skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actual paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/0... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43002458)
There are no ambiguities in the Monty Hall problem. It's usually people who skim read and make assumptions about the challenge. No new problem is going to stop people from skim reading.

For example, going by that ddg search, one result is making a fuss about not knowing whether Monty opens a door at random and happens to show a goat, or purposefully opens a door with a goat behind it. But we do know: it's always on purpose, Monty never opened a door with a car behind it, thus prematurely ending the bet. So there's no ambiguity.

The problem is cool because the right answer doesn't seem intuitively right, even though it can be formally shown to be right.
The problem as stated has the host open an incorrect door and offer the player a chance to change his choice. Inferring that another possible variation might exist does not change the fact that we are discussing the variation that was presented. Both you and Diaconis are wrong.
Take that AI :)
I think the article's author may have seen the cs.DS classification on the arxiv and assumed it meant Data Science instead of Data Structures
Where's he getting that $94.7B, from the US Treasury?
It's a 500B company that undercuts everyone else with incredible efficiency, just like Amazon. It's an example of how capitalism can be great. If you really want to get of out of capitalism, you can just buy directly from farmers or grow your own food.

The whole thing about no ethical consumption under capitalism is a just a way to enjoy the conveniences of capitalism on a moral high ground. It's totally doable, you just might not enjoy it haha.
> For such an interesting and perhaps important line of work, there seems to be a surprising lack of psychometric rigor in certain corners of the literature.

I agree! That's why I wrote it

> I'm skeptical that this is a reliable analysis

I think it's fair to ask whether the headline ("Claude is More Anxious than GPT") is correct, and it's fair to ask whether distance-to-reference-text-embeddings-across-answers is a good or valid metric for "personality". But it is true that we see the numbers reported in the document for the given input/output pairs, and it makes sense that LLM output distribution would vary between models and, as the paper shows, between model families.
Perhaps, shall check with him! But this is only one example, there’s a lot of other places as well. In case you’re interested to see more the project we’re working on is https://github.com/plexe-ai/smolmodels
Everyone agrees the Australian energy mix will involve lots of solar power. The coalition's policy [0] is keeping all the options open - just insistent that nuclear should be in the mix. And lifting the major legal impediments to developing nuclear power is just common sense, our policy on that has been insane for decades.

Although I don't want to be seen as defending the their overall plan. The part where they want the government to own a nuclear reactor is raw madness and it is hard to see how it'll come together as anything but an expensive disaster. Especially if the Labor party offers any resistance of any kind.

[0] https://www.australianeedsnuclear.org.au/our-plan
I'm a founder who is pretty sympathetic to the idea of cooperatives.

The simple answer is that I am not savvy enough with financial instruments to be confident that I can structure something that can't be preyed upon if it's successful. I know I care about making sure my employees are well-treated - you shouldn't believe me when I say that, but I believe me, and that means that in terms of my own ethics there's not much reason not to maintain control and depend on my own judgment. If I want to divide 70% of the profits up among my employees, nothing is going to stop me from doing that, so why not keep my options open?
Unfortunately this doesn't address the problem I'm describing.

My team had these ontologies available to the LLM and provided it in the context window. The queries were ontologically sensible at a surface level, but still wrong.

The problem is that your ontology is rapidly changing in non-obvious and hard to document ways e.g. "this report is only valid if it was generated on a tuesday or thursday after 1pm because that's when the ETL runs, at any other time the data will be incorrect"
Fair enough! Thats a good point :)
I live in Palo Alto and previously went to grad school in Berkeley, and I can corroborate. Frankly you wouldn't need to spend more than a couple hours in either location to pick up on those vibes.
Look, HN people don't like Tesla. A lot of German people in positions of power don't like Tesla. Suddenly an article appears that explicitly highlights Tesla vehicles as not passing TÜV because they allegedly have quality issues. The article mentions no details. If you search for details on Google, you get a list of very similar looking articles all citing the same statement from a TÜV person. None of those provide any details on the actual issues. If no details are provided, the only thing to do is guess.

It's really quite clear what's going on here.

The TÜV does not assess the reliability of a car. The reasons for a car failing an inspection after 3 years can be manifold. It doesn't mean that the car "won't age well" or anything along those lines.

If you dislike Tesla, then say it - it's fine. No need to support vague smear campaigns.

In fact, right now Tesla has the best electric car technology available on the market. Along with the best charging network available on the market. And the best software (light years ahead of the competition) on the market. Also they don't require you to service the car for a long time. That makes German people especially afraid that they lose their car manufacturing, selling and servicing business. And rightly so. No smear campaign and no comparing apples to oranges will save them from reforming and restoring their competitiveness in a very long painful process.
The point presumably is that the valuation in a round is paper money. Whereas Elon's group have just offered cash, so they've set the actual value. The law might only care that the non-profit gets a market cash value actually bid, not the speculative value that it could have based on multipling how much some shares were sold by the number of shares.
Villaraigosa did this - the former mayor of LA. He got divorced and kept the name, so hard to say what happens down the line there.

I tried supremely hard to merge my partner's last name and my own but each iteration sounded multiples worse than our own last names. We've kept our original surnames and given our kiddo a hyphenated one.
He always had it? Money give influence naturally.

I've listened to a history podcast about the robber barons and how following the backlash and dismantlement of the Standard oil, industrialist started buying articles, sometime even newspapers to sell their stories, and in the US, it worked wonderfully. You still have the brand "Quaker" that was born at the time, and probably a dozen other, where they manipulated their own famillial history to build an image, and hide the fact that children died in their mine or that they just had 20 redneck strikers killed. It's not as bad today, but building a personal brand by buying puff articles, fondations. Buying goodwill and influence was always present since at least that time (Honestly, Berkshire Hathaway made at least some of its money on WB reputation, so tech billionaires are not the only kind of CEO who do it)
Problem isn’t a bot traffic. I run an Ecommerce site and scammers run python scripts to test 1000s of cards per hour if there is no captcha. I hate it, my customers hate it, scammers hate it, but it is the only thing that keeps my merchant account running. Any advise is welcome!
I tried, mabe a firefox issue
I come from a country that has rounding. The unrounded price always shown on the shelf, and is what you pay unless it's cash.

If you do pay cash, it's not the item's price that's rounded, it's the total. That's important because the amount being rounded is essentially random, so the shop can't chose a price that would be rounded in one direction. In a $10 purchase using 0.05 rounding the maximum difference amounts to 0.4%, but is usually 0.2% or less. It's so small it could be used as an advertising gimmick, and consequently some retailers chose to always round down. The remainder went with rounding to the nearest with the lowest value winning in a tie.

I do not remember a single one always rounding up. That would be a customer relations disaster.
Distribution of Earnings Among Patreon Projects Charging by the Month
> But these kits only cost a few hundred euros. So why not? If it saves me 10 euro per month or so, it would earn itself back in 3-4 years under ideal circumstances

I'm not saying this is an unreasonable position, but the net present value of an investment that pays 10 euros a month for 4 years is also a couple of hundred euros. So in the end it might be a wash (or might not beat out investing in higher yield projects)

https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/present...
You sure ?

Seeing Elon Musk, it could be a plausible move to screw financing for OpenAI.

Without financing OpenAI may not have enough runway to survive. That would create a bigger market for x.AI, and also as a bonus act as a personal revenge on OpenAI.

https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/

Musk is clearly referring on their lack of funds at the end of this message.
Meet Atkinson Hyperlegible Next and Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono
I disagree.

Many problems are abstract and so we have to build "cartoon" models of what's going on, trying to distill the essence of the problem down to a simple narrative for what the shape of the problem space is and where the limitations are. That often works but backfires when the cartoon is wrong or some assumptions are violated about when the cartoon description works.

Results like this are pretty rare, nowadays, and I suspect this happened because the problem was niche enough or some new idea has had time to ferment that could be applied to this region. This seems like a pretty foundational result, so maybe I'm wrong about that for this case.

A lot of progress is made when there's deeper knowledge about the problem space along with some maturity for when these cartoon descriptions are invalid.
I think you're correct about the importer paying the tariff, but it doesn't really matter, does it? If I sell into the US and have to pay the tariff, I'm going to raise my prices to cover the additional expense. Regardless of who pays, the importer's final cost is higher, who then passes it onto the consumer.
now we have experts who know everything!
The list is at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2014/3140/schedule/1/mad... , linked from the rules at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/incorporation-and...

Enforcement may vary.
While Russia (in the "best" traditions of USSR) has recently, as a response to Ukrainian drones, outlawed detailed Russian topographic data _inside_ Russia.
It doesn't matter. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
TIL: Masked Language Models Are Surprisingly Capable Zero-Shot Learners
But isn't it the case that the cash cow for Amazon is actually AWS? That is, without AWS would we consider Amazon to be the success we see it as today?
Couldn't the prior actions and TikTok be taken as precedents for a National Security takeover? Put it under DOGE?
Rethinking Cancer: Fenbendazole, Mebendazole, and Ivermectin Combined
And I can install flask and get mad at it because auth isn’t built in, or it doesn’t auto generate endpoints based on my markdown api spec or whatever idk i haven’t used flask in a while.

CORS is a basic part of browser security. Yes it’s frustrating when you first encounter it, but the next step is to understand it and why it’s actually quite a good thing that it exists. Or you could write a blog post i guess.
> [...] the problem (as originally stated) doesn’t specify that the host always opens a door and offers a switch. Maybe he only offers a trade when you initially picked the good door.

That would make no sense. Also, Monty always opens a door with a goat. The problem is well-formed, but most people misrepresent it in order to object to it.
I’ve not installed these balcony kits, but I’d be surprised if they used microinverters..

Either way, there is no issue using the panels in the kit you linked to in the way described; they are separate panels with standard MC4 connectors. Just unplug the inverter and plug in the grid forming one.
[Misread, mb - ty @Jarwain]
Picking two examples out of all people approaching problems, while ignoring wasted effort and failures to make progress because of not understanding current knowledge, is an absolutely terrible reason to approach from ignorance.

The biggest gains in theory and in practice are far more often obtained by masters of craft, giving much more weight to attacking problems from a position of knowledge.

In fact, even in this case, this progress required that the author was aware of very recent results in computer science, was thinking deeply about them, and most likely was scouring the literature for pieces to help. The “Tiny Pointers” paper is mentioned directly.
the internet is a surveillance machine
The backup camera is entirely analogue, zero computer required. All manufacturers use the same couple of camera modules which output standard composite video, which is why even nice cars have obvious analogue artifacts and distortions.

Even OEM headunits usually just consume a standard composite video input and switch to it when it has a signal.

This information is valid up until at least 2020, but it might be changing as cars get more advanced cameras and stupid-er head units. I bet Tesla just uses their existing cameras.

>not beeping if seatbelt not fastened

Also trivial to do with analogue electronics, which we have done for decades.

speed limit warnings are a dead end though. Impossible to do without some sort of technology to know what the "current" speed limit is.
Yeah I think this was a wrong puzzle to try according to:

https://sudoku.com/sudoku-solver

A bummer.
The theory is defense-in-depth. It's dubious if it buys you much, but any malware now needs a container escape and a VM escape.

In reality, if it's target malware, it will, and if it's a mass-spray like a simple VSCode extension, it won't have either. (Nigerian Prince theory: You don't want to deal with the security-conscious people for a mass-attack)
It is a somewhat laconic presentation, but what I take Hollywood to mean is that hen values hens future self more than hens current impulses, and applies constant vigilance to succeed at it.

It gets somewhat preachy to promote that one should practice delayed gratification instead of YOLO.
Topsoil in the plains was many feet prior to the dustbowl. Probably not everywhere but many prairie plants have roots down to 15-20 feet.

Topsoil is what we call the upper "living" aerobic portion of soil. It is the portion of soil that participates in nutrient cycling. Roots into subsoil turn it into top soil over time. Tilling kills topsoil. So, its not that all the dirt flew away. Some did, but mostly it just died and turned back into subsoil.
> But we went past that very rapidly, and for the past half a year or so, we've already seen models excelling at every single task listed above simultaneously. Same architecture, same basic training approach, few extra modalities, ever growing capabilities.

With due deference to the title of the top-level post, I'm tempted to call bullshit unless your claim can be justified.

Just because a single model can do a handful of things you've listed doesn't mean that its capabilities are not "jagged"; you've just cherry-picked a few things it can do among the countless things it cannot yet. If AI really were so good at every single task, then (for example) it wouldn't matter much how you prompt it.

PS: I really do want to debate this further and understand your perspective, so I will reach out for continuing discussion.
Have to sample to see if it’s stirred well enough.
This sounds like a nice idea but I would imagine either their electrical usage is _really_ low already or this is being given more praise than it deserves.

From the article, it seems like they're typically installing 2 - 300-watt solar panels. Most they can install is 800-watt without a certification.

Apartments here in the US, at least where I am, have a typical usage of 300 - 800 kW, which is a lot more than 800 watts.

Perhaps no A/C, using natural light more, fewer appliances attribute to a much lower monthly usage in Europe than they do in the US?

If you can do it, then do it but I don't think it would be as worthwhile here in the US.

*EDIT* I am likely thinking incorrectly on this. I am still skeptical of it being useful but not necessarily for that above.
In the post, I say private individuals can own assets in two ways, as individuals (up to a cap) or through a personal corporation (no cap).

So, if you start a company that becomes huge and your slice is worth $100 billion, or even $10 trillion, you can still own all of that via the personal corporation. And you can invest or spend all of it [almost] however you want.

The difference is that the personal corporation has oversight; I only specify there will be a "board" I don't have anything concrete beyond that.

But the idea is in extreme circumstances, the board can over-rule your money-related decisions. The intent is they will only step in if you are going nuts, but the devil is in the details of how exactly to do that. It might be impossible, but I'd rather see us at least try rather have brain-damaged trillionaires causing unchecked mayhem.

When I make this argument, people assume I want to tax or seize the billionaire's wealth, but no, I'm saying they can keep every penny. Although to be fair, if you did cleave apart people's finances like this, taxing the "personal corporation" higher than the individual portion would be tempting.
Just make sure nobody ever sends you an SMS or 'iMessage' as those have a wild history of enabling remote 'zero-click' take-overs. If you doubt this just search for 'imessage vulnerability' or 'imessage cve'. Android has far fewer of these problems, partly due to it being a more diverse system where any single vulnerability is less likely to apply to all Android installs. Of course this diversity also means there are more chances to find problems but the reach of those problems is smaller.
> All you know is that in this particular instance the host has opened a door and offered a switch. You cannot conclude that the host always opens a door and offers a switch.

And in this particular instance, it makes sense to switch.

I'm sorry, but the problem is well-formed and well-specified.
PasswordVault 2025
A password manager for ~20€
It absolutely is destructive. I read an opinion the other day about Microsoft shoving Copilot into every product, and it kinda makes sense. Paraphrasing but: In MS's ideal world, worker 1 drafts a few bullet points and asks Copilot to expand it into a multi-paragraph email. Worker 2 asks Copilot to summarize the email back into bullet points, then acts on it. What's the point? Well, both workers are paying for Copilot licenses, so MS has already won. And management at the firm is happy because "we're using AI, we're so modern." But did it actually help, with anything, at all? Never mind the amount of wasted energy and resources blasting LLM-generated content (that no human will ever read) back and forth.
Descriptions of tables is insufficient (we had it) - you also need descriptions of the systems writing to the tables.

My favorite example was a report that was only accurate if generated on a Tuesday or Thursday due to when the ETL pipeline ran. A small config change on the opposite side of a code base completely altered the semantics of the data!
It's less that it's the best way to approach a problem, but that it optimizes for a different goal. Building on existing knowledge is how you find the local maxima for a problem by moving along the slop you have. Starting from scratch is how you find different slopes, which may lead to higher local maximas.

Of course, if you happen to be on a slope that leads to the global maxima, starting from scratch is far less effective. We don't really know where we are usually, so there's a trade-off.

There was a good article posted to HN years ago that covered this and used rocketry as one of the examples, but I don't recall what it was. The author was well known, IIRC.
Plenty of "state of the art", at least a decade ago, that was not very state of anything.

I think bias is inherent in our literature and solutions. But also, I agree that the probability of a better solution degrades over time (assuming that the implementations themselves do not degrade - building a faster hash table does not matter if you have made all operations exponentially more expensive for stupid, non-computational, reasons)
Perhaps that's the answer to the previous commenter's question about "who takes these offers", then.

Having a tech career at all is an incredible luxury compared to pretty much any other way of making a living. It is easy to have a comfortable life without bothering to chase the high end of the market. One cannot ignore compensation, but neither need it be the focus of one's career decisions.
"John D." is what they opened.
So just go through Yale's students list and Johnny can't read Chinese mo more...
I have been involved in numerous "waterfall" software projects and the majority were successful. This is because the "waterfall" process was never as the Agile proponents describe it. Successful "waterfall" projects are always iterative.

You know what didn't work? SAFe Agile.
To this day, lots of cheap and universal accessories - mice, keyboards, optical drives, what have you - come with silly little "compatible with Windows!" stickers.

It's sort of a user-facing cargo cult for computing; we have supplied the compatibility incantations, therefore, we shall support your compatible system! If you use a non-compatible system, we shall not help you: this is an offense to the gods.
Absolutely agreed on the 'very elegant solution for global-scale tracking' part!
-een is there but probably more common in Ireland/Scotland than in other places.
PeerAuth: Authenticate People with TOTP
I wonder if there's a significant nominative determinism effect--

One might expect some of the most prominent people in math and cs theory to have names like Aaronson and Baez...
It's an intriguing take, but as others have pointed out, the truth will be somewhere in the middle. I don't believe that AI will replace the entire SaaS interface. And I also don't think it will need as many services and APIs of yester-years.

This writeup seems to be authored by a senior designer at Salesforce and I can see the motivation from the their perspective. Their challenges are different than what a new SaaS product will encounter.

Like all the incumbents of their time they are a core-ish database that depended on a plethora of point solutions from vendors and partners to fill in the gaps their product left in constructing workflows. If they don't take an approach like being discussed here – or in the linked OpenAI/Softbank video – they will risk alienating their vendors/partners or worse see them becoming competitors in their own right.

Disclaimer – I'm biased too, I'm building one of the upstarts that aims to compete with Salesforce.
You're introducing bizarre ad hoc hypotheses.

This works as a logic puzzle. Assuming the host offers different doors depending on contestant attractiveness makes absolutely no sense. It's a bizarre assumption.

Maybe the goats can wander from door to door, or maybe there is no car, or maybe behind all of the doors there are tigers. Which would be absurd and unrelated to this puzzle.