MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lukev | 2025-11-20 20:49:32+00:00
Other comments in this thread do a good job explaining the differences in the Markov algorithm vs the transformer algorithm that LLMs use.

I think it's worth mentioning that you have indeed identified a similarity, in that both LLMs and Markov chain generators have the same algorithm structure: autoregressive next-token generation.

Understanding Markov chain generators is actually a really really good step towards understanding how LLMs work, overall, and I think its a really good pedagogical tool.

Once you understand Markov generating, doing a bit of handwaving to say "and LLMs are just like this except with a more sophisticated statistical approach" has the benefit of being true, demystifying LLMs, and also preserving a healthy respect for just how powerful that statistical model can be.
by bathMarm0t | 2025-11-20 20:49:45+00:00
If you're going to give them the triosonatas, you gotta give them the good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOTtDYTc5JY&list=PLCDB42413B...

Put on a good set of headphones and go sit in the corner.

Also obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah392lnFHxM&list=RDAh392lnFH...

The thing I appericiate most about bach is:

you can play it fast.

you can play it slow.

you can play it with an ensemble of random instruments.

you can play a single voicing all by itself.

all of it screams "musical". which, if you do play say, Tuba, or one of the larger instruments, is a godsend, as most of your lines in other pieces will bore you to death.
by notorious_pgb | 2025-11-20 20:49:54+00:00
With respect, none of this sounds like "amazing" work on DuckDB's part. It's not bad work, either! It's competent work.

Comparing it to a naive approach (encrypting an entire database file in a single shot and loading it all into memory at once) is always going to make competent work seem "amazing".

I say this not to shit on DuckDB (I see no reason to shit on them); rather, I think it's important that we as professionals have realistic standards that we expect _ourselves_ to hit. Work we view as "amazing" is work we allow ourselves not to be able to replicate. But this is not in that category, and therefore, you should hold yourself to the same standard.
by rft | 2025-11-20 20:50:03+00:00
I managed to find some statistics on hull losses per million departures [1, p. 13]. Seems like indeed MD-11s have a highish rate of incidents by that metric compared to other types, even if they are not catastrophically less safe than other planes. That metric stacks the statistics a bit against cargo planes, which most (all?) MD-11s are now. These planes tend to fly longer haul instead of short hop, so you get more flight time/miles but less departures. There are also likely some other confounding factors like mostly night operations (visibility and crew fatigue) and the tendency to write off older planes instead of returning them to service after an incident. Plus these aircraft have been in operation long enough that improvements in procedures and training would impact them less than more modern types, as in they already had more accidents before these improvements.

[1] https://www.boeing.com/content/dam/boeing/boeingdotcom/compa...
by bunderbunder | 2025-11-20 20:50:14+00:00
That's definitely something that comes out whenever a Chicago SRO shuts down. The story tends to be, "This 150 year old building is falling apart, we just can't afford to maintain it anymore, and it's now getting so bad we can no longer legally operate it as a place of residence."

So I keep reading that same story, and I keep thinking, "Maybe instead of making it hard to do anything with existing SROs we should see about reducing disincentives to create new ones." Because it seems like the best my city's current policy can possibly accomplish is slowing this inexorable decline that leaves people with no better option than living in an ever-dwindling collection of ancient, crumbling, drafty, uninsulated, leaky buildings. And they're going to stay that way because this same ordnance also makes it incredibly hard to even rehab them.

One in Chicago tried a few years back and it was also a crisis. You can't have people living in it while you rehab, and all the other SROs are also full due to chronic undersupply, so the operator had to essentially just turn everyone out onto the street to do it. Which I gather was necessary because living conditions were becoming unsafe, but still. Legally mandating that de facto your only two options are "continue being a slumlord" and "make everyone homeless" is decidedly Not Awesome.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-20 20:51:02+00:00
Yes that is what I am saying. Most cops carry a multi tool at the minimum (with Phillips screwdriver). They also had a standard 10mm socket (carried by MANY cops and all that is required to dismantle much of any Hyundai).

Using their multi tool, they removed the fender liners (wheel well liners) from all 4 wheels, the trunk side trim (luggage compartment side trim) from both sides - all of which just has plastic push-pin scrivets (retainer clips). They broke 5 of them.

They folded down my back seats (after removing all my personal items out to the shoulder in the rain), then unbolted and removed the back seat.

I do a LOT of interstate driving, and it is not at all uncommon to see this happen.

This is not the only time I have been in situations where authority has been exceeded. My attitude is to generally be cooperative (without giving consent) as my experience has taught me that is the most painless way to go.
by wadadadad | 2025-11-20 20:51:10+00:00
This is an interesting idea, but as you stated, it's all logic; it's hard to come up with an idea where you don't have to explain concepts yet still is dissimilar enough to be in the training.

In your second example with the wizards- did you notice that it failed to follow the rules? Step 3, the witch was summoned by the wizard. I'm curious as to why you didn't comment either way on this.

On a related note, instead of puzzles, what about presenting riddles? I would argue that riddles are creative, pulling bits and pieces of meaning from words to create an answer. If AI can solve riddles not seen before, would that count as creative and not solving problems in their dataset?

Here's one I created and presented (the first incorrect answer I got was Escape Room; I gave it 10 attempts and it didn't get the answer I was thinking of):

---

Solve the riddle:

Chaos erupts around

The shape moot

The goal is key
by Theodores | 2025-11-20 20:51:18+00:00
Your weird take has made me think again.

The thing was that I went to a school where I was one of the lucky few to be in the top set for maths. We had a deal with our teacher where he could leave us unattended and we would collaborate amongst ourselves to get all of our assignments done. He would just pop by at the end of the week to see how we all got on and to set the next assignment. Only on rare occasions would he have to actively teach us.

Our class was calm and we brought in home computers (as it was then), board games and cards. We would be betting our lunch money on games of Bridge, since that was (weirdly) the hot game to play. We all passed with A's.

All of the other classes had maximal supervision, maximal homework, additional 'special needs' classes and utter carnage, should the teacher leave the class unattended for a femtosecond. They were taught properly, but none of them were any good at maths and none of them went on to do anything that paid the big bucks.

Arguably, when it came to arithmetic, due to the low-key gambling and games playing, everyone in the top set had an edge over everyone else. They were merely learning by rote. We were learning in a collective self-directed way within a culture of learning that we very much developed by ourselves. We also learned how to collaborate to solve problems, which conventional education considers to be cheating. Our 'client' was the teacher, and we needed to keep him sweet as we didn't want to lose our privileges. So that was the motivation, not the usual nonsense about how you will never get a job unless blah blah'.

Hence, I have another truly epic weird take. With art we also teach the history of art as a separate subject. So why not have 'the history of maths' as a separate subject?

Imagine learning about what was discovered in antiquity, before people had calculators, slide rules, even pens and paper. Why did that Persian mathematician need to devise tools for doing clever things with numbers 2500 years ago? What are these tools useful for in today's world? How do you code up a script to implement such tools to save on the mental arithmetic?

Such an approach could get nearer to your truly weird epic take. We would be introducing the wonders of maths to kids in such a way that they would be learning a little bit about ancient civilisations as well as the applications in the modern context.
by alwa | 2025-11-20 20:51:21+00:00
Why isn’t the browser development organized as charitable work?

From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]:

> As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have.

Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
by ewzimm | 2025-11-20 20:51:39+00:00
I'm also a long-time Linux user, but there are some things that still need Windows, so here are my cheat codes to make it usable:

O&O Shutup: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

All the missing privacy switches you'd want. Run it after any updates.

PowerToys: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

The real utilities you'll want to control your UI as a power user. Just autohide the taskbar and disable showing badges and flashing. It's a lost cause, and you can mostly just forget it exists. Use alt+space to launch things and keyboard or mouse shortcuts for window management. It's actually pretty good at mixing floating and tiling.

WSL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

I'm sure you know about it, but it works well even for most GUI apps these days, although it still doesn't support fractional scaling.
by zorgmonkey | 2025-11-20 20:52:01+00:00
I found a link to the PDF that seems to work https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...

Also in case that link stops working I got it from this page https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/DCA26MA024.aspx

EDIT: nevermind immediately after posting this comment it is now giving a 403 error
by echelon | 2025-11-20 20:52:37+00:00
There's the solution right there. Google is still growing its AI "sea legs". They've turned the ship around on a dime and things are still a little janky. Truly a "startup mode" pivot.

While we're on this subject of "Google has been stomping around like Godzilla", this is a nice place to state that I think the tide of AI is turning and the new battle lines are starting to appear. Google looks like it's going to lay waste to OpenAI and Anthropic and claim most of the market for itself. These companies do not have the cash flow and will have to train and build their asses off to keep up with where Google already is.

gpt-image-1 is 1/1000th of Nano Banana Pro and takes 80 seconds to generate outputs.

Two years ago Google looked weak. Now I really want to move a lot of my investments over to Google stock.

How are we feeling about Google putting everyone out of work and owning the future? It's starting to feel that way to me.

(FWIW, I really don't like how much power this one company has and how much of a monopoly it already was and is becoming.)
by notorious_pgb | 2025-11-20 20:53:40+00:00
I think that "OOP" is an incredibly overloaded term which makes it difficult to speak about intelligibly or usefully at this point.

Are we talking about using classes at all? Are we arguing about Monoliths vs [Micro]services?

I don't really think about "OOP" very often. I also don't think about microservices. What some people seem to be talking about when they say they use "OOP" seems strange and foreign to me, and I agree we shouldn't do it like that. But what _other_ people mean by "OOP" when they say they don't use it seems entirely reasonable and sane to me.
Ask HN: How do you prioritize dependency updates?
by nrig | 2025-11-20 20:53:48+00:00
I maintain several open source projects and dependency management has become overwhelming.

Dependabot opens 20-30 PRs per week across my repos. Most are minor version bumps, but buried in there are actually critical security issues. I find myself either ignoring them all (risky) or spending hours triaging (unsustainable).

The problem: I don't have a good signal for what's actually urgent vs. what can wait.

What I've tried: - Following CVSS scores → but "critical" doesn't mean "exploitable in my context" - Auto-merging patch versions → missed a few important security fixes - Manual review of everything → takes 5-10 hours/week

I recently discovered CISA's KEV catalog (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) which flags CVEs that are actively being exploited in the wild. This seems like a better signal than CVSS alone, but I'm curious:

1. How do you decide what's actually urgent? CVSS? EPSS? Manual assessment?

2. Do you treat "outdated but not vulnerable" dependencies differently from "has CVEs"?

3. For those using Dependabot/Renovate/Snyk - what's your workflow? Do you review every alert or have you found a good filtering system?

I'm considering building something to help with this (health score + exploitation-based prioritization) but want to make sure I'm not just solving my own weird problem.

What's working for you?
by input_sh | 2025-11-20 20:54:09+00:00
It's the other way around, Mozilla Corporation is profitable and those profits go directly to the Mozilla Foundation which owns 100% of it.

This idea that Mozilla doesn't have enough money to fund Firefox is just wrong, Firefox development is perfectly sustainable, it earns more money than it spends. If you want to give money to the Mozilla Corporation instead of the foundation, you do the same thing as with any company: you purchase products from them (such as their VPN or MDN Plus, both of which are owned by the corporation).

> Why is the browser arm organized as a for-profit at all?

So that they can make business deals with the likes of Google, which they wouldn't be able to do as a non-profit.

Edit: I really wish there was a single thread about Mozilla here that doesn't devolve into this being like 80% of the comments. Maybe one day.
by Logans_Run | 2025-11-20 20:54:53+00:00
Any submission that opens with "In the summer of 1998 I graduated from college and went to work as a programmer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I was put on the group that was building MSN Messenger Service" and then goes in to reverse engineering the OSCAR protocol gets my vote. When it then goes in to the origins of Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" thinking all I can say is - Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
by the__alchemist | 2025-11-20 20:54:55+00:00
I think this is some combination of strawman, and subset of all cases. You can lament complications of OOP. You can also lament the complications of docker, kubernetes, HTTP APIs etc. These aren't mutually exclusive, and they don't span the breadth of programming techniques. I prefer avoiding all of these.

Anecdotally, I've replaced OOP with plain data structures and functions.
by ActorNightly | 2025-11-20 20:55:11+00:00
The problem is that the "both sides are bad" people just uniformly vote Republican. Its the cope of understanding that your side is batshit insane, so you have to pretend that the current state of affairs doesn't actually matter, and the problem goes deeper in the goal of normalizing your party.

The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
by comrade1234 | 2025-11-20 20:55:16+00:00
I supposedly have an iq of 140+ (I don't believe it though) and there's been two experiences where I've been in the presence of someone that just blew me out of the water. (Fellow graduate students in my program)

I don't think I'm that far away intelligently from my friends and other people, but these far outliers were amazing. Not alien, but almost.
by sgarland | 2025-11-20 20:56:04+00:00
The benchmarks were just that - synthetic benchmarks. I’ve ran actual production workloads against both, and Aurora never won. IFF you have an incredibly write-heavy workload, and you have few to no secondary indices, then Aurora might win; I’d also suggest you reconsider your RDBMS choice.

Most workloads are somewhere between 90:10 to 98:2 reads:writes, and most tables have at least one (if not more) secondary indices.

You’re of course welcome to disagree, but speaking as a DBRE who has used both MySQL and Postgres, RDS and Aurora in production, I’m telling you that Aurora does not win on performance.
by bauble | 2025-11-20 20:56:08+00:00
This is so much nonsense. Contracts and interfaces have little to do with OOP. If you don't like inheritance, then talk about OOP. It's fine. Many people, including myself, don't like inheritance. On the other hand, if it's interfaces and contracts that have you bothered, parse-dont-validate to your heart's content. If the domain allows it. Just don't drag unrelated concepts into this particular discussion.
by mapmeld | 2025-11-20 20:56:40+00:00
IBM challenged that the 2019 case could be handled by a supercomputer [1].

The main issue is that these algorithms where today's early quantum computers have an advantage were specifically designed to be demonstration problems. All of the tasks that people previously wanted a quantum computer to do are still impractical with today's hardware.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/google-and-ibm-clash-over-qua...
by runjake | 2025-11-20 20:56:44+00:00
The most approachable way is to use Procmon from the Sysinternals tools released by Microsoft.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...

Here's a good, basic video tutorial from Scott Hanselman, explainer extraordinaire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjKNx41Ubxw
by maerF0x0 | 2025-11-20 20:56:45+00:00
basically renting, not exactly the same.

The point is interest only loan is Renting + Equity Exposure. It's a good move if you are experiencing the price appreciation growing faster than your downpayment. You can enter the market price exposure before you get priced out. And if you're right about the direction it's heading you can make money (relative to renting) so long as your outflow is similar to renting (across the time span, rents go up...)
by anigbrowl | 2025-11-20 20:57:07+00:00
I think the answer to 2) is that the Obama administration scrupulously followed the law, actually targeted those with criminal records rather than grabbing people just based on their ethnicity, and didn't engage in practices like sending people to prisons in third countries such as El Salvador. I suspect you already know this, given your choice to draw a contrast between numbers and methods.
Show HN: GitPulse – AI-powered tool to discover open source projects
by Indri-Fazliji | 2025-11-20 20:57:11+00:00
I built GitPulse to solve a problem I had: finding beginner-friendly repos.

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by kristianp | 2025-11-20 20:57:20+00:00
He refers to byte magazine's article on bitblt: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n185/...

Also XScreensaver's Blitspin hack: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n201/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtcwb-UWW8
by lesuorac | 2025-11-20 20:57:30+00:00
Not sure the phrasing of "undocumented immigrants have had their lives ruined" is the angle you want.

The angle should be that CBP is causing a lot of unjustified problems for legal residents and citizens. People having to spend 20k to get back property that the government never should've taken is not good for deterring undocumented immigrants. When CBP agents need to spend 20 days of the month rounding up people on farms and home depot to meet quota those are 20 days _not_ spent searching for drug dealers.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-11-20 20:57:34+00:00
AirDrop works very infrequently for me. I will open AirDrop and not see someone who's sitting right next to me, or then I'll send them the file and it'll get stuck on "waiting" and they'll never get the notification, or it'll send some of the files then seem to get stuck partway through.

This is all with modern day iPhones, like iPhone 15 and above, and just using it in what should be the happy path. I'm actually really surprised every time I hear people say it's so good, because I almost always have to end up just imessaging a picture instead and finding that it works much better.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-11-20 20:57:56+00:00
You're kind of in luck. For a while, it was trendy (because MIT was doing it) to teach Intro to Programming with Lisps, especially Scheme. Because of this, there are quite a few "learn programming with Lisp" books and resources. The famous "SICP" book was the textbook for the MIT course and all of the examples were Lisp (there's a newer version that uses JavaScript, I think). There are loads of fine online books and guides. Here's a random online book: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

In no time you'll be putting up "my other car is a cdr" bumper stickers!
by barbazoo | 2025-11-20 20:58:17+00:00
> The referenced AA Flight 191 is shockingly similar. It makes me wonder if aviation really is back sliding into a dangerous place.

I think it's cut throat capitalism at its best. Surely it was much too safe before, let's see how far back we can scale maintenance on the operations front but also how far back can you scale cost during development and production and then see where it takes us. If that changes the risk for population from 0.005 to 0.010, the shareholders won't care and it's great for profits.

I think we can see both but especially the latter with Boeing.
by RyanOD | 2025-11-20 20:58:25+00:00
This literally gave me goosebumps. It's hard to convey how much Zork (and the rest of the Infocom portfolio) means to me. This was my first entry into gaming on my Commodore 64.

For anyone out there who had anything to do with bringing these games to market, know that you impacted so many lives in a fun, meaningful, heartfelt way.
by bangaladore | 2025-11-20 20:59:21+00:00
Part of the issue with the "slogan" is Cursor/XYZ jank IDE is already "for files". "Cursor for data" seems slightly better in my opinion. You are clearly using "Cursor" as something to draw familiarity to, But I suspect the bulk of your future target market probably doesn't know what "Cursor" is.
by petsfed | 2025-11-20 20:59:38+00:00
Or worse still, Russia in the early-mid 1920s.

The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
by tovej | 2025-11-20 20:59:46+00:00
Democracy is one imo. And at the very least it's something I think we can agree is debatable.

Liberal democracy thinks the economy, even natural monopolies, should be organized around a free market of LLCs that all get to act self-interestedly.

Social democracy thinks the economy should be organized around state monopolies and a regulated market, along with public institutions for social and labor issues such as collective bargaining, unions, social safety nets and universal healthcare.