MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dekhn | 2025-11-05 23:31:54+00:00
Let me start with an example- some time ago I worked on a VAE that encoded and decoded SMILES strings. The idea is that you should be able to encode a SMILES into an embedding space, do all the normal things you would do in that space, and then convert the resulting embedding vector back to a valid molecule.

The VAE is trained with a very large number of valid SMILES strings, typically tokenized at the character level (so "C" is a token, and "Br" is "B" then "r"). I and others have observed that VAEs trained like this produce large number of embedding vectors that do not decode to valid SMILES strings- they have syntax errors, or perform chemical alchemy (personally, I saw the training set had Br (bromine) and Ca (Calcium), and the output molecules sometimes were Ba (barium) even though that's not in the original dataset at all.

There are other reasons why the tokenizer produces bad results- only about 1-10% of vectors decode to valid molecules. Invalid SMILES are mostly useless- they don't correspond to actual structures.

To respond to this, the SELFIES format makes a few changes so that it is effectively impossible to produce invalid SELFIES stringes when decoding a VAE. Among other things, tokenization matches the actual elements and so the model will only ever output valid elements.

I believe this is the SMILES paper that my own experiments were based on: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.02415 (see https://github.com/maxhodak/keras-molecules for an open source attempt at implementation)

And this is the paper introducing SELFIES: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13741 (open source packages for working with SELFIES, and some example training scripts https://github.com/aspuru-guzik-group/selfies see "Validity of Latent Space in VAE SMILES vs. SELFIES for more detail on the robustness).

BTW, as a side note: even though we put a bunch of effort into duplicating the original SMILES VAE, it was extremely slow to train and not very useful. Now you can just ask Gemini to write a full SELFIES VAE and train it in less than a day on a conventional GPU (thanks pytorch transformers!) to get a decent basic set of embeddings useful for exploring chemical space.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-05 23:32:41+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.

I have to disagree. In a very real sense, the residents of a political entity are the stakeholders within that political boundary and, at least in a democratic (small 'd') society, those stakeholders are, in fact, the owner/shareholders of that political entity.

That's neither very profound nor much of an intellectual stretch. Although, apparently you disagree. Why is that?
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-05 23:32:50+00:00
I think the question only makes sense if you have already a completely diminished view of what a human person is to begin with. In any earlier century the answer would have been very obvious. Humans are oriented towards the infinite, beauty, truth, goodness and being smart doesn't get you there any more than being rich or tall.

In a practical sense maybe you're a bit happier if you're smart for the same reason you're a bit happier if you're handsome but obviously this does not at all address any question of meaning beyond the horizon of everyday problems.

This whole framing in the article, that smart people ought to be happier because they have an easier time solving problems is hilarious. That's works for a Roomba, it doesn't work for a person.
by rtpg | 2025-11-05 23:32:54+00:00
I think the idea is that the kind of organization that would create the wayback machine in a world prior to the wayback machine is one which will also continue to push boundaries beyond that

I think that argument has a certain stasis to it, and kind of assumes that organisations maintain their energy and people (and those people are not changing!)… but there are realities where the initial push is by some people and then future maintenance is by others.

But I think the IA is a uniquely tough project because of how much the ground is shifting around them constantly. It’s not Wikipedia
by igouy | 2025-11-05 23:33:35+00:00
And then what?

Say you made the foreground text color the same as the background text color, so you could no longer see the source code. You can no longer do anything. You can no longer save those changes. And then what?

Better, say you did that in a script file which additionally saved the image, so that image was now unusable. And then what?
by kderbyma | 2025-11-05 23:33:36+00:00
It’s fascinating how society refuses to acknowledge the systemic predators (corporations like MindGeek and Roblox and OnlyFans etc) - but will constantly try to rake the moral high ground on political fads and petty crime.

It seems like the more horrific the crime - the more profitable it is to someone….once a business mode supports the criminals…. Well….at what point is it collusion, willingly turning a blind eye, so the execs maximize that next quarterly bonus —-

How much of a bonus is worth the mutilation and destruction of kids…. ?

—-

Another question…. Why do the porn industry and the game industry both sequester themselves in Montreal primarily?

Is it the mafia in the city? Is it corrupted politicians? Is it taxes? What makes pedophiles and sexually exploitation and child grooming and Wokism…. Reside in Montreal in such abundance?
by eek2121 | 2025-11-05 23:34:04+00:00
Back when I was a teenager, I would have absolutely gone down a rabbit hole like the author did. From "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" to reading all the technical manuals, usenet, etc. I definitely nerded out over this stuff! Glad to see folks still take an interest.

These days, I've an acquired brain injury. Between that an old age, it was a bit hard to read, but also, just a little bit familiar, so I enjoyed it.

Now I am expecting "256 color VGA programming in C" to resurface at some point! :D

Old hardware was always so much fun...
by rhubarbtree | 2025-11-05 23:34:23+00:00
I recently encountered someone who spoke like this and I researched what might be the issue.

I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance. But the truth is most people are smarter than you in some ways and less smart in others, but you’re unable to see it because you’re in this black and white mode where preserving your ego relies on you being the smart guy amongst the idiots.

It’s very common in tech to see this. Maybe because we were all exceptional at maths when we were young and got the idea that meant we were super smart and this compensated for our nerdiness.

I worked with a bunch of physicists and every single one of them was smarter than me at maths and physics, I wasn’t even close. But they sometimes talked about politics and current affairs, which I’m very well read in. I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked at how little they knew and how overconfident they were.

None of those folks were narcissists, thankfully they were lovely people, but for sure it highlighted how poor people were at judging their own expertise in an area.

It’s so easy to dismiss people, criticising is easy, and so hard to see just how stupid you can be yourself.
by maxglute | 2025-11-05 23:34:41+00:00
I get information from everywhere but reality has a china daily bias. This isn't complicated, you ask about PRC relation with neighbours I point out blind spot to of those with poor foriegn policy literacy, i.e. those who don't read enough china daily, that PRC has a lot of neighbours and most of them are in fact settled with PRC majority concessions and now at peace. If we're going to go even more China daily, essentially 100% of PRC disputes were inherited from ROC not only has PRC not caused any of the disputes, they have been borderline treasonous in unwinding through mostly diplomacy and minimum violence.
by w_for_wumbo | 2025-11-05 23:35:43+00:00
It's part of our ecosystem now, we unconsciously mirror the patterns that we notice around us. This will include the language of LLMs because it has been invited in. We always affect the environment, and it always affects us. I hope that the consequence will be that we reduce the fluff, we stop writing to sound important or to justify a position, but instead use language to operate on the level of insight and shift our future into one that benefits us all.
by tonymet | 2025-11-05 23:36:14+00:00
The issue of letting consumers choose the worse product is that the good products get pushed out of the market.

Grocery floorspace that was once primarily staples and whole foods is mostly now junkfood.

Proper razors have been replaced with disposables.

Skincare & toothpaste products contain sodium laureth sulfate , which lathers well, but causes mouth sores and skin irritation.

Letting consumers choose usually ends up optimizing superficial and sometimes harmful traits.
by chownie | 2025-11-05 23:36:56+00:00
I posted that earlier without checking and recalled wrongly, rather than calling for people to physically assault she instead called for her following to take photographs of trans women in public toilets and disseminate those photos to the public[1].

That was my bad, I knew that she had done something abhorrent and indefensible but it was 5 months ago and I'd forgotten which kind of hatred she had been producing specifically. I'll cite the source first next time.

1: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPG5DlIFIz/ -- I don't have a twitter account to forward the original, but there are news stories about this from the time if you're unsatisfied with that link.
by bix6 | 2025-11-05 23:37:02+00:00
I really don’t understand why data centers get such special treatment.

Somewhere gives Google etc a tax break for a data center. In exchange Google destroys a huge swath of land, Hoovers up electricity and water, and provides some temporary construction jobs.

In exchange the local residents get nothing… at least if it was a power plant or something they could get some cheaper electricity. Maybe they get slightly better internet connectivity? But from what I’ve read this doesn’t really seem to be the case.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-05 23:37:13+00:00
Ideally, we should be able to opt-in with a much higher fee. At the $200/mo tier I should be allowed to use this tool. The free users and lower tier paid users should be guard-railed. This is because those users all have trouble using this tool and then get upset at OpenAI and then we all have to endure endless news articles that we wouldn't if the good stuff were price-gated.

Those without money frequently have poor tool use, so eliminating them from the equation will probably allow the tool to be more useful. I don't have any trouble with it right now, but instead of making up fanciful stories about books I'm writing where characters choose certain exotic interventions in pursuit of certain rare medical conditions only to be struck down by their lack of subservience to The Scientific Consensus, I could just say I'm doing these things and that would be a little helpful in a UX sense.
Bubble needs to be destroyed before it destroys the country
by moosedman | 2025-11-05 23:37:59+00:00
If it doesn't pop it is going to consume the country, the economic effects will create political ramifications that will make the United States unrecognizable (more so) Since the Fed started hiking interest rates a substantial part of the country has been in a serious financial downturn. Now with the shut down it is becoming a crisis of food as well. It's been invisible because the massive bubble which has accrued vast amounts of money to a small fraction of the population. This has to stop. The bubble has prevented there from being any sort of help to the people in the economy who are suffering.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-11-05 23:38:20+00:00
> If we want to control national politics, we have to concede that West Virginia and Arizona voters don’t care about the same things as folks in Manhattan and San Francisco. That’s okay. We can embrace that diversity. But it also means we have to respect it and cut out the name calling because a promising candidate on the other side of the country doesn’t embrace your pet issue or identity language.

Very well put, I hope others see this as well.
by StarGrit | 2025-11-05 23:38:27+00:00
People "roll coal" it because it is kinda amusing to do it, and it is a middle finger towards people they perceive to be preachy.

I accidentally "rolled coal" in my 90s Landrover because I was in totally the wrong gear going up a steep hill. It was amusing in the way of "oh shit! I kinda just blew a load of black smoke in the driver face behind me".

Obviously, I don't do this deliberately.
by cxr | 2025-11-05 23:39:21+00:00
> especially since I didn't even ask a question

Oh, that's the operative part? Accept my apologies. What I meant to say is, "I can see that you're deeply, deeply concerned about being able to continue beating your wife. I think you should reconsider your position on this matter."

No question mark, see? So I should be good now.

> Am I missing something here?

Probably not. People who engage in the sort of underhandedness linked to above generally don't do it without knowing that they're doing it. They're not missing anything. It's deliberate.

So, too, I would guess, is the case with you—particularly since your current reply is now employing another familiar underhanded rhetorical move. Familiar because I already called it out within the same comment section:

> The problem is that there is content that works today that will break after the Chrome team follows through on their announced plans of shirking on their responsibility to not break the Web. That's what the problem is. Any "solution" that involves people having to go around un-breaking things that the web browser broke is not a solution to the problem that the Chrome team's actions call for people to go around un-breaking things that the web browser broke.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824392>
by bitwize | 2025-11-05 23:41:05+00:00
Probably a felony under the DMCA.

I'm reminded of when AWS us-east-1 went down and all the beds made by EightSleep (business model: Juicero for beds) became disabled. EightSleep put all the significant control for their beds in the cloud, doubtless because they couldn't or didn't know how to hire embedded engineers, and the only devs they could find were node.js flunkies who only knew how to do cloud. Looks like the makers of this vacuum did the same thing; they didn't know how or didn't want to build just enough smarts to do the localization and mapping itself, and said "fuck it, we'll do it in the cloud".
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-05 23:42:03+00:00
First: Happiness is fleeting. It is better to pursue personal purpose and satisfaction.

Second: Without reading the article, the answer seems simple from real life experience. IQ is uncorrelated to EQ. People with high(er) EQ can navigate complicated, real world social issues that are important for overall life satisfaction. To be clear, when I say "social issues", I don't mean woke-ism and wider society; I'm talking about the small world that each one of inhabits with our friends, family, and lovers.
by tibbar | 2025-11-05 23:42:11+00:00
People sometimes describe me as a "golden retriever." I.E., I present as quite upbeat. 50% of that is just nervous energy, but the rest might just lie in having a poor memory. I can experience something quite negative, even traumatic, and basically forget about it once it goes away.

Still, I used to experience periods of intense negative emotions which basically stopped when I started taking meds. I think, as time goes on, the nervous energy that made me seem like a "golden retriever" has probably decreased, but I'm still, underneath, a pretty happy guy.
by My_Name | 2025-11-05 23:42:17+00:00
I think firstly, we should figure out what exactly we mean by happier. If we eliminate things like being more content, satisfied, at peace and so on, happiness is a surprisingly ephemeral thing to try to define.

Is it a long term feeling, or a short term one. Many long term feeling of happiness are covered by peace, contentment etc. If we consider short term feelings of happiness, I think smart people have just as many of those.

And that's all without diving into the rabbit hole that is defining what smart is. Is it doing well on an IQ test, is it making the best decisions for long term future outcomes based on your current situation, is it being able to hold more complex thoughts than others can and draw logical conclusions from them, is it being able to interact with other people and either get them to do what you want, or get them to do what will benefit them the most but they are resisting.

The simple 5 word question is, on some level, so complex as to be almost meaningless and without merit. Except to make stupid people feel better about being stupid because they can think "Well, I may not be smart, but I'm happy", although the most unhappy people I have ever met have mostly correlated with the most stupid ones.
by ruszki | 2025-11-05 23:42:55+00:00
What do you mean on baseline? Generally speaking, I’m definitely less happy post COVID, than before 2020. I met the first utterly broken, toxic person in my life, whom I allowed to hurt me. This is on top of all the bat shit crazy things happened with me that year, and not just because of COVID. I’m a different person since then. My baseline definitely moved, as I mean.
by ethbr1 | 2025-11-05 23:43:21+00:00
Insurance is a simple business: collect enough money so that in the long run you earn more than you pay out.

American health insurance generally does this in two broad ways. (1) Insure a large enough population group that averages hold and you can price based on actuarial/statistical probabilities. (2) Negotiate deals with provider groups so that they get something they want and you can bound their prices.

Neither of those things are contingent on knowing anything about individuals.

Insurers will generally pick {more randomly-selected customers} over {knowing more about each customer} any day of the week.

Maybe I'm misreading you, but you seem to want insurance that's accurately priced to exactly your circumstances and health (say, how custom high value property insurance is sold).

That doesn't solve insurer's concentrated tail risk problem though, and it means you're fucked if you ever develop a complicated condition, like cancer.
by cyrusradfar | 2025-11-05 23:43:54+00:00
Trigger: Shameful Self Promotion

I created a tool in VSCode for this called Intraview. It allows you to create a dynamic code tour to provide feedback.

It works with your existing agent and creates a sharable tour that you can navigate and provide feedback step by step.

Rationally, this is much easier than reviewing the diff, because you can prompt to break up the PR logically so you can approve in functional pieces.
by rickydroll | 2025-11-05 23:44:10+00:00
https://scholars.org/contribution/how-competition-attract-bu...

> A firm announces a plan to build a new facility, but where? Local and state development officials compete to attract the firm with ever-more-generous tax breaks and subsidies. This scene plays out again and again – even though research shows that incentives do not substantially influence firm behavior, even in the face of media exposes about wasteful giveaways. Why? Governments hope to encourage jobs and business profits, and hubris leads officials to believe “this time will be different,” even if incentives have not worked before.

> But something more pervasive is also at work. My research with Stephen Ellis demonstrates the role of “business climate” in driving economic development professionals and government officials to engage in an incentives arms race. Officials feel they must offer incentives, because failing to compete to attract businesses will be interpreted as evidence that their locality is not business-friendly. States and localities will therefore continue to compete, to the point of giving away more than the value of the new firm or facility. Can American citizens find ways to prevent the negative effects of this no-win arms race?
by daemonologist | 2025-11-05 23:44:51+00:00
I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock.

The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-11-05 23:45:06+00:00
It’s basic math:

50.4-49.8=0.6

That’s how.

You seem to be conflating the margin between the winner and the next candidate with an overwhelming majority of people all feeling the same way. The former is a mandate, the latter is just being the least disliked.

And remember, the day after the election last year people thought Trump had gotten a majority of the popular vote. But then, once absentee ballots were counted he fell just shy of it. This morning there was still 9% of the vote uncounted in NYC, so it’s not unlikely here also Mamdani will have a plurality rather than majority.
by immibis | 2025-11-05 23:45:26+00:00
Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them? I guess not if your business is making more than that - bandwidth expense for a shopping site shouldn't be a problem when the customers are spending $100 for every 0.1GB - but that price should realistically be closer to $0.01/GB or even $0.002/GB. Sounds like they're forwarding you AWS's extremely excessive bandwidth pricing.
by observationist | 2025-11-05 23:45:27+00:00
That's awfully generous. Forcing phone-home, remote control, data harvesting features to be always-on creates a huge amount of data that can be sold for a lot of money. It gets all the wrong people excited about investing and normalizing the level of intrusion into your privacy, with some faceless corporation harvesting gigabytes of data per month from the most intimate and vulnerable physical location in nearly anyone's life.
by tonymet | 2025-11-05 23:45:46+00:00
it's a correlation not a causation. "smart people" (actually just over achievers like those who excel at aptitude tests or collect diplomas) tend to be overly contemplative. Dwelling on things rarely resolves them, and usually just leads to angst.

If your contemplating leads to resolving the issue in the near term -- by all means carry on.

But for most people, their brooding over their relationships, family history, achievements etc only leads to misery.

Focus your efforts outside of yourself.
by My_Name | 2025-11-05 23:46:04+00:00
I have found that partly, happiness is greatly helped along by just not remembering, or not thinking about, the things that make you miserable. On a Buddhist level, just living in the moment you are in, surrounded by the things and situations you are in, without dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, lets you be much less miserable than you could be. Often, the place you are in right now isn't that bad.
Ask HN: VC-funded startup lurking in my community Slack – how to respond?
by nduncan_hmc | 2025-11-05 23:47:03+00:00
I run a small bootstrapped open source startup in a niche space. Growth is slow but steady and we're starting to win larger customers as the product matures.

Recently, the leading vendor in this space ($50 million in funding, dozens of employees) has starting camping out in our community Slack and cold-emailing our community members, offering them thousands of dollars worth of free credits to switch to them. Emails are not exposed in our slack, so they are getting people's names and googling where they work to deduce their email.

The vendor's employees are registering under fake names so there's no straightforward way to ban them from the Slack.

Has anyone else been in this situation, if so what did you do?