MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-29 19:00:56+00:00
> Ok. So you stop bombing. How do you get the hostages back?

I'm assuming "the hostages" you're referring to are the tens of hostages held by Hamas and the thousands of hostages held by israel. I've provided an answer to this question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718080

> not a real answer

According to who? Seems like a real answer to me, and I'm not sure you're the grand supreme decider of real answers :)
by simonw | 2025-07-29 19:01:10+00:00
There's a new model from Qwen today - Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 - that also runs comfortably on my Mac (using about 30GB of RAM with an 8bit quantization).

I tried the "Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders" prompt against it and didn't quite get a working game with a single shot, but it was still an interesting result: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/29/qwen3-30b-a3b-instruct...
by bossyTeacher | 2025-07-29 19:01:20+00:00
LLMs are to learning what self driving cars are to transportation. They take you to the destination most of the time. But the problem is that if you use them too much your brain (your legs) undergoes metaphorical atrophy and when you are faced in the position of having to do it on your own, you are worse than you would be had you spent the time using your brain (legs). Learning is great but learning to learn is the real skilset. You don't develop that if you are always getting spoonfed.
by nojvek | 2025-07-29 19:01:35+00:00
I agree on most points with the author, but stablecoins have fundamental value to countries that are not US whose currency gets devalued faster than US dollar, or want to do cross border transaction.

USD has its own woes with inflation and trade wars so fundamentally isn't stable, compared to say gold. Other currencies have runaway inflation or much higher friction to transact.

However the promise of stablecoin is that it can be exchanged 1:1 with USD with transaction fees much lower than CC fees (on exchanges like Solana e.t.c).

Unlike fraud from FTX, USDC stablecoin buys US treasuries dollar for dollar. This generates demand for USD as well as Circle makes profit from treasury yields.

Elegant idea in a way. Fast, cross-border low fee transactions in USD.

Bitcoin now has proven itself as inflation-hedged store of value. USDC is proving itself as a way to transact on goods and services.

Obviously trust is earned as droplets but leaves in buckets.

Crypto is ripe with scams and shady exchanges.
by turnsout | 2025-07-29 19:01:41+00:00
I understand, but that is not exceptional for a Mac laptop. You could say all Apple Silicon Macs are exceptional, and I guess I agree in the context of the broader PC community. But I would not point at an individual MacBook Pro with 64 GB of RAM and say "whoa, that's exceptional." It's literally just a standard option when you buy the computer. It does bump the price pretty high, but the point of the MBP is to cater to higher-end workflows.
by flyinglizard | 2025-07-29 19:01:49+00:00
IMHO discounting the cultural differences at the core of Arab societies compared to Western societies is racist, but to each his own. See how Alawits and Druze are faring now under the new Syrian regime - made of former ISIS members, no less. Imagine what they'd do to Jews if they just had the chance (indeed, Arabs mass expelled Jews from their countries after the formation of Israel; what do you expect those to do?).

I think your other, bigger mistake is to equate Israel to the colonialist adventures of Africa's past. That's complete misunderstanding of Israeli psyche and source of strength (and indeed you are talking about Israel in an overriding manner, as if it's not their choice on how to solve this). While colonialists in Africa could always turn back to Europe and the white world (and many did), Jews in Israel don't feel nearly the same. Colonialists didn't flee anything, they just came looking for a better future or an adventure. Jews came to Israel to form a homeland. Jews have an undisputed connection to the land through countless artefacts and written history, while colonialists never had that in relation to Africa. Jews have nowhere to return to; where would they go, back to Auschwitz? To the pogroms of Russia, Ukraine and Poland?

Jews are ready, willing and able to fight to the end and currently possess the strongest military in the Middle East (and probably in Europe) by far. The combination of technology, economy, psychology and resilience means Israel could easily outlast any other Middle Eastern country (which are artificial entities to begin it, a result of Sykes-Picot agreements).

And, indeed, look: Syria is out, Lebanon is hanging on the brink of another civil war, Jordan is there just thanks to monarchical oppression (where are their civil rights?), Iraq is a failed state, Saudis want Israeli technology and good favors, the GCC are all in bed with Israel (other than Qatar and Kuwait), Iran is on its knees, Egypt is thirsty and illiterate. Who's left, other than perhaps Turkey (but then they have their business with the Greek which are very close to Israel)?

I've had many such discussions on the internet but not even once did I encounter someone offering that Israel disposes of its F35, nukes and security apparatus and hand the keys to ISIS/Hamas terrorists. There's a first time for anything.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-07-29 19:02:05+00:00
I didn't think that was what was being discussed.

I was attempting to imply that with high-quality literature, it is often reviewed by humans who have some sort of knowledge about a particular topic or are willing to cross reference it with existing literature. The reader often does this as well.

For low-effort literature, this is often not the case, and can lead to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect where a trained observer can point out that something is wrong, but an untrained observer cannot perceive what is incorrect.

IMO, this is adjacent to what human agents interacting with language models experience often. It isn't wrong about everything, but the nuance is enough to introduce some poor underlying thought patterns while learning.
by yoz-y | 2025-07-29 19:02:07+00:00
The fact that the information was passed from the agent to the executing person is something that could be done today and isn’t.

Any call center systematically asks to repeat all information, any administration asks for papers and all its dependencies. (For example in France in order to get married you need both the birth certificate, pacs certificate and pacs non-dissolution certificate. All of these contain the same information)

This is not a problem that needs LLMs to be solved. It’s a data entry and retrieval with consent problem.
by dmitrijbelikov | 2025-07-29 19:02:54+00:00
This is cool. Dividing the answer into chunks, because most users can consume in small portions, this is an interesting idea. But on the other hand, it hints at strange cognitive abilities of the user, but here it is individual, perhaps, on average in a hospital, this is how the target audience should be led. It seems to me that I use it differently. On the other hand, having received a detailed answer, no one stops you from asking for a definition of an unfamiliar term. It's like in reading: understanding the thought ends with the first word that you don't know. It's just that not everyone can or wants to admit that they don't know this or that term. When it comes to professional terms, this is really not the most trivial problem.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-29 19:02:56+00:00
That YouTube video is bad, if not outright wrong.

First of all, like the other commenter said, these days biometrics are rarely used as a key itself (which is how they are often portrayed in old movies). Instead, they are used as a method to gain access to the key. This is quite literally the case with some biometric Yubikeys - the key is the Yubikey, but to get it to work it needs your biometrics. Are you saying it would be better to have a key with no access control at all? Or one with a passcode (just watch the linked WSJ article from TFA - the guy was able to steal data from phones with passcodes, but biometrics would have made that attack vector much more difficult). Phones work pretty much the same way, perhaps the downside being that people often don't consider their phones as something that needs the same level of guarding as an actual key.

And just as importantly, what these kinds of YouTube videos often miss is the old adage "I don't need to outrun the bear - I just need to outrun you." That is, unless you are a particularly high-value target (and you would know if you are), any security that makes you much more difficult to hack than the person using Princess123 as their password means thieves give up and go to the easier target first.
by scythe | 2025-07-29 19:03:57+00:00
I like to point out in these threads that my first exposure to "pornography" was a cunnilingus scene in Al Franken's political tirade Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was eleven.

I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.

I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.
by lrvick | 2025-07-29 19:04:18+00:00
Can we all please stop confusing freeware with Open Source?

If something can not be reproduced from sources which are all distributed under an OSI license it is not Open Source.

Non public sources of unknown license -> Closed source / Proprietary

No training code, no training sources -> Closed source / Proprietary

OSI public source code -> Open Source / Free Software

These terms are very well defined. https://opensource.org/osd
by kube-system | 2025-07-29 19:04:22+00:00
In my analogy, the lawnmower is the cloud server, and your sod is your smart hub.

But forget the analogy.

Cloud services are services. If you buy a device that requires continued services to operate, and the service goes away, it doesn’t operate.

People might be mad about this, but I’m sure everyone on this forum is smart enough to realize that servers don’t run themselves
by AShyFig | 2025-07-29 19:04:41+00:00
This sounds really interesting! I'd love to see it when you're done.

I wasn't aware that my Nest thermostat was going to be End of Life'd, but I just finished replacing it with an older Honeywell/Zwave combo due to lack of features and general de-googleing. Would be great to do something with the hardware, which is really slick.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-07-29 19:05:48+00:00
You could employ a private tutor full time for that sort of money.

That was sort of my reaction: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1943705839891517565

But actually I don't think you could hire a full time tutor for that amount in San Francisco. Many public school teachers in SF cost double that https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-...

You could hire one full time tutor per two children, though...

more expensive than Harvard

Right, but the student:teacher ratio in a typical harvard 'classroom' is much higher.
by breppp | 2025-07-29 19:05:52+00:00
I don't need to speculate, I can read the ideological foundations behind the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafism, the Islamic Republic etc.

One part is rejection of modernism and romanticism of a fantastic past similar to fascist movements. Other is anti-colonialism, but only in the context of european colonialism, not muslim colonialism, which is fine. Because of the aforementioned romanticism to the middle ages, part of any Islamist project is creating a Caliphate, and it is easy to see in Islamic history that these were boundless.

The reason Palestine may be important for them is that according to their perception, while european colonialism is a humiliation, there is no greater shame than the existence of Israel, as it is no some vast British Empire, but rather a nation built by refugees and therefore weak by definition, thereby enhancing their defeat, which in their mind has religious implications. As Islam is a conquering religion, and their conquests are a proof of Allah's power.
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-07-29 19:05:56+00:00
I don't see a false dichotomy here and if there were posts against right to privacy that are flagged while posts for it were not (either with admin intervention or without) I wouldn't say "there is nothing to see here". I would definitely prefer to see both sides of issue and I wouldn't flag posts against privacy, though not upvote it either.

If you think it's nice when media is biased towards what you consider to be right, and that's the point of your analogy, I disagree.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-29 19:06:16+00:00
What is the solution? Toss out thousands of years of tested pedagogy which shows that most people learn by trying things, asking questions, and working through problems with assistance and instead tell everyone to read a textbook by themselves and learn through osmosis?

So what if the LLM is wrong about something. Human teachers are wrong about things, you are wrong about things, I am wrong about things. We figure it out when it doesn't work the way we thought and adjust our thinking. We aren't learning how to operate experimental nuclear reactors here, where messing up results in half a country getting irradiated. We are learning things for fun, hobbies, and self-betterment.
by mindslight | 2025-07-29 19:06:43+00:00
> Do you support "advancement" at all or any cost?

Obviously nobody supports any specific thing at any cost, yet you are still asking this question rhetorically. The implication is the inverse whereby the cost is already too high - without actually substantiating this argument.

Thus the main part of my comment asking what you're actually seeing this cost in terms of, which you didn't respond to. Focusing on merely the monetary cost would be utterly fallacious in the context of this spendthrift administration.
by polotics | 2025-07-29 19:06:46+00:00
Thank you so much for the amazing and reusable example of whataboutism. And please do not insult the Chinese by equating Chinese with censorship, I have too much respect for the intelligence and worth of this civilised people to not hold them to the same standards as the best of the best. Saying Chinese in no way implies any censorship as a necessary condition in my mind.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-29 19:07:55+00:00
Hmm that's not great. I don't have a 100W charger and my laptop is the only thing that I have that could draw that much, the 140W GAN charger I got from them is a total and only does 65W per C port.

I'll keep it in mind if I decide to grab a 100W charger, thanks for the heads up.

I guess we really can't be sure from product to product with Anker and will just have to take each product on reviews or test and return.
by turnsout | 2025-07-29 19:08:08+00:00
They're not sold out—Apple's configurator (and chip naming) is just confusing. The MacBook Pro with M4 Pro is only available in 24 or 48 GB configurations. To get 64 or 128 GB, you need to upgrade to the M4 Max.

If you're looking for the cheapest way into 64 of unified memory, the Mac mini is available with an M4 Pro and 64GB at $1999.

So, truly, not "exceptional" unless you consider the price to be exorbitant (it's not, as evidenced by the long useful life of an M-series Mac).
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-07-29 19:08:21+00:00
AIUI (but actual iOS developers can correct me), for Push Notifications to work on iPhones requires the system to route through the Apple-hosted Apple Push Notification (APN)

https://developer.apple.com/notifications/

This is fairly at odds with the goal of XMPP, where the device listens to the server. But of course that model doesn't really work when the device is sleeping most of the time (and I don't know how IP or TCP connections are handled in an LTE or 5G world, but I'm sure there's a consideration there).

All this to say: iOS is hostile to XMPP.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-07-29 19:08:36+00:00
I've never done a DIY book using the author's technique. I've printed and bound books using the traditional technique of sewn signatures. It was more work than the method described in this post. I was very happy with the results.

There are a ton of tutorials on that method. At this point I don't recall what tutorial(s) I followed (it's been at least 20 years since the last time I made a book).

Don't scrimp on the typesetting. Today there's probably software to "ingest" an EPUB file and make printable output. Back when I was printing books I took plain ASCII text files and fed them to a Microsoft Word template. It was amazing how poorly Word 2003 handled >200 page files.
by ijk | 2025-07-29 19:09:09+00:00
True - though in the actual case of your examples, calcpay, process_user_input, and ProcessUserInput all encode into exactly 3 tokens with GPT-4.

Which is the exact kind of information that you want to know.

It is very non-obvious which one will use more tokens; the Gemma tokenizer has the highest variance with process|_|user|_|input = 5 tokens and Process|UserInput as 2 tokens.

In practice, I'd expect the performance difference to be relatively minimal, as input tokens tends to quickly get aggregated into more general concepts. But that's the kind of question that's worth getting metrics on: my intuition suggests one answer, but do the numbers actually hold up when you actually measure it?
by p2hari | 2025-07-29 19:09:20+00:00
I just downloaded on mac M4 pro mini. I installed the apple silicon version and try to launch it and it fails. No error message or anything. Just the icon keep bouncing on the dock. I assumed it needs some privacy and screen recording and audio permissions and explicitly gave them, however still just jumps on the dock and the app does not open. (OS, mac sequoia 15.5)
by simonw | 2025-07-29 19:09:37+00:00
It sounds like you care deeply about learning as much as you can. I care about that too.

I would encourage you to consider that even LLM-generated code can teach you a ton of useful new things.

Go read the source code for my dumb, zero-effort space invaders clone: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM...

There's a bunch of useful lessons to be picked up even from that!

- Examples of CSS gradients, box shadows and flexbox layout

- CSS keyframe animation

- How to implement keyboard events in JavaScript

- A simple but effective pattern for game loops against a Canvas element, using requestAnimationFrame

- How to implement basic collision detection

If you've written games like this before these may not be new to you, but I found them pretty interesting.
by jaysonelliot | 2025-07-29 19:10:15+00:00
It's a pretty cool proof of concept. I did run into some weirdness with it right away when trying the Harry Potter book. The app kept switching between 2nd and 3rd person for Harry.

The main thing for me, though, was the feeling of emptiness I got while playing. I love text adventures, having grown up with Infocom games. The thing about them is that you can feel the choices made by the writer / programmer, just like you can feel the human author behind a book.

I'm sure part of what feels empty to me is because I know it was autogenerated. But I feel that even if I was shown this without knowing an LLM was behind it, the gameplay wouldn't be as rewarding as something written by a human using Inform.
by arp242 | 2025-07-29 19:10:42+00:00
> If your Linux laptop doubles as a music player, another nice new feature is that you can now stream your audio over USB even while the rest of your system is asleep. That capability's been available in Android for a while, but now it's part of mainline Linux.

How does that work? You still need some program to actually play the music (mpv, Sotify, whatnot)? Or what am I misunderstanding? Unfortunately there are no details in the article, and an interwebz search doesn't really show anything.
by HellDunkel | 2025-07-29 19:10:52+00:00
Because there is no point. If the author is a stochastic people machine it is simply not interesting to reflect on it. The fact people make artefacts turns them into art. A stone is not a work of art without some human doing something with it.

You may argue that stones can be interesting without beeing works of art. But the generator above takes works of art as input and somehow takes the art out if it to some degree.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-29 19:10:55+00:00
It's a huge feature. It won't prevent forks but it will stop corporations from making proprietary enhancements for SaaS. They have to publish the source code.

I even emailed Stallman about it. The only way to make a proprietary version of an AGPLv3 project is to pay the original copyright holders for a special proprietary licensing deal, thereby supporting its development. Forks don't have the same privilege.
by jraph | 2025-07-29 19:11:02+00:00
> There isn't room for everything

I get your point, but this is not specific to null results.

> It only takes an individual

No no no. The desirability of null results need to be recognized and somewhat consensual, and high impact journals and conferences needs to accept them. Otherwise, there's no reason researchers will work to publish them.

1. I don't publish anymore: I'm not a researcher anymore. I didn't encounter the case during the short time I was one (I could have, though. Now I know, years later. I suspect it would have been difficult to convince my advisors to do it). I hope this doesn't matter for my points to stand on their own. Note that I think null results ARE NOT failed research. This is key.

2. Ideally, null or positive result alike, the experiments and the studies need to be solid and convincing enough. Like, there needs to be enough salt and not too much, the dinner needs to be tasty in both cases. If the dinner doesn't taste good, of course you don't publish it. There is something wrong with what you've done (the protocol was not well followed, there's statistical bias, not enough data points, I don't know)

It feels like we are talking past each others, you are thinking I'm talking about failed research, but I'm talking about a hypothesis you believed could be true, you built an experiment to test it, and found no correlation in the end. This result is interesting and should be published, it's not failed research.

As it happens, I attended a PhD defense less than a month ago where the thesis lead to null results… The student was able to publish, these null results felt somewhat surprising and counter intuitive, so it's not like it's impossible, it just needs to be widely seen as not failed research.