MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-09-29 15:31:23+00:00
Eh, not so sure about any of this. There's also the possibility that math gets so easy that AI can figure out proofs of just about anything we could think to ask, in milliseconds, for a penny. In such a case, there's really no need that I can think of for university math departments; math as a discipline would be relegated to hobbyists, and that'd likely trickle down through pure science and engineering as well.

Then as far as king makers and economies, I don't think AI would have as drastic an effect as all that. The real world is messy and there are too many unknowns to control for. A super-AI can be useful if you want to be king, but it's not going to make anyone's ascension unassailable. Nash equilibria are probabilistic, so all a super AI can do is increase your odds.

So if we assume the king thing isn't going to happen, then what? My guess is that the world keeps on moving in roughly the same way it would without AI. AI will be just another resource, and sure it may disrupt some industries, but generally we'll adapt. Competition will still require hiring of people to do the things that AI can't, and if somehow that still leads to large declines in employment, then reasonable democracies will enact programs that accommodate for that. Given the efficiencies that AI creates, such programs should be feasible.

It's plausible that some democracies could fail to establish such protections and become oligarchies or serfdoms, but it seems unlikely to be widespread. Like I said, AI can't really be a kingmaker, so states that fail like this would likely either be temporary or lead to a revolution (or series of them) that eventually re-establishes a more robust democracy.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-29 15:31:25+00:00
Oh... this makes things much clearer to me actually. The issue is that you don't want apps that impersonate other apps showing up. For example, if someone put an app in another market that could sideload to impersonate Facebook's intents and do evil-maid type things. In the new system it would become very difficult to install a fake Facebook that is able to convince other apps that it is in fact Facebook's own app. Google's announcement can be seen as them operating essentially like DNS for app ids and intents and making things safer for a multi-app-store universe.

For example, there is an annoyance that happens sometimes with apps that are distributed in both F-Droid and Play Store related to updates. F-Droid and Play Store will think they both can update the app (they have the same tld.what.ever identifier) but the signing keys only match the store they were installed from. I think F-Droid is now a bit more careful about this and only tries ones it has specifically installed. This is different... but somewhat related.

F-Droid in general is a model good actor as far third-party app stores go, but from the perspective that malicious app stores might exist you would want to try and isolate apps from each other (and prevent unauthorized re-distribution of tampered versions etc). I think what Google is doing forces apps in each store to be cleanly namespaced from each other and prevent collisions (accidental or otherwise). This lets each app store tend and be responsible for its own walled garden.
by ben_w | 2025-09-29 15:31:35+00:00
> Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.

This part I agree with, but is also very easy to fix (use a very old UI system, e.g. direct port of Apple's HyperCard).

On the hardware front, the only thing Trek Padds had that real life can't really do is that Trek's power cells had an energy density on par with "let's say an atomic battery had a way to dial the decay rate up and down at will and were not also a horrifying source of neutron radiation".
by pxoe | 2025-09-29 15:31:36+00:00
This just sounds like two different sets of standards, although for two different platforms, but one is getting goalposts shifted to 'but flashing is scary and nobody does it and also what if other phone makers spy on people' (just spreading FUD, really), while the other gets a pass pretty much on every one of those things while blindly buying into privacy marketing. Kinda reminds me of those lawsuits about app stores on ios and android that were running in parallel, where ios also kinda got a pass pretty much just because it's more locked down.

While regular people probably aren't going to mess with custom roms on android and it's kind of self-selecting situation there, they very much might pick a Samsung phone, or Motorola phone, or some other phone, that will have different flavors of android, and may have some meaningful differences and will have some amount of control over them that phone makers have be spread out between their manufacturer and not just google.

Some people also aren't really gonna be any less susceptible to scams that aren't tied to app stores or apps at all. Might as well lock down the browser and phone app then as well.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-29 15:31:42+00:00
I guess I should clarify that I want a broker, not unsolicited ads.

If LLMs can become true brokers, that would be great, but the pressure to corrupt would be tremendous.

Not sure if we’ll ever get there, though. I have hope. The broker model is centuries old. It’s really a solved problem. The issue is that the current generation is notoriously bad at learning from history.
by NBKMistik | 2025-09-29 15:32:31+00:00
Hey Evan,

I wanted to clear up some confusion around FrontWars. The project isn’t part of 3AM Experiences — it’s something I helped a developer friend, Phoenix, get started with. He’s been a big fan of Terratorial and wanted to make something in a similar style.

When we began, we forked OpenFront under the licenses it was released with (MIT and GPLv3 at the time). The fork has always been public. The only mistake on our end was that it wasn’t linked on the game site at first — as soon as this was pointed out, we corrected it and added proper attribution and license details.

Since then, Phoenix has also been working on writing a new client from scratch in C++ that will use the MIT-licensed backend — this will eventually replace the existing frontend entirely.

From the outside it may look like a simple fork, but the plan has always been to evolve the project in its own direction. The initial release was put out quickly because others were also forking, and we wanted to get something playable online as a foundation.

I’d honestly love to just resolve this directly with you in DMs on Discord. But since legal counsel has already been involved on your side, it’s difficult for me to continue informal conversations — everything has to go through lawyers now.

We’re open to feedback and want to handle this respectfully — our goal is to build something new while fully complying with the terms of the open-source licenses.
by cardanome | 2025-09-29 15:32:52+00:00
Thank you, your post cured my depression. (Sarcasm)

This is pure magical thinking. There are many reasons to be not happy. Being in pain, having lost a loved one, not having your physical needs met and well simply having depression or a myriad of other problems.

And people shouldn't be happy with all circumstances. It is not healthy to be happy all the time. Sometimes accepting the negative emotions is important for growth.
by jlarocco | 2025-09-29 15:33:21+00:00
This is why I hate software engineering as a profession.

You're going to write the "stupid code" to get things out the door, get promoted and move on to another job, and then some future engineer has to come along and fix the mess you made.

But management and the rest of the org won't understand why those future engineers are having such a hard time, why there's so much tech debt, and why any substantial improvements require major rework and refactoring.

So the people writing the stupid code get promoted and look good, but the people who have to deal with the mess end up looking bad.
by fckgw | 2025-09-29 15:33:40+00:00
It's not just about production, it's also about reducing maintenance costs (don't collect snow, less dust build up on panels) and land usage. If you can take that 77% average, but maybe stick a couple more panels on land to reach your energy goals in an overall smaller footprint with less maintenance work, then maybe it's a good solution to specific problems.
by pixl97 | 2025-09-29 15:34:21+00:00
Yea, and in this case unless the property owner says no filming said person would have no legs to stand on.

In most 'fun' events like this with random members of the public said venue has a monetary interest in ensuring people can film in the vast majority of the cases. People go there to have fun, and sharing videos of said fun is but one more way to ensure they get future customers.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-29 15:35:02+00:00
> Most people's threat model doesn't include three-letter-agencies reading their secure enclave.

Maybe it should. I'm not convinced that we're automatically done for if the NSA, CIA or whatever starts coming after us. That sort of demoralization is probably part of their psychological warfare.

The US government is constantly lamenting the fact cryptography has become widespread and regularly attempts to straight up outlaw it. Cryptography is subversive: it has the power to defeat police, judges, spies, governments, militaries. The simple act of encrypting web traffic shifted the landscape to the point governments are stockpiling vulnerabilites to get around the cryptography. The next step is to systematically eliminate these vulnerabilities so that the cryptography cannot be worked around.
by ericwood | 2025-09-29 15:36:09+00:00
This is exactly how I feel; I'd love a switch that performs like the modern apple keyboards. Anytime I've dipped my toe into mechanical keyboard waters I've lost speed and accuracy, even after weeks of practice. The extra key travel felt like it gave me more fatigue, even with low profile switches. Whenever I've researched alternatives I get the sense I'm in the minority, though, and most mechanical keyboard users are after a very different feel. It's a huge shame, because I'd love to move to something with a split for better shoulder/arm positioning.
by tmoertel | 2025-09-29 15:36:16+00:00
On 6502-based systems the available memory was often less than 64 KiB, the maximum addressable by the processor directly. Still, you could squeeze a lot into that small amount of you were clever. For example, Steve Wozniak wrote in BYTE magazine about computing e to over 100K places on an Apple 2:

> I first calculated e to 47 K bytes of precision in January 1978. The program ran for 4.5 days, and the binary result was saved on cassette tape. Because I had no way of detecting lost-bit errors on the Apple (16 K-byte dynamic memory circuits were new items back then), a second result, matching the first, was required. Only then would I have enough confidence in the binary result to print it in decimal. Before I could rerun the 4.5 day program successfully, other projects at Apple, principally the floppy-disk controller, forced me to deposit the project in the bottom drawer. This article, already begun, was postponed along with it. Two years later, in March 1980, I pulled the e project out of the drawer and reran it, obtaining the same results. As usual (for some of us), writing the magazine article consumed more time than that spent meeting the technical challenges.

See page 392 of https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-06.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-29 15:36:22+00:00
> As far as the abstraction, when does it get to a point the compiler can't undo the abstraction?

The early 8-bit systems were so constrained in everything from memory to registers, instruction set, and clock speed, that using a high level language wasn't an option if you were trying to optimize performance or squeeze a lot of functionality into available memory. An 8-bit system would have a 64KB address space, but maybe only 16-32KB of RAM, with the rest used by the "OS" and mapped to the display, etc.

The 6502 was especially impoverished, having only three 8-bit registers and a very minimalistic instruction set. Writing performant software for it depended heavily on using "zero-page" memory (special addressing mode to access 1st 256 bytes of memory) to hold variables, rather than passing stack based parameters to functions, etc. It was really a completely different style of programming and mindset to using a high level language - not about language abstraction, but a painful awareness of the bare metal you were running on all the time.
by LexiMax | 2025-09-29 15:36:47+00:00
I suppose I am fortunate that I don't know anybody who is that far gone that cares deeply about me.

However, the people I use this trick on aren't strangers. They are regular acquaintances that have conspiratorial views, but think I am one of the "good" ones. When these people tell me things like it's just a difference of opinion, you can tell that they derive strength and satisfaction from their ignorance.

My goal isn't to convince them, it's to stop them from reaching into their bag of conspiracy theories when talking to me. In that, it has been wildly successful.
by iamnothere | 2025-09-29 15:36:59+00:00
> So said stalker would have to run facial recognition software on every image on the internet to find the handful that might incidentally contain their victim?

Stalkers often have knowledge of the victim’s friends and associates and have no problem combing through their social media looking for photos.

> Someone that determined would just hire or use the methods of a PI, which have long been effective at finding people who don’t want to be found.

PIs will not do work for people without a legitimate purpose, as they could lose their license. Stalkers with ill intent will also be leaving a paper trail if they hire a PI. And non-PIs may be able to use some PI methods, but they won’t be able to access the full range of PI tools or PI relationships.
by jtbaker | 2025-09-29 15:37:18+00:00
Yeah, I've tinkered with it when it first rolled out. The dev experience and performance left a lot to be desired. Poor visibility on the status of containers, weird phantom bugs, having to learn new platform idiosyncrasies. Just embrace k8s. Just roll it up into a wrapper that runs on GCP or whatever under the hood that would allow people that need more control over the infra to adopt the platform.
by cardanome | 2025-09-29 15:37:47+00:00
CBT and mindfulness can help with SOME problems. It is great when it does but it also can work less well or even harmful for other problems. Especially people that are prone to rumination don't benefit much from it, they need the opposite of mindfulness.

The unhinged part was to imply that people can just choose to be happy under any circumstance which is obviously magical thinking.
by mccoyb | 2025-09-29 15:38:23+00:00
Anecdotally: I tried hook and crook to get the best flagship model at the time (Opus) to help with technical writing for a submission.

First, these models are not good at technical writing at all. They have no sense of the weight of a single sentence, they just love to blather.

Second, they can't keep the core technical story consistent throughout their completions. In other words, they can't "keep the main thing the main thing".

I had an early draft with AI writing, but by the time we submitted our work -- there was not a single piece of AI writing in the paper. And not without trying, I really did some iterations on trying to carefully craft context, give them a sense of the world model in which they needed to evaluate their additions, yada yada.

For clear and concise technical communication, it's a waste of time right now.
by mchusma | 2025-09-29 15:38:28+00:00
I would expect this to be correlated to not having kids as well. Anecdotally the healthiest elderly I know are deeply involved in raising grandkids/great grandkids, and those relatives without kids I've lost early.

I've heard of some efforts to pair retirement homes and preschools in some way, to benefit both, and I'd love to see that idea work in some way. I expect it to have many liability challenges but would be so good for both parties.
by floatrock | 2025-09-29 15:39:06+00:00
Article doesn't give a whole lot of context, but there's two key innovations here:

1. Bi-facial solar panels: can take in sunlight from either end

2. Mounting bi-facials vertically so they can take in sunlight from both directions.

I've been hearing experiments about these for a few years now. There's three main benefits to the vertical arrangement that could, given certain situations, make it more economically valuable:

1. In places with high-albedo snowy winters, this arrangement can boost winter production, which if you have snow, tends to be the energy-heavy time of year.

2. Keeps panels cooler. Panels lose efficiency when they get hot, and by having them vertical, they can run cooler. Losses in less direct sunlight are somewhat offset by efficiency gains from cooler operations.

3. More power during shoulder periods (anti-duck-curve). Especially in places like California that have high solar penetration, prices for excess energy are minimal during peak solar activity. Vertical arrangements give more power in the morning and evening, which is when traditional fields are just ramping up or ramping down. Thus, even if you're making less power overall, you can be making more valuable power by having more production during these ramp-up/ramp-down periods.

Unclear how much of an effect these counter-acting forces actually add, but I understand solar developers are looking into these arrangements.
by mnky9800n | 2025-09-29 15:39:12+00:00
I think the AI acts like that shitty coworker that is super smart but never tells you what they are thinking so they are likely capable of doing whatever you want them to do but working on a team is asking too much and they are apparently not capable of doing that. Because AI promises that you can interact with it like it is human because of it's chat capabilities but it never ever does something like, "hey, i don't understand this part, can you tell me more of what you mean here?"
by wang_li | 2025-09-29 15:39:31+00:00
>...but me walking down a street with a handful of people on it should not lead me to expect...

You shouldn't have an expectation either way. If anything, the expectation that you will not be recorded is more of a violation of the social contract that the reverse. It's a public space that can be used for many purposes. If the effect on bystanders is minimal then attempting to exclude an activity is wrong. Can we say "I don't want you to see me, so look away whenever I am out." "I don't want to wait in traffic so everyone else has to pull over and clear the road when I am driving." "I didn't consent to this smell, so this restaurant has to turn off their stoves and ovens hours before I will be coming by."

Reality is that you can't exclude others if they aren't doing something that excludes you.
by albrewer | 2025-09-29 15:39:45+00:00
Define a protocol[0] that declares it implements `__getitem__` and type annotate with that protocol. Whatever properties are needed inside the function can be described in other protocols.

These are similar to interfaces in C# or traits in Rust - you describe what the parameter _does_ instead of what it _is_.

[0]: https://typing.python.org/en/latest/spec/protocol.html
by ARandomerDude | 2025-09-29 15:39:47+00:00
I've had a Moonlander and a few other ergo mechanical keyboards. I never liked them and they didn't seem to help my forearm pain as much as I hoped.

After a lot of time and well over $1,000, the 2 things that solved it for me were: (1) get a soft, membrane-style wireless keyboard and put it in my lap when I type. I've found the Logitech MX Keys to be the most comfortable. (2) Use compression arm bands when typing. They're cheap.

All-in, you're looking at about $150 for a high-comfort solution. YMMV.
by Helmut10001 | 2025-09-29 15:40:02+00:00
Usually, in these edge cases, I go to the documentation page and dump all pages as Markdown into the AI tool (most often Gemini, due to token count). This context engeneering has helped a lot to get better answers. However, it also means I am consuming sometimes 1 Million tokens on relatively simple problems. Like recently, when I needed to solve a relativey simple but specific MermaidJS issue.
by rockercoaster | 2025-09-29 15:40:04+00:00
> Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some development issues and some nasty bugs at launch. But was still fun.

My wife and I have played through the trilogy twice together. I've played it solo separately once. We're talking about a third joint play through soon, I expect we'll start it before the end of the year.

We made it six or so hours into Andromeda and dropped it, with no desire to ever revisit. Characters, gameplay, and story, all three failed to appeal to us at all. Trying to get into it was a chore, and after three or four feature-films worth of time with zero fun experienced, we cut our losses.

(agreed about ME3's ending, but to be fair we didn't play that until they fixed it, the original presentation does seem really bad from what I've read about it)
by breuleux | 2025-09-29 15:40:06+00:00
The progression is much less clear when you don't view it anthropocentrically. For instance, we see an explosion in intelligible information: information that is formatted in human language or human-made formats. But this is concomitant with a crash in natural spaces and biodiversity, and nothing we make is as information-rich as natural environments, so from a global perspective, what we have is actually an information crash. Or hell, take something like agriculture. Cultured environments are far, far simpler than wild ones. Again: an information crash.

I'm not saying anything about the future, mind you. Just that if we manage to stop sniffing our own farts for a damn second and look at it from the outside, current human civilization is a regression on several metrics. We didn't achieve dominion over nature by being more subtle or complex than it. We achieved that by smashing nature with a metaphorical club and building upon its ruins. Sure, it's impressive. But it's also brutish. Intelligence requires intelligible environments to function, and that is almost invariably done at the expense of complexity and diversity. Do not confuse success for sophistication.

> last 1 year - even the basic improvements to AI models in the last 12 months are an unprecedented level of change, per time, looking back.

Are they? What changed, exactly? What improvements in, say, standards of living? In the rate of resource exploitation? In energy efficiency? What delta in our dominion over Earth? I'll tell you what I think: I think we're making tremendous progress in simulating aspects of humanity that don't matter nearly as much as we think they do. The Internet, smartphones, AI, speak to our brains in an incredible way. Almost like it was by design. However, they matter far more to humans within humanity than they do in the relationship of humanity with the rest of the universe. Unlike, say, agriculture or coal, which positively defaced the planet. Could we leverage AI to unlock fusion energy or other things that actually matter, just so we can cook the rest of the Earth with it? Perhaps! But let's not count our chickens before they hatch. As of right now, in the grand scheme of things, AI doesn't matter. Except, of course, in the currency of vibes.
by SigmundurM | 2025-09-29 15:40:15+00:00
Yeah that looks to be the case. Reading the OpenFront readme, it looks like they transitioned to the AGPL believing it to be stricter (which it might be?).

What's also funny is the FrontWars fork's readme.md [1] has not been changed at all, and still credits the OpenFront maintainer as the project maintainer:

> The project maintainer (evan) has final authority on all code changes and design decisions

[1] https://github.com/Elitis/FrontWars/