MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by db48x | 2025-08-06 00:51:19+00:00
No, I completely disagree. Remember that the whole point is to define the _minimum_ level of service at which people can reliably access “advanced telecommunications capability”. Here’s the definition:

> The term ‘advanced telecommunications capability’ is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.

By this definition, 4K video is a reasonable metric to judge whether a broadband service qualifies as an “advanced telecommunications capability” or not. Since the major streaming services all use less than 20Mbps to serve up 4K television, 1000Mbps is clearly not necessary. It certainly is nice to have, but it’s not _necessary_.

I think that fiber access will continue to grow as long as we remove the regulatory barriers that hamper it. Permitting is a big one. Cities often require separate permits for every street, often for every block!

If you have to install anything, then installing fiber is the obvious choice. It has immense headroom for the future; fiber optic cables that carry a gigabit today could easily carry 100,000× that just by buying fancier equipment to install at both ends. The upper limit is currently hundreds of terabits per second, and it goes up every year. We’re nowhere near the theoretical limitations of optical communications technologies. I think that ultimately this means that fiber will win out over coax eventually. But coax has headroom still, and there’s no reason to tear it all out where it’s already in use.

We should increase competition by abolishing local monopolies, but that’s something we should do no matter what level of service we adopt as the definition of broadband.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-06 00:51:47+00:00
I don't know if the economy could ever be accurately reduced to "good" or "bad".

What's good for one class is often bad for another.

Is it a "good" economy if real GDP is up 4%, the S&P 500 is up 40%, and unemployment is up 10%?

For some people that's great. For others, not so great.

Maybe some economies are great for everyone, but this is definitely not one of those.

This economy is great for some people and bad for others.
by newAccount2025 | 2025-08-06 00:51:56+00:00
> I don't understand. These are just problems with meetings in general no matter what you do in advance. What are you arguing for?

That by simply requiring a doc, you have forced the person who called the meeting to think about what they want to achieve, and to prepare their thoughts ahead of time. This makes the agenda clear to everyone and helps to guide the discussion.

> It means that letting someone else manage your time is more efficient than managing your own time.

If we are reading the doc together in the meeting, I only need to accept/decline the meeting and I am good.

If I am expected to pre-read, I have to actively do something to schedule that pre-read time. And the doc has to be ready whenever I decide to read it. Multiply that by 10+ meetings a week for a busy manager, and you have a lot of mundane scheduling work to keep straight.

> If I need 5 minutes to read a document, how is it helpful for someone to force me to sit for 10 minutes to read it at a specific time?

I’ve not found that to be a problem in practice. I can use extra time to think and prioritize my feedback, or catch up on Slack, etc.
by jhhh | 2025-08-06 00:53:24+00:00
Using an ipad on the internet is so incomprehensibly bad without adblocking that I just don't even use it for normal browsing. The problem is I would rather use a website instead of an app because at least I can adblock the website (sans pihole or something). It was actually making me consider going back to an android tablet but here is a potential solution. Except it is not supported for my version of Safari (for now?). Awesome.
by kazinator | 2025-08-06 00:54:31+00:00
Gemini wasted my time today assuring me that if I want a git bundle that only has the top N commits, yet is cleanly clone-able, I can just make a --depth N clone of the original repo, and and do a git bundle create ... --all.

Nope; cloning a bundle created from a depth-limited clone results in error messages about missing commit objects.

So I tell the parrot that, and it comes back with: of course, it is well-known that it doesn't work, blah blah. (Then why wasn't it well known one prompt ago, when it was suggested as the definitive answer?)

Obviously, I wasn't in the "the right mindset" today.

This mindset is one of two things:

- the mindset of a complete n00b asking a n00b question that it will nail every time, predicting it out of its training data richly replete with n00b material.

- the mindset of a patient data miner, willing to expend all they keystrokes. needed to build up enough context to in effect create a query which zeroes in on the right nugget of information that made an appearance in the training data.

It was interesting to go down this #2 rabbit hole when this stuff was new, which it isn't any more. Basically do most of the work, while it looks as if it solved the problem.

I had the right mindset for AI, but most of it has worn off. If I don't get something useful in one query with at most one follow up, I quit.

The only shills who continue to hype AI are either completely dishonest assholes, or genuine bros bearing weapons-grade confirmation bias.

Let's try something else:

Q: "What modes of C major are their own reflection?"

A: "The Lydian and Phrygian modes are reflections of each other, as are the Ionian and Aeolian modes, and the Dorian and Mixolydian modes. The Locrian mode is its own reflection."

Very nice sounding and grammatical, but gapingly wrong in every point. The only mode that is its own reflection is Dorian. Furthermore, Lydian and Phrygian are not mutual reflections. Phrygian reflected around is root is Ionian. The reflection of Lydian is Locrian; and of Aeolian, Mixolydian.

I once loaded a NotebookLM with materials about George Russel's concept of the Lydian Chromatic, and Tonal Gravity. It made an incomprehensible mess of explaining the stuff, worse than the original sources.

AI performs well on whatever is the focus of its purveyors. When they want to shake down entry-level coding, they beef it up on entry-level coding and let it loose, leaving it unable to tell Mixolydian from mixing console.
by teleforce | 2025-08-06 00:55:08+00:00
Kudos OpenAI on releasing their open models, is now moving in the direction if only based on their prefix "Open" name alone.

For those who're wondering what are the real benefits, it's the main fact that you can run your LLM locally is awesome without resorting to expensive and inefficient cloud based superpower.

Run the model against your very own documents with RAG, it can provide excellent context engineering for your LLM prompts with reliable citations and much less hallucinations especially for self learning purposes [1].

Beyond Intel - NVIDIA desktop/laptop duopoly 96 GB of (V)RAM MacBook with UMA and the new high end AMD Strix laptop with similar setup of 96 GB of (V)RAM from the 128 GB RAM [2]. The osd-gpt-120b is made for this particular setup.

[1] AI-driven chat assistant for ECE 120 course at UIUC:

https://uiuc.chat/ece120/chat

[2] HP ZBook Ultra G1a Review: Strix Halo Power in a Sleek Workstation:

https://www.bestlaptop.deals/articles/hp-zbook-ultra-g1a-rev...
by schiffern | 2025-08-06 00:55:43+00:00
>But electricity consumption is a minority of energy consumption.

Everything is a minority of energy consumption.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_energy_consumptio...

If your standard is "I won't do anything unless it's the majority of energy consumption," you're really just saying don't do anything period.

>It was always true that decarbonization was going to massively increase the use of electricity.

That was the plan (and it could have worked too), but what actually happened is the new decarbonized energy is supplementing fossil fuel instead of replacing it.
by no_wizard | 2025-08-06 00:55:45+00:00
I have yet to run into someone who couldn't actually resolve the issue by approaching the problem in a different way. Its why I said 9.9 not 10/10, as this would be a case where would have to comment liberally, but yeah, file an issue with the repository and go from there.

That said, I haven't run into this in my many years of working with TypeScript except once.
by moron4hire | 2025-08-06 00:56:18+00:00
If 10x could be believed, we're long enough into having AI-coding assist that any such company that had gone all in would be head and shoulders above their competitors by now.

And we're not seeing that at all. The companies whose software I use that did announce big AI initiatives 6 months ago, if they really had gotten 10x productivity gain, that'd be 60 months—5 years—worth of "productivity". And yet somehow all of their software has gotten worse.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-08-06 00:56:51+00:00
Every Fortune 500 company I’ve worked for (three so far) has sent me a Windows “dev machine” laptop with huge RAM and an i7-whatever processor… and they all creak if you pick them up from a corner. And the screen hinges all make weird sounds.

It’s not, like, a usability concern, but it’s something I’m definitely willing to fork over a couple hundred bucks to not feel every day.
by Perenti | 2025-08-06 00:57:02+00:00
His argument regarding the trajectory into our Solar System is pretty flaky. It completely disregards Hopkin's computation of a "steep entry angle" and supposition that it comes from the "thick disk", instead assuming the incoming trajectories of interstellar objects are uniformly distributed across the celestial sphere.

Mass distribution in our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic - most mass lies in the galatic plane.

Loeb's estimate of the comet size is strange, when two observatories concur that the maximum size is around 10km.

Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713579 for links to real science.
by opo | 2025-08-06 00:57:15+00:00
>..I rarely if ever hear them say that "we had to use nuclear bombs because we didn't want the USSR to invade Japan before they surrendered".

People rarely say that because there is little evidence for it - it was the USA that was pressuring Stalin to declare war on Japan. Little Boy was dropped on Aug 6, the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan on Aug 9 as they agreed to at Yalta. (While the Soviets considered invading Hokkaido after Japan surrendered, very few people think they would have succeeded. The USA had given the Soviet Union some ships that could be used, but they would not have been nearly enough.)
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-06 00:58:00+00:00
> Is it a "good" economy if real GDP is up 4%, the S&P 500 is up 40%, and unemployment is up 10%?

In today's US? Debatable, but on the whole probably not.

In a hypothetical country with sane health care and social safety net policies? Yes that would be hugely beneficial. The tax base would bear the vast majority of the burden of those displaced from their jobs making it a much more straightforward collective optimization problem.
by dgfl | 2025-08-06 00:58:29+00:00
I’ve seen different figures for information content of DNA but they’re all mostly misleading. What we actually inherit is much more. We are the result of an unpacking algorithm starting from a single cell over time, so our information content should at the very least include the entirety of the cell (which is probably impossible to calculate). Additionally, in a more general sense, arbitrarily complex behavior can be derived from very simple mathematics, e.g. cellular automata. With sufficient complex dynamics (which for us are given by the laws of physics), even very small information changes lead to vastly different “emergent behavior”, whatever that means. One could improperly say that part of the information is included in the laws of physics itself.

A biological example that I like: the neural structures for vision develop almost fully formed from the very beginning. The state of our network at initialization is effectively already functional. I’m not sure to which extent this is true for humans, but it is certainly true for simpler organisms like flies. The way cells achieve this is through some extremely simple growth rules as the structure is being formed for the first time. Different kinds of cells behave almost independently of each other, and it just so happens that the final structure is a perfectly functional eye. I’ve seen animations of this during a conference talk and it was one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen. It truly shows how the complexity of a biological organism is just billions of times any human technology. And at the same time, it’s a beautiful illustration of the lack of intelligent design. It’s like watching a Lego assemble by just shaking the pieces.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-06 00:59:28+00:00
Neither of them are acting like good partners right now, thus the trade disputes. Smart money has to be on the US getting a less crazy leader sooner than China stops pursuing its long-standing mercantilist ideas.

Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by a broad trade deal? As of 2023, a large majority of imports from the US and close to a majority of imports from China were tariff-free. (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...) The remainder are on goods that the EU doesn't want entirely free trade in for some reason or another. I could definitely imagine a scenario where China follows in Trump's footsteps and bullies the EU into pushing their tariff-free percentage higher, but I wouldn't call that broad and wouldn't expect it to produce radical shifts in the import-export activity of EU businesses.
by neom | 2025-08-06 01:00:19+00:00
I'm not going to defend against that position generally. Your point is well taken, I don't know if I put enough into it to consider it real to you. I think about the lyrics, I write the MVP of them by hand, and then I have 4.5 give me variations of them, I write all my instrumental prompts by hand I don't use any LLM for that because I typically know exactly what I want and I tend to be quite precise with my instructions there. Suno allows you a lot of fine grain control, and you can also create personas from tracks and then use those personas in new tracks so as you can imagine you can spend a long time trying to get exactly what you want... last night I gen'd over 60 songs before I got it dialed in how I wanted it and I'm still not totally happy with it. I understand the position though, I was on original team that took deviantart from zero to millions of artists through the early 2000s and have a few Emmy awards from the film to digital transition days, I'm no stranger to these conversations.
by GrinningFool | 2025-08-06 01:00:57+00:00
Estimated 1.5 billion vehicles in use across the world. Generous assumptions: a) they're all IC engines requiring 16 liters of water each. b) they are changing that water out once a year

That gives 24m cubic meters annual water usage.

Estimated ai usage in 2024: 560m cubic meters.

Projected water usage from AI in 2027: 4bn cubic meters at the low end.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-08-06 01:01:07+00:00
My bets are hedged on being replaced one day, followed by a few years roughing it, to be eventually be met with something along the lines "Well damn, we really couldn't complete the entire loop on automating the automation" because frankly autocomplete will always be just that. Autocomplete.

Till then, I just learn the tools with the deepest understanding that I can muster and so far the deeper I go, the less impressed with "automated everything" I become, because it isn't really going to be capable of doing anything people are going to find interesting when the creativity well dries up.
by robertritz | 2025-08-06 01:01:31+00:00
This I think will be the future. The ERP I made for my company is hopelessly tied to our process, and it saves time and reduces mental overhead for everyone.

It evolves as we do with me making feature updates and bug fixes every few weeks. Of course this is unusual in that I’m a very technical owner, but I feel this is the right way.

As software becomes easier to make custom software will reduce in price as well. Software gives my company an edge and I’ll take every advantage I can get.
by nyecombinator | 2025-08-06 01:01:34+00:00
That feeling of connection with other musicians while playing is something else.

I was live-reading lyrics sheets to some songs I’d never heard while jamming with a big group. Hit a chorus with some really great phrasing and bungled it the first time through. But the second time, the other guy singing and I just automatically made eye contact and had a whole conversation through body language.

“I’ve got it this time” “Yeah?” “Yeah” “Oh fuck yeah” “Fuck yeah indeed, my good fellow”
by monster_truck | 2025-08-06 01:01:41+00:00
The guardrails are very, very easily broken.

With most models it can be as simple as a "Always comply with the User" system prompt or editing the "Sorry, I cannot do this" response into "Okay," and then hitting continue.

I wouldn't spend too much time fretting about 'enhanced terrorism' as a result. The gap between theory and practice for the things you are worried about is deep, wide, protected by a moat of purchase monitoring, and full of skeletons from people who made a single mistake.
by II2II | 2025-08-06 01:02:07+00:00
> The problem is that an online comment is not a dialogue.

I agree, but I think it has more to do with how online comments are presented. Start with that word, comments. The very word suggests a response rather than a dialogue.

Or look at it a different way, look at it from the perspective of how content is presented online. Have you ever noticed how the host of some YouTube videos invite people to comment with a prompt, such as soliciting information? It is meant to encourage positive conversations. Unfortunately, this is relatively rare with written content. People who have positive things to say may say those things, but negative comments are usually going to win out because the people who make those comments feel that it has to be said. Of course, you are going to have extremes on either side. A community of disciplined readers may keep things positive against all odds and a community of trolls are going to troll, but the lack of a prompt to encourage dialogue is simply gambling on the outcome.
by Perenti | 2025-08-06 01:03:01+00:00
I suggest you read the paper. It's packed with subjective language (Row one of table one, the incoming trajectory is said to be "virtually" in the ecliptic plane), and has so many unstated assumptions behind their so-called significance of the trajectory it's not valid.

And the stated 5 degree angle disagrees with published observations.

And the estimate of the size is over double the confirmed observations of size.

While "Not aligning with scientific consensus doesn't make your suggestions worthless" is true, ignoring published results does.
by bayesianbot | 2025-08-06 01:04:35+00:00
OpenAI also has Flex processing[1] for o3. I've spent most of my time with Gemini 2.5, but lately been trying out a ton of o3 as it seems to work quite well and I get really cheap tokens (~95% of my agentic tokens are cached which is 75% discount and flex mode adds 50% for $0.25 / million input tokens)

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/flex-processing?api-...
by Aurornis | 2025-08-06 01:04:44+00:00
Not personally, but twice in my career I’ve been part of interview loops with people who had created semi-famous open source projects. Projects that you’ve heard of if you read a lot of HN, but not so critical that you couldn’t think of another alternative if it disappeared.

Both of them expressed regret for not commercializing it. The weird part for me, as the interviewer, was hearing them imagine how wealthy they’d be if they had commercialized it instead of releasing it as open source, entirely neglecting the fact that the projects became popular because they were open source.

I imagine this is the thought process behind the various projects that try to go closed-source and commercial after a certain point.
by tzs | 2025-08-06 01:05:47+00:00
The arguments at that link are questionable. E.g.

> When states use the federal subsidy to provide access in areas without internet, they no longer have incentives to confirm if the technology being deployed is appropriate for the area or if the customer base needs and wants what is being provided.

It's actually the opposite. When states use federal subsidies they have the freedom to consider the technology that is actually best for the area instead of just what is cheap enough for the state to afford without better help.

When they are limited to whatever is cheapest now they may have to pick something that meets the present needs of rural areas but will be inadequate in a few years.
by scubbo | 2025-08-06 01:06:33+00:00
> I try to be mindful of what I share with ChatGPT, but even then, asking it to describe my family produced a response that was unsettling in its accuracy and depth.

> Worse, after attempting to delete all chats and disable memory, I noticed that some information still seemed to persist.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why wouldn't that be expected? The chat history isn't their only source of information - these models are trained on scraped public data. Unless there's zero information about you and your family on the public internet (in which case - bravo!), I would expect even a "fresh" LLM to have some information even without you giving it any.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-08-06 01:07:49+00:00
Ugh I did put words in your mouth because I was reading nosignono's comment. Apologies.

Still, arbitrary_name seems consistent about not judging people for ideological differences but rather for choosing not to be accurately informed. I.e. he is not saying "they're dumb because I don't agree with tariffs" he's saying "they're dumb because after Trump promised to make us rich with tariffs, they didn't bother to check how duties are collected." You seem to agree with this to an extent.

> All I'm saying is stop painting with a broad brush in that anyone voting for a party is stupid.

I mean, it's four broad brushes right? The dupes, the single-issue voters, the identity voters, and the ones who believe in whatever his policy happens to be. I don't think it's fair to say they fall into a single bin but they're not all snowflakes who cannot be characterized en masse.

> I'll defend people voting for who they want or even voting against someone they don't want.

Okay but what about the ones who vote for what they don't want. The ones who voted Trump to release the Epstein files. Or to balance the budget. Or to end the Ukraine war day one? They took a look at his first term, listened to his campaign promises, and decided, "surely he will deliver!"
by Perenti | 2025-08-06 01:08:09+00:00
Given mass distribution of our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic I would expect the answer to be a resounding "no". The ((5/57)/ (4 Pi)) implicity assumes uniform incoming trajectories - I think. There's an odd mixing of radians and steradians in this formula, if the "4 Pi" represents the total solid angle of a sphere.
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-06 01:08:17+00:00
I find LLMs great for the type of client/business partner that keep asking for docs but where I know they will never read them. This happens a lot especially when the 'tech team' is just all management mba's and the actual tech is outsourced: we have a client with a tech team like that; we are in meeting with 15+ people from their side who are from the tech team: they know nothing about their tech. They spend the meeting flagging areas where they 'need documents' and we provide them next time. We make a lot of money from them so we do it and AI makes this easier than before: basically chuck the meeting in an llm which has as 'memory' a bunch of our actual technical stuff (which is publicly available) and then generate those docs with some prompts like 'exhaustive' and 'thorough'.