MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-10-22 23:10:43+00:00
"there is a second tacit premise at work here: that performing the room's task required something to understand the language. LLMs arguably suggest that the task could be performed without anything resembling a human's understanding of language."

Yeah. I used to assume that. But it's much less obvious now. Or just false or something.

It's actually kind of spooky how well Searle did capture/foreshadow something about LLMs decades ago. No part of the system seems to understand much of anything.

My theory is that Searle came up with the CR while complaining to his wife (for the hundredth time) about bright undergrads who didn't actually understand anything. She finally said "Hey, you should write that down!" Really she just meant "holy moly, stop telling it to me!" But he misunderstood her, and the rest is history.
by bongodongobob | 2025-10-22 23:12:08+00:00
Your intuition is right. I work at a big corp right now and the average age in the operations department is probably just under 50. That's not to say age is bad, however... these people have never worked anywhere else.

They are completely stuck in the 90s. Almost nothing is automated. Everyone clicks buttons on their grossly outdated tools.

Meetings upon meetings upon meetings because we are so top heavy that if they weren't constantly in meetings, I honestly don't know what leadership would do all day.

You have to go through a change committee to do basic maintenance. Director levels gatekeep core tools and tech. Lower levels are blamed when projects faceplant because of decades of technical debt. No one will admit it because it (rightly) shows all of leadership is completely out of touch and is just trying their damnedest to coast to retirement.

The younger people that come into the org all leave within 1-2 years because no one will believe them when they (rightly) sound the whistle saying "what the fuck are we doing here?" "Oh, you're just young and don't know what working in a large org is like."

Meanwhile, infra continues to rot. There are systems in place that are complete mysteries. Servers whose functions are unknown. You want to try to figure it out? Ok, we can discuss 3 months from now and we'll railroad you in our planning meetings.

When it finally falls over, it's going to be breathtaking. All because the fixtures of the org won't admit that they haven't kept up on tech at all and have no desire to actually do their fucking job and lead change.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-22 23:12:21+00:00
Reasons in the press over the last two years or so are due to factors like aggressive growth projections, the availability of cheap capital, and the pandemic-driven surge in demand for online services.

But why do YOU care? Are you trying learn so you can avoid such traps in your own company that you run? Maybe you are trying to understand because you’ve been affected? Or maybe some other reason?
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-22 23:13:26+00:00
I hear you, but I wouldn't put the blame on Cardboard.

The reason these people haven't tried anything else since Cardboard is because VR is still clumsy, expensive, of limited use and/or vomit inducing. I say that as my headset is still in active use after 5 years of owning it. In many respects I think nothing better than Cardboard has yet came out at this point for the ultra casual user.

Otherwise people were willing to give the Vision Pro a try because it was launched with much fanfare with a huge press focus, and I'd expect the Meta glasses to also have interest from people getting to try it.

These kind of big mainstream targeted events need to happen more often and stick in the news for people's perception of XR to move on.
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-10-22 23:13:26+00:00
But your Chalmers line is also literally true. If you're a Martian on Mars and you don't have cake ingredients available, the recipe won't work. If you're on Earth and you have the ingredients, it works fine. Even if (like me) you have almost no understanding of what the ingredients are, how they are made, or why the recipe works.
by Vinnl | 2025-10-22 23:13:27+00:00
> Having said that, I don't know why a "jjhub" is needed. Github seems fine. jj's just a UI for git.

When you make a change to a pr in response to review feedback, do you just jj edit it in, and end up with a force push on GitHub? After which the review comment might get detached from the code or even hidden.

That's definitely something that could be better for me. (That said, there are other projects making it better too.)
by dijit | 2025-10-22 23:13:50+00:00
kernel level anticheat is a chicken and egg problem.

No game developers of seriously looking at enabling even in the cases where it is extremely easy and trivial to enable, because the additional support button isn’t considered worth it for the number of users as they might get.

so when I say it’s defeatist, what I mean is all you have to do is vote with your wallet enough and the games will follow. I know this an absolute fact because I’ve been in this conversation many times.
by Veedrac | 2025-10-22 23:13:59+00:00
This is as would be expected if it were real. Advantage isn't a black and white thing, because the comparison starts against 'any task done the best we know how to do using the most resources we happen to be willing to throw at it, even if we don't have a means to check that the output was correct', and ends at 'useful output you can formally verify where you have a strong reason to believe no classical algorithm would be effective.'
by olliepro | 2025-10-22 23:14:03+00:00
The causal masking means future tokens don’t affect previous tokens embeddings as they evolve throughout the model, but all tokens a processed in parallel… so, yes and no. See this previous HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644328) about how bidirectional encoders are similar to diffusion’s non-linear way of generating text. Vision transformers use bidirectional encoding b/c of the non-causal nature of image pixels.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-10-22 23:15:00+00:00
> The motor’s performance on the dyno has exceeded even our most optimistic simulations

Not to take away from the exciting achievement, but I always found comments like this kindof unusual. Really, it exceeded even your _most optimistic_ simulations? If the high end of your simulated performance was below what you actually measured, I am worried that your simulation is seriously neglecting something. I used to work in decent depth with three phase bldc motors, so I feel I can say with some authority that these things _can_ be simulated, and while real world data is hard to exactly predict, getting something outside of the predicted range would generally be interpreted as a sign that your simulation isn't so good. But maybe this is just marketing-speak, and their simulations are actually totally fine.
by eru | 2025-10-22 23:15:10+00:00
I've been using Linux since the late 1990s.

Gaming has improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years, but non-gaming desktop use has been solid for ages. What little annoyances and bugs and issues kept you going back to Windows?

I found Windows 10 was the first bearable Windows, that I could use without wanting to go back to Linux all the time. Not great, but bearable.

I still used Windows for gaming throughout the whole time. (Until about a year ago, when I accidentally nuked my Windows installation, and then never bothered to set it up again..)

Depending on the job I had at the time, I also used Windows at work.

> As for all the linux a-holes out there, please STFU, I don't wanna hear "winblows sux" or "this distro is better", it's why I didn't specify what specific distro I use. That toxic fanboyism is what keeps people away from seeing it as a viable usable OS.

I've mostly heard that until perhaps about 10 years ago. I'm sure these people are still out there, but it seems to be much less common these days.

I use Arch Linux for what it's worth, but almost any distro can install almost any program (and they all run the same kernels), so it mostly comes down to what package manager and configuration system you want to use, and whether you like the defaults that come with your distribution.

I'm still having some trouble with screen tearing in some games on Linux, alas. I suspect these problems have been ironed out for the more mainstream window manager setups (like whatever you get in Ubuntu by default, instead of me using XMonad), but so far I couldn't be bothered to fix it, yet.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-22 23:15:25+00:00
The "scripts" I use the most that I am most happy with are a set of Vagrant tools that manage initialising different kinds of application environments with an apt cache on the host. Also .ssh/config includes to make it as easy as possible to work with them from VSCode.

I set this stuff up so long ago I sort of forgot that I did it at all; it's like a standard feature. I have to remember I did it.
by dijit | 2025-10-22 23:15:48+00:00
That’s fine, then those games are not available to you.

I’ll be honest, no matter how unpopular it is I’m really sorry, but those kind of solutions genuinely are the only way. I’ve said it before on HN, but we really do try everything. And not having anything leads to some of the worst experiences possible.

If you genuinely have a better solution, then you are more than welcome to enter the industry and make a significant amount of money.

Hell, I’ll offer you a job right now.
by auxiliarymoose | 2025-10-22 23:16:10+00:00
If you sanitize on the server, you are making assumptions about what is safe/unsafe for your clients. It's possible to make these assumptions correctly, but that requires keeping them in sync with all clients which is hard to do correctly.

Something that's sanitized from an HTML standpoint is not necessarily sanitized for native desktop & mobile applications, client UI frameworks, etc. For example, with Cloudflare's CloudBleed security incident, malformed img tags sent by origin servers (which weren't themselves by themselves unsafe in browsers) caused their edge servers to append garbage (including miscellaneous secure data) from heap memory to some requests that got indexed by search engines.

Sanitization is always the sole responsibility of the consumer of the content to make sure it presents any inbound data safely. Sometimes the "consumer" is colocated on the server (e.g. for server rendered HTML + no native/API users) but many times it's not.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-22 23:16:28+00:00
3-phase motors are controlled by torque commands into the driver. Give it a value and it generates requisite voltages to fill the gap between current state and desired state. Give it a positive value and the driver spins up the motor, give it a negative and it artificially spins down the motor progressively by commanded amounts. So especially off-throttle regen is completely free. IIUC.
by Arainach | 2025-10-22 23:16:31+00:00
Florida and Texas are spending because they make life for educators utter hell and there are plenty of other good reasons no teacher wants to go there. Illinois may be a single counterexample, but this is akin to saying "if you watch Craigslist for a few weeks you can get an amazing deal on one car" - the plan does not scale, and if a non-trivial number of the people in the market for [a used car / a better education job] tried to go for that target it would instantly dry up as there aren't enough to go around by many orders of magnitude.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-22 23:17:41+00:00
It is about secure boot and TPM. Linux is unable to 'lie' well enough to emulate windows because it can't cryptographically verify that it is a legit windows install.

The anti cheat developers rely on Microsoft asserting that other cheats aren't loaded prior to the anti-cheat in the kernel. There is no such entity in Linux to attest that a particular linux install is not modified to load the cheats into the kernel before the anti-cheat.

Now, such an entity could be created, and a linux distro released that is signed by that entity, and then the anti-cheat could work on that distro. That would require you to only use that particular distro, though, and you would be limited in how you could change the kernel.

So far, there has not been the push needed to make that happen.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-22 23:18:15+00:00
I already have limited space for long term memory, bash commands are very far down the list of things I'd want to append to my long term storage.

I use ctrl-R with a fuzzy matching program, and let my terminal remember it for me.

And before it's asked: yes that means I'd have more trouble working in a different/someone else's environment. But as it barely ever happens for me, it's hardly an important enough scenario to optimize for.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-22 23:18:43+00:00
To appreciate the “fast” part, nothing beats reading though LuaJIT’s lj_opt_fold.c, none of which would work without SSA.

Of course, LuaJIT is cheating, because compared to most compilers it has redefined the problem to handling exactly two control-flow graphs (a line and a line followed by a loop), so most of the usual awkward parts of SSA simply do not apply. But isn’t creatively redefining the problem the software engineer’s main tool?..
by slipperybeluga | 2025-10-22 23:18:46+00:00
This garbage article is a great example of why NPR taxpayer funding should never be restored. Ridiculous, unsubstantiated claim here. No evidence whatsoever of any link to climate change is presented. These mosquitoes came via ship and are thus like any other invasive species. Mosquitoes flourish in Siberia, Greenland, Canada, and the northernmost parts of Alaska, all places hundreds of miles north of the Arctic circle.
by Animats | 2025-10-22 23:20:31+00:00
"short-term peak rating"

Short-term peak ratings for electric motors are always huge. You can put in higher voltages up to arc-over. More interesting is sustained output. 1 minute, 10 minutes, 1 hour, continuous duty. That's all about how well it can get rid of heat.

That's why electric motors have a "temperature rise" number on the data plate. That's the steady-state temperature increase from a cold start when run continuously at rated power.
by Bolwin | 2025-10-22 23:21:09+00:00
I'm not running them blindly and I do always ask the llm to explain the command since the end goal is not to have the llm do the work but rather for me to learn jj.

+ any good tool will not let you run destructive commands without confirmation unless it's with some force flag and I have enough computer knowledge to not use force flags blindly.

+ "information written by a human" can be unreliable too.
by sindhya1 | 2025-10-22 23:21:21+00:00
CVS Health Ventures’ latest bet comes in. The company announced it led a $25 million strategic investment in Knownwell, a Boston-based obesity-care platform that treats weight management as a chronic condition — not a subscription business. Knownwell’s physician-led model is designed for payers and patients alike, and its expansion signals a deeper shift: the end of the GLP-1 land grab and the start of an outcomes-based phase of obesity care.

Why it matters now: if list prices compress toward $150, access parity rises and the competitive moat shifts from drug arbitrage to care integration.
by abetusk | 2025-10-22 23:21:27+00:00
I'm kicking myself for not thinking of the `nato` script.

I tend to try to not get too used to custom "helper" scripts because I become incapacitated when working in other systems. Nevertheless, I really appreciate all these scripts if nothing else than to see what patterns other programmers pick up.

My only addition is a small `tplate` script that creates HTML, C, C++, Makefile, etc. "template" files to start a project. Kind of like a "wizard setup". e.g.

$ tplate c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { }

And of course, three scripts `:q`, `:w` and `:wq` that get used surprisingly often:

$ cat :q #!/bin/bash echo "you're not in vim"
by rstuart4133 | 2025-10-22 23:21:36+00:00
I'd reverse that. Junior developers should not be using google. But if they are a senior developer, they are probably wasting their time using LLM's instead of google.

The reason is pretty straight forward. I'm a senior developer. If I ask an LLM a question about my domain of expertise, I usually often get hallucinations or 100's of useless words saying nothing. That's because I already know most of what the LLM's have seen on the internet.

But if I ask it for background information in a topic I'm new to, an LLM is great starting point.
by taeric | 2025-10-22 23:21:45+00:00
I didn't say that, though? Some things that don't kill you can, obviously, make you really really weak. Isn't hard to find examples on that front. Polio is the poster case.

But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.

I suspect we would largely align on the idea that growth is the important part. We would also largely agree that trauma is real. Question is how do you combine those ideas?
by eru | 2025-10-22 23:21:50+00:00
> My favorite games can't be played on Steam Deck. Like I said, I have been playing these games for 30 years. I am not about to change my favorite games just so I can make a point about the importance of Steam Deck compatibility. That won't change anything other than I won't be able to play my favorite games anymore.

Oh, I wasn't suggesting you change your favourite games or how you play them.

But I was assuming you are playing more than just your three favourite games over and over again?

> For years I settled on playing on XBOX, but i eventually got annoyed enough i stopped buying the game completely.

This is an example where you changed your behaviour on the margin.

Or another example: if one cupcake tastes massively better to you than another, you are going to buy that. But if there are two drinks that could go about equally well with your cupcake (Pepsi and Coke, say) and you are fairly indifferent between them otherwise, you'll probably going to have a look at the price or what's more convenient etc.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism
by jrockway | 2025-10-22 23:22:22+00:00
Yeah, I always force push. I always treat PRs as one atomic unit ("squash and merge") and the history that goes into the PR isn't relevant to me after it's merged. Maybe once or twice I've regretted this (maybe you want to backport one part of this PR to the release branch, and now you have to manually create that) but in general, how something is made can be ugly and it feels good to me to erase it when something is ready to be merged.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-22 23:22:24+00:00
As an avid gamer for 35+ years, I have played a ton of PvP both locally and online.

One of those experiences can't replace the other.

I am married with two young children. All of my video game time comes in the hour or two after they go to bed and before I go to bed. I don't have friends around at that time, yet I still want to get some good multiplayer gaming in.

Online matchmaking is amazing these days. You are able to match up against people of about your skill level at any time of day. That experience is magical, compared to the matchmaking from 25 years ago where you would try to find a random lobby, and the players might be amazing or terrible.
by adrianmonk | 2025-10-22 23:23:43+00:00
I would hope they designed it where you can keep riding. It seems possible. Pick some charge level (say 20%) and provide less and less power assist as you approach that. Once you hit 20%, a control system tries to keep it about 20% charged. Basically you enter a mode where the battery becomes a buffer (between the pedal and wheels) rather than a power source. The bike would feel sluggish, but it wouldn't stop working.
by tonyarkles | 2025-10-22 23:23:55+00:00
The extra confounding factor here is that not all therapy is created equal. Some of my life has parallels with your first example. I did my first therapy session in grad school and it helped me out tremendously. Again, anecdotal, but one of the things he did very well was to not allow me to continually re-traumatize myself by rehashing the potential sources of my (maladaptive, dysfunctional, pathological, whatever word you want) thoughts and behaviours. He would listen for a bit and then steer the conversation back to: what’s the delta you’re trying to achieve? I can help you find a route from here to there without needing to go back to the beginning. As it turned out, getting myself to a better mental state helped me let go of a lot of resentment and blame that I held about the people responsible for my childhood. It wasn’t explicit, it just kind of happened as I tweaked my thinking.

There is also an element of… it’s easier to get out of a shitty headspace if you’re not already stuck in a shitty present. I moved out of my home town when I turned 18 and went to university 3 hours away. Close enough that I stayed in touch with my family but far enough away that the day-to-day chaos didn’t affect me. Cell phones weren’t a thing yet so there were plenty of viable excuses for not answering the phone.

In your second example, unlike mine, the person spirals downwards instead of escaping. They start out as anxious from the robbery, then end up anxious and unemployed. Then anxious, unemployed, and divorced. It’s pretty tough to think clearly about addressing and processing the robbery when you’re not sure if you’re going to have enough money for groceries and rent.
by bongodongobob | 2025-10-22 23:24:04+00:00
A lot of times, they do. But where I'm at, lawyers have the last say for some reason. A good example is our sub/sister companies. Our lawyers told us that we needed separate physical servers for their fucking VMs and IAM. We have a fucking data center and they wanted us to buy new hardware.

We fought and tried to explain that what they were asking didn't even make sense, all of our data and IAM is already under the same M365 tenant and other various cloud services. We can't take that apart, it's just not possible.

They wouldn't listen and are completely incapable of understanding so we just said "ok, fine" and I was told to just ignore them.

The details were forgotten in the quagmire of meetings and paperwork, and the sun rose the next day in spite of our clueless 70+ year old legal team.
by didibus | 2025-10-22 23:24:53+00:00
I think you're restricting your thinking to Bitcoin. The question is, can cryptography methods solve the problem, not can Bitcoin solve it.

I'm not a super expert, but from the little I know, I think it's possible to issue a one time use key that lets you sign a private/public key pair.

So when that public key enter the network with 1 vote and cast it on the distributed ledger, the network can validate the key is signed by the authority.

You know that the authority allowed the key to exist, but not who the key ties back too.

And the user could only sign one key, so they can't create more.
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-22 23:25:12+00:00
Simple solution that makes everyone happy: make it optional. Anticheat was optional in pretty much every 00s game that had it, and even in the servers that had it disabled, cheating was still rarely an issue. Diablo 2 even let you still bring your single player characters that you could obviously cheat with (which everyone knew from Diablo 1) onto Open Battle.net. Make the Internet optional like it used to be while you're at it with LAN/direct IP support so you can stick to friends only and keep your purchase forever.

Oh but then you can't make all of your revenue on stuff like gambling for textures that anyone could just mod in like they used to.