MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Hellene | 2025-11-21 17:19:41+00:00
Hi, Your blog is very interesting. However, the approach you described is a classical one: most current portfolio optimization software uses the Markowitz Mean-Variance framework to determine the optimal allocation of capital among preselected assets. This method works well for large portfolios and for investors with a strong finance background, as they typically know in advance which assets to include based on their analysis.

However, this approach has limitations. It requires asset managers to spend significant time and effort selecting the assets beforehand, and it cannot explore all possible combinations of assets, which means the resulting portfolio might not be globally optimal. In classical computing, an exhaustive search of all possible combinations is called brute force, but this quickly becomes impractical: for example, considering just 10 assets with simple inclusion/exclusion yields 2¹⁰ = 1,024 combinations, and the number grows dramatically if allocation weights are included.

This is why quantum portfolio optimization (the approach used by our platform) is innovative: it leverages quantum computing to explore many combinations simultaneously, enabling the optimization of large portfolios in real time, even for users without deep financial expertise.
by cuckmaxxed | 2025-11-21 17:19:47+00:00
Dr. Mark Powell: How do you know right from wrong?

Prot: Every being in the universe knows right from wrong, Mark.

Dr. Mark Powell: Suppose someone did do something wrong? Committed murder or rape, how would you punish them?

Prot: Let me tell you something, Mark. You humans, most of you, subscribe to this policy of eye for an eye, a life for a life. This is known through the universe for its stupidity. Even your Buddha and your Christ had quite a different vision but nobody's paid much attention to them not even the Buddhists or the Christians. You humans. Sometimes it's hard to imagine how you have made it this far.
by starburst | 2025-11-21 17:20:08+00:00
Upgrading to new version can also introduce new exploits, no amount of tests can find those.

Some of these can be short-lived, existing only on a minor patch and fixed on the next one promptly but you’ll get it if you upgrade constantly on the latest blindly.

There is always risks either way but latest version doesn’t mean the “best” version, mistakes, errors happens, performance degradation, etc.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-21 17:20:08+00:00
> we have replaced it with a behemoth with precisely the same flaws - but magnified tenfold. OpenAPI schemas replace type-checkers,

First, OpenAPI schemes aren't a replacement for type checkers, they allow for tooling to be built around the scheme and even generated code to be created instead of bespoke implementations for every client language. You still should do input (and even response) validation.

> docker compose replaces service factories,

Compose is a self-documenting set of services to run together in predictable ways in containerized environments.

> Kubernetes replaces the event loop.

K8s expands this to more complex orchestration across multiple systems.

> Every call across components acrues failure modes,

You can containerize fairly monolithic code pretty easily... especially with related services that run as a set... nothing requires micro services or complex orchestration in practice. I think of it as a set of predictable extensions to 12-factor apps.

> requires a slow march through (de)serialisation libraries, a long trek through the kernel’s scheduler. A TLB cache invalidation here, a socket poll there. Perhaps a sneaky HTTP request to localhost for desert.

This is how all client-server systems work... there's some level of (de)serialization involved and a system of coordination between clients a servers... nothing special here. HTTP just has the benefits of being human readable and standardized with tooling for security, authentication, proxies, caching, etc as wrappers and add-ons.

These have nothing to do with OOP or not. For that matter, OOP itself isn't necessarily a panacea... I've always favored utility/worker processes (even in a class based language) separated from state or storage objects that don't have internalized objects... exceptions maybe for attribute markup for type validation if the language supports it.

The rant as a whole doesn't make a lot of sense... if you want to rail against the complexities of micro-services and orchestration, which trades in-application complexity for deployment/orchestration complexity, that's a fair argument to make... especially when the same people are responsible for both. But that isn't an OOP thing at all.
by mothballed | 2025-11-21 17:20:12+00:00
The defense of the rights of alleged neo-nazis are a big reason why we have free-er speech in America. The ACLU defended them (see skokie nazis) and helped ensure more free speech in public forums. Dismissing the rights of alleged nazis is how rights get destroyed for everyone, although now in USA we use it for say allegedly "illegal" aliens or people that look foreign.

I assert, they are a perfect example.
Show HN: I built a generative UI app to teach myself guitar
by michaelmilst | 2025-11-21 17:20:25+00:00
I recently started learning guitar and have been working through basic chords and scales, but I don't want to follow a strict lesson plan.

You can ask for specific chords, but I like asking for vague styles or feelings, like "Show me how to play something chill and dreamy"
by falcor84 | 2025-11-21 17:20:53+00:00
Following up on Anthropic's Project Vend [0] and given the rising popularity of Vending-Bench[1], it's actually quite likely that by the time an AI is deemed to possess consciousness, it will have already been tested in a vending machine.

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

[1] https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench
by K0nserv | 2025-11-21 17:21:01+00:00
This is not how `npm install` works. This misunderstanding is so pervasive. Unless you change stuff in `package.json` `npm install` will not update anything, it still installs based on package-lock.json.

Quoting from the docs:

> This command installs a package and any packages that it depends on. If the package has a package-lock, or an npm shrinkwrap file, or a yarn lock file, the installation of dependencies will be driven by that [..]
by moron4hire | 2025-11-21 17:21:21+00:00
Thinking about it more, maybe the better approach is the 2nd team works on the oldest tickets. That's an objective measure that has no surprises and more directly addresses the problem of long-standing issues that are sometimes embarrassing because they turned out to be easy.

But in general, I do believe that teams should be split on the priority issue in some way. If all you are doing is chasing the highest priority stuff, you're going to miss important things because priority isn't an exact science either.
by solatic | 2025-11-21 17:21:39+00:00
> The C-level folks seem to think they are buying some kind of indemnity with these "enterprise" grade solutions, but there is no such thing.

Something you need to understand about executives, is that they're not really individual God-like figures ruling the world; at the end of the day they answer to their CEO, to their Boards, and want to look good to executive recruiters who might consider them for a C-level role at a larger company for higher pay; and a good many of them lead not-so-affordable lifestyles to keep up appearances among aforementioned folk and might be worse off in their personal finances than you.

All of which is just to say - "nobody got fired for buying IBM." It might be tragic, but going with peer consensus is what helps them stay with their in-crowd. The risks for departing from the herd (holding up deals on compliance concerns, possibly higher downtime for whatever reason, difficulty of hiring people who demand cheaper salaries but already know an Industry Standard Solution) are too high compared to the potential benefits (lower total cost of ownership, increased agility, better security/engineering quality, higher availability assuming for the sake of argument that is actually the case), particularly when increased agility and better quality are difficult to quantify, higher availability is hard to prove (Okta and peers don't exactly publish their real availability figures), and the difference in TCO is not enough to move the needle.

It's very rare to find executives who care more about their company's engineering than their peer group - folks who care that much rarely become executives in the first place.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-21 17:21:59+00:00
Subjugation or extermination, if it wasn't for the addition of "as part of a war of aggression" to the "Crimes against Humanity", the US would have been considered as participating in crimes against humanity at the same time they were partcipating in the Nuremberg trials.

It's thanks to the US, that crimes against humanity is only considered when there is an active war of aggression, precisely because Jim Crow was a current thing at that time.
Ask HN: Has anyone properly set up LLM programming workflow?
by penetrarthur | 2025-11-21 17:22:00+00:00
With new LLMs being released almost daily at this point and with availability of all the possible "spec-driven" workflows(BMAD, AgentOS etc), is anyone really developing production ready software with little to no intervention? I have talked to a lot of software developers in my circles and most of them are using LLMs for autocomplete(which has gotten extremely good with Augment code and others) or attempting to "one-shot" some small features. I keep reading that many people are writing 10k lines of code daily which quite honestly sounds plausible. What I don't understand is whether that code is maintainable, modular, performant and otherwise production ready. I believe that with proper specs and setup, modern LLMs can do all that, but I have yet to hear real life examples of that.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-21 17:22:10+00:00
Hallucinations are not novel ideas. They are novel combinations of tokens constrained by learned probability distributions.

I have mentioned Hume before, and will do so again. You can combine "golden" and "mountain" without seeing a golden mountain, but you cannot conjure "golden" without having encountered something that gave you the concept.

LLMs may generate strings they have not seen, but those strings are still composed entirely from training-derived representations. The model can output "quantum telepathic blockchain" but each token's semantic content comes from training data. It is recombination, not creation. The model has not built representations of concepts it never encountered in training; it is just sampling poorly constrained combinations.

Can you distinguish between a false hallucination and a genuinely novel conceptual representation?
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-21 17:22:45+00:00
Especially given that it references the Anthropic paper on LLM introspection - which confirms that LLMs are somewhat capable of reflecting on their own internal states. Including their past internal states, attached to the past tokens and accessed through the attention mechanism. A weak and unreliable capability in today's LLMs, but a capability nonetheless.

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...

I guess the earlier papers on the topic underestimated how much introspection the autoregressive transformer architecture permits in practice - and it'll take time for this newer research to set the record straight.
by nicoburns | 2025-11-21 17:23:03+00:00
I would like to see a variant of this that is based on a manual review/audit process rather than a time-based cooldown.

Something like, upgrade once there are N independent positive reviews AND less than M negative reviews (where you can configure which people are organisations you trust to audit). And of course you would be able to audit dependencies yourself (and make your review available for others).
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-11-21 17:23:17+00:00
> Those were Soviet nukes, physically located in Ukraine but not controlled by it, same as any French/US nukes stationed in Germany would not make it a nuclear state.

This is not an accurate comparison.

It's not that Russia had nukes in Ukraine and withdrew them. Many of the Soviet soldiers manning them were Ukrainians and stayed behind. Much of the infrastructure for maintaining the Soviet arsenal was also in Ukraine and had to be rebuilt in Russia. The situation was more akin to if the US broke up and Louisiana (which has a lot of nuclear warheads stationed in it) is dealing with whether they are now a nuclear power, or if they need to hand them over to South Carolina or something.
Show HN: Echos – open-source orchestration for agents
by lexokoh | 2025-11-21 17:23:27+00:00
Hi HN, creator of Echos here.

Built this because I was tired of rebuilding orchestrators and database agents for every multi-agent project.

Echos gives you pre-built agent "services" (database, API, search, analysis, code gen) that you compose like AWS services but in YAML. It includes SQL guardrails, SSRF protection, cost tracking, and time-travel debugging.

Just added AWS Bedrock support for compliance-focused teams.

Try it out: https://echoshq.com GitHub: https://github.com/treadiehq/echos
by kotaKat | 2025-11-21 17:23:38+00:00
Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…

I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].

[1] http://archiv.sega-dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...
by duped | 2025-11-21 17:23:38+00:00
A million times this. You update a dependency when there are bug fixes or features that you need (and this includes patching vulnerabilities!). Those situations are rare. Otherwise you're just introducing risk into your system - and not that you're going to be caught in some dragnet supply chain attack, but that some dependency broke something you relied on by accident.

Dependencies are good. Churn is bad.
by pyth0 | 2025-11-21 17:23:52+00:00
Interesting you mention jumping spiders, I just saw a rather interesting video talking about exactly this and includes some interviews with scientists involved in some of these experiments [1]. One interesting fact I learned is that they have a sense of numeracy, and can distinguish between one, two and three-or-more objects.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QF6kaOAuYg
by pstuart | 2025-11-21 17:24:49+00:00
Understandable to (to me) an acceptable placeholder for expressing a sentiment of re-evaluation.

There are so many failings of the Democratic party leadership, but I'd put near the top the failure to message and to let the opposition define the language and terms of concern.

My hopes are tempered that they can figure things out, and more importantly, deliver the goods. The good old "both sides are the same" only holds true in the fact that party leadership is beholden to the economic elites.
by bequanna | 2025-11-21 17:25:14+00:00
> Donald Trump and the Republican Party are damaging our economy and threatening our democracy.

The very first words in the very first sentence illustrate the problem. Since ~2016, the Democratic party has (mostly) defined itself as anti-Trump party, with some gender/identity issues mixed in.

Trump firmly believes there is no such thing as bad press. Giving him endless attention is playing into his hand. Choosing to play his game.

This piece makes some good points on how the Democratic party should shift policy to start talking about things voters actually care about, but first they need to tone down the anti-Trump rhetoric and stop feeding his hype machine.
by yannyu | 2025-11-21 17:25:18+00:00
Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require?

The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics. Even a purely symbolic mind would still need a coherent symbolic universe. And this is precisely where LLMs fall short, through no fault of their own. The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of text. It has no unified physics, no consistent ontology, no object permanence, no stable causal texture. It’s a fragmented, discontinuous series of words and tokens held together by probability and dataset curation rather than coherent laws.

A conscious textual agent would need something like a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences. LLMs don’t have that. They exist in a shifting cloud of possibilities with no single consistent reality to anchor self-maintaining loops. They can generate pockets of local coherence, but they can’t accumulate global coherence across time.

So even if consciousness-in-text were possible in principle, the core requirement isn’t just architecture or emergent cleverness—it’s coherence of habitat. A conscious system, physical or textual, can only be as coherent as the world it lives in. And LLMs don’t live in a world today. They’re still prisoners in the cave, predicting symbols and shadows of worlds they never inhabit.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-21 17:25:22+00:00
I love how the rationale for porn bans changes with the times: First it was bad because of religion/morality. Then the world changed a bit, people aren't as religious, so it became bad because the performers are trafficked and exploited. Then the world changed a bit, OnlyFans turned the tables, actually empowering and enriching performers. Now, porn is bad because of... "hyper stimulants"?? I wonder what the next reason is going to be.
by kube-system | 2025-11-21 17:25:25+00:00
I remember the history quite well and it was just a matter of ecosystem and momentum.

MP3 had mindshare. That's was what people knew and it was what people asked for. People bought MP3 players. People built software that ripped MP3s. The sales guy at the electronics store knew what MP3 was. Everything worked with MP3 and so that was what people bought and downloaded and used.
by toast0 | 2025-11-21 17:25:52+00:00
Why replace when the system is stable? I guess there may be an increased chance of multibit errors. But sometimes new ram is flakey or disturbing the rack causes other problems.

Is ECC a crutch? Sure. But it's hard to walk with a bum leg/bad ram, so why not have it? (Cause it's expensive is a fine reason, but if it were closer to 25% more than 100% more, it'd be easier to say yes)

Memtest86 is great, but systems change and most people aren't running memtest frequently. On my non ecc systems, I run it during setup to make sure things are good, and only later if things get crashy... but if things get crashy because of bad ram, my data may already be corrupted.
by data-ottawa | 2025-11-21 17:26:39+00:00
> 47 tools = 141k tokens consumed before you write a single word

This is the real problem in my opinion.

There are a ton of great sounding MCP but in practice they have too many individual tools and way too much documentation for each tool. It inflates processing time and burns tokens.

I find MCP is the opposite of the Unix design philosophy. You want fewer tools with more options surfaced via schema, shorter documentation, and you want to rely on convention as much as possible.

You don’t want a create file, write file, and update file tools, you want one write file tool with the ability to do all of those things. Instead of ls and find you want your list files tool to support regex and fuzzy matching with a metadata list.

This is based on building these things for most of this year, so it’s anecdotal and ymmv.

As an example rust-mcp-filesystem has 24 tools, many with completely overlapping functionality: `head_file`, `tail_file`, `read_file_lines`, `read_text_file` plus multi-file variants; or there's `list_directory`, `list_directory_with_sizes`, `calculate_directory_size`, `search_files`, and `directory_tree`. I think that whole server could be 4-6 mcp tools and it would accelerate things.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-21 17:27:07+00:00
Well, kind of. :D Wasps do not produce honey, they just collect nectar and sugary substances for immediate consumption, and propolis is specifically a bee product made from tree resins.

That said, wasps are still quite intelligent for insects with regarding to spatial memory, individual recognition, learning, problem-solving, and social cognition. In fact, their intelligence is comparable to honeybees in many respects.

Contrary to popular belief, wasps are not mindless aggressors, their defensive behavior is calculated based on threat assessment. :)
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-21 17:27:09+00:00
> for critical vulnerabilities to assess whether your product is affect by it. Only then do you need to update that specific dependency right away.

This is indeed what's missing from the ecosystem at large. People seem to be under the impression that if a new release of software/library/OS/application is released, you need to move to it today. They don't seem to actually look through the changes, only doing that if anything breaks, and then proceed to upgrade because "why not" or "it'll only get harder in the future", neither which feel like solid choices considering the trade-offs.

While we've seen to already have known that it introduces massive churn and unneeded work, it seems like we're waking up to the realization that it is a security tradeoff as well, to stay at the edge of version numbers. Sadly, not enough tooling seems to take this into account (yet?).
by DrScientist | 2025-11-21 17:27:22+00:00
The think I find most odd about the constant pressure to update to the most recent and implied best version is that there is some implicit belief that software get's uniformly better with each release.

Bottom line those security bugs are not all from version 1.0 , and when you update you may well just be swapping known bugs for unknown bugs.

As has been said elsewhere - sure monitor published issues and patch if needed but don't just blindly update.
by HappyPanacea | 2025-11-21 17:27:44+00:00
> If the sanctioned Israeli politicians and military commanders think those warrants are baseless, why don't they appear before the courts to defend themselves?

Because they aren't under their jurisdiction? Because they might believe the court is biased against them?

> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.

> And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.

You seems to be confused this is done not for Israel's sake but for USA - they don't want the precedent of non-ICC member's government being judged in ICC to protect themselves.