MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rafaelmn | 2025-11-05 19:12:54+00:00
>After it was diagnosed I walked an older version of chat gpt through our experience and it suggested my son’s issue as a possibility along with the correct diagnostic tool in just one back and forth.

Something I've noticed is that it's much easier to lead the LLM to the answer when you know where you want to go (even when the answer is factually wrong !), it doesn't have to be obvious leading but just framing the question in terms of mentioning all the symptoms you now know to be relevant in the order that's diagnosable, etc.

Not saying that's the case here, you might have gotten the correct answer first try - but checking my now diagnosed gastritis I got stuff from GERD to CRC depending on which symptoms I decide to stress and which events I emphasize in the history.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-05 19:13:04+00:00
But now it seems like the argument has shifted.

It started out as, "AI can make more errors than a human. Therefore, it is not useful to humans." Which I disagreed with.

But now it seems like the argument is, "AI is not useful to humans because its output is non-deterministic?" Is that an accurate representation of what you're saying?
by hopelite | 2025-11-05 19:13:44+00:00
Yes, I understand you don't see it. That is precisely part of the effect from being psychologically and emotionally broken. But just mull this over, why did the "German" government just last week plunder "modern Germans" to pay another €1 billion to the supposed 200,000 remaining holocaust survivors, when they've already pay €90 billion since 1945 for things none of them did? Or did you do the holocaust and therefore you should pay?

Another point, I you are not psychologically broken, why would you otherwise tolerate a foreign government maintain 40 colonies within your boundaries with ~200,000 of their colonists? It's the level of rationalization and excuse making that is common among abuse victims, like battered wives. But like I said, I understand why you don't understand it, even though every movie and every video game you have ever watched has some kind of reference of or to nazis and often some belittlement of germans. Why is no other war ever used to belittle and degrade any other people? The US committed war crimes from 2001 to 2021. Far longer than the Nazi regime even existed in total, not to mention Vietnam, which is celebrated in many ways and people who participated in it are looked up to, and those are far more recent conflicts... yet only Germans have been abused as they have been for 80 years. I just heard a German/Nazi reference from a boomer the other day. Of course he is an idiot, but that's someone that was not even alive when the war was going on at all, yet here he is just parroting the things he was trained to do.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-11-05 19:13:47+00:00
>the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile.

That's a choice to limit the meaning of the term to the rigid/immobile parts of the external boundary of an object. It's not obviously the correct choice. Presumably you don't take issue with people saying planes fly. The issue of submarines swimming seems analogous.

>Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”?

I don't think I've ever had a discussion about submarines with anyone, outside of the OceanGate disaster. But this whole approach to the issue seems misguided. With terms like this we should ask what the purpose behind the term is, i.e. it's intension (the concept), not the incidental extension of the term (the collection of things it applies to at some point in time). When we refer to something swimming, we mean that it is moving through water under its own power. The reference to "body" is incidental.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-05 19:14:11+00:00
Sorry, I don't agree with that. The context of profit is money which shareholders are entitled to after accounting for the costs of their business. None of those things apply to government.

Also, New Hampshire does not have sales tax on certain goods and services. Hotel rooms and car rentals, for example, do have sales tax. And apparently, alcohol sold at the state alcohol stores.

https://www.revenue.nh.gov/taxes-glance/meals-rooms-rentals-...
by miltonlost | 2025-11-05 19:15:51+00:00
> I'm well-aware that it's not a truth machine, and any output it provides should be verified, checked for references, and treated with due diligence.

You are, but that's not how AI is being marketed by OpenAI, Google, etc. They never mention, in their ads, how much the output needs to be double and triple checked. They say "AI can do what you want! It knows all! It's smarter than PhDs!". Search engines don't say "And this is the truth" in their results, which is not what LLM hypers do.
by morshu9001 | 2025-11-05 19:15:54+00:00
Historically the main way was Py threads that have all the downsides of OS threads (overhead + data races) without the parallelism advantage (due to GIL), with a confusing API on top. There was no cooperative multitasking until asyncio, at which point it was too late. There are competing solutions now, and many users are thoroughly confused.

And I'm guessing the reason they didn't do greenthreading is it'd severely complicate working with C/native libs.
by MrJohz | 2025-11-05 19:16:01+00:00
There are plenty of ways around this.

As others have pointed out, there are other options for styling XML that work well enough in practice. You can also do content negotiation on the server, so that a browser requesting an html document will get the human-readable version, while any feed reader will be sent the XML version. (If you render the html page with XSLT, you can even take advantage of better XSLT implementations where you don't need to work around bugs and cross-platform jank.) Or you can rely on `link` tags, letting users submit your homepage to their feed reader, and having the feed reader figure out where everything is.

There might even be a mime code for RSS feeds, such that if you open an RSS feed in your browser, it automatically figures out the correct application (i.e. your preferred RSS reader) to open that feed in. But I've not seen that actually implemented anywhere, which is a shame, because that seems like by far the best option for user experience.
by mdriley | 2025-11-05 19:16:28+00:00
> TL;DR: use std::simd if you don’t mind nightly, wide if you don’t need multiversioning, and otherwise pulp or macerator.

This matches the conclusion we reached for Chromium. We were okay with nightly, so we're using `std::simd` but trying to avoid the least stable APIs. More details: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lh9x43gtqXFh5bP1LeYevWj0...
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-05 19:16:39+00:00
"TDLR 10-20 years ago, the US started allowing maintenance of domestic planes in foreign countries, outside the reach of the FAA’s inspections"

There are foreign planes entering US airspace every day, carrying thousands of passengers. They are also serviced by foreign technicians, outside the reach of the FAA's inspections, and they seem to be doing just fine.

"Foreign" in itself isn't bad, you just need to choose/require reputable partners. If you outsource your maintenance to the same crews that maintain jets for Polish LOT or Taiwanese China Airlines, you may save some money and yet get excellent service, as those airlines aren't known for having safety problems.

Kosovo or South Sudan would be a different story.
by mywittyname | 2025-11-05 19:16:51+00:00
I don't think effectively damming (alternatively, rerouting) the Ohio River is a solution to relocating an airport in Louisville. That's a wildly ambitious undertaking compared to most other land reclamation projects.

Yeah, the terrain around Louisville poses a challenge for placing an airport, but they could do like Cincinnati does, and have their airport located across the river. Or place it between Frankfurt and Louisville. Or do like Pittsburg and make the terrain flat enough for an international airport.
by nagaiaida | 2025-11-05 19:16:55+00:00
> You say you turn JS off for security but JS has made billions of people more secure by creating a sandbox for these random apps to run in.

is "every website now expects to run arbitrary code on the client's computer" really a more secure state of affairs? after high profile hardware vulnerabilities exploitable even from within sandboxed js?

from how many unique distributors did the average person run random untrusted apps that required sandboxing before and after this became the normal way to deliver a purely informational website and also basically everything started happening online?
by mfer | 2025-11-05 19:17:08+00:00
Two thoughts....

First, being intelligent (as defined in the article) doesn't relate to being happy. There is nothing inherent about being intelligent that means happy.

Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them. For example, the focus on "more" rather than "enough". We are shaped to always desire more and never be content with what we have. Even intelligent people are shaped by this. Consider the fall in terms of people who have hobbies.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-05 19:18:24+00:00
> One drawback I see is that property-based tests inevitably need to be much more complex than example-based ones.

I don’t think that’s true, I just think the complexity is more explicit (in code) rather than implicit (in the process of coming up with examples). Example-based testing usually involves defining conditions and properties to be tested, then involves constructing sets of examples to test them and which attempt to anticipated edge cases from the description of the requirements (black box) or from knowledge of how the code is implemented (white box).

Property based testing involves defining the conditiosn and properties, writing code that generates the conditions and for each property writing a bit of code that can refute it by passing if and only if it is true of the subject under test for a particular set of inputs.

With a library like Hypothesis which both has good generators for basic types and good abstractions for combining and adapting generators, the latter seems to be less complex overall, as well as moving the complexity into a form where it is explicit and easy to maintain/adapt, whereas adapting example-based tests to requirements changes involves either throwing out examples and starting over or revalidating and updating examples individually.
by mirabilis | 2025-11-05 19:18:25+00:00
An AI-related bromide poisoning incident earlier this year: “Inspired by his history of studying nutrition in college, he decided to conduct a personal experiment to eliminate chloride from his diet. For 3 months, he had replaced sodium chloride with sodium bromide obtained from the internet after consultation with ChatGPT, in which he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning… However, when we asked ChatGPT 3.5 what chloride can be replaced with, we also produced a response that included bromide. Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do.”

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260
by Havoc | 2025-11-05 19:18:43+00:00
Yeah definitely has some value in that sense. That in itself isn't enough to make a dent in the work though.

Think of it this way - an IDE can tell you what functions an object has or autocomplete something is useful to a beginner & learning. But that's not what puts food on the programmers table - writing code that solves real problems does.

Same in excel business use cases - the numbers and formulas don't matter directly - their meaning in a business context does. And that connection can be very tenuous. With code the compiler is the ultimate arbiter - it has to make sense on that level. Excel files it's all freestyle - it could be anything from your grandmas shopping list to a model that runs half a bank.
by evanjrowley | 2025-11-05 19:18:46+00:00
Quoting Nikhil's argument again:

>People who worked remotely for two or more years lost their social skills. They became shy, reserved, and confined to their comfort zones and small groups. They forgot the art of striking up conversations with strangers. They forgot how to have fun with people. Single men became glued to dating apps and lost the ability to approach women even in safe, everyday settings.

The only part of this that's true for me is the part about becoming shy and reserved, but I'd argue it has more to do with the work culture than the structure of working from home. Regardless of where you work, all it takes is a few "don't say anything" remarks from your team lead or supervisor before the outgoing nature is conditioned away from employees. This can be reversed, even when someone is working from home, by incentivizinging them to be more outgoing. Saying this as someone who has been a remote worker for 10 years.
by Animats | 2025-11-05 19:18:59+00:00
This is a lot like One Laptop Per Child, but more vague. What is it supposed to do? Why have one?

It's not that the system doesn't come with a browser. It's that the browser is apparently built into the operating system. Remember IE 6?

If you're going to rethink computing devices, the next thing is probably a big screen, a camera, and a good microphone array. No keyboard. You just talk to it and occasionally gesture, and it organizes and helps you.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-05 19:19:20+00:00
> They’re probably one of the most hated companies in the world

By tecchies.

That’s like adding “In Mice,” to headlines of biological breakthroughs.

It’s quite clear that a fairly significant majority of customers don’t hate Apple. They aren’t “brand slaves,” like Harley riders (anymore), but people clearly vote with their wallets.

Microsoft always had the “My work requires it” thing going, but only a couple of industries are majority Apple.

Like it or not, people pay personal money for Apple kit, and they are a demographic that marketers drool over.
by causal | 2025-11-05 19:19:33+00:00
That's sort of Taleb's whole thing: most successful investors just happened to be riding a wave and cannot claim any sort of genius. The Black Swan event is always explained away as some kind of environmental blip and investment success explained as the inevitable outcome of hard work- when in fact it is Black Swans that are inevitable and hard-working investors are just a background constant.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-05 19:19:37+00:00
America has an entire political party who runs a party line that unregulated businesses will naturally do what's "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society to collapse.

>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.

That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.

Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.

If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
by pnw | 2025-11-05 19:19:59+00:00
Exactly. If the last decade has shown us anything, consumers will always opt for the convenience features and cost far ahead of privacy concerns. I can't think of many successful consumer products with privacy as their key selling point, despite how many times it shows up here. Apple products maybe, but privacy is listed as feature #6 of the 7 features highlighted halfway down the page on https://www.apple.com/iphone/
by miltonlost | 2025-11-05 19:20:42+00:00
Ah sorry, I misread it as coming from someone who doesn't want licensing, so you were appealing to HN by switching to software engineers (and I know many on here loathe to think anything beyond "move fast and break things", which is the opposite of most (non-software) engineers.

But yeah, I'd be down for at least some code of ethics, so we could have "do no harm" instead of "experiment on the mental states of children/adolescents/adults via algorithms and then do whatever is most addictive"
by fluidcruft | 2025-11-05 19:20:43+00:00
I think one of the challenges is attribution. For example if you use Google search to create a fraudulent legal filing there aren't any of Google's fingerprints on the document. It gets reported as malpractice. Whereas reporting on these things is OpenAI or whatever AI is responsible. So even from the perspective of protecting a brand it's unavoidable. Suppose (no idea if true) the Louvre robbers wore Nike shoes and the reporting were that Nike shoes were used to rob the Louvre and all anyone talks about is Nike and how people need to be careful about what they do wearing Nike shoes.

It's like newsrooms took the advice that passive voice is bad form so they inject OpenAI as the subject instead.
by devttyeu | 2025-11-05 19:20:53+00:00
It is halfway there arguably, and libp2p does make use of it - https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/transports/webtransport/

Unlike websockets you can supply "cert hash" which makes it possible for the browser to establish a TLS connection with a client that doesn't have a certificate signed by a traditional PKI provider or even have a domain name. This property is immensely useful because it makes it possible for browsers to establish connections to any known non-browser node on the internet, including from secure contexts (i.e. from an https page where e.g. you can't establish a ws:// connection, only wss:// is allowed but you need a 'real' tls cert for that)
by tbrockman | 2025-11-05 19:21:09+00:00
It seems like there are a lot of people who are desperate for reality to conform to their cynicism, out of fear that they (and their world view) are part of the problem.

For whatever reason, for some it's more gratifying to see others fail to prosper if it confirms their beliefs than it is to watch others succeed and have their beliefs challenged (even if it's to their own detriment).

In many cases, I imagine those who would see themselves as "good" use their world view as a way of absolving themselves of guilt for their actions. If I believe that there was never enough for most to lead dignified lives and that society rewards only self-interest, I don't have to regret taking more than necessary, and I can justify my apathy to the suffering of others. "It is the way of things," I can think to myself, "anything else would be foolish and naive." In this way I can find satisfaction even in inequality, comforted by its inevitability--and my own cleverness in understanding it.
by fny | 2025-11-05 19:21:15+00:00
I mean... you do have to backfill around your drainage pipe, so it's not too far off. Frankly, if you Google the subject people misspeak about "backfilling pipes" too as if the target of the backfill is the pipe itself too not the trench. Garbage in, garbage out.

All the circumstances where ChatGPT has given me shoddy advice fall in three buckets:

1. The internet lacks information, so LLMs will invent answers

2. The internet disagrees, so LLMs sometimes pick some answer without being aware of the others

3. The internet is wrong, so LLMs spew the same nonsense

Knowledge from blue collar trades seems often to in those three buckets. For subjects in healthcare, on the other hand, there are rooms worth of peer reviewed research, textbooks, meta studies, and official sources.
Show HN: Kumi – a portable, declarative, functional core for business logic
by goldenCeasar | 2025-11-05 19:21:24+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the author of Kumi, a declarative, statically-typed, array-oriented, compiled DSL for building calculation systems (think spreadsheets). It is implemented entirely in Ruby (3.1+) and statically checks everything, targets an array-first IR, and compiles down to Ruby/JS. I have been working on it for the past few months and I am curious what you think.

The linked demo covers finance scenarios, tax calculators, Conway's Game of Life (array ops), and a quick Monte Carlo walkthrough so you can see the zero-runtime codegen in practice. (The GOL rendering lives in the supporting React app; Kumi handles the grid math.)

The Original Problem:

The original idea for Kumi came from a complex IAM problem I faced at a previous job. Provisioning a single employee meant applying dozens of interdependent rules (based on role, location, etc.) for every target system. The problem was deeper: even the data abstractions were rule-based. For instance, 'roles' for one system might just be a specific interpretation of Active Directory groups and are mapped to another system by some function over its attributes.

This logic was also highly volatile; writing the rules down became a discovery process, and admins needed to change them live. This was all on top of the underlying challenge of synchronizing data between systems. My solution back then was to handle some of this logic in a component called "Blueprints" that interpreted declarative rules and exposed this logic to other workflows.

The Evolution:

That "Blueprints" component stuck in my mind. About a year later, I decided to tackle the problem more fundamentally with Kumi. My first attempts were brittle—first runtime lambdas, then a series of interpreters. I knew what an AST was, but had to discover concepts like compilers, IRs, and formal type/shape representation. Each iteration revealed deeper problems.

The core issue was my AST representation wasn't expressive enough, forcing me into unverifiable 'runtime magic'. I realized the solution was to iteratively build a more expressive intermediate representation (IR). This wasn't a single step: I spent two months building and throwing away ~5 different IRs, tens of thousands of lines of code. That painful process is what forced me to learn what it truly meant to compile, represent complex shapes, normalize the dataflow, and verify logic. This journey is what led to static type-checking as a necessary outcome, not just an initial goal.

This was coupled with the core challenge: business logic is often about complex, nested, and ragged data (arrays, order items, etc.). If the DSL couldn't natively handle loops over this data, it was pointless. This required an IR expressive enough for optimizations like inlining and loop fusion, which are notoriously hard to reason about with vectorized data.

You can try a web-based demo here: https://kumi-play-web.fly.dev/?example=monte-carlo-simulatio...

And the repo is here: https://github.com/amuta/kumi