MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by netdevphoenix | 2025-09-09 09:38:00+00:00
The way I see it is that from our standpoint till unquestionably AGI there is a wide chasm. Because we don't how far we are from AGI, anything a bit far from our standpoint looks like AGI but when you get to that point, you realise that AGI is still far away.

If you asked people from 1910-1920, if pre-GPT systems were intelligent, you would likely get a mixed answer rather than the straight no that you would get from asking that from 00s people.

Yes, lots of progress has been made but arguably the rate of progress has gone down significantly when you compare the gpt2-gpt4 period to our current period. A lot of the progress now is horizontal rather than vertical. The controversies regarding the integrity of some of the benchmark scores does not help at all. The kind of signs that would show us that we are close to AGI will be things like novel discoveries in science and math performed fully independently (as in on their own, with access to the internet).

As it is the chasm between us and AGI is wide and to make it worse none of us knows how wide it is.

You say "With transformers you can take the context that is fed to one model and feed it to another model, try doing that with a human!". We kind of have a way of doing that but much improved so that the new model can do things that the older model could not do, we call that way university education, the place where not just learning transfer happens but a place where the very nature of what is being learned is questioned and expanded constantly. This level of critical reason is something that GPTs are nowhere near to achieve. Because you require the ability to display skepticism and have your own point of view regardless of what is being shown to you. GPTs are currently unable to do this and we have no way of doing this. You won't fix this with more data. It's an intrinsic limitation of the way neural nets learn. Whatever AI comes next without this limitation will not be a neural net for sure, and thus won't be a transformer. And arguably, without the ability to think critically and create knowledge on arbitrary subjects you cannot possibly be granted the title of "General Artificial Intelligence".
by ben_w | 2025-09-09 09:38:06+00:00
Ad fatigue is mostly because we're seeing 40 seconds of unskippable ads even for 60 second video on YouTube, an ad between every two real Facebook posts, and news/recipes/DIY guides where every sentence is its own paragraph and there's an ad in the gap plus another on the sidebar that doesn't scroll with the content.

I see loads and loads of ad vatiants from a "we can save you money on your rent" company, and I hate all of them.

I see loads of AI generated content including ads, and only the curated stuff (not the fire-and-forget automated stuff) is worth attending to: if I hear a synthetic voice or see Lovecraftian geometry or Cronenberg biology, whatever's being sold is necessarily being sold by a company with low standards, and why would I want to buy from a company with low standards?

But such arguments get ignored by people who make money selling ad slots on their content, so I'm sure you'll do well anyway even as those same content providers complain about ever more ad blockers or even people giving up on the web because of ad-blocker-blockers.
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-09 09:38:52+00:00
>Their content is a suggestion for my user agent, not some unbreakable law. If they don't like it, they should shut down completely.

Alternatively, they can also refuse to serve you their content unless you turn off your ad blocker. Which would be fine. It is their content they're hosting after all.

And it's also fine for you to decide not to turn off your ad blocker and not view their content.
by tim333 | 2025-09-09 09:38:55+00:00
They seem to be making similar mistakes in trying to build stuff from sci-fi rather than what works in the real world. I mean industrial robots have been a thing for ages and domestic roomba type ones are becoming popular but humanoid is a bit of a sci-fi thing. Similarly collaborative virtual worlds like Fortnite are a big hit ($20bn+ revenue) but not Meta's attempt to do the Snow Crash fictional thing.

There's no reason really why robots have to be humanoid, or that you have to interact with virtual worlds by strapping the screen on your face.
by discomrobertul8 | 2025-09-09 09:40:12+00:00
Same in the UK. The fact that iMessage only works for iOS devices means it's a complete non-starter. What's the point in using a messaging app if you can't add all your contacts to a group? And if you're using a different app for group chats for this reason, then why not use it for 1-1 messaging, too?
by pbmonster | 2025-09-09 09:40:24+00:00
> We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.

> easily

That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.

In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-09 09:40:26+00:00
First: This whole reneable thing was done to reduce negative externalities from pollution and CO2 emissions that were simply not paid for previously.

Arguing that "the economy would be better of without pollution/emission limits" is a bit like arguing that dumping trash in the next river is cheaper than proper disposal: Sure, your industrialists are gonna save a few bucks right now, but someone will have to pick up the bill regardless-- with interest.
by gambiting | 2025-09-09 09:40:49+00:00
"changing lanes on a British Motorway you only need to indicate when pulling out not when pulling in."

I've heard multiple people say this in the past, including driving instructors(!!!!!) and it's just not true.

Highway Code article 133 clearly says:

"Lane discipline 133 If you need to change lane, first use your mirrors and if necessary take a quick sideways glance to make sure you will not force another road user to change course or speed. When it is safe to do so, signal to indicate your intentions to other road users and when clear, move over".

You always have to indicate when changing lanes. There is no distinction made between pulling in or out by the highway code, I honestly think people made it up in their heads and they keep to it - maybe because you don't need to indicate back when overtaking on a single lane road, but that doesn't apply on multi-lane carriageways. However the point seems to be mostly academic as in my experience most people don't bother indicating at all on a motorway, whether pulling in or out.

"since undertaking (except in slow moving traffic) is also ilegal."

Highway code doesn't mention anything about slow moving traffic, just "similar speeds" - so it's perfectly legal to undertake a vehicle going 68mph when you're going 70mph, if the traffic is heavy:

"Rule 268 Do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right. Do not weave in and out of lanes to overtake."
by adyashakti | 2025-09-09 09:41:04+00:00
i visited Nepal several times over the last decade. the country was a mess. of course it’s a developing nation, but i’m talking about the culture. Chinese influence is growing, and with it the atheistic materialist Communist view. Nepal’s deep Buddhist and Vedic culture is being devastated, state intelligence and surveillance is pervasive, even in the villages. not a fun place to visit anymore. the corruption culture runs deep, and the people are fed up; something like this crisis was inevitable.
by Eikon | 2025-09-09 09:41:59+00:00
What's so bizarre about it?

Are we prevented from implementing features when the platform itself provides adjacent tech?

Page blobs are 2x+ more expensive ($0.045/GB vs $0.02/GB) and would require Azure-specific code. We don't dream of maintaining separate implementations for each cloud provider.

The approach works identically on S3, GCS, Azure, and local storage. If anything, ZeroFS helps you distance from vendor lock-in, especially if you start to run "usually managed" components on top, say databases.

Speaking of Azure's "native" solutions - we benchmarked ZeroFS against Azure Files. ZeroFS is 35-41x faster for most operations and 38% cheaper. If Azure Files performs that poorly, I don't hold much hope for page blobs either: https://www.zerofs.net/zerofs-vs-azure-files
by hobofan | 2025-09-09 09:42:08+00:00
I think that's a very valid question.

Most German "Mittelstand" I have encountered, that are generally on the more conservative side when it comes to data privacy are still fine with leaning on e.g. Azure with OpenAI models.

Only when you move towards really high security and governmental organizations is when Mistral is usually being brought up as an option.
by qustrolabe | 2025-09-09 09:42:39+00:00
Whatever happens on wallpaper side under the hood on old android versions is so messed up. At some point of using my Android 11 tablet and experiencing a lot of lag when any custom wallpaper was visible on the screen (but not when default one), after lots of digging I discovered that lag was completely gone if I set my wallpaper in portrait orientation. Had to install some separate wallpaper app from google for that but at least lag's gone. Just another little example of weirdness
by TomasBM | 2025-09-09 09:42:47+00:00
I don't know what/who the "security-complex handlers" are, but it's quite useful to start with the supposedly biggest repository of human knowledge. Maybe you realize the causal relations you tease out are low-quality, or maybe you realize that even Wikipedia can provide useful causal relations that you can apply downstream.

But that's from the research POV. If your POV is immediately practical, then yes, it's about as useful as training a new employee using Wikipedia articles about your company.

Side-note: LLMs have actually proven quite useful given that they were trained on mostly what was available online.
by graemep | 2025-09-09 09:43:22+00:00
I think you are misrepresenting Thatcherism. Thatcher was pretty pragmatic and did not want to privatise everything - e.g. Royal Mail and the Post Office - those were done by the very non-Thatcherite coalition government in 2013. They were also messed up (e.g. private ownership of the postcode database).

https://www.ft.com/content/1057f722-75d5-11e1-9dce-00144feab...

A lot of NHS privatisation was done by Blair and Brown - especially to facilitate Brown's use of off-balance sheet debt to fund spending while pretending the government was not increasing national debt.

A lot of privatisations were a good idea. I think most people would agree the government should not own oil companies, airlines, car manufacturers, steel manufacturers, or telecoms, etc. I think the mistakes need to be seen against the backdrop of a necessary correction of a lot of nationalisation.

The problem has also been regulatory. Why were water companies not required to build capacity? Why were they allowed to borrow in order to pay shareholders? This was all entirely foreseeable.

I think the problem is not an ideology, but the lack of a coherent ideology. Privatisation has become an end in itself, backed by politicians who do not seem to understand that its not a magic bullets, and there is no incentive for efficiency in the absence of competition. A private monopoly is usually worse than a state monopoly unless very closely regulated.
by afranky | 2025-09-09 09:43:57+00:00
I’ve been working on Kaset, an open-source toolkit that lets you drop coding agents into your web apps, client-side.

The goal: make it easy for users to tweak, extend, and even build plugins inside your app — safely and transparently.

Kaset treats your app as a filesystem (via the browser’s OPFS). Agents can search, edit, and propose changes to files (like your app's artifacts, themes, or config), with built-in guardrails: approval-gated edits, version control (isomorphic-git), and scoped workspaces.

It comes with KAS, a small browser-native agent, but you can swap in others since the interface is just “filesystem + agent guide.

Would love feedback, use cases, and ideas for shaping sane defaults.

You can find the repo here: https://github.com/pufflyai/kaset And the playground here: https://kaset.dev/
by jacquesm | 2025-09-09 09:44:05+00:00
All of the plans that I've seen for SMR 'farms' were hopelessly naive when it came to security, decommissioning and compliance costs. They were just a hair above that 'swimming turtle island' when it comes to design phase realism. I really see them more as a way to milk subsidies than something that will actually happen in the next 30 years or so, especially not given the rate at which we are putting up solar and stringing HVDC interconnects, which in my opinion are the answer to the storage problem.
by Certhas | 2025-09-09 09:45:31+00:00
It hasn't. Multipolar world, expertise exists everywhere.

But user-facing innovation is coming from the US. No EU Apple, Google, Amazon. And infrastructure R&D in China is unprecedented. They are reaping a multi-decadal investment in higher education.

The US has infinite VC money, a hypercompetitive environment that rewards first-movers, an appetite for letting these first-movers reap the benefits of their monopoly, and a political class that aligns with business interests. China has a coherent STEM education story and protections/state support for key industries. The EU sits at an awkward inbetween spot. It's raison d'etre is enabling free markets, and consequently it doesn't allow national champions and strong industrial politics. But it also doesn't have the same hypercompetitive culture as the US, and it's political class is less aligned with business interests.

The thing is, I don't really want the EU to compete with China and the US on these issues. If you have one system that makes people happy, but where eggs cost 1.20€ and iPhones have a smaller screen resolution, and one where people are miserable but eggs cost 1.10€ and iPhones have a higher screen resolution, then in a free market the system that makes people miserable wins.

I believe there are hard questions, no easy answers, and the EU, being a consensus mechanism for national states that hold the power, is not the best institutional set-up to tackle them.
by sudahtigabulan | 2025-09-09 09:46:02+00:00
Nothing, but there's something in your comment that was not in the article:

> he will be happy to negotiate a payment instead.

This, indeed, sounds way more normal than wanting to keep working for the evil company, and in a toxic environment.

It hasn't occurred to me that one can change their mind and choose a different compensation after the court decision like that.
by cluckindan | 2025-09-09 09:46:13+00:00
I once worked for a small consultancy which did business by fishing for contracts, then doing the absolute to-the-letter minimum to fulfill them, irrespective of damage to the customer’s business or the company reputation. We would deliver working software that was absolutely awful to actually use for anything.

Often, clients would literally tell us to f*ck off when they realized we would not do anything that wasn’t in the contract verbatim, no matter how trivial.

To me, it was insanity. I would have preferred actually solving customer issues in a partnership fashion, and day-to-day work was nightmarish due to the constant conflict of values. Raising an issue about this got me branded a complainer.

The company slowly gathered enough references to attract some bigger clients (realistically: via backroom deals and kickbacks) and was eventually acquired, and some time later the executives were politely told to pack their things and get out.

They got what they wanted: a hefty paycheck and a load of shares from the acquiring company. The entire company was an acquisition scam from the get-go.
by varenc | 2025-09-09 09:46:15+00:00
Not trivially. But with painstaking reverse engineering you could prove this. And people have, so you're not exclusively just taking Meta's word. The fact that Pegasus malware relied on remote code execution vuln to run malware on your phone to extract WhatsApp messages, really suggests that the E2EE works. If it wasn't E2EE, then the makers of Pegasus could have just intercepted traffic to get your messages.

Academics have also reverse engineered it as well, and though there are some weakness it's not a lie that WhatsApp is E2EE. Here's some I just found:

- https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/794.pdf

- https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Wednesday/us-19-Zaikin-Reverse...
by rkomorn | 2025-09-09 09:46:53+00:00
The older I get the more I find boss fights off putting.

I get literally zero satisfaction out of learning whatever pattern you have to learn to perform whatever correct action, at the correct time, you need to defeat a particular boss.

It's just a time consuming chore.

Edit: the "boss" escape sequences in the Ori games were also entirely frustrating and and unsatisfying to me.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-09-09 09:47:09+00:00
> You don't want to test code. You want to test behavior. A good test suite should not need to be rewritten during refactoring.

100% agreed.

> I'm gonna preach for the church of "away with unit tests"

I disagree with the semantics here.

From the article: "In short, your test is not unit if it doesn’t run fast or it talks to the Infrastructure (e.g. a database, the network"

This says _nothing_ about what part of the app structure you test. It's not always a class-method test. Outside-in, behaviour centric tests that are not close-coupled to structure, can also be unit tests. And most of the time, it's a better kind of unit test.

Kent Beck said many times: "tests should be coupled to the behavior of code and decoupled from the structure of code."

"test behavior" was the original intent of unit tests. The idea that unit tests are only close-coupled class-method tests, or that testing 2 collaborating classes from the same app at once counts as an "integration test" is a latter-day misconception. A dumbing down.
by briacdev | 2025-09-09 09:47:10+00:00
Vue Shadcn Icon Picker A modern, flexible icon picker for Vue, built with shadcn/ui and Lucide Icons.

Sleek, responsive UI Offline icon search Progressive icon loading Full Lucide support Fully customizable

Just drop IconPicker.vue into your project and use <IconPicker v-model="icon" />.

MIT License.
by szszrk | 2025-09-09 09:48:17+00:00
Signal ain't exactly commercial project.

They didn't screw over anyone, for the past 8 years Signal was and remains free for everyone.

That service is not mandatory and didn't even exist before, so who exactly is screwed over?

Also, let me know where me and my friends can sign up on your particular matrix instance. What's your ToS anyway?
by assimpleaspossi | 2025-09-09 09:48:40+00:00
Taken to the extreme for example, say Apple had 100% of the market. If a competitor entered the market and gained 1% share,then Apple's market share will have decreased.

In Tesla's case, a number of competitors have entered the market. It would be impossible to maintain whatever market share they had no matter how good the product is or how well their stock price is doing.
by graemep | 2025-09-09 09:49:07+00:00
I disagree about rail - nationalised British Rail was pretty terrible, had more accidents per distance travelled, and carried far fewer people. It think it made little difference.

Nationalised water in Scotland is no better than privatised in England and Wales, and has a higher rate of sewer leaks: https://theferret.scot/scotland-behind-england-sewage-leaks/
by tome | 2025-09-09 09:49:07+00:00
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. Firstly, it's a type error to say "taking equity out of the service via profit". Profit, by definition, does not come from equity. Secondly, the government should spend public money to build public infrastructure because that's one of the major purposes of a government. Thirdly, if you're saying "private companies will use that public infrastructure to make profit", then I guess, yes, they will, just like they use roads. But I would certainly say that if water companies sell water from public reservoirs to customers then they should be required to pay for that service! Why not?
by pimterry | 2025-09-09 09:49:18+00:00
> Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP.

I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.

The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US administration. That the DC is located entirely in the EU does nothing to reduce that risk if it's still fully owned by Amazon.

The was already a major concern for the last couple of years given the successful legal challenges against the privacy shield as sufficient data protection to give personal data to US organizations, and is way more of a concern after issues like Karin Khan and the ICC being suddenly cut off by Microsoft - it's clear that US companies literally can & will suddenly block key business services on administration whims. There's plenty of organizations where that's unacceptable risk.
I relaunched my app thanks to one Reddit message
by start123 | 2025-09-09 09:49:36+00:00
Post Covid - back in 2023 - when my company went full time remote, I wanted to track the number of hours I worked everyday.

Having worked full time in office before, the guilt of not spending enough hours bothered me. After looking for simple time tracking solutions, I failed to find a decent one that wasn't bloated with bells and whistles.

So, I built one over the weekend, bought the domain and used it for a few weeks.

I also showcased here "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38857075" and in one of the productivity subreddits on Reddit.

Eventually, I stopped using it and the domain expired after a year.

Totally forgot about it.

2 weeks ago, out of nowhere, a user on Reddit messaged me this:

"Hey, dude, hope you're doing well.

Just wanted to say TMG was absolutely amazing but I was sad to see it no longer works. Any plans to bring it back?

Cheers"

I was surprised that at least one other person was actively using it, and was impacted by its shutdown.

I quickly opened my laptop, and purchased the domain again on "Friday 22nd of August 2025" to be precise.

I reinstated the simple utility tool, and then for past few days, polished it, add few more features and here I am now, writing about it.

I don't know if something will happen to it, but I promise to keep it running for a long long time.

The Reddit user hasn't responded to my reply yet, I hope he does some day, and will be happy that its back online.

Here is the link to the time tracking tool https://www.timemygrind.com if you are curious.
by a2128 | 2025-09-09 09:50:15+00:00
I wonder if Microsoft tainting their core products with AI will end up backfiring from people no longer trusting their software.

Excel spreadsheets might end up having errors from people (mis)using =COPILOT formulas, but this will never be a problem in other office suites. Hosting your project on GitHub might attract stupid pull requests from clueless people (mis)using the easy Copilot pull request functionality, but this will never be a problem on other forges.

Maybe the market will respond to this long-term?
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-09 09:51:39+00:00
It's interesting that this country with all the spare land is also a world leader in rooftop solar.

That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.

Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.