MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-21 17:34:49+00:00
Terrence Tao, in a recent podcast, said that he's very interested in "working along side these tools". He sees the best use in the near future as "explorers of human set vision" in a way. (i.e. set some ideas/parameters and let the LLMs explore and do parallel search / proof / etc)

Your comparison with chess engines is pretty spot-on, that's how the best of the best chess players do prep nowadays. Gone are the multi person expert teams that analysed positions and offered advice. They now have analysts that use supercomputers to search through bajillions of positions and extract the best ideas, and distill them to their players.
by lumpa | 2025-07-21 17:35:08+00:00
"There's a huge evil magnet that will tear you apart if you have any metal on you" sounds much easier to grasp and less likely to lose the listener's attention. Then, when you have them listening: "It can grab you from outside the room and hurl you into the machine where the evil magnet lives! Any metal, be it coins, necklaces, pins in your bones, belt buckles, bra wiring, dog tags. Anything can be the end of you, be damn sure you don't have any metal on you."

Oh, wait, you still want them willing to go near the machine? That complicates things a bit ;)
by bwanab | 2025-07-21 17:35:10+00:00
> So which is it?

It can easily be both statements are true. And a quick look at Zillow's data on Phoenix shows a huge run up in prices from 2015, but a leveling and interesting looking drop happening over the past year. The article certainly could have described this with a bit more elegance than it did.

The logic of the article is that people want more housing up to the point in which existing owners become terrified at the prospect of losing their equity and demand action. The logic is bizarre because the behavior its trying to describe is bizarre. Economy's are extremely complicated feedback loops and housing is part of the economy.
by cma | 2025-07-21 17:35:21+00:00
I think maybe all Altman companies have used tactics like this.

> We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.

> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.

> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract.

> I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944
by i_am_proteus | 2025-07-21 17:35:43+00:00
>The fact that W7-X results are on a par with JET is remarkable because JET had three times the plasma volume of Wendelstein 7-X.

What's important here is that W 7-X is a stellarator, a different type of fusion reactor from almost all prior reactors (they are tokamaks), with a smaller volume than the co-record holder.

That a stellarator gets these results with a much smaller fusion volume is promising for the performance of future larger stellarators, since fusion reactors typically become more efficient as they get larger.
by sofixa | 2025-07-21 17:35:53+00:00
> Base load is a myth; as long as you can orchestrate low carbon energy (nuclear + renewables + hydro), storage (hydro and batteries), transmission, and load shifting and shedding, the grid will continue to operate at expected service levels. Europe demonstrates this today with high renewables penetration in Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Germany, and nuclear in France (with robust exports to adjacent grids).

As long as you keep the gas peaker plants operating for those few months every couple of years with overcast, low wind weather (e.g. in 2021: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w... ) which severely limits a lot of the renewable output.

Or you don't have an unpredicted peak/drop and the whole grid fails over (cf. Iberia a few months back).

Handwaving very complex problems as "it's a myth" won't make it go away.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 17:36:01+00:00
Does it matter as much though? 100k EUR at age 30 would set me for life, too, but I do not care if it is "just" for them. Many people got it better than me. If you would like to help me out, I would appreciate that a lot. I have BuyMeaCoffee account. Even as "small" (relative, because it is a LOT to me) as 300-500 EUR would make an enormous difference in my life (and some people around me, such as my grandma). I have MS, I am 30 years old, and I am unable to work. I would love to get a fully remote job, but I had severe anxiety and depression long before MS gave me brain lesions, so the situation is much worse now, and I have incontinence and immobility issues on top of all this. Plus I have a severe case of impostor syndrome, among a lot of other things I wish I didn't have.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-21 17:37:49+00:00
As someone who greatly supports solar power and the rights of homeowners to install solar, I think your link is total bullshit and calling it a "solar tax" is disingenuous by people that want something for free

The fundamental problem with net metering is that it is obviously unsustainable and unfair. People who are hooked up to the grid benefit from more than just the energy they consume, but the hookup costs and maintenance of the grid is a real cost that power companies need to pay for. Perhaps even more obviously, any company that is in a retail business can only survive if they buy a product at a (cheaper) wholesale rate and sell it at a (more expensive) retail rate. Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable.

As a homeowner, of course I would love net metering, because I'd be getting a sweet deal. But it's not hard for me to see how this can't continue as solar power installations increase. Austin, TX, was one of the first locales to use "value of solar" pricing, and yeah, while it sucks for the homeowner, it is also fairer and more sustainable. I'm also not saying this is the only way to do things (e.g. you could have a monthly connection fee and a separate monthly power charge), but this "solar rights" group is just spinning bullshit because their sweet deal is about to come to an end.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-21 17:38:00+00:00
> Handwaving very complex problems as "it's a myth" won't make it go away.

Having evidence that the problem is tractable, while observing the continued rate of deployment of generation and storage, as well as their cost decline rates, is arguably not handwaving anything away. Simply follow along observing China as they continue to prove out the thesis ahead of developed countries.

Enough sunlight falls on Earth in ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Everything else is capture, transmission, and storage.

China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million ($63.8 million) and occupying 34,000 square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")

How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo - May 20th, 2025
by jeffbax | 2025-07-21 17:38:16+00:00
I would have bought the 13 mini except at the time the 13 Pro's 3x camera, 120hz and better battery was notable.

Now I kind of dread what will be available when it's time to finally upgrade this year. Am sure they could make a new mini that didn't seem as compromised, but now they think the size is non-viable.

Bring back when small was not a synonym for cheaper.
by Loughla | 2025-07-21 17:39:16+00:00
No one said uninhabitable except you.

OP said that in terms of weather, California is almost ideal for renewables and self-driving cars. California is very, very, very sunny and mild.

Many places in the United States are not that for a good portion of the year. That was the point. Not that it's uninhabitable, but that these results may not translate to other areas.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-21 17:40:10+00:00
The camera is a lot bigger than just the visible lens part, plus there are other sensors too:

https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/5JIdAqwLsxWAFAyZ

Apple isn't doing off-the-shelf. This already is as seamless as you get for the moment. They're not putting the notch in for fun.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-07-21 17:40:14+00:00
It's also not too dissimilar from Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah - which together are a much larger part of the US - and not too far from being able to ship power not too expensively to even more areas.

Florida and Colorado are not much farther below California in total solar radiation per year per sq meter, either.

Ditto for even Idaho and Oklahoma.
by ars | 2025-07-21 17:40:48+00:00
> What we are learning is that "non hospital" medical facilities suck.

That's really not true, just because you have one bad example does not mean they all are. In general the non-hospital facilities just do one thing, and they do it very very well.

> I can tell you that I don't trust you as a doctor unless you are physically located in a hospital, preferably the larger the better.

That's terrible!! Really. Putting the doctor in a hospital makes him a hospital employee usually, you are asking for the end of private practice for Doctors, you are asking for the end of personal relationships with doctors.
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-21 17:41:05+00:00
But under the current global monetary system, buildings increase in monetary value as they physically depreciate. If they are maintained or improved, their value only increases more.

> Nobody ever tells their town to uglify the neighborhood.

Young people move out of towns until they are more or less ghost towns. During this entire process, real estate keeps increasing in value, although demand is steadily and predictably vanishing.
by tinuviel | 2025-07-21 17:41:18+00:00
So many sweeping generalizations, broad strokes and racist undertones in your comment. If you’ve led a middle class life in india, you’ll know most people don't dream of gaining power and sweet corruption money. They dream of honest work and pulling themselves out of poverty and being successful. The country has been wildly successful at this and has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty through economic liberalization and reforms, and has taken great strides in eliminating corruption through technology. Read about their mammoth push to get everyone a bank account and direct benefit transfers.

The people you allude to be dreaming of a cushy govt job that allows them to be corrupt is a tiny tiny % of their 1.3B population.
by kqr | 2025-07-21 17:41:28+00:00
I wouldn't knowingly start large projects in it, but I use it all the time for projects that can be done in a few days, or at most weeks.

I learned it when I became a manager and no longer had time for real programming but still needed to automate stuff. I stepped down to become a real programmer again but I'm ever grateful for learning Perl. It's incredibly productive.
by modeless | 2025-07-21 17:41:30+00:00
> AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof required experts to first translate problems from natural language into domain-specific languages, such as Lean, and vice-versa for the proofs. It also took two to three days of computation. This year, our advanced Gemini model operated end-to-end in natural language, producing rigorous mathematical proofs directly from the official problem descriptions

So, the problem wasn't translated to Lean first. But did the model use Lean, or internet search, or a calculator or Python or any other tool during its internal thinking process? OpenAI said theirs didn't, and I'm not sure if this is exactly the same claim. More clarity on this point would be nice.

I would also love to know the rough order of magnitude of the amount of computation used by both systems, measured in dollars. Being able to do it at all is of course impressive, but not useful yet if the price is outrageous. In the absence of disclosure I'm going to assume the price is, in fact, outrageous.

Edit: "No tool use, no internet access" confirmed: https://x.com/FredZhang0/status/1947364744412758305
by jmb99 | 2025-07-21 17:42:11+00:00
Hardware cost & weight, fine. Glass doesn't need to be thicker than it currently is (I can press on my 13 Pro's screen about twice as hard as was needed for 3D Touch's max depth, and no issues with the screen), and the last time I replaced a battery on a 12, the screen was just as thick as the XS.

>Turns out nobody was really using it because discoverability sucked..

Sure, but then redesign the UI after removing 3D Touch to not be equally undiscoverable but less precise. Even on the latest iOS beta with its full redesign, there's still many, many actions that require a long press that are completely undiscoverable. (For example, if you don't have the Shazam app installed, go find the list of songs Siri has recognized when asked "What's this song?" Don't look up the answer.)
by cryptonector | 2025-07-21 17:42:54+00:00
I'm arguing that sometimes you don't need ACID, or rather, sometimes you accept that ACID is too painful so you accept not having ACID, but no one ever really doesn't want a QL -- they only think that they don't want a QL until they learn better.

I.e., NoACID does not imply NoQueryLanguage, and you can always have a QL, so you should always get a QL, and you should always use a QL.

> Unless they're building for single-host scale, you're not going to get JOINs for free.

If by 'free' you mean not having to code them, then that's wrong. You can always have or implement a QL.

If by 'free' you mean 'performant', then yes, you might have to denormalize your data so that JOINs vanish, though at the cost of write amplification. But so what, that's true whether you use a QL or not -- it's true in SQL RDBMSes too.
by adrianwaj | 2025-07-21 17:43:11+00:00
Developers who charge by business value rather than time could charge $15k for customizing a PHP CMS in a few hours and preparing it for the client. The client thinks they built everything by hand and they're grateful because their customers "ring in" about it.

Most blockchains are public, static in their blocks and ever-present. People say it's a solution looking for a problem: well there's a massive problem it solves. Using it as a decentralized library of intelligence and innovation, and like a forest, there's that ever-present reach for sunlight - ie human attention and whoever gets it, gets rewarded. Like with a forest and life. As someone else said it's just a permissionless P2P network but it can be applied differently.

See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44603344

Imagine if the Library of Alexandria used one, it'd still be standing today, right, in cyberspace?
by scotty79 | 2025-07-21 17:43:39+00:00
Some of the critique is valid but some of it sounds like, "but the rules of the contest are that participants must use less than x joules of energy obtained from cellular respiration and have a singular consciousness"

I don't think anybody thinks AI was competing fair and within the rules that apply to humans. But if the humans were competing on the terms that AI solved those problems on, near-unlimited access to energy, raw compute and data, still very few humans could solve those problems within a reasonable timeframe. It would take me probably months or years to educate myself sufficiently to even have a chance.
by nudgeOrnurture | 2025-07-21 17:43:47+00:00
one state supplying the rest is not what you want, especially if there are chances that something will disturb that states grid.

I remember the uni day discussions about Africa supplying the rest of the world with solar energy and that the material requirements for such an infrastructure should become a thing around 2025 - 2035 ... then someone explained climate change and hinted at the exponential function ...

back to topic: you'd have to maintain an "inert" backup, which isn't portfolio-communist-economically "viable". or you share the load "as much as necessary", which would still become an issue if any of the suppliers have a fallout ...
by gs17 | 2025-07-21 17:44:10+00:00
But it still doesn't apply here. At most they could cross-reference it with a public Steam profile that has the game listed as owned after the purchase (actually, I doubt they would have the account ID to prove it for sure, but with enough purchases they could likely figure it out), but by then you've already sort of revealed to the world you bought whatever embarrassing title yourself.
by fundad | 2025-07-21 17:44:26+00:00
I did something similar. I knew anything on my accounts was already in the palantir dataset used by DHS. I wanted to at least remove presence local on my phone, I didn't bring a computer abroad with me.

I went through my history and deleted twitter, x and bluesky (I didn't and still don't read them via their apps). Probably should have deleted any mastadon links that I viewed in case any were not loyal enough.

I deleted stored passwords for all social media. Deleting SMS was tedious, if you donate, they sell you number to every campaign that is considered the "enemy of the people" by the establishment. The best I could do was search for "campaign" and "Trump" and delete the SMS messages out of the Messages app.

Of course my luck was better than I expected. All I did at immigration was point out one of my kids was really tired (he was quite sick on the plane-ride home). The CBP agent said something about "I'll get you out of here soon" and that was true without a single question.

I suppose my toddler makes me look like less of a risk to national security than when I would return from solo overseas travel. I'm not going to get too comfortable though.
by bluGill | 2025-07-21 17:44:36+00:00
Percentages don't work like this. It isn't a 3% change in rate, it is a doubling of the rate, and that will break the budget. You can find mortgage calculators to run whatever numbers you want, but it is hard to find any realistic scenario where it is less than $500/month, and for many over $1000/month. That amount of money will break any budget.

I expect home prices to go down long term if interest rates remain as they are. However home prices are a lagging indicator and so it will take years for the interest rate changes to cause that change. (and over those years other things will happen meaning we will never be able to figure out how much change is because of rates and how much because of other factors)
by tln | 2025-07-21 17:44:57+00:00
I'm rooting for them but $35/MCF is more like 10x current market price.

"Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price is at a current level of 3.21, down from 3.22 the previous market day and up from 2.17 one year ago." That's in $/MMBTU, divide by 1.038 to get $/MCF.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-21 17:45:20+00:00
I'm still amazed that the Adobe buyout of Macromedia didn't see the Flash tooling used to target Manifest + SVG + JS/ES4/ActionScript3 as an evolution from the Flash format preceding it given their efforts with SVG prior to the buyout. I was really hoping they would pivot to creating great tooling around a more open format. Silverlight (MS) also had a chance around this time.

In the end, that's just not what happened. I also feel there's no reason an offline web-app shouldn't be able to be packaged/zipped similarly, instead of just a caching mechanism around separate http(s) delivered files.
by northhnbesthn | 2025-07-21 17:45:52+00:00
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s violent and some pornography is good for most people. It’s not going to kill or murder or whatever people.

But what’s been happening lately with onlyfans and other things is a recipe for a disaster in my mind. We’ve made it hard for younger generations, made paths to success much less atrainable and instead have enabled black markets while the economy suffers because of it. I imagine we’re stuck with a deranged and broken society of people moonlighting to make ends meet by doing soft porno in far greater numbers than before. And yes of course that’s what strip clubs are for but that was way less of an issue than this.
by thrance | 2025-07-21 17:45:57+00:00
If the models that got a gold medal are anything like those used on ARC-AGI, then you can bet they wrote an insane amount of text trying to reason their ways through these problems. Like, several bookshelves worth of writings.

So funnily enough, "the AI wrote x times the library of Congress to get there" is good enough of a comparison.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-21 17:45:57+00:00
> Then where are the builders which do what they're asked to?

These are independent companies. Who do you think is supposed to be asking them to do something? When a customer asks, they do it. What more do you want?

> This doesn't mean there are no other business models which work in this case. Where they are?

They made less money than this model over the last decade or two. So they are nonexistent, not in the sense that they are impossible, but in the sense that nobody uses them.

Could companies start using them? Sure. But probably, first some homebuilders who use the current model have to go bankrupt. (A side benefit is that some already-built homes would go on the market at bankruptcy sale prices.)
by mekoka | 2025-07-21 17:46:36+00:00
The key difference between caching and memoization is not global shared state, it's determinism. That's why the latter mostly applies locally. In that sense, they're only semantically different. Data in a cache can be expected to go stale; it must not if you rely on the structure as a memoized equivalent to calling the function with the given inputs. In practice, you can have global cache whose data is deterministic and you can also have local cache that goes stale. The latter is not memoization.
by palata | 2025-07-21 17:46:47+00:00
I do understand how my "premature obsolescence" may sound exactly like "planned obsolescence".

It's just that in my mind, there is a difference between "I put efforts into making sure that it won't last longer than what I plan" and "I don't put efforts into making it last longer than what I plan".

- Actively making the product worse is an arsehole move. The way to prevent that is to make it illegal to do it.

- Not actively keeping it alive is actually rational if it is less profitable. We do agree that it is premature for a smartphone to be unusable after 2 weeks. We probably do agree that it is not reasonable to expect a smartphone to last for 10 000 years. So we need regulations that enforces something reasonable upon company. Then it becomes rational for the company to apply it, because if they don't they will get fines and it will be more costly.

I see the first one as "planned obsolescence". The second as "premature obsolescence". For the former, I think we should be extremely severe with companies (the CEO who clearly asks for that should go to prison, if it's at the scale of smarphones). But the latter comes from a lack of regulations.