MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imtringued | 2025-10-17 20:00:44+00:00
Model based reinforcement learning is a thing and it is kind of a crazy idea. Look up temporal difference model predictive control.

The fundamental idea behind temporal difference is that you can record any observable data stream over time and predict the difference between past and present based on your decision variables (e.g. camera movement, actuator movement, and so on). Think of it like the Minecraft clone called Oasis AI. The AI predicts the response to a user provided action.

Now imagine if it worked as presented. The data problem would be solved, because you are receiving a constant stream of data every single second. If anything, the RL algorithms are nowhere near where they need to be and continual learning has not been solved yet, but the best known way is through automatic continual learning ala Schmidhuber (co-inventor of LSTMs along with Hochreiter).

So, model based control is solved right? Everything that can be observed can be controlled once you have a model!

Wrong. Unfortunately. You still need the rest of reinforcement learning: an objective and a way to integrate the model. It turns out that reconstructing the observations is too computationally challenging and the standard computational tricks like U-Nets learn a latent representation that is optimized for reconstruction rather than for your RL objectives. There is a data exchange problem that can only realistically be solved by throwing an even bigger model at it, but here is why that won't work either:

Model predictive control tries to find the best trajectory over a receding horizon. It is inherently future oriented. This means that you need to optimize through your big model and that is expensive to do.

So you're going to have to take shortcuts by optimizing for a specific task. You reduce the dimension of the latent space and stop reconstructing the observations. The price? You are now learning a latent space for your particular task, which is less demanding. The dream of continual learning with infinite data shatters and you are brought down to earth: it's better than what came before, but not that much better.
by Retric | 2025-10-17 20:01:06+00:00
Yes in that when they something outside their field that’s ‘a little out there’ Nobel laureate’s aren’t as a group more useful than random noise. Similarly a crank can happen to say a true statement, but the issue is the process with which the statement is derived is flawed to the point of uselessness.

The derogatory aspect of calling someone a crank is obviously uncalled for, but as a shorthand it’s not unreasonable to use the term.
by btilly | 2025-10-17 20:01:07+00:00
Funny. My Tesla has proven itself to be repairable. And has needed fewer repairs than my ICE car. As for the "will soon require", as https://www.motortrend.com/features/how-long-does-a-tesla-ba... verifies, at 200,000 miles a Tesla still averages being able to hold 90% of original charge. The average ICE car does not survive to 200,000 miles.

While some do need batteries sooner, some ICE cars need new engines sooner. It's a wash. Average lifespan is comparable.

(Electric would win hands down if Tesla had better manufacturing quality though.)
by rapind | 2025-10-17 20:01:19+00:00
I think skills and also MCP to an extent are a UI failure. It's AI after all. It should be able to intelligently adapt to our workflow, maybe present it's findings and ask for feedback. If this means it's stored as a thing called "skills" that's perfectly fine, but it should just be an implementation detail.

I don't mean to be unreasonable, but this is all about managing context in a heavy and highly technical manner. Eventually models must be able to augment their training / weights on the fly, customizing themselves to our needs and workflow. Once that happens (it will be a really big deal), all of the time you've spent messing around with context management tools and procedures will be obsolete. It's still good to have fundamental understanding though!
by lurk2 | 2025-10-17 20:01:26+00:00
> I don't believe self-reported stats are worth anything in this context. Many conservatives have learnt to keep a low profile, since in many circles, right wing association has become a synonym for evil.

This is a baseless conspiracy theory.

> Besides, I am not a U.S citizen, so your quoted stats are not relevant to my statement above them.

These patterns hold for every country in the Anglosphere. Canadian leftists are fond of accusing the media of being conservative, but the reality is that they are just so far into alt politics that they consider anyone remotely normal to be an extremist. Similar accusations of crypto-conservatism are levied against journalists in South America, so I have to think that is what is going on here.

There’s an easy way for us to test my theory: What region do you live in, and what specific statements were these journalists making that struck you as evil?
by russellbeattie | 2025-10-17 20:01:31+00:00
Hmmm... If skills could create Skills, then evaluate the success of those generated Skills and updating as needed, in a loop, seems like an interesting thing to try. It could be like a form of code creation caching. (Or a Skynet in the making).

The question is whether the analysis of all the Skill descriptions is faster or slower than just rewriting the code from scratch each time. Would it be a good or bad thing if an agent has created thousands of slightly varied skills.
by crvdgc | 2025-10-17 20:01:34+00:00
> imagine a folder full of skills that covers tasks like the following:

> Where to get US census data from and how to understand its structure

Reminds me of my first time using Wolfram Alpha and got blown away by its ability to use actual structured tools to solve the problem, compared to normal search engine.

In fact, I tried again just now and am still amazed: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=what%27s+the+total+popu...

I think my mental model for Skills would be Wolfram Alpha with custom extensions.
by fair_enough | 2025-10-17 20:01:40+00:00
I reckon these official converters were instrumental in Tengen's work for reverse engineering the NES to run "unlicensed" games.

It turns out that another blog post on this site explains exactly that:

https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.ht...

"How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it."

This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love every bit of it.
by nevir | 2025-10-17 20:01:47+00:00
The capital cost is even less insane than the fact that power utility companies are the real constraint on this industry.

North American grids are starving for electricity right now.

Someone ought to do a deep dive into how much actual total excess power capacity we have today (that could feasibly be used by data center megacampuses), and how much capacity is coming online and when.

Power plants are massively slow undertakings.

All these datacenters deals seem to be making an assumption that capacity will magically appear in time, and/or that competition for it doesn't exist.
by fragmede | 2025-10-17 20:02:10+00:00
"Something" is broad and not well defined, but basically yeah. Rather than try to define it in terms of complexity of the something, I'll put it in terms of minutes. If the LLM returns a response, and that response gets fed into a system and run, and that's it, I wouldn't really call that agentic. It's got to go a few more rounds back and forth to be agentic, imo. In terms of time, I'd say the agent program has to be capable of at least 10 minutes of going from user input, then the program calling into the LLM, feeding the LLM response into a system, feeding that result back into the LLM, and feeding that into the system in a loop. Obviously there are ways to game that metric, like the terrible lines of code metric, but I think it's a decent handwave for when it feels like there's an agent working for me rather than a non-agentic system. What it's doing for those 10 minutes is important, calling "sleep 600" obviously doesn't count.

Eg for a programming LLM with an agentic agent and access to a computer, would be able to, given design-doc.md and Todo.md, implement feature X, making sure it compiles, run some basic smoke tests, write appropriate unit tests, make sure they all pass, and finally push the code and create a draft PR.

Naturally, not every call into the agent is going to take the full 10 minutes. It may need to ask questions before getting started, or stop if there's an unrecoverable error. Sometimes you'll just need to tell it "continue", but the system should be capable of a 10-minute run (hopefully longer!) given enough support.
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-17 20:03:03+00:00
Maxing out a CPU for a day or a week doesn't count. It has to stay maxed out close to for a month, maybe more.

There are no "fair" terminations except without a court order. You will understand when it happens to you. Also, there is no way for you to determine if a report of a a termination is "unfair". In this way, you will continue reveling in your limited worldview.

I have seen this multiple times with German providers. They promise to serve, then when the user really genuinely exercises the service, they cancel the user.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-17 20:03:09+00:00
Universities are teaching about the Regular languages and about Finite automata.

So if we're saying this means regex isn't simple then - having observed that my University's Math course has two semester long Number Theory courses we must conclude that the integers aren't simple either, right ?

And yet, the integers are simple enough that's where we start five year olds, by counting things.

Simple and Shallow are not the same thing.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-17 20:03:20+00:00
Well seeing how Dropbox is doing now, Steve Jobs was right - it isn’t a product, it’s a feature. For the same price of 2TB of storage on Dropbox you can get the same amount on Google or OneDrive with a full office suite.

People love to quote Dropbox ignoring all of the YC companies that are zombies or outright failed. Just looking at the ones that have gone public.

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
by noosphr | 2025-10-17 20:04:41+00:00
I had a hilarious exchange on here where I used an LLM to explain to a poster at length why they fundamentally didn't understand what I said. It did a bang up job. The poster, and a lot of other people, got mad I used AI and they still didn't understand my original post, or the AI explanation.

LLMs aren't terribly useful to people who fundamentally can't read. When those people can also type very fast you get the current situation.
by ctoth | 2025-10-17 20:04:49+00:00
The hubris here isn't CS people making comparisons, it's assuming biological substrate matters. Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors. So what? The "chemicals not electricity" distinction is pure carbon chauvinism, like insisting hydraulic computers can't be compared to electronic ones because water isn't electricity. Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties; it just hill-climbed to a solution using whatever materials were available. Brains work despite being kludges of evolutionary baggage, not because biology unlocked some deeper truth about intelligence.

Meanwhile, these systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago. At some point, look at the goddamn scoreboard. If you think there's something brains can do that these architectures fundamentally can't, name it specifically instead of gesturing vaguely at "inscrutability." The list of "things only biological brains can do" keeps shrinking, and your objection keeps sounding like "but my substrate is special!!1111"
by pixl97 | 2025-10-17 20:05:23+00:00
You're right, speech should not be limited... in fact I am telling everybody about the time you beat your wife and abused your kids. And I'm putting $100,000 in to advertising this all over the place and ensuring every forum is littered with this fact along with your name and address...

Hopefully you see simple solutions come with their own complex problems.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-17 20:05:25+00:00
A better strategy than slapping an "Copilot+ PC" label on trash laptops with trash silicon from Qualcomm [1] [2].

[1] Take a hint. Maybe someday Qualcomm silicon won't be trash. Often you see companies change their name for no good reason but Qualcomm is never going to be able to sell laptops until they change their name to something else or at the very least change their branding so nobody draws a line between the terrible past and a possible future. They should ask Copilot for a better name.

[2] Personally I think "Plus" is a bad smell in branding, right up there with "One". Sure, Purina One is a premium product but all XBOX ONE does is prove that nobody gets a game console bought by their mom anymore because how could you explain to your mom that an XBOX ONE > XBOX 360?
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-17 20:05:45+00:00
One person's "outlandishly wrong" is another's "boringly obvious" opinion.

>I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets.

Liberal comments are often in bad faith. The top/only political posts that get upvoted are entire bad-faith liberal propaganda hit pieces. The liberal commenters find a way to wedge politics into anything remotely political, spewing Trump Derangement Syndrome or climate hysteria narratives. These comments get upvoted. Trying to talk sense into these people gets consistently downvoted unless you're willing to do a lot of waffling and phrase your objection in the most milquetoast way you can think of.

>I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled.

The audience (that comments, anyway) is mostly a liberal hivemind. There is a lot of dog-piling here. You shouldn't be downvoted for simply disagreeing or presenting a reductio ad absurdum argument but it happens here all the time. It's not as bad as Reddit but still not so good. The rate limit sucks too because you can be spammed by like 5 people and not be able to respond to them quick enough.

I might do better if I pretended to be more on the fence than I am, but I am very opinionated. Some of these comments I respond to are SO stupid that I think shock therapy is the appropriate approach. I try not to be personal. I just point out the absurdity of what they are saying and hope they just snap out of it or say something interesting to prove me wrong.
by genewitch | 2025-10-17 20:05:58+00:00
i don't remember the end-game of the original Diablo; however, in diablo III and IV everyone i've tried to play the game gets bored in the run up to max level. I always tell them "i skip that part as much as possible, because that's not the game. That's just the story!"

Once you hit max level in III and IV, the game actually "begins."

and to explain the Diablo 2 Reference, the amount of time/effort it takes to go from level 98 to level 99 (the max level), is the same amount of time it takes to go from level 1 to level 98. I've heard "2 weeks" as a rough estimate of "unhealthy playtime", at least solo.
by apelapan | 2025-10-17 20:06:01+00:00
Yeah, because a car has tens of thousands of parts that age with both time and usage. The core drivetrain is just a tiny bit of that.

Everything is falling apart and that makes and old, used car... Used and old. Now queue the people who show up to say they haven't changed a tire or wind screen wiper blade on their 2012 Model S/Camry and can't perceive a single difference to when they were new from factory.
by jjangkke | 2025-10-17 20:06:22+00:00
that makes no sense. an EV that cost $50k with or without subsidy that now costs half that is depreciation.

What's more interesting from reading the discussion here is that the depreciation of EV goes beyond the battery and thermal/geographic tax its that there is nothing special from the car market point of view that suggests a mass produced EV should hold its value against some truly sought after ICE cars that offer a unique novelty.

Even the Porsche EVs have not held their value very well compared to their ICE cars. There is simply no appeal to taste when you have to generate ICE sounds via speaker and signals EVs aren't very fun to drive or offer much novelty beyond the fact that its an EV compared to ICE cars where each engine is unique to the maker and has ton of parts all synchronized into a controlled chaos.
by apayan | 2025-10-17 20:06:43+00:00
I agree that GOG needs to port their client to Linux for all the reasons you stated, but as a workaround you can use Lutris which lets you log into your GOG account and download+install games (Windows games too).

It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most popular games.
by alt227 | 2025-10-17 20:06:51+00:00
> education being about producing pliant workers over independent, thinking human beings.

You cant have things like computers and smart phones if you dont have millions of pliant workers mass producing them for you. If you want the technological world that we live in to be possible then you should accept that it requires this concept. If everybody is a creative independant free thinking individual, then nobody is a worker drone in a factory churning out phones, laptops, or the materials and components that go into them.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-17 20:06:59+00:00
I don't know about the overall market analysis so I'm not commenting on that. But I do know that personally, GOG meets my needs in spades and Valve doesn't, so I've spent a lot of money at GOG and will for the foreseeable future. I am a Linux guy and don't own any Windows machines. I couldn't care less about the Galaxy client. To be honest, I'm not even sure what it does -- I just know that I get along just fine without it.

For me, GOG is as close to perfect as I've found.
by ajross | 2025-10-17 20:07:07+00:00
> Knowing which parts-of-speech about sunrises appear together and where is not the same as understanding a sunrise

What does "understanding a sunrise" mean though? Arguments like this end up resting on semantics or tautology, 100% of the time. Arguments of the form "what AI is really doing" likewise fail because we don't know what real brains are "really" doing either.

I mean, if we knew how to model human language/reasoning/whatever we'd just do that. We don't, and we can't. The AI boosters are betting that whatever it is (that we don't understand!) is an emergent property of enough compute power and that all we need to do is keep cranking the data center construction engine. The AI pessimists, you among them, are mostly just arguing from ludditism: "this can't possibly work because I don't understand how it can".

Who the hell knows, basically. We're at an interesting moment where technology and the theory behind it are hitting the wall at the same time. That's really rare[1], generally you know how something works and applying it just a question of figuring out how to build a machine.

[1] Another example might be some of the chemistry fumbling going on at the start of the industrial revolution. We knew how to smelt and cast metals at crazy scales well before we knew what was actually happening. Stuff like that.
by simonw | 2025-10-17 20:07:13+00:00
Here's an incident from September 2024 where links were blocked to a newsletter containing a hacked document with potentially damaging information about JD Vance - and the journalist who published that newsletter then had their account suspended: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...
Show HN: OpenSessionReplay
by preezer | 2025-10-17 20:07:17+00:00
I noticed that many users of my SaaS are only creating accounts, but they are not actually using them.

I wanted to see what they are doing to find out if they don't actually understand the function or if these are just bots.

There are many tools for session recording, something like Posthog or others. These tools are all really great, but I don't really need 90% of the given functions. Recently I got access to Claude, so I vibecoded this small tool.

I run this tool now for a few weeks, and I'm really happy with the function.

Maybe you want to give it a try; it's free, lightweight, and easy to install via docker compose.

URL to the project: https://github.com/berti92/opensessionreplay
by owls-on-wires | 2025-10-17 20:07:20+00:00
My preferred stack:

- jQuery

- Typescript

- Tailwind

- Novel (https://github.com/owls-on-wires/novel)

- Some other small libraries for things like state management

- Webpack for bundling

An example of it in action: (https://mnty.sh/#serenity)
by philipbjorge | 2025-10-17 20:07:45+00:00
We had a similar realization here at Thoughtful and pivoted towards code generation approaches as well.

I know the authors of Skyvern are around here sometimes -- How do you think about code generation with vision based approaches to agentic browser use like OpenAI's Operator, Claude Computer Use and Magnitude?

From my POV, I think the vision based approaches are superior, but they are less amenable to codegen IMO.
by lazide | 2025-10-17 20:07:47+00:00
Same thing happened with the dot-com boom and bust, except with fiber (later called dark fiber) and datacenters.

A lot of people lost a lot of money. Post bankruptcy, it also fueled the later tech booms, as now there was a ton of dark fiber waiting to be used at rock bottom prices, and underutilized datacenters and hardware. Google was a major beneficiary.
by branon | 2025-10-17 20:08:09+00:00
Apples and oranges yes, but to most users (even Linux users) there's only a very blurry line between these concepts. I admit this is not ideal.

I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support problem, and less about the product itself.

Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent products at the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled, yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any significant extent (that I know of).

Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code, accept DRM, or buy a license instead of owning a game. Even Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).

As a Linux user, when you purchase a game from GOG (and I concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.

You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine versions/prefixes/winetricks, or depending on a third party launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton... and then you must maintain this going forward.

This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic (and I do, for certain games). But the majority of the segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a first-party solution, not even for an individual user.

My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I receive first-party support for running the game on my OS. But GOG could change that!