MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BuckRogers | 2025-08-21 22:12:02+00:00
He didn't really cite a source on his huge claim that it had "everything it needed" in all cases. A camera can't see in the dark, or through fog.

I want lidar. But the minimum setup without lidar would be cameras, radar, ultrasonic, GPS/GNSS + IMU.

As I told him, two things can be true at once. AI may not be good enough AND you want more sensors and data to work with.

Everyone tries to present choices like that all the time to try to make a false dichotomy. Yes I concede that it's most likely that most autonomous accidents are probably in crowded spaces or areas with a lot of cars. Simply because that's the most likely place for an accident to occur.

But who doesn't want beyond superhuman sensory data for their vehicle? Why limit to just human eyeball equivalent sensory data? It makes no sense. Unless you're just trying to defend Tesla's decision. I'm sure it can work that way. It would be smarter if the idea was to cost cut, to remove sensors AFTER AI was trained on more data and perfected. Not train a fleet on minimum input and then just beat down the strawman you created that you "don't need more". The task (training the AI) isn't done yet, so you can't really make such a sweeping claim until you succeed.

But why do I want this anyway? Give me two parachutes please, rather than one. I'm so worried about the cost that I won't spare it.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-08-21 22:12:24+00:00
This is definitely the weirdest part, their refusal to treat passengers with any respect. For the most part the crew often doesn't know if it will get fixed in one hour or ten hours, but they don't communicate this and there's never an option to bail and have someone pick you up.

Last time I took Amtrak out of LA Union Station, it broke down but luckily was able to pull into the next station so people could get off and find another route. I stayed on and after about 4 hours we were towed back to union station.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-21 22:12:35+00:00
I skimmed the 'paper'. It seems incredibly rambling and not any sort of coherent theory. However I graduated with an undergrad physics degree in 1987 and became a software engineer. So I am hardly super qualified to comment.

Once in every now and then a genius comes along and turns everything up side down. But there are 1000s of cranks and blowhards for every Einstein. I don't see anything to make me think Weinstein is an Einstein (the similarlity in name notwithstanding).
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-21 22:12:36+00:00
This fundamentally misunderstands why programming languages exist. They're not required because "we can't understand complexity". They were invented because we need a way to be very specific about what we want the machine to do. Whether it's the actual physical hardware we're talking to when writing assembly, or it's an abstract machine that will be translated to the hardware like in C or Java, the key point is that we want to be specific.

Natural language can be specific, but it requires far too many words. `map (+ 1) xs` is far shorter to write than "return a list of elements by applying a function that adds one to its argument to each element of xs and collecting the results in a separate list", or similar.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-21 22:12:49+00:00
> AI would offer automation equaling $2.3 trillion in labor value affecting 39 million positions

But

>Current automation potential: 2.27% of U.S. labor value

Given the US GDP right now is 27 trillion, I'm not sure if this is really mathing out in my head. Wwe're going to potentially optimize 61 billion dollars of US labor value while displacing some 15% of the American labor force, and return back 2.3 trillion in value? Who's purchasing all this (clearly not the workforce)? Meanwhile, investments in AI as of 2025 is already hitting half of that.

Granted, GDP is an odd indicator to measure on for this situation. But I'm unsure how else we measure "labor value" here.
by disposition2 | 2025-08-21 22:12:52+00:00
I can see the value in actual AI. But it seems like in many instances how it is being utilized or applied is more related to terrible search functionality. Even for the web, it seems like we’re using AI to provide more refined search results, rather than just fixing search capabilities.

Maybe it’s just easier to throw ‘AI’ (heavy compute of data) at a search problem, rather than addressing the crux of the problem…people not being provided with the tools to query information. And maybe that’s the answer but it seems like an expensive solution.

That said, I’m not an expert and could be completely off base.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-21 22:14:19+00:00
I voice chat with chatgpt to generate a very very detailed architecture document / spec / prd / whatever, in an implementation checklist order, then I take that and save it as a "VISION.md" file in the repo, and queue up a command for the agent to start working on the problem. I have detailed subagent and task forking logic in my claude setup, so I can get plans that involve 7-8 subagents (some being invoked by claude -p for parallel execution) and take a project from that spec to a very real project in ~6-8 hours, during which time my agents will typically phone home to see if they should continue maybe 2 or 3 times (I have anti stopping hooks but they're lazy SoBs).
by thorum | 2025-08-21 22:14:42+00:00
I like this framing, but I don’t think it’s entirely new to LLMs. Humans have been building flexible, multi-purpose tools and using them for things the original inventor or manufacturer didn’t think of since before the invention of the wheel. It’s in our DNA. Our brains have been shaped by a world where that is normal.

The rigidness and near-perfect reliability of computer software is the unusual thing in human history, an outlier we’ve gotten used to.
by xenotux | 2025-08-21 22:14:45+00:00
> I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory.

I think it's a lesson that we all consistently fail to apply to ourselves. It is so pervasive on social media - HN included - yet it's something we only attribute to others. Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.

It happens for a reason. There's something deeply satisfying about being a contrarian: the implication that you're smarter than the masses. It's usually hard to be a contrarian in your primary field of expertise. It's a lot easier to be a contrarian in someone else's.
by RandallBrown | 2025-08-21 22:14:56+00:00
Interesting. I feel like the majority of toilets (in my US city) have both buttons and it's been that way for almost a decade.

The only time they don't is when it's a toilet that's over 10 years old.

I could be wrong, especially since I mostly just use my own toilet (has two buttons, is 6 years old) or a urinal.
by SecureBitChat | 2025-08-21 22:15:00+00:00
Key Security Improvements: Enhanced Cryptographic Architecture: Advanced mutex system preventing race conditions in cryptographic operations Nested encryption layers with multiple security passes ECDH/ECDSA integration for elliptic curve cryptography Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) with automatic key rotation Session salt generation for unique session identifiers Anti-Fingerprinting & Traffic Analysis Resistance: Packet padding and noise generation systems Decoy communication channels to confuse attackers Advanced anti-tracking techniques Rate limiting and DoS protection New File Transfer System: Bidirectional File Transfer: Fixed asymmetry issues between creator and joiner roles Session-based encryption with unique keys per transfer Smart chunking with backpressure handling SHA-256 integrity verification for all file chunks File Type Restrictions & Validation: Documents: PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, MD, RTF, ODT (50 MB) Images: JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, BMP, SVG, ICO (25 MB) Archives: ZIP, RAR, 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ (100 MB) Media: MP3, MP4, AVI, MKV, MOV, WMV, FLV, WEBM, OGG, WAV (100 MB) General: Any file type up to 50 MB Technical Specifications: Encryption: AES-256-GCM + ECDH P-384 Hash Functions: SHA-384 for integrity verification WebRTC: Optimized peer-to-peer communication PWA: Progressive Web App with offline support Performance: <5% encryption overhead, <50MB memory usage Use Cases: Secure document sharing between verified parties Encrypted file transfers over pure P2P channels Privacy-focused communication with military-grade security Research and development in secure communication protocols Open Source & Community: The project is open source and welcomes contributions from the security research community. Built with modern web standards and designed for both technical and non-technical users.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-21 22:15:39+00:00
But what's the difference between one user making 900k hits and 900k different users making one hit? In both cases you have made a resource available and people are requesting it, some more than others.

If serving traffic for free is a problem, don't. If you are only able to serve N requests per second/minute/day/etc, do that. But don't complain if you give out something for free and people take it.

(also, a lot of the numbers people quote during these AI scraper "attacks" are very tame and the fact they are branded as problematic makes me suspect there's substantial incompetence in the solutions deployed to serve them)
by xyzzy123 | 2025-08-21 22:15:57+00:00
There aren't really any huge gotchas imho in 2025, just watch out that you don't get sidetracked delivering awesome developer infrastructure (preview environments! blue/green! pristine iac! its fun!) if there are actually more important things to be working on (there usually are).

At early stage the product should usually be a monolith and there are a LOT of simple ways to deploy & manage 1 thing.

Probably not an issue for you but costs will also tend to bump up quite a lot, you will be ingesting way more logs, tons more metrics etc just for the cluster itself, you may find yourself paying for more things to help manage & maintain your cluster(s) . Security add-ons can quickly get expensive.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-21 22:16:26+00:00
There's been non-stop talk of "AI bubble" for 3 years now. Frontier AI systems keep improving in the meanwhile.

Clearly, a lot of people very desperately want AI tech to fail. And if there is such a strong demand for "tell me that AI tech will fail", then there will be hacks willing to supply. I trust most of those "experts" as far as I can throw them.
by zmmmmm | 2025-08-21 22:16:43+00:00
it's not really a fair characterisation, because he persisted for nearly 10 years dumping enormous investment into the VR business, and still is to this day. Furthermore, Meta's AI labs predated all the hype and the company was investing and highly respected in the area way before it was "cool".

If anything, I think the panic at this stage is arising from the sense of having his lunch stolen after having invested so much and for so long.
by MengerSponge | 2025-08-21 22:17:07+00:00
While we try to make things accessible to the public, the determination of what is "good" is ultimately made by experts.

"The public" has a level of science literacy that is somewhat medieval (as in pre-Newtonian, and increasingly pre-germ theory), and while it's important to maintain political support, it's not reasonable to expect Joe Schmoe to be able to track the latest experimental results from CERN.

In fact, it's not reasonable to expect a very smart lay person to do the same. The problem is basically that the information that gets encoded in papers and public datasets is not spanning! There's a shocking amount of fiddly details that don't get transmitted for one reason or another. Say what you want about how things "should" be done, but that's how they are done. If you want things done differently you can encourage that behavior by rubbing cash on the problem.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-08-21 22:17:38+00:00
When working well, they enable us to offload needing to memorize a wikipedia worth of information and think about higher level problems. We become more intelligent at higher level solutions. Of course people don't know what was written if they were required to "submit an essay" where the main grade is whether or not they submitted one and the topic may have been one not interesting to them. Ask people to write essays about things they're truly, honestly interested in, and people who have access to an LLM are likely able to enrich their knowledge faster than those without.
by FredPret | 2025-08-21 22:18:05+00:00
> How much water is wasted on golf courses...

Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.

I mean unless you transport it off-planet.

You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.

In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.

You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.

For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.

A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.

Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.

Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-21 22:18:05+00:00
>This pattern suggests that a $20-per-month general-purpose tool often outperforms bespoke enterprise systems costing orders of magnitude more

$20/month? Is "mid-sized" different than I imagined, or was this 3-4 years ago? We're already seeing model subscriptions balloon.

I wouldn't be surprised if these approach typical enterprise prices in a few more years.
by lillecarl | 2025-08-21 22:18:22+00:00
EU put forwards some Eco labeling thing in 2013 to encourage toilet manufacturers to get eco certified and people buy the stuff (though it was already common long before 2013)

Regulation can be for the greater good, and in this case it's not even mandatory.

I feel like there's a cultural difference where wastefulness is frowned upon at home but encouraged in the US. Big cars, big trucks(cars), big trucks(lorries), big (green)lawns, big roads, big houses, big servings, drive everywhere, fly everywhere, no trains, no public transport.

Everything is big except infrastructure unrelated to cars. Except for some cool dams built before something shifted.

And as others mentioned, the "water rights" which can be traded(bought up) by some evil megacorp instead of benefiting local farmers and population becaue ownership trumps everything.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...
by Arnavion | 2025-08-21 22:18:29+00:00
Only tangentially related, but RISC-V intentionally makes any instruction starting with 0x0000 an illegal instruction instead of a NOP, for exactly the reason to prevent NOP-sleds. The official NOPs are 0x0001 (compressed 16-bit instruction) and 0x00000013 (regular 32-bit instruction; instructions are LE so 0x13 is the first byte in memory), both equivalent to addi x0, x0, 0, though many other instructions can act as NOPs by virtue of writing to the zero register.
by timoth3y | 2025-08-21 22:18:45+00:00
There is some important nuance needed.

Plato was not against writing. In fact, he wrote prolifically. Plato's writings form the basis of Western Philosophy.

Plato's teacher Socrates was against writing, and Plato agreed that writing is inferior to dialog in some ways; memory, inquiry, deeper understanding, etc.

We know this because Plato wrote it all down.

I think it would be more accurate to say that Plato appreciated the advantages of both writing and the Socratic method.
by wiredpancake | 2025-08-21 22:19:05+00:00
From all accounts, it appears to be "less nasty". Espically with the advent of vaccines.

COVID is also nothing like the plague, that is a major illogical jump. Early pandemics, such that in the Sasanian Empire, had a 25-50 million deaths (depending what century you draw the line). The Black Death was particularly deadly, with an estimated mortality rate of 70%.

How you can suggest COVID is now the plague is just absurd. You also make a very unfounded conclusion that if we "just stayed in doors a little bit more guys!" we would of solved it. Delusional.
by replygirl | 2025-08-21 22:19:17+00:00
now i've spent 2 minutes implementing, 1 minute drafting and assigning the pr, 10 minutes checking everything, 10 minutes each of two reviewers' time, 10 minutes of qa's time, and 1 minute reporting. it's also likely i spend 2 minutes explaining what it is to each of our PMs and our CTO and why they don't need to worry about it. then i still need to field questions from devs, this time "why did we change this?" and still "what's the difference?". so that costs the company even more.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-21 22:20:23+00:00
> This is, sadly, neither new nor limited to the US.

But it's not a huge issue in Australia, because Australia has compulsory voting. Whatever you think of the indolent that didn't vote in the USA, if you are right that only 1/3 of the population supported Trump he would not have got in if voting was compulsory.

As an Australia, my gut feeling is that our compulsory voting drags everything towards the centre. If a party strays too far from there, their gone. For example we like the USA do have two major parties, split down similar lines. In one state, Western Australia, the right party got taken over by some right wing religious sect. Very few people want government institutions run as a church, and they now have 7 of the 70 or so seats. They ran the place in 2017, and had 31 seats in 2021.

Nationally, the right decided marching to Trump's tune would be a vote winner in this years federal election. In other words, they veered sharply to the right. The result - they lost 25% of their seats.
by deegles | 2025-08-21 22:20:35+00:00
> it's hard to imagine a AI that can competently code that doesn't have an LLM as a component.

That's just it. LLMs are a component, they generate text or images from a higher-level description but are not themselves "intelligent". If you imagine the language center of your brain being replaced with a tiny LLM powered chip, you would not say it's sentient. it translates your thoughts into words which you then choose to speak or not. That's all modulated by consciousness.
by chriskanan | 2025-08-21 22:20:48+00:00
That's my assessment of the report as well.... really, some news truly is "fake" where they are pushing a narrative that they think will drive clicks and eyeballs, and the media is severely misrepresenting what is in this report.

The failure is not AI, but that a lot of existing employees are not adopting the tools or at least not adopting the tools provided by their company. The "Shadow AI economy" they discuss is a real issue: People are just using their personal subscriptions to LLMs rather than internal company offerings. My university made an enterprise version of ChatGPT available to all students, faculty, and staff so that it can be used with data that should not be used with cloud-based LLMs, but it lacks a lot of features and has many limitations compared to, for example, GPT-5. So, adoption and retention of users of that system is relatively low, which is almost surely due to its limitations compared to cloud-based options. Most use-cases don't necessarily involve data that would be illegal to use with a cloud-based system.
by ghotli | 2025-08-21 22:21:06+00:00
The way you wrote this and your previous comment above led me to believe your account is new. I checked it, 74 days at time of writing. I get the impression you haven't read the guidelines here. I like this place as it is generally civil discourse and have no qualms being the person that points you to the "In Comments" section of the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be kind, rewind.
by danielhanchen | 2025-08-21 22:21:19+00:00
For local runs, I made some GGUFs! You need around RAM + VRAM >= 250GB for good perf for dynamic 2bit (2bit MoE, 6-8bit rest) - can also do SSD offloading but it'll be slow.

./llama.cpp/llama-cli -hf unsloth/DeepSeek-V3.1-GGUF:UD-Q2_K_XL -ngl 99 --jinja -ot ".ffn_.*_exps.=CPU"

More details on running + optimal params here: https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/deepseek-v3.1
by janalsncm | 2025-08-21 22:22:03+00:00
> I think Eric is a symptom and not the disease.

I agree with you on this one. It’s a symptom of scientific illiteracy, that people can’t see that a work of creative writing that makes no testable predictions about the world isn’t science.

The problem isn’t that Weinstein is too creative or his math is too impenetrable. The problem is his paper doesn’t make testable predictions. It’s a complicated exercise in world building, not science. A physics paper has well-defined terms and equations. Things that can be tested.

He said himself that it’s entertainment. He isn’t being suppressed by the DISC (“distributed ideas suppression complex”), it just turns out that fiction is a tough industry, readership is declining, and it’s a little too involved for an airport bookstore.

I don’t want him to abandon his work, I want him to engage with its critics in a serious way, not claim to be the victim of some kind of institutional conspiracy. But that would require work.

> Wouldn't a fair criticism of the work itself be "it's too impenetrable and inventive for the majority of the field to show much interest or spend much effort on it."

The problem isn’t that it is inventive or impenetrable. The standard model has plenty of unintuitive aspects as a theory. The difference is that those theories made very accurate predictions about the world which explained empirical results much better than prior theories. Weinstein’s does not.

If you make an unfalsifiable claim about a teapot orbiting Jupiter, you’re not a genius whose theories are being ignored by the establishment.

> Why does the existence of his paper make you feel this obligation

It doesn’t. I was responding to your suggestion that there might be some salvageable bits from his talk/blog post, despite your belief that it isn’t correct.

> I think there's a "cult of physics personalities" that don't appreciate when /any/ public attention is given to fringe ideas from outsiders like Eric

It’s not up to Neil DeGrasse Tyson what makes it into the Standard Model, and if I had to guess he’s probably not up on cutting edge research anyways. The relevant question is whether a new theory can explain empirical results better than existing theories. The fact that Weinstein’s paper doesn’t even attempt to do that puts it into the category of creative writing, not science.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-21 22:22:25+00:00
We have services that will serve you effectively infinite cat videos, and neither cat videos or the websites that do that have ceased to be popular.

It is actually the basis for the sites that people tend to spend most of their time and attention on.

Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok all live on the users that only want to see infinite cat videos (substitute cat video for your favorite niche). Already much of the content is AI generated, and boy does it do numbers.

I am not convinced that novelty, authenticity, or scarcity matter in the business model. If they do, AI has solved novelty, has enough people fooled with authenticity, and scarcity... no one wants their cat video feed to stop.