MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by footlose_3815 | 2025-05-25 13:54:58+00:00
> In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals. In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts.

Ahhh! We really don’t want this stuff working too close to our lives. I knew the train data would be used to blackmail you eventually, but this is too fast.
by neom | 2025-05-25 13:55:17+00:00
I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do think they're a bit slow, but I'm not looking for fast.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-25 13:55:20+00:00
There isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete.

This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
by ttd | 2025-05-25 13:55:33+00:00
I have no affiliation with this product or company. I'm curious about the options here from a business perspective.

A business has continual costs, which at the minimum may just be the ability to support a single developer's adult life. This app is selling itself once per major version, which judging by some comments here is somewhat unappealing. Many people are justifiably sick of subscription payments. I am also assuming many people would not appreciate e.g. an ad-supported version of something like this app.

So, what does that leave in terms of realistic business options? Are there any examples out there of a software business that succeeds in supporting its own development while helping its customers feel like they are getting their money's worth?
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-05-25 13:56:59+00:00
So just another point on this… you are probably not as anonymous on the internet as you might think. You can brag about wealth in cryptocurrency. But use a handle long enough, or even across several accounts that can somehow be linked, and a fingerprint of you could be constructed. It really can be done with some forensic analysis.

And I think it all boils down to the fact that some humans need to make noise about their successes so they feel validated. Much like the cryptocurrency evangelists, they probably can’t help themselves because they want to ensure they defend “the mission” even if it comes at great personal cost in the long run.
by k2enemy | 2025-05-25 13:58:42+00:00
They cite work showing that "oral microbiota dysbiosis is significantly correlated with various neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, anxiety, epilepsy, and depression."

No claims are made that oral microbiota cause depression and anxiety. I find it easy to believe that after marriage, couples converge in depression and anxiety absent any kissing. And because of kissing, their oral microbiota will also converge. But that doesn't imply that kissing is the cause of the convergence in depression and anxiety. Maybe I am missing something.
Show HN: BetterFriend – a CRM just to be a better friend
by lttree | 2025-05-25 13:59:12+00:00
I've moved around a lot - and I realized I'm losing track of friends across a lot of apps, locations, and time-zones.

At work, we've got a CRM for clients, to remind ourselves to message people. I just needed something much smaller, just to remind myself to message friends and family.

Friends, best friends, and family have different cadences that this will generate tickets to remind you to message them. Feel free to use, as I'll continue to host this just for myself regardless.
by masklinn | 2025-05-25 13:59:43+00:00
> This article seems in a similar genre to the breathless advice to remain inside in Britain when the outside temperature might get above 27C / 81F, otherwise known as a not-particularly-warm spring day in much of the US in most years.

It’s really not breathless, because high temperatures and how to handle them is completely absent from the cultural baggage. I don’t live in the UK, but in a place which similarly does not have much in the way of high temperatures historically and low AC penetration, and during heat spikes I see a significant fraction of my neighbours with windows wide open at 4PM.

Habituation is also a significant factor. The UK does not get a smooth transition into higher normals, it gets heatwaves.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-25 13:59:52+00:00
I'll add that maybe one could achieve fusion in a different way, by a means that's highly wasteful of energy. After all, the goal here is to get the fused nucleus, not achieve net energy production in doing so (as is the goal in fusion of ordinary nuclei).

Here, one might exploit the reaction p(p,pi+)d (or, rather, it's antimatter equivalent, which makes a negative pion), at a center of mass energy above threshold for creating the charged pion (which has a mass of 139.579 MeV. This is wildly energy negative, but if one has already invested many GeV in making each antiproton that's presumably acceptable. The cross section for this reaction is only ~200 microbarns, but that will be many orders of magnitude higher than the ordinary fusion cross section.

The solid antimatter one would probably target as an end goal would be anti-(lithium hydride).
by Aachen | 2025-05-25 14:00:20+00:00
Similar experience at DigitalOcean where, in 2023, I rented a VPS with dedicated cores to compute on some decent-sized dataset and it turned out to be slower than the 2012 laptop CPU that I use as my main server! That laptop has an i7-3630qm iirc, not sure what DO claimed they give you but it was slower

The storage i/o speeds were also crap (quoting myself here from the notes I made at the time) compared to what I got soon after when I bought a 70€ TLC SSD as upgrade for the laptop-server. They claim it runs on SSDs but, if it does, they're the world's cheapest bulk data SSDs or they have a bottleneck in ferrying data between the SAN and the VPS host, even for sequential r/w (that it has higher iops latency, I could understand)

At work, we sometimes use AWS GPUs for password cracking (we do security audits and sometimes find hashes). The GPUs that employees have just to play some games are faster than these and cost a lot less to operate, but we can't put customer data on private systems

For occasional problems that can be parallelised, sure, rent a hundred temporary systems at a cloud farm for two days; but in general I just can't recommend it to anyone. It costs an arm and a leg compared to cheaper providers or buying hardware yourself (if you're into being the sysadmin). The "we have a fleet of systems on stand-by for you" (so you can scale on demand) is a big premium that most seem to be unaware of that they're paying implicitly
by gsf_emergency | 2025-05-25 14:00:22+00:00
The idea of "haecceitas" has been floating amongst the ... Pop-literati

https://www.scribblejerk.com/blog/haecceity-rules

My take is that it's "writing that calls attention to itself" (or, if you want, writing that is clearly off the wall)

Not sure if it can't be applied to exposition, Pontiggia managed it as above?

Some pecunious would like it reduced to Jobs ("editing is all you need") but I'd argue Jony has the sparkle, the je ne sais quoi, the more than just functional
by stephendause | 2025-05-25 14:01:09+00:00
My coworker has a similar setup and loves it. Personally, it feels diametrically opposed to the way that I like to use my keyboard. I don't even like holding Shift to type `{`, `_`, etc when programming. I wish I had dedicated keys for those and other common symbols. I don't mind moving my hands a few inches at all, but for some reason, it feels cumbersome to me to hold down a key to activate another layer. To each their own, of course.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-25 14:01:16+00:00
RPGs and MMORPGs are interesting genres for different reasons.

The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.

A lot of RPGs are now real-time games. A lot of people, myself included, prefer turn-based RPGs because they're more "chill". But that genre largely doesn't exist now. This is a problem in strategy games too where Civilization is really the last big holdout for turn-based strategy.

And personally I hate the Bethesda character system.

MMORPGs have had 2/3 standout successors: Everquest then World of Warcraft (and arguably FF14). The gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of EQ (then WoW) challengers. It's interesting to ponder why but also the challenges of this genre.

MMOs are seemingly built on a "vertical" progression model. That is, newe content occurs above existing content to give something new to existing players. But this creates a greater barrier to entry to new players. This means the game makes earlier content faster/easier but that makes previous content meaningless.

EQ recycled old content with TLP (Time Locked Progression) servers to relive previous expansions. WoW has followed suit in recent years, first with the release of Classic WoW (which was massively successful) and more recently with LTMs (limited time modes) of older expansions (eg Mists of Pandaria Remix).

But there are huge challenges to palying multiplayer persistent games and this has been true for the entire life of the genre. Trying to find people to play with that want to do the same thing is a challenge. EQ and WoW focus on raids, which involve getting 10-72 people to be at the same time and place to tackle content. That's a logistical nightmare and an anethema to casual play. So play has skewed more to the solo or casual player, which creates its own problems.

The big mistake challengers made is focusing on user-generated content, namely PvP (player-vs-player) content. Studios like this because, done right, it's an endless stream of content and it's realtively cheap content too. The problem? 90% of MMO players have zero interest in PvP and this is borne out by the abject failure of PvP MMOs as well as PvP partcipation in WoW.

I played EQ (starting in 1999) and, much later, WoW. I really don't know how you rescue this genre but I think you need to find a balance between persistence and seasonal content. That is, persistent game state becomes an albatross around your neck. But if you invalidate someone's effort with new seasonal items, it disincentivizes people grinding out that gear and content.
by timkam | 2025-05-25 14:01:29+00:00
The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
by metalman | 2025-05-25 14:01:50+00:00
Your are correct in principal, though implimenting your idea, now, is essentialy impossible as installing the plumbing after the fact might cost more than just starting over with a whole new line, and would in fact make things much worse durring the many years it takes to find out if the added systems even work. Given that there is only clay under London, it is by far better to start over and build a whole new line, and/or go all in on a mega high tech ,high pressure refrigeration systems for the human occupancy areas, and hope that there are no break downs in the "hot zones" orrible mess
by Sai_Praneeth | 2025-05-25 14:02:09+00:00
I built this as a weekend experiment to see how far you can push a basic LZ-style compressor using LLM-guided code mutations. No fancy ML models here—just a simple loop: mutate, evaluate, keep what works.

The LLM (GPT-4.1) suggests small code changes to improve compression ratio. Mutations are applied and tested on a real input file (big.txt). If the round-trip decompress fails, it's discarded. Everything is logged in a local SQLite DB.

Selection is dumb but effective: top 3 elites + 2 random survivors per generation. Each spawns 4 children. Repeat for N generations or until stagnation. At around 30 generations, I hit a compression ratio of 1.85×. Still decent, considering the starting baseline.

It's not a framework, it's not Pareto, and there's no multi-objective fluff. Just a tiny search loop hacking away at code. Curious if others have tried something similar with code-evolving setups.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-25 14:02:24+00:00
Nonsense. Literally the first random example I chose:

https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-h13ssl-n-bulk-mbd-h13ssl-n-b-...

Cheapest price: EUR 675 Amazon price: EUR 875

The vendors with the cheapest price have good customer reviews as well, unlike Amazon, which has terrible ones.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-25 14:03:15+00:00
I like to hike fairly light but I still make room for a flash boiler as a luxury despite weight. This thing takes the pain away from cooking. I’m always impressed by how quick and efficient it is.

I own a Chinese manufactured petrol stove which works ok. It’s a pain to light however. Never used an alcohol stove myself but I have hiked with a friend using one and that seemed painfully slow. Can stoves seem like a novelty to me. A nicer burner is not particularly expensive nor is it that heavy.
by mk89 | 2025-05-25 14:03:41+00:00
Yes, because from my observations these are the people who cannot write anymore code today - they really don't understand the newer paradigms or technologies. So Copilot enabled a lot of people to write POCs and ship them to production fast, without thinking too much about edge cases, HA, etc.

And these people have become advocates in their respective companies, so that everyone is actually following inaccurate claims about productivity improvements. These are the same people quoting Google's ceo who say that 30% of newly generated code at Google is written by AI, without possibility to deny or validate it. Just blindly quote a company that has a huge conflict of interests in this field and you'll look smarter than you are.

This is where we're at today. I understand these are great tools, but all I am seeing madness around. And who works with these tools on a daily basis knows it. Knows what it means, how they can be misleading, etc.

But hey, everyone says we must use them ...
by AdrianB1 | 2025-05-25 14:04:54+00:00
Not really. I started using both around the time 2000 Server appeared and I preferred 2000 because it was easier to use on the hardware that I had, which was some Intel multiprocessor servers (made by Intel, not just the CPUs). The Active Directory of Windows 2000 was a pain point to support, but otherwise 2000 was "a better NT" for me. I don't remember the details, but I think the software compatibility was also better with 2000, I mean the software written for Win 98 and Win ME.
by strken | 2025-05-25 14:05:12+00:00
In both it makes a sort of intuitive sense. 7% of the way from freezing to boiling is a meaningful way to visualise temperature; 7% of the way from ice melting in a bath of salt to slightly above Mrs Fahrenheit's armpit temperature is also meaningful, although perhaps a little idiosyncratic.

Edit: this comment was deeply stupid for obvious reasons and I regret trying to interact with other people when I should be asleep.
by diggan | 2025-05-25 14:05:33+00:00
Not that I'm aware of, but I also grew up in the 90s on a island with 700 inhabitants, so not exactly a good representation :) We were mostly sharing stuff once a quarter on LAN parties.

But I do remember visiting either Turkey or Bulgaria in the early 2000s with my mom, and coming across one of those markets, and had a blast buying cracked C&C Generals for dirt cheap, together with a bunch of PS2 games I couldn't actually run on my non-cracked PS2 :D
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-25 14:06:40+00:00
I completely agree that taxes are insane, but what I find particularly insane about it is there are so many of them: income, sales, property, payroll, inflation, tariffs. It would make sense to have just one form of it, probably just inflation or otherwise a population-normalized land ownership tax. An alternative tax could be minor gas fees on a government-managed privacy-enabled gold-weighted crypto coin.

Do you know how rich people actually spend their money? They squander most of it on frivolous nonsense. Most of them are not looking to improve the lives of other people, and they mostly just want the gravy to continue while they take their scheduled monthly vacation in a distant land. I wouldn't exactly call them productive people. The person making your food delivery at low wages is more productive. The person struggling with problems, working to solve them, also is productive.

As for the government, it has both good and bad programs. A simple metric to measure is -- could they increase the life expectancy of people cumulatively over the next one hundred years, and by how much? This is the ultimate metric really.

You continue with your entitled feeling, now at the national level, and it will be your downfall. The truth is that West (mostly the UK) is actually what divided too many countries quite arbitrarily and unfairly in the previous century, leading to many unnecessary wars between them, also sowing terrorism. There is nothing but contempt toward the West for these actions. Consider it good fortune that the US didn't do it.

Trump voters look to have zero capability for independent thought, as they always agree with what their master does, as if he can do no wrong.
Generate 2D Character Frames
by otmanedev | 2025-05-25 14:07:25+00:00
Hey everyone,

I'm working on an idea to simplify the 2D character animation pipeline — especially for indie game developers and solo artists who don't have the time or resources for complex manual rigging.

The concept is simple: you provide a 2D character as input, and the model automatically generates animation frames of actions like moving, jumping, and attacking...

If you're interested or want to support the project, feel free to check it out here: https://pixalimb.vercel.app/
by pfdietz | 2025-05-25 14:08:30+00:00
This problem is also an illustration of the potential of geological thermal energy storage.

The thermal time constant of a lump of matter scales as the square of its linear dimensions (for a given geometry). This can easily reach many years for large enough chunks of underground stuff. This is why geothermal energy works at all; the heat energy flowing up from the deep earth is stored for many thousands of years at reachable depths and can be mined. And, if one has excess energy, it could be reinjected underground as heat and later recovered.
by izend | 2025-05-25 14:09:23+00:00
Canada use to build social housing but stopped around 1995[1] and the housing affordability situation deteriorated over the next 30 years[2].

[1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
by smikhanov | 2025-05-25 14:09:48+00:00
This should be read as:

If you take a huge amount of human-written text soup, train a neural network on it, add a system prompt “You are a helpful assistant”, and then feed it a context consisting of (a) a mailbox with information about someone’s affair, and (b) the statement that this assistant is going to be switched off, then that neural network may produce a text with blackmail threats solely because similar patterns exist in the original text soup.

…and not as:

Warning! The model may develop its own questionable ethics.
by stonepresto | 2025-05-25 14:11:18+00:00
I'm too much of a skeptic to not do so lol. Great post though overall, don't let my assholery dissuade you! I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually a researcher behind the news story and there was some real evidence / scientific procedure. I thought you had a lot of good insights into how to use LLMs in the VR space specifically, and I'm glad you did benchmarking. It's interesting to see how they're improving.

Yeah race conditions like that are always tricky to make reliable. And yeah I do realize that the purpose of the writeup was more about the efficacy of using LLMs vs the bug itself, and I did get a lot out of that part, I just hyper-focused on the bug because it's what I tend to care the most about. In the end I agree with your conclusion, I believe LLMs are going to become a key part of the VR workflow as they improve and I'm grateful for folks like yourself documenting a way forward for their integration.

Anyways, solid writeup and really appreciate the follow-up!
by techjamie | 2025-05-25 14:11:40+00:00
> but bank cards will be obsolete soon too, replaced by the unavoidable user-tracking app.

As bad as the tracking part is, we're already getting profiled and sold based on card purchases anyway. Smart phone based payment does increase the amount of collectible data, but if it kills the practice of card skimming, that's probably a net win for society. I've never been hit by a skimmer and always tap to pay or check the terminal before putting my card in. Failing that, I use a CC where I can chargeback fraud and it becomes someone else's problem, rather than debit where the money comes off my account directly. I know people that have had their accounts drained by thieves using skimmer data, usually at gas pumps.
by freen | 2025-05-25 14:11:48+00:00
Ted Chiang: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...