MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by proc0 | 2025-06-22 18:28:18+00:00
This article seems to be conflating AI with deep neural networks and its associated architectures like LLMs and transformers. It could well be that the path forward is a completely different foundational paradigm. It would still be AI but it wouldn't use neural networks. I mention this because the question of whether AGI is possible is not dependent on the current technology. Maybe LLMs can't reach AGI but a different system can.

This is highlighted in statements like this one:

> For AI to truly transcend human intelligence, it would need to learn from something more intelligent than humans.

Just imagine a human with a brain the size of a large watermelon. If the brain is like a computer (let's assume functional computationalism), then larger brain size means more computation. This giant brain human would have an IQ of 300+ and could singlehandedly usher in a new age in human history... THIS is the analog of what AGI is supposed to be (except a lot more because we can have multiple copies of the same genius).

Circling back to the article, this means that an AGI by definition would have the capacity to surpass human intelligent just like a genius human would, given that the AGI is processing information the way human minds process information. It wouldn't just synthesize data like current LLMs, it would actually be a creative genius and discover new things. This isn't to say LLMs won't be creative or discover new things, but the way in which they get there is completely different and more akin to a narrow AI for pattern matching rather than a biological brain which we know for sure has the right kind of creativity to discover and create.
by beepbopboopp | 2025-06-22 18:28:32+00:00
You're referring to the cutting off of supply lines into places where the enemy has chosen to embed themselves. With almost infinite video proof of misappropriation of all humanitarian aid (food and supplies) of their citizens during the conflict.

This is literally how every war since time has gone. The "Starvation" nomenclature is propganda, which to their credit they are CRUSHING at.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-06-22 18:29:00+00:00
Pocket watches are sold in antique shops by the price of their weight in brass. Finding one that is complete but needs a cleaning and new oil to spring to life is relatively easy.

There are 10x more pocket watches than owners interested. Theyre incredible machines... but their greatest use is practice materials for aspiring watch repair technicians.

They're expensive to repair because few people have the skills and tools. The demand is so low. (I have two)
by voidhorse | 2025-06-22 18:29:06+00:00
Actually, I'd agree that "fundamental misunderstanding" is too strong. Obviously there is a certain threshold of comprehensibility one needs to achieve regardless of whether one is pursuing aesthetic ends or informative ones.

That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.

My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.

If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
by mgraczyk | 2025-06-22 18:29:28+00:00
> all equity does is make your cap sheet look marginally worse

But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-22 18:29:32+00:00
Wow. That is... certainly some syntax. It reminds me of Perl.

This syntax is pretty weird even by C++ standards, and it's certainly the worst way to do reflection I've personally seen. But I guess it's good that C++ is finally getting some kind of reflection. Only a few decades late to the party but hey they got there in the end.

Really as C++ grows and evolves, I feel more and more that I'd rather use plain C than wrangle with all of the bizzarro choices C++ has made. C++ is more and more often just the wrong choice of language for anything I want to do. If I need compile-time reflection, I'll use a C# program to generate C code.
by nashashmi | 2025-06-22 18:29:38+00:00
> I have not lived in the US, and I know a lot about the US national character

That is not a good comparison. The US is well reported enough in news and media and movie to have a good awareness of the culture within. You also understand their language.

However, the Arab world is not reported well enough apart from biased sources that seek to defame and discredit them. And neither would you understand their language. So no your awareness of their culture and country and leadership is so far fallen yet you think it is sufficient that it becomes dangerous.

There is no such thing as Islamic population unless you are an Islamophobe who have sought to “other” this part of the world
by simonh | 2025-06-22 18:29:49+00:00
All absolutely true. In fact we're only in this situation because Trump cancelled the nuclear deal with Iran, along with as many treaties as he could get away with so he could get the credit of renegotiating them. Except for the ones he never got round to, like the one with Iran. So, here we are.

I don't particularly blame the Israelis though, and there's broad support for this over there, it's not just Netanyahu.
by SllX | 2025-06-22 18:30:20+00:00
> As challenging as it sounds, we need to develop a strong impartial international institution whose the only mission would be maintaining peace and preventing wars on the planet.

The scenario you concocted here is Disneyland. It’s not just challenging, it’s just an oppressive version of the UN, but it won’t be impartial because it will be the most powerful organization on the planet and a target for every extremist and ideologue that seeks to acquire power. You haven’t changed the game, you’ve temporarily changed the battlefield.
by icameron | 2025-06-22 18:30:43+00:00
Sportsmen use long guns like 30’6 for big game hunting (elk, deer, antelope) out west. Shots over 100 yards require a large cartridge like that. AR-15 are used in the southern states for wild hogs and varmints, or coyotes. Not exactly trophy hunters. I’m just saying the popularity of the AR-15 is not driven by hunters.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-22 18:30:43+00:00
The first ferrochrome produced thus had very high carbon content.

The only kind of stainless steel that could have had any chances of being made with such a ferrochrome would have been a martensitic stainless steel for knife blades.

In any case that kind of ferrochrome was not suitable for researching the properties of chromium alloys. The acceptable compositions for alloys like stellite or various kinds of stainless steels have all been discovered, after many experiments, only by using relatively pure aluminothermic chromium, which was a strictly necessary ingredient for enabling chromium alloy research.

Only after the required composition of a kind of stainless steel was understood and only if it was determined that such a composition can be reached by mixing ferrochrome with iron, the manufacturing process was adjusted for using cheaper ferrochrome instead of pure chromium.

Today there exists low-carbon ferrochrome, which is suitable for making most kinds of stainless steels, but even now the low-carbon ferrochrome is much more expensive than the high-carbon ferrochrome from which only martensitic stainless steel can be made.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-06-22 18:32:09+00:00
To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).

And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.

On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).

Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
by Uehreka | 2025-06-22 18:32:17+00:00
No. If they sell the TPUs for “what they’re worth”, they get to reap a portion of the benefit their competitors would get from them. There’s money they could be making that they aren’t.

Or rather, there would be if TPUs were that good in practice. From the other comments it sounds like TPUs are difficult to use for a lot of workloads, which probably leads to the real explanation: No one wants to use them as much as Google does, so selling them for a premium price as I mentioned above won’t get them many buyers.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-22 18:32:36+00:00
If my government was responsible for funding, training and defending foreign torture camps from international scrutiny, their citizens probably are justified in demanding the destruction of my states as a form of justice for unaccounted human rights abuses: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/legal-and-political-mag...

> SAVAK was established in 1967 with help from both the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.

> All observers to trials since 1965 have reported allegations of torture which have been made by defendants and have expressed their own conviction that prisoners are tortured for the purpose of obtaining confessions. Alleged methods of torture include whipping and beating, electric shocks, the extraction of nails and teeth, boiling water pumped into the rectum, heavy weights hung on the testicles, tying the prisoner to a metal table heated to white heat, inserting a broken bottle into the anus, and rape.

Good luck convincing Iranians that they should welcome your kind into their country for any reason ever again.
by baxuz | 2025-06-22 18:33:30+00:00
Google just bumped the subscription cost for my 2-person household to 18,99€

I don't want to pay for 6 members. I don't want YouTube Originals. I sure as hell don't want YouTube Music. And I'd really like it if I didn't have to manually set my videos to the premium bitrate every damn time.

I'd be fine with paying 10€ for no ads + premium. But for almost 20€/month, I'm thinking of just going back to adblockers.

For 20€/month I expect them to not allow any sponsored content in my feed, including those served by the authors.

Luckily I kinda have that option with sponsorblock.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-06-22 18:33:51+00:00
I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite explanations for literary fiction’s decline that have been pushed by its adherents (“the internet made people stupid”) to really try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore.

His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.

I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?

Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary and “genre” fiction that I’m not sure always exists. Ursula Le Guin is a good counterexample here.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-22 18:34:40+00:00
The kinds of chrome steel used in the 19th century were very fragile, due to high content of carbon and of other impurities.

Their possible uses were very limited in comparison with the ductile stainless steels discovered in the 20th century.

Also the chemical resistance of the first chrome steels was modest, because it was not known which is the minimum content of chromium for avoiding rusting and also their composition was not well controlled.
by kens | 2025-06-22 18:34:40+00:00
It's probably too late for anyone to see this, but I got an answer from CuriousMarc on the transistors: "The collectors are connected to the cans, but there is a coat of insulator on the heatsinks under the transistors on some models or on the whole heatsink on others, so the heatsinks are electrically isolated from the transistors."
by ben_w | 2025-06-22 18:34:49+00:00
> Speak for yourself. LLMs are a feedforward algorithm inferring static weights to create a tokenized response string.

If we're OK with descriptions so lossy that they fit in a sentence, we also understand the human brain:

A electrochemical network with external inputs and some feedback loops, pumping ions around to trigger voltage cascades to create muscle contractions as outputs.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-22 18:34:58+00:00
Broadcast tv is free to consume as much as you can stand. They have standards and practices that they conform and have fines assessed for infractions. Why do we accept that but have weak comments about “you don’t have to watch” for YT? Thanks for confirming the agency I have, but that does nothing to moving the conversation in a compelling manner at all.
by geor9e | 2025-06-22 18:35:23+00:00
The title is clickbait. He more ends up saying that AGI is practically impossible today, given all our current paradigms of how we build computers, algorithms, and neural networks. There's an exponential explosion in how much computation time it requires to match the out-of-frame leaps and bounds that a human brain can make with just a few watts of power, and researchers have no clever ideas yet for emulating that trait.
by super_ar | 2025-06-22 18:35:54+00:00
Fair point. Thanks for calling it out! To clarify, we’re focused on a specific use case: Kafka to ClickHouse pipelines with exactly-once guarantees. Kafka can’t provide exactly-once out of the box when writing to external systems like ClickHouse. You could use something like Flink, but there’s no native Flink-to-ClickHouse connector and Flink requires certain ops effort from the teams. Our goal was to show users a very easy-to-reproduce load test to validate the results. As a next step, we’re actively working on a Kubernetes-ready version that will scale horizontally and plan to share those higher-throughput results with the HN community soon.
Show HN: I built an AI-powered solar analysis tool using NASA satellite data
by niklaslissjos | 2025-06-22 18:36:09+00:00
I built solarscope.io, a tool that combines NASA satellite data with AI to help solar developers and engineers analyze solar energy potential for any location worldwide.

The backstory: This started as my electrical engineering thesis project a few years ago. Back then (prior to mainstream AI tools) it was a clunky step-by-step interface with basic calculations. After seeing what modern AI could do, I rebuilt it from scratch with a cleaner dashboard and AI-powered insights plus chat functionality. I'm a self-taught developer (started building websites at 14) who got into solar through my engineering studies.

Tech stack: Python/Flask backend integrated with NASA's POWER API (20+ years of historical solar irradiance data) and OpenAI for natural language analysis. Deployed on Replit for rapid MVP iteration.

No paying users yet — early beta with core functionality working. Would love feedback from developers, designers, or anyone curious about solar potential. No solar experience needed.

Try it free: I've added a temporary 14-day bypass on the landing page for easy testing. Thanks for reading - would love to hear any feedback!

https://solarscope.io
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-22 18:36:18+00:00
That is certainly the conventional wisdom. But is it right?

Imagine that Iran already had 10 nuclear bombs and the US bombed the production sites with B2s. What would Iran do? They can't drop a nuke on the US, and even if they could, that would just ensure their destruction.

Of course, one could argue that Iran is not rational and that it would nuke NYC even if it meant being destroyed as a country. But if we're assuming that they are irrational, then that's all the more reason to get rid of their weapons, even if it meant taking casualties.

And note that the same calculation applies with Iran vs. Israel. If Israel attacks Iran conventionally, Iran cannot escalate to nuclear without also getting destroyed (since Israel has a larger arsenal).

Moreover, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, actually demonstrates the uselessness of nuclear weapons. Yes, NATO and the US were initially deterred because of fears of Russian escalation, but we've continued to cross "red-lines" in arming Ukraine without escalation (tanks, F16, missile attacks on Russian soil, etc.). I'm pretty confident that Europe at least will continue to support Ukraine with ever more powerful weapons without fear of Russia's nuclear threats.
by alganet | 2025-06-22 18:37:10+00:00
You're mistaking the thing for the tool we use to describe the thing.

Physics gives us a way to answer questions about nature, but it is not nature itself. It is also, so far (and probably forever), incomplete.

Math doesn't need to agree with nature, we can take it as far as we want, as long as it doesn't break its own rules. Physics uses it, but is not based on it.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-06-22 18:37:23+00:00
>The entire "rules based order" is, I think, part of what caused the world to go to chaos. Because there were never any rules besides might makes right, just as always.

I recommend this book:

https://www.amazon.com/United-Nations-History-Stanley-Meisle...

The UN isn't working very well right now, but it's worked considerably better in the past. In the wake of WW2, I think there was a genuine sentiment that war was really horrible and it should be avoided at all costs. Sadly most of the people who saw WW2 have passed away by this point.

In terms of populations "making better decisions on the sorts of foreign policy views to support" -- I think international law is, if anything, helpful in this regard. Foreign policy is complex, and human nature is such that people are always predisposed to see their own interests as just, or at least cloak their interests in the language of justice. On the other hand, total pacifism is also ideologically unworkable for various reasons. (Even most leftists are against "America First" style isolationism for WW2 or Ukraine.) So international law is valuable in the sense that, at least in principle, it helps you figure out who the bad guy is: Who is breaking international law? That may sound rather academic, but in practice it seems to carry more weight than you might expect.

To state my position another way: I think having some sort of international law is a good idea, even if the current scheme needs to be reworked. A better scheme might be: Have some ritualized, non-lethal way for nations to test strength against each other, e.g. through athletic competitions or wargames, as a binding method of resolving disagreements. This could be game-theoretically stable, if success at the "ritual test of strength" is thought to correlate strongly with real-world war performance. Furthermore, any state which initiates lethal, kinetic confrontation after losing the "ritual test of strength" (sore losers who refuse to abide by the outcome) should become international pariahs subject to secondary sanctions.
by nine_k | 2025-06-22 18:38:04+00:00
The comparison with Perl is apt, to my mind. Both Perl and C++ were early to their space, experimenting with concepts that were weird at the time, trying many approaches we now find ugly, and serving as examples of both successes and failures for the much better languages that came after them. The difference is that Perl5 stopped evolving some time ago, while C++ continues the same tendency unabashed.

(Scala is another example of such a language.)
by zh3 | 2025-06-22 18:38:17+00:00
Seared into my soul is the experience porting a linux pipe-based application to Windows, thinking it's all posix and given it's all in memory the performance will be more or less the same. The performance was hideous, even after we found that having pipes waiting for a connection more or less ground windows to a halt.

Some years later this got revisited due to needing to use the same thing under C# on Win10 and while it was better it was still a major embarrassment how big the performance gap was.
by woodruffw | 2025-06-22 18:38:17+00:00
> since gmail requires TLS i highly doubt that there are many servers out there that don't support it.

Gmail doesn’t require TLS, unless by that you mean that their webmail interface is TLS only. Like every other mail provider, they do opportunistic TLS on external delivery, and TLS on MUA connections (SMTP and IMAP) is largely at the mercy of user configuration.

The fact that people seem to think that TLS is a mainstay of the email ecosystem is clearly part of the problem here.

As for the rest of this: I’ve hammered on about Signal because it’s the naive right choice, but it’s ultimately up to you to decide whether your phone number is an acceptable public identifier. But even if it isn’t, there is so much out there that’s indisputably better than this mess: Matrix or even iMessage (with an email identifier instead of a phone) would be better.
by johnisgood | 2025-06-22 18:39:04+00:00
FWIW there is readv() / writev(), splice(), sendfile(), funopen(), and io_buffer() as well.

splice() is great when transferring data between pipes and UNIX sockets with zero-copy, but it is Linux-only.

splice() is the fastest and most efficient way to transfer data through pipes (on Linux), especially for large volumes. It bypasses memory allocations in userspace (as opposed to read(v)/write(v)), there is no extra buffer management logic, there is no memcpy() or iovec traversal.

Sadly on BSDs, for pipes, readv() / writev() is the most performant way to achieve the same if I am not mistaken. Please correct me if I am wrong.

At any rate, this is a great article.