MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-08-08 01:09:43+00:00
Why not? Once a computer can learn at 1x speed (say one camera and one mic with which to observe the world), if it can indeed "learn" as fast as a human would, it sounds like all we need to do is throw more hardware at it at that point. And even if we couldn't, it could at least learn around the clock with no sleep. We can give it some specific task to solve and it could work tirelessly for years to solve it. Spin up one of these specialist bots for each tough problem we want solved.. and it'd still be beneficial because they like 10xPhD people without egos to get in the way or children to feed.

Point is, I think self-learning at any speed is huge and as soon as it's achieved, it'll explode quadratically even if the first few years are slow.
by MisterMower | 2025-08-08 01:10:54+00:00
A morbidly obese person doesn’t need a scale that is accurate to thousandths of a pound. They need medical intervention.

We don’t need a satellite that tells us there is increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is warming the globe with extreme accuracy. We need to do something about it.

You are making the mistaken assumption that more data collection directly leads to less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The steps that need to be taken to reduce it are the same whether or not you can measure atmospheric carbon dioxide with extreme accuracy or not.

The morbidly obese person can lose weight without even taking measurements. The results will be obvious if they’re doing it right. The same is true with climate change. You’ll see fewer droughts, less hurricanes, wildfires, etc.

To use your analogy, you would rather sit in your watchtower and keep tally of exactly how many bear teeth pierced the skin of victims on the ground instead of climbing down from the tower and shooting the bear.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-08 01:12:15+00:00
> But the consequence is that people feel like they are being fleeced when they need another key, because it can cost you hundreds of dollars to pair one.

Because the ARE being fleeced. It's an artificial dependency on the vendor on the one hand versus a blatantly insecure approach on the other.

Secure pairing that can be done by the end user isn't rocket science.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-08 01:12:27+00:00
Announcement: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/guar...

Seems like a good idea. I do wonder whether or how this will impact credit card companies who refuse to do business with certain categories of businesses who they consider too unsavory such as described in this recent story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
by godelski | 2025-08-08 01:13:27+00:00
> Humans have General Intelligence while having a context window

Yes, but humans also have more than a context window. They also have more than memory (weights). There's a lot of things humans have besides memory. For example, human brains are not a static architecture. New neurons as well as pathways (including between existing neurons) are formed and destroyed all the time. This doesn't stop either, it continues happening throughout life.

I think your argument makes sense, but is over simplifying the human brain. I think once we start considering the complexity then this no longer makes sense. It is also why a lot of AGI research is focused on things like "test time learning" or "active learning", not to mention many other areas including dynamic architectures.
by misswaterfairy | 2025-08-08 01:14:06+00:00
> In practice, my number one use of a fob from a remote distance is locking, rather than unlocking, and those two operations don't have the equivalent security risk.

Wouldn't the risk be the same if the same rolling code keys was used for both locking and unlocking?

I would be surprised if automotive manufacturers used separate rolling code keys for locking and unlocking.
by cellis | 2025-08-08 01:15:35+00:00
My favorite thing to ask is ascii art: _ _ _ __ ___ _ __ ___ __ _ __| (_) ___ | '_ \ / _ \| '_ _ \ / _ |/ _ | |/ __| | | | | (_) | | | | | | (_| | (_| | | (__ |_| |_|\___/|_| |_| |_|\__,_|\__,_|_|\___|

What does this say?

GPT 5:

When read normally without the ASCII art spacing, it’s the stylized text for:

markdown Copy Edit _ _ _ __ ___ _ __ ___ __ _ __| (_) ___ | '_ \ / _ \| '_ ` _ \ / _` |/ _` | |/ __| | | | | (_) | | | | | | (_| | (_| | | (__ |_| |_|\___/|_| |_| |_|\__,_|\__,_|_|\___| Which is the ASCII art for:

rust — the default “Rust” welcome banner in ASCII style.
by rcxdude | 2025-08-08 01:15:54+00:00
That's still not particularly usefully accurate: it's not a split between the effects, they're the same thing viewed through different lenses. You could, perhaps, say that an airfoil gets X% more lift than a flat plate at a given angle of attack, but the flat plate also 'gets lift through Bernoulli', it's just not as obvious exactly why the flows are faster on the top (and the common 'the air needs to transit the wing in an equal time on top and bottom' is an incorrect rule, and in practice broken by most wings)
by moody__ | 2025-08-08 01:16:49+00:00
After all of this hype this is the best they can do? This is the forefront company (arguable) of the forefront tech and no one can review slides before being shipped out? I think the reason why this has resonated with people is that it gives a "vibe" of not giving a shit, they'll ship whatever next slop generator they want and they expect people to gladly lap it up. Either that or they're using their own dog food and the result is this mess. Do the stats even matter anymore? Is that what they're banking on?
by vajrabum | 2025-08-08 01:18:38+00:00
Not quite the same thing but some non-negligable percentage of ads I see on Facebook are outright scams which purport to be selling musical instruments at a 'markdown'. First guitars supposedly from the Sam Ash bankruptcy sales linking to an obvious fake site and more lately 'free' giveaways of high end Gibson acoustic guitars. When I've reported them I got the feedback that it didn't violate community standards, but my insta account got perma-banned when I posted the original of a song on youtube from 1928 on a thread which started with a cover from 30 years ago. That was considered spam.
by godelski | 2025-08-08 01:18:50+00:00
> I guess funding an "outsider" non-LLM AI project now requires finding someone like Carmack to get on board

And I think this is a big problem. Especially since these investments tend to be a lot cheaper than the existing ones. Hell, there's stuff in my PhD I tabled and several models I made that I'm confident I could have doubled performance with less than a million dollars worth of compute. My methods could already compete while requiring less compute, so why not give them a chance to scale? I've seen this happen to hundreds of methods. If "scale is all you need" then shouldn't the belief that any of those methods would also scale?
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-08-08 01:19:05+00:00
Nothing is new other than some data that can contribute to meta analyses on isolating the effects of saturated fat and dietary cholesterol, from what I can tell. There isn't anything particularly compelling here.

Eggs have anywhere from 1.25–2g of saturated fat each. The bacon is what, 2.5–4g of saturated fat per slice? I may be slightly off. Regardless, we know saturated fat reduces endogenous cholesterol regulation, and leads to increased blood cholesterol levels. Eggs aren't off the hook because they still contain saturated fat.

There are also people who are 'hyper-responders' to dietary cholesterol, and their endogenous cholesterol regulation is further reduced by dietary cholesterol. So, these people really do need to be careful when including eggs in their diet. It's not even that small of a cohort of the population, as I recall.

Caveat: I don't know anything about this stuff
by bravesoul2 | 2025-08-08 01:19:14+00:00
Nice fairytale. You could make similar stories and replace AI with "stimulant" "SCRUM" or "learning touch typing and emacs"

There is a point in there for sure. But I'm yet to meet a Luddite IRL. It's the extent of AI use that differs and where people want to use it. I think AI can fold into "tool to solve problems and make impact" and we can focus on solving problems again and AI can be a part of that.
by bikeshaving | 2025-08-08 01:19:24+00:00
The maintainer who this piece of “cursed knowledge” is referencing is a member of TC39, and has fought and died on many hills in many popular JavaScript projects, consistently providing some of the worst takes on JavaScript and software development imaginable. For this specific polyfill controversy, some people alleged a pecuniary motivation, I think maybe related to GitHub sponsors or Tidelift, but I never verified that claim, and given how little these sources pay I’m more inclined to believe he just really believes in backwards compatibility. I dare not speak his name, lest I incur the wrath of various influential JavaScript figures who are friends with him, and possibly keep him around like that guy who was trained wrong as a joke in Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. In 2025, I’ve moderated my opinion of him; he does do important maintenance work, and it’s nice to have someone who seems to be consistently wrong in the community, I guess.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-08 01:19:48+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps, it's not strictly against the letters of the guidelines - but I've always found these types of comments against the spirit of the guidelines. I'd largely say they go against the spirt of a few rules, especially: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."

They're low effort, generic, populous comments that do little to contribute to the discussion.
by crazylogger | 2025-08-08 01:19:52+00:00
AI services are widely available, and humans have agency. If my boss can outsource everything to AI and run a one-person company, soon everyone will be running their own one-person companies to compete. If OpenAI refuses to sell me AI, I’ll turn to Anthropic, DeepSeek, etc.

AI is raising individual capability to a level that once required a full team. I believe it’s fundamentally a democratizing force rather than monopolizing. Everybody will try and get the most value out of AI, nobody holds the power to decide whether to share or not.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-08 01:20:31+00:00
For every AWS offering aside from maybe MySQL/Postgres Aurora and DynamoDB, there are better cheaper alternatives. You choose the AWS alternative because they are 80%-90% “good enough” and you have one pain of glass, one IAC implementation, one set of permissions, one point of governance, one account manager, one TAM etc.

That by itself is worth the extra cost for some organizations. While I’m a big fan of AWS as a technology provider and have been heavily in the ecosystem for 8 years, I’m no fan of the company or the organization as a former employee.
by postalcoder | 2025-08-08 01:20:45+00:00
i’d respectfully bet against this.

cursor and 3rd party tools will, unless they make their own superior foundation model, will always have to fight the higher marginal cost battle. This is particularly bad insofar that they offer fixed pricing subscriptions. That means they’re going to have to employ more context saving tricks which are at odds with better performance.

If the cost economics result in Cursor holding, say, 20% fewer tokens in context versus model-provider coding agents, they will necessarily get worse performance, all things equal.

Unless Cursor offers something dramatically different outside of the basic agentic coding stack it’s hard to see why the market will converge to cursor.
by defrost | 2025-08-08 01:21:10+00:00
Along with radicaldreamer suggestions it's also common to be really effective at stonewalling police while on secure wire cameras with audio recording and to have very good criminal lawyers on retainer. Also having patches and wannabes who are prepared to scapegoat themselves.

This isn't so much directly evading law enforcement but it's effective as it can easily cause police take actions that cause evidence and cases to be thrown out, raise reasonable doubt, etc.

Depleting resources and diversions are also relatively common, creating a 'fake' public threat or hate crime to investigate bleeds police resources away from ongoing investigations, etc.

The tango between gang squads and organized criminal groups is an ongoing escalating battle. The EncroPhone transcripts revealed a lot.
by godelski | 2025-08-08 01:21:42+00:00
> Funding multiple startups means _not_ putting your eggs in one basket, doesn't it?

Different basket hierarchy.

Also, yes. They state this and given how there are plenty of open source models that are LLMs and get competitive performance it at least indicates that anyone not doing LLMs is doing so in secret.

If OpenAI isn't using LLMs then doesn't that support my argument?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-08 01:21:48+00:00
Agree about the requirements but disagree that it's difficult.

Two way communication and a few KiB of nonvolatile storage on the fob shouldn't be a deal breaker when an ESP32 dev board runs under $10 (an ESP32 being massive overkill for the described use case).

The device sending an encrypted counter is also trivially easy. There's no reason a modern vehicle can't store hundreds (or thousands, or tens of thousands ...) of { u64 fob_id, u64 fob_key, u64 fob_counter } triplets. Push it up to 128 bits if you're paranoid, it won't have a meaningful impact on resource usage.

Case in point regarding the car storing state, the (broken) rolling window algorithm they use requires that the car track the window and accept presses that are out of sync by a decently wide margin. That's likely more complicated and resource intensive than simply enforcing that the nonce only ever goes up.

The rational conclusion is that the manufacturers are either incompetent or malicious. I firmly conclude the latter given that the fobs they offer that are actually secure introduce vendor lock in and a charge to replace a key.
by kristopolous | 2025-08-08 01:22:13+00:00
No. Not at all. You must be thinking of a different site. Tumblr did and onlyfans did for a hot minute and then backtracked.

Neither of them intended to be porn sites. It's kind of a natural occurrence on UGC sites . Look at Civitai...

Credit card processors are kinda weary of it for some legal reasons I'm not qualified to enough to really understand.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-08 01:23:03+00:00
Countries that allow trans people to serve: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

Canada lifted its ban in 1992 and provides medical support, including gender-affirming surgery

United Kingdom allows open service, though it typically requires individuals to complete their transition before enlistment

Israel supports transgender service, covering hormones and gender-affirming surgery

Bolivia began allowing transgender people to serve openly starting around 2015

Greece lifted its ban in 2025

South Africa has allowed transgender individuals to serve since 1998
The Doom of YC?
by cgibson2025 | 2025-08-08 01:23:06+00:00
When I first learned that the new programming language is natural language, I was trying to figure out if you are using AI to build your app, or your app has AI in it then you probably know how to code or might need an app to take down all your mental notes. I actually applied to YC with a few of my ideas, well I guess I should say my actual platforms, because they are all already live. I don't understand why anyone needs to go through a program where they are still teaching the old SaaS product way, AI apps don't follow the normal "choose one vertical" and focus on that, find product market fit for that vertical and spend millions on hiring devs, advertising, PR, etc. All that is the past, I hope they change the way they teach people because I haven't heard anything about any of the apps that have came outta YC in the last 6 months. Is it possible that AI is so disruptive that YC can't fund unicorns anymore? Why do we need all that money or capitol when most AI tools are dirt cheap? And no one needs programmers, AI is the programmer, it makes no sense to me. Please someone explain what I am missing, because I've done my research very well, and it's not adding up.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-08 01:23:12+00:00
I need you to explain your argument better.

If you were saying they lost accents outside the main 50 or whatever, I'd understand why 8 bits were a problem. But you're saying they lost accents as a general rule, right? Why did they lose accents that were right there on the US code pages? Why would that reason not extend to a 9 bit semi-universal EBCDIC?
by Terr_ | 2025-08-08 01:23:17+00:00
> They are so good at arguing that they can justify almost anything

To sharpen the point a bit, I don't think it's genius "arguing" or logical jujitsu, but some simpler factors:

1. The experience has reached a threshold where we start to anthropomorphize the other end as a person interacting with us.

2. If there were a person, they'd be totally invested in serving you, with nearly unlimited amounts of personal time, attention, and focus given to your questions and requests.

3. The (illusory) entity is intrinsically shameless and appears ever-confident.

Taken together, we start judging the fictional character like a human, and what kind of human would burn hours of their life tirelessly responding and consoling me for no personal gain, never tiring, breaking-character, or expressing any cognitive dissonance? *gasp* They're my friend now and I should trust them. Keeping my guard up is so tiring anyway, so I'm sure anything wrong is either an honest mistake or some kind of misunderstanding on my part, right?

TLDR: It's not not mentat-intelligence or even eloquence, but rather stuff that overlaps with culty indoctrination tricks and con[fidence]-man tactics.
by MisterMower | 2025-08-08 01:23:29+00:00
I think you do see the point I’m making, since you correctly identified it and provided a rebuttal :)

Phrased more accurately: is the value from the sum of the use cases for the data gathered by this satellite greater than the cost of putting it into orbit and operating it? Or even just the continued cost of operating it?

The fact that the article mentions farmers as the only potential non-governmental beneficiary of this information makes me believe the answer to that question is no, it wasn’t.
by Lammy | 2025-08-08 01:24:13+00:00
> I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads.

Back in The Day, Mac OS X Tiger just faked it by measuring how long it took to boot to LoginWindow, writing that number of seconds to a file, and displaying the next boot's progress indicator as a percentage of that time.

Power words: `/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow` and `/var/db/loginwindow.boottime`

- https://daringfireball.net/misc/2005/04/tiger_details#waitin...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20060427030025/http://www.macosx...

- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/05/397/

- https://web.archive.org/web/20060506092123/http://www.macosx...
by dismalaf | 2025-08-08 01:24:44+00:00
Neapolitan pizza isn't even the most popular pizza in Italy...

The AVPN is basically just an organization promoting Neapolitan pizza around the world since Naples is traditionally a poorer part of Italy and extra tourism helps.

It is interesting though, and I do enjoy Neapolitan pizza (even got an Ooni pizza oven just to make it at home lol).
by gloyoyo | 2025-08-08 01:25:16+00:00
The local PD in my area has/had the laptops in their vehicles set to ad-hoc mode, and each broadcast static MAC addresses in the open, and could simply be looked up on the Wigle database. At about 100-yards, you could pick up the broadcast on any phone, and it would be trivial for someone to deduce that you could setup an active monitor w/ alerts for when these specific MAC addresses were present in a designated area, let alone what a distributed monitoring/alert effort would be capable of...
by ggm | 2025-08-08 01:25:21+00:00
When they reach some defined age, their accrued benefits become available? I live in another economy and we have the concept of "preservation age" at which you can begin your retirement, this is somewhat more precise and distinct from "retire early"

Surely their statutory benefits and personal payments cannot be withheld indefinitely? Frozen perhaps, and so declining in value absent contributions.

A shitty move no matter what. I'm trying to understand if this is a misappropriation, a withholding of pension rights in the future.
by kazinator | 2025-08-08 01:25:57+00:00
But before stating that intent, he admits "well, that parable didn't work". The strongest interpretation of which is that the parable he wrote didn't succeed in being about "the dangers of becoming too powerful".

We have to read "was about" as "was (supposed to be) about".

What the parable ends up being about is any consistent interpretation well supported by the actual text of the parable!

In the parable, the Whispering Earring is a kind of character. It has autonomy and agency; a mind of its own, separate from that of the wearer. It generates ideas and suggests them to the wearer, eventually rendering most of their brain unnecessary. (The implication being that the individual, as a sentient being, has wasted away and has been effectively replaced by the host, as if possessed in the classical sense).

Someone who could be just as powerful in making all the right decisions guaranteed to make them happy, but using their own brain instead of taking suggestions from a whispering daemonic oracle, would not waste away and be replaced; their brain would have to be doing remarkable work and developing in the process rather than atrophying.

I suspect that it would actually be very difficult to repair the parable, while retaining the key element of the Whispering Earring as an autonomous entity, into being about "the dangers of becoming too powerful oneself". (Has the author tried?)
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-08 01:26:52+00:00
I loved this the moment I saw it. After looking at an example commit[1], I love it even more. The cursed knowledge entry is committed alongside the fix needed to address it. My first instinct is that every project should have a similar facility. The log is not just cathartic, but turns each frustrating speedbump into a positive learning experience. By making it public, it becomes both a tool for both commiseration and prevention.

1 - https://github.com/savely-krasovsky/immich/commit/aeb5368602...