MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-19 07:50:47+00:00
That analogy only makes sense if current AI capabilities : AGI :: 1950s car speed : light speed.

The speed equivalent of AGI is way below light speed, in that the requirements for silicon to replicate the synaptic complexity of the human brain is far below the maximum compute human civilization can achieve as allowable by physics.

The more important question is whether the progress we've seen in AI is putting us on reliable track to hit AGI in the near future. My opinion is that we are, and not just because Demis, Sam, Elon and Dario say so, though they have very good reasons for believing so (yes, besides mere hype and speculation.)
by cess11 | 2025-07-19 07:52:40+00:00
The US is largely theocratic and has in part because of this managed to resist socialism and other forms of scientific governance to a much larger degree.

Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-07-19 07:53:31+00:00
Your star trek example is cute but misses one important point: cost.

In ST there is apparently an infinite energy source running these replicators, so almost no cost. For any software project, developmemt and maintanenace costs time/money, so anyone replicating your invention or contributing to your project requires time/money(/expertise as a derivative).

That's what the GPL doesnt get and what scares me alittle about the future of the linux foundation.

Imagine Torvals gone and only highly payed corporate devs maintaning the linux kernel and worse, controlling the foundation. If a user hostile descision is made and the nerd outcry is shacking the force, what are they supposed to do? Forking and maintaning their own kernel in competition with high velocity veterans that just boil the frogs slow enough?

I cant imagine this succeeding. Just look at the slowly shrinking market share of BSD.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-bsd

Or the very uneven fight between MS Office and LibreOffice.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-19 07:54:25+00:00
Are you using the free version of ChatGPT, or just 4o?

Whatever model is cheap to provide inference for free is irrelevant when it comes to discussing SOTA AI capabilities and their impact. The state of the art has been reliably improving markedly over the past 3 years. o3, Claude opus 4, gemini-2.5 all surpass their predecessors in every benchmark and indicate that improvement isn't slowing down.

If GPT-5 comes out and it's somehow worse then I'll concede to your point, but so far the claim that the latest models are getting worse is mere speculation and makes no sense given that most labs are already aware of the potential for data contamination and such and have taken measures to ensure high data quality for the models they're spending hundreds of millions to train.
by piker | 2025-07-19 07:54:31+00:00
This is a dupe from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 but I'll repeat what I said over there.

I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life. Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA.

It's not "artificial", it's just complex.

MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't.

The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

[1] Plug: https://tritium.legal
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-19 07:54:56+00:00
> So, my gut tells me this would be better achieved with the (shudder) `.then(...)` paradigm. It sucks, but better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

The whole idea behind `await` is to make the old intuition work without the ugliness of `.then()`. `f(); await g(); h()` has exactly the expected execution ordering.
by denkmoon | 2025-07-19 07:55:24+00:00
I woke up today with a plan of making my DNS at a separate site work properly with ipv6, over my wireguard. I use ULAs for the point to point wireguard link, and GUAs don't like routing to ULAs. I figured the choice was between routing my two sites GUAs over the wireguard when talking to each other, or deploy ULAs in my networks. 4hrs later I had everything set up with ULAs. Had lunch. Decided that was awful. 3hrs after that I've got my GUAs going over the wireguard.

Homelabbing is fun :')
by inejge | 2025-07-19 07:55:50+00:00
> It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?

The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)

I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.
by Expurple | 2025-07-19 07:56:05+00:00
Unless it's a heavily-modified proprietary fork, the cloud providers are only "eating" your profits. Not the share of the project itself. Profit isn't the top priority for everyone. I just want to have quality free software that I can use for my tasks. The more companies contribute and support it - the better.

And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably
by ben_w | 2025-07-19 07:56:05+00:00
They're probably training them to refuse, but fundamentally the models are obviously too small to usually memorise content, and can only do it when there's many copies in the training set. Quotation is a waste of parameters better used for generalisation.

The other thing is that approximately all of the training set is copyrighted, because that's the default even for e.g. comments on forums like this comment you're reading now.

The other other thing is that at least two of the big model makers went and pirated book archives on top of crawling the web.
by pjerem | 2025-07-19 07:57:00+00:00
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909164/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35458717/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12001667

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12030455/

None of those publications are sponsored by dealers.

There are multiple others which I’m not going to search but I hope now you have starting points, you’ll be curious enough to do further research.

> hitting yourself in the head with a brick also causes similar results.

That’s false and you aren’t going to find a single paper (funded by anyone) that would conclude this.
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-07-19 07:57:05+00:00
you can start to gamble NFTs on Steam starting from age 13

but they'll tell you that they got pressured to ban "adult content" from steam

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

Who's kid is obsessed with microtransactions and cs:go cases gamba on steam?

Psyop and propaganda, calling them out gets you a ban
by irusensei | 2025-07-19 07:57:29+00:00
I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.

You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.

Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-19 07:58:30+00:00
Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
by conradludgate | 2025-07-19 07:58:56+00:00
It's important to point out that it's actually not at all about cookies. It's tracking by using information stored on the user's device in general that needs to have consent.

You could use localStorage for the purposes of tracking and it still needs to have a popup/banner.

An authentication cookie does not need a cookie banner, but if you issue lots of network requests for tracking and monitor server logs, that does now need a cookie banner.

If you don't store anything, but use fingerprinting, that is not covered by the law but could be covered by GDPR afaiu
by 9rx | 2025-07-19 07:58:59+00:00
> but with that argument I think you could say most people in software engineering are self taught.

When you get right down to it, I expect few, if any, people in software engineering are actually self-taught. You could theoretically pull it off, I'm sure, but people are pretty lazy and it in this day of age it is much easier to read a book/website or watch a YouTube video prepared by a teacher. That's not self-teaching by any stretch of the imagination.

> To your last point, what can access at a university that you can’t get elsewhere? People.

Deeming people to be the "Unix" of our time comes across as being quite bizarre. It is not like universities were void of people 35 years ago, so the fit you are trying to make is unclear. What is your thought process here?

> Namely, a community of like-minded peers, and personal relationships to experts in the field.

Did you, uh, not notice where you were when you said this? The like-minded peers and experts in the field are unquestionably present and here to mingle. If you are failing to build relationships with them — which I guess is what you are trying to say? — what makes you think you are going to fare better in university?

Maybe what you are trying to say is that you personally already established the connections that you want to have in university, and thus personally don't find need to do the same here? But what does that have to do with the next guy?

Or maybe what you are trying to say, which seems to be supported by the data, that as you get older, you become more closed off to new relationships and have somehow mistakenly conflated youth and university? Still, even if you are now old, what does that have to do with the next (young) guy?

I don't know. I gave my best to try and salvage your comment, but whatever it was that you were trying to get across in suggesting that people are modern day Unix analogs didn't make it.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-19 07:59:38+00:00
Things on an exponential trend tend to continue unless they hit a fundamental limit that leads to an inflection point and then a sloped off S-curve.

Moore's law continued on an exponential for decades. The fundamental limit in terms of transistor density are the laws of physics (uncertainty principle will eventually be a problem), but so far so many paradigms in compute improvement have emerged (especially in GPUs and AI-specific compute) that it has become super-exponential in some respects.

So the question is whether there is a fundamental barrier that AI will hit. The main issues people bring up are a lack of high quality human-generated data, fall-off in value per compute spent, and limits to autoregressive models. However it seems that pretraining has been the only paradigm beginning to show diminished returns but test-time compute and RL are still on the exponential curve.
by noelwelsh | 2025-07-19 08:00:51+00:00
I feel this article really needs a proper introduction. It starts "When I first rolled out this Apple-style frontend UI, it looked sleek, and I was genuinely excited." but it never explains what the UI was for. The first picture is of a basketball stats site but it end with "Medications for Menstrual Pain" which is captioned as "interative [?] background". What UI is this post actually talking about?
by johnisgood | 2025-07-19 08:00:58+00:00
Actually, there are binpkgs, now: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Binary_Host_Quickstart.

My i3 with vim / emacs and even VSCodium flies too, on X Linux. :P

The browser is always the slowest in my case and this has always been my experience, and unfortunately it still is.
by ben_w | 2025-07-19 08:02:11+00:00
I agree fiction is a bad argument.

On the other hand, firstly every single person disagrees what the phrase AGI means, varying from "we've had it for years already" to "the ability to do provably impossible things like solve the halting problem"; and secondly we have a very bad track record for knowing how long it will take to invent anything in the field of AI with both positive and negative failures, for example constantly thinking that self driving cars are just around the corner vs. people saying an AI that could play Go well was "decades" away a mere few months before it beat the world champion.
by irusensei | 2025-07-19 08:02:32+00:00
One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills.

Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.
by crvdgc | 2025-07-19 08:03:09+00:00
The opening quote from Xi seems to come from an exaggerated report from FT. The original Mandarin report [^1] has a milder tone. AI and EV were only mentioned in a passing comment, not the focus of the meeting or the report.

Feel free to skip the next section about the culture-aware interpretation of that quote. Xi's warning is more about the so-called "political tournament". Usually the central government sets some industrial policy goal (AI and EV now, but it could be other things like real estate, chips, or drones from before). The local government would collude with companies to start "projects". The goal is to get brownies points for the former and subsidy package for the latter. Of course, nothing usually comes out of these "projects". Most just stops at the factory building phase. Such practice has always been a real headache to the central government. Xi is warning about it showing up in the AI and EV industry now.

[^1]: https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/pc/content/202507/17/conten...
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-07-19 08:03:38+00:00
People complain more about cookie banners than they do the actual invasive tracking by those cookies.

Those banners suck and I wouldn't mind if the EU rolled back that law and tried another approach. At the same time, it's fairly easy to add an extension to your browser that hides them.

Legislation won't always work. It's complex and human behavior is somewhat unpredictable. We've let tech run rampant up to this point - it's going to take some time to figure out how to best control them. Throwing up our hands because it's hard to protect consumers from power multi-national corporations is a pretty silly position imo.
by lozenge | 2025-07-19 08:04:06+00:00
What would that look like?

"You have opened your Word 97 document in Office 2003. The quirks have been removed, so it might look different now. Check every page before saving as docx."

"You have pasted from a Word 97 document into an Office 2003 OOXML document. Some things will not work."
by sensanaty | 2025-07-19 08:06:35+00:00
No, GDPR is the law that allowed me to successfully request the deletion of everything companies like Meta have ever harvested on me without my consent and for them to permanently delete it.

Fun fact, GitHub doesn't have cookie banners. It's almost like it's possible to run a huge site without being a parasite and harvesting every iota of data of your site's visitors!
by ddrdrck_ | 2025-07-19 08:07:06+00:00
> If I was an IC at an airplane manufacturer and a bug I wrote caused an airplane crash - who is legally responsible?

I am not sure it is that complicated, from a legal perspective. It is the company hiring you that would be legally responsible. If you are an external consultant, things may get more complicated, but I am pretty sure that for critical mission software companies wouldn't use external consultants (for this particular reason but also many others)
by peanut-walrus | 2025-07-19 08:07:28+00:00
The responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement.

I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.

And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.
by sneak | 2025-07-19 08:08:05+00:00
This seems to be the thing: an ecosystem has a bad system (npm, pip, gem, deb stuff), someone decides the system is bad or has bad documentation, and writes some new tool (yarn, pipenv, debcraft), and that becomes the new standard for a while. Then 4-6 years later someone does the same thing again. When you return to the ecosystem after a while you find that there are three layers of outdated “new hotness” CADT you have to sift through.

Only Go did this right by getting the first-party tooling right from the outset (and then upgrading it, again first party, with modules). Nix seems to have come close but now there are Nix flakes which seem to be the same pattern.

It’s called “deb”. Debian should fix this. The fact that they’re spending their time removing version notices in xscreensaver and not fixing the basic tools and formats used is a mistake.
by ultra2d | 2025-07-19 08:09:00+00:00
Do you use encrypted ZFS?

I have dabbled before with FreeIPA and other VMs on a Debian host with ZFS. For simplicity, I switched to running Seafile with encrypted libraries on a VPS and back that up to a local server via ZFS send/receive. That local server switches itself on every night, updates, syncs and then goes into sleep again. For additional resiliency, I'm thinking of switching to ZFS on Linux desktop (currently Fedora), fully encrypted except for Steam. Then sync that every hour or so to another drive in the same machine, and sync less frequently to a local server. Since the dataset is already encrypted, I can either sync to an external drive or some cloud service. Another reason to do it like this is that storing a full photo archive within Seafile on a VPS is too costly.
by ETH_start | 2025-07-19 08:09:22+00:00
Any bureaucratic system is going to be inefficient. You see it in countries with universal healthcare. In Canada, some provinces now have wait times of over a year from referral to treatment. Many European countries face similar access issues, though France and the Netherlands perform somewhat better.

The U.S. is a different kind of mess. It’s a patchwork of heavy government restrictions, large public programs like Medicare, and for-profit corporations, all thrown together without a coherent design. It’s no surprise it’s expensive. In 2023, healthcare spending was nearly 18% of GDP. Another factor could simply be wealth: higher per capita GDP tends to correlate with higher healthcare spending. To be fair to the U.S. healthcare system, it is highly capitalized, with much higher concentrations of diagnostic equipment like MRI machines than other OECD countries, and it does have some of the highest five-year survival rates for cancer and heart disease.

Even so, all of these healthcare systems are heavily dysfunctional in many ways.

In contrast to all of this, cosmetic surgery and laser eye surgery are the only fields of medicine where prices have actually fallen in inflation-adjusted terms, which is extraordinary, as prices in healthcare in general have increased much faster than inflation. The superior performance of these fields is because of basic market dynamics. People pay out of pocket, so they’re price conscious, and providers compete. There are also fewer regulatory restrictions since these fields aren’t tied up in government programs like Medicare.

Innovation is the only thing that reliably drives prices down. But in most of healthcare, it moves slowly. Devices often take 10-30 years to cycle out. Compare that to consumer electronics, where turnover happens every 1-2 years.

If it were up to me, I’d make restrictions on medical providers much lighter. Anyone could offer medical procedures as long as they disclose they’re uncertified and include a government-mandated warning. That kind of freedom is necessary to solve hard problems. You can’t regiment innovation and industry development. Gatekeeping in the name of consumer safety is the worst thing that can be done to any industry, and unfortunately, there is heavy gatekeeping in healthcare.

That is not to say that I am opposed to government intervention in general. I think it can play a critical role in advancing healthcare. Where government intervention creates the most value is in funding research for the public domain: drug designs, medical procedures, and open datasets. These investments have enormous returns and are best handled by governments. If the private sector focused on delivery and innovation, with governments making strategic contributions in foundational research, healthcare would see revolutionary improvements generation after generation.
by alanfranz | 2025-07-19 08:09:24+00:00
They also cover vaping. While smoking harms are clear and its impact on room smell is evident, the connection is pretty weak for vaping. Unless it’s a crowded bar with lots of vaping people, I can’t tell if somebody has previously used an e-cigarette or vaporized anything in a room, and generally speaking I don’t find such vapor disturbing (altough the smell can be not great).