MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-20 17:55:01+00:00
What? An FSD Tesla has its very own "world model". It doesn't try to reconstruct a world "photons in", from scratch, 60 times per second. It continuously updates and refines the data it already has based on the sensor inputs, and then uses this internal representation to make driving decisions.

This "world model" is what you get to peek into through the car's screen. By now, it even has basic "object permanence". Nowhere near as good as a human yet. But AI is getting better, and an average driver isn't.
by Edd314159 | 2025-07-20 17:55:03+00:00
We have a TonieBox that has been much loved by one kid, and now another. And even though everything in my being is telling me to hack it to make it do cool things (mostly because of all the “you just own a _license_ to content” stuff rubs me the wrong way), I wouldn’t dare. It’s a product so simply designed, a 1-year-old can use it. It’s not for me to mess with. This particular thing does not need hacking.

My brittle smart home setup is hanging on by a thread in the spousal approval department. I can’t handle the fury that will befall me if I fuck with the TonieBox.
by pempem | 2025-07-20 17:55:09+00:00
Honestly a quick, enjoyable and fully reflective of the moment read.

The most important part, the part that not enough people are talking about is

"The price of my (blue) milk went up. They blamed it on inflation, on innovations they've made in bottlecap technology. The blue milk now comes in a very fancy new (and very blue) package. But I knew the truth. The company that made blue food coloring had made it almost completely flavorless, and once all the food distributors got used to including it, the price had skyrocketed."
by sp0rk | 2025-07-20 17:55:14+00:00
> These days you've got Gambas for a free and open source VB, including the terrible language, but in my experience the looks are a bit off when you design on one desktop environment and run the application on another.

There is also Lazarus[1], which uses Pascal but feels closer to what I remember of the VB6 experience.

1: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
by bigyabai | 2025-07-20 17:55:23+00:00
> Code is MacOS

What do you mean by this? Applescript isn't a super common language these days and you gotta acknowledge it's not what LLMs are finetuning on. You might be better off asking for a zsh script that does the same thing.

My experience with Claude has been positive as long as the code itself is broken down into ~500 SLOC or less in each module. Huge run-on programs don't seem to play nice with modern context windows.
by oliwarner | 2025-07-20 17:55:24+00:00
Yes. Progressive taxation. That's the point. Tax those who can afford it, fund equal opportunity and a basic standard of living for those who can't. Pull society up from the bottom.

As much as one can complain about specific inefficiencies or not being able to send young Jasper and Tabitha to private school because of VAT and tapered tax relief, I do think we don't take it far enough.

The reason it not working is that we have stapled our personal wealth and economy to housing. 60 years of financiers pushing for higher lending limits with looser regulation resulted in more people able to "afford" a £1m house. That drags up all the prices.

There's no simple way to reverse it this distortion but it had a knock on effect: the generationally rich, the landed gentry through to farmers have become insanely rich, through no work but HODLling all the land until they got planning permission.

I agree, wealth tax is scary but not addressing how wealth works won't fix things either.
by ben_w | 2025-07-20 17:55:59+00:00
> You’re going to let your first grader (6yo) use public transit in America solo? In Copenhagen maybe but sounds like lunacy here.

I mean, that's the exact point being made. The problem isn't public transport, it's American public transport. The USA could just copy what works from the rest of the world, if only it didn't already suffer the misapprehension of being the best at absolutely everything and having nothing to learn.
by throw-number9 | 2025-07-20 17:55:59+00:00
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible .. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.

Yeah, coding (and to a lesser extent IT in general) at one point was a real meritocracy, where skill mattered more than expensive/unnecessary academic pedigree. Not perfect of course, but real nevertheless. And coders were the first engineers who really said "I won't be renting a suit for an interview, I think an old t-shirt is fine" and we normalized that. Part of this was just uncompromisingly practical.. like you can either do the work or not, and fuck the rest of that noise. But there was also a pretty punk aspect to this for many people in the industry.. some recognition that needing to have money to make money was a bullshit relic of closeted classism.

But we're fast approaching a time where both the old metrics (how much quality code are you writing how fast and what's your personal open source portfolio like?) and the new metrics (are you writing a blog post every week about your experience with the new models, is your personal computer fast enough to even try to run crappy local models?) are both going to favor those with plenty of money to experiment.

It's not hard to see how this will make inequality worse and disadvantage junior devs, or just talented people that didn't plan other life-events around purchasing API credits/GPUs. A pay-to-play kind of world was ugly enough in politics and business so it sucks a lot to see it creeping into engineering disciplines but it seems inevitable. If paying for tokens/GPU ever allows you to purchase work or promotion by proxy, we're right back to this type of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-20 17:56:30+00:00
>Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project

So ... exactly for what the device is being sold as? Weird complaint: "I purchased an apple, and all I got was an apple that's only good as an apple."

>I spent some time working on the firmware side of developing custom electronics based on various AVR chips, ATmega328 among them*

Then you would know that ATmegas are in a lot of successful commercial products from the past.
by hedora | 2025-07-20 17:57:12+00:00
It didn’t really come to pass.

Office web is comically slow, even when I have $5K of machines a 100ish GB of DRAM laying around my house.

In the java vision, it’d transparently offload to that network of machines. Also, the user could decide not to offload to untrusted hardware (e.g., I don’t want to trust Microsoft’s cloud compute).
by kiwicopple | 2025-07-20 17:57:54+00:00
We have made our intentions clear with the core team but also haven’t pushed the agenda much - it’s too early.

The conversations we have had so far are promising, we just need to make sure we approach it the right way. Projects like Oriole have started and sputtered out several times (zheap, for example). The burden first lies on our side to prove that we can see it through to GA, with meaningful usage. They (correctly) shouldn’t need to entertain the maintenance burden until they know the juice is worth the squeeze.

If it’s not accepted into core, we will work with cloud providers to add it as a supported extension
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-20 17:57:55+00:00
On its own, that doesn't sound like the worst idea. But at least in Rust, one problem is that further modifying the container will immediately invalidate the new reference, as will reading from the container if you get a mutable reference. References into containers are temperamental in general, unless you can handle them in smaller scopes that are unaware of the larger container.
by bartread | 2025-07-20 17:58:27+00:00
Yeah. HN doesn't really have a sense of humour, which I used to find frustrating, but which (having now spent a lot more time on other forums, like Reddit), I fully appreciate the wisdom of.

I am, along certain axes, a big fan of DIY forums like the r/DIYUK subreddit, and it pisses me off to no end that when anybody asks a serious question looking for serious help the top 5 comments will, as like as not, be bullshit, cheap, obvious, "funny" one-liners from people whose sense of humour has never evolved beyond the playground and that contain zero useful information. I've even considered volunteering as a mod on that particular sub just so I can delete all of these "humorous" comments so that the actual useful information makes it to the top of the page. So, yeah, I've come around to the HN point of view on humour.

But, nevertheless, like you, I found this funny.
by llbbdd | 2025-07-20 17:58:49+00:00
Yeah the A and I in the last line are highlighted to hammer it home. I'm not sure where this ire comes from, I'm annoyed at seeing dumb AI gimmick features pushed everywhere too, but it has uses and doesn't seem to warrant the weird moral high ground people seem to take about it. This post too repeats the "burning down a forest" line that continues to be silly and the people who repeat it don't seem to care that it's false.
by godelski | 2025-07-20 17:59:01+00:00
As a physics undergraduate I had similar style tests for my upper division classes (the classical mechanics professor and loved these). We'd have like 3 days to do the test, open book, open internet[0] and the professor extended his office hours, but no help from peers. It really stretched your thinking. Removed the time pressure but really gave the sense of what it was like to be a real physicist.

Even though in the last decade a lot more of that complex material appears online, there's still a lot that can't. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any AI system come close to answering any of these types of questions. Some look right at a glance but often contain major errors pretty early on.

I wouldn't be surprised if an LLM can ace the Physics GRE. The internet is filled with the test questions and there are so few variations. But I'll be impressed when they can answer one of these types of tests. They require that you actually do world modeling (and not necessarily of the literal world, just the world that the physics problem lives in[1]). Most humans can't get these right without drawing diagrams. You got to pull a lot of different moving information together.

[0] you were expected to report if you stumbled on the solution somewhere. No one ever found one though

[1] an important distinction for those working on world models. What world are you modeling? Which physics are you modeling?
by RGBCube | 2025-07-20 17:59:19+00:00
From the post, it seems like ZSH tries to update on every shell spawn:

DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE="true"

WTF? Even if we ignore the crime of non-critical software updating itself, the fact that it does it on every start instead of every day or week is insane.

I do not want my shell sending network requests to odd servers without explicit action from me, thanks.
by SamDc73 | 2025-07-20 17:59:20+00:00
I think you're better off switching to https://starship.rs

I did try to do my whole zsh config/theme from scratch, but it did take some time and lot of small features here and there were no worth the effort (like python version, vevn, and such) so I just switched to starship which is very fast and easy to use
by josephcsible | 2025-07-20 17:59:23+00:00
Whoops, it turns out Google was showing me the L and not the Metra, because the Metra's headways are so far apart today that you'd get there sooner by taking the much-slower L than you would by waiting for the next Metra. But even when I do pick the Metra, it's still showing a 50 minute journey.
by rollcat | 2025-07-20 17:59:55+00:00
I'm quite certain there's a mod to manage your in-game playlists, and unlike in e.g. Factorio, the server doesn't even need to know about it.

As for c418, you're privileged as an artist when you get to keep your rights and make decent money. That was a very smart strategic move. Microsoft could've responded in any number of ways, but keeping the music + hiring new artists doesn't even sound like a bad compromise; these artists deserve the exposure, even if they can't match c418.
by hollerith | 2025-07-20 17:59:57+00:00
40 g of protein per day is only 6.1 oz of chicken tenderloins (raw weight) per day which is very unlikely to cause the effect described in the paper ("hyperfiltration and increased urinary calcium excretion which can, in turn, lead to chronic kidney disease development").

People who eat a lot of protein die sooner than people who eat less, but that is probably because plentiful protein prevents the body from entering a state called "autophagy". Intentionally inducing autophagy for 5 days every other month (by using Valter Longo's protocol) while eating plenty of protein the rest of the time is probably better for most people than a consistently low-protein diet as long as one is avoiding red meat (provided the people can afford the protein which will be the case for almost everyone in the developed world).
by QRY | 2025-07-20 17:59:58+00:00
Have you considered the Framework Desktop setup they mentioned in their announcement blog post[0]? Just marketing fluff, or is there any merit to it?

> The top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration with 128GB of memory starts at just $1999 USD. This is excellent for gaming, but it is a truly wild value proposition for AI workloads. Local AI inference has been heavily restricted to date by the limited memory capacity and high prices of consumer and workstation graphics cards. With Framework Desktop, you can run giant, capable models like Llama 3.3 70B Q6 at real-time conversational speed right on your desk. With USB4 and 5Gbit Ethernet networking, you can connect multiple systems or Mainboards to run even larger models like the full DeepSeek R1 671B.

I'm futsing around with setups, but adding up the specs would give 384GB of VRAM and 512GB total memory, at a cost of about $10,000-$12,000. This is all highly dubious napkin math, and I hope to see more experimentation in this space.

There's of course the moving target of cloud costs and performance, so analysing break-even time is even more precarious. So if this sort of setup would work, its cost-effectiveness is a mystery to me.

[0] https://frame.work/be/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desk...
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 18:00:03+00:00
So would you rather have the actual data fed to you by a different parent? Airplane goes brrrr ! https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data...

>fun fact: most car accidents do not happen in places where FSD is commonly used

How is that even supposed to in any way be relevant when talking exactly about cases where FSD and similar are used. Sigh.

>Also, vision-only systems work great… if they’re backed by strong intelligence.

Yes. And I do recognize that "Best, with custom in-house NN hw" might not still be "Strong" on all aspiratory statistics. But its already much above human capability, and regardless if you want to try to say the stats are 2x 3x, even 4x exaggerated, they'd still blow the alternative safety standard out of the water.
by letmevoteplease | 2025-07-20 18:00:04+00:00
The source of this claim is a tweet.[1] The tweet screencaps a mathematician who says they talked to an IMO board member who told them "it was the general sense of the Jury and Coordinators that it's rude and inappropriate for AI developers to make announcements about their IMO performances too close to the IMO." This has now morphed into "OpenAI deliberately ignored the requests of IMO organizers to not publish AI results for some time."

[1] https://x.com/Mihonarium/status/1946880931723194389
by guiriduro | 2025-07-20 18:00:16+00:00
Honestly how hard can it be given Microsoft size (and AWS, and Google's) to mandate the intervention of a EU corporate entity to manage their IP in the region, full source code, EU cloud assets, encryption keys, EU-only support access, collect their royalties etc., but essentially act as a privacy buffer wholly unanswerable to any US head office or any obligations US law holds the company to wrt any EU person, its just a black hole that grants them the right to earn money and hold a large market share in the EU. The Chinese aren't afraid to do it.
by delusional | 2025-07-20 18:00:24+00:00
> For hospitals, especially rural hospitals, I think trying to run them for economic gain just doesn't work.

In current day America it doesn't seem like anything useful is compatible with making money. From the outside, it looks like you've entirely divorced money from common good.

It is possible to make hospitals profitable, but it requires you to take control over what sorts of things you wish to make a profit.
by anon84873628 | 2025-07-20 18:00:41+00:00
Well lumping packaged cookies and cured meats together is already part of the problem. The former is bad in excess because of the high calories and poor lipid profile. The latter because of colon cancer risk.

The problem with processed foods is not their individual construction per se, but how overall bad diets are easily enabled by them.

As far as studies go, I can't give you one that directly controls. But look at the "30 plants per week" topic, which suggests that overall diversity of fiber consumption is more correlated to health than any specific details of the diet.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-20 18:00:51+00:00
Yes. This is a component of media literacy that has been melted away by the "magic technology" marketing of the 2000s. It's important for people to treat these stories with allegorical white-gloves rather than interpreting them literally.

Gene Roddenbury knew this, and it's kinda why the original Trek was so entertaining. The juxtaposition of super-technology and interpersonal conflict was a lot more novel in the 60s than it is in a post-internet world, and therefore used to be easier to understand as a literary device. To a modern audience, a Tricorder is indistinguishable from an iPhone; the fancy "hailing channel" is indistinct from Skype or Facetime.
by jacobr1 | 2025-07-20 18:01:21+00:00
Seems the same to me. If you are using the llm as a tool to build your product (rather than a dependency within it for functionality) you can easily switch to a different model, or IDE/Agentic-coder in the same way you can switch between vim and emacs. It might be a `worse` experience for you or have fewer feature, but you aren't locked in, other than in the sense of your preference for productivity. In fact in seems likely to mee that the tools I'll be using a year from now are going to be different than today - and almost certainly a different model will be leading. For example google surprised everyone with the quality of 2.5.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-20 18:01:39+00:00
>The reason I don't like those arguments is that they merge two orthogonal stuff: Solving problems and optimizing your tooling. You can optimize PyCharm just as much you can fiddle with Vim's config.

But you’re ignoring that the “optimizing tooling” is for the goal of making it easier for you. Its spending time now to decrease time spent in the long term.

I spent over a decade with Emacs as my sole editor and have since spent over a decade with PyCharm. Day 1 of PyCharm already had practically everything that it took a decade to get working for Emacs, and more. It was pre-optimized for me, so I was able to spend more time working on my code. Did I need to spend time optimizing Emacs? No. But doing so added intellisense and the ability to jump around the codebase very quickly. You _can_ spend just as much time optimizing Emacs, but I didn’t _have_ to in order to get the same result. Or have I spent that much time optimizing it since, for even more functionality.
by fxj | 2025-07-20 18:01:43+00:00
just tried this: take the graph of the functions x^n and exp(x) how many points of intersection do they have?

chatgpt gave me the wrong answer, it claimed 2 points of intersection, but for n=4 there are 3 as one can easily derive. one for negative x and 2 points for positive x because exp(x) is growing faster than x^4.

then i corrected it and said 3 points of intersection. it said yes and gaev me the 3 points. then i said no there are 4 points of intersection and it again explained to me that there are 2 points of intersection. which is wrong.

then i asked it how many points of intersection for n=e and it said: zero

well, exp(x)=x^e for x=e, isnt it?
by remich | 2025-07-20 18:02:00+00:00
I recommend the context7 MCP tool for this exact purpose. I've been trying to really push agents lately at work to see where they fall down and whether better context can fix it.

As a test recently I instructed an agent using Claude to create a new MCP server in Elixir based on some code I provided that was written in Python. I know that, relatively speaking, Python is over-represented in training data and Elixir is under-represented. So, when I asked the agent to begin by creating its plan, I told it to reference current Elixir/Phoenix/etc documentation using context7 and to search the web using Kagi Search MCP for best practices on implementing MCP servers in Elixir.

It was very interesting to watch how the initially generated plan evolved after using these tools and how after using the tools the model identified an SDK I wasn't even aware of that perfectly fit the purpose (Hermes-mcp).
by floren | 2025-07-20 18:02:20+00:00
I'd been maintaining my own Synapse homeserver for years mainly to chat with one friend, who uses the matrix.org server. Images shared between us break on a regular basis, and yes they broke for a bit during the authenticated media changeover but also since then he just periodically doesn't receive images I send.

It happened again last week, I said "fuck it, the devs will just claim it's my fault if I ask for help, let's just take this to Signal". I'll probably shut down my homeserver once I've figured out alternative ways to access the handful of communities I also happen to follow via Matrix. I have no doubt a reply will be forthcoming soon about how that's all a coincidental thing which isn't actually Matrix's fault but I've been reading those replies here for years and the actual situation doesn't improve.
by intended | 2025-07-20 18:02:23+00:00
Pricing - the point of the airline industry example is to highlight the level of nickel and diming that happens.

I’ve been on the best ranked airline, and had dirty toilets - before take off.

I’m not alluding to enshittification here - just that if your commuters don’t have the money to pay for better quality taxis, they are going to get dirtier cabs, and less safer cars.

Being private isn’t a magic bullet- it’s a matching of incentives and markets that produces outcomes.

This doesn’t mean that public goods and services can’t be equivalently good.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-07-20 18:02:53+00:00
The experience of "socialized hospitals" since the 1980s is also biased by the neoliberal push to cut everything to the bone and then justify privatization. The NHS and provincial healthcare in Canada are two examples where they've gotten less functional over the last 50 years on purpose because the government wants to push for a two-tier system with inferior care for poor people.