MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-12 15:25:50+00:00
There's kind of a fine line between "that this went viral shows that Tesla has a brand problem" (a logically valid argument) and "that I found this believable shows that Tesla is bad" (what the comic is about). The top-level comment did not go super-far out of its way to distinguish between the two, which I think is generally worth doing if you're making an argument that sounds similar to a common fallacy.
by acdha | 2025-08-12 15:26:03+00:00
DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups. If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk at 3am in certain neighborhoods, it had no impact on your life. Fox News likes to describe it as Sarajevo or Mogadishu but it just isn't - go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches. There certainly are crimes happening but anyone telling you it's out of control or that the police are powerless to stop it is lying to you for political reasons.
by WJW | 2025-08-12 15:26:04+00:00
I didn't originally write this, but can't find the original place I read it anymore. I think it makes a lot of sense to repost it here:

All of the World Of Darkness and Chronicles Of Darkness games are basically about coming of age/puberty. Like X-Men but for Goth-Nerds instead of Geek-Nerds.

In Vampire, your body is going through weird changes and you are starting to develop, physically and/or mentally, while realising that the world is run by a bunch of old, evil fools who still expect you to toe the line and stay in your place, but you are starting to wonder if the world wouldn't be better if your generation overthrew them and took over running the world, doing it the right way. And there are all these bad elements trying to convince you that you should do just that, but for the sake of mindless violence and raucous partying. Teenager - the rpg.

In Werewolf, your body is going through weird changes and you are starting to develop, physically and mentally, while realising that you are not a part of the "normal" crowd that the rest of Humanity belongs to. You are different and they just can't handle that whenever it gets revealed. Luckily, there are small communities of people like you out there who take you in and show you how use the power of your "true" self. Of course, even among this community, there are different types of other. LGBT Teenager - the RPG

In Mage, you have begun to take an interest in the real world, and you think you know what the world is really like. The people all around you are just sleep-walking through life, because they don't really get it. This understanding sets you against the people who run the world: the governments and the corporations, trying to stop these sleeper from waking up to the truth and rejecting their comforting lies. You have found some other people who saw through them, and you think they've got a lot of things wrong, but at least they're awake to the lies! Rebellious Teenager - the RPG
by philipwhiuk | 2025-08-12 15:26:13+00:00
In theory if you delete enough you can power off a server.

In practice the random storage and delayed deletion makes this an absurdly asynchronous event.

In reality the UK just doesn't have that many consumer data centres, they mostly serve business. There's not likely even that much AI compute in the UK (yet).

The actual reason (as said elsewhere is water storage planning).
by gethly | 2025-08-12 15:26:31+00:00
But you cannot have reason without substantial proof of how things behave by observing them in the first place. Reason is simply a logical approach to yes and no questions where you factually know, from observation of past events, how things work. And therefore you can simulate an outcome by the exercise of reasoning applied onto a situation that you have not yet observed and come to a logical outcome, given the set of rules and presumptions.
by apercu | 2025-08-12 15:26:55+00:00
In my head I kind of simplified it - if I can reorder the blocks in my history I can "reverse" a transaction, like "erase" that I bought a lambo yesterday so today I have not only the lambo, but the money that was in my account before I bought the lambo, too. But maybe me trying to over simplify and missing the forest for the trees (this is very much not my domain).
by afthonos | 2025-08-12 15:27:44+00:00
What an interesting way of thinking.

More seriously, the correct reaction to a fake is to adjust towards whatever the fake is moving your away from. If the fake wants you to believe Tesla is a company that will brick your car while driving — adjust towards it being more likely that they won’t, because if it were, there would be no need to fake it.

Saying instead “huh, I guess my priors were right all along because of how many people believed it” is…yeah, an interesting way of thinking.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-12 15:28:31+00:00
> You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit.

So many people don't realize this for some reason, but I think it's precisely why we haven't seen anything shown at WWDC '24. Apple tried and quickly realized the tech wasn't ready, and letting it run wild on their platforms would do irreparable brand damage.

This tech (LLMs) have barely been available to the public for ~3-4 years. That's no time at all, anyone using AI regularly now is very much an early adopter, something Apple historically isn't and Apple's users generally appreciate that aspect of them.

I get wanting to stay ahead of the curve and be competitive, but I don't understand this seemingly deep seated fear of these big tech companies that is making them go 100% all in on AI at the cost of all other areas of their business.
by devilbunny | 2025-08-12 15:28:36+00:00
> Automakers didn't update the cassette decks in their cars when CDs came out.

And reasonably enough: few people even in the early 90s had CD changers in cars, and people didn't want to scratch their discs, and in any case everyone pretty much still had a tape deck at home - it wasn't too hard to copy your CD to tape, which was cheap, small, rerecordable, and more durable, and sound quality in cars wasn't great anyway.
by account42 | 2025-08-12 15:28:42+00:00
> And, before you dismiss this idea with "Ha ha imagine if every cell phone provider had a custom, bespoke, negotiated contract with each customer! It can't be done!"

This actually already happens to some extend. Nor a different contract for every individual user but my mobile phone plan is not one you can currently purchase from the provider but just available to existing customers who have been upgraded (more data for the same price as the original contract).
by johnisgood | 2025-08-12 15:28:44+00:00
From the website:

HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

How effective those measures would be?

(I do not understand the down-votes, it is a great way to hear other people's opinion(s). Is that so bad?)
by LoganDark | 2025-08-12 15:29:02+00:00
> Meanwhile, in iOS you can't even install third party browsers. Let alone third-party app stores. Or any apps outside Apple's App Store.

Apple did malicious compliance and only technically complied with the requirements in a specifically geo-restricted area (the EU) without allowing anyone else to benefit. (Although I think it was later ruled that they didn't actually manage to comply thanks to all the malice.)
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-12 15:29:03+00:00
It is an unfortunate reality of our existence that sometimes Chesterton actually did build that fence for a good reason, a good reason that's still here.

(One of my favorite TED talks was about a failed experiment in introducing traditional Western agriculture to a people in Zambia. It turns out when you concentrate too much food in one place, the hippos come and eat it all and people can't actually out-fight hippos in large numbers. In hindsight, the people running the program should have asked how likely it was that folks in a region that had exposure to other people's agriculture for thousands of years, hadn't ever, you know... tried it. https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...)
by meetingthrower | 2025-08-12 15:29:10+00:00
re: switchbacks.

The trail designers, such as they were back in the day, were true masochists. Literally direct lines straight up a ridge or alongside a gully. Given that they are on the fall line, the trails become rivers during rains. Unbelievably painful to hike.

No Forest Service namby pamby shallow grades and switchbacks here! Typical: the Air Line trail, ~4500 feet up at a 21% average grade.
by taude | 2025-08-12 15:29:16+00:00
git was designed as a distributed vcs for high-latency connected developers with plenty of ability to work offline.

I don't think I've really been impacted by any of the outages. Maybe I wait an extra hour to merge a feature or something, in which case I actually get to eat lunch and browse HN, doesn't feel quite as catastrophic for me, as some of you.
by robertlagrant | 2025-08-12 15:29:29+00:00
> Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work

This is just a classic mistake: failing to account for risk as a significant input. Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going, possibly long before any profit is made.

> A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce.

If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
by HSO | 2025-08-12 15:29:40+00:00
they could integrate it with their loyalty points system, whatever it was called, starbucks card or sth

either pay with points, or get a cheaper rate for points, or even get points if you pay normal for the cowirking space

the card could also double as a validator, either for the reserved space or as a key card to a closed one, saving on in-store admin work

if i were starbucks, i would 100% try this

clearly there is a demand for quick and informal working space, instead of a formal, multi month tenant agreement with one limited provider

just go to any store location, and in case of need, pay an hourly rate with your coffee to get a seat
by meroes | 2025-08-12 15:29:58+00:00
It grew out of many different threads: different websites, communities, etc all around the same time. I noticed it contemporaneously in the philosophy world where Nick Bostrom’s Simulation argument was boosted more than it deserved (like everyone was just accepting it at the lay-level). Looking back I see it also developed from less wrong and other sites, but I was wondering what was going on with simulations taking over philosophy talk. Now I see how it all coalesced.

All of it has the appearance of sounding so smart, and a few sites were genuine. But it got taken over.
by alphazard | 2025-08-12 15:30:09+00:00
The terminology here is worth noting. Is a Rationalist Cult a cult that practices Rationalism according to third parties, or is it a cult that says they are Rationalist?

Clearly all of these groups that believe in demons or realities dictated by tabletop games are not what third parties would call Rationalist. They might call themselves that.

There are some pretty simple tests that can out these groups as not rational. None of these people have ever seen a demon, so world models including demons have never predicted any of their sense data. I doubt these people would be willing to make any bets about when or if a demon will show up. Many of us would be glad to make a market concerning predictions made by tabletop games about physical phenomenon.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-12 15:30:15+00:00
I don't think Yudkowski is at all like L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was insane and pure evil. Yudkowski seems like a decent and basically reasonable guy, he's just kind of a blowhard and he's wrong about the science.

L. Ron Hubbard is more like the Zizians.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-12 15:30:23+00:00
It's not just pausing and resuming that I'm looking for, but serialization into a form that can be saved to and loaded from files. (Another commenter calls this "materialization" of continuations.) In that regard, the problem with CPS is that continuations are totally opaque (or nearly so) in every language I'm aware of: you aren't able to do anything with them except resume them within the same execution of the program. Do any of your "defunctionalization" implementations offer such a feature?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-12 15:30:35+00:00
Because we are a forum of craftspeople. The Show HN system is a good faith system for showing something that you built and can presumably engage with us about what you built.

We want to engage with the person who engineered the thing, not someone who is just going to pipe our feedback into an LLM and see what pops out.

Just like I'd consider it deceptive if it turned out that HN populated the comments with an LLM. I want to engage with humans using their own brain.

That said, I would also consider it acceptable if you mentioned that your Show HN was vibe-coded if it were. But consider the vibe shift (pun) that would happen. We'd be curious about your vibe-code workflow and the experience of vibe-coding it if it was impressive, not necessarily curious about the thing the LLM built because that part isn't necessarily interesting anymore.

Finally, it's inevitable that these lines will quickly blur over time as AI becomes increasingly centerpiece in our lives. But in this transitionary phase so far, it kinda feels like you've been actually playing on a bot server in Quake 3 when you catch yourself admiring something that you thought the OP made: it's not rewarding to realize you're just stomping bots that you thought were human.
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-12 15:31:24+00:00
Tidal forces are not the constraining factor - the transformation of space into a timeline property is. There is no out, no away direction. All paths lead to singularity. No particle can travel away from singularity .

Two rockets can diverge in distance, because one is slowing itself along the timeline space dimension toward singularity. If you are moving 1 m/s toward singularity, the fastest your hand can raise above your head is 1 m/s with infinite energy expenditure. The same goes for blood pumping to your head, electrical impulses to your brain, etc.
by xscott | 2025-08-12 15:31:24+00:00
> I edited it to make it more readable - not changed it's meaning.

I think you might have added the copying bit, and that changed its meaning if not the whole topic. Then you claim I'm confusing competition with theft instead of addressing the "right to a living" part. That's kind of insincere and dishonest on your part, but fine, this other topic is interesting to me too.

I have no idea whether OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, or any other company got valid licenses for all of the books they trained on. If they didn't, they likely broke some specific laws. Go after them for that if you want. This is copyright violation, not theft.

But if I legally obtain a hundred books and pay a really smart kid to read them all to learn their style, then I pay that kid to write a new book using the style he's learned, that all seems fair and legal to me. It's the way things have been for a very long time.

For any argument you're going to make about this, please imagine a really smart kid doing it instead of a computer. And if you think there should be different laws for computers vs really smart kids, go get it into legislature.
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 15:31:26+00:00
Maybe that claim is off base, although I wouldn’t expect that to be the overt media story anyway. More of what a typical 35-year-old upper-middle-class liberal “childfree” couple would ramble about to their friends when they’re justifying why “actually, not having kids is the green thing to do.”

Now that I think about it more, I shouldn’t have included that in my Europe hypothesis, as I’ve heard that kind of thinking in general but not more from Europeans.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-12 15:31:32+00:00
I think we dont have a good definition of AGI and that we have already achieved this from multiple companies.

The turing test has been utterly destroyed. That multiple top players now operate as independent agents on their top performing models. The top players are moving beyond AGI to superintelligence.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-achievi...

Lets consider the stages of AGI here.

Autonomy Level 5, agents who work as your personal assistant.

Here's a 25 minute video about chatgpt agent....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jn_RpbPbEc

It's already here. It's already happening.
Show HN: VerbatimRAG – RAG that returns only exact text from documents
by justacoolname | 2025-08-12 15:31:36+00:00
I built VerbatimRAG to solve a specific problem: RAG systems that retrieve the right documents but then paraphrase incorrectly, introducing factual errors (hallucinations).

Instead of letting an LLM generate responses based on retrieved context, VerbatimRAG extracts and returns exact text spans from source documents. Every word in the output exists verbatim in your documents.

Technical approach:

- Fine-tuned ModernBERT on RAGBench dataset for span classification (relevant/not relevant)

- Documents chunked with Docling/Chonkie and indexed with SPLADE for sparse retrieval

- Query-time: retrieve → classify spans → compose response from exact quotes using dynamic templates

- Each span includes citation back to source document

Trade-offs:

- Responses can be choppy since they're composed of exact quotes

- No summarization or synthesis across documents

- Works poorly for conversational/creative tasks

An interesting part: You can run the entire pipeline without any LLM - just embeddings + our ModernBERT extractor. With SPLADE embeddings, it runs entirely on CPU.

- Code: https://github.com/KRLabsOrg/verbatim-rag (MIT)

- Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2025.bionlp-share.8.pdf

- HuggingFace model: https://huggingface.co/KRLabsOrg/verbatim-rag-modern-bert-v1

We can imagine this approach more in applications where accuracy matters more than fluency (e.g. compliant heavy domains).

Curious if others have tried similar "constrained generation" approaches.
by tremon | 2025-08-12 15:31:39+00:00
I don't have a problem with --install-recommends being the default. I think it's a fine distinction to have Recommends be "most of our users will want these" and "this package provides some niche feature that most users won't need".

However, like you, I do have a problem with maintainers abusing the Recommends: field to further their own world domination plans. There is no valid reason that installing an archive tool should mandate a specific init system (looking at you, file-roller and gnome team in general).
by mcherm | 2025-08-12 15:32:13+00:00
This is ridiculous.

Google is not some opaque corporate entity (I mean, yes it IS, but...), it is made up of individuals, many of whom read this site.

Google should offer to send (the public content from) their DB directly to The Internet Archive. It results in LESS overhead for Google than this attempt to scrape it, and results in better information.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-12 15:32:21+00:00
I've been working on a self-hosted alternative to GitHub and I am curious what HN finds to be the most important features. I think Code, Issues and PRs are the critical aspects, but I don't know what typical workflows look like for others these days.

It seems like there are some teams that have figured out a way to turn GH into a labyrinth of CI/CD actions that allegedly produces a ton of business value, but I don't know how typical this kind of use case is. If the average GH user just needs the essentials, I could easily focus those verticals down and spend more time on things like SAML/OIDC, reporting APIs, performance, etc. I suspect there aren't a whole lot of developers who are finding things like first party AI integration to be indispensable.
by sashank_1509 | 2025-08-12 15:32:22+00:00
I’m at Google, we have a million + file codebase. Every piece of code is snapshotted (no need to commit, automatic snapshot whenever a change is made). Every line of code has its own unique URL (this is for your branch too, not just overall). Background tests running nonstop hourly. Never seen any downtime. The infra at Google is insane
by wiredfool | 2025-08-12 15:32:32+00:00
It's really worth reading up on the techniques from Large Group Awareness Training so that you can recognize them when they pop up.

Once you see them listed (social pressure, sleep deprivation, control of drinking/bathroom, control of language/terminology, long exhausting activities, financial buy in, etc) and see where they've been used in cults and other cult adjacent things it's a little bit of a warning signal when you run across them IRL.
by homebrewer | 2025-08-12 15:32:39+00:00
Depends on your needs. Last time I checked, Gitlab wanted money for e.g. assigning multiple PR reviewers, which is available in gitea/forgejo.

The real issue with gitea/forgejo compared to Gitlab is their terrible CI, which is (to some approximation) a clone of GitHub Actions, also a dumpster fire for those of us proficient with/preferring the UNIX command line. You'll probably need a separate CI runner, like Woodpecker or Drone.
by Theodores | 2025-08-12 15:32:45+00:00
They would do better to advise people to boil only the amount of water they need for their tea for the amount of difference it makes.

Even the 'take shorter showers' advice is interesting, they could advise people to skip a few and flush the toilet only after having a 'number two'.

Recently I had the water board out to investigate a leak. Earlier in the year, before there was any hint of drought, I had been pressure washing the green mould off my late father's house, leading to a lot of water usage. And yes, I did use a lot of water then, far more than could be saved by skipping showers, using the dishwasher instead of hand washing crockery and by only boiling the water I needed for tea, nevermind deleting emails.

There will always be some that consume water at an entirely different scale to others, there needs to be a pricing mechanism for this beyond the metering they have now, where everyone gets an allowance for their basic needs and those watering gardens, washing cars or power-spraying houses pay considerably more. There will be
by nyeah | 2025-08-12 15:32:52+00:00
I'm lucky enough work in a pretty rational place (small "r"). We're normally data-limited. Being "more rational" would mean taking/finding more of the right data, talking to the right people, reading the right stuff. Not just thinking harder and harder about what we already know.

There's a point where more passive thinking stops adding value and starts subtracting sanity. It's pretty easy to get to that point. We've all done it.
by glenstein | 2025-08-12 15:32:54+00:00
I personally (for better or worse) became familiar with Ayn Rand as a teenager, and I think Objectivism as a kind of extended Ayn Rand social circle and set of organizations has faced the charge of cultish-ness, and that dates back to, I want to say, the 70s and 80s at least. I know Rand wrote much earlier than that, but I think the social and organizational dynamics unfolded rather late in her career.