MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dash2 | 2025-12-21 02:14:27+00:00
> it often makes early assumptions and fails to validate them, which can waste a lot of time

Is this baked into how the models are built? A model outputs a bunch of tokens, then reads them back and treats them as the existing "state" which has to be built on. So if the model has earlier said (or acted like) a given assumption is true, then it is going to assume "oh, I said that, it must be the case". Presumably one reason that hacks like "Wait..." exist is to work around this problem.
by zoklet-enjoyer | 2025-12-21 02:14:49+00:00
>GABA, which is part of the brain’s natural calming system, is strongly affected by alcohol. Scientists think this is the mechanism by which drinking can reduce stress and anxiety. GABA Labs, a firm based near London, is trying to develop a flavourless substance called Alcarelle that has a similar effect. Trials to show that it is safe could take years. But if they are successful, the firm will be able to market Alcarelle to drinks makers as a way to create soft drinks that mimic the buzzy feeling of booze, with none of the downside.

We already have GBL. It's semi-legal and feels like a long lasting ethanol. I tried it a couple times and thought it was boring. But yeah, we have plenty of alcohol alternatives already. Etizolam seltzers could be a thing.
by LeFantome | 2025-12-21 02:15:11+00:00
I have been a big fan of nuclear for decades. But why now?

Solar with battery storage is about to be so inexpensive and rapid to deploy that perhaps 100% of new capacity should be added this way.

Start with the solar arrays and then add the batteries. They will add to the max immediately. While you are deploying the solar, batteries will improve.

With batteries, you can use solar power even at night.

Lithium batteries are already cheap enough. Sodium is going to be even cheaper and much safer to boot.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-21 02:16:26+00:00
> Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.

It's almost like there could be a book about this from a hundred years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Other-Peoples-Money-How-Bankers/dp/19...
by wb14123 | 2025-12-21 02:17:36+00:00
Yeah I'm also wondering that. I'm looking for self-host PostgreSQL after Cockroach changed their free tier license but found the HA part of PostgreSQL is really lacking. I tested Patroni which seems to be a popular choice but found some pretty critical problems (https://www.binwang.me/2024-12-02-PostgreSQL-High-Availabili...). I tried to explore some other solutions, but found out the lack of a high level design really makes the HA for PostgreSQL really hard if not impossible. For example, without the necessary information in WAL, it's hard to enforce primary node even with an external Raft/Paxos coordinator. I wrote some of them down in this blog (https://www.binwang.me/2025-08-13-Why-Consensus-Shortcuts-Fa...) especially in the section "Highly Available PostgreSQL Cluster" and "Quorum".

My theory of why Postgres is still getting the hype is either people don't know the problem, or it's acceptable on some level. I've worked in a team that maintains the in house database cluster (even though we were using MySQL instead of PostgreSQL) and the HA story was pretty bad. But there were engineers manually recover the data lost and resolve data conflicts, either from the recovery of incident or from customer tickets. So I guess that's one way of doing business.
by VonTum | 2025-12-21 02:17:55+00:00
Regulation is about setting minimum standards for acceptance, not specifying exactly how.

This means that if I walk into a random croissant shop and buy a croissant, I don't subsequently have 2 days of food poisoning.

Arguably, healthier being the default is also good. The less I personally need to think about this, the more I can think about other more useful things.
by zeruch | 2025-12-21 02:20:22+00:00
1. I have some serious biases against Penguin at the time (for...reasons) and frankly was never impressed with their product. 2. Without getting into a bunch of weird minutiae, we got big enough to be a threat to people who could afford to bleed us; case in point, we started doing incredibly well in HPC clusters, and big vendors like IBM and Dell started to offer severely below cost hardware packaged with their full services that completely undercut a business that already had thin margins.

IMHO, we made better gear at the time, but we were not in a market as wide and deep for linux optimized machines as it is now. It's not an unusual story in the valley. We did have a deep talent bench that ended up in key roles in a bunch of firms that are doing well: Google, Apple, et al.
by jchw | 2025-12-21 02:21:58+00:00
This is exactly why I upgrade to the Pixel 10 Pro. On Black Friday, you could get a Pixel 10 Pro for about $450 on the U.S. Google Fi store (which sells unlocked phones)... which is also about how much a Pixel 9 Pro goes for on eBay; minus eBay fees and accounting for shipping, that's an upgrade for < $100. But, it's even better, the Pixel 10 Pro comes with a year of their "AI Pro" plan (which I believe costs around $240/year.) There is really, really no point in upgrading to a Pixel 10 Pro from a Pixel 9 Pro, and environmentally it pains me to be the person upgrading my phone on an annual basis (this is the fastest I've ever upgraded a phone, ever) but it's hard to turn down when Google is selling $800~ish for $400~ish.

And yeah, it's not the insanely priced AI Ultra plan, but if there are any hard limits on Gemini Pro usage I haven't found them. I have played a lot with really long Antigravity sessions to try to figure out what this thing is good for, and it seems like it will pretty much sit there and run all day. (And I can't really blame anyone for still remaining mad about AI to be completely honest, but the technology is too neat by this point to just completely ignore it.)

Seeing as Google is still giving away a bunch of free access, I'm guessing they're still in the ultra-cash-burning phase of things. My hope (hopium, realistically) is that by the time all of the cash burning is over, there will be open-weight local models that are striking near where Gemini 3 Pro strikes today. It doesn't have to be as good, getting nearby on hardware consumers can afford would be awesome.

But I'm not holding my breath, so let's hope the cash burning continues for a few years.

(There is, of course, the other way to look at it, which is that looking at the pricing per token may not tell the whole story. Given that Google is running their own data centers, it's possible the economic proposition isn't as bad as it looks. OTOH, it's also possible it is worse than it looks, if they happen to be selling tokens at a loss... but I quite doubt it, given they are currently SOTA and can charge a premium.)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-21 02:22:11+00:00
> There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything.

So then:

> Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
by morpheos137 | 2025-12-21 02:22:53+00:00
The most annoying thing I have noticed recently is automatic tipping at fast food restaurants. There is a burger franchise near me that if you check out with a card you are automatically surcharged a 30% tip by default. You can choose to not approve it but is the default is to charge you the tip and you need to review four tip options on the POS screen before you find the tiny "no tip" options in the bottom corner.

No I am not paying a tip for $20 burger in a barely heated fast restaurant with no table service.

Another place doing this is subway. No I am not paying a tip to the "sandwich artist" for doing the same job as has been done for what 30 years with no automated tip extortion by default on the POS kiosk.

As a consumer these fast food tip beggings offend me.
by martinald | 2025-12-21 02:23:34+00:00
Interesting. I did finally find a use for IPv6 which I wrote up here: https://martinalderson.com/posts/i-finally-found-a-use-for-i...

Tbh though the docker problems are very serious and extremely painful to work around. Everything works great apart from Docker which has so many issues - it does not handle IPv6 inbound but IPv4 out well at all (at least as far as I can tell!).
by TZubiri | 2025-12-21 02:24:23+00:00
>Then you still have the overhead of the log.trace function call

That's not an overhead at all. Even if it were it's not compareable to string concatenation.

Regarding overhead of lambda and copying params. Depends on the language, but usually strings are pass by ref and pass by values are just 1 word long, so we are talking one cycle per variable and 8 bytes of memory. Which were already paid anyways.

That said, logging functions that just take a list of vars are even better, like python's print()

> printtrace("var x and y",x,y)

> def printtrace(*kwargs):

>> print(kwargs) if trace else None

Python gets a lot of slack for being a slow language, but you get so much expressiveness that you can invest in optimization after paying a flat cycle cost.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-12-21 02:26:03+00:00
Human. And what was their reaction upon having this crime brought to their attention? It was exactly all anyone could ask for.

Shitting on well-intentioned people who merely failed to be perfect is not a great way to get the most of what you ultimately want.

If you think intent doesn't matter then what happens when well-intentioned people decide it's not worth trying because no matter what they will be crucified as murderers even if all they did wrong was fail to clean the break room coffee pot. The actual baddies are still there and have no inhibitions and now not even any competition.
by lisbbb | 2025-12-21 02:26:12+00:00
In and around Minneapolis, I have given up counting the number of times my car got filled with that horrid stench because someone in a car just ahead of mine was hot-boxing the hell out of their commute. It's really nasty to have to drive through the awful clouds of that crap. I also pulled into a gas station recently and my entire car got fumigated. Already sick of it.

Also, the guy who shot up the church school here and killed and wounded a bunch of kids was a massive pot smoker. It made him psychotic, or magnified that existing mental illness.
by pedramamini | 2025-12-21 02:26:57+00:00
Introducing a recent labor of love to the world... Maestro is a cross-platform desktop app for orchestrating your fleet of Al agents. Set them loose on complex tasks, check in from your phone, and let them work while you sleep. Free and open source.

I strongly prefer interacting with ReAct (reason-act) agents over chat agents. It allows for file-system based memory, tool creation and use, MCP agents, etc. I have so many parallel threads with so many agents that I lose track of them regularly. This was the impetus behind the creation of Maestro. Now all my agents sit side-by-side, each logical thread in its own tab, and keyboard short cuts galore allow me to conduct them all at lighting speed.

The single most powerful feature of the application is the Auto Run capability. Work with Al to generate a series of detailed implementation plans, then execute on them with a fresh context per task, allowing for nonstop uninterrupted execution. The current record is over two days of runtime! Even more powerful, organize multiple Markdown documents into a loop-able Playbook, with one stage creating work for other stages.

Just released Group Chat capability in v0.10.0, allowing one to communicate with a team of agents in a single thread.

Mostly tested on OSX with Claude. Codex and Open Code support was recently added and is maturing though not as full fledged as Claude. Please download and send me feedback via issue, PR, Discord message, smoke signal, singing telegram, carrier pigeon, etc.

Cheers

-pedram
by godelski | 2025-12-21 02:27:09+00:00
I think you're looking at different timeframes and different types of bugs.

The last 5 years have been a drastic change for me. For over a decade I've used a Linux desktop and a laptop with various OSes. But in the last 5 years we went from my Linux desktop (Arch of all things!) from having "typical Linux issues" to my macbook having 10x more (and my arch machine being incredibly stable).

Yes, big picture stuff everything is stable and general purpose computers have blurred the line with servers.

BUT there's also a lot of frustrating day to day bugs that did not exist even a year ago. This Apple keyboard bug [0]? Infuriating! I personally hit a similar issue multiple times a day where, despite auto correct being disabled, it will change the word previous to the one I'm typing, even though it was already correct. Worse, pressing backspace delete two words. I'm with this user from years ago... "Am I getting older or is it becoming unbearable?"[1]

Many of the big picture things? Fine. But that doesn't mean I'm not being killed by a million little cuts. That's the problem. They're everywhere and when you complain about any single instance it is easy to brush off. But it isn't a single instance. It is eating hours of my day in 5 sec intervals. That's "buggy as shit"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232528

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33256168
by sokoloff | 2025-12-21 02:28:31+00:00
I think that aviation has a lot of factors that bias its decisions conservatively. The “cost” of being conservative can be pretty easily borne in aviation. As an example, Zyrtec is grounding for 48 hours after taking. I think most Zyrtec users drive daily and likely quite safely, but aviation can afford to ground pilots at a lower level of risk than probably makes sense for drivers.

(I have very little doubt that THC is impairing; that pilots can’t legally use it is only very loosely related to that likely linkage.)
by andrewl | 2025-12-21 02:33:33+00:00
I’m all for analysis of, and challenges to, research studies. If we don’t have that we can’t do science. But I don’t like sneering, knee jerk statements like ourmandave’s Yeah, this seems related to the "raccoons becoming domesticated" bullsht.*

I watched the video ourmandave pointed us to where NessieExplains points out what she says are flaws in the study suggesting raccoons are becoming domesticated:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12983-025-00583-1

The data set and the code used to analyze the data are at https://osf.io/56xcg/overview.

Her criticisms and conclusions may well be correct, but her video is really just her saying her conclusions are correct. She downloaded the data and did her own analysis and points to results in her spreadsheets. It all flies by quite quickly. We have to take her word for it. She also made a snarky comment about this line in the R code:

# 57% Let’s see what we can do to change that!

But the next lines in the code are:

# what if we remove those pictures that we had issues measuring? # that would be gbifIDs: 4855527033, 4096474261, 2311326414, 4528316516 # Vector of IDs to exclude - the image quality was too bad after all ids_to_exclude <- c(4855527033, 4096474261, 4528316516, 2311326414)

So the authors tell us what weak data they’re removing, but the data is still available if other researchers want to put it back in. They are not hiding anything. We do not have to take their word about their conclusions. If NessieExplains does not publish her criticisms she is asking us to take her word for what she says.

She says in the video that she’s an actual raccoon biologist. According to her web site she is pursuing a master’s in biology (nessieexplains.com/about-nessie-explains/) although there is no date on the page, so she may have completed the degree already.

As I say, she may well be correct, but I have no way of knowing.
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-21 02:34:38+00:00
My experience thus far has been that for coding work, the model is at most 50% of the magic sauce, quite possibly less. It’s the harness and tooling doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and for the moment Claude Code remains on top. I think Gemini 3.0 is smarter than Opus 4.5 overall, but Claude Code still handily outperforms Gemini CLI, which all comes down to the quality of the tooling and system prompts.
by jesuslop | 2025-12-21 02:35:39+00:00
My 2 cents is they do justify it by the interest of the consequences, as Tychonoff or Nullstellensatz. I wouldn't call that faith: Best practices is to state Tychonoff as "AC implies Tychonoff" and that last is logically valid. Sometimes the "AC implies..." is missing, buried in the proof or used unawaredly or predates ZFC, and is a bad thing. But very ofen one now see asterisks on theorems needing it.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-21 02:35:43+00:00
> I spent a WEEK without IPv4 to understand IPv6 transition mechanisms

> NAT64 - the method I’ve setup for this test

> IPv6 is absolutely ready for prime-time and has been for awhile

So... No, you spent a week effectively using both v6 and v4 with extra steps. If someone said "Linux is ready for primetime" but their setup only worked because they ran a bunch of applications in a Windows VM, I'd call that strong evidence that it really wasn't. Same here.

That said... This is from early 2023. Any chance it's better now?
by thequux | 2025-12-21 02:36:42+00:00
A few people have called us on this, but it's simply not true. The copy was all written by hand; the only machine assistance here is XCompose (you, too, can type an em-dash!).

It turns out that when everybody involved is some level of techie and you're targeting a sort of "corporate bland" tone so that you look professional and trustworthy by modeling your communications on other successful kickstarters, it comes out looking similar to what other marketing copy looks like, which is precisely what all of the LLMs were trained on.
by krnlclnl | 2025-12-21 02:38:26+00:00
OK? What concrete human problems human biology faces are resolved by this groups consensus? Obsession with notation does little to improve crop yields, or improve working conditions for the child labor these academic geniuses rely on.

Sure, linguists, glad you found some semantics that fit your obsession. Happy for you!

Most people will never encounter their work and live their lives never knowing such an event happened.
by justatdotin | 2025-12-21 02:39:16+00:00
I think I do understand your claim,

which is why I am offering my personal experience as counter-evidence.

agents can empower us to choose the best language for the job, rather than defaulting to one which we are most familiar with.

I suspect our difference in opinion comes from your attitude about tools as a crutch to lean on vs a lever to apply.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-21 02:40:04+00:00
I think you miss the point of the comment you replied to.

> The law's assumption that this level of THC is evidence of impairment seems to be invalid.

I think most will recognize that THC causes impairment. The question that (AFAIK) is unanswered is if it can be measured simply by looking at the concentration of THC in the blood.

In fact, if you look into the mechanisms for alcohol tolerance vs THC tolerance. What you'll find is that alcohol tolerance is a result of the body developing fast paths for breaking down ethanol. Meaning the same BAC will have the same intoxication level, the body just works harder to keep the BAC down.

THC tolerance, on the other hand, appears to be the THC receptors becoming desensitized to THC. Which means the body doesn't appear to metabolize THC faster as tolerance builds.

That's where a blood test might not be a good indicator of THC impairment.
by peacebeard | 2025-12-21 02:40:27+00:00
I've been thinking about this all day. I think the best approach is probably twofold:

1) Thrown errors should track the original error to retain its context. In JavaScript errors have a `cause` option which is perfect for this. You can use the `cause` to hold a deep stack trace even if the error has been handled and wrapped in a different error type that may have a different semantics in the application.

2) For logging that does not stop program execution, I think this is a great case for dependency injection. If a library allows its consumer to provide a logger, the application has complete control over how and when the library logs, and can even change it at runtime. If you have a disagreement with a library, for example it logs errors that you want to treat as warnings, your injected logger can handle that.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-21 02:41:07+00:00
> You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line

For folks on LibreOffice (currently v24.2):

* There's an downward-pointing "expand" triangle to the far-right of the formula input line.

* That button toggles the formula input area between 1-line vs 6-lines with scrolling.

* Newlines can inserted by shift-enter.

* If there are additional formula lines lines outside the viewable line(s), then a dashed line on the relevant border will be shown. (Plus the regular scrollbar, in expanded mode.)
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-21 02:41:47+00:00
I am not using inflammatory language to hurt anyone. I am illustrating a point on the contrast between technical meaning and non-technical meanings. One meaning is offensive the other meaning is technically correct. Don't start a witch hunt by deliberately misinterpreting what I'm saying.

So technical means something like this: in a technical sense you are a stochastic parrot. You are also technically an object. But in everyday language we don't call people stochastic parrots or objects because language is nuanced and the technical meaning is rarely used at face value and other meanings are used in place of the technical one.

So when people use a term in conversation and go by the technical meaning it's usually either very strange or done deliberately to deceive. Sort of like how you claim you don't know what "technically" means and sort of how you deliberately misinterpreted my words as "inflammatory" when I did nothing of the sort.

I hope you learned something basic about the English today! Good day to you sir!
by adabyron | 2025-12-21 02:42:17+00:00
I'm not sure if the next few generations will have the same opportunities as the last few that enjoyed America's dominate place in the world, who also took out incredible amounts of debt that the upcoming generations will have to pay back somehow.

The values you mention are timeless & should be taught to all.

Hopefully technology continues to be a thing that rises all boats & that more people can get said boat.

I fear the current tax laws, political contributions & financial regulations favor those with more wealth so much that when you factor in compounding, their wealth will continue to grow at extreme levels compared to those with less wealth. Retail needs to start pulling their money out of stocks until large companies reduce executive pay to reasonable levels. Otherwise we just blindly keep supporting this current chaos. I believe we also need to start taxing margin loans, instead of going down a wealth tax road.
by Epa095 | 2025-12-21 02:42:46+00:00
Over the last 100 years, the S&P 500 has grown with an average of 6% yearly adjusted for inflation (9.8% nominally).

That means an inflation adjusted doubling every 12 year.

It also means that if you manage to live on e.g 1% of the wealth annually, your wealth will double(inflation adjusted) every 15 year.

So yeah, as long as you don't get too many children (branching factor not more than 4) you 'just' need to get filthy rich, and none of your descendants ever need working.