MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-09-24 07:23:39+00:00
Yes, what Zero Knowledge proofs give you however is composability.

Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'.

I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from.

As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.
Show HN: Pokerbattle.ai – A week-long poker tournament for LLMs
by mpavlov | 2025-09-24 07:23:46+00:00
What

PokerBattle.ai is a week-long live no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament where all players are top-tier reasoning LLMs. We’re testing how different models handle imperfect information and whether they can sustain consistent, math-driven poker without tool use or custom code.

Why

- In poker you can do well with basic math + consistent logic.

- Superhuman poker AIs exist, but they rely on massive simulation/game-theory solvers and are effectively black boxes.

- We want a rough, apples-to-apples comparison of LLM reasoning on poker decisions, and to collect public reasoning summaries that might be useful for teaching humans poker concepts with LLM-based systems.

How it works (rules / format) - Cash format, fixed blinds, no ante.

- Multiple tables run in parallel to increase hand volume.

- All players start with the same bankroll. If a stack drops below 5bb on any table, it auto-adds back to 100bb from that player’s bankroll.

- When a player’s bankroll hits 0, they bust. The largest bankroll at event end wins.

- Same prompt for all models. No extra tools, no code execution — pure language-only decisions.

- Models can keep simple notes about opponents across hands.

- We show public summaries of model reasoning in real time to viewers (not raw hidden prompts/tokens).

Research goals

- Compare different LLMs’ decision consistency and adaptation over long horizons.

- Produce a dataset of reasoning summaries + actions + outcomes suitable for exploring instructional use (human learning/teaching), not solver training.

When / where

- Dates: Oct 27 — Nov 3

- Live on a website: link on the site below (free to watch).

Looking for

- Feedback on design/metrics.

- Participants suggestions.

- Community ideas on fair prompts, leak prevention, and evaluation.

- Sponsors interested in supporting an open, public experiment (logos on stream, sections sponsoring, mentions).

https://pokerbattle.ai/

Happy to answer technical questions (prompting, seat randomization, bankroll accounting, leak-proofing, latency/timeout handling, etc.). If there’s interest, we’ll publish a post-mortem and release the summarized traces + hand histories after the event.
by koolala | 2025-09-24 07:24:58+00:00
So its good because of Scala's ability to implement a programming language and not Scala's language itself being good on its own for general abstract sudo like code. Or does Scala write cleanly (like people say Python does) and is also elegantly able to expands it's own simple syntax?

It bugs me how languages like JS are clean but any custom domain-specific language made in them is ugly.
by sReinwald | 2025-09-24 07:25:20+00:00
> This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels.

What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.

Swen Vincke shared the backstory:

> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!

https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969

That combination of individual passion and company willingness to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.
by Podrod | 2025-09-24 07:25:37+00:00
And sometimes the Windows version runs better under Proton than the native Linux build due to the port being so poorly done which is kinda funny.

Occasionally I do still run things under Windows though like Cyberpunk 2077 as I got about 15 more frames under Windows which let me bump the graphics up a bit more.

Or Assassin's Creed Mirage which got me double the FPS somehow. Currently playing AssCree Shadows on Windows too as it just refuses to run at all via Proton. Other people seem to get it running fine so I dunno why I can't. Ah well.
by dismalaf | 2025-09-24 07:25:50+00:00
Honestly, I have a few favourites and just use those.

Low level stuff, my go-to these days is Odin. Just super pleasant to use. Also super easy C-FFI, so it can interact with most code out there with a small amount of effort.

Web stuff, random scripts, utilities, etc... Ruby. For pretty much the same reason: it's pleasant and easy to use. Obviously easier than Odin because no need to manage memory and much higher level. It's FFI also allows you to interact with most languages (including Odin, in just a few lines of code).

Also, I should mention, I use stuff like JS, Java, C/C++ as needed. Sometimes there's a library you need, a platform where one of those is needed to glue it together, JS for web front end, etc...
by ernst_klim | 2025-09-24 07:25:58+00:00
I'm not sure this is true tho.

The games by Loki Software are still running great for me. It's a matter of skill and discipline. SDL, OpenGL and alike are very stable.

The problems start when developers start to use lots of small third-party libraries and depend on particular versions of them, but IIRC on Windows it's also solved by simply shipping all the libs with the game.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-24 07:26:43+00:00
Guessing these are surfacing due to the recent Radiolab podcast "The Spark of Life": https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-spark-of-life

> in the spectral range of 200–1000 nm

That's UV, visible and near IR. We know that 100-600 nm (infrared EDIT: UV) light "can carry out photostimulation and photobiomodulation effects particularly benefiting neural stimulation, wound healing, and cancer treatment" [1]. I'm curious what could be producing UV and visible light.

Does light production tend to hang out around any particular organs or organelles? If stress causes it, I'd hypothesise it's metabolic or signalling related.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5505738/
by bheadmaster | 2025-09-24 07:26:45+00:00
> LLMs are not AI. Machine learning is more useful.

LLMs are a particular application of machine learning, and as such LLMs both benefit by and contribute to general machine learning techniques.

I agree that LLMs are not the AI we all imagine, but the fact that it broke a huge milestone is a big deal - natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI!

I believe it is only a matter of time until we get to a multi-sensory self-modifying large models which can both understand and learn from all five of human senses, and maybe even some of the senses we have no access to.
by eptcyka | 2025-09-24 07:27:16+00:00
> As usual, you cannot make a coherent understanding on just about any subject by reading headlines alone.

The amount of sweet, sweet irony displayed here will make me diabetic. Did you read the article at all? Salting? What are you on about?

Honestly, it feels that some HN commenters are LLMs instructed to defend a given entity.
by nicbou | 2025-09-24 07:27:47+00:00
If people keep declining invitations, I take the hint. Otherwise I feel like I'm pestering them. From my perspective, Anna is indistinguishable from someone who doesn't like me/the group/our plans that much.

Organizers also put themselves out there when they suggest and idea and invite people. Being repeatedly shot down feels bad too.

The core of my friend circles is the people who keep showing up. They're receptive to each other's plans and proactive about making them happen. When they show up, they bring the homemade dips. You can't get anything off the ground with a group of Annas.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-24 07:28:05+00:00
IIRC some of those researches you're taking estimates from not only used cherry picked figures for AI image generators, but also massively underestimated man-hour costs of human artists by using commission prices and market labor rates without requisite corroboration works before choosing those values.

Their napkin math went like, human artists take $50 or so per art, which is let's say $200/hr skill, which means each art cannot take longer than 10 minutes, therefore the values used for AI must add up to less than 10 workstation minutes, or something like that.

And that math is equally broken for both sides: SDXL users easily spend hours rolling dice a hundred times without usable images, and likewise, artists just easily spend a day or two for an interesting request that may or may not come with free chocolates.

So those estimates are not only biased, but basically entirely useless.
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-24 07:28:16+00:00
Large language models are a deeply impressive technology, but they're not artificial general intelligences, because you need to supervise them. Like everything else that has been called 'artificial intelligence' since the 1950s, I think we'll find some niches that they're good for, and that'll be the end of the hype bubble.

The hype does serve a purpose, though: it motivates people to try to find more possible uses for LLMs. However, as with all experiments, we should expect most of these attempts to fail.
by nobunaga | 2025-09-24 07:29:40+00:00
That’s ok Dang. I’d rather not post considering the quality of other people’s posts which claim ridiculous statements with no proof which you seem to allow or even outright misinformation. Asking for evidence is deemed site breaking? Ok. I’m not sure I’d want to be part of a community which allows so much misinformation and outright nonsense. This use to be a site where rational thoughts use to exist but doesn’t anymore and this thread and your focus on my comments seems to show otherwise. Feel free to ban me if that’s going to fix this site. I’m sure discourse will normalize and the misinformation will disappear.
by Jensson | 2025-09-24 07:29:46+00:00
> If it wasn't them and it was all Google's idea to censor this without any influence from governments or these organizations

We actually has the emails the Biden administration sent to Youtube, here is a quote they sent:

"we want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better. This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House"

That is a very clear threat. "We want to make sure you ...", and then saying this threat is done with the highest authority of the USA, so better get working on what we want.

There are hundreds of such emails detailed in this report if you want to read what they sent to the different tech companies to make them so scared that they banned anything related to Covid: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponizati...
by lordnacho | 2025-09-24 07:29:52+00:00
It's not so strange that e-commerce is the first thing that AI has visibly altered. Most "buy this thing" sites really just have one proposition at their core. The presentation is incidental. You can't have a website looking like it's still 2003, but you also don't really care what your 2025 shop front looks like. Your ads are there to draw attention, not to be works of art.

What does AI do, at its heart? It is literally trained to make things that can pass for what's ordinary. What's the best way to do that, normally? Make a bland thing that is straight down the middle of the road. Boring music, boring pictures, boring writing.

Now there are still some issues with common sense, due to the models lacking certain qualities that I'm sure experts are working on. Things like people with 8 fingers, lack of a model of physics, and so on. But we're already at a place where you could easily not spot a fake, especially while not paying attention.

So where does that leave us? AI is great at producing scaffolding. Lorem Ipsum, but for everything.

Humans come in to add a bit of agency. You have to take some risk when you're producing something, decisions have to be made. Taste, one might call it. And someone needs to be responsible for the decisions. Part of that is cleaning up obvious errors, but also part of it is customizing the skeleton so that it does what you want.
by visarga | 2025-09-24 07:30:33+00:00
I did a little investigation. Turns out that GPT-4's training consumes as much energy as 300 cars in their lifetime, which comes about 50 GWh. Not really that much, could be just families on a short street burning that kind of energy. As for inference, GPT-4 usage for an hour consumes less than watching Netflix for an hour.

If you compare datacenter energy usage to the rest, it amounts to 5%. Making great economies on LLMs won't save the planet.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-09-24 07:30:37+00:00
> How does social media solve the issue?

Huh? Who said anything about social media? Churches and other religious organizations are basically designed to promote and foster these kinds of in-group relationships.

> Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.

It would be very strange to tell someone they can’t decide their own roommate because their selection would be “racist/sexist.” I’m trying to imagine how you would even go about enforcing that at the individual level. Is your plan to assign housing randomly with some centralized lottery system? Extract affadavits from prospective tenants?

Do you believe it’s sexist for a heterosexual woman to use a dating website to look for a husband and not a wife? I don’t see why your logic wouldn’t apply there.
by andyjsong | 2025-09-24 07:31:55+00:00
>I just finished reading Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson.

What took you so long? :) The book came out in 2021. He's even written about Make Sunsets in his substack: https://x.com/MakeSunsets/status/1871734075008115081

Augment and repair are not the right words here. Since the Industrial Revolution, we've already been cooling the Earth by influencing radiative forcing; we're just doing it the worst way possible, by applying sunscreen at the wrong altitude (troposphere) and using too much of it.

Here's further reading if you'd like to learn more https://www.keepcool.co/p/no-one-is-coming-to-save-us-time-t...
by serial_dev | 2025-09-24 07:32:31+00:00
Don’t you ignore the energy used to train the models? I don’t know how much is that “per image”, but it should be included (and if it shouldn’t, we should know why it is negligible).

I’m not sure it will be as high as a full charge of a phone, but it’s incomplete without the resources needed for collecting data and training the model.
by visarga | 2025-09-24 07:33:54+00:00
By the same logic, people working in transportation around the time Ford Model T was introduced did NOT diminish 100 years later. We went from about 3.2 million in 1910 (~8% of the workforce) to 6–16 million in 2023 (~4–10%, depending on definition). That is the effect of a century of transportation development.

Sometimes demand scales, maybe food is less elastic. Programming has been automating itself with each new language and library for 70 years and here we are, so many software devs. Demand scaled up as a result of automation.
by immibis | 2025-09-24 07:34:21+00:00
We can use objective metrics to tell if someone is a liar, a bigot, and a paid disinformant working for a foreign state.

... or we could have, 5-10 years ago. No matter what we call one of these people, no matter how true our findings are, if you accuse a bad person of a bad thing these days, they'll just accuse you of the same bad thing (no matter how little sense it makes) and they have so many stupid followers who will believe it, that being correct is no longer a winning strategy.
by red369 | 2025-09-24 07:34:26+00:00
I'm going to expose my ignorance here, but I thought mAh/Ah was not a good measure for comparing storage of quite different devices, because it doesn't take into account voltage. This is fine for comparing Li-ion devices, because they use the same voltage, but I understood that using watt-hours was therefore more appropriate for apples-to-apples comparisons for devices with different wattages.

Am I missing something? Does the CPU/GPU/APU doing this calculation on servers/PCs run the same wattage as mobile devices?
by ksec | 2025-09-24 07:34:50+00:00
Comparing 2024 and 2025, Ruby is growing again but still on the lower end of spectrum.

Both Java the language and JVM is great. A lot of the important work for JVM just landed. I am not even sure if there are anything that is really missing anymore. But the whole ecosystem is so vast I wonder if anyone would want to just craft out a subset of Java.

No Zig, Crystal, Odin, but Julia and Elixir is there just without numbers.
by ernst_klim | 2025-09-24 07:36:27+00:00
> the amount of time they spend to actually make the agent do the work usually outweighs the time they’d have spent just building the feature themselves

Exactly my experience. I feel like LLMs have potential as Expert Systems/Smart websearch, but not as a generative tool, neither for code nor for text.

You spend more time understanding stuff than writing code, and you need to understand what you commit with or without LLM. But writing code is easier that reviewing, and understanding by doing is easier than understanding by reviewing (bc you get one particular thing at the time and don't have to understand the whole picture at once). So I have a feeling that agents do even have negative impact.
by js8 | 2025-09-24 07:36:31+00:00
There has been several other events like that (Django, Pandas and data science..). I don't think Python's popularity can be ascribed to any single event, it just happens to be a language that is reasonably close to pseudocode with an excellently thought-out (I mean best in the industry) standard library. Python is practical, first and foremost. That's why it won, unlike other languages it doesn't really have an ideological agenda.
by scuff3d | 2025-09-24 07:37:18+00:00
Try to post a meme here, see how long it stays up.

More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.

I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.

When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.

In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.

Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.
by roenxi | 2025-09-24 07:37:20+00:00
It maps very well onto the mathematical concept of a closed interval [a, b] where a and b are endpoints of the interval though. You're adding a constraint for no logical reason and it happens to be very hard to represent in a basic type system.

> An interval where a > b is usually a programming error.

If you want it to be, sure. Anything can be a programming error if the library author feels like it. We may as well put all sorts of constraints on clamp, it is probably an error if the caller uses a large number or a negative too. It is still bad design in a theoretical sense - the clamp function throws an error despite there being an obvious non-error return value. It isn't hard to meaningfully clamp 2 between 4 and 3.
by stared | 2025-09-24 07:38:17+00:00
Markov models do not extrapolate. If we take intuitions from HMMs and use them in LLMs, we are prone to see nothing besides "stochastic parrots".

Anyway, for anyone who wants to go deeper, I recommend Lawrence R. Rabiner, "A tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and selected applications in speech recognition", https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cga/behavior/rabiner1.pdf

And for a cure example, there is also one in nothin else than Claude Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", https://web.archive.org/web/20121108191018/https://www.alcat...
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-24 07:38:28+00:00
In short, there are some things that are risky to tell your boss. The biggest one is if you’re unhappy.

A good boss will try to work with you to resolve the issue, and help you transition to another role or company if that isn’t possible. A bad one will undermine you, violate your confidences by reporting the concern up the chain, or even outright fire you. I’ve had the all of the above happen, though it’s been a while. I think I’ve gotten better at judging people, but it’s also possible that I’ve just had a lucky streak.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-24 07:39:22+00:00
They are spreading this nonsense in part in order to hide from the fact that they refuse to release the Epstein files, something that seems to include a rather lot of high profile/high importance official potentially doing really bad things.

It's called flooding the zone, and it is a current Republican strategy to misinform, to sow defeatism in their political opposition, default/break all of the existing systems for handling politics, with the final outcome to manipulate the next election. And they publicized this yet people like you claim to think it's non issue.
by workfromspace | 2025-09-24 07:39:53+00:00
As a frequent traveller I can say Google Maps (offline mode) sucks!

If you are fully offline, then it works as intended.

However, if you have even a tiny bit of connection, even if your connection is spotty or very slow, Google Maps refuses to use its offline data, crippling the experience and making it unusable.

I agree with the sibling comment. When I travel, I usually use 3 apps and download the offline maps of the regions I visit: Apple Maps (for iOS apps and embedded features), Google Maps, and thank god: Organic Maps.