MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by npoc | 2025-07-12 10:31:54+00:00
If anyone creates a different bitcoin version with double the number of bitcoins, that new network would be worthless.

Not only would no-one have confidence that the same thing wouldnt happen again, but the value of the bitcoin in this new version would be half that of the old system. No one who holds bitcoin (the people who count here) would agree to use the new version. It would be dead in the water.

Even if it did manage to gain traction (which it wouldn't), the people still using the old version would prevail due to their use of harder money, just as bitcoiners are prevailing over fiat-holders.

It's like trying to change the text of the bible - something of that order of difficulty but still much, much harder due to the enormous incentives to carry on using the previous harder version.
by 0x0203 | 2025-07-12 10:32:47+00:00
It's mostly bad actors, and a smattering of optimists who believe that despite its current problems, AI will eventually and inevitably get better. I also wish the whole thing would calm down and come back to reality, but I don't think it's a bubble that will pop. It will continue to get artificially puffed up for a while because too many businesses and people have invested too much for them to just quit (sunk cost falacy) and there's a big enough market in a certain class of writer/developer/etc... for which the short term benefits will justify the continued existence of the AI products for a while. My prediction is that as the long term benefits for honest users peter out, the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon. There will still be a big enough market driven by cons, ad tech and people trying to suck up as many ad dollars as possible, and other bad actors, that the tech will persist, and continue to infest the web/world for quite a while.

AI is the new crypto. Lots of promise and big ideas, lots of people with blind faith about what it will one day become, a lot of people gaming the system for quick gains at the expense of others. But it never actually becomes what it pretends/promises to be and is filled with people continuing the grift trying to make a buck off the next guy. AI just has better marketing and more corporate buy in than crypto. But neither are going anywhere.
by mcv | 2025-07-12 10:32:50+00:00
I'm not sure if I should be pleased or embarrassed about my 17/28. Why do I even know this?

My son was pretty happy with his 11/28 without any experience with js Date. Just deduced it from previous answers. And I explained type coercion to him.

I now realize I may have put him off a career in IT.
by al_borland | 2025-07-12 10:34:15+00:00
My company’s CIO was pushing AI hard for a while. Annoyingly, he was pushing it while we still got regular emails from the security/legal teams saying we weren’t allowed to use it yet.

We now have access, but that CIO is also gone and we don’t hear about it much anymore. We still have the tools, and a general AI (for use outside of code) is coming, but the blind hype seems to be gone.

Maybe your leadership will shift, or come back to reality in time.

Personally, I think it’s a red flag when leaders jump on hype trains that hard. They’re so desperately trying to avoid missing the boat that they ignore common sense and risk. Not good.
by pydry | 2025-07-12 10:35:09+00:00
>You’re again not considering electrification of current loads that burn fossil fuels

You're not considering cost.

>Unfortunately, a lot of these loads are closer to 24/7

The exact opposite is true. Heating, cooling and car charging are just 3 examples of current loads that burn fossil fuels which are already being demand shifted on an electric grid.

>The IEA net zero scenario assumes 100TWh of storage

Did you assume it was all going to be achieved with batteries? This is a common fallacy perpetuated by nuclear industry propaganda.

350GWh are being built in australia right now with zero batteries, and studies show there is plenty of geography suitable to build plenty more of that around the world.

Power2gas+solar+wind is still cheaper than nuclear power even though it's quite expensive.

>but having some clean, always-on generation greatly reduces the amount of storage and overprovisioned production of other types needed

and there is zero point if the cost is stupidly high (which it is) and we have the imagination to look beyond just batteries as a means of storing power.

Nuclear industry propaganda is alas not capable of such.
by renonce | 2025-07-12 10:35:36+00:00
My experience is that experts are not separated in any intuitive way. I would be very interested (and surprised) if someone manages to prune a majority of experts in a way that preserves model capabilities in a specific domain but not others.

See https://github.com/peteryuqin/Kimi-K2-Mini, a project that keeps a small portion of experts and layers and keep the model capabilities across multiple domains.
by sofixa | 2025-07-12 10:36:05+00:00
You continue with the false equivalences trying to smudge reality. And assuming that if I recognise facts, it's because I belong to the tribe that currently recognises those facts too.

> The reason you're emotionally disregulated by russian propaganda is because it threatens your identity-based committment to one group.

No, it's because it lies to advance the imperialist ambitions of a dictator committing war crimes. Seriously, what is wrong with you? Have you no morality to recognise how wrong that is, and therefore assume people against it would be doing so out of moral reasons?

> No one is claiming that russians do not commit war crimes, or release propaganda -- that happens on both sides

Again with trying to both sides things. Russia is committing systemic war crimes and genocide, and flooding everything, including by paying varying people in the US and Europe to spread their propaganda. This is all proven facts. You cannot compare this to what Ukraine is doing, unless you have some sources that back you up?

> Isnt that you think there are "sides" alarming

You're the one who started by both sidesing things. And yes, there are sides - Russia doing the invading and war crimes, Ukraine defending its existence. Anyone should be able to tell them apart.
by anal_reactor | 2025-07-12 10:36:21+00:00
Personally, I have three use cases for AI:

1. Image upscaling. I am decorating my house and AI allowed me to get huge prints from tiny shitty pictures. It's not perfect, but it works.

2. Conversational partner. It's a different question whether it's a good or a bad thing, but I can spend hours talking to Claude about things in general. He's expensive though.

3. Learning basics of something. I'm trying to install LED strips and ChatGPT taught me basics of how that's supposed to work. Also, ChatGPT suggested me what plants might survive in my living room and how to take care of them (we'll see if that works though).

And this is just my personal use case, I'm sure there are more. My point is, you're wrong.

> All the while less perceptive people like yourself apparently don't even seem to realize just how bad the quality of information you're consuming has become, so you cheer it on while labeling us stubborn, resistant to change, or even luddites.

Literally same shit my parents would say while I was cross-checking multiple websites for information and they were watching the only TV channel that our antenna would pick up.
by salawat | 2025-07-12 10:38:03+00:00
History is written by the victors, and the fight never ends. Yesterday's Lost Cause remains just that until current affairs once more brings forth the need for a rebirth of old ideas. Big fan of cannabis legalization? Hop on the State's Rights bus. Don't think that one size fits all? Welcome to the State's Rights bus. Don't think that just because a psychopath is sitting in the highest Federal office, that the rest of the U.S. is obligated to help him? Welcome to the State's Rights bus. Don't think the Feds should be able to universally obliterate women's sovereignty to their own body? Hopefully welcome to the State's Rights bus until such time as we can get something back in play on the Federal level.

It's a disservice to associate a fundamental characteristic of our structure of government with one particularly egregiously unpopular use of it, or to wholesale dismiss it because it tends to be associated with things a lot of people find unpopular. That's rather the point. Arizona or New Mexico can tell off Nevada, who can tell off Utah, or Maryland that how they (Utah/Maryland) do things doesn't fly here.

If you've never been a State hopper, it doesn't quite click, but once you've traveled the U.S. and lived in several different regions for long enough periods of time, it clicks. Not all States are the same, and that's okay.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-07-12 10:38:41+00:00
> and after a certain amount of time, swinging in the opposite direction

As a Brit, I’m not so sure.

The US have elected Trump, not once but twice. It’s basically incomprehensible why you’d have all looked at the results of the first time around (hey, we understand a protest vote, cough Brexit cough), and then said “yes please, we want more of that.”

So although we deplore the decision of who runs the country, it’s not so much Trump that is the problem, it’s what Americans (as a group) stand for that’s become apparent as the real problem, at least as far as voting illustrates. Hate, greed, lack of empathy, the pursuit of money-über-alles, corruption, the erosion of the rule of law. Fascism, essentially.

The question becomes: “why on earth would we want to ally ourselves with that ?” Even the French (I’m a Brit, I get to insult the French as much as they get to insult us - it works both ways until the chips are down and then solidarity ensues) are looking pretty good in comparison…

I’m not entirely convinced there is a way back for the USA, that is Trump’s legacy. The UK used to be sufficiently powerful that it existed in ‘splendid isolation’. The world is a different place today, and I think the US is indeed headed for a more isolated position in it. My gut feeling is that it’s not going to be terribly ‘splendid’ though.

I put my money where my mouth is. I lived in the US for >20 years, and I left the country (ironically on July 4th) because I don’t like the direction it’s going.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-12 10:39:10+00:00
>1) we will live with the reduced usefulness of models trained on data that has been poisoned

This is the entirety of human history, humans create this data, we sink ourselves into it. It's wishful thinking that it would change.

> 2) the best model developers will continue to work hard to curate good data.

Im not sure that this matters much.

Leave these problems in place and you end up with an untrustworthy system, one where skill and diligence become differentiators... Step back from the hope of AI and you get amazing ML tooling that can 10x the most proficient operators.

> supervised tweaks (fine tuning, etc) are now major expenses for the best models. His prediction was that this expense will drive out the smaller players in the next few years.

This kills more refined AI. It is the same problem that killed "expert systems" where the cost of maintaining them and keeping them current was higher than the value they created.
Show HN: I made a game which forces me to workout (do a chin-up, save a cat)
by getToTheChopin | 2025-07-12 10:40:39+00:00
I'm creating a fitness game on the web, where you do exercises to save pets

Here's a live demo (camera access required): https://www.funwithcomputervision.com/chinup/

I've added push-up mode as well, and you can choose whether you want to rescue cats or dogs :)

Tech stack: mediapipe computer vision (body pose tracking model), threejs, tonejs

I'm actively working on this, so please let me know your feedback / other exercises you want added!
by firecall | 2025-07-12 10:44:01+00:00
Unless I’m understanding it wrong, the Tab Completion in Cursor isn’t a moat anymore.

VSCode & CoPilot now offer it.

Is it as good? Maybe not.

But they are really working hard over there at Copilot and seem to be catching up.

I get an Edu license for Copilot, so just ditched Cursor!
by wood_spirit | 2025-07-12 10:44:05+00:00
> Conversational partner

This is the ai holy grail. When tech companies can get users to think of the ai as a friend ( -> best friend -> only friend -> lover ) and be loyal to it it will make the monetisation possibilities of the ad fuelled outrage engagement of the past 10 years look silly.

Scary that that is the endgame for “social” media.
by raphman | 2025-07-12 10:44:15+00:00
Not really. Landing gear switches are above the throttle between the screens¹, fuel cutoff switches are below it².

¹) https://youtu.be/RbmFmWqqq0c?t=19

²) https://youtu.be/33hG9-BCJVQ?t=5

(I'm not an expert, I just watched these videos)
by discodonkey | 2025-07-12 10:44:20+00:00
I don't understand how you can portray these small-business owners as some helpless lambs, powerless against tourists. I can think of many ways to stop tourists from patronising an establishment. But of course (that one cocktail bar owner notwithstanding), most businesses operate for profit, and lap that money up.

Really, it seems to me like this essay is more about turning up your nose that some people are not enjoying Japan the "right" way.
by woodpanel | 2025-07-12 10:44:52+00:00
> Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything

You write this like this is a bad thing.

I just came to a conference to learn some cool new tech, but instead got lectured about my transphobia, that my database is systemic discrimination and my HDD being named „slave“ means I burn crosses in my free time, even though I have zero family relations to anything America.

I mean this screams fun right from the get go.
by nosianu | 2025-07-12 10:46:28+00:00
> if not in the middle of a densely populated city, especially if above a plain or water

What is on the ground below does not matter at that point - how far above that ground you are is what is important. More altitude is more time.

This flight was less than 200 meters up in the air. Sully's flight that you probably remember, that made a successful emergency landing on the river, was about 860 meters high, giving them much more time - about 3.5 minutes of glide time, vs. 32 seconds in the air, total, for the Air India flight.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-12 10:49:01+00:00
From a lawyer, 'tell me something actionable' would mean 'cross the line and say something upon which I can sue you', so I sympathise with anyone finding it unsettling.

In context it's more likely a translation issue, perhaps from modern translation picking up a challenging tone and inadvertently turning it to 'challenged by a lawyer or cop' mode to maintain the tone.
by 0points | 2025-07-12 10:49:17+00:00
> Bad Actors are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

Thats your claim, but you fail to support it.

I would argue the LLM simply does its job, no reasoning involved.

> But here’s the thing, current models “know” that Pravda is a disinformation ring, and they “know” what LLM grooming is (see below) but can’t put two and two together.

This has to stop!

We need journalists who understand the topic to write about LLM's, not magic thinkers who insist that the latest AI sales speak is grounded in truth.

I am fed up wit this crap! Seriously, snap out of it and come back to the rest of us here in reality.

There's no reasoning AI, there's no AGI.

There's nothing but salespeople straight up lying to you.
by Grimblewald | 2025-07-12 10:49:52+00:00
related stuff has, the core part being that if your model reproduces parts or all of a licensed work, it needs to comply with the license / copyright. Otherwise why aren't pirates just making 'models' that generate protected material, or music, and completely bypass all laws?

I know because I wanted to, as a form of protest/performance art, train a model to a few Disney movies and publicly distribute, but legal advice was this would put me directly into hot water not just because of who im pissing off (which i knew and was comfortable with) but also the fact there was precedent (i.e. news papers suing LLM providers).

It would be an open and shut case that would leave me in financial ruin.

The reason openAI hasn't been struck with this yet is, who has the time? and there isn't much to learn from all that either. Most open source tooling out competes openAI's offering as is, so the community wouldn't really win beyond punishing someone.
by ionwake | 2025-07-12 10:50:35+00:00
i worked in many companies but I always remember one , where during a public chat in the middle of an open office the programmer next to me (who was always conniving but I just ignored it ), said incorrectly something akin to " yes I know all about that source control its... based on locking " , the whole point was that although locking technically occurs, the SC would allow different coders to work on it at the same time. The non technical manager said correctly, "no the whole point is that the codebase isnt locked", to which the programmer replied " yeah thats what I mean".

In that moment I realised he was just bare faced lying right infront of everyone, about a technical subject, only HE should be the expert in, and to this day I am perplexed why his contract kept being renewed.

Eventually I was let go ( he possibly suggested I be let go ) for an incident that was unrelated to me.

This is all fine, but i learnt 5 years on he was still being paid a top 1% salary at the same company.

I promise the point isnt that I am jealous, its that this guy, who was a sub par coder and liar, somehow managed to keep his job whilst everyone else lost theirs and earnt untold amount in England ( where salaries are always low).

My goodness - I just remembered he was found by police driving a vehicle seemingly under the influence on a motorway, work found out after the police called them, and somehow he turned up the next day at work , lied about it, and STILL kept his job.

I am only mentioning this guy , because he was NOT a nepotist hire, he was just some guy who would lie and somehow people were ok with it. I still think of him often and wish I could have learnt more from his abilities just out of interest.
by promiseofbeans | 2025-07-12 10:50:50+00:00
The 2nd artwork ('A Door Somewhere " - Bert Monrov) had me really confused for a moment. When I scrolled down to it, there was a sort of flickering effect, like as if it were a gif, with a flickering light adding ambience to the scene.

But no, it's just how that sort of black & white shading looks when you scroll past it - amazing effect!
by jon_smark | 2025-07-12 10:51:32+00:00
Sorry to nitpick, but for a good Bayesian, absence if evidence is evidence of absence. If you want the aphorism to be technically correct, you should say "absence of proof is not proof of absence".

A note on the terminology: "evidence" is a piece of data that suggests a conclusion, while not being conclusive by itself. Whereas "proof" is a piece of data that is conclusive by itself.
ML researchers, let's solve hardware engineering
by MRiabov | 2025-07-12 10:52:19+00:00
Hello HN, I'm talking to ML researchers here, There is a pretty challenging yet unexplored problem in ML yet - hardware engineering.

So far, everything goes against us solving this problem - pretrain data is basically inexistent (no abundance like in NLP/computer vision), there are fundamental gaps in research in the area - e.g. there is no way to encode engineering-level physics information into neural nets (no specialty VAEs/transformers oriented for it), simulating engineering solutions was very expensive up until recently (there are 2024 GPU-run simulators which run 100-1000x faster than anything before them), and on top of it it’s a domain-knowledge heavy ML task.

I’ve fell in love with the problem a few months ago, and I do believe that now is the time to solve this problem. The data scarcity problem is solvable via RL - there were recent advancements in RL that make it stable on smaller training data (see SimbaV2/BROnet), engineering-level simulation can be done via PINOs (Physics Informed Neural Operators - like physics-informed NNs, but 10-100x faster and more accurate), and 3d detection/segmentation/generation models are becoming nearly perfect. And that’s really all we need. I am looking to gather a team of 4-10 people that would solve this problem.

The reason hardware engineering is so important is that if we reliably engineer hardware, we get to scale up our manufacturing, where it becomes much cheaper and we improve on all physical needs of the humanity - more energy generation, physical goods, automotive, housing - everything that uses mass manufacturing to work.

Again, I am looking for a team that would solve this problem: 1. I am an embodied AI researcher myself, mostly in RL and coming from some MechE background. 2. One or two computer vision people, 3. High-performance compute engineer for i.e. RL environments, 4. Any AI researchers who want to contribute.

There is also a market opportunity that can be explored too, so count that in if you wish. It will take a few months to a year to come up with a prototype. I did my research, although that’s basically an empty field yet, and we’ll need to work together to hack together all the inputs. I have also a created RL environment that could be used for training (currently closed-source).

Let us lay the foundation for a technology/create a product that would could benefit millions of people!

Comment if you want to join/mail me to maksymriabov2004@gmail.com. Everybody is welcome if you have at least published a paper in some of the aforementioned areas.
by Someone | 2025-07-12 10:54:23+00:00
> I was recently wondering if it would be possible to detect and deny pointer cycles in a language in an efficient way

In general, I think that cannot be done, but if one restricts what programs can do, solutions exist.

A simple way to do it is by requiring all references “pointing out of” an object to be set the moment the object is created, and be immutable afterwards (that’s what Lisp cons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons) does. Without setf or similar, lisp code cannot create cycles)

That disallows quite a ome code that modifies structures without introducing cycles, but still allows for quite some code to work.

One could also store an ‘age’ field with each object and check, when a reference is updated in an object, that it points to an object that is older than the one being modified. That gives some more leeway, at the price of using more (a lot more, in code using small objects) memory.

Another idea is to add a bit to each object “there are no cycles containing this object”, and have the runtime clear that when it no longer can guarantee that (edit: unfortunately, maintaining that invariant can be very costly. Whenever code does foo.field = bar, with both foo and bar known to be not part of a cycle, you still have to do a search through all objects reachable from bar to check whether a cycle was created and, if so, clear that bit in all objects in the cycle(s). That makes this idea impractical)

If, as I suspect happens in programming languages which are “mostly immutable”, there are many objects for which that flag stays set, that can significantly speed up checking for the creation of cycles.
by andrewingram | 2025-07-12 10:54:58+00:00
I agree it has a good chance of catching up, but the difference in quality is pretty noticeable today. I'd much rather stick with vscode, because I hate all the subtle ways Cursor changes the UI; like taking over the keyboard shortcut for clearing the scrollback in the terminal. But I find it's pretty hard to use Copilot's tab completion after using Cursor for a while.
by adastra22 | 2025-07-12 10:55:00+00:00
They’re idle most of the time. Poweted on 24/7 though, and maybe a few hundred megabytes written every day, plus a few dozen gigabytes now and then. Mostly long-term storage. SMART has too much noise; I wait for zfs to kick it out of the pool before changing. With triple redundancy, never got close to data loss.

To be clear, I should have said replacing 2-3 disks per year.