MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgfitz | 2025-09-11 22:50:45+00:00
> Just because it's not independent and autonomous does not mean it could not be intelligent.

So to rephrase: it’s not independent or autonomous. But it can still be intelligent. This is probably a good time to point out that trees are independent and autonomous. So we can conclude that LLMs are possibly as intelligent as trees. Super duper.

> If existing humans minds could be stopped/started without damage, copied perfectly, and had their memory state modified at-will would that make us not intelligent?

To rephrase: if you take something already agreed to as intelligent, and changed it, is it still intelligent? The answer is, no damn clue.

These are worse than weak arguments, there is no thesis.
by selcuka | 2025-09-11 22:51:53+00:00
> Hypothetically speaking...

Exactly...

> murder is very closely related to poverty

US is the only first world country, together with Russia, in the top 100 intentional homicide list [1]. The previous 3 countries are Burundi, Mayotte, Guadeloupe, and the next 3 countries are Greenland, Zambia, Liechtenstein (Greenland and Liechtenstein are probably round-off errors with less than 5 deaths per year). Are you really suggesting that those countries should be the benchmark for the US?

Now, according to the World Bank [2], the poverty rate in the US is 18%, which is very close to the UK (18.6%). The intentional homicide rates, though, are vastly different (5.763 vs 1.148). How does the poverty argument explain the 400% difference?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...
by peterashford | 2025-09-11 22:52:19+00:00
If you ask a biologist, you will find that categories like "woman" are not clearly defined. Even the concept of biological sex is really complicated. If you want to pretend that this stuff is all black and white, that's up to you but its not a scientifically literate perspective.

That's not the same as saying that "everything is defined by society/culture?" That's a strawman - no-one was claiming that.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-11 22:52:23+00:00
Cool, I've used Dokku similarly, but I'll usually still reach for a dbms myself a lot of the time. I have used SQLite when I need something portable, just not so much for an application that I'm containerizing anyway.

Been following the Cloudflare features with interest along the way... currently have a pretty good size VPS I've been using.
by RAM-bunctious | 2025-09-11 22:53:09+00:00
It's technically possible that early-life microbiome differences from bypassing the birth canal could influence it, but the fact that the association disappears when siblings who were delivered differently are compared is suggestive.

"However, the association did not persist when using sibling controls, implying that this association is due to familial confounding by genetic and/or environmental factors." - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
by vunderba | 2025-09-11 22:53:38+00:00
Yep, Google actually recommends using Imagen4 / Imagen4 Ultra for straight image generation. In spite of that, Flash 2.5 still scored shockingly high on my text-to-image comparisons though image fidelity is obviously not as good as the dedicated text to image models.

Came within striking distance of OpenAI gpt-image-1 at only one point less.
by LorenDB | 2025-09-11 22:54:24+00:00
I just switched from a Motorola Razr+ to a OnePlus 13 because the Razr's internal display cable apparently started flaking out, probably because I dropped it on the hinge on concrete a while back. I almost got another Razr, but even though I got a "normal" phone this time around, I'm tentatively planning to move back to a foldable once my OnePlus is old and gray.

Foldables are just so nice; the flip style for me is especially convenient since it is more compact in a pocket. I also feel like we're almost to the tipping point where we can consider folding displays solved to the point that new generations start having marginal iterations (as opposed to "wow, the crease is so much smaller!" and "Oh look, they finally got foldables IP68 rated!").
by amannm | 2025-09-11 22:54:48+00:00
> Anthropic's more technical users inherently understand how LLMs work.

Yes, I too imagine these "more technical users" spamming rocketship and confetti emojis absolutely _celebrating_ the most toxic code contributions imaginable to some of the most important software out there in the world. Claude is the exact kind of engineer (by default) you don't want in your company. Whatever little reinforcement learning system/simulation they used to fine-tune their model is a mockery of what real software engineering is.
by mgh2 | 2025-09-11 22:54:53+00:00
They are just a data company capitalizing on the AI hype - when the AI bubble pops, they will too.

When ChatGPT launched, Palantir's stock started climbing by selling its "AI platform".

The cycle follows a marketing funnel: AIDA - awareness, interest, decision, action. https://www.smartinsights.com/traffic-building-strategy/offe...

FUD: Awareness and interest (AI) - at the initial stages, doomer marketing by big tech to government about its dangers and regulations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt

FOMO: Decision and action (DA) - After selling, it is all about investing in infrastructure and adopting the technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

Sentiment shift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870777
by coldtea | 2025-09-11 22:55:13+00:00
>Whilst all the choices you make tend to be in the grey matter, the rest of you does have internal state - mostly in your white matter.

Yeah, but so? Does the substrate of the memory ...matter? (pun intended)

When I wrote memory above it could refer to all the state we keep, regardless if it's gray matter, white matter, the gut "second brain", etc.
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-11 22:57:04+00:00
This is a play of Apple here, trying to spin the narrative in its favor.

The upside for the user is to have a larger variety of devices to choose from, each with similar interoperability with his Apple device.

The upside for the market is that all vendors are technically able to compete on the same terms. Apple is not allowed to operate a market, invite others to compete but also participate as a player with preferential treatment.

This is already decided for the existing features of Airpods, Apple Watch, etc. Apple is trying to rally its userbase against the EU by withholding new features now, in hopes that they can secure their skewed playing-field
by benjiro | 2025-09-11 22:58:44+00:00
> I don't really understand the current trend of using sqlite in place of a traditional database. It has it's place, I use it in a client side project and it's really great

I think its more about the issue that databases like postgres are too much "magic". With Sqlite you see your database file, its a physical something. You want to move it to another server, its just a copy action, no dump/restore. You want to "upgrade", there is no mess like with postgres.

You want to create client separation, ... its just a file per client.

> although even there I have to be aware of the one writer only limitation.

The writer limit has not been a limit forever. You can easily do 20k writes per second, what is way beyond what most system anyway. You want 100k? A slightly different access pattern and voila. You want 1 million ... There are ways around it. If you put Sqlite vs Postgres for instance, ironically, seen Sqlite winning against postgres despite that single writer.

The whole hands on "we know what file is, where it is, and how to gain access to it" is really amazing. The whole "do not need to think about how to secure it on the network" also helps a lot.

Do i use Sqlite in production? No ... Postgres its extension support just rules. But i see the appeal for many.
by Mawr | 2025-09-11 22:58:52+00:00
To that I would say that the relationship between vehicle speeds and deaths is not linear. Lowering speeds (via infrastructure, not limits) in cities to 20mph / 30km/h would probably cut deaths by 80% without affecting average travel times much.

It is a great analogy though, in both cases the issue comes down to ease of access to deadly weapons capable of killing a lot of people in a short time period. I remain ever surprised that we think the average person is qualified to handle such weapons, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
by mothballed | 2025-09-11 22:59:06+00:00
Lol you just brushed aside all the generating the FBI did, which i cant beleive is an act of good faith. You know they convicted a bunch of other people that helped generate the plot too right? Not even the FBI subscribes to your idea that only the guy that initially came up with the general idea is culpable, assuming it was Musico ( and even then, to become a conspiracy you need an overt act and not just an idea... like fbi informants helping people buy ammunition or driving them to case a house).

The FBI provided the training, ammunition, addresses, and driving. If the best counterpoint is another crackpot conspirator had allegedly the initial mere idea (which, depending how it is conveyed, may not even be illegal merely as speech if not calling for imminent action or soliciting or threatening to actually do it), well I rest my case about their involvement in generating the conspiracy.
by jrflowers | 2025-09-11 22:59:12+00:00
I just don’t think you have the gotcha that you insist that you do here. You keep quoting the first sentence of what I wrote as if that is all that I wrote. You’re kind of trying to use the same rhetorical trick on what I wrote as you’re attempting to do with Charlie Kirk’s performances: selecting context. “Well what if I only read a fraction of what you wrote? Or deliberately misunderstood it? What if I simply failed to understand a very simple point? That would make you look foolish indeed!” isn’t a cheat code to being correct.

Out of curiosity can you quote the sentence that came immediately after the one you’ve repeated and respond to that? It’s not very long, just a little over 20 words, so complexity shouldn’t be a big issue. If not I’m going to have to end this discussion. The shoddy reasoning and leaps to victory are getting tediously close to “owning the libs“ rigmarole, which is profoundly empty and, frankly, boring.
by LambdaComplex | 2025-09-11 22:59:24+00:00
Maybe by Manjaro's maintainers, but certainly not by Arch's. I've been using Arch for a little over a decade. The position that I've always seen in the official IRC channel is that forks such as Manjaro are explicitly not Arch.

Here's one of the oldest versions of the "Arch-based distributions" page on the wiki. It has a notice at the top that says that forks are not supported by the community or developers: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Arch-based_distri...
by namibj | 2025-09-11 22:59:55+00:00
After looking at Cases 4, 9, 23, 33, and 61, I think it might be suited to take in several wide-angle pictures or photospheres or such from inside a residence, and output a corresponding floor plan schematic.

If anyone has examples, guides, or anything to save me from pouring unnecessary funds into those API credits just to figure out how to feed it for this kind of task, I'd really appreciate sharing.
by istjohn | 2025-09-11 23:00:57+00:00
Kirk didn't deserve to die for having or expressing hateful ideas, but his views were not merely "different."

Charlie Kirk speaking about a trans athlete: "Someone should've just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s[0].

And [1]:

> America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.

And [1]:

> The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

0. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-cha...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-09-11 23:01:06+00:00
>Turn the cameras off and the "debate" is over. It was a strictly transactional exchange in his favour.

Are you claiming Kirk was just shilling, as was imagined about Ann Coulter[0]? (Very NSFW).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP_12j-sPO4
by ricksunny | 2025-09-11 23:01:29+00:00
>what i've seen so far indicates that the LLM just needs the RDF, not an actual database with data stored in triplets

While I guarantee you know much more than I do about graph databases and RDFs, in practice, what is the difference between an RDF graph database and an RDF? They're both a set of text-based triplets, no?
by zamadatix | 2025-09-11 23:01:37+00:00
You seem to do a lot of work on sparse graphs, as most people do, but if you re-read the opening line carefully:

> In graph theory, an adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite (and usually dense) graph.

Many of these issues evaporate on the realization the article sets out to talk talk to the use of adjacency matrices for dense graphs, which it's trying to point out are the ones you'd commonly use an adjacency matrix for, rather than trying to claim all graphs are dense so you should always use an adjacency matrix.

E.g. a dense graph of 1,000,000 nodes would usually be considered "a pretty damn large dense graph" and so on. These are probably good things to have mentioned here though, as pulling in an article about adjacency matrices for conversation without context of knowing why you're using one already can lead to bad conclusions by folks.
by peterdsharpe | 2025-09-11 23:01:41+00:00
I love the concept of this and hope Slate survives, but $27.5k is too expensive for what they're offering. With the Kia Soul at $21.5k and with more features, and the Honda Civic at the same cost, the value proposition isn't there for many people.

Minimialism is great, so long as the price also reflects that.
by snowwrestler | 2025-09-11 23:01:47+00:00
I meant a feature a human activates. Like if you manually drop a HN URL into a comment, the site adds in the visible metadata when it publishes.

Or a “related” feature, separate from normal comments, that only admins can access. You manually designate the related posts and then the site displays them dynamically.

But yeah, fully automated would be pretty amazing, but challenging.
by coldtea | 2025-09-11 23:02:16+00:00
Different, but probably not as orthogonal as one might think.

E.g. cooperating ethics had been necessary for the further development of human populations intelligence (and culture, technology, material wealth, nutrition etc that lead to further increases in intelligence).

So lack of ethics might be a sign of intelligence, but it's also a parasitic intelligence that benefits the individual, and beyond certain level and spread to the detriment of the further evolutionary development of the species.
by BobbyJo | 2025-09-11 23:02:28+00:00
People forget that the popularity of being anti-war is relatively new, like maybe 100-150 years old. World War 1 popped off so quickly specifically because moral objections to war from the standpoint of "violence is wrong" were just not even part of the discussion. Even during World War 2, most objections within the US to entering the war were based on it just not being our problem.

Up until the last century, violence was seen as just another necessary part of living, and morality only came into play when it involved you're own community.
by philwelch | 2025-09-11 23:03:25+00:00
The difference is that nobody actually works in a head mask and full body suit, unless they’re wearing PPE that happens to obscure those things. Covering 100% of your skin is very awkward and uncomfortable. You wouldn’t ever want to do that unless you needed to for some other reason.

So let me propose another example that takes place in a workplace setting where everyone has already been hired. Let’s say it’s a welding shop where the workers are issued welding helmets, welding gloves, and protective long-sleeved overshirts. All of this PPE is provided by the shop. And let’s say that for several years, the PPE is all in the same standardized color, which is yellow because that’s the primary color of the company logo. One day the welding shop decides that, rather than just wearing the yellow PPE, they’re going to issue employees color-coded PPE that approximately matches their natural skin tone if that’s what they’d prefer. Regardless of whether you think it’s a good or bad idea, you can’t deny that such a policy places a lot of significance on skin color.
by duffyjp | 2025-09-11 23:03:28+00:00
Very recently I setup a mergerfs mount for this. It’s very crude for my use case but works perfectly and I could use the existing volume as is.

I got partway thru setting up a script to copy recently accessed files from the HDD to the read-prioritized SSD.

My LLMs load up way faster, and I still have a source of truth volume in the huge HDD. It’s not something I’d use professionally though, way too janky.
by Roguelazer | 2025-09-11 23:03:41+00:00
Some API questions/observations

- I don't see an idempotency key in the request to authorize a charge; that might be something nice for people looking to build reliable systems on this. - How long are accessTokens valid? Forever? Do they become invalid if the subject metadata (firstName, lastName, email) changes?

I think this is a super-cool idea, but I think the idea of extending net30 terms to every customer of some B2C product seems pretty iffy; since you're deferring charging until the end of the month, you won't get most of the fraud signals from Stripe until then and anything popular that used this system seems like it'd be pretty inundated with fraud. I would at least consider doing the charges more frequently (i.e., charge at the end of the month or every $50, whichever comes first) to put a better bound on how long you can go before finding out that someone gave you a stolen card.
by vunderba | 2025-09-11 23:04:05+00:00
I can't provide a definitive answer for this - but I will say that the Google's SDK docs state that a single edit request is limited to a maximum of THREE images so depending on how many you have - you might have to sort of use the "Kontext Kludge", aka stitching together many of input images into a single JPEG.

https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/models...
by echelon | 2025-09-11 23:04:16+00:00
Vision has evolved frequently and quickly in the animal kingdom.

Conscious intelligence has not.

As another argument, we've had mathematical descriptions of optics, drawing algorithms, fixed function pipeline, ray tracing, and so much more rich math for drawing and animating.

Smart, thinking machines? We haven't the faintest idea.

Progress on Generative Images >> LLMs
by IgorPartola | 2025-09-11 23:04:37+00:00
You can install GNU coreutils out of the package repo no problem. Software packages are mostly available except closed source stuff that is Linux-only at which point you would use the Linux compat layer and it mostly works.

Docker is Linux-only for now but there is movement in that area. BSD had jails first and there is work on making generic containers work across multiple operating systems, including BSD. But I think the point of using BSD is to not bring Linux with you. Try their way and see how you like it.
by orlp | 2025-09-11 23:07:18+00:00
Well, years back I released an unstable sort called pdqsort in C++. Then stjepang ported it to the Rust standard library. So at first... nothing. Someone else did it.

A couple years later I was doing my PhD and I spent a lot of time optimizing a stable sort called glidesort. Around the same time Lukas Bergdoll started work on their own and started providing candidate PRs to improve the standard library sort. I reached out to him and we agreed to collaborate instead of compete, and it ended up working out nicely I'd say.

Ultimately I like tinkering with things and making them fast. I actually really like reinventing the wheel, find out why it has the shape that it does, and see if there's anything left to improve.

But it feels a bit sad to do all that work only for it to disappear into the void. It makes me the happiest if people actually use the things I build, and there's no broader path to getting things in people's hands than if it powers the standard library.
by aanet | 2025-09-11 23:07:42+00:00
Thanks for alerting to this. I feel this is not discussed enough in the media, all anyone talks about is how wonderful AI is for productivity etc

Quote from the article:

The research methodology involved embedding written instructions within computer programs rather than traditional pre-written attack code. When activated, the malware contacts AI language models to generate Lua scripts customized for each victim's specific computer setup, using open-source models that lack the safety restrictions of commercial AI services.

Each execution produces unique attack code despite identical starting prompts, creating a major challenge for cybersecurity defenses. Traditional security software relies on detecting known malware signatures or behavioral patterns, but AI-generated attacks produce variable code and execution behaviors that could evade these detection systems entirely.

Testing across three representative environments showed both AI models were highly effective at system mapping and correctly flagged 63-96% of sensitive files depending on environment type. The AI-generated scripts proved cross-platform compatible, operating on (desktop/server) Windows, Linux, and (embedded) Raspberry Pi systems without modification.

/quote
by peterashford | 2025-09-11 23:08:45+00:00
As a person with a degree in Philosophy, I'm going to disagree with you. Discussions about meaning often rely a great deal on what people would usually expect words to mean.

I do think issues of AI/AGI are often Philosophical in nature and I was not claiming that consensus is not required. What I'm arguing against is the requirement for rigorous definitions for words that exist in natural language. Language is messy and often ambiguous - especially around AI.

If we want to have rigorous terms to discuss the state of the art - which I believe we do - then we should define terms for that purpose. i.e: AI needs it's own jargon.
by Razengan | 2025-09-11 23:08:46+00:00
In the past, whenever I read someone say stuff like what I myself say down below, I put them down as a crackpot:

But as time goes by and I travel the world, I find it's hard to deny that there are and always were distinct classes within human civilization, though the lines may be blurred here and there, and almost everything within every human society serves to preserve those classes, whether as the direct intentional goal or as a convenient side effect.

"Govern" is to "rule"

Other commenters mention the lack of government, and pockets of chaos where gangs/bandits/warlords/disasters run rampant, but those too are different classes versus each other, or vacuums where classes have yet to [re]form.
by croes | 2025-09-11 23:08:54+00:00
So you deny that words can cause damage?

Charles Manson was convicted for murders he didn't do himself, so there is obviously a limit in how much damage you're allowed to do with words.

Many dictators didn't kill anyone themselves, they just talked others into it.

Or think of the Hamas leaders who talked their people into the actrocity of the October 7 attacks.

I just want to know where people draw the line.

BTW the whole MAGA thing is based on the assumption of damage that is caused by words. You know the whole LGBTQIA2S+, DEI and climate change stuff our kids get indoctrinated with by schools, universities and the liberal media.