MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by overtone1000 | 2025-12-08 23:13:45+00:00
I agree, and I am a US physician! Curiously, their paper was sponsored by an entity that funds cryopreservation research. The paper asserts that those surveyed were general practitioners, but the actual survey itself had quotas for various subspecialties. The survey also has an introduction section that frames cryopreservation (not used in medicine) in the context of hypothermic protocols (commonly used in medicine), which would seem to lend it some legitimacy. But that isn't a fair comparison. Only critical care specialists and some surgeons and anesthesiologists have much experience with therapeutic hypothermia. GPs would typically have less experience and might not readily notice the inequivalence.

I can't help but wonder whether they changed the protocol after the survey was designed and only interviewed general practitioners. Or, worse, perhaps they selectively excluded a portion of the interviewed population.
by accrual | 2025-12-08 23:14:38+00:00
I feel it's kind of a moot point. GP's intention or train of thought doesn't change the downstream effects. Busy or not, they didn't go, and that's the bool the universe went with.

As others have already stated though it's really not GP's fault and they're not responsible for managing other's decisions. Could they have saved a person? Maybe. Or maybe the late father would have died a week later anyways.
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-08 23:14:45+00:00
I ran a shared services org in a Fortune 50. Enterprise costs don’t scale down well, and things that are absolutely essential to supporting 100k people sound insane for 100 people. Our senior leaders would sometimes demand we try and the CFO and I would just eyeroll.

Nobody would hire the JP Morgan IT team to run a dentist practice IT workload. Likewise, AWS can save you money at scale, but if your business can run on 3 2U servers, it should.
by crote | 2025-12-08 23:15:00+00:00
Imagine how much better for the environment it'd be if your delivery was brought to you via a human-powered bicycle. Or as an in-between: e-bikes and e-mopeds.

Using 2,000lb vehicles for last-mile burrito delivery is a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" scenario. Delivery robots are an improvement because literally anything is.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-08 23:15:02+00:00
I don't worry too much about the butterfly effect because it goes both ways. Sure one stoplight here makes a guy die, but another stoplight over there saves a guys life.

But in this case, when it's a clear "either I put off changing my oil and washing my car, or this 250 lb senior citizen with gout tries going on a hike", it's a lot more clear.
by marcher | 2025-12-08 23:15:05+00:00
As someone who once came extremely close to death and was unconscious for days after eventually receiving medical care, my take on death is that it's probably similar to what you're saying about going under for surgery. I'm somewhat neutral to mixed on having been revived, but I no longer fear death. I still have a fear of suffering and having painful final moments, but death itself seems peaceful if nothing else.

In terms of something happening after death, my only real thought on that is that it really troubles me that I came into existence in the first place and that I experience anything at all. I sometimes wonder if that was truly a one time thing or if it's something that could happen again.
by projektfu | 2025-12-08 23:15:37+00:00
I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.

LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.

Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.

Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.

And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-08 23:16:01+00:00
I concur with your sentiments.

> My paper and pen version of the latest LLM

My point here was to attempt to remove the mystery of LLM's by showing the same thing can be done with pen and paper version, after all an LLM is an algorithm. Because an LLM is running on a 'supercomputer' or is digital doesn't provide it some mysterious new powers.
by nsxwolf | 2025-12-08 23:16:28+00:00
In teams of high performers who have built a lot of mutual trust, code reviews are mostly a formality and a stop gap against the big, obvious accidental blunders. "LGTM!"

I do not know or trust the agents that are putting out all this code, and the code review process is very different.

Watching the Copilot code review plugin complain about Agent code on top of it all has been quite an experience.
by ribfeasty | 2025-12-08 23:17:21+00:00
As someone outside the US, I think the cost of Las Vegas is only a small aspect of the slump. When you factor in the cost of flights and other destinations you may be visiting, Vegas being expensive is often only driving up the total trip cost proportionately.

There have been several situations in the last 12 months where the desire to go to the US (and Vegas, in this case, for conferences) just isn't there, as we are hearing so many terrible stories about travellers being harassed or unwelcome when trying to enter the US, due to the current Government. Anecdotally, this has been the reason I've heard from Canadians who are also considering travel to the same conferences.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-08 23:17:44+00:00
>> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? [...] Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?

> Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company.

This and.

The 'and' being that consulting companies, in their DNA, build solutions for their customers.

Which is a very different business than building products for all users.

Not least because the former is guided by understanding a customer's requirements, while the later is having a strong intuition (backed up by market fit) about what all users want.

I'm pretty sure there might not be a full end user capable (in the sense of design-build-iterate) product team in IBM at this point.

Mostly because I don't think they've any middle/upper management that can think that way. They've got the engineers!
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-08 23:18:05+00:00
> Aluminum wiring in homes, for example, has a very bad reputation.

It has an undeserved bad reputation now, but it deserved the bad rep back in the 60s and 70s. The problem wasn’t solely the aluminum conductors themselves, it was also the terminals on wiring devices. The material the terminals and screws were made out of worked fine with copper, but the thermal expansion profile did not work well with aluminum conductors. That caused arcing and fires, so the wiring device manufacturers figured out a material that works well with both copper and aluminum for wiring device terminations. Wire manufacturers also made changes to ensure better terminations. If you look at the terminals of a light switch or receptacle, it will say Cu/Al on it, signifying it is suitable for use with either type of conductor.

This was solved 50 years ago, it’s similar to being scared of flying on a modern jetliner because the De Havilland Comet ripped itself apart in the 1950s due to the engineers not understanding the stresses from repeat pressurization cycles.

For existing installations of pre-1972 wire, you can buy splicing devices (similar to a WAGO lever nut) that connect to the aluminum conductors inside the box and allow you to connect a copper pigtail to the wiring device, you also have to use an anti-oxidant grease to prevent oxidation.

That being said, I’d still wire a house with copper because you can use #14 Cu for a 15A circuit but you need #12 Al for the same circuit, the NEC does not allow use of #14 Al romex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring

> In North American residential construction, aluminum wire was used for wiring entire houses for a short time from the 1960s to the mid-1970s during a period of high copper prices. Electrical devices (outlets, switches, lighting, fans, etc.) at the time were not designed with the particular properties of the aluminum wire being used in mind, and there were some issues related to the properties of the wire itself, making the installations with aluminum wire much more susceptible to problems. Revised manufacturing standards for both the wire and the devices were developed to reduce the problems. Existing homes with this older aluminum wiring used in branch circuits present a potential fire hazard.
by freefaler | 2025-12-08 23:18:22+00:00
As Hayek proved the information in free markets is encoded by prices, so the value is up to the consenting parties. There is no "good" or "bad" or "improper" profit. If there is competition and willing parties that's where the profit will be. It will go down to something more or less sustainable for the market participants that are willing to work for that profit.
by doublerabbit | 2025-12-08 23:19:13+00:00
Gaming does require more concentration. So you need to allocate x amount to play, but you feel done after a game sesh, normally. You then tend to go and do something else.

Social media is an always-on gimmick of the minute thing which screws you wholly especially when it's bombarding you with disruptive social exploits on every page.

This disruptive nature then leaves you at angst. This then manifests in to FOMO and because three seconds yay is more exciting than the reality of ten minutes of yay you then end up repeating the cycle.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-08 23:19:19+00:00
Right? In my reality, my County Sheriff has on multiple occasions hired deputies who had either resigned in lieu of termination for various problems, and on a couple of occasions, actually terminated. During COVID he denied vaccines to even immunocompromised individuals, but worse (yes, I know that masks are not "100% effective"), forbade the use of masks in his (overcrowded, typically 3 people in 2 person cells, one sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and smaller isolation cells designed for 1, often having 2 or even 3 inmates) county jails, with all the predictable results.

And in the wake of BLM, when Mayors and PD Chiefs were actually doing a fairly good job of trying to community build and form relationships, got on his bullhorn at protests and said that any Sheriff's Deputy who attempted to do so would be subject to disciplinary action and that he was going to be enforcing "zero tolerance" for any protest.
by remyp | 2025-12-08 23:19:47+00:00
Over the years I've noticed something unusual about myself: I don't even see these icons. My brain goes directly to the text. This applies to all visual material, but is most evident in printed advertising.

Apparently other people notice the hot girl and the puppy and the fried chicken sandwich first. Meanwhile, I've already read all the fine print.

No idea why I'm like this.
by cebert | 2025-12-08 23:20:44+00:00
I check Facebook a few times a week mainly to stay updated on family and friends and to wish the occasional happy birthday (I’m not a heavy user). Meta aggressively pushes AI-generated “slop” reel videos in my feed, which I mostly ignore. It’s depressing that there must be an audience for this low-effort content. The videos recommended to me are often AI reels featuring obese people doing something “unexpected.” They’re not particularly interesting, and they feel like they’re mocking people with weight issues which isn’t cool.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-08 23:20:54+00:00
Hallucinations can never be fixed. LLM's 'hallucinate' because that is literally what they can ONLY do, provide some output given some input. The output is measured and judged by a human who then classifies it as 'correct' or 'incorrect'. In the later case it seems to be labelled as a 'hallucination' as if it did something wrong. It did nothing wrong and worked exactly as it was programmed to do.
by dabockster | 2025-12-08 23:21:20+00:00
> You set it up once, exactly the way you like it, and it runs stable forever.

No it doesn't. You still have security patches to install and stuff. And one minor patch can still introduce a breaking change that largely destroys your install.

Pretending that this can be mitigated because it's open source goes straight back to my RTFM comment. You're basically saying that someone has to learn a ton of computer science stuff to be able to use Linux. I'm saying that cannot and should not be the case.

Linux based operating systems have to be able to be used to most of their capability by someone with less than a K-12 education. Anything short of that is a non-starter.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-08 23:21:22+00:00
Sorry, yes, I've had colds and a cough or two for sure. I don't think I've thrown up in 35 years though since I was a child.

When I meant sick, I meant like a longer sustained thing that needs treatment of some kind. I didn't mean I never stayed in bed watching the price is right for two days.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-08 23:22:01+00:00
You wouldn’t have prevented it. You would have maybe unknowingly created a condition that would have postponed it. And then you would never have known that you had done so.

In any case, obesity is the result of a lifestyle and going on the hike was a choice that he made and that his daughter accepted when she chose to go on the hike with her father knowing his condition.

Tragic, but there it is. The clock is ticking for us all. Any day now.
by nelox | 2025-12-08 23:22:36+00:00
It is a critique, not a summary. If you think it stops being one, point out where.

I don’t take articles at face value, especially when it comes to science reporting. Journalists often overstate or oversimplify studies, so I read the actual paper. I highlighted what it really says, what it doesn’t say, and what the article adds that isn’t in the study at all.

If an article misrepresents a paper’s core ideas, why shouldn’t that be called out? Misreporting confuses readers and undermines the authors’ work by failing to represent it accurately.
by jdswain | 2025-12-08 23:22:51+00:00
Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no.

An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.
by skydhash | 2025-12-08 23:23:08+00:00
A plugin that does what exactly? A lot of comments here and under other posts are just declaring things with the following template: "I wanted to do X, but before it would took me N amount of hours, but now with LLM tool L, it has taken me way less time. I can't share anything about X, but LLM tool L is very useful. Just trust me, bro"
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 23:24:15+00:00
> I don't mind the idea of letting certain elements die.

> takes me on good faith

The first overwhelmingly rules out the second. It just makes you a psychopath (if true, which I doubt) or very much not in good faith.

Maybe some people would be ok with letting you or me die - would that be ok? Would it be clever and cool to post on HN?

You don't need to play the victim to identify yourself. One thing victims do, however, is have no compassion for others because - they're a victim!
by pessimizer | 2025-12-08 23:24:48+00:00
I'm pretty sure that the reason everything seems like AI is that AI produces stupid, pointless content at scale, and our "writers" have become people who generate stupid, pointless content at scale.

There's no reason for most things to have been written. Whatever point is being made is pointless. It's not really entertaining, it's meant to be identified with; it's not a call to any specific action; it doesn't create some new fertile interpretation of past events or ideas; it's not even a cry for help. It's just pointless fluff to surround advertising. From a high concept likely dictated by somebody's boss.

AI has no passion and no point. It is not trying to convince anyone of anything, because it does not care. If AI were trying to be convincing, it would try to conceal its own style. But it doesn't mean anything for an AI to try. It's just running through the motions of filling out an idea to a certain length. It's whatever the opposite of compression is.

A generation of writers raised on fanfiction and prestige tv who grew up to write Buzzfeed articles at the rate of five a day are indistinguishable from AI.

Why This Matters
by peacebeard | 2025-12-08 23:24:50+00:00
The part of this that really makes me think is when you thought "I don't think that's going to work" about him going on the hike. That's really tough. In the past there have been times I didn't speak up about a concern I had, then found out that a warning would have been warranted. This is something I think about a lot since becoming a father. There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough. When you're a parent, 99% safe is a nightmare. Risky situations happen every day. Like staying close enough to the kid on the sidewalk to grab her if the she sees a ball and wants to run into the street for the first time ever. As a parent you have to get comfortable just being a total square all the time, and speaking up about safety even if everyone in the room rolls their eyes. So yeah. It's not your fault, and this person's choice wasn't your responsibility. But you're right, if you were a square and spoke up about safety maybe it would have saved a life. That is a valuable lesson to hold on to.
by charlieyu1 | 2025-12-08 23:25:18+00:00
I don't know, I have been forced to update many times just to use Word. Win7/Word 2003 was working fine for me as a math editor. Somehow everyone changes to .docx, Equation Editor 3.0 was replaced, then one of my major client only accept Word 2019 files for consistency so I was forced to update to Windows 10 just to use that.

And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.
by lvl155 | 2025-12-08 23:25:32+00:00
It was really good in early stages (this past summer). But that was before Claude Code and Codex took off big time. I would say the biggest downside of Amp is that it’s expensive. Like running Opus the whole time expensive. But they don’t have their own model so what are you really paying for? Prompts? Not so sure. Amp is for people who are not smart enough to roll their own agents. So in that case, they shouldn’t be using agentic workflow.
by johnfn | 2025-12-08 23:25:37+00:00
> “Chicago sidewalks are for people, not delivery robots.”

This seems to be a false dichotomy. Isn't it obvious that if there weren't robots, there would be people delivering your food instead? And as a biker, I actually find delivery drivers to be quite dangerous. They are constantly blocking the bike lane, forcing me to drive into traffic -- or they are riding their extremely heavy and fast bikes dangerously through the bike lane, which is particularly frustrating as the bike lane should be designed to keep me safe.

I don't know. I mean, there are definitely worse evils than delivery drivers in SF, but if you're going to argue that robots are objectively worse, I'm not so sure.
by anal_reactor | 2025-12-08 23:25:47+00:00
It sounds silly to me not because I don't value humans. I don't value humans because of my personal grievances that are difficult to defend in a serious ethical discussion. It sounds silly to me because it leaves "human" undefined. To me, the question "is LLM human?" is eerily similar to "are black people people?" and "are Jews people?". AI displays intelligence but it doesn't deserve respect because it doesn't meet certain biological requirements. Really awkward position to defend.

Instead of "humanism", where "human" is at the centre, I'd like to propose a view where loosely defined intelligence is at the centre. In pre-AI world that view was consistent with humanism because humans were the only entity that displayed advanced intelligence, with the added bonus that it explains why people tend to value complex life forms more than simple ones. When AI enters the picture, it places sufficiently advanced AI above humans. Which is fine, because AI is nothing but the next step of evolution. It's like placing "homo sapiens" above "homo erectus" except AI is "homo sapiens" and we are "homo erectus". Makes a lot of sense IMO.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-08 23:26:06+00:00
Circa 2005 my boss and I would pitch that the relational database + HTML forms paradigm was a breakthrough that put custom software within reach of more customers: for one thing you could just delete all the Installshield engineers but also memory safety was a big problem in the Win95 era not so much about being hacked and more about application state in applications would get corrupted over time so you just expected Word to crash once an hour or so.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 23:26:22+00:00
To be honest, I've gave it a try a couple of times, but it's so expensive I'm having a hard time even being able to judge it fairly. The first time I spent just $5, second $10 and the third time $20, but they all went by so fast I'm worried even if I find it great, it's way too expensive, and having a number tick up/down makes me nervous or something. And I'm the type of person who has ChatGPT Pro so I'm not exactly stingy with paying for things I find useful, but there is a limit somewhere and I guess for me Amp is that.