MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gigachad | 2025-09-29 23:10:31+00:00
>This will be very challenging for inexperienced programmers.

I'm feeling this for art. AI generated art still has obvious issues, but it produces works much better than a beginner. You also can't meaningfully reprompt or beat the model in to fixing the issues. So seemingly the only way to get actually good art is to grind through hundreds of hours of getting worse results than you could generate in seconds until you beat the models.

How many people are going to push through the painful unsatisfying work to eventually become experienced now.
by cal85 | 2025-09-29 23:10:38+00:00
The difference is that social media now exists. The fear of an embarrassing or compromising moment causing social embarrassment at an unlimited scale or affecting future employment prospects indefinitely is not based on nothing - we have all seen examples of this. Even an unlikely scenario is worth considering if the stakes are that high.

This situation compounded very gradually. In the late 90s, it was extremely common for young people to make each other laugh by doing dumb things in public (sometimes knowingly on camera) that they’d never expect to be seen by a wide audience. Then in the early 00s, the experience of going a little viral (just within your college Facebook community, before the word ‘viral’ was a thing) was actually pretty common and this started to make people just a little more guarded about being photographed. So those who got filmed doing something drunk/dumb would be more likely to go more viral, as it was now a rarer sight. And so on. It’s a recursive effect that made us all duller and more image-conscious and anxious in public. This process took a couple of decades to end up where we are now. It’s not just some new modern prissiness.
by ggm | 2025-09-29 23:11:20+00:00
If you can adb unlock, and it's not a closed box, then people can run F-Droid and install apps. Which means they can run independent path code without "sideload" in the apk download-and-install-by-hand sense. I guess for google, F-Droid IS sideloading.

If you unlock and you cannot run google wallet or your banking app, it's a closed box and the EU anti-monopoly lawsuit may still apply on this. But, if they can make a "trust" story run about LEA access to lawful decode or something, this might go away.

I'd say that the projections about fuschia and the like have turned out to be less interesting than some people hoped: but having two OS in the public eye (3 or more if you include Android TV and whatever closed systems run on Nest and Chromecast) was always a mistake.

I can live inside termux but there are things termux struggles to do, (like tcpdump maybe? and interacting simply with data downloaded from outside termux because of sandbox rules), which I very much would want.

I do not like how Android interacts with removable storage. It's an anti-pattern.
by int_19h | 2025-09-29 23:11:42+00:00
The modern smartphone was predicted with considerable accuracy in a 1965 sci-fi story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_the_Pussyfoot#Joyma...

"The remote-access computer transponder called the "joymaker" is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker."

Just about the only thing today that's meaningfully different from the novel is that our devices are smaller and have screens instead of using voice as the primary input/output method. Well, and they don't have a "medical" module that can dispense drugs (yet?).

Interestingly enough, in the setting of that book, possession of a joymaker is a marker of good standing, and lack of one (e.g. because one cannot afford to pay for service) basically makes one homeless and a target for all kinds of nastiness including from the cops.
Show HN: We ran a F{AI}R hackathon
by seism | 2025-09-29 23:12:24+00:00
Keen to hear your feedback to a series of events we just ran in support of the launch of a sovereign AI platform, thoughts on the future of civic hacktivism, links to your own posts. In my blog I do some armchair philisophising (Apertus-enhanced, of course) before parsing the results from each of a dozen challenges. See https://log.alets.ch/111/ or view the source data at https://siliconlovefield.bb.dribdat.cc/
by paul_manias | 2025-09-29 23:13:26+00:00
Same experience here. In the last week I've successfully managed to build a complete C++20 XPath 1.0 parser with Codex, and am now onto supporting XPath 2.0. Codex has been nailing it time and again - the only caveat is that I have to use their cloud version as local execution is buggy.

Sonnet on the other hand gets tripped up constantly due to the complexity. I'm not seeing the improvement I was hoping for with 4.5, and it's just given up on attempting to implement support for date-time functionality. Codex has nailed the same task, yet Anthropic claim OpenAI have the inferior product?

I'm pretty sad about this as I'm gunning for Anthropic and would have loved to see them at least match Codex with this new release. If OpenAI stays on this course then Claude Code is toast without an important breakthrough. It doesn't help that they're also the more expensive product and have service quality issues pushing people to quit the platform.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 23:13:28+00:00
> It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.

None of this is true.

Competitors save no R&D at all because these chips are custom to Apple.

The schematic doesn't show routing of the PCB. It shows logical connections between components. The routing is not represented.

Decoupling capacitor placement is also chip specific so it does not translate to other vendors. At this level of PCB design the board is simulated in very expensive software to determine how the power distribution network performs.

> but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.

Not in the slightest. This shows logical connections between Apple specific parts. There are no portable industry secrets hidden in this document.
by cperciva | 2025-09-29 23:14:00+00:00
Target is 2025-12-02 00:00 UTC.

Given that this is a major release, there are fairly wide error bars on that; it could be as much as 3 weeks earlier if the first release candidate turns out to be perfect, and of course it could be later if things go badly (but I very much hope to get it out by the end of 2025).
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-29 23:14:30+00:00
Yeah, that's why I specified mass-market products as a target for such a regulation. The big guns certainly don't have anything that cloners could want to use, their "secret sauce" is in the display technology (for TVs) and their userspace applications (for phones) and neither would be exposed by an extensive right-to-repair legislation.

Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
by kibwen | 2025-09-29 23:15:04+00:00
Rust shows that closures don't require automatic memory management, unless you consider Rust's static ownership analysis to be "automatic memory management", which I suppose you could, but it's all at compile-time, not runtime. Of course, it's fair if he doesn't want his language to have an ownership system, but ownership systems honestly aren't very complex, they're just different.
by ojosilva | 2025-09-29 23:15:09+00:00
Comments in code are instant technical debt. They need to be maintained alongside the code, so you are *programming" twice. Avoid comments, except when they really explain some obscure, incomprehensible section of code or to prevent explorers from the future getting smacked on the face twice by the same stick. I find myself using the latter often to tell future agents what not to do in the next few lines.
by txrx0000 | 2025-09-29 23:15:22+00:00
True. The description encodes very little about the actual sensory experience besides its relationship to similar experiences (bitterness, crunchiness, etc) and how to retrieve the memories of those experiences. It probably contains a lot more information about the brain's memory retrieval and pattern relating circuits than the sensory processing circuits.

Text is probably not good enough for recovering the circuits responsible for awareness of the external environment, so I'll concede that you and ijk's claims are correct in a limited sense: LLMs don't know what chocolate tastes like. Multimodal LLMs probably don't know either because we don't have a dataset for taste, but they might know what chocolate looks and sounds like when you bite into it.

My original point still stands: it may be recovering the mental state of a person describing the taste of chocolate. If we cut off a human brain from all sensory organs, does that brain which receives no sensory input have an internal stream of consciousness? Perhaps the LLM has recovered the circuits responsible for this thought stream while missing the rest of the brain and the nervous system. That would explain why first-person chain-of-thought works better than direct prediction.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-29 23:15:25+00:00
> A July Gallup poll found that only 9% of Americans aged 18-34 support Israel’s military action in Gaza.

What if we don't want to be propagandized to. I want to opt-out of being the target of someone trying to convince me that genocide is ok or that this isn't a genocide. I feel like I'd be a worse person if someone changed my mind on the topic.
by int_19h | 2025-09-29 23:15:29+00:00
> Russia: Here is my phone. Yes,it's google pixel with GrapheneOS (it's more secure - Mother Russia is danger so everyone must be vigilant! I banking app via RuStore).

Mother Russia: we'll take care about security, comrade, you just shut up and use a phone from this here list of approved models. And GrapheneOS? squinting suspiciously that's what extremists use to watch gay pornography; are you an extremist, then? No? Let's see if officer Rubber Hosesky here believes you...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-29 23:17:38+00:00
Please don’t confuse all of humanity with the capital market paperclip maximizers. Outside of a few developed countries, there are no stock or equities markets.

If you look at the US capital markets, the number of public companies has been trending down over time and the bottom 90% of the S&P500 hasn’t seen any growth since 2022.

We’re still going to live great lives with meaning and purpose as the relevance of the capital markets declines and we can decouple from it, and those who keep squeezing it for suboptimal purposes (relevant due to the harm caused from said squeezing).

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jamie-dimon-number-u-public-1...

> JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon raised this issue in his annual letter a couple of weeks ago. In the mid-1990s, there were nearly 8,000 public companies listed in the U.S. Today, there are half as many, and at the current rate, we’ll see that number halved again by 2044. “The total should have grown dramatically, not shrunk,” Dimon wrote.
by iagooar | 2025-09-29 23:18:00+00:00
Oh and I agree so much. I just shared a quick first observation in a real-world testing scenario (BTW re-ran Sonnet 4.5 with the same prompt, not much changed). I just keep seeing how LLM providers keep optimizing for benchmarks, but then I cannot reproduce their results in my projects.

I will keep trying, because Claude 4 generally is a very strong line of models. Anthropic has been on the AI coding throne for months before OpenAI with GPT-5 and Codex CLI (and now GPT-5-Codex) has dethroned them.

And sure I do want to keep them competing to make each other even better.
by Agraillo | 2025-09-29 23:18:13+00:00
> ... because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on

Why stop just here? It's AI, right? So it’s all about prediction - next token, next action, it doesn’t matter. Let’s turn Minority Report the movie into reality: when you’re angry at your boss while commuting home, we will watch, predict and prevent your future bad behavior.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 23:18:25+00:00
It's far more complicated than that. You are not going to replace an iPhone PMIC with a microcontroller and some bodge wires. Even if you could nail all of the logic, the bodge wires alone would be an order of magnitude more loop inductance than the tightly designed PCB and it just would not work.

The PMIC for a modern SoC is tightly integrated with the SoC. It handles power management, supply sequencing and timing, transitions between power states, standby modes, battery charging, and communication with the SoC. There is digital communication between the SoC and the PMIC to control all of this.

This isn't something you kludge together with a microcontroller and some off the shelf parts.
by biomcgary | 2025-09-29 23:19:35+00:00
Available data makes causality hard to get right. This paper is trying to get around known constraints with observational data (e.g., some people stop drinking when they start having noticeable problems). Mendelian randomization tries to infer how much a person drinks from their genetic variants. However, the genetic tendency to drink might be associated with the same variants related to dementia. The summary doesn't make it clear if this was addressed.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-09-29 23:19:38+00:00
Something else to add is mathematical discovery. There is a team that is very close to solving the Navier-Stokes Millenium Prize problem: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/discovering-new-soluti...

The cynists will comment that I've just been sucked in by the PR. However, I know this team and have been using these techniques for other problems. I know they are so close to a computationally-assisted proof of counterexample that it is virtually inevitable at this point. If they don't do it, I'm pretty sure I could take a handful of people and a few years and do it myself. Mostly a lot of interval arithmetic with a final application of Schauder that remains; tedious and time-consuming, but not overly challenging compared to the parts already done.
by borroka | 2025-09-29 23:19:56+00:00
I don't think that the "I drink wine because it is healthy", is the main driver of people's drinking--not even the fifth. After all, I have yet to see a sober person picking up drinking wine because it is good for their health. Let's have a sober conversation on this: I drink a glass or half a glass of wine most nights because I like it.
by switknee | 2025-09-29 23:20:47+00:00
Do you seriously believe that hasn't been genericized? Computer people talk about SSH all the time and usually mean openSSH. When they're not talking about openSSH the next most likely is dropbear on embedded hardware. Nobody ever talks about SSH Communications Security except in the context of the trademark registered in the previous century. It's cool that they were the first to develop the protocol, but they're not relevant today and have no right to harass newer projects that people actually use.
by freetime2 | 2025-09-29 23:20:57+00:00
> the only two clear objectives that i can identify are to avoid discomfort unless its deliberate discomfort and to become rich just to prove to myself that i can

IMO any fulfilling goal needs to be about more than just yourself. Not just avoiding discomfort for yourself, but also providing stability for a family (note: not saying this needs to be a "traditional" family). And in business the goal should be to contribute positively to your community, which can include seemingly mundane things like producing things of value, establishing trust-based relationships, mentoring others, providing employment opportunities, etc.

I also don't think the goal of early retirement should just be to quit and do nothing - I think that's actually quite unhealthy. But rather to free up time to focus on the things that are most important to you. Self improvement, health, family, charitable causes and other causes that are important to you, and of course some leisure time as well.

I think by those measures, Kurt Vonnegut was a very successful person. I don't know that always translated into happiness, though. Although I think he was about as happy as he could be - which is the most we can ask for.
by brianpan | 2025-09-29 23:21:17+00:00
Everything in moderation is a strategy to minimize risks with limited information.

When you have information, you probably wouldn't say "cigarettes in moderation". You'd say "avoid smoking" as much as possible. It looks like alcohol is headed in that direction.

You are welcomed to wait for more data, or to choose to continue to drink (to your chosen level of "in moderation") with or without more data. But the guidelines are probably going to end up being "avoid drinking alcohol".
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 23:21:21+00:00
> Schematics cannot be copyrighted

Schematics are absolutely copyrighted.

Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic.

However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk.

In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
by holtkam2 | 2025-09-29 23:22:12+00:00
Trust me, these “vibe coding” tools don’t speed up productivity much in the real world. At the end of the day these systems need to be maintained by humans and humans are the ones held accountable when stuff breaks. That means humans need to understand how the systems (code, infrastructure, etc) work. You can automate the code, even some decisionmaking about how the program should be organized, but you can’t automate the process of having a human develop their mental model of how & why the system works. That was always the bottleneck and still is to this day.

When everyone else has given up on software dev as a career path, you’ll be one of the few who the CEO can call upon to explain why X or Y broke, and fix it. That will make you insanely valuable.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-29 23:22:17+00:00
I love how Derek centers on (and summarizes) Jay Van Bavel's characteristics of online discourse, and the four "Dark Laws" he comes out with:

> 1) Negativity bias increases clicks. 2) Extreme opinions increase sharing. 3) Out-group animosity increases engagement. 4) Moral-emotional language goes viral.

These read as all to familiar, strikes me as having all the ingredients to spiral us down into the nightmare of Sagan's Demon Haunted World. Which has been a lovely dark thread going on today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404373

It feels like we're deep in the whirlpool of such a radically non-empathetic zero-sum dis-reality based thinking.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-29 23:22:34+00:00
Churchill's role in expanding the role of oil was in fact profound. It's another fact I'd learned in Yergin's The Prize (mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

Britain was a naval power, and in the early 20th century was rich in several factors that served as a basis for that, including iron and coal, as well as access (through trade) to the essentials of munitions manufacture (saltpetre, an ingredient in gunpowder and other propellants, was abundant in India).

But coal-fired ships were cumbersome to manage: solid coal had to be physically handled when fueling ships initially, in re-bunkering coal as it was consumed in transit, and of course, being shoveled into the boilers themselves.

Petroleum, by contrast, flowed through pipes, by gravity or with the assistance of pumps. Fueling, bunkering, and operational procedures were streamlined remarkably. Ships also gained vastly greater performance flexibility: direct-combustion engines (diesel or turbine) could be powered up or down in seconds, rather than the many minutes or hours to increase steam-based output. And of course petroleum enabled the two great 20th century advances in naval power: submarines and aircraft, of which the technological history of coal-fired variants is brief.

(Not non-existant, however. The British Navy deployed K-Class submarines, coal powered, in WWI, and the Germans experimented with a coal-dust burning airplane in WWII, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_K-class_submarine> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lippisch_P.13a>.)

Britain's problem in 1913 however was that the country had no domestic oil production capacity. (The North Sea oil fields wouldn't be proven and developed until the 1960s.) Switching from (domestic) coal to (foreign) oil was a tremendous gamble, and required sea-lane control to the Middle East, as well as control of the Suez Canal for greatly-reduced shipping costs.

The story of oil in both World Wars is probably the most fascinating aspect of Yergin's book. WWI in particular started with cavalry charges and horsecarts, and ended with tanks, submarines, and bombers. During WWII, a critical element in the Allied invasion of mainland Europe was the establishment of an oil pipeline, in Operation Pluto, initially consisting of a single two inch diameter cross-channel pipe. Through those two inches flowed the material which made mechanised invasion possible.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pluto>

(Appropriation of German "Jerry Cans" --- Wehrmacht-Einheitskanister to its creators --- was also a huge strategic gain. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan>)
by TheCleric | 2025-09-29 23:22:52+00:00
I normally would wholeheartedly agree with you on this, but in this situation it seems to be a bit ironic that his project is a derivative of another project, and they unilaterally changed the code they forked under the MIT license to AGPL.

So while moral != legal. In this case I find it both legal and morally a bit of just desserts.
by noahrflynn | 2025-09-29 23:22:59+00:00
I've been working on writing two appendix sections on knowledge distillation and reinforcement learning for Machine Learning for Drug Discovery [1], which were initiated as tangents to expand coverage of material from a few earlier chapters. I hope to also write these appendix sections up as freely available articles (at least in a condensed form). Thankfully, I'll be able to finish the knowledge distillation section this month but, unfortunately, I need to pivot to finishing out chapter 11 to stay on schedule for full publication.

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/machine-learning-for-drug-disc...