MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theragra | 2025-06-09 20:06:05+00:00
Pretty cool. I remember how I had written question to local IT newspaper asking how to install BeOS if you have HDD LBA addressing workaround installed. This was way too complex question for them to know.

Still, I think I played with BeOs 5 somehow. I was in high school at the time, and already was familiar with Linux (Ukrainian black cat Linux). I think my curiosity made my career in IT progress much faster. I even was compiling Linux kernel once, which was considered a top achievement at the time.

Good times.
by the_af | 2025-06-09 20:06:06+00:00
> I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

I think it still is, but it works way better than it has any right to, or that we would expect from the description "string words together with math".

So it's easy to understand people's confusion.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-06-09 20:06:14+00:00
See, I think your view is just as baseless as the people calling modern LLMs sentient. If I was to take a human, and gradual replace parts of him and his brain with electronics that simulated the behavior of the removed parts, I'd struggle to call that person not sentient. After all, is a deaf person who is given hearing by a cochlear implant "less sentient"? And if we were to skip the flesh part, and jump straight to building the resulting system, how could we not acknowledge that these two beings are not equals? We have no evidence whatsoever for anything at all so unique about oursleves that they could not be simulated. Hell, even a theological argument has issues: if God was able to create us in his image, complete with sentientience and humanity, what's to say we, too, can't so illuminate our own creations?

To claim we have already achieved machine sentience is preposterous hype swallowing. To assert that it is impossible is baseless conjecture.
by wavemode | 2025-06-09 20:06:19+00:00
I understand the concept that objects like letters are no longer used very much. My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon, and what tangible benefit does it bring, given that people are already used to letter icons, and aren't going to be used to your new icon. Tangible benefit meaning "users will be able to use this interface more easily".

Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.
by mikestew | 2025-06-09 20:06:21+00:00
And you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard?

To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported.

(EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-06-09 20:06:47+00:00
Just to be sure:

Sure: the Oracle of Delphi did have this entire mystic front end they laundered their research output through (presumably because powerpoint wasn't invented yet). Ultimately though, they were really the original McKinsey.

They had an actual research network that did the grunt work. They'd never have been so successful if the system didn't do some level of work.

I know you tripped on this accidentally, but it might yet have some bearing on this conversation. Look at the history of Ethology: It started with people assuming animals were automatons that couldn't think. Now we realize that many are 'alien' intelligences, with clear indicators of consciousness. We need to proceed carefully either way and build understanding, not reject hypotheses out-of-hand.

https://aeon.co/ideas/delphic-priestesses-the-worlds-first-p... (for an introduction to the concept)
by johnea | 2025-06-09 20:07:34+00:00
Total meme punctuation, never saw one prior to recently.

I've been reading US english for about 60 years. This punctuation is not common outside of modern meme space.

A big part of what makes it suck, is it's lack of distinction from the hyphen. Apparently the big difference is that it's 0.3mm longer 8-/

I'd advocate a semicolon, or parenthesis, or anything else with spaces, because this punctuation sucks.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-09 20:07:35+00:00
Watch your tone. You are categorically ignorant to the situation at hand. I'm a moderate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

https://youtu.be/SdeoAgH-H_o?si=1-T1SGNZUyTFCFKP

https://youtu.be/kAolCH_yXwI?si=5wOqB3xxy1e2rayu

https://youtu.be/nms4BMOuDeE?si=auCl7FbXjQ-vnLED

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/population-declin...

https://www.iflscience.com/global-population-growth-is-rapid...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11227040/

https://www.science.org/content/article/population-tipping-p...

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/population-dec...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04868-y

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population#:~:text=The%2...

The last link is from the UN. There’s even a link from Nature.

If you think population decline is political propaganda from right wing people then you are profoundly ignorant. The situation is well known factually by both sides as a logistical issue. The first countries hitting these problems are in Asia. Korea and Japan are facing the brunt of the problem head on before the rest of the westernized world faces it. The US hasn’t gotten the negative side effects of it yet as a lot of the decline is held up by immigration.

Stop being emotional. Stop being angry. I own a dog myself but that does not mean I don’t face biological and logistical reality.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-06-09 20:07:40+00:00
If you mean "AI" in the sense of reasoning LLM, than it is generally prohibited given the industrial scale plagiarism, security leaks, and logical inaccuracies.

For the philosophical insights into ethics... we may turn to fiction =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q
by bornfreddy | 2025-06-09 20:08:35+00:00
Sorry if it irks you, that was not my intention.

My point was not that this job doesn't deserve attention (it does!), but that it would deserve attention from the senior personnel, not (just) the interns. I've seen too many times how important tasks, which are difficult to achieve for someone who wasn't there, are given to newcomers with little oversight and guidance. Maybe that's not how it is here, in which case - good for you!
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-09 20:09:08+00:00
That's signing, it's not encryption. It's a private-key operation, so at best you could consider it decryption. In asymmetric cryptography, the private keys are used for decryption & signing, and the public keys are used for encryption & verification.

Usually you want separate key pairs for signing/verification vs encryption/decryption, but some systems can safely share a key pair for these two sorts of operation.
by thde | 2025-06-09 20:09:50+00:00
> Meet Containerization, an open source project written in Swift to create and run Linux containers on your Mac. Learn how Containerization approaches Linux containers securely and privately. Discover how the open-sourced Container CLI tool utilizes the Containerization package to provide simple, yet powerful functionality to build, run, and deploy Linux Containers on Mac.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346/
by Unearned5161 | 2025-06-09 20:10:20+00:00
Honestly I said that as a shoe in for a representation of my larger view of corporate idealist philosophy. Now that I think of it I don't really have an interest in that particular communication bridge, although I recognize that some people might like having an "omni" search tool that brings results from everywhere.

I'll rephrase to state that I'd much rather have a unix-like philosophy where you have small-ish companies each specializing and being very good at one thing and then you have an active medium they all live in and talk together and hold hands and...
by lelanthran | 2025-06-09 20:10:30+00:00
What an author; I discovered Day of the Jackal when I was 8-10 (not sure). Reading it remains one of my most memorable experiences of my childhood[1].

I genuinely hope someone thought to play this when he expired.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGd6CdtOqEE

[1] It took a lot of convincing by my older brother that there book was, indeed, fiction. TBH, even now, I'm pretty certain it was all plausible.
by laserbeam | 2025-06-09 20:10:51+00:00
It’s not “mistakes”, it’s fashion. The cool thing about fashion is you can never run out of innovation. If something has been out of fashion for 15 years you can bring it back! It makes it seem like everything is forever changing and new. I’ll bet your ass that material design will be all the rave in 10-15 years or so.
by Barrin92 | 2025-06-09 20:11:04+00:00
Just one or two years ago I remember a handful of articles popping up that Gen Z was really into Frutiger Aero, that's the first thing I thought of, with the nature themes and skeuomorphic UI elements.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-gen-z-infatuated-frutige...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-09 20:11:07+00:00
Especially not in non-English countries.

Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.

The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.

So I don't know what the point of this is.

Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.

I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.

This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.
by surgical_fire | 2025-06-09 20:11:27+00:00
Are you telling me that the trillion dollar company had to actually release a laptop with only two USBC ports to "learn" that people need more ports on a laptop? And you do that on a straight face on a sequence where it was claimed that they carefully consider usability and accessibility?

And yes, I am aware those silly toy computers have a couple more ports nowadays, I have to use that on a daily basis for work.
by the_af | 2025-06-09 20:11:51+00:00
> I expect that anybody you asked 10 years ago who was at least decently knowledgeable about tech and AI would have agreed that the Turing Test is a pretty decent way to determine if we have a "real" AI

The "pop culture" interpretation of Turing Test, at least, seems very insufficient to me. It relies on human perception rather than on any algorithmic or AI-like achievement. Humans are very adept at convincing themselves non-sentient things are sentient. The most crude of stochastic parrots can fool many humans, your "average human".

If I remember correctly, ELIZA -- which is very crude by today's standards -- could fool some humans.

I don't think this weak interpretation of the Turing Test (which I know is not exactly what Alan Turing proposed) is at all sufficient.
by rollcat | 2025-06-09 20:12:05+00:00
> [...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up.

Yeah, about that.

When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.

Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.

I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.
by landl0rd | 2025-06-09 20:12:07+00:00
It can also stain the heart and other tissues. But worth noting this was a much higher dose than your typical "biohacker" uses. The levels used in a hospital for things like methemoglobinemia, septic shock, whatever are many times larger.

Regardless, I don't understand why biohackers are often obsessed with things like methylene blue when targeted modulators usually exist. If someone is obsessed with "mitochondrial function" I'd expect him to look at methoxatin or something along those lines before something as broadly active as methylene blue. If someone wants MAO inhibition pharmaceutical options are probably better in terms of controllable isoform affinity. I don't see any reason to prefer something less well-studied for MAO inhibition over e.g. rasagiline or moclobemide.
by creato | 2025-06-09 20:12:08+00:00
Even if true, a small fraction of engineering time on a project is actually developing that asset. The rest is maintenance and support. The tax code does allow for this distinction, but only if you track hours associated with each kind of work, which basically no one does. And even if they tried, it's difficult because that line is blurry. Tasks are rarely 100% one or the other. Ever fixed a bug by refactoring to make something better? Which kind of engineering is that? Can you justify that to the IRS accountant auditing you?
by disambiguation | 2025-06-09 20:12:41+00:00
Open question to HN: In your opinion, what product or piece of work best represents the high-watermark of AI achievement - LLMs or otherwise? I find articles like this are less viable in the face of real counter example. I see a few comments already challenging the author for downplaying the CloudFlare OAuth project - is that repo the current champion of SOTA LLMs?
by cptnapalm | 2025-06-09 20:13:01+00:00
Dogs of War was good enough for it to be the basis for multiple attempted mercenary led coups. Hoare's in the Seychelles failed because his forces went in by plane instead of boat and met the problems which Forsyth foresaw. Denard's guys (if I remember correctly) were given copies of the book with bookmarks to indicate what to do next.
by keyringlight | 2025-06-09 20:13:06+00:00
When a mozilla application crashed it'll ask you to leave a comment to try and help resolve the issue when it prompts to send crash info, and you used to be able to see all those comments on https://crash-stats.mozilla.org (it seems to be behind login or restricted access now). There was a lot of vitriol and unhelpful comments that any developer would need to wade through to get to anything to give them a lead
by WillieCubed | 2025-06-09 20:13:27+00:00
This is the Jevons paradox [1] in full display here. It's much easier to take advantage of hardware to run software at 120 FPS, so why not?

And I agree about liquid glass being successful iff they make the developer tooling for this as easy as additional modifiers to components, or even the default for SwiftUI.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-09 20:13:28+00:00
It's the economic issue AND a dogs issue AND a birth control issue AND porn a porn issue.

Sperm getting launched into socks or condoms instead of vaginas, not enough money and maternal instincts being assuaged by puppies all contributes to the problem.

The mechanisms that force the population to expand are designed to go against our judgement. Sexual instincts, birth control and maternal instincts are all designed to override our judgement and push the population forward at the detriment of of the human individual. Are you poor? Evolution does not give a fuck, it designed you to be horny and to have maternal instincts so you will increase the population no matter how fucked up your situation is.

But thanks to modern technology we've learned to conquer these things. Puppies, condoms and porn. All contributors to the issue.

Bro, I own a dog. I love dogs and condoms. Doesn't mean I'm going to let my love of dogs and condoms cloud my objective reasoning. Also I'm still going to use a condom when I fuck some random hot girl because my individual situation is more important To Me then the overall population problem. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
by madars | 2025-06-09 20:13:35+00:00
This comment (currently downvoted to hard-to-read grey-on-grey) is an excellent example why you should always enable "showdead" in your profile, use user CSS to make downvoted comments readable again (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41514726), and browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the homepage once in a while.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-09 20:13:55+00:00
Liquid sodium has to be kept above the boiling point of water. I've studied the fast breeder reactor enough to not be so afraid of sodium fires (pool fires at least aren't very threatening, though spray fires are) but...

If airlines wanted to use a fuel that had to be heated or cooled they could use alcohol fuels (need just a little heat to not freeze high up in the sky) or liquid methane, both of which are much easier to synthesize than the Fischer-Tropsch Kerosine that sustainable aviation fuels are stuck on now.

Meanwhile this thing basically sprays lye out the back of the plane the same way a bird sprays urea, I'd hate to be past the runway when these are taking off.
by afavour | 2025-06-09 20:14:19+00:00
> User private keys are stored at X

And I'm out. I don't want every thread about X to degenerate into another debate about Musk but at this point they're kind of inseparable. Do I trust that if Musk decided some day that he doesn't like me for whatever reason that he wouldn't grab that private key and publish my DMs? I can't.
by tsoukase | 2025-06-09 20:15:04+00:00
Just coming back from a 3-day journey with my family. A completely different universe than what it would be alone. Chill out, drinks and sex are replaced by nagging and boring activities. BUT, those who have kids can only understand why it worths. The same scales for their entire growing time.

Other commenters have written much more emotional and spot on view points.
by jaggederest | 2025-06-09 20:15:09+00:00
I assume that their weighted revenue per user is around $10 a month, with a discount for annual subscriptions, and they have 50k users.

Edit: And the insane values these days are P/E of 90+, bad businesses are less than 5, so I took a conservative estimate of 10 P/E, but I think a more reasonable number might actually be 40, putting them in the centimillion category for sure.
by sph | 2025-06-09 20:15:09+00:00
It is impossible to have a negative opinion of AI without silly comments like this just one step removed from calling you a boomer or a Luddite. Yes all technological progress is good and if you don’t agree you’re a dumb hick.

AI maximalists are like those 100 years ago that put radium everywhere, even in toothpaste, because new things are cool and we’re so smart you need to trust us they won’t cause any harm.

I’ll keep brushing my teeth with baking soda, thank you very much.
by Lerc | 2025-06-09 20:15:29+00:00
I haven't seen any measure of how frequent these dumb ideas are. Certainly they exist, but what proportion of AI startups are like these cases that turn up in the media as AI disasters.

It's kind of hard to tell with some ideas that they are actually dumb ideas until they have been tried an failed. A few ideas that seem dumb when suggested turn out to be reasonable when tried. Quite a few are revealed to be just as dumb as they looked.

Thinking about it like that actually more comfortable with the idea of investors putting money into dumb ideas, They have taken responsibility for deciding for themselves how dumb they think something might be. It's their money (even if I do have issues with the mechanisms that allowed them to acquire it), let them spend it on things that they feel might possibly work.

I think there should be a distinction made between dumb seeming ideas and deception though. Saying 'I think people will want this' or 'I think AI can solve this problem' is a very different thing to manufacturing data to say "people want this", or telling people a problem has been solved when it hasn't. There's probably too much of this, and I doubt it is limited to AI startups, or even Startups of any kind. There are probably quite a few 'respectable' seeming companies that are, from time to time, prepared to fudge data to make it seem that some of the problems ahead of them are already behind them.
by alwillis | 2025-06-09 20:15:31+00:00
> If you and your spouse could easily share one around the house for different purposes but still having each of your personal apps and settings, you might not buy two!

I get it, but an iPad starts at $349; often available for less.

At this point, an iPad is no different than a phone—most people wouldn't share a single tablet.

Laptops and desktops that run macOS, Linux, Windows which are multiuser operating systems have largely become single-user devices.
by patcon | 2025-06-09 20:15:41+00:00
> a) not enough people who can afford to do so engage in philanthropy, and b) philanthropic funding isn't quasi-democratically distributed. I have to imagine that (a) is a much, much bigger issue than (b)

Consider philanthropy funding as actions that terraform the future. The future is where all possibilities unfold, so shaping future landscape pays dividends to the worldview of those who materialize it.

I would propose that if (b) is miscalibrated and inequitable, it might affect everything, including (a), much more than we assume.

But also, I'm not trying to claim I know that one is more important, just that they're both quite important and very interrelated :)
by leakycap | 2025-06-09 20:15:56+00:00
I don't want the AI features, either -- but I do want a company that can deliver on what they promise.

Apple has fallen behind before; I don't doubt they can recover I just hope it's a good Apple that we get to live with on the other side of what they're going through.

Apple of the last few years hasn't been consumer or developer friendly; their privacy promise being one of the big standouts in their favor.
by pentagrama | 2025-06-09 20:16:04+00:00
I need to experience it more to have a clear opinion, but looking at those videos, these types of translucent UI layers with a magnifying glass effect feel so annoying when they move; it's distracting.

Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.

I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.