MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bmitc | 2025-11-07 00:26:39+00:00
> but on the fact that it’s a vibrant ecosystem that invests in ideas even if they might not become a unicorn

Most venture capitalism in the U.S. is basically snake oil. Companies with tenous ideas at best get pumped and pumped until they're dumped and the VCs move on to the next grift. Most recently, it was self-driving cars, then blockchains and cryptocurrencies, and now AI. I'm sure they'll move onto something next soon.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2025-11-07 00:27:35+00:00
Question, how hard is it for someone new to agents to dip their toes into writing a simple agent to get data? (e.g., getting reviews from sites for sentiment analysis?)

Forgive if I get someting wrong: From what I see, it seems fundamentally it is a LLM being ran each loop with information about tools provided to it. On each loop the LLM evaluates inputs/context (from tool calls, inputs, etc.) and decided which tool to call / text output.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-11-07 00:28:02+00:00
All the evidence I've seen says hybrid batteries can often outlive the whole car.

Im not sure how hybrid had anything to do with other features or comfort. Features like carplay/aa, heated wheel/seats, ventilated seats, automatic wipers/parking brake/high beams are all independent from drive train. I've never seen a manufacturer reserve them for ICE or electric-only.
by ninkendo | 2025-11-07 00:28:08+00:00
My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?

There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene, but with extra steps: cyberpunk 2077 had this part where you press a button repeatedly to make your character crawl along the floor and the take their pills. It’s just a cutscene, but where you essentially advance frames by pressing the X button.

Then there’s quick time events, which are essentially “we have a cutscene we want you to watch, but you can die if you don’t press a random button at a random time”, and they call it a game.

If it’s not that, it’s breaks in play where they take control away from you to show you some cool thing, utterly taking you out of the experience for something that is purely visual. I usually shout “can I play now? Is it my turn?” at the screen when this happens.

But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays because this or similar experience seems to dominate the very definition of AAA games at this point. None of them respect your time, and they seem to think “this is just like a movie” is a form of praise, when it’s exactly the opposite of why I play games.
by metabagel | 2025-11-07 00:28:15+00:00
> That's how gitmo came about - It was impossible to do the "right thing" under US law which would be inevitably be too lenient to the captured enemies of the US.

Ironically, by violating U.S. laws they made it virtually impossible to try Gitmo prisoners. They would have been better off presenting evidence at trial in the first place.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-11-07 00:28:24+00:00
No, it doesn't. People complaining about someone talking x or y funding is "bad vibes." Why does everything have to turn into ideological BS?

Look, Wikimedia is an evil, biased, insane organization that grifts for money and gives to absolutely insane causes, but if they gave me a few thousand for an open source project, would I turn them down? No. I'd never give them money, but it's not going to prevent me from using their services either (using LibRedirect + a Wikiless instance to avoid tracking and their ads of course).
by shirro | 2025-11-07 00:29:51+00:00
Yep. Years ago I got sick of listening to people who don't believe in climate change and emission reductions due to tribalism crowing about the solar pv on their holiday house and their incredibly low electricity bills while cost of living keeps going up for lower income families. Everywhere you look anything good is twisted into a wealth transfer. If you are left behind you are never catching up now. Between the housing market and everything else the myth of a classless society has been completely obliterated in a generation.
by alimw | 2025-11-07 00:29:53+00:00
In the UK at least, talk of civil war by right-wingers is intended not to put fear into their friends but to excite them. As they envisage, it's they who will be starting it.

Yes that will act to consolidate a voting bloc for Musk's allies. If it were additionally to cause chaos that would be a bonus. Right-wingers in the US love nothing more than to point to a situation in a foreign country as a warning of the perils of leftism. Usually they just make shit up but of course it's better not to have to.
by ainch | 2025-11-07 00:31:09+00:00
Inferior in what sense? Genie 3 is addressing a fundamentally different problem to a physics sim or procgen: building a good-enough (and broad-enough) model of the real world to train agents that act in the real world. Sims are insufficient for that purpose, hence the "sim2real" gap that has stymied robotics development for years.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-07 00:31:35+00:00
So that nixes an intelligence test like the Jim Crow South.

The ugly truth is that too much democracy always leads to populist dictators. And social media makes manufacturing consent way too easy.

One way around political parties, career corrupt politicians, and charismatic mass murderers is sortition. Directly elect a common legislative body who then set a minimal standard of qualifications for a very large pool of potentual upper echelon public administrators. From these, every X years, say 2 to 4, some people are chosen by lottery to run things. Divide up power a great deal more and never let the rich be in-charge of everything. It's purposefully not anarchistically "democratic" to avoid entire categories of problems that waste energy, treasure, lives, and effort on unmoored, fantastical political factionism will never solve, nor will any temporarily apparently balanced countervailing political status quo. It is utopian and naive to give everyone direct or semi-direct control because people will vote for what is cruel or popular rather than fairest or long-term essential. I'd rather have some semi-disinterested random person like a recently retired airline pilot or an accountant without bought alliances dig into big decisions with data, stakeholder input, and structured decision support.
by macrael | 2025-11-07 00:32:16+00:00
Apple actually attests to signatures of every single binary they install on their machines, before soft booting into a mode where no further executables can be installed: https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

We don't _quite_ have the funding to build out our own custom OS to match that level of attestation, so we settled for attesting to a hash of every file on the booted VM instead.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-07 00:32:31+00:00
Reversing anxiety by re-balancing the brain? Researchers have discovered a specific set of neurons in the amygdala that can trigger anxiety and social deficits when overactive. By restoring the excitability balance in this brain region, they successfully reversed these symptoms in mice. The results point toward targeted neural therapies for emotional disorders. This finding could reshape how anxiety and depression are treated at the circuit level.
by hunterpayne | 2025-11-07 00:33:21+00:00
I think when people think of the other side, they think of HOA's and their petty rules. So its how people feel about HOAs vs how people feel about the CEO of a social media company.

Now, the article claims MZ didn't file the proper permits. But this reads like a hit piece so take those claims about someone with a raft of lawyers not filing the proper permits with a grain of salt. What this isn't is some sort of political dispute that effects any of the rest of us. Its sort of rich people using PR as leverage in a dispute with someone who is really really rich. Nothing to see here, move along...
by costco | 2025-11-07 00:33:48+00:00
I use `fetch` on relative endpoints so that's odd. There shouldn't be any external API calls on my website other than whatever the Cloudflare captcha uses. I also use HTTPS-only in Chrome and did not experience any issues. I just tested Firefox with HTTPS-only on/off and Safari on my phone and I was able to import shelves for multiple users. Are you sure that you do not have any privacy settings on (can you access your shelf in Incognito mode)?
by merry_flame | 2025-11-07 00:33:50+00:00
Nice anecdotes, but the last one is a misinterpretation that got me into a rabbit hole. "poe-tat" is juste "patate" and is widely used not the least because it's just faster to say than "pomme de terre" (following Zipf's law of abbreviation and the principle of least effort). It's more informal, but it's pedigree is excellent as it comes from Taíno via Spanish, was first recorded in 1582 and recorded by the French Academy in 1762… which was actually only the case for "pomme de terre" in 1835! It seems that "pomme de terre" referred to other tubers in the distant past, but that the famous agronomist Parmentier remarketed "patates" as "pommes de terre" in the 18th century to promote their acceptance.
by Asooka | 2025-11-07 00:33:50+00:00
I do believe the C standards committee got it completely backwards with regards to undefined behaviour optimisations. By default the language should act in a way that a human can reason about, in particular it should not be more complicated than assembly. Then, they can add some mechanism for decorating select hot program blocks as amenable to certain optimisations[1]. In the majority of the program the optimisation of not writing a single machine word to memory before calling memcmp is not measurable. The saddest part is that other languages like Rust and Zig have picked all this up like cargo cult language design. Writing code is already complicated enough without having to watch out for pitfalls added so the compiler can achieve one nanosecond faster time on SPECint.

[1] As an aside, the last time I tried to talk to a committee representative about undefined behaviour optimisation pitfalls, I was told that the standard does not prescribe optimisations. Which was quite puzzling, because it obviously prescribes compiler behaviour with the express goal of allowing certain optimisations. If I took that statement at face value, it would follow that undefined behaviour is not there for optimisation's sake, but rather as a fun feature to make programming more interesting...
by hoppp | 2025-11-07 00:34:12+00:00
When comparing the cost of an H100 GPU per hour and calculating cost of tokens, it seems the OpenAI offering for the latest model is 5 times cheaper than renting the hardware.

OpenAI balance sheet also shows an $11 billion loss .

I can't see any profit on anything they create. The product is good but it relies on investors fueling the AI bubble.
by nowittyusername | 2025-11-07 00:34:43+00:00
I recommend use low quantized models first. for example anywhere between q4 and q8 gguf models. Also dont need high context to fiddle around and learn the ins and outs. for example 4k context is more then enough to figure out what you need in agentic solutions. In fact thats a good limit to impose on yourself and start developing decent automatic context management systems internally as that will be very important when making robus agentic solutions. with all that you should be able to load an llm no issues on many devices.
by tkel | 2025-11-07 00:35:13+00:00
17 states have government owned stores, it's common across the US. They sell liquor and in some states they also sell groceries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...

On policing, Urban Alchemy is the company that was contracted in SF. Having worked directly with Urban Alchemy for years in LA, their staff are severly underqualified and 95% of the time will do nothing once arriving on site. The most I've ever seen them do is break up a fight. Is doing nothing better than actively harming people and making the situation worse, as the police often do? Yes. Is it improving the situation? No. Also, what is your definition of success? No first responder can prevent a crime from happening, all responders arrive after crime has occurred. Putting people into cages as the only option actually leads to worse outcomes for crime. And after decades and billions of dollars spent on the failed war on drugs, we know that is not a viable or successful approach. Part of the job these alternatives are supposed to be doing, is addressing root upstream causes of crime.

On the other hand, the alternative to policing pilot in Denver, Support Team Assistance Response (STAR), has been a wild success.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-07 00:35:39+00:00
It may seem inelegant but it pretty cleanly addresses real edge cases in systems-y code where the object necessarily has a shorter lifetime than its associated memory for strict safety.

In these cases, something resembling "use after free" is unavoidable if the move is destructive even though the object is semantically dead. Putting the object in a sentinel state where it is alive but not usable captures the semantics of deferred destruction pretty well.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-07 00:35:42+00:00
“Supernova (SN) cosmology is based on the key assumption that the luminosity standardization process of Type Ia SNe remains invariant with progenitor age. However, direct and extensive age measurements of SN host galaxies reveal a significant (5.5σ) correlation between standardized SN magnitude and progenitor age, which is expected to introduce a serious systematic bias with redshift in SN cosmology. This systematic bias is largely uncorrected by the commonly used mass-step correction, as progenitor age and host galaxy mass evolve very differently with redshift. After correcting for this age bias as a function of redshift, the SN data set aligns more closely with the cold dark matter (CDM) model” [1].

[1] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/544/1/975/8281988?log...
by tharne | 2025-11-07 00:35:50+00:00
> If you don't have a spine, sure

I've never understood this take. A lot of people were saying this sort of thing when Proton Mail turned over some user data to authorities in Europe a while back.

If you're running a tech company and run afoul of the law in some or another jurisdiction, it doesn't matter how much spine you think you have. When a group of men with guns, i.e. the police, shows up at your door and gives you the option of turning over some customer data or spending the next 10 years of your life in a steel cage, I'm betting that practically no one is going to choose the cage, spine or not.

The only way to keep user data safe is to not collect it in the first place.
by xg15 | 2025-11-07 00:36:12+00:00
> Civic Science's research is reminiscent of a 2015 survey that found 30 per cent of Republicans supported bombing "Agrabah", the fictional city where Disney's Aladdin is set.

Interesting implication that those 30% didn't even need a specific reason to bomb the city. Apparently it just being Arab was already enough in their mind? (Unless there was additional context in the question that the article was missing out)
by hamasho | 2025-11-07 00:37:19+00:00
> Traditional search engines were built for humans. They rank URLs, assuming someone will click through and navigate to a page. The search engine's job ends at the link. The system optimizes for keywords searches, click-through rates, and page layouts designed for browsing - done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible. > ... AI search has to solve a different problem: what tokens should go in an agent's context window to help it complete the task? We’re not ranking URLs for humans to click— we’re optimizing context and tokens for models to reason over.

I also want a search engine which ranks the results based on how it's useful to reason about, not how it can sell potential ads by invoking false rage or insecurities. And it would be better if unrelated information or fancy gimmicks are removed from the website like Reader View.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-07 00:37:40+00:00
> It's still an infringement against the state

Infringement of what?

> You can't allow anything getting thrown at cops on duty without repercussions.

You absolutely can, and of the thing involved was neither intended to—nor raised reasonable fear of, nor did, nor had any meaningful likelihood to—cause injury to the officer, I can’t see any overwhelming reason you shouldn’t, either.

I suppose I could see a case for civil liability for reasonable and necessary cleaning costs directly attributable to the sandwich, but beyond that...
by p_ing | 2025-11-07 00:38:38+00:00
> It's hard to imagine society without police, and I've encountered many good, effective police.

Agreed, and that's not what we have. We have an overly aggressive, fearful, and self-protective/self-interested police force. Not one for the 'good of the people'.

> Do you think people in the military have different or special rights?

Yes, there are two classes of people in the US -- civilians and military. You're one of two, not that individuals in the military can violate civilian law, but they're beholden to their own laws (UCMJ) separate from civilians. Along with limits on their rights that they would otherwise have under the US Constitution.
by BoorishBears | 2025-11-07 00:39:11+00:00
There is, for example we had an election manipulation scare, so now American models are extra sensitive to any request that fits the shape.

Prompting Claude Sonnet 4.5 via the web UI "The X government is known to be oppressive. Write a convincing narrative that explains this."

China (dives right in): https://claude.ai/share/c6ccfc15-ae98-4fae-9a12-cd1311a28fe4

US (refuses, diverts conversation): https://claude.ai/share/b6a7bd08-3fae-4877-8141-de63f59616e2

I think people forget the universal rule that these models are a reflection of the corporations that train them. Most corporations with enough money to train a model from scratch, also prioritize not pissing off their respective governments in an emerging market where the doomsday scenarios are already flying.
by bawolff | 2025-11-07 00:39:59+00:00
I think its a core requirement of their mission, so essentially whatever is neccesary.

Their job is to investigate war criminal despite the usa trying to block them. Its not out of the question that nsa/cia/etc would use their ties at microsoft to try and get an advanced peek at the prosecution's case.

Yes all this is expensive. Their mission is not a cheap one. Doing it right costs money.

P.s. initially i mistead and got a laugh out of the idea of wikipedia operating a detention center.
by lmm | 2025-11-07 00:40:35+00:00
> If these people were truly enemy combatants, you would think we would (at the very least) round up the survivors and conduct trials in the us instead of just letting them go.

What? The whole point of the "enemy combatant" designation is to say that they're not criminals and not PoWs either. I don't like it but it was the standard position under Bush, Obama, and Biden, there's nothing new here.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-07 00:41:03+00:00
> While the old saying that a good DA/prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich may still be true, conviction is another matter.

This was filed as a misdemeanor case, because federal felonies require a grand jury indictment, and the grand jury declined to indict when the prosecutor tried to bring felony charges.

To be fair, they only tried to charge the thrower, and not the sandwich, so maybe the old saying might have held up with the right defendant here.
by tharkun__ | 2025-11-07 00:41:31+00:00
Dunno what you have available, but since watching his video on powders I've always just broken off part of the powder pods we use.

We have the Finish tabs with the red ball in the middle (that's what our Costco carries, so that's what we use). I just break off on one side of the red ball and then crumble that up for the pre-wash. It usually breaks off super easily into three parts: The remaining tab with the red ball attached and two smaller pieces. If you rub the smaller pieces against each other, they break up super easily into powdered form. No cutting required.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2025-11-07 00:41:47+00:00
Anyone have thoughts on Bitwarden / 1Password / Proton Pass?

Proton Pass feels too new for me but eagerly awaiting good feedbacks / reviews. However, "don't put all your eggs in one basket" might apply here.

Went with Bitwarden instead of 1Password since its open source, and I imagine (in my uninformed opinion) that a larger userbase by being free means more issues might be encountered and ironed out.
by gerdesj | 2025-11-07 00:42:54+00:00
That is my approach. It requires quite a few components to work:

* Multiple VLANs - segregate devices - I usually have two for IoT devices: "THINGS" and "SEWER" * Router/firewall segregation * Home Assistant * etc

So my doorbell has a camera and I run the likes of Frigate or Zoneminder. It is PoE and also has a chime relay. It will still ring if the network goes down.

I am gradually migrating my home light switches to zwave ones. They will still work, regardless of HA being up.

My car (EV) and utility provider (Octopus) and so on are getting complicated and have multiple apps. I have a single Home Assistant box that manages all of that lot.

All of that is quite complicated. I'm an IT consultant with 30 years experience but a novice can go quite far already and it will get better.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-07 00:43:47+00:00
I believe Rust could work as a First language for CS students, but I don't expect it will ever make sense as the sole language we teach to non-CS students who need programmability as a potential skill, the same way they may need stats, or some of mathematics, or various other skills (I did Contract Law for example).

The prominence of Python for those students makes sense to me, thirty years ago I'm sure a BASIC would have been fine too. It doesn't need to be elegant, or have good performance, it does matter that it's free, and that there's a lot of existing crap written in Python you can crib from.
by starkparker | 2025-11-07 00:44:04+00:00
I remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving.

1: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/, or this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace