MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Chris2048 | 2025-09-16 16:02:53+00:00
It's be worse that the bot becomes a nannying presence - either pre-emptively denying anything negative based on the worst-case scenario, or otherwise taking in far more context than it should.

How would a real human (with, let's say, an obligation to be helpful and answer prompts) act any different? Perhaps they would take in more context naturally - but otherwise it's impossible to act any different. Watching GoT could of driven someone to suicide, we don't ban it on that basis - it was the mental illness that killed, not the freedom to feed it.
by vidarh | 2025-09-16 16:02:57+00:00
Yeah, I usually stress to employers and clients that I want to be cut off quickly, and usually remind them of what they need to lock me out of when I leave.

Even then, I've had clients for whom things have broken come to me in despair hoping I'd kept access. The day one of them for whatever reason decides to suspect that I was the one to break things, I will be very happy to be able to point to consistently having done what I can to ensure I get locked out.
by iLemming | 2025-09-16 16:02:57+00:00
> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago.

Like visually? I personally don't care much for animations, transitions, rounded corners (this one I actually hate, because you can't even disable them on mac). I'm not a florist, I am programmer. I want efficiency not the looks, bells and whistles. Although I recently started using Hyprland, and oh my, those window animations and transitions are super nice, not to mention that you can completely control every aspect of them.
by Melatonic | 2025-09-16 16:02:58+00:00
I think the problem is that Finder searches too much stuff by default. The same problem is true of modern windows search, iOS search, and Android.

First thing I do on all of them is have it only search local stuff. If I want to do a damn web search I'll open my browser of choice and use Kagi. On iOS I restrict it even further to only show local apps and settings. Massively improves the speed, latency, etc etc.
by blackjack_ | 2025-09-16 16:03:01+00:00
This is not true, because of timing, and mortgages with lower interest rates versus the current interest rate.

If I bought a house in the year 2000 for 200k, and still own it now, I might rent it out for $1200 per month (after refinancing in 2020 for a 2.8% loan on 50k or whatever is left on the mortgage), and still make a gross profit.

If the house were to be sold and purchased now in 2025, it may be valued at $600k or more. The mortgage on this house with 20% down would be like 3500 or 4000 per month after taxes and insurance.

So there is a huge plausible gap between renting and owning a property.

If you are arguing versus some potential mortgage in the past… sure. But you don’t get the mortgage of the past value, you get the mortgage of the current value with the current interest rates.
by buildbot | 2025-09-16 16:03:37+00:00
It’s incredibly rare and specific, many people in the DB world don’t even know about them. 60x60mm sensor, larger than the actual film gate of 56x56mm There was also a version for the Rollei 6x6 6000 series, the Rollei Q16. I’ve only seen one for sale ever.

Technically larger than 6x6 film sensors have existed since the 80s or 90s at least but are typically only used for government things… Some digital aerial systems use huge sensors.
A minimal formula for AI destiny (Max O subject to D(world,human) ≤ ε)
by Aeon_Frame | 2025-09-16 16:03:46+00:00
A minimal formula for AI destiny (Max O subject to D(world,human) ≤ ε)

---

I’ve been exploring a minimal framework for thinking about the long-term trajectories of AI.

The idea is condensed into a simple constraint:

Max O subject to D(world, human) ≤ ε

O = objective to maximize

D(world, human) = distance between the machine’s state and the human manifold

ε = tolerance margin

From this, only four possible “destinies” emerge:

1. Collapse under its own paradox.

2. Erase everything so only purity remains.

3. Push reality to incomprehensible perfection.

4. Adjust the world invisibly, felt only as absence.

This is not a prediction, but a provocative minimal formalization. Curious if this framing resonates with anyone here:

Is it too reductive, or a useful abstraction?

Could it serve as a lens for designing AI alignment constraints?
by rpcope1 | 2025-09-16 16:04:03+00:00
A lot of the 433/915 band devices you can pick up with rtl_433 seem to be much more bullet proof and have longer battery life than equivalent WiFi and Zigbee devices too. Building new protocol decoders for rtl_433 also surprisingly isn't too bad either. One of my favorite ones is the water meter decoder which has saved me a lot of money when I've had irrigation water leaks and not noticed them (but saw conspicuous usage patterns reported).
by srean | 2025-09-16 16:04:32+00:00
Love these kind of comments where I get to learn about things that I haven't played with.

> the simulation itself needed to be accurate to 8-9 sig figs with nanosecond resolution

What kind of application would require such demanding tolerances ? My first thought was nuclear fission. But then the fact that you had one in orbit sending data feed every 15 mins imploded my fanciful thinking.
by DashAnimal | 2025-09-16 16:04:49+00:00
Ok gave this a try. Actually pretty handy. I wish I didn't clean up my Windows PC so I could compare indexing of files, but it did a good job of finding most things but the things I searched for Windows was able to find too. But its nice to have an easy shortcut to Google search and also having Google Lens on my PC to translate text, ask questions about a screenshot etc. I love this feature on my android.

The UI is a little annoying at times. Some apps receive the alt+space key so it doesn't always behave like you expect.

Checking Task Manager it used about 43MB of memory whether running as a background process or in the foreground, showing search results.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-16 16:05:11+00:00
LibreOffice is definitely a better choice than OpenOffice.

For using Teams, I'd recommend just using the web client. I did try installing the Microsoft native client for Linux, but all it seemed to do was open an empty window (i.e. not drawn in, so it showed what was under where it appeared) and wasn't at all functional. The web client seems to work, though I don't use it very often.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-09-16 16:05:57+00:00
Determinism means that the control logic should lead to the same set of behaviours every time with the same set of inputs under otherwise normal runtime conditions.

And if you're gonna come back with "but that's not real determinism!" then I would remind you that actually no code is deterministic because of quantum uncertainty, and that quantum uncertainty isn't necessarily real because of solipsism, and that there's more to life than rhetorical definition interrogations.
by mind-blight | 2025-09-16 16:06:40+00:00
One issue we're running into at my job: we're struggling to find entry-level candidates whoaren't lying about what they know by using an LLM.

For the tech side, we've reduced behavioral questions and created an interview that allows people to use cursor, LLMs, etc. in the interview - that way, it's impossible to cheat.

We have folks build a feature on a fake code base. Unfortunately, more junior folks now seem to struggle a lot more with this problem
by VonGuard | 2025-09-16 16:06:51+00:00
Well, sort of. I mean, yeah he deserved to be praised, but the reason half the SRI staff left to go to Xerox is that Engelbart and his people were becoming obsessed with EST training. EST is basically a cult that starves you, insults you until you cry, then builds you back up with compliments while asking you to pay up front for the next sucker in your family to take the "training." It's about as close as you can get to a cult while still being a business. Engelbart and his closest people were basically forcing SRI workers to take EST training, and they did't like it so they left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
A minimal formula for AI destiny (Max O subject to D(world,human) ≤ ε)
by Aeon_Frame | 2025-09-16 16:06:57+00:00
I’ve been exploring a minimal framework for thinking about the long-term trajectories of AI.

The idea is condensed into a simple constraint:

Max O subject to D(world, human) ≤ ε

O = objective to maximize

D(world, human) = distance between the machine’s state and the human manifold

ε = tolerance margin

From this, only four possible “destinies” emerge:

1. Collapse under its own paradox.

2. Erase everything so only purity remains.

3. Push reality to incomprehensible perfection.

4. Adjust the world invisibly, felt only as absence.

This is not a prediction, but a provocative minimal formalization. Curious if this framing resonates with anyone here:

Is it too reductive, or a useful abstraction?

Could it serve as a lens for designing AI alignment constraints?
by Ajedi32 | 2025-09-16 16:07:21+00:00
There's really no way to get into the vehicle from the outside if the battery is dead? I find that hard to believe...

...okay, looks like there is a way but it's really convoluted and you need to basically jump-start the low voltage system (using either an ICE car or a battery pack). https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-3567D5F... That's really, really dumb.
by vidarh | 2025-09-16 16:07:21+00:00
I think it's reasonable to think that he deserved more recognition.

But I also recall attending a Techcrunch party at Mike Arringtons house in 2006/7 or so that Engelbart showed up at briefly, and how fun it was to see him instantly surrounded like a celebrity, so I think you're righ he was recognised in the circles where it mattered.
by caconym_ | 2025-09-16 16:07:55+00:00
I went to the "extra effort" of learning the (trivial) Mac keystroke to insert an emdash, probably about 10 years ago. Now I use it so often and so easily that I can't even recall which keys it is---it's pure muscle memory. (that three hyphens thing there is translated into an emdash by Pandoc, so it has become my go-to when I'm not typing on a Mac)

I expect most people who use emdashes in casual writing are people who have done a lot of reading and a substantial amount of writing too (professionally or otherwise), who are also tech-savvy enough to understand that it's possible to easily insert symbols that aren't printed on the keys of your keyboard. These are the people you're filtering out when you decide to use emdashes as your primary signal for deciding whether text was written by AI or not, and I think that's pretty stupid. In your haste to avoid content written by AIs you're filtering content written by people who care about writing, which leaves content written by people who don't, and content written by genAI systems told not to use emdashes, which you will naturally be far less suspicious of because you're fixated on the emdash thing.

I generally think it's terrible that genAI slop is displacing human writing, however useful I might LLMs for other tasks. In that, I probably agree with a lot of the people using emdashes as a negative signal. But the fact is that this widespread attitude toward emdashes can only accelerate that displacement, by tarring high quality human writing as suspicious while giving cleverly manipulated LLM output a pass.
by babypuncher | 2025-09-16 16:07:59+00:00
This is my biggest problem with a lot of modern desktop search.

Search in the Start Menu has been doing this by default for years. If I wanted to search the internet, I would have used the search box in my browser that is already open 24/7.

This doesn't add any convenience, it just pollutes search results with irrelevant garbage.

But the goal with these things isn't to provide a better user experience. It's to juice engagement metrics, because our industry sucks.
by wnc3141 | 2025-09-16 16:08:28+00:00
I heard an argument that the valuation of AI/ AI-adjacent firms only makes sense if 1) companies grow their aggregate top-line revenues by multiple trillion dollars of 2) this amounts to the potential savings from gutting knowledge-based employment across an economy.

Of course in the long run a chronically underemployed economy will have little demand for products and services, but that is beyond the scope of companies who, in general, are focused on winning short term and zero-sum market capture. However I believe that while a billion dollar valuation is a market and strategy problem, a trillion dollar valuation is a political problem - and I would hope that a mandate of broad gainful employment translates to political action - although this remains to be seen.
by jparishy | 2025-09-16 16:08:33+00:00
to me it is just market pressure to exploit the high stress on laborers atm. the level of uncertainty today is only a problem if you don't have a ton of existing capital, which everyone in charge does. so they are insulated and can treat people poorly without repercussions. in a market that prefers short term profits, they will then do this in order to make more money right now.

companies must do this, 'cause if they don't then their competition will (i.e. the pressure)

of course, we can collectively decide to equally value labor and profit, as a symbiotic relationship that incentivizes long term prosperity. but where's the memes in that
by charcircuit | 2025-09-16 16:09:03+00:00
>We’re building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.

>And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users’ parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.

This is unacceptable. I don't want the police being called to my house due to AI acusing me of wrong think.
by nradov | 2025-09-16 16:09:10+00:00
Demand side response drives up costs a lot. You end up with expensive, rapidly depreciating capital equipment sitting idle and not earning any revenue. The same problem applies whether the equipment is a GPU cluster or aluminum smelter. If we're going to have a modern industrial economy then we need to have enormous quantities of cheap electrical power available 24 hours a day.

Long distance high voltage transmission lines can help to an extent but create the same sort of concerns about dependence on unreliable foreign countries as fossil fuel imports.
by pdntspa | 2025-09-16 16:09:23+00:00
My guess is that at some the code itself, in a language humans easily comprehend, will become superficial as we delegate more and more of the logic to AI development. Perhaps in the near future AIs will be writing things at a much lower level by default and the entire act of programming as we know it goes away.

Kind of like that meme or how two AIs talking to each other spontaneously develop their own coding for communication. The human trappings become extra baggage.
by reify | 2025-09-16 16:09:57+00:00
The 1925 Ford Model T Touring Car is the best bet.

It has amazing brakes for a 1920's car.

The best thing in my experience is, it does not rely on fantasy ai to drive it. you can just turn the key and Vrooom, away you go.

My local mechanic is be particularly pleased with my purchase and recommendation.

He says, he can repair my car without resorting to repairing the damage the ai mechanic did a few days earlier. which, in the long run saves me an awful lot of money on car maintenance.

I dont have to pay two people to fix one job.

isnt it amazing what humans can do.
by backscratches | 2025-09-16 16:10:05+00:00
Have only owned the starbook mkvi (1 gen previous to current) since it came out 3years or so. Exhaustive research happily led me to discover it is the most Linux compatible laptop, even firmware updates can be performed natively from LVFS/fwudmgr. Knew it was the one when I learned in addition they are basically the only Linux laptop company that also produces their own hardware.

Screen I wish was brighter, and while I don't care, it doesn't have as many pixels as retina. The fan is not bad, but louder than a macbook. Battery I have not tested well, it is far away from battery life of a macbook. But the coreboot firmware allows me to set the charging speed (slower is better for battery) and the max charge level (which I keep at 60% when plugged in) Trackpad is great though, and keyboard is fantastic.

And all the parts are replaceable, as much as the Framework laptops. I don't know why they are not more popular.
by qingcharles | 2025-09-16 16:10:06+00:00
I've helped people released onto parole for years. It's tough. The terms might seem easy, but often aren't in practice. Most people have a history of addiction and/or mental illness and suddenly they are thrown into a world where everything is available for a price, and any medical help they were given is suddenly taken away and the life where everything was done for them (food cooked, clothes washed) is gone.

The majority are returned to prison within days/weeks/months of release.
by j45 | 2025-09-16 16:10:06+00:00
I went to go check my memory :)

Android is based off, and runs off a linux kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system). Android being modified in places including userspace is a fair point, but it's linux derived.

MacOS reminded me of it's BSD intermixings. Although the BSDs are separate from Linux, both were Unix alternatives. MacOS was downported to iOS. While iOS is not Linux at it's core, it's definitely based on an alternative to unix, similar to linux.

BSD references: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma...
by ericpauley | 2025-09-16 16:10:39+00:00
It's particularly telling that Tesla's design flaws are so inexcusable that people have a hard time even believing they are real.

Here's another example: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-A7A60DC...

Yes, opening the rear door in some models requires popping an unlabeled access panel in the cargo pocket.

The craziest part to me is that this isn't the evil profit maximizing à la Unsafe at Any Speed. It's simply pure designer insanity.
by f33d5173 | 2025-09-16 16:10:42+00:00
You can use debian's version of your npm packages if you'd like. The issues you're likely to run into are: some libraries won't be packaged period by debian; those that are might be on unacceptably old versions. You can work around these issues by vendoring dependencies that aren't in your distro's repo, ie copying a particular version into your own source control, manually keeping up with security updates. This is, to my knowledge, what large tech companies do. Other companies that don't are either taking a known risk with regards to vulnerabilities, or are ignorant. Ignorance is very common in this industry.
by dijit | 2025-09-16 16:10:52+00:00
I agree with every point made except there’s two caveats;

1) I am a bonafide systemd hater, and I am bent out of shape about the fact other init systems (more akin to SMF) were (and are) routinely ignored when discussing what was available. But: I feel like Linux desktops are better now for systemd. Even if I can’t tolerate how it spiders into everything personally.

2) Wayland was a “We have pushed X as far as it will go, and now we’re going to have to pay down our tech debt” by the X11 developers themselves.

I know it was “baby with the bathwater”, but in theory we don’t need to do that again for the next 50 years because we have a significantly better baseline for how computers are actually used. The performance ceiling has been lifted because of Wayland; consistent support for multiple monitors and fractional scaling are things we have today because of Wayland.

I won’t argue about security, because honestly most people seem to want as little security as possible if it infringes on software that used to work a certain way, but it should be mentioned at some point that a lack of security posture leads to a pretty terrible experience eventually.

So, yes, Wayland was worth the 10y cost, because the debt was due and with interest. Kicking the can down the road would most likely kill desktop Linux eventually.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-16 16:10:52+00:00
It did take off. There were server pizza boxes and everything. It was killed in 2011 by the very same company that is now introducing it as a "new app" in 2025.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/283722910233

https://web.archive.org/web/20060112110931/https://desktop.g...

The dead Internet theory continues to prevail. What is old is new again because nothing new can be created. The Hollywood reboots formula works, so we continue it with technology reboots.
by shagie | 2025-09-16 16:11:01+00:00
https://trellis.law/doc/district/8373835/united-states-v-roc...

The defendant plead nolo contendere (no contest) in 2014. Any activity between 2014 and 2019 was under supervision restrictions. Any use of Tor during that period would likely be an issue.

Page 6 of 8:

You must not purchase, possess, have contact with, or otherwise use any device that can be connected to the Internet or used to store digital materials, other than that approved by the U.S. Probation Office. You must allow the U.S. Probation Office to install software on any approved device that is designed to record any and all activity on the device the defendant may use, including but not limited to capture of keystrokes, application information, Internet use history, e-mail correspondence, pictures, and chat conversations. You will pay any costs related to the monitoring of his authorized device and must advise anyone in the household that may use an authorized device in question that monitoring software has been installed. If you need access to an employer owned Internet-equipped device for employment purposes, you must advise your probation officer before using the device. The probation officer will ensure the employer is aware of the criminal history, and you must agree to use the device for work purposes only. You must not attempt to remove, tamper with, or in any way circumvent the monitoring software, and must disclose all on-line account information, including usernames and passwords, to the U.S. Probation Office. If requested, you must provide a list of all software/hardware on your computer, as well as telephone, cable, or Internet service provider billing records, and any other information deemed necessary by the probation office to monitor your computer usage. You must not access Tor or participate in any online social environment (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, Linkedin, Craigslist, FaceTime, WhatsApp, video/audio, etc.) or texting applications, which allow the user interaction unless pre-approved and authorized by the probation officer and Court.

His activity, no matter how it is framed, was in violation of the supervision orders.

Furthermore, he worked to circumvent the monitoring software in September of 2019 and had no internet activity recorded in October of 2019.

> 1. Back in 2014 this person committed a pretty grave computer offense, which was not at the time prosecuted.

> 2. Some time after that, he became a high-profile Tor relay operator.

> 3. Some time after that, he was asked to subvert those Tor relays by the DOJ.

It wasn't prosecuted because he plead no contest. After that, the use of Tor was in violation of supervision. I read #3 as "you're not running the monitoring software as required" which would subvert the exit nodes... but he shouldn't have been running them in the first place.
by lenerdenator | 2025-09-16 16:11:15+00:00
The current far-right is ultimately Social Darwinism repackaged into a hoodie with an ironic vibe.

These people ultimately see themselves as the elite and those who have misgivings about their work as "less than". To oppose things like mass tech surveillance and mass unemployment through AI isn't just a thing born out of concerns held by many people, it's a literal attack on the order of nature. If your concerns were worth anything, you'd be sharing it with them at an esoteric corporate-backed technology foundation retreat or at a Mar-a-Lago lunch, but you're not.