MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by omnicognate | 2025-10-27 16:41:18+00:00
It's an old book and I can't vouch for it as I only just discovered it myself, but it appears to be very highly regarded, it focuses on precisely the questions you (and I) have, and just from the preface I like the author already [1]: The Variational Principles of Mechanics, by Cornelius Lanczos.

There's a PDF here: https://pages.jh.edu/rrynasi1/PhysicalPrinciples/literature/...

[1] An appetising quote:

> The author is well aware that he could have shortened his exposition considerably, had he started directly with the Lagrangian equations of motion and then proceeded to Hamilton’s theory. This procedure would have been justified had the purpose of this book been primarily to familiarize the student with a certain formalism and technique in writing down the differential equations which govern a given dynamical problem, together with certain “recipes” which he might apply in order to solve them. But this is exactly what the author did not want to do. There is a tremendous treasure of philosophical meaning behind the great theories of Euler and Lagrange, and of Hamilton and Jacobi, which is completely smothered in a purely formalistic treatment, although it cannot fail to be a source of the greatest intellectual enjoyment to every mathematically-minded person. To give the student a chance to discover for himself the hidden beauty of these theories was one of the foremost intentions of the author.
by demetris | 2025-10-27 16:41:20+00:00
No. demetris’ benchmark of lossless image compression is not a sign that the situation may be changing. :-D

That was just the context for some reading I did to understand where we are now.

> BTW, I don't see how Mozilla's interest in a jpegxl _decoder_ (your first link) has anything to do with the performance of jpegxl encoders compared to avif's encoders. In case you're really interested in the former, Firefox now has more than intentions, but it's still not at production level: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1986393

That is one of the links I shared in my comment (along with the bug title in parenthesis). :-)
by latexr | 2025-10-27 16:41:37+00:00
> You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

I don’t think they are (telling you that). The person who sends you an AI slop PR would be just as happy (probably even happier) if you turned off your brain and just merged it without any critical thinking.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-10-27 16:41:40+00:00
I haven’t personally worked on envoy xds, but it is what I have seen several BigCo’s use for routing from the edge to internal applications.

> Running consensus transcontinentally is very painful

You don’t necessarily have to do that, you can keep your quorum nodes (lets assume we are talking about etcd) far enough apart to be in separate failure domains (fires, power loss, natural disasters) but close enough that network latency isn’t unbearably high between the replicas.

I have seen the following scheme work for millions of workloads:

1. Etcd quorum across 3 close, but independent regions

2. On startup, the app registers itself under a prefix that all other app replicas register

3. All clients to that app issue etcd watches for that prefix and almost instantly will be notified when there is a change. This is baked as a plugin within grpc clients.

4. A custom grpc resolver is used to do lookups by service name
by JohnMakin | 2025-10-27 16:41:45+00:00
Pretending the current iteration of twitter is anything remotely comparable to what existed before is pretty ridiculous. Other than grok, which is by far the worst of all the flavors of models out there (and very technically, made by one of musk's other companies), there haven't been any new features in years, even down to the terrible UI/UX has barely changed at all, and the particular "slant" the site takes in addition to the swarms of boosted bots out there rendered the site practically unusable for me in a very short period of time. I honestly don't understand people that still use it or what they could possibly get out of it. If there was any honest reporting about DAU/MAU I'd bet a large part of my paycheck it's way down from pre-musk levels.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-27 16:41:54+00:00
If you could make your own silicon, you could create a guild or a federation to audit it, and then your trust circle would be smaller and therefore safer.

>Otherwise you're just going to be making stupid mistakes that real cryptographers and security folks found and wrote defenses against three decades ago.

Yeah, thats the point, learn those same techniques, get it in the guild, and watch each others backs.

Rather than just 'trusting' some faceless war profiteers from the midst of an out of control military-industrial complex.
by taylodl | 2025-10-27 16:41:58+00:00
I think Tesla would be better off for the long-term if they cut Elon loose. Elon served his purpose and did a great job showing the value of EVs and that they didn't have to be econobox cars. Job well done! But as a mature company facing intense global competition, Tesla would benefit from someone at the helm knowing how to manage the storm and not engaging in political antics that are hurting the brand. Let Musk go.
by cube00 | 2025-10-27 16:42:04+00:00
> isn't your brain just a cloud of matter and electricity that just reacts to senses deterministically?

LLMs are not deterministic.

I'd argue over the short term humans are more deterministic. I ask a human the same question multiple times and I get the same answer. I ask an LLM and each answer could be very different depending on its "temperature".
by nwallin | 2025-10-27 16:42:07+00:00
They're called NPUs and all recent CPUs from Intel, AMD, or Apple have them. They're actually reasonably power efficient. All flagship smartphones have them, as well as several models down the line as well.

IIRC linux drivers are pretty far behind, because no one who works on linux stuff is particularly interested in running personal info like screenshots or mic captures through a model and uploading the telemetry. While in general I get annoyed when my drivers suck, in this particular case I don't care.
by aeve890 | 2025-10-27 16:42:18+00:00
>No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

Fellas, is it antihuman to use tools to perfect your work?

I can't draw a perfect circle by hand, that's why I use a compass. Do I need to make it bad on purpose and feel embarrassed by the 1000th time just to feel more human? Do I want to make mistakes by doing mental calculations instead of using a calculator, like a normal person? Of course not.

Where this "I'm proud of my sloppy shit, this is what's make me human" thing comes from?

We rised above other species because we learnt to use tools, and now we define to be "human"... by not using tools? The fuck?

Also, ironically, this entire post smells like AI slop.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-27 16:42:24+00:00
I do the same almost, but use "this isn't interesting/fun to read" and don't really care if it was written by AI or not, if it's interesting/fun it's interesting/fun, and if it isn't, it isn't. Many times it's obvious it's AI, but sometimes as you said it could just be bad, and in the end it doesn't really matter, I don't want to continue reading it regardless.
by ben_w | 2025-10-27 16:42:26+00:00
> If be "we don't know" you mean we cannot prove, then, sure, but then we don't know anything aside from maybe mathematics.

More than just that: we don't know what the question is that we're trying to ask. We're pre-paradigmatic.

All of the behaviour you list, those can be emulated by an artificial neural network, the first half even by a small ANN that's mis-classifying various things in its environment — should we call such an artificial neural network "conscious"? I don't ask this as a rhetorical device to cast doubt on the conclusion, I genuinely don't know, and my point is that nobody else seems to either.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-27 16:42:33+00:00
This belongs at r/ufos, not on a HN. To anyone who is new to this - one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel, promotes a theory that old photoplates from mid 20th century, show multiple UFOs because there were discrepancies between two pictures taken 50 minutes apart. To prove this, she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures where this is indeed observed. So, she's right?

First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse.

Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only.

And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects.

tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
by jimmyl02 | 2025-10-27 16:42:53+00:00
always wondered at what scale gossip / SWIM breaks down and you need a hierarchy / partitioning. fly's use of corrosion seems to imply it's good enough for a single region which is pretty surprising because iirc Uber's ringpop was said to face problems at around 3K nodes.

it would be super cool to learn more about how the world's largest gossip systems work :)
by iepathos | 2025-10-27 16:43:10+00:00
Kind of surprised I have to point this out. Power companies do not generate the same amount of power regardless of whether that power would be consumed on their grid or not. They increase generation based on demand. Whether that power comes from high water consumption generation is based on location which determines which power sources are available in the local grid. A major part of why indirect water consumption from power generation is included in the standard WUEsource - water usage effectiveness metric - is because it makes it clear what the impact will be when assessing data center location and size. In other words, it's important to choose locations near power generation that doesn't consume water heavily. Yes, the amount of water used in generating electricity and the efficiency there is controlled power companies choices for power generation at their locations. Data centers control the location they are built in and without an estimate of indirect water usage they cannot strategize locations with lower environmental impact.

Contrary to your belief that it is about clickbait, it's actually just about how to accurately evaluate environmental impact of data centers backed by science and basic logic.
by dev_l1x_be | 2025-10-27 16:43:21+00:00
Is this the case when I put in the effort, spent several hours on tuning the LLM to help me the best possible way and I just use it answer the question "what is the best way to phrase this in American English?"?

I think low effort LLM use is hilariously bad. The content it produces too. Tuning it, giving is style, safeguards, limits, direction, examples, etc. can improve it significantly.
by npodbielski | 2025-10-27 16:43:26+00:00
Which means that in the future will be less engineers and software developers because they never had a chance to learn. And if somebody will know how all of this works really, they won't be working for peanuts. So in an essence all of those companies are eating their own tails. Which is expected since all of it is driven by the stock exchange executives that are interested only by short term profit. Yes it will be terrible but on the other hand all empires are terrible at some point ridden by the stagnation and multitude of radicoulus laws. Will it be the same with technocracy? Probably yes if they lock it all down, new generations will never learn, they will be less and less people with knowledge to maintain the infrastructure and without maintenance it will collapsee eventually.
Show HN: A new approach to voter guides (human and AI) – CA Prop 50 example
by quadtree | 2025-10-27 16:43:30+00:00
I built a new kind of voter guide you can read directly or explore conversationally with AI. It's a prototype with California's Proposition 50 (special election Nov 4) as the test case.

For pragmatic reasons, it uses a Custom GPT for the AI (direct API integration is currently cost-prohibitive at scale for a public-service project). Assume better AI integration scenarios in the future (browser side-panel, better API economics, etc). But the more fundamental concept is, any integration scenario will need a highly curated, issue-specific knowledge source (the guide content and format).

Would love feedback on the content format (organization, depth, balance), overall concept, and user experience.

Other context for those interested...

Audience: People who want to think through issues for themselves at reasonable cost to their time and sanity.

Problem: Public debate is dominated by advocacy rhetoric—facts twisted to fit narratives, nuance lost to slogans. No one enjoys sifting through that noise for signal. And AI assistants trained on (or searching) the discourse can end up echoing the distortions, or diluting valid arguments along with invalid ones while attempting balance.

Approach: Provide highly curated, balanced, and verified content for informed decision-making. Structure content both for people to read and for their AI assistants to use conversationally. Prompt the AI for strict adherence to guide content in presenting arguments and key facts.
by asdev | 2025-10-27 16:43:41+00:00
George Hotz said there's 5 tiers of AI systems, Tier 1 - Data centers, Tier 2 - fabs, Tier 3 - chip makers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers. He said Tier 4 is going to eat all the value of Tier 5, and that Tier 5 is worthless. It's looking like that's going to be the case
by tredre3 | 2025-10-27 16:44:11+00:00
> because those libraries provide you with so much more functionality than just the UI.

Comparing GPUI to Qt based only on what they offer gui-wise is fair, in my opinion. What QtCore provides is sugar over C++: the object model, the signal system, some data types, many helpers. But the thing is, all of those things are in Rust already. They're even in modern C++.

So comparing a Qt hello world that uses QtCore+QtGUI+(QtQML|QtWidget) to a Rust GPUI hello world seems fair to me. It's not like the author also counted QtNetwork, QtSQL, QtSVG, QtHTML, etc.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-10-27 16:44:46+00:00
I affirmatively argue that actually secure computing is not a possibility. It's fun to build toy models where every process has exactly the permissions it needs and no more, sure. In the real world, your users are going to grant superuser/admin permissions to random installers, and they're not going to perform the complex verification rituals you told them to do beforehand.

It's like trying to set up a warehousing system so perfect that the shrinkage rate is 0.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-27 16:44:47+00:00
> They are selfish. The point is themselves, not the reader.

True!

But when I encounter a web site/article/video that has obviously been touched by genAI, I add that source to a blacklist and will never see anything from it again. If more people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to decline.
by snozolli | 2025-10-27 16:45:04+00:00
A couple of similar examples from the United States

2007 Tacoma, WA https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-stripped-in-craigslist-ho...

An online ad offering everything in the house for free left one landlord with quite a shock: By the time she realized what was going on, the house had been stripped of its light fixtures, hot water heater — even the kitchen sink.

2012 Woodstock, GA https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/foreclosed-family...

But big crowds showed up early, while the family was out, breaking into the house and taking practically everything inside, in part because the way that the craigslist ad was written gave them the idea that everything on the property was up for grabs.
by alyxya | 2025-10-27 16:45:08+00:00
I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me.

> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable.
by extr | 2025-10-27 16:45:12+00:00
What is with the negativity in these comments? This is a huge, huge surface area that touches a large percentage of white collar work. Even just basic automation/scaffolding of spreadsheets would be a big productivity boost for many employees.

My wife works in insurance operations - everyone she manages from the top down lives in Excel. For line employees a large percentage of their job is something like "Look at this internal system, export the data to excel, combine it with some other internal system, do some basic interpretation, verify it, make a recommendation". Computer Use + Excel Use isn't there yet...but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.
by mjr00 | 2025-10-27 16:45:44+00:00
> Especially for non-native speakers that work in a globalized market. Why wouldn't they use the tool in their toolbox?

My wife is ESL. She's asked me to review documents such as her resume, emails, etc. It's immediately obvious to me that it's been run through ChatGPT, and I'm sure it's immediately obvious to whomever she's sending the email. While it's a great tool to suggest alternatives and fix grammar mistakes that Word etc don't catch, using it wholesale to generate text is so obvious, you may as well write "yo unc gimme a job rn fr no cap" and your odds of impressing a recruiter would be about the same. (the latter might actually be better since it helps you stand out.)

Humans are really good at pattern matching, even unconsciously. When ChatGPT first came out people here were freaking out about how human it sounded. Yet by now most people have a strong intuition for what sounds ChatGPT-generated, and if you paste a GPT-generated comment here you'll (rightfully) get downvoted and flagged to oblivion.

So why wouldn't you use it? Because it masks the authenticity in your writing, at a time when authenticity is at a premium.
by ericol | 2025-10-27 16:45:49+00:00
> read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.

Ha! That's a very clever spot on insult. Most LLMs would probably be seriously offended by this would thy be rational beings.

> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake.

OK, you are pushing it buddy. My mandarin is not that good; as a matter of fact, I can handle no mandarin at all. Or french to that matter. But I'm certain a decent LLM can do that without me having to resort to reach out to another person, that might not be available or have enough time to deal with my shenanigans.

I agree that there are way too much AI slop being created and made public, but yet there are way too many cases where the use is fair and used for improving whatever the person is doing.

Yes, AI is being abused. No, I don't agree we should all go taliban against even fair use cases.
by strix_varius | 2025-10-27 16:46:35+00:00
I agree, and I'm not sure why it feels off but I have a theory.

AI is good at local coherence, but loses the plot over longer thoughts (paragraphs, pages). I don't think I could identify AI sentences but I'm totally confident I could identify an AI book.

This includes both opening a large text in a way of thinking that isn't reflected several paragraphs later, and also maintaining a repetitive "beat" in the rhythm of writing that is fine locally but becomes obnoxious and repetitive over longer periods. Maybe that's just regression to the mean of "voice?"
by portaouflop | 2025-10-27 16:46:36+00:00
It’s a clever post but people that use so to write personal blogposts ain’t gonna read this and change their mind. Only people who already hate using llms are gonna cheer you on.

But this kind of content is great for engagement farming on HN.

Just write “something something clankers bad”

While I agree with the author it’s a very moot and uninspired point
by bitwize | 2025-10-27 16:46:47+00:00
PCs from IBM could do this as well. There was a ROM'd BASIC in IBM computers that they would default to if they couldn't find a bootable disk. The BASIC that came with PC-DOS, BASICA.COM, was actually a wrapper for this ROM BASIC.

The clones relied on GW-BASIC and later QBasic, which came on disk and was bundled with DOS, to supply this functionality, and didn't have BASIC in ROM. In fact, some early BIOS implementations, if they did not find a bootable disk, displayed a message "NO BASIC FOUND" or similar.
by donmcronald | 2025-10-27 16:46:52+00:00
Exactly. It’s a tactic so big tech doesn’t have to engage in activity that would justify anti-trust action if they want to ban a developer or even a whole class of apps. It’s also usable in general to benefit the wealthy.

They force anyone distributing software into the legal system so a “3rd party” can sue and destroy the life of anyone that goes against the system they want. Anything they don’t like will be accused of violating patents, etc. and the option to distribute anonymously for the good of users / society will no longer exist.
by rcarmo | 2025-10-27 16:47:02+00:00
I don't get all this complaining, TBH. I have been blogging for over 25 years (20+ on the same site), been using em dashes ever since I switched to a Mac (and because the Markdown parser I use converts double dashes to it, which I quite like when I'm banging out text in vim), and have made it a point of running long-form posts through an LLM asking it to critique my text for readability because I have a tendency for very long sentences/passages.

AI is a tool to help you _finish_ stuff, like a wood sander. It's not something you should use as a hacksaw, or as a hammer. As long as you are writing with your own voice, it's just better autocorrect.
by kkylin | 2025-10-27 16:47:05+00:00
MIT Scheme (and ScmUtils) are unfortunately not getting enough maintainence, but they still work with a little effort. Probably better on Linux than any other environment. If you have a Mac you may try this:

https://github.com/kkylin/mit-scheme-intel-mac-patch?tab=rea...

Works well on Intel Macs and (with effort) mostly works on Apple Silicon.