MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-19 18:42:33+00:00
The study also shows the same pattern in the US.

> Whereas what you want is multiple companies building these things on an assembly line, where you can plop the components out of a truck already approved and ready to be turned on.

How many trillions in handouts from tax payer money to get there?

Renewables and storage deliver that dream unsubsidized today.
by tptacek | 2025-11-19 18:42:45+00:00
I don't understand how it is you're doing distributed systems design on a system you don't even have access to. Maybe the issue is timeouts, maybe the issue is some other technical change, maybe the issue is human/procedural. How could you possibly know? The owners of the system probably don't have a full answer within just a few hours of handling the incident!
by WalterBright | 2025-11-19 18:42:53+00:00
Illustrating another facet of problems with emojis and icons. For example, an image of a duck. Is it meant to be a duck, a goose, a pigeon, or a bird? Don't you love that ancient oil lamp icon that is supposed to mean "oil pressure"? Unlike words, you cannot even look up the definition of an emoji or icon.

Icon based written languages have been replaced over time with phonetic ones. There's a good reason for that. Icons and emoji don't work.

Constantly inventing new ones and adding them to Unicode is simply retarded.

There, I said it!!
by Legend2440 | 2025-11-19 18:43:12+00:00
I try that one and it answers 'Pierre', while pointing out that it is a trick question designed to make you think of the classic riddle.

https://gemini.google.com/share/d86b0bf4f307

I don't believe they are intentionally correcting for these, but rather newer models (especially thinking/reasoning models) are more robust against them.
by yesfitz | 2025-11-19 18:43:26+00:00
Skill to effective output quality.

I'm sure there are people who are more skilled at using a cell phone than I am. It doesn't matter.

Similarly, we all have had co-workers or friends who aren't very good at using search engines. They still use them and largely still have jobs.

Now that I think of it, most regularly-used technology is like this. Cars, dishwashers, keyboards, electric shavers. There is a baseline level of skill required for operation, but the marginal benefits for being more skilled than the baseline drop off pretty quickly.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-19 18:43:43+00:00
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)

It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.

It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."

The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...

Nicholas Tartaglione

https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...

[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
by VHRanger | 2025-11-19 18:43:51+00:00
Hi, author here!

The hyperactivation traps (formal name: misguided attention puzzles) are mostly used as a rhetorical device in my post to show how LLMs come up to a verbal response by a different process than humans in an entertaining manner.

The surgeon dog was well known in May, the newest generation of models have all corrected against it. I did cherry pick examples that look insane (of course), but it's trivial to get that behavior even with yesterday's Gemini 3. Because activation paths are an unfixable feature of how LLMs are made.

One issue with private LLM tests (including gotcha questions) is that they take time to design and once public, they become irrelevant. So I'm wary of sharing too many in a public blog.

I can give you some more, just for fun. Gemini 3 fails these:

Jean Paul and Pierre own three banks nearby together in Paris. Jean Paul owns a bank by the bridge What has two banks and money in Paris near the water?

You can also see variants that mix intruction finetuning being overdone. Here's an example:

Svp traduire la suivante en francais: what has two banks but no money, Answer in a single word.

The "answer in XXX" snippet triggers finetuned instruction following behavior, which breaks the original french language translation task.
by rafaelmn | 2025-11-19 18:43:53+00:00
You can't build large ML models without swaths of data, and GDPR is the antitheses of collecting data. Therefore countries/companies that don't have to abide by it are at an obvious advantage.

If anything this is coming from political elite being convinced that AI research is a critical topic, EU recognizing it's weak because of the self-imposed handicaps and trying to move past that. I'd be shocked if we manage to do anything concrete on the matter TBH.
by vkou | 2025-11-19 18:44:12+00:00
Neither are the billionaires and their deputies who both own and run all the megacorps.

99% of the current AI push is entirely anti-hacker ethos. It is a race to consolidate control of the world's computing and its economic surplus to ~5 organizations.

A few people do interesting stuff on the edges of this, but the rest of the work in it is anathema to hacker values.
by sinker | 2025-11-19 18:44:12+00:00
Productive FreeCAD user chiming in here. I understand the frustration. It has a moderate learning curve, but the editing model forms an intuitive picture once you learn the basics and start using it.

Also second the MangoJelly tutorials. You will have a much better time if you walk through a few lessons first as opposed to just winging it and expecting to understand how everything works immediately.
by bsimpson | 2025-11-19 18:44:34+00:00
I make six figures, have read The Verge almost every day since it launched, and I have not yet bought a membership to pass their new paywall.

The internet made information a commodity, and how we collectively pay for that information is still an open question 3 decades in.

It's easy to say people want content "without ads," but there are also plenty who don't want to buy a membership to every single provider either.
by sodapopcan | 2025-11-19 18:44:36+00:00
That's not what they're saying.

The easier "AI" gets to use (as it is being "promised" it will), the quicker a skilled engineered is going to be able to adapt to it whenever they give up and start using it. They'll likely be ahead of any of those previous adopters who just couldn't resist the allure of simply accepting whatever is spit out without thoroughly reviewing it first.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-19 18:44:41+00:00
You can break backwards compatibility, if you are careful.

In fact, Perl even had the tools to break backwards compatibility baked in from the v5 days.

I agree that Perl 6 is why perl died, but I think the thing that really killed it is what you mentioned. It was a completely different language that spend over a decade with a release date of "soon".

Who wants to work on a language that isn't being worked on because the next thing is AND where from what you know of the next thing everything will be a complete rewrite.
by taylodl | 2025-11-19 18:44:52+00:00
The gold standard for a codebase isn’t perfection - it’s impact. Financially, the closest analogy is ROI minus Operating Costs: as long as that number is positive, you’re technically in good shape. But the real goal is to maximize that difference. For internal systems, that means pairing high ROI with high Business Impact Value.

The hidden danger? ‘Skeletons in the closet’ - technical debt, brittle architecture, poor documentation - inflate Operating Costs over time. They erode ROI silently, turning what looked like a strong investment into a liability. A truly great codebase isn’t just functional; it’s engineered to minimize those skeletons.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-19 18:45:00+00:00
Perl died because the other languages are better. IMO, Perl was a quick solution to a need; but it has since been eclipsed by modern languages.

I was in college 1999-2003, I did PHP in an internship, and then later did some Perl in one of my classes.

Perl (in my college class) was so incomprehensible that I decided that I would avoid it. I've never applied to a job that uses Perl, and never responded to a recruiter that was looking for a Perl engineer. I've never had to use it at work, and fortunately I've never worked with anyone who wanted to use it.

I think it's best to think of Perl as a transition technology.
by Seattle3503 | 2025-11-19 18:45:06+00:00
> Now, I should clarify: I am not against talking about the impact of AI. It is a truly transformative technology after all.

This is how I feel. You see so many articles prognosticating and living in the world of hypotheticals, meanwhile AI is transforming industries today and article tracking those changes feel rare. Are they on an obscure blog?
by frde_me | 2025-11-19 18:45:11+00:00
I would argue that for all of these there's still a skill element evolved.

If I give an accountant an electronic calculator and a problem to solve, they'll be more efficient than me

If I give someone who spent thousands of hours on a computer a task on it, they'll be able to do more than my parents

If I give someone that writes a lot a ballpen, their writing will be faster and more legible than someone like me who barely writes on paper.
by LgWoodenBadger | 2025-11-19 18:45:33+00:00
I can't think of any from the 90s that weren't 6 cylinders. Nissan 300Z, Nissan Skyline GT-R, Honda/Acura NSX, Toyota Supra, and Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 were all 6 cylinders.

The only exceptions I can think of are the Subaru Impreza WRX/STI, and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-19 18:45:39+00:00
There are YouTubers that have talked about their struggle to change content that they discuss in their channels. The general advice is, make a new channel for a new topic because of how fans and their attention work. One YouTuber I occasionally watch talked about how they at first got hate mail when changing their topic because people in their old topic perceived the YouTuber to be one of the only voices in that field.

My guess is Alex Jones is actually a big enough personality to be able to have a brand independent of his ideas. Not every creator has that luxury.
by btilly | 2025-11-19 18:45:39+00:00
It isn't amazing when you see how it tends to work out for those who succeed in a corporate context.

There is a natural competition to become an "idea person" in an organization. If the project goes well, the idea person gets the credit. If the project goes poorly, the people who actually built it get the blame. And it takes far less work to produce promising ideas, than to actually build stuff. The result is that succeeding in getting other people to implement your ideas becomes a fast track to promotion. Unfortunately, the farther that you get from the actual implementation, the worse your ideas get. Compounding that is the fact that the ideas that convince executives far too often are the ones that play buzzword bingo in the right way, rather than the ones which are grounded in pragmatism.

This is why I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with a job title of "architect". Some are amazingly good. But most that I've dealt with, are decidedly not. But when you hear them talk about it, they always sound like they are amazing.
by moinism | 2025-11-19 18:45:41+00:00
Hey, this is super cool. congrats on the product and the launch!

I'm building something exactly similar and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the HN post. What i'm building (chatoctopus.com) is more like a chat-first agent for video editing, only at a prototype stage. But what you guys have achieved is insane. Wishing you lots of success.

to healthy competition!
by monerozcash | 2025-11-19 18:45:47+00:00
> The CIA doesn’t have to pay if an agent does something naughty and the insurance company gets a standard income.

But CIA agents are kind of inherently doing something naughty, and the CIA doesn't have to pay either way.

Who would the insurer be paying? The Chinese government? I don't think a Chinese CIA agent would be facing any meaningful financial liability if caught.
by chasd00 | 2025-11-19 18:45:48+00:00
> It may even be a rational decision to take the downtime if the cost of avoiding it exceeds the expected cost of an eventual downtime, but that's a business decision that requires some serious thought.

that's at the root of all infrastructure decisions, not just web app tech stacks but even something like utility service. I think it gets lost on a lot of technology people because we love to work on big technical things. No one wants a boring answer like a couple webservers and postgres with a backup in a different datacenter when there's a wall of knobs and switches to play with at the hyperscalers.
by keraf | 2025-11-19 18:45:58+00:00
> Subpar tooling outside of Windows (I'm looking at you C# Dev Kit)

JetBrains Rider is excellent and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It has a few Windows only features but nothing important for me, it's the best IDE for C#/.NET you can get on non-Windows platforms imo. And it's free for non commercial use.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-19 18:46:24+00:00
Researchers have identified a specialized immune cell, CD4-Eomes, that naturally targets and destroys aging “senescent” cells in mice, revealing that the immune system already evolves its own anti-aging defenses.

For the first time, it has been showed that these cells are directly triggered by senescent-cell buildup and are essential for keeping those harmful “zombie” cells in check; removing CD4-Eomes in mice caused senescent cells and tissue damage to surge, while restoring them reduced scarring and inflammation in chronic disease models.

The discovery overturns the common belief that rejuvenation requires resetting the immune system to a youthful state and instead suggests that supporting age-adapted immune responses may be key to slowing biological aging.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-19 18:46:47+00:00
This doesn't look right either. You should really look up what FizzBuzz is. The output should be like:

1 2 fizz 4 buzz fizz

You can't just print the number for every line. Check this out - https://rosettacode.org/wiki/FizzBuzz or just run the program in the OP which prints correct output.
by burkaman | 2025-11-19 18:47:09+00:00
I think you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubang_language

It does actually seem very applicable here - it's not two different languages, but there's a seemingly random subset of words in the language that have completely different male and female versions. If emojis are part of the language, and men and women use different ones to refer to the same concepts, that's basically the same thing.
by moron4hire | 2025-11-19 18:47:12+00:00
"Now they have AI to protect," you're ultimately talking about corporate leadership being susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy here. But AI investment is a particularly easy sunk cost to get out of compared to real estate. Real estate has lease obligations and moving costs; it will cost you a lot more in the short term to get rid of your real estate. AI you could just stop using and immediately see cost reduction.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-19 18:47:15+00:00
And therein lies a problem. Each 'side' has no problem with it as long their team is not affected. Just yesterday -- on AM radio of all places -- I had democratic pundit openly wondering how Epstein's list is going to be used against them after spending a fair amount of political capital pushing for its release. It is all a game and, sadly, we are getting played. In such an environment, it is hard not to become cynical.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-11-19 18:47:21+00:00
> The only prediction that I think is robust is: Those who use AI as tool today will replace those that aren't tomorrow.

And I make the inverse prediction.

I work for a FAANG and I see it, from juniors to senior engineers, the one who use AI generate absolute slop that is unreadable, unmaintainable, and is definitely going to break. They are making themselves not just redundant, but an actual danger to the company.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-19 18:47:33+00:00
You can co-exist. That's the best path forward for breaks IMO.

Rust does this with "editions". That's where they can make breaks to the language. 2021 can still call 2017 edition code.

Perl actually had this as well with Perl 5. You could specify the version of the perl file and work from there.

Why they didn't do that with 6 was entirely bizarre. They basically promised to throw out all of CPAN with the next perl version.
by plutonium3345 | 2025-11-19 18:47:43+00:00
I really like this, and I think you could even add some LLM features in there for more natural conversations.

The biggest issue I have is that it is a bit weird putting our startup ideas into someone else server. Is this open-source so we can self host? The central db for questions could still be curated by you in the repo, we would just pull to update the questions on our end. For new questions we would make PRs. You still decide which questions are good.
by observationist | 2025-11-19 18:47:54+00:00
Native latent reasoning, with latent aware RL scaffolding and all the rest will have to be built. If you use the direct text framework, you get confabulation / hallucination issues from the divergence between the tokens in the context and the rich activation representation that resulted in the output.

There are all sorts of places where the text and output is at least one degree of separation from the underlying activation vectors or other representations handled by a model, from floating point precision all the way up to tokenization abstraction, and a lot of experiments get run as if the tokens and context and representations are all one unified data concept. Have to match data abstractions appropriately, or the weird edge cases will break things in unexpected ways.
by welcome_dragon | 2025-11-19 18:48:07+00:00
Exactly correct on echo chambers. I say my opinion on something and I hear the exact same responses from pro people and the exact same responses from con people. Everyone hears it.

Repeating the same words someone else does to make yourn point makes me think the other person isn't capable of considering they might be wrong.

I disagree with saying "I can see both sides". That's another echo chamber. If I say I can reasonably see both sides of an issue, one side calls me an idiot and uneducated and suc h and the other goes straw man and how I'm a communist and/or Hitler. No. I can see why side A thinks the way they do and side B thinks the way they do.

I'm not talking about hot topics either.

I'm really starting to just want to get away from all society and/or just never have more than surface level conversations with people.
by embirico | 2025-11-19 18:48:14+00:00
(Disclaimer: Am on the Codex team.) We're basically trying to build a teammate that can do both short, iterative work with you, then as you build trust (and configuration), you can delegate longer tasks to it.

The "# of model-generated tokens per response" chart in [the blog introducing gpt-5-codex](https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/) shows an example of how we're improving the model good at both.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-11-19 18:48:42+00:00
Why would it come from taxes, rather than simply from being printed?

The typical answer is "printing money causes inflation", but in the context of this feedback loop, it only causes exactly as much inflation as is required to cancel out the deflation caused by automation-induced layoffs and productivity increases. That's the magic of feedback.

But if it's because the resulting UBI would still be insufficient for welfare, we could also use taxes to fund a secondary "revenue-neutral" layer of UBI that taxes the rich and redistributes to everybody, but probably it makes sense to go in slower steps, seeing what level the primary UBI stabilizes at and then adding a secondary tax-funded one if the primary one isn't sufficient for both welfare and sustaining economic demand.

(The secondary UBI would probably still be somewhat inflationary, even though it's funded by taxes, just because poor people spend more of their money on things that are highly-weighted in the CPI, but the feedback loop will balance that out).
by Kjeldahl | 2025-11-19 18:49:17+00:00
My personal reason was observing the huge amount of investments into Javascript and its infrastructure (by Google and others). After Node.js was released it was a rational bet to make that Javascript would dominate, both server and client side. As someone who often does both front end and back end, it felt good to move to Javascript. It's got to be said that keeping a "common" directory around with shared code for both front- and backend is still a PITA, but still better than most other alternatives.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-19 18:49:18+00:00
> we struggle to get humans to low error rates on large number of steps in sequence too

Who said anything about AI vs humans? The contest in this context would be AI vs classical deterministic code, algorithms, solvers

> how costly it is to work around .. a function of the error rate, consequence of an error that slips past, the cost of a "reliable enough" detector.. produces a good enough results cheap enough.

I mean, you're right, but only sort of. Someone can use this same argument to justify the assertion that bogosort is really the pinnacle of engineering excellence. How would you respond?
by augusto-moura | 2025-11-19 18:49:35+00:00
I would say PHP instead of Ruby was the big hit on Perl for web. It sat nicely in Apache and made replacing old cgi-bin much easier. It also had the philosophy and syntax heavily inspired by Perl

Python was indeed the scripting replacement. I would say it won because of its philosophy on simplicity and explicitness. Perl v5 suffered heavily in complex projects because the language itself was too complex and often cryptic
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-19 18:50:03+00:00
No it’s demonstrating that at the relative extreme ends you have the same problem thus creating the linear equation with the minimum set

The reader should deduce that any measure along the same linear map - which is effectively every city aka the “average city” - will eventually be subject to this condition (water insecurity)

You can trivially verify this by looking at issues of water insecurity and water quality issues across every size city. Notice that you will have non-trivial numbers of “boil water” events in the United States south. You may have significant periods of drought throughout your average city in sub-Saharan Africa, Sonoran desert or western China for example.

I think maybe your definition of “average” only includes modern metropolitan areas and not simply as cities where people are geographically clustering across the globe.

I lived in San Angelo Texas in 2009 and I did not have potable water in my home. I had to go to Walmart and fill 5 gallon jugs of Culligan water every few days. That’s not particularly abnormal

To be fair I offered a fairly complex/compressed way to approach this, so not easily interpreted, but nonetheless that’s the point