MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-08 21:40:19+00:00
> an untrained and unspecialized human

An untrained and unspecialised human can be trained quickly and reliably for the cost of meals and lodging and will very likely actually try to do the right thing because of personal accountability.

Delegating responsibility to badly-designed or outright unfit-for-purpose systems because of incoherent confidence is plainly a bad plan.

As for the other nuances of your post, I will assume the best intention.
by Veserv | 2025-12-08 21:40:47+00:00
Your response is a non-sequitur. The original statement was about intentionally not detecting cancer. You are talking about whether the cancer is medically necessary to treat.

You are just assuming that all cancer must be treated if detected, even if it is medically unnecessary, therefore we must not detect medically insignificant cancer which would be net harmful to treat. You can detect things and determine no action should be taken. I can understand if that might be the modern standard of care, but if so then that is the problem; not early detection of cancer, which could be medically insignificant, but which may also allow the early detection of medically significant cancer.
by dang | 2025-12-08 21:40:55+00:00
The only coaching going on with Launch HNs is from me and tomhow, and I can tell you that we're constantly urging people to tone down grand claims, provide concrete examples, accessible demos, and so on—partly because it makes the posts more interesting, and partly to reduce surface area for the snarky and rigid objections that internet forums optimize for.

We don't do a perfect job of this, because (1) Launch HN coaching is on top of our main jobs running HN and we only have so many hours; and (2) startup founders' priority is working on their startup (as it should be!). They only have so many cycles for reworking everything to suit HN's preferences, which are idiosyncratic and at times curmudgeonly or cynical. Curmudgeons and cynics can't be convinced in the first place so it's not a good idea for a founder to put too much time into indulging them.

Some of what you're saying here boils down to that their home page shouldn't have any marketing tropes at all (e.g. testimonials, companies-using-us, etc.). I don't like those tropes either, but this is an example of what I mean by an idiosyncratic preference. Companies do that kind of thing because, obviously, it works. That's how the world is. The only thing that you accomplish by angrily blaming a startup founder for doing standard marketing is to make the discussion dyspeptic and offtopic. And yes, I do use the word "dyspeptic" too much :)
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-08 21:41:08+00:00
Just because one layer of the security stack is compromised doesn't turn your device into a paperweight. I know many people who use out-of-support and vulnerable devices and I am not aware of a single one getting pwned by a system exploit, it is always some kind of phishing or scam. This is anecdotal evidence but I couldn't find actual data, as most don't distinguish between malware that rely on system-level vulnerabilities (as in 0-day) and the ones that don't (like fake apps that steal credentials, mine crypto or inject ads). But it is clear that the former are a minority on Android.

If you don't know what to do with it because your security standards are so high, just give it to someone with lower standards then you, or use it for some project that doesn't involve sensitive data. And if security is broken to the core, there is probably some vulnerability you can exploit to root your phone and do whatever you want with it, including installing a custom ROM.

Still, I agree with you on making it mandatory to provide an unlock method, at least for out-of-support phones.
by onecommentman | 2025-12-08 21:41:21+00:00
Do you really want CHSR to revisit anything at this point? Planning started with the CA High Speed Rail Act in 1996, and it currently has zero ridership.

The NM Rail Runner planning started in 2003 and has had a functioning system starting in 2006, 100 miles growing to 15 stations, with the entire system operating for over ten years at this point. At a cost of <$400M dollars, or $.4B dollars in CHSR-speak.

CHSR is less about rolling stock and more about laughing stock. Maybe CA should formal cede jurisdiction of the ROW, actual ownership and governance of the land, to NM so something could get done outside of the morass of CA political processes.
by kristjank | 2025-12-08 21:41:30+00:00
This feeling of verification >> generation anxiety bears a resemblance to that moment when you're learning a foreign language, you speak a well-prepared sentence, and your correspondent says something back, of which you only understand about a third.

In like fashion, when I start thinking of a programming statement (as a bad/rookie programmer) and an assistant completes my train of thought (as is default behaviour in VS Code for example), I get that same feeling that I did not grasp half the stuff I should've, but nevertheless I hit Ctrl-Return because it looks about right to me.
by beingmudit | 2025-12-08 21:41:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a solo dev who spent the last few weeks obsessively trying to solve the "last mile" problem of browser emulation: making it actually feel good to play.

While the core tech (Libretro/WASM) is solid, wrapping it in a UI that feels "native" is a deep rabbit hole. I built Koin Deck Player to solve the glue-code headaches, and I've open-sourced it as a drop-in React component.

It handles the tricky engineering bits so you don't have to:

- Latency Tiers: Automatically enables "Run-Ahead" (calculating frames in advance) for 8/16-bit systems to get sub-frame latency. - Performance: Detects SharedArrayBuffer support to switch N64/PS1 emulation to threaded video rendering, preventing UI freezes. - Mobile Controls: A custom GPU-accelerated virtual controller that uses heuristic multi-touch (sliding finger between buttons works) and haptics. - Audio: Handles the notorious auto-play/resume AudioContext quirks across browsers.

I built this because I believe preservation shouldn't just be about archiving file, it should be about making the experience delightful.

Repo is MIT licensed. I'd love to hear your feedback on the input latency!
by ASalazarMX | 2025-12-08 21:41:57+00:00
> Why do people eat artificially sweetened things? Why do people use birth control? Why do people watch pornography? Why do people do drugs? Why do people play video games? Why do people watch moving lights and pictures? These are all symptoms of humans being misaligned.

I think these behaviors are fully aligned with natural selection. Why do we overengineer our food? It's not for health, because simpler food would satisfy our nutritional needs as easily, it's because our far ancestors developed a taste for food that kept them alive longer. Our incredibly complex chain of meal preparation is just us looking to satisfy that desire for tasty food by overloading it as much as possible.

People prefer artificial sweeteners because they taste sweeter than regular ones, they use birth control because we inherently enjoy sex and want more of it (but not more raising babies), drugs are an overloading of our need for hapiness, etc. Our bodies crave for things, and uninformed, we give them what they want but multiplied several fold.

But geez, I agree, alignment of AI is a hard problem, but it would be wrong to say it's impossible, at least until it's understood better.
by airstrike | 2025-12-08 21:41:57+00:00
I appreciate the thoughtful replies. I struggle to understand why CSS is such a big deal if you're not building for the web. I can make my app as pretty as I'd like using styling that isn't CSS. OK, maybe I miss glow effects, some nicer gradients and 3D transforms, but those are far from showstoppers and still worth giving up for everything else I gain with iced
by piskov | 2025-12-08 21:42:14+00:00
Instead of that sorry excuse of an article, here is the proper long-read about spaces.

Albeit in Russian, all modern browsers support live translation — should be fine.

https://type.today/ru/journal/spaces

Update: in English https://type.today/en/journal/spaces

—

BTW typography is very important to Russian designers and developers.

Many install special typography layout (with “right alt” layer for the symbols) to always enter correct m-dashes, quotes, and what have you.

https://ilyabirman.ru/typography-layout/

There is even an ongoing meme with a woman crying “I don’t deserve such treatment, that’s how I’ve always written” when her flawless typography was considered ChatGPT in the making:

https://youtube.com/shorts/IrhFP67-_vA?si=n9UICaRQ9ZiUyVuT
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-08 21:42:17+00:00
Go to any retailer and buy any in-demand product with the same market value as what you want to buy. Sell it on Craigslist or similar for cryptocurrency using a new wallet. Buy whatever you wanted to buy, never use that wallet again. Alternatively, mine the cryptocurrency yourself, again using a separate wallet for each purchase.

The deanonymization comes from tying any transaction performed by a particular wallet to your identity and thereby deanonymizing all of the other transactions. Which doesn't work if the wallet only ever has two transactions and neither of them are tied to your identity.

That's assuming traditional chains. Privacy coins also exist.
by franckpachot | 2025-12-08 21:42:24+00:00
What about "cannot scale without downtime"? While all databases can scale vertically, increasing or decreasing CPU or memory resources requires a restart, which leads to downtime. All sessions must disconnect, the system restarts, and users reconnect and execute their first queries with a cold cache. This is far from ideal, especially when workload spikes—the very situation where scaling up is needed. Cloud-native databases that promote scalability typically scale horizontally without downtime. This involves adding or removing nodes and automatically resharding data without stopping the application. Such elasticity is key to the cost efficiency in the cloud: it lets you scale resources up or down with the workload, avoiding excess provisioning.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-08 21:43:19+00:00
In the defense of PG, for better or worse as far as I know, the 'what is RDBMS default' falls into two categories;

- Read Committed default with MVCC (Oracle, Postgres, Firebird versions with MVCC, I -think- SQLite with WAL falls under this)

- Read committed with write locks one way or another (MSSQL default, SQLite default, Firebird pre MVCC, probably Sybase given MSSQL's lineage...)

I'm not aware of any RDBMS that treats 'serializable' as the default transaction level OOTB (I'd love to learn though!)

....

All of that said, 'Inconsistent read because you don't know RDBMS and did not pay attention to the transaction model' has a very different blame direction than 'We YOLO fsync on a timer to improve throughput'.

If anything it scares me that there's no other tuning options involved such as number of bytes or number of events.

If I get a write-ack from a middleware I expect it to be written one way or another. Not 'It is written within X seconds'.

AFAIK there's no RDBMS that will just 'lose a write' unless the disk happens to be corrupted (or, IDK, maybe someone YOLOing with chaos mode on DB2?)
by GavCo | 2025-12-08 21:43:49+00:00
My intention isn't to argue that it's impossible to create an unaligned superintelligence. I think that not only is it theoretically possible, but it will almost certainly be attempted by bad actors and most likely they will succeed. I'm cautiously optimistic though that the first superintelligence will be aligned with humanity. The early evidence seems to point to the path of least resistance being aligned rather than unaligned. It would take another 1000 words to try to properly explain my thinking on this, but intuitively consider the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar." A superintelligence that is unaligned but successfully pretending to be aligned would need to be far more capable than a genuinely aligned superintelligence behaving identically.

So yes, if you throw enough compute at it, you can probably get an unaligned highly capable superintelligence accidentally. But I think what we're seeing is that the lab that's taking a more intentional approach to pursuing deep alignment (by training the model to be aligned with human values, culture and context) is pulling ahead in capabilities. And I'm suggesting that it's not coincidental but specifically because they're taking this approach. Training models to be internally coherent and consistent is the path of least resistance.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-08 21:43:54+00:00
What determines if a cancer should be treated is the type, size, growth, and age of a patient.

Type and size and growth you can't find out without doing some sort of test/screening.

I agree that oncologists are ultimately who should be making the call on what needs to be treated and how. But I think your characterization of how common non-dangerous tumors are is off.
by HashiCorps | 2025-12-08 21:43:57+00:00
Former-Hashi employee here: there's a clear prioritization of enterprise products. So much so that I would not be surprised if they stopped supporting the Open Source projects entirely. That would be a big boost for the forks.

Red Hat has far more autonomy. We are not structured the same.

On the HR side — many good people are leaving; new hires have to be on-site for 3 days and located in 4 "strategic" locations in the US.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-08 21:44:21+00:00
> Labor income is very important at the top end. The work a CEO performs in her superintendence of a large company generates what's economically labor income, even when paid as stock grants, options or the like. Basically all professional income (including that of devs) is labor income, not capital income.

If the CEO has a significant voting power in his company, then it's capital income even if the said income is “a salary”. Like it or not.

> Besides, optimal taxation models also say that capital income should not be taxed at all

It would be nice if people advocating for their political view could stop labeling their view as “optimal”, but hey, this is economics so here we are.
by ThrowawayB7 | 2025-12-08 21:44:24+00:00
I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.

There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.
by tonyystef | 2025-12-08 21:44:25+00:00
Currently we match by:

File paths: If you're touching src/auth/, we inject memories that touched auth files. Recency: Most recent memories first, limited to top 10

Semantic search is on the roadmap but not implemented yet. Right now it's straightforward file matching + recency.

(Appreciate the question, really have to start working on this; not the first time someone asked :))
by reactordev | 2025-12-08 21:44:27+00:00
I’m not a fan of the minified glsl that guys like this produce but I do get a chuckle when variable declarations spell out damnit. The frustrations are real.

That aside, i love the work, I just hate having to mentally grok the d and c style variables. As if number of chars minimum is the goal. Number of instructions yes, but we can do better than d and t.

Moonlight is beautiful.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-08 21:44:54+00:00
Calc has many features focused on correctness and reliability. Excel is a joke on both of those accounts.

Turns out close to 100% of the spreadsheet users out there don't care about that. It's unnerving and absurd, and IMO, what is even the point of all the effort of entering your data and working it if you don't care about the result being correct? But that's how the world is.
by moomoo11 | 2025-12-08 21:45:11+00:00
You need to realize when you’re being marketed to and filter out the nonsense.

Now I use agentic coding a lot with maybe 80-90% success rate.

I’m on greenfield projects (my startup) and maintaining strict Md files with architecture decisions and examples helps a lot.

I barely write code anymore, and mostly code review and maintain the documentation.

In existing codebases pre-ai I think it’s near impossible because I’ve never worked anywhere that maintained documentation. It was always a chore.
by kulahan | 2025-12-08 21:45:24+00:00
I'm pretty sure every medical show had an episode where the "money-grubbing hospital admin" character want to start selling full body medical scans, and the "very well-respected and honor-bound doctor" character points out how this is quite literally one of the most useless and corrupt ways for a hospital to make money.

There are probably a dozen things wrong with your body right now. That doesn't mean they're even affecting you. While you may have some type of cancer that is at the absolute first day of detectability, or a bone slightly out of place, or a weird spot on your heart, someone else has a case that is 6 months deeper and needs more dire treatment.

There is zero benefit to society to massively overburden our healthcare system (this is true of any nation) by searching constantly for random problems that may or may not exist.

If there were good reason to do this, you'd have regularly-scheduled checkups, like with colon or breast cancer.
by hoppp | 2025-12-08 21:45:27+00:00
Is your code easy to transfer to other environments? The Apple vendor lock-in is not a great place for development if the end product runs on servers, unlike using AMD Gpus which can be found on the backend. Same goes for games because most gamers either have an AMD or an Nvidia graphics card as playing on Mac is still rare, so priority should be supporting those platforms

Its probably awesome to use Metal and everything but the vendor lock-in sounds like an issue.
by cmurf | 2025-12-08 21:45:37+00:00
Can confirm on a Pixel 6a.

Says September is the latest system update. Click check updates, says it's up to date, click check updates again, says it's preparing system update and hangs out for a while - then says it's downloading and installing a 781M update.

WTF?

Update: OK finally the update completes an hour later, even the reboot took longer than usual - says it's "updated to December 5, 2025"

This phone running Android 16 for a bit over a month now.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-08 21:45:51+00:00
>In the end, the information in the training texts is a distilled proxy for the world

This is routinely asserted. How has it been proven?

Humans write all sorts of text that has zero connection to reality, even when they are ostensibly writing about reality.

Training on ancient greek philosophy which was expressly written to distill knowledge about the real world would produce a stupid LLM that doesn't know about the real world, because the training text was itself wrong about the underlying world.

Also, if LLMs were able to extract underlying truth from training material, why can't they do math very well? It would be easy to train an LLM on only correct math, and indeed you could generate any size corpus of provably correct math you want. I assume someone somewhere has demonstrated success training a neural network on math and having it regenerate something like "addition" or whatever, but how well would such a process survive if a large fraction of it's training material was instead just incorrect math?

The training text is nothing more than human generated text, and asserting anything about that more concrete than "Humans consider this text good enough to be worth writing" is fallacious.

This even applies if your training corpus is, for example, only physics scientific papers that have been strongly replicated and are likely "true". Unless the LLM is also trained on the data itself, the only information available is what the humans thought and wrote. There's no definite link between that and actual reality, which is why physics accepted an "Aether" for so long. The data we had up to that point aligned with our incorrect models. You could not disambiguate between the wrong Aetheric models and a better model with the data we had, and that would remain true of text written about the data.

Humans suck at distilling fact out of reality despite our direct connection to it for all sorts of fun reasons you can read about in psychology, but if you disconnect a human from reality, it only gets worse.

Why would you believe LLMs could possibly be different? A model trained on bad data cannot magically figure out which data is bad.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-08 21:45:57+00:00
Devil's advocate; DoD is probably (read: certainly) one of the sample customers for Intel's 18a node. If the rumors around that manufacturing process are anything close to true, the DoD is probably not super satisfied with the yield and probably can't imagine any cutting-edge applications for the chips.

That puts them in an awkward position and somewhat unable to cut corners around Nvidia. It's possible that 18a has improved a lot recently, but it's also possible that the feds are a big-ticket player in the GPGPU arena.
by bnjms | 2025-12-08 21:46:07+00:00
How does one learn to think about companies buying each other. It’s counterintuitive to me for an entity with stock to buy stock in another entity which could itself own stock in the first.

The way you write it I can’t see why WB would be allowed to sell itself when it makes the most sense for Patamount to go bankrupt some time from now and be split up amongst US media; Netflix/HBO/Disney/Peacock
by analog31 | 2025-12-08 21:46:39+00:00
It's when the users start taking care of IT issues themselves. Maybe the name comes from the Shadow Cabinet in England?

Where it might not be obvious is that IT in this context is not just pulling wires and approving tickets, but is "information technology" in the broader sense of using computers to solve problems. This could mean creating custom apps, databases, etc. A huge amount of this goes on in most businesses. Solutions can range from trivial to massive and mission-critical.
by jauer | 2025-12-08 21:47:04+00:00
IPv4 continues to be available to entities that have a need that fits a particular policy shape, just most people don't. Specifically, you can get IPv4 /24s for IPv6 transition purposes. This includes anycast DNS, MX, etc for legacy clients on other networks, v4-side of CGNAT, etc.

E.g. I was able to get a /24 in the ARIN region in 2021 and could justify 2 more for a _logical_ network topology similar to what NK presents to the world.

APNIC similarly has a pool available for IPv4 allocations: https://www.apnic.net/manage-ip/ipv4-exhaustion/#the-situati...
by still_grokking | 2025-12-08 21:47:38+00:00
Extremely weird list.

The Scala spec is much shorter than the C spec… Also it's of course much shorter than Rust, where nobody has a real issue with its complexity, at least nobody is complaining really loudly.

The C and Go specs are actually extremely involved, long, and complex given that the languages almost don't have any features at all.

But comparing language specs isn't a 100% fair metric.

One should instead look at formal language semantic definitions written all in the same way.

If you look at these you will for example learn that the C semantics are much more complex than for example Java.

Check out https://kframework.org/ to learn more. (A list of semantics for different languages can be found on the "projects" sub page).
by cogman10 | 2025-12-08 21:48:27+00:00
> What did the medical field do to earn such credibility with you?

For oncology? A whole lot. It's actually miraculous what they've developed to treat cancer. Cancer treatment has gotten so good that it's common for oncologists to caution against the 5 year study survival rates due to new and better treatments rapidly coming online. A 5 year study is necessarily 5 years out of date.

Medicine isn't a unified field. Having broad skepticism is an irrational position as there's a huge difference between the oncology field and the nutrition field.