MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Earw0rm | 2025-04-17 17:30:43+00:00
Vast pools of /what/ though?

It seems, at present, that energy is more of a constraint on civilization than matter.

With unlimited cheap energy, there's enough material to do most anything we might reasonably want.

It's likely to cost $thousands/kg to bring materials back from beyond Earth orbit. There are only a handful of elements valuable enough, and that's if they existed in pure form.

Hypothetically, if an asteroid made of pure gold existed, and if a Cargo Dragon atop a Falcon Heavy had enough delta-V to make it there and back with a couple of tonnes, it might break even, but all of this is doubtful.

Most valuable minerals are worth hundreds to low thousands of dollars per kg, so you need a launcher that can bring back a ton of rock for $1M - and not from LEO, you probably need to escape Earth's gravity and get back again.

The physics and engineering are proven, but the economics? Unlikely.

Put another way, you can mine a heck of a lot of Earth rocks with a rocket's worth of kerosene.
by toast0 | 2025-04-17 17:31:00+00:00
Have you heard the pedestrian crossing recordings? It's a spoof, but the advice is spot on: "you don't need to worry because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it."

If you're fiscally conservative, you should be fine; just keep on keeping on for now. The sky has been falling for a long time, and maybe one day it will, but take reasonable actions given the information you have, and accept that you might look back with more information and see that there were other actions you could have taken that would have played out differently. c'est la vie.

You don't need to board every hype train. If it works out, you'll be able to catch up later.
by bilbo0s | 2025-04-17 17:31:25+00:00
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture

To someone whose formative years came before the internet, cancel culture looks a lot like plain old boring boycotts? So there would be a lot of confusion as to why it's so big a deal?

I tend to agree. You need cancel culture. You need people who oppose cancel culture. You need it all. If you don't have any given one of these kinds of civil freedoms, then you actually don't have a democracy.

So a lot of it is just branding. You have to call it cancel culture, because if you were to try and ban the organizing of boycotts, people would laugh at you. It's plainly obvious that you need the freedom to boycott and you need the freedom to oppose the boycott to have a democracy.

Haidt's argument in this regard is non-sensical in that boycotts are, pretty much, a democratic norm in and of themselves.
by sudosteph | 2025-04-17 17:31:27+00:00
Somewhat related, there's a great dark comedy movie called "The Day Shall Come" that revolves around the mechanics of entrapment, and especially how it often targets people on the fringes, especially those with mental illness. Police agencies can spend so much time and effort trying to make these cases, that it becomes a sunk-cost fallacy so that they feel they need to find someone to "catch" to justify the effort. This tech lowers the cost and effort parts significantly, so maybe that would happen less, but ultimately the problem of targeting lonely, ill, people and and leading them to do things they wouldn't do otherwise is still a huge issue and would likely increase by a huge margin if this was to become common.
Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage projects as a solo dev?
by nbbaier | 2025-04-17 17:31:54+00:00
I'm interested in what tools people use to manage their projects as solo developers. Both professional solo projects and just side, fun projects.

EDIT: For clarification, by "manage projects" I mean managing the all the metadata related to tasks, bugs, todos, features, deadlines, milestones, etc.
by ionwake | 2025-04-17 17:32:10+00:00
Yes it is! But how does one make their video upload HDR? I am familiar with video editing but am unsure how I would perform a test, using a test video with my iphone, and upload it so it doesnt lose its HDR encoding? I believe there is a HDR setting for my phone, but I dont think it will upload by default in a HDR state such as the link you just gave me.

Thanks to everyone trying to help me understand this. I have heard of HDR for years but Ive never witnessed my macbook darken and brighten a video before like 2 months ago.
by squigz | 2025-04-17 17:32:27+00:00
> Serious publication or not (which, BTW, is an instance of the Argument from Authority fallacy), they aren't immune to the problem of junk science.[1]

I'm not sure anyone was saying they're immune to it, but their reputation does lend them credibility when compared to a random HN commenter that says stuff like "Chinese metallurgy is an oxymoron"
by thrance | 2025-04-17 17:32:39+00:00
Google doesn't need to fix anything for you, they basically own the market. Their won't be any changes unless the state does something. But I wouldn't expect the most corrupt administration to date to stand against one of the wealthiest organizations in the country.

Also, what censorship are you referring to? Them complying with the new regime in advance and removing pride month from the calendar? Or are you playing into the conservative fantasy of being supposedly censored online despite evidence of the contrary [2] ?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/google-calen...

[2] https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/publication/false-accusation-the-u...
by bbor | 2025-04-17 17:32:44+00:00
If this is indeed the case, then OAI is lying and Sam Altman in particular is extremely convincing, going to the extent to write an off-putting blog on the topic of achieving AGI. There is no AGI that does not have safety risks, catastrophic or otherwise — that’s exactly why OpenAI was founded in the first placed, in fact: https://web.archive.org/web/20230714043611/https://openai.co...

Re:personal preference, I think the direction is crystal clear. For one thing, it’s my understanding from the article that this guy’s whole team was reorg’d into oblivion
by delecti | 2025-04-17 17:33:16+00:00
> The male-pattern skeletal growth isn't necessarily a disadvantage. E.g., narrower hips and stronger bones is likely an advantage in running.

It might or might not help, but if it were a net benefit then you'd expect trans women runners to perform more strongly than they actually do.

> My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.

This sentence seems to presuppose that trans women are men. There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there. To me, the sensible conclusion seems to be that trans women perform roughly on par with cis women, not that cis women perform roughly on par with cis men.
by tshaddox | 2025-04-17 17:33:41+00:00
> Websites can't autoplay audio anymore (which is actually really annoying in a few use cases) precisely because of abuse.

But this is hardly true. There are some complicated heuristics (like Chrome's "Media Engagement Index") but many websites can and do autoplay video and audio. And browser policies are even more relaxed for playing audio on user events (like clicking).
by MattSayar | 2025-04-17 17:33:58+00:00
I don't believe LLMs will directly lead to AGI. I'm also annoyed by the folks who hype it with the same passion as crypto bros.

As new "thinking" techniques and agentic behavior takes off, I think LLMs will continue to incrementally improve and the real trick is finding ways to make them work with the known limitations they have. And they can do quite a bit
by mellosouls | 2025-04-17 17:34:06+00:00
More realistic but boringly-unforeboding title:

OpenAI Risk Official pivots to new technical position at OpenAI

Article quote:

"I'm an intern! After 11 years since my last commit, I'm back to building. I first transitioned to management in 2009, and got more and more disconnected from code and hands-on work."
by sapphicsnail | 2025-04-17 17:34:09+00:00
This is anecdotal evidence but I'm a trans woman who transitioned at 30. I ran cross country and track and was the fastest kid at my school in a relatively competitive program. I got depressed after college and gained a bunch of weight and only ran sporadically. I started HRT, I keep my T levels in the lowest range that's healthy for cis women. I got the urge to start exercising again. I now run more than twice as much as before, lost 40 pounds, and do roller derby on top of that. I'm still not as fast as I was when I was mostly sedentary, drinking beers every night in my apartment. I don't know if I'm faster or slower than I would have been if I was a cis woman but I did take a pretty big hit.
by jezek2 | 2025-04-17 17:34:40+00:00
Thanks for the heads up. I will adjust my cron jobs to run every week instead of every month.

I need it more frequently to get more time in case there is an error as I tend to ignore the error e-mails for multiple weeks due to my fatigue from handling of various kinds of certificates.

Personally I also have an HTTP mirror for my more important projects when availability is more important than security of the connection.
by commandlinefan | 2025-04-17 17:34:49+00:00
> like serving them beer

Censorship is often justified by comparisons to physical substances like this - chemicals can irreparably harm your body, therefore ideas can irreparably harm your brain. I don't believe that these are the same. There's no way to really prove it, but there is a way to prove that censorship (which is what banning social media amounts to) _is_ objectively bad.
by qwerpy | 2025-04-17 17:34:59+00:00
The worst is both parents working high pressure jobs that bleed into hours outside of "9-5 on weekdays" and even when not working, the stress is omnipresent. I haven't met a single person who is superhuman enough to work one of these jobs and be an involved parent while not allowing their own mental/physical health to deteriorate. One of us had to become a full-time parent and the size of the paycheck determined who it was. Taboos be damned, it felt like life and death at that point.
by throwanem | 2025-04-17 17:35:12+00:00
Lucky for Musk, losing money is the real business he's in.

I'm not sure that's actually a joke. How much of the man still remains under all the hair plugs and buccal fat stripping and finasteride? How much is only a husk, the puppet of the hangers-on who are the real beneficiaries of Elon Musk (tm) LLC?

Oh, and here's a real question. Separated from those sycophants and temporarily deprived of all access to face and funds to recruit temporary new ones, how many days do we think he could survive unaided? For bonus points, identify what would be the presenting complaint if he eventually found the sense to try going to an ER.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-17 17:35:16+00:00
>The losers can trust that they aren't going to be arrested, have their property confiscated etc.

Is that what people are worried about? What about the economy, civil rights, wars, etc.

I'm very confused about your argument. Is it that who you vote for doesn't matter because they won't personally attack you and the policies of whatever politician won't harm you?

>lot of them are hoping the voters are going to pick well, or at least decently.

Considering how the popular vote is almost always close to being split (you know like +10/-10) why would a non voter have that trust when from their view it's a coinflip
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-17 17:35:17+00:00
I had a conversation with a dentist about brushing teeth, and he reminded me that much of the cleaning effects come from the mechanical action of brushes rubbing teeth, and so “elbow grease” and time spent brushing is very important. It is also why electric toothbrushes are a good idea, especially when they include timers to encourage you to keep brushing for, say, 30 seconds per quadrant.

In fact, I have used nothing but water (don’t worry, it’s fluoridated water!) to moisten a toothbrush and scrub my teeth, and guess what, even without any paste or gel, my teeth get really clean because it’s the bristles that remove food particles and scuzz from the surface of living bone.

Romans developed quite effective hygiene techniques by using powders. Again, a mechanical action of rubbing abrasive material against very resilient and living bones.

You’ll recall that handwashing also derives most of its benefits from the mechanical action of rubbing hands, soap forming bubbles, and those bubbles carrying away dirt down the drain as you rinse them away. “Foaming soap dispensers”, and hand sanitizers, and other fakery are robbing Americans of that all-important mechanical action.

It is actually quite difficult to formulate a natural tooth powder that lasts long enough (shelf stable) because they tend to get nasty with fungus and bacteria growing in the receptacle itself. Modern toothpastes are absolutely disgusting to human palates, because they are loaded with preservatives and stuff so that you can set the tube on the edge of your sink for seven years and not be infected by the substance itself.

It is a shame that worldwide supplies of lead and cadmium are contaminated by traces of toothpaste. Hopefully Secretary Kennedy can fight to Make America Healthy Again.
Show HN: ChatGPT's Infinite Memory Lies – Anthropic Paper Explainer
by marima2 | 2025-04-17 17:35:20+00:00
Title: Show HN: ChatGPT’s Infinite Memory Lies — Anthropic Paper Explainer

Text: I wrote a breakdown of Anthropic’s new paper on model honesty. It shows how language models frequently give misleading chain-of-thought explanations — even when trained for safety.

The essay includes visual diagrams, code examples, commentary on reward hacking, and implications for model alignment.

• Full explainer: https://open.substack.com/pub/marcovcsiliconvalley/p/chatgpt... • Anthropic paper (PDF): https://assets.anthropic.com/m/71876fabef0f0ed4/original/rea... • Anthropic blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/research/reasoning-models-dont-say...

Would love feedback and discussion.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-04-17 17:35:22+00:00
The exact company you're asking for existed already, almost two decades ago. It was called Project Wonderful, and initially focused on independent blogs and webcomics.

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

It never managed more than modest success and never expanded far outside its initial sphere. It shut down in 2018 because it was unable to compete with all the monopolist walled garden ad spaces.

There are various small projects that could claim to be successors to that ethos -- but (to a rounding error) no one has heard of them because, contrary to your claim, the revealed "premium" that users place on "quality ads" is dwarfed by the premium that advertisers place on aggressive attention vampires (and the latter are the ones actually paying)
by mantas | 2025-04-17 17:35:37+00:00
> famines are caused by conflict

And conflicts are frequently caused by the victim getting weak.

> historically by dumb central government

That's what I pointing at.

> overly strong tyrants

They're not strong. Unless you want to define strong in a very narrow sense which simply dumb.

> you see a country being attacked by another and you blame those hard times on the victim while I blame it on the attacker

Such is nature. When a sugar lover gets diabetis, you don't blame diabetis. If a society wants to stay afloat, it has to be able to defend from outsiders.
by alamortsubite | 2025-04-17 17:35:40+00:00
Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Atari Basketball are two additional games that made use of the 400/800's extra joystick ports. Ali Baba was turn-based, IIRC, so not as exciting of a use case, but playing basketball with three other kids simultaneously was a riot. Very special for the time.
by bediger4000 | 2025-04-17 17:36:24+00:00
At least in the part I can read there's a lot of truth, except maybe about what an LLM can output. It's correct about original, legal purpose for copyright. But the trend for the last 30-odd years has been away from "temporary monopoly to encourage a larger public domain" and towards "owning ideas in order to create economic rents".

This article reeks of the privilege of having made a pile on owning ideas, but now that interpretation of copyright hinders making a bigger pile of money you small copyright holders must suck it up and let me use your content.

That is, this is hypocritical.
by efsavage | 2025-04-17 17:36:57+00:00
The tone here isn't great but parent is more correct than not. This is why large companies don't use freebie services. They vet companies and partners, sign enterprise deals with support, SLAs, penalties, insurance, even bonds in some cases. It costs more, and it's hardly fun for most people, but it's all part of mitigating those risks. And it's not just tech, you see the same thing in non-tech industries like manufacturing.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-17 17:36:58+00:00
Net benefit to the economy does not mean net benefit to everyone individually.

That's one reason that made people at the lower end of the payscale vote for Brexit: Immigration keeps wages low.

We're also seeing it since Covid: immigration keeps the GDP (barely) growing while the GDP per capita is decreasing.

The cost is wholesale destruction of local culture, too. London is a city in England but no longer really an English city, for example.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-17 17:37:34+00:00
I think we do, and many of them are excellent candidates. But social media + big data + algorithm is really "evil" (use quotes because many may not agree), plus it is often exposed to teens and younger kids. It's like mindless TV channel switching with 1) way more channels, 2) way less information for each program and 3) recommendations.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-04-17 17:37:43+00:00
So... by "manage projects" you mean all the metadata related to tasks, bugs, todos, features, deadlines and milestones? (I've heard some people use "manage projects" to mean "how do I build the source? make? cmake? etc.")

To be honest, I just save all that stuff in text files in the same repo as the code (though usually in a specific directory at the root of the project.) I have some tools that pull meta-data out of text files so I can query them for things like "give me a list of open items" or "give me a list of items tagged with a specific release target."

It takes some getting used to if you like HTML interfaces, but I grew up on the command line so it works for me.
by pixelready | 2025-04-17 17:37:55+00:00
Yes, this is why I get frustrated when people eyeroll about the severity of norm violations in our authority figures. Much of the law-in-practice is not the ink on the page, but the cultural norms around enforcement. By the time you get your vindication in court (assuming the court is acting in good faith), your life has already been turned upside down. The corrupt enforcer gets a slap on the wrist, and goes on to continue violating the law as written, knowing full well that they can basically just practice the law that exists in their head and let the court sort out anyone with the resources to fight for their rights.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-04-17 17:37:59+00:00
> if you're seeing that the LLM feature curve is actually sigmoid

It takes a few months to train advanced models - lets say 4 months. So in the 3 years since these models became a thing, there have been only 9 sequential trainings done. There is no way in a technology as advanced as LLMs, one can be sure in depth 9 that they have hit a plateau of performance. Surely, there are many more ideas to be discovered and tested..
by intended | 2025-04-17 17:38:00+00:00
Yeah. Good old social boycott.

I felt you could see this be figured out in real time, if you looked at how people spoke online. You had many phases online, like the Libertarian phase, and people constantly talking about capitalism being great, and markets being great etc. Then you had 2008, and people started learning about things worked, and you started seeing people and different age brackets coming to terms with their reality and agency.

The agency that had previously been defined in market terms! So with everything from anonymous to flash mobs, people put two and two together and figured they could boycott things that they disagreed with.

The only time this became an issue is when it started exerting ACTUAL social force. At that point people had to have the difficult conversation of what people were mad about, AND the new manner in which people were exerting force.

As is inevitable with any use of force, it gets enmeshed with other people who weild force and power and it becomes just another thing that is seen as oppresive and broken.

But its essentially effective (or ineffective) social boycotting.
by dachworker | 2025-04-17 17:38:03+00:00
The whole hype about AI safety is to some extent a shrewd marketing ploy. It's the whole, friends holding back their buddy who is amped up and ready to start throwing punches, act.

That is not to say that Hinton, Sutskever and others aren't genuinely concerned about AI safety. But I doubt that is the reason why the big names are paying lots of random nobodies to pretend to care about AI safety, because frankly, I do not see how they can output anything of use in a possible AGI future.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-17 17:38:21+00:00
You absolutely can because some negative aspects are already cropping up - services capitulating before AI training scraper bots, children being extorted by schoolmates for AI-"nudified" pictures, lawyers submitting AI-generated filings full of hallucinations... that is something that warrants urgent regulatory attention.

Actual customer support by humans being replaced by AI is also something that warrants at least investigations - if not for the protection of one of the last classes of low-skill employment, mismanagement of support has been a thing for so long, "submit your complaint on Hacker News" is a meme.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-17 17:38:50+00:00
>to talk people down instead of rile them up

Well then, police budgets would go down! And if police budgets go down then you are less safe!

Having no crime is more dangerous for politicians then some baseline of crime. If there is no crime they can't run on a hardball anti-crime platform and ignore everything else. If you run into a situation where there is no crime, it's easy enough to go invent some, generally focused at the young and poor.
by shmatt | 2025-04-17 17:39:08+00:00
We sort of are able to recognize Nobel-worthy breakthroughs

One of the many definitions I have for AGI is being able to create the proofs for the 2030, 2050, 2100, etc Nobel Prizes, today

A sillier one I like is that AGI would output a correct proof that P ≠ NP on day 1
by hugodutka | 2025-04-17 17:39:18+00:00
I haven't used claude-task-master before, but based on the README, it looks like it's an AI agent that integrates well with IDEs. In contrast, AgentAPI lets you control other agents - like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex - using HTTP calls instead of typing commands into the terminal. For example, you could use AgentAPI to control Claude Code from a custom frontend, such as a native desktop application.
by aiauthoritydev | 2025-04-17 17:39:18+00:00
As someone who has worked in AdTech I would respectfully disagree. It is indeed complex but it is incredibly efficient. Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.

Some companies like Google are incredible at this. Google is not a "monopoly" in this space. In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top dollars for publishers. I am saying this after working for 10+ years competing against Google.
by Bernard_sha_256 | 2025-04-17 17:40:42+00:00
I believe this is referring to the probability concept of "Independent and Identically distributed".

In the usage in the book/page, it seems to refer to how tasks/problems are run in parallel and the learning averaged, whereas the author is advocating these problems run sequentially.

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