MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asadotzler | 2025-05-21 19:22:25+00:00
I asked Gemini to read a clock for me with hands on 10 and 2 and it got the long hand and the short hand backwards, probably because of the massive trove of online documentation about the symmetry of 10 after 10 being aesthetically pleasing for PR materials and icons or some such nonsense unrelated to the question or the clock.

I don't know about you, but I learned how to read an analog clock in kindergarten and Gemini got it wrong.
by vel0city | 2025-05-21 19:22:29+00:00
This is only forward secrecy for messages that were deleted and would have been captured by Recall and are still within the snapshot history which has a maximum number of days.

All the messages you've previously synced to the device exist in that Signal AppData directory and can be trivially searched and read by any application running as your user account. And all attachments are also just sitting there.

For example:

https://vmois.dev/query-signal-desktop-messages-sqlite/
by chneu | 2025-05-21 19:22:38+00:00
For others: most people don't need to go full keto. Just reducing sugars in general helps a lot of people. Refined sugars especially.

I also have ADHD and caffeine/sugar make my symptoms way worse. If I abstain from caffeine the difference is huge.

Alcohol is also something that really screws with ADHD. One drink can have weeks of effects.
by immibis | 2025-05-21 19:22:40+00:00
Linux still suffers the same flaw as always, though: it's just bad. And the projects that claim to make it better end up being a lot like Microsoft or Apple.

You or I can use Linux, because we're the same type of people who visit Hacker News. It's also completely possible to get your great-grandma on Linux, since the web browsers work the same and you can install the specific apps they need to use and they'll never care about anything else. But the middle user is working in an office exchanging Microsoft Office documents all day, making video calls through Teams, and using one out of a zillion business apps developed specifically for Windows.

We need more free and good projects, and the problem is, that costs time, and in between Richard Stallman's heyday and now, the rent's quadrupled.
by hwayne | 2025-05-21 19:23:12+00:00
A couple of useful general approaches:

- "Metamorphic testing" is where analyze how code changes with changing inputs. For example, adding more filters to a query should return a strict subset of the results, or if a computer vision system recognizes a person, it should recognize the same person if you tilt the image.

- Creating a simplified model of the code, and then comparing the code implementation to the model, a la https://matklad.github.io/2024/07/05/properly-testing-concur... or https://johanneslink.net/model-based-testing

There's also this paper, which I haven't read yet but seems intriguing: https://andrewhead.info/assets/pdf/pbt-in-practice.pdf
Show HN: Mydeep.work – Free Deep Work Productivity System
by FlorinDobinciuc | 2025-05-21 19:23:27+00:00
I built a productivity system based on Cal Newport's Deep Work principles.

It features a CCC task board(Capture→Configure→Control→Done), time-block planning, focused deep work timer, and daily shutdown ritual - all designed to maximize focused work sessions while eliminating context switching.

Free to use at https://mydeep.work
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-05-21 19:23:49+00:00
> What do you mean by "other tasks"? Why are these questions never asked?

To anyone else who, like me, has noticed this, the answer is: these interviews happen so that the interviewee can put out the message they want, and so that the interviewer can charge advertisers. Asking questions that could derail the theatre is not in the interest of the people involved.

This also creates an environment where the interviewers are self selected. Interviewers who derail the interviewee's exposition don't land important interviewees.
by astrange | 2025-05-21 19:24:56+00:00
Note: Ray Peat is a crazy person who Twitter bro-science picked up, the kind of guys who were previously into keto and supplements that don't do anything.

They're similar in that they love saturated fat and red meat, and think vegetable oils are bad, but he also wants you to eat ice cream and sugar.

The ice cream part is possibly correct: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...
by rvz | 2025-05-21 19:24:59+00:00
> When CEOs aggressively promote such tech solutions, it signals we're deep into bubble territory:

Correct. This is how most bubbles are kept up as they are all exposed in the hype cycle.

You will not hear about the mistakes [0] [1] [2] it makes when AI gets it wrong or hallucinates and all the AI boosters can do will be "it only gets better" and promise that we will soon be operating airplanes without humans. [3]

Surely you would feel safer if you or your family boarded a plane that was fully operated by ChatGPT, because it is somewhat closer to "AGI"?

I really don't think so.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/openai-explains-why-chatgp...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/xai-blames-groks-obsession...

[3] https://www.flyingmag.com/replacing-airline-pilots-with-ai/
by detourdog | 2025-05-21 19:25:35+00:00
Just because only 10% of the people participate in progress doesn't register to me as germane to conservative values or definitions.

I don't feel I have been overly abstract or wishy washy. I think we are discussing abstract ideals.

Understanding proposed changes to a current working environment I consider a conservative value.

Curiosity about long term costs and effects of decisions I consider a conservative value.

Conservation of resources I consider conservative values.

I truly believe we won't come to a common understanding. I'm curious about your age as I wonder about our experiences. I was born in 1968.
by acc_297 | 2025-05-21 19:26:12+00:00
I don't completely agree - I think it's not about GPT-3 failing to generalize word puzzle solutions it's about the type of minimized solution that gradient descent algorithms find which will produce overwhelmingly correct outputs but may lack a useful internal organization of the semantics of the training set which may or may not translate into poor model performance on out-of-sample inputs.

It's hard to say that there is no internal organization since trillion parameter models are hard for us to summarize and we do see some semantic vector alignment in the GPT models but the toy example of the 2 skull image generator present a powerful anecdote of how current ML models find correct solutions but miss a potentially valuable property of having what the paper calls factored representation which seems to be the far more "human" way to reason about data.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-05-21 19:26:53+00:00
There's closely related idea that might work, though. Each device editing text could be assigned a 32-bit ID by the server (perhaps auto-incrementing). Devices then maintain a separate 32-bit ID that they increment for each operation they perform. The ID used for each character is (device_id, edit_id), which should fit nicely in 8 bytes.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-21 19:27:02+00:00
> No amount of mental gymnastics will turn your hammer into a sophisticated device that gains new features after you buy it

No amount of mental gymnastics will turn apple's "pay us for every dollar you make" payment extortion model into an innovation good for humankind, nor will it make that model any more innovative. It's simply a vig, one of the oldest business models in history. No change, no innovation. Same ol' "give us a cut of everything you make [or else]" that it's always been. The extortion model is not necessary for the app store, it's not necessary for devices, it's not necessary for security, it's not necessary for anything except making more profits. Apple could start demanding 1% of every dollar spent in an app, instead of 27-30%, and still continue providing the same service. Your deafening silence on the topic of their actual incurred costs speaks volumes here: One would be forgiven for concluding that you agree with me, that it has no justification to speak of, other than greed and might-makes-right.

As for your claim that a hammer manufacturer's "pay us for every nail" model is not a suitable metaphor for the apple's "pay us for every dollar" payment processing model: It was respectfully communicated (thank you for that) and heard. Unfortunately, the case you made for that claim was not persuasive enough. You could try to come back and make a better case, but I think no more meta-arguing (or meta-insisting) need be done regarding whether a metaphor is perfect or not: I will be the first to admit that none are (because comparing a thing to itself is useless), but some are illustrative.

To wit, this metaphor illustrates that the world would be a better place without apple asking to be paid for every dollar accepted in-app which is distributed in the app store, just like the world would be a better place without a hammer manufacturer asking to be paid for every nail driven by the hammer.

Maybe one might think otherwise if apple showed data that explained how their 27-30% cut of others' sales was necessary to allow payments? We understand that making 2 hammers costs ~2x as much as making 1 hammer, but does allowing an app to accept $2 cost ~2x as much as allowing an app to accept $1? ---> What is the magnitude of that cost? <--- Remember that compensation for distribution (which covers the costs of running the app store, and need not be correlated with in-app payments) can happen separately.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 19:27:07+00:00
> He also ignores that prices for minority consumers go up because there are fewer businesses that cater to them.

That's not what was observed in real life. There were form many decades black owned businesses serving clients at competitive price points and integrated businesses where allowed by law serving customers at price points lower than segregated businesses. Integrated Jazz clubs in the 50s served cheap drinks and had good music so white kids patronized them in droves. These interactions changed their preferences.

> And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.

Do you really believe that white Americans only interact economically with black Americans because the law forces them to? Because it looks to me like people's preferences changed. No one forced white kids in the suburbs to buy NWA albums, they were just good albums and no one stopped them.

> He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?

He literally does address this in the chapter. It isn't long, just go read it. You've said yourself that you haven't read much Friedman, you may find yourself surprised.
by lostmsu | 2025-05-21 19:27:09+00:00
Do I count as the founder? I use contractors from Eastern Europe to do frontend, does that count?

Overall seems like a very niche offering, considering $6K is peanuts these days. You can get more by applying for any of Microsoft, Google, or Amazon startup programs. MSFT for instance straight up gives > $100K in cloud credits when you are funded (and if not, how do you pay your developer?)
by sandspar | 2025-05-21 19:27:24+00:00
They say they'll design a "fully novel" type of product - what does that mean? If we take them at their word then it rules out glasses, watches, phones, laptops, and headphones. What does that leave? What seems most in line with Johnny Ive's minimalism is necklaces, rings, or pendants. Could we see some kind of AI brooch in 2026?
by delichon | 2025-05-21 19:27:26+00:00
Take two political extremists, one believes that taxation is theft, the other that property is theft. The difference could make Kamala and Donald seem like twins. Sortition is a way for either to become decision makers by chance. Whichever is more objectionable to you, could you really endorse a process that would put them in power, as opposed to a traditional election where the extremes tend to winnow out? That seems like a large increase in the risk of getting an extreme result.
by saqadri | 2025-05-21 19:27:33+00:00
Authentication and authorization is something we are thinking about a lot at the moment, especially for agents that are MCP servers.

Our thoughts here are to handle auth the same way that the MCP spec outlines auth (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26). The key thing is to send authorization requests back to the user in a structured way. For example, if Agent A invokes Agent B, which requires user approval for executing a tool call, that authorization request needs to be piped back to the client, and then propagated back to the agent.

This is technically possible to do with the MCP protocol as it exists today, but I think we will want to add that support in mcp-agent itself so it is easy to pause an agent workflow waiting for authentication/authorization.

One nice property of representing agents as MCP servers is that Agent discovery is the same as server discovery.
by ramoz | 2025-05-21 19:27:41+00:00
You're talking about a commodity interaction at this point your tool offers nothing different from a chatbot other than your confusing semantics and abstraction.

What Im saying: If the point is to "convert this csv to markdown so i can feed the markdown to a LLM to ask questions about it" etc... it is a completely unnecessary step.

Your service is nothing more than:

1. augmented metadata for files; btw if that requires a whole new drive-oriented solution then you're doing too much.

2. llm api wrapper for a commoditized capability (custom format/or transpilation)
by koeng | 2025-05-21 19:28:36+00:00
Eukaryogenesis is a fascinating topic, and "motherboard" doesn't do it justice.

For efficient respiration, you need to have the translation/transcription of certain ATP synthase genes near to the membrane for basically JIT-ing them when ready to maintain membrane potential, and hence energy generation. Otherwise, the membrane potential falls apart. This simple need is why there are zero multicellular bacteria and multicellularity evolved 6 times in eukaryotes.

By decoupling the rest of the genome from the JIT bits (ie, mitochondrial DNA), you can scale energy independently of genetic information. So if you need 1000x the energy, you need like 5% more DNA (mitochondrial DNA) instead of 1000x more DNA in your genome.

Some estimates say that our eukaryotic genes are in charge of 5000x more energy than the equivalent bacterial gene. Hence, our genomes can inflate that much and its fine. And they have. All that inflation lets us have bullshit hang around in our genome, and hey, sometimes evolution figures out something to do with all that bullshit. We evolved 1000x more complexity than bacteria because we decoupled the performance code from the rest of the code.
by touristtam | 2025-05-21 19:29:09+00:00
> being uncensored

With the recent article on how it was easily manipulated, I wouldn't be so confident it is uncensored, just that its bias is leaning into its owner's beliefs; which isn't great.

Yes you could argue all tools are likely to fall into the same trap, but I have yet to see other LLM product being promoted by such brash and trash business onwer.
by mulmen | 2025-05-21 19:29:30+00:00
> Batteries and EVs are the production side.

That’s what I said?

> Reducing demand is e.g. requiring you to drive fewer miles.

Demand can be reduced by increasing fuel prices. Either at the pump through consumption tax or at production. The effect remains the same.

> You get a car that doesn't run on petroleum and CO2 goes down while vehicle miles can stay the same or go up.

Obviously. What does that have to do with disincentivizing fossil fuel production or consumption?
by brudgers | 2025-05-21 19:29:58+00:00
I don't (keep up with tech/culture/sports) and never did.

When I was young, I had the illusion that I was or could.

You can miss out on opportunities. If it never was an opportunity, you didn't miss out.

Experts have forefront opportunities in their respective fields. Non-experts are on the back of the wave and don't. Or to put it another way, when you read the latest paper you are a year or more behind the people who wrote it.

What matters is what matters. And what matters is the things you make, not the tools you use. Good luck.
by hedora | 2025-05-21 19:30:08+00:00
Yeah; the lack of backup support is getting really old. I was hoping the article meant that you could optionally set it to recall your chat history across backup/restore.

iOS <-> Android account migration would also be good.

I last used Windows in the Windows 8 days. That was when they added the telemetry "feature" that lets MS engineers copy files off your box without your permission (and without notifying you).

At the time, they claimed it's only for debugging software failures, and even then, only with managerial approval. My reading of the US CLOUD Act says they're obligated to let the US gov't copy arbitrary data off your machine, regardless of what country it's in.

I'm not sure if they still do it. The documentation of this stuff is well-buried.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-21 19:30:16+00:00
I had to laugh out loud, having rewatched Mission: Impossible up through Rogue Nation because picking up a dozen eggs these days is equivalent to downloading the NOC List

Or the Ryan George experience https://youtu.be/kAveQ7fc2oo?si=QrRnLY-McPyQI7IR
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-21 19:30:27+00:00
Sure, that's true - for any one person.

Now take a representative body with 100 members. You get, say, five extremists on the left and seven on the right. The other 88 members basically leave those 12 extremists on the margins, and the extremists become irrelevant.

Now, if extremists (total of all flavors) exceed 50% of your population, you're in trouble. But you were probably in trouble in a democracy, too...
by ninininino | 2025-05-21 19:30:48+00:00
> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI.

I stopped reading here. The author seems to fail to understand the new conceptual model that is interactive consumption. A conversation is a higher bandwidth form of communication and a two-way means of communication, it has features that a recorded piece of audio does not.

If you get confused 10% of the way through a podcast, you can't have the podcast change and suddenly spend an extra two minutes explaining a concept it mentioned. But you can ask a conversational AI to explain something you didn't understand.

If you find that the podcast is telling you something you already know, you need to skip around and figure out where it stops doing so and becomes useful again in a painful process. Within a conversation if you're the CEO of one of the world's most valuable corporations, you just cut the person off and say "I know".

The author also fails to understand that people can personalize content by expressing preferences to an AI agent and having it interpolate the content to some new form, or style transfer it. Change its language into one's native tongue. Change the tone to suit one's current mood. Be more concise or funnier.

I can only assume the author is letting their personal preferences for mediums of communication blind them to very real technological and communication advances happening.
by jerf | 2025-05-21 19:31:22+00:00
That's the difference between the additive view of the world and the multiplicative one. A lot of number theory involves trying to bridge that gap, and even this simplest view of numbers can rapidly fling you into the mathematical unknown. The "simplest hard problem", the Collatz conjecture, can be viewed as coming from this space. You either take a step in multiplicative space, or a step in multiplicative space and then additive space, and ask a very simple question about where those steps can take you.

And that's all it takes to end up at an unsolved problem in math.

You can spend a lifetime on this simple observation that "the jumps between neighbors are so dramatic", just trying to reconcile the complex relationships between the additive view of the world and the multiplicative one.

And we haven't even done anything like bring in complex numbers, or rationals, or introduce exponentiation!
by numpad0 | 2025-05-21 19:31:26+00:00
> Put on a good skin and most people wouldn't notice the difference.

I doubt it. Common people can't interpret GUI and discover features unlike developers who'd prefer dynamic "intuitive" interfaces. They rely more on dumb fixed rote memorization.

Most recent example of failure of this approach is Windows Settings app. Not only a lot of configuration panes started to mimic old Control Panel in both features layouts, even verbiages, many had become a mere shortcut links to old Control Panel applets.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-05-21 19:31:37+00:00
I've been thinking about this a lot. DSLs solve an important problem, but they do it in the wrong direction.

It's impossible to write objective fact. Everything we write is subjected to the context it is expressed in, including the grammar that we use to write it. A DSL accommodates this by letting you make a new grammar on the fly. The trouble is, this doesn't help us get out of the context we are writing in already: it only lets us enter a new one that is nested inside.

So what if we could actually get out? What if we could write from outside of the context we are writing? That's the idea I'm working on. I think it's possible, but it's such an abstract idea that it's tricky to get a handle on.
by paul7986 | 2025-05-21 19:31:58+00:00
It’s looks like to me a bunch of people who don’t use ChatGPT daily for everything under the sun. As once you let your imagination run wild with it ..you can see why 500 million use GPT daily to do so many varied things that u can’t go a day without using it and your usage of google is on the decline! Why you want to pick up your phone and have GpT right on ur Lock Screen do to everything under the sun including having it interface with AI agents to book travel, book a local tow truck, reserve whatever, ask questions about friends & family via their own agents, etc
by noman-land | 2025-05-21 19:32:32+00:00
Here's one data point. My grandmother and mother now both use Raspberry Pis as their primary computers and are 100% satisfied. My father is looking to switch as well and he's been setting up a GrapheneOS phone I made for him which runs flawlessly.

If year of Linux doesn't arrive by choice, authoritarianism will force the issue one way or another.
by einsteinx2 | 2025-05-21 19:33:13+00:00
Revenue, not profit.

If it costs them even just one more dollar than that revenue number to provide that service (spoiler, it does), then you could say AI has had no positive economic impact.

Considering we know they’re being subsidized by obscene amounts of investment money just like all other frontier model providers, it seems pretty clear it’s still a negative economic impact, regardless of the revenue number.
by astrolx | 2025-05-21 19:33:20+00:00
This. I bought a System76 laptop in 2011 which is still working very well with lubuntu for office and browser and such, it's now the laptop of my neighbourhood association. I could without problem upgrade RAM and drive to SSD, I could even swap the keyboard after I broke it.

I bought a new one from them this year, still incredible hardware.

My only issue with them, which is a big one, is that they ship only from USA. So as EU customer I have to pay VAT on top!
by mweidner | 2025-05-21 19:33:50+00:00
I believe that Automerge internally stores all operations in an eventually consistent total order, which you can use as a substitute for the server in server reconciliation (cf. https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html#d...). However, Automerge does not actually do that - instead it processes text operations using a traditional CRDT, RGA, probably because (as you point out) undoing and replaying ops is not trivial to implement.