MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tainnor | 2025-07-31 11:30:51+00:00
> so are we basically compiling a dictionary of proofs all stemming from a handful of self-evident truths

I would say, "from a handful of axioms".

It's certainly true that when Euclid started this whole enterprise, it was thought thax axioms should be self-evident. But then, many centuries later, people discovered that there are other interesting geometries that don't satisfy the same axioms.

And when you get to reasoning about infinities, it's very unclear that anything about them can be considered self-evident (a few mathematicians even refuse to work with infinities, although it's definitely a very niche subcommunity).

Some of today's common axioms are indeed self-evident (such as "you should be able to substitute equal subterms"), but things like the axiom of choice have (at least historically) been much more controversial. I would probably say that such axioms can be considered "plausible" and that they generally allow us to be able to prove what we want to prove. But you'll definitely find mathematicians championing different axioms.

> Aside: I recall some famous mathematician had made a list of base proofs that you just hold to be true. Can someone remind me who, and/or what that list is called? I’m guessing they’re considered axioms.

That would be the ZFC axioms. It was originally the ZF axioms (named so after the mathematicians Zermelo and Fraenkel who worked in the early 20th century), and then later the Axiom of Choice (C) was added. It's generally considered to be the "standard" set of axioms for maths, although very few mathematicians actually work directly from these axioms. But in theory, you can take almost every mathematical proof (unless it's explicitly set in some other foundation) and recast it entirely in applications of the ZFC axioms.
by cmiles74 | 2025-07-31 11:31:32+00:00
It's very difficult to get caught, and then to prove wrongdoing, under the current rules. There has already been reporting of filing irregularities.

https://www.newsweek.com/stock-act-congress-violations-tradi...

Making the rules simpler will make it easier to comply. Removing the incentive for insider trades strikes me as a good thing.
Show HN: UGCReal – AI influencers so realistic, people are trying to date them
by Samenn | 2025-07-31 11:31:35+00:00
Hi HN! We built AI-generated influencers that are fooling everyone – including us sometimes. The breakthrough everyone said was impossible: Not "AI-looking" people. Not "almost realistic." Actually indistinguishable from real humans. We're the first to achieve true photorealism in AI-generated people. How real are we talking?

Brands report customers asking for the @ of our AI models to follow them Professional photographers studying our images can't find the tells We've had people try to book our AI influencers for real photoshoots A/B tests show audiences engage MORE with our AI content than real UGC

What everyone else gets wrong: Other AI tools give you plastic skin, symmetric features, that "perfect" CGI look. We generate humans with natural flaws – uneven skin tone, asymmetric features, stray hairs, authentic body language. The imperfections that make people real. See it to believe it: Upload any product. Get back content so authentic you'll double-check it's not a real photoshoot. While others are still fighting uncanny valley, we've moved on to building the future of marketing. The wild part: This isn't our endgame. If we can generate undetectable humans today, imagine what's possible tomorrow. No waitlist. No hype videos. Just try it yourself and tell us if you can spot the AI. What does HN think happens to influencer marketing when anyone can generate perfect UGC instantly?
by lesuorac | 2025-07-31 11:32:46+00:00
"altrustic pricing" is also skewed because monopolies and competitive markets have different economically correct prices.

When you have a monopoly you want to supply less at a higher price because it's more profit overall. See chart under "Monopoly Price and Profit" [1]. Layman way to think about this is doubling your price more than doubles your profit (per unit sold) and when you have no competition might not even drop your sales in half.

[1]: https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Economics/Econo...
by piva00 | 2025-07-31 11:33:31+00:00
Don't forget the fun with Cloudflare's CAPTCHA infinite loop if you use Firefox and adblockers/anti-tracking extensions. I sent feedback about it, through its own tool, many many times, I've tried raising this issue through other channels, it's never been fixed.

I simply avoid any website that presents me with a Cloudflare CAPTCHA, don't know what the fuck they've done in their implementation but it's been broken for a long time.
Show HN: Stateful AI API with OS Models
by arkonrad | 2025-07-31 11:33:53+00:00
We just launched ARK Cloud API: OpenAI‑compatible, stateful AI inference service that keeps context across calls to slash token spend (0.01 USD / 1M input tokens), spins up in 10 s with Google SSO, runs fully on GDPR‑strong EU‑only infra, and gives 50 000 free credits at signup.

Supports Stable Diffusion (cheapest rates), Llama 8 & 70B, embeddings, STT and more.

PAYG, no logs, no data stored ark-labs.ai
by CPLX | 2025-07-31 11:35:05+00:00
I have had this thought too, but not sure I would phrase it the same way. For context I'm an older father who had kids mid-40's and had a lot of time to try life the other way, and a lot of time to observe friends life paths beforehand.

The reality is that family, and especially kids, are just better and more rewarding than anything else. That's the part I think gets lost in the narrative. Needless to say there have to be exceptions to that, and maybe you or someone reading this is one of them.

But in general, that's the reality. I was kind of surprised by it, even though everyone had told me variations on this story for decades. I think it's a little bit impossible to understand just how wonderful it is to spend time with your own children, and help and watch them grow, until you start doing it.

I always thought I had no interest in kids. Turns out I just don't like other people's kids much. Still don't really, it's not like I'm going to go play with other kids for fun, or be a school teacher or coach or something. But that's not the same thing at all. If you don't have kids the reality is there's nothing in your life you can extrapolate from to actually understand what it feels like.

In addition to that, as you get older you realize that most intellectual interests and passions aren't going to ultimately be meaningful to anyone.

That's fine, it's not what they're for. But every year it gets a little more impossible to delude yourself into thinking that somehow you're going to transcend the relatively mundane reality you're actually in. Your train set, or collectible collection, or whatever it is, isn't going to have enduring value, to anyone. Again, that's fine.

Perspectives change. Sometimes it makes me sad, and I wish I could have the delusions of youth back, and think that I was so close to the big breakthrough where it would all click.

It's natural to miss all that. But being older is pretty great too.
by jongjong | 2025-07-31 11:35:10+00:00
I'm starting to think that banning major platforms is fine, necessary even. These platforms have gained enormous power and they need to be reigned in by whatever means necessary or else countries like Australia will forever remain vassal states of whoever controls the platforms.

With US tariffs being imposed on Australia, the economy will go belly up if it cannot have its own independent media.

I'm starting to think that some of the narratives around censorship are a PsyOp to prevent the government from doing what must be done to protect the economy. Banning specific platforms is not the same as preventing people from posting what they want online. So long as the latter is maintained, it's fine. People can find new platforms. Ideally smaller platforms. The government of any country should be allowed to shut down any large corporation it wants if it does not align with the interests of the people who live there.

The only thing the government cannot do is block people's free speech online. A government can demolish a public square if it wants; sure people won't be able to go there to talk anymore, but people can still go talk elsewhere. We shouldn't conflate banning of platforms with censorship. It's not the same.

It's kind of ridiculous how these things have been bunched up together.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-31 11:35:39+00:00
> But at the same time, he was able to prove out a viable business in a matter of a few months with no engineering background and no technical capability.

Is that your takeaway? My takeaway is that he was able to prove that paying nothing for s/ware development is a viable strategy to outcompete businesses who pay for s/ware development.

I mean, by that measure, I can "prove" a viable market for ride-sharing that charges 50% of what Uber, et al charges. All I have to do is have the drivers drive for free.

> Now he's hiring a developer to shore it up.

I would bet good money that that is going to go badly too, unless his instructions to the developer is "Do whatever is necessary, including rewriting from scratch if that is necessary", and the reason I say this is because the vibe-coded apps I looked at were all very hard to follow.
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-31 11:36:03+00:00
> For example, knowing that Oracle will get approval to buy Tiktok early can change Oracle's stock price. That's insider info.

If a congress person gets that info from oracle or TikTok or someone with fiduciary duty to their shareholders that’s insider info (in the US) and that congress person is subject to existing insider trading laws.

If they get it as part of their duties in Congress it’s not insider info, the same way any other person without the fiduciary duty.

It may be an abuse of power and we may want to ban it, but it’s not insider trading.

It’s an important distinction because insider trading laws (in the US) are not predicated on open access to information, rather on not stealing from people you have a duty to. It’s not a fairness doctrine it’s property rights one.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-31 11:37:32+00:00
> A lot of couple do the math and end up in the same place, where working their ass off to earn more, just to pay more doesn't make sense.

I think if you're breaking even on daycare and salary then you're still coming out economically ahead to keep working.

Daycare costs stop once you enroll the kid into school. Typically salaries scale with years of experience so you're forfeiting ~7-9 years of salary growth by stopping work.

That said, there are non-economic reasons to raise your kids ...
by ncruces | 2025-07-31 11:37:52+00:00
A functional adult doesn't need to ever go to a strip club.

A functional adult in the 2020s needs to learn how to use Google and YouTube. It's actually part of the curriculum at school.

The school also uses Gmail, and Classroom, and teaches kids to use Docs, Slides and Sheets (rather than Office 365). I dunno how much money changes hands, but this benefits Google in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't offer the service.

The problem here is Google feeling the need to compete with TikTok, and then mixing it with their educational offerings.
by gruturo | 2025-07-31 11:38:38+00:00
> They were worried about suing and being sued. In the place and time, gas stations simply did not make money off gas. > They made money by selling coffee, which costs less than a cent, for five bucks.

True. That's no reason to "leave money on the table" as they may have seen it, and being substantially cheaper than the alternative, when they could have been barely cheaper and attracting the same amount of people.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-31 11:38:53+00:00
That one is fun, but it's part of a general trend of childish naming of US laws that is not a good sign for the health of the country making them. It's a Brown M&M for the country that you're focused on sound bite names for laws, not their content.

Years ago I ran into the fun hack introduced in Britain's laws during my lifetime. Modern laws provide short names for themselves, so an Act might say you can refer to this as the "1996 Goat Prevention Act" and even though it has an unwieldy long full name that shorter name works everywhere you need to name it, but some older laws don't do this, so that's annoying, and also if you've repealed the law you can't use a short name which no longer exists because the law itself was repealed and that's where the short name comes from.

So, they passed a law which said when you repeal a law which gives any law a short name, those short names still work anyway. Then they passed a law which just provides convenient short names for laws people often want to refer to but don't come with short names, then they repealed that second law. Done.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-31 11:39:26+00:00
Probably similar to how numerous maths PhDs I’ve worked with are terrible at shipping durable production code on time and on budget, or how many doctors are terrible at inserting IVs, or how an architect may likely be terrible at framing a house, or how some Grammy winning musicians can't read classical notation: your mental model for domains of expertise is probably wrong.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-07-31 11:40:32+00:00
My personal take about such questions has always been that the end user on their device can do whatever they want with the content published and sent to their device from a web server, may process it automatically in any way they wish and send their responses back to the web server. Any attempt to control this process means attempting to wiretap and control the user's endpoint device, and therefore should be prohibited.

Just my 2 cents, obviously lawmakers and jurisdiction may see these issues differently.

I suppose there will be a need for reliable human verification soon, though, and unfortunately I can't see any feasible technical solution that doesn't involve a hardware device. However, a purely legal solution might work well enough, too.
by danaris | 2025-07-31 11:40:51+00:00
> This just spreads the cost across all taxpayers, instead of just the people consuming the service.

Yes—and then we can (in theory—obviously not going to happen in the current political climate) shift the bulk of that cost onto the taxpayers who can most afford to subsidize it, and away from the people who are just getting by. Who are, not entirely coincidentally, also the people most likely to be in need of childcare services.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-31 11:41:01+00:00
> There's nothing that I can say that you aren't going to ignore

I ignore nothing. I'm just not convinced when people start claiming that there was a military coup attempt or that these judges did not engage in unconstitutional political censorship. I always explain why and leave myself open to refutation.

There's plenty you can say to me. I've incorporated quite a lot of information people have told me into my world view. For example, I learned about Trump and Musk's possible economic interests from a leftist publication that someone cited while arguing with me. That's a lot more interesting to me than tired worker's party talking points.

> therapy

I go to therapy every week. Not because of this though. My therapist's reaction to this matter was to tell me to focus on things I could directly control. Perfectly reasonable advice.

> The probability of you getting arrested because of comments on Hacker News are so low that I cannot see that thought as something different of delusion.

So we do agree that the chances are not zero.
by e40 | 2025-07-31 11:41:24+00:00
I agree, but I would add one very important thing:

If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.

I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.

Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.
by Atreiden | 2025-07-31 11:41:32+00:00
Some jobs place restriction on your ability to trade individual stocks - I discovered this when I went to work at an investment management firm. This was a policy applied to all people that worked there.

I see no reason not to do the same thing for Congress. The legal space is well-traveled and the fundamental concern - namely, the perverse incentives resulting from asymmetric access to valuable information - is present in Congress the esame way as in a sizable investment firm.

Index funds and mutual funds are often exempt or subject to less scrutiny, and that could be here too.
by wwweston | 2025-07-31 11:41:34+00:00
Adobe has been thinking about GenAI longer than you probably have (probably added because this is HN and you never know).

I got to talk to a product engineer about some of their work back in 2021, and he was describing generative (and even generative-editive) capabilities they had in hand that most associate with the last two years, they were just figuring out how to productize them, many of which they have.

I have my own complaints about Adobe products and choices but they are far from out of the game, and they’re probably going to be fine, especially if a lot of people make the mistake of thinking of them primarily as a dinosaur Figma competitor.
by chii | 2025-07-31 11:42:02+00:00
> As a website operator I don’t want a mob of bots draining my resources

so charge for access. If the value the site provides is high, surely these mobs will pay for it! It will also remove the mis-incentives of advertising driven revenues, which has been the ill of the internet (despite it being the primary revenue source).

And if a bot misbehaves by consuming inordinate amounts of resources, rate limiting them with increasing timeouts or limits.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-31 11:42:45+00:00
Yeah the mass ranges these primordial black holes would need to be mean that it cannot possibly be those little red dots. While the early universe magnifies things, the mass of those little red dots still needs to be close to a small galaxy worth of mass. Tens to hundreds of thousands of star masses absolute minimum. And that's just far, far, incredibly far to high.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-31 11:43:11+00:00
Previous / current behavior is nearly always exempted from legislation.

Same reason why salary increases for senators and etc affect the _next_ session instead of the current one.

Chances are the current administration is already running awfoul of existing laws (especially the part where TrumpCoin conferred actually benefits to its holders). But given the lack of appetite from the current majority parties at enforcing the law I don't expect any changes. Can't wait for anything besides FTTP to become more widespread.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-31 11:44:06+00:00
> On the contrary, he's solving a real business need for these small businesses at a fraction of the cost with a product that's easier to use and with better features.

He's doing the digital equivalent of drop-shipping. No one is making money at that anymore either, although people did well at first.

Drop-shipping software products isn't a long-term thing.

> Yet he's had no churn because there's so much value being delivered.

In a market that is tolerant enough of broken software that they won't churn after getting notice that it broke, it only takes another "ideas guy" to vibe-code a competitor product and take all the customers because they can charge less than he is charging[1].

[1] Because, as you said, he now has to retain a real dev to fix it, which costs money, which will have to come out of the customers., said customers being willing to switch to a cheaper replacement, which will be the vibe-coded low-cost competitor, which will eventually need a real developer, which will raise costs, which have to come from the customer, which ....
by poulpy123 | 2025-07-31 11:45:06+00:00
News and non-fiction articles are not math and cannot be treated as math. At best you could build a tool that check the most glaring contradictions (like a typo changing a number), and I'm not even sure it can be consistent without building a software that understand language. At worse you would build a tool that spit bullshit that millions of people would treat as gospel
by hughJuh | 2025-07-31 11:45:33+00:00
Anecdote: last week a random GPU cloud host contacts me with a huge deal on GPU rentals. Got my deets from a VC I pitched to.

After a minute I replies to point out nvidia sells out but a nobody cloud host has enough bandwidth to offer a nobody project steep discounts? Card supply isn't being saturated.

They suggest I am on to something and ought to trade on that info accordingly.

Nvidia is funding card buys to juice its own stock but the demand isn't there to justify it.

Just more corny finance schemes. No ideas coming out of people who are, really if you take a minute, haven't created anything. They picked up 1960s and 70s tech and polished it up, made it higher resolution. But the physics and fundamental manufacturing processes, know how are 60+ years old.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-31 11:46:03+00:00
> I still don't understand what a "tool" is

"A .NET tool is a special NuGet package that contains a console application. You can install a tool..."

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/global-t...

it's actually very similar to the node.js / NPM equivalent, which came first:

https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-packages-g...
by marcusb | 2025-07-31 11:46:12+00:00
Yes, it is a middle ground. The extreme positions here are "no equity ownership, directly or indirectly" and "no trading restrictions at all." Allowing index fund purchases is squarely in the middle of that continuum.

Additionally, your description of how people purchase and make money on indexes funds is incomplete at best. Really, it's just factually incorrect in that it presumes a certain purchase strategy. People do short-term, dopamine-inducing trades of index funds all the time.

But, I don't think elected representatives should be able to do that, either. At the very least, successful short term trading - directly or through an advisor, of an individual security or a fund - creates the appearance of impropriety.
by irjustin | 2025-07-31 11:46:17+00:00
real problems for people who need to verify identity/phone numbers. OTPs are notorious for scammers to war dial phone numbers abusing it for numbers existence.

We got hit from human verifiers manually war dailing us, this is with account creation, email verify and captcha. I can only imagine how much worse it'll be for us (and Twilio) to do these verifications.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-31 11:47:03+00:00
> Probably a similar amount that it would have taken him to hire someone from the start, except he’s already validated the product and market.

He hasn't validated the market at the price point that includes the cost of a developer to build the product. He's validated a market in which it costs him close to zero to deliver. He's not validated a market which costs (say) a few months of dev time.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-07-31 11:48:00+00:00
Architectural blueprints are very precise. What gets built is a more detailed form of what is in the blueprint.

That is not the case for the TLA+ spec and your 1MLOC Java Database. You hope with fingers crossed that you've implemented the design, but have you?

I can measure that a physical wall has the same dimensions as specified in the blueprint. How do I know my program follows the TLA+ spec?

I'm not being facetious, I think this is a huge issue. While Dafny might not be the answer we should strive to find a good way to do refinement.

And the thing is, we can do it for hardware! Software should actually be easier, not harder. But software is too much of a wild west.

That problem needs to be solved first.