MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gonzobonzo | 2025-11-25 10:45:56+00:00
It's an incredible abuse of power to intentionally mark innocent students' answers wrong when they're correct. Just to solve your own problem, that you may very well be responsible for.

Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.
by 0xEF | 2025-11-25 10:48:07+00:00
PDF link for those that are curious: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

The general sentiment is that you cannot trust code you did not write yourself and that we need to be able to trust the person who did, but you can form your own conclusions about how that fits into the modern tech landscape.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-11-25 10:48:35+00:00
Genuinely uncertain about these claims but I think it's worth engaging:

Doesn't the existence of AlphaFold suggest that there's potential AI to help with biotechnology? Also, one of the AlphaFold creators started a biotechnology startup.

And for fusion, couldn't we build AI models to explore better magnetic containment techniques? As I understand it, the fundamentals and science behind magnetic containment of fusion is pretty simple, but the execution and design of the reactor(?) is the challenging problem.

As for advanced manufacturing, I've seen some research where evolutionary algorithms are used to design a part under specific constraints. Part of that problem space seems like it might benefit from AI research.
by lqet | 2025-11-25 10:48:49+00:00
Strongly agree. I was involved with several CS lectures in the past ~10 years that did not require a final exam, and we always did a 1:1 session between student and tutor in which the tutor asked the student detailed questions about their past exercise sheet solutions. Over the years, I estimate that I conducted about 100 of such 1:1s. It was always obvious when the students did not write the code themselves. They couldn't really explain their design process, they didn't encounter the edge cases themselves during testing, and you couldn't discuss possible improvements with them.
by chii | 2025-11-25 10:49:03+00:00
This problem was also an issue for movies and theaters. The "fix" is to ensure theaters (the distributors) cannot be owned by, nor can they own production studios.

So under this rule, if disney wanted to have their own streaming service and used a high licensing fee to try stop competitors from their content, they'd pay high taxes due to the high licensing fees making huge (fake) profits for the parent company - it'd end in losses, as the streaming service (as a separate company) cannot bill their cost onto the parent company (to offset the profit). It's as if the tax man gets to sit in the middle, and siphon part of that license fee for free. Disney shareholders would never stand for that, and so they won't do it.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-11-25 10:49:14+00:00
I agree with your general idea. I'd add it also looks very similar to what typical GNU/Linux have in practice: blessed packages from the distros' repositories, and third-party repos for those who want them.

Debian also has something 'in the middle' with additional repositories that aren't part of the main distribution and/or contain proprietary software.
by benterix | 2025-11-25 10:49:59+00:00
> old and foreign content

I don't really mean old, I'd even say old movies were "better" in the sense of more variety, also foreign is often not a problem provided it's good (my favorite genre here is comedies like Norsemen or British Ghosts).

What I really dislike is this bland, characterless, boring, inauthentic, unengaging, but neverending stream of pulp that Netflix is producing and promoting. Most people I know just got fed up with it.

Personally I watch maybe one movie a month, and when I do, I make sure my time won't get wasted.
by yladiz | 2025-11-25 10:50:17+00:00
> they said they are currently prototyping the device, and when asked about a timeframe, Ive said it could arrive in “less than” two years.

I'll believe it when I see it. Making hardware is much more complex than making software, and 2 years is a long time given the iffy market circumstances right now, so let's see if it's materializes, and if it does...

> but it’s rumored to be screen-free and “roughly the size of a smartphone.”

Let's see if it turns out to be another Humane situation.
by cedws | 2025-11-25 10:50:32+00:00
I can't see any justification for an AI device. Smartphones are already a perfected form factor developed over decades. They consolidate many other devices people carried in the past. Now most people only need to carry a phone, and maybe they'll wear a smartwatch too. Trying to sell people on a third device that they have to carry around and keep charged just doesn't sound like it will work to me.

I suspect the device is some kind of necklace that actively listens to the environment, records and summarises conversations, and has Siri/Alexa-like capabilities. I don't think this is groundbreaking enough to make people comfortable with an always listening device that transmits to the cloud.
by theothertimcook | 2025-11-25 10:50:53+00:00
It's not a cure but it will definitely help kids with suboptimal executive function.

My primary school had a run club at the beginning of the day we'd hit laps of the school between roll call and 1st session, iirc we had 10 minutes you had to do at least one lap, you had to have good pace for two to be allowed a third, I don't recall many doing 4.

When I moved to highschool I didn't immediately notice why I was suddenly struggling to keep my shit together in class, the absence of moderate intensity cardio at the start of the day.

There's a few books and papers that back this up also
by CriticalLY | 2025-11-25 10:51:21+00:00
I came across an interesting NTFS behavior where adding a trailing space in a Windows directory path creates a “ghost” folder that Explorer and most tools can’t display or access normally.

Attackers can abuse this to drop files inside what appears to be the real System32 directory, making the content extremely hard to notice.

I wrote a short breakdown with examples and behavior analysis.
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-11-25 10:52:13+00:00
It’s strange watching people put so much faith in these so called “AI detection tools”. Nobody really knows how they work yet they’re treated like flawless judges. In practice they’re black boxes that quietly decide who gets flagged for “fraud”, and because the tool said so everyone pretends it must be true. The result is a neat illusion that all the “cheaters” were caught, when in reality the system is mostly just picking people at random and giving the process a fake sense of certainty.

Bizzare and unfair
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-11-25 10:52:33+00:00
IMO it's exactly the right layer, just like for ECC memory.

There's a lot of potential for errors when the storage controller processes and turns the data into analog magic to transmit it.

In practice, this is a solved problem, but only until someone makes a mistake, then there will be a lot of trouble debugging it between the manufacturer certainly denying their mistake and people getting caught up on the usual suspects.

Doing all the ECC stuff right on the CPU gives you all the benefits against bitrot and resilience against all errors in transmission for free.

And if all things go just right we might even be getting better instruction support for ECC stuff. That'd be a nice bonus
by conartist6 | 2025-11-25 10:53:30+00:00
They still won't fucking make it respond to my own key presses.

Why in the the godamn fuck can I not press the right arrow key when I'm in the start menu to move the selection to "stuff I open all the time." It's been like 10 years since they broke this now so I can only assume that nobody there gives a shit about anything
by vintagedave | 2025-11-25 10:53:32+00:00
"The article" is ambiguous. The one this HN post is about does not argue for it, at all. But the one in the comment above directly says,

> Don’t use stream (<iostream>, <stringstream>, etc.), use printf style functions instead.

and has a code example of what they argue 'Orthodox C++' should be, which uses printf.

I'm all for a more sensible or understandable C++, but not at the expense of losing safety. In fact I would prefer the other way: I still feel incredibly saddened that Sean Baxter's Circle proposal for Safe C++ is not where the language is heading. That, plus some deep rethinking and trimming of some of the worst edge behaviours, and a neater standard library, would be incredible.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-25 10:54:43+00:00
> They are born knowing how to walk.

This is unlikely to be a good way to think about them. The norm is for animals to be born knowing how to move. Whether they actually can move shortly after birth is more of a question of muscle development than knowledge.

For example, when birds are held immobile until they're old enough to fly, they fly normally.
by wqaatwt | 2025-11-25 10:54:45+00:00
> The Leave campaign were honest

Regardless of the legitimacy of your other arguments this is a silly thing to say.

Besides the lies and misinformation. Boris was driven purely by his political ambitions and saw Brexit as a great opportunity to take over the Conservative party. That’s it.

Also legally binding referendums are not a thing in the UK. They aren’t a requirement for anything and the parliament has the right to do whatever it wants. Of course it would be a political suicide to ignore the outcome when you agreed to hold one.

Of course tying it to turnout would have been a sensical idea (i.e. requiring that at least 50% of registered voters would vote for leave for it to be binding)
by delaminator | 2025-11-25 10:55:05+00:00
That's only useful if the agent is running in your terminal. The example given about updating a cell in Excel, I mean, I suppose that is a sort of tool you could used for something. SharePoint has an API for updating excels on SharePoint. But to update a single cell is actually quite time consuming for the API round trip - multiple seconds. I recently had to rewrite something because it was doing individual API calls to update cells.
by troupo | 2025-11-25 10:55:08+00:00
> You can happily ignore Disney. You are elevating it to status it does not have to have.

I'm not eleveating Disney to anything. It already is at that level. It owns huge swaths of, well, everything spanning back decades.

For example there was a minor viral news that Winnie the Pooh finally entered public domain. Well, Disney owned it exclusively from 1953 to 2021. All of it, from print to video.

Pooh is just the most famous and advertised example. Since Disney owns most of movie and TV production in the States, through that alone they own rights to a huge number of written works. That's before we go into how many audio and visual media they own.

Disney isn't just Mickey Mouse and Marvel. There was an article on HN yesterday on how the author "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" finally got the rights back after 35 years: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/

Next time you watch a movie you like or even read a book you like there's a very high chance it's owned by Disney (or some other huge license holder).

Or if you can't find that movie or book you like anywhere? Same reason.

> But there is zero reason to create state monopoly around this.

I didn't say anything about this or imply anything of the kind.

Besides, copyright literally exists only due to state exercising its power.
by jstimpfle | 2025-11-25 10:56:10+00:00
I'll bite. printf might be unsafe in terms of typing, in theory, but it's explicit and readable (with some caveats such as "PRIi32"). The actual chance of errors happening is very low in practice, because format strings are static in all practical (sane) uses so testing a single codepath will usually detect any programmer errors -- which are already very rare with some practice. On top of that, most compilers validate format strings. printf compiles, links, and runs comparatively quickly and has small memory footprint. It is stateless so you're always getting the expected results.

Compare to <iostream>, which is stateful and slow.

There's also std::format which might be safe and flexible and have some of the advantages of printf. But I can't use it at any of the places I'm working since it's C++20. It probably also uses a lot of template and constexpr madness, so I assume it's going to be leading to longer compilation times and hard to debug problems.
by nicbou | 2025-11-25 10:56:57+00:00
I visited my Canadian home towns for the first time in 3 years. I lived in Germany for 10 years. Both have a population of roughly 60,000 people.

For the first time, both have a visible, noticeable homeless population. There are homeless encampments in at least one. I have also noticed other encampments well outside of Quebec city and Montreal.

In Berlin, the homeless population has also exploded, and is expected to get much worse. My friends in the US report similar changes.

Things are getting significantly worse all over, it seems.
by sznio | 2025-11-25 10:57:18+00:00
>It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year.

Because it's early enough to make a difference. With the others, the cat is out of the bag. We can try to make AI safer before it becomes necessary. Once it's necessary, it won't be as easy to make it safer.
by delaminator | 2025-11-25 10:58:50+00:00
I'm imagining something more like Rexx with quite high level commands. But that certainly blurs the line between programming language and shell.

The reason for choosing higher level constructs is token use. We certainly reduce the number of tokens by using a shell like command language, But of course that also reduces expressiveness.

I've been meaning to get round to Plan 9 style where the LLM reads and writes from files rather than running commands. I'm not sure whether that's going to be more useful than just running commands. is for an end user because they only have to think about one paradigm - reading/writing files.
by apples_oranges | 2025-11-25 10:59:25+00:00
I think a story, maybe a video clip of a person talking about their struggle will also do.

I understand some people are less sensitive to such things than others, but let's say you watch, for example, a YouTube video, even just a Short, of a WW2 veteran, talking how they stormed a hill and his best friend died. It's touching and you can relate with how it must have been and how this man might have felt or still feels.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-11-25 10:59:34+00:00
The point I made a few comments up is that often we start to identify the need for a new science based on observations we can't explain with our current understanding. Hydro-dynamics and electricity are examples given in the comment I replied to - but we could see those and go "wait, we can't explain this well, yet". Quantum physics, X-rays, wave-particle duality of light, and so on - we observed something and could not explain it.

My point was I don't think that's happening with neuroscience yet. We might not have a complete map yet, but we know where thoughts come from in the organ, we can watch them. Or can we? It's an open question, if people think there is more science to be done to sort out fundamentals, and we're not just in the stage of iterating on our base assumptions more, I'm OK with that, but it's not my understanding today.
by signa11 | 2025-11-25 11:00:17+00:00
indeed, iirc, the 1998 usenix presentation by mckusick et al, seems to be an earlier record of (than the book) these s/w development models.

fwiw, both the gnu project and freebsd champion this (cathedral style of) development model.

however, i don't think linux or bsd is *purely* either approach.

w.r.t `user-facing software` which seems to be central thesis of gp, both the alternates (bsd/linux) offer almost an identical choice.
by molf | 2025-11-25 11:01:37+00:00
What is needed to evaluate OCR for most business applications (above everything else) is accuracy.

Some results look plausible but are just plain wrong. That is worse than useless.

Example: the "Table" sample document contains chemical substances and their properties. How many numbers did the LLM output and associate correctly? That is all that matters. There is no "preference" aspect that is relevant until the data is correct. Nicely formatted incorrect data is still incorrect.

I reviewed the output from Qwen3-VL-8B on this document. It mixes up the rows, resulting in many values associated with the wrong substance. I presume using its output for any real purpose would be incredibly dangerous. This model should not be used for such a purpose. There is no winning aspect to it. Does another model produce worse results? Then both models should be avoided at all costs.

Are there models available that are accurate enough for this purpose? I don't know. It is very time consuming to evaluate. This particular table seems pretty legible. A real production grade OCR solution should probably need a 100% score on this example before it can be adopted. The output of such a table is not something humans are good at reviewing. It is difficult to spot errors. It either needs to be entirely correct, or the OCR has failed completely.

I am confident we'll reach a point where a mix of traditional OCR and LLM models can produce correct and usable output. I would welcome a benchmark where (objective) correctness is rated separately from of the (subjective) output structure.

Edit: Just checked a few other models for errors on this example.

* GPT 5.1 is confused by the column labelled "C4" and mismatches the last 4 columns entirely. And almost all of the numbers in the last column are wrong.

* olmOCR 2 omits the single value in column "C4" from the table.

* Gemini 3 produces "1.001E-04" instead of "1.001E-11" as viscosity at T_max for Argon. Off by 7 orders of magnitude! There is zero ambiguity in the original table. On the second try it got it right. Which is interesting! I want to see this in a benchmark!

There might be more errors! I don't know, I'd like to see them!
by kiicia | 2025-11-25 11:01:44+00:00
It’s like one computer with program (DNA) and helper programs (RNA) creates second generation of computer and programs (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates) that essentially create their own version of computer system in which they govern things like enzymes, hormones etc

But keep in mind that humans are not created in vacuum. After those two levels of computer create third level that is brain, actual programming of brain is done by other living humans.

So actual „humanity” is what persists in living population and would reset when population is culled and newborn must live and learn on their own.

Even if such newborn would live long enough to have access to things like books, computers, even sound and video records… those would be completely useless to them because they won’t even know language and skills required to use those.
by pimterry | 2025-11-25 11:03:37+00:00
From the article:

> These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them. This will always be the case.

This seems like a reasonable balance. They're shipping default distributions with these blobs included, but you can remove them and run the literally completely purely open source version directly instead if you prefer (although it sounds like you'd notably lose heart rate tracking, along with speech recognition & similar).
by pjmlp | 2025-11-25 11:03:38+00:00
For me Linux distributions have always been a way to have cheap UNIX like systems at home, any POSIX like system will do, it could equally been one of the BSDs or Windows NT/POSIX, had Microsoft been actually serious about it.

Actually I was more found of Solaris, Irix, NeXTSTEP in how they approached the whole development experience.

Still got some nice memories of Aix and HP-UX as well, with Xenix and DG/UX as introductory experiences to the UNIX world.

Something like Android is closer to how Plan 9/Inferno got to be, than most GNU/Linux distros, regarding a managed userspace, and more interesting to see where it all goes.

Or modern approaches like Unikernels (even if POSIX based), managed runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, immutable container based OSes,....

Also commercial UNIXes never followed the "Unix philosophy" that keeps being endless recited in Linux circles, ironically, given that GNU tools are hardly anything to go by, given the endless list of options they have available.
by estsauver | 2025-11-25 11:04:29+00:00
Is that true? I think the "we've actually used this leaver, just once" is much more likely to cause European judges to be extremely trepedatious. There's a difference between sanctioning an entire country and it's most important industries, which will force it to react and fight, and just victimizing a single judge, who Europeans can ignore the plight of.
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-11-25 11:05:01+00:00
I spent some time on their Discord chatting and trying to nudge them towards a healthier approach.

Many of them seem to think that PebbleOS was released just for them (they quote the Google press release), and so reading between the lines I really do think they feel at some level that code has been "stolen" from them. Which is ridiculous (and I said so) but if they think it's true then it explains their actions much more clearly than any other explanation I've found (or they've elucidated).

My best understanding (which I've extrapolated from what I've learned) is that they had all these plans of being a scrappy team who worked together on PebbleOS in their spare time, as friends, and Eric capitalising a company of paid developers has made all those plans redundant - so they've been powering through the five stages of grief in coming to terms with that while everyone else has been celebrating the return of Pebble.
by probably_wrong | 2025-11-25 11:06:29+00:00
I think there's a difference between "support" and "enabling".

It is well documented that family members of someone suffering from an addiction will often do their best at shielding the person from the consequences of their acts. While well-intentioned ("If I don't pay this debt they'll have an eviction on their record and will never find a place again"), these acts prevent the addict from seeking help because, without consequences, the addict has no reason to change their ways. Actually helping them requires, paradoxically, to let them hit rock bottom.

An "emotional vibrator" that (for instance) dampens that person's loneliness is likely to result in that person taking longer (if ever) to seek help for their PTSD. IMHO it may look like help when it's actually enabling them.
by lordnacho | 2025-11-25 11:07:05+00:00
I don't know if it's comedy or tragedy, but I've often considered the situation of what a newborn is "expecting".

"Ok, first thing when I come out is I'm gonna meet the family. I'll try to get used to their face, whoever I see first. Maybe they'll show me around the savannah, should be a lot of sunshine, colours, blue sky. Then I'll sleep directly on my mom and get some boob milk."

Kid comes out, everyone is wearing a mask, half of them aren't family, they're indoors with artificial light, and they have "clothes" put on them, and are put in a cot to sleep.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-25 11:08:04+00:00
> I don't see how it could be expressed in a different way without loosing that clarity.

What value does the inheritance provide here?

Can't you just use a flat interface per usecase without inheritance and it will work simpler with less mental overhead keeping the hierarchy in mind?

Explicitly your graphic library sounds should be fine to have the interface DisplayObject which you can then add default implementations on. (That's a form of composition)