MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by obius_prime | 2025-12-05 22:51:14+00:00
Following up on yesterday's resonance chamber post with a deeper finding.

I ran hierarchical analysis: only 23% of peak ratios match algebraic combinations of constants. Not "peaks everywhere" — a specific structure.

But the weirder part: I simulated dimensional reduction (3D→1D collapse, like nuclear pasta phases in neutron stars) and watched what happens to constants:

- Geometric constants (φ, π, e): 99%+ accuracy throughout - Wave constants (α≈137, mp/me≈1836): 13% in 3D → 99.9% in 1D

The wave constants EMERGE during dimensional collapse. Not fitted — emerged from a physical process.

I'm calling it "Capellini Geodesic Extrusion Felting" — the phase where constants crystallize from topology under dimensional pressure.

Code, data, visualizations: https://github.com/Cosmolalia/akataleptos-geodesic-constants... Full writeup: [https://open.substack.com/pub/quantummarmelade/p/capellini-g...]

Three independent paths now converge on the same constants. Either profound or profoundly wrong.

Collaboration/critique welcome: SylvanGaskin@gmail.com
by soco | 2025-12-05 22:51:16+00:00
Even the rationale is looking to me childish "coolest thing in the fuckin world" come on, we're adults here, adults who actually care about the world, and not to woo the world, but to keep it and pass it to our kids in the best shape. Or at least in a better shape, and I believe right now we're failing at it, we are failing our children by throwing at them a flaming molotov instead of a playing ball.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-05 22:51:43+00:00
They are not legally entitled to deny you entry.

That doesn't mean they can't deny you entry. It means you might win a court case some day.

ICE cannot legally arrest people who are citizens for no reason, and yet they have done exactly that 30% of the time by their own admission.

"Knowing your rights" is meaningless if the public chooses to vote for people who don't care about those rights, and celebrate when you do not get your rights.

It doesn't matter what the paper says, it matters what CBP feels like doing, and what their management lets them get away with. The constitution is just a magic circle we all agree to play in, and isn't real if enough people disregard it.

If the border agent doesn't want you to come into the country, you are fucked. Nobody's job is to get between that agent and you and ensure the border agent follows the law on the paper, and the border agent will not go to jail or even lose their job for completely ignoring the law.
by wang_li | 2025-12-05 22:52:00+00:00
The US has a massively progressive tax system. On a net tax basis about 50% of the country pays nothing. Sure, they pay sales tax and employment taxes, but they also receive some mix of earned income tax credits, child tax credits, snap, medicaid, housing, etc. There is no real way for the US to have a single payer tax system without more people actually becoming net tax payers.
by muwtyhg | 2025-12-05 22:52:08+00:00
There are other options besides those. You have two pieces of information: If you trust experts or "do your own research" and if you are correct or not. This leads to four choices:

- You trust experts, and the experts are right -> You are right

- You trust experts, and the experts are wrong -> You are wrong

- You do your own research and are right -> You are right

- You do your own research and you are wrong -> You are wrong

Now, if I had to guess, the people who are more knowledgeable on a subject would likely have a better idea on the truthiness of a statement regarding that subject. Your argument appears to be the opposite.

> It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".

I assume this is just an anecdote but could you extrapolate on this point a bit?Is there a study you could show me where they tested "do your own research" people's knowledge vs domain experts? What topics do you think have the highest chance of the "experts" being stupid and incorrect?
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-05 22:52:34+00:00
"creating a commit would abandon the branch" is certainly something lost in translation. There are other reasons you may have not liked the UX, largely that if you create branches and then add a bunch of commits after it, the branch head doesn't automatically move by default. There is a config setting you can change if you prefer that, or the `jj tug` alias some people set up.

Auto-commit is still a thing, but you can regain the stuff you like with a workflow change, this is called the "squash workflow" and is very popular: https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/real-world-w...
by victorbjorklund | 2025-12-05 22:52:46+00:00
Trust me it doesn’t work perfectly in other countries. Yes, americas system is messed up but in countries like Sweden you will still have to navigate the system to actually get the healthcare you need. There are people who are denied healthcare in Sweden because the govt has deemed that it’s too expensive to save them (while people with similar conditions and a good insurance in the US are covered).
by colechristensen | 2025-12-05 22:53:44+00:00
>I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.

Military hardware is produced with engineering design practices that look nothing at all like what most of the HN crowd is used to. There is an extraordinary amount of documentation, requirements, and validation done for everything.

There is a MIL-SPEC for pop tarts which defines all parts sizes, tolerances, etc.

Unlike a lot in the software world military hardware gets DONE with design and then they just manufacture it.
by orbital-decay | 2025-12-05 22:53:44+00:00
It's their own decisions they made long before the controls and presure. Besides being in bed with the US gov, people that run big AI shops tend to be fervently nationalistic and politically ambitious on their own. Leopold Aschenbrenner's dystopian rant [1] or Dario Amodei's [2] [3] are pretty representative.

[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/

[2] https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

[3] https://www.darioamodei.com/post/on-deepseek-and-export-cont...
by philipkglass | 2025-12-05 22:53:45+00:00
According to another comment this product is pure 1-(perfluorohexyl)octane [1]. There's no practical way to make it at home, but it can be had for $980-$750/kg from an industrial supplier, depending on how many kilograms you commit to buy at once:

https://www.chemicalbook.com/ProductDetail_EN_1-perfluorohex...

Add analytical lab services to analyze it for purity and you could still get a lifetime supply for the price of a couple of brand-name bottles. This is the sort of thing that some Americans have been doing to get cheap GLP-1 peptide drugs from overseas too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorohexyloctane
by imron | 2025-12-05 22:53:56+00:00
I like to use uuid5 for this. It produces unique keys in a given namespace (defined by a uuid) but also takes an input key and produces identical output ID for the same input key.

This has a number of nice properties:

1. You don’t need to store keys in any special way. Just make them a unique column of your db and the db will detect duplicates for you (and you can provide logic to handle as required, eg ignoring if other input fields are the same, raising an error if a message has the same idempotent key but different fields).

2. You can reliably generate new downstream keys from an incoming key without the need for coordination between consumers, getting an identical output key for a given input key regardless of consumer.

3. In the event of a replayed message it’s fine to republish downstream events because the system is now deterministic for a given input, so you’ll get identical output (including generated messages) for identical input, and generating duplicate outputs is not an issue because this will be detected and ignored by downstream consumers.

4. This parallelises well because consumers are deterministic and don’t require any coordination except by db transaction.
by henrikschroder | 2025-12-05 22:54:03+00:00
And yet, the average American pays more in taxes for public healthcare (medicare, medicaid) that they don't receive any of, than the average European pays in taxes for (some kind of) universal healthcare.

It's so bizarre seeing Americans in the debate not wanting "crazy high taxes like in Europe", because the US already spends twice as much public money per capita as the OECD average.

The dirty secret of course is that healthcare as a good is much more expensive to produce in the US than elsewhere, and a large chunk of that is because the private insurance system adds a ton of unnecessary overhead. And yet all the healthcare insurance companies in the US talk about making healthcare "affordable for all". Yeah, no, they're leeches. They're rent-seekers. They drive up the cost of everything.
by Qem | 2025-12-05 22:54:09+00:00
This is counter-intuitive for me. Immune system senescence is a thing. Naively I would assume it should be better to get it early, as a younger immune system has better odds to react strongly to the antigen, providing long lasting protection. Often the elderly organism doesn't react, or the reaction is too weak, to vaccine stimulation. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01652...
by mixedbit | 2025-12-05 22:54:13+00:00
This is architectural problem, the LUA bug, the longer global outage last week, a long list of earlier such outages only uncover the problem with architecture underneath. The original, distributed, decentralized web architecture with heterogeneous endpoints managed by myriad of organisations is much more resistant to this kind of global outages. Homogeneous systems like Cloudflare will continue to cause global outages. Rust won't help, people will always make mistakes, also in Rust. Robust architecture addresses this by not allowing a single mistake to bring down myriad of unrelated services at once.
by sznio | 2025-12-05 22:54:25+00:00
If your target is availability, that's correct.

If your target is security, then _assuming your patch is actually valid_ you're giving better security coverage for free customers than to your paying ones.

Cloudflare is both, and their tradeoffs seem to be set on maximizing security at cost of availability. And it makes sense. A fully unavailable system is perfectly secure.
by teepo | 2025-12-05 22:54:39+00:00
I think that a show like Westworld is a great example of the realities of the streaming era. If HBO kept streaming it on HBO Max it probably costs them $2-4 million in residual liabilities. HBO removed dozens of scripted shows during that phase, and had a mandate to cut around $3B in post merger costs.

After Year 1, WGA/SAG residual formulas decrease: Year 2: ~80% of Year 1 Year 3: ~55% Year 4+: sometimes stabilize at a “floor” rate

So what did they do? They ran it for a few years, ran the numbers, realized that Westworld was no longer profitable on the platform. (Profitable would have to mean draws enough new subscribers to the platform). AND THEN - Warner Bros. Discovery made new deals with other platforms with ads. I think you can still find Westworld on Tubi and other ad-supported platforms that actually pay Warner licensing fees.
by eigencoder | 2025-12-05 22:54:58+00:00
I just disagree with this article. Age gating is a good thing. We should have more gates to keep kids out in the online world and less in the physical world.

I want to see legislation that age gates every social media site. Social media companies have harmed a huge amount of my generation and we should stop them from addicting children.

Privacy preserving methods for age verification exist, and we should use them.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-05 22:55:36+00:00
Chill dude. I added a </sarcasm> tag.

But to engage seriously:

> You’re basically saying the drug companies subsidise a loss in Europe by over charging Americans, right?

No - once they know how to manufacture a drug, it's dirt cheap for them to do so - they're still making a profit in Europe. The purpose of billing Americans a huge amount (other than they can get away with it), is to fund the research + trials for the next generation of drugs.

Of course, even this argument doesn't hold water. I remember when pharmaceuticals spent more on advertising/marketing than on R&D (may still be the case).
by MostlyStable | 2025-12-05 22:56:53+00:00
Going to compare this to our current solution of Amazon's Textract service for analyzing handwritten datasheets. Textract, when extracting tables (which is what we use it for) does not allow for providing any context or information about the tables and what we expect them to contain, but it is really good at correctly recognizing hand written characters. All of my attempts at less specialized, more general models allow me to provide that context, which is helpful in some ways, but fail at the basic part of almost always correctly getting the character.

Hopefully Google pro marries the two together.
by ddtaylor | 2025-12-05 22:57:28+00:00
The streaming platforms suffer from fragmentation right now: People don't like hopping between a dozen different streaming platforms to consume entertainment - regardless of price or ads. If you give them an option for a single place where all their media is, they will use it, regardless of what is happening behind the scenes.

They will never all merge into one because of regulatory pressure and because they are competitors.

It seems nice to have one less streaming platform in some ways, but it's not a pathway forward.

I'll continue to use Jellyfin with a few hard drives.
by guywithahat | 2025-12-05 22:57:38+00:00
I mean you're joking but there are maybe ~20 brands who produce and sell inhalers. Maybe I need the inhaler but I also have a certain amount of choice, and presumably some are more expensive than others. Insulin is a famous example, because you can buy a vial for ~$30 or a nicer one for $300. They all effectively do the same thing but there is a quality difference between them, usually in regards to release time and how often you'd have to take it.

There are some market pressures in healthcare when multiple companies can compete, although it's so heavily regulated it can be hard to see the market pressures in practice. Consumers often do have some amount of choice though
by codyb | 2025-12-05 22:57:45+00:00
Yep, exactly, and amazing.

And it's such a blind spot in the industry that the people most able to build and estimate features and software are left to be the least equipped to see through the end user's eyes.

As such, when you encourage user oriented engineers, these common and often low effort issues can be avoided at the outset which improves velocity organizationally and results in better software and user experiences for projects now and in the future.
by tptacek | 2025-12-05 22:59:19+00:00
Ahhh, of course. Nobody in academia studying herbicide toxicity can get the funding to investigate whether one of the most famous and widely used modern herbicides has human health impacts. After all, there must only be a couple people in the world working on this, and not a couple people in every R1 and R2 research institution in the world, all of whom would become famous if they published a dispositive connection on this.
by nkmnz | 2025-12-05 23:00:38+00:00
The drug in question is perfluorohexyloctane, which is part of a class of substances known as PFAS or „forever chemical“. I‘m a chemist, I love modern medicine and material technologies based on chemistry, and I don’t hesitate to take vaccines or other meds, and I also happen to have SEVERE dry eyes syndrome - but hell no, I’m not going to put that stuff into nature!
by ilovetux | 2025-12-05 23:00:44+00:00
> FYI for anyone who isn't familiar with the wacky US insurance situation: Nobody in the US actually pays $800 for the drug. That's the "list price" for insurance companies to pay. Even insurance companies don't pay that price because they negotiate their own rates with the drug companies, which are lower.

Sure, we do not pay $800 at the pharmacy when we go to pick up the prescription, but every cent the insurance company pays, we are paying by proxie with added admin costs.
by runarberg | 2025-12-05 23:01:06+00:00
> Categories of _what_, exactly?

Precisely. At least apples and oranges are both fruits, and it makes sense to compare e.g. the sugar contents of each. But an LLM model and the human brain are as different as the wind and the sunshine. You cannot measure the windspeed of the sun and you cannot measure the UV index of the wind.

Your choice of the words here was rather poor in my opinion. Statistical models do not have cognition any more than the wind has ultra-violet radiation. Cognition is a well studied phenomena, there is a whole field of science dedicated to cognition. And while cognition of animals are often modeled using statistics, statistical models in them selves do not have cognition.

A much better word here would by “abilities”. That is that these tests demonstrate the different abilities of LLM models compared to human abilities (or even the abilities of traditional [specialized] models which often do pass these kinds of tests).

Semantics often do matter, and what worries me is that these statistical models are being anthropomorphized way more then is healthy. People treat them like the crew of the Enterprise treated Data, when in fact they should be treated like the ship‘s computer. And I think this because of a deliberate (and malicious/consumer hostile) marketing campaign from the AI companies.
by flumpcakes | 2025-12-05 23:01:26+00:00
Americans pay multiples more per capita, and receive worse healthcare based on outcomes compared to European nations. The UK on average has better oral health than the USA, but Americans love to joke about British teeth... I think the US believes it's own "free market" propaganda too much. Clearly socialised universal healthcare (which every G20 nation does outside the US) is a better system.
by phainopepla2 | 2025-12-05 23:02:46+00:00
> No llm could pass for a person for more than a couple minutes of chatting

I strongly doubt this. If you gave it an appropriate system prompt with instructions and examples on how to speak in a certain way (something different from typical slop, like the way a teenager chats on discord or something), I'm quite sure it could fool the majority of people
by erentz | 2025-12-05 23:03:21+00:00
Depending on your situation, if non emergency and you were able to ask the cash price beforehand you might be surprised that you can get the same CT scan for less than what insurance ultimately paid. At least that’s my experience ($450 vs $1200). You may have to ask at a diagnostic imaging place, not the hospital since the hospitals can never tell you what anything costs they aren’t set up for it. (Of course I went through insurance since I didn’t want to pay out of pocket, but it was an interesting lesson in one of the reasons why healthcare is unnecessarily expensive in the US.)
by muwtyhg | 2025-12-05 23:03:22+00:00
"Anyone involved in harming the country" is easy to say. It's much harder to know what "harming the country" means in this context. One persons censorship is another persons fact checking.

If the government is going after anyone "censoring free speech", they can pick and choose who to apply that to because there is no clear definition of a civilian censoring another civilian (because legally this does not exist).
by sorcercode | 2025-12-05 23:03:25+00:00
I wrote an article (this morning actually!) on picking up Rust to combat AI brain atrophy. My background is JVM-based (Kotlin), and my main contenders were Go vs Rust vs Zig.

My reasoning for settling on Rust:

If I wanted something more general-purpose and ergonomic, I'd stick with something like Kotlin, which has wider ecosystem support. Go could fit here too, but I've heard from more experienced folks that Go's simplicity can get limiting as codebases grow (and requires 100s of developers to be disciplined). Not impossible, just not as conducive.

But since I specifically wanted a performant systems language, I figured I'd go to the other extreme. So my choice was Rust or Zig. I eventually chose Rust (as complicated as Rust can seem) the borrow checker is pretty elegant once it clicks and provides the necessary safety net for a language I intentionally am choosing for more control.

(here's my article on learning Rust if folks are interested: https://kau.sh/blog/learn-rust-ai-atrophy/) - different angle from the linked article.
by sdo72 | 2025-12-05 23:03:26+00:00
We all started getting weird symptoms after the vaccines, not after having covid, you got it backward.

I am not quick to blame the vaccine. If you take the vaccine and immediately after you start develop symptoms, then the chances that the vaccine are doing something strange to the body are very likely, not the virus infection.

And these don't get diagnosed with Covid or having Covid symptoms before, it must be something related to the vaccine. That's evidence, not just observation.

I went to UCI, SoCal Kaiser hospitals and cardiologists 6-7 times, a bunch of tests, no doctors could explain why.

I took the vaccines myself, I am no anti-vaxxer, and when it comes to this situation, I don't see there's conclusive studies about the vaccines.
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-05 23:03:39+00:00
That's usually how it works for me in the US. I go in to the pharmacy, and at least half the time they say 'no cost' and hand me my medication. Sometimes I pay a $25 copay. And if I get an expensive drug from Eli Lilly (e.g. Zepbound) then Eli Lilly pays Walgreens up to $1950/year on my behalf and I never even know about it. The only way I figured it out myself was trying to figure out why my insurance said they paid X, and I paid Y, but I had actually only paid $25. Took a trip onto a Zepbound subreddit to learn about the backdoor payment thing. "Savings card" but not actually a card.
by scottyah | 2025-12-05 23:03:46+00:00
I just mean that in the way that this site is a town square, or all of the rfc's, in that anyone can (for free) see all of the discussions and participate. Just like a town square, not every comment has to be addressed or promoted equally, but I don't know of a better way to release information and allow for anyone to discuss it with others.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-05 23:04:32+00:00
The Turing test is a literal benchmark. Its purpose was to replace an ill-posed question (what does it mean to ask if a machine could "think", when we don't know ourselves what this means- and given that the subjective experience of the machine is unknowable in any case) with a question about the product of this process we call "thinking". That is, if a machine can satisfactorily imitate the output of a human brain, then what it does is at least equivalent to thinking.

"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."