MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jsiepkes | 2025-08-08 05:05:46+00:00
> Adding in a stick of metal that can be trivially bypassed does nothing to make the car more secure.

Everyone can use a flipper zero to unlock a car. Not everyone can hotwire a car. Keyless ignition means criminals have a vastly larger recruitment pool of people they can offer money to do something stupid (like stealing a car for them).
by wraptile | 2025-08-08 05:06:04+00:00
> I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.

It's definitely possible but I genuinely don't understand how people work for decades and still move their hand all the way to the arrow keys just go move the cursor to another word. Especially when the solution for this inefficiency is so accessible, existed for decades and is widely available in almost every tool. It's something that goes against the spirit of the medium which is all about automation.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-08 05:07:37+00:00
I received a CAT scan a couple years ago, about 4 hours after I wandered into urgent care. Before they stuffed me through the toroid, I asked the operator to set the dials to 1988 so I could advise my former self to buy MSFT with everything I had.

The bill was quite a whopper, though Obamacare paid most of it. Of course, my Obamacare premiums are about 4x what they were before Obamacare.
by nlh | 2025-08-08 05:08:19+00:00
What I have found Claude Code is extremely good at is that it makes one change at a time, gives you a chance to read the code its changing, and lets you give feedback in real time and steer it properly. I find the mental load with this method to be MUCH lower than Cursor or any of the other tools which give you two very different options: "Ask" mode which dumps a ton of suggestions on your and then requires semi-manual implementation, or "Agent" mode which dumps a ton of actual changes on you and requires your inspection and feedback and roll-backs, etc.

This may not work for everyone, but as a solo dev who wants to keep a real mental model of my work (and not let it get polluted with AI slop), the Claude Code approach just works really well for me. It's like having a coding partner who can iterate and change direction as you talk, not a junior dev who dumps a pile of code on your plate without discussion.
by hinkley | 2025-08-08 05:08:23+00:00
Turns out that due to the way genes splice you have ancestors that you have 0 genes from. The mitochondria and Y chromosome are conserved, but even 9 generations back there are good odds that some of your ancestors have been completely spliced out of your DNA, and a few whom you only got a couple genes from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HclD2E_3rhI

"only 72% of these 7th great grandparents will give you some of your genetics"

"over less than 400 years, 97% of your ancestors contribute nothing to your genetics"
by energy123 | 2025-08-08 05:08:28+00:00
I'm happy with this release. It's half the price of Gemini 2.5 Pro ($5/1M output under flex pricing), lower hallucinations than all other frontier models, and #1 by a margin on lmarena in Code and Hard. It's nailing my tasks better than Gemini 2.5 Pro.

There's disappointment because it's branded as GPT-5 yet it's not a step change. That's fair. But let's be real, this model is just o4. OpenAI felt pressure to use the GPT-5 label eventually, and lacking a step-change breakthrough, they felt this was the best timing.

So yes, there was no hidden step-change breakthrough that we were hoping for. But does that matter much? Zoom out, and look at what's happening:

o1, o3, and now o4 (GPT-5) keep getting better. They have figured out a flywheel. Why are step changes needed here? Just keep running this flywheel for 1 year, 3 years, 10 years.

There is no dopamine rush because it's gradual, but does it make a difference?
by ayhanfuat | 2025-08-08 05:09:00+00:00
> Do not end with opt-in questions or hedging closers. Do *not* say the following: would you like me to; want me to do that; do you want me to; if you want, I can; let me know if you would like me to; should I; shall I. Ask at most one necessary clarifying question at the start, not the end. If the next step is obvious, do it. Example of bad: I can write playful examples. would you like me to? Example of good: Here are three playful examples:..

I always assumed they were instructing it otherwise. I have my own similar instructions but they never worked fully. I keep getting these annoying questions.
by habryka | 2025-08-08 05:09:14+00:00
That's not true!

The minimum is $2,000 if you want to source your own housing (and for example stay with a friend in the area).

The food cost is just fully straightforwardly passed on ($20 for a catered meal is not a lot!), and the rooming is also provided below cost (good luck finding a short term rental for less than $1,500/mo, or even $3000/mo in Berkeley). We are subsidizing this with our own money, this isn't going to make us anything.

Like, man, what are these expectations? Where can you get a month-long hotel experience in a major metropolitan area for less than $3,500 a month? And that is ignoring all of the costs associated with the rest of the program, which will involve a lot of volunteered time from staff with opportunity costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

$100/night in Berkeley is not going to get you something pretty, and definitely no food included.
by ako | 2025-08-08 05:09:46+00:00
I asked claude code for a guidelines file so it would collaborate with windsurf. This is what it proposed:

---

This project uses shared planning documents for collaboration with Claude Code. Please: 1. First read and understand these files: - PLAN.md - current project roadmap and objectives - ARCHITECTURE.md - technical decisions and system design - TODO.md - current tasks and their status - DECISIONS.md - decision history with rationale - COLLABORATION.md - handoff notes from other tools 2. Before making any significant changes, check these documents for: - Existing architectural decisions - Current sprint priorities - Tasks already in progress - Previous context from Claude Code 3. After completing work, update the relevant planning documents with: - Task completion status - New decisions made - Any changes to architecture or approach - Notes for future collaboration Always treat these files as the single source of truth for project state.
by Spivak | 2025-08-08 05:10:47+00:00
Guarantee, of course not. Evidence of, absolutely. Your confidence that you got, essentially, the right prompt increases when parts of it aren't the kind of thing the AI would write—hard topic switches, very specific information, grammar and instruction flow to that isn't typical—and when you get the same thing back using multiple different methods of getting it to fess up.
by runarberg | 2025-08-08 05:11:06+00:00
> That's like saying sitting on the train for an hour isn't better than walking for a day?

No, that’s not it at all. Hiring a qualified worker for a few hours—or having one on staff is not like walking for a day vs. riding a train. First of all, the train is capable of carrying a ton of cargo which you will never be able to on foot, unless you have some horses or mules with you. So having a train line offers you capabilities that simply didn’t exist before (unless you had a canal or a navigable river that goes to your destination). LLMs offers no new capabilities. The content it generates is precisely the same (except its worse) as the content a qualified worker can give you in a couple of hours.

Another difference is that most content can wait the couple of hours it takes the skilled worker to create it, the products you can deliver via train may spoil if carried on foot (even if carried by a horse). A farmer can go back tending the crops after having dropped the cargo at the station, but will be absent for a couple of days if they need to carry it on foot. etc. etc. None of these is applicable for generated content.

> Did workers organize against vacuum cleaners?

Workers have already organized (and won) against generative AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_...

> Dock workers organised against container shipping. They mostly succeeded in old established ports being sidelined in favour of newer, less annoying ports.

I think you are talking about the 1971 ILWU strike. https://www.ilwu.org/history/the-ilwu-story/

But this is not true. Dock workers didn’t organized against mechanization and automation of ports, they organized against mass layoffs and dangerous working conditions as ports got more automated. Port companies would use the automation as an excuse to engage in mass layoffs, leaving far too few workers tending far to much cargo over far to many hours. This resulted in fatigued workers making mistakes which often resulted in serious injuries and even deaths. The 2022 US railroad strike was for precisely the same reason.
by czhu12 | 2025-08-08 05:11:12+00:00
This was exactly a use case I had in mind when building https://canine.sh -- also uses k3s as a provider, and provides a Heroku-like devex.

How to actually reliably expose a homelab to the broader internet is a little tricky, cloudflare tunnels mostly does the trick but can only expose one port at a time, so the set up is somewhat annoying
by MarkusQ | 2025-08-08 05:11:12+00:00
Not in the sense _you_ are talking about perhaps?

Typically, when people talk about "long" and "short" vowels they are referring to a combination of duration and pronunciation (e.g. English "bat" vs. "bate"), and that appears to be the case here as well. If you are interpreting the terms differently, I'm not sure what sense you have in mind.
by nextlevelwizard | 2025-08-08 05:12:45+00:00
Is it?

Nothing we have is anywhere near AGI and as models age others can copy them.

I personally think we are closing the end of improvement for LLMs with current methods. We have consumed all of the readily available data already, so there is no more good quality training material left. We either need new novel approaches or hope that if enough compute is thrown at training actual intelligence will spontaneously emerge.
by NL807 | 2025-08-08 05:13:08+00:00
Lot of doomers gloss over the fact that AI is bounded by the laws of physics, raw resources, energy and the monumental cost of reproducing them.

Humans can reproduce by simply having sex, eating food and drinking water. AI can reproduce by first mining resources, refining said resources, building another Shenzhen, then rolling out another fab at the same scale of TSMC. That is assuming the AI wants control over the entire process. This kind of logistics requires cooperation of an entire civilisation. Any attempt by an AI could be trivially stopped because of the large scope of the infrastructure required.
by energy123 | 2025-08-08 05:13:49+00:00
Neoclassical economics has an answer!

The market can't provide public goods like basic research since it's non-excludable. This is a market failure, causing inefficient allocation of resources.

Therefore, the government has to provide it. This can improve efficiency of resource distribution, if done well.

Whether it's done well is not a foregone conclusion. That's why we need effective and technocratic state capacity, free from corruption and independent of political influence.
by habryka | 2025-08-08 05:14:25+00:00
Seems to be a common term for longer writing programs. At least when we did user-interviews, people thought "retreat" would imply like a week or two at most, and also imply a more remote location than where it is (and also imply you can't source your own housing), so we didn't go with that.

Some writing programs with similar naming schemes: * https://iyws.clas.uiowa.edu/2-week-summer-residential-progra... * https://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/literary-arts/deep-winte... * https://www.hedgebrook.org/residencies

Open to other names. I don't like "retreat" because of the above, don't like "fellowship" because it IMO more strongly implies that you would get paid money instead of paying money, and don't currently have any other great ideas.
by parineum | 2025-08-08 05:14:33+00:00
> Curious to understand where these thoughts are coming from

It's a cynical take but all this AGI talk seems to be driven by either CEOs of companies with a financial interest in the hype or prominent intellectuals with a financial interest in the doom and gloom.

Sam Altman and Sam Harris can pit themselves against each other and, as long as everyone is watching the ping pong ball back and forth, they both win.
by derbOac | 2025-08-08 05:16:06+00:00
The current system is broken but nothing about this administration is aimed at helping fix its problems.

With most actions, there's nothing being remedied, just an assertion of control. The action isn't tied to an improvement goal or a remedy with rationale.

As Tao noted, in cases where a remedy for a wrong is mentioned, the remedies being proposed by the administration do far more harm to any ostensible victims than the original asserted wrongs.

Nothing about their actions is in good faith in terms of improving academics in the US, nor do they even try in most cases to pretend to be trying to improve academics at all.
by v5v3 | 2025-08-08 05:16:43+00:00
Anysphere in that article = Cursor

(I was confused as to why so much of the article mentioned a company called Anysphere who I had not heard of. So looked it up and it's the company name)

https://techfundingnews.com/meet-cursor-how-anyspheres-mit-b...
by sagarm | 2025-08-08 05:18:14+00:00
Improvements are not considered in a land value tax; it's kind of the point. Land is also more fungible and easier to model the value of than improvements.

Why would you prefer an income tax -- by definition, taking earned income -- to a land value tax, which is constructed specifically to target unearned windfalls and the time value of access to public infrastructure and community benefits?
by russellbeattie | 2025-08-08 05:19:28+00:00
This year is definitely the beginning of the end for American scientific leadership. The damage being done is incalculable.

The best and brightest simply aren't going to want to come to the U.S. for an uncertain future where they'll be harassed at the airport every trip and then defunded or deported at any time for "political" reasons (a.k.a. racism, bigotry, religion, ignorance and anti-intellectualism).

Amazingly, we're only 200 days into this administration.

We have 3 years, 5 months and 12 days left, assuming we still have free and fair elections in 2028.

For the next several years, the administration is going to continue to dismantle our country's foundations brick by brick, enabled by Congress and SCOTUS. The attack on immigrants is in full swing, but the total takeover of science, public education, universities and mass media is actually just beginning.
by Deradon | 2025-08-08 05:20:16+00:00
Found this in the GPT-5 Announcement:

> Availability and access > GPT‑5 is starting to roll out today to all Plus, Pro, Team, and Free users, with access for Enterprise and Edu coming in one week. Pro, Plus, and Team users can also start coding with GPT‑5 in the Codex CLI (opens in a new window) by signing in with ChatGPT.
by kinow | 2025-08-08 05:20:25+00:00
ECMWF is on GitHub, and I think they mirror some work in their BitBucket.

Research in Spain has both GitLab and GitHub from what I could see (my company has 2 internal GitLab, a few orgs on GitHub).

Many projects from EOSC or used in EOSC ptojects and deliverables have GitHub repos.

Many projects I use from a Manchester Uni team from ontologies and metadata and provenance are hosted on GitHub.

CERN, Max Planck, INRIA use GitHub, although not sure if exclusively or if they mirror. But I know some of their international collaboration happens there.

So GitLab is definitely used in Eu institutions. Maybe all. But that does not mean GitHub is not also used primarily or as alternative or mirror by these same institutions.
by petesergeant | 2025-08-08 05:22:27+00:00
> All it takes is a simple reply of “you’re wrong.” to Claude/ChatGPT/etc. and it will start to crumble on itself

Fucking Gemini Pro on the other hand digs in, and starts deciding it's in a testing scenario and get adversarial, starts claiming it's using tools the user doesn't know about, etc etc
by rpdillon | 2025-08-08 05:23:05+00:00
I don't think fixing this at the browser-level is the right place. In general, I'm very vigilant, but I know I can be tricked. So I have a policy about not clicking links in emails from companies I already know the address for. I also aggressively right click / long tap links to examine the URL before opening.

In general, opening a malicious URL exposes the user to unnecessary risk, so the correct solution is not to assume the user has visited a malicious site (since that would already be high-risk), but rather to prevent opening of malicious URLs. The most obvious solution is to treat any untrusted content as questionable. So I very carefully examine every domain I visit - as I say to my kids: have a model about who owns the computer you're talking to. Domains matter.

Now, this works for me. I'm not cognitively impaired, I have high conscientiousness, probably from working in military and classified defense contexts way back when, but I'm not really sure to be honest, could just be my personality. But it works for me.

I get that you want that extra safeguard, but it's just not a dealbreaker for me, especially since I'm highly suspicious of browser add-ons and the security implications they bring in. I guess I'm just extremely selective about what add-ons I'll use.
by nextaccountic | 2025-08-08 05:23:18+00:00
Ok this sounds nice. You would just need some syntax sugar to make this ergonomic (both in the side of function calling, and also in the side of the erroring function) but the fundamentals seem solid

I think there's space for a post-Rust, post-Zig language to combine the approaches of both and make it possible to do away with automatic heap allocation (when needed - not every piece of code wants to bother with this), but also don't make code overly verbose when doing so.
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-08 05:23:36+00:00
This is a great idea. Like, if someone asked me to count the number of B's in your paragraph, I'd yeet it through `grep -o 'B' file.txt | wc -l` or similar, why would I sit there counting it by hand?

As a human, if you give me a number on screen like 100000000, I can't be totally sure if that's 100 Million or 1 Billion without getting close and counting carefully. Should ought have my glasses. Mouse pointer helps some as an ersatz thousands-separator, but still.

Since we're giving them tools, especially for math, it makes way more sense to start giving them access to some of the finest tools ever. Make an MCP into Mathematica or Matlab and let the LLM write some math and have classical solvers actually deal with the results. Let the LLM write little bits of bash or python as its primary approach for dealing with these kinds of analytical questions.

It's like giving a kid a calculator...
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-08 05:25:52+00:00
> It's the US short form, matching the word-month order we always use for regular dates: "August 7, 2025".

Counterexample: US Independence Day is called the “Fourth of July”.

I would agree that, for dates with named months, the US mostly writes “August 8, 2025” and says “August eighth, 2025” (or sometimes “August eight, 2025”, I think?), and other countries mostly write “8 August 2025” and say “the eighth of August, 2025”; but neither is absolute.
by dotancohen | 2025-08-08 05:27:11+00:00
> I don’t really understand why so much of science is funded by the government instead of by private philanthropy.

The two are not orthodontal, it is not "instead". Why does the government fund science? To keep the nation ahead of its rivals. Why doesn't philanthropy fund science? Actually, it does. How much more philanthropy would you like? And from whom?
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-08 05:27:47+00:00
I don't have any particular insider knowledge, and I'm on the record of being pretty cynical about AI so far

That said, I would hazard a guess here that they don't want the AI asking clarifying questions for a number of possible reasons

Maybe when it is allowed to ask questions it consistently asks poor questions that illustrate that it is bad at "thinking"

Maybe when it is allowed to ask questions they discovered that it annoys many users who would prefer it to just read their minds

Or maybe the people who built it have massive egos and hate being questioned so they tuned it so it doesn't

I'm sure there are other potential reasons, these just came to mind off the top of my head
by inejge | 2025-08-08 05:27:56+00:00
> An "exquisitely low dose" should be safe.

The problem is that a subset of self-experimenters have the mindset "the more, the better" -- I still remember the Covid-era vitamin D discussions, with people openly reporting taking stupendous daily doses. (Lithium and vit. D are not in the same category, but you'll recognize the approach.)

So someone goes overboard, maybe damages their health, and traces it back to an article without the caveat. Lawsuit time! We're talking about fractions of a percent here, but with a wide enough potential readership you have a non-trivial chance of a hit. Common sense doesn't work at scale. Hence the CYA rhetoric.
by Spivak | 2025-08-08 05:29:16+00:00
I find it odd that lots of people talk about the OSI being corporate captured but I don't defer to them as to what 'counts'. I couldn't care less what the OSI does or approves of. Any software that grants users the four freedoms is Open Source—it's the same criteria to be Free Software which is decidedly not at all corporate captured and hasn't ever changed. The very first freedom of Free Software the freedom to run it for any purpose. It's not some small detail.
by bscphil | 2025-08-08 05:29:18+00:00
I think that's a valid question and I ask it every time someone reports "this LLM said X about itself", but I think there are potential ways to verify it: for example, upthread, someone pointed out that the part about copyright materials is badly worded. It says something like "don't print song lyrics or other copyright material", thereby implying that song lyrics are copyrighted. Someone tested this and sure enough, GPT-5 refused to print the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner, saying it was copyrighted.

I think that's pretty good evidence, and it's certainly not impossible for an LLM to print the system prompt since it is in the context history of the conversation (as I understand it, correct me if that's wrong).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44833342
by xwolfi | 2025-08-08 05:30:04+00:00
because it is a stupid auto complete, it doesn't understand negation fully, it statistically judge the weight of your words to find the next one, and the next one and the next one.

That's not how YOU work, so it makes no sense, you're like "but when I said NOT, a huge red flag popped in my brain with a red cross on it, why the LLM still does it". Because, it has no concept of anything.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-08 05:31:43+00:00
> this delights me.

Not sure how you think a couple hundred thousand women leaving the work force due to childcare issues is going to lower housing cost?

>> But there are reasons to be concerned about women leaving the workforce. Without two salaries, many families struggle to afford basics like housing, food, and transportation; they have less money to spend, which means less money circulating in the economy. Their health care and other benefits are more precarious in an economy where only one partner works. Economic growth has slowed in the first half of the year; in the long term, slowing growth worsens people’s standard of living.

People are already delaying having kids, if they want them at all. They are unable to create the standard of living they want to stabilize a family in and can't do it until they are older. This only creates hardship for families now. The only group this is a long term win for are the ones that champion a declining population as better for the planet and the human condition. Not for your home prices and certainty not for the families directly affected by it now from losing that income.