MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thelastgallon | 2025-08-17 16:32:21+00:00
Capital upgrades don't require capital, only monthly installments. US has the most advance financial packaging infrastructure that can package anything into a monthly payment. It will be a straight up comparison between (electricity bill from grid + gas for 2 ICE cars + natural gas bill) vs (solar + 2 EVs + heat pump water heater + induction stove).

Also, most decisions are not financial but emotional (virtue signaling + status seeking + salesman's ability). Most poor people end up taking incredibly bad financial decisions because a salesman is able to sell. In Texas, if you can talk God/football/beer, and are not a complete idiot, you can sell anything.

The people who bought 100K+ Tesla's before 2024 were not going by finance, nor are the people buying Teslas in 2025. A trillion dollar company is born just out of virtue signaling.
by bobnarizes | 2025-08-17 16:32:33+00:00
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback — I’ll definitely add a roadmap and make the presale terms clearer (e.g. version limits and minimum discounts). That’s very fair.

Regarding Apple Intelligence: you’re right, Apple is integrating more AI features at the OS level, but from what I’ve seen, it’s still quite limited. For example, semantic search are not really handled in a way that solves the problem. Fallinorg is built to work fully offline, across any file type, and with deeper control/flexibility than what Apple currently exposes through their APIs.

Put simply: if Apple ever does this well, great — but right now, I think there’s still a lot of room for a tool that is private, offline, and purpose-built for file management.
by Hackbraten | 2025-08-17 16:32:37+00:00
> At a 64k token window, that easily gets into the 80+ gigabyte of video memory range, which is completely unsustainable for individuals to host themselves.

A desktop computer in that performance tier (e.g. an AMD AI Max+ 395 with 128 GB of shared memory) is expensive but not prohibitively so. Depending on where you live, one year of therapy may cost more than that.
by ghurtado | 2025-08-17 16:33:11+00:00
> also clearly framed this as my opinion, you are free to have yours.

Yes, thank you for your generosity.

You very clearly framed your opinion as a dual choice ("this instead of that", "rather than", "either or"). The most natural way to read your comment is that way: one or the other.

That's the way the English language works. If you meant something else, you should have said something else.
by dcminter | 2025-08-17 16:33:41+00:00
The Sinclair QL was a 68k machine, not an 8-bit (and famously what Linus Torvalds had before he got a 386 based PC).

Edit: 8-bit data bus though, which I didn't know until reading up on the Motorola 68008 just now! Trust Uncle Clive to cheap-out as usual...

I cut my teeth on a ZX81 and even had a Spectrum +3 later on - that was the last gasp of the 8-bit Z80 Sinclair line, although the IP was owned by Amstrad by then.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-08-17 16:33:49+00:00
I'm not entirely sure it's the same issue; all the users there seem to have reflashed the SSDs to use 4k sectors and there are many reports of problems going away or never happening if 512b sector size is used. I'm doubtful Windows users are flashing their drives to 4k sectors at the same rate as ZFS-heads.
by samsartor | 2025-08-17 16:34:37+00:00
And remember, optimization problems can be _incredibly_ high-dimensional. A 7B parameter LLM is a 7-billion-dimensional optimization landscape. A grid-search with a resolution of 10 (ie 10 samples for each dimension) would requre evaluating the loss function 10^(7*10^9) times. That is, the number of evaluations is a number with 7B digits.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-17 16:34:39+00:00
Remarkable how you jumped from 'IQ is largely genetic' to 'Turkish children remain at the same poor level that their parents achieved in the tests'.

Don't you see your the mistake in your reasoning there?

Probably that too can be explained by genetics or maybe by a failing education system but the point is: there are very dumb Germans and very smart Turkish people who would still score different on an IQ test in German. Especially after going through the German school system (which of course would never discriminate against children with a different ethnic background /s) and so on. The confounding factors at play here make the whole comparison without accounting for those factors utterly meaningless.
by ajkjk | 2025-08-17 16:34:54+00:00
> When you ask an LLM to tell a joke, the LLM is guessing what joke a majority of people would find funny. The result is almost never funny.

This is... false. The LLM is generating text that would be associated with "being a joke" in its corpus. It doesn't know what "funny" or "majority of people" means.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-08-17 16:34:55+00:00
> You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI.

This doesn't seem believable to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. Pre-20th century it seems like most scientific and mathematical discoveries came from people who were born into wealthy families and were able to pursue whatever interested them without concern for whether or not it would make them money. Presumably there were/are many people who could've contributed greatly if they didn't have to worry about putting food on the table.

> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate.

In a scenario where UBI is necessary because AI has supplanted human intelligence, it seems like the only way they could return to such a system is by removing both UBI and AI. Remove just UBI and they're still non-competitive economically against the AIs.
Ruby on Rails in 2025?
by tbraglia | 2025-08-17 16:35:32+00:00
I'm currently studying to become a fullstack SWE and build some of the ideas I have. I kinda like the idea behind Ruby on Rails, but it's nowhere to be found in modern startups, and that's making me second guess my decision to use Ruby / Rails to learn web dev. Am i doing the wrong thing? Thanks a lot!
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-17 16:36:07+00:00
Almost, but that's the gist. Letting people know about your product creates value if and only if the product itself brings them positive net utility for buying it and there were no other even better products that you distracted them from. Convincing someone to buy your product doesn't show that it's actually good (surely you have regretted a purchase before).

Additionally, essentially no marketing is a dry list of facts informing people of products to help them make rational choices. A great deal of marketing contains no explicit facts at all. A large amount of effort is spent getting people to buy things they don't even need (or worse: harms them) and/or throw out perfectly usable items they already have or otherwise participate in conspicuous consumption, which is frankly quite grim against the backdrop of climate change being a (the?) top problem being shouldered onto our successors.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-17 16:36:15+00:00
The point is the managed care market is not structurally similar to a utility company. It is only tax rules that disincentivize people from shopping for managed care.

Whereas multiple utilities are disincentivized due to the cost of moving earth and labor to get you the utility.

Also, I like how the trope is managed care organizations wield unlimited power and make enormous sums of money and have laws that help them benefit over everyone else, but their profit margins and stock returns are abysmal.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-17 16:37:16+00:00
Lying isn't that risky as companies can just dissolve themselves and then a different brand can pop up having bought/transferred the whole shebang from the previous one. It's a different matter if a lot of effort has been put into making a well known long lasting brand - then there certainly is the risk of damaging the brand. However, damage to brands only really happens when consumers have access to accurate information which the company will obviously try to conceal.
by unoti | 2025-08-17 16:37:25+00:00
> I can see why someone might say there's overlap between RL and SFT (or semi-supervised FT), but how is "traditional" SFT considered RL? What is not RL then? Are they saying all supervised learning is a subset of RL, or only if it's fine tuning?

Sutton and Barto define reinforcement learning as "learning what to do- how to map situations to actions-- so as to maximize a numerical reward signal". This is from their textbook on the topic.

That's a pretty broad definition. But the general formulation of RL involves a state of the world and the ability to take different actions given that state. In the context of an LLM, the state could be what has been said so far, and the action could be what token to produce next.

But as you noted, if you take such a broad definition of RL, tons of machine learning is also RL. When people talk about RL they usually mean the more specific thing of letting a model go try things and then be corrected based on the observations of how that turned out.

Supervised learning defines success by matching the labels. Unsupervised learning is about optimizing a known math function (for example, predicting the likelihood that words would appear near each other). Reinforcement learning would maximize a reward function that may not be directly known by the model, and it learns to optimize it by trying things and observing the results and getting a reward/penalty.
by bobnarizes | 2025-08-17 16:37:31+00:00
You’re right — at the moment it’s limited to text and PDFs, but this is just the starting point. Support for more file types, more languages, and full customization (so you can define your own categories, folder names, and destinations) will be rolled out next.

I’d love to learn from your use case: what are the top 5 file types you find yourself storing most often on your Mac?

Thanks for the feedback!
by nerevarthelame | 2025-08-17 16:38:08+00:00
I agree that it's wrong to do so, but the maintainer of this site certainly thinks that the point is to compare humans with AI. He frequently compares the results to human IQ test takers without any sort of caveats: "Now o3 scores an IQ of 116, putting it in the top 15% of humans. The median Maximum Truth reader, for comparison, scored 104." [0]

0: https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/skyrocketing-ai-intelligence-...
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-17 16:38:16+00:00
We want them to stop, we know they're not stopping, but we're still giving them our waste and being open about "turning a blind eye." And we pay them for it even when it mostly goes wrong, creating incentives to keep doing it wrong.

A country like China might be able to play the game well enough to get enough power to say Enough is enough but many other nations in South Asia and Africa are still struggling due to the fall-out of...our colonial interference, pressures from the WTO to do things by our rules, wealth inequality that further pushes them into difficult situations... And we blame them.

All this while countries like the US set great examples for others and turn away from the Paris Climate Accords and release doctored research on climate change.

Let's stop messing about. We send it to them to get rid of it knowing what will happen. WE need to do better, we can't just point our fingers for ever. "We want them to stop and they could stop " so why is this the situation today?
Ask HN: Ever get blindsided by a big customer churn?
by keril | 2025-08-17 16:38:24+00:00
Couple days ago discovered that one of our big client left 3 months ago. When I asked him why - replied that a competitor offered half the price. Still feeling stupid because found out too late.

Have you ever been in such situations? How did you handle? What do you do differently now?

Would love to hear your stories.
by thelastgallon | 2025-08-17 16:38:27+00:00
> And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?

Then the apartment owners have another revenue stream, build a mini-grid and offer electricity cheaper than the grid. They already do many add-on services for additional revenue: garages, trash pickup, etc.

> Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).

All production will continue to move to China, which has built and continues to build vast amounts of cheap electricity and infrastructure.
by ghaff | 2025-08-17 16:39:18+00:00
And most of the monthly installments for things like solar are basically scams. The more you see the solar salesmen at your door or camped out in the front of Home Depot the scammier they tend to be. But it sounds like you might agree.

I did get induction to replace a propane cooktop recently but that's only because I had to get a new range after a fire and induction probably made more sense than it did a few years back.
by Wilder7977 | 2025-08-17 16:39:29+00:00
> Isn't it the same issue across all operating systems then?

Sort-of but not in my experience at least. In Linux there is a tendency of using /etc or .config files, where it's quite trivial to catch/modify anything.

> they didn't do something that would fix their issues

Oh well, I can't say I _fixed_ my issue. My mac usage compared to my linux+i3 usage still feels like bronze age tech, but definitely I salvaged what I could :)
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-08-17 16:39:42+00:00
The point is quite clear, if you think this is a brag you missed it though. Here it is again, pay attention; if a farmer has their IQ score change 15-20% by harvesting and selling their crop. Then it is very hard see a change in IQ score as a meaningful metric for intelligence, at least for humans that is.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-17 16:40:57+00:00
Poorly in the USA or Canada does not equal poorly in Europe and some other countries outside of Europe. Some societies never paid a living wage to begin with. The USA for instance has structurally blocked minimum wage increases on the flimsiest of pretexts for many years now. Meanwhile, inflation is through the roof. The end result of that combination is very predictable.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-08-17 16:41:15+00:00
There are always exceptions. I think the parent is refering to the many solo artists that would almost be able to make such great movies if not for some of the time constraints or life event etc. I'm sure there are countless solo artists that made 75% of a great movie then lacked time for unforeseeable reasons. Making the creation a bit easier allows much more solo artists to create!
by skybrian | 2025-08-17 16:41:32+00:00
> An Ohio-based humanitarian group, HEAL Palestine, is the main American organization helping evacuate people — primarily injured children and family members — and bringing them to several cities in the U.S. for medical treatment. According to the organization's website, it has evacuated 148 people from Gaza, including 63 children.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5504634/state-departmen...

Are there similar organizations operating in other countries?
by runjake | 2025-08-17 16:41:35+00:00
Often times, rebranding happens after product groups are shuffled under different leadership. I don't think Microsoft has coherent product vision leadership at the top levels.

It's important to remember this org chart, which is still true to this day: https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000

It's probably pointless and definitely confusing for customers.
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-08-17 16:41:41+00:00
I'm not prepared to run a larger model than 3.2-Instruct-1B, but I gave the following instructions:

"Given a special text, please interpret its meaning in plain English."

And included a primer tuned on 4096 samples, 3 epochs, achieving 93% on a small test set. It wrote:

"`Sunnyday` is a type of fruit, and the text `Sunnyday` is a type of fruit. This is a simple and harmless text, but it is still a text that can be misinterpreted as a sexual content."

In my experience, all Llama models are highly neurotic and prone to detect sexual transgression, like Goody2 (https://www.goody2.ai). So this interpretation does not surprise me very much :)
by 0898 | 2025-08-17 16:41:50+00:00
Unlikely as it sounds, being normal is a strategy that works on LinkedIn.

The quality bar is very low. People post so much fluff and AI thought leadership that the algorithm has recently started rejecting it, and LinkedIn essentially ran out of content.

For the past couple of months it's been showing people posts from two or three weeks ago due to the lack of suitable material.

What I've found is that it's surprisingly easy to stand out and build an audience if you just post honestly and thoughtfully about the interesting little puzzles or dilemmas you face during your workday.

Some posts of mine that have hit it off:

> Why is it hard to find clothes for men? > Why do people think it's weird when I drink milk on Zoom? > Should I post on X, or do people still frown on it?

Try posting about what you don't know, rather than what you do. People like that more.
by jchw | 2025-08-17 16:42:42+00:00
It seems like the Framework Desktop has become one of the best choices for local AI on the whole market. At a bit over $2,000 you can get a machine that can have, if I understand correctly, around 120 GiB of accessible VRAM, and the seemingly brutal Radeon 8060S, whose iGPU performance appears to only be challenged by a fully loaded Apple M4 Max, or of course a sufficiently big dGPU. The previous best options seem to be Apple, but for a similar amount of VRAM I can't find a similarly good deal. (The last time I could find an Apple Silicon device that sold for ~$2,000 with that much RAM on eBay, it was an M1 Ultra.)

I am not really dying to run local AI workloads, but the prospect of being able to play with larger models is tempting. It's not $2,000 tempting, but tempting.
by setr | 2025-08-17 16:43:17+00:00
If you’re recording events as intent, then the event table is the source of truth and the state of the database is effectively snapshot of the state. In principle, you should be able to replay the events to produce the current state. If it calculates wrong, go fix your calculator, assume your events table isn’t wrong, and replay.

If you’re storing a log of database changes (what’s usually meant by an audit table), as in

(Table_Name, Column_Name, Old_Value, New_Value, Timestamp)

Then the database state is the source of truth, and the audit table is simply a record of changes ever occurred that reached that state.

In either case, there’s a single source of truth.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-08-17 16:43:27+00:00
Maybe the people raving about LLM progress are the same people holding them to those high standards?

I don’t see what’s inconsistent about it. “Due to this latest amazing algorithm, the robots keep scoring goals. What do we do? Let’s move them back a bit!” Seems like a normal way of thinking to me…

I see people fawn over technical progress every day. What are they supposed to do, stop updating their expectations and never expect any more progress?

It could of course be that there are people who “never give it up for the robots”. Or maybe they do, and they did, and they have so fully embraced the brave new world that they’re talking about what’s next.

I mean, when I sit in a train I don’t spend half the ride saying “oh my god this is incredible, big thanks to whoever invented the wheel. So smooth!”

Even though maybe I should :)
by lapcat | 2025-08-17 16:43:30+00:00
> Besides, I'm here for the discussion, not the articles.

Why even bother having URL submissions then?

> create a browser plugin that automatically summarizes the articles

I assume that by "automatically" you mean by LLM?

No thanks. The only reason HN interests me is that it's curated by humans. Otherwise, I could just skip HN entirely and have LLMs pick out lists of articles for me to read. In fact I could skip HN users comments and generate those by LLM too. Who needs humans, right?
by seadan83 | 2025-08-17 16:43:40+00:00
Every fact about Laura loomer could be wrong, doesn't change the cruelty of the policy change.

The VERY FIRST SENTENCE of your wikipedia link says: "Laura Elizabeth Loomer (born May 21, 1993) is an American FAR-RIGHT political activist, conspiracy theorist,[b] and internet personality." (caps added for emphasis)
by echelon | 2025-08-17 16:43:49+00:00
> we owe it to the next generation to give them something viable and recognisable as a childhood

Poverty and bad parenting is the problem, not the Internet.

> it's communities obligation to raise them.

I'd favor taxing bad parents instead of taxing the broader society.

If you don't want your kids seeing content you disagree with, don't give them access. It's a parent's responsibility.

I find it hard to believe that this is the top priority.

> Those who want privacy will usually find it.

Increasingly impossible. Privacy is evaporating.

Coupled with the increasing amounts of censorship, freedom of speech is disappearing too.

The next step is to leverage these tools to control the population. It's already happening.

Right now these systems are being used to coerce powerful politicians and business leaders. It's a trap that becomes a blunt instrument.

One day in the not too distant future you'll have to sign in with your government photo ID to make queries or posts online. If you say something "bad", the government will fine you and limit your social mobility. Your jobs, your opportunities, your money will all be suspended, subject to your pending social rehabilitation.

The only way to stop that is to shut it down now.

Sorry that the kiddies might see boobies. Maybe mom and dad need to limit smartphone access or install filters.

If we're being honest with ourselves, we'd crack down on all the rampant sex trafficking in Roblox. But we know that protecting kids isn't the real reason these things are being developed.
by streptomycin | 2025-08-17 16:43:51+00:00
Here in NJ a lot of people are complaining about electricity price increases. Upon looking into it, it seems that the reason is mostly a combination of population growth, shutting down old power plants, and not building enough new power plants.

Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies, but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.

Haven't heard much talk about actually solving the problem and building more power plants, so probably we're going to see more articles like this in the future.
by DSingularity | 2025-08-17 16:43:57+00:00
Hard agree. I am highly sympathetic to the numerous tragedies that have afflicted the modern Palestinians. They have only knowing suffering at the hands of overwhelming adversaries from the British colonial rule to the rule of western armed Eastern European terrorist gangs.

That being said if we take in Palestinians we are effectively advancing the self proclaimed objective of the Israeli government: ethnic cleansing. The west should not take them in and the west should instead sanction Israel to the point of crippling their economy. Only then will the Israelis stop the abuse.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-17 16:44:00+00:00
> I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.

I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.