MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InkCanon | 2025-04-17 18:41:46+00:00
Strongly suspect OAI can't afford 20B cash. Their latest funding round was 40B, and they're burning through money like it's rice paper. They could offer OAI equity, but Cursor's founders would probably be very suspicious of private valued stock (which is fairy money).

How wise it is to buy Cursor is another question. Current valuation has them at 100x revenue. And I suspect agentic products will be a lot less cash flow positive than traditional SaaS because of the massive cost of all that constant codebase context and stream of code.
by reindent | 2025-04-17 18:42:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Diego, the founder of Reindent, a software studio focused on 100% AI agent development.

We released Nanomachine as we wanted to automate some internal browsing/marketing tasks we have in our company.

Nanomachine is fully open-source, under MIT license. We use a Docker container with Chromium, and Browser Use based Nanobrowser, to which we are also contributing to.

We aim to add OS and filesystem control soon, if anyone wants to contribute to the project, you are very welcome to do so.

Thanks for checking us out!
by fsflover | 2025-04-17 18:42:46+00:00
Related:

Apple fined $8.5M for illegally collecting iPhone owners' data for ads (gizmodo.com)

334 points by nixcraft on Jan 8, 2023 | 134 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected (aalto.fi)

274 points by late on April 4, 2024 | 235 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657
by throwup238 | 2025-04-17 18:43:12+00:00
Yes, sort of. DNP doesn’t affect uncoupling proteins directly but it moves protons across the mitochondrial membrane, causing more of the energy to be lost as heat as the uncoupling proteins waste more energy to restore the proton gradient.

There are a bunch of such “protonophores” that move protons across membranes and they are universally toxic if they make it to the mitochondria. I don’t known of any compound that actually mediates the UCPs themselves.
by Frieren | 2025-04-17 18:43:36+00:00
This is necessary now, but it should have been done years back.

Nowadays, many companies backed up by investors with very deep pockets are doing this in all markets: start to buy middle-man companies in a space, it does not matter which one, dominate the market thanks to monopolistic power. Screw the clients making them pay too much, screw the providers paying them too little. Go for the next market.

Google does this for ads. But, with Apple, does the same for app vendors. Amazon does it for all kinds of brands with physical products. Uber does it for taxi drivers and their clients. All of them take a big chunk of the profit while making things more expensive, but they are the only real option to reach clients as they have used tactics to monopolize entire markets.

This should be impossible, because there are laws against it. If it is allowed the future of the economy is one big corporation with all workers working for it, and everybody buying from it. It looks like a scifi dystopia.
by lillecarl | 2025-04-17 18:44:01+00:00
I'd say this is a naive take, it probably happens but I've never heard of someone getting a defamation lawsuit through in Sweden. And even if you end up being right and winning all bridges will be burned and some excuse to keep you fucked will be made.

It's a losers game, and you don't have to play. Which doesn't necessarily mean "don't interact with women" but maybe "keep it to the bare minimum, don't be alone and cover your ass"

Considering how fucked up things are everywhere on so many levels I think any way to get through the day with a positive end is a great way to do it
by darepublic | 2025-04-17 18:44:42+00:00
I didn't really read this extensively but to me I would want to use as much deterministic code as possible and leverage the llm as little as possible. That to me is a better portend of predictable result, lower operational costs and is a signal that nobody could just quickly reproduce the same app. I would tend to roll my own tools and not use out of the box buzz word glue to integrate my llm with other systems. And if these conditions aren't met or aren't necessary I'd figure someone else could just vibe code the same solution in no time anyway. Keep control I say! Die on the hill of control! That's not to say I'm not impressed by LLMs.. quite the opposite
by jowea | 2025-04-17 18:45:33+00:00
> People literally do this on social media and they aren't even being forced.

I think applying the authoritarian-totalitarian distinction in a democracy gets weird because democracies like totalitarian systems but unlike the archetypal authoritarian system expect the average person to engage in politics. So it's not a straight spectrum from democracy to totalitarian with autocracy in the middle.

And if someone forces everyone to wear their symbols, then it becomes obvious who the open dissenters are, and it becomes hard to tell who is neutral, who is enthusiastic, and who is silently dissenting, everyone looks like a supporter and people may start becoming more supporting simply because of apparent social consensus.

Anyway, here's what Wikipedia has to say. Maybe it clears up

> In exercising the power of government upon society, the application of an official dominant ideology differentiates the worldview of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty."[6] Having no ideology to propagate, the politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature",[6] whereas the "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens",[5] by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by a secret police, and monopolistic control of industrial mass society."[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism#Definitions
by alterom | 2025-04-17 18:45:45+00:00
>I don't know what concerns me more, the fact that this isn't a complete conspiracy, or the fact that people (and this comment) seem somewhat indifferent about it.

Judging by the comment history, it appears that their words have been misinterpreted.

Chances are, they're autistic and feel they're in the crosshairs.

At least consider that as a possibility.
by jack_h | 2025-04-17 18:45:59+00:00
Then what is the definition of a monopoly? It doesn’t appear to be the same definition as “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.” Do they exclusively control all ad inventory? Do they control all devices receiving ads? GP states that they don’t have exclusive control broadly, just within their own ecosystem. That’s not the definition of a monopoly though, so it seems like a motte and bailey calling google a monopoly.
by palmotea | 2025-04-17 18:46:12+00:00
> How many developers want to have usage analytics of their editors helping companies build functionality that aspires to replace them? This is silly.

Honestly, too many. Software engineers can be really, really dumb. I think it has something to do with assuming they're really smart.

But even unwilling developers may be forced to participate (see the recent Shopify CEO email), despite knowing full well what's going on. I mean, tons of people have already had to go through the humiliation of training their offshore replacements before getting laid off, and that's a much more in-your-face situation.
by zonkerdonker | 2025-04-17 18:46:15+00:00
Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds.

I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling geofence on their property. How great would it be to have a snapchat free home zone? Or FB, or tiktok
by Me1000 | 2025-04-17 18:46:55+00:00
This is a technology demo, not a model you'd want to use. Because Bitnet models are only average 1.58 bits per weight you'd expect to need the model to be much larger than your fp8/fp16 counterparts in terms of parameter count. Plus this is only a 2 billion parameter model in the first place, even fp16 2B parameter models generally perform pretty poorly.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-04-17 18:47:14+00:00
> How can you have been neutral on Trump until just now and then wrote that? This both-sides-ism looks a bit ludicrous.

Devil's advocate, I think it's easy if you don't directly feel impact from his policies. I've been losing my marbles about Trump at family dinners for a while, but for a chunk of my family he's a check against "radical" liberalism (read: gender ideology, spending money on things that don't serve everyday americans) and a path to lower tax bills.

Similarly, I think it's easy (from a conservative perspective) to dismiss all the seemingly emotional reactions to something Your Guy is saying because that's just politics; that's the expected behavior of politicians. It's not a problem if Your Guy is caught in a lie because they all do it.

I'm straw-manning a bit, but I'm just trying to sketch anecdotes of how I've seen otherwise rational, empathetic, intelligent people routinely offer (to me) unreasonably calm takes on Trump's activities and behavior.
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-17 18:47:22+00:00
My expectations of AI in the next 12-24 months:

FAANG and other large companies are integrating or will integrate AI vertically. A couple of possible scenarios:

1) Executive asks AI to give him some insights, AI talks to him, shows him a few possible clarifications, executive picks one. AI then creates tickets for downstream teams with descriptions and deadlines.

2) Some senior data analyst receives the ticket, and asks AI to build a query. With a bit of discussion they build the query and AI scheduled automatically with a dashboard attached. Analyst click OK and AI closed the ticket, tagged the executive and send him the link

I don't know what's going to happen after 24 months. Maybe AI stays at the same level and FAANG team quits with big bonus and bring the experience to other companies. Maybe it levels up again. Either way, bad for you and me.

I do believe the next two decades are going to be more chaotic and more jungle like.
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by codebydom | 2025-04-17 18:47:25+00:00
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by alabastervlog | 2025-04-17 18:47:28+00:00
I judge this Chicago-school-pushed shift in antitrust enforcement so bad that I usually mark it out as the first noteworthy step on our current thrust toward authoritarianism.

The market consolidation we've seen since, and the concentration of power, have been absolute poison for both liberal democracy and the good aspects of capitalism, so far as contributing to the common good.
by pron | 2025-04-17 18:47:58+00:00
> So, for pure exploration in GP, you do indeed suffer the full weight of the halting theorem. As you transition into the exploitation regime, this becomes more of a grey area.

I don't understand what the grey area is. The time hierarchy theorem (that we can consider the "generalised halting theorem") is a theorem; it is absolute. What we have here isn't something that uses some approximation that is true with some probability that we could maybe call a "grey area", but something that bears the full brunt of the theorem.

That there are subsets of problems in some complexity class X that can be solved faster than X's upper limit is the very point of the complexity hierarchy. Yes, there are a subset of problems in EXPTIME that can be solved in polynomial time, hence the existence of the P class, but that doesn't mean that EXPTIME is a "grey area". If you're solving some problem quickly, then we know that what you've solved was not one of the hard problems to begin with. If you're solving some problems in polynomial time, then those problems are in P.

For example, heuristic SAT solvers solve many SAT problems quickly. But their authors don't consider that evidence that P = NP, and understand that the instances that their solvers solve are "easy" (which is not to say they're not useful). In other words, what they're saying is that many useful SAT problems are easy, not that they're able to solve the hard problems efficiently.
by pier25 | 2025-04-17 18:48:29+00:00
I don't know but it seems like LLMs are just adding small incremental improvements in the polish/iterating phase.

Some new revolutionary thing will probably happen in the future but it might be decades away. Heck AGI might be even harder to solve than fusion which has been 30 years away since even before I was born.

We're probably close to an AI winter. There's been a huge investment (over $1T iirc) and not that much to show for it. The euphoria of the past couple of years is definitely over.

I do think there are some very useful applications for LLMs... just not the ground breaking cancer solving thing we've been told again and again that would justify that much money thrown at it.
by visarga | 2025-04-17 18:48:29+00:00
> Training LLMs on detailed interaction data from AI-powered IDEs could become a powerful flywheel leading to the automation of practical coding.

I agree. But this is a more general flywheel effect. OpenAI has 500M users generating trillions of interactive tokens per month. Those chat sessions are sequences of interaction, where downstream context can be used to judge prior responses. Basically, in hindsight, you check "has this LLM response been good or bad?", and generate a score. You can expand the window to multiple related chats. So you can leverage extended context and hindsight for judging response quality. Using that data you can finetune a RLHF model, and with it finetune the base model.

But it's not just hindsight analysis. Sometimes users test or implement projects in the real world, and the LLM gets to see idea validation. Other times they elicit tacit experience from humans. That is what I think forms an experience flywheel. LLM being together with humans during problem solving, internalizing approaches, learning from outcomes.

Besides problem solving assistance LLMs are used for counselling/keeping company/therapeutic role. People chat with LLMs to understand and clarify their goals. These are generative teleological models. They are also used by 90% of students if I am to believe a random article.

So the triad of uses for LLMs are: professional problem solving, goal setting/therapy, and learning. All three benefit from the flywheel effect of interacting with millions of people.
by Frieren | 2025-04-17 18:48:36+00:00
Each generation of parents fails on something.

This generation is failing at recognizing the dangers of social media.

Teenagers and even children are being radicalized on-line, sold dangerous diets, manipulated by state sponsored creators, lied by companies, taught anti-science, and the list goes on and on.

How is all this not heavily regulated? Even adults need protection from scammers, fake products, misleading ads, hidden product promotions that look like personal opinions...

We have gone back a 100 years when it comes to consumer rights, and children are the ones that are paying the highest price.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-17 18:49:19+00:00
One reason is society has largely restructured itself to make raising children much more difficult than it used to be. It used to be "it takes a village", now that village is atomic families that don't talk to each other and traffic that makes playing outside deadly, and instead of living in multi-generational homes where grandparents can help with raising children, parents live on their own.

So the burden is much higher, and parents cope with it in unhealthy ways.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-17 18:49:23+00:00
>That’s not how Social Security works

And thus you understand. That's my whole point! That is my objection! But to be clear I didn't say that's how SS works, I said that's how the reciprocation works -- I did not say that's when you pay back the SS money elders paid you (they didnt) but rather their investment. I clearly explained SS flows upward.

The flow of investment in the youth is largely from private individuals to youth. [privatized]

But the flow (dividends) the other way is largely through SS upwards. [socialized]

That's my whole point! It's a terrible system because the reciprocation encourages free-riders and poor incentives for investment in the youth, as the ROI is poorly coupled to those making the investment.
by apercu | 2025-04-17 18:49:38+00:00
Not at all my experience. I rinse the dishes before they go in as they will likely sit for days and days before I fill up the dishwasher.

Likely that’s because if there’s just a couple dishes I just hand wash them. But when we have company the dishwasher is a massive time saver. That said, I bet the average American has way more electronic “stuff” and possessions than I do (with the exception of instruments and music gear) as I try to live pretty simply.
by spondylosaurus | 2025-04-17 18:50:07+00:00
Indeed.

Also I originally said "resident" and not "legal resident" because I think it's blatantly insane that anyone in the US, with legal recourse to be here or otherwise, is being captured and sent to a prison in a country they may or may not have ever been to, and in a country over which the US claims to have no authority to bring them back when ordered to do so. Kicking someone out of the US is one thing, but sending them to a shitbox supermax prison abroad is another entirely.

That said, it's also true that many of these people are LEGAL residents, which makes matters that much worse.
by glenstein | 2025-04-17 18:51:07+00:00
Everything about it feels like BFD category for potential microbial life if true. And all the circumstantial details seem to point in the same direction. Potential hydrogen-rich ocean planet in a habitable zone, in alignment with theory about most plausible models for environments that might support life.

It's got no known abiotic process for being generated, but a clearly understood connection to life, and is apparently very reactive and would have to be actively re-generated at mass scale to sustainably show up in an atmosphere.

Nothing should be taken as proven, but it feels staggeringly plausible, and in my opinion would be the biggest of the "big if true" space stories I've ever seen in my lifetime.
by matthest | 2025-04-17 18:51:10+00:00
First, let me say I'm glad the FTC is going after monopolies. True capitalism requires competition, not massive corporations.

That said, I feel like going after Big Tech is a massive misuse of resources. Not because it's not a monopoly (it is), but because there's a far more important monopoly that should be broken up: healthcare insurance.

Something like 7 corporations dominate 70% of the healthcare insurance market. The AMA had a study last year that concluded these insurance companies are charging monopoly pricing.

This is why Americans are paying astronomical prices for healthcare.

This is IMO by far the most pressing issue. Yet the FTC is seemingly spending all its time going after Big Tech, which has a comparatively lower impact on the quality of everyday Americans' lives.
by toast0 | 2025-04-17 18:51:25+00:00
> Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another.

There's certainly some tension between advertisers and publishers, in that advertiser would like to pay less and publishers would like to be paid more; but there's a lot of things an ad exchange can do that are good for both. Selecting ads to display that result in meaningful downstream conversion is good for both advertisers and publishers, because they'll both get paid and maybe something about the user getting something they want too.

Showing inappropriate and ineffective ads isn't great for the advertiser, and it might make the publisher money in the near term, but it can drive users away and tends not to be sustainable --- advertisers stop advertising in venues where they don't get results.

The value of a good ad exchange for the publisher and the advertiser is when it provides reasonable matching at a lower cost than the parties arranging advertising directly. Possibly some amount of assurances for both sides too --- the exchange should ensure the advertising code and destinations aren't going to compromise the publisher or their user and should ensure that the ads paid for are actually seen (to the degree possible). There's room for the exchange to profit from scale while still being lower cost than self-managed advertising.
by chimeracoder | 2025-04-17 18:51:44+00:00
AFAIK this is a somewhat misleading statement. Most of Jane Jacobs's publicly available commentary on political topics are in the context of urbanism, where "conservative" (especially as that first article defines it) is not in line with how modern people would define conservative attitudes towards urbanism.

If we look outside the area of urbanism, the picture becomes less clear. For example, Jacobs was anti-Communist, which we'd consider to be a conservative position by definition, but was well within the bounds of mainstream politics across the spectrum in the time she was most active. She also was outspokenly pro-union, which is decidedly not a conservative position in modern politics.

So yes, you can call Jane Jacobs a conservative if you want to use Edmund Burke as a reference point, but honestly, using Edmund Burke to define conservatism is almost a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, given how much modern-day conservatives actually disagree with Edmund Burke himself about.
by btilly | 2025-04-17 18:51:53+00:00
While this may convince students, you haven't actually prove that any exponential function has a slope. The usual presentation doesn't even demonstrate that such functions are defined at irrational numbers.

That said, it is worthwhile to go through the algebra exercise to convince yourself that, for large n, (1+x/n)^n expands out to approximately 1 + x + x^2/2 + x^3/6 + ...

Hint. The x^k terms come out to (x/n)^k (n choose k). This will turn out to be x^k/k! + O(x^k/n). As n goes to infinity, the error term drops out, and we're just left with the series that we want.