MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshvm | 2025-07-31 19:26:43+00:00
Yeah Faster Payments is great, though it's relatively new in the scheme of banking and was explicitly designed to speed up small transfers (though now up to 1M I think?). My point was that the legacy system here is comparable to other countries. And until very recently a lot of companies still used BACS because that's how their payroll was set up.

I definitely miss it in other places I've worked.
by amluto | 2025-07-31 19:27:05+00:00
Eh, in my experience, if you disable the uplink monitor features aggressively enough (which is in a different place in different firmwares and currently seems to also require disabling all wireless uplink/“mesh” capability), then sometime more of the network will stay up. Maybe even the gateway will keep working too if you don’t touch any gateway settings. Of course, if the gateway does decide to reboot, you’re down for many minutes.

It’s real classy.
by tombert | 2025-07-31 19:27:28+00:00
In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture.

People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generations building upon previous generations work. It's never "done", always growing and refining and figuring out new things to look at.

I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's a bad idea, but it's worth a try.

One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took hundreds of years.

[1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not very fleshed out.
by calmbonsai | 2025-07-31 19:28:05+00:00
> In practice, this naive way of calculating this doesn’t even reflect reality, because odds are the average speed of a driver through Helsinki was around 30km/h anyways. Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster.

This is a wonderful explanation.

Though I've lived in Europe (Düsseldorf and London), my default sense of urban density is still American so it was hard to fathom such a low potential average speed. In London, I didn't bother with a car.
by pyman | 2025-07-31 19:28:36+00:00
I've seen some sites, like Amazon, calculate the probability of a user clicking a link and preload the page. This is called predictive preloading (similar to speculative fetching). It means they load or prepare certain pages or assets before you actually click, based on what you're most likely to do next.

What I like about this is that it's not a guess like the browser does, it's based on probability and real user behaviour. The downside is the implementation cost.

Just wondering if this is something you do too.
by zamalek | 2025-07-31 19:31:12+00:00
I'm guessing that the likes of daring fireballs ads wouldn't be blocked - they originate from the server hosting the website. Google ads and such would be blocked, because they don't originate on the site.

I can see the theory. First-party ads should (but very much could not) be more privacy friendly. Tracking the user becomes difficult because you need to convince people to add your tracking coda to their website without incentives like Ad payments. So you most likely have to tune ads to what is displayed on the page, ultimately making the page and the user's attention products (which is strictly superior to the entirety of the user being the only product).
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-31 19:31:40+00:00
Funny enough, searching "goomba fallacy" in wikipedia's search yields [association fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy) and it appears to be more accurate. (Also, what I assume to be semantic search hitting that article from that search is amusing and more than a little telling.)

The population fallacy is when one infers information about an individual from the group, which wasn't done here as there is no specific individual in question. The population fallacy is seeing that some demographic likes to do a thing more than other demographics and thinking therefore any given subject in that demographic likes to do that thing.
by zahlman | 2025-07-31 19:31:51+00:00
The article you cited is essentially an interview where a few people state personal opinions. It does not present any meaningful theory of harm and does not give any kind of evidence of societal trends. The opinions cited are entirely ignorant of what people generally have in mind when they use words like "crazy" — because activism of this stripe is based on the premise that such intent is irrelevant. I fundamentally and profoundly reject that premise. I have since at least 2007 when I can first recall being exposed to it, and I find it even less reasonable the more I hear it asserted.
by dml2135 | 2025-07-31 19:32:21+00:00
It's down from it's heyday for the mainstream, but for the dedicated few, it's better than ever before. Gone are the days of manually searching for a movie on tracker sites, downloading them, organizing your library and watching stuff on your laptop.

There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on your own personal streaming service on your TV a few minutes later.
by quesera | 2025-07-31 19:32:27+00:00
(Memory Access + Correlation Skills) is a decent proxy for several of the many kinds of human intelligence.

HDDs don't have correlation skills, but LLMs do. They're just not smart-human-level "good", yet.

I am not sure whether I believe AGI will happen. To be meaningful, it would have to be above the level of a smart human.

Building an army of disincorporated average-human-intelligence actors would be economically "productive" though. This is the future I see us trending toward today.

Most humans are not special. This is dystopian, of course. Not in the "machines raise humans for energy" sort of way, but probably no less socially destructive.
by 9rx | 2025-07-31 19:32:27+00:00
> Theres no reason for me to think it will appreciate any faster than inflation because demand is stagnant.

It has in the past. I looked at a $1M (~$1.5M in today's dollars) farm 20 years ago. Couldn't figure out how to make it work at the time, sadly. Frankly, it seemed like complete insanity when I got into the numbers. But, today it would sell for ~$6-8M. About the same gains as the stock market over the same period, granted, but it's way easier to convince someone to loan you money for land than it is to buy stocks.

There may be no reason to think that will continue to happen into the future, but many are willing to place that bet.
by markus_zhang | 2025-07-31 19:32:45+00:00
That's a pretty good thing. I'm glad you can still do it. Nowadays I'm very reluctant to jump into any new hobby that needs thinking and focus (e.g. STEM topics). I know I won't be able to stick to it, so it's better to just drop it instead of trying it out and disappointing myself later. I'm so scared to try out because I really hate failing myself again.

I know it might sound ridiculous but I never succeeded in any hobbies. Family and kid take away time from me so I feel even less likely to be successful in any hobbies. But why do I stick "Hobby" and "Success" together? I think that's because I have never been successful (by my own definition, whatever it is) in real life.
by fine_tune | 2025-07-31 19:32:48+00:00
RAG is taking a bunch of docs, chunking them it to text blocks of a certain length (how best todo this up for debate), creating a search API that takes query (like a google search) and compares it to the document chunks (very much how your describing). Take the returned chunks, ignore the score from vector search, feed those chunks into a re-ranker with the original query (this step is important vector search mostly sucks), filter those re-ranked for the top 1/2 results and then format a prompt like;

The user ask 'long query', we fetched some docs (see below), answer the query based on the docs (reference the docs if u feel like it)

Doc1.pdf - Chunk N Eat cheese

Doc2.pdf- Chunk Y Dont eat cheese

You then expose the search API as a "tool" for the LLM to call, slightly reformatting the prompt above into a multi turn convo, and suddenly you're in ze money.

But once your users are happy with those results they'll want something dumb like the latest football scores, then you need a web tool - and then it never ends.

To be fair though, its pretty powerful once you've got in place.
by rhelz | 2025-07-31 19:32:56+00:00
What is scary to me is that at his age, given the opportunity, I would have done the same thing. I was active in the Purdue Libertarians, a student group.

The moral calculus is very simple: taxation is theft, the ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how many people would die. The theft must stop.

Cf. with abortion: Abortion is murder, so it must stop. The ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how much suffering the banning of abortion would cause, abortion must stop.

What these have in common is a phenomenon which Orwell talked about in his "Principles of Newspeak" essay. If you make words like "theft" and "taxation" to be synonymous, or "abortion and murder" to be synonymous, you blur over the endless richness of meaning that English has. You destroy meaning which are useful in tracking features of reality--and you destroy meanings which could refute your position.

At the age of 23, I had completely bought into it. I would have cheerfully consigned those 14 million people to die. At 23, I knew exactly which lever to pull in trolley scenarios.

What is even more scary is this: would I ever even have been able to let myself realize I was wrong? Or would I have spent the rest of my life rationalizing? How, exactly, do you admit to yourself that you consigned more people to death than Goebbels? Would it even be possible to express any kind of empathy without feeling the weight of so much guilt that it would cause you to be so traumatized that you would never recover?
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-31 19:33:35+00:00
> The incentives actually suggest you should raise wages of current employees more than new ones. Current ones are more valuable.

You should only do this if you have to in order to have better business outcomes. It may be better for the business to not do this, because the current employees will stay even if you don't pay them more, until they don't. So we have to find out what that point they will leave is by not paying some of them more when we otherwise ought to or would otherwise.

> This implies that the footgun will inevitably fire. It also implies you can get out of the line of fire. But you can't get out of the way of a footgun. A footgun is something where you, the gun operator, shoot yourself in the foot.

These are Chekhov's footguns. As you mention in this comment, they do fire, and they will hit whoever is in front of them. They don't only fail when pointed at the feet of the operator. Your wording implies that they will go off in the original comment too. I can't be blamed for the shortcomings of your original metaphorical argument, which I responded to in good faith.

> > That's like trying to fix the damage from the footgun with a footgun.

This implies that the footgun going off is seemingly unavoidable, which leads folks to weird anti-footgun (damage) mitigations, even second footguns. I responded to this phrasing specifically. That's why I argue that the damage of footguns is probabilistic, in that iff footguns usually go off, then on a long enough timeline, they will hit someone somewhere, and you don't want that to be you, so you should jump ship before it seems like it's unavoidable. I don't see how that is a misreading of the concept or your words, because that is consistent with how a lot of job hoppers I know relate to their work and switching jobs. Even when they do their best, the footguns eventually go off on someone at job sites that allow the footguns to begin with, so it is fair to say that they will go off, but it's uncertain who management will blame or find fault with, so they need not "go off on" the person holding the footgun or even the person who loaded it or pulled its trigger. Those are all different roles/jobs, even though they may be done by the same person at times.

> My argument is that the best strategy is to ,,never fire'' the footgun.

Surely then the second best strategy is to not be there if/when it goes off? We can't count on them not being fired, to my view.

After all, these are Chekhov's footguns, remember?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun
by smiley1437 | 2025-07-31 19:33:39+00:00
> people aren't aware of how wrong they can be, and the errors take effort and knowledge to notice.

I have friends who are highly educated professionals (PhDs, MDs) who just assume that AI\LLMs make no mistakes.

They were shocked that it's possible for hallucinations to occur. I wonder if there's a halo effect where the perfect grammar, structure, and confidence of LLM output causes some users to assume expertise?
by webdoodle | 2025-07-31 19:33:56+00:00
I would argue that we already achieved and then bricked Superintelligence a few years ago. Social media allowed people to network with people that previously were completely silo'd from each other, allowing collaboration of ideas on a level well above anything previously possible. This social super intelligence peaked in 2019 though, right before the mass censorship caused by covid. Unfortunately the censorship industrial complex has only expanded its draconian hold on ideation, and we aren't just stagnating, but actively going backwards.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-07-31 19:34:10+00:00
>A fun question: of these projects, which required a long time, and which could have been greatly accelerated?

Pretty much everything on the list is a research study of a long-term process that is inherently impossible to accelerate.

From the list, only the Second Avenue Subway and the Sagrada Familia unambiguously qualify as projects that could be greatly accelerated. The SAS was not under active construction for the vast majority of the time between 1942 and 2017 — actual construction only happened for a couple years in the early 70s, then another couple years in the late 80s, and finally from 2011-2017. The fits and starts were due to a combination of bureaucratic red tape, economic woes, and gross incompetence. The Sagrada Familia has also seen only intermittent construction over the last century, primarily because of lack of funding.
Show HN: SafeRate – AI chat-native mortgage lender
by dmhall23 | 2025-07-31 19:34:19+00:00
Hi HN, Dylan and Shima here. Today we're launching the first version of our project, Safe Rate, an AI-native mortgage lender going all in on the chat experience, at saferate.com.

Mortgage shopping is an uncomfortable experience. You have to share lots of sensitive data to get a single quote, and if you want to comparison shop, the rate aggregator websites straight up sell your data, so you end up with a lot of texts, emails, and phone calls from salespeople you've never met asking you to blindly trust them with a big financial decision.

Getting a mortgage quote should be on your terms. You should be able to share your relevant details anonymously and get real pricing. You should know how competitive the offer is before speaking with someone. And you should still be able to connect with a human if you need support.

So we've built a suite of tools in our AI chat to put shoppers in control:

1. Instant mortgage quoting without sharing any sensitive data (currently live for conventional loans in Illinois)

2. Automatically review a Loan Estimate, which every lender must provide you by law, and see how the estimate scores (0 to 100, benchmarked against 2 million loans). We then can make an instant competing offer so you know if we can save you money.

3. For refinances, share a mortgage statement to see if you can save money today, and if not, create a personalized tracker so you can be notified when rates have fallen

4. Mortgage Q&A for commonly asked mortgage questions. Still lots more to add!

5. Live - a Zoom-like call for mortgage shopping that instantly connects you with a loan officer while our AI assistant listens in, updates the quote details, and gets you pricing

We support this functionality in a variety of ways:

1. Chat on https://saferate.com

2. Email at buddy@saferate.ai

3. Live via our Zoom-like call tailored to mortgage shopping

4. Slackbot (please ask if you're interested in access)

5. Phone 1(888)850-6123

6. Coming soon RCS, SMS, and WhatsApp

Our chats are universal, so you can start with email and then transition to web chat, or vice versa, and it will retain the full context. And we've built our chat to be embeddable on any other website via an iframe. Safe Rate's main chat is actually an embedded iframe itself. And because we can't be wrong when giving a mortgage quote (regulation!) we've designed our AI so it does not hallucinate.

Here’s a 90 second demo video that shows this in action: https://youtu.be/6eIJukspmfU

You can also see a sample Live session: https://youtu.be/alAPtjUJ5xE

We're posting here today because any testing or feedback would be a great help. We're able to join the Live Call if you're brave enough (in addition to building this system ourselves, we're also licensed loan officers). And our quotes are only valid for Illinois with a max loan size of $806,500. We hope to expand nationally soon. Thanks!
by amluto | 2025-07-31 19:35:13+00:00
From vague memory of reading some data sheets: there are cheap little constant current LED driver modules for automotive applications. Two wires in: PWM power. Two wires out: the LED array. To get anything less than full output, you need to drive it with a square wave, and it might not function at a civilized frequency of a few kHz.

Doing better would require a different wiring design — there’s no way to just swap the driver without making the driver fancy enough to take, say, 50% PWM in and produce half current DC out. (Obviously this is trivial, and even available entirely off the shelf for non-automotive applications, if you have three wires in. But you don’t.)
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-31 19:36:54+00:00
Well it would be in oxide's interest to do that before their competitors do if it's profitable, right? Wouldn't the more established companies have more money to invest in research and development to try to beat oxide to their own follow-up, now that the market has spoken in oxide's favor?

This is the concept I'm referring to:

https://gwern.net/complement

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
by beej71 | 2025-07-31 19:37:00+00:00
> I can't go rent them from blockbuster

I can. :) But for those not so lucky, second hand stores have tons of DVDs usually for peanuts. Also your library might lend them out.

I'm still in the process of ripping our collection, but we can watch stuff on TV with Jellyfin.

But to your point, Louis Rossman suggests that when piracy provides the best experience, providers might want to rethink their strategy...
by w10-1 | 2025-07-31 19:37:25+00:00
Perhaps. A hypothesis that their business would be bigger could be seen as a wish. But Alphabet's stock multiples are below comparable companies. From a capitalist perspective, that means they're being poorly run.

So I think you can do more than minimize ("wishful", "negligible"). Also, what you seem to be saying is that being among the biggest makes everything they did right, so one should just accept that.

If I were a Google principal hiring any leader, I'd want to select candidates who had concrete plans for improvement -- opportunities to grow the business or to correct mistakes. Isn't that a better approach?

If instead Google principals and managers were hiring for those who accept their decisions - loyalty -- I'd run in the opposite direction.
by markus_zhang | 2025-07-31 19:37:30+00:00
Thanks! The more I think about it, the more I feel it's my own issue and family simply makes me more vulnerable.

"Never felt being successful in life" -> "Want to achieve something" -> "Naturally turns to hobbies" -> "Family and kid takes focus and time away" -> "Get frustrated"

I think that's the loop I'm in.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-31 19:37:44+00:00
> Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.

> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.

> ...

> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:

It's all in the article.

You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-31 19:37:45+00:00
I agree with most of TFA but not this:

> This means cheaters will plateau at whatever level the AI can provide

From my experience, the skill of using AI effectively is of treating the AI with a "growth mindset" rather than a "fixed" one. What I do is that I roleplay as the AI's manager, giving it a task, and as long as I know enough to tell whether its output is "good enough", I can lend it some of my metagcognition via prompting to get it to continue working through obstacles until I'm happy with the result.

There are diminishing returns of course, but I found that I can get significantly better quality output than what it gave me initially without having to learn the "how" of the skill myself (i.e. I'm still "cheating"), and only focusing my learning on the boundary of what is hard about the task. By doing this, I feel that over time I become a better manager in that domain, without having to spend the amount of effort to become a practitioner myself.
by hermitcrab | 2025-07-31 19:37:48+00:00
Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good, in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than 4 or 5 years.

China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.
by mgh2 | 2025-07-31 19:38:03+00:00
Strategic move on a bull market. With the return of meme stocks [1] and crypto [2], expect more SPAC style IPOs next, we are in the AI speculative period, brace for a crash in 2-5yrs [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44662427

[2] https://www.tradingview.com/news/invezz:91bb28859094b:0-here...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741151
by ashwinsundar | 2025-07-31 19:38:20+00:00
> Creating efficient pages takes time from a competent developer, which costs money upfront, but saves server resources over time.

Not trying to be a contrarian just for the sake of it, but I don't think this has to be true. Choice of technology or framework also influences how easy it is to create an efficient page, and that's a free choice one can make*

* Unless you are being forced to make framework/language/tech decisions by someone else, in which case carry on with this claim. But please don't suggest it's a universal claim
by Pfhortune | 2025-07-31 19:38:32+00:00
The length of time it takes for media to enter the public domain is absolutely absurd. It if didn't take over a century for works to enter the PD, we could say, "Eh, just wait a few years." 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.

If we had a more reasonable period like a decade, it would be a driver for creating new art, and prevent works from being locked away arbitrarily until our great-grandchildren can enjoy them (unless the art was just... lost to time).