MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-09-30 20:11:08+00:00
I posit this is the real story.

OpenAI did not stealthily release Sora 2 to the image and video ELO ranking leaderboards ahead of time as is now somewhat tradition.

This model is probably designed to run fast and cheap as a social play. Emphasis on putting you and your friends into popular franchises and IPs.

OpenAI probably has a totally different model for their Hollywood-grade VFX. One that's too expensive to offer $20/mo consumers.

- - - - -

EDIT:

Oh my god, OpenAI literally just disrupted TikTok:

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973071380842229781

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973122324984693113

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973121891926942103

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973120058907041902 (potentially dangerous ... )

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973111654524264763

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973090475486879818

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973110596825653720 (is this the same model? It doesn't look like it.)

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973096194508251321

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973086729281347650

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973088038851932522 (this is truly something only kids will love)

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973087595967201449

https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1973077105903620504

Holy shit!

This is 100% the future of what kids will do. This is incredible for short form vertical video.

It doesn't need to look good, it just needs to let you tell incredible stories with people and things you care about.

This is way better than Meta's social video app.
by wintermutestwin | 2025-09-30 20:11:22+00:00
I pasted the results of typing man rsync into my macbook’s terminal. I looked up the —delete parameter and pasted the entry. Not sure why your entry was more useful - perhaps a version issue (which is at the root of the painful time I have spent trying to learn how to do something trivial).

Later in the man page, it gives examples and totally fails to explain those examples. And yes, for someone who is going to be doing this frequently and professionally. They should understand this deeply and spending the hours required to be fluent in a command with a kitchen sink full of parameters. I, on the other hand, will be executing these commands maybe a few times in a year.

The more I think about it, the more I think the solution here is to use LLM‘s to write better documentation with lenses for different types of users with different needs.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-09-30 20:11:24+00:00
You often don't get to "inspect the goods" at a user by user level.

Put yourself in the shoes of a non-fraud company where the asset is your customer set. Do you let JPM go through line by line confirming each one? No, you do not. You give redacted data or aggregate data.

In eyeballs/non-paying user businesses, this is just going to happen sometimes. In practice you don't get to do the diligence you want to do sometimes.
by bionsystem | 2025-09-30 20:12:32+00:00
I wonder why people always assume that the strategy would be algorithmic or systematic. How about global macro, long/short equity, or even plain long only done well ? Actually studying markets and assets fundamentally, and finding asymmetric bets ? There are plenty of people that have done that successfully over really long periods of time, I doubt markets are perfectly efficient just because some academics claim so, especially for bets with strong convexity.
by martin-t | 2025-09-30 20:12:32+00:00
While this is true, it's hard to imagine people spending years perfecting the style would be happy to see it copied effortlessly without any compensation while people who made the copying possible are rolling in cash.

This is not just about copyright infringement or plagiarism.

Automatically generating text, images and videos based on training data and a tiny prompt is fundamentally about taking someone's work and making money off of it without giving anything in return.
by tptacek | 2025-09-30 20:12:36+00:00
One thing I'm really fuzzy on is, if you're building a multi-model agent thingy (like, can drive with GPT5 or Sonnet), should you be thinking about context management tools like memory and autoediting as tools the agent provides, or should you be wrapping capabilities the underlying models offer? Memory is really easy to do in the agent code! But presumably Sonnet is better trained to use its own builtins.
by bonoboTP | 2025-09-30 20:12:50+00:00
> much more whimsical and fun than TikTok

In the early years everyone told me that TikTok is actually fun and whimsical (like just after it stopped being musical.ly), and it's all about fun collaboration, and amateur comedy sketches, fun dances and lipsyncs, and people posting fun reactions to each other etc, all lighthearted and that social media is finally fun again!
Question: Resources for Teaching Children
by gruszczy1 | 2025-09-30 20:12:54+00:00
I am looking for good resources for teaching children about computers and programming. I have no sense what kind of class is age appropriate. We did some scratch and we follow lessons, but that's mostly copying stuff, rather than building something themself. I am not sure if they are ready for that and how to facilitate it. Additionally, I don't know if they are ready to learn about things like command line. So I am looking for courses for children that I could follow.
by brandonb | 2025-09-30 20:13:05+00:00
Unlikely (unfortunately).

I work at a startup which offers blood testing—it costs $190 when consumers pay in cash, and when we've tried going through insurance, it ends up about $1400-$1500.

The "insurance-negotiated" rate is massively inflated, and some of the more advanced biomarkers (e.g., ApoB) generally don't have insurance coverage.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-30 20:13:05+00:00
Being an adult is the ability to be responsible for your actions. Arguing for the ability to disclaim any responsibility or risk of responsibility, at the expense of children's safety, is peak child behavior.

This view also makes a mockery of free speech, which was originally intended to allow mature adults to take responsibility and ownership of their actions and beliefs, not run away from them. The idea of running away from your actions and beliefs, in the name of freedom, inverts the entire philosophical foundation.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-09-30 20:13:54+00:00
> - Site blocking with /etc/hosts doesn't work consistently with Orion, it intermittently and inconsistently ignores these rules. (this is sort of niche but it's bizarre for a browser based on WebKit)

oh i hate it when developers get cute with DNS. this doesn't happen with Safari? i've also had issues with the password manager (even after telling it i want to use Passwords, it just... doesn't sometimes).

i've been in the same boat as you - i really want to diversify the browser ecosystem, so i've been daily driving orion for a bit, but their stance toward open source (which you mentioned) is a big bummer.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-30 20:13:58+00:00
> When you “insulate” the civil service from politics, what you end up doing is privileging the ideology and political goals of civil servants over those of voters.

No.

You end up balancing the current political desires of voters with institutional expertise.

Or to put it another way, would you say that "competency" is a political ideology or an objective fact?
by tptacek | 2025-09-30 20:13:59+00:00
I feel like my bona fides on this topic are pretty solid (without getting into my background on container vs. VM vs. runtime isolation) and: "the agents will find new zero days" also seems "big if true". I point `claude` at a shell inside a container and tell it "go find a zero day that breaks me out of this container", and you think I'm going to succeed at that?

I had assumed you were saying something more like "any attacker that prompt-injects you probably has a container escape in their back pocket they'll just stage through the prompt injection vector", but you apparently meant something way further out.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-30 20:14:02+00:00
An interpreted language has a runtime that is essentially a function “i(script: string)” that immediately follows the instructions encoded in the string.

A compiler is a function “c(script: string) -> byte[]” that instead of running the script, outputs a binary that does the same thing as the interpreter, but more efficiently.

Commonly this means converting the human-readable script syntax to binary machine code that a CPU can run directly, but platforms like Java and .NET actually do this through multiple steps with an intermediate “byte code” that CPUs can’t execute without a lightweight runtime.

The benefit of the JIT is that it makes the compiler code portable to other CPU architectures without having to ship the source code. It is simple enough that interpreting it is just a “while” loop that bumps a pointer, reads the next instruction bytes, and uses a giant switch table to decide what to do.

If you squint at it, machine code is the same, except that the “loop and switch statement” is hard wired into the silicon.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-30 20:14:05+00:00
> Whatsapp elaborately explained how it was doing this to the public, it was with a technology (Erlang/OTP) that had rarely been used before, and that technology had been designed for and very successful in an almost identically shaped context (telecom switches.)

Sure. But the point is, Whatsapp had 0.5 total employees per 4 million users, and Frank had 20 support employees per 4 million supposed users.

Even if you think Whatsapp has a massive advantage, those numbers don't make it look like Frank is the one that's lacking in staff.

> Also, more obviously, people you knew were using it every day. 450M is different than 4M, and way different than 300K. If Whatsapp were lying and saying they had 4.5B users, I'd expect JP Morgan to catch that within a few hours, too.

For these reasons it would be much harder for Whatsapp to lie that way.

The corollary of that is it would be much easier for Frank to do it.
by wyldberry | 2025-09-30 20:14:16+00:00
This has been a long time coming. The big buyer for 737 consistently has been Southwest. Before a recent ownership shakeup, Southwest wanted to only operate the 737 airframe, and avoid as many new features as possible to keep training costs low, and maintenance costs low.

New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames. Boeing doesn't want to make 737s, but they are locked in because of this demand.

Source: Family member trains pilots at Southwest after retiring from a major airline carrier after a career as pilot/check-airman.
by cheema33 | 2025-09-30 20:14:58+00:00
Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s. I worked for a very large public tech company. One of the top 10 in that era. And they fell hard for scammers from Las Vegas that promised revolutionary audio/video compression. We had to sign all sorts of NDA and couldn't look under the hood of what they delivered to us under penalty of breach of contract and all that stuff. I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information.

Long story short, the whole project got shut down and about 200 people working on project lost their jobs. Myself included. Luckily I quickly landed at a better place working on more meaningful things.
by colesantiago | 2025-09-30 20:15:20+00:00
> Feels like a pixar moment when CG tech showed a new realm of what was possible with toy story

@qoez

> The first entirely AI generated film (with Sora or other AI video tools) to win an Oscar will be less than 5 years away.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951

This prediction of mine was only 10 months ago.

Imagine when we and if we get to 5 years.
by majorchord | 2025-09-30 20:15:27+00:00
I think "playing politics" means trying to get people to change something, or how a group of people is managed. Not all projects want other people telling them what to do or what they should or shouldn't do, and I think that's perfectly ok.

If "people being themselves" means making SJW politics their entire identity and spraying it across the internet, then I'd say it's likely they're not going to be welcome in many places, CoC or not.

I think you could argue having any rule that someone happens to disagree with is telling them "you cannot be different"... people have to draw the line somewhere, or there wouldn't be rules. Who are we to say what's right or wrong in someone else's project?

And I think your argument still dismisses the weaponization that many people are seeing... maybe you call it their identity being someone who wants to change things... but that doesn't mean they should always get what they want.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-30 20:15:31+00:00
> Google’s revenue was 300 billion with 100 billion in profits last year, the AI industry may never reach that size but 1$/person on the planet is only 8 billion dollars, drop that to 70% of people are online so your down to 5.6 billion.

Google is a huge conglomerate and a poor choice for making estimates because the bulk of their revenue comes from "advertising" with no obvious way to distinguish what proportion of that ad revenue is attributable to AI, e.g. what proportion of search ad revenue is attributable to being the same company that runs the ad network, and to being the default search in Android, iOS and Chrome? Nowhere near all of it or even most of it is from AI.

"Counting books and individual Facebook posts in any language equally" is kind of the issue. The links from the AI summary things are disproportionately not to the New York Times, they're more often to Reddit and YouTube and community forums on the site of the company whose product you're asking about and Stack Overflow and Wikipedia and random personal blogs and so on.

Whereas you might have written an entire book, and that book is very useful and valuable to human readers who want to know about its subject matter, but unless that subject matter is something the general population frequently wants to know about, its value in this context is less than some random Facebook post that provides the answer to a question a lot of people have.

And then the only way anybody is getting a significant amount of money is if it's plundering the little guy. Large incumbent media companies with lawyers get a disproportionate take because they're usurping the share of YouTube creators and Substack authors and forum posters who provided more in aggregate value but get squat. And I don't see any legitimacy in having it be Comcast and the Murdoch family who take the little guy's share at the cost of significant overhead and making it harder for smaller AI companies to compete with the bigger ones.
by wat10000 | 2025-09-30 20:15:42+00:00
Funny how that has the exact same shape as a typical scam targeted at individuals. They usually rely on creating a sense of urgency and the sense that you could blow the whole thing if you aren't careful. A warrant scam will tell you that they need payment (in gift cards, of course) right now or you're going to jail, and likewise if you hang up or tell anyone what's going on (and thus might have someone tell you that you're being had) you're going to jail.

Not far off from "you can't inspect the business you're buying too hard, or the deal is off." And just like with individual scams, that should be a sign that it's shady and you should bail out.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-30 20:16:12+00:00
> I think Google, with their massive YouTube data set, is ultimately going to win this game.

I don't know, applying the same thinking to LLMs, Google should have been first and best with just text based LLMs too, considering the datasets they sit on (and researchers, among others the people who came up with attention). But OpenAI somehow beat them on that regardless.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-30 20:16:30+00:00
> emphatically DOES NOT demonstrate the constructive existence of such an oracle

Of course, but it shows that you can assume that such an oracle exists whenever you are working under additional conditions where the existence of such a "special case" oracle makes sense to you, even though you can't show its existence in the general case. This outlook generalizes to all non-constructive existence statements (and disjunctive statements, as appropriate). It's emphatically not the same as constructive existence, but it can nonetheless be useful.
by roncesvalles | 2025-09-30 20:16:49+00:00
I agree. Almost all of the value that I'm getting out of LLMs is when it helps me understand something, as opposed to when it helps me produce something.

I'm not sure how or why the conversation shifted from LLMs helping you "consume" vs helping you "produce". Maybe there's not as much money in having an Algolia-on-steroids as there is in convincing execs that it will replace people's jobs?
by jkoff | 2025-09-30 20:17:06+00:00
Link: https://infinitepod.app/

I'm working on a web app that creates easy-to-understand stories and explainers for the sake of language learning. You can listen in your favourite podcast app, or directly on the website with illustrations.

I've mostly focused on Japanese and French, but I'm eager to add more languages if anyone is able to help me evaluate the text-to-speech for that language.
by kschrader | 2025-09-30 20:17:22+00:00
I'm not 100% clear on what the scope of ChatPRD is at this point (beyond PRDs) but Korey has a fleet of specialized subagents running underneath for everything from status updates to writing specs to breaking them down into subtasks to understanding how much work everyone on your team is doing and suggesting who the right people for the right jobs are (or agents for the job).

Each subagent is tied to and evaluated against different models (mostly Claude currently), so we can keep improving and adding to them independently.

We're also team centric by default, so if you want to see how someone on your team worked through coming up with a spec you can always see all of the work behind it. We're working on a testing and training framework that would apply your standards company-wide (coming soon).

Finally, we bill on interactions, so it's easy to try out and if you and your team are finding it useful and getting value from it then you pay us, if you don't then you don't. Hopefully this best aligns us to keep improving things and making it better for everyone, instead of just billing you by the seat, regardless of how much people use it.
by ebolyen | 2025-09-30 20:17:27+00:00
It does seem like the state of the art differs from popular understanding. Not only is mitochondrial DNA straight forward (although not especially useful for forensics as it is maternal), but with specialized extraction it is still possible to recover nuclear DNA, just exceedingly painful to do so.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978032399...
by xpe | 2025-09-30 20:17:39+00:00
> if you use Perplexity, they also have a news tab with the exact feature set

"Exact" is far from accurate. I just did a side-by-side comparison. To name only two obvious differences:

A. At the top level, Perplexity has a "Discover" tab [1] -- not titled "News". That leads to a AAF page with the endless-scroll anti-pattern (see [2] [3] for other examples). Kagi News [4] presents a short list of ~7ish items without images.

B. At the detail-page level, Kagi organizes their content differently (with more detail, including "sources", "highlights", "perspectives", "historical background", and "quick questions"). Perplexity only has content with sources and "discover more". You can verify for yourself.

[1]: https://www.perplexity.ai/discover

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/e0a99k/cnn_app_is_ann...

[3]: https://www.tumblr.com/make-me-imagine/614701109842444288/an...

[4]: https://kite.kagi.com
by shoobiedoo | 2025-09-30 20:18:02+00:00
> There are a lot of uses for this capability that will be beneficial to society

Please enlighten me. What are they? If my elderly grandma is on her deathbed and I have no way to get to see her before she passes, will she get more warmth and fond memories of me with a clip of my figure riding an AI generated dragon saying goodbye, or a handwritten letter?
by mbesto | 2025-09-30 20:19:18+00:00
> She pushed back on any direct vetting of the list using privacy laws as a shield and JPMorgan didn't challenge it due to competitive pressure to get the deal done ASAP.

DD guy here.

This is more common then people think. M&A deal dynamics are funny and this is usually a tactic that investment bankers who represent sellers use. According to my cursory research she didn't use an investment banker. For someone fresh out of biz school with no M&A/banking experience that's umm...BOLD.
by jrflowers | 2025-09-30 20:19:29+00:00
This is a good point. It is hard not to see this tiktok video of an unblinking man smiling at a soft focus sasquatch and think of Marconi’s first broadcast across the Atlantic. I challenge any man to look at this unsettling video of a dog astronaut and not compare it in his mind to the first integrated circuit, or alternating current.
by sgjohnson | 2025-09-30 20:19:50+00:00
> They need both.

No. If they could fill the entire plane with business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even less) of it, you bet they would.

The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.

So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn’t say that they need the economy passengers.
by rimunroe | 2025-09-30 20:20:30+00:00
Nationally, Democrats raise significantly more money than Republicans[0], especially from small donors[1]. It wouldn't be surprising to me if this skew was stronger for people working in government.

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-parties

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/donor-demogra...
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-30 20:20:37+00:00
I want to minimize human in the loop. At the moment my agent allows user interaction in one place, after a spec is written+reviewed+updated to reflect the review, it stops. You can then edit the spec before asking for an implementation. It helps to catch cases where the instructions were ambiguous.

At the moment my agent is pretty basic. It doesn't detect endless loops. The model is allowed to bail at any time when it feels it's done or is stuck, so it doesn't seem to need to. It doesn't checkpoint currently. If it does the wrong thing you just roll it all back and improve the AGENTS.md or the mission text. That way you're less likely to encounter problems next time.

The downside is that it's an expensive way to do things but for various reasons that's not a concern for this agent. One of the things I'm experimenting with is how very large token budgets affect agent design.
by egeres | 2025-09-30 20:20:58+00:00
I wonder how this will affect the large cinema production companies (Disney, WB, Universal, Sony, Paramount, 20th century...). The global film market share was estimated to be 100B in 2023. If the production cost of high FX movies like Avengers Infinity War goes down from 300M$ to just 10K$ in a couple of years, will companies like Disney restrain themselves to just release a few epic movies per year? Or will we be flooded with tons of slop? If this kind of AI content keeps getting better, how will movies sustain our attention and feel 'special'? Will people not care if an actor is AI or real?