MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amypetrik8 | 2025-11-22 20:48:33+00:00
The dichotomy of such mental illness is people with more constitutional resilience just say "power through?" and they are absolutely correct, it is something they can power through.

Mentally ill folk literally cant, not in em. There are right answers to help them, but that's not the right one. It's kind of like telling someone who is color blind to squint real hard, won't ever help.

Myself, I'm someone very much in the power through category. It's the simplest and most straightforward answer surely. But if it were the answer that works in practice we'd have no homeless people, no drug addicts.
by jjk166 | 2025-11-22 20:48:42+00:00
> but the amount of stuff you can fit in it is determined by the occupiable space.

You can fit more into a larger terrarium, but that doesn't require a larger terrarium to contain more. Regardless of what is contained within the terrarium, it's heat production is limited by what it receives from the environment.

> But greater atmospheric depth probably still increases equilibrium temperature by reducing heat transfer through that side of the terrarium.

Greater atmospheric depth affects heat transfer by changing the density of the atmosphere, which is relevant for an atmosphere held to a body by gravity, but not for one contained in a pressurized vessel like a terrarium. A terrarium with a 1 atm internal pressure has an atmosphere depth equal to earth's atmosphere regardless of size (at least up until the point where the terrarium's gravity is comparable to a planet).
by cvhc | 2025-11-22 20:48:45+00:00
I'm frustrated that some fundamental aspects in agent development lack clear guideline.

One example is input/output types of function tools. Frameworks offer some flexiblity and seemingly I can use fundamental types and simple data structures (list, dict/map). But on the other hand I know all data types are eventually stringified and this has implications.

I have recently observed two issues when my agent calls a function that simply takes some int64 numeric IDs: (1) when the IDs are presented as hexadecimal in the context, the LLM attempts to convert them to decimal itself but mess it up because it doesn't really calculate; (2) some big IDs are not passed precisely in Google ADK framework [1], presumbly because its JSON serialization failed to keep the precision. I ended up changing the function to take string args instead. I also wasn't sure if the tool should return the data as original as possible in a moderately deeply nested dict, or step further to properly organize the output in a more human-readable text format for model ingestion.

OpenAI's doc [2] writes: "A result must be a string, but the format is up to you (JSON, error codes, plain text, etc.). The model will interpret that string as needed." -- But that clearly contradicts with the framework's capability and some official examples where dict/numbers are returned.

[1] https://github.com/google/adk-python/issues/3592 [2] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-22 20:48:52+00:00
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms ... during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.

Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).
by gfiorav | 2025-11-22 20:49:14+00:00
I’m not sure. If we compare the US to Europe (and I say this with a heavy heart), I wouldn’t be confident that the EU has a positive balance. There hasn’t been any growth in the EU in the last 25 years.

What’s Europe’s future? What's its current relevance?

Sure, the US could eliminate all other expenditures and provide every American with the best subsidized healthcare in the world. But what would that achieve? A few decades of chess-thumping to the world? Then bankruptcy? Who will fund the next innovation in healthcare? Is this what Europe did only now those decades of runway are coming to an end?

When you look at the US, you should note that the poorest state here has about the same per-capita GDP as Germany. And the disposable income for people is 50% higher than even Germany. If you don't consider Germany, the poorest state is richer than every EU country and has a disposable income 80% higher.

You want to feel free? You need disposable income. You want to start a company and have clients? You better hope those clients have disposable income.

You want a welfare state? You better have a strong economy. EU isn't trending too hot in that department.

Many of the usual suspects that defend social welfare "just because" also say things like "face the data!" I suggest you do. Just my thoughts.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-11-22 20:49:34+00:00
It's not controversial to say that submissions are being moderated, that's how this (and many other) sites work. I haven't made any claims about how often it happens, or how it relates to second-chance moderation.

What I'm pointing out is just that moderation isn't the same at different times of the day and that this sometimes can explain what content you see during EU and US waking hours. If you're active during EU daytime hours and US morning hours, you can see the pattern yourself. Tools like hnrankings [1] make it easy to watch how many top-10 stories fall off the front page at different times of day over a few days.

[1]: https://hnrankings.info/
by woopwoop | 2025-11-22 20:50:03+00:00
https://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier/files/math-mag/63-2/f...

"How often should you beat your kids?", by Don Zagier.

> This note is a follow-up to the note "How to beat your kids at their own game" by K. Levasseur, in which the author proposes the following game to be played against one's own children: ... Levasseur analyzes the game and shows that on average you will have a score of n + (sqrt(pi * n) - 1) / 2 + O(n^{-1/2}), while the kid, of course, will have an average score of exactly n.

> We maintain, however, that only the most degenerate parent would play against a 2-year-old for money, and that our concern should therefore be not by how much you expect to win, but with probability you will win at all.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-22 20:50:09+00:00
I'm curious to hear what you specifically use these algorithms for!

PS: My point is not that these things are never used, they clearly are, I'm saying that the majority of CPU cycles globally goes towards "idle", then pushing pixels around with simple bitblt-like algorithms for 2D graphics, then whatever it is that browsers do on the inside, then operating system internals, and then specialised and more interesting algorithms like Linear Programming are a vanishingly small slice of whatever is left of that pie chart.
by 1659447091 | 2025-11-22 20:50:43+00:00
> Funny how the time of day affects the visibility of posting

I have had that happen multiple times as well, but those are usually the ones I posted because I am interested in the thoughtful/knowledgeable comments that happen -- so it works out either way. I assume it's because my main source being BBC -- even though the website has a good variety of interesting (non-headline news) content that is well sourced/linked -- but also because I usually end up posting during odd/off-hours for US central. Think most of the ones I post that gain any traction had ended up in the 2nd chance pool.

This one was a bit of an anomaly for me on how quickly it picked up -- personally thought the one I posted before it was a little more interesting about Rolls-Royce finding ways to limit sand/dust from damaging jet-engines, but this here is Superman after all
by culi | 2025-11-22 20:51:26+00:00
My Wikipedia Library membership gives me access to some cool resources that might be of interest:

- Arcanum is the largest and continuously expanding digital periodical database from Eastern Europe, which contains scientific and specialized journals, encyclopaedias, weekly and daily newspapers and more

- NewspaperARCHIVE.com is an online database of digitized newspapers, with over 2 billion news articles; coverage extends from 1607 to the present from US, Canada, the UK, and 20 other countries.

- Newspapers.com includes more than 800 million pages from 20,000+ newspapers. The collection includes some major newspapers for limited periods (e.g., first 72 years of the New York Times), but mostly consists of US regional papers from the 1700s to the late 1980s. Free accounts through the Wikipedia Library include access to Newspapers.com Publisher Extra content.

- ProQuest is a multidisciplinary research provider. This access includes ProQuest Central, which includes a large collection of journals and newspapers, Literature Online, the HNP Chinese Newspaper Collections, and the Historical New York Times.

- Wikilala is a digital repository consisting of more than 109,000 documents in printed form, including 45,000 newspapers, 32,000 journals, 4,000 books and 26,000 articles concerning the history of the Ottoman Empire from its founding to the modern times.

Also most newspapers maintain their own archives, usually accessible online. Here's some I get access to: The Corriere della Sera (one of Italy's oldest and most read newspapers); The Corriere della Sera (a century of historical archives); The Times of Malta (Founded in 1935, it is the oldest daily newspaper still in circulation in Malta); ZEIT ONLINE (online version of Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper) — and quite a few more
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-22 20:51:38+00:00
To the people downvoting me, you are welcome to actually look at the numbers. [1]

Feel free to read about what it shows about lockdowns. [2] [3] [4]

I understand that the US has somehow turned this topic into a political debate and people hate facing that they might have been wrong but I am thankfully not from this part of the world and the evidence is not in favour of lockdowns ever being such a good idea. If you read the BBC article, you will see that we have reached such a polarised and abusive moment in time that even some experts are scared commenting on the available data.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/4/737/7675929?log...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-024-01216-7

[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecaf.12611

[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250304-the-countries-th...
by retrac | 2025-11-22 20:52:13+00:00
> But I was, ironically, left with an impression that the Victorian era was more comfortable with male intimacy, and appreciation for male beauty, than our own.

This might not be an entirely faulty perception. Wilde was, I think, aiming for plausible deniability. To hide the homoeroticism amidst the pretense of merely intense platonic love. Because in that time such expressions were often permissible.

I've seen the theory phrased a few ways but here's one take. In sufficiently homophobic societies, the possibility that a man doing something we would perceive as homoerotic, is himself gay, is close to zero. Because no one would ever risk exposure. And so expression of non-sexual intimacies we would see as gay are not perceived as gay in those societies.

We see this shift in the recent literary tendency to "queer" platonic male relationships in historical literature. To use a slightly absurd example: are Sam and Frodo in the Lord of the Rings gay? It has been argued by some. (Put "Are Sam and Frodo" into Google and see what pops up on autocomplete to finish that question!)

I think it is the romantic (in the 19th century Wagnerian sense) and conservative worldview of Tolkien in action: the nature of the relationship is that of comrades-in-arms. And in that context certain intimacies that would be intolerable are otherwise not. That is why Sam says that he loves Frodo.

Another example the modern audience often just can't get over, is men who used to sleep together. In the most literal sense of the word. Platonic bed mates. Some guys did this even when other beds were available. Maybe they were cold. But maybe they were just lonely? if some women put on pajamas and have a movie-watching slumber party they probably won't get called lesbians. But men must tread carefully today at least in America for that kind of thing. There is just some mental block in our society with that kind of intimacy between two men. But perhaps not back then. (Or maybe Abraham Lincoln really was gay. But I kind of doubt it.)

Wilde is right on the transition point when it started to be conceivable that a man is actually a self-identifying homosexual and that male intimacy might therefore be coded as homosexual. He played with that ambiguity. And in his case, got burned.
by em-bee | 2025-11-22 20:52:14+00:00
i didn't start having friends until i entered university. and i spent my whole life searching for the kind of relationship that i wanted but didn't get from my parents. only a few years ago i realized that this is what i was searching for, and then i finally found it by realizing that i could be the parent to my kids that i had wanted my parents to be to me. my actual parents are more like friends to me than parents.
by tempest_ | 2025-11-22 20:52:23+00:00
I had forgotten I was running Ublock origin / Privacy Badger / Ghostry so I was a bit confused with the results from that site.

I think it is Ghostry that is faking the responses but I still have a pretty unique fingerprint according to https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/kcarter?aat=1
Show HN: Build the habit of writing meaningful commit messages
by Aplikethewatch | 2025-11-22 20:54:35+00:00
Too often I find myself being lazy with commit messages. But I don't want AI to write them for me... only i truly know why i wrote the code i did.

So why don't i get AI to help me get that into words from my head?

That's what i built: smartcommit asks you questions about your changes, then helps you articulate what you already know into a proper commit message. Captures the what, how, and why.

Built this after repeatedly being confused 6 months in a project as to why i made the change i had made...

Would love feedback!
by KetoManx64 | 2025-11-22 20:54:58+00:00
Those are good points, but it again shows how government getting involved does more harm than good. The government forced the lockdowns instead of letting people make their decisions about their health, then they tries to aid the businesses they caused to suffer, and most of the money didn't end up where it was supposed to. So many examples of this over and over when you look at government involvement. > The fantastic 7 tech companies, get billions of dollars from the government grants, tax breaks, business > We have 4 ISP's that monopolize the market, due to the government giving them billions of dollars to expand infrastructure, which they misappropriated and then uses for lobbying against small ISP's > The SNAP program subsidizes big companies like Walmart, target, etc due to them being able to eat the costs of all the massive regulatiom around it. > etc. etc. etc.
by m_ke | 2025-11-22 20:55:04+00:00
Yes it would require completely new hardware and most likely ditching gradient descent for alternative optimization methods, though I'm not convinced that we'd need to turn to discrete optimization.

Some recent works that people might find interesting:

- Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale - https://eshyperscale.github.io/

- Introducing Nested Learning: A new ML paradigm for continual learning - https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-n...

- Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks - https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04871

- Nemotron Elastic: Towards Efficient Many-in-One Reasoning LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16664
by verdverm | 2025-11-22 20:55:05+00:00
been using it for years, no idea what you are getting at

I've never had the downtime or service busy situations I've heard others complain about with other vendors.

They did pricing based on chars back in the day, but now they are token based like everyone else.

I like that they are building custom hardware that is industry leading in terms of limiting how much my AI usage impacts the environment.

What do you think I shouldn't be enthusiastic about?
by yorwba | 2025-11-22 20:56:14+00:00
Yes, mixture of experts is basically structured activation sparsity. You could imagine concatenating the expert matrices into a huge block matrix and multiplying by an input vector where only the coefficients corresponding to activated experts are nonzero.

From that perspective, it's disappointing that the paper only enforces modest amounts of activation sparsity, since holding the maximum number of nonzero coefficients constant while growing the number of dimensions seems like a plausible avenue to increase representational capacity without correspondingly higher computation cost.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-11-22 20:57:03+00:00
"SotA diffusion uses adversarial methods anyways" seems like a bit of a departure from the case you make in the blog post.

edit: For what it's worth - I agree. At least some auto-encoders (which will produce latents for diffusion models) use some form of adversarial method.

Still, I'm curious if you think GAN models in their more familiar form are going to eventually take on LCM/diffusion models?
Show HN: Building an AI Agent
by thimoteelegrand | 2025-11-22 20:58:42+00:00
Hello, my goal is to create an AI agent connected to each component of a software project (backend, frontend, third-party APIs, etc.) to centralize the project context and prevent developers from having to constantly update it when other components change. The agent will also be able to update each software component with a simple prompt. One of the objectives is to have a centralized knowledge base that allows developers to work faster. I want to create a tool that goes beyond code generation and assists developers in all aspects of software development. Currently, I am developing a command-line interface (CLI) application that serves as a foundation for my idea. For any questions, you can contact me at hello@9cotopus.com.
by netsharc | 2025-11-22 20:59:10+00:00
I remember seeing "Germany 9PM News 30 years ago" reporting about the quite accidental opening of the Berlin Wall.

This YouTube channel posts the news bulletin of 45 years ago, daily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS7E58zLcws . For our American readers, it has the exoticism of 70's/80's Europe.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-22 20:59:11+00:00
> There is no way it can be expected to give more.

It is indeed not possible for it to give more, because it only has a single bit answer, which by the pigeonhole principle can't give you more than one bit.

The best yes/no questions are the ones which are independent of each other and bisect the group evenly. "Are you female" is typically good because it will be approximately half the population. Then you want independent questions that bisect the population again, like "does your first name have more than the median number of letters" which should be mostly independent of the first question. Another good one is conditional questions like "are you taller than the median for your sex" since a pure height question wouldn't be independent of sex but that one is.

Whereas bad questions would be ones with highly disproportionate responses, like "do you have pink hair with black and green highlights" which might be true for someone somewhere but is going to have >99% of people answering no, or "were you born on the planet Mercury" which will be 100% no and provide zero bits of information.
by lazide | 2025-11-22 20:59:20+00:00
Thorium 232 is the thorium in the cycle yes. And all kinds of nonsense is correct for the daughter products. But in general, to actually use do anything with thorium you need excess neutrons.

Even the daughter uranium 233 only produces on average 2.48 neutrons per fission, so it’s very difficult even in a combined lifecycle process to have enough - thorium doesn’t produce uranium 233 immediately (takes almost 30 days), neutron capture with that low a ratio requires a LOT of thorium, which is going to mostly just suck up all neutrons and you won’t have any extra for addition uranium 233 fissions, etc.

It’s quite difficult (impossible?)to have actually work without a source of a large amount of additional neutrons.
by oezi | 2025-11-22 20:59:30+00:00
Some years ago I had a similar thing happening to me based on a friend who would gift me his finished The Economist issues with usually a 1 or 2 week delay.

When you read the news even one week later you already realize which stories didn't stay in the public's interest or didn't develop further and you just skip them, while those which did allow you to actually read the first hand accounts without much of the spin added afterwards.

It also removed most of the urge for being angry or sensational about stuff because you realize many stories aren't as bad as it seems on the day they are published (The Economist as a weekly publication does a lot of filtering of course anyway due to their publishing schedule).
by librexpr | 2025-11-22 20:59:50+00:00
> Say I want natural numbers, I need to choose a concrete implementation in set theory e.g. Von Neumann, but there are multiple choices.

You don't need to choose a concrete implementation. If you don't want to choose a construction, you can just say something like "let (N, 0, +, *) be a structure satisfying the peano axioms" and work from there.

> For all good definitions, so get Peano arithmetic and can work with, but the question “Is 1 and member of 3” depends on your chosen implementation. Even though it is a weird question, it is valid and not isomorphic under implementations. That is problematic, since it is hidden in how we do mathematics mostly.

Why is that problematic? The constructions are isomorphic under the sentences that actually matter. This kind of statement is usually called a "junk theorem", and they are a thing in type theory too, see for example this quote from a faq by Kevin Buzzard about why Lean defines division by zero to be zero:

> The idiomatic way to do it is to allow garbage inputs like negative numbers into your square root function, and return garbage outputs. It is in the theorems where one puts the non-negativity hypotheses.

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/division-by-zer...

> Secondly, it is hard to formalize, and I think mathematics desperately needs to be formalized.

Is that actually true? At the very least writing out the axioms and derivation rules is easier for set theory, since it's simpler than type theory. And there has been plenty of computer-verified mathematics done in Metamath/set.mm and Isabelle/ZF, even though less has been done than in type theory. Currently the automated tools are better for type theory, but it seems likely to me that that has more to do with how much effort has been put into type theory than any major inherent advantages of it.

---

More generally, types in type theory are also constructed! The real numbers in Lean don't come from the platonic realm of forms, they are constructed as equivalence classes of cauchy sequences. And the construction involves a lot of type-theoretic machinery which I'd usually rather ignore when working with reals, much like I'd usually rather ignore the set-theoretic construction of the real numbers. And the great thing is that I can ignore them, in either foundation!

So I just don't really buy these common criticisms of set theory, which to me seem like double standards.