MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikestew | 2025-05-28 17:47:38+00:00
One could argue two different directions:

“Have we learned nothing from the ethanol-in-fuel grift?”

or

“The ag industry has learned well from the ethanol grift.”

Regardless, we should now collectively know that making fuel out of food is just dumb and inefficient. The question remaining is whether we are smart enough to quit giving our money to someone who is giving us an inferior product.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-28 17:47:46+00:00
>No I think money laundering is when you knowingly mix proceeds of crime, obscuring it.

I can exempt myself from the $10k deposit/withdrawal/structuring rules at the bank by affirming to them that it's not the proceeds of a crime? If a cop decides to take the $300 out of my wallet, I just state "that's not drug money" and he has to give it back then and there?

Keep in mind that I can lose the money without a conviction, trial, or even being charged, so I don't think this has anything to do with it being the proceeds of a crime.
by WhitneyLand | 2025-05-28 17:47:53+00:00
To be fair, predictions are the final gold standard, but not all predictions are equal.

The math would allow for the predictions to be precise, quantifiable, and directly falsifiable.

As is the predictions qualify as interesting, but there are also weaknesses. Some of it was already predicted by others, some needs more verification, some of the claims were more broad “lots of jets, lots of quasars” so they say less than more precise predictions would.
by AmazingTurtle | 2025-05-28 17:48:01+00:00
Well, technically, GPT "itself" really isn't a search engine. The LLM was trained with capabilities to communicate to the runtime that I can request additional information for fulfilling the request, such as performing a web request - which is performed by the runtime and the results were fed back into the LLM as a regular prompt. Thus GPT only answers based on the textual context - again: involving statistical likeliehood.
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-28 17:48:13+00:00
Seemed to have been - horsehair and shoddy stuffed and hessian webbing, oak, brass tacks, and very perished leather. I recognised them immediately as there were a few at the debating chamber at my university which had been gifted by some MP back in the day.

I’ve no idea if that dump is still the gold mine it once was - I ended up with several very nice club chairs, some Victorian wingback armchairs, and an absolutely enormous camelhair Persian rug - chairs all needed reupholstering (I became quite good at this quite quickly), and the rug just needed a damned good clean and lasted me a decade before it finally actually disintegrated. Oh, and a few 30’s valve radios which needed nothing other than new capacitors. I’d assume it was always the kids cleaning out dead mum’s place or what have you to refurnish with ikea.
by gecko6 | 2025-05-28 17:48:18+00:00
CS Lewis on the dangers of caring too much:

"It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help, and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do for those we know.) A great many people now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others; but even while we're doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, your jokes, and the birdsong and the frosty sunrise."
by DisjointedHunt | 2025-05-28 17:48:21+00:00
Telegram channels are upstream of ALL text based social media and to an increasing degress, culturally upstream to many content trends as well.

Take the war in Ukraines for example, the uncensored and real time updates you get in open Telegram channels make most intelligence agencies except for Five Eyes nations look regular.

This deal may be much bigger than it seems off the bat. The cohort of people using Telegram to exchange content is maybe the top 5% of the world in many important niches.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-05-28 17:48:36+00:00
In some ways, there hasn't been a _ton_ of truly novel and exciting developments in computer science for awhile now. From that perspective (and despite all the annoying hype) - deep learning _is_ super cool and exciting. I mean Alan Turing talked about ideas so similar to this all the way back in the 50's and it's finally coming to fruition!

I can understand why you're looking elsewhere - but I figured I'd reframe the context for those who are passionate about deep learning and have no control over the hype.
by UncleEntity | 2025-05-28 17:48:38+00:00
I went from writing zero code, because I'm lazy, to writing zero code because I get the robots to do it.

I have this folder of academic papers from when access was free during covid which is enough to keep me busy for quite a while. Usually I get caught up with the yak shaving and never really progress on whatever I was intending to work on but now I have this super efficient yak shaver so I can, umm, still get caught up with the yak shaving.

But, alas, shaving yaks and arguing with stupid robots makes me happy so...
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-28 17:48:48+00:00
Bit of a strange announcement. This already happened a long time ago. The MSIX engine that they mention uses a lot of the same technology as Windows Update and thus has many of the same features. I suspect what they mean is adding some more APIs to try and help non-Chrome non-MSIX apps benefit from those.

MSIX is an interesting beast. My company sells a tool called Conveyor [1] that can create these packages from any platform including macOS and Linux given a simple config file for apps using runtimes like Electron, Flutter or the JVM (it's free for open source projects). We do a lot of work to make MSIX work better and be easier to use, because out of the box it's quite raw and in particular there are a lot of bugs in Windows 10 that Microsoft never fix because they view it as EOL. Conveyor creates a tiny 500kb installer EXE that drives the MSIX package manager API to do the install whilst working around these bugs.

Amongst other things, MSIX gives you:

• Chrome-style silent background updates on a regular schedule, even if the app isn't running.

• Incremental block-based delta updates.

• Incremental block-based downloads and installs, i.e. Windows can re-use parts of one app to install another, based on file block hashes. Makes installs very fast when they share a common runtime!

• And those installs/updates can pull blocks from other machines on the LAN too!

• Declarative installs and OS-controlled uninstalls. Writes to the user's AppData directory are virtualized, so uninstalls can be clean.

• Packages can be installed without admin rights, without dumping stuff in the user's home directory. Windows runs an elevated service that does the install for you.

• You can sandbox apps if they're shipped with MSIX.

• EXEs can be automatically added to the user's path, without needing any terminals or shells to be restarted. MacOS can't do that!

• Windows admins can easily deploy and manage them.

• They're cryptographically signed and their integrity is protected by the OS, so malware can't fiddle with the binaries (unless it manages to elevate to root).

• Although you can't create them with a regular zip tool, you can extract them with one.

Conveyor adds some other features on top like the ability to have web-style "update immediately on launch" updates, and a simple Electron/JVM control API so you can force updates on users.

It's a pretty nice feature set overall and has some big advantages over Squirrel, which is what Electron uses. However, I would definitely NOT recommend you try and work with MSIX directly. Microsoft's tooling is quite awkward, and their policy of only supporting fully up to date Win11 machines - and only from Windows - means you can't realistically distribute apps using MSIX unless you go via an intermediary like Conveyor that's committed to making it work. You'll just hit lots of weird bugs and installs that fail for no obvious reason with mysterious error codes. We ploughed through the pain so you don't have to.

[1] https://hydraulic.dev/
by whstl | 2025-05-28 17:48:55+00:00
I don’t think you’re grasping where I’m getting at.

It’s not just about time or budget, at all. Some things are downright impossible without the appropriate data.

I mention this above but: I was recently in a situation where a PM wanted two calls to a pure mathematical function to have the same result even though the inputs were different.

I can patiently explain this multiple times and provide alternatives and try to explore the actual problem space, but it comes a point that the PM saying “maybe I should ask another engineer” becomes grating enough to make you want to quit.

Working with people who not only are unable to do their jobs but also refuse to listen to others has become too normalized in this industry.
by everfree | 2025-05-28 17:49:09+00:00
> Ugh. Satoshi wrote about this.

I don't believe he did, and I'm familiar with a lot of his writings. Do you have a source?

> Single Client = Good. multiple client = menace.

Two major bugs took 100% of the Bitcoin network down on two occasions.

In contrast, several major bugs temporarily took out small subsets of Ethereum validators several times, but the network remained operational throughout. Due to EIP-1559, the network was not even degraded at all in terms of performance or throughput.

Apparently you're right that I can't convince you otherwise. One network's major bugs have caused major outages, and another network's major bugs resulted in 100.0% uptime still being maintained, and you still think the one with the major outages has a better strategy to defend against bugs.
by tartuffe78 | 2025-05-28 17:49:23+00:00
Yea it's very polarized like everything seems to be these days. It's very similar to crypto in that people pumping it up for financial gain or because they enjoy being part of the current hype are overconfident in how much of an impact it's going to have. Unlike crypto my workplace is very into it for our domain, so it's something we have to deal with.

At my company most people do have a very balanced view of its capability, which is nice, but it's hard to find online discussion that isn't polarized. I guess it's also disheartening because if half of the optimistic projections are true, it's going to mean more kids cheating on homework, less people who are able to read and write and think critically, and more lonely people with AI girlfriends/boyfriends disconnected from human society.
by auntieal | 2025-05-28 17:49:26+00:00
Actual models do usually start as speculation and hand waving. As others have pointed out, it seems like the LCDM models actually never STOPPED being speculation and hand waving. Lots of math can hide the fact that a theory is literally just handwaving (LCDM) and a lack of math can indicate a robust theory is in its infancy and needs more math people working on it (blowtorch).
by ryandrake | 2025-05-28 17:49:43+00:00
It's absolutely wild and scary watching how much money is being spent on pushing AI down the unwilling public's throats. Nobody wants this. Yet we're hiring expensive AI researchers and developers, buying datacenters full of GPUs, and now paying "partner" companies, to deliver this thing that nobody is asking for. What in the world is going on here? What am I not understanding?
by SirFatty | 2025-05-28 17:50:20+00:00
"The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy competition for getting into power."

Actually, no, the issue is corruption. The two party system is fine. Both parties are corrupt. Have 4 parties... still are going to be corrupt. Citizens United, meme coins, insider trading and no term limits equals a bad time for John and Jane Doe.
by swyx | 2025-05-28 17:50:51+00:00
bluesky uniquely hates AI. very toxic around it. https://eugeneyan.com/writing/anti/

its sad that the informal social media bubbles we all have formally forked[0] into Red Twitter and Blue Twitter. just a direct consequence of filters, feeds, algorithms that we say we dont want but vote for with our actions.

with Latent Space I try very hard to stay practical and grounded. but this means i lose out to other podcasters who get huge hits by asking biglab people their AGI timelines (perpetually 2 years away every 2 years, upper bounds of every estimation conveniently landing within the lifetime of $current_middle_aged_generation)

with AIE i started my agents conference with a loud agents skeptic (https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer/search?query=sayash). that did better online but the audience/sponsors didn't like being told they were overhyping.

[0]: wont stop there - i have called it the Great Unzippening: https://swyx.io/the-great-unzippening
by searine | 2025-05-28 17:51:26+00:00
>AI art is often terrible and slightly creepy. I have seen AI art that was fine. This is very rare.

This is just the "special effects" problem all over again, its use is invisible if done correctly. Only the bad produced SFX sticks out and gets called "CGI".

Much like a programmer using AI to supplement their existing knowledge, a lot of artists (way more than you think) are using AI to supplement production of their art. The product is indistinguishable from their non-AI work, it just takes a fraction of the time.

People just aren't talking about it because it is highly stigmatized by the art community.
by OmarShehata | 2025-05-28 17:51:35+00:00
I don't think that's necessarily true, I think it's about curation, not volume. The largest open source projects in the world have enormous inbound volume but extremely high quality discussion because of curation (I'm thinking about maintenance of Wikipedia, Open Street Map, and Godot).

This is also true on twitter & blue sky. Looking at the general feed is a completely different world from looking at specific networks.
by asadotzler | 2025-05-28 17:52:15+00:00
Google pays a rev share on the return it gets from the deal. This isn't pay and cross your fingers child's play here. Google makes most of the money for search transactions that click ads and the distributor, Apple, makes a small fraction of that for providing the search access points. Where's xAI's lucrative return here? Where's their 80:20 split?
by teitoklien | 2025-05-28 17:52:18+00:00
we run everything under systemd managed services instead of k8s and deploy via ansible playbooks at our company, and we similarly use tmuxinator to spin up all the backend api, search engine, databases like qdrant, meilisearch, etc and frontend services all in dev mode with all the terminals auto opening in window panes inside a tmux shell.

It really makes development in dev mode super simple and easy, and running all of the services in local dev environment is as simple as running one command, ‘tmuxinator’ at root of our monorepo and boom everything is up.

Monorepo truly outcompete individual repos for almost all projects, its far more pleasurable ever since I changed to this method of development.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-28 17:52:25+00:00
You're right, I caught myself committing a post hoc fallacy.

Just because i predicted the guidelines would be damaging to their platform and now they are declining that these arent necessarily linked.

Using OP website, I can see all top accounts seem to be democrats. No republicans or conservatives?

When there is such an imbalance, the platform is behind it. If you actively ban entire ideological groups on a social platform, you're never going to be successful. What rule are these entire ideological groups violating?

On various speedruns by conservatives that ive watched, they got banned for 'being disrespectful' or 'abuse' obviously a ban speedrun will typically run into the vague rules the most.

Lets look at the rule.

Treat others with respect. For example, no: Harassment or abuse directed at a specific person or group,

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7qqkq2zdwq4j5jingukgtuky/po...

"MAGA cultists" or "hateful cockroaches" is abusive towards a group. I would expect this post to violate bluesky rules. Yet not only allowed, well received with 7.4k likes.

If a republican went on bluesky and called democrats cultists and cockroaches. How fast would they be banned?
by nraychaudhuri | 2025-05-28 17:52:55+00:00
No offense taken—LinkedIn-post bots aren’t the point. Think UNIX pipes for business ops: small, single-skill agents you chain, swap, and reuse.

Here are some concrete examples:

- Financial KPI radar pull-stripe -> calc-kpis -> write-digest — 2-hour spreadsheet grind becomes a cron job.

- Support triage classify-ticket -> fetch-answer -> route-edge — weekend inbox time drops 4 h → 30 m.

- Bug-fix conveyor parse-logs -> rank-severity -> draft-patch — Great for tiny teams with no dedicated QA.

- Receipts → Books ocr-receipt -> map-account -> push-p&l — zero-touch bookkeeping until tax season.

I'm still tuning the granularity—“one verb per agent” feels right so far. Thoughts?
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-28 17:53:00+00:00
It's had one for over a decade now called MSIX, see my other comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118703

Not much uses it because very little new development happens for Windows, even by Microsoft. Everyone either uses portable frameworks and inherits the defaults, which aren't MSIX, or has legacy systems they developed from before MSIX got good.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-28 17:53:21+00:00
> Note that in the US, the usual rule does not allow for shifting attorney's fees to the loser.

While in the US, the default rules in many kinds of cases don't start with loser pays, as in some other systems, there are conditions applicable to most causes of actions which will allow attorney's fees, and the default rules for some claims do assign costs and fees to a party found liable without requiring any additional factors—notably, in the context of a trademark demand letter from the holder of a registered trademark, this includes violation of any of the rights of a holder of a registered trademark, see 15 U.S.C. § 1117(a).
by Sesse__ | 2025-05-28 17:53:23+00:00
> Some famous programmer once wrote about how links should last forever.

You're probably thinking of W3C's guidance: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

> But he was wrong, it should be /foo/bar.html because the end-result will always be HTML

20 years ago, it wasn't obvious at all that the end-result would always be HTML (in particular, various styled forms of XML was thought to eventually take over). And in any case, there's no reason to have the content-type in the URL; why would the user care about that?
by cyberax | 2025-05-28 17:54:06+00:00
No, the combination of densification turning toxic (see: San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Manhattan) and self-driving becoming available will change that.

> There's no way out of denser cities

There is: tax dense office space. There are no magically unique "amenities" in dense cities that make life worth living there, for the vast majority of people. Theaters and museum visits are at most a monthly occurrence (if that). And specialty ethnic restaurants are usually not a deal-breaker.

Everything else is now available online: specialty stores, interesting classes, art-house movie clubs, etc.
by Xmd5a | 2025-05-28 17:54:09+00:00
I've been calling out the similarity of works done by Barbour, Turok, Farnes & Petit for a long time, and the last developments by Turok's team vindicate this intuition. It is now very close to Jean-Pierre Petit's Janus model. Curt Jaimungal announced he'd interview him soon.

https://januscosmologicalmodel.com

Petit's models implies negative masses that would sit at the center of the cosmic voids, giving it structure.

Someone wrote simulation showcasing this emergent phenomenon a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtcbBpieR5U
by righthand | 2025-05-28 17:54:53+00:00
The offered discourse on AI is “isn’t it cool how this can replace the work that you do? Eventually we won’t even need you and you can go get a hobby to spend the rest of your life.”

That doesn’t exactly leave a lot of room for people to feel the need to be involved in a discourse about it. For one thing the majority of people aren’t all workaholics looking for extra hobby time.

The author mentions ChatGpt can search the web. Okay calling a search engine and retrieving a result has been possible for a while. Llm companies just slapped statistical response on top as the UI.

Maybe the discourse sucks because the reality of it sucks?
by castillar76 | 2025-05-28 17:54:56+00:00
I'm experimenting with moving to Zen, but finding it frustrating. I think I can get around the containers-vs-workspaces-as-separate-things shift, but the last time I tried it I found it really opinionated and you lose a lot of the customization benefits of something like Firefox because it's so different.

It's seriously annoying because Arc has been just perfect for the kind of "keep each hat separate" workflows I have going. SigmaOS is the closest other thing I've used to it, but its reliance on a weird amalgam of the Safari and Chromium engines makes it behave really oddly with plugins like 1Password.
by thundergolfer | 2025-05-28 17:54:59+00:00
This is unfortunately a Bluesky problem. I’m still using the platform, but it’s got too many people posting unsophisticated takes, either in tech or culture or politics.

It’s not about being pro-AI or anti, left or right. I just read too much on Bluesky which has me thinking “oh, you really have no idea what you’re talking about.” As Steve says, to verify that they’re wrong is trivial, and yet they’re they are.

Twitter, on the other hand, rarely has this problem if you only look at the “following” tab and curate who you follow.
by breckinloggins | 2025-05-28 17:55:02+00:00
I propose we stop using the term "discourse" to describe what amounts to mobs with ever-shifting alliances shouting at each other.

Not really sure what I'd call it instead, but in a perfect world "irrelevant" might be my top candidate.

And yes, I'm aware that this very comment is an example of such "discourse". But at least with sites like Reddit and Hacker News the "comment-ness" of these little thought droppings is part of the UI.

Microblogging sites, though... the thought droppings are the point. I remain unconvinced that this will be seen in the future as a societal advance no matter the underlying positions or values.
by yojo | 2025-05-28 17:55:09+00:00
Nothing flat out broke, but I am developing and dogfooding on a Mac, so I get visual QA for free on that platform. When I tested my app on a Windows machine, I noticed several UI regressions that looked/felt really janky. I didn't get as far as testing a Linux build, but I assume I'd find more issues there.

I can't remember why I wanted to migrate to 2.0 now, but there was a nice-to-have that I couldn't do in 1.4. I ended up abandoning the 2.0 migration after a slew of cryptic errors, took a step back, and decided I'd be better off using Electron for my project. My app is at heart a rich UI text editor and none of the computation is that expensive. With all the value add coming from the interface, optimizing for consistency there feels right.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-05-28 17:55:34+00:00
Yes.

When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).

If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.

In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.