MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scottlamb | 2025-08-13 04:52:11+00:00
> I even managed to find an unmanaged 16-port 2.5GbE PoE ... It's a no-name Chinese brand, but who cares?

Does it have a NRTL certification (UL or the like)? This is something I'd look for in a PoE switch, which often have internal power supplies specced for several hundred watts. Potential fire hazard. If it were a non-PoE switch plugged into a standard 12V/2A external power supply or the like, then I'd be with you, who cares if it's a no-name Chinese brand.

(btw, MokerLink, a previously-unknown-to-me Chinese brand, gave me excellent support last night. I complained a switch wasn't working. They asked for a video, then told me they're sending me a replacement. It's being delivered tomorrow. So at least some of these no-name Chinese brands are earning some trust.)
by femto | 2025-08-13 04:52:45+00:00
At one point it was [1], and I'm not aware that that has changed. I've also a memory of talking to the seL4 team at a NICTA open day, and them saying it was widely deployed on Qualcomm based devices. It's not part of Android per se, sitting underneath Android and acting as a secure hypervisor, so any Android vulnerabilities are contained.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120211210405/http://www.ok-lab...
by pjmlp | 2025-08-13 04:53:18+00:00
Contrary to HN folks, I habe no issues with Oracle, it is my favourite database engine.

Also it was the only company that cared to buy Sun.

People love to hate it, everyone praises Sun, yet in the end no one felt it was worth rescuing, not even Google, that could have taken advantage to finally control Java.

I guess most would rather have seen Java die in version 6, and Maxime VM ideas never becoming mainstream, or the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging for taming C never coming out.

And since I am not a fan boy I am also quite aware that what doesn't produce profit, is immediately killed by Oracle, and they are quite found of enforcing their licenses, hence why people have to actually read those licenses.
by kbouck | 2025-08-13 04:53:48+00:00
> moving toward a world where coding isn't really about sitting down and grinding out syntax

Love the idea of "coding" while walking/running outside. For me those outside activities help me clear my mind and think about tough problems or higher level stuff. The thought of directing agents to help persist and refine fleeting thoughts/ideas/insights, flesh out design/code, etc is intriguing
by eru | 2025-08-13 04:54:05+00:00
I am inclined to agree.

However, I'm not completely sure. Eg object oriented programming was basically a useless fad full of empty, never-delivered-on promises, but software companies still lapped it up. (If you happen to like OOP, you can probably substitute your own favourite software or wider management fad.)

Another objection: even an LLM with limited capabilities and glaring flaws can still be useful for some commercial use-cases. Eg the job of first line call centre agents that aren't allowed to deviate from a fixed script can be reasonable automated with even a fairly bad LLM.

Will it suck occasionally? Of course! But so does interacting with the humans placed into these positions without authority to get anything done for you. So if the bad LLM is cheaper, it might be worthwhile.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-08-13 04:54:20+00:00
What is it about San Francisco that makes it the global center for this stuff?

Reading this, I was reminded of the 60's hippy communes, that generally centered around SF, and the problems they reported. So similar, especially around that turning-inward group emotional dynamics problem, that such groups tend to become dysfunctional (as TFA says) by blowing up internal emotional group politics into huge problems that need the entire group to be involved in trying to heal (as opposed to, say, accepting that a certain amount of interpersonal conflict is inevitable in human groups and ignoring it). It's fascinating that the same kind of groups seem to encounter the same kind of problems despite being ~60 years apart and armed with a lot more tech and knowledge.

And, yeah, why SF?
by elliotto | 2025-08-13 04:56:43+00:00
I think you are understating how difficult this is to do. I suspect there are a handful of super-geniuses who can read the philosophical canon and understand it, without some formal guidance. Plato and Dostoevsky might be possible (Socrates would be a bit difficult), but getting to Hegel and these newer more complex authors is almost impossible to navigate unless you are a savant.

I suspect a lot of the rationalists have gotten stuck here, and rather than seek out guidance or slowing down, changed tack entirely and decided to engage with the philosophers du jour, which unfortunately is a lot of slop running downstream from Thiel.
by thisisit | 2025-08-13 04:56:59+00:00
> The global pandemic will tank the stock market - the market did crash and then Fed stepped in. Rates were cut and Fed

> War in Ukraine will tank the stock market - Market did go down by -30% between Jan-Oct 2022 and went nowhere for sometime after that.

> High interest rates will tank the stock market - Impact for this remains to be seen. Even during 2008 the high interest rates risk persisted for couple of years before the crash. So, I'd give it more time.

> Tariffs will tank the stock market - Did we not see a 20% drop before tariffs were put on hold for 90 days?

> IA will tank the stock market - I don't have much conviction on this one.

It is true that no one knows when a prolonged market crash like 2008 will happen. Maybe never. Government has figured out that Fed intervention can help the market stay afloat. So, maybe unless Fed doesn't step in for a long time these predictions will come true.

The flip side of this is that investment returns of a diversified portfolio (net of inflation) is slowly going down. The choices are to either concentrate or find alternative investing vehicles. That is one of reasons private equity is out looking for alternate income sources like buying up houses and hiking up the rents etc.
by stickfigure | 2025-08-13 04:57:02+00:00
You're falling into some sort of fallacy; maybe a better rationalist than I could name it.

The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. We're reading an article that focuses on a few dysfunctional subgroups. They are interesting because they are so dysfunctional and rare.

Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people. Even Pacifism doesn't get a pass.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-13 04:57:13+00:00
> Then you're going to need to do business with China in spite of their being a national security threat.

You can restrict the sale of advanced chips to China and still do business with them.

Putting a tax on it does nothing; the Chinese companies aren't the ones paying the tax anyway.

It shows that the US isn't really serious about maintaining a lead in these advanced technologies; all Trump knows how to do is extort money through various threats--tarrifs, law suits, export bans etc. To his credit he's good at that. Would make a great mobster.
by zjp | 2025-08-13 04:57:20+00:00
I've seen firsthand the attrition in restoration work. It's in a pretty sad state. My dad runs the garage his dad started in Kansas City decades ago, and his business partner is in the back half of his 80s. They're rushing to get work done and knowledge transferred before it's gone forever, but he's always telling me about people who have had to stop working, or died. I can never believe what people are paying to get work like chrome plating or upholstery done or the wait times. I wonder if there will be anyone left by the time we get around to restoring one of our own.
by mystraline | 2025-08-13 04:58:21+00:00
> You say that like it's an actual policy goal.

I do. There's reasons for that from previous employment that would indicate that as a policy goal.

Red Hat is also technically accepted by US Gov. Technically. But you need to use? They're bypassing all sorts of security shit with ongoing POAMs and doing their own thing.

And yes, I would agree that its corruption as well.
by stephencoyner | 2025-08-13 04:59:15+00:00
The way that this write up describes it, the "ads" would be well curated, expensive responses from top AI models with lots of reasoning. If this is the case then the responses would be far more valuable for the user than a free response from a GPT-4o type model could ever be. It sounds like a win-win

I talk to people all the time who say "I love Instagram ads, they always know what I need before I do." People don't hate ads, they hate bad ads. The best AI in the world laser focused on burning compute to get the user the most helpful information sounds like it could capture the same sentiment as Instagram, but taken even further.
by scottlamb | 2025-08-13 04:59:18+00:00
Sobering for sure, but I think vanishingly few of those are from residual energy in capacitors in unplugged appliances during disassembly, [1] and certainly far from the "this forum is missing x people just like doubled112 because of tragedies" that I imagine when you say "there's a fair bit of survivorship bias in this".

[1] a quick search mentions things like damaged cords, the classic metal object into the outlet, etc. I installed tamper-resistant outlets everywhere in my house to prevent the latter as part of child-proofing. I think they're mandatory now in new construction. I also may have gone a bit overboard trying to instill caution in my children about this this particular risk; my son tonight asked me if he was okay after his sleeve brushed against the metal part of a USB-C connector while he was plugging in his tablet.
by mrcwinn | 2025-08-13 04:59:52+00:00
I wish they’d fix other things faster. Still can’t upload an Excel file in the iOS app, even with analyst mode enabled. The voice mode feels like it’s 10 years behind OpenAI (no realtime, for example). And Opus 4.1 still occasionally goes absolutely mental and provides much worse analysis than o3 or GPT5-thinking.

Rooting for Anthropic. Competition in this space is good.

I watched an interview with Dario recently where he said he wasted a “product guy” and it really shows.
by nativeforks | 2025-08-13 05:01:18+00:00
References:

F-Droid admin issue: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/593

Catima example: https://github.com/CatimaLoyalty/Android/issues/2608

MBCompass case: https://github.com/CompassMB/MBCompass/issues/88
by yosefk | 2025-08-13 05:01:29+00:00
Cursor fails miserably for me even just trying to replace function calls with method calls consistently, like I said in the post. This I would hope is fixable. By dealing autonomously I mean "you don't need a programmer - a PM talks to an LLM and that's how the code base is maintained, and this happens a lot (rather than on one or two famous cases where it's pretty well known how they are special and different from most work)"

By "large" I mean 300K lines (strong prediction), or 10 times the context window (weaker prediction)

I don't shy away from looking stupid in the future, you've got to give me this much
by qingcharles | 2025-08-13 05:02:00+00:00
Amazingly McDonald's just went full practical on their new McDonaldland commercial, which is wild considering how many elements it combines. I have a feeling they did this as a pushback to everyone complaining about everything being made with AI.

Here's the making of:

https://xcancel.com/HuinGuillaume/status/1955301767740096659

(could only find it on X)
by adastra22 | 2025-08-13 05:02:57+00:00
Subagents has changed this for me. I routinely run half hour to hour long tasks with no human intervention, and actually get good results at the end (most of the time, not all of the time).

The reason isn’t that AI models have gotten better, although they clearly have, but that using subagents (1) keeps context clear of false starts and errors that otherwise poison the AI’s view of the project, and (2) by throwing in directives to run subagents that keep the main agent aligned (e.g. code review agents), it gets nudged back on course a surprisingly high percentage of the time.
by 827a | 2025-08-13 05:03:04+00:00
Again, this doesn't require intelligence, beyond a point. Breakthrough medical therapies aren't invented by 180 IQ Einsteinian hyper-intellectuals.

My point in being pedantic about this is to just point out that an extreme amount of value could be generated by these systems if they only attained the capability to do the things 110 IQ humans already do today. Instead of optimizing toward that goal, the frontier labs seem obsessed with optimizing toward some other weird goal of hyper-intelligence that has very unclear marketability. When pressed on this, leaders in these companies will say "its transferable"; that hyper-intellectuality will suddenly unlock realistic 110 IQ use-cases; but we're increasingly seeing, quite clearly to me, that this isn't the case. And there's very good first principal reasons why you should believe that it won't be.
by plorkyeran | 2025-08-13 05:04:44+00:00
All this time has been wasted by Wayland developers insisting that if Wayland makes something impossible by design, then users who want that thing are simply incorrect to want it and therefore it doesn't count. Wayland does not deliver on basic shit working, and as long as "that's incompatible with Wayland's security model" is considered an acceptable answer, it never will.
by GolfPopper | 2025-08-13 05:04:45+00:00
And the GPUs are being maxed out because money seeking a high return is being thrown at LLMs in the hope that they turn into AGI, because there's no other market segment promising such high returns... and being believed.

I suspect the bubble is self-sustaining, because everyone making investment decisions is confident that they won't be blamed if (IMHO, when) the bubble collapses, because "everyone was investing in AI" while simultaneously, even those who might be skeptical are terrified of missing the boat if LLMs really do live up to their hype, or at least convinced they can ride the bubble and find a greater fool before it pops.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-13 05:05:34+00:00
Like the other reply said, each exam has entirely new questions which are of course secret until the test is taken.

Sure, the questions were probably in a similar genre as existing questions or required similar techniques that could be found in solutions that are out there. So what? You still need some kind of world model of mathematics in which to understand the new problem and apply the different techniques to solve it.

Are you really claiming that SOTA LLMs don’t have any world model of mathematics at all? If so, can you tell us what sort of example would convince you otherwise? (Note that the ability to do novel mathematics research is setting the bar too high, because many capable mathematics majors never get to that point, and they clearly have a reasonable model of mathematics in their heads.)
by mnsc | 2025-08-13 05:05:51+00:00
You are right, and another angle is that empathy with a homeless drug addict is less about needing to understand/analogize why the person is a drug addict, which is hard if you only do soft socially acceptable drugs, but rather to remember that the homeless drug addict is not completely defined by that simple definition. That the person in front of you is a complete human that shares a lot of feelings and experiences with you. When you think about that and use those feelings to connect with that human it lets you be kinder towards him/her.
by kouteiheika | 2025-08-13 05:06:57+00:00
> > They should retry rewriting it in rust (or zig)

> It's an antipattern to chase whatever language is being hyped the most at the moment.

Hype? Come on, Rust's 1.0 release was already over a decade ago. At this point it's pretty boring. How many more years will it take before people start taking it seriously and finally accept that those who prefer Rust over C do so because it's a much better language than C and not just because it's hyped?
by doubleunplussed | 2025-08-13 05:07:09+00:00
I think you'll indeed find, if you were to seek out the relevant literature, that those claims are more or less true, or at least, are the currently best-supported interpretation available. So I don't think they're assumptions so much as simply current state of the science on the matter, and therefore widely accepted among those who for whatever reason have looked into it (or, more likely, inherited the information from someone they trust who has read up on it).

Interestingly, I think we're increasingly learning that although most aspects of human intelligence seem to correlate with each other (thus the "singular factor" interpretation), the grab-bag of skills this corresponds to are maybe a bit arbitrary when compared to AI. What evolution decided to optimise the hell out of in human intelligence is specific to us, and not at all the same set of skills as you get out of cranking up the number of parameters in an LLM.

Thus LLMs continuing to make atrocious mistakes of certain kinds, despite outshining humans at other tasks.

Nonetheless I do think it's correct to say that the rationalists think intelligence is a real measurable thing, and that although in humans it might be a set of skills that correlate and maybe in AIs it's a different set of skills that correlate (such that outperforming humans in IQ tests is impressive but not definitive), that therefore AI progress can be measured and it is meaningful to say "AI is smarter than humans" at some point. And that AI with better-than-human intelligence could solve a lot of problems, if of course it doesn't kill us all.
by grapesodaaaaa | 2025-08-13 05:09:00+00:00
How about an older Porsche or Mercedes? I stand by my original statement.

I had a friend who collected and restored very old BMWs. He certainly wasn’t doing it for the ride quality or features vs a modern car. I just picked the F1, because it’s a shining example of a car people love that is impractical compared to modern cars of equivalent specs.
by vpribish | 2025-08-13 05:09:09+00:00
so i don't see the path to AGI either, certainly not with LLMs. but there is some very useful stuff to be done with deep learning, and LLMs are a pretty amazin advance for search, translation, communication and user interfaces. but it's not the next industrial revolution.

i don't see the sunk-cost fallacy angle, just the sunk costs. the capital allocators will absolutely shut off the spigot when they see that it isn't going to yield. yeah, there could be some dark data centers. not the end of the world, just another ai winter at worst - maybe a dot-com crash... whatever.

the world is way bigger than the techo chamber
by mnsc | 2025-08-13 05:11:15+00:00
For example, the homeless drug addict might have a dog that he/she loves deeply, maybe oceanplexian have a dog that they love deeply. Suddenly oceanplexian can empathize with the homeless drug addict. Even though they still can't understand why on earth the drug addict doesn't quit drugs to make the dog's life better. (Spoiler alert drugs override rational behaviour, now oceanplexian also understand the homeless drug addict)
by swores | 2025-08-13 05:12:22+00:00
Their write up (linked at top of page below main link, and in a comment) says:

> "media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can access these Street View images; you don’t even need a Google account!)."

Maybe they used multiple IPs / devices and didn't want to mention doing something technically naughty to get around Google's free limits, or maybe they somehow didn't hit a limit doing it as a single user? Either way, it doesn't sound like they had to pay if they only mention not needing an account.

(Or maybe they just thought people didn't need to know that they had to pay, and that readers would just want the free access to look up a few images, rather than a whole city's worth?)
by elliotto | 2025-08-13 05:12:48+00:00
I find using an AI to understand complex philosophical topics one of my most unexpected use cases. Previously, I would get stuck scrolling through wikipedia full of incredibly opaque language, that assumes a background I don't have. But I can tell a bot what my background is, and it can make an explanation that is in the right level of complexity.

As an example, I'm reading a book on Buddhism, and I'm comfortable with Kant, and AI is useful for explaining to me a lot of the ideas they have as they relate to transcendental idealism (Kant).

On the other hand, I still don't know what a body without organs is.
by Monilshah23 | 2025-08-13 05:13:16+00:00
Location: Chicago, IL, United States Remote: Open to all settings Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Python, AWS, Docker, SQL, Bash, Shell Scripting, RDBMS, Maths, Terraform, R, GitHub Actions Résumé/CV: https://github.com/Monil-23/Portfolio/blob/main/Monil_Resume.pdf Email: shahmonil.work@gmail.com
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-13 05:13:43+00:00
Shorting the coin wouldn't work well because you have to take a long position at least temporarily in order to execute the attack; you would have to borrow 51% of the supply and also a bunch more coins that you'd then sell short, enough to more than compensate for the cost of borrowing the 51% and the risk of failure, and that would get more-than-proportionally expensive. Seems hard to make the math pencil out.

Taking a long position in a competing coin could maybe work but you'd have to be really sure that it would go up, instead of going down due to decreased confidence in the broader altcoin ecosystem.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-08-13 05:13:50+00:00
> I disagree, I may not have the whole codebase in my head in one moment but I have had all of it in my head at some point, and it is still there, that is not true of an LLM.

All 3 points (you have had all of it your head at some point, it is still there, that is not true of an LLM) are mere conjectures, and not provable at this time, certainly not in the general case. You may be able to show this of some codebases for some developers and for some LLMs, but not all.
by goku12 | 2025-08-13 05:15:01+00:00
This is the reason why I don't like systemd. Make no mistake, systemd has some very good ideas. But when they say that it's modular, replaceable, maintainable etc, this is what actually happens. It's all that in theory. But the reality is very different. GNU Shepherd (guix's init) for instance, is something you can hack deeply using Guile Scheme - sort of like Emacs with Elisp. Much of the Guix OS is like that. Strongly integrated with Guile Scheme glue. But flexible and modular enough to be swapped out easily. Imagine doing the same with systemd init.
by dse1982 | 2025-08-13 05:16:11+00:00
Out of pure curiousity: do your really think that would make any significant difference for voter behavior? My understanding is that one of the biggest misunderstandings of the last decade+, was that center and leftist politicians assumed it would keep people from voting against their interests if you point out the lies of the relevant politicians and how their policies actually go against their voters interests. I mean that was the whole point of the fact-checking stuff gaining traction in mainstream-media during that time: just to be mostly abolished again because people are just not interested in truth and facts as much as we like to assume. Not not at all. But not as much as we tend to think.

Please don't get me wrong, I am not trying to be sarcastic here. I would love to see a perspective – just any perspective – of how to get out of the current political situation. Not just in the US but in many other countries the same playbook is followed by authoritarians with just as much success as in the US. So if you have material or some reasoning at hand why more information for the population would make a difference on the voting behaviour I would be super-interested. Thanks in advance!