MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shash42 | 2025-11-21 19:41:17+00:00
New blogpost: Why I think automated research is the means, not just the end, for training superintelligent AI systems.

In pointing models at scientific discovery, we will have to achieve the capabilities today's LLMs lack: - long-horizon palnning - continual adaptation - reasoning about uncertainty - information-efficient learning - and creative exploration.

Some of these capabilities may emerge from large-scale training. Others will will require changes in how we implement and train AI systems. I don't yet know how exactly such a training loop would look. So consider this post a conjecture.

But science offers a few unique properties at its foundation: - large open data - verifiability - truth-seeking (instead of power-seeking) incentives.

And thus I think scientific discovery is the ideal successor to internet-scale pretraining. It's not just an application, it maybe the means to building what we're missing. Maybe that's why we have @openai @GoogleDeepMind @periodiclabs @futurehouse etc. all focusing on it.
by starkparker | 2025-11-21 19:42:11+00:00
> Why is food so expensive at sporting events? ... why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? I don’t know. Probably something complicated, like that expensive food allows you to extract extra money from rich people without losing business from non-rich people.

Because there's at least two additional parties to concession revenues beyond the venue operator: the home team, who often takes up to 50% of the revenue, and concessionaires, who employ the servers and supply the actual food.

Venue operators and sports teams don't like the liability and cost exposures of serving food, so they farm it to a third party. And rather than carve that up into multiple competing vendors, most modern large venues hand it to a single hospitality company, who uses scale to lower costs and offer a lower share of revenue in exchange for exclusivity over all venue food service. Without competition, they can jack the price up.

Worth noting two things on the "why not raise ticket prices" angle: ticketing is moving in the same outsourced direction as concessions, and ticket prices are going up anyway (up >100% since 1999[1]).

> Across pro sports, Matheson says, teams are making the determination that "they can make more money selling fewer, more expensive tickets rather than lots of cheap seats."

Most venues have given up having their own box offices and farm that out to StubHub, TicketMaster, etc. Same motivations, same result: the venue spends less by contracting out ticketing, the team gets a bigger cut of the revenue, and the ticket vendors get exclusive control not only over selling the tickets but reselling them, with dark patterns like dynamic pricing and fees piled onto the buyer at every part of every transaction.

Both wipe out all competition on both quality and price. Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. Apply that pattern to existing fanbases grown over generations during eras of better prices or quality and you get a captive audience who complains constantly but never quits spending, so there's no pressure to lower prices or improve quality.

1: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5561909/ticket-prices-s...
AgentxSuite – Open-Source Control Plane for AI Agents Using MCP
by aliparnan | 2025-11-21 19:42:41+00:00
I’ve been working on AgentxSuite, an open source control plane for AI agents built around the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Most teams building agent features run into the same issues:

each agent needs its own tool wiring

permissions, policies and audit logs scatter across different services

no central place to register tools, resources or prompts

hard to track what an agent actually did across runs

integrating with external MCP servers (Postgres, filesystem, etc.) is repetitive

AgentxSuite tries to solve this by giving you a single layer to manage:

agents

tools

resources

prompts

policies

audit trails

token and usage tracking

multiple MCP servers (local or remote)

It also includes an Agent Designer Canvas to visually inspect the full graph of agents, their tools and their policies.

If you want to integrate MCP into your own product, or if you’re exploring multi-agent architectures with proper access control, feedback welcome. https://github.com/alparn/agentxsuite
by lysace | 2025-11-21 19:43:19+00:00
Ok. Just noting: Realistically, your concerns are not going to change the eating desires of actual humans in the real world.

So the plan is a beef tax, then?

Here's a reality check from Sweden:

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/svenskarna-dissar-kottska... (the public service broadcaster)

https://www-svt-se.translate.goog/nyheter/inrikes/svenskarna...
by newfriend | 2025-11-21 19:43:43+00:00
What exactly is your paste here supposed to prove?

That Biden is trying to blame Trump for the border disaster that he caused?

Give me a break.

Here are some Republican Senators talking about their criticisms of the bill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944

It sure doesn't sound like a "really good bill" that only failed because Trump said so. That is a Democrat-spun narrative.
by georgefrowny | 2025-11-21 19:43:50+00:00
> They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with

Without wishing to derail from the main point, they are very easy to comply with, but they have broadly not been complied with.

Any site with PII collection where the "deny optional cookies" button isn't right there, and not deemphasized, is conducting illegal data collection. But as the enforcement is carried out by national agencies who appear not to have given any shits for a decade, everyone has been getting away with making users jump though stupid hoops (that not only are not required by the law as the sites imply, but are actually outright forbidden) like navigating a dark pattern minigame or outright cunty behaviour like making the "deny" button hang with a spinner indefinitely.
by Brendinooo | 2025-11-21 19:44:02+00:00
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores

>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades

This reads as an inconsistency.

As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
by notherhack | 2025-11-21 19:44:38+00:00
I gave the iOS app a spin. 1. It requires at least 2 characters to search for a symbol. What about Verizon (V) or AT&T (T)? 2. I entered a holding for a fund that doesn’t have public quotes by choosing not to look up the symbol and entering the price and purchase date, but then I couldn’t find a way to manually add price quotes for later dates to reflect the change in value.
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-21 19:45:15+00:00
You can imagine a table feeling if you can imagine the table not doing anything (being unable to or deciding not to). It's not intuitive because it doesn't really help you, whereas imagining a human or even animal as conscious lets you predict its next actions (by predicting your next actions if you were in its place), so there's an evolutionary benefit (also because it causes empathy which causes altruism).

> Why suspect that something that isn't organic life can be conscious, if we have no reason to suspect it?

There may be no good reason unless you feel it's interesting. Although there's probably at least one good reason to imagine consciousness specifically on a (non-organic) neural network: because, like humans and animals, it lets us predict how the NN will behave (in some situations; in others it's detrimental, because even though they're more similar than any known non-NN algorithm, NNs are still much different than humans and moreso than animals like dogs).
by andrewla | 2025-11-21 19:45:41+00:00
Opinions vary, but I posted a link to a web page that he co-authored, which I would argue stands as a very significant and deep dismissal of his views on AI. If, after reading that essay, a person still feels that Scott Alexander has something interesting to say about AI, then I challenge them to defend that thesis.

Probably better for me to have remained silent out of politeness, but if anyone follows that link to the https://ai-2027.com/ page then I feel I have done my part to help inform that person of the lack of rigor in Scott Alexander's thinking around AI.
by snicker7 | 2025-11-21 19:46:13+00:00
Message queues (e.g. SQS) are inappropriate for tracking long-running tasks/workflows. This is due to the operational requirements such as:

- Checking the status of a task (queued, pending, failed, cancelled, completed) - Cancelling a queued task (or pending task if the execution environment supports it) - Re-prioritizing queued tasks - Searching for tasks based off an attribute (e.g. tag)

You really do need a database for this.
by beloch | 2025-11-21 19:46:13+00:00
Make product worse, get money, go out of business.

It's interesting that this article uses the restaurant industry as an example, because it is rife with examples of restaurants that debut to acclaim, enshittify their offerings, and then go out of business as their clientele evaporates. How many software products have gone the same route? How many were initially good, bolted on too many unwanted features, ignored their core audience, and ultimately lost their users to the next big thing?

It seems like something is missing in this fellows theory, and the answer is fair competition. Pizzaria's don't sell cardboard discs for $300 precisely because they become the worst pizza in town long before reaching that point. Restaurants that stay in business long-term are forced to limit their impulse to seek greater profits. They must maintain a level of quality that lets them remain competitive. That's a hard limit imposed by the market. Many choose to dance around on the boundaries of this limit. It's profitable, but risky. If you go too far and consumers abandon you, you can't just improve your product a little and expect them to flock back.

This is why big tech companies love to buy out, lobby against, and otherwise disrupt or obliterate their competitors. Competition is what places limits on profit-seeking enshitification. If you can establish a monopoly then you can enshittify to your heart's content. e.g. Google.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-21 19:46:38+00:00
This just isn't true even in the already regulated environment.

It is "irrational" for a "greedy" slaveowner to kill their slave, a significant monetary investment sometimes, and yet it happened all the time, because capital owners are not rational.

A significant fraction of aviation fatalities can be traced directly back to those "greedy capitalist villains" actually completely cutting corners to save a penny and losing million dollar aircraft.

Business owners are not rational actors, they are gamblers.
by DaveZale | 2025-11-21 19:47:01+00:00
I still click on my lolli app every day to get up to a few dozen free satoshis every day.

More rewards are available with some purchases, or by testing or downloading games there. No time for that lately but I'll circle back eventually. The downside is the large time gap between earnings and earnings availability. They kinda trap users into "keep coming back"
by collingreen | 2025-11-21 19:47:18+00:00
You're spending a lot of effort and well made points arguing against a person who isn't trying to see where you're coming from. Their take is pure libertarianism where a concept of freedom outclasses any real consequences. Like most of these pure-freedom arguments the whole thing pivots on a carefully contorted definition of "harm" - your clear examples of harm being discussed apparently don't count and there isn't a good faith conversation about why, they are just being hand waved away.

I think your attention is better spent on other commenters.
by cptskippy | 2025-11-21 19:47:28+00:00
I just made the discovery the other day that there are two Arduino IDEs, the old crusty one maintained by Arduino.org and the new hotness maintained by Arduino.cc.

I'd been using the Arduino.org version which had mostly driven me to use PlatformIO and ESPHome.

https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/#ide

Unfortunately, but perhaps fortuitously, I needed to use a Library only compatible with Arduino 3.0.0 which is incompatible with PlatformIO. That lead me to discover the Arduino.cc IDE which, while not on par with VSCode, is dramatically better than the Arduino.org IDE.
by swatcoder | 2025-11-21 19:47:30+00:00
Huh?

Of course there are "specialty" coffees at many McDonald's. Well over a decade ago, recognizing the margin and admitting the public interest in sweet, creamy, coffee drinks, they began a shift into direct competition with Starbucks, et al and offer a full menu of Americanized espresso and blended coffee drinks. Like at Starbucks, these easily run over $5 for the large sizes, and they're widely available.

Because of both brand loyalty, or because they also want other things from McDonald's that Starbucks don't carry, it's a extremely successful and profitable product segment for them, even when a Starbucks is "literally 50m/150ft away".

https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu/mccafe-coffees....

https://www.mac-menus.com/mccafe-menu/
by necovek | 2025-11-21 19:48:07+00:00
I wouldn't go so far: just 50 or 100 years ago (even today in some areas), we had arranged marriages, male dominance (women seen as sexual servants to men) etc.

But the study really does not show anything of interest: it seems to have been specifically designed (without covering obvious biases) to confirm a hypothesis instead of uncover new knowledge.
by nine_k | 2025-11-21 19:48:15+00:00
There is a difference between doing

$ npm i 78 packages upgraded

and upgrading just one dependency from 3.7.2_1 to 3.7.2_2, after carefully looking at the code of the bugfix.

The cooldown approach makes the automatic upgrades of the former kind much safer, while allowing for the latter approach when (hopefully rarely) you actually need a fix ASAP.
by Jtsummers | 2025-11-21 19:48:29+00:00
I'm curious what kinds of problems took dozens of hours to fix. We had a script that was using master, and the default name of main (Github) broke things. But it wasn't a surprise, we knew it was coming, someone just forgot to adjust a script.

They just changed the script, took about 30 seconds. If you had a lot of scripts, then you could always make a master branch and use it instead of main. That would also be pretty quick to fix.

And it wasn't like when Github changed things (or now git itself will be changing) there weren't announcements. You'd have to have been living under a rock to not know about it and be taken by surprise.
by negzero7 | 2025-11-21 19:48:29+00:00
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...

https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
by patall | 2025-11-21 19:48:33+00:00
Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.
by account1984 | 2025-11-21 19:48:37+00:00
I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)

I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
by yannyu | 2025-11-21 19:48:59+00:00
Okay, you're right. There is a world, and some hypotheses, and some falsifiability.

But how rich is this world?

Does this world progress without direct action from another entity? Can the agent in this case form hypotheses and test them without intervention? Can the agent form their own goals and move towards them? Does the agent have agency, or is it simply responding to inputs?

If the world doesn’t develop and change on its own, and the agent can’t act independently, is it really an inhabited world? Or just a controlled workspace?
by Izikiel43 | 2025-11-21 19:49:31+00:00
Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things. The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world. SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers. WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.
by gred | 2025-11-21 19:49:34+00:00
Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.
by M95D | 2025-11-21 19:49:35+00:00
I don't trust that reply.

I'm not saying the person(s) who wrote that is(are) lying. It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.

To me "Arduino Team" is just a bunch of hopeful or even naive employees.
by itsalwaysgood | 2025-11-21 19:50:45+00:00
Maybe it helps to consider motivation. Humans do what we do because of emotions and an underlying unconsciousness.

An AI on the other hand is only ever motivated by a prompt. We get better results when we use feedback loops to refine output, or use better training.

One lives in an environment and is under continuous prompts due to our multiple sensory inputs.

The other only comes to life when prompted, and sits idle when a result is reached.

Both use feedback to learn and produce better results.

Could you ever possibly plug the AI consciousness into a human body and see it function? What about a robot body?
by koolba | 2025-11-21 19:50:55+00:00
The article says:

> Never Handroll Your Own Two-Phase Commit

And then buried at the end:

> A few notable features of this snippet:

> Limiting number of retries makes the code more complicated, but definitely worth it for user-facing side-effects like emails.

This isn't two-phase commit. This is lock the DB indefinitely while remote system is processing and pray we don't crash saving the transaction after it completes. That locked also eats up a database connection so your concurrency is limited by the size of your DB pool.

More importantly, if the email sends but the transaction to update the task status fails, it will try again. And again. Forever. If you're going to track retries it would have to be before you start the attempt. Otherwise the "update the attempts count" logic itself could fail and lead to more retries.

The real answer to all this is to use a provider that supports idempotency keys. Then when you can retry the action repeatedly without it actually happening again. My favorite article on this subject: https://brandur.org/idempotency-keys
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-21 19:51:18+00:00
> Collectively decide and easily are carrying lots of weight here.

I agree. The problem is that we do not decide collectively on issues, we decide on representatives. And while a supermajority might agree, for example, that single payer healthcare is good, they may not all prioritize it the same way amongst a number of issues they are concerned about. And in the end, they get a very limited number of candidates to choose from, none of whom are likely to 100% match their priorities and choices.

So the politicians focus on the few issues that really will get people to pull the lever for them. Abortion being an obvious one. Health care doesn't have a strong enough consensus and priority combo to make it happen.
by Redster | 2025-11-21 19:51:29+00:00
The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.

Respectfully, A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.

P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.