MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-13 14:32:30+00:00
> For decades part of the logic for buying a house was that, after the down payment, mortgage payments were generally cheaper than renting.

I thought the logic was that, after say 30 years, you own the home you were making mortgage payments on.

My dad explained it to me best. He had bought a single-family house in Homer, Alaska after having moved up there and working in construction for a number of years. He had never owned a home in his life. He got a 30-year fixed loan. He said at the time he was questioning himself as to what he was doing — mortgage payments were something like $400 a month!

"Ten years on, you know what the monthly mortgage was?" he asked me. "$400 a month," was his (obvious) answer. He laughed when he said it because at the time that would have been peanuts for rent.

He wasn't there for the whole of 30 years but had enough equity in the home some years later that when he did sell it he was able to outright purchase land out East End and build a new home on it.

To be sure, times have changed — the market has changed (interest rates have changed of nothing else). But putting money toward ownership still seems like a win.
by jadamson | 2025-08-13 14:32:37+00:00
The grooming gangs in those towns consisted of men from a variety of occupations, though a clear pattern was the involvement of takeaways and taxi firms. The involvement of police and politicians was mostly limited to denial, dismissal, and cover-up.

Although there have been individual allegations against local politicians[1] and police[2], they do little to help your case here. There certainly were thousands of victims, and I'm not clear why you'd deny that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/26/rotherham-gr...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9y0lvpyqvo
by xnx | 2025-08-13 14:33:02+00:00
Classic plotter art as performance art video: https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_schachter_how_i_turned_frus...

After rewatching that, I did a one-shot remake in p5js: https://g.co/gemini/share/b983a93e3ae2

Is there actual plotter simulation software I could be using?
by scott_s | 2025-08-13 14:33:35+00:00
> Of course, because I am not new to the problem, whereas an LLM is new to it every new prompt.

That is true for the LLMs you have access to now. Now imagine if the LLM had been trained on your entire code base. And not just the code, but the entire commit history, commit messages and also all of your external design docs. And code and docs from all relevant projects. That LLM would not be new to the problem every prompt. Basically, imagine that you fine-tuned an LLM for your specific project. You will eventually have access to such an LLM.
by mvieira38 | 2025-08-13 14:33:35+00:00
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff

[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
by raspyberr | 2025-08-13 14:33:41+00:00
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 means authorities can request encryption keys (passwords) from you and you can't say no.

Investigatory Powers Act 2016 literally nicknamed Snoopers' Charter. Means ISPs keep all your traffic for minimum a year, police are given access to it, but politicians are exempt and need a warrant to have their data viewed?!?!?

UK police have been rolling out Live Facial Recognition in London and Wales for the last few years. Seven new regions are being added. 10 new vans coming in.

Supermarkets are using facial recognition to keep a database of people they deem criminals.

UK tried to make Apple put in a backdoor to its encrypted storage. Apple removed the ability for UK citizens to use that feature.

Online Safety Act forced online services to implement age verification for "adult" content. Many niche forums closed down because they would face large fines and jail time if they didn't comply. Larger businesses offloaded this requirement onto third party companies so now if you want to see "adult" content online you need to share your face or bank details or government ID with a random third party likely from a different country.

None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
by DrScientist | 2025-08-13 14:34:11+00:00
> This is why it's a copyright violation and not a theft.

But is it? Copying the OpenAI model is only potentially copyright - as you have to prove it's not exempt via fair use etc. Note I'm not selling it on - I'm just selling the output - which isn't soley determined by the model - it's determined by the model plus random numbers plus context - what I'm selling is only partly determined by the source model I copied.

Now if I copied it and used it to undercut your original buisness - then clearly that's not fair use - but that's rather my point no?

These companies have clearly copied source material without permission on a huge scale - but because it's copying and the people haven't lost the original - there is in effect another test - do the original people lose out as result etc.

It's quite clear - say in the news industry which might be supported by advertising - that copying content and then presenting a summary version so that people never visit the source material is clearly damaging the underlying copyright holders.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-08-13 14:34:25+00:00
the rustbelt was caused by the rest of the world catching up after being bombed back to the stone age during WW2.

unions kept wages high and led to offshoring, but inefficient garbage tier cars from Detroit lost ground to better engineering and no planned obsolesce coming from European and Japanese models. A lot of that came from a decline in steel, coal, and acute pain points related to the oil crises in the 70s.
by theptip | 2025-08-13 14:34:28+00:00
I agree with this as one reason Apple hasn’t rolled out Apple Intelligence. It’s a fair point.

However, I think it was a strategic blunder to go announce a full guns-blazing release that solves all of these problems, before taking the easier iteration of just making Siri not suck.

If you had the conversational fluency of ChatGPT with a very locked down set of tool calls (maybe no write actions, or maybe it can only propose simple intents that you must manually confirm, and definitely no purchases) I think they would not be perceived to be as far behind.

Nobody has solved the AI personal assistant product. It’s an insanely massive market segment just for consumers. Going after this as your V1 seems like a bad choice to me.
by roscas | 2025-08-13 14:34:33+00:00
Chrome should be out of Google a long time ago, but they are allowed to keept it, so they must be paying loads of tons to somebody.

But Perplexity is a better service than most of the free AI. Search the web for related content and try to provide a consise response.

Can't compare it to paid Perplexity or ChatGPT because I don't have those services. But for a free service, it's very good.

Perplexity talked about having it's own browser long time ago.
by simianparrot | 2025-08-13 14:34:38+00:00
I am aware of our legislation but there’s also a cultural component. Many things are technically legal but culturally uncommon. IIRC less than 2000 changed their legal gender in the last decade over here. There’s not that much of a focus on gender because it’s ok to be a feminine male or a woman with masculine traits.

Personally I think this obsession with making new categories for people who don’t strictly fit some weird resurgence of classic gender roles —- like intersex —- does more harm than good.
by mrangle | 2025-08-13 14:34:43+00:00
I'm observing how this is breaking down into questioning where I live (in another post), or whether what I say happened actually happened.

Should I not believe that people's post's here defending cities are from legitimate experience (at least as stated, in their bubbles)?

What happened to the "believe" people ethic?

I don't live in Oakland. What do you want me to read carefully, super-sleuth? To what purpose? In spite of your masterful rhetorical question, you're wrong about the event in question and location.

Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.

Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.

You can't be good with nine months of nationwide riots and then ever think that you understand the impact or can get a handle on everything that occurred via zero-start google searches.
by tanelpoder | 2025-08-13 14:34:47+00:00
Previous discussion about an earlier version of the same eBPF/bcc-based thread activity "tracking + sampling" concept and implementation:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40869877 (2024)

The latest version uses modern eBPF/libbpf/Rust-based blazesym and in basic mode does not inject any tracepoints or probes onto the critical path of other threads in the systems (such passive sampling is achieved using sleepable eBPF programs, task iterators, etc).
by empath75 | 2025-08-13 14:35:00+00:00
Models will engage in post-hoc rationalizations, so you can't trust their purported reasoning -- in particular, if you sneak an answer into the context (even an incorrect answer), it will provide reasoning for giving you that as the final answer, even if the answer is wrong. So, it could be arguing backwards from an answer that is in it's training data, you can't possibly tell that it isn't from its reasoning.

On the other hand we do know the training cut off of these models, so you could easily create a corpus of post-cut off Connections with confidence that it doesn't have access to them.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-13 14:35:09+00:00
Uh, Switzerland is one of the best locations to do this in, due to the government fibre build-out mandate. However, you have to start a little larger than "minimum" ISP size in other countries to be able to take advantage of it.

Peering… really depends on where you are, it hasn't been a problem for us.

That said, Init7 is, for the time being, still a scaled-up mini ISP. They're slowly devolving into corporate-dom, but not there yet.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-13 14:35:19+00:00
Yes. It's also worth thinking about the sharp cliff effect. Things either fall into the category of "medical device" (expensive, heavily regulated, scarce, uninnovative), or they don't, in which case it's a free for all of unregulated supplements and unsupported claims.

The home brew "automatic pancreas" by making a bluetooth control loop between a glucose monitor and an insulin pump counts as a "medical device". Somehow a computer system that encourages people to take bromide isn't. There ought to be a middle ground.
by xtracto | 2025-08-13 14:35:21+00:00
Someone close to me works in Workday. About 3 years ago, Workday arrived to Mexico and opened a lot of positions. They opened offices in several cities as well.

Fast forward to today, Someone up in the management chain decided that Costa Rica was better, closed any openings in Mexico and even "downgraded " the manager positions (became ICs) of people already working there.

I find it a bit funny watching my connationals get angry at exactly the same thing that allowed them to be employed in the first place.
by permo-w | 2025-08-13 14:37:07+00:00
and yet this doesn't change the fact that they wrote an entire medical article the crux of which is little more than hearsay. "did you get advice from an LLM?" is far less relevant and all-catching a question here than "have you made any dietary changes recently?" and yet the article isn't about that, because odd dietary changes aren't the attention-grabbing topic right now. I imagine you could find thousands of similar stories where the culprit was google or facebook or youtube instead of an LM, and yet nothing needs to be changed for them because they too can be covered with a question akin to "have you made any dietary changes recently?"
by axus | 2025-08-13 14:37:07+00:00
Here's a fun snippet from Wikipedia's anti-satellite weapon page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon#Soviet_U...

"Elements within the Soviet space industry convinced Leonid Brezhnev that the Shuttle was a single-orbit weapon that would be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, manoeuvre to avoid existing anti-ballistic missile sites, bomb Moscow in a first strike, and then land. Although the Soviet military was aware these claims were false, Brezhnev believed them and ordered a resumption of [satellite destroyer] testing along with a Shuttle of their own."
by immibis | 2025-08-13 14:38:01+00:00
But temporary authoritarianism to avert a crisis is rarely what people are thinking of when they say authoritarianism.

Ancient Rome would elect dictators to take control for two weeks at a time, because that was the only effective way to control a crisis. It remains a very effective way to control a crisis, but it only works if people can trust the political system because the political system is worth trusting. Especially people have to be able to trust they can unelect that guy (at least by waiting two weeks).
by eldaisfish | 2025-08-13 14:38:10+00:00
that's not a valid comparison. The highest voltage in a Prius battery is about 350 V. Most older Prius designs use a 200 V battery. A typical EV battery is also around 350 V but the current in and out is much higher. Many EVs use 800 V designs.

The most important factors that destroy solid state devices like IGBTs are voltage and heat. IGBTs in wind turbines fail every ten years or so. Expect to see many EV inverters fail in the next decade.
by corytheboyd | 2025-08-13 14:39:04+00:00
To be fair, 1. They made the training themselves, it’s just that it was made mandatory for all of eng 2. They did start out more like just allowing access, but lately it’s tipping towards full crazy (obviously the end game is see if it can replace some expensive engineers)

> Do they also post vacancies asking for 5 years experience in a 2 year old technology?

Honestly no… before all this they were actually pretty sane. In fact I’d say they wasted tons of time and effort on ancient poorly designed things, almost the opposite problem.
by olddustytrail | 2025-08-13 14:39:14+00:00
> Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start.

No, it looks like an exponential all the way to the top of the curve. And the natural reaction when you consider it an s-curve is to think you're near the top. Unfortunately near the top looks exactly the same as near the bottom, so you might consider that you're nowhere near the top and that there's no reason you should be.

Then you go on to speculate about tech that didn't exist 3 years ago and extrapolate 75 years in the future.

No one has any idea what we'll have in 10 years time never mind 75. Even linearly, it's like someone from 1950 trying to guess about 2025.
by svara | 2025-08-13 14:39:16+00:00
AI is LLMs now. Similar to how machine learning became AI 5-10 years ago.

I'm not endorsing this, just stating an observation.

I do a lot of deep learning for computer vision, which became AI a while ago. Now, when you use the word AI in this context, it will confuse people because it doesn't involve LLMs.
by uludag | 2025-08-13 14:39:34+00:00
I wonder if it would be feasible for an entity to eject certain nonsense into the internet to such an extend that, at least for certain cases degrades the performance or injects certain vulnerabilities during pre-training.

Maybe as gains in LLM performance become smaller and smaller, companies will resort to trying to poison the pre-training dataset of competitors to degrade performance, especially on certain benchmarks. This would be a pretty fascinating arms race to observe.
by reactordev | 2025-08-13 14:39:36+00:00
Not all AI is LLMs. That's just what's most prevalent right now. There's still great work being done by models that don't "speak" but "perform". The issue is they need to be trained to perform like you said. The more tools like Claude Code are used, the more training they receive as well. I do think we'll see a plateau (if we haven't reached it already) of diminishing returns and we'll seek out new algorithms to improve it.

Never underestimate the will of someone determined to gain an extra 10% performance or accuracy. It's the last 1% I worry about. 99.99% uptime is great until it isn't. 99% accuracy is great until it isn't. These things could be mitigated by running inference on different quantinizations of a model tree but ultimately we're going to have to triple check the work somehow.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-08-13 14:39:49+00:00
whisper is definitely nice, but it's a bit too slow. Having subtitles and transcription for everything is great - but Nemo Parakeet (pretty much whisper by nvidia) completely changed how I interact with the computer.

It enables dictation that actually works and it's as fast as you can think. I also have a set of scripts which just wait for voice commands and do things. I can pipe the results to an LLM, run commands, synthesize a voice with F5-TTS back and it's like having a local Jarvis.

The main limitation is being english only.
by skydhash | 2025-08-13 14:39:50+00:00
Hacker News is very much a collection of documents and forms with hyperlinks creating the whole concept of applications. No need to add desktop interactivity (which is already provided by the browser: loading documents, submit the form,...).

Most SPAs are reinventing the browser features (history, routing, navigation state, submitting forms, showing request's responses). When you really needs a full fledged application, those don't really matter (Figma, music players, document viewers,..).
by mrangle | 2025-08-13 14:40:15+00:00
It doesn't matter whether or not you believe me. You believing me doesn't even begin to calculate into a single thought that I have.

Besides that, not believing someone is not an argument. On these issues, it means that you lack realistic perspective and have nothing to say.

Aside from what it makes you to discount someone's very real trauma, as your only patter.
by righthand | 2025-08-13 14:40:33+00:00
No the world is actually much much safer especially in these first world countries.

However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.

This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.

These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.

It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
by viggity | 2025-08-13 14:40:37+00:00
Anytime béziers are mentioned on HN, I feel compelled to share these absolutely incredible videos from Freya Holmér

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds (73 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwxzDHniEw (24 minutes)
by scrollaway | 2025-08-13 14:40:42+00:00
We didn't test using post-hoc reasoning. Instead, we focused on checking whether specific, obscure questions could be recognized or identified in any way, using various ad-hoc methods to see if the answers could be surfaced without relying on reasoning.

It's very difficult to prove either way (and basically impossible without the model weights), but we're reasonably confident that there's no significant prior knowledge of the questions that would affect the score.
by wtallis | 2025-08-13 14:41:10+00:00
If they're running hardware that old, and it's causing them software compatibility problems, then we can infer that their infrastructure is unmaintained, because the cost of moving to newer hardware is so low that the cost of newer hardware could not plausibly be the reason they haven't moved to new hardware. There's dirt cheap used server hardware that would be substantially faster, cheaper to operate, and not have software compatibility issues like this. Money can't be preventing them from using newer hardware.

We don't know for sure the servers don't have SSDs, but we do know that back in the days of server hardware that didn't support SSE4.1, SSDs had not yet displaced hard drives for mainstream storage, so it's likely that servers that old didn't originally ship with SSDs. It's not impossible to retrofit such a server with SSDs, but doing that without upgrading to a more recent platform would be a weird choice.

A server at that age is also going to be harder to repair when something dies, and it's due for something to die. If they lose a PSU it might be cheaper to replace the whole system with something a bit less old. Other components they'd have to rely on replacing with something used, from a different manufacturer than the original, or use a newer generation component and hope it's backwards compatible. Hence why I said using hardware that old would imply their infrastructure is fragile.

But all of this is still just speculation because nobody involved with F-Droid has actually explained what specific hardware they're using, or why. So I'm still not convinced that the possibility of a misconfigured hypervisor has been ruled out.
by px43 | 2025-08-13 14:42:05+00:00
Skytalks happened this year and was better attended than ever. Getting a seat was extremely competitive, people lined up for several hours for a single talk token. I would have loved to go to some, but unfortunately there was a ton of other stuff I wanted to see so I didn't have time to stand in line.

They were a side conference to a side conference, but the structure let them run things the way they wanted, which is important.
by rollcat | 2025-08-13 14:42:10+00:00
Since we're having an impromptu ADHD club forming in this thread - I totally feel you. I've had too many ideas like this one, even some prototypes over the years.

There are many tricks to stay focused, particularly when there are no stakeholders but you. Try a body double, someone to keep you in check - you can also return the favor, like working from the same room, or just coming to their home to watch them clean while you do your stuff.

When you do get hyperfixated on something - that can be a very productive period, until you crash. Again, bring in a friend. Not to get back to it - just to make sure you're still eating. Don't push yourself to either side, find your own balance around it - I've picked up many hobbies where I've slowed down, but maintained interest over the years, decades.

Look for buddies in your local neurodivergent group, there's usually one somewhere near you. (Even here on HN, it turns out.)
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-13 14:42:34+00:00
Yeah, that's a concern too.

I'm not opposed to the idea of autonomous (or better near-autonomous) tractors working in fields. They'd definitely be safer than autonomous vehicles on roads. I just think people, especially at a tech-loving forum like this, are a little too quick to assume safety concerns are fully covered. Perhaps they can be, but will they be when large corporate farms cut corners on things like maintenance?

I started driving tractors when I was 10, and I've been in a couple situations where equipment failure required some quick action to get stopped before serious damage was done. Shit happens, and should be expected to happen and prepared for.
by roflmaostc | 2025-08-13 14:42:34+00:00
I live in Lausanne and also noticed that the air looks quite hazy these days. But the MeteoSwiss weather app does not indicate any high levels of bad air quality. Notably, ozone shows a value of 90µm/m^3 around Geneva. The article states 180µm/m^3.

All other index such as PM10 or NO2 are not crazy high either.