MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strangecasts | 2025-07-18 08:24:56+00:00
There are FHE schemes which effectively allow putting together arbitrary logical circuits, so you can make larger algorithms FHE by turning them into FHE circuits -- Jeremy Kun's 2024 overview [1] has a good summary

[1] https://www.jeremykun.com/2024/05/04/fhe-overview/ - discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262626
by sjw987 | 2025-07-18 08:25:17+00:00
Are you kidding? Most products and services on the market are tat. They serve no real purpose (regardless of whether they happen to have customers). It would be easier to list the few things which actually do have value.

If you go into a supermarket, there's only a fraction of aisles that are devoted to food worth eating (unprocessed or lightly processed, providing nutritional value). The rest is 100s of types of unnecessary and mostly destructive junk food and alcohol. If you walk into any shopping district or center, only a handful of businesses are ever selling anything with real value and purpose. The rest is superficial and if it were removed from the high street or never existed in the first place, nobody would miss it. The digital market is at least a little less destructive environmentally, but is still crowded with mostly pointless apps and software.

People always bring up supply and demand, but that doesn't negate the argument that these products are unnecessary, unsustainable and destructive. Add to that, they are often predatory and prey (or the marketing preys) on peoples weaknesses and insecurities.

For every one of these companies selling fast fashion clothes that fall apart after a handful of uses, shoes too impractical for daily use or sportswear, expensive hygiene products which hinge mostly on the way they are displayed in the store, and a million variations of CRUD apps for tracking water consumption and a myriad of other things you could just record in a note, whole teams of people are working away in jobs to produce, market and provide these unnecessary things. They're all polluting the environment (either through industrial production, energy use etc.) and peoples minds (for example, Instagram has been highly damaging to young girls self-esteem and similar services are causing unprecedented mental decline in their userbases), and unsustainable, because 9 times out of 10 all of these products and services are flashes in the pan that will be dead or out of trend (increasingly fast these days).

The only justification a lot of this stuff has is that it gives people employment and their livelihoods. Sometimes that element forces people to be okay with abetting something they fundamentally don't like. One of the largest employers in my local city is Sky Bet (a gambling company). Every single person (hundreds of employees) that works there is propping up a "service" which destroys peoples lives.
by fsloth | 2025-07-18 08:25:52+00:00
I agree with you both. I feel LLM kills both procrastination AND capability for original thought.

But! There are some problems that are intrinsically interesting to me and others that are boring as hell but need to be solved.

In 20 years of work I’ve not come up with any way to make those boring tasks psychologically _not_ so disagreeable they are close to painfull.

But now the LLM can do whatever crap it does for those and I _finally_ can focus just on the interesting bits.

So, a boring task - off to the LLM you go - interesting - it’s mine, all mine!
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-07-18 08:25:56+00:00
I am sorry you experience this disease. I have a question: You said "they do not change the nuclear DNA, they just insert copies of working genes into the cell ... The results aren’t carried through to new cells during division."

Isn't this a bit contradictory? I mean, if they insert copies of working genes into the cell, it is in nuclear DNA, so when the cells divide, the daughter cells carry the new gene?

I can imagine other cases, for example, progenitor cells were not infected, cells that do not divide, etc...

Thanks for any answer
by swiftcoder | 2025-07-18 08:26:01+00:00
> But writing an internal implementation basically puts you in the worst-case scenario by default - you have to maintain the code yourself, and it's probably less maintainable than an external codebase

This very much depends on the type of dependency we are talking about. if it's externally-facing, sure, you'll have to maintain a suitable security posture and keep up with spec/requirement changes coming in from the outside world.

If it's an internal-facing dependency, it's reasonably likely that you never have to touch it again once the problem is solved. When I worked at Amazon we had internal libraries that hadn't really changed in the past decade, because they were designed to operate inside controlled environments that insulated them from the changing world outside.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-18 08:26:02+00:00
Five different issues. They don't (yet) collaborate. However, Claude Code does let the model farm out subtasks to "sub agents" which is basically just forking the chat history in order to manage context explosion. Claude often does this to find things in the codebase - it effectively instructs a sub-instance of itself to work out where something is, the sub-conversation terminates with an answer and the main context window only contains the answer. It can also do this in parallel.

So, it's kinda both. Terragon works on separate tasks in parallel, Claude Code farms out subtasks and sometimes also in parallel.
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-18 08:26:18+00:00
I remember an /r/AskReddit thread years ago about 'What's your favourite free smartphone app?' (or something along those lines) and the comment that most stuck in my mind was from an iPhone user lamenting how many interesting and novel things were only available on Android, because publishing for iOS was simply too hard.

This isn't to say that the Google Play Store is intrinsically better than Apple's App Store; Google is equally guilty of this what's the cheapest thing we can pass off as due diligence? nonsense. However, it is a good reminder that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, and is only getting worse.

I think the idea of the smartphone as a general-purpose computing machine is dead, and that instead phones are now the designated Muggle-safe Internet consumption platform. Apart from media streaming, ordinary people aren't using computing machinery for anything they weren't using it for twenty years ago, so I think they won't feel any loss from the stagnation of mobile apps.

The lessons for HN readers are: a) app stores exist within their platform's moat; and b) don't build your business inside someone else's moat.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-18 08:27:17+00:00
You completely missed the point of the post. It isn't about what phone they own. It's about what phone all the users own.

which is the same for the EU's Digital Markets Act. It's not the Smartphone Owner's Act. It's a law for letting business reach customers without having Apple in the middle. Apple (nor Google) can be allowed to have control over such a large market of customers betwen them and nearly every business.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-18 08:27:29+00:00
Don't do that. Quality of all models tanks in non-English unfortunately. It's fine for chat and translation tasks but their cognitive capacities does reduce a lot.

One of the next features I'm expecting wrappers to add on top is auto-translation. In many work contexts it makes more sense to translate what the user said to English, process that and translate the answer back than ask the model to speak the language natively.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-18 08:28:18+00:00
I would argue that 2 is the much more important reason. A dependency is worth it if it saves you a lot of time building the same thing. For example, if you wanted to ship a general computing device, you should probably run Linux on it rather than building your own OS from scratch, because you'll save literal years of work. Even if Linux had stopped being maintained, this would still be the right call compared to building your own (of course, it would be even better to choose some other OS still being actively maintained, if any is available).
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-18 08:28:49+00:00
No, lots of people are in that situation. Either due to IP or cost concerns. $200/month/developer is a non-trivial expensive for most companies, given that they aren't easily able to monitor developer productivity, and as people keep observing it's not clear that the $200/month price point is sustainable given how easy it is to ramp up usage what would cost $2000/month on the API.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-18 08:30:45+00:00
Good. Advertising is valuable and important. It's how people learn about new products and services. Articles like this are part of why I come to HN. And I wanted something like Terragon for ages. It's an obvious idea, clearly where the industry needs to go, and if it's well implemented then I'd be happy to use it. OpenAI has been trying the same thing with Codex.

Of course, the question is price. It's "free during beta".
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-18 08:33:11+00:00
You don't have to use the special hardware, it's just faster and easier if you do. And you the customized hardware deal pre-dates the cloud: you can buy the pre-built racks and have them wheeled into a self-hosted datacenter if you want. That's called ExaData.

But if you want to run the DB on your own VMs or bare metal, you can do that. It doesn't have any DRM so from time to time you'll be expected to run some scripts that check your usage and reports back, to ensure you've been paying for what you use. But otherwise it's operationally no different to an open source DB.

The open source aspect makes a difference in terms of who you pay for support (if anyone), what quality of support you get, things like that.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-18 08:33:19+00:00
> Tough for me to speak about embedded in general, but many companies are on vendor toolchains or paid compilers by choice, and it is the right choice to make given the tradeoffs involved.

That's true in general. With paid licenses and especially subscriptions, you're not just getting the service, you're also entering a relationship with the provider.

For companies, that often matters more than the service itself - especially when support is part of this relationship. That's one of many reasons companies like subscriptions.

For individuals, that sucks. They don't need or want another relationship with some random party, that they now need to keep track of. The relationship has so much power imbalance that it doesn't benefit the individual at all - in fact, for most businesses, such customer is nothing more than a row in an analytics database - or less, if GDPR applies.
by dkga | 2025-07-18 08:33:48+00:00
That‘s very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Incidentally and veering off topic, I find it extremely annoying that to open both pictures I need to click numerous times to avoid receiving unwanted cookies (even if some are „legitimate“, implying others are not). A further nuisance is from the fact that multiple websites have the same cookies vendor pop-up, suggesting there is a „cookies-as-a-service“ vendor of some sort.
by notarobot123 | 2025-07-18 08:34:14+00:00
> at least they are not as much a single point of failure

Yes, network effects and hyper scale produce perverse incentives. It sucks that Wikipedia can be gamed. Saying that, you'd need to be actively colluding with other contributors to maintain control.

Imagining that AI is somehow more neutral or resistant to influence is incredibly naive. Isn't it obvious that they can be "aligned" to favor the interests of whoever trains them?
by chaz6 | 2025-07-18 08:34:48+00:00
I use Fedora and have it enabled. Every time there is a kernel update I have to run a script to re-compile and sign the vmware drivers. I could probably figure out how to do it with dkms at some point. Every now and then, there's a kernel change big enough to make the vmware drivers stop working so I have to get a new patch.
by ls612 | 2025-07-18 08:38:14+00:00
PhD Economist here (but not a game theorist): Game Theory is really fucking hard. In many ways the choice of what is studied by theorists and how it is framed is dominated by what we can even make tractable with our current knowledge. Very few people do full time game theory research, most of us only suffer through one or two courses on game theory and mechanism design in first or second year.
by ktallett | 2025-07-18 08:38:20+00:00
Tech only spreads when the average user can get use with their average interactions. Having to tailor prompts to be so specific is a flaw. Even then it is at times absolutely useless. AI to be genuinely useful needs to accept when it doesn't know and state as such rather than creating waffle. Just as in life, I don't know is far more intelligent sometimes, than just making something up.
by bananapub | 2025-07-18 08:40:10+00:00
do you feel it's a good faith argument for management to make at the same time as they're trying to get personal approval from Trump to sell the company[0], and shortly after they just paid him a massive personal bribe[1], and one day after the person who is having their show cancelled, said this on said show [2]?

I really did not expect that the credulity of Americans would be one of their downfalls.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_merger_of_Skydance_Me...

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

2: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jul/15/late-night-r...
by jjcob | 2025-07-18 08:42:08+00:00
I think we disagree on what we consider bland. I consider people reposting right wing memes on facebook extremely bland. People who blame all the problems on "the foreigners" are so common that I just don't care to listen to them.

If thats what you want to read about in the media, good for you, because that's what social media (and traditional media) provide plenty of.

I just wish that people who accomplish exceptional things would focus on those exceptional things instead of using their enormous publicity to stir controversy by sharing bland right wing talking points.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-18 08:43:31+00:00
The teacher is likely to spend a higher proportion of the money given to them on consumption than the law partner who paid for it.

This is the positive intention of UBI, but I cannot understand how people think “some people are so low paid that they don’t save or invest while others are able to accumulate large nest eggs” doesn’t imply that it we shift money from the latter to the former that we won’t see an increase in the consumption that will exceed the increase in production.
by specproc | 2025-07-18 08:45:12+00:00
I wouldn't underestimate the anxiety it's causing.

Most of my social circle are non-technicial. A lot of people have had a difficult time with work recently, for various reasons.

The global economic climate feels very precarious, politics is ugly, people feel powerless and afraid. AI tends to come up in the "state of the world" conversation.

It's destroying friends' decade old businesses in translation, copywriting and editing. It's completely upturned a lot of other jobs, I know a lot of teachers and academics, for example.

Corporate enthusiasm for AI is seen for what it actually is, a chance to cut head count.

I'm into AI, I get value out of it, but decision makers need to read the room a bit better. The vibe in 2025 is angry and scared.
by michaelt | 2025-07-18 08:45:51+00:00
I would rate the experience as 6.5/10

If you use a major distro like Ubuntu, you might find Secure Boot works out-of-the-box, with no need to dick about with 'machine owner keys' and suchlike.

Ubuntu has packages like "linux-modules-nvidia-550-generic" containing a version of nvidia's 550 drivers signed with canonical's keys. If the stars align and that package gets installed, you'll have nvidia drivers that work under secure boot.

They also have a second mechanism. You can set up a 'machine owner key' (MOK) then software updates will trigger automatically building new nvidia kernel modules, using 'dkms' then sign them with the MOK allowing them to work under secure boot.

The problem is this process can be a bit wonky. The MOK setup process involves rebooting and going through the "MOK Manager", an interface that looks like something from the 1980s. If you didn't know to expect it, or what it's there for, or you don't speak English, it's easy to hit the wrong thing and not set up your MOK. And it only shows up for a single boot, unless you know an arcane terminal command.

And if you run into any problems during the setup process - you're going to be researching the fix on your phone, because your PC isn't booting.

Meanwhile, the third option of just turning off secure boot is easy (assuming you know what the BIOS is) and it works every time. So a lot of 'how to set up nvidia drivers' guides just recommend doing that.

Although I complain about it, I find it impressive things like dynamically compiling and signing kernel modules works as well as it does - especially as so much of it is maintained by volunteers, selflessly giving up their free time when they could have simply turned off secure boot in their BIOS too.
by oldenlessons | 2025-07-18 08:46:07+00:00
What you are talking about here is accidental vs essential complexity as described by Brooks in the 80s.

Your claim that LLMs do away entirely with accidental complexity and manage essential complexity for you is not supported by reality. Adding these tools to workflows adds a tonne of accidental complexity, and they still cannot shield you from all the essential complexity because they are often wrong.

There have been endless noise made over semantics but the plain fact is that LLMs render output that is incongruent with reality very often. And now we are trying to remedy it with what amounts to expert systems.

There is no silver bullet. You have to painstakingly get rid of accidental complexity and tackle essential complexity in order to build complex and useful systems.

I don't understand what's so abhorrent about it that people invent layers and layers of accidental complexity trying to avoid facing simple facts. We need to understand computers and domains with high accuracy to build any useful software and that's how it's always been and how it's always gonna be.

There is no silver bullet.
by yonatan8070 | 2025-07-18 08:46:12+00:00
In order to get anything from a USB-C power supply, a device needs to have 5.1kΩ resistors from the CC1 and CC2 pins of the USB-C port to ground. Devices that cheap out on these two resistors (which cost well under a cent each) will not get any power from the power supply.
by close04 | 2025-07-18 08:46:41+00:00
It would be great if used as an "emergency power source". I see this equivalent to the satellite SOS systems - not useful for daily use but essential in emergencies. You know you can get brief emergency function every x hours.

But for the question asked higher in the thread, it would never be comparable to a "real" battery. This would be a very special purpose battery.
by dzonga | 2025-07-18 08:47:10+00:00
till present day, I haven't found a justified reason of why people use typescript on the backend.

C# - gives you similar syntax with a better ecosystem + tools. if it's just types you love Java, Kotlin, Golang the same. Better languages better tools, better ecosystems.

typescript on the backend shows people have more money than sense.

maybe after all i'm lost on the incentives.
by mynti | 2025-07-18 08:47:30+00:00
> Grok-4 significantly underperformed compared to expectations. Many of its initial responses were extremely short, often consisting only of a final answer without explanation.

this is very weird. given how verbose most models usually are, there must have been something wrong in the system prompt.

also: grok used 89996 input tokens compared to 591624 for o3 high. What kind of tokenizer are they using that compresses the input so much? I suppose all inputs are actually the same, since the math problem + instructions are the same. only difference is the tokenizer or the system prompt. but i suppose it would not make up the difference. is o3 using 500k more tokens for their system prompt?
by skeletal88 | 2025-07-18 08:49:44+00:00
This is it. I don't want to use some kind of AI search in fb messenger, I want to find someone to send them a message. I don't need AI search in google, I don't need it in gmail. What I need is search that actually works, there is no need to replace existing search functionality with "AI".

It is shoved everywhere but nobody really needs it.
by sandworm101 | 2025-07-18 08:49:51+00:00
Until the next windows update changes everything. I had my parent ran Linux for 15+ years because, unlike windows/Mac, the user interface didn't change every other year. Some 'simple' users prioritize stability over ready access to geek squad.

(If you have dementia, even a changed wallpaper can be a big deal. Popups with "new feature" or rando security notices are not helpful.)
by dr_dshiv | 2025-07-18 08:49:53+00:00
I guess it’s the sort of thing that encourages secrecy even into the far past — from both the takers and those from which it was taken from. How to know mining yields and extrapolate past mining?

https://chatgpt.com/share/687a0a4c-6bd4-8007-bec8-2683ef49df...

But after some research, I’m convinced. We mine a lot more gold today than in the ancient past. Not much more gold left to mine, though — at current rates, we are done in 20 some years! I find that also hard to believe, but so it goes.
by oldenlessons | 2025-07-18 08:50:04+00:00
Nothing has served me better over the past few decades than accumulating ever more detailed and accurate knowledge of what it is exactly that computers do under the hood.

All the layers of abstraction are well intended and often useful. But they by no means eliminate the need to understand in detail the hard facts underlying computer engineering if you want to build performant and reliable software.

You can trade that off at different rates for different circumstances but the notion that you can do away entirely with the need to know these details has never been true.

More people being enabled to think less about these details necessitates more expertise to exist to support them, never less.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-18 08:51:51+00:00
All your DNA markers show that you have no markers for any adverse genetic conditions and can therefore have lower insurance rates if one of the worst case scenarios occurs (them selling data to health insurers).

I did the 23andme thing years ago (foolishly or not, I found it interesting), and everything on there at the time and when I checked recently said I had no markers for anything. They are very pro-active in reminding you all over the app/website and for each condition they track that they only track a few markers so the results are obviously not really that predictive of anything, and that practicing a healthy lifestyle (whatever your genetic markers) is the most important thing to do.
by fer | 2025-07-18 08:52:18+00:00
Since the last big movements of the front that's absolutely been the case, though you're right it doesn't apply if you account for the early captures. Once you remove them (Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk), that's very easily verifiable.

Avdiivka had 30-32k pre-war population, estimated 40-47k Russian casualties. Bakhmut had 71k pre-war, Russia suffered an estimated 75k casualties from Wagner alone. Pokrovsk 61k pre-war, ongoing, 21k estimated casualties in January alone, and it's been ongoing for a year.

And beyond cities, the daily casualty rates at most obtain tiny settlements of a few dozen pre-war inhabitants. In the worst case you have the North Kharkiv front with 10s of thousands of casualties and basically a stalemate.

>It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.

"One thing is debatable so everything is debatable", I didn't expect this level on HN.