MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2025-07-05 20:12:30+00:00
> I disagree. Innate talent / affinity and transferable experience exist. I agree with "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration"; however, given equal effort, people with innate talent are going to win over people with no or less talent by a wide margin.

I think you are misreading the person you're replying to.

They aren't saying "everybody can be equally good at everything with practice."

They're saying "don't quit just because you aren't great on day 1."

First time playing basketball even if you've played soccer a ton and have good general athletic ability? Don't expect to hold your own if joining a game being played by people who play every week.

First time doing woodworking even if you have an electrical engineering background and the methodicalness is not foreign to you? Don't expect your first table to be stunning. Still gonna be bad at it compared to people with more practice!

Honestly, if you think you're great at something the first time you try it, you probably just don't know what being great at it actually looks like. (It could even be "similar result, but better in some hidden ways, and done in 1/10th the time.")

But if you believe that you'll get better at it with practice, you'll keep doing it.

If you believe "guess I just don't have innate ability here" you'll give up and never get good.
by standardUser | 2025-07-05 20:13:37+00:00
It either helps me find a solution or it doesn't. About 90% of the time, or less formally I would just say "almost all of the time", it does. Keep in mind that I, the user, decide which questions to ask in the first place. If my batting average seems unbelievably high, perhaps my skill is in knowing when to use an LLM and when not to.
by timacles | 2025-07-05 20:14:01+00:00
> A sufficiently good simulation of understanding is functionally equivalent to understanding.

This is just a thing to say that has no substantial meaning.

- What is "sufficiently" mean? - What is functionally equivalent? - and what is even understanding?

All just vague hand waving

We're not philosophizing here, we're talking about practical results and clearly, in the current context, it does not deliver in that area.

> At that point, the question of whether the model really does understand is pointless.

You're right it is pointless, because you are suggesting something that doesnt exist. And the current models cannot understand
by RugnirViking | 2025-07-05 20:14:19+00:00
thats the point though, its not sufficient. Not even slightly. It constantly makes obvious mistakes, and cannot keep things coherent

I was almost going to explicitly mention your point but deleted it because I thought people would be able to understand.

This is not a philosophy/theology sitting around handwringing about "oh but would a sufficiently powerful LLM be able to dance on the head of a pin". We're talking about a thing, that actually exists, that you can actually test. In a whole lot of real-world scenarios that you try to throw at it, it fails in strange and unpredictable ways. Ways that it will swear up and down it did not do. It will lie to your face. It's convincing. But then it will lose in chess, it will fuck up running a vending machine buisness, it will get lost coding and reinvent the same functions over and over, it will make completely nonsensical answers to crossword puzzles.

This is not an intelligence that is unlimited, it is a deeply flawed two year old that just so happens to have read the entire output of human writing. It's a fundamentally different mind to ours, and makes different mistakes. It sounds convincing and yet fails, constantly. It will tell you a four step explanation of how its going to do something, then fail to execute four simple steps.
by michaelmrose | 2025-07-05 20:14:48+00:00
I don't think a court is going to understand git revisions. I also don't think a person reverting to timepoint 1 with license A changes the fact that they received it at time point 2 offered under license B.

At best the license.txt that accompanies a particular revision can serve as a sign post of what license applies it is not dispositive and if the sign post is wrong it was your bad for failing to understand what license applied before distributing.
by tedsanders | 2025-07-05 20:14:50+00:00
I think it's important to not let valid criticisms of implausibly short AGI timelines cloud our judgments of AGI's potential impact. Compared to babies born today, AGI that's actually AGI may have many advantages:

- Faster reading and writing speed

- Ability to make copies of the most productive workers

- No old age

- No need to sleep

- No need to worry about severance and welfare and human rights and breaks and worker safety

- Can be scaled up and scaled down and redeployed much more quickly

- Potentially lower cost, especially with adaptive compute

- Potentially high processing speed

Even if AGI has downsides compared to human labor, it might also have advantages that lead to widespread deployment.

Like, if I had an employee with low IQ, but this employee could work 24 hours around the clock learning and practicing, and they could work for 200 years straight without aging, and they could make parallel copies of themselves, surely there would have to be some tasks at which they're going to outperform humans, right?
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-07-05 20:14:51+00:00
The diet described seemed more limited. We are not vegetarian, but eat healthy and extensive amount of veggies and fruit.

I still eat too much, but that's a me problem, the rest of the family is good.

I manage to keep the weight under control (but I can't lose weight any further, so far) by going to the gym 5 times per week and being on diet every day of my life. Of course I break diet during the weekend at times because I'm human and that aeems sufficient to never lose weight, lol
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-05 20:14:59+00:00
I don't think it's the content per se it is the perceived personal relationship. Guys (mostly guys I'd say) who are paying OnlyFans performers are paying for the fantasy that the performer is really into them and performing for them. It's quite unhealthy IMO but I don't think that the performance of the same acts without the personal interaction will have the same effect.
by kragen | 2025-07-05 20:15:06+00:00
Very plausibly the identity of Satoshi is already known to more people than Cosby's rapes or the 9/11 hijacking plans, before everybody knew about them. The hijacking plans weren't even well-known inside the FBI! And it's also very plausible that the people involved in Bitcoin were either strongly idealistic, facing death penalties for disclosure (for example, if they work for the Mossad), or both.

I agree with your weakened claim that secrets are very difficult to keep, but much of modern society is built on institutions that are very good at keeping them: armies, intelligence agencies, and even companies with trade secrets.

I agree that Satoshi was probably just one or two people, and the difficulty in keeping secrets with more than a few people is one of my reasons for that. But you said it was impossible, not difficult, which is much too extreme to be justifiable.

(I think it's about 50% likely that it's one of a couple of dozen people I've met personally, but I wouldn't be able to convince anyone else. So you might be talking to one of the people in the position of Bill Cosby's friends before the news came out.)
by jowea | 2025-07-05 20:15:18+00:00
> It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.

Issuing a transaction may be easy, but I don't think that's meaningful when people get hit with issues similar to "pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked" on the on and off-ramps.
by cycomanic | 2025-07-05 20:15:44+00:00
For anyone visiting Paris, the sewer museum is definitely a unique experience and worth a visit (although smelly). It gives you a grasp of what a monumental it was to build the sewers back then. You can also see the overflow reservoirs that dump water into the Seine when there is heavy rain (they were talking about the cleanup efforts leading to the Olympics when I was there some years ago).
by WJW | 2025-07-05 20:16:01+00:00
There is a weird ability that everyone seems to have, which is that by looking at any random object around you, you can accurately predict how it would taste/feel if you put it in your mouth. Go on, try it right now by choosing a random object around you.

It obviously comes from babies putting almost anything in their mouth when they get the chance, but it's still amazing how well this holds up into adulthood.
Ask HN: Would you use AI software to assist you in an interview?
by acmeian | 2025-07-05 20:16:20+00:00
How do folks feel about tools like Cluely and Cheating Daddy, whose very purpose is to provide undetectable real-time AI assistance on virtual interviews and meetings? Many people probably view it as cheating.

But would you personally use these tools? Where do you draw the line on this kind of technology? How do you see this affect the way companies hire talent and conduct interviews going forward?
by dickstrawng | 2025-07-05 20:18:00+00:00
i've never discriminated. I don't wanna know your name I don't wanna see your face. Pass the test pass the interview. we can use chat if you want to I don't care. Well maybe now I care because of ChatGPT. you also have to pass all the criteria from HR, but that could have anything to do with your right to work or criminal record. That's not my concern either. On my last job the first person I hired was 67 years old and I didn't even know it. They did the work of eight people easily. The only surprise was that I didn't learn anything from them. (Pro tip: if someone like this tries to teach you something someone told them to tell you. this guy is not gonna say anything he's getting paid €300 an hour) What was not surprising, was that every project was completed with extremely high-quality and completed early. what I learned from him was always keep a pocketbook handy for the times you get bored. He was bored very often.
by HenryBemis | 2025-07-05 20:18:07+00:00
How not to pay your taxes:

1) be rich (or even better filthy rich) 2) go to PWC/EY/etc, pay them handsomely, let them work their magic 3) they got offices all over the planet and are updated on every single legislation/regulation around the planet 4) they (PWC/EY/..) make sure you use the very best ways, tailor-made to not pay taxes. This could mean thwt you need to move and live to some random village in Switzerland (IKEA dude, the writer of the Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)). 5) never pay taxes
by mitul72 | 2025-07-05 20:19:01+00:00
Location: Edmonton, Canada Remote: Yes Willing to Relocate: Yes, within Canada Technologies: C++, Rust, Kafka, TypeScript, Express.js, C#, React, Postgres, KDB+ Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wqc3C_7bAOXQ3DTIQXJHuWypl6d... Email: mituldhawan154@gmail.com

I'm someone who enjoys building fast, reliable systems and solving complex technical problems. Over the past year, I've worked on everything from ultra-low-latency trading engines in C++ and Rust to building a high-performance CPU emulator from the ground up. I’ve had the chance to work with lead backend developers at startups, optimize systems for scale. I’m comfortable working across the stack, whether that’s building APIs with Express.js and TypeScript or diving deep into Kafka pipelines and distributed architectures. I care about writing clean, maintainable code, and I’m always up for learning something new or tackling tough challenges with a team.
by lightbulbish | 2025-07-05 20:19:13+00:00
I feel I could argue the counterpoint. Hijacking the pathways of the human brain that leads to addictive behaviour has the potential to utterly ruins peoples lives. And so talking about it, if you have good intentions, seems like a thing anyone with the heart in the right place would.

Take VEO3 and YouTube integration as an example:

Google made VEO3 and YouTube has shorts and are aware of the data that shows addictive behaviour (i.e. a person sitting down at 11pm, sitting up doing shorts for 3 hours, and then having 5 hours of sleep, before doing shorts on the bus on the way to work) - I am sure there are other negative patterns, but this is one I can confirm from a friend.

If you have data that shows your other distribution platform are being used to an excessive amount, and you create a powerful new AI content generator, is that good for the users?
by seec | 2025-07-05 20:19:21+00:00
Yes, this is the main reason for doing "cloud" I believe. Otherwise, it would make no sense for someone like Adobe to adopt this model, since the softwares still largely require to run locally for technical reasons.

It's the same thing as the subscriptions for movies like Netflix, except at least in the last case we can fight back with various means (and it's not a necessity).

The SaaS model is basically a perfect racketeering setup, I think it should be outlawed at least philosophically. There is no way business is not going to abuse that power and they have already shown as much...

I agree with your sentiment on Open Source. I think like many of these types of things, it lives in contradictions. In any case, Linux as it is today, couldn't exist without the big commercial players paying quite a bit to get it going.
by general1726 | 2025-07-05 20:19:22+00:00
> People in the west in general fail to understand the fundamental cultural underpinnings that guide Chinese (and largely Russian as well) behaviour on the global stage, causing them to badly miscalculate their steps.

I agree invading Ukraine in 2022 was extreme miscalculation on Russian side. West is now only pouring a little bit of money and weapons just to keep that Ukrainian potato too hot to swallow by Russian mouth. Who could have expected that this keeps going for 3 years with Russia losing essentially its all accumulated military inheritance from USSR time to get what? Few fields in Eastern Ukraine? From perspective of so called West, this is an unexpected strategic victory while doing essentially nothing.
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-05 20:19:46+00:00
> as though subscription software is something which has been sneaked in on us

Oh but it has (IMO).

> users today expect things like instant updates [...] constant bug fixes and patches

Nah, this is in reverse. With boxed software, the developer had to deliver an essentially bug-free product. Now, with easy updates technically possible, the developers have gone complacent, and deliver shit. That is why users expect bugfixes instantly. (And any enlightened user abhors unrequested features, as there are no features without regressions, and who wants regressions in any serious application?) The only tolerable online updates are security fixes.

> sync across devices, collaboration

This is a valid expectation, but its execution has been a train-wreck. Research, design and implementation should start with end-to-end encryption; the network architecture should be peer-to-peer (mesh, not centralized). What do we get instead? More centralization of control than ever, and less privacy and ownership than ever.
by AngryData | 2025-07-05 20:19:57+00:00
China isn't dumb, they saw what the US did to the USSR and anyone who else who was even the smallest possible threat to the US. And they knew how big of an actual potential threat they would become as they industrialized and hollowed out US manufacturing. And I think it is the right move on their part, surpass the US economically, let the US continuously drain its resources across the globe, and when the US is under pressure and decides China has too much control it will be too late and they can just starve the US out economically. The worst thing that can happen at this point to China is the US actually does build back a broad local manufacturing sector and reduces imports, but that still leaves China with a far larger domestic market. Every other potential outcome has China sitting in an even better position.
by ben_w | 2025-07-05 20:20:17+00:00
That kind of knowledge is present in the training set, doesn't need to be in the context or system prompt.

That said, I too would only use an LLM today in the same kinds of role that five years ago would be outsourced to a different culture.

Culture, not even language: this is how you get the difference between "biscuits and gravy" as understood in the UK vs in the USA.
by standardUser | 2025-07-05 20:21:25+00:00
> The imbalance of power between the buyer and the person coerced into the act remains regardless of whether the act takes place in a physical space or in front of a camera.

They act like they've discovered capitalism. It's not a bad argument, it's just not an argument against sex work. It's a disingenuous attempt to disguise misogynistic views of women as something noble.
by majormajor | 2025-07-05 20:22:54+00:00
If you're seriously asking why discussions like this exist...

One thing - and this may not be your intent - that often happens is that people will disingenuously use "nobody should do more than they have to" as sleight of hand to point in the direction of "oh it's the law that's bad" with no intent of actually encouraging fixing the tax code.

Another thing is that there's often a big difference between the letter and spirit of a law, since the laws are made by imperfect humans and other humans have FAR more cumulative people-hours available after the law is passed to find holes. There is likely no such thing as a "simple and unconditional" tax law that can't be worked around in ways its authors did not intend. And here this may seem circular - "then the government should patch the hole" - but of course that would be great and yet it is something the government is rarely incentivized to do when people with money give them that money to influence them to not want to.
by al_borland | 2025-07-05 20:23:26+00:00
This mainly just requires the ability to export, and standard formats. For generic file storage, emails, contacts, calendars, etc, this is largely possible already. Though there are minor incompatibilities based on various implementations or customizations on top of the standard.

The big problem comes into play for new, or more custom types of applications. It takes a while for something to become ubiquitous enough that standard formats are developed to support them.
by pyman | 2025-07-05 20:24:05+00:00
Context matters.

The PayPal mafia (Musk, Nossk, Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, and the rest) spent years working closely, obsessing over banks, money, payments, and how to move value on the internet, questioning everything: What is money? Who controls it? How do you make it more efficient, global, and digital?
by ggm | 2025-07-05 20:24:31+00:00
An externally connected USB-Sata device providing disk(s) with external power management, through a single USB port? sure.

What I had was a 4 device SATA hat, 2 USB ports bridged on each half of the divide to form the channel for data, GPIO pins were used solely for card control and power distribution. It was clever, but not sensible.

People who construct RAID sets over USB attached devices on discrete ports also wind up in odd places. The device enumeration can be semi random and so you have some logistical barriers to things (ZFS amongst other sane things, writes the ZVOL/DEV information into the structure on disk so which enumerated device it is becomes less important) as well as a power distribution problem. I ran an early version of this using an unpowered USB hub with 4 USB sticks and it was very badly behaved.

When I do my 3-2-1 the removable external ZFS drive is USB-3 connected.
by phtrivier | 2025-07-05 20:24:38+00:00
I always wonder if there was an opportunity for a startup to "uberize" tax avoidance.

The article is mostly about avoiding taxes on "having your startup acquired" - not everyone will be able to do that.

But setting up funds and deduce everything you buy ? Creating shill companies ? Becoming a trustee for some random that badly wants to avoid their taxes ? Sounds like that can be automated ?

Sure, it would be insanely immoral, and I hope the person who master tax avoidance get to loose access to everything payed by the tax payers, just doe thrill.

Or maybe we should have voluntary taxation ; but, beyond a certain level, you really loose access. Don't want to pay ? Sure. You put off the fires yourself, you heal and tech your kids yourself, you build and drive on your own roads, fund your own research, don't access supermarkets that are full of FDA-vetted food, etc...

In all seriousness, if budgets were voted by "real" people and not representatives, how many of things would survive ? Can you convince people about the usefulness of tax free 10M$ startup sale, where every cent your earn is taxed as some portion ?

Anyway, let the tax avoidance experts be the richest of their graveyards.
by cyberax | 2025-07-05 20:25:49+00:00
> This entire paradigm gets turned on its head with AI. I tried to do this with purely local compute, and it's a bad play. We don't have good edge compute yet.

Your TV likely has a good enough CPU to run a decent model for home automation. And a game console most definitely does.

I'd love to see a protocol that would allow devices to upload a model to a computer and then let it sleep until a command it received. Current AI models are really self-contained, they don't need complicated infrastructure to run them.
by pcrh | 2025-07-05 20:25:52+00:00
AI for basic copy-editing is legitimate, I think, even if it might be a bit erratic right now.

Manuscripts I've had approved have been sent to be that are clearly copy-edited by AI, and it does spot errors.

However, AI should not be used to evaluate the scientific worthiness of a manuscript, it simply isn't capable of doing so.
by jt2190 | 2025-07-05 20:26:00+00:00
> in order to optimise your taxes, you have to be quite wealthy to begin with (hiring a tax guy, etc.)

Another way of thinking about this is that the wealthy person is incentivized to invest their wealth directly into higher-risk, economy-boosting activities like starting businesses that (if successful) create jobs that then pay income taxes. Ideally tax revenue is generated from this incentive. The wealthy person could just buy gold bars and create no jobs that generate income tax, but they don't get as good a tax deal on that.
by amai | 2025-07-05 20:26:02+00:00
No it can’t. Starting wars is much easier than stopping them. The Russian economy and politics nowadays needs a war. And if Ukraine will stop fighting they will search for a new war. That is why Europe is so nervous at the moment about Russia. It might well attack the Baltic states or Moldovia soon after Ukraine stopps fighting. So the EU has no interest in Ukraine losing its war. In that sense it is a proxy war China against EU, with neither China nor EU fully understanding their role.
by danillonunes | 2025-07-05 20:26:36+00:00
I understand free-shaped icons can sometimes be really bad designed and look really shitty, but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons. It was even transmitted to other software companies that target Apple devices. You could tell with high confidence when a software was made specifically for Mac and when it was ported just looking at the icon.

Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.