MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dcre | 2025-10-20 00:49:29+00:00
The base model is a pure next token predictor. It just continues whatever prompt you give it — if you ask it a question, it might just keep elaborating the question. To turn these models into something that can actually chat (and more recently, that can do things like tool calls) they do a second phase of training, including reinforcement learning, which teaches the model to maximize some kind of reward signal meant to represent good answers of various kinds. This reward signal applies at the level of the whole response (or possibly parts of the response) so it is not predicting the most likely next token. I don’t know in an absolute sense how much this ends up changing the base model weights, and it’s surprisingly hard to find discussions of this, I guess because the state of the art is quite secret. But it’s clear that RL is important for getting the models to become useful.

This is a reasonable explanation, though as a non-expert I can’t vouch for the formal parts: https://www.harysdalvi.com/blog/llms-dont-predict-next-word/

There are other posttraining techniques that are not strictly speaking RL (again, not an expert) but it sounds to me like they are still not teaching straightforward next token prediction in the way people mean when they say LLMs can’t do X because they’re merely predicting the most likely next token based on the training corpus.
by foobarian | 2025-10-20 00:49:46+00:00
- I find that writing notes in class helped me learn just through the physical action of my hands. (I think there is some formal study of this as a phenomenon). I am poorly disciplined so at least getting that hour or so of writing notes is probably more than I would have managed alone.

- In class, sometimes the lecturer provides helpful intuition for something through informal speech or even intonation. For example I struggled with the concept of ergodicity from a textbook until I saw someone explain it to me like I'm 5. I find that often, textbooks are like man pages, in that they are almost afraid to provide informal/intuitive writing for fear of appearing unserious.

p.s. if ChatGPT existed 30 years ago I would have managed to learn so much more instead of spinning wheels on dry writing. ChatGPT is really good at being a "personalized manpage explainer"
by FredPret | 2025-10-20 00:49:59+00:00
It’s reality-based, empirical economics, not “mine”.

Place that let adults choose who to work for and who to employ, and furthermore consider it improper to even use the word “let” in this context, universally have better employment situations than places that follow your “spherical cow” theoretical planned / over-regulated economies.

You seem to ascribe agency only to the employers, but remember that every Uber driver and every shitty minimum-wage job holder is almost certainly just doing their best. Making their jobs illegal will not improve their lives one iota, not in theory, and not in practice.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-20 00:50:40+00:00
>The West Coast and North East form compacts, companies, or nonprofits that provide healthcare, retirement and funding for their schools.

These coastal states run blowout deficits despite having high taxes on workers and businesses. The companies there might migrate if they could save money on taxes.

>The south, parts of the Midwest, and the plains fail to do so (at least to the same level) and within a generation we have two separate countries and war.

The states are already supposed to be largely sovereign. It is the Federal government asserting authority to tax and regulate everyone that fouls things up. Unfortunately we already have extensive social programs that people have been robbed to pay for, so walking it back would leave too many people everywhere feeling ripped off.

There is NOTHING special about the coastal states that guarantees them supremacy in any area of production. They have lots of people and inertia. Whatever they can do, other states can do also (and probably already are). It's an elitist attitude of the residents of those states that makes them think they're better than the "flyover" states.
by mandeepj | 2025-10-20 00:51:23+00:00
> they are doing exactly what they were shouting from the rooftops that they would do.

You mean lower prices on day 1?

Unfortunately some of us still remember those outlandish promises which we knew will remain just promises.

Doesn’t matter how much you push his promises under the rug, but we will not forget - how big of a fraud and scammer the current sitting president is.

Did they also shout - 51st state, crypto scams, private funding deals etc etc?
Show HN: Why system modeling should look like code, not PowerPoint
by twopowerX | 2025-10-20 00:53:22+00:00
Systems engineers model billion-dollar spacecraft, life-saving medical devices, and autonomous vehicles in tools that can't even do a proper diff/merge/version control even with large expensive infrastructure.

I built Sylang to address that.

What is Sylang?

A text-based language for modeling complex systems. Write declarative code, get visual diagrams, traceability matrices, FMEA analyses, and compliance reports automatically. Works with Git, VSCode, and AI code assistants.

Example:

def requirement BrakeActivation description "System shall activate brakes within 100ms" safetylevel ASIL-D testedby ref testcase EmergencyBrakeTest derivedfrom ref safetygoal PreventCollision allocatedto ref block BrakeController

This generates:

- Architecture diagrams (decomposition, internal block diagrams) - Traceability matrix (requirement ↔ test ↔ block ↔ safety goal) - Coverage analysis (which requirements lack tests?) - Compliance reports (functional safety, ASPICE, etc.)

Why text-based modeling works:

Your AI code assistant (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude, Gemini) can: - Generate requirements from safety goals - Create test cases from requirements - Draft FMEA analyses from architecture - Refactor across files with semantic understanding - Suggest missing relationships

Git workflows that actually work:

git diff requirements.req # See what changed git merge feature/new-sensors # Merge architecture branches git blame safety-goals.sgl # Who defined this safety goal?

No XMI. No database exports. No PowerPoint. Just readable text that generates everything you need.

What you get:

23 file types covering the full engineering lifecycle: - Product lines & variants (.ple, .fml, .vml) - Architecture (.blk, .fun, .ifc) - Requirements & tests (.req, .tst) - Behavioral models (.ucd, .seq, .smd) - Safety analysis (.haz, .sgl, .sam, .flr, .fta) - Dashboards & specs (.dash, .spec) - Automation (.agt, .spr)

All auto-generating visual diagrams: feature models, decomposition diagrams, sequence diagrams, state machines, traceability matrices.

Current state:

- Language stable (v0.9.27) - VSCode extension available (search "Sylang" in Extensions) - Works with Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude, Gemini code assistants - Diagram rendering, traceability, coverage analysis working - Solo dev, part-time, building in public

Download at:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=balaji-e...

Website: https://sylang.dev

GitHub: https://github.com/balaji-embedcentrum/sylang

Feedback welcome—especially from engineers who've wished their modeling tools worked more like their code editors.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-20 00:54:13+00:00
I don't think it's premature at all. HN often objects to this sort of "overreach" and then witnesses the consequences firsthand (eg. Apple's App Store censorship). We can already demonstrate that AI has mishandled intellectual property and caused damage to rightsholders - I definitely don't think robots are coming for my job but I absolutely support corrective regulation. The alternative is forfeiting copyright as we know it.

The US cannot move fast and break things forever. If American businesses want to sell digital tchotchkes, then we first have to convince rightsholders that they own anything of value.
by pklausler | 2025-10-20 00:55:24+00:00
You don’t have to worry about the order of evaluation. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, until you have a big messy problem with data-dependent interdependency. Also, every list is a generator, and every indexable container is an instance of “dynamic programming”. So you just declare how values are computed from other values, and let the runtime take care of ordering things, and it just works. It’s what makes a functional programming language into a declarative one, in practice.
by munificent | 2025-10-20 00:55:27+00:00
This is a deep question!

Authoritarianism has a lot of obvious appeal for the authority, but what is in it for the bootlickers? The answer isn't clear, but I think it mostly rests on a sense that it feels safest/strongest to be a member of the tribe whose alpha is the biggest baddest gorilla. People that support an authoritarian leader often believe that the leader will protect them and be on their side.

Of course, anyone who knows even a bit of history of authoritarianism knows that Dear Leader will happily kick people out at the slightest provocation and seems to always need his subjects to make sacrifices he himself never seems to have to make. But there is always no shortage of suckers who just want to feel like they're on a winning team.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-20 00:56:08+00:00
Yep. We should probably have industrial developers pay into some kind of fund that is then available to pay for cleanup if the site is abandoned. Basically insurance against a bankrupt owner leaving a mess for the public to deal with.

Instead we often give them tax abatements and other incentives with little recourse if they don’t deliver the promised economic growth and jobs.
by whoopdedo | 2025-10-20 00:56:12+00:00
Look at the subroutine `EnemyMoveGetMaxRowBot` starting at line #9353. On #9414 the data row pointer is set to the enemy's current row. On #9441 it checks if the column to the left is a pole. On #9516 it checks if the column to the right is a pole. Now notice that on #9461 the row pointer is moved to the row below so it can check for a walkable tile (brick or ladder). When the right-side check is done after a left-side check the row pointer will be on the wrong row.

Here it is in C (from my own notes)

SetCurrentRow1(y); if (CURROW1[x] != 0) { if (x != 0) { if (CURROW1[x-1] == 4) { TargetY = y; if (y >= PlayerY) return y; } else { SetCurrentRow1(y+1); if (CURROW1[x-1] == 1 || CURROW1[x-1] == 2 || CURROW1[x-1] == 3) { TargetY = y; if (y >= PlayerY) return y; } } } if (x < 27) { if (CURROW1[x+1] == 4) { TargetY = y; if (y >= PlayerY) return y; } else { SetCurrentRow1(y+1); if (CURROW1[x+1] == 1 || CURROW1[x+1] == 2 || CURROW1[x+1] == 3) { TargetY = y; if (y >= PlayerY) return y; } } } }

The bug can be seen on level 29 if you stand on the left set of blocks that has a single gold in it. The enemies will get stuck on the second ladder which has a pole on the right side.

The Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and naturally the VIC-20 versions of the game have this bug since they were all made by Broderbund. But interestingly so does the Hudson Soft NES port. The later Macintosh version, which is otherwise a direct port of the Apple II code, fixed it. The IBM-PC version didn't have this bug because it was rewritten with the memory layout column-ordered instead of row-ordered. But then introduced a similar bug by subtracting when it should be adding.

(edit: I hadn't checked until just now but I'm amused to find that Lode Runner Legacy from 2017 preserved this bug in the classic game mode.)
by jacquesm | 2025-10-20 00:56:14+00:00
This is not going to be popular: I think the whole idea that a build system just fetches resources from outside of the build environment is fundamentally broken. It invites all kinds of trouble and makes it next to impossible to really achieve stability and to ensure that all code that is in the build has been verified. Because after you've done it four times the fifth time you won't be looking closely. But if you don't do it automatically but only when you actually need it you will be looking a lot more sharpish at what has changed since you last pulled in the code. Especially for older and stable libraries the consumers should dictate when they upgrade, not some automatic build process. But because we're all conditioned to download stuff because it may have solved some security issue we stopped to think about the security issues associated with just downloading stuff and dumping it into the build process.
by TheDong | 2025-10-20 00:56:32+00:00
> Something that the XZ back door made me realise is that the fundamental difference between proprietary and open source software is not the price or source availability for most of its users — no not developers! - it is the reputation and protected brand of the former and the anonymity of the latter.

You're making a distinction not between open source and proprietary software but rather between hobbyist and corporate software.

There are open source projects made by companies with no external contributions allowed (sqlite sorta, most of google and amazon's oss projects in practice etc)

There are proprietary software downloads with no name attached, like practically every keygen, game crack, many indie games posted for free download on forums or 4chan, etc etc.
by bsder | 2025-10-20 00:57:00+00:00
> And then you hit that moment – you're debugging, you hit "Go to Definition", and suddenly you're free falling through ten layers of traits, macros, and generics just to figure out how a buffer updates.

This isn't unique to Rust. I find exactly the same thing about C++. I will often have to wade through 8 layers of constructors to find where some field is set.

However, I wonder if the "Orphan Rule" makes it worse in Rust. It is not uncommon for you have to create a trivial "newtype" to wrap something because of the orphan rule. A couple of layers of that and you've got an impenetrable mess on your hands.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-10-20 00:59:03+00:00
>the US is simply so huge and diverse in thought and religion that you'll always be upsetting a large swath of people no matter what you decide.

And Sir Peter Medawar agrees[0]:

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.

[0] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1064507
by gnatman | 2025-10-20 01:00:21+00:00
I’m guessing this is the source paper?

> https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/5/1087

>> This study challenges the perception of such structures as being purely defensive, revealing the Gobi Wall’s multifunctional role as an imperial tool for demarcating boundaries, managing populations and resources, and consolidating territorial control
by yupyupyups | 2025-10-20 01:01:17+00:00
I'm not an expert. I speculate that the compiler is unlikely to optimize the wasm binary better than an x86 binary. Furthermore, every VM instruction is on average going to need more than 1 cpu instructions to be executed. Intuitively, that would suggest slower execution. That is also what we see happen in practice with VMs.

Python is not a particularly fast language in the first place due to bad utilization of memory, hash table lookups everywhere and a high function call overhead.
by tzs | 2025-10-20 01:02:00+00:00
That article could use some work. In the second paragraph after the one that quote is from it says:

> His dramatic change in fortune attracted local media attention, and two weeks after his first scratchcard win in May 1999, Nine News asked him to re-enact it for the B-roll footage of their news report. While being filmed scratching off another card inside the shop, he turned around, held up the ticket and said, "I just won 250,000. I'm not joking. I just won 250,000."

1998 was when he suffered a car crash followed by serious medical problems.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-20 01:03:13+00:00
That doesn't figure into the pricing strategy or giving away patent protection in Canada in 2018 as far as I can tell?

Compounding isn't allowed in Canada, currently, so I assume you are talking about the US? Compounding Ozempic in the US wasn't a thing in 2018 when this patent was released in Canada, so not sure what one has to do with the other.

What are you getting at in reference to the argument that the patent was released intentionally in order to charge a higher price?
by sestep | 2025-10-20 01:03:51+00:00
Saw this in a comment on a different post and thought it was interesting enough to submit as its own item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45637392

Previous discussion (I don't know why the date was listed as 2018 instead of 2011 here):

The Church of Interruption (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32545023 - Aug 2022 (95 comments)
by llm_nerd | 2025-10-20 01:04:27+00:00
>And during most of that time

Most of what time? The patent just expired a few months ago. Generics are now ramping up because the patent expired, not because of some hypothetical eight year clinical trials. And for that matter, generics of existing ingredients and dosages do not have to repeat clinical trials anyways, which is one of the big reasons generics are a lot less expensive.

This hypothesis seems retconned and completely at odds with the actual facts. Not least that there has been absolutely nothing exceptional about the pricing of their product in Canada, which has always been one of the cheaper pricings worldwide.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-20 01:04:33+00:00
> I have started looking at how reasonable it is to move the compressor of my expensive and low quality 2025 fridge across the wall into the garage (refrigerant capture and refill, brazing new lines etc).

It would be worth looking into commercial refrigeration as well, you can get a refrigerator with a remote condenser and I’m sure you could find used equipment. Either way you’re going to have to run refrigerant piping and plumb in condensate drains.
by k1t | 2025-10-20 01:05:01+00:00
Here's dang's explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page.
by kaliszad | 2025-10-20 01:06:56+00:00
Anyone who is really committed to their infrastructure will not build it on top of highly proprietary stuff where you have 0 visibility into what's actually happening so you can only hope that somebody fixes it sustainably, in a reasonable time frame and permanently.

With open source, if you have the right people, you can find/ bisect down to the commit and function where the problem is exactly, which speeds up the remedy immensely. We have done such a thing with backup restores from the Proxmox Backup Server. The patches are now in Proxmox VE 9.0 because the low hanging fruit problem was actually with the client code not the Proxmox Backup Server.
by spectre3d | 2025-10-20 01:07:13+00:00
I wish there was something like Keyboard Maestro for Windows or Linux. It seems like there isn’t. I’d love to be corrected, though!

From what I can tell, AHK can’t do (m)any of the cool things that KM does, like “Click at Found Image”, “Set the Find Pasteboard”, “Prompt for Screen Rectangle”, “Stream Deck Show OK”, “Increase Song Rating by Half a Star”, “OCR Image/Screen”, “Paste from Named Clipboard”, or many other useful actions. Is there any Windows or Linux application that can?
by munificent | 2025-10-20 01:09:02+00:00
I don't think they're fine with print(foo) and stuck at (print foo).

They're fine with:

if a < b + c then d * e - f

And stuck at:

(if (< a (+ b c)) (- (* d e)))

I personally don't mind s-expr syntax, but not having any infix expressions or precedence levels means a lot more parentheses in idiomatic code.
by okanat | 2025-10-20 01:11:02+00:00
2035 is a massive "screw you, stop being poor" for Eastern and Southern members of the EU where the electrical infrastructure is weak in many parts. EVs need to get 1/3 of the price they are now to be viable in those markets where people buy Dacias, Fiats or Seats.

Without massively improving the infrastructure, it is just shooting both the industrial members by killing a well developed product class and the private individuals who cannot buy cheaper budget ICE vehicles. I am all for developing this infrastructure as green as possible. Trying to force it in this short of a timespan is just stupid.
by jusims | 2025-10-20 01:11:13+00:00
Former VMware service provider here. We switched about 1,000 VMs from VMware to Proxmox VE a couple years back, and it's been one of our best moves. We run Proxmox hyper-converged now, love the built-in VM firewalls, solid backups with PBS, and Ceph storage. The paid subscription gives us reliable updates, too.

Hardware requirements for Proxmox are way more flexible (and cheaper) than VMware, in our experience. Plus, more MSPs are jumping on the Proxmox train, so the support scene is growing fast.

Proxmox isn’t a perfect VMware clone, but it covers a lot of ground for service providers or mid-sized setups that want reliability, flexibility, and lower costs.
by munificent | 2025-10-20 01:13:07+00:00
> Given these deep divisions over the essential nature of the Scheme language, does it even make sense that we still keep making a Scheme report?

> ‘No’ is an entirely possible answer to this question. Already in the R6RS and R7RS small days, people were arguing that Scheme standardization should stop.

> If we went this way then, just like Racket in its default mode no longer claims to be a Scheme report implementation, Schemes would slowly diverge into different languages. Guile Scheme would one day simply be Guile; Chicken Scheme would be Chicken, and so on. Like the many descendants of Algol 60 and 68, and the many dialects of those descendants, each of these languages would have a strongly recognizable common ancestor, but each would still be distinct and, ultimately, likely incompatible.

This would doom all of those variants to irrelevance even more than they already are.

To the degree that people want Scheme to be a useful language for writing programs that solve real-world problems, it needs an ecosystem. And in order to compete with other languages, that ecosystem needs to commensurate with the scale that those other languages have. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how elegant the syntax is or how powerful the macro system is. If user needs to talk to a database and there isn't a good database library, they aren't going to pick the language.

The Scheme ecosystem is already tiny when you lump all languages and their packages into one. Fragment that, and you're probably below viability for all of them.

Now, it is fine if the goal of Scheme is not writing programs to solve real-world problems. It may be just a teaching language. But the evidence seems to be that it's hard to motivate programming students to learn a language that they ultimately won't end up using.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-20 01:14:53+00:00
I’m reminded by your newspaper suggestion that I once read that Dread Pirate Roberts aka Ross Ulbricht had part of their setup infected by a 0-day delivered via a news website, possibly via a third party ad network, but I don’t remember the details and don’t have a source at hand, nor do I know as a matter of fact that this occurred or was merely reported or rumored.

All of this is to say that I’m not sure that inconsistencies couldn’t be intentionally introduced in even the printed material to throw off encryption attempts if the source of the one-time pad were to have leaked. Knowing what is public knowledge regarding Crypto AG being compromised, I’m not willing to bet that a newspaper would be a safe bet for source material. A King James Version Bible, perhaps.

On the other hand, you have more fingers, and the long arm of the law casts an even longer shadow in wartime. Multi-armed bandits exist.