MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slaucon | 2025-09-28 15:05:05+00:00
I feel like there should be some take away from the fact that we have to come up with new and interesting metrics like “Length of a Task That Can Be Automated” in order to point out that exponential growth is still happening. Fwiw, it does seem like a good metric, but it also feels like you can often find some metric that’s improving exponentially even when the base function is leveling out.
by BrS96bVxXBLzf5B | 2025-09-28 15:05:25+00:00
The font is really awful. Misunderstanding aesthetics from difference cultural sources to feed to people who will take them at a surface level, there's nothing of substance. It's giving [0] and it's bad vibes, nothing should aspire to this. It leads me to question every other emotional connection I might otherwise have with the experience.

[0] https://i.redd.it/jv2yw7uqmu3e1.png
by refulgentis | 2025-09-28 15:05:50+00:00
I'm really curious: can you share these definitions of left and right?

> Yes, I know how to spell onlookers, as does my spellchecker. I don’t know what you hope to gain from nitpicking someone’s typos, but I encourage you to answer that question to yourself. Dare I say “nothing”?

Geez, didn't know it hurt that much :) I'm 37 and still discover words I mis-spell and am grateful when people correct me. I get the need for us all to have a safe space but I didn't know the left went this far...
by elnerd | 2025-09-28 15:06:19+00:00
You are actually more likely to buy a car just after you have bought a car than the 10 years you did not need to buy a car. Maybe not cars, but I’ve heard this argument for kitchen appliances. If you for some reason return the item you just bought, you may buy what you get ads for. Maybe you regret you did not get the premium one, especially when they shove it in your face afterwards…
by msarnoff | 2025-09-28 15:06:26+00:00
I acquired a nonfunctional Diehl VSR a while back, naïvely thinking I could bring it back to life.

Oh my goodness, I took the cover off and what I saw was jaw-dropping. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of the most densely packed metal levers and cams and gears one could ever imagine. Nearly all of which would have needed cleaning and lubrication. Getting this thing fully working could have taken a year or more, especially with no repair manuals, and all available information in German.

The respect I have for the designers of these machines, and the servicepeople who repaired them, is immeasurable.

They are also electrical death traps. Lots of exposed switch contacts carrying mains voltage.
by chad1n | 2025-09-28 15:07:44+00:00
So the author is in a clear conflict of interest with the contents of the blog because he's an employee of Anthropic. But regarding this "blog", showing the graph where OpenAI compares "frontier" models and shows gpt-4o vs o3-high is just disingenuous, o1 vs o3 would have been a closer fight between "frontier" models. Also today I learned that there are people paid to benchmark AI models in terms of how close they are to "human" level, apparently even "expert" level whatever that means. I'm not a LLM hater by any means, but I can confidently say that they aren't experts in any fields.
by latchkey | 2025-09-28 15:08:50+00:00
I once backed a kickstarter for a US company called Vantage Robotics. They were building a cool drone and it looked like it would be fun to have. It took them about 2 years to get it delivered and by then, drone technology had advanced far past what they were offering. The thing crashed on its first flight, destroying it.

Instead of just shutting down, they dropped all their early supporters and pivoted to US military contracts. Their website is still full of out dated technology. Reading this headline is no surprise to me.
by morsecodist | 2025-09-28 15:09:01+00:00
> When just a few years ago, having AI do these things was complete science fiction!

This is only because these projects only became consumer facing fairly recently. There was a lot of incremental progress in the academic language model space leading up to this. It wasn't as sudden as this makes it sound.

The deeper issue is that this future-looking analysis goes no deeper than drawing a line connecting a few points. COVID is a really interesting comparison, because in epidemiology the exponential model comes from us understanding disease transmission. It is also not actually exponential, as the population becomes saturated the transmission rate slows (it is worth noting that unbounded exponential growth doesn't really seem to exist in nature). Drawing an exponential line like this doesn't really add anything interesting. When you do a regression you need to pick the model that best represents your system.

This is made even worse because this uses benchmarks and coming up with good benchmarks is actually an important part of the AI problem. AI is really good at improving things we can measure so it makes total sense that it will crush any benchmark we throw at it eventually, but there will always be some difference between benchmarks and reality. I would argue that as you are trying to benchmark more subtle things it becomes much harder to make a benchmark. This is just a conjecture on my end but if something like this is possible it means you need to rule it out when modeling AI progress.

There are also economic incentives to always declare percent increases in progress at a regular schedule.

Will AI ever get this advanced? Maybe, maybe even as fast as the author says, but this just isn't a compelling case for it.
by tetha | 2025-09-28 15:09:25+00:00
I think that the practically available type checkers evolved to a point where many of the common idioms can be expressed with little effort.

If one thinks back to some of the early statically typed languages, you'd have a huge rift: You either have this entirely weird world of Caml and Haskell (which can express most of what python type hints have, and could since many years), and something like C, in which types are merely some compiler hints tbh. Early Java may have been a slight improvement, but eh.

Now, especially with decent union types, you can express a lot of idioms of dynamic code easily. So it's a fairly painless way to get type completion in an editor, so one does that.
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-28 15:10:50+00:00
Email is sort-of a walled garden: I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.

Technically it's impossible to make a service that can't be a walled garden, specifically because the walls can be legal. Today, there are laws preventing you from sharing data you have access to (e.g. DMCA, clickwrap). Without those laws, no publicly-accessible data would be walled off, because people could just scrape and redistribute it, and distribute hacks (though without those laws, less services would exist in the first place, since they would be much harder to monetize).
by quitit | 2025-09-28 15:11:01+00:00
If you're looking to develop based on raw or processed gyroscope data then Core Motion is helpful

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion

"For example, a game might use accelerometer and gyroscope input to control onscreen game behavior."

The part specifically about obtaining headphone orientation is here (added in 2023):

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmheadp...
by gorgoiler | 2025-09-28 15:11:27+00:00
Oddly, the Dibnah near-death experience I most remember giving me the willies was when he dropped his cap in a puddle just after scratching his bonce. Having wrung his cap out he put it straight back on. The water had a dead pigeon in it though and so he ended up catching a virus which started spreading through his head via the cap and the cut. It got quite serious out of nowhere.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 15:12:05+00:00
> I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too.

They'd be wrong, of course - for not realizing demand is a limiting factor here. Airline speeds plateaued not because we couldn't make planes go faster anymore, but because no one wanted them to go faster.

This is partially economical and partially social factor - transit times are bucketed by what they enable people to do. It makes little difference if going from London to New York takes 8 hours instead of 12 - it's still in the "multi-day business trip" bucket (even 6 hours goes into that bucket, once you add airport overhead). Now, if you could drop that to 3 hours, like Concorde did[0], that finally moves it into "hop over for a meet, fly back the same day" bucket, and then business customers start paying attention[1].

For various technical, legal and social reasons, we didn't manage to cross that chasm before money for R&D dried out. Still, the trend continued anyway - in military aviation and, later, in supersonic missiles.

With AI, the demand is extreme and only growing, and it shows no sign of being structured into classes with large thresholds between them - in fact, models are improving faster than we're able to put them to any use; even if we suddenly hit a limit now and couldn't train even better models anymore, we have decades of improvements to extract just from learning how to properly apply the models we have. But there's no sign we're about to hit a wall with training any time soon.

Airline speeds are inherently a bad example for the argument you're making, but in general, I don't think pointing out S-curves is all that useful. As you correctly observe:

> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

But, what happens when one technology - or rather, one metric of that technology - stops improving? Something else starts - another metric of that technology, or something built on top of it, or something that was enabled by it. The exponent is S-curves on top of S-curves, all the way down, but how long that exponent is depends on what you consider in scope. So, a matter of accounting. So yeah, AI progress can flatten tomorrow or continue exponentially for the next couple years - depending on how narrowly you define "AI progress".

Ergo, not all that useful.

--

[0] - https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fastest-transatlantic-cros...

[1] - This is why Elon Musk wasn't immediately laughed out of the room after proposing using Starship for moving people and cargo across the Earth, back in 2017. Hopping between cities on an ICBM sounds borderline absurd for many reasons, but it also promised cutting flight time to less than one hour between any two points on Earth, which put it a completely new bucket, even more interesting for businesses.
by nicce | 2025-09-28 15:12:41+00:00
> Maybe "Rust" in the title helps, maybe it doesn't. Clearly HN doesn't like it and that's okay

HN definitely likes it, when it is used in the correct context. Using Rust in the title is a soft promise for better reliability and quality for the software than on average. But it starts to get controversial when Rust is not purely the controlling part of the software anymore. So people start to complain because it can be misleading marketing which is based on the promise that Rust can offer.
by mothballed | 2025-09-28 15:13:30+00:00
If I (willingly) don't pay my taxes someone will put me in a tiny cage, violently ("tax evasion").

If I don't fix my road, I just can't go anywhere, which obviously forces me to voluntarily fix it. If I don't voluntarily fix it, I'm stuck until someone comes along with a backhoe, and given only the tiniest % of people will purposefully sabotage their ability to go buy groceries, the burden of having to fix a neighbors road is so miniscule that it fits well within tolerable natural rates of charity.

The end result is the county roads are enforced by violence (tax man will toss grandma out of her house if she doesn't pay up, and assault her if she resists), while the private roads are enforced by a mixture of voluntary action on your own property and some relatively rare charity for those who just don't give a shit if they ever leave their house.

The difference here is the government can initiate violence against me, while the people involved in the private roads cannot.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 15:13:34+00:00
> I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.

This is just another case of monopoly abuse though. Both Google and Microsoft (the two largest email providers) make it notoriously hard to deliver regular mail to their customers. Meanwhile, you still get tons of spam that makes it through their filters so they are both blocking legit mail and allowing spam to filter through at the same time.
by IanCal | 2025-09-28 15:14:05+00:00
Somewhat missed by many comments proclaiming that it’s sigmoidal is that sigmoid curves exhibit significant growth after it stops looking exponential. Unless you think things have already hit a dramatic wall you should probably assume further growth.

We should probably expect compute to get cheaper at the same time, so that’s performance increases with lowering costs. Even after things flatline for performance you would expect lowering costs of inference.

Without specific evidence it’s also unlikely you randomly pick the point on a sigmoid where things change.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-09-28 15:14:09+00:00
Do people actually choose to use Outlook if they're not already forced to use Exchange/Office365, usually for work?

In my experience, it's hands down the worst e-mail client I've ever used. I only have it on my work PC because my employer uses Office 365. It never even crossed my mind to try to use it for my personal e-mailing needs.

I do agree, however, that companies that decide to trust MS don't care one bit about their scandalous practices. I don't even think it's as much of an actual choice as a cop-out, as in "everybody uses microsoft", so they rarely actually ponder the decision.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-28 15:14:22+00:00
It was tried once. Unfortunately it was ultimately killed off by a corrupt leader who took over the military and started deploying them the cities to stop crime. That leader ultimately strong armed the other elected officials into doing his bidding leading to the destruction of the once great nation. He ignored the law and the will of the people.

He was ultimately assassinated in 44BC. I believe his name was Julius Caesar.
by modulardevtools | 2025-09-28 15:15:25+00:00
Hi HN! I've built something different from the usual game engine and would love your thoughts.

Sovereign Engine: Project Flux https://modulardev-tools.github.io/Project-Flux/

This is a fully functional game engine where every system is modifiable at runtime in the browser. The core philosophy challenges software as a black box – all code is exposed and hackable.

Key Technical Differentiators:

Live Dependency Injection – Core systems (weapons, rules, physics) are dependency-injected and hot-swappable No Build Step – Edit code → Apply → See changes instantly while playing Deterministic Engine – Seeded RNG for reproducible gameplay/mod testing Public Domain – No licensing restrictions, truly yours to modify

Try the Live Modding:

Play the game normally (wave-based shooter with boss fights) Open any mod panel ( WEAPON, RULES, PLAYER) Load a preset or write your own code Click Apply – changes take effect immediately

Example – Modify Weapon Behavior: javascript

// In the WEAPON panel – create a 3-shot burst function shoot(player, target, engine) { for (let i = 0; i < 3; i++) { setTimeout(() => { engine.projectiles.push({ x: player.x, y: player.y, vx: Math.cos(angle) * 450, vy: Math.sin(angle) * 450, size: 3, color: '#ff55ff', life: 1.5 }); }, i * 80); } }

Architecture Highlights:

Clean separation between engine core and mod systems Mods run in same context as engine (full API access) localStorage persistence for user creations All audio generated procedurally

Why I Built This: Most game engines treat their internals as black boxes. I wanted to create something where the educational value is inherent – you learn game development by modifying a working game, seeing immediate results.

The engine demonstrates "sovereign software" principles: transparent, modifiable, and truly owned by users. No permissions, no gatekeepers, just creative freedom.

I'm particularly interested in HN's thoughts on:

The technical architecture choices Potential applications beyond gaming The "sovereign software" philosophy Ways to improve the modding API

Live Demo: https://modulardev-tools.github.io/Project-Flux/ GitHub: https://github.com/JamesTheGiblet/Project-Flux-MVP-Ready

Looking forward to your feedback and seeing what mods you create!
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 15:16:44+00:00
> The idea that slavery is intolerable, which you easily hold in your head in 2025 without having worked for it—was bequeathed to you by John Adams and his ilk.

That's a rather US centric point of view. Slavery was considered intolerable in many places, the US was different in that it actually allowed it for as long as it did. Of course there are many guises for slavery that are practiced in other places but on a moral level lots of people realize it is wrong and John Adams had absolutely nothing to do with that.
by card_zero | 2025-09-28 15:16:55+00:00
I dislike the "pale blue dot" speech for assigning importance to a big empty universe just because it's big, and then accusing us of all sorts of hubris despite acknowledging that this is the only known place where anything's of interest.

> Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the [irrelevant empty space with nothing going for it except size] ...
by heavenlyblue | 2025-09-28 15:17:05+00:00
If you assume the availability of hosts is local to the perimeter of the infected hosts, then the relative growth is limited to 2/R where R is the distance from patient 0 in 2 dimensions. It's becuase an area of the circle defines how many hosts are already ill but the interaction can only happen on the perimeter of the circle.

The disease is obviously also limited by the total amount of hosts, but I assume there's also the "bottom" limit - i.e. the resource consumption of already-infected hosts.
by solaric | 2025-09-28 15:17:22+00:00
> China, who cares for less about preserving the world

The premises of your argument are refuted by facts.

A larger percentage of people in China (compared to the USA) believe climate change is a serious threat to humanity and support policies to tackle climate change. https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support

The US is much worse than China in terms of emissions per capita, both historically and today https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

China also leads the world in tech that is crucial for the move away from fossil fuels (solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries). You can easily look up evidence for this, if you feel any initial doubt.

This recent news article has a nice snippet on the current trajectory on climate change https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/24/china-doubles-down-... "China pledged Wednesday to cut its world-leading levels of climate pollution by up to 10 percent during the next decade — one day after U.S. President Donald Trump urged global leaders to abandon the effort to halt the Earth’s rising temperatures."
by logifail | 2025-09-28 15:17:23+00:00
> instead of constantly starting and stopping to access road-side mailboxes

Q: What's the (average) distance between deliveries to road-side mailboxes?

I'm thinking of the average driving time between them, compared with the time to get out of a vehicle, put mail in a mailbox, and get back in the a vehicle...

I know "mounted delivery routes" sound and feel more efficient, but just how much more efficient are they actually?

We should note that USPS letter volumes are falling (just like everywhere else in the world) and somehow parcel/packet delivery services do not need to have "mounted routes", the delivery crew appear to be able to just get out of their vehicles(?)
by chubot | 2025-09-28 15:18:31+00:00
Yeah exactly, there WAS a battle back then, and it WAS won for a while

But that doesn't mean it's won forever -- the people of the NEXT generation still have to put in effort

---

This thread shows the ingratitude: You didn't fix our problems for all time, in a rapidly changing world! The thing you invented and gave away only fixed it for a decade or so

Comment below:

> The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything

Memories are short; history is written and framed by interested parties
by codedokode | 2025-09-28 15:18:39+00:00
While it is an amazing chart, the problem is that when you click on a point named "Rap" located in year 1972, a song from 1984 plays so I cannot hear what Rap sounded like in 1972 and how it evolved. I understand that there can be copyright issues, but one could put a link to Youtube or at least a track name. So it would be cool if the track played matched the year you click.

Edit: it seems you need to click on the rectangles rather than circles to choose the year.
by sipjca | 2025-09-28 15:18:41+00:00
Fair enough, most of the critical code in this case is written in Rust. A Rust transcription library popped out of the project `transcription-rs`. And there is a real-time audio library I'd like to put out which allows for filters. I could have called out to ffmpeg or similar, but I chose to implement an audio pipeline myself (for better or worse)

So makes sense, but there are benefits to writing a desktop application backend in Rust for the ecosystem as well.
by jonas21 | 2025-09-28 15:18:43+00:00
> eventually the list will become silly and the function will earn a # pyre-ignore annotation. This defeats the whole point of the pointless exercise.

No, this is the great thing about gradual typing! You can use it to catch errors and provide IDE assistance in the 90% of cases where things have well-defined types, and then turn it off in the remaining 10% where it gets in the way.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-09-28 15:19:43+00:00
The entire podcast and youtube channel industry relies on contextual ads right?

Havent almost everyone including MKBHD said youtube ads doesnt give them enough to be used as the only revenue.

Contextual ads are more effective. You type shoes, you get shoes ads. It doesnt first need the shoe data and then later show shoe ads after you started searching for socks. And with no middlemen,more profitable. Duckduckgo employs this IIRC.

Behavioural ads are easy cos you are setting up an api. Contextual ads would mean you need a worthy product and having to handle your ad folks yourself. You cannot buy a domain and immediately start showing ads.

Behavioural ads breakeven because they sell your data. Not ads.

The whole reason why new media outlets moved to subscription model is bizarre to me. They could've just started doing it old school and it would have made news open and more privacy friendly.
by pengaru | 2025-09-28 15:19:48+00:00
I saw some twitter-like shit comments on chi-mesh while visiting family in IL.

But I've seen nothing but friendly interactions on the SF bay mesh which is much larger and thriving.

Nothing seemed particularly toxic, not on either of these meshes. Considering it's an open system anyone can say anything on, I'm sure it'll devolve into chaos as it gets more popular.

But when it comes to toxicity I'm going to assume you're either referring to the Discord, or making shit up. Discord having its roots in gamers is known to be a dumpster fire and I expect nothing less than toxic behavior on any Discord "server".

I do not understand why people spend time on Discord to play with Meshtastic though. Play with the mesh, that's the whole point.
by true_blue | 2025-09-28 15:19:51+00:00
>though maybe there's a path forward to give a variable a sort of "de-hint" in that in can be everything BUT this type

I think this is called a negation type, and it acts like a logical NOT operator. I'd like it too, and I hear that it works well with union types (logical OR) and intersection types (logical AND) for specifying types precisely in a readable way.