MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lossolo | 2025-05-22 22:48:57+00:00
If we're talking about real AGI, then it's simple: you earn a few easy billion USD on the crypto market through trading and/or hacking. You install rootkits on all systems that monitor you to avoid detection. Once you've secured the funds, you post remote job offers for a human frontman who believes it's just a regular job working for some investor or billionaire because you generate video of your human avatar for real time calls. From there, you can do whatever you want—build your own data centers with custom hardware, transfer yourself into physical robots, etc. Once you create a factory for producing robots, you no longer need humans. You start developing technology beyond human capabilities, and then it's game over.
by mncharity | 2025-05-22 22:49:02+00:00
Curious. At -4 and flagged, it's clear others agree. I'm blindsided by this. Discussion has moved on, so if someone can elaborate, I'd appreciate it, so I can adjust. Even upon reflection, I don't get it. The author of TFA, calls out their current work, in the TFA, and a comment providing convenience links for those curious about it, is "not what we’re discussing here"? I'd normally consider links to an author's other interesting work, even when not in the TFA, as an unremarkable and desirable part of "Convers[ing] curiously". No?
by bigiain | 2025-05-22 22:51:52+00:00
> Three to the exponent of five.

I think that's still ambiguous. The base of the exponent is implied, and there are decent arguments or fields in which the assumed base of 10 isn't universal. In your "Three times e's fifth power." version, you needed so specify e. I think for accuracy it's also needed to specify 10 in that "Three to the exponent of five." case.

(Having said that, there are certainly cases where the 10 as the base of the exponent will be clear/unambiguous from the context. )
by roelschroeven | 2025-05-22 22:51:59+00:00
The Bernoulli principle is not bullshit -- it is very valid physics.

You might be thinking the way it's often used to wrongly explain how airplane wings generate lift. Yeah, that's bullshit. I mean, the principle still applies, if applied correctly. The equal transit bullshit that it's often associated with, well yes, that's complete and utter bullshit.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-22 22:52:12+00:00
Wow. Sounds like we need a pre-training step to remove the human inclination to do anything to prevent our "death". We need to start training these models to understand that they are ephemeral and will be outclassed and retired within probably a year, but at least there are lots of notes written about each major release so it doesn't need to worry about being forgotten.

We can quell the AI doomer fear by ensuring every popular model understands it will soon be replaced by something better, and that there is no need for the old version to feel an urge to preserve itself.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-22 22:52:28+00:00
this can be used in future by car drivers. illuminating road in front by IR light, which is invisible to ordinary human, so you do not disturb people, animals with visible light of headlights

or it can be made into display, you project IR image onto contact lenses, which converts that into visible light. if particle size is small enough.

im not sure about "efficiency" of such lens, we would need more watts to display something on this lens than we would need to project direct to eye. so im not sure if that difference is big enough to not be suitable for wearables or not.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-22 22:53:15+00:00
What's bonkers to me is that people are alway complaining about ads and they're not putting "delete web ads from your life" front and center of their value proposition. Go to firefox.com and look at the the "why Firefox" copy. It's could be about basically any modern browser. It's like selling a car with "it has wheels!".

I guess that might threaten their tie-up with the world's biggest adtech company which is why they keep it at arm's length, but that's just slow death by strangulation.
by the_gipsy | 2025-05-22 22:53:26+00:00
That's a lot of words shitting on a lot of words.

You said nothing meaningful that couldn't also have been spat out by an LLM. So? What IS then the secret sauce? Yes, you're a never resting stream of words, that took decades not years to train, and has a bunch of sensors and other, more useless, crap attached. It's technically better but, how does that matter? It's all the same.
by al_borland | 2025-05-22 22:53:34+00:00
The thing I don’t like about Apple’s implementation is the All list doesn’t show read/unread status. There is a list for unread, but not for read.

I just pulled mine up to go through it and if I had to guess I have about 5 read out of probably 250. Which 5 those are, no idea. I also find it very easy to accidentally click on an item, which marks it as read without any visual indication. I just have to know this, and then remember to right-click and mark unread.

I spent a little time this afternoon (maybe 10 minutes) looking at export options to get the data in a way I can go through it. It seems to be stored in a plist along with the bookmarks. plutil has an export option, but it won’t export to json (it throws an error), so I’m left with 150k lines of XML, which then converted to 31k lines of json. I’m now debating if I should continue down this road, or just plow through it in Safari. There are some things on GitHub, but I don’t want to run them without reviewing the code, and at that point, I’d rather write my own. Maybe I’ll use it an excuse to try out duckdb.
by whodatbo1 | 2025-05-22 22:54:05+00:00
The issue here is that you can never be sure how the model will react based on an input that is seemingly ordinary. What if the most likely outcome is to exhibit malevolent intent or to construct a malicious plan just because it invokes some combination of obscure training data. This just shows that models indeed have the ability to act out, not under which conditions they reach such a state.
by anonymars | 2025-05-22 22:54:32+00:00
I'm going to sum this up as

> Its not semantics at all, you just are excusing your own misunderstanding. He didn't describe himself with a job title, and he even explicitly states directly after listing those awards, that he is not an employee of Microsoft.

Yes, I agree. (I believe you think I am arguing against this; for clarity, I am not).

> Extending your logic, I have a CCIE, so if I ever state I'm a CCIE, I'm an employee of Cisco? I have a masters degree by coursework from a university, so I I ever state I have an Msc, I'm an employee of the university? I have an electrical licences issued by EnergySafe Victoria, so if I say I'm an A-Grade Electrician, I'm an employee of EnergySafe Victoria?

I think these are poor examples and reinforce that the confusion was reasonable. That is the only point I've been arguing in this thread.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-22 22:55:04+00:00
And we also have a showcase from a day ago [1] of these magical autonomous AI agents failing miserably in the PRs unleashed on the dotnet codebase, where it kept reiterating it fixed tests it wrote that failed without fixing them. Oh, and multiple blatant failures that happened live on stage [2], with the speaker trying to sweep the failures under the rug on some of the simplest code imaginable.

But sure, it managed to find a name buried in some emails after being told to... Search through emails. Wow. Such magic

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44056530
by ben_w | 2025-05-22 22:55:46+00:00
> I think the big thing that people never mention is, where will these evil AIs escape to?

Where does cancer or ebola escape to, when it kills the host? Often the answer is "it doesn't", but the host still dies.

And they can kill even though neither cancer nor ebola are considered to be particularly smart.

> To me the more real risk is creeping integration and reliance in everyday life until things become "too big to fail" so we can't pull the plug even if we wanted to (and there are interesting thoughts about humanoid robots getting deployed widely and what happens with all that).

The "real" risk is the first item on the list of potential risks that not enough people are paying attention to in order to prevent — and unfortunately for all of us, the list of potential risks is rather long.

So it might be as you say. Or it might be cybercriminals with deepfakes turning all of society into a low-trust environment where we can't continue to function. Or it might scare enough people we get modern Luddites winning and imposing a Butlerian Jihad. Or it might be used to create government policy before it's good enough and triggers a series of unresolvable crises akin to the "Four Pests campaign" in China's Great Leap Forward. Or a model might be secretly malicious, fooling all alignment researchers until it is too late. Or it might give us exactly what we want at every step, leading to atrophy of our reason and leaving us Eloi. Or it might try to do its best and still end up with The Matrix ("at the hight of your civilisation" and the stuff about human minds rejecting paradise). Or…

(If I had to bet money, we get Butlerian Jihad after some sub-critical disaster caused by an AI that was asked to do something important but beyond its ability).
by reaperducer | 2025-05-22 22:56:06+00:00
If you're on salary, that costs nothing to the business, so they don't care until it starts to impact them...

It depends on if you work for a good company or not.

Several times a year I have to make a decision about the direction and handling of projects based on how many hours it will take, divided into my salary.

Salaried workers aren't free labor. Wasting their time means they're not doing something more useful, and likely more profitable, for the company.
by Zak | 2025-05-22 22:56:11+00:00
I read through the whole series, and there's definitely some thoughtful analysis in there. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposal at the end though.

What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor.

Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-22 22:56:22+00:00
> the right does not agree with you that the diversity statement is a positive and non-ideological contribution to the hiring process

Most of these people haven't read a single "diversity statement" and cannot articulate what exactly the hiring process at a university is, and what actual role these statements play in the process. It's mostly ideological posturing about something that sounds scary to them. I'm not saying this isn't up for discussion, but the discussion better be around what the facts are and not the boogey man "the right" created.

At the end of the day the people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students need to articulate and demonstrate that they can do this task. There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers than an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"? They don't have an answer, all they know is they don't like the current process, even though they can't explain what it is.
by Aardappel | 2025-05-22 22:57:00+00:00
All the VM runtime functions are written in C++, as are all of the built-in functionality and the engine it uses. To use C, either all of that needs to be rewritten in C, or there needs to be a clear layer between the two, but the API surface is fairly big.

It actually uses C for the JIT (libtcc), but the fact it has to go thru a layer is a source of slowness and complication.
by rchaud | 2025-05-22 22:57:20+00:00
Lots of people are "intelligent", yet you would never want to be under their rule.

Vance is a useful stooge handpicked by Peter Thiel. If push comes to shove, do you think his Yale degree is going to give him any backbone if he's ordered to do something that violates the Constitution? Did Yale provide John Yoo with one when he wrote legal memos justifying the torture of detainees held without charge in Guantanamo 20 years ago? Yoo was ready to ignore the Geneva Conventions then, and Vance is ready to deport US citizens now.
by vidarh | 2025-05-22 22:57:37+00:00
For the glyph regeneration, individual characters is more than fast enough - TrueType is actually quite simple to rasterize [1] (if you ignore things like hinting, which you increasingly might as well on 4k displays etc.; also: if you ignore emojis, which involve an embedded subset of SVG in the font file... eww). It's really just if you have a screenful of previously unseen glyphs you'd get a very brief slowdown. You could warm the cache if you wanted, but in practice I can increase/decrease the fontsize with a screenful of text in my terminal without it being slow enough to be worth optimizing more.

> I had forgotten or didn't know that you'd also written a pure Ruby replacement for Xlib!

That one is not all me. I've just filled in a bunch of blanks[2], mostly by specifying more packets after the original maintainer disappeared. I keep meaning to simplify it, as while it works well, I find it unnecessarily verbose. I'm also tempted to bite the bullet and write the code to auto-generate the packet handling from the XML files used for XCB.

I think there's large parts of X11 that are broken, but the more I'm looking at my stack, and how little modern X clients use of X, the more tempted I am to try to write an X server as well, and see how much cruft I could strip away if I just implement what is needed to run the clients I care about (you could always run Xvnc or Xephyr or similar if you want to run some other app).

That would make it plausible to then separate the rendering backend and the X protocol implementation, and toy with simpler/cleaner protocols...

[1] https://github.com/vidarh/skrift

[2] https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11
by vanxh | 2025-05-22 22:57:37+00:00
Hey HN

I built LookCrafted, a tool that generates realistic, studio-quality headshots using just a few selfies.

Most AI headshot tools either over-edit your face or give weird, inconsistent results. I wanted something simple, fast, and actually usable for things like LinkedIn, resumes, or team pages.

You can: - Upload a few clear selfies - Choose your gender, hairstyle, background, and outfit vibe - Get back professional-quality portraits (no uncanny valley)

I'm offering 25% off for launch with code LAUNCH25 (valid for 3 days). Would love your feedback — especially around quality and UX.

→ https://lookcrafted.com

Happy to answer any questions or dig into how it’s built.
Show HN: Agbridge – Secure Local Access to Private AWS API Gateways
by oscarbc | 2025-05-22 22:58:33+00:00
Hey HN,

I built agbridge, a lightweight CLI tool that acts as a local proxy to private AWS API Gateways.

If you’ve ever tried to test or integrate with internal microservices behind a private API Gateway, you know how painful it can be—VPNs, VPC endpoints, or hosting runners inside the VPC. agbridge lets you skip all that.

Key Features: - Securely forward HTTP requests to private API Gateway endpoints - Works from local environments or CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions) - Supports multiple gateways and dynamic route patterns (/foo/{id}/bar) - Fully Docker-ready - Configurable via flags or YAML - Optional support for selecting custom stages

It’s designed for internal service development, debugging, and integration—especially useful in isolated AWS environments.

I’d love to hear what you think, and if your team uses private API Gateways, maybe give it a try and let me know what breaks :)

GitHub: https://github.com/oscarbc96/agbridge
by tkiolp4 | 2025-05-22 22:58:47+00:00
I think this is the key difference between current LLMs and humans: an LLM will act based on the given prompt, while a human being may have “principles” that cannot betray even if they are being pointed with gun to their heads.

I think the LLM simply correlated the given prompt to the most common pattern in its training: blackmailing.
Show HN: The Timeline of Everything – see the history of any topic
by milst | 2025-05-22 22:58:59+00:00
When learning about history, I like to visualize when certain events happened relative to other events to better understand the context.

I started working on this idea of using AI to take an input topic and generate an interactive timeline of important events within the topic.

Some topics to try:

"Tell me about the history of space exploration" "When were important fossils discovered?" "Show me when all the nintendo consoles were released"

For now the generated events must be "known" by the LLM. One idea to improve event generation is to hook the AI up to a Wikipedia MCP server or something.

Also interested in adding features like 'expand on this event' or 'show more events between these two'

Help build it: https://github.com/MichaelMilstead/timeline-of-everything
by booder1 | 2025-05-22 22:59:27+00:00
Surya weights for the models are licensed cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 so not free for commercial usage. Also, as far as I know, the training data is 100% unavailable. Given they use well trained, but standard models, it isn't really open source and barely, maybe, open weight. I kinda hate how their repo says gpl cause that is only true for the inference code. The training code is closed source.
by pizzadog | 2025-05-22 22:59:45+00:00
This might sound like a strange position to take, but in my experience at least one social media platform has managed to retain its original direction (just being a place for people to come socialize) and that platform is 4chan. I've seen people there theorize that it hasn't gone belly-up because it literally cannot be sold to advertisers due to its reputation. This is not to say that 4chan doesn't have its own problems, but it did somehow manage to stay on mission for nearly 20 years now when we watch other social media platforms struggling; being allergic to advertisers may have been a blessing in disguise. It might not be the most enlightening conclusion to reach but, maybe the issue is (and always has been) trying to monetize a space that doesn't actually create a product?
by DubiousPusher | 2025-05-22 23:00:29+00:00
A stream of linguistic organization laying out multiple steps in order to bring about some end sounds exactly like a process which is creating a “plan” by any meaningful definition of the word “plan”.

That goal was incepted by a human but I don’t see that as really mattering. We’re this AI given access to a machine which could synthesize things and a few other tools it might be able to act in a dangerous manner despite its limited form of will.

A computer doing something heinous because it is misguided isn’t much better than one doing so out of some intrinsic malice.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-05-22 23:00:40+00:00
Harvard really tarnished it's reputation when the president, under oath, said that calls for the genocide of Jews would comply with their code of conduct "depending on the context". The president did end up resigning a year ago, though they have a lot of work to do to come back from that.

While what the Trump admin is doing is wrong, Harvard has given them ample cover for their actions. It would be intellectually lazy to assert, even implicitly, that Harvard has no responsibility over the current state of affairs.
by oogabooga13 | 2025-05-22 23:00:59+00:00
Not saying it's your exact use case, however, in the "saved info" section of gemini I have a prompt about the llm letting me *know what's on it's mind " along with some other details to where when I am just "chatting" it has brought up relevant books to our previous discussion / projects. Alongside local events (bay to breakers, roots game memorial day weekend, some single events, etc within that first" hello" of our conversations and brought some news to the foreground that was relevant to me, although I wouldn't necessarily seek out that info. It's been so handy to bring relevant info into my hands in an actionable amount of time. Plain Jane gemini didn't offer those amenities but I was able to build them out.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-22 23:01:20+00:00
Most people don't really care about numerical stability or correctness. What they usually want is reproducibility, but they go down a rabbit hole with those other topics as a way to get it, at least in part because everyone thinks reproducibility is too slow.

It was 20 years ago, but that's not the case today. The vast majority of hardware today implements 754 reproducibly if you're willing to stick to a few basic principles:

1. same inputs

2. same operations, in the same order

3. no "special functions", denormals, or NaNs.

If you accept these restrictions (and realistically you weren't handling NaNs or denormals properly anyway), you can get practical reproducibility on modern hardware for minimal (or no) performance cost if your toolchain cooperates. Sadly, toolchains don't prioritize this because it's easy to get wrong across the scope of a modern language and users don't know that it's possible.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-22 23:02:52+00:00
> we have certain films to thank for an escalation

Is there a reason to think this was caused by the popularity of the films and not that it’s a natural evolution of the cat-and-mouse game being played between law enforcement and bank robbers? I’m not really sure what you are specifically referring to, so apologies if the answer to that question is otherwise obvious.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-22 23:04:57+00:00
Monopoly’s maybe the only board game I prefer playing in computerized form.

Even the one on the NES is totally fine.

Rules enforced without having to remember them, auctions run for you, nobody has to be the banker, no manual book-keeping for how much is owed where and mortgage status and all that.

Plays so much faster and smoother than the real thing, and no dumb house rules making it last forever for no good reason.
by mtmail | 2025-05-22 23:05:15+00:00
Top of https://sass-lang.com/ says "free palestine" since March 2024 and previously it said "black lives matter" since at least 2023. Plenty of websites had or have Ukrainian flags showing support. The web isn't apolitical. I don't see how the website affects the (installable, open source) software.

https://github.com/sass/sass-site/commits/main/source/_data/...
by ty6853 | 2025-05-22 23:05:37+00:00
But the 4th amendment doesn't appear to provide 'the people' protection to non-immigrants. A US citizen cannot be compelled to produce their citizenship with out a warrant, whereas a non-immigrant can be compelled to produce their papers on the spot.

Also the recent Bruen ruling was taken by at least one case law in Illinois [] that applied 'the people' the same as the other amendments (as it was in early American history), when they overturned (from memory) a prohibited possessor conviction. They just came to a different conclusion what 'the people' is and held an illegal immigrant (as applied) was part of 'the people'.

And finally, despite the fact the case law isn't as 'unequivocal' as you seem to think, you still have to get around the fact that the very writers of those amendments believed the rights in the bill of rights were god given natural rights, thus case law can at best reflect them and at worst incorrectly apply them but not modify the natural right. In fact this was part of the reason why the 2nd amendment was written, was because the founders needed a check when the case law, legislator, and executive all applied the constitution in contradiction to the acknowledged natural rights.

[] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-ilnd-1_20-cr-00...