MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stouset | 2025-08-07 20:55:51+00:00
> These reduction to absurdity arguments about the temperature of the earth assume we're not going to space. I don't understand why you reject this idea outright.

Not just going to space, but transitioning to a primarily space-based civilization. We'll need to terraform Mars within 400 years, and even then that will only buy us thirty years of sustained growth. Even if we slow down to 1% growth, once we exhaust Earth, we'll exhaust Earth-2 in just seventy.

Further, this doesn’t actually solve much because all the growth is happening on the outer planets. Earth is definitionally full in this future, so it needs to stay steady-state. Unless we forcibly ship off half the population every doubling period.

Is it going to happen? Maybe. But I'm not sure we should be playing brinksmanship with the one planet we know we've got on the idea that the overwhelming majority of humans will (and must) live in space on every rock in the solar system in the same amount of time it took us to go from the Renaissance to the Internet.

> All the above calculations about the energy available to us are from a tiny pin-prick sliver of how much energy the sun deposits in all directions, every day, all day, for the 4 billion years.

Exponential growth is a bitch. In roughly the same time it took us to go from the dark ages to now, we'll need to be consuming 100% of the sun's total energy output.

I think it's far more likely that either:

a) we won't stop using more energy and literally cook ourselves off the planet, or b) we'll stop exponential growth of energy use

Based on our approach to the economy vs. climate change, I think it's pretty clear which of those two choices humanity will opt for. If we even make it there, thanks to the aforementioned climate change.
by boston_clone | 2025-08-07 20:55:54+00:00
This makes me super curious - could you share how you came to find this site and decide to sign up? It's called "hacker news" with the implication that content posted here is intellectually stimulating for hackers - or, those who hack together computer programs.

If you do already program, have you never been exposed to JavaScript at all? If not, I think you should use that curiosity to find out what JavaScript is and what effects disabling it may have.

Even more odd when I see that the majority of your comments are really just posting archive links to bypass a paywall. Not an issue with me per se, but even more surprising to be ignorant of JS at that point.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-08-07 20:57:10+00:00
"That said, I think framing all UPFs or processed foods as "bad" misses the point. What really matters is the nutritional value of the food itself. A food being ultra-processed doesn’t automatically make it less healthy than a minimally processed one."

Figuring out which ultra processed foods are ok and which ones aren't is very difficult and can be manipulated. I think it's much easier to avoid that stuff and cook from scratch.
by judahmeek | 2025-08-07 20:57:18+00:00
I love The Atlantic for articles like this.

I've definitely considered liquidity & wealth inequality as reasons behind the resilience & height of the stock market, but I would never have considered the effort of a switch from active to passive brokers.

I guess short-term it means that the stock market just barrels upwards and shrugs off issues that would have resulted in market corrections.

Long-term, my guess is that the first effect of this will be on politics. The stock market is used as an indicator by politicians of consumer confidence and the more resilient the stock market is, the more willing politicians will be to play fast & loose.
by sgk284 | 2025-08-07 20:57:30+00:00
We use Claude Code pretty aggressively at our startup, so were naturally curious to compare the coding examples that OpenAI published today to Opus 4.1.

All of these were one-shotted by Claude.

(OpenAI's GPT-5 Coding Examples: https://github.com/openai/gpt-5-coding-examples)
by taylodl | 2025-08-07 20:57:39+00:00
> but we should also not let them

America is supposed to be a nation of laws, not a nation of political purges. If we start punishing people based on vague suspicions or geopolitical anxieties rather than actual legal violations, we’re not defending democracy - we’re imitating the very authoritarian regimes we claim to oppose.

Intel’s CEO isn’t accused of espionage or sabotage. The Justice Department accepted a plea bargain. Case closed. If that’s not good enough for you, maybe your problem isn’t with Intel, it’s with the Constitution.

We don’t preserve our military and industrial advantage by abandoning due process. We preserve it by investing in strategic capabilities - like Intel’s foundry expansion - and by upholding the rule of law even when it’s inconvenient.

If you want to beat authoritarianism, don’t become it.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-07 20:57:42+00:00
I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue.

I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-07 20:57:50+00:00
The problem is that there is really like no middle ground. You either get essentially very fancy search engines which is the current slew of models (along with manually coded processing loops in the form of agents), which all fall into the same valley of explicit development and patching, which solves for known issues.

Or you get something that can actually reason, which means it can solve for unknown issues, which means it can be very powerful. But this is something that we aren't even close to figuring out.

There is a limit to power though - in general it seems that reality is full of non computationally reducible processes, which means that an AI will have to simulate reality faster than reality in parallel. So all powerful all knowing AGI is likely impossible.

But something that can reason is going to be very useful because it can figure things out that haven't been explicitly trained on.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-07 20:58:00+00:00
It has been more than 5 years since the release of GPT-3.

GPT-5 is a marginal, incremental improvement over GPT-4. GPT-4 was a moderate, but not groundbreaking, improvement over GPT-3. So, "something like GPT-5" has existed for longer than the timeline you gave.

Let's pretend the above is false for a moment though, and rewind even further. I still think you're wrong. Would people in 2015 have said "AI that can code at the level of a CS college grad is a lifespan away"? I don't think so, no. I think they would have said "That's at least a decade away", anytime pre-2018. Which, sure, maybe they were a couple years off, but if it seemed like that was a decade away in 2015, well, it's been a decade since 2015.
by vl | 2025-08-07 20:58:15+00:00
Re: orbital assembly. L1 point is bad in every respect. If most materials come from Moon, then the best assembly point is low Moon orbit (as benefit you get a boot to your launch speed to escape Earth gravity), if most material comes from Earth, then best assembly point is low Earth orbit. Hauling all material to L1 is going to be more expensive in either case (unless the ratio of materials is very exact, which is unlikely).

Re: spin. I still claim that the best design is to rotate entire living module as one. Most of the activity is going to be on the outer shell. Warehouses, etc will be in the lower gravity inside. No moving parts.

The only question is what to do with fuel and retro engines. Rotate them as well? Fuel tanks need to be stronger. Do not rotate? Then maybe living module can undock for the flight and rotate separately.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-07 20:58:18+00:00
Awesome stuff about older cars: Tactile controls. No screens. Not blinding drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists (bfciia). Not ruining others' visibility with pointless oversizeness (bfciia). No telemetry. Crank windows (excpt 2011). No forced flood of accessories/features. Whatever happens, we can repair it - well.

Not awesome stuff about older vehicles: No cruise control on most of them(sigh). Higher gas consumption on the 61 and 69. The 69 does 130mph at low rpm and needs to go away. The 61 has fewer driving days because droptop. Can't see around pointlessly oversized vehicles.

It's a Wash: 30mpg from 63, 92, 96 and 2011 (89 not on road yet). Repair/Service time varies wildly on new models and is hard to compare to ours (we are 2hrs/mo)(more when tinkering for fun).

bfciia: References behavior formerly clustered in intentional aholes (but now mandated for millions of [mostly] unwilling drivers).
by lotyrin | 2025-08-07 20:58:32+00:00
Yeah. Or like, a loop that plays continuously and has style parameters exposed you can tweak with a controller like a Midi Fighter Twister and get feedback from in real-time. Then you could do something akin to DJ/live production by having two of these going in sync with each other into a mixer. (Tweak params of the cue track until you like it, transition at a phrase point, repeat).
by phren0logy | 2025-08-07 20:58:34+00:00
Holy moly. I did not see that coming, but it makes sense. I’m enjoying the terminal-based coding agents way more than I ever would have expected. I can keep one spinning in the background while I do #dayjob, and as a bonus I feel like a haX0r.

2025 is the year of the terminal, apparently?

For my prototype purposes, it’s great, and Claude code the most fun I’ve had with tech in a jillion years.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-07 20:58:39+00:00
Most artificial lenses, especially more than 5 years back, had a single focal point and did not adjust. You chose to either have near vision (mostly carless old people), far vision (and still use reading glasses), or blended vision (one eye far one near).

The flexible lens stuff is still relatively new and there are reports of them sort of being like 80% focused 100% of the time, which can suck. Apparently lots of individual variability in results, where as the single-focus lenses are 60s technology and well figured out.
by jcastro | 2025-08-07 20:58:46+00:00
Hi Jeff, I'm a linux ambassador for Framework and I have one of these units. It'd be interesting if you would install ramalama in fedora and test that. I've been using that out of the box as a drop in replacement for ollama and everything was GPU accelerated out of the box. It pulls rocm from a container and just figures it out, etc. Would love to see actual numbers though.

Great work on this!
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-08-07 20:59:59+00:00
This is another reason I advocate for open source hardware and silicon.

I hope we can see ToR fiber switches and routers that are normally seen in a data center interconnect become more open and affordable. Given how fragmented the web is becoming between geopolitics, encryption issues, and verification...the only path forward is high speed e2e encryption and lowering the barriers for an individual to create an Autonomous System to join the "global web"
by lazide | 2025-08-07 21:00:45+00:00
Southern India has particularly low Muslim populations - and definitely doesn’t follow that guidance.

The vedas have many sections which get widely ignored.

Edit: HN throttling is terrible. Here is a link to a couple studies [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32641190/], [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-consanguineous...]

AP has the highest rate, around 28%
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-07 21:01:00+00:00
They probably will. Given how fast GPT 5 is, it feels like all the models are very small.

Maybe to service more users they're thinking they'll shrink the models and have reasoning close the gap... of course, that only really works for verifiable tasks.

And I've seen the claims of a "universal verifier", but that feels like the Philosopher's Stone of AI. Everyone who's tried it has shown limited carryover between verifiable tasks (like code) to tasks with subjective preference.

-

To clarify also: I don't think this is nefarious. I think as you serve more users, you need to at least try to reign in the unit economics.

Even OpenAI can only afford to burn so many dollars per user per week once they're trying to serve a billion users a week. At some point there isn't even enough money to be raised to keep up with costs.
by 9rx | 2025-08-07 21:02:24+00:00
You can assume a meaning for the sake of your own purposes, but it does not reflect back on the original comment.

Your quip "So it is the Democrats fault we have Trump???" presumably demonstrates that you understand exactly that. After all, if you could have logically projected your interpretation onto the original comment there would have been no need to ask. You'd have already known.

Still, how you managed establish that there was even potential suggestion of "fault" is a head scratcher. Whether or not the account in the original comment is accurate, it clearly only tells a story of what (supposedly) happened. There is no sensible leap from an ostensible historic account to an attribution of blame.

You seem to indicate, if I understand you correctly, that because you randomly had that idea pop into your head (that Democrats are at fault) when reading the comment that the other party must have also been thinking the same thing, but I find that a little unsatisfactory. Perhaps we need to simply dig deeper, freeing ourselves from the immediate context, and look at the line of thinking more broadly. What insights can you offer into your thought processes?
by stouset | 2025-08-07 21:02:27+00:00
A series of fads are not responsible for the economic growth we've experienced as a civilization for the last 2,000 years.

What you are describing is not economic growth, but a steady-state economy. Money will still change hands, but we'll capped in the total amount of energy that can be expended towards production. That is going to require an enormous change in the way the economy functions.
by shirleygiven968 | 2025-08-07 21:03:12+00:00
I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2010 and put on Avonex immediately. I also discovered the Swank MS diet and went on it soon after being diagnosed. A few years later, my liver enzymes were affected and my neurologist said she had other patients who were just on the Swank diet, so I went off the Avonex and have just been on MS-4 from uinehealthcentre for several months now, 15 years after my diagnosis, my annual MRI shows no additional lesions, and I have no disability. All my symptoms declined. I work as a realtor and interior designer and am on my feet all day. I am 68 and going strong. Anyone who reads this I got the treatment from uinehealthcentre. net
by einarfd | 2025-08-07 21:03:28+00:00
I got the same when trying it with standard gpt5. But when I used the thinking mode I got:

3 — cranberry.

Tried with Claude sonnet 4 as well:

There are 3 r’s in the word “cranberry”:

c-*r*-a-n-b-e-*rr*-y

The r’s appear in positions 2, 7, and 8.

I would expect standard gpt5 to get it right tbh.
by bartman | 2025-08-07 21:03:57+00:00
I am not (usually) photosensitive, but the animated static noise on your websites causes noticable flickering on various screens I use and made it impossible for me to read your article.

For better accessibility and a safer experience[1] I would recommend not animating the background, or at least making it easily togglable.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/G...
by spaceribs | 2025-08-07 21:03:59+00:00
> Buy it from whom? ... now you have to buy that land from the original owner, who is obligated to hold on to it even though he may want to use his capital for something else.

There's no obligation to "Own" land, if you want to put your capital elsewhere then either use your existing land as collateral for a loan or otherwise sell it. Technically everyone is actually leasing land from a government, it's not a commodity and it has a finite supply, so unlike corn or even housing, what is a speculator even speculating on?

I also want to be clear I think it would be very silly to ban speculators, the act of speculation is something that we all do when we own literally anything, but speculating on limited finite ground space that no one actually owns doesn't make any logical sense. Just properly tax speculation into a space that is unprofitable to hoard.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-07 21:04:20+00:00
>Why does that indicate they would lie about a worse thing?

Because they know their audience. It's an audience that also doesn't care for copyright and would love for them to win their court cases. They are fineaking such an argument to those kinds of people.

Meanwhile, the reaction from the same audience when legal did a very typical subpoena process on said data, data they chose to submit to an online server of their own volition, completely freaked out. Suddenly, they felt like their privacy was invaded.

It doesn't make any logical sense in my mind, but a lot of the discourse over this topic isnt based on logic.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-07 21:04:51+00:00
Yeah it would be much more practical for color. 12 bit rgb4, 24 bit rgb8 or rgba6, and 48 bit rgb16 or rgba12 would all have proper alignment. The obvious rgb12 would obviate the need for the unholy mess of asymmetric 32 bit packed rgb formats we "enjoy" today.

Physical memory - Intel added support for 57 bits (up from 48 bits) in 2019, and AMD in 2022. 48 bit pointers obviously address the vast majority of needs. 96 bit pointers would make the developers of GC'd languages and VMs very happy (lots of tag bits).

For floats presumably you'd match the native sizes to maintain alignment. An f48 with a 10 bit exponent and an f96 with a 15 or 17 bit exponent. I doubt the former has any downsides relative to an f32 and the latter we've already had the equivalent of since forever in the form of 80 bit extended precision floats with a 16 bit exponent.

Amusingly I'm just now realizing that the Intel 80 bit representation has a wider exponent than IEEE binary128.

I guess high end hardware that supports f128 would either be f144 or f192. The latter maintains alignment so presumably that would win out. Anyway pretty much no one supports f128 in hardware to begin with.
by nartho | 2025-08-07 21:05:15+00:00
It doesn't. But fast food and pre-cooked meals made it so a large percentage of people can't cook with raw or unprocessed ingredients anymore and can only rely on giant companies to feed themselves.

Junk food is OK every once in a while, but if that's all you eat you're not going to be healthy. I believe the same is true for the media you consume.

Edit: Also, to add to your analogy, junk food made it so people's palates became accustomed to high amounts of sugar, fat and salt, to a point where some people "Don't like water". If you've only known pizza rolls and chicken tenders, you're unlikely to enjoy a chicory salad or a even a moussaka. And if all your entertainment is call of duty, marvel movies and AI generated music, you're unlikely to enjoy Weather Report, Rachmaninoff or Pynchon. I'm not saying that to to be elitist, but we've got to stop dumbing down culture and entertainment
by qingcharles | 2025-08-07 21:05:21+00:00
I've found passkeys support on Windows to be a bit janky right now. You can get into weird scenarios where the passkeys don't work, but there's also no UI to remove them or reset them. This is especially annoying when you change out some component in your PC and it seems to void however they are encrypted and Windows can't figure out why it can't access them.

It's too early for grandma to use, IMO.
by jp_nc | 2025-08-07 21:05:45+00:00
I don’t know… Travis Kalanick said he’s doing “vibe physics” sessions with MechaHitler approaching the boundaries of quantum physics.

"I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics"
by dawnofdusk | 2025-08-07 21:06:05+00:00
Yann LeCun (Meta AI head) is still all-in on energy based models, which are basically Hopfield-like. Not sure if there are any major developments in that direction, but the hype/optimism is still there. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-5468/ad292b/...
by tialaramex | 2025-08-07 21:06:08+00:00
Consensual sex between adult brother and sister for example isn't abuse. If it results in a child it is also unacceptably likely to result in birth defects because that's 50% DNA commonality. Consensual sex between parent and (adult obviously) child is more arguable because there's a significant power imbalance which would usually not be present for siblings, but it might not be abuse.

Cousin sex is just not a big deal, and especially beyond the 1st cousins with zero removal, ie the children of your parents' blood siblings. When it comes to stuff like "She's the daughter of my great-auntie's oldest boy" it's negligible. In some societies that wouldn't be tracked, everybody is a cousin and nobody is. Americans are weird about this. Rudy Giuliani for example married his second cousin. I don't even know the names of my second cousins. If I met one in a bar I'd have no idea. But in the US somehow that counts as strange.
by cogman10 | 2025-08-07 21:06:30+00:00
The biggest issue of ARM to me is the fact that ARM hardware never seems to have good or updated drivers.

If I pull an x86 machine or even laptop off the shelf, I'm like 90% sure I can perpetually support that machine for 30 or so years with the latest linux kernel.

For arm, I'm almost guaranteed that the only kernel support I can get is their custom kernel, which I'd have to scrape out of their custom OS. That means being locked into a vendored 3.10 linux kernel forever because there was never any real effort to upstream drivers into the kernel.

It's frankly a bit bizarre that it's so bad. x86 just works even with the latest CPUs. ARM doesn't.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-07 21:06:33+00:00
Oh it's worse than that just pupil shrinking in dark. Basically, cone cells see color and detail but need more light, rods see in low light but mostly serve peripheral vision. So your vision system is just wholly optimized to only doing detail work in fairly bright light; nighttime is for predator evasion.

Another way to look at that: We likely evolved decent color vision to identify edible fruits. That wasn't doable with vision in the dark (and we opted out of the olfactory tech tree), so now your accurate-vision tasks are optimized for daylight.
by EA-3167 | 2025-08-07 21:06:57+00:00
> I'm not optimistic about BlueSky's profitability - the current free-at-point of use is a result of VC funding.

You aren't wrong, there will be a turn at some point just like there was with Twitter, but then the same is true of 'AI' and people seem happy to go all-in on that. If VC's want to burn their money on the dream of becoming some new kind of rich... good, let them. Sure it turns sour after a while (Uber, Doordash, etc)... but enjoy the largess before they figure out there's no magic money tree in those hills.