MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-24 20:14:27+00:00
> Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import.

That's what breaking them up is. "Stop being a monopoly" is breaking them up.

Leaving them in one piece and trying to pass a separate rule against every monopolistic practice they can come up with while they remain in one piece is an exercise in futility.

> Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege?

Some people do, in fact, e.g. because the evidence was seized unlawfully and the government's penalty for that is not getting to use it, or because the charges were filed in the wrong jurisdiction etc. This is why rich people often get away with things -- they have money to pay lawyers to trawl through thousands of pages of regulations to find the mistake the government made or bamboozle the jury or the court. See e.g. O.J. Simpson.

But the problem in cases like this is much harder than that, because there is no murder without a body. It isn't a normal thing to be having to decide if the person who killed someone is guilty of murder because it isn't a normal thing to be the person who killed someone.

Whereas it is a normal thing for companies to sell things for money and enter into contracts etc. Which means you're not trying to decide if they did something wrong in an outrageous event that happens zero times in the median person's life, you're trying to decide if they did something wrong in any of the millions of transactions they take part in every day.

Is requiring a fee or the use of an identification service in order to publish an app just recovering their costs, or is it a ploy to inhibit people from doing it? Is preventing third party software from performing certain system functions a security measure, or a means to prevent competitors making an app store that actually functions properly?

You can't be getting into the weeds like that or their lawyers will eventually come up with something the government accepts as the former while it still has the effect of the latter. You have to remove the structural incentive they have to do it to begin with, which comes from these separate products all being tied together within the same company.
by r2b2 | 2025-10-24 20:14:58+00:00
This camera's attestation and zero-knowledge proof cannot verify that a photo is not AI generated. Worse, those "verifications" may trick people into believing photos are trustworthy or authentic that are not.

Similar to ad-clicks or product reviews, if this were to catch on, Roc cameras (and Roc camera farms) will be used to take photos of inauthentic photos.

Ultimately, the only useful authenticity test is human reputation.

If someone (or an organization) wants to be trusted as authentic, the best they can do is stake their identity on the authenticity of things they do and share, over and over.
by mothballed | 2025-10-24 20:15:21+00:00
The fact lottery tickets were one of the less practical examples does nothing to dispel the point that gambling is a commonly used method of money laundering, which was my point. Your point on one specific form of gambling might be valid but completely unmoving against the principle.

There is no need to have an accomplice, someone could just bet $20 an improbable lottery every time they sell a "hit", eventually they would win big and then have legal taxed income washed and only have to explain how they came up with $20 to end up with thousands in earnings. Who cares if they lose 20,30,50% to the house and taxes when they are happy to pay that to stay out of prison and making high margins.

In fact, watch videos of various change and counterfeit scammers, they quite often use the lottery tickets to launder their proceeds and as part of their crime.[]

[] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKXmEkyl7Bw
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-24 20:15:25+00:00
"I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen"

OK, so you are optimistic. My own specialization is encryption/security, so I am not. State actors can do such things, too, and we've already had a small wave of classical physical-world sabotages in Europe that everyone suspects Russia of.

"further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths"

This is something I can agree upon, but you have to take into account that human societies don't work on a purely arithmetic/statistical basis. Mass casualty events have their own political and cultural gravitas, doubly so if they were intentional.

Sinking of the Titanic shocked the whole world and it is still a frequent subject for artists 100 years later, even though 1500 deaths aren't objectively that many. I don't doubt that way more than 1500 people drowned in individual accidents worldwide in April 1912 alone, but the general public didn't care about those deaths.

And a terrorist attack with merely 3000 dead put the US on a war footing for more than a decade and made it spend a trillion dollars on military campaigns, even though drunk American drivers manage the same carnage in five months or so.
by reify | 2025-10-24 20:15:42+00:00
I'm James Pelton.

I help Christians and values-driven people use AI, side hustles, and simple apps to build real income streams—without hype and without compromising your faith. On this ...

My friend had the same problem and failed to get her accounts back. her husband changed all her passwords for everything and abandonded her. Google, facebook, youtube, TV subscriptions, utility bills, all gone.

Not a nice thing to do, but she should not have cheated on him. He was clearly very angry.

she could not get any accounts back online.

what a nightmare

Have you considered asking god for some help! he might be up for a side hustle.
by photonthug | 2025-10-24 20:15:47+00:00
> It DOES fail more when the numbers are longer (because it results with more text in the context),

I tried to raise this question yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683113#45687769

Declaring victory on "reasoning" based on cherry-picking a correct result about arithmetic is, of course, very narrow and absurdly optimistic. Even if it correctly works for all NxM calculations. Moving on from arithmetic to any kind of problem that fundamentally reduces to model-checking behind the scenes.. we would be talking about exploring a state-space with potentially many thousands of state-transitions for simple stuff. If each one even has a small chance of crapping out due to hallucination, the chance of encountering errors at the macro-scale is going to be practically guaranteed.

Everyone will say, "but you want tool-use or code-gen for this anyway". Sure! But carry-digits or similar is just one version of "correct matters" and putting some non-local kinds of demands on attention, plus it's easier to check than code. So tool-use or code-gen is just pushing the same problem somewhere else to hide it.. there's still a lot of steps involved, and each one really has to be correct if the macro-layer is going to be correct and the whole thing is going to be hands-off / actually automated. Maybe that's why local-models can still barely handle nontrivial tool-calling.
by unethical_ban | 2025-10-24 20:15:58+00:00
The Internet and cable probably helped spur this movement of bubbles, where economically and socially insecure people can be told their problems aren't caused by the wealthy or the corrupt, but by non-Christians and immigrants.

I think a lot of people, particularly on the right, cannot define what they actually want this country to look like in 20-30 years or how it needs to get there.
by jjkaczor | 2025-10-24 20:16:32+00:00
Heh - I once made a little chunk of change, because a former client from 10-years previous discovered the shiny "DVD/CD" backups had succumbed to "bit-rot" and needed some source code.

I grabbed the hard-drive off the shelf, put it in an enclosure and handed them the source-code... (At the time, every time I upgraded my system, I would just keep my old drives, so... had a stack of them - buy a new external enclosure, slot it and park it.)
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-24 20:17:39+00:00
At the time (2010), MongoDB was intended (from the creators) for handling high volumes of data where some loss was tolerable.

What happened was that its document model, and flexible index model, made it very attractive as an easy-to-use database. I used to call it the "Visual Basic" of databases.

I think the less technical people in marketing latched on to how a lot of people found MongoDB easier to work with, and there was a lot of selling to people who it shouldn't have been sold to.

The problem was that the lossiness nature of MongoDB didn't rear it's ugly head until deep in a project, and the assumptions made when writing documents lead to situations where operations required changing multiple documents; or other corner cases that triggered loss in larger schemas.

Of course, if you used MongoDB as intended, which was for ingesting lots of data with some tolerance of loss, you were totally fine.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-24 20:17:40+00:00
Something to note is the impermanence of the final product, as thermal paper does not have longevity (only ~1 year). I have not found a similar solution (printer + media with a similar form factor) where the print lasts longer, so open to suggestions for such use cases. I suppose in the short term, including a QR code in the print job that links to a perma/deep link online might work from a publishing perspective for bookmarking purposes.
by CHY872 | 2025-10-24 20:19:18+00:00
In computer vision transformers have basically taken over most perception fields. If you look at paperswithcode benchmarks it’s common to find like 10/10 recent winners being transformer based against common CV problems. Note, I’m not talking about VLMs here, just small ViTs with a few million parameters. YOLOs and other CNNs are still hanging around for detection but it’s only a matter of time.
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-24 20:20:09+00:00
As other comments have mentioned, they have kind of a "total hands-off; neither help nor hinder" policy around 3rd-party operating systems on Apple Silicon. They aren't providing any kind of assistance, but they aren't doing anything to obstruct it either: even though the Linux drivers have to be reverse-engineered, the actual installation process is very easy and not inhibited at all by the extensive cryptographic boot chain protections built into macOS, even though it easily could be. And as far as I know, what little they have said publicly about this is that they don't intend to ever try and actively block Linux.

So in that sense I think it's mostly just a resources thing: they don't feel it's worth their time and money to assist this process. Which, honestly, I can't get that upset about: we're not entitled to Apple spending resources to help people install other operating systems on their hardware; so long as they don't actively impede the process I see no reason to get upset.
by api | 2025-10-24 20:20:23+00:00
Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners. They're just super super super compact objects.

I've actually posted this a few times:

If you suddenly transformed the Moon into a black hole of the same mass, it would continue to orbit the Earth in the same spot. It wouldn't suck up the Earth or anything. The ocean tides would continue as normal under the influence of the black-hole-moon's gravity, which would be the same if it was orbiting at the same distance. You wouldn't see a moon in the sky, but if you focused a good telescope on where it was you'd see gravitational lensing. It would be a little smaller than a BB.
by unethical_ban | 2025-10-24 20:20:25+00:00
This is all speech from a voter in a rural area, happy they get to tell the rest of the country how to behave despite being a minority of the vote.

Allow me to be "aggressive" as well:

For the other 60% of the country, we don't want Federal laws held up by people in arbitrarily drawn political districts and don't share our values regarding human rights and dignity. This is why, while states do retain broad rights to administer their internal affairs, spending and education, federal laws should be altered with a majority, excepting certain fundamental laws like the Constitution.
by gdulli | 2025-10-24 20:20:31+00:00
I tried to make Twitter and Reddit more usable as they started to enshittify, but after a certain point I realized it was a fundamentally losing battle and gave them up altogether. Those sites were not one or two features away from becoming usable again, the rot was more comprehensive. Today in hindsight, I can see that moving on was the only way to go.
by ben_w | 2025-10-24 20:22:53+00:00
The Tesla Optimus is, unlike Optimus Prime, smaller than a car. This means it has less room for battery and compute. The gap between the cars and the robots suggests that Koomey's law[0] will still require 5-10 years to go from compute that can run in and operate a self-driving car (by any constant standard[1]) and compute that can run in the power envelope available to a humanoid robot which can get into any old car and drive it equally well.

And that's just the ability to drive a car. To be what Musk is selling Optimus as, it would have to be much more capable than simply driving a car.

--

None of this precludes him selling Optimus robots as remote control units, where the AI is only the bare minimum for walking without falling over. This would already be transformative to a lot of industries, and if such robots would have a TCO in factory conditions of, say, $24k/year, could easily lead to a lot of American factories being filled with such robots remotely controlled by people in other countries very happy to get paid $12k/year, and a whole bunch of very confused and also very unemployed Americans.

I suspect a lot of people will feel cheated if this is what happens… but also, I have not seen any specific minimum requirement for what is actually shipped for this payout. Musk being the troll he is, I wouldn't put it past him to buy out Hasbro, ship a million of these, and claim victory: https://www.amazon.com/Optimus-Auto-Converting-Transformers-...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Definitions
by api | 2025-10-24 20:23:06+00:00
It would have the same mass, and it would be tiny -- like the size of a hydrogen or helium atom.

AFAIK an asteroid mass black hole wouldn't evaporate yet since the CMB is still warmer than its Hawking temperature. Very tiny black holes would have evaporated earlier in the universe. A black hole evaporates when its Hawking temperature exceeds the ambient temperature.
by dabinat | 2025-10-24 20:23:33+00:00
I feel like this is a great thing for small network operators. The one thing that keeps me on Verizon is that there have been many occasions where I have been working in the middle of nowhere and I am the only person with a signal (everyone else was on T-Mobile). If you can get satellite internet anywhere in the world, suddenly it matters a lot less how good the provider’s network is.
by lisbbb | 2025-10-24 20:24:36+00:00
That's a great question. I never worked on any cool NASA stuff which would involve large scale number crunching. In the corpo space, that's not been my experience at all. We were trying to solve big data problems of like, how to report on medical claims that are in flight (which are hardly ever static until much later after the claim is long completed and no longer interesting to anyone) and do it at scale of tens of thousands per hour. It never went that well, tbh, because it is so hard to validate what a "claim" even is since it is changing in real time. I don't think excess GPUs would help with that.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-10-24 20:24:40+00:00
> You're acting like they said, "We came out here to ask you questions regarding the crime of protesting that happened on the the 11th of June" which is not what happened.

Actually, I'm acting like you said that, which you have. You've claimed that it is necessarily the case that the FBI is investigating a crime by virtue of the fact that they are criminal investigators investigating something. The thing the FBI said they're investigating is a protest. Ergo, you are saying the FBI is investigating the crime of protesting.

Going back a few comments, you wrote

> They're investigating a crime

That's not true. You have no reason to believe they're investigating a crime. In fact, there is reason to believe they are not investigating a crime because they said they are investigating something that is not a crime.

> "We came out here to ask you questions regarding a protest that happened on the the 11th of June" -- Sounds like textbook investigative work to me.

Investigative work, yes, but not of a crime.
by adolph | 2025-10-24 20:24:58+00:00
Costs aren't exactly lower. The study noted that the cost savings came from higher student to teacher ratios in 1st-3rd offsetting higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials over a hypothetical amortization period. This is rational but not indicative of flipping a switch to save x%.

The upfront costs of teacher training and Montessori materials were amortized over their expected lifespan of 25 y. Total costs for Montessori and traditional programs were divided by the average number of children in each type of classroom at the PK3, PK4, and kindergarten years, then summed to yield the cost difference of Montessori and traditional programming over three years of public preschool.

0. https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506130122
by leptons | 2025-10-24 20:25:20+00:00
Humans hallucinate too, but there's usually dysfunction, and it's not expected as a normal operational output.

>If anyone still insists on hidden magical components ranging from immortal souls to Penrose's quantum woo, well... let's see what you've got.

This isn't too far off from the marketing and hypesteria surrounding "AI" companies.
by tippytippytango | 2025-10-24 20:25:21+00:00
It's difficult to do because of how well matched they are to the hardware we have. They were partially designed to solve the mismatch between RNNs and GPUs, and they are way too good at it. If you come up with something truly new, it's quite likely you have to influence hardware makers to help scale your idea. That makes any new idea fundamentally coupled to hardware, and that's the lesson we should be taking from this. Work on the idea as a simultaneous synthesis of hardware and software. But, it also means that fundamental change is measured in decade scales.

I get the impulse to do something new, to be radically different and stand out, especially when everyone is obsessing over it, but we are going to be stuck with transformers for a while.
by wobfan | 2025-10-24 20:25:23+00:00
100%. Though their UI has been update a little with the last major release.

> But compare it to immich for example and they're just not playing in the same league imo

I mean, this doesn't make sense at all, tbf. They're literally not in the same league, as their targeting different use cases. Nextcloud offers a MUCH broader experience, while Immich has a very clear cut focus and does nothing outside of that. Comparing it doesn't make any sense. Except if you're actually talking about the UI exclusively. Then, yes, Immich feels much more modern and smooth.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-24 20:26:04+00:00
Countries that small are outliers and aren't really the point. It's about the size of the company, not the size of the country. Being too powerful for the smallest country isn't that interesting. Being too powerful for the median country seems like a problem, much less for the UK, which is at the ~90th percentile by population and #6 in the world by GDP.
by stdbrouw | 2025-10-24 20:26:26+00:00
Yeah, the intention to treat design is a particularly nice touch, not so common outside of biostatistics. They also compare the full cost of Montessori vs. plain ol', not the cost to the state, which could otherwise have given the Montessori schools (which are in wealthier neighborhoods on average) an unfair advantage if they have a lot of parents chipping in with donations and help. I've skimmed through the methods section and it does seem like they've gone to great lengths to allow for a fair comparison.

That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate, though. It seems plausible that teachers in Montessori schools are more motivated and knowledgeable than the average teacher and have made a conscious decision to teach in such a school. If every public school were to become a Montessori school, you would still get the cost savings (student-to-teacher ratios are higher in Montessori!) but you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise and so the learning gains might not carry over. It's just really hard to know whether something might generalize in the educational sciences.
by lsy | 2025-10-24 20:26:34+00:00
It's interesting to call this a pre-mortem as it seems mainly organized around thinking positively past the imperfections of the technology. It's like a pre-mortem for the housing crisis that focuses on the benefits of subprime mortgage lending.

What I'd expect to see is an analysis of how to address or prevent the same situation as previous bubbles: that society has allocated resources to a specific investment that are far in excess of what that investment can fundamentally be expected to return. How can we avoid thinking sloppily about this technology, or getting taken in by hucksters' just-so stories of its future impact? How can we successfully identify use-cases where revenues exceed investment? When the next exciting tech comes around, how can we harness it well as a society without succumbing to irrational exuberance?
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-24 20:27:36+00:00
"Class sizes under 20 and schools under 120 at least through middle school would raise a far less pathologically self-centered society."

This is a big if. Until the 1990s, class sizes routinely exceeded 30 and school sizes 500 in former Czechoslovakia, but I wouldn't call us "pathologically self-centered society".

As for self-centeredness, shrinking family size might be the true reason. Only children tend to be a lot more pampered than kids who were born into a family of six. In China, they are called "Little Emperors".
by alexjplant | 2025-10-24 20:27:37+00:00
Years ago one of my friends left a half-drank can of beer outside of my house on a hot summer night. I found it a few days later when I went to take the mower out of the shed. To my surprise when I picked it up I felt something rattling around inside. In the interceding period a bunch of wasps had apparently decided to help themselves to my buddy's leftover National Bohemian and ended up drowning in what I assume to be intoxicated bliss.

Or maybe they couldn't find their way out of the can in the dark, who knows. As a fellow Boh aficionado I can't blame them for trying.
by jpc0 | 2025-10-24 20:28:53+00:00
Big O notation drops the coefficient, sometimes that coefficient is massive enough that O(N) only beats out O(N^2) at billions of iterations.

Premature optimisation is a massive issue, spending days working on finding a better algorithm is many times not with the time spent since the worse algorithm was plenty good enough.

Real world beats algorithmic complexity many many times because you spent ages building a complex data structure with a bunch of heap allocations all over the heap to get O(N) while it's significantly faster to just do the stupid thing that is in linear memory.