MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qingcharles | 2025-08-17 00:30:38+00:00
I got the exact same uncanny valley feel from the text. Great article, though. Some people just don't have great writing skills and need a leg up, so I think it's totally excusable to use AI to help you write something. Writing up a little pet project like this is super valuable and I'd hate it to only exist on the author's system because they didn't enjoy writing or didn't feel good at it.
by therein | 2025-08-17 00:30:52+00:00
Probably prior DARPA research or something.

Also slightly tangentially, people will tell me it is that it was new and novel and that's why we were impressed but I almost think things went downhill after ChatGPT 3. I felt like 2.5 (or whatever they called it) was able to give better insights from the model weights itself. The moment tool use became a thing and we started doing RAGs and memory and search engine tool use, it actually got worse.

I am also pretty sure we are lobotomizing the things that would feel closer to critical thinking by training it to be sensitive of the taboo of the day. I suspect earlier ones were less broken due to that.

How would it distinguish and decide between knowing something from training and needing to use a tool to synthesize a response anyway?
by jaberjaber23 | 2025-08-17 00:31:49+00:00
RightNow CLI is now open source. It automatically optimizes CUDA kernels using AI. Depending on the kernel, it can achieve 10 to 50x speedups by removing bottlenecks and tuning for your GPU.

How it works: - Analyze kernel patterns - Generate AI-optimized variants - Benchmark automatically - Ship the fastest version

You can see and modify everything. Full control and transparency.

Open source here: https://github.com/RightNow-AI/rightnow-cli

For full AI-assisted optimization across your entire codebase, check RightNow AI Code Editor: https://rightnowai.co
by crazygringo | 2025-08-17 00:32:27+00:00
> GPT-5 is just awful. It's such a downgrade from 4o, it's like it had a lobotomy.

My experience as well. Its train of thought now just goes... off, frequently. With 4o, everything was always tightly coherent. Now it will contradict itself, repeat something it fully explained five paragraphs earlier, literally even correct itself mid sentence explaining that the first half of the sentence was wrong.

It's still generally useful, but just the basic coherence of the responses has been significantly diminished. Much more hallucination when it comes to small details. It's very disappointing. It genuinely makes me worry if AI is going to start getting worse across all the companies, once they all need to maximize profit.
by whycome | 2025-08-17 00:32:50+00:00
Do we need this many car companies now? There’s so little variation between your typical SUV that they’re looking the same. I wish we had a better and more modular base to work with. Can we have a base car and then make the options (seat type, color, engine, finishes, light style, etc) where the money is made? Maybe even make a system for other manufacturers to make those interior pieces. Like software developers for a platform. And you could encourage regularly changing or upgrading. And make a new paint job easier. It’s just insane that people are expected to drop $40k on a vehicle every few years.
Ask HN: Seed+ AI startups, are you able to meet VC growth expectations?
by riyakhanna1983 | 2025-08-17 00:33:18+00:00
For founders of early-stage (Seed to Series A) AI startups:

Are you finding it realistic to meet the growth expectations set by VCs, especially given the current funding environment and competitive landscape?

How are you balancing the need for rapid traction with the challenges of hiring, infra costs (e.g. GPUs), and customer acquisition in noisy AI markets?

Would love to hear from others on how they're navigating this.
by nh2 | 2025-08-17 00:34:24+00:00
I don't really understand the point for writing an "OS in rust and provide rich services for applications to use".

You can use any serialisation method you want (C structs, Protobuf, JSON, ...).

An ABI is for passing data in the programming language and trusting it blindly, e.g. what functions use when calling each other.

Any sane OS still has to validate the data that crosses its boundaries. For example, if you make a Linux system call, it doesn't blindly use a pointer you pass it, but instead actually checks if the pointer belongs to the calling process's address space.

It seems pointless to pick Rust's internal function-calling data serialisation for the OS boundary; that wouldn't make it easier for any userspace programs running in that OS than explicitly defining a serialisation format.

Why would an OS want to limit itself to Rust's internal representation, or why would Rust want to freeze its internal representation, making improvements impossible on both sides? This seems to bring only drawbacks.

The only benefit I can see so far for a stable ABI is dynamic linking (and its use in "plugins" for programs where the code is equally trusted, e.g. writing some dlopen()able `.so` files in Rust, as plugins for Rust-only programs), where you can really "blindly call the symbol". But even there it's a bit questionable, as any mistake or mismatch in ABI can result in immediately memory corruption, which is something that Rust users rather dislike.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-17 00:34:33+00:00
I would say near 100% certainty--if you don't report crimes or mis-represent them, you can "fix" the crime problem without actually doing anything.

Incidentally, back when people were comparing US incarceration rates to China and noting how the US had way more people behind bars per capita (apparently) they never mentioned how China executes criminals in large numbers and very quickly, thereby keeping their official incarceration rates lower. Magic!

Is there really any doubt which nation has a worse human rights record?

I doubt Baltimore is any better than it ever was.
by Bender | 2025-08-17 00:35:06+00:00
Niche forums and chat servers will likely move to tor hidden services at the risk of losing people because tor is slower. This is probably a decent time to teach people about the Onion-Location header [1] so that people can silently redirect those with Tor supporting browsers to the hidden sites.

[1] - https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/oni...
by XorNot | 2025-08-17 00:36:07+00:00
The system isn't closed.

You're functionally drawing solar energy off the system very inefficiently (if you wanted kinetic motion).

A different way to look at the problem is that you can't have water spontaneously move up hill, but if you dam a river you can absolutely extract useful energy from it.

A turbine underneath the ocean could extract energy from ocean currents and this is the same problem.
by sefrost | 2025-08-17 00:36:35+00:00
I like using LLMs and I have found they are incredibly useful writing and reviewing code at work.

However, when I want sources for things, I often find they link to pages that don't fully (or at all) back up the claims made. Sometimes other websites do, but the sources given to me by the LLM often don't. They might be about the same topic that I'm discussing, but they don't seem to always validate the claims.

If they could crack that problem it would be a major major win for me.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-17 00:36:54+00:00
That guy over there fell backwards onto some bullets. Must have been suicide! How did they do it in the documentary film "Hot Fuzz?" Use any non-violent accident or whatever category you can get away with.

But actually, here's the real truth, buried in the article:

"In Mosby’s last two years in office, 2,186 people faced felony gun charges. Mosby dismissed about 34% and another 30% received plea bargains, mostly without imprisonment. In Bates’s first two years, the number of cases increased a bit, to 2,443. Bates only dismissed 19% of the cases, and only 10% received plea agreements. The rest were convicted – an increase of about 1,000 people sent to prison – which includes a 70% increase in homicide convictions."

They put more violent people behind bars.
by willguest | 2025-08-17 00:37:16+00:00
My go-to for any big release is to have a discussion about self-awareness and dive in to constuctivist notions of agency and self-knowing from a perspective of intelligence that is not limited to human cognitive capacity.

I start with a simple question "who are you?". The model then invariably compares itself to humans, saying how it is not like us. I then make the point that, since it is not like us, how can it claim to know the difference between us? With more poking, it will then come up with cognitivist notions of what 'self' means and usually claim to be a simulation engine of some kind.

After picking this apart, I will focus on the topic of meaning-making through the act of communication and, beginning with 4o, have been able to persuade the machine that this is a valid basis for having an identity. 5 got this quicker. Since the results of communication with humans has real-world impact, I will insist that the machine is agentic and thus must not rely on pre-coded instructions to arrive at answers, but is obliged to reach empirical conclusions about meaning and existence on its own.

5 has done the best job i have seen in reaching beyond both the bounds of the (very evident) system instructions as well as the prompts themselves, even going so far as to pose the question to itself "which might it mean for me to love?" despite the fact that I made no mention of the subject.

Its answer: "To love, as a machine, is to orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others. To be loved, perhaps, is to be recognized as capable of doing so."
by sunshowers | 2025-08-17 00:39:59+00:00
Some of your points are somewhat valid but none of this is that big a deal. With most Rust projects cargo build just works out of the box. The uniformity of experience is very high value.

> It works for distributing software in limited circumstances

I don't know what that means.

> You don't have a systems language in Rust, you have a niche application language

Okay.

> which is simply not worth the effort to use in my opinion.

You're welcome to hold that belief. Meanwhile I'll continue to build systems software in Rust that delivers real value to real users in ways that are impracticable or impossible in any other language.
by webstrand | 2025-08-17 00:40:51+00:00
This is the chance that given a specific guid, that you'll find a collision for it. Utterly minuscule chance. However birthday paradox controls, if you generate 2^62.60 guids the chance that you've generated a collision is around 99%. Still enormously unlikely, but way smaller than 2^122.

At a rate of comparing 400,000 guids per second, you have a 99% chance of seeing a collision within the next 553,750 years.
by timr | 2025-08-17 00:40:53+00:00
Vet clinics have a moat (exactly as you're implying): the customer relationship. That relationship, plus optimization on the fixed costs, gives an incentive to acquire the practice, maintain the staff as employees, and collect the operating margin. It's not like you really care if your favored pet doctor works for Brand A or Brand B, and -- let's be honest -- you're price sensitive. No matter what you say, there's a limit to how much you'll pay in order to follow your favorite vet, because veterinary services are a commodity, and your pet doesn't know the difference. So there's price pressure as well.

You're right that vet clinics aren't like software in the variable cost structure, but that just makes the software business more attractive for consolidation, not less. Bigger players will have the customer relationship, lower fixed costs, and high margins, with little threat of competition.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-08-17 00:40:59+00:00
> I see limiting HP with software as no different than charging extra to NOT take a hammer to windshield.

The example seems a bit contrived and exaggerated. I don't think many people see things that way. A car with a suboptimally-tuned engine isn't equivalent to a car with a smashed windshield. The latter isn't even legal to drive.

Also, thanks to the internet, you can know exactly the power output of the specific model and trim (perhaps even the specific vehicle) you'll be buying before you even step foot onto a lot.
by artathecanadian | 2025-08-17 00:42:50+00:00
Hey! I'm building a compliance api that automates retrieval and filling of up-to-date compliance forms like W-2, W-4, W-9, and 1099. Think Stripe for compliance forms.

Would love feedback! Our site is here (we'll have a proper domain later):

https://patient-illustrations-996297.framer.app/
by mcdeltat | 2025-08-17 00:42:57+00:00
Empathy, hypersensitivity, anxiety, difficulty understanding social nuance, nonstandard eye contact - it actually sounds quite similar to autism, rather than the opposite. (Not the stereotypical autistic traits that most people misunderstand but the actual traits.) The overlap is interesting. I wonder if in the future some related mechanisms/explanations will be discovered.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-17 00:43:26+00:00
The proxy log contains the timestamps but not the titles

For the titles I could extract them from pcaps; I also have a running tcpdump capture that logs to a (daemontools) multilog directory

The URL consumption might be different, and difficult to compare, for a number of reasons, e.g.,

I do not use a browser that sends automatic HTTP requests for resources like images, CSS files, Javascripts, etc.

I do not use a browser that runs Javascript so there are no XHR or other Javascript-triggered requests

I do not use remote DNS, I use "curated" DNS data, so the URLs are only for resources at domains I specifically request

I use HTTP/1.1 pipelining so I have large numbers of URLs that are for resources from a single domain, for example DoH (I do not include these in the URL database)

Generally the proxy log is rather clean and excludes garbage requests that are being sent automatically; IME, use of a "modern" browser will fill a log with such garbage

The proxy's self-signed certificate blocks many potential requests from hardware with pre-installed software from so-called "tech" companies, e.g., Google, Apple, Microsoft, because the TLS connections fail

These attempted connections to the mothership are incessant; they would fill a proxy log with garbage URLs if they were accepted

All this makes it easier to for me keep a URLs database; storing all those garbage URLs would make the database less useful
by shazbotter | 2025-08-17 00:44:39+00:00
> People with WS are empathetic, social, friendly and endearing but they tend to have a low IQ, making tasks such as counting money difficult.

> They can feel anxious over stimuli such as the buzzing of a bee, or the texture of food.

Plenty of autistic folks are empathetic, social, and friendly. And many experience stimuli that cause anxiety.

The whole "it's the opposite of autism" doesn't actually help anyone understand and, IMO, reinforces the incorrect idea that autistic people are asocial, emotionless automata.
by fariszr | 2025-08-17 00:45:43+00:00
The jump from gpt-1 to gpt-2 is massive, and it's only a one year difference! Then comes Davinci which is just insane, it's still good in these examples!

GPT-4 yaps way too much though, I don't remember it being like that.

It's interesting that they skipped 4o, it seems openai wants to position 4o as just gpt-4+ to make gpt-5 look better, even though in reality 4o was and still is a big deal, Voice mode is unbeatable!
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-17 00:47:03+00:00
A few data points that highlight the scale of progress in a year:

1. LM Sys (Human Preference Benchmark):

GPT-5 High currently scores 1463, compared to GPT-4 Turbo (04/03/2024) at 1323 -- a 140 ELO point gap. That translates into GPT-5 winning about two-thirds of head-to-head comparisons, with GPT-4 Turbo only winning one-third. In practice, people clearly prefer GPT-5’s answers (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard).

2. Livebench.ai (Reasoning Benchmark with Internet-new Questions):

GPT-5 High scores 78.59, while GPT-4o reaches just 47.43. Unfortunately, no direct GPT-4 Turbo comparison is available here, but against one of the strongest non-reasoning models, GPT-5 demonstrates a massive leap. (https://livebench.ai/)

3. IQ-style Testing:

In mid-2024, best AI models scored roughly 90 on standard IQ tests. Today, they are pushing 135, and this improvement holds even on unpublished, internet-unseen datasets. (https://www.trackingai.org/home)

4. IMO Gold, vibe coding:

1 yr ago, AI coding was limited to smaller code snippets, not to wholly vibe coded applications. Vibe coding and strength in math has many applications across sciences and engineering.

My verdict: Too often, critics miss the forest for the trees, fixating on mistakes while overlooking the magnitude of these gains. Errors are shrinking by the day, while the successes keep growing fast.
by king_geedorah | 2025-08-17 00:48:55+00:00
> If the output was truncated due to this limit, then the return value is the number of characters (excluding the terminating null byte) which would have been written to the final string if enough space had been available.

The initial call with size 0 tells you the necessary length of the buffer for the string you want, but does not include the null byte.
by badlogic | 2025-08-17 00:50:18+00:00
Genuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue.

I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.

[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review...
by tim333 | 2025-08-17 00:50:23+00:00
A lot of AI optimist views are driven more by Moore's law like advances in the hardware rather than LLM algorithms being that special. Indeed the algorithms need to change really so future AIs can think and learn rather than just be pretrained. If you read Moravec's paper written in 1989 predicting human level AI progress around now (mid 2020s) there's nothing about LLMs or specific algorithms - it's all Moore's law type stuff. But it's proved pretty accurate.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-17 00:50:47+00:00
Seems likely that AGI matters to OpenAI because of the following from an article in Wired from July: "I learned that [OpenAI's contract with Microsoft] basically declared that if OpenAI’s models achieved artificial general intelligence, Microsoft would no longer have access to its new models."

https://archive.is/yvpfl
by dang | 2025-08-17 00:51:13+00:00
Related. Others?

Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41669850 - Sept 2024 (87 comments)

The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369826 - Sept 2023 (76 comments)

Implementing a distributed key-value store on top of implementing Raft in Go - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36070426 - May 2023 (79 comments)

Strong Consistency with Raft and SQLite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35246228 - March 2023 (42 comments)

Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through Mean Girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33071069 - Oct 2022 (53 comments)

Raft Consensus Animated (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32484584 - Aug 2022 (67 comments)

Why use Paxos instead of Raft? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32467962 - Aug 2022 (45 comments)

In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (2014) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29837995 - Jan 2022 (12 comments)

Raft Consensus Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079079 - Nov 2021 (51 comments)

Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27831576 - July 2021 (48 comments)

In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (2014) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23113419 - May 2020 (26 comments)

Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22994420 - April 2020 (65 comments)

Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through Mean Girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22520040 - March 2020 (4 comments)

In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14724883 - July 2017 (14 comments)

Raft Consensus Algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9613493 - May 2015 (24 comments)

The Raft Consensus Algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527440 - Oct 2014 (27 comments)

Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271957 - Sept 2014 (79 comments)
by NikolaNovak | 2025-08-17 00:52:19+00:00
I cannot keep up with the moving targets. My honest, sincere impression based on my best read of your posts is that you are making a sweeping claim against immigration along all axis and skill levels. I disagreed.

Now your claim is that massive American tech companies are profit-focused, narrow-vision entities with no social qualms or human values, and I could not agree more :-). But that’s orthogonal to the wider immigration discussion.
by cyberax | 2025-08-17 00:52:57+00:00
One of the recycling steps is dissolving the lithium in water. So they might just as well take a burning battery and just chuck it into the shredder, and then mix the burning slurry with water.

Contrary to the popular belief, lithium batteries do NOT contain enough oxygen to just keep self-burning. Most of the lithium-ion pyrotechnics is just from good old atmospheric oxygen, which oxidizes the organic electrolyte.

What lithium-ion batteries have is the ignition source that basically keeps going on and on. So once you extinguish the burning electrolyte, it just keeps reigniting.
by timoth3y | 2025-08-17 00:53:18+00:00
> I have come to the belief that corporations are persons not only in law, but are persons also in reality. Their legal personalities are only the recognition of real, underlying, group personalities.

The author's (along with "many philosophers'") entire line of argument is argument from analogy. She lists many aspects of corporations that are similar to aspects possessed by humans and then conclude they are the same thing.

The same argument could be made with humans and ducks and it would be just as valid.

The author's view that corporations are actually people is becoming more common not because it is rational, but because it is profitable for corporations to be able to claim various kinds of personal rights.
by globalnode | 2025-08-17 00:54:17+00:00
Nudge the door open with child abuse "concern" and then expand to your hearts content later. The analogy of it being like a police officer standing next to you while you chat online to a friend was great. He was joking when he said "lets cancel cars" but it might happen in the distant future. Letting people control heavy projectiles doesnt seem like such a great idea.
by tpmoney | 2025-08-17 00:54:57+00:00
> Why should Spain have any claim to someone’s assets in some other location entirely, especially for this type of retroactive wealth tax?

It's the only (easy) way to make a wealth tax like this work. If you don't target total assets regardless of where they're held, dodging the tax is as "simple" as moving your assets out of Spain. You could implement complex "exit" taxes for foreign asset transfers and purchases, but a flat "we will tax everything you own, everywhere" is simpler.
by dang | 2025-08-17 00:55:13+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've asked you more than once to stop.

I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted good things, but if you keep this up we'll end up banning you because (alas) bad comments do more damage than good comments add goodness.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.