skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or maybe, “I want to know the truth, not just what you believe I’d like to hear as truth

Which seems… pretty reasonable to me. Both involve the other party substituting some vaguely patronizing judgment of theirs for the first party’s.
cool stuff! I wish there were a fuzzy search / filter bar to make it easier to search for more specific things.

I'm also curious, what are you using to structure the outputs?
Ask HN: Opinion on efforts to find prior art on outrageous priced drugs
Dear HNers,

You may have read this article:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/17/health/zolgensma-sma-gene-therapy-drug-pricing-propublica/index.html

To over-simplify the article, it's about a non-profit that financed pre-clinical studies on a genetic disease that strikes infants: SMA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinal_muscular_atrophy

Once the pre-clinical studies were finished, contacts with the non-profit were much less frequent, and in the end, the drug was approved by the FDA. The price is more than $2 million per dose.

This drug, Zolgensma, involves administering an AAV9 virus capsid containing an SMN1 transgene. Today, commercial companies have mastered this technology, are very efficient, and can produce it at little cost.

I wonder if there could be a collaborative effort to lower the price of such drugs. One way would be to find alternate providers but a main roadblock is the intellectual property.

The first patents on this drug will expire in a few years (they were written in the mid-2000).

I know it's possible to make three kinds of attacks on PI:

- One would be to find an alternative PI not related to the original patents, but it requires pre-clinical studies. The competition of the patent holder would be pleased to finance such pre-clinical studies.

Another option is to find prior art to invalidate the patent. This seems weird, as there should have been at least prior art research before accepting a patent, yet it's feasible. I had the honor of participating in one.

- Then it's possible to evade a PI because the system of claims has a weak point. For example, let's say the administration of the drug is part of the claims, and that several claims depend on that particular. Then it would be trivial to create another patent with the same efficacy but with another administration route. Indeed this is only an example to make this last point clear, I don't claim it has some validity.

I assume there is no need to sue the patent holder as the mere existence of such a website would lower prices.

What do you think of the idea of creating a sort of website where a challenge will be presented: Find a strategy to enable lowering the price on this or that drug, and contributors could discuss and propose solutions. It would be a sort of GitHub project.

Thanks for your comments!
I think the intent of highlighting that sentence ('The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework') was to draw attention to the fact that the sponsors will not move fast nor achieve anything of note. To put it more sarcastically, with sponsors like that, who needs others throwing down roadblocks!
The only way to test actual work is to do actual work, should be obvious but here we are.
> Good old security by full data disclosure
I've always been very uncomfortable with the S3 API becoming a defacto protocol, and this shows why.
Kagi impresses me with regular improvements and new features https://kagi.com/changelog
Agreed. I frequently disagree with his conclusions, but he never fails to make me see things in a new light.

One of the few academics who was willing to propose radically new ideas which nobody had an economic incentive to pursue.
America has never saved anyone unless they thought it was from a threat to America.

And no, the executive branch had much less power “in the beginning”. As many people have learned, what America’s constitution says has never really matched what America does. The increasing mindless worship of a dead text, called “originalism”, is part of what will destroy it.
Ok so ignore fraud, they're finding waste that doesn't align with the Presidents vision for America. It's as simple as that. The president isn't in alignment with Gender Ideology or "wokeness" as is often put. The large majority of these programs support those ideas. That's his right through EO and his cabinet picks to change. HHS has now defined what a woman is, anything counter to that is counter to their opinion and is going to be removed. You don't have to agree, or like it, but it is what it is.

There is excess spending on what the admin sees as bullshit, they're going to remove it. Just as Biden pushed to forgive student loans and it played out in the courts, this will play out as well, though it seems to not be in favor of the "losing parties".
> Most of today is the result of stealing from the future, and that strategy is running out of steam

If you "calculate the net present value (NPV) of benefits received minus taxes paid for US generations born 1850 to 2090," you find "all generations 1950 to 2050 are net gainers, while many current elderly are losers" [1].

("There are two peaks in net benefits. The first peak was centered on the cohort born in 1908 which experienced the large windfall gains from the start-up of social security but missed much of the windfall losses from the expansion of public education funding. On net, the 1908 cohort received net transfers amounting to 5.7% of lifetime earnings. The second peak in net benefit is centered on the cohorts born in 1993-94 which experienced the positive benefits of the educational expansion funded by previous generations and which are projected to avoid the looming net costs of paying the social security and Medicare implicit debt. On net, these cohorts are forecast to receive net benefits amounting to 5.6% of lifetime earnings.

There are three sets of cohorts which experienced net losses through the transfer systems. Those born before 1880 experienced net losses due to the expansion of the public education system. Those born between 1930 and 1947 also experienced net losses. While these cohorts did receive large windfall gains associated with the start-up periods for Social Security and Medicare, these were more than offset by windfall losses from the expansion of the public education system. Cohorts born after 2060 are expected to incur increasingly large net losses via the public transfer systems as Social Security and Medicare overwhelm the gains through education.")

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2840408/
I've had a few good experiences with interviews at small companies and startups, so they do exist.

But I have also had really terrible experiences, similar to what you've mentioned. Sounds like you've just gotten unlucky and gotten the terrible ones.
Bad image generation
>This is classic EU. An announcement of an effort to collect collaborators to discuss doing something that they might do in the future.

It should be done in secret? How did they manage to create CERN? maybe there was no reddit like people commenting back then?
Define successfully, I'm pretty sure they could have been a lot more successful by giving hiring the attention it deserves.
> It doesn't need a blocker for third-party scripting, service workers ... because the browser's technology simply doesn't recognise these page components

I'd never thought about it like that, but it's a nice side-effect. You don't have to worry about obtrusive JS, if your browser doesn't know what JS is. :D
I'm a big user of LLM tools.

The problem, so far, is that they're still...quite unreliable, to say it least. Sometimes I can feed the model files, and it will read and parse the data 100 out of 100 times. Other times, the model seems clueless about what to do, and just spits out code on how to do it manually, with some vague "sorry I can't seem to read the file", multiple times, only to start working again.

And then you have the cases where the models seem to dig themselves into some sort of terminal state, or oscillate between 2-3 states, that they can't get out off - until you fire up a new model, and transfer the code to it.

Overall they do save me a ton of time, especially with boilerplate stuff, but very routinely even the most SOTA models will have their stupid moments, or keep trying to do the same thing.
That's 10x the budget of Indianapolis which has a larger population (GDP is around $200B for ref).
Based on what I've seen so far, I'm thinking a timeline more like 5-10 years where anything involving at least frontend has all but evaporated. What value is there in having a giant app team grind for 2 years on the perfect Android app when a user can simply ask for the display they want, and 5 variants of it until they are happy, all in a couple of seconds while sitting in the back of a car. What happens to all the hundreds of UI frameworks when a system as a widespread as Android adopts a technology approach like this?

Backend is significantly murkier, there are many tasks it seems unlikely an AI will accomplish any time soon (my toy example so far is inventing and finalizing the next video compression standard). But a lot of the complexity in backend derives from supporting human teams with human styles of work, and only exists due to the steady cashflow generated by organizations extracting tremendous premiums to solve problems in their particular style. I have no good way to explain this - what value is a $500 accounting system backend if models get good enough at reliably spitting out bespoke $15 systems with infinite customizations in a few seconds for a non-developer user, and what of all the technologies whose maintenance was supported by the cashflows generated by that $500 system?
SCP isn't region replicated.
That's my point, they are not on the roadmap, although they absolutely should be, IMO.

The W3C and WHATWG have their priorities mixed up.
The expectation that S3 should not improve functionality for paying customers because other people use the SDK for something completely unrelated is asinine.
Drilling robot to unlock limitless energy source beneath Earth's surface
Soy has estrogen emulators. Not good for males.
No, but it is hilarious that you are proposing a famous failed attempt as the inspiration.
> I don't generally have a lot of empathy for people complaining about not being accepted to colleges but having a high GPA at a competitive school, and a high SAT score, as well as having an interesting-enough 'hook' like his own moderately successful startup should've at least gotten him into one in-state school.

That’s the thing. It’s one thing for someone to be rejected from only the very best universities or to have a good-but-not-great resume and face rejection. But to have perfect grades, near-perfect test scores, multiple awards in coding competitions, a startup, and still get rejected by Cal Poly or UC Davis or Michigan or Wisconsin? It makes no sense and shows something is seriously wrong here.
You're right, premature optimization is exactly what it is.
I know I know I know that this same refrain has probably been said nonstop since Julia's first day after launch, but the language really is getting noticeably better every single release. Each of the releases I've been around for (so 1.8-1.11, and now on nightly, 1.12) is adding meaningful new features, performance improvements, and addressing many of the oldest and sharpest pain points

the `--trim` feature coming in 1.12 will still be considered experimental, and if I had to take a guess won't be considered "stable" until 1.14 or so, but I'm really excited to see it picked up around the ecosystem!
So how about:

1. A global, networked shader cache — where when any instance of the emulator encounters a new shader, it compiles it, and then pushes the KV-pair (ROM hash, target platform, console shader object-code hash)=(target-platform shader object-code) into some KV server somewhere; and some async process comes along periodically to pack all so-far-submitted KV entries with a given (ROM hash, target platform) prefix into shader-cache packfiles. On first load of a game, the emulator fetches the packfile if it exists, and loads the KV pairs from it into the emulator's local KV cache. (In theory, the emulator could also offer the option to fetch global-shader-cache-KV-store "WAL segment" files — chunks of arbitrary global-shader-cache KV writes — as they're published on a 15-minute-ly basis. Or KV entries for given (ROM hash, target) prefixes could be put into message-queue topics named after those prefixes, to which running instances of the emulator could subscribe. These optimizations might be helpful when e.g. many people are playing a just-released ROMhack, where no single person has yet run through the whole game to get it in the cache yet. Though, mind you, the ROMhack's shaders could already be cached into the global store before release, if the ROMhacker used the emulator during development... or if they knew about this, and were considerate enough to use some tool created by the emulator dev to explicitly compile + submit their raw shader project files into the global KV store.)

2. Have the emulator (or some separate tool) "mine out" all the [statically-specified] shaders embedded from the ROM, as a one-time process. (Probably not just a binwalk, because arbitrary compression. Instead, think: a concolic execution of the ROM, that is looking for any call to the "load main-memory region into VRAM as shader" GPU instruction — where there is a symbolically-emulated memory with regions that either have concrete or abstract values. If the RAM region referenced in this "load as shader" instruction is statically determinable — and the memory in that region has a statically-determinable value on a given code-path — then capture that RAM region.) Precompile all shaders discovered this way create a "perfect" KV cachefile for the game. Publish this into a DHT (or just a central database) under the ROM's hash. (Think: OpenSubtitles.org)

Mind you, I think the best strategy would actually combine the two approaches — solution #2 can virtually eliminate stutter with a single pre-processing step, but it doesn't allow for caching of dynamically-procedurally-generated shaders. Solution #1 still has stutter for at least one player, one time, for each encountered shader — but it handles the case of dynamic shaders.
Its nice that they have a spec.

Since my xkcd email address has been one of my main sources of spam over the years, it's clear the site has been cracked repeatedly...
Peter Singer makes this argument in Animal Liberation, one of the seminal works on modern animal ethics. One of Singer's points is that it's ethical to eat animals so long as they are raised and killed in a way to minimize suffering.

IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.
> can’t solve that by taking away existing pensions

Of course you can. Pensions are a form of debt. If the state is bankrupt, it's reasonable to trim its creditors. Pensioners included. (The politically-savvy way to do this is probably to spin off the pension fund as its own entity and then default on bonds, which the pension fund would hold alongside others. Then leave it to the pensioners to figure out how they haircut themselves.)
On top of that, there's an assumption that there's no existing cleaning effort. I'm sure there is and it's just a difficult problem. The cases left must be either in progress, hard to track down, or not actually meaningfully active.

Or, as is really common with the federal government, the agency is actually underfunded and hasn't been able to modernize because the Republicans in congress have been trying to starve the administrative capacity the classic, slow way until now.

Like with the IRS. I've made mistakes in filing, and gotten a notice from the IRS about it, but sometimes years later (!). In the meantime, if you "audited" the IRS records, you'd see that my records are out of compliance and could claim "See, there's fraud!". In reality, the IRS just has slow antiquated systems, and is barred from giving taxpayers direct access to their records. Which is by design from the rich and anti-government.
In Texas the HOA can fuck off because you have a statutory right to have up to six hens in your backyard.
Your sample size of one isn't that relevant to the previous comment.
Safety and no School shootings, Universal Health Care, Worker Rights, almost free Universities. The USA in the 23th century...
That narrative is so boring and tired, and it's ultimately why Trumpism will be short lived and fade to the dustbin of history.

I'm not a leftist, and I mostly don't care about the groups, the right can have them. I care about things like medical research, nuclear energy and the food supply, which are all at risk because the regime's only tactic seems to be to unplug everything and see what breaks, and then decide if they even want it to work. They're not trying to run the country efficiently, they're trying to punish federal employees.

Most people are like me - they want real solutions for housing and health, not the impotence we get from the neoliberals or the kayfabe we get from Trumpism.
What’s different now is that tech companies all have mutually assured destruction pacts.

Many key pieces of AI technology, like transformers, have patents. If you start trying to enforce your “…with AI” patent against Google, they’re just going to turn around and sue you for using their patented technology.
I wanted to say it doesn't have to be planned from the top because people naturally want to flock to a cause. But I also remembered a certain billionaire paying people to play computer games under his account to boost his stats. Paying people or bots to downvote criticism is certainly not below him or any of the others, it's just marketing expenditure.
Do recall the specific problem he was trying to solve?

It's amazing to me how much thought and work has gone into the seemingly trivial things we encounter on a daily basis.

I think of this every time I see a blue LED. Or a rice cooker!! So easy to take for granted.
As a Canadian I disagree entirely. Our prime minister Stephen Harper years ago muzzled scientists who had time sensitive, extremely pertinent research to act on. After he was replaced, that research was immediately put to use in policy making. Throughout his term, scientists in the public service spoke out about what was happening.

If justice is important to a democracy, these scientists did the right thing. That takes real courage.

I see no difference in what’s happening in the American public service. The processes occurring now are not democratic in nature. Musk’s role is extremely unorthodox and only ostensibly voted for ‘by the people’.

In the weeks since Trump took office, I see no hard evidence to support any kind of deep state corruption. I see inefficiency, and yet, I see that in how DOGE dismantles things as well. I see it in every organization I work in, in every industry, in every home. It’s inevitable.
The demo is quite interesting but I am mostly intrigued by the claim that it is running totally local to each robot. It seems to use some agentic decision making but the article doesn't touch on that. What possible combo of model types are they stringing together? Or is this something novel?

The article mentions that the system in each robot uses two ai models.

S2 is built on a 7B-parameter open-source, open-weight VLM pretrained on internet-scale data

and the other

S1, an 80M parameter cross-attention encoder-decoder transformer, handles low-level [motor?] control.

It feels like although the article is quite openly technical they are leaving out the secret sauce? So they use an open source VLM to identify the objects on the counter. And another model to generate the mechanical motions of the robot.

What part of this system understands 3 dimensional space of that kitchen?

How does the robot closest to the refrigerator know to pass the cookies to the robot on the left?

How is this kind of speech to text, visual identification, decision making, motor control, multi-robot coordination and navigation of 3d space possible locally?

Figure robots, each equipped with dual low-power-consumption embedded GPUs

Is anyone skeptical? How much of this is possible vs a staged tech demo to raise funding?
As an interviewer I’d just skip the questions and talk about your Forth haha
But once it knows it’s pretty certain to become common knowledge almost instantaneously. That’s not possible now. What you learn stays localised to you and may be people 1 degree away from you that’s it.
This how I used to read HN at work, nobody bats an eye at text in the terminal. I'm sure I could have gotten away with sipping my coffee in the morning with the orange website plastered all over my screen, but I felt like it was important to keep up appearances--call it productivity theater.
What did/do you call your services you offer? I sincerely love debugging (fixing tech of any kind digital or analog). Never thought I could offer services just fixing instead of building from scratch...
That's the best-case scenario. It remains possible that topological qubits, even if they are theoretically achievable, will turn out to be a dead end engineeringwise. Presumably competing quantum computing labs think this is likely, since they're not working on topological qubits; only Microsoft thinks they'll end up being important.
> GDP is just more people spending more money for more expensive things. It's kind of a failed metric for economic productivity

It's a good metric for a tax base.

> unless you think an $8 Big Mac is twice as productive to the economy than a $4 Big Mac

Which is why we consider both nominal and real GDP. (In your example, the former represents 2x nominal GDP. They're equivalent in terms of real GDP.)
> as a taxpayer, I don't want my money to be taken from me (postponing my own retirement) to fund her retirement.

by that logic, sure, as shareholders in Meta (or any public tech co), we absolutely don't want employing expensive human devs to fund their retirement.

.. see where this is going
Could you use ngrok and dropbox to put together something like this quickly?
There are great alternative libraries for AWS & AWS-compatible services like S3

Been really happy with aws4fetch in TypeScript (for Cloudflare R2, generating presigned URLs & sending mails via SES) after getting much frustration out of the official JS SDK.

https://github.com/mhart/aws4fetch
Best course of action imo is watch yourself in that moment, understand that people are going above and beyond for you even though they don't fully understand you, they are trying to accept you. I'd go to the bathroom, try to reason with myself that no animals are being killed specifically for you, the accidental touch won't give any flavour to your dish and it's all in your head. There's no ethical issues whatsoever in that situation.

If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.
> Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans

I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."
Really? I sort of feel the opposite. I am a mid-career as well and HIGHLY TIRED of writing yet another set of boilerplate to do a thing or chase down some syntax error in the code and the fact that AI will now do this for me has given me a lot more energy to focus on the higher level thinking about how it all fits together.