MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anon_cow1111 | 2025-11-15 01:18:13+00:00
The actual error bar of "typical time-to-infection", as per CDC guideline is 36 hours minimum. 24 is my generous amount of error factor in the most optimistic (or worst, if you're a human and not a tick) direction.

So in other words, this was my experience, and it was at least 50% worse in timescale than the cdc predicted
by KK7NIL | 2025-11-15 01:19:10+00:00
You imply in your argument that finance mainly makes money from HFT("it's hard to me to see how market trading activity that provides a price for equities to the second") but this is simply not true, HFT and quants make up a very small portion of financial staff or profits.

My understanding is that the majority of big finance's income is from private equity or debt deals (pairing companies who need money with investors who have money), not from trading (there's very few people who we can confidently say are net winning traders and they don't scale).
by kragen | 2025-11-15 01:19:15+00:00
> I'm not an expert on the subject, but is there an obvious bottleneck that would prevent Helion from manufacturing an arbitrarily large number of generators that scales with demand?

No, nothing is obvious to anyone outside the company.

> I'd expect that they probably wouldn't focus on copying Orion exactly,

Hopefully their next model will come out before another billion dollars of investment goes down the drain.

> Opex also seems like a non-issue to me, given that the machines will be automated, the fuel will be cheap,

Yes, that could happen, but what it really means is that we don't have any idea what the opex is.

> My understanding is that exporting might not be a huge hurdle to get a green light for due to the low proliferation concerns,

I think the bigger concern there would be whether China would import it.

> But I also don't see a reason why the US couldn't be a highly lucrative market for Helion,

Well, the US hasn't been a highly lucrative market for power plants for 50 years. Maybe the advent of new, radically cheaper technology could change that, but I suspect it won't; the advent of new, radically cheaper energy in the late 18th century didn't turn China or Japan into a highly lucrative market for power plants, for essentially social or political rather than technical and economic reasons.

> We can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison between a mature technology in active high-volume production and a speculative future technology, but the latter in this case does seem to me to have a higher ceiling on its potential value over the long run.

Yes, I agree. But we weren't talking about the long run, but rather about currently existing companies that need to return money to their investors in the next ten or twenty years. Breakthroughs do happen, but rarely.
by Genego | 2025-11-15 01:22:20+00:00
You're just one person, those people have their own audiences; so your own critique, is just your own critique. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean that it is not resonating well with others. I can tell you from the research I am doing for several hours per day on ai-filmmaking that there are already a few handful of creators making a living from this; with communities behind them that keep growing, and their audiences that keep expanding (some already have 100k to 1m subscribers across different social media channels). Some of them are even striking brand deals.

Entire narrative driven AI stores that are driven by AI stories and AI characters in AI generated universes... they are here already, but I can only count those who do it well on two hands (last year, there where 1-2). This is going to accelerate, and if you think its "slop" now, it just takes a few iterations of artists who you personally resonate with to jump onto this, before you stop seeing it as slop. I am jumping on this, because I can see very clearly where this will all lead. You don't have to like it, but it will arrive regardless.
by georgehotz | 2025-11-15 01:23:27+00:00
Full disclosure, we have a contract with AMD to get Llama 405B training on MI350X on MLPerf.

Things are turning around for AMD. If you have an AMD card, go to pytorch.org, click Linux+ROCm and install PyTorch. 3 years ago, this was hopeless. Today, most mainline things work. I ran nanochat on MI300X and it just worked. I think that's true about MI350X now too. The MI350X machine is stable.

They are clearly behind NVIDIA, nobody doubts that. And a lot of investment into software will be required to catch up, ecosystem, compiler, and driver. But 2 years ago they seemed hopeless, now they don't. Things take time. HipKittens is a great codebase to study to see where AMD's LLVM backend is still lacking; compare it to the CUDA Kittens.

For training, it's NVIDIA and Google in first. AMD in second. And nobody in third. Intel and Tenstorrent are not remotely close. Huawei examples segfaulted. Groq gave up selling chips. Cerebras isn't available anywhere. Trainium had a 5 day wait time to get one instance and I lost interest.
by gerdesj | 2025-11-15 01:23:49+00:00
Teams will always work in a browser, so make hay whilst the sun shines.

Sadly bits fall off depending on which browser you use. Firefox seems to have fallen out of favour and can no longer share. Chromium efforts still seem to work OK. I have sometimes found that faking my browser agent helps with stability ... which is sad and possibly rather disingenuous.

I must get around to spinning up a Jitsi jobbie. BBB should be my favourite but is a non starter due to elderly software in the stack. I need to take another look at all this stuff.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-15 01:24:00+00:00
I would also keep in mind that the 180k number is almost certainly inaccurate, if we go by this administration’s behavior during the DOGE efforts of manufacturing false claims of “fraud” out of benign circumstances as an excuse to tear down the social safety net systems.[1]

> Bobba [DOGE engineer] had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data. Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek [SSA employee] watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.”

[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-doge-social-securi...
by Moto7451 | 2025-11-15 01:25:25+00:00
I used it a decade ago and it was handy at the time. I’d hope it got better over time. Generally I know enough about how Windows works I didn’t have much trouble using normal Wine installations of software but the bottles did make some Adobe products easier to use.

It was funny being able to use Photoshop 7 in Wine but not the native macOS version.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-15 01:26:03+00:00
Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really.

If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working.

Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
by Bocajmai | 2025-11-15 01:27:22+00:00
For me, the hardest part of Shape Up isn't understanding the principles, it's knowing when a pitch is actually done. What's the right level of detail? How do you know if you've shaped enough?

This is a reference I made for myself. Five required sections from the book, quality checks for each one, and one extension I added (Open Questions as a shapedness metric).

Would love to hear how others have adapted Shape Up for their context.
by jact | 2025-11-15 01:28:03+00:00
Xquery is what I would call a “weirdly good” language. It’s weird how good it is and how well designed it is relative to how little adoption it has.

The key thing is that since XML is a first-class datatype in XPath, trees are therefore a first class datatype. Since XPath is built into the language, you don’t need lenses or anything like that to do operations on deep tree structures. It just works. I am tempted sometimes to use it for more general projects than processing XML.
by famouswaffles | 2025-11-15 01:28:40+00:00
There is plenty reason. This article is just one example of many. People bring it up because LLMs routinely do things we call reasoning when we see them manifest in other humans. Brushing it off as 'deep pattern prediction' is genuinely meaningless. Nobody who uses that phrase in that way can actually explain what they are talking about in a way that can be falsified. It's just vibes. It's an unfalsifiable conversation-stopper, not a real explanation. You can replace "pattern matching" with "magic" and the argument is identical because the phrase isn't actually doing anything.

A - A force is required to lift a ball

B - I see Human-N lifting a ball

C - Obviously, Human-N cannot produce forces

D - Forces are not required to lift a ball

Well sir, why are you so sure Human-N cannot produce forces? How is she lifting the ball ? Well Of course Human-N is just using s̶t̶a̶t̶i̶s̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ magic.
by onecommentman | 2025-11-15 01:29:53+00:00
Embarrassed by the HN comments here. Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get. Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic. Such commenters should be forced to prepare and serve lunches for hundreds of hungry children while also being forced to listen to screaming political rants through taped-on headphones. The lower middle class, my native land, gets too little applause for their contributions.
by beeflet | 2025-11-15 01:30:01+00:00
Well that makes sense. Perhaps it is not a transfer of wealth to the poor, but a transfer of power to the middle class.

I would say this: in the future I think we are gonna have all sorts of robotics that will be able to use LLMs and vision models and stuff to do basic reason and coordination to automate a ton of tasks. The average person is basically going to be able to fit a micro-factory in their house that can knit all of their clothes, make circuit boards for all of the computers they need, stitch their wounds together, and such.

In the future, we won't even need to engage in the economy of mass production, and we will basically all be low effort self-sufficient sustainable farmers and manufacturers due to AI reducing the effectiveness of economies of scale.

No one will have conventional jobs, so we will each recreate the old economy on a tiny scale to avoid the expensive monopolies. A single person's job would be like operating a tiny factory that produces a certain type of insulin or a certain antibiotic, or some sort of resistor or tobacco or something. Like the idea of family farms extended to the industrial domain.

And all of this progress is being taken on for free at massive cost by these AI companies that think it will have the exact opposite effect, which is monetizable.

I think that LLMs can be used as a far more advanced search than google. Imagine you have some project that requires a certain part. You could spend hours browsing the internet for the best deal, or you run a local LLM that scrapes websites and does the shipping calculations and runs a reasoning model to decide if it is a good fit based on the criteria you give it, etc. You essentially have the shopping done for you, it is just a matter of one person designing the framework and open sourcing it.

Most searching isn't so much finding a direct answer to your query, but scoping out a general field of information where you don't even know what it is you want to know. LLMs give us the opportunity to script general reasoning tasks.

Maybe it is bad or neutral for labor in the short term, but in the long run I think it is worse for capital. A lot of the moat that capital has is the ability to organize labor. If anyone with a computer can do the work of 100 men, then when the 100 men get laid off they will all ask themselves "why can't I also just start a competitor where I automate all the tasks in the company?".

Thanks for reading my TED talk.
by nmstoker | 2025-11-15 01:30:11+00:00
Yes, fuly agree. And enough time has passed with it being robust and performant that the old bores who used to go on about KDE performance have finally given up bleeting on about that.

I wouldn't bash GNOME as clearly plenty of work goes into it and having two decent DE is good for the ecosystem, but for me GNOME never struck a chord compared to the elegance of KDE - it just feels like the Duplo version compared to KDE
by ryandrake | 2025-11-15 01:30:15+00:00
Phrases like "basically impossible" and "if they can" evoke some kind of physical force stopping an action that everyone, in good faith, wants to take. In your example (and in the article's) it just doesn't seem like everyone actually wants to take the good action.

If the game studios were actually not being assholes, they could each say, "You know what, we're not making any money from whatever rights we might or might not have, so, lawyers: scram and go do something else. Here's a signed paper saying we give up all rights to the IP. Go have a ball."

But, they'll never do this because corporations are like Smaug, as another poster put it--they hoard for hoarding's sake and will never voluntarily give up value, even if it's a fractional share of potential value, and even if that value is not materially helping them. They'd rather destroy something they're not using than give it away.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-15 01:31:39+00:00
It varies so widely across the US.

I went to school in several States, and it ran the gamut from unhealthy corporate slop (e.g. multiple schools in California) to delicious food prepared daily from fresh ingredients by local grannies (Nebraska).

The latter was amazing and wasn't even generic American food, it reflected the predominant ethnicity of the people that lived in that locale (because grannies doing home-cooking). This was decades ago and the area has hollowed out, so I don't know if it is still a thing there.
Show HN: BranchBox – isolated dev environments per feature
by rida | 2025-11-15 01:31:43+00:00
I built a small tool called BranchBox to solve a problem I kept running into while working with multiple coding agents and multiple features at the same time.

Parallel development sounds great until containers share ports, worktrees drift, databases collide, and environment variables leak across branches. My laptop would regularly get into broken states, and I wanted a predictable way to run several fully isolated environments side-by-side.

BranchBox creates a complete, self-contained dev environment for every feature:

• its own Git worktree

• its own devcontainer

• its own Docker network

• its own database

• its own ports

• its own environment variables

• optional tunnels (cloudflared for now, ngrok to come)

• shared credentials mounted safely

It is not a sandbox. It spins up real containers and real databases, but keeps everything isolated so nothing touches anything else unless you explicitly want it to. This has made parallel work (both human and agent-driven) much safer and more manageable.

I use it daily across several projects and wanted to share it in case others run into similar issues.

Repo: https://github.com/branchbox/branchbox Docs: https://branchbox.github.io/branchbox/

Happy to answer questions, share internals, or get feedback.
by Springtime | 2025-11-15 01:32:09+00:00
On the second minute I had the AI World Clocks site open the GPT-5 generated version displayed a perfect clock. Its clock before and every clock from it since has had very apparent issues though.

If you could get a perfect clock several times for the identical prompt in fresh contexts with the same model then it'd be a better comparison. Potentially the ChatGPT site you're using though is doing some adjustments that the API fed version isn't.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-15 01:32:31+00:00
Third option: I don't pay for it, I don't load the ads, and the trillion dollar company figures out a way to live with the economic consequences of their own decisions.

The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.

They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.

Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
by rmah | 2025-11-15 01:32:34+00:00
I don't understand why tesla (a car manufacturer), uber (a ride services company), robinhood (financial services), doordash (meal delivery service) are in the treemap of "tech market" companies. OK, I take that back, I understand why (i.e. good PR by those companies to be included in a sector other than their own in order to get higher market valuations), I just don't agree with it.
by phire | 2025-11-15 01:34:50+00:00
Most image models are diffusion models, not LLMs, and have a bunch of other idiosyncrasies.

So I suspect it's more that lessons from diffusion image models don't carry over to text LLMs.

And the Image models which are based on multi-mode LLMs (like Nano Banana) seem to do a lot better at novel concepts.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-15 01:35:28+00:00
Yes, this is correct. I’d get at most 2 hits from an IP, spaced minutes apart.

I went as far as blocking every AS that fetched a tripwire URL, but ended up blocking a huge chunk of the Internet, to the point that I asked myself whether it’d be easier to allowlist IPs, which is a horrid way to run a website.

But I did block IPv6 addresses as /48 networks, figuring that was a reasonable prefixlen for an individual attacker.
by qingcharles | 2025-11-15 01:35:30+00:00
Right, I think .Net 7 brought the top-level statements to Program.cs.

The oldest version of .Net I could find on Windows 11 was .Net 4, but it still compiles just great without a project file since it has since v1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmIwGxcMOLg
by crote | 2025-11-15 01:36:13+00:00
Yes, but this wasn't the usual two-party election. The 1972 referendum to join the EU got a 67% "yes" vote, the 2011 Alternate Vote referendum got a 68% "no" vote. You see similar number with, say, California's ballot propositions: a "solid win" is closer to a two-thirds majority. 52-48 is close enough to flip depending on the weather.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-15 01:36:14+00:00
> I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.

So you favor a race to the bottom, but you want a single race to go to the bottom faster than the others in order to become more like minorities in the sixties.

That kind of morbid attitudes is why Pareto developed his notion of optimality and efficiency.
by egl2020 | 2025-11-15 01:36:30+00:00
I've been writing go professionally for about ten years, and with go I regularly find myself saying "this is pretty boring", followed by "but that's a good thing" because I'm pretty sure that I won't do anything in a go program that would cause the other team members much trouble if I were to get run over by a bus or die of boredom.

In contrast writing C++ feels like solving an endless series of puzzles, and there is a constant temptation to do Something Really Clever.
by neom | 2025-11-15 01:36:51+00:00
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. I try my best to be encouraging and educating without being preachy or condescending with my wife on this subject. I read hn, I see the posts of folks in, frankly what reads like anguish, about having a tool replace their expertise. I feel really, sad? about it. It's interesting to be confronted with it here (a place I love!) and at home (a place I love!) in quite different context. I've also never been particularly good at becoming good at something, I can't do very much, and genai is really exciting for me, I'm both drawn to and have love for experts so... This whole thing generally has been keeping me up at night a bit, because I feel anguish for the anguish.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-11-15 01:37:06+00:00
I love using encoder models, and they are generally a better technology for this kind of application. But the price of GPU instances is too damn high.

I won’t lie that I’ve been unreasonably annoyed that I have to use a lot more compute than I need, for no other reason than an LLM API exists and it’s good enough in a relatively small throughput application.
by asa400 | 2025-11-15 01:37:17+00:00
> The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time

This always feels like one of those “taste” things that some programmers tend to like on a personal level but has almost no evidence that it leads to more real-world success vs any other language.

Like, people get real work done every day at scale with C# and C++. And Java, and Ruby, and Rust, and JavaScript. And every other language that programmers castigate as being huge and bloated.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to have a preference for smaller languages, I just haven’t seen anything in my career to indicate that smaller languages outperform when it comes to faster delivery or less bugs.

As an aside, I’d even go so far as to say that the main problem with C++ is not that it has so many features in number, but that its features interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Said another way, it’s not the number of nodes in the graph, but the number of edges and the manner of those edges.
by XorNot | 2025-11-15 01:37:59+00:00
I agree with this up till saying we must be very far from AGI. I don't think we're close, but the scale of human inputs doesn't tell us anything about it. A useful AGI need not be capable of human level cognition, and human level cognition need not require the entire human biological or nervous systems - we're a product of millions of years of undirected random evolution, optimized to run a fleshy body and survive African plains predators. This whole thing we do of thinking and science and engineering is a quirk that made us very adaptable, but how much of what we are is required to implement it isn't clear (i.e. a human minus a hand can still understand advanced mathematics, there are blind programmers etc.)
by fragmede | 2025-11-15 01:38:15+00:00
hinkley wrote:

> We got the results back. You are a horrible person. I’m serious, that’s what it says: “Horrible person.”

> We weren’t even testing for that.

joshstrange then wrote:

> If you want to listen to the line from Portal 2 it's on this page (second line in the section linked): https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/GLaDOS_voice_lines_(Portal_2)...

as if the fact that the words that hinkley wrote are from a popular video game excuses the fact that hinkley just also called zer00eyz horrible.