MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyphar | 2025-09-09 04:05:49+00:00
> There needs to be a point where enough is enough, and locking down devices so that you cannot install programs nor practically use custom operating systems on them anymore is way past that line.

That is to say, banks are not the only entities in existence.

If they really need such high security to avoid scams and losing such large sums of money they should just issue bank customers with a locked down device that can only be used for banking (maybe banks can collaborate on a standard for it so you can have one device for multiple banks). To be clear, I would still probably be strongly against such a proposal but at least we would be talking about a somewhat understandable approach.
by chubot | 2025-09-09 04:06:29+00:00
I guess it's worth reminding people that in 2016, Geoff Hinton said some pretty arrogant things that turned out to be totally wrong:

Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious. I think if you work as a radiologist, you're like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down

It’s just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.… It might be 10 years, but we’ve got plenty of radiologists already.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ

This article has some good perspective:

https://newrepublic.com/article/187203/ai-radiology-geoffrey...

His words were consequential. The late 2010s were filled with articles that professed the end of radiology; I know at least a few people who chose alternative careers because of these predictions.

---

According to US News, radiology is the 7th best paying job in 2025, and the demand is rising:

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-pay...

https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/h...

I asked AI about radiologists in 2025, and it came up with this article:

https://medicushcs.com/resources/the-radiologist-shortage-ad...

The Radiologist Shortage: Rising Demand, Limited Supply, Strategic Response

(Ironically, this article feels spammy to me -- AI is probably being too credulous about what's written on the web!)

---

I read Cade Metz's book about Hinton and the tech transfer from universities to big tech ... I can respect him for persisting in his line of research for 20-30 years, while others saying he was barking up the wrong tree

But maybe this late life vindication led to a chip on his shoulder

The way he phrased this is remarkably confident and arrogant, and not like the behavior of respected scientist (now with a Nobel Prize) ... It's almost like Twitter-speak that made its way into real life, and he's obviously not from the generation that grew up with Twitter
by jagthebeetle | 2025-09-09 04:07:24+00:00
I quite like _The Secret History_ too.

I think in _Babel_ (and _Katabasis_ as well), Kuang is a bit more prone than Tartt to showing off legit academic tidbits, which gives a nice scholarly glint (the illusion of high-brow? authenticity, dare I say?) to the environment, while not compromising the easy fantasy reading. More details than vibes, perhaps?

(When she gets details wrong, it does break the illusion. Like a small tangent on the etymology of the Greek word for truth in _Katabasis_.)

Oxford also simply has a certain aura for me, being from the US. All in all, I think Kuang's books are great "binge" or "airplane" reads with a smack of academic authenticity.

I saw _Possession_ mentioned elsewhere, which I think does academic vibes _and_ details very and IMO resides in a more refined literary category than either of the two other books. I should reread it!
by eigencoder | 2025-09-09 04:07:26+00:00
I've been using the same setup as the author for about a year, I can help some.

1. I don't know, never tried this. I do know iCloud backups still work, because I've used them after wiping my phone. But I think you must plug the new phone into your computer and set it up as a managed device before you load the backup, or else parts of the profile might not take.

2. No, it's not. I traded in my old macbook pro for a mac mini back in May. I was able to use Apple Configurator on the new mac mini to change the profile on my phone. There is one caveat though -- the phone is still technically supervised by the old mac, so you have to confirm the profile by going into the phone's settings. Using the original, you just have to plug the phone in and unlock it.
by bitwize | 2025-09-09 04:07:51+00:00
Sounds similar to, but not as bletcherous as, BANCStar, a famed "esolang" that was really the output of a form generation tool used in the finance industry in the 90s. Some engineers figured out that the form generator's output was actually expressed in a Turing-complete, though very arcane, notation replete with opcodes and operands, reverse-engineered it, and started working directly in this language without using the tool to do more sophisticated things than the tool enabled on its own. The boss man probably said "Great! When can we put this into production?" and it's been downhill since.

https://esolangs.org/wiki/BANCStar

https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar

Relatedly, a long time ago I discovered that Zenographics Mirage—a vector graphics/illustration program originally designed to run on like, VAXen, with both a text terminal and a graphics terminal with a digitizing tablet (similar to this setup seen on Reading Rainbow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_zYaIxb6dY&t=965s), but later ported to PCs—ran on a sort of bytecode. There were a number of sample scripts shipped with the package that allowed you to automate things in Mirage's command language. Some of them had statements like DO 62,2,32472,32476,0 and comments that read "Don't worry about this, this is just Mirage assembly language." Intrigued, I discovered in the manual a feature you could enable called Op Code Monitor that flashed similar numbers whenever you entered a command. It was mentioned but not documented in detail, nor what the numbers meant, but from that and the scripts I could make some pretty good guesses. I figured out how to make Mirage prompt for a point and store it in a register; and with that I made a command to draw a rectangle that could be rotated. A rectangle in Mirage was defined by its corner points, so when you attempted to rotate it it just rotated the corner points and drew an axis-aligned rectangle with the new corner points. My command accepted two corner points and drew a polyline, so that when you rotated it, the whole rectangle rotated.
by airstrike | 2025-09-09 04:08:45+00:00
Both things can be true. It had a genuine purpose, but the fact that Microsoft will go out of its way to not implement anything better and less temperamental is an indication it's not really open. There's plenty of evidence of Microsoft dragging their feet at playing nice with the rest of the office ecosystem.

I'm not saying they shouldn't do that as a company maximizing shareholder value. But we should all collectively groan every time the topic comes up, not applaud them.
by freejazz | 2025-09-09 04:09:39+00:00
Yawn. Is this supposed to be charming? Principled? I don't get your shtick. People act like it's politics but it really comes off more as just being foremost disagreable and unreasonable.

Jumping into a conversation about pedophiles to offer that their harms are only subjective is just ridiculous but for some reason I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but I've come to realize that was wrong.
by taminka | 2025-09-09 04:09:45+00:00
do i understand correctly that there's nothing preventing someone from adding a postcondition check X and then just not implementing it inside the function? wouldn't this just mean that now the ub is triggered by the post()'s `unceachable()` instead of whatever ub would happen w/, say, dereferencing a null pointer, as a consequence of not actually implementing post check X? so it's just for speed optimisations then?

from reading about contracts for C before i assumed it would be like what cake[1] does, which actually compile time enforces pointer (non)nullability, as well as resource ownership and a bunch of other stuff, very cool project, check it out if you haven't seen it yet :)

[1]https://github.com/thradams/cake
Show HN: Modular, LLM-optimized OpenAPI docs – deterministic URLs
by saransh_01 | 2025-09-09 04:10:09+00:00
We struggled with context overload using LLMs (Claude Code, Cursor etc) on large APIs. Even with doc search tools (Mintlify MCP, etc.), models would grab too much irrelevant info, miss types/params/schemas, or hallucinate context — so LLM outputs were unreliable.

To solve this, we turned our OpenAPI spec into highly modular docs:

- Every schema, endpoint, or parameter lives at a deterministic URL (/schemas/Product, /operations/CreateOrder, etc.)

- Each doc page has the TypeScript definition, relevant OpenAPI fragment, and links to related items

- LLMs (and human devs!) always get exactly the info they need—no more, no less.

- We automated the flow so docs auto update whenever OpenAPI changes

Result: much more accurate, reliable LLM-powered codegen and improved developer productivity.

Would love to know:

- Has anyone else hit this context overload problem?

- Are modular, LLM-optimized API docs for each API entity something others want/need?

Happy to share our approach or hear about others’ solutions!
by dheera | 2025-09-09 04:10:15+00:00
setTimeout(() => { // fuck up all future javascripts setTimeout = setInterval = requestAnimationFrame = () => {}; Element.prototype.appendChild = () => { throw new Error("Blocked"); }; document.addEventListener = () => {}; window.addEventListener = () => {}; Object.defineProperty(document, "readyState", { get: () => { throw new Error("No JS"); } }); document.write = () => {}; // fuck up canvas if(window.HTMLCanvasElement) HTMLCanvasElement.prototype.getContext=()=>null; // fuck up webgl if(window.WebGLRenderingContext) window.WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}}; // fuck up webgl2 if(window.WebGL2RenderingContext) window.WebGL2RenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}}; // fuck up websockets window.WebSocket=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}}; window.EventSource=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}}; // fuck up popups window.open=()=>null; // ... }, 500);
by bruce511 | 2025-09-09 04:10:46+00:00
2 companies make airplanes. Around 10 make cars. Entertainment comes from a handful of streaming services. 2 make a phone OS. I could go on.

I guess what I'm saying is that you're right. There's a limited number of AI providers. But just about any technology I use, or the appliances I buy, or transport, or whatever, is taken from a very small pool of suppliers.

So yeah, your argument is completely true, but its also true for most everything else.
by eigencoder | 2025-09-09 04:11:00+00:00
I totally get that, but for me I'd rather put in controls that make it easy to do the things I want, a la Atomic Habits.

Like, I want to eat healthier. I can try more self-control to not eat the Oreos in the pantry, or I can stop putting Oreos there. Putting guardrails on my devices is just easier to help me live the life I want.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-09 04:11:22+00:00
Hinton never notices that information isn't psychological, his generation failed at resolving the conduit metaphor, ie making the arbitrary in any ways specific (unless it's about diagnostic targets). Of course Hinton is a doomer, he's bullish on his own tech's explosive growth, which, as semantic dilution and/or delusion, is really just a huge bust, generally. Hinton will be seen as another version of Tucker, not Tesla.
by pmarreck | 2025-09-09 04:12:47+00:00
> However, these are insignificant compared to the number of PCs running x86 today, as well as the volume of notebooks being shipped with an x86 CPU

Which is insignificant compared to the number of smartphones and pad devices running ARM quite powerfully (and without much heat) for hours and hours. Their point?

Everything I've read about x86 is that it is hideously complex, which is almost certainly impeding progress. Why would you want to prolong the life of an architecture like that?
by freejazz | 2025-09-09 04:12:49+00:00
> And I don't think kids seeing porn is particularly harmful.

That's not what is happening on Facebook and there is no way I could believe you genuinely think that's what everyone is talking about. Did you even read the article? Porn isn't mentioned once. Pedophiles are asking kids to send them photos, trying to connect with them to arrange sex. You, upthread, told me that the sexual solicitation of minors was only harmful "subjectively" whatever that means.
by EGreg | 2025-09-09 04:13:09+00:00
2022 is also when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza started in earnest

When wars are going on, most people in affected countries are thinking about heavier things than going to an art exhibit and boosting their collections.

2020 and 2021 was when the pandemic happened. Businesses started feeling the crunch all over the world from the lockdowns. Supply chains got bullwhipped. People weren’t exactly interested in going to buy artworks after their one-time UBI checks and PPP funds ran out. And other countries didn’t send those out at all.

Oh yeah, and AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry. But we can’t say that on HN, there will always be someone popping out of the woodwork claiming AI is a non-factor and saying things were always like that.
by monero-xmr | 2025-09-09 04:13:42+00:00
I'm saying as an investor, collectibles are very difficult and highly speculative, and the friction makes them even less attractive. I disagree that buying old, consistent collectibles cannot themselves be speculative - if you wait for the right moment they can make significant returns. But the downside is significantly reduced if you restrict your investments to something that has been consistently valuable across the longterm.

If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
by Gimpei | 2025-09-09 04:13:53+00:00
This is not true. Look at median household income in FRED. It is unequivocally up for everyone across the board.

Inequality has increased but it’s no longer clear that it’s as severe an increase as Piketty and Saez once argued. So, yes, things could certainly be much better. The US could, for example, benefit from a more progressive taxation and a stronger social safety net. But at the same time, we aren’t all headed to hell.
by nneonneo | 2025-09-09 04:15:46+00:00
Microsoft seems to have known that they could ram basically anything through a standards body, so they presumably didn't bother to actually try and simplify the standard. Instead, it's basically an XML serialization of their older binary formats, complete with all of the quirks and bugs that have to be emulated for 100% compatibility.

To be fair, we're talking about a product line with over 35 years of history here. Cruft in the format builds up but can never be removed, so long as you commit to strong backwards compatibility - which Microsoft has always done.

Fun trivia: many of the old binary formats use a meta-format called OLE2 (Object Linking and Embedding). The file format is a FAT12 filesystem packed into a single file, with a FAT filesystem chain, file blocks aligned to a specific power-of-two size, etc. This made saving files very fast, but raised the possibility of internal fragmentation (where individual sub-files are scattered over many non-contiguous blocks); hence, users were recommended to "Save As..." periodically for large/complex files to optimize the internal storage.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-09-09 04:17:04+00:00
My broader point is not about any one part or process, but rather that every big mass-market technology that dies out in favor of something new (hard drives, film cameras, casette tapes, incandescent lights, vacuum tubes, etc) also takes down dozens of niche industries that had sprung up around that technology's economies of scale, and which are not economical to continue when it winds down. While the original product might be obsolete, these smaller industries are often producing something completely different and just happen to be sharing some element of the supply chain, but they're not big enough to sustain that supply chain on their own. Sometimes they might be able to substitute something else at a small loss, sometimes they can purchase the last remaining inventory of the closing factories and survive on that for a decade or two, but there are cases where a technology just disappears, never to be recreated.

Written documentation almost never captures the complete details needed to produce a complex technology, and outside of extremely vertically-integrated industries, such documentation would rarely exist in one place anyway. You're lucky enough to find detailed documentation from the source company that makes the sensor/widget, but even so a document that opens with "step 1: purchase alloy #755-D from Westchester Special Metals, hydrogen annealed" is not much help if Westchester Special Metals went out of business 60 years ago, and had the usual number of trade secrets.
by neilv | 2025-09-09 04:17:27+00:00
> No adblocker detected. Consider using an extension like uBlock Origin to save time and bandwidth.

And attention and privacy.

This notice is a great idea.

I might remove the "like" from the notice, since "uBlock Origin" is good, but some others are questionable or even outright malware.

BTW, note that the `ublockorigin.com` Web site that is linked to isn't by Raymond Hill, leader of uBlock Origin. It looks well-intended, and is nicely polished UX, but good practice would be to be careful (since it doesn't appear to be under Hill's control, and is an additional point of potential compromise in what would be very valuable malware). Hill seems to operate from <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock>. One link that isn't too bad to view <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md>. Another that isn't great but OK is <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki>.
by chamomeal | 2025-09-09 04:18:16+00:00
Damn it sucks that instagram is the defacto second internet. My gf finds so much cool stuff on IG. Local bands post their show dates, a brewery in my neighborhood posts their hours (it’s just a husband and wife, and their hours are whenever-I-feel-like-it). I don’t have instagram, so I’m just totally in the dark on all that stuff.

And I get it. Not everybody is going to make a website or blog or whatever. But it totally sucks that everybody and their dog is on instagram and it’s like this walled garden club that you just can’t access if you don’t want to support Facebook. The internet is cool! Why did we make it suck!!

I wonder if the instagram API lets you download enough data to make a public mirror of a user’s posts. It’d be cool to make a service that does something like that. Help people break their instagram dependency. Not that any meaningful amount of people would care to use it lol
by eigencoder | 2025-09-09 04:18:25+00:00
I've been doing what the author did for about a year using Configurator. I have the browser blocked completely. I found that I could still get around it by sending messages to myself in apps like Messenger and using the built-in browser.

So I ended up using an allow list for internet traffic with nothing allowed, which stopped that. What do you find you need the browser for?
by amluto | 2025-09-09 04:19:48+00:00
I’m waiting for owners to discover water damage in the equipment under the hood liner: Cybertruck’s lack a scuttle/cowl/gutter [0] to collect and divert water from the bottom of the windshield. Basically every car ever has one, except the Cybertruck. This isn’t a QC problem — it’s just poor design.

[0] I’m not sure anyone agrees what it’s called.
by ozb | 2025-09-09 04:20:18+00:00
I'm not an expert/lawyer, but this does seem to indicate that the situation is a bit more complicated than either "pernicious myth" or "probably illegal" in general (but much closer to toast0's understanding); my interpretation is that you can either avoid an 80% threshold of "disparate impact" or you can in theory formally validate that a particular test measures/predicts performance at a particular job; that all sounds compatible with "companies do it in the open, but very few, and you can easily get in trouble for doing it wrong" https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/1607.15
by dfxm12 | 2025-09-09 04:21:17+00:00
Collectors are different from speculators or investors. Collectors want something for personal reasons, whatever they are.

Speculators are just trying to buy low and sell high. Investing has overlap with speculating, but it's generally more long term.

I think this is important to understand when considering buying collectables. You have to know the different types of people you're bidding against, whether it's an out of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
by theologic | 2025-09-09 04:21:22+00:00
Hinton's citations is 5x what Russell has. There's a good reason why he's won both the Turing and the Nobel Prize. He is just an incredible researcher. I would make the argument that sometimes when you're an incredibly bright, talented person in terms of understanding problems that many other people simply are incapable of following, you're not the right person to be setting expectations how fast a product may ramp into mainstream society.

Russell is much more measured in his statements and much more policy driven.

In my mind you need to listen to both and try to figure out where they're coming from.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-09 04:21:33+00:00
Some myths just won't die.

OOXML is complex because it has to be. It has to losslessly round trip through an open format every single feature of Office. That's a lot of features.

Yes, it's complex. Should Microsoft have cut features of Office just to make OOXML simpler? That's ridiculous. What about users who relied on those cut features?

It was fair to ask Microsoft to open the file format. It wasn't fair to expect them to cut features and compatibility. The complaints about complexity from RMS and others represent outsiders seeing the sausage factory and realizing that the sausage making is complicated and needs a lot of moving parts. Maybe life wasn't as simple as the Slashdot "Micro$oft" narrative would suggest. Maybe the complexity of the product was downstream of the shit ton of complexity and sweat and thought that had gone into it.

But admitting that would have been hard. Easier to come up with conspiracy theories.
by giardini | 2025-09-09 04:22:50+00:00
I wouldn't be too hard on Hinton. Researchers in image processing, geophysics and medicine have been saying the same thing since at least the early 1980's. There was always something coming that was just over the next hill that would take the human out of the loop. That special something always evaporated with time. I suppose it did keep funding coming in.
by mergy | 2025-09-09 04:23:15+00:00
Okay - that is too extreme of a "bubble" definition for me. False dilemma.

So, then, I guess, nothing is a bubble for you. For me, a more reasonable definition is a large build-up of capital that, at some point, snaps or pops, then sits at a level much lower than the original.

If you take something like that approach of the "bubble" then you can have a more charitable discussion. The AI bubble discussion then is about if the current levels of investment and capital being dumped into AI will stay at the same levels or have a more dramatic dip to be more of the future run-rate, then you can see how people see the parallels of other "bubbles" and actually have more of a discussion I think.

My sense is most view this concept of the "bubble" as the assumption.