MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-08-02 13:55:59+00:00
Most people don't realize this is happening.

My dad sent me a few chats he had with ChatGPT and they were both stroking each other's egos pretty hard. It was pretty weird. He was using it a lot to get information and prep before a surgery and I felt like ChatGPT reinforced his unrealistic expectations for the speed of recovery. I didn't say anything before the surgery, as I didn't want to break his spirit and a positive attitude has its value.

A couple weeks post-op, when reality set in that the recovery was going to be longer and harder than he expected, we ended up on the topic of AI during a chat. I mentioned how AI can be steered and gave some examples on how I will often frame questions, and come at it from different angles to try and better find some semblance of true. I've even sent him chats that I've had with ChatGPT where I catch it in lies about itself about its own capabilities to try and drive the point home.

His response was to say he also does this, and he's worried about people who aren't as self-aware as "us" who take the AI results at face value. We even discussed people using AI as a therapist, and his concern was that the AI wouldn't challenge someone's existing ideas, like a real therapist often does.

It seems that even though he thinks he is challenging it, and will sometimes go to multiple different chatbots for a more serious question, he is still being misled. The silver lining is that he does have an abnormally large friend network for someone in his 70s. Not just Facebook friends, but people who he regularly sees in person from all eras of his life. Hopefully that keeps things in check and he doesn't go too far off the deep end. Though he does seem to disproportionally value ChatGPT's opinion over most others, probably because it always tells him how smart and insightful he is.
by radpanda | 2025-08-02 13:56:38+00:00
> There are, in fact, 88 approved Icelandic names with this exact pattern of declension, and they all end with “dur”, “tur” or “ður”.

…

> But that quickly breaks down. There are other names ending with “ður” or “dur” that follow a different pattern of declension

My “everything should be completely orderly” comp-sci brain is always triggered by these almost trivial problems that end up being much more interesting.

Is the suffix pattern based on the pronunciation of the syllable(s) before the suffix? If one wanted to improve upon your work for unknown names, rather than consider the letters used, would you have to do some NLP on the name to get a representation of the pronunciation and look that up (in a trie or otherwise)?
by api | 2025-08-02 13:56:40+00:00
To me AI feels like the early web. I can get information without sifting through heaps of SEO trash, and it’s like having this weird magic thinking mirror to explore ideas. Unlike social media it’s not a sea of culture war rage trolling and slop.

I am not trying to use it as a companion though. Not only do I have human ones but it feels super weird and creepy to try. I couldn’t suspend disbelief since I know how these things work.
Show HN: Focuser – 20-second pause that blocks doom-scrolling
by ImmuneFOMO | 2025-08-02 13:57:59+00:00
I built Focuser because I kept doom-scrolling when I was supposed to work

What it does

You pick any time-sink site

Next visit, Focuser asks, “Do you really need this site?”

If you tap Yes, you must 1⃣ Write why you need it 2⃣ Choose exactly how long you need access

This 20 second friction is based on Shawn Achor’s habit-formation research

Why it’s different

Runs 100% client-side—no analytics, no external calls

Uses Manifest V3 already (future-proof for June 2025 Chrome deprecation)

Works offline

Settings live in localStorage

Ask

Does the 20-second rule feel too long or too short?

Any edge-cases where permissions worry you?

Ideas for a Firefox port?

Try it here (free): https://focuser.app/ I’m online and happy to answer every question. Thanks for reading!
by stncls | 2025-08-02 13:58:05+00:00
I don't know about "best", but I'm very happy with my last few Lenovo ThinkPads (X1 carbon, nano, some T-series). Before that, I had some Asus Zenbook, and everything worked as well. All had 4-15hr batteries, more than I expected in their respective eras. I've heard Dell XPS were good too.

There is no black magic. The only trick is checking the amazing Arch Linux wiki [1]. It will tell you everything you need to know, things like avoiding the recent Intel MIPI webcams (Linux support is coming, but count a couple of years for out-of-the-box).

Regarding Desktop Environments, it depends on your taste. I don't enjoy Gnome, but OSX refugees tend to like it. I've used XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, and recently KDE, and I have only good things to say about all. And tiling DE aficionados are spoiled for choice.

Plus, exchanging low-level code with Windows (wsl2) and OSX (largely posix-compatible) has never been easier. The only remaining issue being if you go down to assembly (Aarch64-vs-x86_64), which only crops up if you depend on proprietary applications.

To summarize, the picture is quite good nowadays, has been for a while, and is only improving. Of course, the one problem is closed-source apps. If you rely on one, document yourself on its quirks. Otherwise, Arch Linux wiki for hw support, and you're golden.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org
by unsigner | 2025-08-02 13:58:25+00:00
Dead business?

The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit.

The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.
Ask HN: How is it possible to get -0.0 in a sum?
by gus_massa | 2025-08-02 13:58:43+00:00
I'm looking for corner cases where he result is -0.0. As far as I know, the only way to get -0.0 in a sum is

(-0.0) + (-0.0)

Does someone know any other case in IEEE 754?

Bonus question: What happens in subtractions? I only know

(-0.0) - (+0.0)

Is there any other case?
by laughingcurve | 2025-08-02 13:59:27+00:00
Thank you so much for sharing your story. It is never easy to admit mistakes or problems, but we are all just human. AI-induced psychosis seems to be a trending issue, and presents a real problem. I was previously very skeptical as well about safety, alignment, risks, etc. While it might not be my focus right now as a researcher, stories like yours help remind others that these problems are real and do exist.
by dijit | 2025-08-02 14:00:10+00:00
It’s absolutely sick that we think of cycling as being dangerous and risk seeking behaviour.

I’m coming from a part of the world that doesn’t needlessly look down on cycling (its common for nearly everyone to cycle in Copenhagen/Malmö) and the idea that people should become drivers because its safer is a total tragedy of the commons and would not hold much weight here - the cities would be crushed under the necessary weight of roads and cars.

Other parts of the world need to get some more cars off the road by making safer infrastructure, it’s ridiculous.
by gruez | 2025-08-02 14:00:29+00:00
The final jury instructions doesn't say anything about whether facebook parsed it or not. If anything it makes the case worse than I thought. On page 17 the instructions says that the plaintiffs needed to prove, among other things, "That Meta intentionally eavesdropped on or recorded these plaintiffs’ conversations by using an electronic device". To anyone who knows how SDKs work, that clearly didn't happen.
Show HN: Skyline – A Go Library for Efficient Multi-Dimensional Skyline Queries
by gkoos | 2025-08-02 14:00:39+00:00
Hi Hacker News! I built Skyline, a Go library implementing skyline queries — a powerful algorithmic technique for filtering datasets by identifying non-dominated points across multiple dimensions. It’s useful for multi-criteria decision making, recommendation systems, and pruning large datasets efficiently. The repo has examples, benchmarks, and is ready for contributions. Would love to hear your feedback or use cases!
by wafflemaker | 2025-08-02 14:01:04+00:00
Reading the special prompt that makes the new mode, I discovered that in my prompting I never used enough ALL CAPS.

Is Trump, with his often ALL CAPS SENTENCES on to something? Is he training AI?

Need to check these bindings. Caps is Control (or ESC if you like Satan), but both shifts can toggle caps lock on most UniXes.
by cornholio | 2025-08-02 14:01:15+00:00
> AI makes it even easier to spin up fake personas to pretend to be human and advocate

It's not only that. AI enables a never-before-seen level of individual targeting for political and commercial actors, campaigns of behavioral modification and radicalization, to the point where the entire intelectual foundations of democracy become questionable.

When power actors addressed the people in traditional media they could send a single message that was tailored to maximize effect, but necessarily needed to be addressed to the common man. The explosion of internet fragmented the media space, but we're still talking about unitary publications, say, an opinion piece presented identically to all online subscribers of a certain publication, with narratives targeting broad swaths of the population: young urban males, conservative retirees and so on. Cambridge Analytica disrupted that model, allowing targeting based on individual profiling, A/B testing to see what kind of content works best on people with certain proclivities etc.; but again, the decisions were relatively low complexity and automatic.

Now imagine each individual has a dedicated GPT-5 level agent following him around across devices and media, that operates 24/7 with the singular task of influencing his opinion, convince him to join a cause, plunge him into depression, buy something, or whatever else the power actor needs from that individual. This agent not only has an excelent profile of his target and can generate videos, fake personas etc. as necessary, but also has a near expert level competence in things like psychology, persuasion and manipulation. It doesn't just push narratives, its tasked with convincing you and isolating you from whatever external influence threatens that goal, and it reasons towards that goal with near expert level accuracy. Would 99% of the population resist such a brainwashing machine? Would you?

This is the type of agent Facebook and Twitter/x are striving towards. It's a world where people no longer have common understanding of a shared social reality, and collaboration towards keeping Power in check becomes fundamentally impossible. It's orwellian to a degree even Orwell didn't imagine.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-02 14:01:20+00:00
Probably the single most important thing is learning good defensive driving. Which is different than "good driving".

Lots of "good drivers" T-bone the guy who ran a red light. Defensive drivers see him barreling towards the intersection, as they check both ways despite it being green.

On a motorcycle, even if a crash is not your fault, you're still dead.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-02 14:01:49+00:00
I don’t understand how you u can’t worry about this.

Like there’s a trend line of progress right? Ok so the thing isn’t effective now. But there’s a decade of upward progress and that projection line point to a future where a better AI exists.

Trend-lines don’t point to an exact future just a most probable future. It is unwise to discount the most probable future.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-08-02 14:01:52+00:00
What are you talking about? CyberArk is enterprise privileged access management. It’s not an app you install and forget about for 1-2 years. It’s certainly not something you just uninstall because you found out very basic information about the vendor on HN, because you almost assuredly run it because auditors require you to, and uninstalling it without a like replacement would be an extremely bad idea.
by transcriptase | 2025-08-02 14:02:17+00:00
Ah, now we get to the crux of it. Despite him being a comedian, who hosts a podcast in pretty much the same format he has since 2009, just doing unscripted long-form unedited with friends and people he finds interesting, and despite him saying ten thousand times he’s not an expert and not to take his advice just because something worked for him:

You’ll now pivot to some narrative that because he’s popular and people might take the wrong message away that he has a duty not to talk about certain things, not have certain people on, have others on to balance it out when someone says false things, push back on his guests and argue with them etc.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-02 14:03:46+00:00
A considerable number of C++ libraries are header-only, so having this macro defined is the onus of the libraries' consumers, rather than just the package managers'.

Also, I mentioned no libc equivalent, and that remains true. Regardless of the libc distribution (glibc, musl, BSD, macOS libSystem), none of them have a debug mode in the vein that Windows UCRT does.
by al_borland | 2025-08-02 14:03:49+00:00
Exactly. The article also mentions people can pay to not be lonely. I tried this once and it made the loneliness 100x worse. It some ways it felt like a rock bottom. I wouldn't recommend it.

Just sitting silently with someone can eliminate loneliness, no words needed... sometimes that's preferred. The idea that someone needs to be in an active conversation to not be lonely is missing the mark.
by philwelch | 2025-08-02 14:04:04+00:00
That’s equivalent to saying that if you don’t have a motorcycle license, don’t register your bike, don’t have insurance, and don’t wear your helmet, your fatal accident risk increases by over 3x. Put that way, it’s not surprising, nor does it actually tell you anything about the base rate safety of lawful motorcycling. By way of analogy, you could just as easily say “not dousing yourself in gasoline reduces the risk of death by smoking by 98%”, which is both true and useless.
by h4ch1 | 2025-08-02 14:04:04+00:00
Try using any AI tool to write a working realtime GI (global illumination) implementation. I've been working on a novel implementation for 60fps/1080p GI and everytime I use Copilot or Claude to even try fixing a minor bug/troubleshoot it nukes entire functions and rewrites them using garbled shader code, old syntax/methods.

Puts things into stark perspective for me.

PS. no amount of prompt engineering will save you in this endeavour.
by charcircuit | 2025-08-02 14:04:06+00:00
>zoom through UAC prompts without reading.

UAC is not a security boundary, so it is not relevant when talking about security.

>SELinux and AppArmor already provide transparent system isolation for decades

If they are setup and most Linux distros only limit individual apps. So a brand new app can still run wild.

>you can install an immutable distro.

Even immutable distros let people download new software off the internet and run it.

>Plus, these repositories are generally well-vetted and observed by their maintainers.

This has been shown to be false in practice due to the xz backdoor. Maintainers do not actually vet anything other than that the code is coming from the developer. Which is also what app stores do.
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-02 14:04:45+00:00
Well you call this instance brand genericity instead of brand loyalty and hinge your argument on a past situation that doesn't really have any resemblance to this one.

Gemini is a google default so why isn't it used anywhere near a much as chatGPT ?

Meta has stuffed their llama model into Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook and god knows what so why isn't it used anywhere near as much as chatGPT ?

In all the time these players pushed their apps and models to their billions of users, chatGPT's userbase has been growing massively.

Clearly people do care about using chatGPT and specifically chatGPT and what would be the 'existential crisis' by the incumbent players has come and gone, with Open AI unscathed.
by csense | 2025-08-02 14:04:56+00:00
I think you missed the point of the example.

The question I'm asking (and that I think the study was trying to ask) is "If we have limited resources to apply, how should we try to minimize CO2 emissions?"

The point I was trying to make (and that I think the study was trying to make) is that replacing the plants that emit the most tons of CO2 per MWH is a decent place to start, especially when you know you don't have the money and political will to replace them all.

(But you probably ought to put other factors into the math, like that you need X MW of solar to replace 1 MW of fossil fuels, to account for the fact the sun doesn't shine at night -- and the exact value of X differs due to local conditions like latitude and weather.)

Saying "I wish we had the money and political will to replace all fossil fuel plants" or "We have a moral imperative to replace all fossil fuel plants" is...not productive. Your wishes or moral views don't change the fact that we don't actually have that much money and political will.

There will be some bureaucrat or politician or somebody somewhere who at some point says "Okay, we know how much money and political will we have for this CO2 emissions reduction thing. Where should we spend it? Let's see if anyone's made a study."

And when that decision maker goes off searching the literature, we really want them to find a study that gives an honest, non-misleading analysis -- with the example numbers I gave, that would mean closing the coal plant in Indiana is the optimal play, even though that state's climate and weather is less ideal than south or west.

If the study uses misleading math and the resources get applied in a sub-optimal place -- if we could have gotten rid of X tons of emissions with the money and political will available, but because of the bad math we applied it in the wrong place and got rid of Y tons instead, for some Y < X -- that just seems like unnecessary societal inefficiency and stupidity.
by Krasnol | 2025-08-02 14:05:28+00:00
> I don't think we are ready for the risk of mass manipulation through AI relationships.

We are not ready but we're ripe for them.

The advertisement industry has fingered our brains and raped our attention while eating up all the information they could get, now "AI" is harvesting our "open relationship with sharing information about ourself". The merger between the work the Ad Industry has done in preparation with the new data will collect will be catastrophically successful.

Meanwhile, we willingfully slept on digital literacy. The effects ripple already through many aspects of our societies. Causing havoc.

We're running toward an really "interesting" peak in Western Societies and I don't see how that might stop or even slow down.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-02 14:06:59+00:00
> Open AI don't have to do a lot to be profitable, ads would be enough.

Yeah man, absolutely! Ads can pay for all of it!

> It's nonsensical

Yep, wanting a business to be profitable before investing in it, or at least to show that it could be profitable by providing a plan and timeline to profitability, is too much to ask for nowadays. Of course companies can be successful and great without any clear path to profitability, hype and enthusiasm are enough, just look at the great success of WeWork and Adam Neumann!

Who are we to doubt that? Just keep repeatedly giving couple of trillions to Sama and all will be okay, AGI is just behind the corner, trust him bro.
by hunglee2 | 2025-08-02 14:08:14+00:00
US auto industry is protected by US government, especially against Chinese EV's, which are today amongst the most affordable vehicles in the world. This protectionism will give domestic manufacturers the breathing space to create new models to serve the mass market, which may be coming soon, Ford CEO Jim Farley only last week as indicated that they are going to have Ford Model-T moment in Aug 11.
by theMMaI | 2025-08-02 14:08:32+00:00
Even moreso when you take into account that CyberArk is not exactly a beloved product because it involves a lot of hassle. At 5-6B it may have been reasonable or simply a portfolio add that's cheap because of shared ownership/refinance but for 25B they could have bought Okta, which would have added much more value to their portfolio...
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-02 14:08:39+00:00
Apparently Reddit is full of such posts. A similar genre is when the bot assures them that they did something very special: they for the first time ever awakened the AI to true consciousness and this is rare and the user is a one in a billion genius and this will change everything. And they use back and forth some physics jargon and philosophy of consciousness technical terms and the bot always reaffims how insightful the user's mishmash of those concepts are and apparently many people fall for this.

Some people are also more susceptible to various too-good-to-be-true scams without alarm bells going off, or to hypnosis or cold reading or soothsayers etc. Or even propaganda radicalization rabbit holes via recommendation algorithms.

It's probably quite difficult and shameful-feeling for someone to admit that this happened to them, so they may insist it was different or something. It's also a warning sign when a user talks about "my chatgpt" as if it was a pet they grew and that the user has awakened it and now they together explore the universe and consciousness and then the user asks for a summary writeup and they try to send it to physicists or other experts and of course they are upset when they don't recognize the genius.
Show HN: WebGPU enables local LLM in the browser – demo site with AI chat
by andreinwald | 2025-08-02 14:09:12+00:00
Browser LLM demo working on JavaScript and WebGPU. WebGPU is already supported in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS (v26) and Android.

Demo, similar to ChatGPT https://andreinwald.github.io/browser-llm/

Code https://github.com/andreinwald/browser-llm

- No need to use your OPENAI_API_KEY - its local model that runs on your device

- No network requests to any API

- No need to install any program

- No need to download files on your device (model is cached in browser)

- Site will ask before downloading large files (llm model) to browser cache

- Hosted on Github Pages from this repo - secure, because you see what you are running
by soraminazuki | 2025-08-02 14:10:11+00:00
Isn't that a bit too optimistic? Even before Trump, neoliberalism has wrecked the lives of the majority of Americans for decades at this point. See healthcare, housing, food safety, water supply, electrical grid, public transportation, broadband access, worker protection, wealth gap, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot more.

Is the reason we're in this situation.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-08-02 14:10:19+00:00
But it's not gonna solve loneliness. Machines can't replace human contact. It can be a weak substitute like doom scrolling or media consumption is for feeling your own feelings, but it's not gonna replace human contact in all it's entirety and is a bad solution to an important problem. Are people who think and write this so alienated from their own race that they don't know what that all entails? The hormones, the connectedness, touch, smell, moments, joy, tears, everything. This will never be replaced by a machine or some code. Capitalism and our culture (which is driven by late stage capitalmism) destroyed community. It won't fix it. I'm afraid of people who feel/think like that to be honest.
by laughingcurve | 2025-08-02 14:10:27+00:00
Yes, exactly. How the heck? It makes no sense to me either, but you can certainly find plenty of laymen/not-in-the-know folks making those kinds of comments, often in non-technical spaces. Often the worst parts of the internet where discourse is non-existent. Human psychology allows for us to hold many contradictory positions all at once. Ideologies are the lens through which we view the world and it distorts our perception.