MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfengel | 2025-07-21 19:53:50+00:00
My AI professor, in the early 90s, described AI like this:

"In the 60s, we wanted to build computers that acted like people. Not just people, but smart people. So what do smart people do? We play chess! So we spent a lot of time beating chess and learned basically nothing about AI."

Beating the Math Olympiad strikes me as much the same. They're solving "hard" problems, but not solving easy ones.

I want a robot that can clean a toilet. Hand it a brush, send it into the room, and get it clean. Then have it make the bed, without crushing any of the stuff strewn haphazardly about. Something humans do for minimum wage because anybody at all can do it.

Physical manipulation of the real world isn't strictly required for AI, but as a test it precludes a lot of solving the hard problem without solving the 'easy' problem. The real world is very unforgiving of automata in uncontrolled circumstances, something that animals (not just humans) do with minimal effort.
by jfengel | 2025-07-21 19:53:52+00:00
In the US, you have no right to dignity. I've always admired that the German constitution starts with one, and I feel that the lack of it is a serious flaw in the American constitution. The right to free speech is almost unlimited, and nearly free from pressure by the government.

But that is not what the "free speech" warriors wanted. They weren't just asking for the right to speak, but the right to force you to listen. They wanted to compel companies to carry their speech.

Now, the actual government is explicitly telling people to shut up, and implicitly threatening them with legal action. That may or may not be legal, but surely those who have such an extreme pro-free-speech position would object, no?
by jfengel | 2025-07-21 19:53:55+00:00
So you're talking about a page where the results are generated according to what the user asks for at the request time, but doesn't otherwise need to change.

If it were a blog, or a corporate info page, I'd rather use a CMS. That way I don't write HTML at all. It would just hand me minimal interactivity.

If it were a shopping site, I'd probably want more interaction than just a single "like" button. I'd want to filter results, sort them, edit a shopping cart, etc.

It doesn't sound appropriate for visualization. It might be useful for a dashboard, but the more people expect to interact with the dashboard, the more likely it'll tip over into SPA territory.

I'm sure there's a niche, but it feels kind of narrow. It's complicated enough to require programming, but not complicated enough to require an SPA.
by itake | 2025-07-21 19:54:13+00:00
On the surface, I feel the same as you but as someone that bought a house three years ago at 5.5% interest and has only lost money on the property due to significant home repairs it really doesn’t feel great that my capital is just evaporating.

I spent $50,000 replacing the pipes and removing asbestos 1 year after I bought the house. While I don’t expect the down payment and regular mortgage payments to grow and value, it’s very painful when there’s an unexpected repair that requires additional capital that isn’t recaptured in the home value growth.

It’s like driving a new car off the dealership parking lot and immediately getting your doors dinged. I’d feel a lot less about it if the car went up in value…
by tolien | 2025-07-21 19:54:43+00:00
[citation needed], your Economist article [0] quotes 30 a day (which would be <11k a year) but muddies the water pretty significantly:

> Under these laws, British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Some are serious offenders, such as stalkers.

How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.

0: For anyone curious, https://archive.ph/vaCkJ#selection-1287.0-1298.0
by mdaniel | 2025-07-21 19:54:59+00:00
IMHO, if bitcoin mining had given some people $10MM and debited other people $10, but each one at random, no matter what --temperature= was provided to the mining CLI, you'd have likely seen the same discussion

> It's making me rich! It's making me poor! Well then you're holding it wrong! Well you're spending electricity on senseless compute! Well you're just living in a fiat past!

(nod)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-21 19:55:07+00:00
Those random brands that flood amazon (TYUOIT or ERYWERP) are dispensable brands in part because it allows them to discharge the company if something like a recall becomes necessary.

Part of the price of cheap shit.

Anker on the other hand is a recognizable name with a brand image. So they need to do right to keep their trust.
by bitwize | 2025-07-21 19:55:20+00:00
Thankfully, NeWS has a successor: the browser and Electron. Before you giggle, recognize that in 1990 16 MiB was a HUGE amount of memory, and apps that needed that much to run felt even slower and more bloated than today's Electron apps. A workstation with that much memory would have cost $10,000 or so in 1980s dollars.

Can't wait for DonHopkins to magically appear and infodump about NeWS and his involvement therewith, copypasta-ing entire email threads and even a PostScript pie menu implementation.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-21 19:55:35+00:00
Yeah the thing is, while these things were "lightweight" in comparison to today, they were not lightweight relative to the machines of the time. I had an 8MB 486 running early Linux versions and it was always a struggle. You could, with some swapping, run emacs, mosaic, X, etc. all at once, but it was slow.

As now, same back then .. software developers tended to max out the capabilities of their machines. Which we were often on the whole beefier than what the general community had.

If you actually go back and use software from the 90s on 90s machines, it's amazing how slow the experience can be. Input latencies are often better, but .. throughput awful. Start up times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading... which we just accepted along with the sound of a grinding hard drive or floppy disk.
by tempnew | 2025-07-21 19:55:35+00:00
“subscriptions like Apple News”

They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
by randomname93857 | 2025-07-21 19:55:43+00:00
Yeah, with help of KGB. What could possibly go wrong? It could become as democratic as Cuba. In best case. Or take path of other countries with exported communist revolutions, like North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. You just don't know about pervasive and perverted level of informants and delation that was installed by these "democratic" countries
by josefritzishere | 2025-07-21 19:56:07+00:00
This article well summarizes where I have landed on AI. No tool ever created by humans is good at everything. Like all previous tools, it will be good at some things but not everything. The rest is hype. If you are over 25 you have seen hype come and go before. This is no different except that AI also can create a truly incredible amount of spam and probably should be regulated by the FCC for that alone.
by Aachen | 2025-07-21 19:56:37+00:00
I don't know that someone who's barely seven can be expected to have an informed opinion that would be worth adding as an appendix. It might be cute, or interesting to learn about child development to see what they would answer at 7yo, or fun to have them read it back five years later, but not to inform your decision by all that much. Figuring out what's in their best interest is what a parent chose to dedicate their life to imo; it's the parent's/parents' responsibility to think for them, not to use their fanciful answers to prove a predictable point

Given the quote, though, it does sound like the parent is not putting the kid's best interests first and foremost
by modeless | 2025-07-21 19:56:42+00:00
It seems very likely from the description in the link that formal verification tools for mathematical proofs were used in part of the RL training for this model. On the other hand, OpenAI claims "We reach this capability level not via narrow, task-specific methodology, but by breaking new ground in general-purpose reinforcement learning and test-time compute scaling." Which might suggest that they don't specifically use e.g. Lean in their training process. But it's not explicitly stated. All we can really do is speculate unless they publish more detail.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-07-21 19:57:25+00:00
Most media outlets these days are just a pile of dark patterns.

My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.

If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).

If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
by jacquesm | 2025-07-21 19:57:36+00:00
You know genomes. But you don't seem to understand how big corporations operate and what the risks to your privacy are when your DNA and/or significant fractions thereof start floating around. It takes ~33 bits to uniquely identify a human. This is 'gods own GUID' and it has far, far more than 33 bits, even in the most limited case.
by aranelsurion | 2025-07-21 19:57:38+00:00
Another alternative: https://github.com/tellerops/teller

It's a standalone tool with YAML configuration, simple to use.

Basically the way it works:

- You create the secret in GCP/AWS/etc Secrets Manager service, and put the secret data there.

- Refer to the secret by its name in Teller.

- Whenever you run `$ teller run ...` it fetches the data from the remote service, and makes it available to your process.
by derefr | 2025-07-21 19:57:46+00:00
> especially with "63" or "FF" appearing in every Infinite Lives cheat code

Except that those numbers did not commonly appear in Game Genie codes, because Game Genie codes are [trivially] enciphered. See e.g. https://gamehacking.org/library/114 for an explanation — the cipher used was different for each system.

AFAICT this enciphering was done precisely to discourage third-party code creation. Galoob never made any explicit statements about why they did it, but I'd guess† it served as a kind of DRM for codes, so that Galoob could be the only source of them, and thus sell you code books or something.

If you're remembering "a cheat-code device that preceded the GameShark that had literal address:value codes, and became the default input format for cheat codes in NES/SNES/GB emulators", then you're probably thinking of the Game Genie's competitor, the (Pro) Action Replay.

---

† There was also possibility of a vague hope on Galoob's part of contracting with games studios to create and publish "licensed" codes — making their device into less of a "cheating device" and more of a kind of post-sales-marketing micro-DLC-publishing channel for games studios.

Think of the type of thing that you see in e.g. Nintendo Switch Online with "special editions" of games that are just the regular game with a code applied. Studios could have been putting out "special editions" after-the-fact by publishing [i.e. working with Galoob to publish] officially-sanctioned codes in gaming magazines.

This never materialized... probably because studios that wanted to do post-sales-marketing micro-DLC, had enough foresight to build it into the game, in the form of pre-written live logic whose only live codepath involves a long and esoteric title-screen button-combo no player would ever guess; or even pre-written dead logic, that can be made live by an executable payload encoded into a password-system password, or a link-cable / e-reader / wi-fi distribution.
by cuuupid | 2025-07-21 19:57:50+00:00
On paper sure, but ODNI & CIA are interchangeable highside. The NRO is spun off the CIA, NSA’s network sits in a network gated by the CIA, and everything under DIA is overseen by the NSC which is “advised” by the CIA. They also control all HUMINT which is critical to the mission of nearly every agency.

Would also mention the last two DNI were CIA directors. The two before that were NSA directors during a time where the NSA was largely controlled by the CIA and its leadership largely shared positions on the CIA’s senior leadership team.
by solatic | 2025-07-21 19:57:57+00:00
Yeah there's a very serious bias when an E9 is telling people to work 18 hour days like he did when he was getting promoted every year at Microsoft. Of course an E9 has a latent interest in seeing more lower-level Facebook ICs put in longer hours. If every Facebook IC put in 12+ hour days, that would be a terrific success from his leadership.

... but what are the chances of every Facebook IC getting promoted to E9? If you're the only rat on the treadmill when everyone else is ambling about, maybe you stand out to get promoted. If you join a company where all the rats are on treadmills, nobody wins that rat race.
by yegle | 2025-07-21 19:58:01+00:00
FWIW this has caused a big storm in China. The root of the issue is known to be caused by the battery cell vendor Amprius changing the battery design w/o notifying the power bank manufacturers. AFAIKT Amprius lost the 3C certification (a certification in China) because of this incident.

This is one of the Chinese reports on the issue: https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_31048287

Excerpt from the report above (translated using Google):

> The Paper learned from an insider that Anker Innovations' battery cell supplier is already a leading battery cell supplier in the industry, and did not inform customers after it changed materials. In addition to Anker Innovations, the supplier also cooperates with leading power bank brands, so the impact is huge. Although Anker Innovations did not name the supplier, an insider pointed out that the supplier was Amprius.

UPDATE:

There's an exclusive interview by 36kr with one of Anker's VPs:

https://m.36kr.com/p/3365435892680709
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-21 19:58:36+00:00
I started work in that era. That secretary booked an airline ticket by calling her contact at the same airline, regardless of price savings.

She typed his messages; that task is obviously done by the boss himself these days (Obama's blackberry addiction is a case in point). Voice-to-text handles her job while I'm driving; NO ONE did that job back then.

In the middle of the night, I can set an appointment that just occurred to me. Again, that's not something 1980s me could do.

Technology is a force multiplier you are ignoring. As bad as Outlook seems, it is better than most secretaries could be.
by JamesSwift | 2025-07-21 19:58:41+00:00
> Isn't Lottie rendering the vector data directly to screen?

It has to rasterize if theres not native vector support, unless its converting the vector to GL calls. Maybe it targets lowest common denominator for the platforms it supports in order to have a stable output.

iOS also didnt support native vector display until fairly recently, and Im not sure if its limited to baked assets in an image atlas or not. It also had limitations in that it only allowed pdf vectors rather than SVG directly. I haven't kept up to know what current state is.
by phoronixrly | 2025-07-21 19:59:02+00:00
How about tasteful magazine-style ads interspersed in-between the article's text and meticulously inserted in a way that not even does not harm the UX/design but contributes to it. You know, like it used to be on printed media? Only in the case of the web, the ads must not be taking up most of the web page (like full-page magazine/newspaper ads), and definitely not the entire above-fold part of it.

And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.

Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
by anthk | 2025-07-21 19:59:26+00:00
BTW, for fun, with XGopher, Gopher or Mosaic, head to gopher://hngopher.com

Also, if you want a 'modern' Motif desktop mimicking the mid-90's, install emwm, xfile, classic-colors, xpdf (the old Motif) one, XImaginag and Nedit for XFT.

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

For a 'browser' you can use BFG, it runs gopher/gemini and gopher://magical.fish, gemini://gemi.dev and gopher://hnhgopher.com will look fine:

https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG

For IRC and Usenet, just use any terminal IRC client against libera.chat (it will look the exact same under XTerm) and... SLRN against the servers from https://eternal-september.org

And, as for Emacs, just install/build Lucid Emacs, get a nice Unicode font such as Go for sans as monospaced variants, it will look 100% close to Lucida fonts.

At ~/.Xdefaults:

emacs.pane.menubar.font: Go-9 emacs.font: Go-9 emacs.fontSet: Go-9

At ~/.emacs:

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Terminus" :height 100) ;; Proportionately spaced typeface (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "Go" :height 1.0) ;; Monospaced typeface (set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Terminus" :height 1.0)

Terminus is not Artwiz, but it's good enough.

Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so mid-90's, but close.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-21 19:59:45+00:00
> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.

How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts

Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.

I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
by caseysoftware | 2025-07-21 19:59:49+00:00
> To add on, the Court has also allowed the executive branch to essentially shutter federal departments that were created by Congress, such as the Department of Education.

The Dept of Ed had ~4200 employees and they laid of ~1400. It is not "essentially shuttered" currently regardless of the goal.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...

The important question is: "Can they fulfill their legally mandated obligations with the smaller staff?"

If the answer is "yes" then we saved money and still did the job. If the answer is "no" then we have a problem.

So far I haven't seen anyone identify "here are the legally mandated obligations that won't be fulfilled any longer" which would be useful and could be compelling.
by adsharma | 2025-07-21 19:59:53+00:00
Which of these two is the higher order bit?

* ParadeDB speaks postgres protocol

* These setups don't have a complex ETL pipeline

If you have a ETL pipeline specialized for PG logical replication (as opposed to generic JVM based Debizium/Kafka setups), you get some fraction of the same benefits. I'm curious about Conduit and its postgres plugin.

That leaves: ParadeDB uses vanilla postgres + rust extension. This is a technology detail. I was looking for an articulation of the customer benefit because of this technologically appealing architecture.
by technothrasher | 2025-07-21 19:59:56+00:00
I got dragged to Neuschwanstein by my family, not knowing much about it. Well, it was a crowded and annoying tourist trap, and then I realized, "Wait, this is a fake castle made by a crazy dude?" I found my local fake castle made by a crazy dude more enjoyable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_Castle).
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-21 20:00:02+00:00
Netflix mainly runs from caching boxes at ISPs though. Most of their content comes from there. AWS is way too expensive to serve all that content from.

I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.
by stanfordkid | 2025-07-21 20:00:16+00:00
This a bone headed article… umm we can’t extract anything from it about your health (*now)… so might as well just spread it everywhere?

Like he doesn’t even go into the fact that it could be used by law enforcement wrongfully etc: e.g Unregulated Chinese crime detection startup buys the data, you happen to be in China and get arrested bc they used inadequate algorithms that wrongfully accused you.

There is absolutely nothing convincing here.
by useless_foghorn | 2025-07-21 20:00:19+00:00
I'd partake in a microtransaction system that pays based on the percentage of the article I finished. Some assurance of high-quality journalism would be helpful. If HN existed as pay-to-play for instance (it probably wouldn't), I wouldn't be opposed to paying based on my usage for the curation - knowing that I'm supporting the creators/authors of the content I'm enjoying. I don't think an unlimited plan makes sense - instead pay per article. I think the amount you pay per should be chosen when you create your account, not every time you open an article. I think this is most fair to the creators and consumers with the least organizational bloat.
by aroch | 2025-07-21 20:00:25+00:00
> However–and here’s the rub–some 25 years after the human genome was sequenced, and despite huge efforts to link genes and disease, there are almost no SNPs that tell you anything consequential about your health. If you have a genetic disease, you almost certainly already know about it, and if you don’t know, then the 23andMe data just isn’t going to reveal anything.

For someone who “knows genomes”, this is a brain dead take on microarrays. Lots of the content on arrays _is_ directly tied to a phenotype because there’s limited space so we directly test variants that are known to cause problems!

Is he really claiming that BRCA1/2 variants don’t increase risk of breast cancer in a meaningful way? Or that there aren’t tons of people who are XXY who don’t know even though it’s the hidden cause of many infertility problems?

This is just such a bad take it is hard to take anything said here seriously