MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hbn | 2025-08-07 13:37:39+00:00
> “Peck at this button like a trained parrot!

All of the prompts users get these days in an effort to add "security" have trained users to mindlessly say "yes" to everything just so they can access the thing they're trying to do on their computer; we've never had less secure users. The cookie tracking prompts should probably take most of the blame.

I know with the last major macOS update, nearly every app is now repeatedly asking if it can connect to devices on my network. I don't know? I've been saying yes just so I don't have stuff mysteriously break, and I assume most people are too. They also make apps that take screenshots or screen record nag you with prompts to continue having access to that feature. But how many users are really gonna do a proper audit, as opposed to the amount that will just blindly click "sure, leave me alone"?

On my phone, it keeps asking if I want to let apps have access to my camera roll. Those stupid web notifications have every website asking if it can send notifications, so everyone's parents who use desktop Chrome or an Android have a bunch of scam lotto site ad notifications and don't know how to turn them off.
by jerf | 2025-08-07 13:37:53+00:00
You can't even "traverse" a data structure at that speed. We're talking low-single-digit cycles here. A compiled for loop tends to require two cycles just to loop (you need to increment, compare, and jump back but the CPU can speculate the loop will in fact jump back so the three operations can take two cycles), and I don't know what the minimum for a JS-engine JIT'd loop is but needing 4 or 5 wouldn't stun me. That's literally the "compiled loop do-nothing speed".

I mention this and underline it because this is really an honorary "latency value every programmer should know"; I've encountered this multiple times online where someone thought they were benchmarking something but they didn't think about the fact that .6 nanoseconds per iteration comes out to about 2-3 cycles (depending on CPU speed) and there's no way what they thought was benchmarking could be done that quickly, and I've now encountered it twice at work. It's a think worth knowing.
by rootbear | 2025-08-07 13:38:09+00:00
Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.
by diggan | 2025-08-07 13:38:49+00:00
Depends on the model. Each runner needs to implement support when there are new architectures, and they all seemingly focuses on different things. As far as I've gathered so far, vLLM focuses on inference speed, SGLang on parallizing across multiple GPUs, Ollama on being as fast out the door with their implementation as possible, sometimes cutting corners, llama.cpp sits somewhere in-between Ollama and vLLM. Then LM Studio seems to lag slightly behind with their llama.cpp usage, so I'm guessing that's the difference between LM Studio and building llama.cpp from source today.
by icetank | 2025-08-07 13:39:27+00:00
Maybe the issue is that people assume that a randomly selected population would consist of US citizens. What if you picked Japanese? They did well during covid. An they are know for having a strong communal responsibility. Maybe the average US citizen is just a bad choice for a generation ship? Then again given the choice between sending foreign citizen's or sending no generation ship would probably result in no generation ship bring launched.
by 827a | 2025-08-07 13:40:06+00:00
I've flipped my stance on this. I used to be pretty pro passkey, but after using them for a while what I've observed is:

1. There's very low consistency in implementation, so while I understand the problems passkeys solve, it seems like every vendor has chosen different subproblems of the problem space to actually implement. Does it replace your password? Does it replace MFA? Can I store multiple passkeys? Can I turn off other forms of MFA? Do I still need to provide my email address when I sign in (Github actually says No to this)?

2. The experience of passkeys was supposed to be easier and more secure than passwords for users who struggle to select good passwords, but all I've observed is: Laypeople whose passwords have never been compromised, in 20 years of computing, now deeply struggling to authenticate with services. Syncing passwords or passkeys between devices is something none of these people in my life have figured out. I still know two people in their late 20s who use a text file on their computer and Evernote to manage their passwords. What is their solution for passkeys? They don't know. They're definitely using them though. The average situation I've seen is: "What the heck is this how do I do this I guess I'll just click save passkey on this iOS prompt" and then they can never get back into that service. The QR code experience for authenticating on desktop using mobile barely works on every Windows machine I've seen.

3. There is still extremely low support among password managers for exporting passkeys. No password managers I've interacted with can do it. Instead its to my eyes become another user-hostile business decision; why should we prioritize a feature that enables our users to leave my product? "Oh FIDO has standardized the import/export system its coming" Yeah we've also standardized IPv6. Standards aren't useful until they're used. "Just create new passkeys instead of exporting" as someone who has recently tried to migrate from 1Password to custom-hosted Bit/Vaultwarden: This is the reason why I gave up. By the way, neither of these products support exporting passkeys.

It might end up being like USB-C where its horrible for the first ten years, but slowly things start getting better and the vision becomes clear. But I think if that's the case: We The Industry can't be pulling an Jony Ive Apple 2016 Macbook Pro and telling users "you have to use these things and you have no other option [1]". Apple learned that lesson. I'm also reasonably happy with how Apple has implemented Passkeys (putting aside all the lockin natural to using Apple products, at least its expected with them). But no one else learned that lesson from them.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/your-microsoft-passwords-will-vani...
by creddit | 2025-08-07 13:40:08+00:00
> But here’s the important part: LLMs don’t know how to use tools. They don’t have native tool calling support. They just generate text that represents a function call.

This terrifies me. This whole time I was writing bash commands into my terminal, I thought I knew how to use the tools. Now, I’ve just learned that I had no idea how to use tools at all! I just knew how to write text that /represented/ tool use.
by iancmceachern | 2025-08-07 13:40:39+00:00
I have the opposite experience.

I am friends with the Cafe owner on my street.

He has a ton of regulars that hang out there all the time, myself included. I spend a lot there, so do they. Often times they are having their real estate sales meetings there, startup discussions, etc (you know, doing business).

They all, including me, known the owner well, we are friends.

Something like this would completely ruin that dynamic. It would push away the customers like me and the others I described that regularly spend a lot there in favor of getting $5 from the "randos".
by johnmaguire | 2025-08-07 13:41:18+00:00
I think you might be missing the point of this quote, which is that you don't have to introduce additional code into the model to support MCP.

MCP happens at a different layer. You have to run the MCP commands. Or use a client that does it for you:

> But the LLM will never know you are using MCP, unless you are letting it know in the system prompt of tool definitions. You, the developer, is responsible for calling the tools. The LLM only generates a snippet of what tool(s) to call with which input parameters.

The article is describing how MCP works, not making an argument about what it means to "understand" something.
by KineticLensman | 2025-08-07 13:41:36+00:00
Yes, exactly. Why not mine a few asteroids, deploy comms and mapping sats, etc.

Building a ground civ from scratch would be hard enough for anyone, let alone a space-adapted population who have spent generations being coddled by AI, and who have exactly zero experience of planet-side ops with hostile terrain and meteorology, with physical tools that they have never used in an operational setting.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-07 13:42:04+00:00
The domain is banned. Turn on showdead and check the domain history: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gizvault.com

The submitter is intentionally evading the ban since most of their recent posts put the URL in the text to avoid the ban: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ricecat
by Bender | 2025-08-07 13:42:10+00:00
I don't like any of the methods used today. Passwords are OK for me since I pick strong pass phrases, use different emails per site but for me the superior option for me is IP/CIDR restrictions. A small handful of sites support it and some of those don't expose that they do because some people think a long DHCP lease is a static IP and that can cause a customer support ticket. It was a battle but I have managed to get some financial institutions to enable it for me. Every bank big and small can do this but tellers and bankers have no idea, only their IT person. When that fails I just disable internet access to my account from the financial institutions and go talk to a real person face to face. If that isn't an option I just don't do business with them. Simple as. I do 99.999999% of my internet access from home but if I depended on mobile I would have a VPN back to my home to utilize my static IP from a Linux laptop. I do not browse the internet from a cell phone and never will. Not perfect, nothing is.
by keiferski | 2025-08-07 13:42:19+00:00
Well, there’s a fundamental difference: the Internet blew up because it enabled people to connect with each other more easily: culturally, economically, politically.

AI is more-or-less replacing people, not connecting them. In many cases this is economically valuable, but in others I think it just pushes the human connection into another venue. I wouldn’t be surprised if in-person meetup groups really make a comeback, for example.

So if a prediction about AI involves it replacing human cultural activities (say, the idea that YouTube will just be replaced by AI videos and real people will be left out of a job), then I’m quite bearish. People will find other ways to connect with each other instead.
by dsign | 2025-08-07 13:42:38+00:00
I don't think AI is having much impact on the bits of the economy that have to do with labor and consumption. Folk who are getting displaced by AI are, for now, probably being re-hired to fix AI mess-ups later.

But if, or when AI gets a little better, then we will start to see a much more pronounced impact. The thing competent AIs will do is to super-charge the rate at which profits don't go to labor nor to social security, and this time they will have a legit reason: "you really didn't use any humans to pave the roads that my autonomous trucks use. Why should I pay for medical expenses for the humans, and generally for the well-being of their pesky flesh? You want to shutdown our digital CEO? You first need to break through our lines of (digital) lawyers and ChatGPT-dependent bought politicians."
by lagrange77 | 2025-08-07 13:42:40+00:00
Thanks for your answers!

While it is seemingly hard to calculate it, maybe one should just make a database website that tracks specific setups (model, exact variant / quantisation, runner, hardware) where users can report, which combination they got running (or not) along with metrics like tokens/s.

Visitors could then specify their runner and hardware and filter for a list of models that would run on that.
by ben_w | 2025-08-07 13:42:54+00:00
Mm. Partial agree, partial disagree.

These things, as they are right now, are essentially at the performance level of an intern or recent graduate in approximately all academic topics (but not necessarily practical topics), that can run on high-end consumer hardware. The learning curves suggest to me limited opportunities for further quality improvements within the foreseeable future… though "foreseeable future" here means "18 months".

I definitely agree it's a bubble. Many of these companies are priced with the assumption that they get most of the market; they obviously can't all get most of the market, and because these models are accessible to the upper end of consumer hardware, there's a reasonable chance none of them will be able to capture any of the market because open models will be zero cost and the inference hardware is something you had anyway so it's all running locally.

Other than that, to the extent that I agree with you that:

> GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives

I do so only in that not everyone wants (or would even benefit from) a book-smart-no-practical-experience intern, and not all economic tasks are such that book-smarts count for much anyway. This set of AI advancements didn't suddenly cause all cars manufacturers to suddenly agree that this was the one weird trick holding back level 5 self driving, for example.

But for those of us who can make use of them, these models are already useful (and, like all power tools, dangerous when used incautiously) beyond merely being coding assistants.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-08-07 13:42:58+00:00
>Without AI, US economic growth would be meager.

The assumption here is that, without AI, none of that capital would have been deployed anywhere. That intuitively doesn't sound realistic. The article follows on with:

>In the last two years, about 60 percent of the stock market’s growth has come from AI-related companies, such as Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta.

Which is a statement that's been broadly true since 2020, long before ChatGPT started the current boom. We had the Magnificent Seven, and before that the FAANG group. The US stock market has been tightly concentrated around a few small groups for a decades now.

>You see it in the business data. According to Stripe, firms that self-describe as “AI companies” are dominating revenue growth on the platform, and they’re far surpassing the growth rate of any other group.

The current Venn Diagram of "startups" and "AI companies" is two mostly concentric circles. Again, you could have written the following statement at any time in the last four decades:

> According to [datasource], firms that self-describe as “startups” are dominating revenue growth on the platform, and they’re far surpassing the growth rate of any other group.
by matt-attack | 2025-08-07 13:43:30+00:00
If something “appears” as a color then that’s the color it IS.

The reason anything is the color it is is because that’s how it appears.

Am I missing something?

It’s like saying, “oh the sky is only blue because it scatters blue light”. Well then the sky is blue. Full stop.

“Red paint is only red because it happens to absorb certain other color spectrums leaving mostly red light”. Ok then it’s red.
by morsecodist | 2025-08-07 13:43:43+00:00
I think it's fair to point out that they were never intended to be a good framework for aligning robots and humans. Even in his own stories they lead to problems. They were created precisely to make the point that encoding these things in rules is hard.

As for practical problems they are extremely vague. What counts as harm? Could a robot serve me a burger and fries if that isn't good for my health? By the rules they actually can't even passively allow me to get harmed so should they stop me from eating one? They have to follow human orders but which human? What if orders conflict?
by DrScientist | 2025-08-07 13:43:52+00:00
Indeed - even if not strictly true - ( https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-hea... ).

Though the main impact I suspect won't be the lack of global vaccine development and availability ( the US is important - but not the whole world ), but rather in the diminishing of the US science and industry base.
by snarf21 | 2025-08-07 13:43:59+00:00
I would argue that difference is that entering my group chat is the same as entering my house to install a listening device. If there is a warrant to tap someone's phone, that is based on probable cause not blanket surveillance. We don't shut down a bar just because some criminals hang out there.

Also, warrants are when there is evidence to suggest guilt. You are not known to be guilty. That is the point of the warrant, to collect more evidence to prove guilt.
by sofixa | 2025-08-07 13:44:04+00:00
> I mean, this is kinda what you expect from software written in Go, right

Unlike real software, written by real men, in Assembly, on paper, bare chested during a full moon, right?

> The point of go is to make is it so that below average programmers can write roughly average code

You either have no clue about Go, or are mistaking it with something else.

Go was created at Google to have a performant language with static types that was easy to read (because code is read much more often than it is written, while improving it, fixing it, reviewing it, etc). Lots of extremely solid, good, widely used software is written in it, and for good reasons.

Comparing Go with JavaScript also doesn't leave us with the impression you've even heard of Go before this comment.
by silvestrov | 2025-08-07 13:44:06+00:00
Newspapers could have made their own "Craigslist". They just didn't want to learn anything about internet technology or how it could shape the media landscape.

They did not want any computer science people in the company boards or top management level.

Their articles are still written in the same style as when paper ruled. We still only get 1 or 2 photos per article even when it's easy to snap 10-20 photos.

We don't get links to other sites. Articles that says "Apple's press release announced xyz" never links to the press release.
by toss1 | 2025-08-07 13:44:15+00:00
OK

And exactly ZERO of those licenses allow you to get anywhere near an autopilot system. Those licenses are for Visual Flight Rules only. You are not even allowed to fly in conditions that require you to use instruments.

To get to use an autopilot, at MINIMUM is required an instrument rating which is 10+ hours past Private Pilot AND a Commercial Pilot License which is 250 hours minimum, assuming you can find a plane with an autopilot that requires that minimum and included that in your learning program (so hours counted towards both commercial and type certification). Then, you need to be rated on the particular autopilot system.

On top of that, you need to follow RULES about when the autopilot can be engaged, e.g., not below certain altitudes, conditions, etc.

The point stands that the training required just to be able to understand an aircraft autopilot sufficiently to be allowed to use it is a level of serious specialized expertise not encountered in ordinary civilian life.

Taking technical terms of art from areas of specialized expertise and abusing common misunderstandings to apply them to broad marketing and then relying on legal technicalities to try to say "we told you so" when you did no such thing it is just an advanced form of lying. Musk is fooling you too.
by ivanstepanovftw | 2025-08-07 13:44:22+00:00
Not a humor for me. I have lost myself. I have removed this line from my bio because it causes bad associations to me with this journey of finding myself.

As for the author of the one-year-old PR, he was surprised:

- https://t.me/ziglang_en/140663

- https://t.me/ziglang_en/140664
by gaoshan | 2025-08-07 13:44:56+00:00
I did pretty much the same thing some 10 years ago but only for my own images and this creator overcame a problem that I could not. I ingested a collection of images, read the metadata and used that to place the images on a map like this. However, I could not figure out how to determine facing. This project has an arrow indicator to show this, I ended up setting it manually. I would love to know how they determined this because I really cannot figure it. Does image metadata contain more information than it used to? Is there a way to use an AI agent to analyze the light/angles/streets/landmarks to approximate this?
by ivape | 2025-08-07 13:45:08+00:00
What about LangChain makes more sense? It’s one of the most prematurely complex libs I’ve seen. I’m calling it right now, LangChain is going to run a mind fuck on everyone and convince people that’s actually how complicated orchestrating LLM control flow should be. The community needs to fight this framework off.

That’s besides the point. MCP servers let you discover function interfaces that you’ll have to implement yourself (in which case, yeah, what’s the point of this? I want the whole function body).
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-07 13:45:25+00:00
>Odd take on causality.

If you have something to say say it like a man. This is an internet comment section, not a bunch of mean girls pretending to run a parent teacher association.

>It’s perfectly reasonable to say that an event was caused by earlier events and also that different actions in the intervening years could have produced different outcomes.

The problem is that it's a meaningless statement. Everything "has its origins" or "was caused by" the prior situation which has its origins (or whatever comparable verbiage you prefer) in a nearly infinite set of things that created the immediate necessary preconditions. Like if the middle east didn't suck you might not have got Colombus when you did and the resultant effects. Or if the middle east sucked a little more you might not have gotten Marco Polo when you did having the resultant effects. But this all just devolves into a stupid "look how smart I am" exercise where we're all just basically listing things that came before and circle jerk about the ways they put their metaphorical thumbs on the scale of the future.
by browningstreet | 2025-08-07 13:45:58+00:00
I just deleted my gofundme because they kicked me into this cycle today. Somehow I've managed to have an account there and make contributions over the years, but now they wanted my phone number and an MFA code to proceed, and there was no opt-out. I went through it but then deactivated my account. I need less of this in my life, and gofuneme is not essential to my life.

I'm in the rental market right now, and Zillow not only has a log-in for the app, but to read messages in your inbox, you have to MFA again each time, and the time-out period is about an hour.

We're being annoyed to death.

This is madness.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-07 13:46:03+00:00
Which excludes the massive difference in obesity. No Wal-Mart motorized shopping carts in Europe.

> The color-coded visualization shared by Brilliant Maps shows that in many U.S. states, obesity rates exceed 30 percent, with some surpassing 40 percent. Southern and Midwestern states, such as Mississippi and West Virginia, report the highest levels, while Western states like Colorado and Hawaii have comparatively lower rates, though still above most European nations.

> Comparatively, obesity rates in most European countries remain below 25 percent, with some nations, particularly in Southern and Western Europe, reporting levels under 15 percent.

https://www.newsweek.com/map-reveals-obesity-rates-us-compar...
by JohnBooty | 2025-08-07 13:46:08+00:00
That's certainly good news.

I did buy some rechargeable fans this year, and they had a very welcome "night mode" that shuts off the blue LEDs.

I'm not sure if they exactly advertised it as a feature. The Amazon product page was kind of a soup of mangled English. I guess it was probably mentioned in there somewhere.

Hopefully it's a growing trend.