MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-10 15:44:45+00:00
> Human life is valuable because of critical properties

Specifically, the capacity for rationality and the capacity to choose among alternatives (insects feel things, too, in their myriad insect ways). And these properties, far from being properties among many, are definitive, constitutive, essential* to what it means to be human. (The instantiation of other human properties is always as human-specific instantiations rooted in these above essential properties; while a cat also feels something analogous to human anger and experiences something analogous to the human desire for food, they are not univocal.)

In other words: human value comes from the kind of thing humans are, which is to say rational animals.

And these essential properties exist in potentia during the embryonic stage. A rock does not have the potential to be rational, nor does a dung beetle at any stage, nor do even human gametes, as their development does not lead to a rational being. But at fertilization, from that first cell when a new human being comes into existence, we have a being in the most literal sense that has exactly that rationality scheduled, as it were. And the degree of rationality we express is always a continuum. How much rationality has developed in an infant? How much rationality does a toddler express? The teenager or even most adults? A bed-ridden person with Alzheimer's in old age? A comatose patient? To say that human life at some stage or other does not possess humanity is drawing lines in the sand, an arbitrary threshold that we choose to rationalize some action we wish to take that is opposed to the good of such a being.
by Arch-TK | 2025-11-10 15:44:53+00:00
> A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.

That's cool, but you can't enforce that the rest of the kernel hasn't been modified with that kernel module. You need a chain of trust.

> We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.

Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.

> Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.

It doesn't support it with KLA. Bypassing this kind of anti-cheat on Linux is relatively trivial compared to windows with KLA.
by Brendinooo | 2025-11-10 15:45:04+00:00
>I think LLMs should not be seen as knowledge engines but as confidence engines.

This is a good line, and I think it tempers the "not just misinformed, but misinformed with conviction" observation quite a bit, because sometimes moving forward with an idea at less than 100% accuracy will still bring the best outcome.

Obviously that's a less than ideal thing to say, but imo (and in my experience as the former gifted student who struggles to ship) intelligent people tend to underestimate the importance of doing stuff with confidence.
by matt-p | 2025-11-10 15:45:09+00:00
We said this about 5Ghz when that came out. I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated. I would rather fix that first. Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?

APs using 160MHZ channel widths with 1 or 2 spatial streams because it's cheaper than 80MHZ channels and 3 or 4 spatial streams. Absolutely crap 'auto' channel selection, too high a power (because cheaper than a second AP), poor AP placement and inappropriate channel width (in an apartment block 40Mhz per AP might be optimal).
by energy123 | 2025-11-10 15:45:38+00:00
Granted that my comment was an over-simplification. Israel did get use from reconnaissance Hermes drones in the 12 Day War, possibly launched from Azerbaijan, for another example to add to the list. But as a broad gesture I believe the sentiment is correct. Strategic depth shifts the utility from saturation with attack drones and SRBMs, like what Russia is doing to Ukraine, and what Iran couldn't replicate with MRBMs due to the distance ... to the classic F16 missile trucks to deliver JDAMs with F35s for SEAD.
by Chabsff | 2025-11-10 15:45:40+00:00
> I feel like LLMs are a fairly boring technology. They are stochastic black boxes. The training is essentially run-of-the-mill statistical inference. There are some more recent innovations on software/hardware-level, but these are not LLM-specific really.

This is pretty ironic, considering the subject matter of that blog post. It's a super-common misconception that's gained very wide popularity due to reactionary (and, imo, rather poor) popular science reporting.

The author parroting that with confidence in a post about Dunner-Krugering gives me a bit of a chuckle.
by js8 | 2025-11-10 15:46:00+00:00
Yes and we are IMHO worse off, without a proper theory of reasoning under uncertainty, it's difficult to understand what LLMs are doing (or even hard to define what they should be doing).

I agree that DS is computationally prohibitive, but another way out (aside from probability, which I don't like either) is with various systems of fuzzy logic (or you can just go with the most expressive one under the lovely name \L\Pi 1/2).

(BTW I am also exploring approach to uncertainty based on untyped lambda calculus, where each term is interpreted as a kind of "model of the world". Uncertainty degree is given by whether the term has a normal form or not. If it has not, then it is certain, while if it has a normal form, it means that additional assumptions/arguments need to be supplied to specify the model further.)
Show HN: Akamas Insights now GA – Optimize reliability, performance, and costs
by enricobruschini | 2025-11-10 15:46:18+00:00
Akamas is the autonomous optimization platform that unites developers, SREs, and platform engineers around one goal: delivering reliable, efficient services. By connecting directly to your observability data, Akamas detects optimization opportunities, estimates their impact on cost and reliability, and recommends or applies safe, validated optimizations across the full stack - from applications to clusters.
by abdullin | 2025-11-10 15:46:43+00:00
Yep, exactly the same concept. Except not live-streaming, but giving out a lot of multi-step tasks that require reasoning and adaptation.

Here is a screenshot of a test task: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/abdullin_ddd-ai-sgr-here-is-h...

Although… since I record all interactions, could replay all them as if they were streamed.
by sho_hn | 2025-11-10 15:46:53+00:00
I'm not sure this is something I really worry about. Whenever I use an LLM I feel dumber, not smarter; there's a sensation of relying on a crutch instead of having done the due diligence of learning something myself. I'm less confident in the knowledge and less likely to present it as such. Is anyone really cocksure on the basis of LLM received knowledge?

> As I ChatGPT user I notice that I’m often left with a sense of certainty.

They have almost the opposite effect on me.

Even with knowledge from books or articles I've learned to multi-source and question things, and my mind treats the LLMs as a less reliable averaging of sources.
by thisislife2 | 2025-11-10 15:46:58+00:00
Can't specifically comment on the translation as I don't know French, but I grew up reading the English versions of this comic and have always enjoyed it. Ofcourse, those were by Anthea Bell whose translations have been acclaimed in the media ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/18/anthea-bell-ma... ) , and online too. Now someone else has taken up the translation. Overall though, I was a bit disappointed with the writing, by Fabcaro, for this issue - it wasn't as good as Asterix and the White Iris (the previous issue). (Don't know if something was lost in the tranlsation this time). Personally, I enjoyed the stories written by Jean-Yves Ferri's (the Picts, the Missing Scroll, the Chariot Race, the Chieftain's Daughter and the Griffin) more than Fabcaro (who wrote for the last two issues).
by lrvick | 2025-11-10 15:47:18+00:00
I abstain from surveillance capitalism tech which is designed to track and distract. Google, Apple, and Qualcomm controlled devices are a non starter for me. I would rather be 20 years behind in tech and have sovereignty and reasonable privacy.

I am not at all opposed to useful tools in our pockets. Meshtastic messengers and the Precursor are the best candidates right now that might get tech back in my own pocket or that of kids, but they are not mature enough to daily drive just yet IMO.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-11-10 15:47:30+00:00
I mean, we had a lot of very black and white charges as of 2021 already. (We have many more now.)

But I would say that if your goal is preserving widespread support of elections and the judiciary from Trump supporters, that is a battle long since lost. Trump and his lackeys already believe any election that isn't a landslide for them was fraud, and has been actively attacking any judge who doesn't go along with his actions.

If we can't preserve widespread support for elections and the judiciary, we might as well put him in prison.
by vbezhenar | 2025-11-10 15:47:42+00:00
XSLT was the only convenient way to create a static website without JS. Other ways either require build step or server-side applications. With XSLT, you could write data into XML files, templating into XSL files and it'll just work.

Of course you can achieve similar effects with JS, by downloading data files and rendering them into whatever HTML you want. But that cuts users without enabled JS.

Not a huge loss, I guess, given the lack of popularity of these technologies. But loss nonetheless. One more step to bloated overengineered web.
by MisterTea | 2025-11-10 15:48:02+00:00
I Was talking to a friend about Final Fantasy the other night and he bought up a good point: Chocobo breeding was the precursor to Pokemon breeding. FF7 development started in 1994 and was released in 1997, a year before Pokemon which started as a trading card game in 1996. Not sure if that is significant but its very similar.
by vehemenz | 2025-11-10 15:48:28+00:00
I hate to comment on just a headline—thought I did read the article—but it's wrong enough to warrant correcting.

This is not what the Dunning-Kruger effect is. It's lacking metacognitive ability to understand one's own skill level. Overconfidence resulting from ignorance isn't the same thing. Joe Rogan propagated the version of this phenomenon that infiltrated public consciousness, and we've been stuck with it ever since.

Ironically, you can plug this story into your favorite LLM, and it will tell you the same thing. And, also ironically, the LLM will generally know more than you in most contexts, so anyone with a degree epistemic humility is better served taking it at least as seriously as their own thoughts and intuitions, if not at face value.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-10 15:48:36+00:00
> I don’t think Decimal64 has the same features, but it has been a while.

Decimal32, Decimal64, and Decimal128 all follow the same rules, they just have different values for the exponent range and number of significant figures.

Actually, this is true for all of the IEEE 754 formats: the specification is parameterized on (base (though only 2 or 10 is possible), max exponent, number of significant figures), although there are number of issues that only exist for IEEE 754 decimal floating-point numbers, like exponent quantum or BID/DPD encoding stuff.
by Arch-TK | 2025-11-10 15:49:06+00:00
Sure valve can make Gamedroid a reality, but Valve seems to be on the side of not using KLA themselves.

And, again, Gamedroid != Linux and PS5's OS is not anything like normal BSD. In both cases (hypothetical Gamderoid and current Console OSes and Windows) the game companies are granted a controlled runtime environment. Linux will not support any effective KLA without a third party providing a blessed (all drivers must be signed, secure boot, etc) distro.

The reasons are:

* PITA to support different distros (although not infeasible). * Trivial for anyone to just write their own kernel module which your KLA is blind to. * Trivial to modify how your KLA driver hooks Linux to make it blind to the cheats.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-10 15:49:15+00:00
Okay, I suppose I asked for that, exposing my US-centric thoughts. I meant in the US :).

In the US, insurance covers stupidity. At least once -- your insurer may drop you after they pay out. As long as you don't have an exclusion in the contract covering a particular type of stupidity, and you are not committing fraud, you will be covered.
by zokier | 2025-11-10 15:49:21+00:00
I'm pretty confident that dfp is used for financial computation. Both because it has been pushed heavily by IBM (who certainly are very involved in financial industry) and because many papers describing dfp use financial applications as motivating example. For example this paper: https://speleotrove.com/decimal/IEEE-cowlishaw-arith16.pdf

> This extensive use of decimal data suggested that it would be worthwhile to study how the data are used and how decimal arithmetic should be defined. These investigations showed that the nature of commercial computation has changed so that decimal floating-point arithmetic is now an advantage for many applications.

> It also became apparent that the increasing use of decimal floating-point, both in programming languages and in application libraries, brought into question any assumption that decimal arithmetic is an insignificant part of commercial workloads.

> Simple changes to existing benchmarks (which used incorrect binary approximations for financial computations) indicated that many applications, such as a typical Internet-based ‘warehouse’ application, may be spending 50% or more of their processing time in decimal arithmetic. Further, a new benchmark, designed to model an extreme case (a telephone company’s daily billing application), shows that the decimal processing overhead could reach over 90%
by lukev | 2025-11-10 15:49:23+00:00
I very much agree. I've been telling folks in trainings that I do that the term "artificial intelligence" is a cognitohazard, in that it pre-consciously steers you to conceptualize a LLM as an entity.

LLMs are cool and useful technology, but if you approach them with the attitude you're talking with an other, you are leaving yourself vulnerable to all sorts of cognitive distortions.
by Insanity | 2025-11-10 15:49:32+00:00
I remember back when I was in secondary school, something commonly heard was

"Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong".

Now, almost 2 decades later, I rarely hear this stance and I see people relying on wikipedia as an authoritative source of truth. i.e, linking to wikipedia instead of the underlying sources.

In the same sense, I can see that "Don't trust LLMs" will slowly fade away and people will blindly trust them.
by Zigurd | 2025-11-10 15:50:07+00:00
It's a bit of a racist trope to see the Chinese as more sophisticated in the way they handle international relations, especially compared to what's currently going on in the US. The Chinese are totally capable of being boorish and loud and offensive. They even had a name for this trend: "Wolf Warrior Diplomacy." You might think that's something Pete Hegseth invented.

Salt Typhoon is a serious ongoing attack on lawful intercept systems in telecom networks. There's nothing any individual can do to protect themselves from this, and it's probably deployed everywhere that US style lawful intercept specifications are implemented in telecom networks.

Of course the irony is that domestic surveillance is the attack surface for this exploit.

I would like to be able to weigh the risk of a TP link router being a national security threat against something like Salt Typhoon. But there's a lack of transparency that makes that impossible.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-10 15:50:38+00:00
Looks like that case was resolved to the policyholders satisfaction, so not a good example at all. Besides that, the denial was because they were, in actuality, not in compliance with their policy, not because they did something stupid. It was a stupid denial because the violation was extremely in the “well, technically” category, and had nothing to do with the loss.

https://www.insurancenews.com.au/daily/egg-side-hustle-claim...
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-10 15:50:41+00:00
Humans broadly have a tenuous grasp of “reality” and “truth.” Propagandists, spies and marketers know what philosophers of mind prove all too well: most humans do not perceive or interact with reality as it is, rather their perception of it as it contributes or contradicts their desired future.

Provide a person confidence in their opinion and they will not challenge it, as that would risk the reward of lend you live in a coherent universe.

The majority person has never heard the term “epistemology” despite the concept being central to how people derive coherence. Yet all these trite pieces written about AI and its intersectionality with knowledge claim some important technical distinction.

I’m hopeful that a crisis of epistemology is coming, though that’s probably too hopeful. I’m just enjoying the circus at this point
by balderdash | 2025-11-10 15:50:42+00:00
I ascribe the effect of LLMs as similar to reading the newspaper, when I learn about something I have no knowledge base in I come away feeling like I learned a lot. When I interact with a newspaper or LLM in an area where I have real domain expertise I realize they don’t know what they are talking about - which is concerning about the information I get from them about topics I don’t have that high level of domain expertise.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-10 15:51:06+00:00
No definitely not in practice. 5Ghz reaches across multiple rooms with some loss whereas 6Ghz clearly looses more and drops off to 0 much faster.

The really big problem here is that 6Ghz also comes with the ability to have 320Mhz towards one channel so its got double the bandwidth of 5Ghz as well as being lower penetration. Its really good for things like VR headsets due to the lower interference and higher bandwidth.
by kraftman | 2025-11-10 15:51:08+00:00
I feel like when I talk to someone and they tell me a fact, that fact goes into a kind of holding space, where I apply a filter of 'who is this person that is telling me this thing to know what the thing they are telling me is'. There's how well I know them, there's the other beleifs I know they have, there's their professional experience and their personal experience. That fact then gets marked as 'probably a true fact' or 'mark beleives in aliens'.

When I use chatGPT I do the same before I've asked for the fact: how common is this problem? how well known is it? How likely is that chatgpt both knows it and can surface it? Afterwards I don't feel like I know something, I feel like I've got a faster broad idea of what facts might exist and where to look for them, a good set of things to investigate, etc.
by Insanity | 2025-11-10 15:51:13+00:00
I don't think this is entirely accurate. If you look at this: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt..., it shows that search engines do engage your brain _more_ than LLM usage. So you'll remember more through search engine use (and crawling the web 'manually') than by just prompting a chatbot.
by mensetmanusman | 2025-11-10 15:51:19+00:00
My favorite part about these class of materials is that the computational cost to design them is so high.

We finally have computers powerful enough to design optical metamaterials with enough precision that they are a reasonably affordable thing to make (each real experiment in making these is on the order of $100,000, and the design space is so large >10^10 that we could never reconcile the two without in-silicon experiments).
by saubeidl | 2025-11-10 15:51:42+00:00
The slow Czech train is incredible though! Their dining car still has a full-on kitchen where you can get freshly made Schnitzel and Pilsner Urquell from the tap, complete with white tablecloth.

Yes, there should be a faster option. But if you have the time, do give it a shot, it's quite the experience.
by Arch-TK | 2025-11-10 15:52:39+00:00
Yeah most games, except the ones which rely on KLA.

There aren't _that many_ games in that realm, but most PC gamers play at least one of them a lot.

Without effective KLA support (which would require a locked down Linux aka Gamedroid, for reasons I explain in my other comments) the best you can do is support these mostly non-competitive-multiplayer games. If you have friends who play lots of games, you'll quickly find most of them play at least one game which requires KLA.
by usgroup | 2025-11-10 15:52:47+00:00
I think that's overly reductivist. In the general case DS operates on up to 2^M sets where M is the cardinality of the hypothesis space: worst case scenario. That's not true if hypotheses are hierarchical, or if evidence is frequently about the same set, or there just isn't enough evidence to fuse to get to 2^M.

In the worst case scenario there are efficient approximation methods which can be used.
by Sidnicious | 2025-11-10 15:52:50+00:00
Not suggesting an alternative model here, but I think that Google et. al (based on my own time working on Chrome) don't take that responsibility quite as seriously as they should. Being responsible may be an accident, but being dominant in any given area is not. The forces inside Google which take over parts of the world do so without really caring about the long term commitment.

It is so possible to preserve XSLT and other web features e.g. by wrapping them in built-in (potentially even standardized) polyfills, but that kind of work isn't incentivized over new features and big flashy refactors.
by calf | 2025-11-10 15:53:02+00:00
I feel like statins are harder to accept than vaccines. With vaccines we can say it is just training our existing immune system to recognize and fight something. So how would you straightforwardly explain statins to a scientifically literate adult so they can make an informed decision. But part of that means honestly acknowledging whatever scientific unknowns and uncertainties there are in this area of human biology.
by bparsons | 2025-11-10 15:53:11+00:00
This video answers a lot of the questions around why shipbuilding is concentrated in east Asia now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo&t

The TLDR is:

- Unique, state backed financial instruments that remove a lot of the risk for purchasers. The state needs a large amount of foreign reserves to do this;

- A concentration of industrial and labour capacity. You need to achieve a certain scale in order for the economics to work.

They also look at the case of Germany, who don't produce a lot of finished ships, but export the most profitable, complex components to east Asia. They are at least pursuing a rational strategy, even if they don't have the ability to crank out thousands of ships a year.
by superxpro12 | 2025-11-10 15:53:39+00:00
If it reaches thermal runaway... there's not much you can do. There's simply too much potential energy in the pack.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SweatyPalms/comments/1gbryd1/factor...

Throw it in a massive body of water is about as good as you can do until the energy is depleted. (Also, making a human perform the puncture to initiate a violent chemical reaction is WILD. Do better)

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nuo0fj/...

For real dev work... essentially special sheds with massive ventilation to handle thermal runaways, rated by amount of kwh.