MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by basisword | 2025-08-24 17:48:41+00:00
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.

Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
by ilamont | 2025-08-24 17:48:55+00:00
> The one exception would be if I had a long layover.

That's what I did for a day-long layover in Istanbul. I took a short self-guided tour of the city via tram, then returned to the airport in the evening and paid for the lounge until my 1 am flight. It was like 20 Euros, absolutely worth it (this lounge had a shower).

I've taken the freebie lounge access on those rare occasions I have a business class ticket, but only if there is no line. If it's a zoo, what's the point? I can sit in one of the empty gate areas with no one around me until it's time to get on the plane.
by dang | 2025-08-24 17:48:56+00:00
When was the last time that a single study produced this much media?

Edit: I mean the one discussed here, and in countless other recently submitted articles:

95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 - Aug 2025 (413 comments)

95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 - Aug 2025 (167 comments)

95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from AI according to MIT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44956648 - Aug 2025 (14 comments)
by Timwi | 2025-08-24 17:48:59+00:00
Whatever it is that gives rise to consciousness is, by definition, physics. It might not be known physics, but even if it isn't known yet, it's within the purview of physics to find out. If you're going to claim that it could be something that fundamentally can't be found out, then you're admitting to thinking in terms of magic/superstition.
by geor9e | 2025-08-24 17:49:04+00:00
I know a FAANG company whose IT department, for the last few years, has been "out of stock" for SSD drives over 250GB . They claim its a global market issue (it's not). There's constant complaining in the chats for folks who compile locally. The engineers make $300k+ so they just buy a second SSD from Amazon on their credit cards and self-install them without mentioning it to the IT dept. I've never heard a rational explanation for the "shortage" other than chronic incompetence from the team supplying engineers with laptops/desktops. Meanwhile, spinning up a 100TB cloud VM has no friction whatsoever there. It's a cushy place to work tho, so folks just accept the comically dumb aspects everyone knows about.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-24 17:49:06+00:00
Did GPT-1 scale up to be a database ? No - it scaled up to be GPT-2

Did GPT-2 scale up to be an expert system ? No - it scaled up to be GPT-3

..

Did GPT-4 scale up to become AGI ? No - it scaled up to be GPT-5

Moreover, the differences between each new version are becoming increasingly less. We're reaching an asymptote because the more data you've trained on, natural or synthetic, the less is the impact of any incremental additions.

If you scale up an LLM big enough, then essentially what you'll get is GPT-5.
by ProcNetWireless | 2025-08-24 17:49:40+00:00
> Wait, so you want games on your hard drive because SSD space is too expensive (~55€/TB),

I have 3 SSDs and a hard disk. The SSDs are mostly full and I've run out of SATA ports.

>so then you permanently occupy some RAM instead (at ~6500€/TB)?

Its not permanent, the files would be stored in cache which would be cleared if its needed elsewhere.
by benbreen | 2025-08-24 17:49:50+00:00
I realize this isn't the same thing as your point about images as part of training data, but just flagging it in case anyone isn't aware: Claude Code lets you copy and paste images into terminal. I've been designing a "universal history simulator" game for use in my history classes lately, and it is really helpful to be able to make a mockup of a ui change I want and then paste it in, rather than trying to explain it verbally. Also good for debugging graphics issues.
by zeta0134 | 2025-08-24 17:50:36+00:00
The sortof fun thing is that this happens with human safety teams too. The Swiss Cheese model is generally used to understand how the failures can line up to cause disaster to punch right through the guardrails:

https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital...

It's better to close the hole entirely by making dangerous actions actually impossible, but often (even with computers) there's some wiggle room. For example, if we reduce the agent's permissions, then we haven't eliminated the possibility of those permissions being exploited, merely required some sort of privilege escalation to remove the block. If we give the agent an approved list of actions, then we may still have the possibility of unintended and unsafe interactions between those actions, or some way an attacker could add an unsafe action to the list. And so on, and so forth.

In the case of an AI model, just like with humans, the security model really should not assume that the model will not "make mistakes." It has a random number generator built right in. It will, just like the user, occasionally do dumb things, misunderstand policies, and break rules. Those risks have to be factored in if one is to use the things at all.
by theluketaylor | 2025-08-24 17:50:37+00:00
Overground is a great example of how to re-use existing rights of way, but I do think London is a bit in the sheer number of under or dis-used lines that were available. DLR is a similar re-use of existing rights of way, but there just are not that many places that had such a huge explosion of rail in the 19th century that is now derelict and available for re-use.

I do think Overground is a great case study in the value of both branding and service. Quite a bit of the Overground was already operational passenger rail, but it was fragmented under different operators, names, and service patterns. TfL wisely brought it under a single brand, making it simple to understand, especially as part of the larger London transportation network.

TfL also arranged consistent service, newer rolling stock, and full electrification and made the service pretty reliable. Turns out if you offer good frequency people will make use of it. Wild.

Here in Ontario we've been watching Metrolinx try and fail miserably to build out an RER/S-Bahn system out of the GO network. We're 8 years into the GO Expansion plan and Metrolinx has yet to raise a single catenary pole. It's beyond shameful. We're getting tons of shiny stations with huge capacity, but no real service has emerged (or shows any sign of emerging) to get value from all the dollars spent.

Metrolinx has been unwilling to make the leap to metro operations with line isolation and high floor platforms. They are also unwilling to move to electric multiple units to realize acceleration gains. They are trying to cling to scheduled service and commuter-oriented patterns, just because that's how it's always been done.
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-24 17:51:54+00:00
> Why do I need a legion of Salesforce consultants to make their shit work with my shit when I can just have the AI write all the reports I'll ever need?

The article has some interesting thoughts but I think this one misses the mark.

Reports aren't the hard thing, it's the overall system that is modeling complex business state and state transitions. This business state is frequently at an abstract level above the individual enterprise systems because it's spread out between multiple systems.
by sublinear | 2025-08-24 17:52:39+00:00
It's just a really inconvenient encoding scheme for an almost un-musical subset of music. Every note must be the same length and the fractal just keeps getting uglier the more symbols you want to encode.

The video does acknowledge that and other some other musical limitations, but the biggest ergonomic one was unmentioned. Similar encodings are not located near each other, and the spatial difference only gets larger for symbols earlier in the string.

That's pretty bad if you wanted to use this as an instrument. I don't believe there is any fractal encoding scheme that could fix this. It's very silly.

It may be better off as a compression scheme. A single coordinate of modest precision could probably encode a fairly long string.
by bradley13 | 2025-08-24 17:53:13+00:00
I am Swiss, but haven't looked into this in detail. My understanding is that the new law basically would require logging user data, with a six-month retention. While this isn't great, the EU is continually pressing for backdoors in encryption. That's far worse.

Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.
by nh2 | 2025-08-24 17:53:14+00:00
> Sqlite defaults in many ways perfectly fine

In the sibling comment we are discussing how the default of sqlite is not durable, so it's only ACI, not ACID.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45005866

So you do get the foot guns automatically.

> rather than commenting on HN

I appreciate the parent commenting on HN, because they seem to be ... right.
by nh2 | 2025-08-24 17:53:36+00:00
Yes, I'm talking about the fact that sqlite in its default (journal_mode = DELETE) is not durable.

Which in my opinion is worse than whatever may apply to WAL mode, because WAL is something a user needs to explicitly enable.

If it is true as stated, then I also don't find it very confusing, but would definitely appreciate if it were more explicit, replacing "will not corrupt the database" by "will not corrupt the database (but may still lose committed transactions on power loss)", and I certainly find that a very bad default.
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-24 17:53:49+00:00
I love this direction of research.

Reducing costs of reasoning is a huge ongoing challenge in LLMs. We're spending so much energy and compute resources today on reasoning that today's consumption rates were unexpected (to me) a short 1 yr ago. We're literally burning forests, the atmosphere and making electricity expensive for everyone.

DeepThink v3.1 made a significant leap in this direction recently -- significantly shorter thinking tokens at the same quality. GPT5's router was also one (important) attempt to reduce reasoning costs and make o3-quality available in the free tier without breaking the bank. This is also why Claude 4 is winning the coding wars against its reasoning peers -- it provides great quality without all the added reasoning tokens.

Getting inspiration from Alpha-go and MCMC literature -- applying tree weighting, prioritization and pruning feels extremely appropriate. (To improve the quality of Deep Think -- offered by Gemini & GPT5 Pro today)

So, yes, more of this please. Totally the right direction.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-24 17:54:46+00:00
Generally when organizations has attempted to put a number on "grid fees" it is quite small in the grand scheme of things.

For Australia CSIRO found this number to be €9B. [1] Vastly lower than the subsidies a single large scale new built reactor would need.

[2]: https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost-2024-25-...

In Sweden we have recently seen an explosion on costs for ancillary services as new markets has been added which needs to be built out. But they have lowered in cost after a year or two. The same will happen for the most recent markets.

Then Sweden has a problem with low population density, large grid and high wages which makes labor intensive infrastructure like the grid cost more.
by leakycap | 2025-08-24 17:55:23+00:00
Reading "Why Mavericks" made me glad not to be alone in noticing the slow progression toward a general lack of usability in macOS.

For me, it started with 10.7 when a lot of things changed just to look different. From then forward, user habits were seemingly not considered and everything moved here and there on a yearly basis.

At least with Windows, the major overhauls to Explorer come so slowly that your productivity routines don't get sand in the cogs every year when you update and Apple's OS shifts extremely key parts of the window UI around and makes the hit points even smaller over time.

The killer for me is how difficult it is to fix things if you don't like them. Modern macOS has horrendous mouse speed handling, and changing this beyond Apple's very limited settings is a pain. And even then, Windows and Linux and older OS X handled the cursor movement better. I like(d) so much about Apple over the years, but it is clear they're an iPhone company that makes laptops and desktops... not the other way around.
by swores | 2025-08-24 17:56:35+00:00
Copied from the paper (halfway down page 6: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15260 )

> "Specifically, DeepConf-low uses top η= 10% (corresponding to the 90th percentile) and DeepConf-high uses top η = 90% (corresponding to the 10th percentile) uniformly across all settings. This threshold ensures that during online generation, traces are terminated when their confidence falls below the level that retains the top η% highest-confidence traces from the warmup phase."

I'm not sure if I'm parsing it right, but are they using "low" and "high" as descriptors of the number used as the %, meaning that the "low" 10 cuts anything outside the best 10%, while the "high" 90 leaves the best 90% ie high is less selective than low?
by GolfPopper | 2025-08-24 17:56:43+00:00
The more common version of this, which I do remember hearing in history courses in college, was that people in the Middle Ages frequently mixed beer or wine with water. Whether that was done purely for taste, or in the belief that it would make potentially unsafe water safe, and what the details of making water safe to drink by mixing beer or wine with it actually are, I don't know. The author himself makes this point repeatedly, that water was frequently mixed with wine (at which point people are drinking watered wine).

It's like there are two parallel arguments:

"Medieval Europeans exclusively drank alcoholic beverages, because the water was so bad." And,

"We currently over-estimate the degree to which people in the Medieval-era consumed alcohol, and under-estimate the degree to which they drank pure water."

The author seems to conflate the two willy-nilly, claims the first to be widely held, and that he has disproved it (while, among others, citing Classical rather than Medieval sources).
by SteveJS | 2025-08-24 17:57:07+00:00
Was trying to remember a counter example on good hires and wasted money.

Alex St. John Microsoft Windows 95 era, created directX annnnd also built an alien spaceship.

I dimly recalled it as a friend in the games division telling me about some someone getting 5 and a 1 review scores in close succession.

Facts i could find (yes i asked an llm)

5.0 review: Moderately supported. St. John himself hosted a copy of his Jan 10, 1996 Microsoft performance review on his blog (the file listing still exists in archives). It reportedly shows a 5.0 rating, which in that era was the rare top-box mark. Fired a year later: Factual. In an open letter (published via GameSpot) he states he was escorted out of Microsoft on June 24, 1997, about 18 months after the 5.0 review. Judgment Day II alien spaceship party: Well documented as a plan. St. John’s own account (quoted in Neowin, Gizmodo, and others) describes an H.R. Giger–designed alien-ship interior in an Alameda air hangar, complete with X-Files cast involvement and a Gates “head reveal” gag. Sunk cost before cancellation: Supported. St. John says the shutdown came “a couple of weeks” before the 1996 event date, after ~$4.3M had already been spent/committed (≈$1.2M MS budget + ≈$1.1M sponsors + additional sunk costs). Independent summaries repeat this figure (“in excess of $4 million”).

So: 5.0 review — moderate evidence Fired 1997 — factual Alien spaceship build planned — factual ≈$4M sunk costs — supported by St. John’s own retrospective and secondary reporting
by ripe | 2025-08-24 17:57:14+00:00
Intrigued, I looked into the basics of "line-scan vision systems".

TIL about an industrial inspection application where your line camera is scanning objects passing by on a conveyor. Since you can never guarantee a rock-steady conveyor speed, you need real-time control of the scanning speed based on the current conveyor speed (using encoders) [1]

I see that the bulk of the article is about somehow using math for estimating the train speed so that the scanning can be interpreted correctly.

[1] this camera vendor has an explanatory video that explains the need for an encoder around 4:15. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E_I9kxHEYYM&t=35s&pp=2AEjkAIB
by cobbal | 2025-08-24 17:57:31+00:00
It's a common mistake to apply probabilistic assumptions to attacker input.

The only [citation needed] correct way to use probability in security is when you get randomness from a CSPRNG. Then you can assume you have input conforming to a probability distribution. If your input is chosen by the person trying to break your system, you must assume it's a worst-case input and secure accordingly.
by dang | 2025-08-24 17:58:05+00:00
(I'm a mod here) - it's fine to talk about paid features, as long as it's clear which ones are paid and which ones not.

The only thing that wouldn't be fine is to post a Show HN with no way to try the product out (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and you're fine on that part.
by debazel | 2025-08-24 17:58:13+00:00
They did mention how much they spent here: https://github.com/repomirrorhq/repomirror/blob/main/repomir...

> We spent a little less than $800 on inference for the project. Overall the agents made ~1100 commits across all software projects. Each Sonnet agent costs about $10.50/hour to run overnight.
by nicoburns | 2025-08-24 17:58:19+00:00
> My work computer is 10 years old... but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it

It depends what you're working on. My work laptop is 5 years old, and it takes ~4 minutes to do a clean compile of a codebase I work on regularly. The laptop I had before that (which would now be around 10 years old) would take ~40 minutes to compile to the same codebase. It would be completely untenable for me to do the job I do with that laptop (and indeed I only started working in the area I do once I got this one).
by davidandgoli4th | 2025-08-24 17:58:21+00:00
Hi vorejdajo, thanks for the feedback. We've been in private mode, and recently launched access to the general public. Additional info will be added to our website and Developer API guide.

"Nevertheless, Am I not parting more of my data by giving Govt id to another third party(stripe) rather than just my email?"

- Identity verification is OPTIONAL for Changefly ID. We chose to work with Stripe for government ID verifications because we can guarantee that after the verification and anonymization, your PII is verifiably deleted.

- Regarding using your email for logins and identity verification, that is no longer feasible in this day and age due to phishing, credential stuffing, account takeovers, scams, and the list goes on.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-24 17:59:13+00:00
On this one, I would say it was quite clear for my generation, a PC ran either an IBM, Digital Research or Microsoft OS and that was it.

That is why those old Mac vs PC ads from Apple were the way they were, back when Apple was relaunching themselves.

Everything else is trying to give new meaning to something that during 1980-2000's was quite clear what it stand for.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-24 17:59:20+00:00
From experience: A static type system is MUCH better for agents than dynamic. I've done a few projects both ways - the agent is just much, much better with the static system because it sees compile errors right away, and also has access to better static analysis tools. I don't know how much the types themselves help the LLM, it's better context but more tokens, but the agent seeing errors is just a huge difference.

It's also much easier for you as a developer to digest the code if you need to refactor because you got lazy and accepted some slop.
by callc | 2025-08-24 17:59:32+00:00
I was away from my regular desktop dev PC for multiple months recently and only used a crappy laptop for dev work. I got used to it pretty quickly.

This makes me remember so many years ago starting to program on a dual core plastic MacBook.

Also, I’m very impressed by one of my coworkers working on 13 inch laptop only. Extremely smart. A bigger guy so I worry about his posture and RSI on such a small laptop.

TLDR I think more screen space does not scale near linearly with productivity
by beezle | 2025-08-24 18:00:31+00:00
When ever I've built a new desktop I've always gone near the top performance with some consideration given to cache and power consumption (remember when peeps cared about that? lol).

From dual pentium pros to my current desktop - Xeon E3-1245 v3 @ 3.40GHz built with 32 GB top end ram in late 2012 which has only recently started to feel a little pokey, I think largely due to cpu security mitigations added to Windows over the years.

So that extra few hundred up front gets me many years extra on the backend.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-24 18:00:35+00:00
Good grief, no. They got an extra hour of productive (or semi-productive time; after 8 hours most people are, unsurprisingly, kind of worn down) out of us while waiting for dinner to arrive and a bit of team-building as we commiserate over whatever we're working on causing us to stay late over a meal. That more than offsets the cost of the food.

If an employee or team is not putting in the effort desired, that's a separate issue and there are other administrative processes for dealing with that.
by pierre-renaux | 2025-08-24 18:00:35+00:00
Yes, of course it does, isn't it nice?

Even better if you want to automate the whole notarization thing you don't have a "nice" notarize-this-thing command that blocks until its notarized and fails if there's an issue, you send a notarization request... and wait, and then you can write a nice for/sleep/check loop in a shell script to figure out whether the notarization finished and whether it did so successfully. Of course from time to time the error/success message changes so that script will of course break every so often, have to keep things interesting.

Xcode does most of this as part of the project build - when it feels like it that is. But if you want to run this in CI its a ton a additional fun.
by hinkley | 2025-08-24 18:01:32+00:00
At the most disruptive place I finally arranged it so I worked at home on Fridays and Monday through Thursday were used to answer questions, attend meetings, do shallow work and do exploratory work for deep work. For instance, you need to do a refactor for a new feature or a bug fix. Is the code going to just let you do it, or will this change require another, and another, and another to get things working again?

So most Fridays I knew exactly what I needed to do and I coded for a solid six+ hours. And having already poked around I typically got about twice as much done in that time as I typically would in a day.
by basisword | 2025-08-24 18:02:10+00:00
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62998484
by mdaniel | 2025-08-24 18:02:30+00:00
I much prefer the brave.com submission, but it appears the twitter one has won the upvote lottery https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45004846

I recently learned about https://xcancel.com/zack_overflow/status/1959308058200551721 but I think it's a nitter instance and thus subject to being overwhelmed