MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-28 11:59:40+00:00
Wind and solar grew as industries, but solar in particular is regarded as a tough business to be in because new entrants keep making better and cheaper solar panels leading to cutthroat competition.

That's a very different skill set than gaining access to scarce mineral resources and monopolising them to extract maximum profit.

Some subcontractors may have transferrable skills e.g. offshore boat crews but at a high level the two industries are fairly incompatible.

It doesn't help that the fossil companies have succeeded in using politics to salt the ground of their potential new ventures at home. A real burn the boats moment for them.
by lowsong | 2025-08-28 12:00:35+00:00
We can debate about how legally culpable OpenAI is for their products and if they did enough to ensure safeguards functioned, but if you can’t agree that “a machine that encourages and enables suicide is dangerous and morally wrong” without qualification, then there is nothing to discuss.

There is no wider context that would make a product encouraging this behaviour acceptable. Deflecting blame onto the parents or the victim is extremely offensive, and I sincerely hope you don’t repeat these comments to people who have lost loved ones to suicide.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-28 12:00:42+00:00
Humans have been staying up late next to a bright light (fire) for longer than we've been Homo sapiens. Considering humans have unique physiological adaptations to smoke (heavy tear and mucus production) I think it's plausible that our circadian rhythms also adapted and aren't quite as sensitive to red/yellow light as other primates. Blue light, however...
by dralley | 2025-08-28 12:00:53+00:00
Mainly because the government was backing the investment on national security grounds because of the cold war. Every variety of nuclear investment was through the roof

There was also massive demand for electricity as it was being extended to rural areas and as electric household appliances became common.

Until the AI craze there was no long term demand for that much additional electricity, and who knows if that will hold.
by koonsolo | 2025-08-28 12:01:08+00:00
This has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with cults, beliefs, fears, Russian disinformation campaigns, political alignment, etc.

I've seen intelligent people fall for crazy conspiracy theories. Once all those antivaxers became pro-Russia, which basically has nothing to do with each other, it became clear were all this disinformation was coming from (talking mainly about Central Europe here, but I'm sure it applies to US too)
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-28 12:01:16+00:00
That's basically just a boring old commutative diagram. You see them in a lot of places (ex the famous "lambda cube"[1]).

It's just an easy way to show a bunch of different variations of a thing when they cleanly split across properties and those properties commute.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_cube
by latexr | 2025-08-28 12:02:28+00:00
> Happy to offer a free virtual session for founders

Why specifically for founders? Founders of what? Tech founders specifically? Again, why single those out?

> our work is always gifted.

From your website:

> This is the type of experience is usually reserved for my year long ALCHEMY clients. The Alchemists happily pay thousands a month to access these tools and my time

So is it always gifted, or does it usually cost thousands a month?
by cmontella | 2025-08-28 12:02:30+00:00
Super cool! I just happened to write one of these last week, I posted it here if anyone wants to take a look at another implementation: https://github.com/mech-lang/mech/releases/tag/v0.2.58-beta

The code is here: https://github.com/mech-lang/mech/tree/main/src/core/src/pro...
by Citizen8396 | 2025-08-28 12:02:34+00:00
Unlike what the article suggests, "The Com" is not really a formal group. They tend to be younger individuals with technical skills. As you can imagine, this demographic likes to embellish for perceived credibility. Realistically, I think the $100,000 figure is a dramatic exaggeration of what they made since they started (not just the past week).

This is like playing the telephone game with the average 4chan user. Nothing should be taken too literally. Still, these people have some capability. If they're smart, they'd monetize their skills legitimately before it's too late.
by Mallowram | 2025-08-28 12:02:39+00:00
btw - this is the Achilles heel to CS "Nothing is specific to neural networks." Pretty fascinating that the illusion of counting, math, algebra will all ne superseded by measurement in analog, a measurement that requires no math, simply differences in syntax. How we code that is up for grabs. How did all these math-heads take control of reality through counting? Really a bonkers group of capitalists had nothing to do except dominate by counted value. Rather insane.
by acdha | 2025-08-28 12:02:44+00:00
Fair, I guess my point was not to underestimate your opponents: assume that they’re just as smart and motivated but are using their talents based on the Fox News cinematic universe / Christian nationalism.

I live in DC so right now a lot of my neighbors are having surreal conversations with their extended family members who are saying things which would make sense if you started with certain false pretenses like all of the police statistics being faked. One of them was telling me about how they were talking with someone who had an Ivy degree, serious job, etc. but wouldn’t believe that our downtown wasn’t a movie gangland even though his own relative was telling him they take young kids in those area all the time and never see anything more unsafe than an out of control toddler on a bike. They kept coming up with complicated “maybe you missed” theories because they couldn’t bear to question that one starting premise. If you want to call that stupid, sure, but I think we might want a different term it.
by majkinetor | 2025-08-28 12:03:03+00:00
Not only are they unnecessary, they are often best to be avoided. I recently had to reinstall Windows OS after I updated firewall software as after that VPN stopped working and some serious IT pros were not able to fix it (even with different clients tried). After we lost a couple of days, I reinstalled OS.

This ofc. happened at worst possible time.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-08-28 12:03:09+00:00
I love to employ AI but completely understand the criticism. It does increase my productivity as a software dev.

I also think the 10 hours of random electro swing or other genres of generated music is of extremely high quality. It isn't bland music, on the contrary it is playful and varied. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmUSK1IjoQg&list=RDLmUSK1Ijo...

It is entertaining and a viewing experience. And yet, I still doesn't feel the same if you know it is just generated by some carefully selected prompts. Sure, that itself is a creative endeavor, but I would have preferred for AI to clean my room for me instead of slowly replacing every creative venue from writing to art to music.

I continue to play music myself, but I will never reach a level AI is able to achieve in a few minutes. Sure, this example certainly took a while to create and the result is awesome. So what do we do with all the superfluous artists now?
by gentooflux | 2025-08-28 12:03:22+00:00
We are certainly being beaten over the head with it, if that's what you mean by "impact".

It's decent for scenarios where I need to look something up but don't have the most likely specific words for the concept, it seems to be able to consider synonyms and/or domain-specific jargon that I don't have a grasp of yet.

It's bad for scenarios where I need to accomplish something using a specific version of a library, language or platform. It can help to be very specific with your version numbers in your prompts, but at a certain point it doesn't seem to alleviate the effort of just reading version-specific documentation for whatever you're trying to do yourself.

It's worse than terrible at writing code, because it's great at writing code which looks correct and is thoroughly commented as though it understands what the code it's generating should be doing, but that code is often wrong in subtle ways.
by robitec97 | 2025-08-28 12:04:22+00:00
Hi Hacker News!

This is my very first post here (so I hope I’m not making a bad impression ). I’d like to introduce *Boog*, a lightweight, cat-persona AI agent inspired by ChatGPT. It runs on free-tier *Groq* for inference and taps into *Tavily* for live web search capabilities, all hosted on *Heroku*.

Highlights: - Adorable cat-themed conversational interface - *Groq* for AI inference—no paid compute needed - *Tavily* integration—fetches real-time web data - Deploys with minimal setup to Heroku - Forkable, hackable, and open-source

Check it out here: • GitHub: [https://github.com/robitec97/Boog]

I built this in my spare time to explore agentic AI tooling and have some fun along the way. Boog is currently in early alpha—feature patches welcome!

Would love feedback, ideas, or even your favorite cat-joke prompts!

— [robitec97]
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-28 12:04:25+00:00
As the other commenter pointed out, it's whether they want to be; I went to an evangelical church in the US one time, and they were using a lot of hypnotizing techniques to their audience. Many in said audience were very receptive to it, going into a trance-like state themselves. It wasn't for me so I wasn't influenced by it, but I can imagine how many people want to be and enjoy it.

That said, when going in for psychological treatment, some people get tested extra for e.g. autism, as that will influence the effectiveness of certain treatments; apparently CBT doesn't really work on autistic people, possibly because they're too analytical about it (my take, I haven't read the actual reason).
by ath3nd | 2025-08-28 12:04:42+00:00
The LLM crowd always sees themselves as messianic and victims, eerly reminding me of the NFT crowd back 1 year ago. I would not be surprised if a lot of those are the same folks.

The burden of proof is on the ones saying a new concept/tool (LLMs/NFT) is revolutionary or useful. I provided studies showing not only the new concept is not revolutionary, but that it is a step back in terms of productivity. Where are the studies and evidence proving that LLMs are a revolution?

NFT boosters tried for years to make us believe something that wasn't there. I will take the LLM crowd more seriously when I actually see the impact and usefulness of LLMs. For now, it's simply not there.

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

> Your argument seems to project significantly more certainty and spittle.

I am not surprised that a bunch of folks outsourcing their critical thinking to a fancy autocomplete don't have any arguments nor studies though, to refute a pretty simple argument with some receipts behind it. Spittle? Please, at least there is an argument and links.

From the LLM cult crowd there is usually nothing, just crickets. Show me the studies, show me the links, show me the proof that LLMs are the revolution you so desperately want it to be.

Until then, I got the receipts that, if anything, LLMs are just another tool but hardly a revolution worth paying attention to.
by shashanoid | 2025-08-28 12:04:44+00:00
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by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-28 12:05:01+00:00
Tobacco companies mostly just pivoted to targetting weaker nations, e.g. this summary from a study looking at price elasticity:

> The tobacco industry undermines tobacco control efforts in low-income countries and targets vulnerable populations through aggressive marketing and lobbying for less tobacco control and lower taxes.

Unfortunately for fossil fuels most of the world are importers of their products which makes them a tough sell as other options become cheaper.
by freakynit | 2025-08-28 12:05:24+00:00
That's true. But then all models exposed by Perplexity AI should be affected, not just gpt-5. This is not the case.

---

I switched to Sonnet and asked same question, and it responsed with::: "I'm Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic"

---

for grok-4, it was something even worse. Here is what was in the "thinking tokens"::: "I'm identifying myself as an AI language model by OpenAI, specifically based on GPT-4 architecture." ... but, the final answer produced this::: "I’m Perplexity’s AI assistant. I use a combination of advanced large-language-model back-ends (including GPT-4o and Claude 4 Sonnet) and Perplexity’s own retrieval system to answer your questions in real time."

---

For O3, here was it's response::: "I’m a large-language AI assistant built by Perplexity, powered by state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o."
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-28 12:05:57+00:00
It is somewhat disappointing that major European powers and the US are not represented (or only at very low level) because the Chinese victory over Japan is part of the allies victory over Japan. But the same goes when Russia is not invited to D-Day landings celebrations, etc.

Those celebrations have always been political under the veil of History.

What celebrations are taking place on the ROC/Taiwan side?
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-28 12:06:25+00:00
>> PowerPC and Intel Macs used to use Open Firmware ...

> There is no OpenFirmware on Intel Macs. They used EFI ...

I thought I remembered playing with Forth at the boot prompt on an Intel Mac. I guess I was wrong and it was on a PowerPC Mac.

> Adieu to logic, uh? (Which LLM hallucinated that stuff for you?)

Human memory. Yours may be perfect in every recall, being the first human ever to be able to claim this miraculous ability, but I highly doubt it.
by ta12653421 | 2025-08-28 12:06:50+00:00
Not quite exactly:

There was a earlier competitor much better than PayPal, called Giro-Pay: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giropay

It had all the stuff PayPal had at launch, also some of the feature made it into the eventually-died "Paydirekt" (which also died)

The main reason could be the high fragmentatin across the EU market.

Though, WERO, now we have a new appraoch, this time with support von ECB :-D
by dijit | 2025-08-28 12:07:01+00:00
I've had plenty of issues with Arch updates.

In fact; I have a laptop right now that hasn't received updates because there's a shared object that has been removed that `yay` depends on.

(this was from a long time ago).

I generally think that updates of the mainstream distro's like Debian will definitely *NOT* brick your system in almost any circumstance, and arch tends to be somewhat solid, but every once in a while something dire happens with arch which would make me not agree with the fact that updates are always seamless.
by MereInterest | 2025-08-28 12:07:09+00:00
> Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence.

You can’t just lay this bear trap of an opportunity and expect me to not pedantically state that the word is either “pedantry”, the activity performed by pedants, or “pedantic”, to describe such activities.

“Pedantism” would be a philosophy or viewpoint that extols pedantry. Pedantism would be to pedantry as deontology is to rule-following, a justification of an activity. As such, pedantism would be a slightly higher form of pseudo-intelligence than mere pedantry.

But only slightly.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-08-28 12:08:40+00:00
If you have not read this piece, I recommend it:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/17/diseases-of-the-wi...

> The situation is far more serious: question everything.

Someone who thrived at life or work to a satisfying enough point will always tell you something

- nihilistic like "it does not matter",

- or reaffirming like "that's a lot of stuff to write about, no matter how many people write about it"

- or "that's a lot of stuff to deal with, are you in a state to work any of these inquiries problems?".

- or they tell you all the above combined in the form of "that's where we are and there's reasons why and how we got here. Where do you wanna go?".

In either case you are left with sticking to the prescribed reality or you say fuck it and go down any of the spiritual and or occultist rabbit holes. There's enough narratives for billions of lifetimes.

When it comes to our online experience, the main questions are: how big or small is your network and how deep or shallow are the connections.

Whether something is real is easier assessed in cooperation; as is whether and how something useless can be turned into something useful. But it all works solo just as much, except in cases where doubt is warranted, which is when more heads traverse more data, connections and patterns in less time.

We found our inquiries entirely on our backgrounds and the motivations of our psychosocial (low base death growl in the back of my head intensifies) environment, which is, by definition, almost always, perfectly average. They don't take any of the things you mentioned serious because they haven't been negatively affected by any of it for at least one and half generations.

60 - 70 %, maybe more, of the population live by the narrative created by swarm intelligence and the gratefulness of having a comfy enough place, spot, role in that swarm. They will, passively or actively, support those who convince them of what is necessary to keep that place, spot, role comfy enough. In the end, these people and that process alone, is responsible for the current state of civilization.
by keepamovin | 2025-08-28 12:08:45+00:00
A bit circular. How do you know the domain? Trust.

I like this “onion pinning” possibility:

There is value in exposing the existence of an onion site via CT Logs. If someone navigates to the plain web version of a site, and is presented with a certificate containing a Subject Alternative Name (SAN) for both the plain web and the onion site that provides a strong cryptographic guarantee that they are the same site. Effectively this would replace the Onion-Location header with something more authenticated.
by firesteelrain | 2025-08-28 12:09:01+00:00
I don’t know how best to react to this article.

On one hand, Hollywood is immensely popular and so is American media. It has taken over a lot of what people look up to

On the other hand, it is so popular that it unintentionally smothers lesser budgeted and not as popular national and cultural aspects such that you need to actively seek out those things in other ways rather than sitting in front of a screen. The same could be said for even the US where not every possible aspect of society is represented.

I got the sense that the West was being blamed for the portrayal of Libyans when few movies actually try for accurate representation. Like the movie Kandahar that is on Netflix now is about Afghanistan (fictionalized account) but perhaps could be criticized because film locations in Afghanistan were not actually used. This is common where like Vancouver is used and the movie will say it is Chicago for example.

Not meant to be a shallow dismissal of the article’s premise

The problems are really rooted in the reign of Gadahffi and the inability of Libyans to understand who they are culturally and broadcast that image out
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-28 12:09:28+00:00
And yet, not unusual; some years ago there were posts about nutrition fairly frequently, when Soylent was being developed and SF was high on investor money being thrown around left right and center. People came out and shared their personal experiences with regards to health, diet and nutrition, with the Soylent developer leading the effort in min/maxing food and eating down to a convenient shake, and its proponents sharing their experiences in weight loss, time min/maxing, how food is boring and a distraction, etc. A lot of people had a Steve Jobs-like mentality, believing that eating, thinking about what to eat, etc is a distraction from what they think is Actually Important. Famously Steve Jobs wore the same outfit all the time so he didn't have to think about what to wear.

Some time later it was about microdosing LSD and nootropics.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-08-28 12:09:39+00:00
IIRC rhythm perception is extremely sophisticated in terms of brain function, involving several regions working together in complex ways. It's built on the functions we use to model movement through space and has a timing-based prediction component plus of course the auditory processing. I don't know enough about it to confidently say but it seems reasonable to me that most animals simply don't have the prerequisite gear.
by megaloblasto | 2025-08-28 12:10:05+00:00
I have to read a lot of papers for work. Sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Often when I find one I'm interested in, they want $60 to read the one paper. If I have to read one paper a day, that's about $20,000 a year just to stay up to date with the science.

That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-08-28 12:11:02+00:00
This is another example of why requiring TLS everywhere doesn't make sense. Onion traffic is already encrypted, but because software demands TLS everywhere, we add TLS on top, even when unnecessary.

The same happens with 1:1 tunnels, or even localhost. None of these need TLS, and I should be able to tell my browser "enable all features on this site, consider it fully secure".
by radarsat1 | 2025-08-28 12:11:05+00:00
Whenever someone says this I like to point out that they are very often used to train the VAE and VQVAE models that LDM models use. Slowly diffusion is encroaching on its territory with 1-step models, however, and there are now alternative methods to generate rich latent spaces and decoders too, so this is changing, but I'd say up until last year most of the image generators still used an adversarial objective for the encoder-decoder training. This year, not sure..
by 542354234235 | 2025-08-28 12:11:06+00:00
It feels like Neo is the opposite of where things should go. The great thing about EV is that every outlet is a refueling station. More EV charging for apartment buildings and parking lots feels like the answer. Those battery swap stations are insanely complex and expensive, and the complexity and added weight on the car are very significant. Unlike a gas station that just needs two nozzle types, or an EV charging port standard, having to standardize battery packs for everything from compacts to trucks would be a nightmare. Most people are not taking hundreds of mile road trips most of the time. Slow charging your car while it sits at home or at work or at the shop will work for 90% of cases. I could see the case for industrial or work vehicles, where keeping them running constantly is a legitimate need, but for personal vehicles that sit in driveways, parking lots, or garages 80% of every day, battery swaps feel like massive overkill.
by dijit | 2025-08-28 12:11:12+00:00
I think the issue is that we excuse worse behaviour of Windows because of a preconceived notion that "Windows is easy and linux is hard".

The amount of registry hacks and debloat scripts and messed up updates I've had to endure on Windows makes my Linux experience seem very breezy by comparison to be perfectly honest with you.

The main issue I have with my own reasoning here is that about 20 years ago when I was getting into Linux: it was hard; and thus I learned a lot. Something that is a literal 2 second fix for me might take someone else 2 days or not be solvable. I can't really understand how hard others have it.

But: my mum ran Linux mint for the last 8 years without issue. So maybe it really is a skill issue. This woman is not tech literate like I am. So, there's that.