MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-06-12 13:33:49+00:00
> I dont think memorizing stuff is the same as being smart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

I agree. The problem I have with the Chinese Room thought experiment is: just as the human who mechanically reading books to answer questions they don't understands does not themselves know Chinese, likewise no neuron in the human brain knows how the brain works.

The intelligence, such as it is, is found in the process that generated the structure — of the translation books in the Chinese room, of the connectome in our brains, and of the weights in an LLM.

What comes out of that process is an artefact of intelligence, and that artefact can translate Chinese or whatever.

Because all current AI take a huge number of examples to learn anything, I think it's fair to say they're not particularly intelligent — but likewise, they can to an extent make up for being stupid by being stupid very very quickly.

But: this definition of intelligence doesn't really fit "can solve novel puzzle", as there's a lot of room for getting good at that my memorising lot of things that puzzle-creators tend to do.

And any mind (biological or synthetic) must learn patterns before getting started: the problem of induction* is that no finite number of examples is ever guaranteed to be sufficient to predict the next item in a sequence, there is always an infinite set of other possible solutions in general (though in reality bounded by 2^n, where n = the number of bits required to express the universe in any given state).

I suspect, but cannot prove, that biological intelligence learns from fewer examples for a related reason, that our brains have been given a bias by evolution towards certain priors from which "common sense" answers tend to follow. And "common sense" is often wrong, c.f. Aristotelian physics (never mind Newtonian) instead of QM/GR.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
by nipah | 2025-06-12 13:34:27+00:00
Amazing, because I realized I procrastinate MORE when using LLM to write code which I know I could write. And not only that, I feel I'm losing the ability to do the coding myself and solve the problems myself when delegating this to the AI. Which is why no one should base their own decisions for life, like using or not using an LLM, on some random story from the internet.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-12 13:35:09+00:00
>Why would social media companies only make money from what users do on their platform but be spared any accountability?

Here's the thing that confuses me. In every country I know, TV and radio stations are liable for the content they broadcast. Both in terms of programs and also ads. I've seen several fines being issued for such breaches, and my country is very liberal and loosely regulated here. So then why do we let social media broadcast whatever poison they want, plus all those scammy and predatory ads to people and get away with it?

That's how big-tech social media oligarchies got so insanely rich compared to brick and mortar businesses. All the scale of the global internet, with none of the liability. Maybe it's time to change that?
by codethief | 2025-06-12 13:35:37+00:00
> I don't think the spacetime swap idea is particularly well explained though?

What exactly do you mean by "spacetime swap idea"? If you're saying the behavior of Schwarzschild coordinates at the event horizon is not well-understood, then I disagree. There is nothing particularly weird or surprising going on, there's just a trapped surface[0].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_surface
by mtotheb | 2025-06-12 13:35:46+00:00
An important variable, the titles of the posts set the stage. That post's title was "Windows 10 _spies_ on your use of System Settings" whereas this one is "My Mac _contacted_ 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use." It would be interesting to, in a month or so when everyone has forgotten this conversation, repost this with a more critical title and see if that reshapes the comments or influences their tone.
by dengolius | 2025-06-12 13:36:21+00:00
VictoriaMetrics team member here.

Have you had a chance to play with VictoriaLogs? If not, then I highly recommend to test it. Our team is also working on implementing traces in top of Jaeger and VictoriaLogs, see https://victoriametrics.com/blog/dev-note-distributed-tracin...
by closewith | 2025-06-12 13:36:31+00:00
> Not once have I heard anyone even broach this as a topic.

I have a feeling you just don't pay attention or, from previous experience with you, are incapable of determining how other people feel about this topic.

> ROI is a perfectly serviceable term for helping people understand what you mean, if the context isn't clear enough already.

It's a specifically politically charged term used by people who either don't know better or have a bone to pick. It's not commonly used in Ireland and it's not used to differentiate innocently between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
by Sanzig | 2025-06-12 13:36:35+00:00
Hmm. I wonder if there would be a market for a super simple TOTP authentication device with an e-paper display. Kind of like those RSA tokens with the LCDs, but more modern and able to hold any number of TOTP credentials.

Getting the credentials loaded could be a bit of a pain without a camera for QR code scanning. Easiest solution would be via Bluetooth to a companion app, which you would probably want anyway for periodic time sync (likely wouldn't be worth it to embed a GNSS receiver just to update the time).

Probably be a pretty small market, but as a niche Kickstarter device? I could see a small but loyal customer base.
by amanchanda | 2025-06-12 13:36:36+00:00
I am a founder and also wear the hat of a product manager for my products. JTBD is a pretty common use case for me. I have also brainstormed features, written detailed specs, and done early prototyping. Also used Lovable to convert my thoughts into screens that I can pass on to my engineers.

Recently, I even used Claude to design my entire DB and dummy data to fill it up quickly to test out prototypes.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-12 13:36:38+00:00
No.

This article: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

> while not in use

That is not "Apple reports every click you make", _very_ different from Microsoft. These requests seem like they are all for background tasks to keep data up to date when the user goes to use it. Now can you see a difference between that and _reporting_ on what you are doing?
by m3kw9 | 2025-06-12 13:37:04+00:00
I think most competent games innately flashes you your progress constantly(levels, maps, story progress, upgrades) and also how easy you can start making progress after you started playing. This system is exactly doing that with the see through jar of finished micro sub tasks. In theory you can create your own “easy progress” flasher system that is tailored to you and would achieve this.

Get on it lol
Show HN: Tool-Assisted Speedrunning the Boring Parts of Animal Crossing (GCN)
by hunterirving | 2025-06-12 13:37:06+00:00
I recently dug my Nintendo GameCube out of storage to revisit the first Animal Crossing game. Things were mostly as I remembered, but the game's heavy reliance on a clunky on-screen keyboard quickly wore my patience thin.

Unwilling to accept this subpar experience, I did what any rational person would do and ordered a rare, Japan-exclusive, keyboard/controller hybrid on eBay, then used a Raspberry Pi Pico to 1. listen for keypresses and 2. send simulated controller events to the GameCube, automating typing in Animal Crossing at a Tool-Assisted Speedrun level.

Of course, this oddball controller's keycaps didn't map perfectly to Animal Crossing's in-game character set, so I watched a 10 hour FreeCAD tutorial at 2x speed, then modeled the 7 keycap profiles to create 81 custom, 3D printed keycaps, taking care to include even the most esoteric Greek and Old English characters that Nintendo chose to include in the game.

And then, having solved my original problem, I decided to sniff out some new ones. I used my homemade TAS device to automate the entry of customizable "Town Tune" melodies, took advantage of a cracked encryption algorithm to give on-demand access to (almost) every item in the game, and, in a Club-Mate-fueled haze, whipped up a Python script to convert arbitrary images to the game's 32x32 pixel custom design format.

Even at superhuman speed, those 1024 pixels took about 3 minutes to input, but that didn't stop me from extending the concept to video - playing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", Bad Apple!, Shrek, and even a short gameplay video of DOOM very, veryyyy slowly (about 7.5 hours to render 30 seconds of footage at 5fps).

Then, realizing that DOOM at 0.0056fps probably wouldn't be the most "playable" thing in the world, I set out to get some kind of video game running within Animal Crossing, and ultimately landed on Snake.

Since it only needs to update 1 pixel for every frame of animation, I was able to get Snake running at around 1ish* frames per second (for technical reasons, it runs at a variable framerate). Maybe not the most primo experience the modern gaming world has to offer, but without a doubt, technically a video game. It even has its own, in-memory high score ranking (so far I'm undefeated).

The code and design files are distributed for free on GitHub[0], and a build/demonstration video[1] is out now on Youtube.

[0] - https://github.com/hunterirving/pico-crossing

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw8Alf_lolA

It started as a "quick, simple project", then quickly ballooned into 7 or 8 "quick, simple projects", but I had a ton of fun putting it all together. Thanks for checking it out!
by jowday | 2025-06-12 13:37:07+00:00
The most confusing part is that it only happened really intensely on just one developer's machine.

I'll admit that the way we were using the image tag was a little unusual, but still something that was imminently supported by a plain HTML image tag.

My point is more that Next is such a bizarre black box that things like this were a regular occurrence.

To clarify: yes, it was the next Image tag. The moment we switched to using a plain image tag it resolved itself.
by logicchains | 2025-06-12 13:37:16+00:00
>Just because you have a mic and want to go on a racist rant about other cultures, I don’t think this should be protected by free speech.

You're essentially making the claim that somebody shouldn't be able to say something that offends some people even if it's true, which is a great way to shut down discourse and enforce the status quo, because there's no limit to what people can claim to be offended by.
by z2 | 2025-06-12 13:37:20+00:00
I think this is the right approach, speaking as someone who went down the rabbit-hole of looking at alternative non-bisphenol or non-phenol image developers. The very little research on the new ones tend to conclude "we don't know if it's toxic in the long term" or in the case of urea-based papers, "it's highly toxic against aquatic life."

To the GP, if the goal is to avoid phenol papers, phenol papers tend to develop deeper black. And in the US, phenol-free papers are new enough the backside often advertises it. Some are very misleadingly labeled BPA-free, which usually means it's made with the very similar and likely equally toxic BPS.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-06-12 13:37:38+00:00
Personally I think that social media companies should be at least in part liable for content posted by their users. There is a tendency to treat social media as a mere conduit, like the post office, that should not be responsible for content but the post office doesn't decide who sees what or profits from advertising inserted into mail.

I thought about this a few months ago and came up with this <strike>rant</strike>completely reasonable proposal[0] that tries to balance internet freedom with assigning limited responsibility for user content published by web sites.

Summary: under some conditions based on the number of views, whether any money changed hands, and whether the post was widely shared or mostly private, a publisher should be liable for some of the damages caused by a post.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/section_230_and_internet_freedom%...
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-06-12 13:37:44+00:00
>improve rates of wanted births

A problem is many of these politicians call themselves pro-life™, when they're actually pro-birth™ (as indicated in their political actions, which are certainly not pro-choice™). You have to make it a society where people WANT to reproduce...

We used to suggest forced birthings as slavery, now it's just with extra steps (to quote R&M).
by DanielHB | 2025-06-12 13:38:03+00:00
As a Brazilian kid I played WoW with an American guild. One day people were doing some trash talking and I threw the line "it is all Obama fault" thinking it was funny because I often heard that from TV due to all the political drama in the US at the time. The conversation wasn't about politics at all.

My guild leader pulled me aside and seriously said to not bring politics into it haha. My first big culture shock of my life.

In Brazil it is quite common (at the time at least) to just blame the government for everything, no matter who is in government.

The second was that apparently wearing speedos is not socially acceptable in most a lot of the first world beaches anymore.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-12 13:38:21+00:00
>as its content is user generated

Content on TV stations is also mostly third party generated. Channel 5 didn't make The Punisher, they bought the rights to play it on air. Radio 2 didn't make In da Club, but 50 Cent did, they're just playing it on air. Newspapers also publish letters and content from readers, yet unlike social media they're the ones responsible for that content.

Because in many countries, content is age restricted per times of day, so the TV and radio statins need to edit the songs and movies they play to cut out various swear words, violence and sex scenes if they want to air to to general audiences, otherwise they get fined.

So why are social media companies allowed to wreak havok?
by dckx | 2025-06-12 13:38:27+00:00
I'm intently following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171

Any discussion about causes is going to be pure speculation right now. It's too early. But the Wiki article is pretty good to get an overview. Some interesting discussion on its talk page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Air_India_Flight_171
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-12 13:38:34+00:00
Royce's original "Waterfall" paper[1] is significantly more iterative & agile than Scrum! It's outdated since at the time (1970) programming was done mostly on paper & then run later on a mainframe or special-purpose computer, but many of the core ideas still hold true for modern programming environments.

Of course many of the organizations that claimed to be implementing Waterfall omitted the iterative steps, then wondered why it didn't work. That also happens with "Agile" processes. Sticking to the waterfall analogy, it's like if you stopped the evaporation & precipitation cycle that refills the upstream aquifer & wondered why the waterfall stopped flowing!

[1] https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf
by cometapi | 2025-06-12 13:39:05+00:00
The competition between leading AI developers has intensified with Google’s launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s introduction of GPT-4.1. These cutting-edge models promise significant advancements in areas ranging from coding and long-context comprehension to cost-efficiency and enterprise readiness. This in-depth comparison explores the latest features, benchmark results, and practical considerations for selecting the right model for your needs.
by MegaDeKay | 2025-06-12 13:39:19+00:00
In my past life, we had a mix of Linux users using LibreOffice and MS Windows using Office. It was indeed at times painful, especially when LO content had to be merged into a Word doc.

But too often I think people just think of Word vs Writer but we're talking the Office experience here. Calc is a poor man's version of Excel: I've found it slow with many rows of data and crash-prone (Office is surprisingly solid). Then there is Visio vs Draw. Use Draw for anything complex and you're going to have a really bad time. Us Engineering folk would put together Visio documents all the time and embed them in lengthy technical documents and proposals. Trying to do this in LO is a road to ruin. The Linux folks would either draw diagrams with sticks and boxes or get somebody in Windows to make something decent in Visio.

What we ended up doing was giving a Windows VM with Office on it for those Linux users that needed to produce documents and the like.
by jfinnery | 2025-06-12 13:39:42+00:00
Can confirm, I'd charge a laaaarge premium to ever work on an existing Rails codebase again.

Did it several times over a period of 15 years and they were always a wreck and unreasonably painful to work with. Every single time.

I'd start a green field one, no problem, provided I get veto on gem choices ("Let's use some twee fucking template language that's a ton worse-performing than the default and doesn't let you programmatically control nesting levels / end tags because it's terribly designed" yeah how about we don't do that because it's going to make my life a living hell) without charging a premium. But no more onboarding to rails codebases without enough money to make it worth my hating every second of work for the (assuredly short) duration.

... and I like Ruby!
by microtonal | 2025-06-12 13:39:55+00:00
There are many people who use 5 year old or older iPhones. My dad uses an iPhone 12 (2020), my mum an iPhone 11 (2019), someone else in my family still uses an XS (2018). In one of these cases a dying battery was replaced (which is still much cheaper than a new phone). They all still work very well and fast.

Also a lot of folks around still sporting Samsun S20 (though they should probably ditch them now due to the lack of security updates).

Getting only 2-3 years of life is very bad for most people.
by nipah | 2025-06-12 13:39:56+00:00
Now you are just being silly with your comparisons. There is no analogy between those things: * the difference between handwritting a book and typing is the extreme pain you would feel in your hands versus being able to write more in the same time without it * the difference between typing and using your voice could be of a similar magnitude for someone with problems in their hands * the difference between any of those writing methods and using an AI to do it for you, is that you are abstracting YOURSELF from the equation, not the method of writing. It's not analogous, not even from a mountain of distance far. You are not less "bottlenecked" because you don't need to write the thing yourself, you are just not producing it at all, it's more analogous to you guiding the hands of another person with vague instructions, using of their own expressivity to make your book for you, then claiming it was you who wrote it. It's not a bottleneck question, it was never a bottleneck question, and this is the case because code IS the writing, it IS the problem solving area where you need to put your mind to work, not writing a prompt, but coding in a specific and well defined formal syntax.
by uncircle | 2025-06-12 13:41:00+00:00
I was about to be a little snarky but your comment reminded me to be kind. Thanks.

I don't have a receipt printer, what helps me is an A4-sized whiteboard with marker when I feel like I'm falling behind my tasks. Also, to use todos sparingly, so they retain their effectiveness. It's actually quite underrated to forget and let go of tasks; what's important tends to stick around in your head and keep you up at night.

The snark was from my personal experience that serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money for something that hopefully solves their issues. It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast. This is why there is tons of posts about "here's how I solved my procrastination issue" when they've only used the supposed panacea for a couple of days. What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years. Then one can claim to have found a cure, albeit one that probably only works for them.

In any case, keep writing. It helps a lot if you too suffer from squirrel brain.
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-12 13:41:18+00:00
Finally! I've been yelling at the clouds for years now how it made zero sense to apply “hosting services” rules for social media when they haven't been doing mere content hosting for years: with their algorithmic feeds curating what everyone is viewing they are literally acting as content editors, and as such it made no sense to me that they didn't have the same obligations as any other other editors out there.

In fact, because of them the regulation on mere hosting services have increased sharply for no reasons, just because the regulators wanted to have more control on social medias.
by NoGravitas | 2025-06-12 13:41:35+00:00
It may surprise you, but the population density of Tennessee is 67/km^2, which sure, is a lot lower than Denmark, but also a lot higher than 36. Most of the east coast has a higher population density than Denmark. Florida has a higher population density than Denmark. When people talk about the low population density of the US, they're averaging in a lot of sparsely populated land west of the Mississippi, which has fuck-all to do with whether rail lines would be useful in the parts of the US where people actually live.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-12 13:42:30+00:00
Good, Linux will be perfect for you. The vast majority of people want/need a bit more than that. Most consumers have come to expect a certain baseline such as:

- Cloud Drive

- Up to date Weather/News

- Malware checks

- System update checks

- Push Notifications

and more.

Before you say "I don't care about News", sure but lots of people do and everyone has a different subset of the network-traffic-causing features. Yes, this means many things are "on by default" but, again, that's what the average consumer wants. HN is a completely different crowd with, sometimes, different wants/needs as compared to the average user.
by coldpie | 2025-06-12 13:42:33+00:00
> We've collectively destroyed this concept for the next generation of young people and we need to desperately course correct.

Sorry, turns out it's economically way more important for the richest two dozen people in the world to turn all of our collective resources into computer programs that will tell them how special and cool and inventive and totally not "the man" they are. Anything that gets in the way of that must be destroyed.
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-12 13:43:27+00:00
Exactly this.

And the same thing for residential scale is literally just a ceramic space heater running at ~1500w.

They're dirt cheap, usually have temp safety checks built in, work on a residentially sized circuit, and are available everywhere.

I needed a cheap and consistent load to do LFP battery testing, and I could spend $5,000 for a real test unit, or $21 for a ceramic heater that will do basically the same thing.

If you've already got the monitoring for the batteries/inverters, a heater is a GREAT load choice.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-12 13:43:41+00:00
>Social media is the opposite

Disagree here, all social media platforms have "the algorithm" which chooses what to show and to who, in order o maximize engagement and ad revenue.

If they don't want to be responsible for what they show to users, maybe they should leave all that ad money on the table, but it seems like they have no moral issues cashing those cheques while outsourcing their externalities to society. It's not like Meta is scrambling for change between the couch cushions and can't invest in better human plus bot moderation and curation. But then Zuck will only be able to afford a gold trim on his yacht instead of the platinum one, and a smaller island. Oh no, how sad, how terrible.

So tell me again, why do we have double standards for super wealthy social media oligopolies compared to traditional mediums?