MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qualeed | 2025-06-19 17:04:35+00:00
>Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real.

>Same for DNA then.

There's a world of difference between cloning a fingerprint/planting DNA (in the traditional sense, like fluids), and this technology.

The air might carry the particulates to areas never traveled to. That... doesn't happen with fingerprints.

Walking around the city with an air filter than traveling to a different city could imply that thousands of people have gone to a city they never went to before. Not happening with fingerprints or traditional DNA.

The noise with this tech is way too high to be useful in privacy-damaging ways. It's useless for tracking, useless for court, and more easily game-able than any other biometric by a lot.

To put it in your terms, this wont be used in forensics because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than the possibility that it is real.
by Certhas | 2025-06-19 17:04:53+00:00
I think this is a valid point. But to some degree both can be true. I often felt when reading some of these type of texts: Wait a second, there is a wealth of thinking on these topics out there; You are not at all situating all your elaborate thinking in a broader context. And there absolutely is willingness to be challenged, and (maybe less so) a willingness to be wrong. But there also is an arrogance that "we are the ones thinking about this rationally, and we will figure this out". As if people hadn't been thinking and discussing and (verbally and literally) fighting over all sorts of adjacent and similar topics in philosophy and sociology and anthropology and ... clubs and seminars forever. And importantly maybe there also isn't as much taste for understanding the limits of vigorous discussion and rational deduction. Adorno and Horkheimer posit a dialectic of rationality and enlightenment, Habermas tries to rebuild rational discourse by analyzing its preconditions. Yet for all the vigorous intellectualism of the rationalists, none of that ever seems to feature even in passing (maybe I have simply missed it...).

And I have definitely encountered "if you just listen to me properly you will understand that I am right, because I have derived my conclusions rationally" in in person interactions.

On the balance I'd rather have some arrogance and willingness to be debated and be wrong, over a timid need to defer to centuries of established thought though. The people I've met in person I've always been happy to hang out with and talk to.
by Hilift | 2025-06-19 17:05:00+00:00
> I work in a research lab with 10s of 1000s of dollars worth of Windows 10 workstations that cannot be upgraded.

It's the same situation as last time with Windows 7. You can get three years of extended support for the monthly cumulative update, which I assume is being done given it is fairly inexpensive. The US government gets favorable pricing from Microsoft.

The consumer price for Windows 10 ESU is $30/$60/$90 for the first/second/third year.
by k310 | 2025-06-19 17:05:03+00:00
If the labor-centric article does not appeal to you, here's an alternate perspective by Michael Moritz.

Musk vs Trump is a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley [0] Story by Michael Moritz

The writer is a longtime Silicon Valley investor, former board member of PayPal and an investor in SpaceX

> While Musk has left Washington with his reputation tarnished and his businesses impaired, the president’s family has inked deals for new hotels and golf courses around the world. Membership fees at Mar-a-Lago, his Floridian sanctuary, ballooned last year. And he is milking the enthusiasm of his supporters with his own controversial memecoin, launched days before his inauguration.

> One word of advice for those in Silicon Valley who followed Musk’s lead and sided with Trump. Leave. Don’t delude yourself that you are working to make crypto a part of global finance, minimising artificial intelligence regulation, helping start-up companies or protecting the interests of Silicon Valley. You have no sway. You are just cannon fodder.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/c779b3b6-e989-4277-91fd-d72468291...

https://archive.is/hnPQC#selection-136.5-136.6
by goku12 | 2025-06-19 17:05:08+00:00
They're pitching something similar to the US military. The proposal is to use the Starship (the spacecraft alone without the Super Heavy booster) as a suborbital personnel/cargo carrier. Personally though, I'm a bit skeptical about the whole concept. And they're certainly not untouchable. At least 3 other nations have the ability to knock them out in space. And 2 of them are hostile towards the US.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-06-19 17:05:20+00:00
Still RTFA but this made me rage:

> In fact, we as engineers are quite willing to subject each others to completely inadequate tooling, bad or missing documentation and ridiculous API footguns all the time. “User error” is what we used to call this, nowadays it's a “skill issue”. It puts the blame on the user and absolves the creator, at least momentarily. For APIs it can be random crashes if you use a function wrong

I recently implemented Microsoft's MSAL authentication on iOS which includes as you might expect a function that retrieves the authenticated accounts. Oh sorry, I said function, but there's two actually: one that retrieves one account, and one that retrieves multiple accounts, which is odd but harmless enough right?

Wrong, because whoever designed this had an absolutely galaxy brained moment and decided if you try and retrieve one account when multiple accounts are signed in, instead of, oh I dunno, just returning an error message, or perhaps returning the most recently used account, no no no, what we should do in that case is throw an exception and crash the fucking app.

I just. Why. Why would you design anything this way!? I can't fathom any situation you would use the one-account function in when the multi-account one does the exact same fucking thing, notably WITHOUT the potential to cause a CRASH, and just returns a set of one, and further, why then if you were REALLY INTENT ON making available one that only returned one, it wouldn't itself just call the other function and return Accounts.first.

</ rant>
by CaveTech | 2025-06-19 17:05:24+00:00
More than the team with no product. There's a huge difference between large entrenched businesses and early-stage startups. Turnover in large corporations is huge, the team has turned over multiple times already, they can do so again.

An early stage company that barely has any code? Yes, in that case, it's the team that matters because they haven't fulfilled the vision yet.
by troyastorino | 2025-06-19 17:05:26+00:00
The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current people, and that the number of future people vastly outweighs everyone alive today (or who has ever lived), then even small probabilities of catastrophic events wiping out humanity yield enormous negative expected value. Therefore, nothing can produce greater positive expected value than preventing existential risks—so working to reduce these risks becomes the highest priority.

People in these communities are generally quite smart, and it’s seductive to reason in a purely logical, deductive way. There is real value in thinking rigorously and in making sure you’re not beholden to commonly held beliefs. But, like you said, reality is complex, and it’s really hard to pick initial premises that capture everything relevant. The insane conclusions they get to could be avoided by re-checking & revising premises, especially when the argument is going in a direction that clashes with history, real-world experience, or basic common sense.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-06-19 17:05:28+00:00
Yes, I have seen several, including one that had to be forcibly sedated in the dirt. I have also seen many drunks fighting others and police.

Over 15 years at burning man, I have seen many people injured and maimed doing stupid things while high.

That said, the type of intentional self harm described above is basically unheard of. Mostly dumb accidents and some suicides.

To the extent there is any unique risk, it is more about long term psychiatric issues
by nyeah | 2025-06-19 17:05:56+00:00
'Reductionist' can be an insult. It can also be an uncontroversial observation, a useful approach, or a legitimate objection to that approach.

If you're looking for insults, and declaring the whole conversation a "culture war" as soon as you think you found one, (a) you'll avoid plenty of assholes, but (b) in the end you will read whatever you want to read, not what the thoughtful people are actually writing.
by shthed | 2025-06-19 17:06:01+00:00
I used to be a huge elon fan, watched spacex rocket development daily, livestream all of the launches, watched many of his interviews, very impressed by tesla, selfdriving, starlink, optimus, neuralink.. he came off as a very skilled engineer.

however..

when he started spamming political misinformation on twitter i had to block him. very concerned he was burnt out and brainwashed into into politics. the nazi salute, then making nazi jokes about it, was just insane.

doge is a joke, he lost the plot.

now i barely check updates on whats happening at starbase, cheer on when the rockets explode, couldn't care less about tesla.. it's a real shame. all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..

he needs to resign from everything and go hide under a rock for a few years until he finally gets into orbit and burns up on rentry.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-06-19 17:06:18+00:00
> their initial conditions were highly artificial

There has to be (or ought to be) a name for this kind of epistemological fallacy, where in pursuit of truth, the pursuit of logical sophistication and soundness between starting assumptions (or first principles) and conclusions becomes functionally way more important than carefully evaluating and thoughtfully choosing the right starting assumptions (and being willing to change them when they are found to be inconsistent with sound observation and interpretation).
by edwardbernays | 2025-06-19 17:06:36+00:00
Logic is the study of what is true, and also what is provable.

In the most ideal circumstances, these are the same. Logic has been decomposed into model theory (the study of what is true) and proof theory (the study of what is provable). So much of modern day rationalism is unmoored proof theory. Many of them would do well to read Kant's "The Critique of Pure Reason."

Unfortunately, in the very complex systems we often deal with, what is true may not be provable and many things which are provable may not be true. This is why it's equally as important to hone your skills of discernment, and practice reckoning as well as reasoning. I think of it as hearing "a ring of truth," but this is obviously unfalsifiable and I must remain skeptical against myself when I believe I hear this. It should be a guide toward deeper investigation, not the final destination.

Many people are led astray by thinking. It is seductive. It should be more commonly said that thinking is but a conscious stumbling block on the way to unconscious perfection.
by mindslight | 2025-06-19 17:06:52+00:00
Regular Windows users are also not going to reinstall Windows. I'd say this page does the right thing putting the "Find someone to help you" as the first option. Most people want something that just works, and it's a great value proposition to say "I'll take your old computer and turn it into a new device that works better".

The biggest sticking point is the fear of losing what they do have, but we're at the point where even their previous generation computer could be made to run Linux.
by eesmith | 2025-06-19 17:07:23+00:00
I'm being jocular, yes. But don't let that hide the hard reality behind it.

The more information the government (or anyone else with power over you) has, the higher the chance of false positives and of confusing correlation with causation. It's not like they will have a crack team of auditors review everything.

If you are arrested and conveyed to a foreign torture jail because an AI scanning your social media posts hallucinated that you are an international gang member, then it's also not the end of the world.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-06-19 17:07:28+00:00
Linux has to install somewhere, and it needs a filesystem that supports POSIX permissions, so you need a partition formatted for it. If NTFS is taking up the entire drive and can't be shrunk, where does Linux install?

You can't do this all on the same drive, because you need a place to copy the documents directory to. You need to delete the NTFS partition to create the place to copy the files to, but by the time you've done that, the Documents are inaccessible. You could do it in memory, feasibly, if you create a RAMdisk and are lucky enough to have enough memory for all your documents, but then you're still gambling on not running out of memory during the install.

So it is possible to copy the documents on the same device, and it's possible to even automate the process, but it's not possible to do it reliably or safely, and the reliability is so low that it's not worth even offering the possibility. If somebody has a handful of gigabytes of documents, it's already a nonstarter. To be safe you'd demand the user make a backup onto another device anyway, in which case they might as well do that and then copy the files into a fresh install themselves
by lostdog | 2025-06-19 17:08:36+00:00
A lot of the "science" we do is experimenting on bunches of humans, giving them surveys, and treating the result as objective. How many places can we do much better by surveying a specific AI?

It may not be objective, but at least it's consistent, and it reflects something about the default human position.

For example, there are no good ways of measuring the amount of technical debt in a codebase. It's such a fuzzy question that only subjective measures work. But what if we show the AI one file at a time, ask "Rate, 1-10, the comprehensibility, complexity, and malleability of this code," and then average across the codebase. Then we get measure of tech debt, which we can compare over time to measure if it's rising or falling. The AI makes subjective measurements consistent.

This essay gives such a cool new idea, while only scratching the surface.
by ben_w | 2025-06-19 17:08:43+00:00
I'm old enough to remember when the iMac was the best selling PC in the world*.

This was the 90s and Apple had only just narrowly avoided bankruptcy, but as they only had one model (even one colour!) of "cheap" consumer PC whereas everyone else had loads, they were by this measure the best seller.

* or the region, I forget, after all it was the 90s.
by zackmorris | 2025-06-19 17:08:49+00:00
You shouldn't have been downvoted.

In chip design, boolean logic circuits are often reduced to their simplest NAND/NOR representation, optimized, then translated to RTL, DTL or TTL as explained below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOR_logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor–transistor_logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode–transistor_logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor–transistor_logic

https://www.etechnog.com/2021/12/comparison-between-rtl-dtl-...

https://hackaday.com/2015/06/30/gates-to-fpgas-ttl-electrica...

I studied this heavily in my electrical and computer engineering (ECE) courses in the late 1990s, and wish that more programmers were exposed to it.

On that note, I never had a single spreadsheet course. Which is regrettable, as that would have tied functional programming to logic circuits. Then it's a small step to understand mutability, then monads (which are more difficult), how they negatively impact determinism, and how that greatly increases the mental load of tracking state in imperative programming. Leading to why futures, promises, deferreds and async programming in general should be avoided.

Unfortunately these insights are all but unknown today, which left us with the over-engineered soup of web languages and frameworks that bury us in mountains of unnecessary complexity. Which we tried to get away from when declarative and idempotent HTML/HTTP metaphors were invented late in the desktop computing era, when C++ and object-oriented programming dominated tech.
Ask HN: Technologia, Tech..No..Logia – Audience/Customer Insights
by usercvapp | 2025-06-19 17:09:08+00:00
Hello everyone, Recently, we made our free CV/Resume themes open-source on GitHub here - https://github.com/UserCV/resume-cv-website-theme

And, we have this very unique insight to assume, either we have built a bad app, UI, or are not able to get/match the audience's thought process, or the sector can only survive on open source.

Views: 128 total viewers, 58 unique viewers.

Cloned/Downloaded: 25 unique clones and 26 total clones, that's like 50% of them cloned it.

Platform signups - 0

https://i.imgur.com/10jdonK.png

Yeah! Looks like everyone needs them. But no one wants to use them as either SaaS or in hosted.

Even though this traction is low to understand in detail, we are committed to helping this part of the community with whatever they need, except offering a job - that's on individuals' skills.

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated on what more can be done to help this part of the community.

Just FYI: we have recently built a SaaS where people can launch their own personal CV/Resume website.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-06-19 17:09:14+00:00
> They remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd

Isn't there a lot of overlap between the two groups?

I recently read a great book that examines these various groups and their commonality: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker. Highly recommended.
by j45 | 2025-06-19 17:09:41+00:00
It's interesting how researchers are ahead on some insights and introducing them, and it feels like some are new to them but it might already exist and they're helping present them to the world.

A positive video all around, have got to learn a lot from Andrej's Youtube account.

LLMs are really strange, I don't know if I've seen a technology where the technology class that applies it (or can verify applicability) has been so separate or unengaged compared to the non-technical people looking to solve problems.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-06-19 17:09:47+00:00
I don't think this validates the criticism that "they don't really ever show a sense of[...] maybe I'm wrong".

I think that sentence would be a fair description of certain individuals in the EA community, especially SBF, but that is not the same thing as saying that rationalists don't ever express epistemic uncertainty, when on average they spend more words on that than just about any other group I can think of.
by treyd | 2025-06-19 17:09:54+00:00
> A random person was able to compromise the supply chain of many Linux distros.

The xz backdoor was successfully caught before it landed in mainstream release branches, because it's free software.

But broadening the scope a bit, the norms of using package managers as opposed to the norm on Windows of "download this .exe" is a much stronger security posture overall.

I am aware the Windows Store exists, it's not widely used enough to make exes a marginal distribution pathway. I am aware curl | bash exists, it's more common than it should be, but even in those cases the source is visible and auditable, and that's very uncommon for non-technical users to ever do (unlike downloading random exes).

> Freedom 0 and 1 does not give you the freedom to cheat against other players without being banned.

That's a strawman, I never claimed you should have the right to cheat against other players.

> You can be free to modify the game client, but you aren't entitled to play with others using it.

And that's the issue, Windows has functionality to impede your ability to run the software as you see fit and modify it to your needs. Perhaps you want to run your own server, with different moderation policies.
by goku12 | 2025-06-19 17:10:14+00:00
I'm not so sure. The biggest explosion I saw in the video was right at the base. I think that the liquid methane spilled and fell to the ground. Probably the oxygen tank also burst by that time, spilling LOX right into the path of the falling liquid methane - creating a nice mixture of methane and oxygen right at the base, ready to explode.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-19 17:10:41+00:00
>s a smokescreen to distract people from thinking clearly about the more pedestrian hazards of AI that isn't self-improving or superhuman,

Anything that can't be self-improving or superhuman almost certainly isn't worthy of the moniker "AI". A true AI will be born into a world that has already unlocked the principles of intelligence. Humans in that world would be capable themselves of improving AI (slowly), but the AI itself will (presumably) run on silicon and be a quick thinker. It will be able to self-improve, rapidly at first, and then more rapidly as its increased intelligence allows for even quicker rates of improvement. And if not superhuman initially, it would soon become so.

We don't even have anything resembling real AI at the moment. Generative models are probably some blind alley.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-19 17:11:20+00:00
You mis-used the word "write". Not that it makes much sense to say that Markdown "writes" anything, and the best guess for what is meant when it is said that a markup language "writes" something is that it includes something as markup when one writes in that language, which in this case it definitely does not.

a2ps isn't writing ASCII and overstrikes, either. Obviously so, as its output is PostScript. It's reading ASCII and overstrikes, like pg, most, less, more, and even the humble ul command; and writing something else entirely. Reading stuff that was destined for old typewriter-like printers and turning it into something else is straying quite far from what strogonoff and I were actually talking about. That's a whole other discussion, and how bad less and more (and indeed a2ps) are at reading such stuff, even compared to what ul is capable of, is a lengthy discussion in itself.

Note that I did explicitly point to the part of groff that is used where it is the "tty" output post-processing, i.e. grotty, which handles what are called in the groff doco the "typewriter-like devices". PostScript and PDF and non-fixed-width fonts are the domain of grops and gropdf et al. and again not the typewriters that we were talking about.

In the context of GNU groff, it is what is written to those "typewriter-like devices" that is what is relevant to typewriters, in that groff (grotty) uses the same idea for the same effect, relies upon the same assumptions about glyph shapes not being crazily different from the norm (which turns out to be a fairly shaky assumption for the middle to late 20th century), and can (as typewriters with a few judicious glyph designs for things like single quotes and such could) actually construct a fairly decent subset of Latin-1 and some other bits and bobs using this technique from the typewriter days.