skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Scaling Myth: One argument proposes that many problems with AI will be fixed with more data or better training. ... The idea that this is a path to a “general” intelligence — a system that can perform nearly any task at or beyond a human level — is still highly speculative.

https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-genera...
Not relevant to the discussion on language choice, but I love this part:

> The single remarkable feature of my reader is that I don’t sort posts chronologically but by “reverse frequency”. If I follow a news site that publishes twice an hour and an essayist that publishes every two months, I want the essayist at the top of my feed if they published yesterday, even if there are 30 more recent news posts.

I love the idea of seeing the less frequent posters at the top!
I've experienced quasi-remission twice now. Both times when I got so sick from food in a foreign country that I couldn't eat for days (and had no appetite for it either). I lived on water. Afterwards, for 1-2 weeks, I did not require insulin (while eating a lot).

I used to think it was due to the pills they gave me there, or perhaps due to the bacteria (or virus?) causing some strange temporal abating of auto-immune response and regrowth of beta-cells. But seeing this is making me reconsider that (I was doubting the effect of the medicine since I took some home and took it in a healthy state but did not get the good effects).
Is support for 2034 announced?
Thanks for the tips. The defaults command worked well for my needs.
"I love the uneducated"
enlightened centrism really needs to be stopped, this "logic" helps nobody
Show HN: Multi-modal RAG with ColQwen in a single line of Code
Hi HN, we're Arnav and Adi, and we're building DataBridge - a multi-modal database built from the ground up with AI use cases in mind.

We recently launched support for ColPali-style image embeddings and late-interaction retrieval. We've implemented a hamming distance version of retrieval which helps this approach scale significantly more when compared with the regular late-interaction similarity scoring.

These embeddings provide a significantly better retrieval accuracy, with ColQwen achieving around an 89% average score on the ViDoRe benchmark, compared to around 67% for traditional parsing and captioning based methods.

We're completely open source, and getting started takes less than 10 minutes (get started here: https://databridge.mintlify.app/getting-started). In fact, using these style of embeddings requires just setting `use_colpali=True` in our python SDK while ingesting or retrieving documents.

Our long term goal is to make state of the art research in retrieval be as accessible for production use cases as possible, and integrating ColPali is an initial step towards that goal. If there's research that you think is compelling, but haven't been able to integrate into production, let us know: we'd be happy to help.

We really appreciate the honest feedback the HN community provides, and so we'd love to hear from you!
UK, France, what's the third one?
what you're saying is they love to hallucinate... and ai will help them get there

God help us all
Thanks, friend. I currently don't have depression, but I'll see if I can work towards that.
In this spirit of practicing and making multiple small games before a big one, I find the 20 Games Challenge[0] interesting. It's a list of known games sorted in increasing difficulty to reproduce, introducing new concepts progressively.

[0]: https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/
Bronze age morality was rather different than what most readers here will have in mind when seeing you use that word.
What Happened to This Post?
What happened to this post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43207491

It had 15 upvotes last time I saw it. It led to this link:

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/government-destruction-ssa-doge

Now it’s just empty.
Or separating tabs in personal / Work A / Work B contexts. Containers are a poweruser feature.
pg explores a similar thought in his meta essay about essays: https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

In the essay, pg explores the idea that an essay helps him explore ideas.
Basically all politicians in Mexico are “serving at the pleasure of the cartels” so to say, so it would be far fetched to think the cartes don’t try to extract concessions from the wealthy as well. Plata o plomo
The next step in data and AI integration?
APIs have long been the glue between applications, but as AI continues to evolve, we're seeing a shift toward Agentic APIs—APIs that don’t just fetch data but reason, plan, and execute based on it. For example, integrating Snowflake's Cortex Agents REST API into platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams allows business users to query structured and unstructured data conversationally, without needing to write SQL or understand database structures. The API interprets intent, retrieves relevant information, and formulates responses in real time.

But, this also raises some interesting questions:

- Are we moving towards autonomous data assistants that replace dashboards and manual querying
- How do we balance control vs. automation in enterprise AI workflows
- What challenges exist in ensuring accuracy, security, and governance in these agentic systems

Would love to hear thoughts from the HN community—what other Agentic API patterns are you seeing emerge, and where do you see this heading?
Flutter is unique because it is a cross platform canvas renderer with huge number of components built on top. Sort of, there are libs like QT but nobody wants to deal with C++ for GUI apps, and even the bindings leak C++isms last time I checked.

Rendering Flutter to DOM sounds like a huge effort bound to fail on some level - just use React and React native if you are leaning in that direction. Im sure Flutter can add some shims to get basic stuff like navigation working to be more web like.
Other than Chaitin's constant(s), name a few that aren't computable.
Which is why you manage atomic access to non-thread-safe objects yourself, or use a thread-safe version of them when using them across threads.

Multithreading errors are the worst to debug. In this case it's dead simple to identify at design time and warning flags should have gone up as soon as he started thinking about using any of the normal containers in a multithreaded environment.
Ignoring the fact that the word "typically" was highly operative, he's a great example of the point you're trying to undermine. The government never would have gone away empty handed with no conviction of any sort like they did the first time they went after Menendez in the late 2010s. A normal peasant would have had their life ruined and been just barely scraping by in the 2020s when he was doing the things that ultimately got him put away.
Why not use AI to make Skype successful?

Not adding AI, but have AI design, and execute the steps to turn Skype into a successful product
>It is important to slash in order to determine a middle ground

That's not true.

> If a company fires 100 employees and certain operations stop functioning, they may hire back 10 employees and reassess

How likely is it that 10 employees come back? How likely is it that critical institutional knowledge is lost forever?

> The result is a company that functions just as effectively as before but with fewer employees

Does it? Have you ever been through a reorg or restructuring at work? Do things ever get back to just as effective as before any time soon?

> This is an optimization of resources and efficiency

It's squandering human capitol, knowledge and reduced efficiency both in the short term and long term. It's the most expensive way to reduce your overhead. A far cry from optimization.
I have no problem with substrate-independence, but given substrate independence that doesn't mean the "consciousness" property is transitive in the way needed to claim the US is conscious. You need additional assumptions beyond just materialism and substrate independence.

Computations are mechanistically clear, deterministic and substrate independent, but they still have properties that we use to classify them. Just because some component of a larger computational system has a property (or classification), it does not entail that the larger system has that property (or classification). Consciousness could be like this.
> The text provides for the police to remotely activate the microphones and cameras of fixed and mobile connected devices (computers, telephones, etc.) to spy on people.

Well, at least they are consistent in demanding the same capabilities online and offline. What this law wants is simple - the state should be all-seeing, you should not be able to share a single word with your friends without the possibility that it is being recorded (at near-zero cost to the state).
This seems very dramatic given OpenAI still has the best model in the world `o3`.
I use syncthing for notes across iOS and macOS devices and I wouldn't say it's great. It works most of the time until it doesn't, until one client all of a sudden stops syncing and then you gotta figure out where it's hanging. Couple of days ago it was the macOS syncthing app. Just wouldn't start, wouldn't show an error. Usually it's the iOS helper app "Möbius Sync" not actually syncing in the background. It's annoying but still better than using a cloud provider.

I suspect the experience is better on Android.
Should I read this as the Java TreeMap itself is thread unsafe, and the JVM is in a loop, or that the business logic itself was thread unsafe, and just needed to lock around its transactions?
"risk management" is not puritanism - sex work has a different/higher risk profile for PSPs (fraud, chargebacks, etc) and it's easier to say "no" than to come up with a new product to serve customers.

An enterprising PM at a PSP or fintech could look at the size of the sex industry, measure the risk of providing payment/banking services to sex workers and businesses and offer them at a premium like any other "niche" financial area.

And while we're on the topic of "draconian" regulations from the government - it's not outside their interest to limit the availability of obscene content from children. This isn't a "think of the children" argument so much as "children consume graphic pornography at huge rates and porn providers make money off them as consumers and producers with such inept guardrails that age verification has been a meme for 25 years." I don't think validating your identity with a government ID (and storing it forever) is a good countermeasure but I disagree its some kind of draconian limitation on free speech. If porn sites didn't buy and sell sex from kids and self regulated, this wouldn't be necessary (nb4 "it's the parent's problem" - good luck!)
At least Bandcamp has days where 100% of the money goes to the artist if I buy something of them.
Is there a good alternative with high-bandwidth, high-quality video? I just tried Discord, Telegram, and Element - they all compress their video quite noticeably into a blurry mush.
Tangentially related, but the built-in Windows Notepad still to this day will append the current time and date to a file on opening, if the first line is ".LOG".
Is support for 2034 on the calendar?
It's a tradegy antitrust enforcement isn't forbidding advertising networks owning / having undue influence on browsers.

I think this is heading to a point where lot of power users are simply not updating their browsers any more.

Personally I'll take the miniscule chance of being infected with malware due to a security bug on an older version of Firefox over the inability to run uBlock Origin any day. I can recover from malware installation. I can not use the web without an ad blocker.

What I'll probably do is use an isolated sandbox environment for any web browsing I need absolute security (e.g. online banking/shopping).
Microsoft co-pilot does this out of the box

Just upload your documents to a OneDrive, Sharepoint, or Teams Site that you have access to and just start asking questions.
> OpenAI knowing how to build AGI and similar outlandish claims.

The fact that the scaling of pretrained models is hitting a wall doesn't invalidate any of those claims. Everyone in the industry is now shifting towards reasoning models (a.k.a. chain of thought, a.k.a. inference time reasoning, etc.) because it keeps scaling further than pretraining.

Sam said the phrase you refer to [1] in January, when OpenAI had already released o1 and was preparing to release o3.

[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections
The genes (code sequences stored in the DNA) are not modified.

Epigenetics is a recent discovery that the genes can be muted or not expressed).

The mechanism is that parts of the DNA strand often curl themselves up in a ball which prevents themselves from being replicated/expressed. Researchers are discovering there are many factors that influence this behavior.
Civilization makes a society successful in war because of the destructive power of the weaponry available. But it absolutely seems reasonable that individual people could be less fit for physical combat as the above aspects of civilization (materialism, luxury, etc.)
Deep sea divers know about oxygen toxicity;

Trimix (breathing gas)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas) :

> With a mixture of three gases it is possible to create mixes suitable for different depths or purposes by adjusting the proportions of each gas. Oxygen content can be optimised for the depth to limit the risk of toxicity, and the inert component balanced between nitrogen (which is cheap but narcotic) and helium (which is not narcotic and reduces work of breathing, but is more expensive and can increase heat loss).

> The mixture of helium and oxygen with a 0% nitrogen content is generally known as heliox. This is frequently used as a breathing gas in deep commercial diving operations, where it is often recycled to save the expensive helium component. Analysis of two-component gases is much simpler than three-component gases.
So Framework launches with Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics which has RDNA 3.5.

RDNA 4 has a 2x performance gain over 3.5 (4x with Sparsity) at FP16.

It just makes it all harder (the picking and choosing). Let's see what Project DIGITS brings once it launches.
Elixir has been in that place not too many years ago, on the verge of being mainstream. I'm not very sure that it's not still there now but I paid my bills with it for a while and I was generally happy with the language except for the handle this handle that verbosity. I liked the Ruby like syntax but I always said to the other devs in the team that an equivalent language with curly braces would be more successful because it would make many more developers feel at home. Gleam is a { } language and won't scare away anyone coming from C, C++, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Go, etc.
“ Federal workers at the Social Security Administration (SSA) learned Wednesday that a plan was in motion to cut 50% of staff. Tuesday evening an anonymous comment on a well-known industry blog caught the attention of many workers already on high alert about their jobs. The comment said that on a 3pm call, Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek told SSA leadership that, “he wanted a plan to cut 50% of ALL staff, including frontline staff, to him by tomorrow afternoon.”

By early Wednesday afternoon, The American Prospect confirmed the rumor. Dudek, the Elon Musk loyalist I wrote about last week who went from administrative leave to leading the agency after helping the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), planned to cut the workforce in half. The move could affect tens of thousands of employees across the country, and far more people who rely on the agency for monthly checks that keep them afloat.

"Can say unequivocally that such deep cuts to SSA, which is already at historically low staffing, will cause significant to extreme degradation of services,” an SSA employee texted me Wednesday afternoon, “very likely including checks missed and individuals dying before their claims can be processed.” ”

Seems pretty grim. Do all these cuts aim towards essentially moving the work that still needs to be done to the private sector? Or is there something else I’ve missed that will help to keep the work going?
Even he couldn't have imagined it (fentanyl-Trump) being used as a pre-text for trade tariffs with Canada.
It’s not so many things. It’s two people who died, one of whom was 95 and had a heart condition. With the people dead, the locked up dog died. But people like a good conspiracy.
I can see it in a tab that is not logged in. It has 20 points. Do you mean that it had comments? If so those could have been merged recently into a duplicate submission. Anything DOGE related will likely have many duplicate submissions. The only way to know for sure is if dang adds a comment or if you email them.
I suspect the full force will come when there's a nuke accident.
So, just to be clear, someone at HN is removing these posts from the front page, right?

And this person is blocking them why?
Because they dont like the subject matter?
I don't think they are being sarcastic. Maybe you are the bot /s
Ghostery doesn’t just hide consent banners and blocks tracking cookies, it also automatically opts-out from tracking consent.

https://www.ghostery.com/blog/never-consent-by-ghostery#neve...
Leaving motives aside, I question the process. There doesn't appear to be any cohesive plan or vision. It's all slash-and-burn, damn the consequences. I'd like to see a plan put together and put before Congress. The Republicans have the majority, so they can ultimately do what they want. But it would at least provide an opportunity to review the consequences, so we don't have an "oh shit" moment when some critical service fails.

Their approach is breathtakingly reckless.
> But I’m clueless. don’t know design or mechanics

> Any books, videos, or communities that helped you grasp design or make fun mechanics?

Why do you want to make games? People who do generally have a lot of ideas they want to explore around design and mechanics.

That doesn’t mean all your ideas have to be good, or you start out good. But you’re asking the wrong questions.

Someone who is interested in game design should be able to make a fun game in PowerPoint,
Bars certainly get in huge trouble if they let someone drink too much, and they leave and drive and kill somebody.
Works fine on iPhone 13 mini with iOS Safari. It's your browser.
I don't know that this is super well-founded: It seems similar to the "Fremen Mirage" [1], and misses that in most cases the society that escapes war for longer will have time and energy to build infrastructure and accumulate resources that provide a decisive advantage in conflict and defense. Looking back at history it's rare that the "virile fighting" nation/group wins against a more "civilized" adversary that's better organized and resourced.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
> Gmail drafts

> Keeps them quite hidden / private / secure

Not hidden from Google obviously :) At that point, why not just use Keep at that point to get proper support for notes?
Or press <F5>
Claude Code creates SAGE design system
War on drugs != War on drug users.

Shouldn't it be War on dug dealers?
I tried to learn more but this link from readme gives me 404 https://databridge.gitbook.io/databridge-docs/architecture/o...

Can you tell what is it and how it works?
Formula simulator racing game – A new racing simulator with realistic physics
Hi all, I’ve just released Formula Simulator Racing Game, a passion project I’ve been working on. It’s a racing sim with realistic physics, customizable cars, and dynamic tracks—built for fans of speed and tech alike. Check it out here: https://www.gaminguides.com/game/formula-simulator-racing-ga.... Feedback welcome!
Does a ConcurrentSkipListMap not give the correct O(log N) guarantees on top of being concurrency friendly?

java.util.concurrent is one of the best libraries ever. If you do something related to concurrency and don't reach for it to start, you're gonna have a bad time.
Do you, though? Need the best of the best?
You could watch wallpaper dry, but instead you watch a depressed loaf watching wallpaper dry. Very meta.
Someone should write a blog post about the prestige/effectiveness negative feedback loop. This is also the Achilles heel of top tier SV VCs including YC.
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...

"Note that this implementation is not synchronized. If multiple threads access a map concurrently, and at least one of the threads modifies the map structurally, it must be synchronized externally. (A structural modification is any operation that adds or deletes one or more mappings; merely changing the value associated with an existing key is not a structural modification.) This is typically accomplished by synchronizing on some object that naturally encapsulates the map. If no such object exists, the map should be "wrapped" using the Collections.synchronizedSortedMap method. This is best done at creation time, to prevent accidental unsynchronized access to the map..."
Right, but what you are forgetting is, that in exchange for all the efficiency provided by a central government agency, millionaires with only 2 yachts will be able to leverage this private contract into enough money to buy a third yacht.
And the country that you reside in has never had clowns of corruption? I doubt it.
> I have wondered about how to repeal Prop 13, but I can't come up with a repeal that doesn't do equal and opposite damage.

I haven't thought enough of the consequences, but what I have been pondering is complete removal of property tax on your personal residence. You have to spend 50% + 1 day to count it as your residence.

Any commercial property or nonresidence would continue to have property tax.

There would be some cheats, like people claiming to have spent 50% + 1 day despite not having done that, or somebody living in an apartment complex they own to avoid tax, but overall I think it would solve a lot of problems.

The only drawback I see is less tax revenue.
I think that's great for work and great for corporations. I use AI at my job too, and I think it certainly does increase productivity!

How does any of this make the world a better place? CEOs like Sam Altman have very lofty ideas about the inherent potential "goodness" of higher-order artificial intelligence that I find thus far has not borne out in reality, save a few specific cases. Useful is not the same as good. Technology is inherently useful, that does not make it good.
Great for game tech, but not much about game design.
Salesforce, Workday Are Hiring More Overseas to Save Cash
I should have paid more attention to the menu bar. Show Path Bar helps with my needs.

For sorting I want it to sort like File Explorer or Dophin. So folders on top (sorted by name), then files (sorted by name). It works if I change Settings > Advanced > Keep folders on top.
The idiots think they're slick at hiding their corruption. This is all middle school to them. It's about all they're intellectually able to handle.
It still does.

There's a button saying "58 languages" on the trailing edge of where the title of the page is. It opens a drop-down with language selection.

(Presumably the UI is different on mobile, speaking about web.)