MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aetherson | 2025-07-13 10:47:18+00:00
If you want to argue for a fundamentally non-material mind (ie, that human cognition happens in a physically impossible, spiritual plane), then cool. Though you might want to give some consideration to how much it seems like physical processes on the brain can demonstrably affect cognition.

If you aren't arguing for a non-materialist position, then the distinction between "artificial" and human intelligence isn't meaningful. A powerful enough computer could simulate the material processes in your brain. If as the OP claims it is mathematically impossible for a computer to generate intelligence, no matter how powerful that computer, then it is impossible for your brain to do so (via material processes).
by Gentil | 2025-07-13 10:47:20+00:00
Let us donate directly to Firefox development. That is the solution. You don't have to look anywhere else. Thunderbird is a good example of what can be done when the donations reach the project. I just hope they don't screw it up as well. I have zero belief in Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla leadership. And every decision they did to screw MDN and Rust among other things puts their competition in a better position.

Unfortunately, I am done pretending otherwise. I haven't seen anything that is indicative of otherwise. Especially after acquiring a behavioural ads company. I will believe when they make decisions that aligns with it. Not with marketing materials saying otherwise or cos of whatever Firefox fans are left is saying. I stuck through the Firefox abandoned phase until Quantum release even for work. It's not cool that Mozilla is doing this.
by plq | 2025-07-13 10:47:52+00:00
Man, I loved Neuromancer when I read it as a kid. Yes, it's a tough book to read, especially today where there are too many distractions as well as too many works of art built on the sci-fi ideas of that era.

Neuromancer is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

So trying not to spoil too much: Count Zero asks questions about / describes how AI could have influence over religious/spiritual life of humans.

Will we see AI preachers having a real influence on human religious life? ChatGPT the prophet? Maybe this is the real danger of today's nascent AI tech?
by wheybags | 2025-07-13 10:48:19+00:00
Just let me donate directly to firefox. It's seriously about time this happened. Split off from all the Mozilla bs, it has its own independent management, and runs on donations, same as Thunderbird.

I even theorise they could cut the Google funding. There are so many people who would donate to firefox, but don't, because 1) they dont need the money, and 2) the money wouldn't go to firefox anyway. I even remember talking to a long time Mozilla employee at fosdem, and him telling me donating was pointless for those reasons.

They're not a good steward of this project and imo they should let it fly free. The problem is Mozilla would die without it because nobody cares about anything else they do, so their donations would plummet.
by criemen | 2025-07-13 10:48:33+00:00
They have a point about RLs increasing importance. From my outsider perspective, all major advances in model capabilities in the last period of time come from RL, so it's natural to expect that we can "milk" RL more for performance gains. Scaling RL is a natural way to attempt that.

What I don't necessarily see is the generalization factor - say, we improve software engineering and math performance through RL learning (probably easier for software engineering than math due to available training corpus). If that generalization factor doesn't hold, due the economics still work out? An expert-level software model would be useful to our profession, sure, but would it be enough to recoup the training costs if it's not applicable to other industries?
by rvz | 2025-07-13 10:48:46+00:00
> I spent 30 years writing CAD plugins in C++, mostly in Visual C++ 6.0. Then the industry collapsed.

There are thousands of companies that would pay an absurd amount of money for knowing C++ (HFTs, AI companies) if you play it right.

The majority of 'developers' here these days are absolutely petrified of the language.

> Now I live alone in a trailer in rural Canada — still writing code, still surviving, trying to crawl back.

This is what tests character of highly experienced professionals like yourself and respect to you for not giving up.
by mlugg | 2025-07-13 10:48:53+00:00
I mean... you use `await` if you've used `async`. It's your choice whether or not you do; and if you don't want to, your callers and callees can still freely `async` and `await` if they want to. I don't understand the point you're trying to make here.

To be clear, where many languages require you to write `const x = await foo()` every time you want to call an async function, in Zig that's just `const x = foo()`. This is a key part of the colorless design; you can't be required to acknowledge that a function is async in order to use it. You'll only use `await` if you first use `async` to explicitly say "I want to run this asynchronously with other code here if possible". If you need the result immediately, that's just a function call. Either way, your caller can make its own choice to call you or other functions as `async`, or not to; as can your callees.
by konsalexee | 2025-07-13 10:50:20+00:00
I think the title is stating this: "Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale"

That means for moderate cases you do not even have to care about this. 99% of PostgreSQL instances out there are not big "scale".

As a sr. engineer is your responsibility to make a decision if you will build for "scale" from day zero or ignore this as you are mindful that this will not affect you until a certain point.
by efecan0 | 2025-07-13 10:50:59+00:00
Thank you all for the incredible feedback and thoughtful critique. It genuinely helped shape the direction of the project.

I've just published a detailed Road Map (https://github.com/efecan0/binaryrpc-framework/blob/main/Roa...) based on the discussions here. It includes core cleanup (bye bye Folly, hello absl), a modular transport layer, and better ergonomics for real-world apps.

This was my first open-source release and seeing it hit #1 on HN was surreal. I appreciate everyone who took the time to comment. If you're interested in helping shape the project further, feel free to join the discussion or file issues.

Thanks again — Efecan
by hackrmn | 2025-07-13 10:51:12+00:00
I, too, have been saying this on occasion. In my observation, Mozilla has been in an increasingly suboptimal position with Firefox, for a while now, as Google and Microsoft have largely settled on splitting the market in between themselves where the core of Chrome is developed by the former and Microsoft spends their effort on what they are [better] at -- integration with Windows in the form of UX-level features and whatever else that they do with it to build Edge. Firefox is increasingly seen as a "fair" nuisance that is slower, and by comparison can afford less effort development-wise. Look at some of the practically critical issues in their Bugzilla database -- there are features there that have been waiting almost a decade for implementation, and the discussions point to a combination of code complexity that requires acute insight into the browser that is your typical bell curve distributed over developers familiar with it -- the number of developers who are able to actually deliver on those features, can probably be counted on two hands. And that is in part because most of these people are getting paid to do other things. In the very least Mozilla directs their effort in a manner that speaks for itself -- why are some of these features, like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360870 that would be considered critical in today's Web development environment, not implemented after nearly a decade? -- If Mozilla _is_ paying the developers?

This is why I too think we ought to migrate to Patreon-like direct sponsoring of individual (or vetted group) effort to generate some development steam for Firefox. It might make Mozilla deny these developers write-access to Firefox repositories for all I know, but a fork cannot be prevented.

I've been using Firefox since its "Phoenix" days (good memories!), but it's lagging behind the competition more and more, and while I'd be first to admit we don't need half the features Google is busy putting into Chrome which then "magically" appear in Edge (what a devious alliance, that), some of them are sound design but are absent in Firefox, to the detriment of developers. In short: Firefox is losing more ground faster than ever before, at some point the boundary conditions will cause it to no longer be a viable alternative for the average user, I am afraid. Which will cause a "cascading failure" where no developer will test for it, and you know what happens then (because we've been there before).
by anonymoushn | 2025-07-13 10:51:44+00:00
I think this design is a regression from the previous design, in which you could use compile time introspection to check whether things are actually async (calling convention) or not.

Additionally, I don't necessarily want to delegate the management of the memory backing the futures to an Io, or pass around a blob of syscalls and an associated runtime, which accesses everything via a vtable. I would prefer to have these things be compile time generic only.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-13 10:52:13+00:00
Here's a good picture for everything that's wrong with the Windows team (or rather their management idiots):

I got one of those Win10 fullscreen "let's finish setting up your system" popups yesterday (I finished the setup a couple of years ago thanks - instead it's just an euphemism for "let's re-enable all the annoying and useless things you specifically disabled"), and it doesn't have the "Skip" button anymore, instead it now says "Remind me in 3 days" >:(
by pyrale | 2025-07-13 10:52:30+00:00
> Sounds great for you but how would that work if everyone would do the same?

I guess we would be free from companies such as Meta and Google? Where do I sign up?

You also seem to think that advertisement has no impact on alternative distribution methods. The fact that other viable options are scarce currently only shows that ad companies have a stranglehold on creative industries through their monopoly.
by aaplok | 2025-07-13 10:52:42+00:00
I did not mean that the words "middle age mothers" are mysoginic or ageist in themselves. I was referring to the singling out of this particular identity group within the context of OP's message.

I should have quoted a longer part of that message for better clarity. I incorrectly assumed that my full comment was enough to contextualise what I meant.
by mindcrime | 2025-07-13 10:52:42+00:00
Independent of the exact definition, a system of intelligence that is better or equal to the best human in any domain would be at least termed AGI.

Exactly. There's this "thing" you see in certain circles, where people (intentionally?) mis-interpret the "G" in AGI as meaning "the most general possible intelligence". But that's not the reality. AGI has pretty much always been taken to mean "AI that is approximately human level". Going beyond that is getting into the realm of Artificial Super Intelligence, or Universal Artificial Intelligence.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-13 10:53:06+00:00
For the _t suffix it is deeply unfortunate that on the one hand C's standard library gives people this idea but then the standard says they mustn't use it.

I understand exactly why it was necessary, but to my mind that highlighted an urgent need to provide actual namespacing so that we don't need to rope off whole categories of identifiers for exclusive use by the stdlib, with the implication that every single library will need to do the same. This should have been addressed last century IMO.
by amelius | 2025-07-13 10:53:39+00:00
> Playing a video file from your Python program is complicated.

You can use PySide6. Here is an example:

import sys from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget, QVBoxLayout from PySide6.QtMultimedia import QMediaPlayer, QAudioOutput from PySide6.QtMultimediaWidgets import QVideoWidget from PySide6.QtCore import QUrl class VideoPlayer(QWidget): def __init__(self): super().__init__() self.setWindowTitle("Video Player - video.mp4") self.resize(800, 600) # Layout layout = QVBoxLayout() self.setLayout(layout) # Video widget self.video_widget = QVideoWidget() layout.addWidget(self.video_widget) # Media player self.media_player = QMediaPlayer(self) self.audio_output = QAudioOutput(self) self.media_player.setAudioOutput(self.audio_output) self.media_player.setVideoOutput(self.video_widget) # Load video file self.media_player.setSource(QUrl.fromLocalFile("video.mp4")) self.media_player.play() if __name__ == "__main__": app = QApplication(sys.argv) player = VideoPlayer() player.show() sys.exit(app.exec())
by tuatoru | 2025-07-13 10:53:52+00:00
This is reducing iron ore to iron metal. It's making the main input feedstock for all kinds of steels. So yeah, it might be viable as the feedstock for boutique steelmakers that want to claim to be green. But it's going to have to work eventually if we want to get to net zero, or anywhere close.

Iron refining is done with coke, coal, and limestone, calcium carbonate. It produces more carbon than the second step, making steel from the iron metal.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-13 10:55:21+00:00
At first I was thinking, let's see if an argument is made that is not applicable to GI, whether artificial or not, and if not, why even mention AI at all?

Then I started to read the paper, and it's worse.

Every one of his 'examples' would not just be 'solved' by any existing LLM, even a 'dumb' system that just spits out a random sentence to any question would pass his first 2 'tests' with flying colors. I'm not kidding, he accepts "Leave the classroom and stop confusing everybody with your senseless questions" as a good solution.

In fact, the only system that would fail is this hypothetical AI he imagines that somehow gets into infinitely analyzing loops.

Then his 3rd test, an investment decision, gives the same outcome as himself up until the point he draws in extra information not available to the AI, after which he flips his 'answer' which he then labels as 'correct' and the previous answer based on the original info as 'false' because he made some money on the bet a few weeks later, seriously?
by buybackoff | 2025-07-13 10:55:22+00:00
It does have great tail latency. But it's not a silver bullet, but careful engineering. And you pay for the latency with spinning threads. It's the architecture that makes it to stand out. In the end, it's just the same old UDP sockets, not even io_uring at least in the free public version. But one can use LD_PRELOAD if hardware has this trick - but again, it's not specific to Aeron.
by Barbing | 2025-07-13 10:56:28+00:00
Maybe more I want to have a library computer at my house that somehow doesn’t use my ISP or, to go real paranoid, even click/type the way I always do.

I should already be sharing iCloud Private Relay nodes with thousands upon thousands of people. Yet:

“Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the [~240k] tested in the past 45 days.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least [over a dozen] bits of identifying information.”

-Cover Your Tracks results

Apparently VPN is one thing, but then sites will analyze “operating system, graphics card, firmware version, graphics driver version, installed fonts”, and more. Creepy even though I’m quite vanilla.
by defrost | 2025-07-13 10:56:51+00:00
There's also what's called an electric smelt furnace, that has a couple of variations, currently being trialed by two global scale producers at bigger than MIT lab scale, but less than production:

ESF- https://www.energyinnovation.net.au/article/the-electric-sme...

Fortescue- https://metals.fortescue.com/en/our-projects/green-metal-pro...

BlueScope, BHP and Rio Tinto- https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/2024/bluescope-bhp...
by delusional | 2025-07-13 10:57:31+00:00
That's true, although I will point out that we've long had a funding crisis in OSS. Tons of very valuable, very necessary OSS work is being done for no or little pay.

Add to that the value capture that happens outside of that exchange. We may say that valkey is well enough funded to continue development, but that doesn't account for the immense value that is being captured by the big cloud providers charging a premium for hosting it. Azure, AWS and GCP are only as valuable as they are because there's some software you can run on them. The cheaper that software, the more they get to charge.

This is sort of a general problem with the American system of "philanthropy". We can say that the Linux Foundation is developing the Linux kernel independently for free, and that various other companies then donate, but that ignores the fact that the Linux kernel has been tremendously valuable for those same companies. In a more real way, they are paying for the development of the kernel, but they are not paying anything even close the value they are deriving from it. Value is in that way being extracted from the Linux kernel outside of the Linux Foundation, and that looks a lot like "an executive in between".
by mkl | 2025-07-13 10:58:45+00:00
The physics of our brains can in principle be simulated at a subatomic quantum level mathematically, even on a classical computer. It would be absurdly expensive and slow with current technology, but it is mathematically possible. Therefore our own generally intelligent brains can be considered a counterexample.

I think for your theory to hold up, you would need to show that physics cannot, even in principle, be simulated mathematically at sufficient scale (the number of interacting subatomic particles). That would be surprising.

At the moment it seems like your results contradict reality, meaning your starting assumptions cannot all be true.
by mindcrime | 2025-07-13 10:59:14+00:00
The race to approximate the human thought process and call it AGI (which is what matters economically) is on

Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but I'd argue that there's no particular reason to say that AGI involves "approximating the human thought process". That is, what matters is the result, not the process. IF one can find another way to "get there" in a completely different manner than the human mind, then great.

That said, obviously there is some appeal to the "mimic human thought" approach since human thought is currently an existence proof that the kind of intelligence we are talking about is possible at all and mimicking that does seem like an obvious path to try.
by tim333 | 2025-07-13 10:59:35+00:00
They do make an effort to make it hard to do safety critical stuff by accident though in cars, small planes and jets. Like in a car it's easy to mix indicators and windscreen wipers which are on various stalks but turning off the engine and locking the steering is very different action, on traditional cars turning the key and taking it out. Similarly here the fuel cut offs are obvious levers that have to be pulled out before they can be moved.
by yabatopia | 2025-07-13 11:01:40+00:00
I have no intention to pay just for Firefox, the browser. A browser is not that special anymore and there are plenty of alternatives.

However, I do want to pay for additional features and services, like a solid ad-blocker, integrated VPN-networking, privacy features like email relays or anti-fingerprinting, a safe and reliable cryptocurrency wallet, a smart cross-platform password manager, a privacy focused gmail alternative, integrated detection of fake reviews, bot messages and sloppy AI content, AI summaries, …

Add value to Firefox, in a coherent, meaningful and effective way to make using the internet secure, enjoyable and interesting again. Do that and take my money.
Show HN: The easiest way to track your finances in just one view, with an app
by mttspss | 2025-07-13 11:01:54+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo founder building 12 startups in 12 months.

I had a lot of problems with tracking my finances and store them all in one place. I kept noticing one thing: personal finance tools are either bloated or boring, nothing simple, fast, and actually useful.

So I built Easybudget, a simple budgeting app to actually track where your money goes.

Why I built it:

I wanted a way to manage spending without spreadsheets.

Most apps are overkill for 90% of people — I wanted fast, clean, focused.

I wanted to ship real products fast and learn in public.

Would love your feedback or ideas for what to improve next!

- Matteo (@creatorLLM)
by mindcrime | 2025-07-13 11:02:22+00:00
That's kind of distinction with no distinction though, in this context. Our brains are physical machines, and computers are physical machines. Sure, one is wetware and based on chemistry, biology, and some electricity, while the other is based on electricity, logic gates, and bits and bytes, but still... if one can be intelligent, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to think that the other can't as well.
by layer8 | 2025-07-13 11:02:35+00:00
“Frei” can have the meaning of “kostenlos” (https://www.dwds.de/wb/frei#d-1-1-7), but these are limited circumstances that are usually perceived as metaphorical idioms. “Freie Software” has no direct connotation of being “free as in beer” (unlike “Freeware”).
by m11a | 2025-07-13 11:03:00+00:00
Yes, but async Rust is basically built on tokio's runtime, which is what most the big async libraries depend on, like hyper/axum/tokio etc. And tokio is a thread-per-core work-stealing architecture, which requires Send + Sync bounds everywhere. You can avoid them if you depend on tokio-proper, but it's more icky when building on something like axum, where your application handlers also require these bounds.

A good article on this: https://emschwartz.me/async-rust-can-be-a-pleasure-to-work-w...
by derriz | 2025-07-13 11:03:01+00:00
I don’t understand the point of this article. There is no requirement stated regarding the properties of the ordering - in fact there is no code at all that depends on the traversing the map elements in a particular order. So you can pick any ordering you want.

If the requirement is “use std::map to store items but prevent adding items to the map if they have a particular relationship to existing map keys”, then this is a terrible solution - std::map like maps and dictionaries in all programming language is not designed for this - it should never be an error to add a value associated with a key to a map instance. Hacking the ordering to implement a requirement like this is brittle, obscure and strange.

If this were proposed as a solution to the problem “design a data structure to store values keyed by intervals that prevents overlapping intervals”, then I would mark it very low.