MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by llbbdd | 2025-11-17 04:30:29+00:00
You're not a web developer, right? See my other comment about context if you want to learn more about the role of context in software development in general. If you keep repeating whatever point you're trying to make about some imaginary driving force to pointlessly update dependencies in web dev, you'll probably continue to embarrass yourself, but it's not hard to understand if you read about it instead of repeating the same drivel under every comment in this thread.
by jbritton | 2025-11-17 04:30:31+00:00
Gotham Chess has done chat bot chess championships. The chat bots make a few good moves, and then begin making illegal moves, randomly removing or adding pieces, and completing ignoring obvious threats and attacks. It is so obvious that the pattern matching is not resulting in reasoning. Another example is Towers of Hanoi. An LLM can write code to solve it, because that’s an easy pattern match. But it can’t write out the steps beyond a 3 disk puzzle. It has no understanding of the recursive nature of the problem.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-17 04:31:02+00:00
> If all you're judging is the first-order impacts on a single business, you're missing the forest for the trees.

Sounds like typical American C-Suite thinking. From what I can see, maybe Chinese companies see further, and that may just be because the government is so powerful, over there, and the government is known for taking the long view.
by darthcircuit | 2025-11-17 04:31:55+00:00
I’ve lived in the mountains most of my life and only a couple years in a city. I’d take the mountains any day. The view doesn’t get old (at least to me). The air quality and noise alone are enough for me to not want to go back to a city.

I’m still working at simplifying my life a lot, and I still am on the internet more than I want to be, but If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem.

I’m finding the more time I choose to break away from the screen, my self esteem improves, I care more about my health (physical and mental), I spend more time with my family, and the world doesn’t seem to be as heavy.
by tomhow | 2025-11-17 04:32:11+00:00
It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the discussion to be about the substance of the article. (Of course it's relevant if the submitter is the author, because then they can engage in Q&A about the article's content.)

If users notice that someone is posting large volumes of low-quality content (i.e., spam, self-promotional content or articles that break the guidelines) they can email us and we'll investigate.

In this case the user in question just posts a lot of stuff from mainstream publications on either side of the ideological centre – i.e., lots from the NY Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic but also WSJ and Bloomberg. The articles that are [dead] are from sites like The Information that are only banned due to being hard-paywalled.

It's obviously inflammatory to describe their pattern of posting as "propaganda". (Sure it can be argued and debated in the right context, but this is not that.) But even without the word "propaganda", the guidelines still ask us to keep discussions on-topic and to avoid generic tangents.
by KetoManx64 | 2025-11-17 04:32:42+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if the US government doesn't attempt something just like this in the next 3-5 years. There are a lot of people fleeing the very inflationary US dollar for BTC. I think at this point it would be too late though. There are too many countries, individuals and corporations around the world that own BTC for it to be successful. There was a long term holder that dumped 24,000BTC onto the market in August and the price dropped down about 5% for maybe half a day before recovering, and it's not going to be long until other countries follow El Salvador's lead and invite Bitcoin owners to live there tax free. If the USA bans Bitcoin there will be a massive brain drain of very intelligent people who will just move to those countries.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-17 04:33:41+00:00
> So the idea that America forced every single country in the world to basically have the same security procedures even on domestic flights - except for removing your shoes - was completely false?

There was no such premise to begin with. They applied some pressure to some countries which had some effect, others followed suit by following bad precedents set by others.

> No I’m saying both that historically, no one tried to hijack a train. What exactly are they going to make the train conductor do?

I mean, people used to rob trains. That was definitely a thing.

> Yes because so many guns ands bombs have gotten through TSA since 2001…

Look, we need to keep paying the expensive lease on this bear-repelling rock because even though it demonstrably hasn't repelled the actual bears we've encountered, if we didn't have it there might have been thousands of bears, possibly trillions.

> Which commercial airports let you get on the plane without going through security?

How about this one: How many of them require it to be a government agency? Even in a lot of Europe it's private.

> the high speed train in Florida does require you to go through security domestically

Let's get rid of that too then.

> Last time I checked, hijackers can’t run a hotel into a building or make the hotel employees move a hotel to another country.

Neither can you do that with a plane if your plan is to blow it up, so why do you have to take off your shoes and have your drink stolen?
by Jach | 2025-11-17 04:33:41+00:00
To me it's another specimen in the "demonstrating personhood" problem that predates LLMs. e.g. Someone replies to you on HN or twitter or wherever, are they a real person worth engaging with? Sometimes it'll literally be a person but their behavior is indistinguishable from a bot, that's their problem. Convincing signs of life include account age, past writing samples, and topic diversity.
by mattmaroon | 2025-11-17 04:33:44+00:00
I don’t think so. It’s not that law firms intentionally passed up on bidding a little more for women because they were as good as men but cheaper. It’s because they thought the women were simply less good.

It takes awhile for people to change their view. If you come from a society that has for thousands of years said women couldn’t do jobs like be a lawyer as well as men, it’s not crazy that it would take you 40 years to figure out that wasn’t true.

It’s not a bad foundation when it comes to something like what we’re discussing, allocation of capital by professional investors in the medical space. They’re pretty close to homo economicus, but they’re still human so they still err.
by agucova | 2025-11-17 04:34:31+00:00
I ran the introduction chapter through Pangram [1], which is one of the most reliable AI-generated text classifiers out there [2] (with a benchmarked accuracy of 99.85% over long-form text), and it gives high confidence for it having been AI-generated. It's also very intuitively obvious if you play a lot with LLMs.

I have no problem at all reading AI-generated content if it's good, but I don't appreciate dishonesty.

[1]: https://www.pangram.com/ [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873
by eviks | 2025-11-17 04:34:37+00:00
I suppose some people would see this as progress: fewer dependencies, more robust code (even if it’s a bit more verbose), quicker turnaround time than the old “search npm, find a package, read the docs, install it” approach.

Why would randomized code be more robust? Also, how is searching/reading the docs slower than checking the correctness of a randomized function?
by Nevermark | 2025-11-17 04:38:12+00:00
Perhaps you are meaning to compare transistors with neurons? If we do that, then yes, a transistor is a lot simpler than a neuron. But transistors are also insanely fast compared to neurons, so transistors do far FAR more, per unit of time.

A bee brain might have a million neurons, operating at maximum speed of about 250 Hz.

10^6 neurons x 250 Hz

= 2.5 x 10^8 Hz for a bee brain.

We can easily model that many neurons with a trillion transistors, operating at 100 Ghz. (If that sounds fast to you, keep in mind that CPU clock speeds account for many transistors switching in series.)

10^12 transistors x 10^11 Hz

= 10^23 Hz for a CPU

That is a factor of 4 x 10^14 more powerful.

So yeah, the only problem for modeling a bee brain is identifying the organization of its neurons.

Nature does a lot with a little. Trillions of bee life years went into designing a really efficient bee brain.

---

Atoms:

A bee brain might have 10^20 atoms. Atoms interact at speeds that are far beyond anything we are talking about here. But they don't "switch", they bounce around every which way and slowly end up reacting when they connect with the right conditions. This is called Brownian motion and its not computation, its natures way of using the chaos produced by heat to give compounds so many chances to find their right context that they eventually do.

While we could not easily model that many atoms, nobody wants to (with regard to bees). Atoms are neither the "transistors" or the neurons of a bee brain.
by btilly | 2025-11-17 04:39:39+00:00
It is worth noting that this is an ad. It is a law firm that is advertising their expertise in this field. And the product that they want people to buy is revealed in this passage:

Freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis therefore remains critical for market entrants. Whilst the primary patents have expired, a dense web of secondary patents, covering additives, coatings, and production methods, still poses infringement risks.

Of course Shoosmiths would be happy to do a FTO analysis for your potential product...for a fee.

That doesn't mean that it doesn't contain quality information. Law firms tend to make this kind of ad informative. But it does mean that there is an agenda.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-11-17 04:40:55+00:00
C++ is far better than C in very many ways. It's also far worse than C in very many other ways. Given a choice between the two, I'd still choose C++ every day just for RAII. There's only so much that we can blame programmers for memory leaks, use-after-free, buffer overflows, and other things that are still common in new C code. At some point, it is the language itself that is unsuitable and insufficient.
by guywithahat | 2025-11-17 04:41:06+00:00
Public transit is a great business model, what are you talking about? The only time it seems to be a bad business model is when governments take it over and run it. Transit relies on recurring customers paying you basically every day, or subscribing. It has a reliable, stable revenue stream which is relatively inelastic, which are generally precursors for a good business model
by kitesay | 2025-11-17 04:43:02+00:00
This seems relevant to the topic:

Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...?

Five parts. This, the last gives a sense of what life was like.

I guess most people imagining those days think they'd be amongst the rich nobility, not in the peasant class.

There'd be few today that would want to go back to life at that time.
by orbital-decay | 2025-11-17 04:43:13+00:00
The biases and the resulting choices are determined by the developers and the uncontrolled part of the dataset (you can't curate everything), not the model. "Alignment" is a feel-good strawman invented by AI ethicists, as well as "harm" and many others. There are no spherical human values in vacuum to align the model with, they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else. Which is good as long as you agree with all of them.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-17 04:45:32+00:00
Yeah!

Also, the closest thing to a graph search in reference counting, as most of us understand it, occurs at a totally different level in the stack.

In a GC: the graph search is hidden from view and implemented in any number of clever ways by the language runtime. Or, if you’re implementing the GC yourself, it sits out of the way of normal operations on your “heap”.

In ref counting: down ref to zero triggers a destructor. That destructor can do anything. It so happens that if the type has reference counted references, then the destructor will, either automatically or manually, invoke downref operations. All of this is part of the language’s normal execution semantics.

To say that these things are alike is a stretch. You could use similar logic to say that anyone doing a graph search is collecting garbage
by umanwizard | 2025-11-17 04:50:57+00:00
Western Europe did not recover the same level of civilizational development that it had under the Roman Empire until hundreds of years later, maybe 1000. That is a fact. The Napoleonic code of laws promulgated in 1804 was based on Roman law of the sixth century because they didn’t have anything better. The Roman Empire was synonymous with civilization in Western Europe for centuries — people were publishing scientific books in Latin in 1900 (!)

“Dark ages” is an oversimplification, but it contains a quite large grain of truth.
by analog31 | 2025-11-17 04:51:52+00:00
Indeed, my dad was a research scientist at a large chemical company, and every scientist had a Friden mechanical calculator, which was capable of multiplying and dividing. But it was not a programmable computer.

When the HP 35 came out, it was cheaper than the annual maintenance contract for the Friden. They bought one, and passed it around to try out for a week, then all of the Fridens went into the dumpster. Of course he brought one home, and we got to play with it.
by cameldrv | 2025-11-17 04:52:22+00:00
I think CATL is promoting a hybrid pack of LFP and Sodium that would give you the cheapness and density of LFP, but with maybe 30% Sodium that you could use for a quick partial charge, and could also be used when the car is cold-soaked. Once you drive for a while, the whole pack gets warmed up and you can use the LFP.
by llbbdd | 2025-11-17 04:52:26+00:00
I keep seeing this attitude and I don't really understand it at all; there's no upside to publishing open source work because it might be utilized by more people, is that correct?

Or is it the attribution? There are many many libraries I have used and continue to use and I don't know the author's internet handle or Christian name. Does that matter? Why?

I have written a lot of code that my name is no longer attached to. I don't care and I don't know why anyone does. If it were valuable I would have made more money off of it in the first place, and I don't have the ego to just care that people know it's my code either.

I want the things I do today to have an upside for people in the future. If that means I write code that gets incorporated into a model that people use to build things N number of years from now, that's great. That's awesome. Why the hell is that apparently so demotivating to some people?
by majormajor | 2025-11-17 04:53:17+00:00
> Then the complex pure part you test the heck out of, and the stateful/side effectful impure part becomes barely a wrapper over system APIs.

In practice the issues I see with this are that the "side effect" part is usually either: extensive enough to still justify mocking around testing it, and also intertwined enough with your logic to be hard to remove all the "pure" logic. I rarely see 90-95% of functions being pure logic vs side effects.

E.g. for the first, you could have an action that requires several sequenced side effects and then your "wrapper over APIs" still needs validation of calling the right APIs in the right oder with the right params, for various scenarios. Enter mocks or fakes. (And sometimes people will get clever and say use pubsub or events for this, but... you're usually just making the full-system-level testing there harder, as well as introducing less determinism around your consistency.)

For the second, something like "do steps I and J. If the API you call in step J fails, unwind the change in I." Now you've got some logic back in there. And it's not uncommon for the branching to get more complex. Were you building everything in the system from first principles, you could try to architect something where I and J can be combined or consolidated in a way to work around this; when I and J are third party dependencies, that gets harder.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-11-17 04:53:19+00:00
They did try adding variations to the amount (+0.50-1.00) late in the game, but by then it was ineffective, I could still quickly detect them and turn on the randomized data poisoning. I expect that they want to keep the amount small so most cardholders won't bother to look into the unfamiliar charge.

I do wonder whether these people sold their list of "verified" credit card numbers to any criminal enterprises before they realized the data was poisoned. That would be potentially awkward for them.
by agumonkey | 2025-11-17 04:55:05+00:00
It's something I've been wondering about for a long long time. Thanks for bringing up the question. Sometimes my problem-of-the-day is not even that hard but I have near zero drive to finish it, but if anybody comes with an issue, I then feel motivated (up until I realize his/her issue was hard I guess).

I see three dimensions:

- natural pleasure of helping someone

- ignorance about the problem, making it seems easier

- a saturation aspect: my problem has probably something i've been dealing with for days, my brain is full of unanswered questions about it and has no more "space" for it
by wahern | 2025-11-17 04:57:53+00:00
The issue in the US isn't lack of institutionalization, per se, it's the lack of mandatory mental health treatment. That is, it's very difficult and rare to require the mentally ill in the US to take medicine, even after repeatedly demonstrating an inability to control their conditions or even to take basic care of themselves. For one thing, there was an overcorrection in civil rights law that makes it difficult to establish a mandatory treatment plan. Secondly, because of lack of institutional beds and a will to use them, there's little backstop even for the few patients that are on court-ordered treatment and fail to comply.

While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis. (This is true of drugs as well, which is part of the reason "harm reduction" often works better in Europe--a credible threat of involuntary hospitalization.) This was the original plan in the 1970s in the US, to transition to out-patient care, but it didn't pan out. The mental hospitals were closed, but rather than shift the funding to out-patient clinics and treatment, the funding was simply pulled altogether. And because of the civil rights law overcorrection, addressing this is more than simply re-establishing the funding. California, for example, restored hundreds of millions of funding in the past decade, but for various legal and inertial reasons, cities and counties simply won't force treatment plans on even the most desperately ill patients, even when they're harming themselves or others. Sadly, we're slipping back into using the penal system to house the mentally ill; there's much less political and institutional pushback than increasing the use of conservatorship and civil commitment.

The problem has been well understood for more than 40 years. Here's a 1984 piece from the NY Times that could be written the same today: Richard D. Lyons, "How Release of Mental Patients Began", https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me...

See also, Natasha Tracy, "In Defense of Mental Illness Conservatorship—Despite the Britney Spears Case", https://natashatracy.com/mental-illness-issues/mental-illnes...
by kamaal | 2025-11-17 04:58:40+00:00
>>If you’re really finding yourself getting bored by not constantly interacting with the shiny new thing, then maybe the impediment of modern life is the problem.

The real question of modern life, or may be all life. How much wasted effort goes into acquiring things which one doesn't need? That includes need to be entertained by the minute.

In the context of a motorcycle, I realise how different riding a motorcycle is compared to say driving a car. When you are driving a motorcycle. You feel the sun, the air, the cold, the heat, the drizzle, you enjoy the perspectives and feelings of all kinds(mountains, sun, oceans, lakes, rivers, trees) now you don't feel the need for music as this is entertainment enough. Heck even stopping for food and restroom breaks feels enjoyable.

Compare this to say a car, where you need to play something like music or a podcast to act as fillers to replace all that feeling. Taking a break feels like stepping out of some boredom and tiresome activity.

I have come to realise the need for these constant background entertainment needs largely stem from being in a largely non-interactive, non-responsive, non-natural environments(equivalent of sensory deprivation) where engagement with things around is either 0, or not something that your instinct naturally enjoys.
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-11-17 04:59:48+00:00
It's in Thiel's nature to make moves counter to Altman's. Certainly, he does not share Masa's (or PG's) weakness for the genii of the day. (Secretly despises, actually?) They are kinda nontechnical in the same way (chess or SaaS are equally relevant to the future), but what Thiel has passion for are flexible moral abstractions, not politics (the whys rather than the whats of winning)
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-17 05:00:02+00:00
AI offering the solution for a small problem that probably doesn’t deserve yet another dependency suggests to me that there’s a middle ground that we’ve failed to sufficiently cover: how to socialize code snippets that you’re meant to just inline into your project. Stack Overflow is probably the closest we’ve gotten to a generalized solution and it doesn’t exactly feel like a good one.

I came across this once before in the form of a react hooks library that had no dependency to install. It was just a website and when you found the hook you wanted you were meant to paste it into your project.
by ethbr1 | 2025-11-17 05:00:06+00:00
Microsoft has the same struggle as Facebook and Google.

If AI matures into the next big thing, it risks wiping them out of their dominant positions if they don't spend to keep pace.

If it doesn't, then they just blew a bunch of money but are still dominant players, with an existential threat in the rearview.

Given the relative risks, they'd be foolish not to pump some of their cash flow into AI for a few years until the pace settles.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-17 05:00:53+00:00
Devereaux wrote that series in large part in response to all the people going "gosh, modern life is just so much worse than medieval peasants!"

But honestly, even if you're comparing to the richest kings of the time, your median modern person has a better life. People seriously underestimate just how much of our modern life would be unattainable luxury in the Medieval period.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-11-17 05:01:05+00:00
what about splinter cell conviction, 15 yrs and nobody has figured out its map file format .unr that uses custom unreal engine 2.x. It even has a tool that lets you unpack its UMD files https://github.com/wcolding/UMDModTemplate The library on github requires this tool unumd https://www.gildor.org/smf/index.php/topic,458.msg15196.html... The same tool also works for blacklist. I would like to change the type of enemy spawned in the map but I cannot find any assistance on it. UEExplorer doesnt work because it is some kinda custom map file