MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 02:55:51+00:00
> I don't think there's any real reason to think intelligence depends on "meat" as its substrate

This made me think of... ok, so let's say that we discover that intelligence does indeed depend on "meat". Could we then engineer a sort of organic computer that has general intelligence? But could we also claim that this organic computer isn't a computer at all, but is actually a new genetically engineered life form?
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-24 02:55:57+00:00
Sorry, I should've just left it at trivially defeated. My preferred method is to just use a different browser and/or clear my cookies. Meanwhile I spent around 30 seconds on DDG and came up with 5 chrome store captcha solvers, 2 github projects, and 1 paid captcha solving service.

False. Sense. Of. Security.
by zahlman | 2025-08-24 02:56:16+00:00
> perhaps due to indentation of Hacker News, so I manually applied since it did seem pretty straightforward

Yes, that would be exactly why. You can use e.g. `sed` to remove leading whitespace from each line (I used it to add the leading whitespace for posting).

> ... that said, it does do one odd thing (following is output on launching):

Yes, that's the warning I mentioned. The original code requests to use a buffer size of 1, which is no longer supported (it now means to use line buffering).

> It is much slower to render.

Avoiding line buffering (by requiring a buffer size of 2 or more) might fix that. Actually, it might be a good idea to use a significantly larger buffer, so that e.g. an entire ANSI colour code can be read all at once.

The other issues are, I'm pretty sure, because of other things that changed in how `subprocess` works. Fixing things at this level would indeed require quite a bit more hacking around with the low-level terminal APIs.

> I mean, I only formed my opinion that maybe there was a problem with python3 byte/string handling to just how many attempts there were... Were they trying to do things in a more idiomatic python3 fashion? Did the python3 APIs change? Does the error hint at something more concerning?

Most likely, other attempts either a) didn't understand what the original code was doing in precise enough detail, or b) didn't know how to send binary data to standard output properly (Python 3 defaults to opening standard output as a text stream).

All of that said: I think that nowadays you should just be able to get a build of NetHack that just outputs UTF-8 characters directly; failing that, you can use the `locale` command to tell your terminal to expect cp437 data.
by eklitzke | 2025-08-24 02:56:46+00:00
From what I could tell from the article and the linked videos the innovation here is that it essentially lets you serve the shuttlecock while it's facing the wrong direction. Normally even if the shuttlecock has spin when it crosses the court it will move with the cork side forward, at least by the time it crosses the net. Hence I don't think this technique would be applicable to other sports that use a ball.
by alankarmisra | 2025-08-24 02:57:01+00:00
They’d presumably do worse. LLMs have no intrinsic sense of programming logic. They are merely pattern matching against a large training set. If you invent a new language that doesn’t have sufficient training examples for a variety of coding tasks, and is syntactically very different from all the existing languages, the LLMs wouldn’t have enough training data and would do very badly.
by andrekandre | 2025-08-24 02:57:25+00:00
> It is hard to predict disaster, but you can prepare for it.

yes, you need slack to deal with inevitable surprises and delays that will occur so that you can actually make it 'in time'

> But if you always predict to be on schedule you're more likely to fall behind because there's more ways to fall behind than get ahead.

this is counterintuitive for a lot of people and especially for managers under pressure from above

running without slack means every bump in the road adds a delay which makes the manager's troubles even worse when they have to report the inevitable delay (which leads to a negative spiral of rush-and-delay)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-24 02:57:38+00:00
Sounds didactic

What about uMatrix; some might argue it is even better than uBlock Origin, at least one can use both at the same time; if "security issues" are a concern, the so-called "modern" browser is a gigantic target that sources and runs Javascript from the internet automatically; there is also the choice of not using one (hence no need for uBlock or other extensions); Javascript isn't required for downloading or watching YouTube videos but YouTube of course wants everyone to use their "Javascript player" so they can monitor people's behaviour at the computer with telemetry and other unsolicited connections

"A company that depends on ads, lives by using you."

Ad services. The company acts as an intermediary (middleman), sitting between two parties, e.g., a video producer and a video consumer, conducting surveillance, collecting data, serving ads, relying on other people to produce and upload video, for free, then targeting the people consuming it with ads; parasitic

Mozilla is the company's business partner, sending data about www users to the company

As such, their software seems compromised; they continually promote an "internet advertising ecocsystem"

There are other ways to avoid ads that do not require a so-called "modern" browser that runs Javascript; usually the so-called "modern" browser are distributed by the company and its partners or competitors; optimised for serving ads

In fact, usually internet ads rely on Javascript, so the "ad blocker" solution is using Javascript to counter Javascript

Some users might prefer to just not choose the so-called "modern" browser as their client, and not run Javascript

Also, not sure whether it is still true but Pi-Hole used to suggest the company's DNS service as "upstream", provide it as a choice, maybe even set it as a default

Nothing hands the company more control than using its public DNS service; the company's DNS cache is filled with IP addresses of tracking and ad servers; users will actually pay third parties like NextDNS to filter these addresses out while the company's hardware products hardcode their public DNS service into the products to allow phoning home to the mothership and free flow of telemetry, tracking and advertising
by MrResearcher | 2025-08-24 02:58:12+00:00
Why is he wrong?

Here's an excerpt from the close(2) syscall description:

RETURN VALUE close() returns zero on success. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS EBADF fd isn't a valid open file descriptor.

EINTR The close() call was interrupted by a signal; see signal(7). EIO An I/O error occurred. ENOSPC EDQUOT On NFS, these errors are not normally reported against the first write which exceeds the available storage space, but instead against a subsequent write(2), fsync(2), or close(). See NOTES for a discussion of why close() should not be retried after an error.

It obviously can fail due to a multitude of reasons.
by cubefox | 2025-08-24 02:58:24+00:00
If that were the case here, the correct translation for "Sein Name war nicht Geissler sondern Geißler" would be "His name was Geissler rather than Geissler." Which is clearly wrong, as the first makes sense but the second doesn't. (I agree though that the noun "Geissler tube" is it's own thing and indeed language specific.)
by adithyassekhar | 2025-08-24 02:59:41+00:00
I went through the coolify rabbit hole. They have a google fonts drop in alternative https://fonts.coollabs.io, which uses https://gwfh.mranftl.com/fonts but there are no mentions of the latter anywhere on coollabs readme or GitHub. If anyone from coollabs is here, you should atleast mention it somewhere.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-24 03:00:30+00:00
Strong link trouble or weak link trouble :)?

In any case..

I hope TW Körner doesn't have that last footnote on the topic..

(Fwiw left/right (meta-)division seems to me to encompass all the moral taxonomies of the day, TWK just happened to settle for rich/smart vs social wrt UK)

>Social Darwinism applies the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest to human society. Rich social Darwinists take wealth as the best indication of fitness to survive, academic social Darwinists take intellectual achievements as the best indication and so on. They are often haunted by the fear that the unfit do not understand this and may outbreed the fit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24154247
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 03:01:29+00:00
I think the LLM businesses as-is are potentially fine businesses. Certainly the compute cost of running and using them is very high, not yet reflected in the prices companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are charging customers. It remains to be seen if people will pay the real costs.

But even if LLMs are going to tap out at some point, and are a local maximum, dead-end, when it comes to taking steps toward AGI, I would still pay for Claude Code until and unless there's something better. Maybe a company like Anthropic is going to lead that research and build it, or maybe (probably) it's some group or company that doesn't exist yet.
by card_zero | 2025-08-24 03:02:49+00:00
Well, the test is if it's directed to and likely to cause a panic (in the US). So if you avoid causing a panic by sheer luck - like something counteracts your yelling and everybody settles down again, and that's the only reason nobody was crushed - you're still in trouble.

Though moral luck is certainly a thing in general, where negligence and risk-taking is not a crime until it goes wrong.
by simonw | 2025-08-24 03:02:58+00:00
The author of this clearly mostly runs non-static sites in containers, but since they have container-based hosting setup already it's more consistent for them to deploy a static site with Caddy in a dedicated container than to spin up a new deployment mechanism that's inconsistent with everything else they are running.

Also their site isn't entirely static: they're using Caddy to proxy specific paths to plausible.io for analytics.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-08-24 03:03:15+00:00
The relevant commission is supposed to re-assess and come up with new recommendations every 5 years.

If someone comes up with a better method for charging, they can get all the big device manufacturers in the room, convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.

This is not far-fetched. All the players relevant to internet, for example, collaborate to determine how web standards should evolve. It works pretty well. It's more or less the same companies who need to collaborate to build something better than USB-C.
by NotPractical | 2025-08-24 03:04:39+00:00
I agree. It would be one thing if they did an independent analysis on the outcomes of each regulation and arrived at an evidence-based conclusion (and even then it would still be very difficult or impossible to achieve objectivity).

But from what I can tell, it basically boils down to "let's just read the bullet points for each one and put it on the list if they sound good", which is misleading and even dangerous. Chat Control should be on the list by those standards.
by th0ma5 | 2025-08-24 03:05:19+00:00
Well they meant that I was conflating two things, and I was, because you can reference stylesheets to transform XML from one form to another, you can use it to render XML into HTML (or anything within limits), and that was the part that I was referring to specifically. That process can happen in a browser, on the command line, inside of Java dependency injection, build systems... It's in a lot of things because for what it is and what it can do it is pretty broadly applicable. It just isn't sexy front end or clear isolated backend so maybe that's the confusion here. I'm talking IBM, Oracle software acquired over decades from smaller companies that tried it all. And taking it out of a browser engine breaks these systems as well. A browser is used for testing, literal hack glue using tools like Selenium for systems integration, end users interacting with the system or administrators interacting with them... And again, some systems use browsers programmatically... XSLT is huge in mid 2000s report generation. The more I think about it, it does feel like a mini Y2K to touch the HTML rendering pipeline in this way. I think it could have subtle and hard to find consequences, and it doesn't feel extreme, maybe making a whole thread does about it though lol
by iLemming | 2025-08-24 03:05:24+00:00
> Wrote more stuff in Emacs

Can you name Emacs packages you've authored, maintained or contributed to?

> vscode now does simply too many things out of the box

Oh yeah? Can you edit your filesystem in VSCode like a wiki? Changing directories and filenames as if you're editing plain text? Can any of thousand of its extensions provide "indirect buffer" experience? Can you bind a double tap of the comma to navigate to the last error and automatically fix it? Can you at all bind to double/tripple comma or just about any arbitrary key based on context in VSCode? Keyboard macros with counters - e.g. to transform lists into numbered lists? True buffer based (not file oriented) workflows? Occur-mode style search and replace? Comint style process interaction? Are there any extensions that allow you to move the cursor to the piece of a plain text like "rfc-3540" or "myproj#4044", intelligently recognize it and allow you to browse the RFC document or review a Pull-Request - Emacs does. Can you run a shell command and pipe it into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer through series of shell commands and into another buffer?

> I totally stopped using Org-mode, because Google docs do it way better.

Don't be ridiculous. They are completely different classes of products. If you are even having to compare Org-mode with GDocs, perhaps you don't know well either or both. GDocs can't manage my dotfiles. I can't use it to annotate books or academic papers. I can't have inline LaTeX formulas in GDocs. It can't let me control a videoplayer and type my notes at the same time. I can't use it to manage my flashcards or keep the log of my LLM interactions there. I can't have executable blocks of code - in org-mode I can explore APIs or send SQL queries while passing them into data transforming code blocks. There are no TODO states/keywords in GDocs, no agenda views, no scheduling/deadlines, no time tracking/clocking, no habit tracking, no pomodoro timers, no dynamic time tables, no tag-based filtering, no capture/refile system.

> At some point you have to move on

Like I told you already, you're assuming too broadly. Both VSCode and Google Docs are excellent products - no denying that, but they are not universally better. If you came to the opposite conclusion, it is yours, and yours only.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-24 03:05:37+00:00
Yes I was one of those. But I've moved off Apple years ago because their UNIX got more and more delapidated and all their fancy cloud stuff was unusable to me for not working on all my OSes.

Every new release I'd tick off more and more features that were unusable to me, hated all the iOSification of a desktop OS, and hated the new hardware lockdowns. The actual new features I liked were few and far between. So I just gave up on Apple completely. I had already left iOS at that point because of its locked down nature (no alternative appstores mainly and no hardware support for OpenPGP cards over NFC)
by soraminazuki | 2025-08-24 03:06:02+00:00
And now shadowbanned accounts are hurling insults [1]? Come on.

If it wasn't clear enough when you made your fallacious argument, and even after I called it out twice, issues with domain name registration has no bearing on the choice of commercial email providers handing out previously used addresses to anyone who asks. They can stop doing that today without having to break the internet for an unrelated issue or go through internet standards committees to do so.

In addition, email addresses handed out by commercial email providers are highly personal as opposed to your typical domain names. End users, who are oblivious to how any of this works, risk being victims of identity theft by having their previous address taken. Scammers can impersonate as grandchildren and steal from the elderly. They can take over online accounts that's tied to that email address. There are grave consequences to these kind of decisions.

This is obvious stuff to anyone who has an idea of what a domain name is. But I understand, you're "just asking questions."

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44998990
by joshvm | 2025-08-24 03:08:34+00:00
Yes, I've worked in this space for dogs (for re-identifying animals that have been vaccinated for rabies). It's a very difficult problem, but mostly because getting/scraping good training data is difficult. You really want lots of paired images of the same animal and that's hard compared to searching for "cat". Plus the usual challenges: animals don't like to stay still so getting good pictures is hard and users must have good guidance for lighting/pose to get the best results. Human facial recognition benefits from strong commercial interest and the most robust methods rely on extras like 3D scanning.

Tricks include facial alignment + cropping and very strong constraints on orientation to make sure you have a good frontal image (apps will give users photo alignment markers). Otherwise it's a standard visual seatch. Run a face extraction model to get the crop, warp to standard key points, compute the crop embedding, store in a database and do a nearest neighbour lookup.

There are a few startups doing this. Also look at PetFace which was a benchmark released a year or so ago. Not a huge amount of work in this area compared to humans, but it's of interest to people like cattle farmers as well.

https://github.com/mapooon/PetFace
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 03:08:53+00:00
> Am I the only one who feels that Claude Code is what they would have imagined basic AGI to be like 10 years ago?

That wouldn't have occurred to me, to be honest. To me, AGI is Data from Star Trek. Or at the very least, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character from The Terminator.

I'm not sure that I'd make sentience a hard requirement for AGI, but I think my general mental fantasy of AGI even includes sentience.

Claude Code is amazing, but I would never mistake it for AGI.
by zywoo | 2025-08-24 03:09:36+00:00
As a heavy user, I feel that when GPT-5 was first launched, its anthropomorphic system might have been down-weighted due to cost or technical reasons. Within just two hours of its release, I realized its level of logic had improved a lot, but its tone felt similar to the 4o model where I had explicitly turned off the anthropomorphic system. Recently, however, it seems to have improved significantly.
by phyzome | 2025-08-24 03:09:50+00:00
Real world case where I've observed these load characteristics: A cluster of three Redis nodes, one of which is primary and therefore has slightly (but persistently) worse latency. Pick-2 would send significantly less read traffic to that node. Like you say, it's no worse than a 2x difference, but I'd prefer better balancing than that.

(Pick-2 also can at most give 2x less traffic to a node with terrible performance, which is not awesome.)
by xpe | 2025-08-24 03:10:00+00:00
A time traveler from the future has recommended we both read or reread “Disputing Definitions” by Yudkowsky (2008).

Some favorite quotes of mine from it:

> Dictionary editors are historians of usage, not legislators of language. Dictionary editors find words in current usage, then write down the words next to (a small part of) what people seem to mean by them.

> Arguing about definitions is a garden path; people wouldn't go down the path if they saw at the outset where it led.

>> Eliezer: "Personally I'd say that if the issue arises, both sides should switch to describing the event in unambiguous lower-level constituents, like acoustic vibrations or auditory experiences. Or each side could designate a new word, like 'alberzle' and 'bargulum', to use for what they respectively used to call 'sound'; and then both sides could use the new words consistently. That way neither side has to back down or lose face, but they can still communicate. And of course you should try to keep track, at all times, of some testable proposition that the argument is actually about. Does that sound right to you?"
by Uehreka | 2025-08-24 03:11:10+00:00
Nah.

The real philosophical headache is that we still haven’t solved the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re disappointed because we hoped in our hearts (if not out loud) that building AI would give us some shred of insight into the rich and mysterious experience of life we somehow incontrovertibly perceive but can’t explain.

Instead we got a machine that can outwardly present as human, can do tasks we had thought only humans can do, but reveals little to us about the nature of consciousness. And all we can do is keep arguing about the goalposts as this thing irrevocably reshapes our society, because it seems bizarre that we could be bested by something so banal and mechanical.
by ramses0 | 2025-08-24 03:11:47+00:00
Per his dive stats, he had 7k+ dives under his belt, "discovered" 50 MILES of new cave passages and mapped 25km of them.

Through an accident of fate and the original guide I'd booked getting sick, he was my guide on literally my first dives after getting certified.

He was like: "don't touch my equipment, try not to die, I'll be fine... what are you realistically going to do for me if there's a problem (and there won't be a problem)" ...after I explained that I was just trying to adopt the good habits we were taught in the classes I just took, he chilled out a bit, but still wouldn't let me touch his equipment.

My first open water dive (post certification) was unplanned- a small earthquake closed the cenotes on the second/third day until they could be vetted by "the pros" and make sure everything was safe for tourists again.

Ended up bumping into a shark (aka: "bear in the woods") at ~80ft and my (different) guide went chasing after it to take pictures, so I had to kindof keep up and think to myself: "I probably would stay away from that roughly human-sized shark, but also, I'm supposed to stay within 5-10 feet of my buddy in case he has equipment problems...... I'll just keep him in between me and the shark..."

Good times! :-D
by margalabargala | 2025-08-24 03:11:59+00:00
Plenty of roads were designed for horses. It's clearly unsafe to have paved those roads and allowed automobiles on them, the result of doing so was as you said increased traffic congestion and more accidents.

Why are you okay with the double standard of redistributing property to the motorists, but not redistributing property from the motorists?

I find your position immensely hypocritical.

What do you think is the leading cause of death for Americans younger than 45?
by favflam | 2025-08-24 03:12:40+00:00
Voters in Red states destroyed any motivation by foreign companies to build factories there (tariffs) and Democrats to focus infrastructure spending there (CHIPS, IRA being worthless in getting votes).

And now Republicans are ok with impounding Congressionally assigned funds.

So I guess outside of facebook brain rot and doom-scrolling, there is no way to convince voters to vote with policy (requires attention span of more than 30 seconds and high school level reading skills).
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 03:14:08+00:00
Unclear. You might be right, but I think it's possible that you're also wrong.

It's possible to stumble upon a solution to something without fully understanding the problem. I think this happens fairly often, really, in a lot of different problem domains.

I'm not sure we need to fully understand human consciousness in order to build an AGI, assuming it's possible to do so. But I do think we need to define what "general intelligence" is, and having a better understanding of what in our brains makes us generally intelligent will certainly help us move forward.