MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-05-12 23:40:57+00:00
From the beginning, TCC has been a house of cards. It only impedes legitimate developers and tortures users with permission prompts that Apple ridiculed back in the day, while malicious apps can easily bypass the "security" (theater) in countless ways that researchers continue to uncover and report. I'm not a professional security researcher, just a Mac developer, but I've discovered a number of bypasses myself. It's almost as if Apple engineers don't even understand the technology they're using. And maybe they don't! How many remain from the pre-iPhone era?
by rtpg | 2025-05-12 23:41:33+00:00
I _really_ appreciate Tokyo's system of basically forcing you to affirmatively declare your parking spot when you buy a car, on top of the usual "pay extra rent to have a parking space" thing that happens in many spots.

While it doesn't stop cars from being abandoned "randomly", just the entire principle of having a paper trail for these things and creating a bunch of incentives to make sure that parking spots don't turn into trash heaps[0].

Especially now that I live in a place where street parking is a prime resource and yet people _who have garages_ still choose to street park out of convenience...

[0]: not always of course, I know about the trash houses
by raddan | 2025-05-12 23:41:51+00:00
It would be seriously disappointing if the world we are moving to is one where people don’t care about in person talks anymore. Not only do I love in-person conferences, I would probably stop caring about publishing papers if it was disconnected from the social parts. The social parts of PLDI, SPLASH, and yes, ATC (where I was fortunate enough to win a best paper on my one and only submission there) have been major highlights of my career, and more than once have led to friendships, interesting projects, and even employment. I was part of the team that helped make PLDI virtual during the pandemic in 2020, and as well as it went, I found it so painful to attend that I basically did not attend.

I understand that I am in the minority here when it comes to remote work, etc, but if opportunities to learn from and socialize in person with colleagues go away, then I will too. Woodworkers don’t seem so enamored with virtual this and that, so I would probably jump ship and do something else.
by closewith | 2025-05-12 23:42:13+00:00
The only country in Europe where PAs made any significant inroads was the UK, where their most significant role has been abolished.

In Germany and all other countries, PAs are unable to treat patients without direct oversight and they are single digit percentages compared to NPs.

It's clear you have no experience in this area, so I wonder why the need to comment at all?
by pkkkzip | 2025-05-12 23:42:17+00:00
the difference means getting funded or not. people fake testimonials and put logos of large companies too on their saas.

some people even buy residential proxies and create accounts on communities that can steer them towards specific action like "hey lets short squeeze this company let me sell you my call option" etc.

there's no incentive to be honest, i know two founders where one cheated with fake accounts, github likes and exited. the other ultimately gave up and worked in another field.

the old saying "if you lie to those who wants to be lied to you will become wealthy" rings true.

however at the end of the day it is dishonest and money earned through deception is bad.
by matthewfcarlson | 2025-05-12 23:43:06+00:00
Part of the problem is the wake word “hey siri” is actually handed by a separate coprocessor (AOP) with the model compiled into the firmware. While anything is technically possible, it isn’t as simple as just letting the google app run in the background since the AP is asleep when any of these gesture happen. You could probably setup the action button on the side to open an assistant, but that’s going to be a less pleasant experience (app might not be open, etc).

Details are listed below

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
by tharkun__ | 2025-05-12 23:45:43+00:00
You are using one particular "definition" of the phrase common sense. It does appear when I search as well. But so do others.

knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument. As such, it is often considered to represent the basic level of sound practical judgement or knowledge of basic facts that any adult human being ought to possess.

Now with that definition some of what you said very definitely would no longer be the case as the above definition would seem to automatically "adjust with the times" so to speak in that what we might expect most adults to know and understand changes over the years, decades and definitely centuries.
by Mandatum | 2025-05-12 23:45:52+00:00
Whichever Salesforce employee has their bonus tied to this being declared an incident and not an outage; fuck you.

This has affected critical, operational processes which YOUR sales and marketing teams use in Case Studies[0][1][2] and documentation[3][4].

[0] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/customer-stories/react-veterans...

[1] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/customer-stories/veterans-affai...

[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/customer-stories/mta-new-york-c...

[3] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/blog/productivity/why-every-bus...

[4] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/blog/productivity/standard-oper...?
by Havoc | 2025-05-12 23:47:14+00:00
Tough reading this sort of thing. :(

I don’t quite see the link to AI though?

The CV bot hellhole yes, but not how it replaced him? Is he saying nobody is hiring php devs anymore because of cursor & co? Presumably with 20 years experience he isn’t coding simple stuff so that doesn’t seem super likely

> something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years.

End of ZIRP. For a lot of companies, especially in the early stage world the math stopped mathing without free money

Regardless overall the message does seem directionally correct - society is going to need a solution pretty soon for people struggling to compete, AI or otherwise
by _whiteCaps_ | 2025-05-12 23:48:38+00:00
Re WWII use of radio:

My grandfather flew Typhoons, and they operated 'cab rank' as part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. The Army would radio in coordinates of German tanks or fortified positions, and the Typhoons would come in with their rockets / bombs / cannons. I wish he was still around so I could ask him how that was done. A central dispatcher? Or did they talk to the Army directly? Not sure.
by mianos | 2025-05-12 23:49:01+00:00
It’s also why other regulatory zones outside the US, with much stronger privacy laws like the EU, don’t seem to produce as much innovation, while the US and China keep churning out new stuff.

It’s a trade-off between shipping fast and courting risk. I’m not judging one over the other; it comes down to what you’re willing to accept, not what you wish for.
by imiric | 2025-05-12 23:49:57+00:00
> Why do you think an AI couldn't do better than a human, when we have ample evidence of computers/AI exceeding humans in many areas?

I was specifically referring to the ability of discerning between accurate content and nonsense. SOTA LLMs today produce nonsensical output themselves, partly due to their training data being from poor quality sources. Cleaning up and validating training data for accuracy is an unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problem. We can't expect AI to do this for us, since this requires judgment from expert humans. And for specific applications such as healthcare, accuracy is not something you can ignore by placing a disclaimer.
by benoau | 2025-05-12 23:50:01+00:00
That endowment is not their budget for scientific research. The EU basically caught up with what Harvard spends of their own money with that €500 million.

> In fiscal year 2024 (FY24), research at Harvard was supported by more than $1 billion of sponsored funds from federal, foundation, and industry sponsors, alongside an additional $526 million funded directly by the University.

https://osp.finance.harvard.edu/osp-annual-report
by kqr2 | 2025-05-12 23:50:07+00:00
TLDR: Hawking radiation can cause things besides black holes to evaporate.

Man and moon: 10^90 years

Because the researchers were at it anyway, they also calculated how long it takes for the moon and a human to evaporate via Hawking-like radiation. That's 10^90 years. Of course, the researchers subtly note, there are other processes that may cause humans and the moon to disappear faster than calculated.
by okdood64 | 2025-05-12 23:51:12+00:00
Precisely the reason I don't understand how people can daily drive Linux on their laptop. (I say laptop because additionally: trackpad issues, Bluetooth issues, etc.)

Is it much better than 10 or 20 years ago? Yes.

Is it still annoying enough and sometimes colossal waste of time? Yes. Just use a Macbook and be done with it.
by dekhn | 2025-05-12 23:55:09+00:00
Check out the history of BBN, who was deeply involved in the creation of the modern internet. There was an open revolving door between BBN employees and granting agencies, and BBN was even charged with contract fraud by the government . It's owned by Raytheon- a classic defense company.

Our country's tight relationship between the government, military, academia, and industrial has paid off repeatedly, even if it has some graft.
by haswell | 2025-05-12 23:55:33+00:00
I think those are the right questions to be asking, with emphasis on the fact that these remain questions.

Too many AI accelerationists are treating these questions as foregone conclusions, which seems like an enormously dangerous bet without a clearer pathway to a truly beneficial outcome.

It may very well be that some form of AI (which form? hard to say - probably not LLMs) are a part of the solution. It may just as well be that they are not. But when building software, the age old advice to “start with the problem, not the solution” comes to mind.

The number of engineers I’ve worked with over the years (I’ve been one of them) who are convinced that the feature they’re building is the right thing to build, only to realize later that it doesn’t solve a problem people care about…is a very large number.

Regarding degrowth, I’m not advocating for it. With that said, that will be the unwanted result forced on us by the realities of the environment if we can’t put a lid on the climate issue.
Show HN: I built an all-in-one feedback system to ship the right features faster
by optinghost | 2025-05-12 23:56:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always believed that great products are built with continuous user feedback. But when I tried tools like Canny, I ran into two main issues:

* They were overloaded with features I didn’t need

* At $99/month, they were just too expensive for small teams or indie makers

So I decided to build something simpler.

An all-in-one feedback platform that helps you collect, organize, and act on user feedback — without the complexity or the cost.

It includes:

* Feedback boards (public or private)

* Tags, categories, and statuses

* Roadmaps and changelogs

* Status updates to close the loop with users

I built this for teams that want just enough structure to stay focused, without getting bogged down in process.

Would love your feedback, and I’m happy to answer any questions.
by nradov | 2025-05-12 23:56:06+00:00
PAs have to practice under some level of physician oversight pretty much everywhere. That part was never in dispute. But they can offload physicians for some routine primary care cases where a real doctor isn't needed.

The data clearly shows that PA numbers continue increasing in many countries, so obviously they don't consider it a failed experiment and you're just lying to push some kind of personal agenda. It's clear you have no experience in this area, so I wonder why the need to comment at all?
by muzani | 2025-05-12 23:57:08+00:00
I did freelancing for 5 years and the trick for me was just aiming to do things faster, cheaper, better.

Well, the trick is really just faster. If you can do things at 2x the speed, you can charge 1.5x and clients will be very happy. And if things are done faster, you can layer on more quality things as well – tests, features, fancy backgrounds and animations, optimizations for low end devices, and so on.

People are often afraid that being too productive will make them run out of work. But with software, here's an endless amount of things to do. One of the more valuable things a contractor can do is help a profitable company with tech debt transition out of the tech debt. Eventually they become productive and take on tech debt because there's value to releasing new products as early as possible, and it's an endless cycle.
Show HN: AGI Hits a Structural Wall – A Billion-Dollar Problem
by mmschlereth | 2025-05-12 23:57:26+00:00
This paper formally defines where current AGI hits a structural wall — not a technical one.

It shows that no amount of scaling, reinforcement learning, or recursive optimization will break through three deep epistemological and formal constraints:

1. Semantic Closure — An AI system cannot generate outputs that require meaning beyond its internal frame.

2. Non-Computability of Frame Innovation — New cognitive structures cannot be computed from within an existing one.

3. Statistical Breakdown in Open Worlds — Probabilistic inference collapses in environments with heavy-tailed uncertainty.

These aren’t limitations of today’s models. They’re structural boundaries inherent to algorithmic cognition itself — mathematical, logical, epistemological.

But this isn’t a rejection of AI. It’s a clear definition of the boundary condition that must be faced — and, potentially, designed around.

If AGI fails at this wall, the opportunity isn’t over — it’s just starting. For anyone serious about cognition, this is the real frontier.

Full paper:

https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHTAB-13

Open to critique, challenge, or counterproofs.
by GianFabien | 2025-05-12 23:58:06+00:00
I've been contracting for a long time. Clients always have deadlines, mostly unrealistic ones. In my experience, business always prioritizes making or saving money ASAP.

What has worked for me is to work hard and fast. Deliver the results. Then take time out. This cycle works for me, because it typically takes some time to secure the next contract. When working on a contract, I don't have time to look for the next one.
by dekhn | 2025-05-12 23:58:37+00:00
What do you mean universities can't commercialize in the same way (I may have misunderstood what you meant)? Due to Bayh-Dole, Universities can patent and license the tech they develop under contract for the government- often helping professors start up companies with funding, while simultaneously charging those companies to license the tech. This is also true for National labs run by universities (Berkeley and a few others). the other labs run under contract by external for-profit companies.
by gnabgib | 2025-05-12 23:59:55+00:00
(2016) Popular in:

2023 (174 points, 66 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38627864

2022 (180 points, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462345

2015 (179 points, 35 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531332

2016 (136 points, 38 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11570606

2016 (467 points, 142 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11501493
by muzani | 2025-05-13 00:00:31+00:00
I've been using it since August '24 and it has never been reliable enough for production. My app from then is broken because it doesn't follow instructions, especially when you make it output JSON without some middle layer to "repair" the broken bits. There was a point where it simply broke all the JSON arrays and I had to restructure it to not use arrays.

It seems to work okay for something like Cursor, where you clearly realize that you're using a certain model and are willing to take on the risk for higher quality output.
by barrkel | 2025-05-13 00:02:00+00:00
Your strident tone isn't doing your position any favours.

You're a lot closer to everything in the Barbican than you are in Croydon or Enfield or Acton or Stratford.

London is big. The City is close enough to the centre that it is central, compared to most of London.

(Personally I think the Barbican is ugly, and I didn't like moving around in it, with long walkways forcing unnatural navigation. It only works, in so far as it works, due to a degree of elite mindshare capture keeping it owned and occupied by the wealthy. Put the same idea in Stratford and come back to somewhere far less pleasant in 20 years.)
by ngangaga | 2025-05-13 00:02:17+00:00
> the difference means getting funded or not.

This speaks more to the incompetence of VC than anything. How can you justify deploying hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on the basis of "stars"?

I have a very hard time blaming the people who pull off this scam. Money is money and taking from VCs is morally (nearly) free.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-13 00:02:34+00:00
There are a ton of big examples of advances across all subfields of AI over the last year, but the first one that came to my mind was AlphaGeometry2 [0], which combines Gemini with a symbolic agent to solve (offer proofs for) the vast majority of IMO geometry problems. I believe that this sort of approach can be applied to many other types of problems.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03544
by WatchDog | 2025-05-13 00:03:04+00:00
So Australian and now UK special forces have been implicated in similar war crimes.

How is it that US special forces haven’t been implicated in similar war crimes?

Does the US have a genuinely better culture, or are they just less accountable?

People like Chris Kyle are treated as heroes, but it seems unlikely that he got so many kills by following the rules of engagement properly.
by dlivingston | 2025-05-13 00:03:10+00:00
Absolutely not. We would be moving backwards as a society. Increased energy usage is a bellwether of societal advancement. See the Kardashev scale and Dyson sphere for example.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
by catigula | 2025-05-13 00:03:19+00:00
Yes, I only see downsides.

It's mostly because the actual stated and actualized goal of real AI is clearly bad.

It's like if you approached me and said "I'm going to erase meaning from your life. You will want for nothing. The entire paradigm of reality will be changed: your entire evolutionary struggle, made meaningless. You will want for nothing: "be" nothing. Also this might potentially kill you or some rich person or more likely nation-state could enslave you."

The actual stated goals seem negative to me. I'm not very interested in erasing and surpassing human achievement in every way. It seems inherently bad. I don't think that's an absurd perspective.

I think the disconnect here is asked in "what is the purpose of life" and I don't think any reasonable interpretation of that is "be obscenely comfortable".
by LeanderK | 2025-05-13 00:04:01+00:00
I didn't enjoy the city of arts and sciences tbh, it felt disconnected, artificial, maybe almost totalitarian in its will to show off. I also thought that, if you look past the immediate effect, it just didn't feel that good looking. A bit similar to how I often feel about Zaha Hadids work.

In comparison, in the barbican I felt like I could sit there for hours and enjoy the architecture. It has so many interesting details and aesthetically pleasing corners.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-13 00:04:47+00:00
I’m kind of perplexed by the way Ross Ulbricht is held up as a hero after he was caught spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire hitmen to murder multiple people. Usually when I bring this up people try to change the subject to the FBI agent who tried to steal crypto or they suggest that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the claims (the court found that by a preponderance of the evidence he sent the messages). There are also claims that because they didn’t pursue those charges they do t “count” despite the preponderance of evidence. Some people just aren’t aware at all.

It’s a strange internet phenomenon where people seem to want him to be a folk hero and they’re willing to ignore or use mental gymnastics to wash away the fact that he was spending a lot of money to murder several people.
by K0balt | 2025-05-13 00:06:40+00:00
This is a great example, really.

If I’m bored I sometimes freelance as a field repair technician for service contractors. It’s typically opening up a machine I’ve never seen, and finding the combination of mechanical, electronic, and/or software fixes it needs to come back online. It can be a lot of fun, and the pay is not terrible. But you need to understand some analog electronics, strong digital electronics skills, basic programming paradigms, SQL, networking from the physical layer on up through the application layer, and also how to read between the lines on poorly written manuals and find the hidden truth that the various contradictions point to.

I’ve worked on everything from CT scanners to cutting lasers to ATMs, and done more server swaps, PDU replacements, and field upgrades than I care to count. It’s great when I need a break from the sea of bytes, and I get to see an inside view on a lot of cool stuff, and some pretty concerning things going on behind the scenes as well. I could say, I’ve seen some shit.

I’ve watched a 27 year old pentium pro boot up off the arm of Michelin, the sparkle of the token ring LEDs twitching furtively in the twighlight of an abandoned server room, screens blaring static amid a tangle of drooping cables and fallen raceways. Shit still gives me nightmares.
by imiric | 2025-05-13 00:07:09+00:00
That's my hope as well. A responsible doctor that uses technology critically and knows its limitations is fine with me. My concern is that it's more likely that whatever AI says will be taken for granted, overruling any human judgment, because they're supposed to be expert systems that scored highly on some made-up benchmark produced by the same company that trained the model.

We see this today with AI-generated content on the web, and a flood of sloppily put together software produced by people who swear that AI is making them more productive. There's little interest in judging the output, and a lot of interest in lazy cash grabs. There are no guardrails in place in the healthcare industry AFAIA to prevent the same happening there, which is a scary thought.
by protocolture | 2025-05-13 00:08:08+00:00
My guess:

Something would need to happen to stop / prevent production for about 30 - 60 years.

Thats roughly equivalent to the Saturn V engine, and Codename FOGBANK which are the 2 examples of technologies that had to be reverse engineered after the fact.

Hypothetically we might choose to stop making new ones if demand dried up significantly.
by transpute | 2025-05-13 00:08:46+00:00
> pile of dirt on top of a pile of dirt

Infinite flexibility for reproducible commercial packaging of dirt permutations.

Packaging system pain exists at the border of chaos and simulated order.

There are useful concepts in Yocto but they were never formalized in academic papers, unlike some build systems for Haskell. There are packaging nuances encoded in bitbake recipes that will likely die there because they work "enough", instead of being further studied for long term lessons.

Given that shellcheck is written in Haskell, it might be an interesting academic exercise to write a Haskell replacement for bitbake, which converts bitbake recipes (shell+python) into something more maintainable.
by i_v | 2025-05-13 00:09:32+00:00
I was obsessed with the idea of music production as an engine within a game a long time ago. It was just something I came across in passing when I read about how Elder Scrolls Online created a soundtrack in a similar manner. This resurfaced in my mind again when I started digging into Suno and other AI-generated music recently and it's kind of fun to wonder what'll be possible with storytelling in games and visual novels with the ability to limitlessly adapt and change based on player interactions.