MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whistle650 | 2025-10-15 15:59:23+00:00
That’s true. But you probably can’t. At least any more than others. It’s a systemic issue in the ad network ecosystem which you don’t have much control over. If you can figure it out, odds are lots of others can too. People do assess the quality of traffic sources and do check the return on ad spend. It’s that system wide process that keeps the return on ad spend roughly constant.

The point here, for me, is that a microeconomic perspective on this whole question is more salient than a purely technical one.
by hermitcrab | 2025-10-15 15:59:29+00:00
I recently ran $851 of ads on Reddit and the results were crap. Mean engaged time per active user of 8 seconds (mean - not median!). I makes me wonder if it wasn't mostly bots. If so, who was running the bots?

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
by AlexandrB | 2025-10-15 15:59:30+00:00
LLMs largely live in the world of pure language and related tokens - something humans invented late in their evolution. Human intelligence comes - at least partially - from more fundamental physical experience. Look at examples of intelligent animals that lack language.

Basically there's something missing with AI. Its conception of the physical world is limited by our ability to describe it - either linguistically or mathematically. I'm not sure what this means for AGI, but I suspect that LLM intelligence is fundamentally not the same as human or animal intelligence at the moment as a result.
by lioeters | 2025-10-15 15:59:38+00:00
There's a lot of good CSS knowledge and experience in this comment - as long as one can get past the grouchy tone, with which I sympathize. I agree that for a page showing how to use CSS, the code examples have room for improvement to demonstrate best practices.

Somewhere I imagine there's a summary of the "common sense" guideline for CSS, like the range of reasonable line width and height, avoid !important, and so on. A linter like Stylelint can help enforce them. ..Huh, ESLint now supports linting CSS (announced Feb 2025).
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-15 15:59:39+00:00
Yup, for sure. But part of risk management is considering how likely a failure mode might be and if it's really worth paying to mitigate. Developers are really good at imagining failure modes, but often not so good at estimating their likelihood/cost.

I have no "hard rules" on how to appraise a dependency. In addition to the above, I also like to skim the issue tracker, skim code for a moment to get a feel for quality, skim the docs, etc. I think that being able to quickly skim a project and get a feel for quality, as well as knowing when to dig deeper and how deep to dig are what makes someone a seasoned developer.

And beware of anyone who has opinions on right vs. wrong without knowing anything about your project and it's risk appetite. There's a whole range between "I'm making a microwave website" and "I'm making software that operates MRIs."
by devy | 2025-10-15 15:59:46+00:00
This is a optional/invite only feature. LinkedIn doesn't provide that work email validation feature for all employers on their platform. Why did I know that? Because my past startup was requesting LinkedIn to enable that so that we can enable that feature but they said it's an invite only feature. Internally, I think they are only invite those employers who has certain amount of employees and/or revenues to turn it on.

Apple / Google developer program uses Dun&Bradstreet to verify company and developer identities. That's another way. But LinkedIn doesn't have that feature (yet).
by cwyers | 2025-10-15 16:00:42+00:00
LLMs are good at pursuing objectives, but they aren't necessarily good at juggling competing objectives at once. So you can picture doing the following, for instance:

- "Here is a spec for an API endpoint. Implement this spec."

- "Using these tools, refactor the codebase. Make sure that you are passing all tests from (dead code checker, cyclomatic complexity checker, etc.)"

The clankers are very good at iteratively moving towards a defined objective (it's how they were post-trained), so you can get them to do basically anything you can define an objective for, as long as you can chunk it up in a way that it fits in their usable context window.
by jncfhnb | 2025-10-15 16:00:43+00:00
That’s actually exactly my point. You cannot fake it till you make it by using forever larger context windows. You have to map it back to actual system state. Giant context windows might progressively produce the illusion of working due to unfathomable scale, but it’s a terrible tool for the job.

LLMs are not stateful. A chat log is a truly shitty state tracker. An LLM will never be a good agent (beyond a conceivable illusion of unfathomable scale). A simple agent system that uses an LLM for most of its thinking operations could.
by mcdonje | 2025-10-15 16:00:55+00:00
Don't forget all the private sector jobs associated with means testing.

Read "Bullshit Jobs".

Also, taxes on the top are way, way too low. As evidenced by the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.

Edit: The person I replied to made a pithy comment about 'feelings being uncorrelated with accuracy', then made an incomplete superficial analysis.

Now, I'm getting downvoted with no logical rebuttal.

Seems like a knee-jerk emotional reaction to me daring to say taxes aren't high enough, even though inequality is high, and the balance of power does favor the super rich over the government and the masses.

Either that, or an inability to imagine the second order effects on the economy if people who are currently working BS jobs had enough of a safety net to persue their passion projects.

Even though their wages are private sector, the jobs are private sector waste to support governmental waste. Imagine if instead of getting people to work 40 hours a week to help a company determine if they're in compliance with a governmental means-tested program, people were just given money to live.

Some would spend their time taking care of their grandkids. Many would start businesses. Open source projects would have plenty of labor. Towns battling invasive species would have plenty of labor.
by bluescrn | 2025-10-15 16:01:03+00:00
Far less open-source software for it, no compilers, emulators banned until recently.

And as for paid software, almost everything a bloodys subscription even for things like note-taking apps, that or loaded with ads and microtransactions.

And anything touch-centric encourages dumbed-down limited-functionality software to begin with. More advanced software requires more precise input devices.
by racktash | 2025-10-15 16:01:04+00:00
Strawman.

Some things need funding despite being unprofitable. Not everyone will agree, but I believe art/culture (including often unprofitable forms thereof) are worthwhile, and should thus receive public funding (to some degree). I believe the same about justice, policing, education, research etc.

None of this rules allowing a freeish market to operate where doing so "delivers the goods".
by itsnowandnever | 2025-10-15 16:01:06+00:00
the penrose-lucas argument is the best bet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument

the basic idea being that either the human mind is NOT a computation at all (and it's instead spooky unexplainable magic of the universe) and thus can't be replicated by a machine OR it's an inconsistent machine with contradictory logic. and this is a deduction based on godel's incompleteness theorems.

but most people that believe AGI is possible would say the human mind is the latter. technically we don't have enough information today to know either way but we know the human mind (including memories) is fallible so while we don't have enough information to prove the mind is an incomplete system, we have enough to believe it is. but that's also kind of a paradox because that "belief" in unproven information is a cornerstone of consciousness.
by nradov | 2025-10-15 16:01:16+00:00
Human bodies don't adapt much to become more metabolically efficient. Some endurance athletes will gain a few percent after extensive training but the effect is small.

For some activities there is a skill and technique aspect which impacts the amount of energy required. Like if a keyboard jockey literally doesn't know how to swing a pickaxe effectively then they're going to burn more calories digging a ditch compared to someone who's been doing it for years.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-10-15 16:01:24+00:00
Models are made of "parameters" which are really weights in a large neural network. For each token generated, each parameter needs to take its turn inside the CPU/GPU to be calculated.

So if you have a 7B parameter model with 16-bit quantization, that means you'll have 14 GB/s of data coming in. If you only have 153 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, that means you'll cap out ~11 tokens/sec, regardless of how my processing power you have.

You can of course quantize to 8-bit or even 4-bit, or use a smaller model, but doing so makes your model dumber. There's a trade-off between performance and capability.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-10-15 16:02:38+00:00
Take 100% of the wealth of everyone with more than $1B in the US and you get $23k per person / $33k per adult. That's a good amount of money; the adult number would be enough to live off of in the right parts of the country. It's about 4x the annual welfare spend. But then next year comes, you have to find the money again, and you're out of billionaires.

Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
by blooalien | 2025-10-15 16:03:28+00:00
> I personally haves an ansible playbook to ~setup all my commonly used tooling on ~any cli I will use significantly;

^^ Yep. Totally this. I've become entirely too accustomed to all the little niceties of a well-crafted toolchain that covers all my needs at any given moment. It was worth the time invested to automate installing and configuring all the fancy newfangled stuff I've built up muscle-memory for. :)
by retrac | 2025-10-15 16:03:28+00:00
You mention pensions already. In my country the profoundly disabled are also provided payments and housing. (Not much and not enough but it's there.) Your argument applies equally to that. We're promising to support them for the rest of their lives. But maybe one day we won't be able to.

I think I see what you're arguing but I am not following the logic. It would seem to be a general argument that can apply to any form of assistance to anyone in need. Don't provide it, because one day you might be bankrupt, and not be able to provide it anymore, but now they'll be dependent on you and so they'll suffer more than they would have otherwise if they'd never been dependent on you.

But one factor I think you maybe haven't considered: poverty often diminishes capacity to function, and to earn income. I realize this is well into just speculative economic philosophy but my own intuition seems to be the exact opposite of yours: assistance of this kind probably improves capacity to be independent, should it one day be withdrawn.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-15 16:03:41+00:00
> Hyatt later reflected on some of the (celluloid, i.e. nitro-cellulose or gun-cotton) balls’ flaws, recalling, “A lighted cigar applied would at once result in a serious flame and occasionally the violent contact of the balls would produce a mild explosion like a percussion guncap.” He received “a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado, mentioning this fact and saying that he did not care so much about it but that instantly every man in the room pulled a gun.”

Depicted in the brilliant "Connections" series by James Burke [1].

Scrub to 29:12 [1] https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e09
by vaisa99 | 2025-10-15 16:03:50+00:00
Reading is the most challenging thing we ever learn to do. Each letter is a symbol, those symbols make sounds, then add them together and the sounds and meanings changes.

What we need to be ready for is adjusting our expectations that every kid has to perform at the same level. “Standards” are business models, and they don’t apply to children and developing minds. Schools should be willing (and allowed) to organize classes where students read and write at the same level. That would be more equitable than working towards the middle of the statistical range, which neglects both those students at the top as well as those at the bottom. Focus instruction where it’s most needed, and work just beyond where those students are capable of. That is what leads to progress.

And stop giving everyone the same test. Start there and adjust downward.
by insraq | 2025-10-15 16:04:00+00:00
I wrote a post (rant)[1] about my experience of releasing a game on macOS as an indie dev. tl;dr: Apples goes a long way to make the process as painful as possible with tons of paper cuts.

[1] https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-platforms.html#...
by tracker1 | 2025-10-15 16:04:23+00:00
What really bugs me, is the huge performance gains are against the M1 and an (5-7yo chip) Intel Mac, that from my own memory had throttling and overheating issues. While not as impressive, I'd really appreciate if they simply showed the generational gains, or actual charts against several previous generations.

I'm still pretty happy with my 16gb M1 Air, but it would be nice to know some closer to real world differences.
by procaryote | 2025-10-15 16:04:31+00:00
Hello world in java is pretty fast. Not rust fast but a lot faster than you'd expect.

Java starting slowly is mostly from all the cruft in the typical java app, with springboot, dependency injection frameworks, registries etc. You don't have to have those, it's just that most java devs use them and can't conceive of a world of low dependencies

Still not great for commandline apps, but java itself is much better than java devs
by coffeeaddict1 | 2025-10-15 16:04:34+00:00
> an absolutely ancient OpenGL version

I still don't get this. Apple is a trillion dollar company. How much does it cost to pay a couple of engineers to maintain an up to date version on top of Metal? Their current implementation is 4.1, it wouldn't cost them much to provide one for 4.6. Even Microsoft collaborated with Mesa to build a translation on top of dx12, Apple could do the same.
by throwforfeds | 2025-10-15 16:05:01+00:00
I agree, it'd be nice to cut the bullshit jobs, but you're right that that's not going to happen.

But I still am down with paying a little more to support people that are providing to our overall culture. I'm friends with many artists here in NYC, and in most cases everyone is broke. You'll see profiles written about them in the NYT, or see them on panels at major cultural institutions, but that's just the outward appearance. In reality, they're struggling to pay rent. Sometimes they're sleeping in cars when out on tour doing work because they can't afford a motel.

Many of us don't have the courage to do what they do. It's not like they're sitting around, flush with cash, day dreaming all day. They're doing extremely difficult work (personal, spiritual, cultural), and we all benefit from it. I'm down with supporting it. Of the tens of thousands of dollars I pay in taxes every year, an extra $40 isn't a big deal.
Show HN: Go-nvtrust – Go library for Nvidia GPU attestation
by yoihito | 2025-10-15 16:05:12+00:00
As part of my work at Confident Security, I built a go library called `go-nvtrust` that makes it easy to handle attestation for NVIDIA's confidential computing features on Hopper (H100/H200), Blackwell GPUs. It supports single-GPU and multi-GPU configurations.

The library is inspired by NVIDIA's nvtrust tool and provides a simple Go implementation for NVidia GPU attestation. It includes bindings for libnvidia-nscq. The goal is to help build tamper-proof systems for anyone who cares about data privacy.

Key features:

* Integration with go-nvml for GPU attestation.

* Go bindings for NVSwitch via libnvidia-nscq.

* Easy API for evidence collection and NRAS workflows.

* Apache-2.0 licensed.

https://github.com/confidentsecurity/go-nvtrust (README has quick start, examples, and API docs).
Show HN: Typeswipe – carousel text post maker
by morsecode | 2025-10-15 16:05:27+00:00
Hello,

Typeswipe turns long-form writing into beautiful carousel text posts for social media.

This was initially a python script that I wrote for myself to share blog-style posts on instagram during covid. I didn’t want to spend time manually slotting text into template slides but wanted prettier than screenshotting my text editor.

Over the years and on the side, it became a swift app that I eventually rewrote in react native to launch on both platforms. This all took a lot longer than anticipated but I enjoyed the process. The free version has no watermarks and a subscription gives extra fonts/colours.

Would love feedback and happy to answer any questions!
by hedora | 2025-10-15 16:05:28+00:00
Yeah; I wished they'd gone the other way, and made memory leaks unsafe (yes, this means no Rc or Arc). That way, you could pass references across async boundaries without causing the borrow checker to spuriously error out.

(It's safe to leak a promise, so there's no way for the borrow checker to prove an async function actually returned before control flow is handed back to the caller.)
by DavidDodda | 2025-10-15 16:06:01+00:00
so I wrote this article a few weeks back, i reached out to the company on LinkedIn, even tried to connect with their leadership team. sent a few people from the org a draft of the article. I did not get any response at all. so, not really sure about this myself.

also, got blocked by the 'Chief Blockchain Officer' when I asked for a comment.
by taeric | 2025-10-15 16:06:03+00:00
Really hard to get past the headline's blame of Americans for this. Because it is evidently always the fault of Americans?

I'm also not clear that this somehow "paved the way" for synthetic plastics. Was an early mover precisely because it was a luxury activity. But I don't think anyone thinks they would have not been invented had it not been for the sport?
by omnicognate | 2025-10-15 16:06:30+00:00
That's too brief to capture it, and I'm not going to try to summarise(*). The books are well worth a read regardless of whether you agree with Penrose. (The Emperor's New Mind is a lovely, wide-ranging book on many topics, but Shadows of the Mind is only worth it if you want to go into extreme detail on the AI argument and its counterarguments.)

* I will mention though that "some" should be "all" in 2, but that doesn't make it a correct statement of the argument.
by Damogran6 | 2025-10-15 16:06:43+00:00
There's a cost/value calculation that just doesn't work well...I have a Ryzen9/rtx3070 PC ($2k over time) and my M4 Mini ($450) holds it's own for most all normal user stuff...sprinting ahead for specific tasks (Video CODEC)...but the 6 year old dedicated GPU on the PC annihilates the Mini in pushing pixels...You can spec an Apple that does better for gaming, but man, are you gonna pay for it, and still not keep up with current PC GPUS.

Now...something like minecraft or SubNautica? The M4 is fine, especially if you're not pushing 4k 240hz.

Apple has been pushing the gaming experience for years (iPhone 4s?) but it never REALLY seems to land, and when someone has a great gaming seperience in a modern AAA game, they always seem to be using a $4500 Studio or similar.
by raldi | 2025-10-15 16:06:51+00:00
The author comes so close to getting it, with the paragraph about how if you drop a human into an environment, they inevitably take over as the deadliest and most powerful creature.

But the next step is to ask why; in the case of the Gruffalo it was obvious: fangs, claws, strength, size…

In the case of humans, it’s because we’re the most intelligent creature in the forest. And for the first time in our history, we’re about to not be.
by throwuxiytayq | 2025-10-15 16:07:05+00:00
> Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation

I don’t think anybody does this. I haven’t heard about official emulators for any of the mainstream consoles. Emulation would be prohibitively slow.

Developers usually test on dedicated devkits which are a version of the target console (often with slightly better specs as dev builds need more memory and run more slowly). This is annoying, slow and difficult, but at least you can get these dev kits, usually for a decent price, and there’s a point to trying to ship on those platforms. Meanwhile, nobody plays games on macs, and Apple is making zero effort to bring in the developers or the gamers. It’s a no-chicken-and-no-egg situation, really.
by disambiguation | 2025-10-15 16:07:42+00:00
I suppose intelligence can be partitioned as less than, equal to, or greater than human. Given the initial theory depends on natural evidence, one could argue there's no proof that "greater than human" intelligence is possible - depending on your meaning of AGI.

But then intelligence too is a dubious term. An average mind with infinite time and resources might have eventually discovered general relativity.
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-15 16:08:41+00:00
But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots?

How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale?

I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?
by forgotoldacc | 2025-10-15 16:08:56+00:00
I guess we also need to define what biological life means. Even biologists have debated whether viruses should be considered life.

And if we determine it must be something with cells that can sustain themselves, we run into a challenge should we encounter extraterrestrials that don't share our evolutionary path.

When we get self-building machines that can repair themselves, move, analyze situations, and respond accordingly, I don't think it's unfair to consider them life. But simply being life doesn't mean it's inherently good. Humans see syphilis bacteria and ticks as living things, but we don't respect them. We acknowledge that polar bears have a consciousness, but they're at odds with our existence if we're put in the same room. If we have autonomous machines that can destroy humans, I think those could be considered life. But it's life that opposes our own.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-15 16:09:00+00:00
What I wanted to say was that people should read books which challenge themselves. That the judge of complexity should be they and that it is not up to me to decide what people read. That reading for the sake of reading is actually always worthwhile and that nobody should be judged for what they are reading. That all reading is a joy. That slop was just a way to categorize, but that each person themselves had to categorize themselves. That there is nothing wrong with treasuring what other see as banal or slop.

All this is what I was trying to express to you. I tried to emphasize, because I am a reader of genre fiction and I do love books. Just like you.

But actually you made me rethink this. Reading slop is worthless. The only reason to do is because it is marginally better than watching tiktok. I will look at someone reading Kings slop novels just like I look at someone watching TikTok slop. Reading for the sake of reading is worthless. Someone being illiterate or only reading slop makes no difference at all. Yes I do look down at you. Reading romance novels does make you a worse person. Sci-fi is for people who are semi tech literate losers who do not shower enough. Fantasy is for people running around in plastic armor as if they were 5.

I guess a thank you is in order for making me come to this realization.