MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sonzohan | 2025-10-14 22:14:45+00:00
This used to be what people did before COVID. Now it's a hardcore seller's market in the US:

The car chip shortage caused the resale value of cars to skyrocket. In the past few years my 15 year old CRV, which just passed 100k miles, has gone UP in value according to my mechanic because the used car market is so bad.

Many car dealerships, already well-known for poor consumer practices, have straight up refused to sell cars to people who don't wish to finance because they can make a lot more money off someone who wants to finance. You used to be able to convince them you planned to finance, then buy the car in full at the last minute, and the salesperson would do so because of sunk investment. Not anymore, many of my friends have experienced this firsthand when shopping for a new vehicle.

Combine this with it being all-but-required for people in the US to have a personal vehicle and drive if they want a job ("reliable transportation" in job postings), new & used car dealers have the additional leverage of time pressure as people can and do get fired for their car breaking down.

What I see a lot of wealthy people do, on the other hand, is finance a luxury vehicle, drive it for 3-5 years, then trade in for a newer model. Used to be lots of luxury vehicles, like the Giulia Quadrifoglio, with 20-30k miles for 30-40% of the original vehicle cost (25k-35k) which is an incredible deal for a luxury brand. This isn't really a thing anymore as the cost of a new car skyrockets.
by tarive26 | 2025-10-14 22:15:21+00:00
Modeling human societies and interaction dynamics is extraordinarily challenging yet potentially transformative—solving it could unlock breakthrough applications in simulation, prediction, and coordination. I believe multi-agent LLM systems with hive-mind architectures are uniquely suited for this because they excel at the very thing that makes human behavior hard to model: probabilistic, unpredictable dynamics.

As an open source contributor to claude-flow and claude-swarm, I've worked on systems where specialized agents (Queen orchestrator, Workers, Scouts, Guardians, Architects) collaborate through: - Task orchestration with decomposition, distribution, and progress aggregation - Consensus protocols with voting and tie-breaking for strategic decisions - Shared memory enabling collective learning and pattern recognition - Real-time coordination with auto-scaling, load balancing, and fault tolerance - Self-healing mechanisms that rebalance and recover from failures

This hive-mind approach demonstrates how agent collectives can achieve what isolated agents cannot: parallel problem-solving, emergent intelligence, and robust execution at scale. The probabilistic nature of LLMs—often seen as a limitation—becomes an asset when simulating the inherent unpredictability of human social systems.

I'm eager to contribute to teams working on agent societies, emergence, and collective intelligence. GitHub: https://github.com/Tar-ive
by consumer451 | 2025-10-14 22:16:33+00:00
Religion was my partial read for "fixed beliefs" as well. I have been alive for quite some time now, and the major battle for the young mind in the US was regarding evolution vs. literal biblical interpretation. This is the reason for charter schools, destroying the U.S. Department of Education, and much more. Those "fixed beliefs" are very fragile when exposed to new information.
by reactordev | 2025-10-14 22:16:51+00:00
Not saying it does but what I am saying is it’s not two brackets anymore. It’s not Math & Literacy defined by one’s ability to do long divisional polynomials and identify the problematic grammar of some sub paragraph from a book from 1880s.

The reality is the testing and scores don’t reflect reality and everyone’s in arms over it instead of looking at the testing methodology.
by vict7 | 2025-10-14 22:17:14+00:00
I was fortunate enough to grow up without cable television. Any clip I see from Fox/CNN is usually a bunch of inauthentic, ignorant talking heads that I wouldn’t even trust to tell me the weather.

I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.
by riku_iki | 2025-10-14 22:17:14+00:00
> AI in medicine is challenging because AI is bad at systems thinking, citation of fact and data privacy.

main question is if humans are better than that. I have experiences with doctor: he gave prescription of Xmg, I am asking why, he said because some study said so, I go home, pull study, and it is XXmg there. Doctors can make things up all the time without much consequences and likely do. For AI, corps and community can do all kind of benchmarking and evaluation on industrial scale.
by braebo | 2025-10-14 22:18:05+00:00
I like the new iOS design, despite having low expectations after seeing nothing but hate online leading up to the release.

It’s non intrusive and neat to look at. There are some decisions that are annoying, like a hidden button that takes an extra click now, but it’s also something I spend such a small amount of time interacting with that spending any time fretting over it seems like a wasteful overreaction.

That said, I empathize with your frustration, and I have plenty of things that trigger me into passionate “overreaction”, so I totally get it… and things like “more battery consumption” are objectively bad.

Hopefully my experience will be similar with macOS once I try it out though.
by roncesvalles | 2025-10-14 22:18:55+00:00
I sense sarcasm but just to add on, most software problems actually have very predictable natural upper bounds. There are only X number of people in the world growing at a well-defined rate. There are only X number of people in your country, or in your TAM (e.g. if you're a restaurant) etc. This is especially true for B2B.

The need to accommodate runaway scale (unbounded N and unbounded rate of growth of N) is actually quite rare.
by thowfaraway | 2025-10-14 22:19:28+00:00
This is one the lesson plans that was a trigger at the time. It is a typical constructivist pedagogy.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141023181930/https://api.ning....

Fixed beliefs are things like America is a good nation. You should teach the whole of history, good, bad and ugly, but stop trying to make kids reinterpret everything through modern political lenses
by ben_w | 2025-10-14 22:19:55+00:00
Sure, but also the METR study showed the rate of change is t doubles every 7 months where t ~= «duration of human time needed to complete a task, such that SOTA AI can complete same with 50% success»: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499

I don't know how long that exponential will continue for, and I have my suspicions that it stops before week-long tasks, but that's the trend-line we're on.
by lotyrin | 2025-10-14 22:20:11+00:00
Not in the hearts and minds of most individual SMB hackers, though (except Heroku to some degree in some circles). Most of the rest were only for Enterprisey teams. Many, many folks graduated straight from FTPing PHP to the customer's shared host to running docker compose on the customer's VPS or cloud instance. The least-common-denominator clients that hire these folks graduated from shared hosting (where PHP/MySQL was the only viable option, really) to cloud instances (where suddenly all the other languages and backing services were viable). The GoDaddy->AWS LightSail "our website budget is 5 dollars" pipeline.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-10-14 22:20:23+00:00
>> Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable

"Almost half of cancer deaths are preventable" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02355-x

600,000 people die of cancer per year, 40,000 people die in automobile accidents. Focusing on 40,000 automobile accidents to the exclusion of focusing on 300,000 preventable cancer deaths does not math.
by mcv | 2025-10-14 22:21:08+00:00
I'm amazed this is so common. I don't think any of my household appliances require wifi access. Our PC, laptops, phones, tablets and printer do, of course. I do occasionally check which devices are connected to my wifi, and try to keep track of what's what, but there are always a few mysterious devices I don't recognise, so I block those just to see what stops working.
Show HN: An MCP Server for Testing MCP Servers Using Claude Code
by rdwj | 2025-10-14 22:21:29+00:00
When developing with an AI agent like Claude Desktop or Claude Code, it is helpful for the agent to be able to test the code you are developing, as you go. This MCP server lets Claude interact with your MCP as a real client, run the tools, execute prompts using an optional LLM configuration, and gain insight into how well the MCP complies with the standard you are going for. You don't have to add your new MCP to the Claude configuration. This one serves as a bridge.

I developed this to solve a real problem I was having. When I would have issues with an MCP deployed to my test cluster, Claude would fail to use the proper tools for it (like cMCP, etc.), and assume the client side was just set up wrong and start rewiring it for Websocket or REST. With this MCP in place, that has stopped, and now I can have Claude use all the tools, prompts and resources for an MCP and then with that in context, help me create an agent that uses the MCP.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-14 22:21:48+00:00
I work in a company that's "all in on AI" and there's so much BS being blown up just because they can't have it fail because all the top dogs will have mud on their faces. They're literally just faking it. Just making up numbers, using biased surveys, making sure employees know it's being "appreciated" if they choose option A "Yes AI makes me so much more productive" etc.

This is definitely something that biases me against AI, sure. Seeing how the sausage is made doesn't help. Because it's really a lot of offal right now especially where I work.

I'm a very anti-corporate non-teamplayer kinda person so I tend to be highly critical, I'll never just go along with PR if it's actually false. I won't support my 'team' if it's just wrong. Which often rubs people the wrong way at work. Like when I emphasised in a training that AI results must be double checked. Or when I answered in an "anonymous" survey that I'd rather have a free lunch than "copilot" and rated it a 2 out of 5 in terms of added value (I mean, at the time it didn't even work in some apps)

But I'm kinda done with soul-killing corporatism anyway. Just waiting for some good redundancy packages when the AI bubble collapses :)
by hasante | 2025-10-14 22:21:48+00:00
Hi - dont know how to answer you directly - but yes the store has an index already, at a timed sequence for example. And a key called thread:thread_meta.

This statement is in no way saying you dont need an index, its simply saying, this is the variety of ways people might end up choosing.

Which is just 1 example of the type of work - a thread model & compatible store can fix and fix more efficiently.

In no way fancy too - this is just redis with a disc and some steps imo.
by topspin | 2025-10-14 22:21:51+00:00
> People only use Nix because it doesn't randomly break, bitrot or require arcane system setup.

I'll stipulate this, despite knowing and appreciating the much greater value Nix has.

Then, the problem that Nix solves isn't something container users care about. At scale, the bare metal OS hosting containers is among the least of one's problems: typically a host image is some actively maintained, rigorously tested artifact provided by one of a couple different reliable sources. Ideally container users are indifferent to it, and they experience few if any surprises using them, including taking frequent updates to close vulnerabilities.

> Unlike containers.

Containers randomly break or bitrot? I've never encountered that view. They don't do this as far as I'm aware. Container images incorporate layer hashing that ensure integrity: they do not "bitrot." Image immutability delivers highly consistent behavior, as opposed to "randomly break." The self-contained nature of containers delivers high portability, despite differences in "system setup." I fail to find any agreement with these claims. Today, people think nothing of developing images using one set of tools (Docker or what have you) and running these image using entirely distinct runtimes (containerd, cloud service runtimes, etc.) This is taken entirely for granted, and it works well.

> Arcane system setup.

I don't know what is meant by "system setup" here, and "arcane" is subjective. What I do know is that the popular container systems are successfully and routinely used by neophytes, and that this doesn't happen when the "system setup" is too demanding and arcane. The other certainty I have is that whatever cost there is in acquiring the rather minimal knowledge needed to operate containers is vastly smaller than achieving the same ends without containers: the moment a system involves more than 2-3 runtime components, containers start paying off verses running the same components natively.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-14 22:22:04+00:00
I think what GP is saying is you can drop an absolute value every e.g. 8192 elements (or even orders of magnitude more if you're actually processing GBs of element) and this frees you to compute the blocks in parallel threads in a dependency free manor. The latency for a block would still bound by the single core rate, but the throughput of a stream is likely memory bound after 2-3 cores. It still hurts the point of doing delta compression, but not nearly as bad as every 16 values would.

Even if one is willing to adopt such an encoding scheme, you'd still want to optimize what you have here anyways though. It also doesn't help, as mentioned, if the goal is actually latency of small streams rather than throughput of large ones.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-14 22:22:35+00:00
Not buying a carrier phone or buying an iPhone (which doesn't permit carriers to inject the same type of crap into the device, they can only influence access to certain settings). AppLovin cannot install anything in the background without deep system access, and manual installation of non-Google apps requires confirming at least three popups.

There are antivirus apps on Android that will warn you for this crap, but an antivirus cannot work on an operating system designed to install malware.
by tshaddox | 2025-10-14 22:23:39+00:00
Is that only a function of the number of individuals targeted by a group of warrants? What determines "group membership" of a warrant? It seems like it actually is hard to determine, both for the legal system (there are many controversies in the U.S. about whether dragnet warrants are constitutional and what constitutes a dragnet warrant) and for a company receiving these warrants.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-14 22:23:45+00:00
Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions.

The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists therefore believe that Pleistocene people didn't build permanent structures out of stone because nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles were more optimal for the chaotic pleistocene environments happening globally. There's a few people who disagree with the universality of this idea, most famously the authors of Dawn of Everything who argue for a more diverse family of lifeways in early humans, but that's just quibbling about the edges of this overall narrative rather than rewriting it.

And we'd expect to have more evidence than we do if the holocene boundary wasn't the effective start date for this kind of structure. Cave environments are much more stable, and it's where much of our evidence comes from. Gobekli Tepe (GT) and other Tas Tepler sites are made with local limestone, an extremely erosion-prone rock. We have sites covered by existing urban cities like Jericho, the earliest layers of which date from around the same time as GT. We also have older structures, like the epigravittean mammoth huts, and a fairly good idea of the forager->farmer transition in the near east across the natufian culture. GT is actually thought to be part of that transition.

But yes, a lot of organic stuff from the pleistocene is gone. Organics were probably the dominant form of material used, so that leaves a huge gap we're still struggling with. Not really sure where I'm going with this, so I guess I'll stop here?
by joshstrange | 2025-10-14 22:24:03+00:00
This is funny but I worry most people wouldn't get joke. I'm not sure how best to convey "This is a captcha". Maybe add other "noise" and the printed text "Type the letters above to enter" or something like that.

Though, maybe the subtlety of this is the point. A way to be nerdy without being completely obvious. "I guess that person just likes a wavy 'Welcome' text mat" vs iykyk
by zem | 2025-10-14 22:24:49+00:00
as an aside to the last bit about monorepos, from a dev point of view monorepos are pretty awesome. you never need to deal with complicated merge commits and you always have a consistent state of the world, enforced by ci. i would imagine maintaining the tooling and infrastructure to support said monorepo is pretty hard and painful, but as a user I love working in one.
by danpalmer | 2025-10-14 22:24:59+00:00
Just anecdotally, I'm more productive in languages that I know _and_ which have good LLM understanding, than in languages that I'm just experienced with.

As much as I dislike Go as a language, LLMs are very good at it. Java too somewhat, Python a fair amount but less (and LLMs write Python I don't like). Swift however, I love programming in, but LLMs are pretty bad at it. We also have an internal config language which our LLMs are trained on, but which is complex and not very ergonomic, and LLMs aren't good at it.
by hashstring | 2025-10-14 22:25:00+00:00
Hm, but to news readers, how actionable are terrorism-related deaths really?

I would say less than heart disease related ones.

To policy makers, well, terrorism is actionable but so is diabetes. And that while diabetes accounts for a far larger number of deaths.

So I think there is real asymmetry if we look at the data from an “actionable” perspective.
by hinkley | 2025-10-14 22:25:05+00:00
I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense.

The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.

The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
by shoo | 2025-10-14 22:25:45+00:00
fgiesen has a 3 part series of blog posts from 2018, "reading bits in far too many ways", focusing on the problem of reading data encoded a variable-bit-length code

Part 3 explores a straightforward idea that can be used to improve performance of bitstream decoding - decode multiple streams at once.

> if decoding from a single bitstream is too serial, then why not decode from multiple bitstreams at once?

> So how many streams should you use? It depends. At this point, for anything that is even remotely performance-sensitive, I would recommend trying at least N=2 streams. Even if your decoder has a lot of other stuff going on (computations with the decoded values etc.), bitstream decoding tends to be serial enough that there’s many wasted cycles otherwise, even on something relatively narrow like a dual-issue in-order machine.

> If you’re using multiple streams, you need to decide how these multiple streams get assembled into the final output bitstream. If you don’t have any particular reason to go with a fine-grained interleaving, the easiest and most straightforward option is to concatenate the sub-streams

For delta coding, perhaps instead of resetting the delta encoding stream with an absolute value every X deltas, for a small value of X, this suggests we could use a much larger value of X, i.e. partition the input into coarse chunks and delta encode each, and then rewrite our decoder to decode a pair (or more) of the resulting streams at once.

Unclear if that would help at all here, or if there's already enough independent work for the CPU to keep busy with.

Part 1 https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/reading-bits-in-far...

Part 2 https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/reading-bits-in-far...

Part 3 https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/09/27/reading-bits-in-far...
by westurner | 2025-10-14 22:25:48+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45241431 :

> "Perihelion precession of planetary orbits solved from quantum field theory" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14447 :

>> We derive the perihelion precession of planetary orbits using quantum field theory extending the Standard Model to include gravity. Modeling the gravitational bound state of an electron via the Dirac equation of unified gravity [Rep. Prog. Phys. 88, 057802 (2025)], and taking the classical planetary state limit, we obtain orbital dynamics exhibiting a precession in agreement with general relativity. This demonstrates that key general relativistic effects in planetary motion can emerge directly from quantum field theory without invoking the geometric framework of general relativity.

What about [super] fluids, too, though?

> Physical vacuum as a dilatant fluid yields exact solutions to Pioneer anomaly and Mercury’s perihelion precession" (2019) https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjp-2018-0744

And (origami) geometry is enough to skip a bunch of Feynman diagrams for calculating scattering amplitudes:

"Amplituhedra and origami" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09574 ... "Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492704
by ajross | 2025-10-14 22:26:29+00:00
No one (at least no one of note) ever claimed that government coercion of social media was a "good thing". The controversy around the "Twitter Files" was (and remains) whether any such coercion[1] actually happened. Do remember the smoking gun request for a takedown turned out to have been penis photos.

But for the record, since consistent propriety is the subject of the subthread: as a left-leaning liberal, I hereby declare that I think coercing Twitter to remove content for political reasons is equally as bad as doing the same to Facebook.

[1] Not least because the entity doing the coercing was not the government, which was run by Biden's opponent.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-10-14 22:26:43+00:00
This take seems fair, the headline kind of removes the nuance. There are times where generating a lot of low quality code quickly is useful. And there are situations where the required code is simple and common and LLMs can spit out working code that's decent quality, even if it doesn't understand it. In those cases the developer doesn't really need to exert much mental effort to write it, but they save time by not having to write it.

I find AI more useful for all the things that are secondary to writing code - things like accessibility passes over HTML, generating documentation, creating debug UI's, figuring out some library or API so I don't need to read the docs, debugging build issues (unrelated to my code), and in general managing all the BS we've self-inflicted on ourselves so I can focus on just writing code. AI probably saves me 1-2 hours a day, which is hardly a 10x speed up but it's still really significant. And those numbers are in line with a recent study the UK government did on AI assisted software development, although I didn't save the link to it.