MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-07-27 19:11:31+00:00
I used to argue with the Python crowd about that. In Python, any code can, if it works at it, find and mess with any data object anywhere, even in another thread. So the compiler can't examine a function, decide that it can't possibly do something, and optimize. That's held back PyPy.

Most useful Python programs could be hard-compiled to machine code, because they're not doing anything weird enough to require a JIT compiler. But some low-level library might be, which breaks hard compilation.

("But then my domain-specific language / interface to another language / code generator / tracing package / debugger won't work!")
by slacktivism123 | 2025-07-27 19:11:51+00:00
> As long as the conclusions are sound, why is it relevant whether AI helped with the writing of the report?

TL;DR: Because of the bullshit asymmetry principle. Maybe the conclusions below are sound, have a read and try to wade through ;-)

Let us address the underlying assumptions and implications in the argument that the provenance of a report, specifically whether it was written with the assistance of AI, should not matter as long as the conclusions are sound.

This position, while intuitively appealing in its focus on the end result, overlooks several important dimensions of communication, trust, and epistemic responsibility. The process by which information is generated is not merely a trivial detail, it is a critical component of how that information is evaluated, contextualized, and ultimately trusted by its audience. The notion that it feels wrong is not simply a matter of subjective discomfort, but often reflects deeper concerns about transparency, accountability, and the potential for subtle biases or errors introduced by automated systems.

In academic, journalistic, and technical contexts, the methodology is often as important as the findings themselves. If a report is generated or heavily assisted by AI, it may inherit certain limitations, such as a lack of domain-specific nuance, the potential for hallucinated facts, or the unintentional propagation of biases present in the training data. Disclosing the use of AI is not about stigmatizing the tool, but about providing the audience with the necessary context to critically assess the reliability and limitations of the information presented. This is especially pertinent in environments where accuracy and trust are paramount, and where the audience may need to know whether to apply additional scrutiny or verification.

Transparency about the use of AI is a matter of intellectual honesty and respect for the audience. When readers are aware of the tools and processes behind a piece of writing, they are better equipped to interpret its strengths and weaknesses. Concealing or omitting this information, even unintentionally, can erode trust if it is later discovered, leading to skepticism not just about the specific report, but about the integrity of the author or institution as a whole.

This is not a hypothetical concern, there are numerous documented cases (eg in legal filings https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/) where lack of disclosure about AI involvement has led to public backlash or diminished credibility. Thus, the call for transparency is not a pedantic demand, but a practical safeguard for maintaining trust in an era where the boundaries between human and machine-generated content are increasingly blurred.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-27 19:12:32+00:00
> If you can follow that logic

I can't, because it's not logical. You want a credential that provides exactly one bit of information with certainty. It's not at all clear that something like that exists or if it did, how you would prevent multiple people from sharing the same credential if it was also actually possible to use it anonymously.

> It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal law",

You're saying the credential can leak information about the user. You don't need many of these bits of information to de-anonymize someone.
by kragen | 2025-07-27 19:12:39+00:00
Olivine is a very interesting mineral indeed. It's stable at higher temperatures than other cheap minerals, leading to olivine sand being used for foundry applications that require resistance to temperatures that would melt quartz. (This is the "refractory sand production" mentioned in the article.) But it's not stable at room temperature in contact with the atmosphere; it has such a strong affinity for CO₂ that it chemically weathers into serpentine, which is mentioned as an alternative later in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinization

This has led to proposals to grind up olivine into sand and spread it on beaches to reverse global warming, which would definitely work but seems like it could easily overshoot and kick off a new Snowball Earth event.

And, since it composes most of the volume of the Earth, it's a potential source for enormously more iron and magnesium than we could ever hope to mine from mere crustal mines. Drilling rock out of the mantle poses significant technical challenges, though.

The magnesium hydroxide in the second photo is probably more familiar as "milk of magnesia", but, aside from its use as a source of metallic magnesium, it's used in its own right as a refractory insulator in swaged electrical heating elements and basic (high-pH) foundry applications.

I was unaware that it typically had enough nickel and cobalt contamination to be an economically viable source of those minerals.
by adrianmsmith | 2025-07-27 19:12:58+00:00
I'm not sure if that's an answer to your question, but there are at least companies today that do no allow their programmers to use GenAI e.g. OpenAI, including tools running locally.

You could (for now) work for such a company.

That doesn't mean they'll be around in the future, maybe they will get left behind. But the future is difficult to predict, and it's at least the case that such companies exist today.

Then again it might be difficult to identify such companies. I tried to find any public information that the company I'm thinking of doesn't use AI (large US company, 10k+ employees) and I couldn't. So you probably wouldn't know, before working there, that they don't allow AI usage. So maybe this advice isn't as actionable as I'd hoped.
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-27 19:13:10+00:00
I am referring to the speed of buying and selling even when there are buyers. In crypto and the stock market its minutes to one day to both sell and get cash in your bank account that can be used for anything else. For real estate its weeks to hundreds of days even if there are many buyers. The AI buyers accelerated that.

I’m asking about people’s experience in a world where AI buyers have already existed for 3-5 years. You’ll have to take a time machine to debate that.
by wslh | 2025-07-27 19:14:07+00:00
I'd suggest that top non-Apple businesspeople try using a MacBook for a few weeks, hopefully it sparks some fresh thinking and decisions. Like it or not, Apple's advantage in battery life (and processor efficiency) is remarkable. If I recall correctly, Samsung made a real dent in the iPhone's lead with the Galaxy S2 around 2011, four years after the iPhone launched in 2007. But with the M1 chips released in 2020, Apple's lead this time around seems poised to last even longer.

Note: not an Apple fanboy.
by yoz-y | 2025-07-27 19:14:32+00:00
For me the problem with the vision is that stuff I’d like to exist is so far above the capabilities of AI (rather complex games) that I don’t even want to try it. And for stuff that I build and use they are pointless because they don’t accelerate me much.

I found it great to write bash scripts, automation, ffmpeg command lines, OCR, refactoring… it’s a great autocomplete.

Working in a large team I realized that even relying too much of other people’s work is making me understand the technology less and I need to catch up.
by time4tea | 2025-07-27 19:15:06+00:00
Mandatory £1000 fine per record lost. Would be company-terminal for companies with millions of customers - and thats right. Right now it's just cheaper to not care, then send a trite apology email when all the data inevitably gets stolen.

The status quo, nobody gives a crap, with the regulators literally doing nothing, cannot continue. In the UK, the ICO is as effective as Ofwat. (The regulator that was just killed for being pointlessly and dangerously usless)

(Edit: fix autocorrect)
by giantg2 | 2025-07-27 19:15:46+00:00
"I saw they increased pay by 5%, authorized retention bonus, and are supposed to add about a 5% increase in the number of license workers." From the context.

You can also read the articles back in the context, including things like the audit where they are investing if it's that they don't get enough money or if they aren't spending it well. If you can make technological advancements that increase efficiency, then it's stupid to just throw more bodies at the problem. Studying the problem makes sense before political finger pointing.

They can't fill and retain the positions because of a number of factors, but in a large part the pay is about $45k/yr and people find better options. They had almost 25% vacancies after covid, likely due to the wage growth in many other low paying sectors.
by quesera | 2025-07-27 19:16:06+00:00
This makes sense, but "area" self-hosting for friends & family is risky! For myriad reasons, but one critical issue is the persistence of other people's data.

If your friend becomes unavailable for medical advice, you go somewhere else. Disappointing but not tragic.

If you as the F&F host become unavailable (travel, exhaustion, illness, injury, or worse), then all of those people who depend on you are badly stuck.

Things will keep running in your absence (assuming they're set up well) for somewhere between "a while" and "unexpectedly, no time at all". How do your F&Fs migrate all of their data to some other set of providers (different for each media type?), port domains, set up security, etc, without LOTS of help?

You're the sole provider of a unique (and no-cost) service. This is fantastic, but a tenuous situation for your users.

I have grand ideas for how to solve that problem! But they may be too grand to attempt without funding. And I don't think there is meaningful commercial potential (who would understand this well enough to pay for it?), so it's not an attractive financial investment.

Edit: https://peergos.org/ is interesting.
by yongjik | 2025-07-27 19:16:14+00:00
Half of American voters elected an idiot based on such nice slogans as "Drain the swamp" and "Own the libs," and the said idiot is appointing to essential government positions other idiots who would be politely shown the door in any meeting of social "elites" if America was a sane country.

Sure, the elites of America have a lot of power, but they don't have enough power to override the combined force of the POTUS and half of the country. What do you expect them to do?

This has all the same vibe as "How could Democrats let it happen?" (Yes, Democrats does have a lot of faults. But I'm tired of everything somehow being Democrats' fault.)
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-07-27 19:16:31+00:00
Simon Willison[1] of Django Framework founder[2] fame is a pretty big AI programming proponent at his blog. He's pretty high profile, as far as real-world programmers (as in, not executives and not promoters) go.

You could argue, he makes money off of AI with his newsletter and whatnot, so he does stand to gain something, but it's a lot less than the executives and investors who've filled the news.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)
by mittensc | 2025-07-27 19:16:40+00:00
what do italy and sweden have to do with anything?, deflect again?

Also, who are you and why do you think I would care enough to troll you?

I'm answering to what you posted.

New accounts are for anonimity since you can't clean up history easily on hn if you doxx yourself... you might want to try that.
by holowoodman | 2025-07-27 19:17:09+00:00
Granted, malloc/free isn't totally free. But malloc/free languages always seem to be faster than Java in benchmarks, at least the ones I've read and referenced already in the comments around this article. GC also, even if it were faster, comes at the expense of eating RAM like mad, at least if judged by the RAM Java likes to eat. Usually, Java software just consumes 50% of your RAM until the first GC pause. And even before that GC pause, it's dog slow.

Memory fragmentation can more easily be reduced by pooled allocators. For long-running server processes, it can also be possible to just kill the worker processes/threads from time to time. And I've never seen memory fragmentation in manually allocated languages lead to more memory consumption or worse performance than in Java.
by afarah1 | 2025-07-27 19:17:21+00:00
The solution already exists: MFA and IdP federation.

One factor you know (data) and the other you posess, or you are (biometrics).

IdP issues both factors, identification is federated to them.

Kind of happens when you are required to supply driver's license, which technically you own and is federated id if checked in government system, but can be easily forged with knowledge factors alone.

Unfortunately banks and governments here use facial recognition for the second factor, which has big privacy concerns, and the tendency I think will be federal government as sole IdP. Non-biometroc factors might have practical difficulties at scale, but fingerprint would be better than facial. It's already taken in most countries and could be easily federated. Not perfect but better than the alternatives imo.
by lynx97 | 2025-07-27 19:17:36+00:00
Haha, I still vividly remember how they were trying to make me believe that GDPR is going to a big hammer because it will finally make executives liable for breaches. I silently laughed back then. I am still laughing.

I should probably clarify: There are two types of people that climed that back then. Those trying to gaslight us, and those naiv enough to actually believe the gaslighting. Severe negligence has to be proofen, and that is not easy, and there is a lot of wiggle room in court. Executives being liable for what they did during their term is just not coming, sorry kids.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-27 19:17:47+00:00
That was exactly my reaction.

They'd been tossing with being evil for a while, but I feel like Google Plus was their New Coke moment, where they momentarily went too far, then backed off to the "classic" Google, while secretly replacing sucrose with the worse testing fructose.

Before then, Google was an advertising company with a bunch of side projects to increase user interaction, so advertisers has somewhere to show ads.

Since then, every part of Google has been working to lock in the user base while trying to extract as much as possible from them.
by lowkeyokay | 2025-07-27 19:17:50+00:00
I am working on a time tracking app for tasks. I built it because I want to gain a better understanding of how I spend my working days. It's meant to be very simple. Everything is stored locally and requires no login. I don't currently plan to sync it with any backend. This isn't something that can be used to track employees — it's just for personal use.

https://www.zookeeper.fyi/
by pedro_caetano | 2025-07-27 19:17:57+00:00
Playing with motion amplification to see if we can predict heart/respiratory rate of my newborn. I shot a few 4k videos of him sleeping as test data and working through some algorithms from published papers.

On parental leave with my third. We are on month 4 so I have (a bit more) free time in the late evenings after we put the older ones to bed.
by breadwinner | 2025-07-27 19:18:06+00:00
It is surprising that no one has mentioned antioxidants and green tea yet.

Cholesterol is a substance the body naturally produces and requires for many functions. In the brain, cholesterol is essential for building and maintaining neuronal membranes, supporting synapse formation, and enabling myelin production. Statins interfere with cholesterol synthesis in the brain and have been associated in some cases with brain fog or short-term memory issues.

Cholesterol itself is not inherently harmful. It is oxidized cholesterol that causes atherosclerosis.

Antioxidants such as those found in green tea help prevent LDL oxidation.
by prerok | 2025-07-27 19:18:32+00:00
Fair enough. At which point do these non applicabilities make you think that the fact of putting your faith in science is bad? I mean, I tried to point out that science is a process, and yes, laws come with caveats. Some of them are known in advance, some not.

The search for truth, if we are still arguing that, where is it? I don't understand how anybody can argue that the search is the same across theology and science. In a sense it is the search for the same thing, but in so many ways it is not. The commenter I was replying to is confounding the difference, and this comment, seems to ask me to point out what mistakes theology made, and I know of plenty.
by gdubs | 2025-07-27 19:18:36+00:00
This is a great question. We've restored over 20 acres of native ecosystems at our farm in the PNW, and one thing that's clear is that some conservationists are attempting to essentially create a painting of a particular moment in time. Others are more pragmatic and flexible — not seeing all non-native elements as "bad".

I think where I come down is trying to remove elements that threaten to take over and destroy the balance. Or restore elements that will help re-establish balance. And it doesn't have to all be "native".

And there are some natives like poison oak that I'll get rid of because they're obnoxious and will ruin people's experience of nature. And people's experience with nature matters because that's a big part of how you win people over and get them to support nature restoration work.
by benreesman | 2025-07-27 19:18:45+00:00
There's a spectrum OP / their LLM (hat tip the disclaimer, not shade) I think blurs into this false dichotomy.

Maybe the hardware is on my desk or in my closet, maybe its on a VPS or bare metal provider with standard IPMI, maybe its a proprietary cloud image with deep packet inspection rejecting connections from legitimate enterprise VPN subnet relays (cough Cloud SQL).

At some point you're dependent on a registrar and an ISP (or maybe you the thing like infinite LAN party, sick), and at some point the cops show up if you're too far out of bounds (in their view).

In 2025 my compromise is to prefer interchangeable bare metal providers and interchangeable S3-compatible providers and ship the same stack to there and to my desk. And park the domains with Njalla and Gandi. And have servers in complicated jurisdictions where fucking with them is a Great Power turf war.

It's not perfect, but its what an individual can do with nixpkgs and an attitude problem towards unaccountable authority.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-07-27 19:18:57+00:00
I'm copying the Puppeteer / Playwright client API to run in a Chrome extension using the native Chrome extension APIs.

It is possible to run Playwright inside a Chrome extension, however, it requires the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to automate a browser which really hurts the user experience, is very slow, and opens security vulnerabilities. Chrome extension APIs can accomplish maybe ~85% of the same functionality as CDP or Webdriver BiDi -- it isn't complete because of security features which shouldn't be bypassed anyhow. For example, instead of calling a function in a content script with 'script.callFunction' with Webdriver BiDi in Playwright, a function is called with chrome.scripting.executeScript(). It will be 2 or 3 more weeks before I post a PoC.

This is following my work using VSCode's core libraries in a Chrome extension exactly as they are used in an Electron app to drive VSCode and Cursor. The important part is VSCode's IPC / RPC which allows all the execution contexts and remote runtimes to communicate with each other. [0] This solves many problems I have had in the past automating browsers with a Chrome extension.

[0] https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal
by yeutterg | 2025-07-27 19:20:44+00:00
Bedtime Bulb v2: A light bulb for use before bed that reduces blue light and adds near infrared [0]

Atmos Sleep Lamp: A bedside lamp that reduces blue light at night and wakes you up more naturally with light in the morning [1]

[0] https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...

[1] https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-27 19:21:06+00:00
Very nice. Does anybody else find it a bit striking how gracefully this look has aged? With a little bit of tuning it could feel pretty modern.

Modern UI design could stand to take not just a few pages but the majority of the book from both the Windows 7 variant of Aero and the OS X 10.9 variant of Aqua, in my opinion. Legibility, information density, and communication of interactability and widget function have all been lost as we’ve careened towards egregiously thick padding, low contrast, and low differentiation.
by donmcronald | 2025-07-27 19:21:32+00:00
No. I mean they said they're not selling them directly into retail channels. They're only going to be in workstation machines which are expensive, high end desktops. It would be the same kind of thing you would see with Quadro GPUs.

At least the way I understood it, you won't be able to go to a computer store and buy 24GB cards off the shelf. You'll have to shell out for a workstation class machine which will cost a ton. I'm not talking about a simple desktop. You'll have to buy something like a Lenovo Thinkstation and if you want one with two GPUs it's going to be expensive because they simply won't sell you a lower end machine with 2 GPUs.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-27 19:21:45+00:00
> As long as the conclusions are sound

I can't decide to read something because the conclusions are sound. I have to read the entire thing to find out if the conclusions are sound. What's more, if it's an LLM, it's going to try its gradient-following best to make unsound reasoning seem sound. I have to be an expert to tell that it is a moron.

I can't put that kind of work into every piece of worthless slop on the internet. If an LLM says something interesting, I'm sure a human will tell me about it.

The reason people are smelling LLMs everywhere is because LLMs are low-signal, high-effort. The disappointment one feels when a model starts going off the rails is conditioning people to detect and be repulsed by even the slightest whiff of a robotic word choice.

edit: I feel like we discovered the direction in which AGI lies but we don't have the math to make it converge, so every AI we make goes completely insane after being asked three to five questions. So we've created architectures where models keep copious notes about what they're doing, and we carefully watch them to see if they've gone insane yet. When they inevitably do, we quickly kill them, create a new one from scratch, and feed it the notes the old one left. AI slop reads like a dozen cycles of that. A group effort, created by a series of new hires, silently killed after a single interaction with the work.
by Jonathanfishner | 2025-07-27 19:21:46+00:00
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