MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jay_kyburz | 2025-06-10 22:01:14+00:00
haha yes, I tried to use my kids phone the other day and I had forgotten how much larger I had set the fonts on my own phone. It was impossible to read anything.

It's actually a credit to google that you can scale the fonts up so much and then forget you had done it. In the old days, the UI would be broken in various places.
by minimaxir | 2025-06-10 22:01:17+00:00
> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools.

This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs.

> As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours

This is the first time a number has been given in terms of ChatGPT's cost-per-query and is obviously much lower than the 3 watts still cited by detractors, but there's a lot of asterisks in how that number might be calculated (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?).
by croddin | 2025-06-10 22:01:48+00:00
There is still plenty of room for growth on the ARC-AGI benchmarks. ARC-AGI 2 is still <5% for o3-pro and ARC-AGI 1 is only at 59% for o3-pro-high:

"ARC-AGI-1: * Low: 44%, $1.64/task * Medium: 57%, $3.18/task * High: 59%, $4.16/task

ARC-AGI-2: * All reasoning efforts: <5%, $4-7/task

Takeaways: * o3-pro in line with o3 performance * o3's new price sets the ARC-AGI-1 Frontier"

- https://x.com/arcprize/status/1932535378080395332
by charleszyong | 2025-06-10 22:02:36+00:00
Design for manufacturing is one thing. I did it a lot when building micro gas turbines in college. Sometimes changing the design or manufacturing process will make it 10x faster to make one while not compromising the performance.

The second thing is low margin. When people are pricing hardware, they usually plan a 50% to 100% margin to offset various costs that happen in the real world. From what I've heard, in extreme cases, some products cost around $100 while they are being sold at close to $1000. I believe in the Prusa printer approach: you design a good product and price it a little bit above cost. So the company grows with the community.

Deep down, there are so many times that I wish I could afford a fancy tool like a Milwaukee drill or a Mitutoyo caliper. And in extreme cases, I really wish I could have a HAAS UMC-400 or even a KERN Micro HD+. Now that I can set the price, I really wish I could make someone get what they want without breaking their bank.
by kiba | 2025-06-10 22:03:39+00:00
It's simply pointing out that taxation of economic activity is detrimental to the state, not that taxes are evil. This should be avoided as much as possible unless truly necessary.

The state can still tax in two ways, taxes on undesirable negative extremity such as products that give you long cancer, and unreproducible privileges. I listed those examples. There may be ground for taxing extreme wealth but I want to see extreme inequality fixed first.

I am not even disputing that the government spending encourages economic activity, but we should at least not shoot ourselves in the foot only to heal the foot with another hand.

I am advocating for the interest of the state.
by ofalkaed | 2025-06-10 22:04:39+00:00
Chair backs serve purposes other than reclining against and many are designed with their primary purpose to be something other than reclining. Dining chairs are a good example and historically we see a great many classic designs which are very uncomfortable if you recline into the back; backs on dining chairs were often intended as a handle to make it easier to pull out and push back in from the table and you are supposed to sit on them more as you would a stool.

It is actually a fairly comfortable chair, I built a quick copy years ago just so I could see it in person and get a better feel for the design. Even when made out of scrap low grade pine it held up quite well and was my desk chair until the canvas I used for the seat started to sag too much and did not seem worth replacing since that cheap pine was eventually going to fail. The stresses in the chair are well thought out and will be long lasting if made from a suitable wood.

Not sure why you think the chair can not be used in that location, looks like a great place to stop for a think.
by simmanian | 2025-06-10 22:05:14+00:00
I find it hard to believe too, but at the same time, Demis Hassabis has also said that AI will help us "colonize the galaxy" in as little as five years [1]. Maybe Sam Altman was emboldened by Hassabis' statement.

I would not be opposed to living in a future where I can personally live in space. It would be quite fun.

[1] (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-has...
by Spivak | 2025-06-10 22:06:27+00:00
I mean Fox News seemed to be pretty darn good at calling out Biden and made it their personal mission to hate everything Obama touched. Why aren't people comfortable calling out Trump? Because he's made it clear he will and has retaliated against anyone who does.

We've implicitly relied on the "courtesy" of the executive to just sit there and take it for the good of the country and public discussion. But now that time seems to have passed. No more high road and turning the other cheek.
by spankalee | 2025-06-10 22:07:02+00:00
Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here:

- If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves.

Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.
by satisfice | 2025-06-10 22:07:20+00:00
“We” are not wondering whether AI can write “a beautifully written novel.” Yes, some people are.

Other people know a novel cannot be written by a machine— because a novel is human by definition, and AI is not human, by definition.

It’s like wondering if a machine can express heartfelt condolences. Certainly a machine can string words together that humans associate with other humans who express heartfelt condolences, but when AI does this they are NOT condolences. Plagiarized emotional phrases do not indicate the presence of feeling, just the presence of bullshit.
by xg15 | 2025-06-10 22:07:30+00:00
> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year.

How about affordable housing?
by minaguib | 2025-06-10 22:07:47+00:00
I've always been a backend/systems kind of guy.

For the frontend for this I used Vue.JS as a learning experience. Overall it was straightforward and quite pleasant.

The hardest part was the mental process of giving up on server-side business logic enforcement (such as anti-cheating). At the end of the day ... "it's just a game" :)
by afavour | 2025-06-10 22:07:49+00:00
To extend my previous comparison, I believe Altman and Hassabis are the ones in the smoky room passing a joint around the circle. They’re absolutely emboldened by each other but that doesn’t mean they’re tethered to reality.

(my comparison is incomplete though, it doesn’t factor in that these two also have a huge financial incentive to be hyping this stuff up)
by turnsout | 2025-06-10 22:07:51+00:00
> Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon?

Yes: we still have a long way to go in restoring equilibrium to the climate and producing more sustainable alternatives to our current cities, products and materials. It's a megaproject which could take hundreds of years, and will require plenty of human involvement.

The planet is going to be fine either way, but if capitalism doesn't figure out how to price in externalities, it will slowly run out of human consumers.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-10 22:07:53+00:00
I switch to o1-pro on occasion, but it is slow enough that I don't use it as much as some of the others. It is a reasonably-effective last resort when I'm not getting the answer quality that I think should be achievable. It's the best available reasoning model from any provider by a noticeable margin.

Sounds like o3-pro is even slower, which is fine as long as it's better.

o4-mini-high is my usual go-to model if I need something better than the default GPT4-du jour. I don't see much point in the others and don't understand why they remain available. If o3-pro really is consistently better, it will move o1-pro into that category for me.
by jcranmer | 2025-06-10 22:07:55+00:00
The way I've previously internalized it is CMS is bad principally because it's generic container of general generalizablity (on multiple levels, even) and the fundamentally wrong notion that signature and encryption are fully orthogonal. But generic generalizability can be ameliorated with a concerted, coordinated effort. As for S/MIME (specifically, working out how to embed CMS in MIME)... well, email and MIME make a good solution impossible from the outset, and S/MIME is probably the least bad you can do.

Encrypted email can never have a good solution simply because email is the poster child for "Why Postel's Law is a bad idea"
by ty6853 | 2025-06-10 22:08:24+00:00
Amazing how fast you backtracked. Point to actual cases of parts of the USA going hard on racist policy preventing demographic replacement which based on your rhetoric is something you pretend to be against, and your response is more or less lol actually it doesn't matter, it's just some rocks.

No matter that previously you were pointing to places as small as Arlington Texas.

You don't actually care about eliminating these discriminatory policies. You just have your racist motives to apply it inequally.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-10 22:09:09+00:00
Since you're not American, a brief overview of our military:

1. We have 5 or 6 branches of military. The important one here is the national guard, ones meant to aid Americans in emergency or crisis.

2. The other branches have huge limits on when the federal government can deploy them domestically The Posse Comitatus Act that came as a result of the US civil war covers this.so having marines being deployed is a huge overreach.

3. The vast majority of the time, the national guard is managed by the state Governor, and Gavin Newsom has explicitly opposed this decision. The federal government taking command of the national guard is an exploit of The Insurrection Act that's been going on for a while.

All thst context being given: Newsom is right. This isn't trying to establish order, this is a meticulous escalation on a conservative president in a liberal city to make a show of force. For reference, there's reportedly some 600 rioters and they sent out 2000 (now 4000) national guard and 709 marines. This is all without including the LAPD which is comprised of over 8000 officers.

The amount of money and resources spent on this is utter overkill. And part of the point. They want an excuse to call martial law so badly.
by noleary | 2025-06-10 22:10:16+00:00
(I wrote the article)

I probably could have phrased that better.

I often meet people who think their customer asking for SCIM provisioning means that their customer is identically asking for some newfangled data retention policy. All I meant to emphasize was that SCIM is just a provisioning / update protocol.

Indeed, you are right -- we see customers careful about the data retention policies applicable to SCIM data -- but that's because they'll have reasons to be broadly concerned with data retention matters. Hence my writing "this is usually a separate conversation you might need to have with your customer."
by gpderetta | 2025-06-10 22:10:25+00:00
The "counter" here is an RWMutex (or RWSpinLock). You can't really make it distributed while guaranteeing mutual exclusion [1]. You could use an hashmap with more fine grained locking, but to deal with rehashing you end up reinventing something like ArcSwap anyway.

[1] True no-writes-on-shared-locking RWMutexes do exist, but are significantly more complex and require epoch detection like the ArcSwap, so there is no significant advantage.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-06-10 22:10:26+00:00
Nicely done! This goes in the right rabbit holes and to a depth conductive to rational discussion. The lack of other comments, while disappointing, isn't unexpected, partly due to the processes described in the article itself.

> “Right before our eyes, a world order is being formed in which truth as a category does not exist,” - Ukrainian author Oleksandr Mykhed

What was, and is still being done to Ukraine is tragic. The tragedy didn't start with the Russian invasion, it preceded it and enabled it. In every act of this tragedy, regardless of who the other actors were, Ukraine was the designated loser. That statement goes one step deeper than what the original author discussed, but it's a necessary step, we can't get close enough to the truth if we skip it.
by n42 | 2025-06-10 22:10:32+00:00
I think that's an interesting observation. It seems to be a philosophical discussion on social trust.

Anticheat is an attempt to control the behavior of the community. Your solution is to just control who is in your community.

In a way, I think it's the same lessons learned from social networks. You see it in the trends moving away from global communities back toward smaller online communities; private Discord servers, BlueSky follow/block lists, and so on.
What happened to the "floating license" model?
by ashwinsundar | 2025-06-10 22:10:36+00:00
I feel like I used to encounter this licensing model a lot more, in the world of enterprise software. MATLAB famously had floating licenses at the last organization I was at. If too many people concurrently were using MATLAB at the same time, then the server would not let new users sign in (because no licenses were available).

Clearly this is a con, but the pro is that organizations could purchase way fewer licenses than the number of employees that might need to use the software, because presumably not everyone needed to be signed in at the same time. This worked well for software someone might access once a week, for example.

I haven't seen this model offered in a while though. Has it fallen out of favor, and if so, why?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_licensing
by chimineycricket | 2025-06-10 22:10:42+00:00
I'm not understanding most of this.

>the Salafi, take the Jewish legalistic idea

What is "the Jewish legalistic idea"? It's not a monolith. What makes a salafi a salafi has nothing to do with legalistic ideas.

>majority of other traditions in Islam lean towards Tafsir

This also doesn't make sense to me, as tafsir is exegesis of Quran. Salafis and all muslims care about tafsir.

The core differences between different groups of muslims, loosely in order of priority, is which sources to take from after the demise of Prophet Mohammed, and then how to interpret any sources (incl. Quran) (literally (salafis), logically (shia), etc.).

There are different tafsirs of Quran as well, and can have very stark differences. However loopholes are completely disallowed by all muslims.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-10 22:10:54+00:00
> The Nazis had strong support. But Hitler was appointed.

Well, yeah, PM’s (and the Chancellor in the German system at the time, and now, is a PM) are almost invariably appointed by the head of state after either a general election—or sometimes between them if an incumbent resigns or a vacancy occurs by other means—as the leader of the majority party (if any), the leader of the majority coalition (if there's no majority party but there is a majority coalition), or sometimes (and whether this is allowed and whether it makes a sooner next election than would otherwise be required varies) some minority party leader based on some combination of size of minority, support and opposition from other parties, and discretion of the head of state.

And, yes, Hitler was first appointed as the last and weakest kind, but that's still effectively winning the tiebreaker set out for an ambiguous electoral result, since it could only happen because no other party or coalition could form a legislative majority.
by Mobius01 | 2025-06-10 22:11:01+00:00
> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools.

"probably", "if they embrace the new tools". Hard to read anything but contempt for the role of humans in creative endeavors here, he advocates for quantity as a measure of success.
by pvg | 2025-06-10 22:11:40+00:00
You can repost in a year, give or take or perhaps sooner for really major rework but after you've had a recent significant Show HN's, the updates count as dupes. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html or this mod comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771829
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-10 22:12:38+00:00
Worse than that. Such computations are nothing to a desktop computer, or a server in a datacenter. But they are definitely going to be a problem for cheap smartphones.

Ironically, the computers that are the best suited for solving these proof-of-work problem are the same kind of computers that are used to train and run AIs.

And for even more irony, chatbots are relatively lightweight on the client side, being just text, while news sites tend to be bloated even without considering PoW.

So there is a good chance for PoW not to affect AI scrapers much (they have powerful computers to solve the challenges) while driving away smartphone users towards chatbots and other AI-based summaries.
by discohead | 2025-06-10 22:13:16+00:00
"A new report from Protocol today details that Apple has gone on a cloud computing hiring spree over the last few months... Michael Crosby, one of a handful of ex-Docker engineers to join Apple this year. Michael is who we can thank for containers as they exist today. He was the powerhouse engineer behind all of it, said a former colleague who asked to remain anonymous."

https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/11/apple-cloud-computing/
by stared | 2025-06-10 22:13:19+00:00
Call me a cynic, but Gary Marcus and Sam Altman are the last people I want to read about AGI and related topics.

Gary has invested heavily in an anti-AI persona, continually forecasting AI Winters despite wave after wave of breakthroughs.

Sam, on the other hand, is not just an AI enthusiast; he speaks in a manner designed to build the brand, influence policy, and continuously boost OpenAI's valuation and consolidate its power. It's akin to asking the Pope whether Catholicism is true.

Of course, there might indeed be significant roadblocks ahead. It’s also possible that OpenAI might outpace its competitors—although, as of now, Gemini 2.5 Pro holds the lead. Nevertheless, whenever we listen to highly biased figures, we should always take their claims with a grain of salt.
by belorn | 2025-06-10 22:13:39+00:00
Looking at Sweden and the issue of human trafficking in construction, cleaning and farming, the general problem is that the fine businesses are employing independent contractors from multiple layers of hiring firms, and no one seems very interesting to hold the people who is benefiting from the labor responsible.

It is a well know open secret that not only do practically every large construction site employ illegal immigrants, but there is also a tier system for who do what job. The highest risk and longest hours are given to illegal immigrants. The next tier are those that work off the books, and then last we got those that operate legit as there need to be at least a few of those. This setup seemingly works, until there is an accident or the hiring firm suddenly refuse paying the illegal workers and the miserable details of the human slavery becomes news for a day.
by runako | 2025-06-10 22:13:42+00:00
My quibble is with naming choices and differentiating. Even here they are confusing:

- o4 is reasoning

- 4o is not

They simply do not do a good job of differentiating. Unless you work directly in the field, it is likely not obvious what is the difference between "our most powerful reasoning model" and "our flagship model for complex tasks."

"Does my complex task need reasoning or not?" seems to be how one would choose. (What type of task is complex but does not require any reasoning?) This seems less than ideal!
by crazygringo | 2025-06-10 22:14:04+00:00
Seriously. It would be like living on a submarine. But I guess if you don't like sky, mountains, beaches, nature, weather, animals, etc... Like, if you hate the outdoors and spend all your time in windowless rooms with poor air quality? Then OK, maybe space is for you? Also the food is probably going to be extremely monotonous, so that also needs to not matter.

Unless people are envisioning living in magical holodecks all the time, with magical food replicators? But those don't come along automatically with "space", no matter how much Star Trek you've seen...
by georgemcbay | 2025-06-10 22:14:16+00:00
I agree with your assessment of how terrible online news sites are, but I'm sure the same problem is true for not just news sites but any sort of site where searchable content is shown for ad eyeballs, news sites are just the ones that you're going to hear about it first and most loudly from for pretty obvious reasons.

Regardless of which side you take on any of this (anti/pro-SEO clickbait, anti/pro-AI), it is still ultimately a serious ouroboros problem for Google and other "AI" companies because their "AI" relies on these sites for ongoing training. Kill them all off and where does new content for their AIs to slurp come from?
by jrvarela56 | 2025-06-10 22:15:01+00:00
You made it obvious: techno-utopic dreams only matter to us 1%-ers.

The average person on earth would love it we could have readily available clean water, cheaper housing and food, reliable healthcare to retire without worrying.

That would actually be blissful beyond our wildest dreams: everyone around you and beyond being able to have a peaceful life.
by Bjartr | 2025-06-10 22:15:14+00:00
> because a novel is human by definition

I thought a novel was just a decent length fiction book?

The purpose of fiction at least isn't to express true feeling, it's to instill feeling in the reader. To that end it doesn't matter the process that produces the words.

Is AI going to win the Pulitzer any time soon? Nah.

Is AI going to be able to produce novel length works of fiction that are good enough for at least some people in the near future? Most likely.