MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-14 08:58:59+00:00
> people CHOOSE to engage with that

In the same was a smoker "chooses" to engage with cigarettes. Let's not underestimate the fact that core human programming is being exploited to enable such behavior. Similar to telling a smoker to "just out the cigsreet down", we can't just suddenly tell people in social media to "stop being angry".

>people on [BlueSky] want to behave the same way they wanted to on Twitter.

Yes. Changing established habits is even harder to address. You can't make a horse drink (I'm sure anyone who ever had to deal with a disengaged captive audience feels this in their souls). Whike it's become many peoples primary "news source", aka the bread, most people came there for the circus.

I don't really have an answer here. Society needs to understand social media addiction the same way they understand sugar addictions; have it slammed in there that it's not healthy and to use sparingly. That's not something you can fix with laws and regulation. Not something you fix in even a decade.
by davydm | 2025-08-14 08:59:06+00:00
MS once again drops the ball

No-one is looking to talk to their PC. Most people don't want an AI recording everything they do; many, like me, simply don't want the current gen of hallucinating AIs anywhere near anything important, let alone in a supervisor role on their machine.

How about this, MS: - provide a quick, light OS that just works, with the fewest required services running, and an easy way for people to _opt_into_ extra features instead of having to _opt_out_ every time they get a fresh machine? - bring features people actually want, like the abandoned feature to run android apps via WSL, or a similar layer - prioritise user experience over business concerns, such that the OS shouldn't lag or lose functionality when your advertising streams are interrupted

I feel like MS was making good progress from win7, through 8, to 10, and has dropped the ball with 11 in several regards, not the least of which is abandoning hardware which is still fully capable of serving user needs, for an artificial requirement of requiring a specific generation of cpu, or requiring a TPM, which has been shown to be not necessary for a lot of users. No worries though - the customers you're bleeding will simply move to Linux, or continue to use outdated versions of your software which are vulnerable, giving your company a bad name.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-14 08:59:40+00:00
Voice input: people don't talk to their desktop or laptop computers, because they are sat in front of them with more detailed, immediate and nuanced input devices available; they talk to their phones and other small appliances that are "ambient".

> "Fundamentally, the concept that your computer can actually look at your screen and is context aware is going to become an important modality for us going forward."

I hate to break it to them but they are the people who make the OS that renders all the content on the screen. They could make it more efficiently context-aware without massive privacy risks, simply by using the information they already have at that moment, and introducing APIs that applications could use to communicate context, under their users' control.

They don't want to do this because they don't want applications or users to have that kind of fine-grained control.
by Woodi | 2025-08-14 09:00:35+00:00
yes, yes, everybody know that now...

but software is just not-a-base thing - it needs cpu's, computers. If you want realy independence do base thing - computer hardware ! Make small hardware that just can run Linux, can display things and use keyboard and mouse... Do eg. Dennmark do this ? Or Bosh ? Or...

Computers just to connect to internet and send some messages via IRC or something... ;)
by bob1029 | 2025-08-14 09:00:46+00:00
> You are training the neural network (a big block of matrices) using gradient descent (a trick that modifies the big block of matrices) to do something.

Things get even more mysterious (and efficient) if you introduce non-linearities, recurrence and a time domain. These mainstream ANN architectures are fairly pedestrian by comparison. You can visualize and walk through the statistical distributions. Everything is effectively instantaneous within each next token generation. It's hard to follow an action potential around in time because it's constantly being integrated with other potentials and its influence is only relevant for a brief moment.
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-14 09:01:19+00:00
It's a dilemma.

There might be demand, but this "platform A" will be in competition with a dopamine-focused engagement "platform B" which also supports to host updates from "the lives of people you follow".

The majority of people will then have both installed but spend more time on "platform B" as it is actively engaging them.

Platform A will again end up in competition for user-attention with Platform B, as it needs money to operate their business etc.

Now if Platform A asks for a subscription fee to fund their non-engagement social media platform, how many of these users described above will pay and not simply prefer the free "platform B"?

How will such a churn affect users willing to PAY for "Platform A", if people whose "life they want to follow" have completely moved to "Platform B"?

Funny enough, as a European I could use WhatsApp as this "Platform A", as it has features to share status-updates, pictures etc. as part of your profile. Everyone I know has WhatsApp, noone is using those features.

So in essence, this Platform A already exists in Europe but doesn't work as "social media" because people don't engage with it...
by exasperaited | 2025-08-14 09:01:54+00:00
> I feel like MS was making good progress from win7, through 8, to 10, and has dropped the ball with 11 in several regards

On my little low-powered mini coffee-shop laptop, Windows 11 is both the best Windows it has ever been in terms of smooth usability, and the worst in terms of all the things you have to switch off first in order to get that usability.
by kldg | 2025-08-14 09:02:23+00:00
I have gone through this with daughter, because she's running into similar anxiety issues (social and otherwise) I did as a youth. They charge me $75/hour self-pay (though I see prices around here up to $150/hour; granted, I'm not in Manhattan or whatever). Therapist is okay-enough, but the actual therapeutic driving actions are largely on me, the parent; therapist is more there as support for daughter and kind of a supervisor for me, to run my therapy plans by and tweak; we're mostly going exposure therapy route, intentionally doing more things in-person or over phone, doing volunteer work at a local homeless shelter, trying to make human interaction more normal for her.

Talk therapy is useful for some things, but it can also be to get you to more relevant therapy routes. I don't think LLMs are suited to talk therapy because they're almost never going to push back against you; they're made to be comforting, but overseeking comfort is often unhealthy avoidance, sort of like alcoholism but hopefully without the terminal being organ failure.

With that said, an LLM was actually the first to recommend exposure therapy, because I did go over what I was observing with an LLM, but notably, I did not talk to the LLM in first-person. -So perhaps there is value in talking to an LLM but putting yourself in the role of your sibling/parent/child and talking about yourself third-person to try getting away from LLM's general desire to provide comfort.
by gyomu | 2025-08-14 09:03:13+00:00
There's plenty of options, take your pick. The latest one that I've been hearing about is https://retro.app, there are others.

The issue of course is that your friends won't be on it, most of them won't sign up even if you beg them, and most likely none of you will be using the service anymore 6 months from now.
by quesomaster9000 | 2025-08-14 09:03:33+00:00
I'd argue that the problem is that QR codes shouldn't be an 'app' problem, and yes there's a chicken-egg problem with PoS terminals verifying incoming bank payments but that's a separate issue.

If you want to do account-to-account payments you can show the customer the account/routing number, amount & invoice ID - but obviously that's high friction and the customer needs to login to their account and send a payment with lots of manual data entry.

Making yet another app, adding a financial intermediary, requiring you to link your bank account - these aren't solving the friction points.

We already have bank apps, when I scan a QR code in an industry-wide format it should ask me or confirm which bank app to open and pre-fill all the payment information.

So from my perspective, the problem is that FedNow in the US, and Open Banking in the UK - they could have just dictated "Banks must support EPC QR, or EMV QR code scanning and deep-links", and QR code payments would happen very quickly - even with NFC/RFID you can do passive scanning to achieve the same thing.

* Choose Account * Confirm details * Press send

That's about as easy as you can get for push payments, with a real industry-wide standard for communicating payment intents via NFC/QR. But both FedNow and UK OpenBanking are structured in a way which requires friction, and onerous regulation, through their clunky APIs - meaning you can't actually solve that problem on your own.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-14 09:05:13+00:00
Maybe it doesn't suck. Others are just better at posting discoverable content than you. (note: "discoverable" =/= "engaging")

If we believe the discoverability algorithms to avoid "engagement" is respected, who would be more discoverable? The person coming in to show off one high quality article every 6 months, or the person doing weekly blogs with some nuggets of information on the same topic?

Maybe your article goes viral, but odds are that the weekly blogger will amass more followers, have more comments, and will build up to a point where they 99% of the time get more buzz on their updates than the one hit wonder.
by vitonsky | 2025-08-14 09:05:36+00:00
One yet another narrative that claim all people owe to an open source.

I believe, once in deep future, an open source developers will grown and stop repeating this sectarian mantra.

No one owes you anything. If you do opensource and you need in money - use your open source as marketing tool to promote services you sell.

It's simple as 2+2, I've mention it in my blog post https://vitonsky.net/blog/2025/06/24/open-source/

I think those who believe a companies will pay to you for a random OSS is just a kids. Ask people who can use a sheets, they explain you why your product will die with this approach.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-14 09:06:51+00:00
SHA-3 in fast when implemented in hardware.

Its slowness in software and quickness in hardware have almost nothing to do with it being sponge-based, but are caused by the Boolean functions executed by the Keccak algorithm, which are easy to implement in hardware, but need many instructions on most older CPUs (but much less instructions on Armv9 CPUs or AMD/Intel CPUs with AVX-512).

The sponge construction is not inherently slower than the Merkle–Damgård construction. One could reuse the functions iterated by SHA-512 or by SHA-256 and reorganize them to be used in a sponge-based algorithm, obtaining similar speeds with the standard algorithms.

That is not done because for the sponge construction it is better to design a mixing function with a single wider input instead of a mixing function with 2 narrower inputs, like for Merkle–Damgård. Therefore it is better to design the function from the beginning for being used inside a sponge construction, instead of trying to adapt functions intended for other purposes.
by distances | 2025-08-14 09:07:14+00:00
I suppose this, again, depends on the country. They can get very expensive, especially if you're in a "loser pays" country. And a judge may even then divide the costs more fairly, and you find that your lawyer costs exceeded the monetary value of the judgement you won. That on top of potentially stressing years and years about it.

And then the loser may request a next level court to consider the case, potentially leading to more stressful years and a lot of additional financial risk.
by immibis | 2025-08-14 09:08:34+00:00
Arguably, drunk bad decisions were the only thing keeping the population up, and now they're not. Kinda like AI data centers and the stock market.

Now Our Benefactors will have to figure out ways to make people want to reproduce, or just deal with the low population and racial demographic shifts (just kidding, they'll probably find ways to force people to reproduce).
by foldr | 2025-08-14 09:08:38+00:00
Not really. The UK government does not operate a centrally-controlled CCTV surveillance system, contrary to popular myth. There are a lot of privately owned cameras (but no reliable estimates of how many), and some local authorities, police forces, etc. operate CCTV cameras in certain locations.

If you actually dig in to the statistics that sometimes get quoted about CCTV in the UK you’ll find that a lot of the numbers have very little foundation.
by fao_ | 2025-08-14 09:08:41+00:00
> > There’s no option to create original content...

> While this is true, I'd say the vast majority of users don't create original content either, but still end up shaping the social media environment through the actions that they did model. Again, it's not perfect but I'm more convinced that it might be useful after reading the interview.

Ok, but, this is by design. Other forms of social media, places like Mastodon etc have a far, far higher rate of people creating original content.
by immibis | 2025-08-14 09:09:20+00:00
We have many times. We've ruined lives and literally killed people over it, but we just accept this is how money works. We couldn't possibly consider changing The System because The System is perfect, all-knowing and benevolent. Trust in The System!

Also there's a bunch of really annoying and expensive processes for rich people to get their money back after an error, so they don't see any problem.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-14 09:10:06+00:00
Sounds like a return to old school, long term forums. They still exist, but there's a reason Reddit and Twitter took over the "forum space". They toom the core ideas and injected it with "engagement". In this case, with the voting system of reddit, and the follower system of Twitter. Gamefying the act of interacting with peope had effects beyond anyone's comprehension in 2007
by ttoinou | 2025-08-14 09:10:27+00:00
a rat race promoted by rich sociopaths, specifically designed to have the underclasses ripping each other apart while they live lavish lives that don’t even amount to longer lives.

That could also describe Socialized healthcare except the money is spread on more people working useless jobs and having more normal life

a lot of you probably don’t want to admit, purely for ideological reasons: socialized healthcare.

A yes of course, there are no rational arguments against communism, it’s not like we have austrian economics, classic liberal philosophy, game theory, public choice, experience from the past and basic common sense.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-14 09:10:32+00:00
> Stop pretending that people want to use social media for entertainment and news and celebrities

People actually want media, social and otherwise, for exactly that.

> Stop forcing content from outside of my network upon me.

There are social media apps and platforms that don't do that. They are persistently less popular. People, by and large, do want passive discovery from outside of their network, just like they do, in aggregate, want entertainment and news and celebrities.

> Make the chronological feed the only option.

Chronological by what? Original post? Most recent edit? Most recent response? Most recent reaction?
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-08-14 09:10:39+00:00
Your article, unlike the bizarre desperate take from the poster above, is actually very good. We do not understand the features the neural net learns, that's 100% true (and really the whole point of them in the first place).

For small image recognition models we can visualize them and get an intuition for what they are doing, but it doesn't really matter.

For even smaller models, we can translate them to a classical AI model (like a mixed integer program as an example) and actually do various "queries" on the model itself to, e.g., learn that the network recognizes the number "8" by just checking 2 pixels in the image.

None of this changes the fact that we know what these things are and how they work, because we built them. Any comparisons to our lack of knowledge of the human brain are ridiculous. LLMs are obviously not conscious, they don't even have real "state", they're an approximated pure function f(context: List<Token>) -> Token, that's run in a loop.

The only valid alarmist take is that we're using black box algorithms to make decisions with serious real-world impact, but this is true of any black box algorithm, not just the latest and greatest ML models.
by chriseidhof | 2025-08-14 09:12:30+00:00
This really speaks to me.

I teach SwiftUI to people. I've written books and teach classes. The books don't work nearly as well (because many people just read it instead of actually practicing SwiftUI). The classes I teach ("workshops") are extremely hands on, I try to defer my explanations to after the exercise as much as possible. The feedback is often very positive, and I can tell afterwards that people have really grasped stuff. I know I'm just trying to confirm my biases here as well, but to me, there's nothing better than doing stuff first and then analyzing it.
by e33or-assasin | 2025-08-14 09:13:41+00:00
I built Prexist to solve a frustration I kept running into —> not knowing if my “brilliant” idea already existed… until it was too late.

What Prexist does: * Search 8+ platforms in one click * See similar products with AI powered analysis * Get suggested keywords and relevance scores * All in a clean, unified interface

Built for: * Founders validating startup ideas * Product managers doing competitive analysis * VCs and consultants doing due diligence

Save hours (or days) of manual research, find out what already exists before you build.

Would love your feedback, ideas, and support If you like it, please give it an upvote and share it with someone who’s building something new!
by glaarinee | 2025-08-14 09:14:01+00:00
The problem is that there is a class of assets whose price is some best guess of the firms engineering them. Much like sub-prime.

> Accel-KKR’s investment in isolved, which the firm acquired in 2011, has generated a 19.2 times gross multiple on investment, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It pitched another continuation fund for isolved because the company has more room for growth, the people said.

If they haven't sold isolved, it means they are just saying it is worth 19.2 times as much as they paid for it. When they "roll" it into a Continuation Vehicle, they are effectively inflating assets by saying its value is 20x what it paid for and the reason is "trust us bro".
by modo_mario | 2025-08-14 09:14:01+00:00
The vast majority in any given colonial nation neither partook nor benefited much if at all.

For the vast crimes of leopold and subsequently to lesser extent the belgian state in congo the biggest chunk of money got invested in the brazilian rail network to make one family very rich for example. My great grandparents being subsistence farmers didn't see shit and you'd punish not just them but me for it.

Typically the people moving in are from countries which given fair comparison are similarly not owed an opinion given their sins of the father and many a nation is not allowed it's borders likely also yours lest you live in Buthan or so.
by isgb | 2025-08-14 09:14:08+00:00
Well, I'd like my writing and my code to be something I can share with other people freely, but not let it be part of a data set some company uses in their for-profit product.

Of course, a crawler can also mock user agents and fetch data in patterns that emulate real users and there'd be no way to tell - but maybe we could supply real-seeming data (at least to the crawlers we can identify) and that'll be good enough?
by godelski | 2025-08-14 09:14:12+00:00
> you are taking the rationalist argument to be

I think they say P(doom) is high number[0]. Or in other words, AGI is likely to kill us. I interpret this as "if we make a really intelligent machine it is very likely to kill us all." My interpretation is mainly biased on them saying "if we build a really intelligent machine, it is very likely to kill us all."

Yud literally wrote a book titled "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies."[1] There's not much room for ambiguity here...

[0] Yud is on the record saying at least 95% https://pauseai.info/pdoom He also said anyone with a higher P(doom) than him is crazy so I think that says a lot...

[1] https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-08-14 09:15:19+00:00
That is also what I would expect, regardless of firearm laws. Like look at how many people are fans of populists right now. Then 10x that if basically everyone is unemployed.

It's gonna be a wild ride.

That being said, I'm not convinced LLM based workflows will be transformative, at least over the short term (3-5 years). It took a long time for the whole of society to end up on the Internet and I'd expect around the same speed for AI/LLM approaches (even in the best case scenario).
by 999900000999 | 2025-08-14 09:16:47+00:00
It's ok.

My first reply was flagged for pointing out an unaffordable treatment has no real use.

I forgot this is a forum where 800$ a month is a trivial amount of money.

No snark intended. I've been to Europe a few times, as far as I'm concerned The Netherlands, Belgium, and the UK are essentially utopias.

Not having to play the health insurance game, significantly lower crime rates, actual worker rights. No place is perfect, but try being poor in America. Nothing is closer to hell.
by imtringued | 2025-08-14 09:17:39+00:00
>FWIW, as a pip maintainer, I don't strongly agree with this statement, I think if pip had the same full time employee resources that uv has enjoyed over the last year that a lot of these issues could be solved.

No. This something people tell each other, that it's a lack of resources, but in reality almost all OSS projects with long standing flaws don't have a resources problem. They have a prioritization problem, where they actively ignore and refuse to work on things that affect users every single day of usage.

There are features in FreeCAD that are straight up just broken that you hit every single day of using FreeCAD. When a simple low cost fix is suggested you get immense pushback, because of how "impure" the fix is despite being entirely cosmetic, also being reversible and having no long term impact on maintenance.

Progress happens when you sidestep those who block progress. That's what realthunder was doing and that's what Astral is doing with uv. No more bullshit excuses.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-14 09:18:04+00:00
Yes and mostly No. No, because I work in games and I've seen enough people thinking that a "good game" just needs pretty graphics and a facsimile of "fun" to know that AI can't ever simulate this. Mkst Humans can't even seem to do it consistently, on all organizational levels.

But i have a footnote of "yes" because as you said, decision makers are just not interested in having this discussion about "focus on making fun games". So it will unfortunately affect my job in the short and even medium terms. Because so much of big money in games these days is in fact not focused on making a game, but on trying to either generate a gambling simulator, an engagement trap, or (you guessed it) AI hype. Both to try and claim you can just poof up assets, and to try and replace labor.

Knowing this, I do have long term plans to break out into my own indie route.