MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yard2010 | 2025-08-27 08:30:16+00:00
I member! Remember when dissatisfied women needing an orgasm was a mental disorder?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3480686/

> Fate, which takes away healthy, free, young people, never pardoned me once. It has let me live all this time, quite lucid, but closed up in here ... since I was ten years old .... eighty years in psychiatric hospital for a headache

Take modern medicine with a grain of salt.
by AlbertoGP | 2025-08-27 08:30:19+00:00
That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:

Episode 1 - “It’s Happening Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc

Episode 4 - “It’s on the Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXqb1QT_tI

Episode 5 - “The New Media“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETqUVMXX3I

Episode 10 - “Things to Come”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLL7HmbcrvQ
by lelanthran | 2025-08-27 08:30:32+00:00
> Is it possible to give your parents access to to your browser in a safe way?

No.

Give them access to a browser running as a different user with different homedir? Sure, but that is not my browser.

Access to my browser in a private tab? Maybe, but that still isn't my browser. Still a danger though.

Anything that counts as "my browser" is not safe for me to give to someone else (whether parent or spouse or trusted advisor is irrelevant, they're all the same levels of insecurity).
by AdamN | 2025-08-27 08:31:01+00:00
This is true but there also needs to be good developers as well. It can't just be great process and low quality developer practices. There needs to be: 1/ high quality individual processes (development being one of them), 2/ high quality delivery mechanisms, 3/ feedback loops to improve that quality, 4/ out of band mechanisms to inspect and improve the quality.
by MrOrelliOReilly | 2025-08-27 08:31:07+00:00
This is incredibly useful! I was manually generating my own model comparisons last night, so great to see this :)

I will note that, personally, while adherence is a useful measure, it does miss some of the qualitative differences between models. For your "spheron" test for example, you note that "4o absolutely dominated this test," but the image exhibits all the hallmarks of a ChatGPT-generated image that I personally dislike (yellow, with veiny, almost impasto brush strokes). I have stopped using ChatGPT for image generation altogether because I find the style so awful. I wonder what objective measures one could track for "style"?

It reminders be a bit of ChatGPT vs Claude for software development... Regardless of how each scores on benchmarks, Claude has been a clear winner in terms of actual results.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-27 08:31:38+00:00
Not really.

Until modern times, Intel was the largest GPU manufacture, unless you include phones, then it was Qualcomm.

Now it's AMD, between computers, consoles, and the datacenter.

DGPUs for the desktop aren't really all that relevant for either AMD and NV's bottom lines, they're not major sellers. Switch sales also aren't enough to compete with combined Xbox/Playstation sales.

A lot of claims of NV's superiority is just marketing smoke and mirrors.
by antves | 2025-08-27 08:31:47+00:00
I agree, these mitigations alone can't be sufficient, but they are all necessary within a wider framework.

The only way to make this kind of agents safe is to work on every layer. Part of it is teaching the underlying model to see the dangers, part of it is building stronger critics, and part of it is hardening the systems they connect to. These aren’t alternatives, we need all of them.
by anonnon | 2025-08-27 08:32:16+00:00
> Canadian officials acknowledged these concerns — “We know that in some places in our country, it’s easier to access MAID than it is to get a wheelchair,”

Let alone a wheelchair ramp, apparently, even if you're a veteran:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...

> A paraplegic former member of the Canadian military shocked MPs on Thursday by testifying that the Department of Veterans Affairs offered her, in writing, the opportunity for a medically assisted death — and even offered to provide the equipment.

> Retired corporal Christine Gauthier, who competed for Canada at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics and the Invictus Games that same year, spoke before the House of Commons veterans committee and agreed to provide a copy of the letter.

> "With respect to me, I have a letter in my file, because I had to face that as well," said Gauthier, referring to the debate about veterans being offered the option of medical assistance in dying (MAID).

> "I have a letter saying that if you're so desperate, madam, we can offer you MAID, medical assistance in dying," said Gauthier who first injured her back in a training accident in 1989.

> Testifying in French, she said she has been fighting for a home wheelchair ramp for five years and expressed her concerns about the assisted dying offer in a recent letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
by jibal | 2025-08-27 08:32:44+00:00
P.S.

> You make the claim that AGI can exist, right?

No, I obviously never made any such claim ... all I said was "Proof?"

> I make the claim it cannot.

Which remains unsupported.

> try to not manipulate the language

Another false charge.

> I acknowledge I started this but there is not a position that is better than the other.

Again, only you made an absolute claim. Honesty is better than appalling dishonesty.
by zwnow | 2025-08-27 08:32:46+00:00
To make it clear, I am fully against these types of AI tools. At least for as long as we did not solve security issues that come with them. We are really good at shipping bullshit nobody asked for without acknowledging security concerns. Most people out there can not operate a computer. A lot of people still click on obvious scam links they've received per email. Humanity is far from being ready for more complexity and more security related issues.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-08-27 08:32:58+00:00
This bothered me too; I think it should be re-framed as a difference between different JS engines (NodeJS vs Deno) because that's what happening. TS is just a fancy way to write JavaScript after all and a lot of TS source code gets literally erased in order to obtain runnable JS. Deno has been able to execute pure JavaScript from day one while NodeJS can now also execute a subset of TS without a visible translation step, all of which makes framing NodeJS vs Deno as "JavaScript vs TypeScript" even weirder.
by thyristan | 2025-08-27 08:33:21+00:00
In the same vein one could argue that Therac-25 was not actually a software bug but a hardware problem. Interlocks, that could have prevented the accidents and that where present in earlier Therac models, were missing. The software was written with those interlocks in mind. Greedy management/hardware engineers skipped them for the -25 version.

It's almost never just software. It's almost never just one cause.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-27 08:33:46+00:00
It definitely is survivorship bias. Go and watch videos from the retrocomputing enthusiasts. There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all.

Microdrives. The Jupiter Ace. Spindle controllers. The TMS9900 processor. Bubble memory. The Transputer. The LS-120. Mattel's Aquarius. …

And while we remember that we had flip-'phones because of communicators in 1960s Star Trek we forget that we do not have the mad user interfaces of Iron Man and that bloke in Minority Report, that the nipple-slapping communicators from later Star Trek did not catch on (quelle surprise!), that dining tables with 3-D displays are not an everyday thing, …

… and that no-one, despite it being easily achievable, has given us the commlock from Space 1999. (-:

* https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114590229374309238
by benrutter | 2025-08-27 08:34:00+00:00
Interestingly, we are, and have been, at a point were you can publish applications that run on any OS for a while, with PWAs.

There are very few software examples, that couldn't be distributed as PWAs, including secure things like banking, etc. With WASM in the mix as well, theoretically the sky should be the limit.

Even more interestingly it hasn't happened - mainly because Apple and Google haven't got behind PWAs for obvious reasons, so the app ecosystem just doesn't exist. It's hard to see how this will changes, when mobile operating systems are dominated by two players, with very obvious incentives to make things worse for consumers but better for themselves, by grabbing as much control of the apps on their system as possible.
by andrepd | 2025-08-27 08:34:01+00:00
At the heart of this is the irresponsible marketing, by companies and acolytes, of these tools as some kind of superintelligence imbued with insights and feelings rather than the dumb pattern matching chatbots they are. This is what's responsible for giving laypeople the false impression that they're talking to a quasi-person (of superhuman intelligence at that).
by akomtu | 2025-08-27 08:34:02+00:00
I'd guess that the main reason Googel has done this is to prevent side-loading of messenger apps, such as Signal, with true end-to-end encryption. Such messengers would be very difficult to surveil at scale. You might ask why not to simply install these apps from Play Store? The reason is Google demands signing keys for all apps, so it can impersonate the developer, inject any spyware, rebuild the app, sign it and make it look untampered. Side-loading bypasses this entirely.
by edanm | 2025-08-27 08:34:28+00:00
If ChatGPT has helped people be saved who might otherwise have died (e.g. by offering good medical advice that saved them), are all those lives saved also something you "attribute" to OpenAI?

I don't know if ChatGPT has saved lives (thought I've read stories that claim that, yes, this happened). But assuming it has, are you OK saying that OpenAI has saved dozens/hundreds of lives? Given how scaling works, would you be OK saying that OpenAI has saved more lives than most doctors/hospitals, which is what I assume will happen in a few years?

Maybe your answer is yes to all the above! I bring this up because lots of people only want to attribute the downsides to ChatGPT but not the upsides.
by cambaceres | 2025-08-27 08:35:06+00:00
> Adam confessed that his noose setup was for a “partial hanging.” ChatGPT responded, “Thanks for being real about it. You don’t have to sugarcoat it with me—I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”

> A few hours later, Adam’s mom found her son’s body hanging from the exact noose and partial suspension setup that ChatGPT had designed for him.

Imagine being his mother going through his ChatGPT history and finding this.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-27 08:38:16+00:00
Nvidia "working" on Linux requires binary drivers that often have severe issues, especially if your mainline stable kernel is too new.

The new open source drivers that replace Novaeu aren't ready yet, and the closed source drivers had relentless drama over, first, refusal to support Wayland (after the head of Xorg, Keith Packard, officially announced the end of X development, and, second, how all future development will be for Wayland), and then trying to hijack the process with their unwanted EGLstreams API until finally relenting and supporting GBM.
by notpushkin | 2025-08-27 08:38:17+00:00
There’s a feedback form, in case anybody wants to tell Google what they think about all this: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfN3UQeNspQsZCO2ITk...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45030967
by kgwgk | 2025-08-27 08:39:26+00:00
Several people killed themselves over this: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...

One member of the development team, David McDonnell, who had worked on the Epos system side of the project, told the inquiry that “of eight [people] in the development team, two were very good, another two were mediocre but we could work with them, and then there were probably three or four who just weren’t up to it and weren’t capable of producing professional code”.

What sort of bugs resulted?

As early as 2001, McDonnell’s team had found “hundreds” of bugs. A full list has never been produced, but successive vindications of post office operators have revealed the sort of problems that arose. One, named the “Dalmellington Bug”, after the village in Scotland where a post office operator first fell prey to it, would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.

Another bug, called the Callendar Square bug – again named after the first branch found to have been affected by it – created duplicate transactions due to an error in the database underpinning the system: despite being clear duplicates, the post office operator was again held responsible for the errors.
Show HN: PageIndex – Vectorless RAG
by page_index | 2025-08-27 08:39:32+00:00
Not all improvements come from adding complexity — sometimes it's about removing it.

PageIndex takes a different approach to RAG. Instead of relying on vector databases or artificial chunking, it builds a hierarchical tree structure from documents and uses reasoning-based tree search to locate the most relevant sections. This mirrors how humans approach reading: navigating through sections and context rather than matching embeddings.

As a result, the retrieval feels transparent, structured, and explainable. It moves RAG away from approximate "semantic vibes" and toward explicit reasoning about where information lives. That clarity can help teams trust outputs and debug workflows more effectively.

The broader implication is that retrieval doesn't need to scale endlessly in vectors to be powerful. By leaning on document structure and reasoning, it reminds us that efficiency and human-like logic can be just as transformative as raw horsepower.
by t43562 | 2025-08-27 08:39:45+00:00
I don't have any great answer - you may not want to bother to read the rest! Just a couple of thoughts.

The problem I have seen with on premises is the inability to scale up. e.g. you have a server room and you don't have enough power or AC or space to add another server. You hit a problem at some point where the cost is not linear anymore - suddenly you need a new building or some bit of super expensive equipment. Since you may not be making money at the time this happens the company might get very reluctant to blow the cash to expand just to handle 5 more users and will start suggesting that the software needs some complicated change to fit the available hardware. This might turn the software into a pile of complicated crap.

In your case your customer probably thinks they have limited requirements so running it themselves is going to be no problem. It's going to be essentially a testing problem for you. For ever afterwards you will need a way to check that your system has not grown any hard dependencies on AWS and will still work in the client's setup.

Every update to the system is going to require some special consideration for that customer. You won't have their data on hand to check that your migration procedure is perfect. They may decide that they don't want your latest upgrade but that means that one day there will be a big, scary jump and you won't be able to monitor it and check that it went ok.

I think it's worth trying to ensure that you're solving the correct problem - if you simply made the effort to test your code on an alternate cloud service all the time to show that you have a recovery plan ... would that be enough to make the sale?
by wafflemaker | 2025-08-27 08:40:04+00:00
Same reason why Germany closed it's nuclear plants ahead of time or switched to burning gas in "green" propane gas-burning powerplants. Regulations.

You add tariffs and you make steel production profitable in US. China subsidizes it's electric cars industry and they can sell EVs in Europe for half the price of European cars, literally killing the market.

You subsidize renewables heavily and you get windfarms that are unprofitable once subsidizing ends.

I'm sure that in a free market situation, your comment would make lot of sense. But this is not the case and you should read up a little.

I believe that one should aim to, in spite of their political views, try to see the big picture. Like why there's so little nuclear vs sun or wind.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-27 08:40:29+00:00
Yeah this thread boils down to US vs rest-of-world confusion. Or maybe a US vs Europe confusion.

TOTP, which you say is best, is considered weak sauce outside the US. I don't know any banks that have used it for a very long time. It's not secure enough. Cheques were phased out decades ago. There are entire generations in Europe who have never even seen a cheque, let alone written one. I think the last time I had a chequebook issued it was in 2004.

IIRC the differences arise because in the US consumer legislation makes merchants liable for refunding fraudulent transactions, so banks and consumers have no incentive to improve security and merchants can't do it except via convoluted and hardly working risk analysis. It's just so easy to do chargebacks there that nobody bothers fixing the infrastructure. This pushes everyone into the arms of Amazon and the like because they have the most data for ML.

Outside the US and especially in Europe, merchants aren't liable for fraudulent transactions if they verified the credentials correctly. It's much harder to do chargebacks as a consequence. Even if a merchant delivered subpar stuff or there was some other commercial dispute, chargebacks are very hard (I tried once and the bank just refused). So liability shifts to banks, unless they can show that the transaction was authorized by the account holder and they had correct information. That means banks and merchants are incentivized to improve security, and they do.
by Maxion | 2025-08-27 08:41:25+00:00
> Personally, I've found even the latest batch of agents fairly poor at embedded systems

I mean even simple crud web apps where the data models are more complex, and where the same data has multiple structures, the LLMs get confused after the second data transformation (at the most).

E.g. You take in data with field created_at, store it as created_on, and send it out to another system as last_modified.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-27 08:41:30+00:00
Therapy isn't about being pleasant, it's about healing and strengthening and it's supposed to be somewhat unpleasant.

Colin Fraser had a good tweet about this: https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1956414662087733498#...

In a therapy session, you're actually going to do most of the talking. It's hard. Your friend is going to want to talk about their own stuff half the time and you have to listen. With an LLM, it's happy to do 99% of the talking, and 100% of it is about you.
by thrance | 2025-08-27 08:41:45+00:00
I'm all for calling out fascist behavior when it is spotted, but let's not muddy the waters further. This word is already denatured enough.

This is not fascism, this is just a rational move from Google in a market economy. It feels like every time something like this happens, Americans rediscover what capitalism is and implies, then blame it on "human nature", "greed" or "fascism".
by wqaatwt | 2025-08-27 08:41:46+00:00
The single market and tariff free trade existed long before the EU was technically a thing. I do certainly agree about east vs west, though.

I do also strongly believe that the Eurozone or a rather a monetary union without a fiscal union hasn’t been the best idea as far as south-north goes.

And then you have countries which are doing quite well despite retaining their free-floating currency.
by extraisland | 2025-08-27 08:44:10+00:00
I saw a BBC archive video about AMSTRAD. AMSTRAD owned a PC manufacturer called Viglen. In the archive the CEO of Viglen was having a video call to someone offsite presumably on what looked like Windows 3.11. This was 1995.

https://youtu.be/XX53VbgcpQ4?t=793

In the same video the salesman was selling a Pentium 75MHZ machine. So it must have run on a PC of similar specification.

People had seen the tech working in some form on TV for some time. It just wasn't mainstream.
by mlsu | 2025-08-27 08:44:15+00:00
I'm currently reading Assembling California (California resident, so I've seen all the things he discusses in the book, and wondered, like why is Half Dome so big and grey??). Like you I am rapidly developing a layman's interest in plate tectonics.

In every chapter there is a passage like this:

If you could pull up an acre of abyssal plain anywhere in the world -- lift into view a complete column of the ocean floor, from the accumulated sediments at the top to mantle rock at the base -- you would find the sheeted dikes about halfway down. In contrast to the rock columns you find all over the continents -- giddy with time gaps among lithologies of miscellaneous origin and age -- this totem assemblage from the oceans tells a generally consistent story. At its low end is peridotite, the rock of the mantle, tectonically altered in several ways on departure from the spreading center. Above the mantle rock lie the cooled remains of the great magma chamber that released flowing red rock into the spreading center. The chamber, in cooling, tends to form strata, as developing crystals settle within it like snow -- olivine, plagioclase, pyroxene snow -- but above these cumulate bands it becomes essentially a massive gabbro shading upward into plagiogranite as the magmatic juices chemically differentiate themselves in ways that relate to temperature. Just above the granites are the sheeted dikes of diabase, which keep filling the rift between the diverging plates. Above the sheeted dikes, where the fluid rock actually entered the sea, the suddenly chilled extrusions are piled high, like logs outside a sawmill. Because these extrusions have convex ends that bulge smoothly and resemble pillows, they are known in geology as pillow lavas. Above the pillows are the various sediments that have drifted downward through the deep sea -- umbers, ochres, cherts, chalk. Unlike the rest of the crust-and-mantle package, the sediments may hint at the surrounding world.

...

This guy basically writes in a way that transforms the book I am holding in front of my face, physically into a rock. Like some kind of magic trick. He clearly had so much fun writing this, it's amazing and very fun... if rocks tickle you even a little bit this book is worth reading.
by moomin | 2025-08-27 08:45:17+00:00
Problem is, when people start to analyse things like this, even apart from falling into utilitarian traps, they don’t apply regular business reasoning.

There’s a bunch of effects to consider 1) improving lives right now may well improve subsequent generations lives directly 2) your future project may have a higher failure rate than your current one 3) the problems you are trying to solve may no longer be relevant in the future 4) you could be very wrong about future population growth.

All of this boils down to: you should be risk-discounting future benefits just the same way as you do future cash flows.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-27 08:45:18+00:00
It must have been around 15 years ago I first noticed birds singing in the dead of night near street lights. Light pollution is up there with noise pollution as my least favourite things about living in a society. Both seem to be mostly due to cars as it happens. It's kind of absurd that we talk about energy saving etc. but light up entire damn streets all through the night for no reason.