MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:17:34+00:00
> AI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing.

We are living in an unprecedented golden age of peace and prosperity. What collapse are you talking about?

Yes, climate change is gonna knock a few percent points off global GDP, but it's not gonna be the end of the world. It's no worse than living in the UK rather than the US in these terms.

Keep in mind that this impact comes super imposed the our regularly scheduled growth.

We also also plenty of relatively low cost mitigation strategies. (Though many of them are not currently politically feasible.)

> [...] we're watching the United States transform into State Capitalism [...]

Hard to believe, but luckily there's more than one country on the planet.

Please vote with your feet!
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-13 07:18:16+00:00
> Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor.

Legally, there are exceptions to that (primarily the Insurrection Act, though there are some deployments that are permitted within states on federal authority on other legal bases with tightly-constrained functions), and practically, the legal limits don't matter because response time off the courts is to slow for them to act as a meaningful brake. (E.g., the lawsuit filed the first court day after the order to mobilize the guard for LA just reached the trial stage this week.)
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-13 07:18:23+00:00
So in your example you can apply just one test result at a time, in any order. And the more pieces of evidence you apply, the stronger your argument gets.

f = "The test(s) say the patient is a vampire, with a .01 false positive rate."

f∘f∘f = "The test(s) say the patient is a vampire, with a .000001 false positive rate."

In the chain example f or g or h on its own is useless. Only f∘g∘h is relevant. And f∘g∘h is a lot weaker than f or g or h appears on its own.

This is what a logic chain looks like, adapted for vampirism to make it easier to compare:

f: "The test says situation 1 is true, with a 10% false positive rate."

g: "If situation 1 then situation 2 is true, with a 10% false positive rate."

h: "If situation 2 then the patient is a vampire, with a 10% false positive rate."

f∘g∘h = "The test says the patient is a vampire, with a 27% false positive rate."

So there are two key differences. One is the "if"s that make the false positives build up. The other is that only h tells you anything about vampires. f and g are mere setup, so they can only weaken h. At best f and g would have 100% reliability and h would be its original strength, 10% false positive. The false positive rate of h will never be decreased by adding more chain links, only increased. If you want a smaller false positive rate you need a separate piece of evidence. Like how your example has three similar but separate pieces of evidence.
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:20:00+00:00
That's interesting!

Historically (at least for the last century or so) we mostly stopped lowering working hours and instead focused on increased output.

Eg people still work eight hours a day, but get paid vastly more in real terms than in the 1950s. Instead of working only one hour a day (or fewer years or whatever) and taking a 1950s compensation package.

Of course, this is merely a statistical observation. There are plenty of people who eg decide to retire early on a modest nest egg.
by stared | 2025-08-13 07:20:01+00:00
Not sure if "Python 4.0" is the best comparison.

Go is compiled, Python - interpreted. Go focuses on concurrency, Python on making it easy to do things with code.

Many things that are a one-liner in Python (but itself or with a library), in Go take quite a lot of lines or boilerplate. For example, there is no built-in string templates in Go.
by defrost | 2025-08-13 07:20:07+00:00
> There was a store that had a sign .. that was forced to take it down by the police.

That literally didn't happen, at least according to your own link.

But Mr Davies has remained defiant he will not change the message despite being advised by police to reword it.

The article has all the elements of clickbait, hinting at police seriously overstepping their mark on the basis of a self reported anecdote by a shop owner about a supposed remark by an unnamed officer.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-13 07:21:09+00:00
It has been introduced in Intel Penryn, in November 2007.

However the AMD CPUs did not implement it until Bulldozer, in mid 2011.

While they lacked the many additional instructions provided by Bulldozer, also including AVX and FMA, for many applications the older Opteron CPUs were significantly faster than the Bulldozer-based CPUs, so there were few incentives for upgrading them, before the launch of AMD Epyc in mid 2017.

SSE 4.1 is a cut point in supporting old CPUs for many software packages, because older CPUs have a very high overhead for divergent computations (e.g. with if ... else ...) inside loops that are parallelized with SIMD instructions.
by internet_points | 2025-08-13 07:22:33+00:00
Yeah I also noticed that even though I can accept a calendar invite from gnus in emacs, and the person inviting me sees that I've accepted, my own provider (fastmail) doesn't register me as having accepted in my fastmail calendar.

I've never tried debugging C# from within emacs (though eglot with omnisharp solves all the other IDE needs like goto, see references, renaming and such). I think you're more likely to find help on r/emacs or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79516308/how-to-debug-c-... or something for that.
by ifwinterco | 2025-08-13 07:23:03+00:00
In the end state (after ~2140), mining rewards just come from TX fees. But true, it is possible you could just redistribute TX fees to stakers.

Post-merge ethereum is designed so that the gas fees and the staking rewards roughly cancel out on balance (so overall inflation is around zero), but they are decoupled so even if nobody is using the network you still get a staking yield
by plufz | 2025-08-13 07:23:28+00:00
When I first started using Blender I found it to be an insane application that I would never be able to like. It breaks every possible convention for user interfaces. After getting over the quite long initial hurdle I started loving the interface and how the core logic applies to all elements to the app, e.g moving something on a timeline has the same command as moving an object in 3D space. It's not perfect but now I miss the workflow in all other visual creative applications. I would love a vector app with a blender like interface. It's the first open source creative app that I actually found good. But Blender most certainly is the "vi of 3D modeling".
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:23:43+00:00
> And let's be real: we're in a bubble. There's zero evidence that LLMs have produced a measurable productivity boom. [...]

You are right that a general productivity boom is hard to detect so far.

But we already have certain industries with more than measurable productivity impact.

A very salient example: first level call centre agents. The kind of unfortunate souls who are paid to man a phone and not allowed to deviate from their script, nor authorised to actually solve your problem.

The companies renting out these services make heavy use of current AI and that has measurably affected hiring, staffing, prices etc.

Even fairly basic AI (like what we have today) is good for this use case.

Does it suck: sure. Does it suck more than the status quo with warm bodies without power: not really. And it's cheaper.
by perihelions | 2025-08-13 07:24:31+00:00
Some similar discussions from earlier this year,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152154 ("In memoriam (onlinesafetyact.co.uk)"—147 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044 ("Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced) (lfgss.com)"—555 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152178 ("Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act"—87 comments)
by NoBeardMarch | 2025-08-13 07:25:31+00:00
Honestly, I use Things 3 pretty much like the author uses his text-app. One single list for all to-do's. The beauty of Things 3 is that there is no feature bloat and unnecessary complexity like most to-do managers.

The important difference is automatic recurring tasks, and daily task will show up outside the app as that red bubble on its icon indicating how many things "need" to be done today, the rest is optional.

Crucially, you need to commit to it, and use it everyday - even if just a little. The authors notepad works because it's a daily simple thing, like you said.
by tempfile | 2025-08-13 07:25:52+00:00
Consider that even the named phenomenon is sloppy: "recursive self improvement" does not imply "self improvement without bounds". This is the "what if you hit diminishing returns and never get past it" claim. Absolutely no justification for the jump, ever, among AI boosters.

> If AI ever gets to human-level intelligence

This picture of intelligence as a numerical scale that you just go up or down, with ants at the bottom and humans/AI at the top, is very very shaky. AI is vulnerable to this problem, because we do not have a definition of intelligence. We can attempt to match up capabilities LLMs seem to have with capabilities humans have, and if the capability is well-defined we may even be able to reason about how stable it is relative to how LLMs work.

For "reasoning" we categorically do not have this. There is not even any evidence that LLMs will continue increasing as techniques improve, except in the tautological sense that if LLMs don't appear to resemble humans more closely we will call the technique a failure. IIRC there was a recent paper about giving LLMs more opportunity processing time, and this reduced performance. Same with adding extraneous details, sometimes that reduces performance too. What if eventually everything you try reduces performance? Totally unaddressed.

> It that an insane belief worthy of being a primary example of a community not thinking clearly?

I really need to stress this: thinking clearly is about the reasoning, not the conclusion. Given the available evidence, no legitimate argument has been presented that implies the conclusion. This does not mean the conclusion is wrong! But just putting your finger in the air and saying "the wind feels right, we'll probably have AGI tomorrow" is how you get bubbles and winters.
by Gareth321 | 2025-08-13 07:26:02+00:00
I don't think your comment even addresses what they argue. In the case of the drug addicted homeless person with mental health issues, context doesn't change that different people have different perspectives. For example, I believe that the system is imperfect, and yet it is still cruel and unjust for both the homeless person and innocent members of society who are the victims of violent crime for said homeless person to be allowed to roam free. You might believe that the risk to themselves and others is acceptable to uphold your notion of civil liberties. Neither of us are objectively right or wrong, and that is the issue with the definition of empathy above. It works for both of us. We're both empathetic, even though we want opposite outcomes.

Maybe we don't even need to change the definition of empathy. We just have to accept that it means different things to different people.
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:26:37+00:00
Where's the monopoly (or rather oligopoly) you are talking about?

There's many models offered by many companies and labs that are close enough to state of the art. Many of them are completely open source or at least have open weights.

You might complain about outsourcing your thinking to a machine, sure. But there's no monopoly nor oligopoly.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-08-13 07:27:41+00:00
Go to Google Search and literally ask "How do steam engines work?", and an AI-generated answer is exactly what it will show you, along with a Wikipedia link/excerpt followed by an endless list of links to clickfarms with lede talking about steam engines in general terms to lure you onto their ad-cluttered pages (btw, Duck Duck Go/Bing is just the same).

Shouldn't you rather say "go to Wikipedia straight", or push for Wikipedia to improve their search with all their money already? Isn't a choice of using local open-weight LLMs not actually progress over "googling" and Google's rotten algorithms, or even freaking YouTube and their even worse ad feeds?

So what's your point (I'm tempted to insert "boomer" here)?
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:29:59+00:00
1950s houses are no longer legal in most places.

Both because in the US new construction is basically outlawed. But also because 1950s style houses and goods in general are so shoddy, you can no longer legally produce or buy them. In many cases, no one would even take them off your for free, even if they were still legal.)

On a global scale, the times between perhaps 1940s to 1970s had some of the harshest inequality ever. It's been since about the 1980s that inequality has gone down markedly.

Remember how India and China used to be on the verge of famine (or outright in famine). Nowadays obesity is the bigger problem.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-08-13 07:30:16+00:00
>They could’ve made an example of a prosperous territory and enabling trust.

How do they create a prosperous territory? Israel destroyed Gaza's airport. Israel destroyed the foundations of Gaza's seaport. Israel maintains a maritime blockade of Gaza, so it's not like they can freely engage in trade with other sovereign territories. Israel maintains control over exploitation of Gaza's natural gas deposits.[1][2]

> But people keep forgetting that we still have living hostages in tunnels under Gaza, and we can’t accept a militarized Gaza anymore.

Even before Oct7, there were something like 350-500 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, charged with no crimes but indefinitely detained. They are functionally the same as hostages. Why should Gaza accept Israel holding hostages? Why should Palestine accept a militarized Israel? [3][4]

> Hamas should return the hostages and surrender its arms.

Israel should return its hostages and surrender its arms. And then the leadership should stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. We put some Hamas leaders on trial at the same time if you like, I'm fine with that, but the total disarmament of Israel and the prosecution of its leadership will likely be an overwhelming net good for the rest of humanity.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/21/palestines-forg...

[2] https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/the-gas-fields-off-gaza-a-gif...

[3] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/10/un-expert-ca...

[4] https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-prison-intifada-supporting...
by inkyoto | 2025-08-13 07:30:43+00:00
> FreeBSD code is also in iOS and macOS via Darwin […]

It is a common belief that Darwin has allegedly descended from FreeBSD, but there is not a lot in there: a pretty ancient snapshot of the FreeBSD userland, another snapshot of the TCP/IP stack that has now completely diverged from the current FreeBSD TCP/IP stack (or, more correctly, the other way round), plus a few borrowed kernel level API's (kqueue is the most notable one).

VMM, VFS, driver layers, file systems etc etc do not share the same lineage.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-13 07:30:55+00:00
I mean, TBH I would expect this to be true: an LLM is trained over a massive corpus of internet data, which contains many typos, and is required to accurately predict tokens despite edit errors. A spellchecker is typically running a deterministic algorithm really, really quickly, and has hardcoded limits on acceptable edit distance (and has no learned knowledge of what looks correct/incorrect to human eyes). An LLM should generally trounce a spellchecker at figuring out what you meant to type, unless the spellchecker is secretly a tiny LLM / ML model of some kind under the hood.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-08-13 07:30:57+00:00
> What could go wrong?

> "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

- F Herbert, 1965

I want to emphasise the "other men with machines" part. Mr Herbert wasn't talking about an AI takeover. He was talking about a techbro takeover.

He didn't even believe in the agency of machines, just human potential - an inanimate thing that does not want, will not want to take over. It is a tool for the people who command it and do.
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-08-13 07:31:25+00:00
“Somewhere in the mix”? Sure. I’ve seen TTRPG folks experimenting with LLMs for about as long as LLMs have been around. A couple years later it still can’t really run a session, but you might find it useful for generating some details of an adventure.

The big issue really is making its output interesting. As usual, an LLM will default to the most generic outcomes and settings. For a TTRPG to be fun you usually want surprise, drama, creativity - it can’t do any of those.
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:33:31+00:00
> Golden ages are fictional constructs, applied retroactively as part of an agenda. There is no such thing as living in a current golden age without knowing the future.

That's a weird self contradiction. I just contemporarily applied the Golden Age moniker, so your assertion is just plain wrong.

People have never been as rich as today, even poor people. Wars are a bit bursty, but if you smooth it out a bit, but the probability for an average human to become a casualty in a war has been going down over the centuries, and is still going down over the last decades.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-08-13 07:34:27+00:00
At this point, I am pretty confident I can live the rest of my life without ever entering British air space.

So I ask myself - could I come up with a simple HTML page that would be illegal in the UK without age verification checks? I won't host pornography, but it seems to cover a lot more than that. Photos from contests? Calls to overthrow the government?

I'd put it under some creative commons license so other people could host the exact same content. What if there were thousands, or tens of thousands of sites that did it. It'd be wonderful if people were willing to put their money where their mouth is how them how impotent and illegitimate their laws really are.
by nickweb | 2025-08-13 07:34:37+00:00
Fully understand the reasons for the site - and the title on HN is shutdowns and site blocks - but the site itself displays self-enforcinging sites and shows them as potential government blocks.

There are blocked sites but you have to look for them in different sections of the site.

One site shown at the start of the other pages, adult friend finder is showing as blocked, however I can access it from my UK provider so honestly not sure what value this site brings (yet) apart from highlighting those that have a self-enforced blackout due to "451 Legal Reasons".

I'm on mobile so difficult to copy and paste - but that site was the top of an alphabetical list after I made my way past a few VPNs.
Show HN: Floaty – Multithreaded Fluid and Soft Body Simulation for Browsers
by matsuoka-601 | 2025-08-13 07:36:04+00:00
Hi, I implemented a real-time physics simulation optimized with multithreading. The simulation runs on your browser, so check it out if you're interested!

You can drag the soft bodies, and change the simulation boundary size by resizing the window.

Demo: https://floaty-fluid.netlify.app/

Repo: https://github.com/matsuoka-601/Floaty

I'll briefly explain how it works under the hood.

For simulating fluid and soft bodies, a method called Position Based Dynamics (PBD) is used. This method is often chosen when real-time performance is required. Fluid and soft bodies interact with each other, and buoyancy is simulated based on a paper "Unified Particle Physics for Real-Time Applications".

The most time consuming part of the solver is optimized with wasm-bindgen-rayon. Since PBD is relatively easy to parallelize, multithreading greatly improves the performance of the solver. Thanks to this, the simulation runs smoothly on relatively weak devices I guess.
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:36:23+00:00
Depends on what you mean by 'optimal'. Ie what are you optimising over?

In terms of 'can I run it locally on an early 2000s machine?' LLMs are definitely the wrong choice.

In terms of 'what can I quickly hack together in 2025 regardless of variable cost?' LLMs might be the right choice.

> I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker [...]

You can get pretty far with some lookup tables and some heuristics.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-08-13 07:37:16+00:00
> I’m pointing out that I specifically intended to exclude professionals by scoping my statement to “social groups”.

I think your argumentation is a generalization that's close to a rationalist fallacy we're discussing:

> a social group with a lot of invented lingo is a red flag that you can see before you get isolated from your loved ones.

Groups of artists do this all the time for the sake of agency over their intentions. They borrow terminology from economics, psychology, computer science etc., but exclude economists, psychologists and computer scientists all the time. I had one choreographer talk to me about his performances as if they were "Protocols". People are free to use any vocabulary to describe their observed dynamics, expressions or phenomena.

As far as red flag moments go, the intent to use a certain terminology still prevails any choice of terminology itself.
by MrAcer74 | 2025-08-13 07:37:49+00:00
We’re exploring an idea for an AI-powered home buying platform with a swiping/matching interface, think Tinder, but for finding your dream home.

Instead of manually filtering endless listings, users describe what they want (location, lifestyle, quirks) or app guesses it and the app uses AI + image understanding to suggest better matches than traditional search. From there, it can guide buyers through the entire process including offers, disclosures, negotiation, insurance, basically acting like a “super-agent” in your pocket, available 24/7.

We’re trying to understand:

1. Is the “dating app” UX for home search a gimmick or a genuinely better discovery method?

2. Would buyers trust an AI to handle key steps like offer strategy and disclosure review?

3. What do you think are the biggest blockers, data access, regulation, trust, something else?

Curious to hear from folks who’ve recently bought homes, work in proptech, or have strong opinions about real estate’s pain points.
by eru | 2025-08-13 07:38:30+00:00
This is the first time I hear about this. (It's certainly possible, but I'd need to see some evidence or at least a write-up.)

OpenAI got flamed over announcing their results before the embargo was up:

IMO had asked companies to wait at least a week or so after the human winners were announced to announce the AI results. OpenAI did not wait.
by leodiceaa | 2025-08-13 07:39:10+00:00
Hard prohibition and violent enforcement is the root cause of this problem. There are no alcohol cartels, but there where when alcohol was illegal.

It drives profits and incentives for violence, and corruption. And once the money is flowing, the system reinforces itself.

Brutalizing populations, spiraling repression - all these policies can do is entrench the problem. It won't be until all drugs are legal and taxed that this problem will go away. And that won't happen because drug trafficking drives huge amounts of money that is essentially tax free.

The drug repression system exists to drive the flow of money outside the purview of the State, not because "drugs are bad hmkay". That is just propaganda. Otherwise, why would alcohol, by far the most harmful drug, be legal?