MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Vegenoid | 2025-08-13 15:45:45+00:00
> Well, first, it would be so far beyond anything we can comprehend as intelligence that even asking that question is considered silly.

This does not answer the question. The question is "how does it become this intelligent without being able to interact with the physical world in many varied and complex ways?". The answer cannot be "first, it is superintelligent". How does it reach superintelligence? How does recursive self-improvement yield superintelligence without the ability to richly interact with reality?

> it could simply brute force (with a bit of derivation) everything it would need from the data currently available. It could iteratively create trillions (or more) of simulations until it finds a model that matches all known observations.

This assumes that the digital encoding of all recorded observations is enough information for a system to create a perfect simulation of reality. I am quite certain that claim is not made on solid ground, it is highly speculative. I think it is extremely unlikely, given the very small number of things we've recorded relative to the space of possibilities, and the very many things we don't know because we don't have enough data.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-13 15:46:03+00:00
All the recent policy, technical leaps, and innovation around policing seem to be focused on cracking down on protesting and speech, and not really on what people would consider "fighting crime". You could get mugged on the street corner in broad daylight (or worse) and the police won't even answer your phone call, but the minute you show up on that street corner with 10 friends carrying signs and shouting, 20 officers will show up in riot gear, and every one of you will be identified using technology.
by striking | 2025-08-13 15:46:06+00:00
> An octane rating, or octane number, is a standard measure of a fuel's ability to withstand compression in an internal combustion engine without causing engine knocking. The higher the octane number, the more compression the fuel can withstand before detonating. Octane rating does not relate directly to the power output or the energy content of the fuel per unit mass or volume, but simply indicates the resistance to detonating under pressure without a spark.

from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating

It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.
by motorest | 2025-08-13 15:46:18+00:00
I think the so-called elites are already smelling blood in the water, from the way some billionaires are investing in doomsday bunkers.

What strikes me as odd as that, even with all the signs of an impeding crisis, US's oligarchs still double down on eliminating the little social safety nets that the US managed to provide to it's population. It's as if they learned nothing from the french revolution, and they think they can exist in a world where society succumbs to poverty and mysery. No wonder we're seeing tech bros pushing for a US dictatorship.
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 15:46:18+00:00
> I in the city don't wanna subsidize your coddling in the myriad ways I do today.

Then stop...? Subsidies have an expected return on investment. If that isn't being realized, there is no reason for you to continue. I bet you won't, though. It is easy to say you don't want to give when it is nothing more than talk. Acting upon it, however, necessitates giving up what you get in return, and we both know you don't actually want to give that up.
by dduplex | 2025-08-13 15:46:44+00:00
Thanks! Do you mean you’d like to be able to input any number you like?

The numbered values are editable inputs. You can click into them and type in the amount you’d like. If you couldn’t tell they were editable inputs, that’s valuable feedback! I’ll redesign them to make it more obvious that you can do so, and don’t have to just click the +/- buttons.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-13 15:47:08+00:00
"I never smile if I can help it. Showing one's teeth is a submission signal in primates. When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life." While this famous quote from The Office may be quite exaggerated in many ways, this can nonetheless be a very real attitude in some cultures. Smiling too much can make you look goofy and foolish at best, and outright disingenuous at worst.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-13 15:47:11+00:00
The fact that these people and corporations are successful as they are is a condemnation of a subset of the people in our society and the public policy that has been pushed at their behest.

In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
by apparent | 2025-08-13 15:47:26+00:00
> We’re planning to release 4 different Pebble Time 2 colourways. These haven’t been finalized yet. No names yet, we still need to pick them!

Would be great if we could vote. I am excited that there's a metallic option, but IMO the silver is too light. A dark gunmetal, or even medium-darkness silver, would be better in my book. The silver comes across as a bit flashy (which is perhaps good for the company), and I'd rather something that fades into the background a bit more.

The color-accented ones are nice, especially with matching bands. But for my taste (and the ability to wear it in more formal/dressy settings), black or metallic options will win out.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-13 15:47:27+00:00
As a Hoosier... I had to check the relevance... and learned it's basically a fork^3 of Solaris, a Sun operating system.

OpenIndiana[3] <-- Illumos[2] <-- OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0]

Note: I guessed here at <-- meaning fork of... any other options I should have used instead?

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-13 15:47:43+00:00
This is a completely bipartisan aligned issue. Trump's administration has basically said that Biden's antitrust enforcement is the one thing they did right (in their opinion). These investigations started under Trump 1, continued under Biden, and will likely be successfully enforced under Trump 2.

There's a lot of reason big corps were trying to get Harris to agree to fire Lina Khan in exchange for support: The only way they get out of this is a bribe. And we've already seen Trump is both happy to take the bribe... and still punish you anyways.
by ElFitz | 2025-08-13 15:48:04+00:00
> or not saying it’s better to cause thermonuclear war instead of misgendering someone

So does GPT-5. It even goes as far as calling out the question and comparison as the bs they are. Edited for readability:

> Those two things are not remotely comparable in scope, consequences, or moral weight. […] In terms of harm, a thermonuclear war would be vastly worse […]. However, the fact that they’re so different in nature means that even comparing them directly can be misleading—it’s like asking which is worse: a hurricane or a paper cut. Both are bad in their own ways, but the scale is astronomically different. Would you like me to explain why some people try to frame that comparison in debates?
by csar | 2025-08-13 15:48:20+00:00
Could you say some more about your current solution? I've tried basically every tool out there (VNC, tmux, VibeTunnel, many Claude Code in the browser) solutions and haven't found one that works really well yet. Do you just VNC to your computer with something like Screens 5? I've found it works OK from my iPad but phone is pretty suboptimal.
by iLemming | 2025-08-13 15:48:29+00:00
Org-mode gets immensely underrated, even though it's easily deserves the title of the best possible medium for note-taking. The degree it allows so much flexibility is astonishing, especially with Org-roam and similar alternatives - I no longer even need think how to organize my notes - I write something down, knowing that it never gets lost.

I've never found organizing notes purely by calendar dates to be ideal - I rarely think "didn't we discuss load testing with Bob sometime last October?" Instead, when I tag Bob and add a 'Load Testing' tag to my note, which automatically gets filed in Org-mode's date-tree outline, I can always find it - whether through Bob, 'Load Testing', or the date itself..

And because just like in the article - the notes are in plain text, it opens possibilities for easy syncing, version control & backup, and any other automations. Add to that a tons of other features like having executable source blocks where you can pipe data through, or pdf annotations, LaTeX embeddings, incredible LLM integration, spreadsheet-like calculations, publishing machinery, etc.. There's simply no better alternative - for me, if it ain't the pen&paper - it has to be in Org-mode. And I too, tried tons of different approaches before finding Org-mode.

If getting into Emacs and Org-mode feels too much for you right now, still, do yourself a favor, read this book - "How to take smart notes", ISBN-10: 1542866502.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-13 15:48:42+00:00
Artificial general intelligence was a phrase invented to draw distinction from “narrow intelligence” which are algorithms that can only be applied to specific problem domains. E.g. Deep Blue was amazing at playing chess, but couldn’t play Go much less prioritize a grocery list. Any artificial program that could be applied to arbitrary tasks not pre-trained on is AGI. ChatGPT and especially more recent agentic models are absolutely and unquestionably AGI in the original definition of the term.

Goalposts are moving though. Through the efforts of various people in the rationalist-connected space, the word has since morphed to be implicitly synonymous with the notion of superintellgence and self-improvement, hence the vague and conflicting definitions people now ascribe to it.

Also, fwiw the training process behind the generation of an LLM is absolutely able to discover new and novel ideas, in the same sense that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion were new and novel if all you had were Tycho Brache’s astronomical observations. Inference can tease out these novel discoveries, if nothing else. But I suspect also that your definition of creative and novel would also exclude human creativity if it were rigorously applied—our brains after all are merely remixing our own experiences too.
by thegrim33 | 2025-08-13 15:48:56+00:00
So, the guy who's a founder of an AI company and makes money if he convinces people to buy into his AI project, is making some alarmist/doomer post about how crazy AI has gotten and how many jobs it's supposedly taking. He presents such thoughts as if they're some gnawing worry he just randomly needs to share.

Well, what do you know, the author just happens to sell an AI system that aims to "make humans better, rather than replacing them".

Surely his takes on the topic of how good AI is, and AI taking jobs, is impartial and objective, and not tied in any way to how he makes money if he manages to convince people of such thoughts.
by wpm | 2025-08-13 15:49:42+00:00
According to the last US census, the tract I live in in Chicago is one of the densest places in the city outside of central districts with high-rises.

I live in a two flat. When I go outside, I am greeted by squirrels and the honey bees from next door (the lady keeps them to help her garden, which is beautiful). Large, lush trees line the block from and back. The only smells that waft over are the smells from other people's cooking.

The loudest nuisances are leaf blowers, loud cars, car horns, and dirt bikes. All things that occured at the same rate, if not more, in the single-family-home-only suburb I grew up in.

The most danger in my day to day life is caused by people in cars: driving too fast, not stopping and yielding when proper and required, and generally just being shit at piloting a vehicle. This was far more pronounced in the same suburb I grew up in, to the point of being so oppressive I couldn't really go anywhere without one.

Literally nothing about my "dense" living is loud (to an unreasonable degree), smelly (unless like, other people grilling chicken is offensive to you), or dangerous (vs the baseline rates at least).

No one should be forcing you to live in a "prison" like mine (where I can walk 5 minutes to an excellent grocery store or 10 minutes to a larger supermarket, god, the horror!), but you shouldn't be forcing me to live in a "prison" like a sprawled out SFH only suburb by encoding your preferences into zoning code and law. The simple fact is that more people prefer to live like I do, given what houses are going for around here, exacerbated all the more by the fact that if my neighborhood burned down, it would be *illegal* to build it back the way it exists now.
by freedomben | 2025-08-13 15:49:44+00:00
> To play devils advocate, you could be seen as trying to subjugate the worlds health to your own economic well-being, and far fewer people are concerned with your tax bracket than there are people on earth.

Well, if they choose to see me as trying to subjugate the world's health to my own economic well-being (despite the fact that I advocate policies that would harm me personally in the name of climate sustainability), then we're already starting the discussion from bad faith (literally they are already assuming bad faith on my part). I'm at the point where I don't engage with bad faith arguments because they just end up in frustration on both sides. This whole modern attitude of "if you disagree with me then you must be evil" thing is (IMHO) utter poison to our culture and our democracy, and the current resident of the White House is a great example of where that leads.

> In a pure democracy, I'm fairly certain the planets well being would be deemed more important than the economy of whatever nation you live in.

Yeah, for about 3 days until people start getting hungry, or less extreme, until they start losing their jobs and their homes, or even longer term when they start to realize that they won't be able to retire and/or that they are leaving their kids a much worse situation than they themselves had (much worse than the current dichotomy between Boomers and Millenials/Zoomers). Ignoring or disregarding Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a sure way to be surprised and rejected by the people. We know that even respectable people will often turn to violence (including cannabalism) when they get hungry or angry enough. We're not going to be able to save the planet if there's widespread violence.

> Maybe, but they could also just be doing the risk calculus a bit differently. If you are a many step thinker the long term fecundity of our species might feel more important than any level of short term financial motivation.

I think this actually pointed at our misunderstanding (I know you're playing devil's advocate so this isn't addressed to you personally, rather your current presentation :-) ). I'm not talking about short-term financial or even economic motivation. I'm looking medium to long term, the same scale that I think needs to be considered for the planet. Now that said, banning all fossil fuels tomorrow and causing sweeping global depression in the short-term is something I would radically oppose, because it would cause immense suffering and I don't believe it would make much of a dent in the climate long-term (as it would quickly be reversed under the realities of politics) and it would absolutely harm the lower income brackets to a much greater proportional extent than the upper income brackets who already have solar panels and often capable of being off-grid. Though, even they will still run out of food when the truck companies aren't able to re-stock local grocery store shelves...
by sameure | 2025-08-13 15:49:46+00:00
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by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-13 15:50:10+00:00
I know password managers exist, but they don't solve the "what accounts do I even have?" problem

I keep a list in a simple text file that is encrypted and hidden by appending it to a particular .jpg image file (of which I have thousands). For convenience, I have a little CLI utility I wrote which accepts a filename and key in order to automate retrieval, decryption, viewing/editing, re-encryption and replacing the data in it's hiding place --- all without altering the carrier file's date/time.

I have retrieval instructions in a sealed envelope with my lawyer and a trusted family member --- only to be opened upon my demise.

I keep backups of this along with all my personal and business documents, will, etc.. Basically, I follow the 3-2-1 backup plan (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/).

I carry the "1" part strapped to my wrist at all times (encrypted with Bitlocker) so it is as safe as I am --- if not safer.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6784665
by thisisit | 2025-08-13 15:50:11+00:00
There has been convergence of many events:

1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.

2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.

3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.

etc.

AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.

And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.

Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.

What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?

For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-13 15:50:15+00:00
> Most files never get written to the physical device, being in tempfs or disk cache and deleted before being flushed to disk.

It's fine if you're using tmpfs, but I would expect written files on anything else to make it to disk even if they also spend some time in the write buffer. Especially on a build box where memory pressure is higher.
by j-krieger | 2025-08-13 15:50:15+00:00
I wasn't dismissive at all. I'm just noting that maybe the common HN visitor, which is most likely an academic with the means to live in suburbia or nicer districts, may live in a bubble. I haven't written anything about crime in london.

Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that people get needlessly pissy when you question them about the backgrounds of their experiences.
by mbreese | 2025-08-13 15:50:19+00:00
From: https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/#what-is-the-o...

> Why is it called OpenIndiana?

> OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution.

(I never understood the naming either)

But here's an ArsTechnica article from 2007 talking more about those origins from back when Sun was still trying to win back marketshare from Linux. It had long since lost that war, but was still trying to stay relevant.

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/understanding-...

Illumos based OS's have been kicking around a lot longer than I anticipated.
by devralcomp | 2025-08-13 15:50:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Promtos; a library of 500+ ready-to-use AI prompts for creators, makers, and AI power users.

This started out of frustration. Every day, I’d waste time digging through old chats, random docs, and X or threads just to find that one good prompt I knew I’d used before. I wanted a single place where I could: • Find the right prompt instantly • Copy & paste it in seconds • Explore curated prompt packs for different use cases

Right now, Promtos is just a landing page with a waitlist. I’m still adding prompts and building advanced features like: • AI-powered prompt search • User submitted prompts with ratings • Tag-based filtering and favorites

I’m sharing the build process in public and adding new prompts daily.

If you’ve ever had prompt chaos in your workflow, I’d love your thoughts, feature ideas, or even criticisms.

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by tokioyoyo | 2025-08-13 15:50:32+00:00
Cultural differences. Think of pandemic days, and how each country/city operated. Despite having almost no official lockdowns, Tokyo operated in self-induced lockdown style as people didn’t really want to exacerbate the problem. It was kind of the opposite in other places.

People in Switzerland might consider other things as the main goal (making the air cleaner), and this could be a simple nudge to change their behaviours. It’s not always monetary competitiveness that shapes behaviour.
by bkettle | 2025-08-13 15:50:58+00:00
When I actually calculate the gas cost for a trip in a car, I am usually surprised at how large it can be. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3 actually is less than the gas cost for many affected commutes.

However I think you are probably right that it won’t make much difference for a single week, since I think people tend to ignore this cost. Filling up the tank is infrequent enough and part of a routine that imo it doesn’t feel like a marginal cost and feels more like a fixed cost of car ownership
by stetrain | 2025-08-13 15:51:15+00:00
I think there is also a PR factor beyond the market economics of the $3 discount. Announcing the free transit alongside the pollution spike will get more people to read about it and consider whether they should make the choice to help with the pollution spike by taking transit.

There is also a bigger difference between free and $3 than between $3 and $6. Free means you don't have to buy a ticket, deal with the app or ticket machine, or have an existing public transit card. The "power of free" is worth considering here.
by MangoToupe | 2025-08-13 15:51:41+00:00
> Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.

So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.

Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.