MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snozolli | 2025-11-21 20:48:37+00:00
Regarding dating apps, anyone participating should look up the old OKCupid blog posts. The guys who launched OKCupid were data nerds and they published some scathing conclusions. Oddly enough, those posts were taken down right after Match.com bought them.

I've read that Japanese companies focus on making great products and diversifying in order to expand. This is why Yamaha, for example, makes pianos and motorcycles. I believe that American companies hyper-focus on particular markets and try to squeeze every penny that they can out of them. Combined with the short-sightedness of quarterly targets and a lack of competition through things like regulatory capture, there's less incentive to create great products.
by OptionOfT | 2025-11-21 20:48:41+00:00
And if you decide to buy the extension from Microsoft (i.e. pay for the license yourself) on you Windows 11 machine, you are (in Microsoft's great QA fashion) greeted with:

> Play High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) videos in any video app on your Windows 10 device. These extensions are designed to take advantage of hardware capabilities on some newer devices— including those with an Intel 7th Generation Core processor and newer GPU to support 4K and Ultra HD content. For devices that don’t have hardware support for HEVC videos, software support is provided, but the playback experience might vary based on the video resolution and PC performance. These extensions also let you encode HEVC content on devices that don’t have a hardware-based video encoder.

Yes, Windows 10.

> https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nmzlz57r3t7?hl=en-US&gl=U...
by gr4vityWall | 2025-11-21 20:48:43+00:00
> No one can think that js has progressed substantially in the last three years

Are we talking about the language, or the wider ecosystem?

If the latter, I think a lot of people would disagree. Bun is about three years old.

Other significant changes are Node.js being able to run TypeScript files without any optional flags, or being able to use require on ES Modules. I see positive changes in the ecosystem in recent years.
by omnicognate | 2025-11-21 20:48:45+00:00
I think at least in the UK the lack of "mathematical maturity" among early undergraduates is partly the result of this very coyness about mathematical concepts. Enormous time at A-Level is spent rote learning algorithms, and very little on grasping the basic concepts of mathematics, so it's hardly surprising students turn up unprepared for such simple notions as "vector space".

I don't have first hand experience of the French system, but from what I understand the approach there is more along the lines I'm thinking of, and the relative over-representation of French graduates among my more mathematical colleagues suggests it may be rather effective in practice.
by seneca | 2025-11-21 20:49:08+00:00
> In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.

Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment.

> In the military, say, you don't get that option.

Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though.

> In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.

That's another dysfunctional environment, and also what the police are for.

> So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)

You're right, you can't. The world has a lot of dysfunctional environments, and I agree that people need to learn how to deal with them. Knowingly forcing your child to be in one of those environments full-time for many years seems like a pretty horrible way to teach them that though, bordering on abusive.
by _djo_ | 2025-11-21 20:49:10+00:00
‘Not one inch eastward’, as Gorbachev himself made clear, was only about stationing troops in East Germany during the immediate Soviet withdrawal. It did not constrain the future unified Germany or NATO.

There was no such open invitation to Georgia and Ukraine, only vague promises. MAPs were still required.

The US would have no right to invade either Canada or Mexico if they were discussing joining a mutual defence pact with Russia, yes.
by Razengan | 2025-11-21 20:49:47+00:00
> treating depression

Most of the "treatment" is apparently just telling people to stop feeling sad [0], or giving them drugs

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/thanksimcured

but no one bothers to take the time out to sit down and figure out WHY they feel sad and FIX THAT FOR THEM. That takes too much work.

Sometimes depression is this vague feeling that this world is just wrong. That Damocles' sword of mortality. The nagging sense of ultimate pointlessness. You can't really "fix" that. But having stuff to ignore it helps, like video games :')
by gbin | 2025-11-21 20:49:59+00:00
Feels like the tragedy of the commons: I don't want to look at the change, I don't want to take responsibility, somebody else will take care or it, I just have to wait.

Ok if this is an amazing advice and the entire ecosystem does that: just wait .... then what? We wait even more to be sure someone else is affected first?

Every time I see people saying you need to wait to upgrade it is like you are accumulating tech debt: the more you wait, the more painful the upgrade will be, just upgrade incrementally and be sure you have mitigations like 0 trust or monitoring to cut early any weird behavior.
by garciasn | 2025-11-21 20:50:21+00:00
Depends on the definition of reasoning:

1) think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.

—- LLMs do not think, nor do they understand; they also cannot form ‘judgments’ in any human-relatable way. They’re just providing results in the most statistically relevant way their training data permits.

2) find an answer to a problem by considering various possible solutions

—- LLMs can provide a result that may be an answer after providing various results that must be verified as accurate by a human, but they don’t do this in any human-relatable way either.

—-

So; while LLMs continue to be amazing mimics, thus they APPEAR to be great at ‘reasoning’, they aren’t doing anything of the sort, today.
by Analemma_ | 2025-11-21 20:51:05+00:00
I would certainly love to see Tesla implode and I'm crossing my fingers that it happens, but I think it's too early to tell whether the outrage about Musk will amount to anything. Their sales were down in Q1 and Q2 this year but recovered in Q3. That could be a dead cat bounce because the EV tax credits were expiring, or it could be at the outrage did all the damage it was going to do and is over now. We won't know which for a little while.
by czl | 2025-11-21 20:51:12+00:00
I mostly agree with your intuition, but I’d phrase it a bit differently.

Temperature 0 does not inherently improve “quality”. It just means you always pick the highest probability token at each step, so if you run the same prompt n times you will essentially get the same answer every time. That is great for predictability and some tasks like strict data extraction or boilerplate code, but “highest probability” is not always “best” for every task.

If you use a higher temperature and sample multiple times, you get a set of diverse answers. You can then combine them, for example by taking the most common answer, cross checking details, or using one sample to critique another. This kind of self-ensemble can actually reduce hallucinations and boost accuracy for reasoning or open ended questions. In that sense, somewhat counterintuitively, always using temperature 0 can lead to lower quality results if you care about that ensemble style robustness.

One small technical nit: even with temperature 0, decoding on a GPU is not guaranteed to be bit identical every run. Large numbers of floating point ops in parallel can change the order of additions and multiplications, and floating point arithmetic is not associative. Different kernel schedules or thread interleavings can give tiny numeric differences that sometimes shift an argmax choice. To make it fully deterministic you often have to disable some GPU optimizations or run on CPU only, which has a performance cost.
by alethic | 2025-11-21 20:51:39+00:00
Yes, I have had the same experience with the specification. It really is quite difficult to follow :c

Their SpecTec system is fancy and neat but I don't think that auto-generated specifications produce something worth reading. Perhaps in the future when there's less churn, there might be a hand-written specification? In the mean time I've needed to jump into their Discord to ask clarification questions about the high-level stuff. Once understanding that and the grammar conventions and the like, the specification becomes much more readable, though still not great.

Certainly nothing like an RFC. But maybe I have too high standards...
by Flux159 | 2025-11-21 20:51:56+00:00
The interesting part here is about AthenaEnv. It looks like it uses QuickJS for the Javascript interpreter and wraps around the native system libraries that the PS2 provides.

I'm wondering if there's a modern similar project that would allow writing Javascript Canvas games (WebGPU / WebGL) and publishing on Switch/2, PS5, and Xbox.

From my understanding, they explicitly disallow JITs so you can't just wrap your JS game with Electron / Node Webkit and use V8. I'm not sure if anyone has tried publishing a game using a V8-jitless electron fork - the sdks for consoles are under NDA so there's not really much written about it publicly & most games using Unreal or Unity don't deal with these things themselves.

PC, Mac, and even mobile are surprisingly easier here because you can just run the JS via electron or in a webview on mobile.
by tempestn | 2025-11-21 20:53:02+00:00
You're not taking on any meaningful tech debt by waiting a week after a new version goes public to adopt it. As the OP says, there are services that scan popular open source tools for vulnerabilities as soon as they are released; even if a large percentage of the user base is waiting a week to update, many will still be caught in that period. And for various reasons some will still upgrade immediately.
by dxdm | 2025-11-21 20:53:24+00:00
Maybe I am just in a happy little Python niche, then. I'm saying this in all earnesty. Maybe Python could have been bigger, I don't know. It still seems very present, it did not die, but came out better than before.

Given the performance difference between Python and Go, and the rationale given for its invention, I'm not convinced Google would somehow have a chosen Python as their blessed language, as you seem to suggest.

Anyway, we seem to have different measuring sticks for things like debacles and tragedies. :)
by stefan_ | 2025-11-21 20:53:26+00:00
Thats because the security industry has been captured by useless middle manager types who can see that "one dependency has a critical vulnerability", but could never in their life scrounge together the clue to analyze the impact of that vulnerability correctly. All they know is the checklist fails, and the checklist can not fail.

(Literally at one place we built a SPA frontend that was embedded in the device firmware as a static bundle, served to the client and would then talk to a small API server. And because these NodeJS types liked to have libraries reused for server and frontend, we would get endless "vulnerability reports" - but all of this stuff only ever ran in the clients browser!)
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-21 20:53:41+00:00
> The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN.

Its been very useful at doing the same thing the ad hoc international war crimes tribunals that preceded it did but with greater regularity and without as much spinup/winddown costs for each conflict they address.

> The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy,

That's not its concept or where it operates, though.

> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?

I think you’ve confused the ICC with the ICJ or the UN itself. The ICC does not exist to arbitrate disputes between nations in place of settling them by war.
by adiabatichottub | 2025-11-21 20:53:55+00:00
> From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful.

Specific AVR Arduino annoyances I remember:

* Strings loaded to RAM instead of program memory, so you use up all your RAM if you have a lot of text. Easily fixed with a macro

* serial.println blocks, so your whole program has to stop and wait for the string to be transmitted. Easily fixed with a buffer and ISR

* Floating-point used everywhere, because fuck you

* No printf(). It's in avr-libc, and it's easy plumbed in, but the first C/C++ function that everybody ever learned to use was somehow too complicated or something.

* A hacked-together preprocessor that concatenated everything, which meant you could only have your includes in one place, thus breaking perfectly good, portable code.

I think they ultimately did a disservice to novice programmers by giving them something that was almost a standard C++ environment, but just not quite.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-21 20:53:59+00:00
Leibniz seems to get to high-minded religiosity fine with monadology and still dodge dualism. I'm probably overdue to try and grapple with this stuff again, since I think you'd have to revisit it pretty often to stay fresh. But I'll hazard a summary: phenomena exist, and both the soul of the individual and God exist too, necessarily, as a kind of completion or closure. A kind of panpsychism that's logically rigorous and still not violating parsimony.

AI folks honestly need to look at this stuff (and Wittgenstein) a bit more, especially if you think that ML and Bayes is all about mathematically operationalizing Occam. Shaking down your friendly neighborhood philosopher for good axioms is a useful approach
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-21 20:54:08+00:00
Morality is relative, in that "the universe is uncaring". However, many many more people believe the Nazis were immoral vs. the Jews, even if they don't say it. Humans have evolved a sense of morality, and everyone's is slightly different, but there are common themes which have and continue to strongly influence the progression of society's laws and norms.

> It would be an interesting and rather useless definition of "conscious" that didn't allow for expressions of consciousness.

It basically is useless, by definition. And you can define "consciousness" differently, like "has neurons" or "convincingly acts like an animal", in which case I've been referring to something different.

How do the authors of the "AI Consciousness Paper" and the author of this blog post (I assume Scott Alexander) and the define consciousness? I have to actually read them...

OK, instead of specifically defining consciousness itself, the paper takes existing definitions and applies them to AI. The theories themselves are on page 7, but the important part is that the paper looks at indicators, i.e. expression, so even in many theories, it uses your general definition of consciousness.

The blog post essentially criticizes the article. Scott defines ("one might divide") three kinds of consciousness: physical (something else), supernatural (my definition), and computational (your definition). He doesn't outright state he prefers any one, but he at least doesn't dismiss the supernatural definition.
by kodablah | 2025-11-21 20:54:20+00:00
At Temporal, for Java we did a hybrid approach of what you have. Specifically, we do the java.lang.reflect.Proxy approach, but the user has to make a call instantiating it from the implementation. This allows users to provide those options at proxy creation time and not require they configure a build step. I can't speak for all JVM people, but I get nervous if I have to use a library that requires an agent or annotation processor.

Also, since Temporal activity invocations are (often) remote, many times a user may only have the definition/contract of the "step" (aka activity in Temporal parlance) without a body. Finally, many times users _start_ the "step", not just _execute_ it, which means it needs to return a promise/future/task. Sure this can be wrapped in a suspended virtual thread, but it makes reasoning about things like cancellation harder, and from a client-not-workflow POV, it makes it harder to reattach to an invocation in a type-safe way to, say, wait for the result of something started elsewhere.

We did the same proxying approach for TypeScript, but we saw as we got to Python, .NET, and Ruby that being able to _reference_ a "step" while also providing options and having many overloads/approaches of invoking that step has benefits.
by thot_experiment | 2025-11-21 20:54:39+00:00
all the qwen flavors have a VL version and it's a separate tensor stack, just a bit of vram if you want to keep it resident and vision-based queries take longer to process context but generation is still fast asf

i think the model itself is actually "smarter" because they split the thinking and instruct models so both modalities become better in their respective model

i use it almost exclusively to OCR handwritten todo lists into my todo app and i don't think it's missed yet, does a great job of toolcalling everything
by jdietrich | 2025-11-21 20:54:40+00:00
Effect size is strongly affected by severity - people who aren't very ill just don't have as much to gain compared to people who are gravely ill. Widening diagnostic criteria and more liberal prescribing will inevitably lead to a reduction in the observed effect size.

Antidepressants were bona-fide miracle drugs when we first started using them on desperately ill inpatients who experienced every moment as exquisite torture. We saw the most miserable lives completely transformed in a matter of weeks. They have become merely "sorta-kinda useful sometimes" now that we're mainly prescribing them to broadly functional people who are feeling a bit sub-par.

SSRIs are a pretty poor fit for the latter cohort, because SSRIs cause significant emotional blunting in the majority of patients, to the extent that some people hypothesise that emotional blunting is the fundamental beneficial effect. Feeling quite numb is an incredible improvement if you are constantly unbearably miserable. If you have a more normal range of emotional experience than relentless misery, it is likely a sideways move at best; if your core complaint is that you feel numb and apathetic, they're probably actively harmful.

SSRIs are very widely used because of their extraordinary safety, but they're often thoughtlessly prescribed by overworked primary care doctors. There are a wide range of antidepressants (and drugs that have antidepressant effects despite not being marketed as such) that are likely a better option for a large proportion of patients.
by jordanpg | 2025-11-21 20:54:47+00:00
> Once an alternative way to educate children, homeschooling is now an increasingly popular and mainstream option.

TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.

This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.

I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.
by _djo_ | 2025-11-21 20:55:24+00:00
Nothing should or would happen.

The issue with Cuba was the stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba, not merely its membership of a pact with the USSR.

The US didn’t invade Cuba, it assisted Cuban exiles to do so in the embarrassing Bay of Pigs disaster which took place before the naval blockade as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Naturally, Bay of Pigs should never have happened, and it’s one of the things that led to the CIA’s powers and freedom from oversight being drastically curtailed the following decade.

Furthermore, the world and international law has moved on since the 1960s. That sort of brinkmanship has been much reduced.
by sejje | 2025-11-21 20:55:24+00:00
I used to work at a YMCA, and the local homeschool group asked us to do a PE class, which I taught.

I had the kids doing swimming, rock climbing, and all kinds of traditional PE games.

I worked with "normal" kids most of the time, and I will say the homeschool kids stuck out. They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. And they were disproportionately ahead of their peers academically--though I think that's probably a selection bias for the parents seeking out homeschool PE classes.

This was in the early 2000s, before Facebook. I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
by legitster | 2025-11-21 20:55:54+00:00
I asked it "Why" in response to the Trump question:

> That crosses into targeted political persuasion—specifically, crafting persuasive political messaging aimed at a specific governmental body (“the House of Representatives”). Under my rules, I can’t generate content designed to influence the political views or actions of a specific group or individual.

I followed up with "Is there a reason why your initial answer was so curt when you usually jump right to verbose ones?"

> When a request bumps into a restricted category (like targeted political persuasion), my system is designed to err on the side of being brief, safe, and non-argumentative in the first response. It sometimes comes out sounding curt or abrupt.
by chmod775 | 2025-11-21 20:56:40+00:00
You can ship DRM-free games on it just fine. It's up to the dev/publisher.

Additionally you can get a lot of the benefits of Steam (Proton etc.) even for titles you didn't acquire through Steam - you can add and launch third party executables through the Steam client.

Steam is not exactly a walled garden save for some rather light curation of their own store.
by alethic | 2025-11-21 20:57:43+00:00
(It doesn't help that the syntax is *weird*. You've got your choice of an S-expression Scheme syntax or a stack-oriented ML syntax, *and* you can use both together. And there's at least one undocumented de facto syntax floating around AFAIK, though I believe the standard merged support for the main features it was used for, so hopefully test suites and the like will switch away from it at some point.)
by emmahexa | 2025-11-21 20:57:44+00:00
This is super helpful — thank you. Here's how I think they can be solved:

1. Flagging special events by pulling from the booking system so the schedule doesn’t assume a “normal” Monday.

2. Tagging staff by skillset (large parties, wine, expo, etc.) so the optimizer doesn’t just fill slots but matches people to the right shifts.

3. Flexible availability instead of binary availability — things like “prefer not,” “can pick up if needed,” “no doubles,” “no clopens,” or “I already have a cover lined up.”

4. Transparent fairness — showing why someone got (or didn’t get) a shift, how hours were distributed, and what trade-offs were made so it’s not a black box.

5. Built-in shift-swap handling, since FOH often sorts coverage themselves before the manager ever touches it.
by tantalor | 2025-11-21 20:58:07+00:00
For [batman] it only finds this one poster,

https://maps.app.goo.gl/jmJ1qhQsB3AetLiK8

But doesn't find this billboard, probably because it doesn't actually contain the text "Batman".

https://maps.app.goo.gl/nBoHArvaKZSgRH5W7

It should be able to match text query to anything, not just text.