MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by os2warpman | 2025-07-15 21:00:26+00:00
Success is almost entirely familial positioning and timing.

The Great Man is a myth that needs to die.

If you or any other person had wealthy parents who sent you to Philips Exeter and then Harvard and been friends and roommates with who Zuckerberg had been, you would be a wealthy banker, professional, or with luck-- Facebook founder.

My best friend in the Army was a Philips Exeter cat who rebelled against his parents and joined the military, married a stripper, drank and fucked his way across a couple of countries, divorced the stripper, got out of the military, went back home with his hat in his hand, got his mom and dad to pay for Marquette, and now he's the CEO of a medical device manufacturing company his parents started.

Nice guy.

Dumb as hell, but nice.
by ICBTheory | 2025-07-15 21:00:33+00:00
3. On “He redefines AGI to make his result inevitable”

Sure. I redefined AGI. By using… …the definition from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, IBM, Goertzel, and Hutter.

So unless those are now fringe newsletters, the definition stands:

- A general-purpose system that autonomously solves a wide range of human-level problems, with competence equivalent to or greater than human performance -

If that’s the target, the contradiction is structural: No symbolic system can operate stably in the kinds of semantic drift, ambiguity, or frame collapse that general intelligence actually requires. So if you think I smuggled in a trap, check your own luggage because the industry packed it for me.
by lxgr | 2025-07-15 21:00:36+00:00
> Clever use of WebAuthn’s PRF to reuse synced passkeys for file encryption

Agreed on the clever part, but arguably that's exactly what PRF was designed for :)

> The catch is credential revocation: leaked passkeys mean full rotation and bulk re-encryption of files.

That's where the PRF input of key derivation comes in. The idea is to have that input be rotate-able.

That's also why there is two of them: So you can "atomically" (or at least using only one WebAuthN interaction) rotate the derived keys.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-15 21:01:06+00:00
William Gass - The Tunnel. For the past year or so I have been trying to come up with a good way to help people understand it without explaining it all away. Think I have mostly figured out how to do it, just need to spend a month or two heavily annotating the book and taking notes, and then make a website. So many books these days have terrible online resources that do more damage than good, indices and annotations which seem to index and annotate by whim with no sense of scope or purpose. Quite a few seem like they were personal projects in the creators process of understanding the novel and while I think it is great they shared it all with the world, I wish they had used what it taught them to edit their indices and annotations before they uploaded them.

Been dragging my feet on this since I don't really feel like learning all the web stuff, have not made a webpage in 20 years. Eventually I will get to it, or maybe I will find an accomplice.
by mrkramer | 2025-07-15 21:02:13+00:00
My intention was preventing the abuse of financial power e.g. put price controls on player acquisitions so Manchester City or PSG are not allowed to pay €100M for a new player while other clubs can't afford top players or rising stars. It would disturb the football industry at first but you can make that policy dynamic or in another words limits change as the macro climate in the football industry changes.
by bagxrvxpepzn | 2025-07-15 21:02:16+00:00
Given that he leaves OpenAI almost immediately after hitting his 25% vesting cliff, it seems like his employment at OpenAI and this blog post (which makes him and OpenAI look good while making the reader feel good) were done cynically. I.e. primarily in his self-interest. What makes it even worse is his stated reason for leaving:

> It's hard to go from being a founder of your own thing to an employee at a 3,000-person organization. Right now I'm craving a fresh start.

This is just wholly irrational for someone whose credentials indicate someone who is capable of applying critical thinking towards accomplishing their goals. People who operate at that level don't often act on impulse or suddenly realize they want to do something different. It seems much more likely he intentionally planned to give himself a year of vacation at OpenAI, which allows him to hedge a bit while taking a breather before jumping back into being a founder.

Is this essentially speculation? Yes. Is it cynical to assume he's acting cynically? Yes. Speculation on his true motives is necessary because otherwise we'll never get confirmation, short of him openly admitting to it (which is still fraught). We have to look at behaviors and actions and assess likelihoods from there.
by faeranne | 2025-07-15 21:02:43+00:00
Checkout passage: https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage which has done part of this by using age instead of pgp. I used it for a while, and last I checked there was sadly no android app (the pass android app hardcoded too much PGP to be a useful base, so I was told), but the work is def there.
by watwut | 2025-07-15 21:04:11+00:00
I did not said the song makes no sense. It makes perfect sense. And it is in fact released as a standalone song.

> Well look closer then

As I said, I did not found sexual assault visuals. Only abstract abstract video with words and pink colors.

> There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it.

Sure, but there is nothing about song itself that would make one feel bad about it. Or even be aware it is sexual assault what is going on. You have to bring that out from somewhere else.

> It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.

I do not think it is realistic portrayal of such relationship. It is glamorous portrayal. It makes you feel the harmful part feels good and is worth it. Realistic portrayal would had more pain in it, it would had mix of negative emotions in it. It would show dark side and pain, not just rational realization "this is harmful but I want it".

People in abusive relationship do not feel just the addiction and choice part. They do have fair amount of suffering, fear, feeling like they cant mixed in. They do not feel it is sweet. This song feels sweet.
by MrScruff | 2025-07-15 21:04:11+00:00
Indeed but this is a discussion about Blender and you posted originally:

> Making a feature platform specific to a negligible fraction of the users is inefficient, as many applications will never be ported to Linux platforms.

All the large studios use Linux, that's why all the third party software that is used in feature animation and vfx is supported on Linux. So I'm just saying 'negligible fraction of users' in the case of Blender (which as a project would like to increase adoption in professional feature animation and vfx) isn't really true.
by eXpl0it3r | 2025-07-15 21:04:14+00:00
It's a matter of convenience and eco-system. Here on HN you can see comments of people praising all the various static site generators (SSG), yet basically all of them require you to run some CLI, copy around files, manually fiddle with some theme and then awkwardly upload the files somewhere. People will praise that it's Markdown and integrates with Git, which misses the day to day use case of 99.999% of people when it comes to websites.

Want to have some interesting facts, links, images, etc. in a sidebar, but only for some pages, etc.? The static site generator goes up in flames or needs a lot of manual tweaking. In WordPress and any other CMS it's either built-in or one plugin install away.

Want to edit some published page, create and preview something new? With SSG you need to make sure you have the latest version locally, then edit the file, create a new commit or copy the file, push the change, wait for some pipeline to run and only then will you see the actual result.

Don't get me wrong SSG are great, but they are solutions for very technical people who like to fiddle with workflows and automations. If you want a WYSIWYG and one-click install experience, you end up with some CMS.

And that hasn't even touched the whole web shop integration topic.

PS: My blog runs on WordPress
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-15 21:05:15+00:00
A modicum of competence, a willingness to engage in cut-throat business tactics to take more than most would think their contributions are worth, a good deal of runway/connections, a little risk-taking...and a huge, huge pile of luck are the only things that could have propelled Zuck to his empire.

Do you really think it's just competence?

A lot of other people also started businesses in ~2004. I worked with one yesterday, he's now a freelancing consultant who is well worth the $180/hour he charges for software development skills in the niche he's built in the last 20 years. He's technically brilliant, brings himself rapidly up to date on new tools, works hard and fast, and is also extremely professional when it comes to communication, finances, and scheduling - a rare combination. I haven't asked about his personal net worth, but he's talked about retirement in a few years, just guessing he's worth maybe a couple million?

Competence cannot be in any way correlated to empire and net worth if Zuck is worth 100,000 times more than my friend. From what I've seen and read from Zuckerberg, he's maybe 0.8x? 0.7? as capable or as intelligent. Maybe, if it's all a front and he's actually the most incredible human being ever, he's 2x. Or even imagine he's a so-called 10x worker. But there's no way that any human's contributions can be imagined to be worth 100,000x more than even an average person's labor.

I'll grant that maybe there's a floor on competence required to reach that level of income. Maybe Zuck isn't truly incompetent. But it's definitely not just competence.
Ask HN: Time to Pivot Out of Engineering?
by bdnsj | 2025-07-15 21:05:19+00:00
I’m looking for a new job and I’m not sure if I should even keep applying to SWE roles or not. Looking back on the 6 years I’ve been working as a SWE, I’ve always ended up in a position where I was pretty miserable after a couple years no matter what company I was working for at the time. I’m annoyed at all the process, I’m annoyed with the people, I’m not interested in what the company is doing, and it just feels like such a grind.

Earlier on, I thought that this was just a symptom of not liking the product, culture, or just getting bored of what I was working on at the time and could be fixed by going to a different company. But now after working at 3 different companies of slightly different sizes, I’m starting to think that maybe I just don’t enjoy this field as much as I thought I would.

I’m definitely not a 10x engineer who is constantly cranking out code, and if I’m being honest with myself I am just a slightly above average engineer. I’m good enough to do the tasks that are needed of me but that’s about it. I’m not going above and beyond frankly because I don’t have the mental bandwidth to give 150% at my job and still be able to live a normal life outside of work.

I’m still interested in writing software on my own time, but I keep waiting for something to click where I feel confident and good at what I do that never really comes, and a change of environment has not helped either. All of the companies I talk to are only “hiring the best” and I always think to myself “that’s not me” so I’m wondering if it’s time to just pursue other options. Any advice would be appreciated.
by MonkeyIsNull | 2025-07-15 21:06:22+00:00
> 2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expenditure of training and hosting them,

I always think back to how Bezos and Amazon were railed against for losing money for years. People thought that would never work. And then when he started selling stuff other than books? People I know were like: please, he's desperate.

Someone, somewhere will figure out how to make money off it - just not most people.
by mxschumacher | 2025-07-15 21:06:42+00:00
what I struggle with is that the top 10 providers of LLMs all have identical* products. The services have amazing capabilities, but no real moats.

The social media applications have strong network effects, this drives a lot of their profitability.

* sure, there are differences, see the benchmarks, but from a consumer perspective, there's no meaningful differentiation
by jeffbee | 2025-07-15 21:07:08+00:00
It's not whataboutism. The point is it's a tradeoff. Would the whiners shut up if Facebook bought and shut down the local golf course? Probably not. Google remediated a flood-irrigated alfalfa farm (really!) near Las Vegas (I am not making this up) to zero out the water demands of their Henderson datacenter. This did not prevent the national press from making hay (did you see what I did there?)
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-07-15 21:08:13+00:00
The problem with supersonic commercial jets was mainly one of marketing/politics. The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you.

The conspiracy theorist tells me the American aerospace manufacturers at the time (Boening, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.), did everything they could to kill the Concorde. With limited flyable routes (NYC and DC to Paris and London I think were the only ones), the financials didn't make sense. If overland routes were available, especially opening up LA, San Francisco and Chicago, it might have been a different story.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-15 21:08:28+00:00
> I'd rather be under the Chinese boot than having all of humanity under the boot of an AI

That is not the options being offered. The options are under the boot of a Western AI or a Chinese AI. Maybe you'd prefer the Chinese AI boot to the Western AI boot?

> certainly no reason to try to increase the chance of summoning a machine god

The argument is that this is inevitable. If it's possible to make AGI someone will eventually do it. Does it matter who does it first? I don't know. Yes, making it happen faster might be bad. Waiting until someone else does it first might be worse.
by deepdarkforest | 2025-07-15 21:08:36+00:00
I mean isn't that amazing for an 1 year old product? If it's already better than a terrible dev with an LLM, or better than a decent dev without an LLM, it's not hard to imagine in 2-3-5 years Devin is better and cheaper than most hires you could do. Without having to do HR, equity etc.
Show HN: McClane – Done-for-you lead drops from Facebook group conversations
by nickalex | 2025-07-15 21:09:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm testing a new approach to growth for solo founders and lean marketers.

*McClane* is a done-for-you lead research service that finds real buyer intent inside Facebook groups. I go through group conversations, extract patterns, predict realistic emails (without scraping), and deliver leads + messaging suggestions manually.

No dashboards. No learning curves. No scraping.

One early test gave me a 51% open rate from a group-based cold campaign and saved around $25K fot LAL optimizing. That gave me the push to offer this to others.

Would love your thoughts: – Would this be useful in your work? – Where would this break ethically or technically?

I'm currently validating interest and running early tests.

https://tally.so/r/npqEgB
by pirates | 2025-07-15 21:09:20+00:00
This largely matches my experience working with a team internally who were trying to get Backstage deployed. Or maybe I should say they got it deployed, the lead dev in charge left, and now it sits there mostly used by interns and completely un-serious people who’ve still got the idea that someday it’ll turn into this amazing must have tool that everybody will suddenly adopt.

One of the biggest problems is that they didn’t try to actually interface with other teams to sell why Backstage might be something they want to use. Instead they got it 20% populated with low hanging fruit, and the rest of the company is blissfully unaware that it even exists.
Graph Continuous Thought Machines
by Sai-dewa | 2025-07-15 21:10:16+00:00
We propose a method by which a neural graph continuous thought machines dispositional nodes connections may be designed faithful to a human brain. A graph continuous thought machine replaces the synapse and neuron level models with a graph cnn .In some sense, the nodes of the graph at any one time represent the instantiation of the nodes of the dispositional neural model it is part of. Instantiating only those nodes that are currently firing. The GCNN then outputs the next graph as the system searches graph space for solutions as guided by learnt property vectors.The outputs from its neural synchronization matrix then modulate the attention given to inputs as well as to the nodes of the dispositional network. This way it designs The dispositional neural models connections (disposition for particular graphs to be next after others). We then employ neural training modules which are spiking neural networks which have their nodes mapped with keys from a musical keyboard. In particular when exposed to the state of teacher systems the nodes are trained to musically harmonize, while when exposed to the state of the untrained agent they are dissonant. The agent then tries to maximise consonance in the spiking network by using it as a reward signal. By this method the agent is trained to perform like the teacher system. We introduce text conditioned neural training modules, that condition the input on text. We show a method to modulate not just the behavior of the system , but the connectivity of the dispositional network of a GCTM. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392733228_Text_Conditioned_Self_Architecture_Search_for_Building_Brain_Like_Connectivity_by_Describing_It
by vFunct | 2025-07-15 21:10:25+00:00
He describes 78,000 public pull requests per engineer over 53 days. LMAO. So it's likely 99.99% LLM written.

Lots of good info in the post, surprised he was able to share so much publicly. I would have kept most of the business process info secret.

Edit: NVM. That 78k pull requests is for all users of Codex, not all engineers of Codex.
by 63stack | 2025-07-15 21:11:06+00:00
I'm aware that this might very well be "in the works", what's your point with that? Who is this "we" you are talking about? Are you going to publish a repository on github about what you believe is the ethical way to do this, and you expect Google to follow, or ???

What is this "one big cyberattack away" that you are talking about? Large sites get hacked all the time, and _nobody_ in power gives a single flying fuck. There are zero people held responsible for storing passwords in plaintext, or the admin password set to "123456" or passwords left as the default.

Seriously, what are you talking about?
by skybrian | 2025-07-15 21:11:22+00:00
This could simplify things a bit for website owners since they don’t need to protect a database where they store encryption keys. Bugs or supply-chain attacks on client-side software are still a vulnerability, though.

For the customer, they are unlikely to be able to audit the client-side software and any updates to it, so it still requires trust. The software could still have a lot of telemetry baked in.

Maybe someday there will be something like certificate transparency for software?
by Sai-dewa | 2025-07-15 21:11:46+00:00
have a paper on graph continuous thought machines that replace the synapse model and the neuron models with a graph convolutional network.

The gcnn outputs the next graph in the thought process as guided by learnt property vectors.

What's interesting is that the synchronization matrix regulates the attention given to the nodes as well as the input.

So these nodes may be seen as neurons in their own right. And consecutive graphs have connections between them that sent virtual signals and caused them to spike.

The nodes and potential nodes exist in a dispositional neural network, and only the nodes that are currently activated are instantiated in the gcnn.

So as the outputs from the synchronization matrix modulate attention, a subset of the attended dispositional neurons will represent memory.

While other parts of the dispositional network and parts of the input represent keys that index the next presentation of memory.

In fact only the pre frontal cortex dispositional nodes will contribute to the synchronization matrix.

So the pfc performs read and write operations to memory this way.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-15 21:12:15+00:00
Yea, that's what I assumed too but the article didn't include them and I assumed it was for speed reasons. I've run into this often where some idealized version doesn't take into account usage ergonomics. A compiler that can't tell me where an error is is not a useful compiler to me so if this lexer doesn't support that then it won't actually be a net positive in development speed for me. I fail compilation more often than I succeed.
by ICBTheory | 2025-07-15 21:12:25+00:00
4. On “This is just the No Free Lunch Theorem again”

Well … not quite. The No Free Lunch theorem says no optimizer is universally better across all functions. That’s an averaging result.

But this paper is not at all about average-case optimization. It’s about specific classes of problems—social ambiguity, paradigm shifts, semantic recursion—where: a)The tail exponent alpha is = or < 1 —>no mean exists, b) Kolmogorov complexity is incompressible, and c) the symbol space lacks the needed abstraction

In these spaces, learning collapses not due to lack of training, but due to structural divergence. Entropy grows with depth. More data doesn’t help. It makes it worse.

That is what “IOpenER” means: Information Opens, Entropy Rises.

It is NOT a theorem about COST… rather a structure about meaning. What exactly is so hard to understand about this?
by OgsyedIE | 2025-07-15 21:12:34+00:00
It is an open question and typing "human intelligence ceiling ai" into your search engine of choice is a good way to see that, but it is basically wishful thinking. The likes of David Deutsch, Judea Pearl and Noam Chomsky all argue this at differing levels of academic integrity (IMO Steven Byrnes has produced the most rigorous work on the English internet), but there is a simple objection.

If you have a single AI that is capped at an intelligence ceiling equivalent to human levels of intellect, what is stopping you from running fifty of them, in parallel, at fifty times faster than our normal human clock speed, as a team?
by asdff | 2025-07-15 21:12:45+00:00
The big difference maker imo in movie theater experience is size and sound. You still need to drop about the same few thousand dollars you had to drop in 2002 to buy a proper projector and sound system today. 85 inch low pixel density screen and a sound bar ain't it, but if it is it for you, you are probably no discerning audiophile who would have probably have been fine with whatever was sold in a comparable market segment in 2002 (refrigerator width crt displays were in fact all the rage and very desirable at one point).
by teamonkey | 2025-07-15 21:13:39+00:00
> I think they are both ineffective. So I don't believe that is true.

I disagree that writing to MPs is always ineffective. Some campaigns have been successful. Whether it will be effective in this case is another matter. Maybe when people start to experience the block it will gain traction.

Of course if you don’t even make low-effort attempts to make your voice heard and exercise your democratic rights, you can be certain that you’ll lose them.
by orochimaaru | 2025-07-15 21:14:01+00:00
Not true. These are people who are likely responsible for global economic meltdowns and then asking for handouts (anyone remember 2008). Zuck isn’t making anyone’s life harder without them signing into his platforms. Just stay off of them if you don’t like zuck.

But you can’t stay off the financial system. So, creepy as zuck maybe, I think he is impact for evil is a whole lot less.