MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cjameskeller | 2025-08-07 18:56:15+00:00
We are told:

>"It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own."

I think one very simple explanation would be that this comes down to a matter of exploration vs exploitation. Since it is only giving "better" advice, and not even 'locally optimal', there is reason to favor exploring vs merely following the advice unquestioningly.

A more complex, but ultimately comprehensive answer, is that free will consists, at least in one aspect, in the ability not only to choose one's goals or means, but also what _aspect_ of those various options to consider "good" or "better".

And if one were to say that all such considerations ultimately resolve back to a fundamental desire to be "happy", to me, this seems to be hand-waving, rather than addressing the argument, because different people have different definitions of the "happy" end-state. If these differences were attributed fully to biology & environment, the story loses its impact, because there was never free will in the first place. If, while reading the story, we adopt a view that genuine free will exists, and hold some kind of agnosticism about the possible means by which that can be so, then it seems reasonable to attribute at least some of the differences in what the "happy" end-state looks like to the choices made by the people, themselves.

Given that kind of freedom, unless one has truly perfect knowledge (beyond the partial knowledge contained in the advice of the earring), the pursuit of one's goals seems to unavoidably entail some regrets. And with perfect knowledge, well... The kind of 'freedom' attributed, for example, to God by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, is explicitly only analogous to our own, and is understood to be an unchanging condition, rather than a sequential act.

(As a final note: One might wonder what this 'freedom to choose aspects' approaches as an 'asymptotic state' -- that is, for an immortal person. And this leads to metaphysical concerns -- of course, with some things 'smuggled in' by the presumption of genuine freedom, already. Provided one agrees that human nature undeniably provides some structure to ultimate desires/"happiness", the idea of virtue ethics follows naturally, and from there many philosophers have arrived at similar notions of some kind of apotheosis as a stable end-state, as well as the contrary state of some kind of scattering or decay of the mind...)
by Retric | 2025-08-07 18:56:16+00:00
A sphere is a great shape for dealing with such forces but it’s just a more complicated system. Rotation can cause metal fatigue, openings get more complicated, etc.

> For context, the pressure vessels of the largest submarine in the world have a diameter of 10.9 meters.

Few subs can reach the titanic at 12,500 feet, at more common crush depths and especially non spherical geometries it’s very much worth considering. Subs often dive and surface at a significant angle.
by uncircle | 2025-08-07 18:56:19+00:00
I believe the slightly higher barrier is a feature, and a good filter for low quality spam.

On the other hand, if I spent time and effort writing a patch for public release, I have no issues jumping through hurdles to see it published, whether I have to create an account or learning the correct incantation to git send-email. Usually the thing that stops contribution is finding the time and will to prepare a PR for review; in comparison to that effort, creating an account is trivial.

The way I see it, using a distributed VCS like git benefits from having a distributed ecosystem. Putting everything in Microsoft’s hand for them to train their commercial AI product on your code is a little reckless and short-sighted. And we could do with fewer siloes.
by knodi123 | 2025-08-07 18:57:19+00:00
* or governments fail to look far enough ahead, due to a bunch of small-minded short-sighted greedy petty fools.

Seriously, our government just announced it's slashing half a billion dollars in vaccine research because "vaccines are deadly and ineffective", and it fired a chief statistician because the president didn't like the numbers he calculated, and it ordered the destruction of two expensive satellites because they can observe politically inconvenient climate change. THOSE are the people you are trusting to keep an eye on the pace of development inside of private, secretive AGI companies?
by kybernetikos | 2025-08-07 18:57:36+00:00
This is associating the self with the thing that decides how best to achieve goals (the earring / the part of your brain that works out how to achieve a goal), while I'm saying that I think I would associate the self much more with the thing that decides what the goals are.

> they don't just want to solve them; they want to solve them theirselves. That's what is lost here.

I think in this story, the earring would not solve the crossword for you, if for some reason your goal was to solve the crossword yourself.
by zahlman | 2025-08-07 18:57:42+00:00
> This has been done in response to the discovery that the popular installer uv has a different extraction behavior to many Python-based installers that use the ZIP parser implementation provided by the zipfile standard library module.

> For maintainers of installer projects: Ensure that your ZIP implementation follows the ZIP standard and checks the Central Directory before proceeding with decompression. See the CPython zipfile module for a ZIP implementation that implements this logic. Begin checking the RECORD file against ZIP contents and erroring or warning the user that the wheel is incorrectly formatted.

Good to know that I won't need to work around any issues with `zipfile` — and it would be rather absurd for any Python-based installer to use anything else to do the decompression. (Checking RECORD for consistency is straightforward, although of course it takes time.)

... but surely uv got its zip-decompression logic from a crate rather than hand-rolling it? How many other Rust projects out there might have questionable handling of zip files?

> PyPI already implements ZIP and tarball compression-bomb detection as a part of upload processing.

... The implication is that `zipfile` doesn't handle this. But perhaps it can't really? Are there valid uses for zips that work that way? (Or maybe there isn't a clear rule for what counts as a "bomb", and PyPI has to choose a threshold value?)
Ask HN: How did you like GPT-4.5?
by felipemesquita | 2025-08-07 18:58:09+00:00
I found it was the best model when the task at hand required only “writing” - no coding, tool use or reasoning. Like proofreading and suggesting better phrasing.

I think it would fare quite well against GPT-5 in writing tasks like the ones progress.openai.com.

I’m disappointed it’s been deprecated and there where not any comparisons with it in the GPT-5 demos.

ps: if someone here is on the pro plan and that still gives access to 4.5, could you please give it the prompts in progress.openai.com to see how it compares with 5?
by bpt3 | 2025-08-07 18:58:59+00:00
"Your kind" are the type of people who use terms like "turbo greed" and expect to have their opinions taken seriously.

It's not a coincidence that there's a huge overlap between people who use terms like "turbo greed", those who "don't agree" with the economic principles that have outperformed all known alternatives, and those who think that more state involvement is the solution to every problem.
by sandeepkd | 2025-08-07 18:59:33+00:00
I am afraid that this flaw is present for almost all phishable methods (SMS, TOTP, email OTP, App Push) to certain extent (except passkeys, mtls)

"Click a link in the email" isn't much secure either for most part. You might end up following a link blindly which can lure you into revealing even more information

Passkeys aren't that great either cause almost everyone has to provide a account recovery flow which uses these same phishable methods.

The language in communication is probably the most important deterrent here, second to using signals in the flow to present more friction to the abuser. A simple check like presenting captcha like challenge to the user in case they are not authenticating from the same machine can go a long way to prevent these kind of attacks at scale
by MisterSandman | 2025-08-07 18:59:36+00:00
It still is, not all queries trigger web search, and it takes more tokens and time to do research. ChatGPT will confidently give me outdated information, and unless I know it’s wrong and ask it to research, it wouldn’t know it is wrong. Having a more recent knowledge base can be very useful (for example, knowing who the president is without looking it up, making references to newer node versions instead of old ones)
by d_newecki | 2025-08-07 18:59:59+00:00
Author here. I'm excited to share the first public prototype of CORE, a project I've been working on to explore how an AI system can build and evolve software safely. I've always been concerned by the "black box" nature of many AI dev tools. They generate code, but often without clear principles, governance, or traceability. This makes them risky for anything that requires trust and auditability. CORE is my attempt at a solution. The core idea is a strict separation between the system's "Mind" (a declarative .intent/ directory with its constitution, policies, and self-knowledge) and its "Body" (the Python source code). It can only act in ways that are aligned with its constitution, and any proposed changes to its own governing principles must go through a secure, human-in-the-loop "canary check" process. Right now, it's an architectural prototype. The self-audit and constitutional amendment loops are stable and working. The next big step is building out the agent capabilities to let it generate new applications from scratch. I'm making this public now to get feedback on the core architecture and to find potential collaborators who are also interested in this new frontier of governed, self-improving systems. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'll be here all day to answer questions.
by pxc | 2025-08-07 19:00:02+00:00
It seemed like good performances from people whose main skillset is not this.

For me, it's knowing what we know about the company and its history that gave a eerie feeling in combination with the sterility.

When they brought on the woman who has cancer, I felt deeply uncomfortable. My dad also has cancer right now. He's unlikely to survive. Watching a cancer patient come on to tell their story as part of an extended advertisement, expression serene, any hint of discomfort or pain or fear or bitterness completely hidden, ongoing hardship acknowledged only with a few shallow and euphemistic words, felt deeply uncomfortable to me.

Maybe this person enthusiastically volunteered, because she feels happy about what her husband is working on, and grateful for the ways that ChatGPT has helped her prepare for her appointments with doctors. I don't want to disrespect or discredit her, and I've also used LLMs alongside web searches in trying to formulare questions about my father's illness, so I understand how this is a real use case.

But something about it just felt wrong, inauthentic. I found myself wondering if she or her husband felt pressured to make this appearance. I also wondered if this kind of storytelling was irresponsible or deceptive, designed to describe technically responsible uses of LLMs (preparing notes for doctor's visits, where someone will verify the LLM's outputs against real expertise), but to suggest in every conceivable implicit way that these ChatGPT is actually capable of medical expertise itself. Put alongside "subject-matter experts in your pocket", talk of use in medical research and practice (where machine learning has a dubious history of deception and methodological misapplication problems), what are people likely to think?

I thought also of my mom, who drives herself crazy with anxiety every time my dad gets a new test result, obsessively trying to directly interpret them herself from the moment they arrive to his doctor's visit a week or two later. What impression would this clip leave on her? Does the idea of her using an LLM in this way feel safe to me?

There's a deeper sense that OpenAI's messaging, mission, and orientation are some mixture of deceptive and incoherent that leaves viewers with the sense that we're being lied to in presentations like this. It goes beyond stiff performances or rehearsed choices of words.

There's something cultish about the "AGI" hype, the sci-fi fever dream of "safety" problems that the field has mainstreamed, the slippage of OpenAI from a non-profit research institution to a for-profit startup all while claiming to be focused on the same mission, the role of AI as an oracle so opaque it might as well be magic, the idea of finding a sacred "rationality" in predictions founded purely on statistics without communicable/interrogable structural or causal models... all of it. It's against this backdrop that the same kind of stiffness that might be cute or campy in an infomercial for kitchen gadgets becomes uncanny.
by candiddevmike | 2025-08-07 19:00:18+00:00
This post seems far more marketing-y than your previous posts, which have a bit more criticality to them (such as your Gemini 2.5 blog post here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/17/gemini-2-5/). You seem to gloss over a lot of GPT-5's shortcomings and spend more time hyping it than other posts. Is there some kind of conflict of interest happening?
by netsharc | 2025-08-07 19:00:52+00:00
As featured on Top Gear's test of the hyperest (at that time) of hypercars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL_eIZjiLUk

This year's race was lame, because they should've raced in the wet.

Speaking of racing there in the wet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1cS593on7E
by Gibbon1 | 2025-08-07 19:01:33+00:00
George Orwell made a comment that the landlord in the impoverished coal mining town he visited was usually an old widow.

Always gets me is the ideological contortions people will get up to in order to not face that California is short a couple million units of housing. Really the US has been investing in looting schemes and not in build out for the last 40 years.
by ancillary | 2025-08-07 19:01:57+00:00
I'm not OP or a doomer, but I do worry about AI making tasks too achievable. Right now if a very angry but not particularly diligent or smart person wants to construct a small nuclear bomb and detonate it in a city center, there are so many obstacles to figuring out how to build it that they'll just give up, even though at least one book has been written (in the early 70s! The Curve of Binding Energy) arguing that it is doable by one or a very small group of committed people.

Given an (at this point still hypothetical, I think) AI that can accurately synthesize publicly available information without even needing to develop new ideas, and then break the whole process into discrete and simple steps, I think that protective friction is a lot less protective. And this argument applies to malware, spam, bioweapons, anything nasty that has so far required a fair amount of acquirable knowledge to do effectively.
by taeric | 2025-08-07 19:02:02+00:00
But that is part of my point. This is not actually the conflict. Progress by leaps is often only possible in places that are also making repeated incremental progress.

It is tempting to think of this in terms of sports. As an easy example, home runs make larger impacts for teams that are good at getting people on bases. Of course, you can argue that baseball has a ceiling on how much you can make from a single home run which is not true for most businesses.

But even sports somewhat miss one of the main things that is hard to communicate. What feels like small progress is often needed just to stay afloat. I suppose the sports nature of it would be that you have an offense and a defense, usually. In business, that daily short term progress would be the defense.

It is frustrating, because we do want to focus on the big ideas. But so many of the big ideas needed a TON of little ideas around them to be viable. And by nature, when we discuss one as a thing that we want, we almost necessarily ignore the other. We can really only focus on one thing at a time.
by belter | 2025-08-07 19:02:11+00:00
AWS Support absolutely fumbled the incident, but what you should have learned from the experience, and the majority of others commenting here is: Running a business critical workload in one AWS account is a self-inflicted single point of failure. Using separate accounts for prod/dev/test (and a break-glass account) is one of #1 security best practices:

“SEC01-BP01 Separate workloads using accounts.” - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/security-...

Keep resources out of the payer/management accounts. Consolidated billing is fine, but the management account should stay empty.

"Best practices for the management account" - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...

Enable cross-account backups. Copy snapshots or AWS Backup vaults to a second account so Support lockouts don’t equal data loss.

"Creating backup copies across AWS accounts" - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/creat...

Populate Billing, Security, and Ops alternate contacts. AWS Support escalates to those addresses when the primary inbox is dead. "Update the alternate contacts for your AWS account" - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage...

Follow the multi-account white-paper for long-term org design. It is not optional reading. "Organizing Your AWS Environment Using Multiple Accounts" - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/organizing-yo...

Maybe get some training?

https://aws.amazon.com/training/classroom/
by m4nu3l | 2025-08-07 19:02:17+00:00
Very funny. The very first answer it gave to illustrate its "Expert knowledge" is quite common, and it's wrong. What's even funnier is that you can find why on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#False_explanation... What's terminally funny is that in the visualisation app, it used a symmetric wing, which of course wouldn't generate lift according to its own explanation (as the travelled distance and hence air flow speed would be the same). I work as a game physics programmer, so I noticed that immediately and almost laughed. I watched only that part so far while I was still at the office, though.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-07 19:02:48+00:00
It's both lower pressure above the wing (~20% of lift) and the reaction force from pushing air down (give or take the remaining 80% of lift). The main wrong thing is that the air travels faster because it has to travel farther causing the air to accelerate causing the lower pressure that's double plus wrong. It's a weird old misunderstanding that gets repeated over and over because it's a neat connection to attach to the Bernoulli Principal when it's being explained to children.
by themafia | 2025-08-07 19:02:51+00:00
Wild mice do not get AD. Even if you let them achieve old age they do not develop the same brain plaques or tangles that are linked to Alzheimers.

Even if they did you'd have to run huge samples then do post testing necropsies to see which mice had AD which which didn't, then filter your data, then try to find results in what remains.

Otherwise you can inject the mice with a chemical known to cause AD, which is not reliable on it's own, so you can get genetically modified mice which express _some_ of the known plaques and misfolds that are associated with human AD.

Animal testing is still, largely, a very unethical and cruel affair. AD testing in mice is especially fraught with hazard.
by m4rtink | 2025-08-07 19:03:01+00:00
The whole oh-no-prions from hell was kinda unconvincing, as well as choosing to go back to Sol instead of just building up living space via artificial habitats in the target solar system.

If you can refuel a fucking interstellar ark in field conditions, you totally can also keep it running and expand it and your living space using local resources instead.
by anon7000 | 2025-08-07 19:03:15+00:00
True. At a minimum, as long as LLMs don't include some kind of more strict representation of the world, they will fail in a lot of tasks. Hallucinations -- responding with a prediction that doesn't make any sense in the context of the response -- are still a big problem. Because LLMs never really develop rules about the world.

For example, while you can get it to predict good chess moves if you train it on enough chess games, it can't really constrain itself to the rules of chess. (https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/generative-ais-crippling-a...)
by bell-cot | 2025-08-07 19:03:31+00:00
Maybe the WP has never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll - or maybe that falls under an "omit any inconvenient facts" editorial policy of theirs?

This assertion didn't impress me either:

> AI could be used to allow legitimate polling calls and texts to go through, while filtering out fraud and scams.
by kraih | 2025-08-07 19:03:37+00:00
As a SUSE employee myself, I want to add that it is also part of our company culture for employees to contribute code upstream whenever possible. That's how many of my own Open Source contributions happened in the past few years. Most recently building an MCP Perl SDK (https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo-mcp). SUSE is giving a lot more than just money to the Perl community.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-08-07 19:03:41+00:00
I suspect the vast majority of OpenAI's users are only using ChatGPT, and the vast majority of those ChatGPT users are only using the free tier.

For all of them, getting access to full-blown GPT-5 will probably be mind-blowing, even if it's severely rate-limited. OpenAI's previous/current generation of models haven't really been ergonomic enough (with the clunky model pickers) to be fully appreciated by less tech-savvy users, and its full capabilities have been behind a paywall.

I think that's why they're making this launch is a big deal. It's just an incremental upgrade for the power users and the people that are paying money, but it'll be a step-change in capability to everyone else.
by QuantumGood | 2025-08-07 19:04:07+00:00
When I started giving injections to a family member, I learned many things can cause problems that I didn't know about, such as that very tiny bits can break loose from the bottle top and cause issues. "Blind safetyism" is a point of view that can be more popular with certain personality types, but I think it's often a good starting point for research.