MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-28 14:18:12+00:00
>No, but if you’re going to say things like “increase safety by roughly 2x” then if you can’t even identify the unit then you are misleading people.

So when I talk about multipliers I have to have a unit? What is the unit of safety? I can't say something like 2x more safe? I just have to say more safe? What if I want to emphasize that it can DOUBLE safety?

Basically with your insane logic people can't talk about productivity or safety or multipliers at the same time because none of these concepts have units.

Look I told YOU it's anecdotal, EVERYONE can read it. You're no longer "deceived" and no one else is.

>Okay, so if it’s 1.5×, 2.0×, or 2.5×… again, what metric? What unit are we dealing with?

If you don't have the capacity to understand what I'm talking about without me specifying a unit than I'll make one up:

I call it safety units. The amount of errors you catch in production. That's my unit: 1 caught error in prod in a year. For Untyped languages let's say you catch about 20 errors a year. With types that goes down to 10.

>It’s not a fact, it’s ridiculous. You genuinely believe that if somebody disagrees with you, it’s a fact that they lack knowledge and experience? It’s not even remotely possible for somebody to have an informed difference of opinion with you?

What? and you think all opinions are equal and everyone has the freedom to have any opinion they want and no one can be right or wrong because everything is just an opinion? Do all opinions need to be fully respected even though it's insane?

Like my example, if you have the opinion that eating horse shit is healthy, I'm going to make a judgement call that your opinion is WRONG. Lack of Typing is one of these "opinions"
by nkrisc | 2025-09-28 14:18:12+00:00
Reminds me a bit of the "ultraviolet catastrophe".

> The ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe, was the prediction of late 19th century and early 20th century classical physics that an ideal black body at thermal equilibrium would emit an unbounded quantity of energy as wavelength decreased into the ultraviolet range.

[...]

> The phrase refers to the fact that the empirically derived Rayleigh–Jeans law, which accurately predicted experimental results at large wavelengths, failed to do so for short wavelengths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-28 14:18:13+00:00
Indeed, totally losing the benefit of the doubt when it comes to matters of censorship and lying, is one consequences of being the administration historically most infamous for censorship and lying. Normally that is motivation enough for people to choose not to become infamous for censorship and lying.

If any evidentiary memos or documents are due, they are due from the administration (with credible independent verification, of course), since at the moment the whistleblowers are more credible based on their assertions alone, and so their claim currently prevails.
by xenophonf | 2025-09-28 14:18:19+00:00
From the article:

> Sales track—or simply track, in industry parlance—is an invisible force shaping contemporary literature. Much depends on that number. On the basis of track, published authors struggle to keep going; those just starting out fear their careers will be severed at the root. Track shapes how an agent pitches a book and how editors assess whether to buy it. Track restricts reader choice by dictating which books are served up as the next big thing (and the next, and the next) and by kneecapping writers deemed insufficiently commercial. The primacy of track, in other words, is a barometer for the health of literary culture. Right now, when the industry is especially skittish, the obsession with finding the next blockbuster hit privileges the survival of the few at the expense of the many.
by mapt | 2025-09-28 14:18:21+00:00
Starlink is just under 600km in order to target a specific voluntary threshold of 25 year decay. Most of their finished birds are going to make around 5 years without propulsion or impacts.

Three things about that -

Profitability generates competition, which may or may not respect precedent. Right now Starlink is only really worried about collisions with other parts of Starlink. We cannot afford a Starlink-inspired future to happen at 600km.

Debris generating events can spin out an object with much higher cross sectional mass than an intact satellite. Think of it in terms of what we use drag for on Earth, like a kid building kites. A heavy metal bolt works worse as a kite than a long thin panel.

These calendar decay timelines are blind to density. If there are a billion satellites with a natural lifespan of 5 years flying at 551km then they are going to go into an exponential cascade in a matter of weeks. If you plan to launch very large constellations, you need very fast decay timelines to keep that safe. It is much safer at very low altitude. There is decay 'room' for >10x as many satellites at 300km as at 400km, and >10x as many at 400km as at 500km, and >10x as many at 500km as 600km.

...

It would also be nice to set aside something for manned spaceflight. Unlike with a satellite collision, if a pressure vessel gets penetrated everybody dies and nobody wants to go back. The ISS and Tianhe are going to have to deal with debris risk slowly raining down from a collision at 971km.
by evanelias | 2025-09-28 14:19:05+00:00
Superficial? House is literally the same four-on-the-floor beat originally created in Philly by Earl Young of The Trammps.

Countless early house and techno legends say they listened to disco, sampled disco, made covers of disco songs, played disco in their DJ sets. Some key producers directly overlapped between the synth-heavy forms of disco (Italo-disco, High-NRG, Mutant Disco) and electronic dance music - for example Shep Pettibone, François K, and Material, to name just a few.

I guess believe whatever you want, but everyone else listens to what the people who created electronic dance music actually said and did which puts disco as a direct core ancestor.
Show HN: Dictly – Real-time dictation. Styled, in place
by JannikJung | 2025-09-28 14:19:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Dictly, a macOS app that turns your voice into styled text in near real-time (~200ms latency). Unlike most dictation tools, everything runs 100% on-device: no cloud, no servers, no internet required.

Main features: • Instant streaming transcription — words appear as you speak • Privacy-first — all processing happens locally on Apple Silicon • ⌨ Quick Capture anywhere — press a hotkey and dictate into any text field, system-wide • Custom dictionaries — teach Dictly your jargon, names, or code • Customizable post-processing pipelines — remove fillers, auto-format lists, adjust tone, or apply regex rules in real time

It’s available now on TestFlight with the official release pending on Apple's approval!.

I’d love feedback — especially from developers, writers, and productivity nerds. I’m particularly curious how people feel about the pipeline customization (per-word, sentence, or full transcript).

Link: https://dictly.app

Thanks!

Best regards, Jannik
by topaz0 | 2025-09-28 14:19:54+00:00
FWIW the second part does not address my concern (which was about omitting literal parentheses that are present in the markup, in some cases), though it is related. Personally I think it's already a mistake for bare/unescaped words to indicate markup, or I guess the intention is that they indicate mathematical semantics and then Typst decides the best way to write down that semantics unless you explicitly interfere -- seems like a recipe for confusion whenever Typst's ideas of the mapping from semantics to typography don't quite line up with yours, or the conventions in your field. I'd much rather approach mathematical typesetting with a typesetting language than a mathematical language where somebody else has decided how that math should be typeset, even if it means a sea of backslashes and curly braces.

(Edit to add: I guess this means my preference would be option E from the blog post -- I see the extra symbols as far preferable to the ambiguity between content and markup)

Also wow, recovering from this breaking change is going to be incredibly painful for somebody.
by podgorniy | 2025-09-28 14:20:01+00:00
> By the end of 2027, models will frequently outperform experts on many tasks.

In passing the quiz-es

> Models will be able to autonomously work for full days (8 working hours) by mid-2026.

Who will carry responsibility for the consequences of these model's errors? What tools will be avaiable to that resposible _person_?

--

Tehchno optimists will be optimistic. Techno pessimists will be pessimistic.

Processes we're discussing have their own limiting factors which no one mentiones. Why to mention what exactly makes graph go up and holds it from going exponential? Why to mention or discuss inherit limitations of the LLMs architecture? Or what is legal perspective on AI agency?

Thus we're discussing results of AI models passing tests and people's perception of other people opinions.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-09-28 14:21:03+00:00
I heard him on a podcast recently. I wondered when the hosts will ask him about how his tech is being used to directly attack and actively destabilise his own home country (along with the rest of the world) by tech robber barons who own the biggest mouthpieces that run on his tech/idea.

But that’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is it happened in a way that it handed over the almost the complete practical control of WWW, in a very consolidated way, to just one country, which isn’t even his own home country (not that it would have been any better).
by adrian_b | 2025-09-28 14:21:22+00:00
This is not EMP.

It is just a high-power microwave transmitter, made with gallium nitride field-effect transistors.

Like any microwave transmitter, it can use a directional antenna. If the antenna is big enough, it can have a narrow enough transmitted microwave beacon to intercept only a single drone.

The GaN FETs enable a higher transmitter power at whatever high frequency they are using. At lower frequencies, a 70-kW power was already easily achievable in the past. The higher frequency allows a precise aiming of the microwave beacon with an antenna of reasonable size.
by salawat | 2025-09-28 14:21:32+00:00
Anything with micro transactions is dead on arrival without massive disintermediation, or a revolution in the way we handle the incestuous relationship between finance, crime, and law enforcement.

You can have a world where all people are capable of trivially transacting, without having anyone else say no, and consequently, financial crime is trivial, and a nigh-intractable problem to handle. Or you have the ability to enforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and taxation laws, financial crime is at least tractable with sufficient will, and you have the perfect abusable engine of tyranny through which people can be completed ousted from society through financial lockout or micromanagement. Almost inevitably, you will not be the one with your hand on that button.

Choose wisely.
by olooney | 2025-09-28 14:21:45+00:00
Good article, the METR metric is very interesting. See also Leopold Aschenbrenner's work in the same vein:

https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/

IMO this approach ultimately asks the wrong question. Every exponential trend in history has eventually flattened out. Every. single. one. Two rabbits would create a population with a mass greater than the Earth in a couple of years if that trend continues indefinitely. The left hand side of a sigmoid curve looks exactly like exponential growth to the naked eye... until it nears the inflection point at t=0. The two curves can't be distinguished when you only have noisy data from t<0.

A better question is, "When will the curve flatten out?" and that can only be addressed by looking outside the dataset for which constraints will eventually make growth impossible. For example, for Moore's law, we could examine as the quantum limits on how small a single transistor can be. You have to analyze the context, not just do the line fitting exercise.

The only really interesting question in the long term is if it will level off at a level near, below, or above human intelligence. It doesn't matter much if that takes five years or fifty. Simply looking at lines that are currently going up and extending them off the right side of the page doesn't really get us any closer to answering that. We have to look at the fundamental constraints of our understanding and algorithms, independent of hardware. For example, hallucinations may be unsolvable with the current approach and require a genuine paradigm shift to solve, and paradigm shifts don't show up on trend lines, more or less by definition.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-09-28 14:21:57+00:00
I'm in favor of partitioning the set of reasons it can fail to compile into separate checks with separate tools. Taming the zoo of tooling is extra work, but smaller more focused tools are easier to work with once you understand their relationship to their neighbors.

There's a world of difference between:

> I've been using a different type checker and I like it, you should try it

And

> I'd like to switch our project to a different compiler

The former makes for more nimble ecosystem.
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-28 14:22:07+00:00
I suspect we'll end up with a patchwork: From activist private organizations / charities. To state gov'ts in blue states. To just private industry (given how solar is now the least expensive energy source). To just private citizens who would prefer to work for less money on something valuable than squeeze a tiny bit more profit as a corporate cog.

Ideally the Federal gov't gets back into play, but we shouldn't plan for that future. It's a nice to have, but its a single point of failure. Especially if the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the independence of agencies anymore.

As an example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now has their own vaccine schedule, which they didn't have before. Nobody in their right mind trusts the CDC / FDA on this right now.
by EliRivers | 2025-09-28 14:22:10+00:00
Because I need to specify an amount of time short enough that big investors will hand over a lot of money, long enough that I can extract a big chunk of it for myself before it all comes crashing down.

A couple of years is probably a bit tight, really, but I'm competing for that cash with other people so the timeframe we make up is going to about the lowest we think we can get away with.
by Adachi91 | 2025-09-28 14:22:43+00:00
This title breaks my brain, I non-jokingly googled fettuccine to make sure I wasn't losing my mind. English is that hard for CNN?

`Walmart meatball meals may be linked to deadly Listeria outbreak.`

`Meatball meals from Walmart suspected in deadly Listeria outbreak.`

Edit: The craziest part is this has nothing to do with "fettuccine", as per the article:

"The U.S. Agriculture Department issued a public health alert late Thursday for Marketside Linguine with Beef Meatballs & Marinara Sauce sold in refrigerated 12-ounce clear plastic trays."

Was the entire article written by an LLM?
by xg15 | 2025-09-28 14:22:51+00:00
OP failing to understand S-curves again...

I think the first comment on the article put it best: With COVID, researchers could be certain that exponential growth was taking place because they knew the underlying mechanisms of the growth. The virus was self-replicating, so the more people were already infected, the faster would new infections happen.

(Even this dynamic would only go on for a certain time and eventual slow down, forming an S-curve, when the virus could not find any more vulnerable persons to continue the rate of spread. The critical question was of course if this would happen because everyone was vaccinated or isolated enough to prevent infection - or because everyone was already infected or dead)

With AI, there is no such underlying mechanism. There is the dream of the "self-improving AI" where either humans can make use of the current-generation AI to develop the next-generation AI in a fraction of the time - or where the AI simply creates the next generation on its own.

If this dream were reality, it could be genuine exponential growth, but from all I know, it isn't. Coding agents speed up a number of bespoke programming tasks, but they do not exponentially speed up development of new AI models. Yes, we can now quickly generate large corpora of synthetic training data and use them for distillation. We couldn't do that before - but a large part of the training data discussion is about the observation that synthetic data can not replace real data, so data collection remains a bottleneck.

There is one point where a feedback loop does happen, and this is with the hype curve: Initial models produced extremely impressive results compared to everything we had before - there caused an enormous hype and unlocked investments that allowed more resources for the developed of the next model - which then delivered even better results. But it's obvious that this kind of feedback loop will eventually end when no more additional capital is available and diminishing returns set in.

Then we will once again be in the upper part of the S-curve.
by stickfigure | 2025-09-28 14:23:05+00:00
"Models will be able to autonomously work for full days (8 working hours)" does not make them equivalent to a human employee. My employees go home and come back retaining context from the previous day; they get smarter every month. With Claude Code I have to reset the context between bite-sized tasks.

To replace humans in my workplace, LLMs need some equivalent of neuroplasticity. Maybe it's possible, but it would require some sort of shift in the approach that may or may not be coming.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-28 14:23:13+00:00
Just because something exhibits an exponential growth at one point in time, that doesn’t mean that a particular subject is capable of sustaining exponential growth.

Their Covid example is a great counter argument to their point in that covid isn’t still growing exponentially.

Where the AI skeptics (or even just pragmatists, like myself) chime in is saying “yeah AI will improve. But LLMs are a limited technology that cannot fully bridge the gap between what they’re producing now, and what the “hypists” claim they’ll be able to do in the future.”

People like Sam Altman know ChatGPT is a million miles away from AGI. But their primary goal is to make money. So they have to convince VCs that their technology has a longer period of exponential growth than what it actually will have.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-09-28 14:23:18+00:00
How about a multimodal model that looks at sensor inputs and decides about what it sees being the actual target and what might be a decoy, and generates guidance commands to the real target? Does that sound like a military application of the GenAI capabilities we know exist today with vision and computer use?

Or perhaps an AI with a tactics/strategy prompt that watches the statuses/locations of several drones and coordinates their actions to achieve an overall objective? Does that sound like a military application that the military could be working on?
by dragontamer | 2025-09-28 14:23:34+00:00
> For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.

In Go, I think everyone feels like they're a "beginner" for years.

In my experience, absolute beginners (30kyu or weaker) should study tactics. You have nothing else to study after all and need a baseline. But even by 20kyu or 15kyu, you _WILL_ stall out and be unable to continue if you're unable to recognize when a 2-point jump, horse move, running on the 4th line vs 3rd line is appropriate.

And you probably should be studying joseki theory in any case, because you need to start the game with _SOME_ move. And then you need to connect your opening theory with different, strategic level moves somehow.

----------

Is it not strange to you that there's a 50+ set tutorials with not a single one discussing the 1-point jump, horse move, or 2-point jump, or diagonal move?

This set of tutorials gets to Tiger Mouth (they call it a "hanging connection, section 3.11) before it gets to diagonal moves (ie: never).

There's no discussion on the appropriateness to sacrifice stones to gain momentum or territory. Etc. etc. This is perhaps more of a 10kyu level concept. But seriously, some of this stuff (ex: 2-point jump vs horse move) is simple enough for a 25kyu beginner.
by chrisfosterelli | 2025-09-28 14:23:34+00:00
Heart rate muscle tissue is largely influenced by hormones. The sympathetic system releases noradrenaline to speed up the heart rate, while the parasympathetic system releases acetylcholine to slow it down. But the release of these hormones is controlled by nerves, which are largely severed. So you typically end up with a less "dynamic" heart rate -- resting rate higher and responsiveness to stimuli reduced. These nerve connections can regenerate to some degree but it's individual and rarely close to what they were before.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-28 14:23:41+00:00
The syntax is a monstrosity. You can also extract a proven OCaml program from Coq and Coq has a beautiful syntax.

If you insist on the same language for specifying types, some Lisp variants do that with a much nicer syntax.

Python people have been indoctrinated since ctypes that a monstrous type syntax is normal and they reject anything else. In fact Python type hints are basically stuck on the ctypes level syntax wise.
by graypegg | 2025-09-28 14:24:03+00:00
I think they're more so talking about measuring attenuation that apple applies for the "spatial audio" effect (after apple does all of the fancy IMU tracking for you), by using a known amplitude of signal in, and the ability to programmatically monitor the signal out after the effect, you can reverse engineer a crude estimated angle out of the delta between the two.

I don't think that's how this app works though, after installing it I got a permission prompt for motion tracking.

Looks like there is an API for this. Here's an example: https://github.com/tukuyo/AirPodsPro-Motion-Sampler/blob/8ac...
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-28 14:24:10+00:00
You have to remember we live in a nation that poured cement into public pools across the country just so they wouldn’t have to share them with black Americans.

I don’t think people realize how many private schools exist purely because of reintegration. People decided they would rather build new schools and pay private tuition on top of the taxes they pay for public education. Again, all of this was just so they wouldn’t have to share those schools with black Americans.

This is all recent history. Many of the people who did this are still alive.
by Isamu | 2025-09-28 14:24:26+00:00
>they somehow jump to the conclusion that AI will never be able to do these tasks at human level

I don’t see that, I mostly see AI criticism that it’s not up to the hype, today. I think most people know it will approach human ability, we just don’t believe the hype that it will be here tomorrow.

I’ve lived through enough AI winter in the past to know that the problem is hard, progress is real and steady, but we could see a big contraction in AI spending in a few years if the bets don’t pay off well in the near term.

The money going into AI right now is huge, but it carries real risks because people want returns on that investment soon, not down the road eventually.