MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggm | 2025-10-18 05:11:28+00:00
Flourinert was very.. yellow. The cray-1 had a see-through plastic recirculation tank with a float, much like a toilet. Oddly, hidden away inside a cabinet. We hung a plastic squeaky Lobster in ours (-UQ) because we'd named the Cray "yabby" for obvious reasons.

I helped in very minor ways commissioning the system, so I got to play around the edges. Looking at hotspots through an old school IR camera with about 127 scanlines was fun too.

Hint: just because a raised floor was OK for IBM cooling pipes doesn't mean it meets minimum bend radius for a Cray. Oh dear..
by rkomorn | 2025-10-18 05:12:31+00:00
The first definition for beefy from Merriam-Webster is: heavily and powerfully built .

As someone who's had to rack some pretty heavy servers with lots of GPUs, CPUs, NVMe drives, and RAM, that turned out to be quite powerful, I'd say "beefy" is accurate.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beefy

Side note edit: hefty and chonky don't tell me much about power. Stacked is usually more about a team or group of things (and for individuals, I'd rather not see it).
Show HN: FastApps – zero-boilerplate framework for building ChatGPT apps
by zachpark | 2025-10-18 05:12:41+00:00
Building interactive widgets for ChatGPT turned out to be way more complex than I expected. Between the MCP protocol, widget registration, build setup, CSP policies, and resource serving — I kept writing the same boilerplate over and over just to get something basic working.

That’s why I built FastApps, an open-source framework that lets you build ChatGPT apps with only two files: a Python backend and a React frontend.

It removes all the glue code and focuses on developer experience:

- Auto-discovers and registers MCP widgets automatically

- Builds and bundles React UIs with zero config

- Manages CSP, metadata, and resource serving out of the box

- Type-safe data flow with Pydantic and React hooks

- Runs as an MCP server, fully compatible with ChatGPT and other MCP clients

If you’ve been experimenting with MCP or building ChatGPT tools, I’d love your feedback. It’s fully open source — and I’m looking for contributors who want to help shape this ecosystem together.

GitHub → https://github.com/DooiLabs/FastApps

Docs → https://www.fastapps.org/
by somenameforme | 2025-10-18 05:13:11+00:00
Your claim doesn't argue against the issue. Even if we accept that you're correct there, you're again speaking of more people getting to their 'expiration date' rather than expanding that date itself. If you cure cancer, heart disease, and everything else - we're still not going to be living to a 100, or even near it, on average.

The reason humans die of 'old age' is not because of any specific disease but because of advanced senescence. Your entire body just starts to fail. At that point basically anything can kill you. And sometimes there won't even be any particular cause, but instead your heart will simply stop beating one night while you sleep. This is how you can see people who look like they're in great shape for their age, yet the next month they're dead.
by dang | 2025-10-18 05:13:14+00:00
More specific responses have come in as people have digested more of the content.

This is the reflexive/reflective distinction (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Reflexive comments—the kind that express some pre-existing feeling or opinion that happens to get triggered by association—are much faster to produce, so unfortunately they show up first in many threads.
by k310 | 2025-10-18 05:13:32+00:00
The plot thickens.

Spyware maker NSO Group confirms acquisition by US investors October 10, 2025 [0]

> NSO spokesperson Oded Hershowitz told TechCrunch on Friday that “an American investment group has invested tens of millions of dollars in the company and has acquired controlling ownership.” Confirmation of the deal came soon after Israeli tech news website Calcalist reported Friday that a group led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds agreed to purchase the surveillance tech maker in a deal valued in the tens of millions of dollars.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/10/spyware-maker-nso-group-co...
by dasil003 | 2025-10-18 05:13:38+00:00
> We've all experienced that stare when talking to someone who does not have sufficient depth of understanding in a topic.

I think you're really putting your finger on something here. LLMs have blown us away because they can interact with language in a very similar way to humans, and in fact it approximates how humans operate in many contexts when they lack a depth of understanding. Computers never could do this before, so it's impressive and novel. But despite how impressive it is, humans who were operating this way were never actually generating significant value. We may have pretended they were for social reasons, and there may even have been some real value associated with the human camaraderie and connections they were a part of, but certainly it is not of value when automated.

Prior to LLMs just being able to read and write code at a pretty basic level was deemed an employable skill, but because it was not a natural skill for lots of human, it was also a market for lemons and just the basic coding was overvalued by those who did not actually understand it. But of course the real value of coding has always been to create systems that serve human outcomes, and the outcomes that are desired are always driven by human concerns that are probably inscrutable to something without the same wetware as us. Hell, it's hard enough for humans to understand each other half the time, but even when we don't fully understand each other, the information conferred through non-verbal cue, and familiarity with the personalities and connotations that we only learn through extended interaction has a robust baseline which text alone can never capture.

When I think about strategic technology decisions I've been involved with in large tech companies, things are often shaped by high level choices that come from 5 or 6 different teams, each of which can not be effectively distilled without deep domain expertise, and which ultimately can only be translated to a working system by expert engineers and analysts who are able to communicate in an extremely high bandwidth fashion relying on mutual trust and applying a robust theory of the mind every step along the way. Such collaborators can not only understand distilled expert statements of which they don't have direct detailed knowledge, but also, they can make such distilled expert statements and confirm sufficient understanding from a cross-domain peer.

I still think there's a ton of utility to be squeezed out of LLMs as we learn how to harness and feed them context most effectively, and they are likely to revolutionize the way programming is done day-to-day, but I don't believe we are anywhere near AGI or anything else that will replace the value of what a solid senior engineer brings to the table.
by zhivota | 2025-10-18 05:14:35+00:00
I was nodding along until the bashing of neoliberalism, which I believe to be unfounded left-woo essentially.

If we were to apply neoliberalism a bit more in the present moment, we may be much better off, but that's not what the current trend is anyway. We're currently experimenting with some unholy mix of populism and authoritarianism which has basically no predictable endpoint, because it's just based on the whims of one man (in each respective country doing this at the moment).

Also the view of climate change as primarily being about photosynthesis is laughably myopic... he does acknowledge weather instability as being an issue as well, but it's that and sea level rise which really seems to be poised to disrupt the current iteration of civilization.
by davisr | 2025-10-18 05:16:19+00:00
While that provides a plausible origin story, it doesn't stand to reason why the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency has been sustained for so long. For toy or prototype purposes, sure, the FCC could say "put them next to the microwave ovens." But Wi-Fi is, at this point, a critical national security utility, or even as you put it yourself, "serious business."

I'm not a radio engineer, but it doesn't take that many brain cells to beg the question: for a handheld/laptop device, why choose a carrier wave frequency absorbed by the body holding it, and by the metallic electronics sitting beside it? Logically, that's one of the most energy-inefficient frequencies one could choose, and a terrible design choice for personal wireless communication technology. I think a good engineer would want to conserve power and not be blocked by the very body holding it.

However, as the future unfolded, we now have nearly every household with a bright radiant point light casting human-shaped shadows, trivially reconstructed, to detect not only the body's silhouette but it's heartbeat and respiration, too.

And with everything we know, with leaks going back decades about the abuses of government power, surveilling their own citizenry, recording, analyzing, and manipulating the population in subtle ways, resulting in the financial benefactor of a handful of billionaires and the power benefactor of media-savvy pawns, why are these basic technological choices not being questioned more?

(mastax, I'm replying to you because you're top reply, but felt it important to continue my original point.)
by veqq | 2025-10-18 05:16:34+00:00
J and BQN (APL has off-ramps...)

https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Tacit_Expressions

https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/tacit.html and https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/control.html

Forth, Factor and Uiua (which combines the above approach) don't use these concepts yet are also inherently point-free, and without lambdas so you definitely wouldn't be able to rely on functional techniques!
by intended | 2025-10-18 05:16:54+00:00
The fact that things are constructed by neurons in the brain, and are a representation of other things - does not preclude your representation from being deeper and richer than LLM representations.

The patterns in experience are reduced to some dimensions in an LLM (or generative model). They do not capture all the dimensions - because the representation itself is a capture of another representation.

Personally, I have no need to reassure myself whether I am a special snowflake or not.

Whatever snowflake I am, I strongly prefer accuracy in my analogies of technology. GenAI does not capture a model of the world, it captures a model of the training data.

If video tools were that good, they would have started with voxels.
by zhivota | 2025-10-18 05:17:48+00:00
Is there any more information about the Eureka educational project? I think it's probably the wrong endpoint to target teaching about AI first (too complex, too many pre-reqs), really these tools should work from the base of the educational pyramid and move up from there.

There is a lot of success already in adaptive learning in elementary school for instance, my kids are blasting through math on Prodigy and it seems like Synthesis may be a great tool as well, and I believe we're just at the beginning of this wave. For that level of learning I don't think we need incredibly more capability, just better application.
by vasco | 2025-10-18 05:17:59+00:00
> another way to look at it is the self driving car - they got there eventually

Current self driving cars only work in American roads. Maybe Canada too, not sure how their roads are. Come to Europe/anywhere else and every other road would be intractable. Much tighter lanes, many turns you have a little mirror to see who's coming on the other side, single car at a time lanes that you need to "understand" who goes first, mountain roads where you sometimes need to reverse for 100m when another car is coming so it's wide enough that they can pass before you can keep going forward, etc.

Many things like this that would require another 2 or 3 "nines" as the guy put it than acceptable quality in American huge roads.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ4NWIt...
by kristianp | 2025-10-18 05:18:19+00:00
My favourite Stross books are "Saturn's Children", "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise" in that order, to name some of his other books. "Neptune's Breed" is the sequel to "Saturn's Children". For "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", I really enjoyed the concept of an AI that seeks to prevent the use of time travel to change history, by using secret agents that are distributed between multiple star systems.
by bitwize | 2025-10-18 05:18:21+00:00
The TI-99/4A had 256 BYTES (128 words) of static RAM available to the CPU. All accesses the 16K of main memory had to be done through the video chip. This made a lot of things on the TI-99/4A slow, but there were occasional bits of brilliance where you see a tiny bit of the system it could've been. Thanks to the fast SRAM and 16-bit CPU, the smooth scrolling in Parsec was done entirely in software—the TMS9918A video chip lacking scroll registers entirely.
by Razengan | 2025-10-18 05:18:27+00:00
Frankly, LLMs with transparent prompts, as well as user-side filters based on LLM prompts (e.g. "Don't show me comment threads talking shit about Attack on Titan") could do a better and more "fair" job than meat-based moderators now.

They won't have personal biases, don't need to sleep (ending the infamous "mods are asleep, post xxx" waves), their prompts would be visible to everyone, and there could be ways for the users themselves to update the space's rules/prompts.
by throwaway-0001 | 2025-10-18 05:18:31+00:00
Actually I think the line between creative and regurgitate is so blurred you can’t tell me a single creative thing you did. So if 99% of people are not creative, and just regurgitate then why we keep AI standards so high?

Can you show me one single thing you did in your life that was truly creative and not regurgitated?
by zachpark | 2025-10-18 05:19:34+00:00
It’s an actual runtime, not just scaffolding. FastApps runs as an MCP server and it handles widget registration, protocol messages, static assets, and the data flow between backend and frontend.

When you run fastapps create, you get a running service that ChatGPT talks to over MCP, not just a code template. You can extend or deploy it like any other web app.
by zhivota | 2025-10-18 05:20:20+00:00
The way you describe the transition events elides the incredible instability that people living through them experienced (wars, revolutions, famines, etc.), which I think is what Stross is getting at here, and ultimately is probably right about.

Will things end up better? Maybe, and based on history you could even make a case for "probably", but will it be better for _us_, the ones alive _right now_? Again, based on history, almost certainly not.
by simonh | 2025-10-18 05:21:05+00:00
I’d say sophistication.

Observing the landscape enables us to spot useful resources and terrain features, or spot dangers and predators. We are afraid of dark enclosed spaces because they could hide dangers. Our ancestors with appropriate responses were more likely to survive.

A huge limitation of LLMs is that they have no ability to dynamically engage with the world. We’re not just passive observers, we’re participants in our environment and we learn from testing that environment through action. I know there are experiments with AIs doing this, and in a sense game playing AIs are learning about model worlds through action in them.
by raverbashing | 2025-10-18 05:22:30+00:00
> Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?

Because MechE are even worse than EEs at doing software (and yes, having worked at EE companies it was 90% cluelessness)

(also let's not pretend that HW companies ran by SW people don't have multiple issues neither ;) )

And as per other commenter

> Because everyone is making $300k+ at MAGA and they're offering half, if that.

Yes. That as well
by ryandv | 2025-10-18 05:22:34+00:00
> I don't like talking about a heterogeneous group of people

> many such people in the Ruby community.

In which case, this presumes that the values you share with the Ruby community are positive - otherwise you would be talking about this heterogeneous group in a generally negative way.

This would appear to beg the very question under contention - that the values of the Ruby community are not in fact positive, but toxic; unless you wish to argue that a community can simultaneously profess positive values and still exhibit toxic behaviour.

One position offers historical (and current) examples; the other offers an impressive feat of linguistic gymnastics.
by vikarti | 2025-10-18 05:23:01+00:00
Potential issue: what EXACTLY DRM is? Is "you can only read this book/view this video on tivoized device which have it's own cellular connection to mothership and no USB/Ethernet/WiFi" counts as DRM for this purposes? What about "you can only buy this book at some obscure store which have it's own obscure reader which only work on specific versions of specific OS"? What if said OS is out-of-date? What about "you can buy only from specific store, store provides you reader app als specifically allows you to gift reader and books to friends,etc but reader app is personalized and will tell your name on start up"?(btw,I did buy some books protected this way in 00s)
by tfvlrue | 2025-10-18 05:23:44+00:00
My (admittedly very, very limited) personal experience owning cars actually suggests cars are getting cheaper over the past couple decades. Specifically, my data looks like this:

- A new Honda Accord LX in 2003 was ~$19k

- A new Honda Accord LX in 2020 was ~$23k

In today's dollars, that's roughly $33k and $29k, respectively. These numbers are very approximate, but it means the same car model in 2020 was about 12% less expensive than the one in 2003. And the new version has a whole lot of improvements and features the old one didn't. (They cheaped out and removed the lock from the glove compartment though!)

Stepping back and thinking about the complexities that go into manufacturing a modern automobile, it's wild to me that they can cost so little compared to what you get. It's a machine that can travel 200+ thousand miles and last for decades with barely any maintenance.

Commercial-scale vehicles (semi trucks, busses) cost an order of magnitude more than personal vehicles, yet share many of the same complexities. Like, how are cars so cheap for what they are? Manufacturing volume, I guess.
by robomartin | 2025-10-18 05:23:48+00:00
I am not liking the term "AGI". I think intelligence and understanding are very different things and they are both required to build a useful tool that we can trust.

To use an image that might be familiar to lots of people reading this, the Sheldon character in Big Bang Theory is very intelligent about lots of fields of study and yet lacks tons of understanding about many things, particularly social interaction, the human impact of decisions, etc. Intelligence alone (AGI) isn't the solution we should be after. Nice buzz word, but not the solution we need. This should not be the objective at the top of the hill.
by measurablefunc | 2025-10-18 05:24:25+00:00
There must be lots of theorems in optimization theory that can be improved w/ more intellectual effort. Unlike video generation if AI is applied to find better algorithms it will have a direct impact on the economy b/c almost every industrial process is using some kind of constraint optimization algorithm including the simplex algorithm & its variations. But it's not flashy & profitable so OpenAI will keep promising AGI by 2030 w/o showing any actual breakthroughs in real world applications.
by dang | 2025-10-18 05:25:54+00:00
It takes time for more reflective comments to appear, because reflection is a slower mental operation. Reflexive responses are much faster and tend to be generic and shallow. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)

I believe this distinction is pretty fundamental to humans, so we're not likely to escape it, but the good news is that reflective comments do show up eventually if the article is substantive and the reflexive ones haven't ruined the thread. We also try to downweight the more reflexive subthreads.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45625084.
by pmontra | 2025-10-18 05:26:05+00:00
I agree with you that picking quantum was probably the fad of the time and it was an easy pick as quantum is everywhere. He cold have said "electrons". However the argument against unknown physics is not very sound IMHO.

There has been unknown physics at play inside brains since forever and it still is and always will be, by definition of science.

The point is that we don't even know how to define consciousness and humanity doesn't have a shared agreement about which living beings are conscious or are not. We're still like engineers building things millennia or centuries ago with only a shadow of a theory of why their creations worked. And yet we still walk on bridges from 2000 years ago and we had electric batteries and power plants before knowing how an electro magnetic wave moved.
by pinkgolem | 2025-10-18 05:28:32+00:00
Let's have a look at the standard range.

2021 Tesla is on the Intel processor, so the software runs laggy and is missing some updates.

It would likely have the heatpump which was introduced 2020 but some markets only got it 2021 if I remember correctly.

You are also missing on cooled seats, have worse noise isolation & worse dampers, no lfp Batterie, 130km less range and so on
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-10-18 05:28:34+00:00
>I mean that's just obviously, objectively, not true. If you're born with 12-inch legs you are _not_ going to be an elite marathon runner

My empiric objection is simply to watch this video. Everything here is objectively true:

https://youtu.be/cEItmb_a20M
by vasco | 2025-10-18 05:28:52+00:00
> But I might want to continue and ask you a question, and this is just out of curiosity, do you think consciousness is made of matter?

You might want to stop calling people silly if you want them to answer your random questions. You'd have to define consciousness to ask that question because every person that overthinks these topics has their own personal definition and they are 100% sure they are right.
by NegativeLatency | 2025-10-18 05:30:04+00:00
I use it when I have to process some files manually, maybe involving multiple steps (blue is started, green is done, or whatever)

In a world where “normal” people are calling files “v2_final_final” it’s nice to have a way to encode more information than just a file name.

Other people also use them for organization and workflows and stuff
by Razengan | 2025-10-18 05:30:13+00:00
Paraphrasing a previous comment:

macOS Tahoe is the second time that I have felt this kind of frustration with an operating system since I jumped from the Microsoft ship during Windows 8 and their "Metro" iPad-envy crap.

Did some Apple CxO let their brother-in-law's cousin's nephew have a go at managing all the teams? It's not like "oh, these kinds of bugs are easy to overlook, and a low priority, they'll be fixed soon" and they do. But rather, Tahoe is full of moments like "HOW the hell could the richest company on Earth not have seen this for a whole YEAR?? and HOW did none of the beta testers complain about it??!"

It's unbelievable: Some basic UI is LITERALLY (not an exaggeration) unreadable on the dumbass "glass" implementation. There are blatant rendering bugs and placeholders still in the shipped version (just look at the Contacts app).

DRM slowdowns have crippled the Music and TV apps so much that I literally cancelled my subscription and went to just pirating the content.

I'll never go back to Windows and I'll still buy MacBooks, but maybe I'll start exploring Linux a bit more. Things like Omarchy etc. seem genuinely tempting.