at all excited for it.

1. They silently make it online only. Currently you need to make an account and be online on activation, so they're already one step closer to getting there.

2. They silently ditch the concept of buying and owning Affinity software, but that's okay because it's ~totally free~!

3. As soon as they lock in enough users from how nice and friendly they are, pull the rug. At some point they'll suddenly start locking features behind the pro subscription.

It's textbook at this point.
by senordevnyc | 2025-10-30 18:15:37+00:00
Spoilers!

I thought it was excellent. And I was disappointed with the ending, but I also don't know that any other ending would have been better. The point of the ending to me is that literally no one on earth knows what would happen beyond that point.

Our very civilization is Schrodinger's box that's a few mins away from being opened.
by downrightmike | 2025-10-30 18:15:50+00:00
Which is even more stupid, because more solar means they can sell more gas/oil to everyone else including gas starved Europe.

City gas was actually the first industry that proved the more you make, the more people demand. If we make more power, we will use it.

Then consider that AI datacenters as big as NYC will need as much power as possible.
by diath | 2025-10-30 18:15:51+00:00
> It's so common it's almost an instinct. But that description doesn't quite hold up once you look closer. UDP isn't unreliable in the sense that it fails to do its job -- it's unreliable in the same way a convertible is "un-dry".

Well, no, it's unreliable in the sense that if I ordered a package online, the courier may get lost on the way and never come with my package, and then I have to order it again if I want it delivered, and then hope that this time it actually does, in that case, it kind of does fail to do its job if you want things to be delivered.
by rchaud | 2025-10-30 18:16:18+00:00
That scenario assumes that history will work the same way it did in the aftermath of WWII. There is no guarantee of that. America could become another Russia, where the collapse of the Soviet Union led to secession of several republics. The new democratic government was too weak to face the challenges of successive financial crises and active civil wars. Eventually power falls back into the hands of s strongman who scales back democratic reforms to maintain power.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-10-30 18:16:20+00:00
We probably shouldn’t have the government lobster truck that comes by and gives everybody a fresh lobster, but people’s nutritional needs should be met. In modern society with modern agriculture, we could afford to do that just fine. I think the thing that’s really broken right now is the food environment that people have to choose from. It makes a program like snap or EBT less cost-effective in terms of getting nutrition to people.
by DanHulton | 2025-10-30 18:16:38+00:00
That sucks if that's your experience, but it's not the universal, or even the common, experience.

For reference, I get a sore-ish shoulder the next day, and that's it. Also for reference, when I got Actual Covid, I was knocked on my ass for almost two weeks. So for me, at least, the choice is easy.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-30 18:16:44+00:00
Most fields just don’t have the same culture of collaborative everyone-wins that software does. Artists don’t produce CC art in anywhere close to the same influence as engineers produce software. This is probably due to some kind of compounding effect available in software that isn’t available in graphics.

Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists doing the same at the same scale. Or architects, or structural engineers. Maybe the closest are some boat designs but even those are accidental.

It might just be that we were lucky to have some Stallmans in this field early.
by shermantanktop | 2025-10-30 18:16:44+00:00
The thesis about human speech occupying less crowded spectrum is well aligned with a book called "The Great Animal Orchestra" (https://www.amazon.com/Great-Animal-Orchestra-Finding-Origin...).

That author details how the "dawn chorus" is composed of a vast number of species making noise, but who are able to pick out mating calls and other signals due to evolving their vocalizations into unique sonic niches.

It's quite interesting but also a bit depressing as he documents the decline in intensity of this phenomenon with habitat destruction etc.
by fabian2k | 2025-10-30 18:16:47+00:00
There certainly were stupid comments by politicians on this topic. But I don't think the vaccines were oversold, they did exactly what was claimed initially.

That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. I don't mean that it was entirely unexpected, but there simply wasn't any way to forecast how much it would mutate in advance.

The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. But they couldn't prevent infection for the new strains.

Some politicians and parts of the media were quite bad at handling the way the pandemic changed over time. But it was still easily possible to get good information about them.
by _rs | 2025-10-30 18:17:16+00:00
> Detaching and reattaching EBS volumes can take 10s for healthy volumes to 20m for failed ones

Is there a source for the 20m time limit for failed EBS volumes? I experienced this at work for the first time recently but couldn't find anything documenting the 20m SLA (and it did take just about 20 full minutes).
by mihaic | 2025-10-30 18:17:20+00:00
Would be fascinating if true, but I'd be very curious what kind of model of "reality" they actually have.

The paper itself [1] seems quite compact and extremely high level, so I'm sure some heavy hitters would try to reformulate it. Would be the most unintuitive thing to happen since Bell's theorem [2].

[1] https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
by nirava | 2025-10-30 18:17:30+00:00
disappointed because a "best we offer, forever" paid software got swapped under our nose for "free for all after you login but we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.

There are many many free and amazing software tools in this space I could have made a workflow out of. I explicitly BOUGHT this thing because it promised to be simple and "the best experience we can offer" software.

I think that distinction matters.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-30 18:17:31+00:00
I'm not familiar with Cali's NEM scheme...but does it work like this?

- Electric utility must make up to _forward_maximum_kW of electrical energy available to customer, 24x7, at _rate

- Customer may force electrical utility to accept up to _reverse_maximum_kW - without notice, at his sole discretion, and without regard for electrical utility's needs or wishes, at _rate

If so, just talk to any sane businessman about the viability of being stuck on the utility's end of such a deal.
by kburman | 2025-10-30 18:17:40+00:00
It’s an interesting direction, but feels pretty expensive for what might still be a guess at what matters.

I’m not sure an LLM can really capture project-specific context yet from a single PR diff.

Honestly, a simple data-driven heatmap showing which parts of the code change most often or correlate with past bugs would probably give reviewers more trustworthy signals.
by fschuett | 2025-10-30 18:17:40+00:00
> Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks.

To be fair, the Audacity UX designer made a massive video about the next UX redesign and how he tried to get rid of "modes" and the "Audacity says no" problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38

So this problem should get better in the future. Good UX (doesn't necessarily have to have a flashy UI, but just a good UX) in free software is often lacking or an afterthought.
by Kiboneu | 2025-10-30 18:17:47+00:00
The point of the article is that calling a protocol reliable doesn't make sense. You can (and should) use UDP if you don't care about (or you have a special way of handling) packet loss, and instead need to receive the latest packet as soon as possible. In the context of multiplayer FPS games and remote controlling drones -- it is actually more reliable.
by mothballed | 2025-10-30 18:17:59+00:00
I was using REITs as a proxy for the value and opportunity cost of buying your housing rather than investing in a retirement account. If you actually buy REITs this breaks down because REIT capital gains are taxable, while residence capital gains on a primary residence of modest value are not.

It was not my intent to convey you should buy REITs instead of a place to live.

After early career this breaks down though, because the tax advantage are only good for primary residence modest value homes, it's not a strategy that can be continually employed.
by palmotea | 2025-10-30 18:18:00+00:00
> Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now.

That's hilariously wrong: you're basically claiming current-day conservatives [or at least Trump I conservatives, if you want to be hyper-literal) are all about conserving [Democratic-party] Clintonism. Pretty soon they'll all in on Obamacare? You're trying to be clever but have no idea what you're talking about.
by bitwize | 2025-10-30 18:18:01+00:00
Great, now I'm getting Carrot Top flashbacks. "Dial right down the center of the phone!"

For non-Americans and/or those too young to remember when landline service was still dominant, in the 90s and early 2000s AT&T ran a collect-call service accessible through the number 1-800-CALL-ATT (1-800-225-5288) and promoted it with ads featuring comedian Carrot Top. And if you don't know who Carrot Top is, maybe that's for the best.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-30 18:18:13+00:00
> V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.

What are you talking about? I plan to use it for at least 5-10 years more. Excellent software that takes care of all my needs. Melanie Perkins is not going to visit you in your house and force you to uninstall it.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-30 18:18:28+00:00
In Ruby, methods called mainly for side effects rather than return value conventionally return the object itself, and so can be chanined by:

an_object.a_method.another_method

but, sure, it's less elegant (or at least less terse) than Smalltalk for the specific case of chaining invocations of methods with meaningful return values which are called for their side effects while discarding the return values.
by bluGill | 2025-10-30 18:18:52+00:00
There are a lot of it depends. If you are going to be a retail worker all your life there is no reason to go to college. A music degree has questionable value on its own, but many people get them understanding that "any degree" is needed for some good jobs and those that find those do well enough (your generals and non-major electives are important). The school matters - Harvard is expensive but the networking can be worth it if you network well in school. State schools tend to be a lot cheaper than private or out of state as well, and generally pretty good. Scholarships enter in as well. Degrees like Engineering or Medical doctor tend to have a much better ROI long term, but only if you pick the right one and pass.

But you need to make your own decisions. For some your best ROI is dropping out of school at 16 - but for the vast majority more school will be worth it.
by okanat | 2025-10-30 18:18:58+00:00
Good software is never freemium. It is either paid upfront or it is a timebomb. I am okay with keeping things proprietary and asking for a fair price. Once free-to-play is introduced, the software is gone for good.

I thought about buying Affinity a couple of months ago since they offered a perpetual license. Now I won't even think installing it
by spuz | 2025-10-30 18:19:04+00:00
I think you are probably right but it's hard to find an example of a piece of text that an LLM is willing to output verbatim (i.e. not subject to copyright guardrails) but also hasn't been widely studied and summarised by humans. Regardless, I think you could probably find many such examples especially if you had control of the LLM training process.
by zdw | 2025-10-30 18:19:19+00:00
ONOS is being used with VOLTHA to enable PON networking in various locations (For example DT in Germany: https://convergedigest.com/deutsche-telekom-taps-open-source... , and IIRC it's also in production in Turkey).

There was a Comcast deployment to trial ONOS + whitebox switches a while ago.

The specific interplay of commercial deployment to open source vs commercial closed source in the networking space was better described in this post from Larry Peterson: https://systemsapproach.org/2022/02/28/venn-diagram-engineer...
by Atlas667 | 2025-10-30 18:19:22+00:00
They have also had the longest on going embargo on earth right after they were nearly wiped out by a genocidal war on behalf of the US.

I don't doubt their history explains the shape of their economy.

This may seem like I am defending North Korea, but in reality I am putting in perspective who/why they are. Facts which nearly amount propaganda to western nations.
by Spivak | 2025-10-30 18:19:22+00:00
Good tasting (for their culture), fresh, nutritious, and calorically dense food available from somewhere at least as convenient as a grocery store. As well as some extra money to afford a few prepared meals and a few 'luxury' food items. The first to encourage socialization (i.e. you can go out with your friends/family without shame) and because life without small joys isn't.

That's probably where I would put the floor in order to avoid a population that actively desires my head on a platter.
by bigyikes | 2025-10-30 18:19:25+00:00
I’ve interrogated people about this but can never get a straight answer.

——

“So you can really see things in your head when your eyes are closed?”

Yeah!

“And it’s as though you’re seeing the object in front of you?”

Yeah, you don’t have that?

“So it’s like you’re really seeing it? It’s the sensation of sight?“

Well… it’s kind of different. I’m not really seeing it.

——

…and around we go.

Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes. I can recite the qualities of an object, and this generates impressions of the object in my head, but it’s not really seeing. It’s vibe seeing.
by alt227 | 2025-10-30 18:19:32+00:00
This is such a shame IMO. The Serif suite was great, and I used to try to get every designer I could to dump adobe and switch to serif.

Now that it has switched to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI, I wont be using this or telling other people about it any more. Their priorities have changed. No longer are they trying to to beat adobe at their own game, they are just chasing AI money like everyone else.
by tinfoilhatter | 2025-10-30 18:19:45+00:00
Standard bs defense to prevent any legitimate criticism of Jewish people no matter how reprehensible their actions are. Please spare me.

Maybe we should get into what Natalie Rothschild said while being interviewed, about her family's fondness for incest? Or would that be anti-Semtiic as well?

What exactly can you say about the Rothschild bloodline (except for praising them) that isn't considered anti-Semitic? Please do tell!