MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by glenstein | 2025-08-12 15:39:53+00:00
Yeah, I would say the groups in question are notionally, aspirationally rational and I would hate for the takeaway to be disengagement from principles of critical thinking and skeptical thinking writ large.

Which, to me, raises the fascinating question of what does a "good" version look like, of groups and group dynamics centered around a shared interest in best practices associated with critical thinking?

At a first impression, I think maybe these virtues (which are real!) disappear into the background of other, more applied specializations, whether professions, hobbies, backyard family barbecues.
by bhouston | 2025-08-12 15:40:45+00:00
> proscribed terroist organization

Terrorist designations are local to each country and the language you are using is UK language. Which countries rules do you want to enforce here in your censorship?

> CNN or NYT will bring Israeli government and IDF spox but also ask hard questions about civilian casualties

Also do we have to ban BBC News from here for interview Houthis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOH00weB24

> I do not trust it. At some point you need to also validate whether your source is credible or not. And MintPress simply is not a credible source.

"I do not trust it" is the worst response. Find a reason to say it is incorrect rather than these double standard censorship claims. Or just downvote it and move on.
by righthand | 2025-08-12 15:40:56+00:00
Sure many people across the globe are susceptible to cult-think. It’s just been a century long trend in America to seek a superior way of living to “save all Americans” is all. No offense to other countries peoples, I’m sure they’re just as good cult members championing over application as any American.

It probably speaks more volumes that you are taking my comment about this so literally.
by bko | 2025-08-12 15:41:11+00:00
I have a sense this is one of those issues that people don't know how they should feel, but some narrative of how we as enlightened technologists should feel will form.

On one hand, people don't like Google owning chrome as they have a huge influence on open web and they're essentially an ad company

On the other hand, if in the hands of an AI company, this could mean using your data for models, VC incentives, less open in general. Perplexity doesn't have a money printing machine to forever subsidize a browser.

It'll be interesting which narrative wins out.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-08-12 15:41:34+00:00
After two decades of software development, I switched over to cybersecurity and did that for about five years. My general impression is that while most companies would be happy to prevent data breaches, what they're really after is giving themselves a shield against legal liability. Because of this, they're far more concerned with having the appearance of security than having actual security. Being able to dodge charges of negligence appears to be what they're paying for. If they can reduce headcount by using AI tools, even if the tools aren't all that effective, that will be a business win if it still provides the same legal liability shield.

Things might be different on the business secrets side of things but where I was on the PII/PCI data protection side of things, cybersecurity = legal risk management.
by ryao | 2025-08-12 15:41:42+00:00
With the exception of the asinine piece of advice at the end, given that such advice likely has around for decades, I cannot imagine it being very effective anymore as the measures suggested should already be in effect.

I would have speculated that they are imagining savings opportunities that do not exist, but the “delete emails” advice gives clear evidence that they are imagining savings opportunities that do not exist, so there is no need for speculation.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-12 15:41:54+00:00
I use git pretty basically, just as a revision system where the hosted version has some nice-to-haves on top like rendering markdown, permalinking bits of code to people, and being able to open tickets and contribute code. Gitea/Forgejo/Codeberg does all of that and I haven't run into any missing features. It's also a lot easier to navigate than GitLab, but I'll admit that's probably just a matter of me not being used to it

Having self-hosted Gitea after considering GitLab, I can also say that the resource consumption of Gitea is a tiny fraction of that of GitLab's. I don't get the impression that their employees care about self hosters beyond as a gateway for enterprise sysadmins to get it running quickly before doing some big installation
by cddotdotslash | 2025-08-12 15:42:12+00:00
Companies should automate this. Write their own outage monitoring, feed the results, plus the cumbersome format you have to send to the provider, into an LLM, have it spit out an email requesting SLA credits or whatever the contract specifies.

Probably not worth it for low cost services, but if you’re paying GitHub $x millions per year, maybe it is.
Show HN: I built an AI that remembers everything and learns from mistakes
by VAC-AGI | 2025-08-12 15:42:17+00:00
*Demo:* [Available under NDA - email for private access] *Contact:* viktoradamcore@pm.me

---

## What I built

After years of frustration with AI that forgets everything between conversations, I created *VAC* - an AI system with permanent, hierarchical memory that actually learns from every interaction.

Unlike ChatGPT or Claude that reset after each session, VAC builds a growing knowledge base from every conversation, success, and failure. Think of it as hiring an AI colleague who:

- Remembers every project you've worked on together - Learns from past mistakes and won't repeat them - Gets smarter with each interaction - Runs completely offline (zero data leakage)

## The core innovation

*Patent-protected architecture* that combines: - *Permanent episodic memory* - stores every interaction with context - *Hierarchical knowledge organization* - like human long-term memory - *Self-reflection engine* - learns from failures and improves strategies - *Contextual recall* - finds relevant past experiences for new problems

## Why this matters

Current AI has amnesia. Every conversation starts from zero. Enterprises pay millions for AI that can't learn from their specific use cases or retain institutional knowledge.

*Example:* A doctor using VAC for patient analysis. Over months, VAC learns the doctor's diagnostic patterns, remembers similar cases, and suggests increasingly relevant insights. Traditional AI? Same generic responses every time.

## Technical approach

- *Memory layer:* FAISS + SQLite for hierarchical experience storage - *Learning engine:* Custom algorithms for experience replay and strategy evolution - *Privacy-first:* Completely offline operation, no cloud dependencies - *Modular design:* Can integrate with existing LLMs or run standalone

## Early validation

*USPTO patent granted* (filed July 2025) *Working prototype* with web interface *Enterprise interest* from healthcare and finance sectors *Technical validation* across multiple use cases

## What's next

Looking for: - *Technical feedback* from the HN community - *Enterprise pilots* in healthcare, finance, legal - *Strategic partnerships* with organizations needing persistent AI memory - *Investment conversations* for scaling the technology

---

## Why I'm sharing this

The AI industry is moving toward more capable systems, but memory persistence remains unsolved. I believe this is a fundamental building block for AGI - AI that truly learns and evolves like a human colleague.

*Note:* Core architecture is patent-protected. Happy to discuss technical approaches and potential applications under appropriate agreements.

*Questions, feedback, and collaboration opportunities welcome.*

---

Building the first AI that actually remembers you.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-12 15:42:22+00:00
> A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.

I like how all the demos just show these crazy simple, single page "web apps" that are effectively just coding tutorial material, and people eat it up. There's no talk of auth, persistence, security, deployment, performance, etc.

Cool...it vibe coded a janky snake game with no collision, now what?
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-12 15:42:23+00:00
I think the model actually cares about where you post though, or at least there's some kind of location based standard.

I've used Reddit for ages, but recently received two 'account suspensions' both which misrepresented my remarks, one in which the appeal was ignored, the other in which the response to the appeal was a false claim that the remark was a threat.

But both happened very soon after I participated in discussions in /r/ukpolitics. I especially think they want to get rid of discussion concerning the proscription of Palestine Action. I don't think it's somebody from there following my comment feed and reporting things but instead something actually automated and part of Reddit itself, because it was rather fast.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-08-12 15:42:31+00:00
I think what I was trying to convey is that the image of life in an American city that the parent was portraying, when he described a beautiful, wealthy city as "Fallujah" (which he has now deleted), and what this couple clearly had in their head, is just completely alien to most people who actually live in those cities. The impression that you get from conservative media and often local TV news is just completely divorced from reality - or at best the media has taken the experience of a relatively small number of people who live in particularly dangerous housing projects, or particularly dangerous streets, and presented it as how the city works in general. I know Boston better than Washington, so I'll use that as an example. Admittedly, it's a city with much lower crime than Washington, but I've had plenty of experiences talking to older, more conservative people who live in suburban and rural areas, and seem to think it's crime ridden. I used to work in several neighborhoods that are considered dangerous - Roxbury and Mattapan, and I've spent time in some of the rougher parts of Dorchester. I've been inside a number of low-income housing projects. I've walked and ridden buses in these neighborhoods. What I noticed was that whatever concern I felt about my safety came from things that I had heard from the media, not from anything that I personally saw, or even anything that happened to anyone I knew. There are a few exceptions to this, like a few blocks in the South End where homeless addicts congregate where I would genuinely be concerned about something happening. The neighborhoods where I've lived - which are not necessarily affluent - have all felt perfectly safe, with the exception of some petty thefts - particularly bike thefts.

I am not trying to argue that there is no crime problem anywhere - of course there is and people shouldn't have to live in unsafe areas. But as someone who has intimate knowledge of a major American city, it very much feels like there's a propaganda machine that's pumping out distorted images of life in American cities, either for political purposes or simply because sensationalizing crime draws more viewers. People who don't live in these cities are left with a view that completely lacks the nuance and complexity of actual life in a major city.
by reaperducer | 2025-08-12 15:42:50+00:00
The point of coffee shops in this regard is that the use as free coworking space

Incidentally, back when I was doing startups, there were free coworking spaces in the under-utilized portions of the Seattle convention center. Big, squishy chairs, fast wifi, and power ports galore.

It was like a self-service micro tech incubator, and helped me bootstrap a company that lasted over a decade. The State of Washington more than got its money back in taxes.
by rvz | 2025-08-12 15:43:04+00:00
This is not a serious offer. Even if it was, is a low-ball one for a browser like Chrome. (Why did they choose that figure given they know they don't have the money).

Also they do not have anywhere close to having the money or stock value to buy it. So this is just for attention grabbing for the headlines.

Move along now, nothing to see here.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-12 15:43:09+00:00
To be honest I don't understand that objection. If you strip it from all its culty sociological effects, one of the original ideas of rationalism was to try to use logical reasoning and statistical techniques to explicitly avoid the pitfalls of known cognitive biases. Given that foundational tenet, "rationalism" seems like an extremely appropriate moniker.

I fully accept that the rationalist community may have morphed into something far beyond that original tenet, but I think rationalism just describes the approach, not that it's the "one true philosophy".
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-12 15:43:10+00:00
That's not at all relevant to parent post's point. BTC mining is famously centralized, and continues to get more so. It is inevitable that a manufacturer of BTC asics with access to cheap power will become large enough to control 51% of the hash. It's inevitable. It's bad system design - it makes being able to manufacture your own custom silicon table stakes to run a financial system for some reason.

BTC will have to move to a proof of stake design to survive. It's unavoidable.
by Barrin92 | 2025-08-12 15:43:16+00:00
>so world models including demons have never predicted any of their sense data.

There's a reason they call themselves "rationalists" instead of empiricists or positivists. They perfectly inverted Hume ("reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions")

These kinds of harebrained views aren't an accident but a product of rationalism. The idea that intellect is quasi infinite and that the world can be mirrored in the mind is not running contradictory to, but just the most extreme form of rationalism taken to its conclusion, and of course deeply religious, hence the constant fantasies about AI divinities and singularities.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-12 15:43:18+00:00
I could buy the idea of the plugin system itself being desired (e.g. maybe I even want english definitions from Merriam-Webster or something because I like their style more than the open source database) but I think that's separate from what an app does by default. Especially on something like Debian, one should expect a FOSS-first approach whenever reasonable, and for >99% of users the reasonable default is a local dictionary.
by GeekyBear | 2025-08-12 15:43:41+00:00
> First of all, I don't think Google ever made such a "claim".

They explicitly made the claim that Android was open on many occasions.

Remember when a major Android selling point was that Android was "open source" before they started moving all the updated versions of the developer APIs into the Play Store?

https://medium.com/@coopossum/how-open-source-is-android-8d1...
by the_af | 2025-08-12 15:44:21+00:00
I know they define "achievements" in order to measure "how well" the LLM plays the game, and by definition this is arbitrary. As an experiment, I cannot argue with this.

However, I must point out the kind of "modern" (relatively speaking) adventure games mentioned in the article -- which are more accurately called "interactive fiction" by the community -- is not very suitable for this kind of experiment. Why? Well, because so many of them are exploratory/experimental, and not at all about "winning" (unlike, say, "Colossal Cave Adventure", where there is a clear goal).

You cannot automate (via LLM) "playing" them, because they are all about the thoughts and emotions (and maybe shocked laughter) they elicit in human players. This cannot be automated.

If you think I'm being snobby, consider this: the first game TFA mentions is "9:05". Now, you can set goals for a bot to play this game, but truly -- if you've played the game -- you know this would be completely missing the point. You cannot "win" this game, it's all about subverting expectations, and about replaying it once you've seen the first, most straightforward ending, and having a laugh about it.

Saying more will spoil the game :)

(And do note there's no such thing as "spoiling a game" for an LLM, which is precisely the reason they cannot truly "play" these games!)
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-12 15:44:25+00:00
The book Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson) touches on this, making the case that in modern times, "nation" has replaced the cultural narrative purpose previously held by "tribe," "village," "royal subject," or "religion."

The shared thread among these is (in ever widening circles) a story people tell themselves to justify precisely why, for example, the actions of someone you'll never meet in Tulsa, OK have any bearing whatsoever on the fate of you, a person in Lincoln, NE.

One can see how this leaves an individual in a tenuous place if one doesn't feel particularly connected to nationhood (one can also see how being too connected to nationhood, in an exclusionary way, can also have deleterious consequences, and how not unlike differing forms of Christianity, differing concepts on what the 'soul' of a nation is can foment internal strife).

(To be clear: those fates are intertwined to some extent; the world we live in grows ever smaller due to the power of up-scaled influence of action granted by technology. But "nation" is a sort of fiction we tell ourselves to fit all that complexity into the slippery meat between human ears).
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-12 15:44:28+00:00
If I remember correctly, one of the purposes for goo.gl was for Google to get metrics on how such direct-links spread "out of band" and how often they were opened (as they would direct people to pages without Google acting as intermediary).

I guess Chrome metrics and URL-suffixes now answer this better (and so they probably failed to justify the internal budget to keep it)...
by imranq | 2025-08-12 15:44:34+00:00
People basically want a life coach, someone by their side who can tell them what the best next thing to do is at any given moment. Everything else are just approximation of that ideal.

The author's .txt file works because its simplicity forces a daily ritual of self-coaching. The tool demands that the user manually review, prioritize, and decide what matters. There are no features to hide behind, only the discipline of the process itself.

The impulse to use complex apps or build custom scripts is the attempt to engineer a better coach. We try to automate the prioritization and reminders, hoping the system can do the coaching for us.

The great trap, of course, is when we fall in love with engineering the system instead of doing the work. This turns productivity into a sophisticated form of procrastination.

Ultimately, the best system is the one that removes the most friction between decision and action. For the author, that meant stripping away everything but the list itself.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-12 15:44:38+00:00
I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else.

One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.
by mcv | 2025-08-12 15:44:40+00:00
In fact, I'd go a step further and note the similarity with organized religion. People have a tendency to organize and dogmatize everything. The problem with religion is rarely the core ideas, but always the desire to use it as a basis for authority, to turn it dogmatic and ultimately form a power structure.

And I say this as a Christian. I often think that becoming a state religion was the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity, or any religion, because then it unavoidably becomes a tool for power and authority.

And doing the same with other ideas or ideologies is no different. Look at what happened to communism, capitalism, or almost any other secular idea you can think of: the moment it becomes established, accepted, and official, the corruption sets in.
by pron | 2025-08-12 15:44:44+00:00
> You can do whatever you want, but systemically it is a lot better than doing it manually and anyone experienced with modern C++ will tell you it essentially stops being a problem.

Yeah, it's fine, but I think that systematically the Zig approach is a lot better for my needs and preferences.

> In practice this doesn't really happen.

I've only been programming low-level code for 25 years or so, including hard realtime safety-critical software, where a missed deadline or a stack overflow means dead people, so I have some grasp on what can really happen.

There's a clear tradeoff between forgetting to write some code and not noticing when code runs when you may not expect it to. Saying that one is universally better than the other is, at the very least, unsubstantiated.
by dfabulich | 2025-08-12 15:44:53+00:00
The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments.

Well, it turns out that intuition and long-lived cultural norms often have rational justifications, but individuals may not know what they are, and norms/intuitions provide useful antibodies against narcissist would-be cult leaders.

Can you find the "rational" justification not to isolate yourself from non-Rationalists, not to live with them in a polycule, and not to take a bunch of psychedelic drugs with them? If you can't solve that puzzle, you're in danger of letting the group take advantage of you.
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 15:45:02+00:00
I don’t think I would anthropomorphize the whole species like that, but I actually think some people are consciously pulling back for that exact “we have too many people already” reason. I believe it to be wildly misguided though. I think it’s a sick mind that perceives their own species as an invasive pest to be exterminated. Humans can be bad and they can be good. If you are dismayed, as I am, at how bad the bad people can be, I would argue that all the good people laying down and dying (either immediately or through voluntary infertility) does not solve that problem. If anything, that might increase the bad-to-good ratio. The actual fixes for that are MUCH harder: 1. Have more kids and raise them to know right from wrong. 2. Have a positive impact on the world to promote doing what’s right.

For instance, Fred Rogers did more for improving the world than 10,000,000 people guiltily refusing to have kids would have.

So did Mother Teresa, who, through her work, both increased the population and inspired others to do good.
by reactordev | 2025-08-12 15:45:03+00:00
I think I read it too, it’s called Twilight. /s

I had friends who were into Vampire growing up. I hadn’t heard of Werewolf until after the aforementioned book came out and people started going nuts for it. I mentioned to my wife at the time that there was this game called “Vampire” and told her about it and she just laughed, pointed to the book, and said “this is so much better”. :shrug:

Rewind back and there were the Star Wars kids. Fast forward and there are the Harry Potter kids/adults. Each generation has their own “thing”. During that time, it was Quake MSDOS and Vampire. Oh and we started Senior Assassinations. 90s super soakers were the real deal.
by glenstein | 2025-08-12 15:45:13+00:00
Agreed, I appreciate that there's a conceptual distinction between the philosophical versions of rationalism and empiricism, but what's being talked about here is a conception that (again, at least notionally) is interested in and compatible with both.

I am pretty sure many of the LessWrong posts are about how to understand the meaning of different types of data and are very much about examining, developing, criticizing a rich variety of empirical attitudes.