MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cgriswald | 2025-11-10 16:16:39+00:00
I don't think that is actually a problem. For decades people have believed that computers can't be wrong. Why, now, suddenly, would it be worse if they believed the computer wasn't a computer?

The larger problem is cognitive offloading. The people for whom this is a problem were already not doing the cognitive work of verifying facts and forming their own opinions. Maybe they watched the news, read a Wikipedia article, or listened to a TEDtalk, but the results are the same: an opinion they felt confident in without a verified basis.

To the extent this is on 'steroids', it is because they see it as an expert (in everything) computer and because it is so much faster than watching a TED talk or reading a long form article.
by Brendinooo | 2025-11-10 16:16:41+00:00
I remember seeing a tweet awhile back that talked about how modernity separated work from physicality, and now you have to do exercise on purpose. I think the Internet plus car-driven societies had done something similar to being social, and LLMs are doing something to both thinking, as well as the kind of virtue that enables one to master a craft.

So, while it's an imperfect answer that I haven't really nailed down yet, maybe the answer is just to realize this and make sure we're doing hard things on purpose sometimes. This stuff has enabled free time, we just can't use it to doomscroll.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-11-10 16:16:46+00:00
"One example of such an "iron grip" from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old;"

Got to admit that's very interesting. That was January 5, 2020, I wonder how it looks today.

I asked chat:

Boomers: ~13 of 20 (~65%) Examples: Princeton (Christopher Eisgruber, 1961), MIT (Sally Kornbluth, 1960), Harvard (Alan Garber, 1955), Duke (Vincent Price, 1957), Brown (Christina Paxson, 1960), Johns Hopkins (Ron Daniels, 1959), Columbia’s acting leaders across 2024–25 were also Boomers.

Gen X: ~7 of 20 (~35%) Examples: Stanford (Jonathan Levin, 1972), Yale (Maurie McInnis, 1966), Dartmouth (Sian Beilock, 1976), Rice (Reginald DesRoches, 1967), Vanderbilt (Daniel Diermeier, 1965), WashU (Andrew D. Martin, 1972), Notre Dame (Rev. Robert A. Dowd, 1965).

Millennials/Silent: 0 in this Top-20 (today). (A few large publics just outside the USNWR top-20 have Boomer or Gen-X chancellors as well; e.g., UC Berkeley’s Rich Lyons, 1961.)

The boomers are still holding on to power. Amazing!

What's it like in the private sector?

Gen X: ~53% (Microsoft/S. Nadella 1967; Alphabet/S. Pichai 1972; Amazon/A. Jassy 1968; Tesla/E. Musk 1971; Eli Lilly/D. Ricks 1967; Walmart/D. McMillon 1966; Tencent/Ma Huateng 1971; Visa/R. McInerney 1975; Mastercard/M. Miebach 1968; ExxonMobil/D. Woods 1965; plus Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters 1970.)

Boomers: ~43% (Nvidia/J. Huang 1963; Apple/T. Cook 1960; Saudi Aramco/A. Nasser 1958; Broadcom/Hock Tan 1951/52; TSMC/C.C. Wei 1953; JPMorgan/J. Dimon 1956; Oracle/S. Catz 1961; plus Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos 1964.)

Millennials: ~5% (Meta/Mark Zuckerberg 1984.)

Silent Generation: ~5% (Berkshire Hathaway/Warren Buffett 1930 — slated to hand CEO role to Greg Abel, b. 1962, at year-end 2025.)

A little better, but my gosh they are really holding on. I'm sure it is unprecedented. Certainly heath is better than any time in history, but this seems extreme.
by 9rx | 2025-11-10 16:17:09+00:00
> I’m hard pressed to find another person that is from the millennial generation that has been a persistent “public figure” as long and persistently than Zuck.

Prince William and Prince Harry have him beat on that front, surely? They've been persistent public figures since birth.

And if we limit it to modern times, Taylor Swift has got to be way more well known. Even my young kids know who Taylor Swift is. They have no clue about who Zuckerberg is.
by pydry | 2025-11-10 16:17:31+00:00
>I heard if you work for BBC you can't even mention a toothbrush maker without going through alternatives.

It depends on the politics of the BBC at the time. It used to be that being critical of Trump attracted no lashback.

Being supportive of Ukraine on social media will not raise any eyebrows.

So in essence: what youre saying is flatly untrue. BBC policies are not applied indiscriminately.

>in this case on one side there is a jihadist organization

There's that Islamophobic trope again. This is not a war on Hamas. Hamas is nearly irrelevant. It is a racist war on Arab civilians, with Hamas used as the excuse to commit genocide.

There is clear and simple proof of this: Israel has already tried to ethnically cleanse the region. They had their own equivalent of Hitler's Madagascar Plan. Like the Madacascar Plan it failed.

>if what you are saying is that things are clear and there is no "bias" in painting one side as baddies

There are three sides here: Israel committing genocide, Hamas who committed Oct 7th atrocity and civilians.

Im on the side of innocent civilians, you're apparently (if Im reading correctly) on the side of the racists committing (according to the UN) a genocide.

>Ah yes. I have not mentioned race but there we go American white guilt

This has nothing to do with white guilt. If somebody didnt mention race but denied the Holocaust what would they be?

Exactly.
by everdrive | 2025-11-10 16:18:03+00:00
I'm averse to installing any apps. I don't want to use a smartphone, and I don't want companies or governments to mandate their usage. As a consumer you have no real way of knowing which apps are tracking you and selling your data and which are not. Every app is suspect, even if some are legitimately clean. Every single company that says "just use the app" is another roll of the dice: will they get breached and reveal my data? Are they tracking me and selling to advertisers / insurance companies / police? Consumers really have no way of knowing for sure.
by zdragnar | 2025-11-10 16:18:14+00:00
I don't know about the UK, but in the US this is only half true. Degree-requiring jobs still have better social status over trades and low/no skill work, at least from a "what do you want to be when you grow up" point of view.

However, many more people than previously are skeptical of the math behind the cost of a college degree. Going into significant debt only to find a field flooded with others, competing with overly ambitious expectations for AI, and it's much harder to see the value in becoming a desk jockey at big corp versus becoming a plumber or field tech, or welder.

I'm sure someone will point out the math still works in favor of getting a degree, but I'm not really the one that needs convincing.

The local state flagship public university has $18k listed for annual tuition for residents of the state, and double that if you're from out of state. Add in their estimates for books, housing, food, and a surcharge for computer science majors, and you're looking at $40k for the 2025-26 school year... $160k worth of debt for a 4 year degree, at a public school, with nothing but a piece of paper and a bad economy to greet you on the other end.

Conversely, trade schools in the same city offer $8k tuition for a full 20 accreditation course load, no book costs, and no mandatory dormitory stays. You'll spend the rest of the time probably in a lower paid apprenticeship, especially if you do go for being an electrician or something similar, so it isn't all roses.
by zamalek | 2025-11-10 16:18:30+00:00
The first line in the email that I linked is pretty unambiguous:

> Oh Christ. Is somebody seriously working on BE support in 2025?

Followed by Eric:

> And as someone who works on optimized crypto and CRC code, the arm64 big endian kernel support has always been really problematic. It's rarely tested, and code that produces incorrect outputs on arm64 big endian regularly gets committed and released. It sometimes gets fixed, but not always; currently the arm64 SM3 and SM4 code produces incorrect outputs on big endian in mainline

BE support is unambiguously best-effort (which is none in some cases).

No, the Kernel does not take BE seriously. Not sure why I have to quote from the mailing list when the URL was a significant portion of my comment text - it directly contradicts your assertion on multiple fronts.
by thomascountz | 2025-11-10 16:18:38+00:00
Phone's dead/dropped under a bus tire/stolen at security/got bit-flipped by a cosmic ray, now what?

Nearly 80% of 207M passengers already adopted it means 41M passengers have not.

I apologize in advance for being overly dramatic. I just flew with a digital boarding pass and my phone nearly died while waiting at the outlet-less gate. I'm sure I could have gotten assistance, but it was stressful.
by dbcurtis | 2025-11-10 16:18:39+00:00
It is important to remember that IEEE 754 is, in practice, aspirational. It is very complex and nobody gets it 100% correct. There are so many end cases around the sticky bit, quiet vs. signaling NaNs, etc, that a processor that gets it 100% correct for every special case simply does not exist.

One of the most important things that IEEE 754 mandates is gradual underflow (denormals) in the smallest binate. Otherwise you have a giant non-monotonic jump between the smallest normalizable float and zero. Which plays havoc with the stability of numerical algorithms.
by throwforfeds | 2025-11-10 16:18:58+00:00
Yeah, you're right in that it is highly dependent on the person and the set and setting. For me, I went into that first experience seeking a catalyst for insight into the things that were holding me back in my life, and got it. Intention setting is super important, which is why in formal meditation practice and in yoga they teach you to set a samkalpa for your practice session [1].

I've certainly taken LSD and gone to a rave with 6k people before, but I usually end up wanting to go home to meditate after a while. Insight into that existential void (sunyata) is exactly what I'm seeking out. But there's of course nothing wrong with wanting to stay at the party and dance all night! They're both manifestations of the same thing if you can see it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path#Right_res...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81
by maxbaines | 2025-11-10 16:19:09+00:00
Looks like a pretty useful offering, 128Gb Memory Unified, with the ability to be chained. IN the Uk release price looks to be £2999.99 Nice to see AI Inference becoming available to us all, rather than using a GPU ..3090etc.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-ascent-gx10-desktop-ai-...
by ccanassa | 2025-11-10 16:19:29+00:00
I’ve been reverse-engineering an obscure childhood game called Entomorph:

https://github.com/entomorph/reverse-engineering

I started the project when ChatGPT 4 was first released, using it as a way to explore what LLMs could actually do. I also find working on it very relaxing, there is something cool about uncovering secrets hidden in code for more than twenty years.
by codegeek | 2025-11-10 16:19:34+00:00
I think requiring app is an overreach. I hate installing apps. If you want to save money and not do paper, I would just do this:

- Provide a discount/credit for using electronic digital boarding pass (PDF file, no apps). If someone is not able to use the PDF etc (either their own printout or on their phone) and require a paper pass at the airport for any reason, their discount/credit goes away. Simple.
by afavour | 2025-11-10 16:19:39+00:00
This is simply the mindset of discount airlines. If your battery is dead when you arrive at check-in that's too bad for you. It's in the terms and conditions.

If the server is flaky then boarding will be delayed for everyone and it'll be a whole crapshow but if their overall cost is lower than it would have been with printed boarding passes, fine.
by whimsicalism | 2025-11-10 16:19:48+00:00
Your own claim was unambiguous: enrolling fetus/baby/infants (who cannot consent) in a trial for anything other than avoiding certain death is ‘on par with anything the nazis … did in WWII.’

I’m familiar with the Nazi medical experiments and how it informs modern bioethics. What you said is a significant step beyond any bioethicist consensus and trivializes the horrific mass murder that was the Holocaust.

Take care.
by lxgr | 2025-11-10 16:19:57+00:00
I once flew from London on Ryanair when the airport's passenger Wi-Fi was completely down, and 4G was completely overloaded as a result as well.

Things were indeed pretty chaotic. I can't remember if they did print paper boarding passes in the end.

> it seems like the small fraction of people using a paper boarding pass can't be adding much extra cost

You're looking at this from the wrong angle: This is Ryanair. Actual cost does not matter, only the opportunity to extract more revenue. Presumably app users are that much more valuable to Ryanair (as they can be upsold various things there, and potentially because it also acts as a filter for a generally less profitable customer segment).
by egypturnash | 2025-11-10 16:20:05+00:00
> “We are talking about more subtle things,” Paczynski explains, “like the game not supporting modern controllers, the game not supporting ultra-wide screens or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like being able to minimize the game.”

I dunno if it's really preservation when you have to completely rework the game to work on a screen three times wider and 4x denser than anything that existed when the game was designed, and hack in a completely new way of talking to the controllers. Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day. Even if they're still both running versions of Windows, a 2025 computer and a 1997 computer are completely alien systems that have about as much to do with each other as a 2025 computer and a Nintendo 64.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-10 16:20:12+00:00
The only thing that helped me was to take regular breaks from looking at a screen. My daily habit now is that, at least once per hour, I get up and take a walk around the block.

This hugely improved my eye strain problem as well as a few other physiological oddities. Actually going outside seems to be a critical part of this. Just strolling around the office doesn't have the benefits.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-10 16:20:20+00:00
The lower life expectancy in the US is almost entirely down to young people dying at a much higher rate than Europe due to car accidents, murder, and drug overdoses. It skews the averages pretty badly. If those individual risks don't apply to you then life expectancy is actually pretty decent.

There is a wide variance in the general healthiness of the population depending on where you live in the US, which does affect life expectancy. Where I live in the US my life expectancy is in the mid-80s despite the number of young people that die.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-10 16:20:22+00:00
I'm not sure if this is a good approach or not.. but I've started just exploding my resume out, then feeding it to an LLM to create a job-specific version a few times... I'll edit the job-specific version a bit, which does cut things down.

I don't know it's helped or hurt, as I've only gotten a response from about 1:50 that I sent out before or since I made the shift and I know the job market sucks.

I still need to flush out some of the prior jobs in terms of older history, projects and accomplishments. I've done a lot of contract work in 6-12 month segments in the past three decades... It's kind of wild to look back on the shear variety, scale, scope and size of some of the things I've done and worked on.

At this point, I'm not sure if it's luck, ageism or just the number of short stints in my past... but It's a weird feeling in recent job market that I haven't felt in decades. 5 years ago, it felt like I was being overwhelmed when I wasn't even looking... today it's a mess.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-10 16:20:35+00:00
More broadly, we need regulation where companies cannot make "ownership of the newest smartphone" a requirement to do business with them. I'm lucky to be in the USA where we still haven't smartphone-ized everything yet, but every year I see it creeping in. Every year, a new bank requires a smartphone to create a passkey or whatever. Every year, a restaurant I like moves over to QR code menus. Every year, a doctor decides to move over to smartphone-based payments only. And of course, all of the crappy app developers insist that 1. I use a very recent phone and 2. I run the latest OS, or I'm shut out.

I have no problem with enabling smartphone-based payments and passes for people who like them, but companies should not be allowed to block out (or charge extra to) others who prefer not to tether themselves to a phone.
by motoboi | 2025-11-10 16:20:41+00:00
Thanks for this. This helped me understand Zuckerberg’s recent change of style.

It is now clear that he made a repositioning, and not that was fruit of some psychological breakthrough or something like that.

At the same time it’s scary to think about to what extent that men can go for business and also, given his pathetic behavior at the White House dinner, who is actually controlling that man.
by globular-toast | 2025-11-10 16:20:45+00:00
> faster

Scanning a QR code from a screen is faster than from a piece of paper? How does that work?

> smarter

A smart person would carry both a digital and paper copy of their travel documents.

> greener

Ah, yes, all it takes to make flying "green" is eliminating a single sheet of A4 paper per passenger.
by glenstein | 2025-11-10 16:20:59+00:00
I agree that you would have to believe something like that to make sense of what it's implying. But by the same token, that very contention is so implausible that that's what makes it rhetorical overreach.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that anyone's access to published legislation would be threatened by its deprecation.

This is probably the part where someone goes "aha, exactly! That's why it's okay to be deprecated!" Okay, but the point was supposed to be what would a proponent of XSLT mean by this that wouldn't count as them engaging in rhetorical overreach. Something that makes the case against themselves ain't it.
by dahart | 2025-11-10 16:21:36+00:00
That’s not too surprising to me, I imagine that many number types are used, and it depends entirely on the task at hand? If you have deeper knowledge of what gets done in practice, I’m still curious what criteria and types and how many decimal points might get used in the most restrictive cases. What do people use in practice for, say, interest compounding on a trillion dollars? I can calculate how many decimal places I need at a minimum for any given transaction to guarantee the correct pennies value, but I don’t have first-hand experience with banks and I don’t know what the rules of thumb, or formal standards might be for safe & careful calculation on large sums of money. I would imagine they avoid doing floating point analysis in every case, since that’s expensive engineering?
by lrvick | 2025-11-10 16:21:44+00:00
Frontier already expects digital boarding passes. I do not own a phone, so they charged me a $25 fee to print one at customer service. Except they also do not accept cash, so I had to go buy a gift card with cash from a vending machine for another $5 fee.

For $30 I could buy an entire discount printer and print one myself.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-10 16:21:51+00:00
Than you haven't been watching the EU enough. They are currently working on MULTIPLE different omnibus laws that will make owning an Google or Apple Approved Phone, running Google or Apple Approved Firmware and using the Google or Apple App store de-facto mandatory for living in the EU.

You vill download ze app and you vill accept the TOS.

*Downvote me all you want here's the proof:* https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...
by OptionOfT | 2025-11-10 16:21:54+00:00
But why? What is wrong with PDFs? Either printed or digitally?

Want to make it a little bit more fancy? Apple Wallet and Google Wallet both support a more fancy setup.

Technologically speaking banning the other things is only driven by hoping that people will forget something and they can charge extra.

What's next? They 'accidentally' kill the app during boarding. And they can up charge you.
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-10 16:21:59+00:00
DrDrang is almost always great

To me, when I set the limits on an axis, the plotting software should not extend that axis by an extra 5% or so by default. It should just do what I tell it to do and nothing more.

You can tell he used to be a working engineer. Until at least 1990, picking off values from a plot in a paper or book was extremely common, this attitude was almost universal in engineers doing calculations.
by rixed | 2025-11-10 16:22:01+00:00
Ryanair basically invented most of the dark patterns that are now prevalent in all travel websites. Back then, the experience was so awful that it was comical (and even inspired a song[0]). Therefore I'm not surprised that they are the first to mandate you install their app on your phone. All other companies that have dreamed of this will be quick to follow suit.

Notice the euphemism of calling this "going digital". Everybody is already digital, using a pdf reader on their phone at the terminal, despite some companies discouraging this practice. That's not digital enough, is it?

[0]: https://youtu.be/Id-zzOGnN6A?t=102
Ask HN: Any Hardware Startups Here?
by guzik | 2025-11-10 16:22:19+00:00
AI is eating the world. Feels like every hour there's a new SaaS or GPT wrapper launching. That's cool, but I'm curious who's still building hardware? I'm keen to meet those in our community taking on the often-quoted "hardware is hard" challenge.

Would love to hear what you're working on, even if it's just a prototype: anything that involves devices, sensors, rockets, robots, cameras, wind turbines, solar panels, self-driving cars, wearables, medical tech, anything that actually touches the physical world.

Remember, no venture is too small or niche!
by parineum | 2025-11-10 16:22:27+00:00
I'm not sure what claim your disputing or making with this.

What more are LLMs than statistical inference machines? I don't know that I'd assert that's all they are with confidence but all the configurations options I can play with during generation (Top K, Top P, Temperature, etc.) are all ways to _not_ select the most likely next token which leads me to believe that they are, in fact, just statistical inference machines.
by ml- | 2025-11-10 16:22:47+00:00
Started work on a project to put local history on a map. If I go somewhere I would ideally want to just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.

Maybe it's a story about named local fishermen from the early 1900s, with pictures, the history of a statue and videos of the process, or the state of a graffiti wall over time.

Currently in a phase of UI development and testing, and historical societies outreach for collaboration. It might stall and just fizzle into nothing, or it might be something cool.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.
by 4ndrewl | 2025-11-10 16:23:02+00:00
It'll be interesting to see where this is enforced. Most people won't actually see a member of Ryanair staff until the gate (at which point very often you're asked to scan your own barcode with a staff member present).

I reckon you'll be able to print out a screenshot of the app and use it to check your bags in and get through security. They won't hold a flight up with checked bags at the gate - will cost them too much money.