MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creata | 2025-08-13 08:55:56+00:00
> You probably haven't heard about the ones that are succeeding at doing cool stuff because people don't gossip about charitable successes.

People do gossip about charitable successes.

Anyway, aren't capital-R Rationalists typically very online about what they do? If there are any amazing success stories you want to bring up (and I'm not saying they do or don't exist) surely you can just link to some of them?
by ilumanty | 2025-08-13 08:56:49+00:00
The official narrative is beyond ridiculous: https://x.com/AkkadSecretary/status/1950318214258516161

> And for everybody out there who's thinking about using VPNs, let me just say to you directly, verifying your age keeps a child safe. Keeps children safe in our country. So let's just not try and find a way around. Just prove your age. Make the internet safer for children. Make it a better experience for everyone. That's surely what we should aspire to in this country.

It's a grave insult to think someone would even believe this.

EDIT: Pictured in the video is Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kyle
by gabriel666smith | 2025-08-13 08:57:23+00:00
This feels a little unkind, but also functionally inaccurate.

The previous readme I posted was for an Apple Music client. It contained a download link for the client. Other Apple Music clients shared in the same way were heavily-upvoted by the community that same week.

I understand my Apple Music client had a cat DJ as a UI, and that isn't funny to some people. But it wasn't lazy. Nor was it 'performance' - it is a real thing that I put a lot of effort into that exists. And I hoped it would be a fun and novel way for the community to interact with music streaming.

Conversely, this submission is just a readme, that part is accurate. I don't maintain an active blog, so it's a simple way of hosting text.

In this case, the text is: "here is a theory, and some work I did towards it, which may or may not be interesting, but I'm unable to take it further myself. Perhaps it can spark something for someone."

Neither is performance art. I really like this forum (which is why I comment far more than post!), and both submissions are, sincerely, good-faith contributions.

From the HN comments guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
by majoe | 2025-08-13 08:57:36+00:00
"Just read the scripture" is not enough. Catholics are supposed to use the historical critical method, when interpreting texts from the bible. There are other Christian groups, which take the bible verbatim, but Catholicism is none of them.

For that and other reasons there are plenty of things presented in the old testament as sins, which Christians don't consider to be sins. The most obvious example is probably rules around kosher food.
by piva00 | 2025-08-13 08:58:59+00:00
It's also quite sad there isn't anyone with a big political voice connecting the dots between Brexit and the rise in crime.

Brexit has markedly made the UK's economy weaker, there are less opportunities, the opportunities that exist outside of finance/tech are quite low paid compared to other European countries while the cost of living in London is absurdly high when compared to other major European cities. It's the perfect storm coupled with high immigration: blame immigrants for the lack of opportunities caused by a policy pushed by anti-immigration rhetoric, it will just feed into giving power to Reform which, if given power, will continue to crash the UK's economical prospects.

The ship has sailed, it will take the UK quite a while to correct course, perhaps even a generation or so... While that correction course happens British society will just keep eroding away.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-13 08:59:09+00:00
> What I think will be next frontier in home computing is truly understanding and owning the systems that run a smart home and that comes with understanding the environment (sensor data, presence detection, etc.)

That's gonna be a while coming - we're now entering a stage where we won't even understand the code that gets written.

Now, sure, some holdouts will understand the code, but that's not going to be the norm soon.
by ncruces | 2025-08-13 08:59:25+00:00
So how can you implement an allocator in the language itself? Not even talking about malloc (which gets to have language blessed semantics); say an arena allocator.

You get a bunch of memory from mmap. There are no “objects” (in C terminology) in there, and a single “provenance” (if at all, you got it from a syscall, which is not part of the language).

If arbitrary integer/pointer math inside that buffer is not OK, how do to get heterogeneous allocations from the arena to work? When do slices of it become “objects” and gain any other ”provenance”?

Is C supposed to be the language you can't write an arena allocator in (or a conservative GC, or…)?
by vidarh | 2025-08-13 08:59:35+00:00
Per the Crime Survey for England and Wales - which doesn't depend on "tracking" but on peoples reported experience of crime -, crime is overall at a one of the lowest levels in decades.

EDIT: Since there is one (dead) comment on this: To reiterate: The Crime Survey surveys people and tracks the rate of crime people state in a response to a survey that they have experienced. As such it includes crimes that are not reported.
by zimpenfish | 2025-08-13 09:00:17+00:00
> could I come up with a simple HTML page that would be illegal in the UK without age verification checks?

Put up a page saying you support "Palestine Action". Given that group is (currently) a proscribed "terrorist organisation" (and therefore illegal to support, obvs.), your page would definitely be illegal in the UK.

(Although I suppose there's the light risk that MI6 might decided to rendition you with $LOCALCOUNTRY's assistance if they're feeling exuberant.)
by rob74 | 2025-08-13 09:00:28+00:00
Well, the first of the ten commandments is "You shall have no other gods before Me" , and that, according to a widespread interpretation, also forbids atheism:

> There is manifestly contained in this commandment AN IMPLICIT DENIAL OF ALL ATHEISM. The command, "Thou shalt have none other gods before Me," rests on the assumption that there is one true and living God. The law therefore forbids atheism as being a denial of God. (https://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/barrett/the_first_commandm...)
by ben_w | 2025-08-13 09:01:51+00:00
> Covid and the half a million Americans it left dead.

1,168,021 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...

But — unlike the attempted coup which was totally his fault — I'm not sure you can blame even half of that death toll on Trump, given all the other countries that also did badly.
Ask HN: Is the rise of AI tools going to be the next 'dot com' bust?
by Dicey84 | 2025-08-13 09:02:17+00:00
For context, attended an Australian based tech expo / conference recently and whilst at the show (I’m sure there were marginally more) only two exhibitors didn’t have the term AI or Agent in there pitch or stand marketing..

And for reference, the two companies that stood out for non-AI capabilities made monitor stands.

This got me dwelling back into the post title, is this influx of AI tools going to be sustainable, or is there going to be an impending crash leaving only the ‘best and brightest’ on the other side?
by philipallstar | 2025-08-13 09:02:36+00:00
> If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.

I agree, but on the flip side: the point of applying for an H1-B visa is to come and work for a company in a specialised field. If you're trying to use it to get yourself permanently into a country, then that's the wrong visa type to apply for. I've worked overseas on a visa, and it was stressful for this reason, but I was under no illusions about that when I applied for it.
by woooooo | 2025-08-13 09:04:28+00:00
I think there's a distinction between inventing new terms for utilitarian purposes vs ideological and in-group signalling purposes.

If you have groups talking about "expected value" or "dot products", that's different from groups who talk a lot about "privilege" or "the deep state". Even though the latter would claim they're just using jargon between experts, just like the scientists.
by chetansorted | 2025-08-13 09:04:53+00:00
That’s a great point — I totally get that typing out expenses on a touchscreen every time isn’t realistic for most people. The core idea behind what I’m building is that it’s voice-first. You just open the app, tap the mic, and say something like “Spent 250 on chai” or “Paid 12,000 for rent yesterday.” It uses GPT on the backend to parse that and log it.

The goal is to make it feel as effortless as sending a quick voice note.

That said, I love your idea of having a quick-access number pad + category buttons as an alternative. Could be great for when you’re in a rush or want to log multiple expenses fast.

And yeah, syncing with banks would be ideal, but pretty tough to pull off across all providers — especially here in India. A TSV/CSV import option sounds like a solid workaround for now. Definitely noting that.

Really appreciate your input — this kind of feedback is exactly what I need at this stage.
by vidarh | 2025-08-13 09:05:27+00:00
Based on crowdsourced data.

Given we know from comparing e.g. Crime Survey data to polls about peoples beliefs about crimes that peoples beliefs about crime rates in the UK are not remotely well correlated with actual crime rates, that page doesn't tell us what you claim it does.

It tells us that out of visitors to Numbeo, people who claim to live in 3 British cities report that they are more worried than most others.

For Bradford, the data is based on just 131 contributors in the last 5 years:

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/in/Bradford
by manumasson | 2025-08-13 09:06:08+00:00
> it's becoming more about organizing tasks and letting ai agents figure out the implementation details ... different agents pick up different pieces and coordinate with each other

This is exactly what I have been working on for the past year and a half. A system for managing agents where you get to work at a higher abstraction level, explaining (literally with your voice) the concepts & providing feedback. All the agent-agent-human communication is on a shared markdown tree.

I haven't posted it anywhere yet, but your comment just describes the vision too well, I guess it's time to start sharing it :D see https://voicetree.io for a demo video. I have been using it everyday for engineering work, and it really is feeling like how you describe; my job is now more about organizing tasks, explaining them well, and providing critique, but just through talking to the computer. For example, when going through the git diffs of what the agents wrote, I will be speaking out loud any problems I notice, resulting in voice -> text -> markdown tree updates and these will send hook notifications to claude code so they automatically address feedback.
by ivape | 2025-08-13 09:06:18+00:00
It’s interesting that even those that concluded God like Descartes were banned.

Christ specifically was impressed with a Centurion that sought his healing power (for another, not himself) without even being a Jew or follower of Christ. As in, Christ was simply amazed:

“Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.” (Matthew 8:10, NIV)

Descartes would haven fallen under such faith. I really need to study how the Catholic Church butchered so many interpretations.
by alpaca128 | 2025-08-13 09:06:22+00:00
When I used Windows Phone 8.1 I felt like I was typing text twice as fast as on Android. Better suggestions, more accurate keyboard inputs on the same screen size, and selecting an entire word was just a single tap which made fixing a typo very quick as well. Meanwhile back then it was impossible to make certain text selections without a bluetooth keyboard because of how Android constantly tried "fixing" touch-based selections. It's sad that Microsoft shut down the only system & UI that felt like the developers were actually thinking of the user when designing it. To this day no other mobile OS is as friendly to left-handed users.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-13 09:06:42+00:00
> I don’t remember the last time I ran into something in Safari and Chrome but not FF.

It’s not especially uncommon. For instance payment requests, web share, and remote playback are all implemented by Blink and WebKit but not Gecko.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Share_A...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/RemotePlayb...

I occasionally look into what CSS is being transcoded for the projects I work on, and it’s normally Firefox ESR that needs the most help. If you eliminate that from your browserlists configuration, your source and deployed CSS become a lot more closely aligned. For instance, it was only a year ago that Firefox ESR got CSS nesting.
by cjs_ac | 2025-08-13 09:07:51+00:00
The law doesn't work by having ISPs block websites. It works by imposing a legal duty on website operators to a) determine what risks there are to their users from the content that may appear on their website; and b) develop and implement policies to eliminate or substantially mitigate that risk. All of the blocks listed above are voluntary self-censorship to avoid obligations under the Act.

If Ofcom does decide to pursue you, they will start by asking to see your risk assessments and policy documents, and would then in theory proceed to legal action, but in practice would just ignore you, because you're just protesting, and they have no chance of getting the millions in fines out of you.

I'm not sure what content you could put on your page, but if anyone suggests a message of support for a protest group called Palestine Action, I most strongly recommend that you don't do this, because the nature of their protests has led to their proscription as a terrorist organisation, and the resultant legal action against you would be of a very different nature.
by ffaser5gxlsll | 2025-08-13 09:08:19+00:00
On the server side, probably not, but I'd like to point out that old hardware is not uncommon, and it's going to be more and more likely as time passes especially in the desktop space.

I was hit by this scenario in the 2000s with an old desktop pc I had, also in the 10ys range, I was using just for boring stuff and random browsing, which was old, but perfectly adequate for the purpose. With time programs got rebuilt with some version of SSE it didn't support. When even firefox switched to the new instruction set, I had to essentially trash a perfectly working desktop pc as it became useless for the purpose.
by foldr | 2025-08-13 09:08:41+00:00
The OSA doesn’t make any provision for the government blocking access to websites that are critical of it. This is a pretty long slippery slope that you’re talking about, where the government directly enforces the rules instead of OFCOM, and the rules are substantially different from those currently in force. In other words, you are basically just saying that “things might get worse”. This is true, but it’s not really a very strong criticism of the OSA (which I do not support).

Also, any hypothetical attempt to abuse the OSA to rein in political dissent would almost certainly be subject to legal challenges under the ECHR.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-13 09:08:48+00:00
You need to go out there, then.

There are areas where people do drugs openly, and overdosing, too, and no one cares. A cop walked past a lady overdosing.

You should watch videos of YouTubers going to these areas if you do not want to do it yourself.

The areas are famous for tourists where most phone snatching is rampant, 18 a day at a minimum, on one famous street alone.

FWIW, I am talking about London.
by leodiceaa | 2025-08-13 09:09:03+00:00
You are wasting the time of everyone who reads this and I am leaving a warning so less people waste their times.

The text you posted is nonsense. This is not an acceptable contribution. It's detrimental to the community.

From the readme

>> Input: "sarah loves my french toast"

>> Output: "sarah loves my french toast a piney connubial produit"

C'mon now. This is gibberish. You are producing and publishing gibberish and you should not do that here.
by tau255 | 2025-08-13 09:09:04+00:00
I have found some footage of the seedpod exploding [1]. It seems that Impatiens parviflora is invasive species that propagated from botanical gardens in Europe. One research [2] states it can shoot seed up to 3.4 meters.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QUzag5u7Pi0 [2] über Impatiens parviflora Dc. als Agriophyt in mitteleuropa, L Trepl - 1984
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-13 09:10:21+00:00
Claude Code isn't an LLM. It's a hybrid architecture where an LLM provides the interface and some of the reasoning, embedded inside a broader set of more or less deterministic tools.

It's obvious LLMs can't do the job without these external tools, so the claim above - that LLMs can't do this job - is on firm ground.

But it's also obvious these hybrid systems will become more and more complex and capable over time, and there's a possibility they will be able to replace humans at every level of the stack, from junior to CEO.

If that happens, it's inevitable these domain-specific systems will be networked into a kind of interhybrid AGI, where you can ask for specific outputs, and if the domain has been automated you'll be guided to what you want.

It's still a hybrid architecture though. LLMs on their own aren't going to make this work.

It's also short of AGI, never mind ASI, because AGI requires a system that would create high quality domain-specific systems from scratch given a domain to automate.
by liampulles | 2025-08-13 09:10:39+00:00
I have a 1963 Mini, which for a while I used as a daily driver. It's a very fun car for city driving, though it lacks some modern niceties. But every couple of months I'd have to spend a fortune to get various parts of it fixed with refurbished parts. Eventually I got a new cheap hatchback which I drive instead. Now the mini sits there with flat tires and cobwebs under a rain cover, and it looks quite sad.

I've thought that if I ever took a sabbatical, maybe I could try retrofit it with an electric system, but I just know it's going to take me down another money hole.

Classic cars are an expensive interest.
by willvarfar | 2025-08-13 09:10:53+00:00
Trivia: a long time ago when an sqlite file was found on the iphone that has a full location history, some random HNer connected with me to make a web app that let the user see their location history if they uploaded their file.

And IIRC all iphones had a first test GPS fix from somewhere in the mid US. We speculated that it was part of a factory quality check or something.
by philipallstar | 2025-08-13 09:11:16+00:00
Nazis weren't bad because they saluted in that way. They were bad because they were a high-authoritarian, socialist, racism bunch of warmongering killers. Their salute is the silliest thing to worry about. It's like thinking if someone grew a Hitler moustache that that would be the worst thing ever. It's actually the most superficial thing ever, for superficial thinking only. The next evil won't look like the last one. In fact the next, and greater, evils were Stalin and Mau, and it's somehow fine to salute like them, or call your kid Joseph, or peddle communism in universities.
by aaronmdjones | 2025-08-13 09:11:41+00:00
It's a permanent double conversion UPS; it's always inverting. You could activate the "high efficiency" bypass mode to directly connect the input to the output in the presence of mains AC input, but this would also pass through disturbances like fluctuations, harmonics, and surges, so I don't have it enabled. This wastes about 80W in my setup but whatever. I'm not worried about the inverter temperature is the point I'm trying to make; but I was considering this when I did it, which is why they're wired to run at full speed all the time.
by vidarh | 2025-08-13 09:12:09+00:00
Peter Kyle is the same person who has strongly implied that everyone opposed to this law are siding with pedophiles. Meanwhile, there are pictures of him with his friend Ivor Caplin[1], who was caught in a sting and arrested on suspicion of engaging in online sexual communications with a child[2], so perhaps he should worry more about the people he surround himself with.

[1] https://x.com/GregHadfield/status/1878113938593730650?lang=e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Caplin
by benterix | 2025-08-13 09:13:36+00:00
> Remember the ones who loudly proclaimed the internet to be a passing fad, not useful for normal people. All anti LLM rants taste like that to me.

For me they're very different and they sound much more the crypto-skepticism. It's not like "LLMs are worthless, there are no use cases, they should be banned" but rather "LLMs do have their use cases but they also do have inherent flaws that need to be addressed; embedding them in every product makes no sense etc.". (I mean LLMs as tech, what's happening with GenAI companies and their leaders is a completely different matter and we have every right to criticize every lie, hypocrisy and manipulation, but let's not mix up these two.)
by cbeach | 2025-08-13 09:13:36+00:00
I'm resigned to the fact we need the next four years to be sufficiently awful, that voters will want radical change in 2029.

As things stand, it's coming:

https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...

Reform UK will repeal the Online Safety Act.

Zia Yusuf, tech entrepreneur and head of Reform UK Department of Government Efficiency explains this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3JRuAh4jeY (36:05)
by vidarh | 2025-08-13 09:14:55+00:00
Who are "they"? British authorities does not block anything directly.

A few sites are covered by DNS/IP blocks by network providers separate to the Online Safety Act, but no sites are - at least so far - blocked by providers because of the OSA. These are mainly piracy related. E.g. The Pirate Bay.

The blocks/age verification due to OSA are done by the sites themselves under threat of steep fines.

This is all in the finest British tradition of passing the responsibility to someone else so you can point fingers when you get blamed. UK authorities love getting industry to "self regulate" as much possible, under threat of more restrictive laws or court challenges when they don't regulate hard enough.

The upside from a government point of view is that these blocks then are hard to challenge in court.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-13 09:15:00+00:00
Exactly what I was going to say, though I don't think this will stop adults either. If somebody wants porn without asking Big Brother for permission, they're going to search for the answer for how to do that, and find it immediately.

In the era of LLMs this is even more true. Every single chatbot I tried (DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT) except ChatGPT immediately gave numerous and detailed instructions on how to easily bypass the bans. I'm sure one could trivially push ChatGPT outside its love for big brother as well, if they cared to do so.

It's not clear to me who exactly such bans are effective against, and to what end. Obviously the government gains an immense amount of power so they're going to love it, regardless of its efficacy.