MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by narrator | 2025-08-13 02:22:55+00:00
I think everyone should be familiar with hermeticism because its various mystery cults have been with us since Hermes Trismegistus laid down its principles in Ancient Egypt on the Emerald Tablets. It was where early science like practices like alchemy originated, but that wheat got separated out from the chaff during the renaissance and the more coercive control aspects remained. That part, how to get people to follow you and fight for you and maintain a leadership hierarchy is extremely old technology.

They essentially use this glitch in human psychology that gets exploited over and over again. The glitch is a more generalized version of the advanced fee scam. You tell people that if we just believe something can be true, it can be true. Then we discriminate against people who don't believe in that thing. We then say only the leader(s) can make that thing true, but first you must give them all your power and support so they can fight the people who don't believe in that thing.

Unfortunately, reality is much more messy than the cult leaders would have you believe, and leaders often don't have their followers best interests at heart, especially those who follow blindly, or even the ability to make the thing true that everyone wants to be true, but use it as this white rabbit that everyone in the cult has to chase after forever.
Show HN: You can turn your articles/websites/pictures/and PDFs into mind maps
by teenthsch | 2025-08-13 02:25:08+00:00
In the era of big models, the barrier to entry for mind mapping has become lower. While many software programs offer built-in functionality, their features are limited.

For example:

1. Generated mind maps cannot be edited.

2. Mind maps cannot be exported to other formats.

My idea was to create a lightweight tool that would meet the needs of novice users and require only a single operation. Therefore, I've broken down various functions into separate software, including PDF, image, URL, and text generation. Other features will be added later.
by acjohnson55 | 2025-08-13 02:25:32+00:00
I'm a little rusty with the terminology, but in a blockchain, the canonical current block is the one that has the greatest amount of proof of work (I think they call this the heaviest chain). Typically, each new block is the descendant of the most recent block. But it is possible to create a heavier chain from an earlier block. This invalidates any transactions on what was previously known to be the heaviest chain, and is called a reorg.

The farther back, the less likely a reorg is, so to have a reorg that invalidates is blocks is extremely unusual.

If one entity has a majority of the hash power, they gain the ability to try to force reorgs with a likelihood that increases with their advantage in hash power.

I typed all this before realizing I could have recommend you ask an LLM, and it probably would have given you a better answer.
by camperegrine | 2025-08-13 02:25:47+00:00
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by ar-nelson | 2025-08-13 02:25:53+00:00
> It does not assume that progress will be in LLMs

If that's the case then there's not as much reason to assume that this progress will occur now, and not years from now; LLMs are the only major recent development that gives the AI 2027 scenario a reason to exist.

> You have have 2 AIs, then 4, then 8.... then millions

The most powerful AI we have now is strictly hardware-dependent, which is why only a few big corporations have it. Scaling it up or cloning it is bottlenecked by building more data centers.

Now it's certainly possible that there will be a development soon that makes LLMs significantly more efficient and frees up all of that compute for more copies of them. But there's no evidence that even state-of-the-art LLMs will be any help in finding this development; that kind of novel research is just not something they're any good at. They're good at doing well-understood things quickly and in large volume, with small variations based on user input.

> But the thought experiment doesn't seem indefensible.

The part that seems indefensible is the unexamined assumptions about LLMs' ability (or AI's ability more broadly) to jump to optimal human ability in fields like software or research, using better algorithms and data alone.

Take https://ai-2027.com/research/takeoff-forecast as an example: it's the side page of AI 2027 that attempts to deal with these types of objections. It spends hundreds of paragraphs on what the impact of AI reaching a "superhuman coder" level will be on AI research, and on the difference between the effectiveness of an organizations average and best researchers, and the impact of an AI closing that gap and having the same research effectiveness as the best humans.

But what goes completely unexamined and unjustified is the idea that AI will be capable of reaching "superhuman coder" level, or developing peak-human-level "research taste", at all, at any point, with any amount of compute or data. It's simply assumed that it will get there because the exponential curve of the recent AI boom will keep going up.

Skills like "research taste" can't be learned at a high level from books and the internet, even if, like ChatGPT, you've read the entire Internet and can see all the connections within it. They require experience, trial and error. Probably the same amount that a human expert would require, but even that assumes we can make an AI that can learn from experience as efficiently as a human, and we're not there yet.
by mcbrit | 2025-08-13 02:26:30+00:00
Line: The ADR of standard colonoscopy decreased significantly from 28·4% (226 of 795) before to 22·4% (145 of 648) after exposure to AI

Supprt: Statistically speaking, on average, for each 1% increase in ADR, there is a 3% decrease in the risk of CRC. (colorectal cancer)

My objection is all the decimal points without error bars. Freshman physics majors are beat on for not including reasonable error estimates during labs, which massively overstates how certain they should be; sophomores and juniors are beat on for propogating errors in dumb ways that massively understates how certain they should be.

This article is up strolls rando doctor (granted: with more certs than I will ever have) with a bunch of decimal points. One decimal point, but that still looks dumb to me. What is the precision of your measuring device? Do you have a model for your measuring device? Are you quite sure that your study, given error bars, which you don't even acknowledge the existence of, don't cancel out the study?
by NaOH | 2025-08-13 02:26:42+00:00
Better is not what's being measured. The measure is contributions to wins. Boggs, being a good/great player contributed more by virtue of having played well for more games.

Think of it in terms of HN:

Let's say you and I both make the same number of comments and submissions per year. For 7 years each of your comments and submissions gets 100 karma. For 20 years each of mine gets 75 karma. On a per-comment/submission basis you contributed more, but I contributed more in my HN career.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-13 02:27:39+00:00
Huh, funny, is that how much a PHEV costs relative to an EV?

No?

Because a PHEV is basically the same as an EV, except you take 4/5s of the battery out (and make four more PHEVs from that supply).

THEN, you put a nice compact rotary engine that runs at one optimized speed and an alternator. Does that sound like it costs $10,000? Does your lawnmower cost $10,000?

"It's a pretty small set of people" Dude, you live in on the West Coast, it is so blindingly obvious. There's about, what, 40 states between the two coasts? Right, NOBODY lives there.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-13 02:27:55+00:00
If I had my 'druthers, local approval for road-cameras etc. would contain some enabling provision like:

"These services may not be operated unless there is a state law creating a criminal penalty of at least X severity for the service being abused in any of the following Y ways. If these conditions cease to be true, the service must be terminated within Z weeks unless the condition is restored before then."

Ideally with some termination provisions so that any would-be vendors are strongly motivated to petition the state government to keep the laws against abuse.
by zzzeek | 2025-08-13 02:30:12+00:00
I think it's a problem when decisions about disease regimens are turned over to software which then becomes the sole arbiter of these decisions, because humans no longer know how to verify the results and have no choice but to trust the machines entirely.

The scenario we want to avoid is:

"sorry, your claim was denied, the AI said your condition did not need that treatment. You'll have to sell your house."
by dang | 2025-08-13 02:31:01+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34971924 - Feb 2023 (180 comments)

A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296900 - Dec 2020 (143 comments)

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789019 - Dec 2015 (29 comments)

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4640658 - Oct 2012 (70 comments)

A Spellchecker Used To Be A Major Feat of Software Engineering - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466388 - Jan 2012 (61 comments)

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212221 - June 2008 (22 comments)
by komali2 | 2025-08-13 02:31:20+00:00
> And masks? How many graphs of cases/day with mask mandate transitions overlayed are required before people realize masks did nothing? Whole countries went from nearly nobody wearing them, to everyone wearing them, overnight, and COVID cases/day didn't even notice.

Most of those countries didn't actually follow their mask mandates - the USA for example. I visited because the PRC was preventing vaccine deliveries to Taiwan so I flew to the USA to get a vaccine, and I distinctly remember thinking "yeah... Of course" when walked around an airport of people chin diapering.

Taiwan halted a couple outbreaks from pilots completely, partially because people are so used to wearing masks when they're sick here (and also because the mask mandate was strictly enforced everywhere).

I visited DC a year later where they had a memorial for victims of COVID. It was 700,000 white flags near the Washington monument when I visited, as I recall it broke a million a few months later.
by remexre | 2025-08-13 02:31:58+00:00
That's a really anthropomorphizing description; a more mechanical one might be,

The attention mechanism that transformers use to find information in the context is, in its simplest form, O(n^2); for each token position, the model considers whether relevant information has been produced at the position of every other token.

To preserve performance when really long contexts are used, current-generation LLMs use various ways to consider fewer positions in the context; for example, they might only consider the 4096 "most likely" places to matter (de-emphasizing large numbers of "subtle hints" that something isn't correct), or they might have some way of combining multiple tokens worth of information into a single value (losing some fine detail).
by goku12 | 2025-08-13 02:32:00+00:00
You could use most of those arguments verbatim and unironically create a page titled "Please don't promote X11". Meanwhile, some of the Wayland-specific complaints were solved a while ago and some weren't even Wayland's fault to begin with.

I get it that some people don't want give up the old systems in favor of the shiny new technologies. I'm also on that side for some software like systemd (not debating. Systemd does offer many compelling benefits). But this article feels like complaining for the sake of it, rather than making reasonable detractions that could perhaps be addressed in Wayland. Attacking a software for just existing isn't a good strategy in FOSS. It is fundamentally about having choices.
by DigitalDopamine | 2025-08-13 02:33:08+00:00
nice launch. the "pick up the same claude code session on your phone bit" resonates. I’ve wanted that too, but with self-hosting and a few creature comforts.

I hacked a tiny web client around the claude CLI that I use daily:

https://github.com/sunpix/claude-code-web

- works on the go via PWA

- voice input (whiser) auto reading messages TTS

- drag and drop images with preview/remove

- hotkeys
by rgoulter | 2025-08-13 02:33:34+00:00
> Nix always felt like an OS on the blockchain. It's fine if you value verifiability above everything, but becomes very burdensome if you find yourself tweaking your dev environment often.

With Nix, "dev environment" can be scoped to be specific to a project. Where on a typical system, you might install a compiler & libraries, with Nix you can describe the development environment in isolation. (Dev Containers uses containers to similar effect).

I'd rephrase your comment as: NixOS is anti-practical. Rather than just changing a config (& restarting a service), you have to change a NixOS config, rebuild that, & switch to the updated config. -- I'd say NixOS (and Nix) support the mindset of "put in all the effort up front now, in order to save effort later".

If someone's written a nix-shell or devenv file for a project, then no further effort is required to get a working dev environment setup. (Devenv is notable for nicer DX over docker-compose for things like "services.postgres.enable = true" to get a working DB).
by photon_lines | 2025-08-13 02:34:38+00:00
My favorite LLMs ranked:

DeepSeek (with thinking & reasoning & search turned on) Claude Code QWEN Coder (with thinking & reasoning & search turned on) ChatGPT Google Gemini

Each one has it's own strength and I use each one for different tasks:

- DeepSeek: excellent at coming up with solutions and churning out prototypes / working solutions with Reasoning mode turned on. - Claude Code: I use this with cursor to quickly come up with overviews / READMEs for repos / new code I'm browsing and in making quick changes to the code-base (I only use it for simple tasks and don't usually trust it for implementing more advanced features). - QWEN Coder: similar to deep-seek but much better at working with visual / image data sets. - ChatGPT: usually use it for simple answers / finding bugs in code / resolving issues. - Google Gemini: is catching up to other models when it comes to coding and more advanced tasks but still produces code that is a bit too verbose for my taste. Still solid progress since initial release and will most likely catch up to other models on most coding tasks soon.
by next_xibalba | 2025-08-13 02:36:21+00:00
Yep. Thiel funded Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute. Thiel seems to have soured on the rationalists though as he has repeatedly criticized “the East Bay rationalists” in his public remarks. He also apparently thinks he helped create a Black Pill monster in Yudkowsky and his disciples which ultimately led to Sam Altman’s brief ousting from Open AI.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-13 02:37:21+00:00
> Imagine if script tags required HTML escaping:

There are two situations in which it does.

① XML syntax, which is absolutely still a thing:

data:application/xhtml+xml,<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><script>console.log( 1 &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; 0 &lt; 1 )</script></html>

② Inside an SVG <script> element in HTML syntax:

data:text/html,<svg><script>console.log( 1 &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; 0 &lt; 1 )</script></svg>
by rgoulter | 2025-08-13 02:37:59+00:00
Regarding "not supposed to do that": the docs mention you can install packages with commands like "nix-env -iA <package name>", using nix approximately the same way as apt or pacman. -- Trouble is, this is kindof a footgun. (e.g. it's a bad idea to run this command with sudo, even though you'd use sudo for equivalent commands). So, it's easier to just say "you're not supposed to do that".
by bapak | 2025-08-13 02:38:29+00:00
> they really don’t want you saying bad words of any kind.

Not true anymore, I just typed fuck in this comment without having to fight it. They made a change I think last year and they even announced it.

> they do not look at context at all

Also not true. It's true that they're not perfect at it, but replacement after you typed 2 more words happen specifically because it can tell better what you want to say. Sometimes works against you because language is highly personal.
by windowshopping | 2025-08-13 02:38:33+00:00
So, I've been keeping a journal for 17 years, off and on. I don't know anyone else who does it my way, so here's my method.

I made a dedicated email account just for the journal. I personally chose gmail but if you distrust google you could use any other provider including self-hosted.

At the end of the day, or when I feel like it, I log in and email the account from itself with a message about whatever happened that day and whatever I'm thinking or feeling, and use the date for the subject line, like "August 12, 2025". I never, ever send emails to anything else from that account nor connect it to anything or use it for anything else. It is a total island.

The result is 17 years of easily-searchable journal, password-protected, backed-up, accessible from anywhere that has internet, can't be "lost" like a physical journal (yes I know I'm trusting google, but again, go self-host if you're worried about that), can't be "found" by someone looking through my things.

I can't even tell you how much value I've gotten out of it. You forget things you don't even know you forgot. So many little moments and days in life. You'll be shocked at the things you used to think and feel sometimes. You'll be shocked at whole magical days that you haven't thought of in years and years and likely would never have thought of again. It's a record of me changing over time and the phases I've gone through. I can't recommend it enough.

And it doesn't take much discipline, either. It's not something I "have" to do. I do it when I feel like it. There are years where I have only 25 entries, and others where I have 200. It depends how much I felt like writing. I find it spikes in years where I'm feeling very emotional, usually during bad times. But I've written down many great days too.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-13 02:38:46+00:00
> The best position in the middle is the combination of Python and C.

This is an opinion of which many would disagree, for various legitimate reasons, yet appears to be the polyglot approach you prefer. So let's briefly explore it.

> I don't know why people are so aghast about writing small C programs, compiling them, and launching them with Python through an os call.

There are significant limitations to using fork[0]/exec[1] as a general purpose component integration strategy, not the least of which is the inability of fine-grained bidirectional interactions.

A better "Python and C" integration option is to employ SWIG[2] to incorporate C/C++ libraries directly into the Python execution environment.

0 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fork&apropos=0&sek...

1 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=execve&sektion=2&a...

2 - https://swig.org/
by deodar | 2025-08-13 02:38:50+00:00
All the cold data is on spinning rust, and most of the data at large scales is cold. Much of the warm data is still on HDDs too, fronted by a flash or RAM cache.

The storage densities are constantly increasing to keep costs low. SMR drives have significantly pushed up the achievable densities at the cost of write performance which matters little for cold data. The 1PB/node mark was breached a few years ago.

Few players have the budget to store these volumes of data on flash, especially since you're always erasure coding for redundancy which adds anywhere from 50-100% storage overhead, depending on other tradeoffs.

HDDs are a remarkable invention and not going anywhere soon. Heck, I think tapes aren't dead either.
by runsWphotons | 2025-08-13 02:39:46+00:00
What fundamental freedoms are people in DC going to lose? See my other comment---I think this is much less intrusive on civil liberties than adding more surveillance.

National Guardsmen may not find many guns if they arent searching people, but people will think twice about using them with guardsmen standing around. They will get into and escalate altercations where guns might be used less. There are plenty of prior cases where more policing has reduced crime like this, and DC was not doing enough, so this is going to be tried. If the police decide to work together with them enthusiastically, then even more can be done with the extra manpower.

I don't think public perception of police will change much, and anyway it always hovers around 50% confidence in surveys.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-08-13 02:40:51+00:00
Gosh! Maybe one of these days someone will take time off from this cultural wonderment to construct a simple, easy to use, text-to-audio.file program - you know, install, paste in some text, convert, start-up a player - so that the blind can listen to texts that aren't recorded in audiobooks. Without a CS degree.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-13 02:41:46+00:00
a things I noticed on ChatGPT’s websit:

I couldn’t tell if gpt-5’s answer was better than gpt-4’s in the examples they gave but I did notice that it seemed to be trying to _sound_ smarter, and as I think it highlighted in this article, I don’t usually want to talk to PHDs. Many businesses in the world operate perfectly fine without a PHD, and gpt-5 is kinda the worst of all worlds. Less helpful answers in a tone of someone geeking out while talking down to you.

I think it’s a little funny that every time I ask Claude a question it says “how insightful!” But that’s basically the only problem I have with the tone.
by duskwuff | 2025-08-13 02:44:19+00:00
Modern computer power supplies are far less dangerous than CRTs were.

CRTs were dangerous because they used extremely high voltages (often as high as 25 kV), and that voltage was often present on the CRT itself, which acted as a capacitor. The capacitance of the CRT was relatively low, but it still stored enough energy to be very hazardous. There's ways to safely discharge them, but you absolutely need to know what you're doing and work with one hand behind your back.

The voltages in a modern switching power supply are much lower (typically no more than ~1.5x line voltage ≈ 180V), and the capacitors usually have "bleeder" resistors which will discharge them to safe voltages within a few seconds. I'd still give one a few minutes before touching it - and maybe check one or two of the bigger capacitors with a multimeter - but it's still much less dangerous.
by Daub | 2025-08-13 02:44:30+00:00
An appropriate time to post a photo of a replica Galileo telescope made by my late father.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2cc84vlxe9q8v6ppp6st9/tel.jpg...

And bonus, a replica he made of van Leeuwenhoek's microscope:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gwdb2r71d49pf8m4a5243/micro.j...