MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-07-31 20:08:39+00:00
Yeah, I understood why she wouldn't tell me, but I couldn't help myself from asking. I'm also glad she didn't tell me, as that was one of my big fears with the testing, that I wouldn't be able to trust it due to my own skewing of the results. When I first thought this might be my issue, I went deep down the rabbit hole, but once I scheduled testing I purposefully stopped reading and watching content about it, because I wanted to make sure I was answering for myself and not related to stuff I watched/saw.

This may be why I haven't done much since the diagnosis. It was initially all I wanted to do, but once several months passed while waiting, my interests shifted to other things, and going back to that topic has a lot less novelty to it, so I already did the early deep dive.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-31 20:08:50+00:00
> By a "superintelligence" we mean an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.

To me, that's a really good definition. "Much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field". It's going to be hard to weasel around that.

> Once artificial intelligence reaches human level, there will be a positive feedback loop that will give the development a further boost. AIs would help constructing better AIs, which in turn would help building better AIs, and so forth.

This depends a great deal on what the shape of the processor-power-vs-better-algorithm curve is. If the AI can get you 1% better algorithms, and that gets you an AI that can in turn get you 0.5% better algorithms, and so on, then yes, you're still getting "a further boost", but it won't matter much.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-31 20:09:09+00:00
http://dslreports.com/

You'd have to poke around in the forums. I'm not sure what the best keywords to search with would be. The gist of it is only AT&T ONTs can connect, because it's using certificate fuckery, but there was a guy buying those up for $1 or $5 or something on ebay, jtag-ing the certs off of those, and selling them for $10 each. There were instructions for how to program the sfp module to use those, and when I got mine those modules were only about $50 each (no idea what they're now with the tariff nonsense). You'd need a router that can accept those, I've got a Mikrotik. I think Ubiquiti has a prosumer router with one too that's not too crazy.

At the time (3 years ago-ish), no one had figured out a way to do it with AT&T 5gig service. But for that you'd need something with SFP+ slots, and those are seriously pricey.
by YmiYugy | 2025-07-31 20:09:25+00:00
In the update videos posted on the Ladybird YouTube channel it's said that they have exhausted most of the low hanging fruit in terms of correctness. Browsers and the web standard have a very long tail of odd behavior that you need to implement. I could be wrong, but if I had to guess they'll stall at a point where it's just good enough that some people will make it work, but it's not really useful for general use.
by dvrp | 2025-07-31 20:10:04+00:00
OMG. Thank you! I had to setup a CDN-level redirect and I was so confused as to why when I asked others to help, their submissions were flagged as [dupe] or [dead]

Thank you so much! I knew that HN software was advanced, but I didn’t know you guys used Canonical URLs like Google does. Smart and thanks for helping us with this slip!!!
by BlandDuck | 2025-07-31 20:10:06+00:00
I judge technical explanations of audio gear by their description of balanced signals. A common error is to focus on the positive and negative signals having opposite polarity, which is entirely irrelevant for canceling out interference (it may improve headroom, but what is actually important for eliminating common mode noise is to have identical impedance with respect to ground).

I would say this text fails this test, which gives me pause. The description is: "The two conductors carry the same signal, but with reverse polarity (meaning that one conductor carries a signal that is the mirror image of the other). If external noise and interference enters the cable, it will probably affect both conductors equally."
by verelo | 2025-07-31 20:10:10+00:00
Oh man i love this take. It's how I've been selling what I do when I speak with a specific segment of my audience: "My goal isn't to make the best realtors better, it's to make the worst realtors acceptable".

And my client is often the brokerage, they just want their agents to produce commissions so they make a cut. They know their top producers probably wont get much from what I offer, but we all see that their worst performers could easily double their business.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-31 20:10:26+00:00
Super enjoyed this read today. And a much shorter punchline. https://www.volts.wtf/p/us-transit-costs-and-how-to-tame https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lvbpy6p2zk2c

It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
by Bukhmanizer | 2025-07-31 20:10:51+00:00
This reminded me of an old comic or meme about people’s expectations about science that went like:

Protester: What do we want??

Crowd: High quality, double blinded, N of 100000, 20 year longitudinal, preregistered studies!!

Protester: When do we want it??

Crowd: Now!!!
by LinuxAmbulance | 2025-07-31 20:11:02+00:00
Ah, the optimism of 1997.

The article is super focused on the hardware side of things, and to a point, that makes sense. Your hardware has to be able to handle what you're simulating.

But it's not the hardware that's the difficult problem. We're nowhere close to hitting the limits of scaling hardware capability, and every time people declare that we are, they're proven wrong in just a few years, and sometimes even in just a few months.

It's the software. And we're so far away from being able to construct anything that could think like a human being that the beginning of it isn't even in sight.

LLMs are fantastic, but they're not a path to building something more intelligent than a human being, "Superintelligence". I would have a negative amount of surprise if LLMs are an evolutionary dead end as far as building superintelligence goes.

Is modeling neuron interactions the only way to achieve it? No idea. But even doing that for the number of neurons in a human brain is currently in fantasy land and most likely will be for at least a few decades, if not longer.

If I had to characterize the current state of things, we're like Leonardo Da Vinci and his aerial screw. We know what a helicopter could be and have ideas about how it could work, but the supporting things required to make it happen are a long, long way off.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-31 20:11:54+00:00
Sortition. If no one can vote, then there can't be any of the chicanery that comes from that. Political parties couldn't exist, because a party can't help someone get elected. We no longer have the problem of the only people in office being those who wanted to be in office enough to go to the trouble. No need for term limits (people are unlikely to win office twice, let alone more often).

And yet it preserves everything you like about democracy.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-31 20:12:25+00:00
> But instead we hold these works of art captive for no reason, other than a few multi-billion-dollar conglomerates want to keep milking art for money again and again.

In many cases, the conglomerates aren't even making money from them. How much do you think the movie company (and all the various middlemen) are making from some obscure movie from the 80s that they don't even make available on DVD or streaming anywhere? They're just griefing the public by withholding it and not even making any money.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-31 20:12:25+00:00
I've not used it for long enough yet for this to be a strong opinion, but so far I'd say that it is indeed a bit better than Claude Code, as per the results on Terminal Bench[0]. And on a side note, I quite like the fact that I can type shell commands and chat commands interchangeably into the same input and it just knows whether to run it or respond to it (accidentally forgetting the leading exclamation mark has been a recurring mistake for me in Claude Code).

[0] https://www.tbench.ai/
by mikepurvis | 2025-07-31 20:12:28+00:00
Dang, 45? I mean, I assume that's C++, Go, Python, Java, and JavaScript/TypeScript. And languages for build scripts, plus stuff like md and rst. And some shells. Probably embedded languages like lua, sql, graphql, and maybe some shading languages. Fortran and some assembly languages, a forth or two for low level bringup or firmware. Dart of course.

But all of those is still less than 30. What am I missing?
by wczerniak | 2025-07-31 20:12:34+00:00
I'm finishing Flatcal https://flatcal.com a service that merges icalendar streams from various sources into one. It's weird that we can create multiple calendars to better organize scheduling and then to share availability we have to send each one as a separate link. It helps with more than that but sharing multiple calendars as one is the main goal atm.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-31 20:12:45+00:00
I guess the difference is zig doesn’t even properly type check a function if you didn’t use it. Whereas rust relies on the linker to remove machine code after that code went through the entire compiler pipeline.

Zig not even type checking some code when compiling felt a bit off but now I just try to make sure all code is at least being smoke tested, so I don’t get random compilation errors down the line
by throwawayoldie | 2025-07-31 20:13:11+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

> In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum and imitating a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.
by int_19h | 2025-07-31 20:13:48+00:00
When you prevent distribution of information, that is censorship by definition. You can argue that censorship in this case is socially beneficial, but don't muddy the waters as to what it it is.

At the same time, laws like these require creation of infrastructure that is goal-agnostic. Once you have ISPs implement mandatory blocking of websites for copyright reasons, this system can, and eventually will, be used to block other things deemed undesirable for the plebs to access.

Given the current presidential administration especially, any Democrat participating in such a project should be tarred and feathered.
by alganet | 2025-07-31 20:14:06+00:00
Chess implies a game. Conversations that are games already exist. It makes your idea dumb. Dumb ideas deserve no space.

Conversations that are not games are rare. That's an idea worth pursuing.

---

I'm not afraid of games. I can play them if it is the only thing available. In fact, I can play the most terrifying role (for gamers): the role of ending the game and opening up space for reality.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-07-31 20:14:46+00:00
I only understand the frustration with finding any legal avenue at all to see certain films. I don't really understand why disparate services are a big deal. You don't need to subscribe to multiple things all at once, and it's all done in a few clicks in the convenience of your own home.

I'm concerned and curious about one thing, which is that tech giants have a monopoly on renting. If you want to rent a digital movie that isn't otherwise available from subscription, you might be able to get it from MSFT, Google or Amazon. Meanwhile the telecoms only seem to offer this through cable machines, just new releases at that.

I'm interested in seeing a few Korean films, the kind that aren't on criterion or mubi. Basically no legal way to see them.
by cropher | 2025-07-31 20:14:46+00:00
Really liked this article.

I wonder: the graphs treat learning with and without AI as two different paths. But obviously people can switch between learning methods or abandon one of them.

Then again, I wonder how many people go from learning about a topic using LLMs to then leaving them behind to continue the old school way. I think the early spoils of LLM usage could poison your motivation to engage with the topic on your own later on.
by fine_tune | 2025-07-31 20:15:29+00:00
Yes and no, for human search - its kinda neat, you might find some duplicates, or some nearby neighbour bugs that help you solve a whole class of issues.

But the cool kids? They'd do something worse;

They'd define some complicated agentic setup that cloned your code base into containers firewalled off from the world, give prompts like;

Your expert software dev in MY_FAVE_LANG, here's a bug description 'LONG BUG DESCRIPTION' explore the code and write a solution. Here's some tools (read_file, write_file, ETC)

You'd then spawn as many of these as you can, per task, and have them all generate pull requests for the tasks. Review them with an LLM, then manually and accept PR's you wanted. Now your in the ultra money.

You'd use RAG to guide an untuned LLM on your code base for styles and how to write code. You'd write docs like "how to write an API, how to write a DB migration, ETC" and give that as tool to the agents writing the code.

With time and effort, you can write agents to be specific to your code base through fine tuning, but who's got that kind of money?
by another_twist | 2025-07-31 20:16:48+00:00
I have a question - bottleneck for TCP is said to the handshake. But that can be solved by reusing connections and/or multiplexing. The current implementation is 3-4x slower than the Linux impl and performance gap is expected to close.

If speed is touted as the advantage for QUIC and it is in fact slower, why bother with this protocol ? The author of the PR itself attributes some of the speed issues to the protocol design. Are there other problems in TCP that need fixing ?
by seanwilson | 2025-07-31 20:16:57+00:00
> Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side

Hmm, can you explain more about why the Apple APIs were important for this? Isn't the screen rendering for UI design content modest compared to what cross platform 3D games at the time had to render?
by precompute | 2025-07-31 20:17:57+00:00
I'd argue that AI reduces the distance between the floor and the ceiling, only both the floor and ceiling move -- the floor moves up, the ceiling downwards. Just using AI makes the floor move up, while over-reliance on it (a very personal metric) pushes the ceiling downwards.

Unlike the telephone (telephones excited a certain class of people into believing that world-wide enlightenment was on their doorstep), LLMs don't just reduce reliance on visual tells and mannerisms, they reduce reliance on thinking itself. And that's a very dangerous slope to go down on. What will happen to the next generation when their parents supply substandard socially-computed results of their mental work (aka language)? Culture will decay and societal norms will veer towards anti-civilizational trends. And that's exactly what we're witnessing these days. The things that were commonplace are now rare and sometimes mythic.

Everyone has the same number of hours and days and years. Some people master some difficult, arcane field while others while it away in front of the television. LLMs make it easier for the television-watchers to experience "entertainment nirvana" while enticing the smart, hard-workers to give up their toil and engage "just a little" rest, which due to the insidious nature of AI-based entertainment, meshes more readily with their more receptive minds.
by thebruce87m | 2025-07-31 20:17:58+00:00
A UPS is not a solution for all power outages, just ones short enough to last the UPS uptime. The brains of the system is supposed to be the Cloud Key anyway which has its own built in “UPS” and seems to shut down gracefully if you kill power.

The cameras and viewports should not be writing data at all after an initial configuration if designed properly and killing power should present no problems to any system with a read-only filesystem. As someone who designs systems like these it absolutely baffles me.
by samsartor | 2025-07-31 20:18:50+00:00
This also tracks with my experience. Of course, technical progress never looks smooth through the steep part of the s-curve, more a sequence of jagged stair-steps (each their own little s-curve in miniature). We might only be at the top of a stair. But my feeling is that we're exhausting the form-factor of LLMs. If something new and impressive comes along it'll be shaped different and fill a different niche.
by dang | 2025-07-31 20:19:01+00:00
Related. Others?

Carbon is not a programming language (sort of) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42983733 - Feb 2025 (97 comments)

Ask HN: How is the Carbon language going? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40480446 - May 2024 (1 comment)

Will Carbon Replace C++? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34957215 - Feb 2023 (321 comments)

Carbon Programming Language from Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250267 - July 2022 (1 comment)

Google Launches Carbon, an Experimental Replacement for C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223270 - July 2022 (232 comments)

Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32151609 - July 2022 (504 comments)

Carbon: high level programming language that compiles to plain C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676789 - Oct 2012 (39 comments)
Show HN: I built simple free app to collect user feedback and build what matters
by averadev | 2025-07-31 20:19:03+00:00
Hi HN,

If you're building a product — whether it's a SaaS, app, or startup — you know how crucial it is to listen to your users and build what they actually need. But feedback often ends up scattered in emails, chats, or lost in your memory.

That’s why I built Fidbaq: a simple (and free) app that helps you collect, organize, and prioritize user feedback — all in one place.

- Users submit ideas, bug reports, or suggestions - Others vote so you know what matters most - You build with confidence, based on real demand

Try it here: https://www.fidbaq.xyz

Would love to hear your feedback or ideas to improve it.

— Agustín
by trklausss | 2025-07-31 20:19:22+00:00
I'm skeptical, not because it can't be achieved, but because it's not that practical.

Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate. You can have it there for years, and with good design, it just springs up the next day.

This nuclear reactor has to be connected for fleet monitoring if you want to operate it. Which excludes it from many real life scenarios where diesel generators are used.

Maybe for remote locations where constant power is needed (Antarctica and such), but I see their uses being very limited.
by serial_dev | 2025-07-31 20:19:25+00:00
I learn about different subjects mixing traditional resources and AI.

I can watch a video about the subject, when I want to go deeper, I go to LLMs, throw a bunch of questions at it, because thanks to the videos I now know what to ask. Then the AI responses tell me what I need to understand deeper, so I pick a book that addresses those subjects. Then as I read the book and I don’t understand something, or I have some questions that I want the answer for immediately, I consult ChatGPT (or any other tool I want to try). At different points in the journey, I find something I could build myself to deepen my understanding. I google open source implementations, read them, ask LLMs again, I watch summary videos, and work my way through the problem.

LLMs serve as a “much better StackOverflow / Google”.
by cubefox | 2025-07-31 20:19:27+00:00
A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.

The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.

It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by all that come later.
by loremm | 2025-07-31 20:19:29+00:00
Keep in mind that default Gmail allows webhooks for any changes (email received but also changing labels, etc), for free using Gmail pubsub. I use it a lot because it's the only way of getting programmatic notifications from credit card purchases (turn on purchase alerts to all cards, send to Gmail, have a filter archive but capture the reception in webhooks. Parse with simple regex)

Super fast low latency very satisfying. Pubsub scales well and free :)
by DinoNuggies456 | 2025-07-31 20:20:17+00:00
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a small project called Drift Notes, an anonymous journaling and confession space where entries are sent into a shared “sea,” gently animated and filterable by tone or timestamp. The twist: everything is currently powered entirely by localStorage. There’s no backend, no database, no user accounts, and no external API calls. Every note is stored in your browser, and the interface is designed to feel like you’re writing something that disappears into the world but without revealing anything about you. The goal was to explore how far you could push the feeling of connectedness using only client-side logic. I built a lightweight parser to tag entries by mood and time, and I use timestamps and note metadata to simulate a public flow. There’s also a simple scheduler, notes can be written now but set to appear later, which I implemented with a filter on Date.now() vs the releaseAt field in localStorage. The UI is minimal and focused on atmosphere: soft sea animation, bottle-like fading transitions, and note interactions that avoid anything resembling traditional social feedback loops. There are no likes or comments, just drift. The Limitation: Since everything runs locally, each user only sees their own sea. There’s no shared ocean, no actual public pool of confessions. For what it is now, that makes sense but I want to expand this into a truly global experience where thousands of anonymous notes can coexist and update in real-time, or at least asynchronously across sessions. That’s where I’m stuck. I’m actively looking for advice on how to transition from this fully local model into a secure, lightweight backend that doesn’t compromise the core values of the app: anonymity, simplicity, and no logins. I’m open to ideas whether it’s a basic serverless setup, a P2P sync layer, or even a write-only API that obfuscates inputs. If you’ve built something like this, or have thoughts on privacy-respecting architectures, I’d really love to hear from you. Until then, Drift Notes is live in its local form, and you’re welcome to send a thought into your own private sea. Try it here: https://dino-nuggies45.github.io/Drift-Notes/