MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codingdave | 2025-07-10 21:57:16+00:00
As a consumer, don't consume AI slop. As a creator, use it to speed your workflow and creation process, but do the actual content generation yourself. The answers are not difficult, they just conflict with how people are trying to use AI to make money.

Part of the problem is people saying what the article quotes, that AI-generated content can be interesting, so it needs to exist. But does it? Did we run out of ideas and content to create on our own, that we need some new way to create? Personally, I don't think so. I think if your content is interesting enough to be worth creating, it is interesting enough to do it yourself.

That doesn't mean I'm against all use of AI. LLMs have many use cases where they are helpful that are not directly generating the final creative product. Focus there.
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-10 21:57:25+00:00
Not to mention the question of if these setups are financially feasible for the consumer of the AI and for the AI provider. It doesn't make that much business sense for a multi-billion dollar operation to fully automate their data engineering if it now depends on OpenAI, Meta or whatever, it's a huge operational liability. If the models go down you lose the data engineering sector entirely, and then you have no one to turn to because the only one who understands the code is the AI you don't even own.

I know companies have taken these operational liabilities with cloud storage and compute, but it's not the same thing as in it's not possible to mitigate. You can have a local, but shorter, backup of your stuff, but you can't have backup engineers
by rphln | 2025-07-10 21:57:59+00:00
The app asks you to move the camera or change your expression throughout the verification.

I'm not familiar with how it works on the implementation side. A ML conference that I attended had a presenter working on this area and beating AI impersonation was their #1 priority (along with other trivial approaches).

For what it's worth, this might also be just a security theater from the banks, though.
by rlf_dev | 2025-07-10 21:58:34+00:00
There still are cars being sold without much of new "technology", I daily a MY2024 Abarth 595 that still doesn't have start-stop, ECall, auto braking, telemetry, lane-assist, the infotainment is replaceable by a standard third-party box without messing with the rest of the car and still has a traditional ignition key. It's a basic turbocharged FIAT FIRE engine, so maintenance is stupidly cheap and anyone can do it.
by svieira | 2025-07-10 21:58:45+00:00
The 12 1/2 cent coin suggestion is brilliant and deserves more discussion, so I'm bringing it back up here.

For those who don't know, the US Dollar was based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_real which was often broken into eight pieces to make change (hence, "pieces of eight" and "two bits"). Might as well bring it back while inflation lets us be nostalgic.
by s1gsegv | 2025-07-10 21:59:01+00:00
It already is- to some extent. I see a ton of TikToks on friends feeds that are scenes from the TV show Friends but they’ve generated video of baby versions of each character to say the lines. I haven’t seen them replace the audio but you could imagine that being a next step whenever they hit copyright trouble. The worst part is that I’ve asked why they like them, they say the babies are cute and they know/love the scenes so it’s all good.

It does feel like it must be the engagement version of junk food, though.

“The algorithm” knows perfectly well what you want to watch. So it seems inevitable to me that eventually “the algorithm” just generates an endless stream of content fine tuned to you.
by runarberg | 2025-07-10 21:59:12+00:00
This is still ultimately a research within the field of the behavior sciences, and as such the laws of human behavior apply, where behaviorism offers a far more successful theoretical framework than personality psychology.

Nobody is denying that people have personalities btw. Not even true behavioralists do that, they simply argue from reductionism that personality can be explained with learning contingencies and the reinforcement history. Very few people are true behavioralists these days though, but within the behavior sciences, scientists are much more likely to borrow missing factors (i.e. things that learning contingencies fail to explain) from fields such as cognitive science (or even further to neuroscience) and (less often) social science.

What I am arguing here, however, is that the appeal to personality is unnecessary when explaining behavior.

As for figuring out what personality is, that is still within the realm of philosophy. Maybe cognitive science will do a better job at explaining it than psychometricians have done for the past century. I certainly hope so, it would be nice to have a better model of human behavior. But I think even if we could explain personality, it still wouldn’t help us here. At best we would be in a similar situation as physics, where one model can explain things traveling at the speed of light, while another model can explain things at the sub-atomic scale, but the two models cannot be applied together.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-10 21:59:25+00:00
My hot take: Cursor is a bad tool for agentic coding. Had a subscription and canceled it in favor of Claude Code. I don’t want to spend 90% of my time approving every line the agent wants to write. With Claude Code I review whole diffs - 1-2 minutes of the agent’s work at a time. Then I work with the agent at a level of what its approach is, almost never asking about specific lines of code. I can look at 5 files at once in git diff and then ask “why’d you choose that way?” “Can we undo that and try to find a simpler way?”

Cursor’s workflow exposes how differently different people track context. The best ways to work with Cursor may simply not work for some of us.

If Cursor isn’t working for you, I strongly encourage you to try CLI agents like Claude Code.
by NoFunPedant | 2025-07-10 21:59:55+00:00
1. The states never had the right to secede. U.S. Constitution, Article VI: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Article I, Section 10: "No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation .... No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War ..."

It is abundantly clear in the records of the Constitutional Convention, the text of the Constitution, the debates on ratification, and the Federalist Papers that the intent of the Constitution was to create a supreme national government, not a league of states.

2. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the authority to regulate currency. Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power ... To coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof ..."
by const_cast | 2025-07-10 21:59:59+00:00
I said this before in another comment a while ago, but we have echo chambers in real life: they're called friends.

I won't be friends with assholes, but, for some reason, there's this sort of expectation to humor crazy people. I'd rather just call you crazy and move on. Bonus points if we don't interact in the first place.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-10 22:00:28+00:00
You are right. A different way of thinking of this is that we'll be able to saturate whatever cable capacity there is with excess solar and wind in order to charge whatever battery capacity needs charging. It's a careful balance between time shifting solar and wind with batteries or shifting it in space with cables. They complement each other. The natural consequence of people installing more solar, wind, and batteries than they need is running surpluses most of the time. Which means that whenever there's a local shortage, cables are a way out because there's plenty of energy in the system. The more excess energy there is, the more attractive cables get.

It's not an either or thing. And this will be a self optimizing system as well. It won't be up to grid operators anymore. If people need more power, they'll get some even if the grids won't provide it. And if they need it to be more reliable, they'll fix it anyway they can. Which includes using batteries, generators, and whatever else works.

Hydrogen for energy production is a bit of a fantasy IMHO. Awful battery. Expensive to create. And there are plenty more profitable uses for it than sacrificing it as a simple methane alternative. Honestly, burning it is a bit desperate. If you have all this valuable hydrogen and burning it is the most valuable thing you can imagine doing, you're doing it wrong and missing out on some big dollar amount of more sane shit you should be doing.

Cables are expensive mainly because of policy. They are mainly made using commodity materials (copper, aluminium, etc.). Cable manufacturing isn't expensive. Installing them isn't rocket science. Land disputes on the other hand are cripplingly expensive. Solve that and cables become cheap. Geothermal works the same way; not that hard. Drill some holes (oil companies are really good at this) and that's most of the work. Getting permission to do that is the hard and expensive part.
by ben_w | 2025-07-10 22:00:40+00:00
Before you've built any green power plants, none of the energy you use to build green power plants can itself be green.

When all the power plants are green, all of the energy you use to build green power plants is necessarily green.

How green a new power plant is, during the process of construction, is a statement of how much progress you've already made before this step, not how much you make in the act of making this step.
by why_at | 2025-07-10 22:00:47+00:00
I get that LLMs are a black box in ways that most other technologies aren't. It still feels to me like they have to be okay with abstracting out some of the details of how things work.

Unless they have a lot of knowledge in electrical engineering/optics, the average user of this isn't going to understand how the camera or projector work except at a very high level.

I feel like the problem with LLMs here is more that they are not very predictable in their output and can fail in unexpected ways that are hard to resolve. You can rely on the camera to output some bits corresponding to whatever you're pointing it at even if you don't know anything about its internals.
by npc_anon | 2025-07-10 22:00:49+00:00
Apple is late but has the resources to catch up in AI. And if not, they can just partner with the AI providers. They'll even get paid for it, similar to Google handing over billions per year to Apple just to be the default search provider.

What is unfortunate for them though is that their AI miss is happening at the same time window in which smartphones seem close to done. They've produced 3 models in a row with zero memorable innovations. You can call Apple a hardware company but it's above all an iPhone company.
by raddan | 2025-07-10 22:01:30+00:00
I don’t know if a blanket answer is possible. I had the experience yesterday of asking for a simplification of a working (a computational geometry problem, to a first approximation) algorithm that I wrote. ChatGPT responded with what looked like a rather clever simplification that seemed to rely on some number theory hack I did not understand, so I asked it to explain it to me. It proceeded to demonstrate to itself that it was actually wrong, then it came up with two alternative algorithms that it also concluded were wrong, before deciding that my own algorithm was best. Then it proceeded to rewrite my program using the original flawed algorithm.

I later worked out a simpler version myself, on paper. It was kind of a waste of time. I tend not to ask for solutions from whole cloth anymore. It’s much better at giving me small in-context examples of API use, or finding handy functions in libraries, or pointing out corner cases.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-10 22:01:38+00:00
The general principle would be making other parts with interference fit such that it or they visibly do not align without properly tightening/attaching parts below/about them. For example, the door plug should not sit in the correct position unless door plug bolts are all tightened and untightened door plug bolts shouldn't allow installing other parts like trim pieces to be flush.

Every critical step should be as "idiot-proof" as possible, until better idiots are created who hammer structural parts into position to meet management-mandated arbitrary deadlines.
by rshemet | 2025-07-10 22:01:49+00:00
Very good point - we've heard this before.

We're restructuring the model initialization API to point to a local file & exposing a separate abstracted download function that takes in a URL.

wrt downloading post-install: based on our feedback, this is indeed a preferred pattern (as opposed to bundling in large files).

We'll update the download API, thanks again.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-10 22:02:24+00:00
I think the weak version of it is that people feel they need some explanation of why they think "they" can see something looking out their eyes.

A weaker version that tries to be stronger is Penrose's argument from The Emperor's New Mind which goes along the lines that "A machine can't do math because of those problems Gödel pointed out, but I can prove theorems so I'm not a machine, I'm a thetan [1]" Penrose is not consistent or complete or able to prove he is consistent or complete so I don't think Gödel has anything on him -- and there is no problem building a machine that can prove some theorems even though you can't build a machine that proves all theorems but Penrose can't prove all theorems either.

I'm also skeptical about anything involving sleep, anesthesia and such because so far as I know you are able to respond to stimuli when you're asleep and may very well be "aware" of them but what's clear is that you're not writing narrative memories, whatever LRH says.

[1] https://www.scientology.org/what-is-scientology/basic-princi...
by masfuerte | 2025-07-10 22:02:28+00:00
This comment [1] has a link to this obituary [2] of Matt. The comment is flagged, probably because the author's other comment is very mean spirited, but the linked obituary is excellent.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44523887

[2]: https://curtispoe.org/blog/rip-mst.html
by quonn | 2025-07-10 22:02:33+00:00
I think I already answered those above. I draw the line between 3 and 4, possibly between 4 and 5. I don't know for sure. But there are good reasons to hold this belief.

> the Buddhists call this nirvana, and it's quite difficult to actually achieve.

Not really. The zen buddhists call what I described kensho and it's not very hard to achieve. I specifically said a few seconds. Probably anyone who wholeheartedly meditated for some time has experienced this.

Nirvana, on the other hand, is just the other side of practice-and-enlightenment as a drawn out process. You may call it hard to achieve, others may call it the dharma gate of ease and joy.
by wlesieutre | 2025-07-10 22:02:33+00:00
A warning on Zigbee - Ikea just announced that they're moving their smarthome products to Matter over Thread. It's a win for interoperability, but they've been one of the main reliable and affordable vendors for Zigbee buttons/remotes, door sensors, smart outlets, lightbulbs (way cheaper than Hue), etc. There will still be others, but the ecosystem may not be the best long term investment anymore.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-07-10 22:02:38+00:00
Not sure how we pivoted to "terror" from "national security," which is much broader, but since we are here:

School shootings are not typically classified as "terrorism" unless they are explicitly motivated by political, ideological or religious agendas.

Foreign-sponsored terrorist attacks, such as 9/11, San Bernardino shooting, Pulse nightclub shooting, etc result in significantly higher casualties, widespread fear and greater economic impact (in the $trillions). Foreign actors are typically more sophisticated, thus calling for enhanced screening. And their actions have further-reaching consequences such as the cost of wars and homeland security measures.
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-10 22:02:42+00:00
I had a bad time with Cursor. I use Claude Code inside of VS: Code. You don't necessarily need Max, but you can spend a lot of money very quickly on API tokens, so I'd recommend to anyone trying, start with the $20/month one, no need to spend a ton of money just to try something out.

There is a skill gap, like, I think of it like vim: at first it slows you down, but then as you learn it, you end up speeding up. So you may also find that it doesn't really vibe with the way you work, even if I am having a good time with it. I know people who are great engineers who still don't like this stuff, just like I know ones that do too.
by GTP | 2025-07-10 22:04:01+00:00
Yes, I happened to study how the Fiat-Shamir transform works a couple years ago, but I only saw it in the context of using it to transform an interactive zero knowledge proof into a digital signature scheme.

So, if the prover can know beforehand how an hash function behaves, wouldn't this make it a more general attack on hash functions (so potentially even worse than how it is presented in the article) and the Fiat-Shamir transform is only broken as a consequence of it relying on an hash function? If not, why?
by godelski | 2025-07-10 22:04:11+00:00
> are you being for real?

Yes

> did you see anything as such in the bug listing?

Yes

> but even IF they did put safeguards in place, the fact that this is SEVENTEEN YEARS, no warning, functionality still enabled without ANY WARNING losing people data. unforgivable.

The software has change a ton in 17 years. Right? We can agree on this? (I mean it underwent a major revision in 2018, getting a lot of the codebase rewritten (like Firefox Quantum).

So let's consider a hypothetical situation. Suppose the problem was resolved in the almost 2 decades of rewriting BUT you still do not know what caused the bug in the first place and, consequently, can't reproduce it.

Do you mark the bug as resolved?

Now let's not sit in the hypothetical setting and act as developers. Some safeguards have been put in place (you can verify by looking at referenced issues). You've solved similar, but are unable to determine if these are the same problems or different problems (again, see referenced or use the search).

Do you mark the bug as resolved?

Your sibling commenter implied they would. Personally, I wouldn't. Marking as resolved is a promise to the user that it is fixed. But I can't make such a promise. I can't make any strong statement until I can reproduce. So yeah, it seems appropriate to me that it is marked as "unresolved" with steps "needs reproduction." That is an entirely appropriate status to me. You try as hard as you can and you implement as many safety features as you can, but you don't mark as resolved until you can verify. Unfortunately, this means issues go stale. Hell, there'll even be some noise like if a hacker or even just your dog deleted everything. We wouldn't want to assume the user is dumb and lull ourselves into a false sense of security, right? But you can only do so much.

*YOU CANNOT CLOSE A BUG REPORT IF YOU CANNOT VERIFY THE BUG*. That's the policy they are using. You may use a different policy, but that's the one they are using.
by floxy | 2025-07-10 22:04:15+00:00
The scroll saw seems like about the safest power saw that a kid could use. But every one I've ever owned/used could definitely cut human flesh. Maybe someone could come up with one that has a very limited range of motion, so that it works like a cast saw / oscillatory multi-tool, where the teeth movement is so small that it is within the elastic range of your skin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx1AiQdMQro
by SheinhardtWigCo | 2025-07-10 22:04:30+00:00
> In 3 of 4 calls, the service desk reset passwords and re-enrolled MFA with zero resistance. The caller simply gave a name – no validation, no callback, no check. On the 4th call, the attacker requested access to a privileged group. The TCS agent asked for an employee ID. The ID given didn’t even match our company’s format; and yet, the access was granted anyway.

Yikes
by basisword | 2025-07-10 22:04:33+00:00
My thought on this is that parents shouldn't be giving 9 year olds accounts on any online service. But that doesn't seem to be something that is manageable for parents (no judgement). Would it make more sense for the government to completely ban children under x years from using phones/tablets? The internet? It sounds ridiculous but if an adult provided a child with alcohol or tobacco they would face consequences and therefore those things are controlled to a large extent. Could we do something similar in the digital world? Banning it at the website level is futile so maybe taking a step back to the devices themselves is the solution.
by akyshnik | 2025-07-10 22:04:34+00:00
feedback is generated based on evals. example: eval: function foo wasn't triggered even though [...]

feedback (exaggerated): 1. change stage prompt 2. change function description 3. add extra instructions to the end of the context

metrics are easy to generalize (e.g. call transfer rate), but baseline is different for each agent, so we're interpreting only the changes, not the absolute values (in the context of self-improvement).
by robocat | 2025-07-10 22:04:36+00:00
> ministry of lies

Winston worked in the Ministry of Truth.

By doublethink, internally you know there are two meanings although you can never actually do the crimethink of believing or saying any ungood connotations. Edit - added quote:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, [and remember it if necessary]. To deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-10 22:04:51+00:00
Let's not pretend these kids were trying to hack the Gibson just for the lulz. Calling into help desk, requesting password resets with social engineering, getting into network, installing ransomware is all well beyond playing around. I know there are smart teens, but I would not be surprised to find out there is someone more experienced in the background that got the kids going if not even on behalf of.

There are plenty of teens selling dope, stealing cars, breaking into homes, yet nobody thinks they're just knuckleheads playing around. Why do we think because "but on a computer" makes it different?
by const_cast | 2025-07-10 22:05:14+00:00
Jesus Christ, the sarcasm is thick. You even used the word "wrongthink".

It's not a conspiracy or anything like you're describing, it's that moderate politics is often just... wrong. Believe it or not, there's sometimes a right answer, and a wrong answer. And if you go "in the middle" you end up being wrong.

I mean, take a small gander a history. There's usually a right answer... and a wrong one. Typically, in the moment, the people don't know that. So some construct middle-ground that they believe seems reasonable. Then, we look back on it, and say "what the fuck were you thinking". And that's how we end up with bullshit like the 3/5ths compromise. Seriously, what the fuck was that?

Point being, simply being moderate or depolarized doesn't save you. Consider that, in some countries right now, moderate positions are pro-genocide. Because that's how far gone the politics in said country are.