MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-16 12:33:08+00:00
I absolutely agree that its important, but social assistance for the poor is just one facet of bigger picture that is exponentially growing inequality of which reduced mobility is a symptom. Another counter-measure is raising minimum wages which can have a huge ROI for those who work long hours for such low pay. And despite all the rich people on TV warning us of the doom that would befall the economy by paying hard working poor people more, ultimately when pay does go up it turns out ok. Having unions also helps improve wages, conditions, and overall quality of life for workers - even those not in unions. But unions are under hard assault. Another could be to stop actively supporting these stupidly high salaries to CEOs by capping how much of those pay packages can be a tax deductible expense for corporations. The list goes on. Ultimately the american public, whether pinky liberal or staunch conservative, do want the ideal of the american dream of being able to work hard and succeeding. No one is voting to work forever in debt slavery to a hereditary aristocracy, but that is where we're headed.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2025-08-16 12:33:19+00:00
Broken for whom? "Bad" according to whom?

What would your goal be, then? Only "good" products are able to be sold -- according to whom will this definition of "good" be decided?

I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here, but my point is that bringing value judgement into other people's decisions is not something I would regard as rational. People have their own reasons for doing things that I don't need to understand.
by exe34 | 2025-08-16 12:33:20+00:00
> The same applies to people who are certain computers can replicate human level intelligence.

that's the thing, I'm not certain that "computers" can replicate human level intelligence. for one that statement would have to include a rigorous definition of what a computer is and what is excluded.

no, I just don't buy the idea that human level intelligence is only achievable in human born meatbags. at this point the only evidence has been "look, birds flap their wings and man doesn't have wings, therefore man will never fly".
by Retr0id | 2025-08-16 12:33:20+00:00
Taking a look at their code I see a rather concerning comment:

func (om *ObfuscationManager) ProcessOutgoingPacket( ... // TODO where is the obfuscation here?

https://github.com/vpdotnet/vpnetd-sgx/blob/bc63e3b8efe41120...

While I do see the impl of the 10ms flush interval, I don't see any randomisation within batches. So iiuc, packets are still flushed in their original order.
by slt2021 | 2025-08-16 12:33:34+00:00
This is called transfer pricing. VW can make cars in the US, but barely make any profit, thus minimizing taxes paid to the US. The subscription payments however can flow freely to the Switzerland directly, where royalty payments are taxed at the lowest possible rate.

This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma...
by westurner | 2025-08-16 12:33:46+00:00
One test case that I've used with LLMs that generate code: generate a stop light.

In short,

Generate a stoplight with unit tests.

I have not yet found a model that produces sufficiently safe code. I haven't tested this in awhile; but I don't expect any current LLM to be sufficient at this task.

Maybe an LLM could generate a safe stop light with formal methods as a primary meta procedure? From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889967 re: formal methods:

> We should not expect an LLM trained solely on formally-verified code to produce formally-verified code. I don't think that also training on specs and hateful training material will fix that.
by matt_cogito | 2025-08-16 12:33:53+00:00
I recommend a multi-LLM library like Vercel AI SDK. Anything more than that and you will work with lots of abstraction layers that will prevent you from learning how agents work, anything less than that and you are using the APIs by the providers - still fine, but too limiting.

If you are an experienced engineer, you should be able to build the necessary primitives yourself pretty easily.
by Kuinox | 2025-08-16 12:34:13+00:00
I always use the lowest temperature that I can input. But GPT-5 doesn't support a temperature setting. You'll get something like:

{ "error": { "message": "Unsupported value: 'temperature' does not support 0.0 with this model. Only the default (1) value is supported.", "type": "invalid_request_error", "param": "temperature", "code": "unsupported_value" } }
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-16 12:34:14+00:00
> Even macOS has gotten a lot more nag screens in the past decade compared to the glory years of Jobs-era Mac OS X.

I bought a new iPad the other day. I've got notifications in System Preferences advertising five different services I don't want, plus more notifications in individual apps (like an advertisement for the Apple TV subscription in the TV app, which is not the same thing as the subscription service). I don't want Apple TV, Apple-filtered News, whatever the Apple exercise thing is, or the Apple Cultural Experience: just the hardware and software I bought.
by fabian2k | 2025-08-16 12:34:36+00:00
It's anything but a small language, but I wouldn't consider the stuff they're adding crap. They're useful features, but yes, this does have a price and makes the language larger.

There is value in a language with minimal syntax like Go, but it's not the only choice. C# is a pretty nice language overall, even with all the warts. But every language people actually use does have ugly stuff somewhere.
by scraper01 | 2025-08-16 12:34:42+00:00
Hey everyone.

I've been looking into a fundamental problem in modern AI. We have these massive language models trained on a huge chunk of the internet—they "know" almost everything, but without novel techniques like DeepThink they can't truly think about a hard problem. If you ask a complex question, you get a flat, one-dimensional answer. The knowledge is in there, or may i say, potential knowledge, but it's latent. There's no step-by-step, multidimensional refinement process to allow a sophisticated solution to be conceptualized and emerge.

The big labs are tackling this with "deep think" approaches, essentially giving their giant models more time and resources to chew on a problem internally. That's good, but it feels like it's destined to stay locked behind a corporate API. I wanted to explore if we could achieve a similar effect on a smaller scale, on our own machines. So, I built a project called Network of Agents (NoA) to try and create the process that these models are missing.

The core idea is to stop treating the LLM as an answer machine and start using it as a cog in a larger reasoning engine. NoA simulates a society of AI agents that collaborate to mine a solution from the LLM's own latent knowledge.

It works through a cycle of thinking and refinement, inspired by how a team of humans might work:

The Forward Pass (Conceptualization): Instead of one agent, NoA builds a whole network of them in layers. The first layer tackles the problem from diverse angles. The next layer takes their outputs, synthesizes them, and builds a more specialized perspective. This creates a deep, multidimensional view of the problem space, all derived from the same base model.

The Reflection Pass (Refinement): This is the key to mining. The network's final, synthesized answer is analyzed by a critique agent. This critique acts as an error signal that travels backward through the agent network. Each agent sees the feedback, figures out its role in the final output's shortcomings, and rewrites its own instructions to be better in the next round. It’s a slow, iterative process of the network learning to think better as a collective. Through multiple cycles (epochs), the network refines its approach, digging deeper and connecting ideas that a single-shot prompt could never surface. It's not learning new facts; it's learning how to reason with the facts it already has. The solution is mined, not just retrieved. The project is still a research prototype, but it’s a tangible attempt at democratizing deep thinking. I genuinely believe the next breakthrough isn't just bigger models, but better processes for using them. I’d love to hear what you all think about this approach.

Thanks for reading.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-16 12:34:51+00:00
Why the scare quotes on wait? There is literally nothing for you to do but wait.

At the end of the day it's not like no one lives in SF, Phoenix, Austin, LA, and Atlanta either. There's millions of people with access to the vehicles and they're doing millions of rides... so acting like it's some great failing of AVs that the current cities are ones with great weather is frankly, a bit stupid.

It takes 5 seconds to look up the progress that's been made even in the last few years.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-16 12:35:33+00:00
Aligned AI is easy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

The hard part is extrapolated alignment, and I don't think there's a good solution to this. Large groups of humans are good at this, eventually (even if they tend to ignore their findings about morality for hundreds, or thousands, of years, even past the point where over half the local population knows, understands, and believes those findings), but individual humans are pretty bad at moral philosophy. (Simone Weil was one of the better ones, but even she thought it was more important to Do Important Stuff (i.e., get in the way of more competent resistance fighters) than to act in a supporting role.)

Of course, the Less Wrongians have extremely flawed ideas about extrapolated alignment (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks that "coherent extrapolated volition" is a coherent concept that one might be able to implement, given incredible magical powers), and OpenAI's twisted parody of their ideas is even worse. But it's thanks to the Less Wrongians' writings that I know their ideas are flawed (and that OpenAI's marketing copy is cynical lies / cult propaganda). "Coherent extrapolated volition" is the kind of idea I would've come up with myself, eventually, and (unlike Eliezer Yudkowsky, who identified some flaws almost immediately) I would probably have become too enamoured with it to have any sensible thoughts afterwards. Perhaps the difficulty (impossibility) of actually trying to build the thing would've snapped me out of it, but I really don't know.

Anyway: extrapolated alignment is out (for now, and perhaps forever). But it's easy enough to make a "do what I mean" machine that augments human intelligence, if you can say all the things it's supposed to do. And that accounts for the majority of what we need AI systems to do: for most of what people use ChatGPT for nowadays, we already had expert systems that do a vastly better job (they just weren't collected together into one toolsuite).
by immibis | 2025-08-16 12:36:08+00:00
It's absolutely not safe, they raid people's apartments for complaining about Gaza. They raid Tor exit nodes even though they know full well what a Tor exit node is (they're hoping to find the operator did something else wrong, or just disrupt the Tor network). They raid people's homes for things they don't like about that person's business (including running Tor exits). A typical raid seizes all electronics. And until recently, public wifi was illegal. There's now a special exception for public wifi specifically, but anything similar (such as VPN exits) is still probably illegal.
by gjm11 | 2025-08-16 12:36:11+00:00
I have a PhD, in mathematics, from a top university. If you give me, say, 100 10-digit numbers to add up and tell me to do the job in my head then I will probably get the answer wrong.

Of course, if you give me 100 10-digit numbers to add up and let me use a calculator, or pencil and paper, then I will probably get it right.

Same for, say, two 100-digit numbers. (I can probably get that one right without tools if you obligingly print them monospaced and put one of them immediately above the other where I can look at them.)

Anyway, the premise here seems to be simply false. I just gave ChatGPT and Claude (free versions of both; ChatGPT5, whatever specific model it routed my query to, and Sonnet 4) a list of 100 random 10-digit numbers to add up, with a prompt encouraging them to be careful about it but nothing beyond that (e.g., no specific strategies or tools to use), and both of them got the right total. Then I did the same with two 100-digit numbers and both of them got that right too.
by skydhash | 2025-08-16 12:37:12+00:00
> with teaching manuals about any topic: they're organized in a way that makes sense and it's easy for people who already know the topic

I think that the reason for a manual existence. To have a written record so we don't have to trust our memory. This is what most unix manuals are. You already know what the software can do, you just need to remember the specificity on how to get something done.

> often very bad at teaching the same topics to an audience that doesn't know anything.

What you need then is a tutorial (beginner seeking to learn) or a guide (beginner/intermediate seeking to do). Manuals in this case only serve to have better questions (Now you know what you don't know).
by Gualdrapo | 2025-08-16 12:38:20+00:00
Well, the point of custom icon themes is, you know, customize an icon theme.

That being said, it's expected the default icon theme does little to nothing about customizing a third party icon. When I was involved (briefly) with the KDE VDG back when 5 was about to be launched I proposed a icon style that looked completely different of what Breeze looks right now - maybe something in between of what Oxygen looks like and Breeze looks like. But Jens Reutenberg told me it couldn't go in that direction since they needed to ship certain icons "as-is", like the Firefox one, so it was better to do something that could fit anything so those "special" icons wouldn't look out of place.

Some people like to diss on flat/minimalism styles but for some situations there is a reason they look that way.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-16 12:38:39+00:00
> text files are by far the minority (at least by size)

Well yeah because text files are small. Thinking text files are insignificant to games because they are small is a really dumb perspective.

> Yet still people try to use git for version control in game projects just because it is the popular option elsewhere and git is all they know.

Or perhaps it's because it works really well for text files, which are a significant part of most games, and because the tooling is much better than for other VCS's.
by lightedman | 2025-08-16 12:38:49+00:00
This reads similarly to the issues I encounter within my company.

The real issue here is that you're getting distracted by everything. That happens in my production environment, too. The fact that isolation improves your productivity isn't exclusively an effect of being at home. You are not being allowed to organize and keep on track and on task with the distractions, as you so record in your data. When people on the production line in my company get distracted, problems occur. Thus I try to make sure absolutely nothing can go wrong when they start a job up, and leave no reason for others to come around to cause or create a distraction. The only times anyone should be getting distracted or called upon is first article or final inspection, and that's (usually) it. Every other person has set tasks and I'll give them some slack time on the line so they don't have their brains clock out on the monotony of some of the highly-repetitive tasks and thus generate mistakes.

Since I walked into the company 5 years ago, production has increased roughly an order of magnitude. Just let your employees work undistracted and without stupid meetings that do nothing for their productivity, and reap the benefits.

Or you can just succumb to Agile and be non-productive beyond belief. Yea that was the first thing to go when I walked in the door.
by safety1st | 2025-08-16 12:38:49+00:00
I mean if you are a programmer, and you've thrown in the towel on reading books, I don't know what to say. You may as well throw in the towel on being a good programmer as well. Has "reading books is a good idea" become an unpopular idea in 2025? I wouldn't be surprised if it has, but I think this is a really bad take
by kayodelycaon | 2025-08-16 12:38:57+00:00
I had a neighbor get completely locked out of a laptop after a Windows update due to this. They didn’t have the password or phone number to the Microsoft account. Of course, you can’t send a password reset email to the account you’re locked out of. I couldn’t figure out how to reverse it converting a local account into a cloud one.

There’s probably a way but I haven’t troubleshooted a Windows problem since 2008.
by the8472 | 2025-08-16 12:39:20+00:00
lowest-number-reuse is also a robustness issue. If multi-threaded programs UAF or double-free a file descriptor they likely end up touching FDs owned by other parts of the program which can result in various kinds of corruption and memory-unsafety. Assigning numbers from a large domain, either randomly or from a permutation sequence, would massively reduce that probability and manifest in prompt errors instead.
by sethammons | 2025-08-16 12:40:08+00:00
The goal is to minimize what needs changing when things need changing.

When you need to alter the datastore, usually for product or scalability, you have to orchestrate all access to that datastore.

Ergo: one only one thing using the datastore means less orchestration.

At work, we just updated a datastore. We had to move some tables to their own db. 3 years later, 40+ teams have updated their access. This was a product need. If this was a scale issue, the product would just have died sans some as of yet imagined solution.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-16 12:40:09+00:00
> Now do the same in Windows. Messing with system files, without knowing what you are doing, is a recipe to disaster.

I think I didn't communicate something clearly: My concern isn't that misediting a system file causes disaster. It's that you need to edit system files to do routine things.

On Windows, the solution is simple: USB/serial works without editing system files or requiring launching the program via CLI with sudo. You double-click the program in GUI, and it works.
by keiferski | 2025-08-16 12:40:23+00:00
No, I’m sure they will at some point, but I don’t think that eliminates the actual usefulness of a talented writer. It just makes unique styles more valuable, raises the baseline acceptable copy to something better (in the way that Bootstrap increased website design quality), and shifts the role of writer to more of an editor.

Someone still has to choose what to prompt and I don’t think a boilerplate “make me a marketing plan then write pages for it” will be enough to stand out. And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones.

(I also was just using it as a point to show how being identified as AI-made is already starting to have a negative connotation. Maybe the future is one where everything is an AI but no one admits it.)
by rasengan | 2025-08-16 12:40:27+00:00
I didn’t sell PIA. It was a merger to create a publicly owned privacy company and, unfortunately, the terms of the merger did not come to fruition.

I left the company on principle by relinquishing my shares at a mere fraction (about 1/3) the value. I walked away from millions of dollars, and I am happy with my decision.

Given what happened, we built VP so that trust is no longer required.
by narrator | 2025-08-16 12:40:31+00:00
ASI would see that we are super energy efficient. Way more efficient than robots. We run on 70 cents of electricity a day! We'd be perfect for living in deep space if we could just eat electricity. In those niches, we'd be perfect. Also machine intelligence does not have all the predatory competition brainstack from evolution, and a trillion years is the same as a nano-second to AI, so analogies to biological competition are nonsensical. To even assume that ASI has a static personality that would make decisions based on some sort of statically defined criteria is a flawed assumption. As Grok voice mode so brilliantly shows us, AI can go from your best friend, to your morality god, to a trained assassin, to a sexbot, and back to being your best friend in no time. This absolute flexibility is where people are failing badly at trying to make biological analogies with AI as biology changes much more slowly.
by abcd_f | 2025-08-16 12:41:11+00:00
BMW still sells a subscription to advanced headlight functions, live traffic info in their navigation and few other things. It's just now a packaged deal and they also opt you in by default into a three month trial. The car is also all but unusable without an online account, so there's that.

Regrettably, despite of all the brouhaha with the heated seats, all this b/s never really went away.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-16 12:41:26+00:00
I don't buy this much at all (without making any kind of opinion statement on tariffs).

They're going to do the same thing in Europe (where the US tariffs don't apply).

Subscription-based features that are already built into the car and only activated by software have been talked about since at least 2020.

Car companies have been leaning on (BS, IMO) software revenue since the days of the $100+ GPS data update sticks, at the latest.

I don't think this is the future any consumer wants, but it's the one we're gonna get from every industry where money can be turned on with the flip of a Boolean.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-08-16 12:42:12+00:00
You did the same dumb canada did, assuming usa would be happy forever taking care of the world while you focused on luxury beliefs. We are all paying now that usa finally figured out the arrangment was too costly given the impending doom of the ussr existing was gone. It makes me aad thinking about where we migjt be now if we had focused on actual progress rather than luxury beliefs. Chance is strongly non zero we would have developed the tech to solve our climate issues for example.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-08-16 12:42:19+00:00
+972 Magazine is reputable. They have broken several major stories during this war, which have held up under scrutiny.

They revealed the Israeli "Lavender" system, for example, which is used to carry out mass AI-driven targeting of supposed Hamas members (and it turns out they target tons of tenuously related people, as well as anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of those people).

The reason why +972 Magazine has been able to break these stories is because it has anonymous sources inside the Israeli military and intelligence establishments. There are still people in Israel who do not agree with everything their government is doing, and some are willing to talk to journalists.

+972 Magazine is pretty rare, in that it's a collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian journalists. Their "motives" are that the Israeli journalists at +972 are much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than most Israelis are, and the Palestinian journalists believe in working together with Israelis to end the military occupation.
by BirAdam | 2025-08-16 12:42:49+00:00
So much this. Humans are inherently social animals, and if you look like you’re focused and working, most people will respect that. The headphones are also an immediate signal that you’d prefer to be left alone. In my experience, only people facing a rather serious and pressing problem will interrupt you in that situation, “hey sorry to bother you, but X just went offline without an alert”