MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-04 18:41:24+00:00
The "hallucination problem" can't be solved, it's intrinsic to how stochastic text and image generators work. It's not a bug to be fixed, it's not some leak in the pipe somewhere, it is the whole pipe.

> there's still going to be a lot of toxic waste generated.

And how are LLMs going to get better as the quality of the training data nosedives because of this? Model collapse is a thing. You can easily see a scenario how they'll never be better than they are now.
by atonse | 2025-12-04 18:42:01+00:00
This reminds me of making a trip to a jeweler when I was < 10 years old, and noticing that they had a weighing scale that seemed to be down to decimal points of a gram (which I guess counts when you're weighing gold, etc).

And the numbers kept changing even when the scale was empty. I think I had a whole conversation with my grandpa about why that was happening, and we came up with "probably just variations in air/breeze around the scale causing them to change"

No idea if that's actually what it was, but it's plausible if you're doing sub-gram weighing?
by nerdjon | 2025-12-04 18:42:09+00:00
> This never happened. We did not overprescribe Ritalin.

I think it is important to stress a difference between "over medicated", "over prescribed", and "over dosed" (often also called over medicated, something I have been guilty of).

An example being my partner, apparently when he was a kid and diagnosed with ADHD he was put on a very high (I am only relaying what I was told) dose that he hated being on. That has caused him now as an adult to be very cautious to go back on the medication.

Where as for myself I was not diagnosed until an adult, was able to actually advocate for myself and I started on the lowest dose possible for all of my medications (also treating Anxiety and Depression). While I do take several medications I would not consider myself over medicated because we have identified that at this point in time all of these medications are actually helpful, but I am very cautious of being on too high of a dose for each of these.

I do think there are likely people that were put on too high of a dose too quickly to expedite treatment, but being on the medication in the first place was not the issue. It doesn't mean that the diagnoses was wrong though.
by skybrian | 2025-12-04 18:42:16+00:00
For an example of a language feature that looks kind of like standard object-oriented inheritance, but isn’t, check out “struct embedding” in Go. Struct embedding gives you the syntax of inheritance and you can even override methods, but for internal self-calls, methods don’t get overridden. (If you wanted to allow that, you’d need to add function pointers or an interface to the struct.)
by SilasX | 2025-12-04 18:42:20+00:00
That's over the entire population, which includes the elderly. For the 18-34yo block, it's 8.3%, and you'd probably expect it even lower for ... well, the population that, to put it bluntly, succeeded in life enough to get into Stanford.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/disa...

Edit: And to clarify, just to be fair, I can accept there are many things that would qualify as "a disability that the education system should care about" but which don't rise to the level of the hard binary classification of "disabled" that would show up in government stats. I'm just saying that the overall 25% figure isn't quite applicable here.
by sedawk | 2025-12-04 18:42:25+00:00
This is true, but is effective only if the dogfooders' feedback is accepted and worked upon. Which is not the case, I can tell you this from first-hand experience (currently work at Msft). Also unleashing and forcing tech savvy people to use immature tools is only asking for trouble when you don't have allocated enough manpower to deal with the fallout (that is, incessant downpour of improvement feedback). One cannot just force engineers to dogfood tools and then ignore them. This is precisely like Win-8 era mania, only this time it's infecting the whole company not just single org!
by hexedpackets | 2025-12-04 18:42:55+00:00
I think the argument still applies on a shorter timescale. The child mortality rate in the US fell from 26 per thousand in 1970 to 7 in 2020 [1]. It seems reasonable that some portion of kids that now have treatable but persistent illnesses such as allergies/asthma would have died just a few decades ago.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-04 18:43:55+00:00
> If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business.

Let's consider the implications of this. We take an existing successful business, change absolutely nothing about it, but separately and for unrelated reasons the local population increases and the government prohibits the construction of new housing.

Now real estate is more scarce and the business has to pay higher rent, so they're making even less than before and there is nothing there for them to increase wages with. Meanwhile the wages they were paying before are now "not a living wage" because housing costs went way up.

Is it this business who is morally culpable for this result, or the zoning board?
by overfeed | 2025-12-04 18:44:12+00:00
> You do come off like you're disingenuously concern trolling over something you don't agree with politically.

Beyond mere political alignment, lots of actual DOGE boys were recruited (or volunteered) from the valley, and hang around HN. Don't be surprised by intentional muddying of the waters. There are bunch of people invested in managing the reputation of DOGE, so their association with it doesn't become a stain on theirs.
by davidivadavid | 2025-12-04 18:44:27+00:00
Looking at it from a slightly different angle, one I find most illuminating, removing "friction" is like removing "difficulty" from a game, and "friction free" as an ideal is like "cheat codes from the start" as an ideal. It's making a game where there's a single button that says "press here to win." The goal isn't the remove "friction", it's the remove a specific type of valueless friction, to replace it with valuable friction.
by lossolo | 2025-12-04 18:44:45+00:00
Are you bald, or are you just imagining things? It affects your quality of life. Because I know a lot of people who struggle with baldness including some in my family, I take it seriously. If you think depression is worth spending time on, then baldness is worth spending time on too. Some people have a head shape that doesn't suit being bald, and they don't look good bald at all. In today's Western world, the majority of women won't choose a bald person if there’s a similar alternative with hair, it's simple biology. Only a minority of people look attractive bald. Good luck on dating apps being bald, seriously. You have no idea what you are talking about.

What you're saying is basically "Let them eat cake".

Here are some meta analysis + studies that support this:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37605428

"2024 mixed methods international survey paper summarizes prior experimental and cross sectional work and notes that studies often find more negative perceptions linked to baldness (e.g., being seen as older, less attractive, less successful)"

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11977830
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-12-04 18:44:56+00:00
I just realised I have been thinking about OSS funding the wrong way around

It’s not “the world economy depends on this stuff why is it not properly funded” (which is true) it’s “never before has a coupe of guys or girls in a garage been able to reach so many people, and stand a chance of getting funding”

The troubles people have finding ways to make a living whilst providing value to people suggests something is wrong not with them but the economy
by standardly | 2025-12-04 18:45:14+00:00
"You do it in your own post, attributing a defined, binary, thing as "I am somewhere on the spectrum"

"You either have some quantity of illness or you don't."

I'm not sure what kind of argument you are making for (or against?) "binary" symptoms. The DSM-5 clearly lays out the spectrum. There is a conglomerate of effects caused by autism, and where you are on "the spectrum" is determined by how many of the symptoms you have, and their severity.

There is nothing wrong with someone claiming "I'm on the spectrum" if you don't know how or what they were diagnosed with. That language is consistent with the DSM. Unless they admitted to self-diagnosing, it seems wrong to assume someone is lying about their own experience.

"You can't just ascribe some quirky, possibly somewhat anti-social, behavior as being on the spectrum"

Quriky, somewhat anti-social behaviour (in your words) essentially is one of the dialogistic criteria. But nobody would be diagnosed with autism for that alone. Just like how autistic folks usually avoid eye contact. That doesn't mean they ALL avoid eye contact, and it also doesn't mean anyone who avoids eye contact is autistic. It's a wholistic diagnosis. One would need to be experiencing SEVERAL of the symptoms to receive an autism diagnosis. IME, the majority on the spectrum are indeed level 1, and high functioning, even to the point others might question if they are really autistic.

If you take issue with people self-diagnosing, I don't think anyone would disagree. But your combativeness in just discussing the topic kind of looks similar to people who refuse to accept that autism is really a thing ("there were no autisms back in my day" kind of thing).
by daft_pink | 2025-12-04 18:45:22+00:00
I think if this were a much larger number like $100k or even $10k, I might agree with your argument, but the fact that this less than 1% of a college degree or less than 1% of a communities total spending on a child or even just a fraction of the minimum wage.

I feel he would have been better off going to someone like Coursera and funding minimum accredited US associates degrees and delivered electronically and delivered for free to anyone in the United States.

It seems like the buying power of $6 billion to deliver electronic services on the cheap would make more sense than giving millions of children a one time amount of essentially pocket change in relation to total spending.
by rovr138 | 2025-12-04 18:45:46+00:00
Okay, the oposite would be, you put a stringent process on how to measure things. You have rigorous testing. These all take time and money, including lost income in time you need to take away, and money paid for the testing.

And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints.

So, what do you do then?

> then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled

Good question. We should study this and figure what the fuck we are messing up as a society... if only we had funding and also we had someone that could act with the findings and take action.

Looks like Stanford might be a good place to start. How's their funding situation?
by aaroninsf | 2025-12-04 18:45:58+00:00
I knew what a glider was,

what I am personally still wondering is,

what is significant about making such a peculiar shape?

I find it difficult to believe that making a recurrent structure that translates in the grid (my lay language of doing what a glider does) requires a preposterously long structure like this,

so my guess was, is the excitement that someone made something extremely long, and there is some kind of race to make bigger and bigger structures with this behavior, akin crudely to the race to compute digits of Pi?

Or is it rather that no one has described a structure which "glides," with this preposterous number of cycles... which I would guess is coupled to the size?

Or is it rather that no one has described a 1D structure which "glides," at all...?

I would think that if what's desired is to find novel larger-scale structures, the best approach today would be to just fuzz noise of all kinds in large windows, let them iterate, and put the energy into the ML which evaluates the evolution of the world to categorize the results...
by ActorNightly | 2025-12-04 18:46:09+00:00
You are correct in the sense that a single person can't change anything, but the issue is a level deeper. The thing is, even if you dislike a company and don't use it, you aren't willing to bully people who do use it.

If as a society, we were more willing to police ourselves, you would see real change. In the end, acceptance of peers is the number one fundamental drive for a lot of people past basic needs.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-12-04 18:46:15+00:00
"In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents,"

I thought in 2008 we told the incumbents "you are the most important component of our economy. We will allow everybody to go down the drain but you. That's because you caused the problem, so you are the only ones to guide us out of it"
by zubiaur | 2025-12-04 18:46:48+00:00
I would think so too. There is something else going though. It a system that relies partly on trust. A sort of moral asset with herd effects. It’s a system that can tolerate a certain amount of gaming, but when the threshold is surpassed, it becomes a failed system. It has to change, to the detriment of the justly entitled.

And that is the sad part, when that unstated assumption, that one may not lie, is broken past a threshold, it increases the transaction cost for everyone.
by westurner | 2025-12-04 18:46:49+00:00
"Cage: Hardware-Accelerated Safe WebAssembly" (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11456v2 :

> Abstract: WebAssembly (WASM) is an immensely versatile and increasingly popular compilation target. It executes applications written in several languages (e.g., C/C++) with near-native performance in various domains (e.g., mobile, edge, cloud). Despite WASM's sandboxing feature, which isolates applications from other instances and the host platform, WASM does not inherently provide any memory safety guarantees for applications written in low-level, unsafe languages.

> To this end, we propose Cage, a hardware-accelerated toolchain for WASM that supports unmodified applications compiled to WASM and utilizes diverse Arm hardware features aiming to enrich the memory safety properties of WASM. Precisely, Cage leverages Arm's Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) to (i) provide spatial and temporal memory safety for heap and stack allocations and (ii) improve the performance of WASM's sandboxing mechanism. Cage further employs Arm's Pointer Authentication (PAC) to prevent leaked pointers from being reused by other WASM instances, thus enhancing WASM's security properties.

> We implement our system based on 64-bit WASM. We provide a WASM compiler and runtime with support for Arm's MTE and PAC. On top of that, Cage's LLVM-based compiler toolchain transforms unmodified applications to provide spatial and temporal memory safety for stack and heap allocations and prevent function pointer reuse. Our evaluation on real hardware shows that Cage incurs minimal runtime (<5.8%) and memory (<3.7%) overheads and can improve the performance of WASM's sandboxing mechanism, achieving a speedup of over 5.1%, while offering efficient memory safety guarantees.

Src: https://github.com/TUM-DSE/cage-meta

llvm-memsafe-wasm: https://github.com/TUM-DSE/llvm-memsafe-wasm :

> A LLVM fork to implement MTE-based memory safety for WASM

wasmtime-mte: https://github.com/TUM-DSE/wasmtime-mte :

> A fork of wasmtime to implement MTE-based memory safety for WASM

wasm-tools-mte: https://github.com/TUM-DSE/wasm-tools-mte

wasi-libc: https://github.com/martin-fink/wasi-libc
by rkomorn | 2025-12-04 18:47:10+00:00
Facing Worlds was really something. Getting absurd streaks mowing down bots wasn't particularly challenging but it sure felt good.

And wine made it playable on FreeBSD which was quite something to behold.

Especially when my friend launched it on the 256 color, literal X term I had at home. Solid 0.2 FPS over the network.
by crapple8430 | 2025-12-04 18:47:15+00:00
There are different levels of anti-user checks. Some only detect unlocked bootloader and/or root. Others use the play integrity anti-feature provided by Google. GrapheneOS tells you when apps request play integrity checks, and you'll see that a lot of apps do these requests constantly, even if they don't actually block you for using an unlocked or non-vendor system (custom key but otherwise locked and not rooted like GOS).

We really need a more foolproof technical solution for this if general purpose computing on the mobile phone is to be preserved. Perhaps some type of a remote control scheme to operate on a "slave" device. Failing that, if I do need one of such apps needing "strong" integrity, I'd probably look into getting an iPhone for those.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-04 18:47:58+00:00
> I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

How would they? They are a monopoly, and partake in aggressive product bundling and price manipulation tactics. They juice their user numbers by enabling things in enterprise tenants by default.

If a product of theirs doesn't sell, they bundle it for "free" in the next tier up of license to drive adoption and upgrades. Case in point, the InTune suite (includes EntraID P2, Remote assistance, endpoint privilege management) will now be included in E5, and the price of E5 is going up (by $10/user/month, less than the now bundled features cost when bought separately). People didn't buy it otherwise, so now there's an incentive to move customers off E3 and into E5.

Now their customers are in a place where Microsoft can check boxes, even if the products aren't good, so there's little incentive to switch.

Try to price out Google Workspace (and also, an office license still because someone will need Excel), Identity, EDR, MDM for Windows, mac, mobile, slack, VoIP, DLP, etc. You won't come close to Microsoft's bundled pricing by piecing together the whole M365 stack yourself.

So yeah, they escape market discipline because they are the only choice. Their customers are fully captive.
by whizzter | 2025-12-04 18:48:21+00:00
The problem is the arbitrary way the funding is allocated, find something interesting to companies du jour with a clear path to funding and you're golden.

If whatever OSS is too obscure to be noticed by non-techies but still fundamental (think OpenSSL, libxz,etc) it's more likely to lead to burnout far before anyone wants to put in any sane money (curl is one of few counter-examples but that hasn't had a straight journey).
by rovr138 | 2025-12-04 18:48:29+00:00
I would love to have experts look at the data of this self reported community survey vs the CDC's data.

---

To the edit, I can agree.

We are talking ultimately what ADA classifies as a dissability. Which is different from what might be needed for driving (as an example).

ADA has requirements. Doctors have their definitions. They're being met.

If a doctor abuses it, then we should be going for the doctors. As was said in another comment, while they are human and susceptible, they also are the ones with the license.
by Swenrekcah | 2025-12-04 18:48:38+00:00
Those are real words, that’s true. The following however is anywhere from not true to wild speculation without any factual basis.

>Global responsibility sounds like the direct opposite of self-determination.

>Some United Nations NGO bureaucrats being brought in to administer it, without acknowledging local knowledge. Getting UNESCO to administer it is not "honoring indigenous traditions"

>Also "store carbon", is more cargo cult pop science.

>They are probably trying to refer to trapping and reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but this is a misleading way of doing so.
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-04 18:48:58+00:00
That's not at all what I'm talking about. I know it's confusing because I used the word "transferred," but if you don't put your own misunderstanding into my statement, you'll notice that I didn't say from a 35mm negative. It's just a complete transfer of the frames as they were meant for film but crucially, not from film, into a digital file.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-04 18:49:05+00:00
Being diagnosed with the disorder does not automatically qualify as a disability. This article, and many people in this thread seem not to be able to distinguish between the rising rate of diagnoses, and being disabled or needing accommodation.

I have been diagnosed as being several different types of neuro-divergent, but I am also not qualified as disabled and do not need or want any special dispensation. I would say that I have been relatively successful in life by almost anyone's metrics without it.

There is still an enormous advantage in understanding yourself, even without the expectation of accommodation or medication. I was also, sadly, not diagnosed until my mid-40's.

I would have had a much easier time getting to where I am today if diagnostic criteria and awareness among clinical staff were better when I was younger.
by furyofantares | 2025-12-04 18:49:07+00:00
I am an autist in a family filled with autists - some of whom I think you would CLEARLY recognize as autistic, but some of whom you'd have this "absolute nonsense" reaction to. I say that because that is the reaction I had myself, I was very skeptical of this whole thing until I came to learn a lot about it after my daughter was diagnosed.

I don't think it's mainstream science, but monotropism is a theory of attention which has been theorized as the central underlying feature of autism and you might be interested in looking it up. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think the more mainstream way of talking about it is bottom up processing (details, the trees rather than the forest) vs top down processing (holistic, the forest rather than the trees).

Either way - you can get a very diverse set of results depending on how which sorts of things the individual's attention gets commandeered by, and by how much. Some people can't stop paying attention to individual sounds or individual tactile sensations or any other individual sensation, some people have difficulty putting sentences together despite having an excellent grasp of each word, some get stuck trying to process specific individual facial expressions and fail to grasp the actual social dynamics going on around them - it goes on and on.

Some have special interests (deep attention to a specific topic) that are extremely economically profitable (programming) or simply socially mainstream (music or movies) which give them social cachet. Some have special interests that mark them as weird and socially outcast (collecting bugs, memorizing bus routes). Some are very intelligent and are able to make up for a lot of difficulties with effort. Some have a great focus on social dynamics and come off quite charming. All of this can add up to very different experiences though life, very different sets of difficulties, and that of course can compound.

I think you should expect there to be a very wide variety of autistic people, if there is an underlying similarity in processing things. There is a very wide variety of non-autistic people, too. Heck, I think there's a wide variety of people with only one hand, just because Jim Abbott was a major league baseball pitcher doesn't mean he actually had two hands, and just because Muggsy Bogues was a great NBA player doesn't mean he wasn't short.
by alwa | 2025-12-04 18:49:11+00:00
But, like—isn’t the bleaker thing that that seems so existential of an outcome? The vast majority don’t go to Stanford. The vast majority of those aren’t valedictorian.

And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war…