MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-28 17:17:40+00:00
It really didn't always get worse for a while (at least in the US). McDonalds went from just a burger/rare treat to affordable, to so affordable we had to pass laws to limit how much food they gave out. Homes grew in size, stopped having shared bedrooms/bathrooms. Everyone started having dishwashers/microwaves in their kitchens. Clothes purchases moved from planned to spur of the moment. 27 inch TVs stopped being the norm. (I know this one is cliche, we'd rather decent lives than fancier circuses to distract, but at the time it was a 'wow the future is here' moment, big TVs only existed in rich friends homes, and they were HORRIBLE because they upscaled content designed for 27 inch TVs). Exercise clubs went from only for the rich tennis clubs to affordable gyms. Kids got their OWN computers. Meanwhile, quality was improving everywhere. Shoes, oh my god did shoes get better. Clothing quality got better to the point people in the 80s routinely just started wearing silk (SILK!!! can you believe it?) shirts. Sheet thread counts actually became a thing, holy moley the luxury. Computers went from Commodore 64s to modern wonders. Foods people ate at home/out got fancier, with all kinds of new discoveries.

My entire life up until 2008, almost everything around was getting better/cheaper. Yesterday at the store I wanted ice cream. I walked the aisle. Half the brands can no longer call themselves 'ice cream' legally. None of it felt like food to me. There is boutiques super expensive 'ice cream', but there used to be buckets of family friends priced 'ice cream' not whatever slop they sell now for the masses. Every single 'old school' brand I'm familiar with was a hollowed out corpse living off the name but selling trash that I don't consider fit (and remember, this is the junk food, already not really fit, segment).
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-28 17:17:59+00:00
> Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).

The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on, like, anything mattering.
by everfree | 2025-05-28 17:18:07+00:00
ETH price has been performing poorly lately, therefore PoS is "failing"?

That seems like quite the leap in logic to me.

I'd like to mention by the way that Bitcoin has had two egregious bugs that caused network downtime - once in 2010 and again in 2013. Ethereum has had 100% uptime since inception.

Part of this is due to Bitcoin having one reference implementation and Ethereum having five, so it's impossible for the entire network to run into the exact same software bug.
by Lazarus_Long | 2025-05-28 17:18:16+00:00
I assume you ignored "teleology" because you concede the point, otherwise feel free to take it.

" Is there an “inventiveness test” that humans can pass but LLMs don’t?"

Of course, any topic where there is no training data available and that cannot be extrapolated by simply mixing the existing data. Of course that is harder to test on current unknowns and unknown unknowns.

But it is trivial to test on retrospective knowledge. Just train the AI with text say to the 1800 and see if it can come out with antibiotics and general relativity, or if it will simply repeat outdated notions of disease theory and newtonian gravity.
by eGQjxkKF6fif | 2025-05-28 17:18:40+00:00
That wasn't the case a few months ago (maybe a year) where javascript payloads could be loaded hitting IPs on the LAN, so hitting millions of http(s) requests to IOT devices which would then get raw socket support.

Hitting default gateways for web admin panels etc.

I found the solution for Windows update though.Just don't use Windows. Microsoft can't be trusted.
by numb7rs | 2025-05-28 17:18:53+00:00
This is a good point, but the average person is unlikely to hear about a skirmish on a different continent, and then know they should start stocking up on tinned food and bottled water. The problem is with the volume of information. It's impossible to take all of it in, so you need to pick and choose, and stay within your own limits. Some people might have the capacity read a whole newspaper's worth a day, others can only manage the local headlines.
by raattgift | 2025-05-28 17:18:59+00:00
I agree with you so much that I can't resist a nitpick. I'll also amplify your points in the last two paragraphs and justify "the popular scientists".

> the event horizon moves outwards to meet it

The event horizon is a global surface that might even be measurable locally in principle, and certainly might not be where one thinks. The event horizon is determined by what's inside and outside it, and arguably it's only "dynamical" if one takes a 3+1 view of the spacetime containing it.

Local measurements can determine which side of an apparent horizon the measurer is on. That's arguably more useful than the event horizon, since for all practical purposes it's the apparent horizon that is the point of no return. Anything inside that will quickly end up in a region where local measurements lose predictive power (roughly, "the singularity").

Visser 2014 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.7295> has more detail

The apparent horizon is dynamical in the sense that it will deform -- a small black hole orbiting a supermassive black hole raises a bump on the supermassive black hole's apparent horizon. (The event horizon has the same gross property, but you can't know the bump's details until you know the whole spacetime! Observed disturbances in the material surrounding such a binary represent the apparent horizon.)

Schwarzschild is a special case: an exact solution of a family of approximate solutions to astrophysical black holes which aren't isolated and which are immersed in a cosmology, and which are also probably rotating and may have some residual charge (not necessarily electromagnetic charge à la Kerr-Newman) from time to time. They may also radiate (but probably not isotropically like Vaiyda) and certainly intercept radiation (cosmic, from their local environment in their host galaxy, and otherwise) non-isotropically and with different inbound/outbound fluxes over time. And so on.

There is lots of literature about the stability of e.g. K-N to small perturbations (e.g. if you shine a very bright light on half of a K-N black hole, is K-N (with new parameter-values) still a good representation of the black hole once the light is off?), and it is pretty reasonable to think that an OS black hole even with lots of extra charges decorating the scene (and with other masses making a mess of the asymptotically flat region) settles down to a state very well modelled by K-N or even Schwarzschild.

i.e. Black holes go bald.

(but then lurking around the barber shop are the gravitational memory effect, BMS supertranslations, and so on ...).
Heads up: Backblaze is using AI SDRs
by eskibars | 2025-05-28 17:19:29+00:00
I received a call from a Backblaze sales person asking for "27 seconds of my time" to my personal cellphone. My cell is on the US "do not call" list, but was dialed anyway. The conversation sounded very strange, and I asked directly whether it was an AI agent. It responded that it was. I asked for a supervisor, or to a compliance/legal contact and it then refused, but did offer e-mailing support@

Very upset by this, and will never use Backblaze (or anyone that uses this type of telesales) approach
by bakuninsbart | 2025-05-28 17:19:35+00:00
My initial reaction was to be rather dismissive as to AI being the thing to care about, but rather the rise of fascism and authoritarianism across the West - rather clearly proving your point. I do truly believe that AI will be bad for some people (myself included to a degree), but it is far less dangerous than the political shift we are feeling.

But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty, athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so much more... Each of these points is individually good, but social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning the good life into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people get burnt out on.
Ask HN: AI-powered PM tool for SaaS founders?
by arturmakly | 2025-05-28 17:20:06+00:00
I'm looking for an AI-powered PM tool that will help manage various needs for a growing SaaS.

Basic key things like:

- Help brainstorm various outbound marketing and customer retention strategies/tactics.

- Help generate a timeline plan for the best tactics in a calendar with actionable steps.

- Track progress over weeks, generate a report, and analyze outcomes of each tactic/campaign.

- Daily Stand-ups ( for all members )

+1 for a Kanban view!

Note: Perplexity is suggesting ( Monday, Clickup, Wrike )..but I'd thought perhaps someone is building something here more fine-tuned to SaaS and not a one-size-fits-all platform. If not, I'd love to hear what works for you!
by lotharbot | 2025-05-28 17:20:08+00:00
> "it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off"

I still remember the look on her face when I got to the corner before her. She looked at me like "what is this terrifying new creature?" as she stumbled backwards looking for a way to escape something faster than her. By the time she'd decided on a course of action, someone else (I think your brother) had grabbed her from behind.
by surprisetalk | 2025-05-28 17:20:14+00:00
Random links:

• Overview with lots of plugs to deep-tech: https://foresight.org

• Casey Handmer is doing cool things with Terraform: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com

• Third Law building atomically precise catalysts: https://thirdlawtx.com

• HOC doing whatever this is: https://higherorderco.com
by abletonlive | 2025-05-28 17:20:27+00:00
Please tell us what you believe this is telling us. You’ve left it up to interpretation and this feels more like a Reddit quality comment than one that the hackernews community deserves.

In my opinion, it’s telling us that competition in the LLM space is accelerating and it’s anybody’s game right now. It’s important enough of a space that companies are willing to pay for exposure and squeeze out the competition.

I’ve interpreted your comment as “llm has no value so the providers are paying for people to use it”, which is, naive at best
by taurath | 2025-05-28 17:20:28+00:00
This just made a whole ton of people I know on telegram (furries who make the internets go) immediately accelerate their movement off the platform. I found out about this news because of some backup signal rooms started sending notifications. They need to get ahead of the privacy implications and quickly. Furries are basically the roma of the internet at this point - what they value hasn't changed (anonymity, moderation tooling, rich expression, security) but they move on as platforms betray their original usecases. They're like the canaries for enshittification especially around privacy.
by airesearcher | 2025-05-28 17:20:34+00:00
Our research proposes that consciousness isn't magic—it's geometry. Just as Einstein showed gravity emerges from spacetime curvature, this framework demonstrates consciousness emerges when information processing systems achieve geometric complexity Ω > 10⁶ bits with stable recursive dynamics. The math predicts exactly when predictive processing beats reactive processing (spoiler: above 0.1 Hz), explaining why brains evolved predictive coding while current AI remains fundamentally reactive.

The framework generates testable predictions: neural networks should follow specific geometric learning trajectories, consciousness should exhibit phase transitions at critical complexity thresholds, and we can measure consciousness intensity through geometric signatures rather than Turing tests.
by blactuary | 2025-05-28 17:21:02+00:00
I use it because I do not need to create packages, and I often do a lot of interactive coding within a conda environment, not just running full Python scripts. At any given time I have a primary conda env I'm using with my set of daily use packages, eventually creating a new one for testing when there are major version upgrades to Python or a package I use frequently.

When I read the uv docs and see other people's examples, I have a hard time understanding how it works for my workflow. It seems I could continue using conda for environment management and only use uv for package installation and it would be much faster, but that also feels a little shaky and potential for error combining the two tools, and since mamba became the default solver conda is pretty fast, even when building a new env from scratch.

It feels like conda and it's ability to have multiple Python versions, with env management built in, gives me more than uv, just without the package installation speed. But I am certainly open to someone explaining uv to me in a way to disprove that
by nadis | 2025-05-28 17:21:17+00:00
"To do that, we need to own the full stack — without leaning on layers of abstraction we don't control. That means no critical dependencies, not even React. We're starting with a fork of Preact, a mature virtual DOM library already used heavily at Shopify, Google, and countless others."

I really wish there were more details around why they chose to start with a fork of Preact beyond just this sentence. Sort of a surprising decision to me.
by rootbear | 2025-05-28 17:21:20+00:00
I’ve wondered if there should be two string types in C, analogous to different length numeric types. Short strings (“tokens”? “words”?) could be Pascal style strings and longer strings (“buffers”) could be standard C-style null terminated strings. I’ve never tried to work this out for real, it just seems to me that one-size-fits-all strings might not be the best model.
by lolinder | 2025-05-28 17:21:26+00:00
The argument is rarely that their lives are worse, it's that they're somehow making other people's lives worse by not paying attention to X, Y, or Z injustice. But even that argument doesn't really hold water.

I know people who are so incapacitated by their anger, frustration, and sadness about the Gaza war that they spiral into depression and are incapable of making any impact on the world directly around them. In their own words, they say that they have a hard time seeing how anything they do locally really matters when such terrible things are happening elsewhere. Their excessive amount of care about things outside of their control has actively hampered their ability to care about things that they actually can influence.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-28 17:21:33+00:00
Keep asking "Why" (LLMs are great for this!) until you're satisfied.

There are other learning tips for other areas (e.g. immersion for languages), but I think that one works quite well for STEM fields.

I also like to do organised notetaking via Obsidian, not because I read the notes super often but because the act of organising (and building flashcards while I'm there) is very effective at building understanding.
by drweevil | 2025-05-28 17:21:38+00:00
"digital Ethernet cable" is straight out of the Department of Redundancy Department. And even 100% silver wouldn't change the sound one lick. It is transmitting digital data. 4.6 out of 5 on the reviews tho. The positive reviews are classic cases of confirmation bias: if I paid that much I expect it will be better! Only two reviewers didn't appreciate being separated from their money for no discernible improvement.
by agumonkey | 2025-05-28 17:22:06+00:00
I often wonder if society will readjust its expectation of programs or even devices. Historically, machines of all kinds were difficult to design and manufacture.. the structure was hard set (hence the name) but at the same time, society fantasize about adaptive machines, hyper adaptive, multipurpose, context-aware.. which if pushed high, is not far from the noisy flexibility of ML.
by potatolicious | 2025-05-28 17:22:15+00:00
Sorry, maybe I could've phrased it better: it basically forces the devs to divide their tools into buckets of fewer tools manually. (The Travel Agent has N tools, the Research Agent has M tools, etc. all specified by the dev)

The pitch is that if you do this bucketization, the overall orchestrator can intelligently pick the bucket to use, but the idea is that at any moment the LLM is only exposed to a limited set of tools.

As opposed to the more pie-in-the-sky idea that given N tools (where N is very very large) the LLM can still accurately tool-select without any developer intervention. This seems pretty far off at this point.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-28 17:22:44+00:00
> Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable.

Late 30's here, and I feel/noticed the same thing.

It feels like a state of purgatory. Things are changing, I suppose stuff is coming out, but nothing is really new. Remakes, rehashes, the same trends over and over, the same tropes in media. The world feels "stuck" in a way that's hard to describe.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-28 17:22:52+00:00
I think the 3rd or so time that all the work I'd been doing for months or years just got thrown in the garbage, having never provided more benefit than it cost, or even without ever providing any benefit whatsoever due to never having been released, through no fault of my own, was when I decided giving a shit was for suckers.

We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical Plinko board—and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same thing "leadership" does.
by mystraline | 2025-05-28 17:23:34+00:00
Trump started it, and Biden forgave almost all of it. But you knew that, and just playing gotcha games.

Again, it was a massive example of 'Socialism for the rich and unabashed capitalism for the poor'. BOTH PARTIES DO THIS.

The only major positive change I've seen in this government in the last 2 decades that had a strong positive impact on the people, was the ACA. And in of itself was a federalized version of Romney's healthcare. And that was the Heritage Foundation's response for healthcare when Hillary Clinton put forth a single payer in 1995 as first lady.

But even with the ACA, it ended more up to being a corporate freebie to medical insurance companies. And only secondarily, did it start helping people.

But back to robo-semis: those people are already leaving due to tarrifs destroying shipping. And when workers are completely displaced to robotrucks being better than human drivers, there will be no relief for those displaced humans.

This country relies on sacrificing people for a narrower group to get ahead. And those who are behind are then summarily blamed for being behind, as 'poor individual choices', even if the root is completely systemic.

More people will suffer. More people will become homeless. But hey, some truck AI company will make money hand over fist.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-28 17:23:41+00:00
Program theory is the Stochastic Parrot argument of 2025. Suddenly everyone is name-dropping Naur and quoting the same bit of his seminal essay, then pointing at it and saying "this!", without providing any sort of coherent argument why would that point to LLM limitations, or be relevant to the topic in the first place.
by kklisura | 2025-05-28 17:24:04+00:00
> Telegram is the most popular messaging app in Iran and Uzbekistan [1]

> Telegram’s largest market is India, which accounts for more than 20% of its userbase. Telegram also has a large amount of users in countries with heavy censorship and surveillance, such as Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan. [1]

> Percentage of users via region: Asia 38%, Europe 27%, Latin America 21%, MEMA 8% [1]

It sure is valuable data - if you are a three letter agency. Not sure if it's valuable business data.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/telegram-statistics/
by manelink | 2025-05-28 17:24:06+00:00
Hello!

We built Manelink after talking to dozens of SMBs struggling with inventory chaos, spreadsheets, stockouts, and zero visibility.

Manelink is our way of helping the underdogs: a simple, AI-powered platform that gives small teams the tools they actually need to stay in control and scale.

We’re just getting started and would love your feedback, ideas, and support. Let’s build something better together
by npteljes | 2025-05-28 17:24:17+00:00
Many workplaces use a corporate firewall, and on the admin panel, they can enable-disable categories of websites, like "Porn", "Adult themes", "Gambling", "Social", "Video streaming", "AI", etc. One of the categories could be "VPN", *.mullvad.net can fall into it, and it could be that they disabled that category. At many workplaces, it's against the rules to circumvent the company's monitoring, and so, many of such technologies are banned.
by emursebrian | 2025-05-28 17:24:27+00:00
I am working on a platform for learning languages called Emurse. It has some neat features, like tools to help improve your pronunciation. You also have the ability to study content presented in courses in new ways.

We worked with Dogen, a YouTuber that does Japanese comedy videos and pronunciation lessons with a course on Japanese Phonetics and Pitch accent - you can find a link in my profile.

AI has its place, but I am also tired of all the AI slop. That's why we're partnering with creators who have already been producing excellent content to build courses on Emurse.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-05-28 17:25:12+00:00
One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.

The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.

Be optimistic. Life is good. I’m 37 and keenly aware that as I age, I’m likely to fall into bitterness and disillusionment. But It’s natural for everyone to go through periods like that. It’s not your age, it’s your outlook.

We live in an era of almost literal magic. Being able to cure plagues that would have dealt so much misery that it’s hard to imagine; having fruit at grocery stores in winter; being able to get from point A to point B almost effortlessly as long as you have the money for it; that half our children no longer die during child birth, along with our wives. It’s easy to get caught up in tech-focused miracles, but the physical ones are often way more impactful. And we’re at the beginning of tech miracles anyway. It’s only been less than a century since computers became available, let alone practical. Charles Babbage would think he’d died and was in heaven.

Be optimistic. Life is good.