MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-17 18:18:37+00:00
Well UUID generation isn’t going to be quite as SIMDable as counting so the analogy breaks down there partially because of that. And += 1 isn’t a very SIMDable operation? Unless I guess you create a mask of +1, +2, +3, +4 and add that to your base number to generate those offsets (which only works with avx512 - avx2 can only do 2 increments since these are 64bit integers)

Then your 32 HT threads aren’t really going to give you full access to the underlying SIMD registers which are going to be per core which is where I assume you realized the 2x difference might show up?

And to do += 1 multithreaded you have to partition the range or you won’t get any speed up - if you don’t amortize the cost of atomic synchronization across threads you’re going to be going slower than a non-SIMD increment.
by imnatron | 2025-08-17 18:19:01+00:00
I built FlooringZap, a SaaS tool for epoxy floor contractors. Homeowners can upload a photo of their garage floor and instantly see a realistic after-image with epoxy flake coatings.

Contractors use it as a sales tool:

Helps close more jobs by showing results before installation.

Improves epoxy floor marketing by keeping prospects engaged.

Can be embedded on their own websites to capture leads.

Curious what this community thinks about sales tools like this in niche industries.
by nialse | 2025-08-17 18:19:09+00:00
“It [g] will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded.”

Excellent quote! Unfortunately not all high g people engage in moral reasoning, and I fear that they will tend to exploit lower g people, rather than to help them utilize AI to compensate. There is a real opportunity to help individuals with cognitive impairments enhance their abilities with AI. The question is how, and how they collectively feel about it.
by notahacker | 2025-08-17 18:19:39+00:00
I think you're quite right that most content gets likes and engagement from people promoting their company, their mates in the industry and people whose attention they want to attract, and usually doesn't spread much beyond that. That's the case whether it's genuinely interesting or generic promotions.

But the "viral" content seems to be something else entirely: as you point out a lot of the people are rubes running pre-product start-ups or consulting, and surely there are more people wanting to impress people with actual budgets and teams and products. Feels like they're successfully catering to an algorithm calibrated for bored but easily impressed scrollers (as well as other rubes and bot-operated accounts that want to share their equally unlikely takes on B2B sales) rather than their network.

Recently I saw a recruiter posting side by side screenshots of the engagement with a high effort collection of industry info she'd compiled with infographics and links, and a copy/paste of an unfunny meme with a tagline applying it to her industry. You'll never guess which one had 10x the engagement...
by latchkey | 2025-08-17 18:20:39+00:00
Amazing to watch someone try to argue FOR credit cards. Maybe you work in that industry. ;-)

> Consumers use credit cards because of chargebacks and fraud protection.

True! However it isn't your credit card that protects you with purchases from Amazon, it is Amazon.

I use my credit card for all sorts of things, because it is just convenient. Do you expect to do a chargeback at a grocery store or gas station? No. But, what you're giving up for that privilege, is all of your data.

> Crypto's irreversibility

In what I'm talking about, this part is irrelevant since you're just paying with cash.

> all your transactions are literally public.

You actually believe that credit card transactions are private? LOL. They are sold to the highest bidder.
by supertrope | 2025-08-17 18:20:49+00:00
They got around that rule by buying out pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), hospitals, doctor's offices, and pharmacies. While the health insurance side of UnitedHealthCare is capped at 20% or 15% overhead, they can realize their earnings by marking up the price of drugs through their pharmacy subsidiary OptumRx. They steer customers toward OptumRx by structuring their health insurance to favor that pharmacy.

CVS bought Aetna [health insurance]. CVS also owns CVS Caremark a PBM. If your employer picked Aetna as your health insurance you must fill your meds at a CVS.
by jedberg | 2025-08-17 18:21:02+00:00
The IQ curve is designed so that 100 is average. So two of your questions can be answered with math:

> average US IQ

100

>human 80th percentile

113

The last one, Ivy League average, can be guessed based on published data. The median SAT score of an Ivy League attendee is 1500. A 1500 on the SAT is roughly an IQ of 130-140.

So in theory, the median Ivy League attendee is at the genius level.
by bartread | 2025-08-17 18:21:39+00:00
> Any halfway decent therapist will spot these behaviors and at least not encourage them. LLM therapists seem to spot these behaviors and give the user what they want to hear.

FWIW I agree with you but, to some extent, I think some portion of people who want to engage in "disingenous" therapy with an LLM will also do the same with a human, and won't derive benefit from therapy as a result.

I've literally seen this in the lives of some people I've known, one very close. It's impossible to break the cycle without good faith engagement, and bad faith engagement is just as possible with humans as it is with robots.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-17 18:22:10+00:00
I think the main point people should focus on and take away should be that the people that know the truth about psychology and psychotherapy know that its a very vulnerable state where the participant isn't in control, has no ability to discern, and is highly malleable in such states.

If the guide is benevolent, you may move towards better actions, but the opposite is equally true. The more isolated you are the more powerful the effect in either direction.

People have psychological blindspots, some with no real mitigations possible aside from reducing exposure. Distorted reflected appraisal is one such blindspot which has been used by Cults for decades.

The people behind the Oracle are incentivized to make you dependent, malleable, cede agency/control, and be in a state of complete compromise. A state of being where you have no future because you gave it away in exchange for glass beads.

The dangers are quite clear, and I would imagine there will eventually be strict exposure limits, just like there are safe handling for chemicals. Its not a leap to understand there would be harsh penalties within communities of like-minded intelligent people who have hope for a future.

You either choose towards choices for a better future, or you are just waiting to die, or moving towards such outcomes where you impose that on everyone.
by ares623 | 2025-08-17 18:22:39+00:00
Won’t you get taxed on “gains”when you do that and then eventually convert to fiat?

I was considering this path a few years ago but all my research pointed to me being taxed for moving my own money from one country to another. Which would’ve cost significantly more than a good ol’ bank transfer. (I needed the fiat on the other end)

My understanding was that as far as the receiving bank is concerned, the converted crypto would’ve appeared out of an investment/trading platform and needed to be taxed

The bank transfer cost like a couple of bucks anyway so it wasn’t worth the risk of trying the crypto route in the end for me.
by timr | 2025-08-17 18:23:45+00:00
That is what happens in the later stages of monopoly. In any case, my point wasn't about vet clinics, it was about the business financial properties that lead to monopoly. Even a business model as mundane as the local veterinary practice is undergoing industry-wide consolidation.

Any profitable software business is vastly more interesting for consolidation than a vet practice.
by bartread | 2025-08-17 18:24:03+00:00
That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.
by righthand | 2025-08-17 18:24:14+00:00
I’m ahead on payments because I want to get rid of them. Now I’m wondering if I should hold on to them and stop paying ahead so I am not covering other peoples chunk of the debt today. This sounds cruel in some passive way but I’d rather help signal the unaffordable-ness of the Usa.

I can’t afford:

- eggs (generally many groceries are more expensive)

- a 1-2 bed home of any quality

- medical care that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg

- my energy bill has doubled

- my savings payments have lowered

- 9+% inflation

And many of these problem have existed for the last 10+ years. But at least we had a pretty great bond market for a few years to help offset regular inflation.

If people can’t afford something like a student loan that’s already been “delayed or postponed” they will definitely deprioritize it.
by stackskipton | 2025-08-17 18:24:22+00:00
What is this report supposed to show? System level Daemons have low level access or iPhone, unlocked and having trusted the hardware I assume, can be made to reveal data? This reads like someone asked AI about debugging iPhone using their laptop, dug into some system daemons and wrote up a report acting like sky is falling when it's expected behavior. UID 0 can bypass file permissions, alert kernel developers!

Real question is, can other iOS applications trigger this data leaking behavior or can untrusted MacOS devices do this as well?
by metadat | 2025-08-17 18:24:24+00:00
There are also enterprise SSDs in existence now which pack more than 200TB into a single NVMe drive. $$$$$, though (for the foreseeable future?)

Kioxia LC9 SSD Hits 245.76TB of Capacity in a Single Drive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44643038 (22 days ago, 7 comments)

-> https://www.servethehome.com/kioxia-lc9-ssd-hits-245-76tb-of...

SanDisk's "reply": Sandisk unveils 256 TB SSD for AI workloads, shipping in 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823148 (10 days ago, no discussion)

-> https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/08/05/sandisk-pre-announces-...
by diggan | 2025-08-17 18:24:35+00:00
I don't think it means much except you need to enable "web" or searching at least for most models to deal well with facts, and that's probably for the better.

Even a basic search tool + GPT-OSS-20b handles it correctly it seems to me (https://gist.github.com/victorb/de69a8c2169e6a7cc1989592419b...), if I guessed what prompt you used correctly, "Were George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff related?".
by shivenigma | 2025-08-17 18:25:02+00:00
> The author does not understand what LLMs and coding tools are capable of today.

Not really, I would say they used it well and understood the limitations of LLM exactly. No matter how much polished the output or how good it is, LLMs can't build mental models of a codebase like a human does because they are just statistical machines.
by mikestew | 2025-08-17 18:25:31+00:00
This article is bordering on flaggable. For reference, the HN title above differs from original: "Anxiety about the economy is forcing two-thirds of U.S. employers to yank budgets for raises" (emphasis mine). It opens with this:

"In 2026, US employers are expected to grant employees raises that are largely in line with what they’re receiving this year, according to a Payscale report released on Aug. 7."

Umm, wait a minute. Just seconds ago was the claim that a large majority of employers were yanking raises.

But the bullshit blog spam doesn't even match the title of the original:

"Of the respondents who said their 2026 budget for salary increases is expected to be lower than their 2025 budget, nearly two-thirds (66%), said they were “concerned about future economic conditions or business performance,” up 17 percentage points from last year."

I'll repeat that via paraphrasing: "Of those companies who are cutting comp budgets, 2/3 said..." That differs a lot from the original title, and the HN title (which I'll assume was edited for space) doesn't even make sense at that point.
by ozgung | 2025-08-17 18:25:38+00:00
This made me realize OpenAI is actually in the Artificial Humans business right now, not just AI. I am not sure if this was what they wanted.

They have to deal with real humans. Billions of conversations with billions of people. In the Social Networks era this was easy. SN companies outsourced talking with humans part to other users. They had the c2c model. They just provided the platform, transmitted the messages and scaled up to billion users. They quietly watched to gather data and serve ads.

But these AI companies have to generate all those messages themself. They are basically like a giant call center. And call centers are stressful. Human communication at scale is a hard problem. Possibly harder than AGI. And those researchers in AI labs may net be best people to solve this problem.

ChatGPT started as something like a research experiment. Now it's the #1 app in the world. I'm not sure about the future of ChatGPT (and Claude). These companies want to sell AI workers to assist/replace human employees. An artificial human companion like in the movie Her (2013) is a different thing. It's a different business. A harder one. Maybe they sunset it at some point or go full b2b.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-17 18:25:55+00:00
It's not a new thing. I'm genX and I lived in rental until my 40s. Was in a 1 bed flat with my wife and son until he was 4. Eventually managed to buy a small place, but even then I was lucky.

I reject this generational war thing though. British state pensions are the worst in Europe. The triple lock doesn't make pensioners rich; it just keeps them from sliding into abject poverty.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-17 18:26:51+00:00
This. Nobody is free, until everybody got a thermonuclear warhead.

I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
by philwelch | 2025-08-17 18:27:06+00:00
The assault ships can be much farther offshore for air operations. The flight deck isn’t just for STOVL jets, it can also handle lots of helicopter and tiltrotor traffic, which is also used for ship-to-shore movement.

Also, anti ship missiles and drones aren’t a cheat code. They can be suppressed, jammed, destroyed with preparatory fires, or shot down in flight. Anti-ship missiles aren’t new, nor are anti-anti-ship-missile-missiles. Anti-ship missiles were a major factor in the 1982 Falklands War but not, in the end, a decisive one.
by zoogeny | 2025-08-17 18:27:46+00:00
People here are giving you mathematical answers which is what you are asking for, but I want to challenge your intuition here.

In construction, grading a site for building is a whole process involving surveying. If you dropped a person on a random patch of earth that hasn't previously been levelled and gave them no tools, it would be a significant challenge for that person to level the ground correctly.

What I'm saying is, your intuition that "I can look around me and find the minimum of anything" is almost certainly wrong, unless you have a superpower that no other person has.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-17 18:28:00+00:00
I am not a Blender user, but my strong suspicion is that the output of these things does not match what you'd be able to do in very short order by learning a bit of Blender.

One of my suspicions about these "can we make an LLM do something that isn't text?" projects is that underpinning it is something that isn't to do with AI at all.

Instead it's that a lot of specialist programmers really really loathe GUI paradigms for anything, consider text interfaces inherently superior, think the job of a GUI is only to simplify tasks and hide complexity, and so think all complex GUIs that are not immediately intuitive are categorical failures.

In rejecting learning GUI tools they rule out the possibility that GUI interfaces support paradigms text cannot, and they rule out the possibility that anyone who has deep skills in a particular GUI knows anything more than what all the switches and buttons do, when a Blender user is very evidently engaging in a similar kind of abstract thought as programming involved.

It is much the same with FreeCAD. Does the FreeCAD GUI still suck in several places? Yes. It was confusing and annoying until I learned that it is not trying to hide complexity. The inherent complexity is in the problem domain. But a programmer with a bit of maths and logic knowledge can, IMO, easily learn it. And then you discover that the FreeCAD UI is what it is because it is a set of tools designed by CAD-focussed programmers that attempts little to no magic, and suddenly you are using the tools to solve your own problems.

In short a lot of these projects have a whiff of "but I don't wannnnna learn a GUI". The LLM or AI generator offers a way to defer properly learning the tools or techniques that are not so difficult to learn, and so attracts a lot of attention.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-17 18:28:15+00:00
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.

I've gotten two good jobs from posting on LinkedIn. Mutual connections see your posts, and recruiters can find and contact you. When you list it on your resume, people do look at it. So yes it "changes" your career, by helping you get jobs.

Yeah it's full of drivel. All social media is full of drivel. Stop paging through the drivel and use it as a tool. Collect good connections, keep up with old colleagues, network. That's what it's for.
by filoleg | 2025-08-17 18:28:30+00:00
Yup, agreed heavily with your take.

I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).

For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.

As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
by hbosch | 2025-08-17 18:28:30+00:00
I am not sure Secure Boot, TPM, or kernel-level anti-cheat still manage to accurately detect hardware with direct memory access. DMA hardware can still circumvent all of these things, and they only cost a few hundred bucks. The question in my mind remains: why would you pay ~$300 for DMA hardware and then ~$10-100+/month for an active private cheat? Is it worth it to look cool online to random strangers before you eventually get algorithmically detected or mass-reported and manually banned, just to create a new account and start all over? Even for those cheaters who buy high level accounts, what is the endgame of spending all that money and recycling the process?
by supertrope | 2025-08-17 18:28:49+00:00
The furnace or heat pump is a much larger energy consumer than the stove. Complaining about gas stove bans is just a distraction from the much larger prize of heating fuel demand. People can see and feel their stove. They don't think about their furnace much except when they get their natural gas bill or it stops working. Gas utilities are afraid of a death spiral of people switching to all electric appliances, infrastructure costs being spread over a smaller customer base, which incentivizes more people to switch.
by nocoiner | 2025-08-17 18:28:58+00:00
I have a question about this.

Per google, shortened links “won't work after August 25 and we recommend transitioning to another URL shortener if you haven’t already.”

Am I missing something, or doesn’t this basically obviate the entire gesture of keeping some links active? If your shortened link is embedded in a document somewhere and can’t be updated, google is about to break it, no?
by tombert | 2025-08-17 18:29:54+00:00
I built a URL shortener years ago for fun. I don't have the resources that Google has, but I just hacked it together in Erlang using Riak KV and it did horizontally scale across at least three computer (I didn't have more at the time).

Unless I'm just super smart (I'm not), it's pretty easy to write a URL shortener as a key-value system, and pure key-value stuff is pretty easy to scale. I cannot imagine that isn't doing something as or more efficient than what I did.
by IFC_LLC | 2025-08-17 18:30:03+00:00
Now, here is one thing that I want to contest here. And this is about the numbers of Pi. The "Universe" have no idea about the numbers of Pi, because Pi is just an artificial construct created by humans. From the viewpoint of the Universe, there are no numbers in Pi. Pi exists in the way it exists only because we have created 10-base numbering system that we are trying to impose on the Universe.

Again, there is no reason we use 10-base, but the amount of fingers, which is a completely arbitrary number. We could as easily create a base-π numbering system where π equals 10 in this case.

The idea of dividing time runs into Plank's constant. Time itself can be captured only on the basis of observing some sort of motion. Thus, when you divide the time to the minimum quant of time, which is to say, the time that takes light to pass the Plank's constant length, you have it. There isn't any more "divisibility" of time.

And again, we are here just because we have math. There is a minimum quant of time, yet math allows us to continue dividing it beyond that constant.

Thus far, pretty much the only "Unknown" we have is a singularity, but give it some time, I'm sure when we inspect it much more, we'll figure it out.

The text was not in fact written by GPT. Yet, I've used GPT to check grammar and other errors.
by ac29 | 2025-08-17 18:31:09+00:00
I'd argue only four of those are purely tech companies (NVDA, MSFT, AAPL, AVGO).

AMZN does tech stuff, but also retailing, grocery, logistics, media and more.

META and GOOG are advertising businesses.

BRK is a basically a holding company, its businesses are in a wide variety of markets, mostly non-tech (and it owns public equity too).

TSLA is a car manufacturer.
by mindslight | 2025-08-17 18:32:07+00:00
"People who won't think" resonates with me for the draw I've felt being pulled towards by chatbots, and I've got plenty of experience in software and electrical engineering. They're pretty damn helpful to aid discovery and rubber ducking, but even trying to evaluate different products/approaches versus one another they will hallucinate wild facts and tie them together with a nice polished narrative. It's easy enough to believe them as it is, never mind if I had less expertise. I've found that I have to consciously pull the ripcord at a certain point, telling myself that if I really want the answer to some question I've got to spend the time digging into it myself.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-17 18:33:02+00:00
> e.g. it's not like there's a single "socialising gene" which is either on or off and explains the entire phenotype.

Indeed, naïvely it almost seems to me like in Williams Syndrome what is missing is something that causes the brain to keep the mirror neurons in perspective. People with the syndrome rapidly experience a sense of closeness with people they don't actually understand and whose motivations may be harmful.