MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by falcor84 | 2025-09-29 17:08:32+00:00
I agree that Google were too slow to move, but entirely disagree with the first part. ChatGPT is very much not a "search engine". Arguably it is an "Answer engine", but more so, it is a conversational partner - I almost never use ChatGPT to just get one response; the real benefit is being able to follow up with it until I'm satisfied. It's an entirely different medium of interaction as compared to search engines.
by Gormo | 2025-09-29 17:08:38+00:00
> You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system?

I don't see there being a distinction between the two in the real world. An institutional system's behavior largely determined by the incentive structures that actually exist on the ground, irrespective of initial intentions or de jure rules.

An institutional system that is expected to self-moderate is one where the motivations that inform its primary behavior are the same ones ultimately informing its self-moderation -- i.e. it's functionally equivalent to an unmoderated system, just more pretextual rationalization.

> Do you see any value in QC?

Sure. But I don't see much value in a QC process that's administered by the same people or judged against the same metrics as the thing it's QCing.

I'd love the equivalent of QC to be applied to both legislation and administrative rule-making in our current system. Maybe with the Loper Bright decision, the courts will gradually resume responsibility for doing this properly. But the capricious and arbitrary nature of the current administration is revealing the extent to which checks and balances are already eroded, and just what an uphill battle that's likely to be.

The entire political system in its current state is riddled with perverse incentives, and the mechanisms of external accountability are totally broken. Even with inter-branch checks and balances, the federal government in its current form is simply not trustworthy.
by mohsen1 | 2025-09-29 17:09:26+00:00
Price is playing a big role in my AI usage for coding. I am using Grok Code Fast as it's super cheap. Next to it GPT-5 Codex. If you are paying for model use out of pocket Claude prices are super expensive. With better tooling setup those less smart (and often faster) models can give you better results.

I am going to give this another shot but it will cost me $50 just to try it on a real project :(
by al_borland | 2025-09-29 17:09:28+00:00
I don’t go there anymore. The owner has been texting me on and off to try and get me to go back. I’ve been looking for other options, but am having trouble finding one that looks decent for me.

It’s a bit of a paradox. When I’m looking for a gym, I find pictures incredibly helpful, but I don’t want them taken of me as a member there.
by agedclock | 2025-09-29 17:09:29+00:00
No having a high credit score has nothing do with your wealth or social class. I have worked in this industry briefly. It looks at your ability to manage credit, and whether you have any flags.

e.g. I had a 995 credit score on Experian back in the late 2000s. The highest was 999. I earned £18,000 at the time, and was in my mid-20s and didn't really own anything at the time. I did have a credit card at the time where I made the payments, and I lived at a household which had no debt, and I was on the electoral roll.

That is why when you are making larger purchases they do a "means test" e.g. see if you earn enough to pay a mortgage.
by colechristensen | 2025-09-29 17:09:35+00:00
The cost is now at the point where we don't care so much about actually using every watt and when we do need more watts at a particular time we add more in "inefficient" configurations to supply it.

Whole industries are going to pop up to take advantage of the intermittent very cheap electricity. Also there will be a competitive balance between the cost of storage and the "cost" of non-optimally aligned solar panels.
by rayiner | 2025-09-29 17:09:39+00:00
Your options are limited when you have none of the tech stack to find the oil, development fields, and extract the oil. Nor the capital to buy the equipment and do it all yourself.

Theoretically, book authors could “hire” everyone needed to turn a popular book into a movie. But in practice they sell the rights to develop the property to a studio in return for a cut of the profits.
by foxyv | 2025-09-29 17:09:41+00:00
When I was a kid, I quickly learned that most school administrators are lazy monsters. You only get in trouble if you make them do their jobs. You could literally get your ass beat by a crowd of feral children and then get suspended for being attacked and doing nothing in return.

Bullying isn't just condoned in schools, it is supported. If you try to report it to administrators you are more likely to be punished than the bullies because YOU are the pain point for them.
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-29 17:10:42+00:00
Uhh that's just every dating site since at least the 2000s.

They didn't need LLMs to build bots.

Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.

If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
by parineum | 2025-09-29 17:11:08+00:00
Battlefield was always jank built on top of an innovative (or just finally achieved) idea of large battles with vehicles that worked. 1942 wasn't really innovative but the technical achievements of player count and not shitty vehicles made it a novel experience.

The further they moved away from that, the more generic it became. I don't want to say any one was really the "last good one" but the last one I put significant time into was BF2 but I played all pc versions up to 4 and you're right, it was absolutely broken on launch. It's not why I haven't played one since but I never did go back to BF or even really FPSs since. They all seem like CoD clones now, even (or especially) the CoD franchise and it's tiring.
by NiloCK | 2025-09-29 17:11:10+00:00
This is mostly a joke, but objects in fantasy land are sometimes closer than they appear.

Major cloud compute and OS infra providers should provide a global opt-out of public bystander-recording. OK, record me, but it will be known by my face, location stamps from my device, etc, that it's me, and post-processing will anonymize me.

Legitimate public interest? EG, I stole your car and it's on tape? Sure, provide the cloud provider with a warrant for 'originals'.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-29 17:11:13+00:00
"It's still a public event even if everyone is not invited."

You are not stating the same thing. You are saying that an invite only is not a private event. You've apparently misread the bit you quoted as it is a double negative; "> Just because people know about it doesn't make it not private". Just because people know about a private event does not mean the event is public. Knowledge of the event is not what makes it private. What makes it private is the host's restriction of who can attend.

Also, I'm not hostile. You're being defensive on an indefensible position and not liking the fact you are being called out for that position. There's a difference.
by Avamander | 2025-09-29 17:11:17+00:00
I read it and I think I understood it. But I disagree on the premise. I don't find that inefficiency is needed, protective or preventative.

I find it more likely that a totalitarian system that doesn't tolerate wrong-think will inherently start accumulating inefficiencies among other things. Which can then end up with the collapse of such a regime.

Building a technologically modernized authoritarian state might increase stability for a while, but not thinking is simply not competitive long-term. Unless you achieve total world domination, I guess.
by anon025 | 2025-09-29 17:11:21+00:00
Currently working on a new project: https://fetchfavicon.com for getting the best quality favicon from any website. This came out of necessity for a desktop app I was working on, used https://icon.horse before, but the site has been down some days and wanted to build something more reliable for myself. It turns getting favicons right is a lot of work but got most of the hurdles figured out.

Currently working on supporting batch favicon requests that bundle multiple URLs in a single image sprite.
by b3lvedere | 2025-09-29 17:11:41+00:00
For those who want to play it. Mass Effect Legendary Edition plays great on a Steam Deck or medium pc, but also has 4k reolution. It’s €6 at the moment.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328670/Mass_Effect_Legen...

Part of the EA autumn sale. More discounts here:

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/EA/sale/ea-autumn-s...
by ramblingrain | 2025-09-29 17:13:28+00:00
The first source I clicked into was a meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials.

What you say sounds true about chronic illness and isolation. These researchers are looking at research done using actual interventions and real results.

What should they do to analyze this more than RCTs and then meta-analysis of RCTs?

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... Tackling social disconnection: an umbrella review of RCT-based interventions targeting social isolation and loneliness
by dooglius | 2025-09-29 17:14:26+00:00
The 'i' has more background:

> The game is inspired by the synthesis of linear reversible circuits; a problem in reversible and quantum computation. Here, the goal is to construct a target operation, the target pattern in Swapple, using a sequence of simpler operations, specifically controlled NOT (CNOT) gates, which flip the state of a target bit if and only if a control bit is set. In Swapple, each row and column operation corresponds to applying a CNOT gate. Your task is to find a sequence of these gates, i.e. a circuit, that transform the initial configuration, corresponding to an empty circuit, into the target configuration. Moreover, finding one of the shortest sequences of moves to achieve this goal corresponds to finding one of the most efficient circuits that implements the desired operation.
by ghaff | 2025-09-29 17:14:40+00:00
The Eiffel Tower situation is a somewhat complicated matter. You can (of course) publish a photo of the tower on your social media account. But the nighttime illumination is apparently copyrighted and it's not clear to me if the prohibition about publishing extends beyond commercial purposes anyway.

I agree with your broader point. Recognizable people get their photos published on social media every second of every day and, while someone can probably find an outlier example where someone got prosecuted for doing so, it's incredibly rare at the least--even in countries where it's technically a violation of some law.
by Wilsoniumite | 2025-09-29 17:14:54+00:00
I agree a lot with the sentiments here and I think people who want to avoid being filmed should have that right. But, as someone who doesn't mind (and is younger) I suppose I could share my rationalizion for it (as flawed as it may be)

One often mentioned reason is the fear that in some way your likeness will end up in something significant, or viral. That makes sense, it's the most invasive and significant violation. We "risk becoming the side character in someone else's parasocial relationship" as another commentator mentioned. I myself wouldn't want that either, but I derive some comfort from one main observation: virality doesn't scale. A lot of the worries come from the fact that "everyone is filming now", "everything is shared now". That's true, but the likelihood of any of this ever becoming popular or even seen goes down as the volume goes up. That alone is enough for me to not be that worried, at least not by the increased prevalence of public filming/photography.

On the other hand, this does nothing to limit the effect of data harvesting and government espionage, a real worry I might have.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-29 17:14:54+00:00
For me, the "why" is a mix of:

1- ubiquity: now, virtually everyone's got a device capable of capturing high quality photo/video of you at any time

2- discoverability: social media gives anything the potential to go viral which might put you in the spotlight or limelight, and the frequency at which things can go viral "enough" is way higher (more platforms, larger follower counts, etc) (this is I assume what you meant by "reach")

3- "content creators" are everywhere: people want to turn anything into something, through all kinds of incentives that were unavailable 20 years ago, so it's a much more active "capture and use it" context

Things just aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-29 17:15:03+00:00
The AI would, hands down, write a better sentence if you compared the output quality of an author writing 10,000 words per day with an AI writing 10,000 words per day. Or make the AI write 100,000 words per day, it could write sentences better than that 24/7 without breaking a sweat, while the human would literally be incapable of achieving this goal.

But if you gave both a month to write the best 400 word article they could possibly generate on a particular subject, the human author would dominate. Give them time to make a few drafts, to research and think and talk to people, to edit and reorganize and restart and rehearse, and they'll produce something that's worth being read and re-read and considered thoughtfully by thousands of people.

The problem is that the journalism industry has become optimized to generate content to be skimmed by a few people and read by thousands of bots.
by falcor84 | 2025-09-29 17:15:10+00:00
> I wonder whether LLMs are capable of doing more

I don't see how that is a question. I come up with new ideas to improve the LLM-based tools I'm using at least once a day, and the vast majority of these are plain engineering changes that I could do on my own if I wanted to put the effort into it. I think that even if God comes down from heaven to prevent us from further training the LLMs themselves (if God is listening to Yudkowsky's prayers), then we would still have a good few decades of extensively improving the capabilities of LLM-based tools to extract a massive amount of further productivity by just building better agentic wrappers and pipelines, applying proper software development and QA methodology.
by brisky | 2025-09-29 17:15:30+00:00
Great points. With Meta glasses and other similar gadgets I think manual consent is not enough. There should be a 'protocol' to announce that you don't allow your images to be included in social media. I propose a QR code that would signify that you don't want to filmed. We need to push for legislation allowing (returning) such liberty. After such automated consent is legal it will be up to social media platforms to blur and anonymize individuals with such preferences. Finally we will have a job where AI could be put to good use!
by wduquette | 2025-09-29 17:15:38+00:00
Unless you're solving the same old problem for the Nth time for a new customer, you don't really understand the problem fully until you write the code.

If it's a new problem, you need to write the code so that you discover all the peculiar corner cases and understand them.

If it's the (N+M)th time, and you've been using AI to write the code for the last M times, you may find you no longer understand the problem.

Fair warning. Write the damn code.
by Spivak | 2025-09-29 17:15:38+00:00
And on Free Balloon Day too, the absolute monsters.

How many times are people going to join the software hippie commune that believes as its fundamental principle that software shouldn't be bound by IP restrictions, and who wrote a bunch of licenses to realize that belief within a strong-ip system, then get confused when they can't enforce IP restrictions.

OpenTofu, Valkey, OpenSearch, NextCloud, OpenSSH, VeraCrypt, OpenBao, OPNsense are all apparently stolen software.
by schmorptron | 2025-09-29 17:15:55+00:00
Oh wow, a lot of focus on code from the big labs recently. In hindsight it makes sense that the domain the people building it know best is the one getting the most attention, and it's also the one the models have seen the most undeniable usefulness in so far. Though personally, the unpredictability of the future where all of this goes is a bit unsettling at the same time...
by _joel | 2025-09-29 17:16:07+00:00
I'm paying $90(?) a month for the Max and it holds up for about an hour or so of in depth coding before it kicks in the 5-hour window lockout (so effectively about 4 hours of time when I can't run it). Kinda frustrating, even with efficient prompt and context length conservation techniques. I'm going to test this new sonnet 4.5, now but it'll probably be just as quick to gobble my credits.
by hadlock | 2025-09-29 17:16:13+00:00
Apparently there are companies out there who engineer otherwise inert particles, or mixes of particles, that fluoresce under specific wavelengths, for example Mobil might add the particles to their premium Mobile 1 synthetic motor oil product to find counterfeit products in certain markets. By opening a bottle of oil purchased off the shelf they can hit it with ~620nm && ~580nm and if it does not respond correctly, it is relatively easy to demonstrate that it is counterfeit and quickly get it removed from shelves. This can also be applied to crude oil and quietly tested at the refinery to verify it hasn't been diluted with similar product.
by basisword | 2025-09-29 17:16:16+00:00
>> Asking guests to not take photos is such a faux pass that the couple has destroyed their reputation completely.

The day is not about you. Just like people are free to exclude children from weddings, if they ask you not to take photos and you take umbrage at that, you need to take a hard look at yourself. It's. Not. About. You.
by Kuinox | 2025-09-29 17:16:16+00:00
I never understood the point of the pellican on a bicycle exercise: LLMs coding agent doesnt have any way to see the output. It means the only thing this test is testing, is the ability of the LLMs to memorise.

Edit: just to show my point, a regular human on a bicycle is way worse with the same model: https://i.imgur.com/flxSJI9.png
by KronisLV | 2025-09-29 17:16:24+00:00
> I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands.

Try N times, adding more context about the environment and error messages along the way. If it doesn't work after those, try other models (Claude, Gemini, ...). If none of those work on whatever number of attempts you've chosen, then LLMs won't be able to help you well enough and you should save yourself some time and look elsewhere.

A good starting point is trying for 10-20 minutes, after which point an LLM might actually become slower than you going the old fashioned way of digging into docs and reading forum posts and such. There are also problems that are a bit too complex for LLMs as well and they'd just take you in circles no matter for how long you try.
by agedclock | 2025-09-29 17:16:34+00:00
> I have also had a problem before with a transaction being inaccurately flagged as fraudulent. This could either be because an anti-fraud algorithm isn’t perfect 100% of the time, or it could be the result of a vast government conspiracy to limit my travel.

I never said it was part of a government conspiracy. What I am saying is that your ability to transact freely is infringed by opaque mechanisms.

If that is added with digital only payments which is tied to your gov id, it isn't difficult to imagine a scenario where your ability to transact freely be taken away to stop you from travelling for political reasons.
by gms7777 | 2025-09-29 17:16:46+00:00
I've been to weddings that had an "open" ceremony and a closed reception. This has generally been at a church, where the wedding itself is announced to the whole church community, but then the reception is a more limited number of family and friends.

More commonly though, I've been to weddings where they had a small private ceremony (just the couple, officiant, and a handful of family), and then a large reception for everyone in the evening.
by Someone | 2025-09-29 17:17:41+00:00
> If thousands of people would work on this indefinitely the time would drop to seconds.

Even the small Apple II screen takes 7.5 kilobytes of RAM. Reading https://imapenguin.com/2022/06/how-fast-can-a-6502-transfer-..., just writing all of that to the screen takes a tenth of a second, for just over 50,000 pixels, and that’s ignoring the idiosyncratic video memory layout of the Apple II.

Going below ten seconds for decompressing that would mean you must produce 5 output pixels every millisecond, which means you have about 200 CPU cycles per pixel. On a 6502, that’s less than 100 instructions.

That makes me doubt it can get under 10 seconds.

⇒ if you want to get down to seconds, I think you’ll have to drop even more image data than this does, and do that fast.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-29 17:17:53+00:00
well then clearly you cannot be trusted on this issue, as sports games peaked with nba jam tournament edition (1994)

fr tho you and the OP are talking about two different things here. it's possible to be an avid gamer who just does not care about sports games, in which case EA is both an absolute titan of the industry and of little to no relevance to you
by dfxm12 | 2025-09-29 17:18:01+00:00
The author suggests this was not a public space. Legal or not, it's more about not being a jerk. I think this is especially important in the context of a hobby, and the local community around that hobby. There are easy ways for everyone to get what they want in these situations.

So, why not get a release? Why not perform some light video editing to cut/blur out people who don't want to be there? These are not high bars to clear. I've done similar things, you have every opportunity to talk to the group and sort this out, and explain why you're filming and where you're publishing. Then people can come to an informed decision...
by cmdli | 2025-09-29 17:18:29+00:00
The reports I have seen have shown significant decreases in revenue, from around $5B in 2021 to $2.5B in 2024: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

I’m not sure about profit, but I do know that Twitter made $1.4B in profit in 2019 according to their SEC filings.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-09-29 17:18:33+00:00
I always wonder how absolute in performance a given model is. Sometimes i ask for Claude-Opus and the responses i get back are worse than the lowest end models of other assistants. Other times it surprises me and is clearly best in class.

Sometimes in between this variability of performance it pops up a little survey. "How's Claude doing this session from 1-5? 5 being great." and i suspect i'm in some experiment of extremely low performance. I'm actually at the point where i get the feeling peak hour weekdays is terrible and odd hour weekends are great even when forcing a specific model.

While there is some non-determinism it really does feel like performance is actually quite variable. It would make sense they scale up and down depending on utilization right? There was a post a week ago from Anthropic acknowledging terrible model performance in parts of August due to an experiemnt. Perhaps also at peak hour GPT has more datacenter capacity and doesn't get degraded as badly? No idea for sure but it is frustrating when simple asks fail and complex asks succeed without it being clear to me why that may be.
by xp84 | 2025-09-29 17:18:38+00:00
Indeed; and when you don't want the brand it's even more ideal. We saw a few months ago an example of the "new company" buying the brand and the assets but not the liabilities, including some suckers who bought "lifetime" subscriptions[1] from the old owners that they allegedly didn't even disclose, and which legally speaking weren't the liability of this random unrelated company which just bought the assets and the brand of the defunct company who made the promises.

In this case though with a new name and product that won't be an issue.

[1] someone else will remember the name of that company - it escapes me