MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AngryData | 2025-11-05 21:59:12+00:00
To me it sounds like you already partially contradicted yourself. Bakers sleeping while at work? That would never fly today even if you had literally nothing to do except wait for bread to rise.

Their hours away from home may be similar in many cases, but that doesn't mean they had as high of a workload or had to work as fast as the modern equivalent. Most of them were working for themselves, and set their own pace and rules. And working for yourself is a HUGE perk and often many people's dream scenario. Want to drink beer all day while you chop wood? Sure. Want to sing baudy ballads while you patch your roof? Go ahead. Hurt your wrist while pulling weeds or managing your copice? Go take an immediate break or maybe just come back the next day. And because 90% of the population did that, those expectations carried over into many other jobs because anyone could walk away and find some farm they could work on instead if they really wanted.
by kawfey | 2025-11-05 21:59:42+00:00
I just went down a rabbit hole researching a toothpaste that's giving me constant ads. I went looking for reviews and ended up posting a comment on /r/PeriodontalDisease - https://old.reddit.com/r/PeriodontalDisease/comments/1bcna04...

TL;DR: EDTA is the magic ingredient that will annihilate the disease-causing biofilm on your teeth & gums, especially when you fund your own studies and spend the rest of your money made from your overpriced toothpaste gel on marketing.

Just brush and floss 2x a day, and chew gum if you like to.
by vintermann | 2025-11-05 22:00:09+00:00
It's a bit of a non-issue if you ask me. This remote-access feature sounds like what we usually call a software update feature if it came from a country we weren't scared of.

China disabling our buses? Really? That would be insanely petty and useless. I think maybe we're straining at gnats and swallowing camels, considering virtually all our phones, computers, TVs etc. come with auto update features, usually giving someone in the US the theoretical capability to brick it. And considering what was done to Karim Khan, I'd say they're far more likely to actually use it.
by epistasis | 2025-11-05 22:00:29+00:00
Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less.

Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-05 22:00:46+00:00
If by "reality" you mean "the universe", then the way the universe is depends on a cause, as the existence of the universe is not explained by the universe itself (even an "eternal" universe). Its existence is contingent on some other cause that ultimately cannot be contingent and thus does not require explanation.

So the cause or dare I say reason for the universe being the way it is will depend on its cause.
by mixedCase | 2025-11-05 22:00:48+00:00
Happiness chemicals are the end result, and end result we cannot cause directly, anyway. What leads you there, how the process involves your particular brain and environment, and how it acts as a feedback loop are a higher concern.

Even if one day you could just squirt the cocktail directly into your receptors or otherwise trick them, there's more to happiness as a part of life than turning yourself into a vegetable, but I digress.
by missinglugnut | 2025-11-05 22:01:09+00:00
As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.

Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.

They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
by vinceguidry | 2025-11-05 22:01:10+00:00
Ruby isn't Smalltalk. The only thing Ruby inherited from it is the pure object model. Everything else was cribbed from other languages. Ruby doesn't have what makes Smalltalk great, the image-based development model.

I'm making my own text editor in Ruby now, as I'm wishing for a more Smalltalk-like experience with it. There's just so much missing. Ruby has the reflective capability to enjoy a Smalltalk-like IDE, but Rails took over and drove Ruby in that direction long before anyone could cook one up.

Which is a shame, IDEs that aren't Smalltalk / Lisp haven't graduated past the need for static analysis despite having 50 years to do so. Now it's the red-headed stepchild of languages due to no fault of its own.
by andyferris | 2025-11-05 22:01:24+00:00
Regarding autovectorization:

> The other drawback of this method is that the optimizer won’t even touch anything involving floats (f32 and f64 types). It’s not permitted to change any observable outputs of the program, and reordering float operations may alter the result due to precision loss. (There is a way to tell the compiler not to worry about precision loss, but it’s currently nightly-only).

Ah - this makes a lot of sense. I've had zero trouble getting excellent performance out of Julia using autovectorization (from LLVM) so I was wondering why this was such a "thing" in Rust. I wonder if that nightly feature is a per-crate setting or what?
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-05 22:01:29+00:00
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school

What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
by chermi | 2025-11-05 22:01:31+00:00
Computational biology/cheminformatics has probably been on the most frustrating investments pharma companies have made in the past 20 years. There's been waves of optimism with many hires, then a slump after reality doesn't match optimistic expections, and so on. This time it may actually be different, and I myself am in that camp. I'm particularly excited by the discoveries in sampling methods that aren't just molecular dynamics. And the cellular foundation models for pre-screening drug interactions - they aren't quite there yet, but give it time.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-05 22:01:34+00:00
What question is there to answer? Do you legitimately not know about the controversies surrounding Elon Musk? Not thinking they’re a big deal is not the same as not knowing about them. If you are on HN you know his reputation and you know the things he’s done that have upset certain populations. There is no way you’re going to convince me this question is meant to be seriously answered.
by RickJWagner | 2025-11-05 22:01:35+00:00
Bill Gates opened the floodgates.

After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.

It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.

Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.

It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
by sudobash1 | 2025-11-05 22:01:41+00:00
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers

Actually, I have wanted better profile support for a while to segregate addons. There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them, but even so, I keep these in a separate profile just in case. That is something that can't be done with containers.
by igouy | 2025-11-05 22:02:16+00:00
> also retain the "scripting" (light) commandline approach

Smalltalk developers preferred to do their scripting within the Smalltalk IDE, so they could use their familiar tools.

And then save their "scripting" as a text file ("fact.st").

$ cat fact.st Stdio stdout nextPutAll: 100 factorial printString; nextPut: Character lf.! SmalltalkImage current snapshot: false andQuit: true!

And then "run" that text file ("fact.st") from the commandline.

$ bin/pharo --headless Pharo10-SNAPSHOT-64bit-502addc.image fact.st

93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-05 22:02:56+00:00
I see problems:

The paper claims that Qwen3-4B achieved 89.2% best-arm selection by demonstrating superior "probabilistic reasoning". But this is a 2-armed bandit where random guessing should converge to ~50% over 500 runs of 25 iterations each. An 89% rate is suspiciously high and suggests to me that something else is happening (like prompt bias or the model pattern-matching rather than reasoning)

When they increase from 2 to 5 arms, Qwen3-4B drops from 89% to 6.5% accuracy. I assert that if it truly had probabilistic reasoning capability, performance would degrade more gracefully.

The "overthinking" explanation is hand-wavy. I don't see evidence or chain of reasoning. This is just a post-hoc story to explain unexpected results.

No discussion of variance, confidence intervals, or statistical significance. With 500 runs, these should be straightforward to calculate.

Does the claimed 89% accuracy in a binary choice task strike anyone else as implausibly high for what they're claiming?
by rmonvfer | 2025-11-05 22:03:26+00:00
This looks great, but I’m a bit confused about what actually exists right now. The site uses the present tense (“it is”, “we are”), but I couldn’t find anything after browsing and clicking around for about 15 minutes. From the “log”, it sounds like only the parser for R Prime is implemented, and that R Prime itself is just a precursor to the actual language that will be used to develop the whole system (from scratch?). Does that mean that R Prime has to be fully developed before work on its successor can even begin?

If anything is already working, where’s the code? Can people contribute yet?

Not trying to nitpick, but it’s hard to tell what’s real vs. vaporware (beyond the author’s very impressive abilities for systems/language design and writing)

The website also mentions a device but I get that’s many years away too, right? I mean how long will it take to actually develop everything that’s described in the website?
by Timon3 | 2025-11-05 22:03:33+00:00
> Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem.

Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose.

> LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before.

LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data. When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.

> You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)

It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature. Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.

> Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.

Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data. This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.
by AngryData | 2025-11-05 22:03:37+00:00
But 90% of the common people were farmers and were not bakers or bath tenders or vendors or the like so would be enjoying the day off. Although farmers didn't really need dedicated days off because their only schedule conflictions would be the main planting and harvest months, the festivals would just be a good way to bring all the farmers together at similar times to party and spend money or trade.
by jmclnx | 2025-11-05 22:03:41+00:00
>I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics

Did you see what happened in Europe with a rather small mass migration 10/15 years ago due to Arab Spring ? People have short memories.

Can you imagine what will happen when 100 of thousands start migrating north when they can no longer feed themselves and maybe even work outside ? Italy was close to sinking boats coming across the the sea. Other countries in the EU started building walls. And even Germany took a slight right turn. Once these large migrations start, I expect bombs will be dropped. Same applies to North America.
Show HN: Astrobiology Search Engine (NASA Space Apps Global Nominee 2025)
by nullkevin | 2025-11-05 22:04:03+00:00
Made this project for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2025, and today got announced a global nominee (unfortunately through email, due to the US funding issues).

It's created using Vue and reading and filtering about 608 publications on space biology from open NASA data.

Way un-optimized for a practical project but made it in a few days before the challenge as a solo developer, so quite happy with the outcome.

Repo: https://github.com/kevinmahrous/astrobiology-search Site: https://astrobiology-search.vercel.app/

Feedback, contributions, and ideas are all welcome.
by areoform | 2025-11-05 22:04:17+00:00
If you are a capitalist, you should be pro-acquisition (i.e. of smaller firms) and anti-merger (for larger firms), because mergers are a form of crony capitalism that leads to reduced product quality and market dysfunction.

First, merging firms reduce the number of products they sell, with the effects materializing one year after the M&A and accelerating over the next several years. Second, merging firms tend to drop and add products at the periphery of their joint product portfolio. Third, the net effect is an increase in the similarity among the products that firms offer following a merger or acquisition.

from: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/02/merged-firms-offer-less...

This finding has been consistently true since people have started measuring merger outcomes, "we find that each merger is associated with a quality decrease (increase) in markets where the merging firms had (had no) pre-merger competition with each other, and the quality change can have a U-shaped relationship with pre-merger competition intensity. Consumer gains/losses associated with quality changes, which we monetize, are substantial " – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01677...

It is doubtful that merging two companies would have improved the EU's capability to compete with Chinese state operators. On the other hand, lowering the capital threshold to create a new entrant would definitely improve the EU's competitive position and capabilities, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=cele...
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-05 22:04:22+00:00
> Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters.

Clearly not chess masters.

---

> poorly defined problems [are also] everyday questions like [...] “how do you figure out what to do today.”

I think that I do have a sensible answer to this question, but the problem rather is that my answer is very different from what I am obliged by society to do. I can easily believe that a less intelligent person would not immediately see this discrepancy, and thus be happier.

---

Concerning

> Christopher Langan, a guy who can score eye-popping numbers on IQ tests, believes that 9/11 was an inside job

and

> they’re still unable to solve basic but poorly defined problems like “maintain a basic grip on reality”

Being intelligent does not mean that that you have the same "trust anchor of truth" as many other people in society have, even if you assume that they are perfectly rationally thinking people (and I personally believe that being very smart and being a rationalist are only loosely correlated (you must be somewhat smart to be a rationalist, but the other direction (smart people are very rationalist) in my experience does not hold)).
by richardfeynman | 2025-11-05 22:04:51+00:00
I agree with you that if all he did was attack the Israeli court system, we could have a reasonable discussion. However, he was not dunking on Israel, he was dunking on the enlightenment and western values of jurisprudence, for example the right to a fair trial and the concept of presumed innocence. In any event, his comment was flagged and is now deleted, so apparently the mods agreed with me.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-11-05 22:04:51+00:00
PVWatts will help you figure this out: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov

According to PVWatts, a 10kW solar system would get me very close to my average usage in December. I'd be way over in the summer, could probably get away with a 4kW system and dial back use during an outage. I can lease two Powerwall 3 batteries from my utility company for $55/mo.

Or look at: https://www.franklinwh.com/products/apower2-home-battery-bac...

Edit: this also looks like a good option: https://www.santansolar.com/product/the-homesteady-kit/

We used to lose power 3-4 days a winter in our old house. It would have been really nice to have heat. A generator or smaller system could handle that.
by parodysbird | 2025-11-05 22:05:15+00:00
> The challenge with comparing AI to humans is that the bar keeps shifting up.

Exactly. There is no standard, humans will adapt and find how to use AI as a tool, and the bar will never and should never be fixed.

The beauty of Turing's Test (which he strangely seemed to misunderstand) is that it is almost impossible to pass.
by imgabe | 2025-11-05 22:05:15+00:00
"happy" seems like a temporary state. It's a reaction you have to an event. In base state without any input, you would be neither happy nor unhappy. Then something happens and if you like it you're happy about it for a while and if you don't like it you're unhappy about it for a while and then you go back to being neutral. It seems like the wrong question to ask to expect people to just walk around "happy" 24/7 for no reason.

Questions like this are basically just noise. If you ask someone whether they are happy with their life overall, it will depend on whatever most recently happened and how they feel about it. Being smart doesn't mean nothing unhappy is ever going to happen to you. You'll still fail at something, pets and loved ones will die, you'll get laid off or whatever.
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-05 22:05:40+00:00
I only read the intro, and I don't think I can bare the rest of it. First, I think the premises is false. I think smarter people are happyer. Second, many people when they engage with pieces like this, expect that smarter people are unhappyer, which, yes, the article doesn't say this, but I feel it at least suggests it.

And last but not least, their study that says smart people are not happier doesn't really say that. It essentially says smart people are happier when not surrounded by stupid people.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-05 22:05:48+00:00
There is no reason a TUI couldn't do this. Calling another program is easier in a TUI, since it is one step nearer to execve and a shell. If it is in a file, then opening another program isn't hard.

> The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.

Run another Linux VM on the client. /s

Aren't there X servers for Windows? I remembered installing one on a locked down university computer for fun.
by cortesoft | 2025-11-05 22:05:51+00:00
There was a movie a while back that talked about what makes people happy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_(2011_film)

It had some interesting ideas, and one of the things that stuck with me is the idea of your brain being a "difference engine" in that the variation is what matters. If we don't experience pain, we can't experience pleasure.

It seems a bit simplistic when stated that way, but I think there is something to it.

Another thing I have come to believe as I have aged is that our western (American especially) society places too much emphasis on happiness, in that we think happiness is (and should be) the prime goal of every human. I have come to believe that less and less, and think something like satisfaction, contentment, and purpose are much more important as life goals than happiness. Happiness is an important part of life, and is important for reaching the other goals I mentioned, but it is not the end goal (to me). I think most of us somewhat intuitively understand this, although our response is often to redefine what happiness is rather than concluding happiness isn't our end goal.

If happiness was everything, we would be much more accepting and encouraging towards hedonism than we are. A heroin addict who has a good clean supply and no responsibilities would be the ultimate dream life if we truly believed pure happiness was the most important thing.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-05 22:06:33+00:00
When I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for providing steady output in China from 100% renewable energy (wind/solar/battery/hydrogen) at minimum cost using 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, the solar curtailment is just 7.3% (and most of the energy is coming from solar, not wind). If I remove hydrogen and solve again, solar curtailment increases to 16.7%. "200% overcapacity" is completely bogus.
by Johnny555 | 2025-11-05 22:06:53+00:00
While they aren't stopping users from getting medical advice, the new terms (which they say are pretty much the same as the old terms), seem to prohibit users from seeking medical advice even for themselves if that advice would otherwise come from a licensed health professional:

https://openai.com/en-GB/policies/usage-policies/

Your use of OpenAI services must follow these Usage Policies: Protect people. Everyone has a right to safety and security. So you cannot use our services for: provision of tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional
by epistasis | 2025-11-05 22:06:55+00:00
During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions.

I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.