skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If you do this, you’ve just recreated an MD program for no real reason.

If there was a dramatic increase in the number of medical schools, I'd see no reason maybe. But I think flexibility of educational tracks is another. My point is these are the kinds of discussions that need to happen. And it's also important to keep in mind the question of whether or not X training in Y field is actually necessary or if it's unnecessary overhead. We assume a certain educational model is necessary for safety but that's not clear at all, especially as you get into specialties. As some have pointed out, current residency practices might even decrease patient safety in a lot of ways.

Arguments about curriculum rigor also seem questionable to me if you consider, eg all the foreign medical school graduates and DO graduates practicing just fine. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on them, just they also tend to have lower scores etc and have long respectable practices.

>Physicians salaries only make up 8.5% of healthcare spending.

For what it's worth I don't think it's the salaries per se, it's the cost multipliers due to lack of options. I think NPs and PAs are just one example. The question is, if other service provision models were adopted, how would it decrease service costs? I don't think it's possible to extrapolate costs of service from physician salaries in this model to costs of service in a different model.

Let's say eg you required vaccines to be administered by a physician. There would be huge costs associated with that that wouldn't be represented by salaries alone. There would be delivery bottlenecks that could be leveraged by unscrupulous actors, an increase in price solely due to bottlenecks and so forth.

And that's not even getting into patient satisfaction due to increased choice, that might not be reflected in costs at all.

Also it's important to clarify I am not in favor of private equity run care, and in fact would prefer (single payer) public health care provided for all citizens.

I just think there's a lot that more types of providers could be providing now.
I can believe this is possible from a cost perspective, but I cannot believe that local governments can have leadership quality that is sufficient to do this well most of the time.
People seem confused about the UI. You don't need to click, just move. Most keys on the keyboard correspond to a color. Shift + those keys sets the background.

I like it that there's no hint, it just rewards exploration and experimentation.
> Lutron Clear Connect is great, but it’s not even a standard within Lutron. It’s a whole bunch of things, often wildly incompatible with each other. At least most of their stuff is compatible with Pico.

Yeah, what I was trying to get at was specifically their Caseta line with 433 MHz Clear Connect (and not their more expensive solutions, which are also great, but a completely different tier).

> But I’m surprised you put Z-Wave above Zigbee.

I was a late-comer to Z-Wave, so I haven't used anything below Z-Wave 800 devices, and it's been solid for me, though I've been very judicious in the quality of devices I pick up, and am careful with device configuration to limit chatter, which can wreck Z-Wave networks. Zigbee has also been solid for me - the real upside for me with Z-Wave is simply the better range/reduced interference of 900 MHz vs 2.4 GHz.

> I haven’t used Zigbee and Thread much, but my understanding is that Zigbee’s mesh should expect much lower latency than Z-Wave, and that Thread is even better. And Thread can supposedly sort-of-transparently use Ethernet backhaul to extend the mesh. Sadly the Thread ecosystem appears to be a mess.

Thread's been pretty good for me too - but again, I'm pretty careful about devices. I use ethernet-connected Apple TVs on each floor of my house for the backhaul and don't have any thread devices that aren't also HomeKit compatible.
I changed the way I wrote my y's (now very curly) and z's (now crossed) in college while studying math after realizing I was making silly mistakes changing y's to x's and z's to 2's.
your 200+ git repo's attest to that !
Same here.

>>contemporary C++30 can express the ideas embodied in such old-style code far simpler

IMO, newer C++ versions are becoming more complex (too many ways to do the same thing), less readable (prefer explicit types over 'auto', unless unavoidable) and harder to analyse performance and memory implications (hard to even track down what is happening under the hood).

I wish the C++ language and standard library would have been left alone, and efforts went into another language, say improving Rust instead.
Some years ago in a very idle moment I was searching for a place on Earth where you could anchor an hypothetical space elevator.

You'd need a place near the equator, preferably unsettled but still politically stable. A mountain would be nice to shorten the length, but mountains are difficult.

For my internal fantasy I settled on Ascension Island, part of a British Overseas Territory, at 7.5° South.

It's not natively settled, the only people there are for work, military, spooks, space agencies for tracking and telecommunications. With the arrival of European explorers there was an ecological extinction, mostly the island seems to be barren.

And the name, of course, is perfect for a space elevator fantasy.
The Lost Voice of 60M: How Marie Arana Is Writing a Chapter for Latinos
Both TFA and your comment raise valid concerns. That said, some points in both seem to conflate Bitcoin with traditional monetary systems in ways that don’t quite hold for me.

TFA: Bitcoin and Quantum Risk

> Global Infrastructure can be upgraded, Bitcoin cannot.

Bitcoin has already undergone significant upgrades (SegWit, Taproot, Lightning Network). Transitioning to quantum-resistant cryptography would be complex but not impossible, which TFA acknowledges, as well as the difficulties presented by the decentralized consensus model. That said, the same quantum threat applies to existing financial infrastructure, including banking, government systems, and encrypted communications. These systems will likely upgrade, and if Bitcoin remains valuable, it seems likely to adapt as well.

> An estimated 24 million BTC—25% of all Bitcoin—resides in vulnerable wallets.

This is a legitimate concern, but the assumption that quantum attacks would instantly drain these funds without any network-wide response overlooks how Bitcoin has handled security risks in the past. Solutions like soft forks, address migrations, or layer-2 mitigations could play a role if such a threat became imminent/apparent.

WRT your comments on inflation and investment

> The normal level of inflation […] is just a consequence of the fundamental fact that certain amounts of money in the future is worth less than the same amount of money today.

This seems to assume inflation is inherent, rather than a result of policy choices. Historically, we’ve seen long periods of monetary stability under commodity-backed systems. Bitcoin, being supply-capped, follows a different model—whether that’s good or bad depends on whether you believe inflation is necessary for economic growth.

> Currencies that have a fixed cap are fundamentally bad for investments.

Debt-driven growth models rely on flexible money supply, but investment doesn’t necessarily require inflation. Gold-backed systems supported lending through alternative mechanisms like equity-based financing. If Bitcoin were to play a major role in finance, it might push economies toward similar non-debt-based structures.

As for your point on Bitcoin’s Long-Term Viability

> If it can’t attract a significant number of new people willing to stuff their money into the Bitcoin machine, Bitcoin essentially loses all of its value.

Is this not true for any asset? Gold, for example, isn’t required for transactions— it retains value because people want to hold it. Bitcoin’s “value” is similarly also tied to its properties—decentralization, censorship resistance, fixed supply. Its future depends on whether people continue to find those properties useful, not solely on its ability to attract new entrants.

Concerns around quantum security, Bitcoin’s governance, and its long-term sustainability are real, but dismissing it as “just a gamble” overlooks its existing use cases. A more interesting discussion might be: What would it take for Bitcoin to adapt?

Given its history, outright failure seems less likely than some form of evolution.
You mean you don't need .local, .config, .cache, .fonts, and .<appname> x <# of apps>? /s

Makes me want to run off a read-only DVD.
There is a stable ABI for these purposes, it's called the C ABI. Or you could use modern "naked functions" support and set up your own function prologues, epilogues and parameter passing in assembly code.
I wonder if China is going to step up to the plate and swipe all that American influence under their umbrella. They can print out yuan the same way we print dollars except that theirs are backed by being the world's factory.
And a hotkey to go directly to the space. Only seem to work for spaces now and not fullscreen apps, which I make heavy use of
We are destroying software by directly contradicting ourselves when we describe how we are destroying software.
He won’t be the only person getting a bonus. Or a fancy office conference table. Or offsite team building exercises in Hawaii.
I cannot comprehend what point you're trying to make or how you derived it from me describing my own lived experience. I have lived elsewhere, even outside the US. I know nyc isn't the only way to live and I'm not telling anyone it's the best. Just that it's not as dangerous as portrayed in some media and it's possible to live a fulfilling life and even raise kids.
This is a good resource, and pretty much what I tell students in my classes. I take great care to explain how to write symbols, and I also give multiple pronunciations of the Greek letters.

Students with math and physics backgrounds are fine with Greek letters and other mathematical symbols, but the biologists in the class are mystified. They also get terribly confused when I reuse symbols for different purposes.

What I've discovered is that the students who have trouble with mathematical notation and reasoning got derailed when a teacher, in an early grade, said "let x be the unknown". That is a phrase that never comes up in other contexts, and I think it throws them off track. Many find it difficult to get back on-track later, so they memorize and sleep-walk their way through other mathematics classes until the system no longer insists that they take them. A shame, really.
Not really. Now when I want to uninstall something, I have to look in multiple places for its artifacts, rather than just nuking .<appname>. And there is no universal pattern of use. It's even worse than /usr vs /opt.
You don't 'have' to keep up with the language and I don't know that many people try to keep up with every single new feature - but it is worse to be one of those programmers for whom C++ stopped at C++03 and fight any feature introduced since then (the same people generally have strong opinions about templates too).

There are certainly better tools for many jobs and it is important to have languages to reach for depending on the task at hand. I don't know that anything is better than C++ for performance sensitive code.
Sure you can punch in a chemical fingerprint for say the smell of a specific type of rose.
Maybe it doesn't matter for the learning process that in an equivalent human experience it was preceeded by someone making you a compliment a couple minutes earlier, or that it was combined with all the other chemical fingerprints present at the moment, like maybe it just rained shortly before and there's a slight smell of wet earth in the air or someone smoking a cigarette walked by and there's minimal leftovers of that, or the window wasn't opened for a couple hours and everything has a slight tint of "used air" to it, which might add a factor of dampened learning, which might be necessary for the specific learning process to happen slow enough to sink in properly etc...

Don't get me wrong I would be curious to see such research done to see whether it would improve anything above the stochastic parrot level - it's just going to take a while to figure out what is even relevant
A simple first step is to remove section 230 protections from any platform that utilizes algorithmic filtering.

Allowing users to do their own filtering is pretty hands-off, and basic moderation is necessary for most online platforms to function, but providing tailor-made echo chambers for each user goes way too far into curation to reasonably claim the platform bears no responsibility for its content.
But why would we do that even if we could? Making a very expensive machine act like a human is essentially useless, it is not like there is a shortage of humans on Earth. It wouldn't even be a great model of a human brain.

The reason we are doing all that is for its potential uses. Write letters, code, help customers, find information, etc... Even AGI is not about making artificial humans, it is about solving general problems (that's the "G").

And even if we could make artificial humans, there would be a philosophical problem. Since the idea is to make these AIs work for us, if we make these AI as human-like as possible, isn't it slavery? It is like making artificial meat but insist on making the meat-making machine conscious so that it can feel being slaughtered.
This is awkward—I use em-dash all the time on HN! I'm not an LLM (as far as I know); I just like to write neatly when I'm able to, and it's very low friction when you're familiar with your keyboard compose sequences[0]. It's a trivial four keypresses,

AltR(hold) - - -

(The discoverability of these functions is way too low, on GNOME/Linux; I really dislike the direction of modern UX, with its fake simplicity, and infantalization of users. Way more people would be using —'s and friends if they were easily discoverable and prominently hinted in their UX. "It's documented in x.org man pages" is an unacceptable state of affairs for a core GUI workflow).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118338#35118598 (On "Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen" (2023); 356 comments)
since -14 or -17 I feel no need to keep up with it. thats cool if they add a bunch more stuff, but what I'm using works great now. I only feel some "peer pressure" to signal to other people that I know c++20, but as of now, I've put nothing into it. I think it's best to lag behind a few years (for this language, specifically).
If you only read HN, you would think C++ died years ago.

As someone who worked in HFT, C++ is very much alive and new projects continue to be created in it simply because of the sheer of amount of experts in it. (For better or for worse)
> support for up to 128GB of ECC memory

Since Strix Halo desktop supports ECC, perhaps a SH laptop will also have ECC memory.
> But that isn’t how language models work. LLMs model the distribution of words and phrases in a language as tokens. Their responses are nothing more than a statistically likely continuation of the prompt.

Not saying the author is wrong in general, but this kind of argument always annoys me. It's effectively a Forer statement for the "sceptics" side: It appears like a full-on refutation, but really says very little. It also evokes certain associations which are plain incorrect.

LLMs are functions that return a probability distribution of the next word given the previous words; this distribution is derived from the training data. That much is true. But this does not tell anything about how the derivation and probability generation processes actually work or how simple or complex they are.

What it does however, is evoke two implicit assumptions without justifying them:

1) LLMs fundamentally cannot have humanlike intelligence, because humans are qualitatively different: An LLM is a mathematical model and a human is, well, a human.

Sounds reasonable until you have a look at the human brain and find that human consciousness and thought too could be represented as nothing more than interactions between neurons. At which point, it gets metaphysical...

2) It implies that because LLMs are "statistical models", they are essentially slightly improved Markov chains. So if an LLM predicts the next word, it would essentially just look up where the previous words appeared in its training data most often and then return the next word from there.

That's not how LLMs work at all. For starters, the most extensive Markov chains have a context length of 3 or 4 words, while LLMs have a context length of many thousand words. Your required amounts of training data would go to "number of atoms in the universe" territory if you wanted to create a Markov chain with comparable context length.

Secondly, as current LLMs are based on the mathematical abstraction of neural networks, the relationship between training data and the eventual model weights/parameters isn't even fully deterministic: The weights are set to initial values based on some process that is independent of the training data - e.g. they are set to random values - and then incrementally adjusted so that the model can increasingly replicate the training data. This means that the "meaning" of individual weights and their relationship to the training data remains very unclear, and there is plenty of space in the model where higher-level "semantic" representations might evolve.

None of that is proof that LLMs have "intelligence", but I think it does show that the question can't be simply dismissed by saying that LLMs are statistical models.
I didn't even realise I still had stuff in ~/Applications. Probably got there via some Installer wizard...

ls ~/Applications
Autodesk Fusion Service Utility.app
Autodesk Fusion.app
Chrome Apps.localized
Edge Apps.localized
Remove Autodesk Fusion.app

ls -ls /Applications | wc -l
94
> Also, have a billing system that lets the patient pay on discharge (like restaurants).

If we're wishing, let's wish for it to be like car repair. Where they have to give us a quote before they begin service. Need some allowance for billing for care when you were unable to consent, like when an ambulance picks you up for an emergency, or if something unexpected comes up during a surgery.
It's not clear that anyone ever lived there in a self sufficient manner:

An outpost was established at Dundas Harbour in 1924, and it was leased to Hudson's Bay Company nine years later. The collapse of fur prices led to the dispersal of 52 Baffin Island Inuit families on the island in 1934. It was considered a disaster due to wind conditions and the much colder climate, and the Inuit chose to leave in 1936. Dundas Harbour was populated again in the late 1940s, but it was closed again in 1951. Only the ruins of a few buildings remain today.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devon_Island

The fur trapping may have been sustained by barrels of pickled fish and the Inuit families that remained left within 24 months following economic collapse.

Today, with a cash injection, training for Mars, Moon, Asteroids, it's been attempted a few times (see Wikipedia).

You'd want energy storage for the long dark, well insulated greenhouses for the short growing season, small animals for company and perhaps heat and food, it's a tough environment.

A big challenge to living there indefinitely with no resupply is growing food during the dark times. You might get by with enough wind turbines to power artifical grow lights.

Until you need parts.
> Self-determination does not apply here because the current population is not indigenous

What a ridiculous (even racist) argument!

Are you seriously going to tell us that only native North Americans can vote in the next US or Canadian elections!
It's also significantly genetically determined (twin studies) so in this case I meant genetic heritability.

Also for some reason people seem to think I'm making a comment about high IQ and elitism.

I think low IQ is far more important for poverty discussion. Like sub 80 IQ is a significant percentage of population while being close to or having a mental disability. Sub 100 kind of makes it hard to have a well paying job in today's economy.

And not only is genetic factor big here but also having low IQ/poor parents means your environment will likely have a negative impact on your cognitive development.
I see your point, but it makes it hard for Rust programmers to grok the code, as all caps denotes a constant. Even enums are camel case.
It feels like we are stuck in two different worlds with this stuff right now. One being the AI users that interface solely through app based things like ChatGPT, who have been burned over and over again by hallucinations or lack of context, to the point of disillusionment. The other world is the one where developers who are working with agentic systems built on frontier models right now are literally watching AGI materialize in front of us in real time. I think 2025 will be the year those worlds converge (for the better).
We destroyed software when we stopped writing machine code by hand.
> Also, why do I have to install new software in every couple of months to access my bank account, secure chat, flight booking system, etc., etc., without any noticable difference in operation and functionality. A lot of things unreasonably becoming incompatible with 'old' (we are talking about months for f's sake!!) versions. That's a nuisance and erosion of trust.

Are you talking about security updates?
Thank you, for a second there I thought the company behind Trader Joes Black Forest Bacon was also getting in on the AI rush.
I was an extreme C++ bigot back in the late 90's, early 2000's. My license plate back then was CPPHACKR[1]. But industry trends and other things took my career in the direction of favoring Java, and I've spent most of the last 20+ years thinking of myself as mainly a "Java guy". But I keep buying new C++ books and I always install the C++ tooling on any new box I build. I tell myself that "one day" I'm going to invest the time to bone up on all the new goodies in C++ since I last touched it, and have another go.

When the heck that day will actually arrive, FSM only knows. The will is sort-of there, but there are just SO many other things competing for my time and attention. :-(

[1]: funny side story about that. For anybody too young to remember just how hot the job market was back then... one day I was sitting stopped at a traffic light in Durham (NC). I'm just minding my own business, waiting for the light to change, when I catch a glimpse out of my side mirror, of somebody on foot, running towards my car. The guy gets right up to my car, and I think I had my window down already anyway. Anyway, the guy gets up to me, panting and out of breath from the run and he's like "Hey, I noticed your license plate and was wondering if you were looking for a new job." About then the light turned green in my direction, and I'm sitting there for a second in just stunned disbelief. This guy got out of his car, ran a few car lengths, to approach a stranger in traffic, to try to recruit him. I wasn't going to sit there and have a conversation with horns honking all around me, so I just yelled "sorry man" and drove off. One of the weirder experiences of my life.
Yocto still has dependencies on a bootstrap build distro.

Stagex + Yocto would be fully reproducible from a small seed.

> Yocto would make the base for a good general purpose desktop distro

YP has been working on a public binary reference cache/distro.