MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-08 08:26:15+00:00
I'm surprised by the "have been found not to receive the normal extent of damage upon major impact" quote about cybertrucks as I've heard about various issues with the build quality and how they have trouble surviving an encounter with a car wash.

Also, it seems odd that an enemy of the U.S. would choose cybertrucks when they could conceivably be disabled remotely by Tesla (presumably more likely to side with the U.S.). Maybe this is in preparation for a possible civil war as that would seem the most likely scenario where they need to destroy cybertrucks.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-08-08 08:28:01+00:00
A package "for-each"[0] that depends on a package "is-callable"[1], just to make forEach work on objects? Nope, not buying the goodwill here.

[0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/for-each

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-callable
by michaelt | 2025-08-08 08:28:56+00:00
If a person is configuring an LLM for education, to provide personalised math coaching to 10 year olds, they want an LLM that won't output anything NSFW, no matter how the user pokes and prods it. That's totally reasonable.

But if that person is applying AI safety techniques like concept erasure to remove the model's ability to output porn, is that not anti-porn in the most literal sense?
by kmmlng | 2025-08-08 08:30:02+00:00
Basically what we have done the last few years is notice neural scaling laws and drive them to their logical conclusion. Those laws are power laws, which are not quite as bad as logarithmic laws, but you would still expect most of the big gains early on and then see diminishing returns.

Barring a kind of grey swan event of groundbreaking algorithmic innovation, I don't see how we get out of this. I suppose it could be that some of those diminishing returns are still big enough to bridge the gap to create an AI that can meaningfully recursively improve itself, but I personally don't see it.

At the moment, I would say everything is progressing exactly as expected and will continue to do so until it doesn't. If or when that happens is not predictable.
by nicbou | 2025-08-08 08:30:23+00:00
Well I'm one such person so you can hear it from me instead of guessing. I feel disrespected.

I can also confirm that I will do a lot less of it since it's threatening the parts of my business that supported me and gave me so much free time to release things for free. It almost halved my audience, so I have to do the same amount of work for nearly half the pay, half the community, and half the credit.
by OffScopes | 2025-08-08 08:30:29+00:00
Hey everybody

I built a site to collect mind-blowing, underrated websites — a curated home for hidden gems you probably haven’t seen before.

Over the past few weeks, I noticed tons of TikToks and Shorts going viral just by showcasing “websites you didn’t know existed,” and I thought: Why not create a dedicated place where people can discover all these cool sites in one spot?

So I made offscopes.com — a curated directory of underrated, often-overlooked websites. You can filter by tags like DevTools, Productivity, Cure Boredom, and more, plus explore weekly featured champions.

No logins required — just browse, favorite, and enjoy at your own pace.

I’d love your honest feedback — especially on the idea, the user experience, and whether it’s something you’d actually use or share with friends!

Check it out here: https://offscopes.com

PS: Suggestions and submissions of hidden websites are super welcome!
by Thorrez | 2025-08-08 08:30:32+00:00
I think I agree with most of your first section. A couple points though:

>However, I am very certain that this conviction is not a scientific necessity.

Well personhood isn't a scientific concept. So science can't prove when personhood begins. It can only provide evidence about development that we can use to try to determine when personhood begins.

>If you accept that my nonhuman ancestors example disproves your axiom of non-partiality of personhood in the domain of philosphy/science

It doesn't 100% disprove it, because we don't 100% know what happened in the past.

>If you need to provide your kidneys for the duration of one week, then your sacrifice is clearly much less than that of a pregnant woman.

Well if I'm tied down by a tube, would I be able to walk around, drive a car, sleep, use the restroom, have a private conversation? A pregnant woman can do all those things. Yes, while in labor her activities are more restricted, but that doesn't last a week.

If the level of inconvenience of the tube was similar to the level of inconvenience of pregnancy, I would be in favor of the state making it illegal to disconnect the tube IF it's the only way to prevent an innocent person from dying. The state should however compensate the healthy person. I'm also in favor of the state providing compensation for pregnant women.

>So you must either claim that it's a different entity, or that not being fertilized doesn't count as a "problem".

The "or" in that sentence is inclusive or, right, not exclusive or? So it's ok for me to claim both, or just 1?

I claim that not being fertilized doesn't count as a problem. Most eggs don't get fertilized. The standard course of events for an egg is no fertilization.

I also think the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg are different entities. But due to the "or", I don't need to argue this point. For the sake of an argument we could say they're the same entity, and my overall point would still stand.

>Then what was the point you were making by bringing up the definition of an organism?

You said "You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you." I do think that's the clear boundary between entities, and I replied why. However, my overall definition is valid regardless of whether they're the same entity or different entities.
by sobani | 2025-08-08 08:31:10+00:00
> 1-(1-1/1,000,000)^(4×1,000,000) ≈ 98%

> Pretty close to 1 account per day

No, this means there is a 98% chance you get _at least_ 1 account.

`1-1/1,000,000` is the probability you fail 1 attempt. That probability to the 4millionth is the probability you fail 4 million times in a row. 1 minus _that_ probability is that the probability that you _don't_ fail 4 million times in a row, aka that you succeed at least once.

The expected number of accounts is still number of attempts times the probability of success for 1 try, or: 4 accounts.
by arkh | 2025-08-08 08:32:23+00:00
Add Microsoft products to the list.

Requires a "professional account" just to register. And tend to refuse gmail accounts to create said microsoft professional account.

So the 30 day trial period you could use to check what's possible and see if you can integrate their shit with your IT infrastructure? Not happening. And if it's a bother just to get to try your shit, I can't fathom how bad the rest of the experience can be so you can keep your AI enhanced CRM, ERP, Dataverse etc.
by procaryote | 2025-08-08 08:33:04+00:00
An exit tax in itself does nothing to prevent hoarding of wealth. It might enable you to deploy other taxes that would make rational people leave the country, but it's a bit of a "lock the doors and rob people" strategy.

If you have good advisors as a wealthy person you know this and leave as soon as an exit tax is on the table. If you start new businesses you start them outside of the country

If you're a regular non-wealthy person who happens to become successful you're stuck paying high taxes of course, but you'll probably learn and structure your next venture better.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-08 08:33:29+00:00
Strong disagree. Many car thefts are by POS teenagers who do it because it's easy and they can get away with it. They then proceed to drive those cars recklessly, endangering the lives of other people, or worse, use the sense of anonymity and power provided by the stolen car to commit violent crimes.

https://www.krqe.com/news/crime/teen-given-max-sentence-afte...
by unwind | 2025-08-08 08:34:36+00:00
Your images didn't load for me, sadly. Might be some corporate filtering.

Anyway, I googled up this [1] article about supposedly original poke, and it also mentions rice and shows images of bowls with rice. Interesting!

PS. As a Swedish person, the "cinnamon rolls" with frosting that are typical in the US are somewhat triggering to me (because [2]). Sorry about the poke!

Edit: switched the cinnamon roll link to the actual Swedish-style image, for clarity.

[1]: https://guide.michelin.com/hk/en/article/features/6-things-t...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_roll#/media/File:Cinn...
by arjie | 2025-08-08 08:35:03+00:00
I have a setup that is perhaps not as robust, but where my primary aim was that I should be able to incrementally encapsulate the parts. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/One_Quick_Way_To_Host_A_WebA...

As an example, I use cloudflare tunnel to point to an nginx that reverse proxies all the services, but I could just as well point DNS to that nginx and it would still work. I had to rebuild the entire thing on my home server when I found that the cheap VPS I was using was super over-provisioned ($2/mo for 2 Ryzen 7950 cores? Of course it was) and I had this thing at home anyway, and this served me well for that use-case.

When I rebuilt it, I was able to get it running pretty quickly and each piece could be incrementally done: i.e. I could run without cloudflare tunnel and then add it to the mix, I could run without R2 and then switch file storage to R2 because I used FUSE s3fs to mount R2, so on and so forth.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-08 08:35:43+00:00
That has nothing to do with secure pairing. It's an entirely orthogonal concern. Any sensitive system on a vehicle is going to be subject to the same thing.

I don't think anyone will be surprised if the security is swiss cheese once you pop the hood open or bust a headlight out. Keep in mind that a brick to the window and tearing up the center console will get you physical access to the head unit on most vehicles.
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-08 08:36:32+00:00
AI looks like it understands things because it generates text that sounds plausible. Poetry requires the application of certain rule to that text, and the rules for Latin and Greek poetry are very simple and well understood. Scansion is especially easy once you understand the concept, and you actually can, as someone else suggested, train a child to scan poetry by applying these rules.

An LLM will spit out what looks like poetry, but will violate certain rules. It will generate some hexameters but fail harder on trimeter, presumably because it is trained on more hexametric data (epic poetry: think Homer) than trimetric (iambic and tragedy, where it’s mixed with other meters). It is trained on text containing the rules for poetry too, so it can regurgitate rules like defining a penthemimeral cæsura. But, LLMs do not understand those rules and thus cannot apply them as a child could. That makes ancient poetry a great way to show how far LLMs are from actually performing simple, rules-based analysis and how badly they hide that lack of understanding by BS-ing.
by sensanaty | 2025-08-08 08:37:01+00:00
Let's ignore for the moment that we're talking about a word generator that relies on an infinite amount of pirated data input to "learn" anything. Let's also ignore that the primary goal of "AGI" for the people pushing it is to replace workers en masse and to enrich themselves, and not any naive notion of progress or whatever.

So this miraculous technology that can do everything, cure diseases, reverse human aging, absolve us of our sins etc. can't accurately make a bar chart? Something kids learn in 5th grade mathematics? (At least I did, mileage might vary there)
Tell HN: C and C++ are absolute beasts when it comes to performance efficient
by delduca | 2025-08-08 08:37:05+00:00
C and C++ are absolute beasts when it comes to performance and efficient resource usage.

Want proof? Recently, I spent just a few minutes crafting an HTTP server using Boost.Beast. Each request can send Lua code, and for every request, a new Lua VM is instantiated, the code is executed, and the result returned.

Think of it like AWS Lambda — but without Firecracker’s isolation.

I ran benchmarks with over 10,000 parallel requests — that is, 10,000 isolated Lua VM instances orchestrated on just 8 physical cores, with a latency of around 15ms.

And that was using code written by ChatGPT. If I dove into aggressive optimizations and coroutines, I could probably reach 100K simultaneous clients — assuming the kernel allows it.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-08 08:37:42+00:00
They could lose 90% of what they have and still be comfortable for the rest of their life.

And the only reason their money depends on factors like the value of companies is because they want to add to the pile. It could literally be a pile of gold if they wanted it to be, that's just not the best way to make it grow. More realistically, it could be invested in index funds or something similar that the administration can't selectively destroy.

Worst case the government finds a way to confiscate everything, or imprison/kill them, in which case they're exactly as vulnerable as a normal person.
by jeofken | 2025-08-08 08:37:57+00:00
Norway has a high wealth tax (it’s gonna be 1.1% of total wealth per year in normal cases), high capital gains tax, and an exit tax treating moving abroad as a capital gains event.

This means, if you start a not-yet-publicly-listed company, get investment at a high valuation (on paper), you must pay wealth tax as if you had that money liquid in your own name. But you don’t have it liquid, it’s yet just a valuation of a VC, so you are screwed.

This means any Norwegian trying to start eg a fast growing software biz must relocate to Sweden if they want to be close to home, or Switzerland more realistically, as swedens top income tax bracket is >50%.

Scandinavia is attractive as a destination if you are poor and especially from the 3rd world and could benefit from free government services and welfare, but for anyone entrepreneurial or already wealthy, there are many better alternatives.
by dustincoates | 2025-08-08 08:38:07+00:00
This is OpenAI's MO. Remember how they wouldn't release GPT-2 because of concerns of what people would do with it?

Though, I wonder how much of it is honest versus marketing. When I worked with the OpenAI team before the GPT-3 rollout, they had a lot of requirements in place about what we could and couldn't do. A lot of those requirements got in the way, so I imagine it wasn't all for show.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-08-08 08:38:42+00:00
To be fair, he himself removed his unnecessary dependency that caused the explosion of dependencies: https://github.com/A11yance/aria-query/commit/ee003d2af54b6b...

EDIT: Oops, he just did the changelog entry. The actual fix was done by someone else: https://github.com/A11yance/aria-query/commit/f5b8f4c9001ba7...
by jacquesm | 2025-08-08 08:38:54+00:00
That response is quite in line with the typical human based PR response on a first draft.

There is a possibility that machine based PR reviews are better: for instance because they are not prejudiced based on who is the initiator of the PR and because they don't take other environmental factors into account. You'd expect a machine to be more neutral, so on that front the machine should and possibly could score better. But until the models consistently outperform the humans in impartially scored quality vs a baseline of human results it is the humans that should call this, not the machines.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-08 08:39:15+00:00
I created one of the first CDDBs in 1995 when Windows 95 was in beta. It came with a file, IIRC, cdplayer.ini, that contained all the track names you'd typed in from your CDs.

I put out requests across the Net, mostly Usenet at the time, and people sent me their track listings and I would put out a new file every day with the new additions.

Until I hit 64KB which is the max size of an .ini file under Windows, I guess. And that was the end of that project.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-08 08:39:37+00:00
There's a restaurant chain in Texas called "Cheddar's" that doesn't (or didn't when I saw it last) have any nutritional or serving size information at all, not in restaurants and not online. Just expect all the salt, cream, tallow, HFCS, and heart attacks.

There aren't many restaurant choices around and none are any good.
by roenxi | 2025-08-08 08:39:56+00:00
The most interesting part of this article is there doesn't seem to be any strong evidence that the paranoid people were wrong. Europe has spent most of the last 200 years under the control of a relatively small number of families and it is just common sense that there would be conspiracies to seize control of the US government and change its ideology. People debate which of them should gain the ascendancy every election.

> John Robison ... saw [the Masons] as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights...

That is a pretty accurate description of where Europe ended up in the 1900s to today, so it seems a unreasonable to dismiss the man out of hand. 100 years for a big social project isn't that long a time given how slowly the world moved back then. It is reasonable to say that the Masons might have been a benign organisation - but they also might not have been. There is no contest that groups in Europe were trying and succeeding to push in that direction. The communists had their big breakout in the 1900s but the personality type always has and will exist and the intellectual groundwork was being laid at least as early as the 1850s.

There is this weird social dynamic where people dismiss the idea that radical change is possible in foresight then shrug it off and basically don't care in hindsight. It results in remarkably small groups being able to achieve some incredible things, but it is a bit frustrating an attitude to argue with.
by jwr | 2025-08-08 08:40:53+00:00
The US does not have an exit tax for businesses, but has an absolutely horrible tax system in which expats are treated badly.

The reporting requirements for expats are insane: all bank/brokerage/whatever accounts with max levels during the year, FATCA and FBAR forms, and the cherry on top: Form 8858 ("Foreign Disregarded Entities", whatever that is) which is needed for your self-employment and for each of your rental properties. If you think this is easy, look it up — https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-8858

It's pretty much impossible to file your taxes yourself, you will never get it right. You have to pay specialized accountants, some of which will charge you >$1500 to prepare a yearly return with self-employment and rental.

Then come the actual taxes to pay, which are the least of all problems.

Expats are treated this way because they have no lobbying power.
by cdeez | 2025-08-08 08:41:30+00:00
Australia has a "good" system for this (or fair system) - when you leave the country you either choose to pay CGT based on the value at that date, or Australia has a claim on the assets when you eventually sell.

Source -> https://www.ato.gov.au/individuals-and-families/coming-to-au...

If you cease to be an Australian resident while overseas, we deem some of your assets – generally those not taxable Australian property – to have been disposed of for CGT purposes. This may mean you become liable to pay CGT.

You can choose not to have this deemed disposal apply. But if you do eventually dispose of the assets, we consider the whole period of ownership – including any period when you're not an Australian resident – when we calculate a capital gain or loss for CGT purposes.
by SturgeonsLaw | 2025-08-08 08:42:58+00:00
>But surely the real problem is a systemic one and you can’t blame the workers for participating. After all, they are just trying to feed themselves and get healthcare. And, that is correct, of course. What’s also correct is that systems are powered by people. They rely on the labor of people to function

That statement is pivotal and one which people really need to be called out on when they use it as a crutch.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game"... Motherfucker there's only a game because of the players!
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-08 08:44:38+00:00
I think at this point it's an absurd take that they aren't reasoning. I don't think without reasoning about code (& math) you can get to such high scores on competitive coding and IMO scores.

Alphazero also doesn't need training data as input--it's generated by game-play. The information fed in is just game rules. Theoretically should also be possible in research math. Less so in programming b/c we care about less rigid things like style. But if you rigorously defined the objective, training data should also be not necessary.
by yvan-eht-nioj | 2025-08-08 08:45:24+00:00
The rise of dual income households increases total household income, allowing couples to qualify for larger mortgages. As more buyers can service bigger debts, demand for housing at higher prices rises. The increase in borrowing capacity generates an arms race, driving up house prices over time.

Ultimately buyers set prices, not sellers. Thus a trend of households having less ability to incur larger debts should, over time, lead to greater housing affordability.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-08 08:45:25+00:00
That same jury would have a very hard time processing the fact that all music is based upon the music that came before. Before you know it the JS Bach estate (if there is such a thing) ends up owning all of the music made after the 16th century and we should all be very lucky that Hildegard von Bingen was a nun from a very early age.
by nolverostae | 2025-08-08 08:46:32+00:00
I was someone who almost got hit by this tax. You don't need any offshore shenanigans to get around it.

If you just want to move out of the country you can also just keep the ownership of the company within the country. You do this by putting your shares into a holding that stays in Germany even when you move out. That holding needs to be managed within Germany, so you need to assign a friend or be in Germany twice a year to sign off on having done the management within Germany.

You do need a bit more expensive tax advisor, but it's not that difficult. There's a description here: https://www.juhn.com/fachwissen/internationales-steuerrecht/... (3.1.)

Of course, if you want to move the company out of the country, you'll need to pay taxes on any value increase the company had. As others have described this is pretty reasonable though - you get taxed exactly as if gains were realized. This is tax you would have had to pay some time in the future anyways, except by moving to a tax-evasion country.

The only unreasonable part of the law is how they can assume your valuation based on earnings, but that only applies if you can't provide a valuation based on German standards.
by skydhash | 2025-08-08 08:47:06+00:00
As someone who have dabbled in drawing and tried to learn the guitar, those skills are hard to get. It takes times to get decent and a touch of brilliance to get really good. In contrast learning enough to know you’re not good yet (and probably never will be) is actually easy. But now I know enough to enjoy real masters going at it and fantasize sometimes.