MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acdha | 2025-10-27 01:02:42+00:00
You don’t need to know how JPEG or AVIF work internally to use an <img> tag.

> Meanwhile, there simply aren’t web standards that match React’s capabilities.

This isn't true for much of the web but it’s more deeply missing the point: if you’re building a web app, you need to learn the web APIs because those are what all web apps actually use. Adding intermediaries means that you have more things to learn, troubleshoot, and optimize. React’s value comes from managing the complexity of the code you write, which can be a real benefit for some projects but it doesn’t remove the need for you to know how browsers work.
by mikepurvis | 2025-10-27 01:03:57+00:00
But the big crisis right now is that for an astonishing number of tasks that a normal person could come up with, chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human.

If you took the current state of affairs back to the 90s you’d quickly convince most people that we’re there. Given that we’re actually not, we’re now have to come up with new goalposts.
by wilg | 2025-10-27 01:05:25+00:00
There are no commercials with YouTube Premium, which is totally worth it. Why people feel entitled to pirate things still is incredible. People fundamentally hate paying artists for their work even though it's incredibly cheap, because they can come up with some bogus way to blame a corporation and feel, like you said here, laughably, like Luke Skywalker. Insane.
by socalgal2 | 2025-10-27 01:08:13+00:00
Can you point to an LLM passing the turing test where they didn't invalidate the test by limiting the time or the topics?

I've seen claims of passing but it's always things like "with only 3 questions" or "with only 3 minutes of interrogation" or "With only questions about topic X". Those aren't Turing Tests. As an example, if you limit the test to short things than anything will pass "Limit to 1 word one question". User types "Hello", LLM response "Hi". PASS! (not!)
by neilv | 2025-10-27 01:08:41+00:00
> My lightly optimized Markov babbler consumes around ~60 CPU microseconds per request.

What about taking valid "content" that some dumb AI scraper would process (e.g., literature, how-to instructions, news), and filtering it through a program that saturates it with gratuitous ideological messages and propaganda.

The most impact would be if they deployed with this training. For example, users couldn't ask an LLM trained by these awful AI scraping companies how to make sourdough starter yeast, without the LLM riffing tangentially on why you should never have intimate relations with AI company billionaires. And no pet care tip would be complete, without the AI reminding the user never to leave their pet unsupervised near politicians of a particular party.

Or at least the companies will stop destroying your servers whilst violating your copyrights.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-10-27 01:09:46+00:00
Please reread that section. You'll discover it has nothing to do with whether humans can pass the test.

If you can find a part of the paper in which Turing really does claim that it is unnecessary for most adult humans to be able to pass the test, by all means quote it. But this would be a surprising thing for him to claim, because it would undermine the entire foundation of his Imitation Game.
by xethos | 2025-10-27 01:12:37+00:00
Thank you. Mine appears fast enough that I hadn't actually noticed - seemingly by the time I release my right-click button. This is on (what I consider) obscenely powerful hardware for a web browser though: a 5600X, 64Gb RAM, and a hardwired connection with geek-level hardware all the way up the chain. Basically the best possible scenario, and it's still noticably slower than the rest of the context menu now that I look for it.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-27 01:13:21+00:00
Yeah humans have done this physically for very long. We have puny little teeth but have knives and butchering tools much better than any animal's teeth. We have little hair, but make clothes that can keep us warm in the arctic or even in space. We have an underdeveloped colon and digestive system, but instead we pre-digest the food by cooking it on fire. In some sense the stove is part of our digestive system, the jacket is part of our dermis (like the shell of a snail, except we build it through a different process), and we have external teeth in the form of utensils and stone tools.

Now, ideally, the LLMs could also design their own tools, when they realize there is a recurring task that can be accomplished better and more reliably by coding up a tool.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-10-27 01:15:49+00:00
GP is basing their comment on 5 year old data. As of April 2025 the duck curve problem is solved - https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/. Mid day demand increased because of battery charging, smoothing out the load. The California grid is looking immensely healthy, being a net exporter most days.

Will it handle an extended heatwave that also affects other states simultaneously? You’re right, we can’t know that with certainty until after it happens. But based on what I’ve read I’m confident it will.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-10-27 01:15:59+00:00
> Microsoft completely lacks POSIX tools

True!

> compiler needs to have a complete IDE installed

Not true. You can download just MSVC the toolchain sans IDE. Works great. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76792904/how-to-install-...

> compiler invocation also doesn't really correspond to any other compiler

True. But you don’t have to use MSVC. You can just use Clang for everything.

Clang on Windows does typically use the Microsoft C++ standard library implementation. But that’s totally fine and won’t impact your invocation.
by p1esk | 2025-10-27 01:18:02+00:00
Exactly. Five years ago I posted here on HN that AI will pass Turing Test in the next 3 years (I was impressed by Facebook chatbot progress at the time). I was laughed at and downvoted into oblivion. TT was seen by many as a huge milestone, incredibly difficult task, “maybe in my lifetime” possibility.
by drmpeg | 2025-10-27 01:18:39+00:00
I got to go inside Cheyenne Mountain Complex back in 1988 when I was the project engineer for the DSP satellite ground network upgrade. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any control room. In fact, I didn't get to see much at all. When we got there we were informed that the problem had already been resolved, so we just turned around and left.

But I did get to go down the tunnel and through the blast door.
by godelski | 2025-10-27 01:18:49+00:00
But is this not abuse of the smartphone rather than inherent to the smartphone itself?

I'll put it another way: can you have a smartphone without infinite scrolling, microtransactions, advertising, overloading of notifications, etc.

Certainly the answer is "yes".

We can have GPS without tracking. We can have notifications without advertising. We can have phone calls without spam calls. We can have games without microtransactions. We can have software without locking everything down. So on and so on.

You might call this a pipe dream, but we're just talking about technical feasibility here. There's no doubt we can do those things! Funding those things is a different conversation, but it can't start to happen if we don't even recognize that it is possible. We can't make progress if we don't have direction. The pipe dream doesn't have to be completely achieved to make success, it stands as direction to work towards.

> but we all carried dumb phones

I'm sure this would be better too, but it is also better to blow my nose when I'm sick but the Kleenex doesn't cure my flu. It treats symptoms, relieves them, makes them less problematic, but it does not solve them or address the underlying issues. By not fixing the underlying issues we still leave the environment setup for abuse. To be blunt, I think you are illustrating my concern.

Why do we have to try to fix everything with duct tape? That's not a fix, that's a patch.

And let's be honest, getting rid of a phone with internet and GPS is basically a non-starter for most people.
by ompogUe | 2025-10-27 01:18:58+00:00
The 30's is where it really got kicked up a notch. amazing stage performers, state-of-the-art film tech, and a world full of life. "Captains Courageous" shows how incredible many fish were in the water. "You Can't Take it with You" is an homage to the artists soul. "Tonight or Never"'s perfectly balanced pre-code saucy love story. The effects in "Ssh, the octopus" and "the old dark house" still stand up
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-27 01:19:02+00:00
I just don't really care for TV that much, but my husband was on at least three streaming services. I would occasionally manually pirate shows and movies when he asked, but a while back I hooked up radarr to my jellyfin server. Now he's canceled all our streaming services and gone full pirate.

Our entire tv and movie budget is now condensed into a single subscription: the VPN behind my torrent box. And also all the new disks I have to keep adding to the media array to support his new habit.
by lumost | 2025-10-27 01:20:17+00:00
The fundamental constraint the article alludes to is the powerlessness of consumer choice. You can’t make a better choice because you don’t have any better option. When there is a better option, you lack the tools to verify that the option is truly better vs scamming you to pay more for something which either doesn’t matter or is simply a lie.

Prior to free trade, you could reasonably sue the manufacturers or distributors for egregious harms. You could also reasonably expect domestic regulatory authorities to intervene before these harms entered the market.*

In principal, this could be done in a free trade system with counterparties who implement and enforce similar rules. But then you need all parties to agree on any new rules and enforcement mechanisms. You only need one bad actor to nuke the arrangement by growing without these burdens.

* Assuming regulations and laws are equitably and incorruptibly enforced in the local government.
by kelnos | 2025-10-27 01:21:19+00:00
> it probably costs you as much or more than it costs them in terms of both network bytes and CPU

Network bytes, perhaps (though text is small), but the article points out that each garbage page is served using only microseconds of CPU time, and a little over a megabyte of RAM.

The goal here isn't to get the bots to go away, it's to feed them garbage forever, in a way that's light on your resources. Certainly the bot, plus the offline process that trains on your garbage data, will be using more CPU (and I/O) time than you will to generate it.
by newfriend | 2025-10-27 01:21:25+00:00
So you've abandoned the "majority" vote argument, and now you're saying the individual vote tallies in that state don't matter.

So if 49% of California voted Republican, but both Senators are Democrats, then the entire population they represent should be counted as Democrats.

A flawed argument.

It also completely ignores the entire reason the Senate exists in the first place, to represent the States.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-27 01:21:49+00:00
Man, jellyfin is shockingly absolutely killer for subtitles. I don't remember if it's a plugin or built in, but there's a subtitle search option that cross-references your video's filename into some database that usually gives you a workable set of subs.

Plus it respects your options to default subs on or off, in a language you choose, in a style you like to see. I don't think any streaming services do it this well honestly
by mbreese | 2025-10-27 01:22:55+00:00
Unless you can submit an interactive slurm job and get exclusive access to an H100 for a few hours of dedicated time. If the cluster is overloaded, it’s hard to get those to run when you’d like, but there are still ways. But you do have to be patient.

But it’s still not quite like exclusive access to resources when you want them. So I can see it from both ways.
by jnaina | 2025-10-27 01:23:46+00:00
I subscribe to Amazon Prime/Apple TV+/NetFlix.

But I also have subscriptions to 2 Usenet services, a paid Plex account, couple of Nzbget instances running full-time attached to a Qnap NAS and an instances of Sonnar.

Just so that I can get unfettered access to 4K content and consume it anyway I want it (Stream using Infuse on Apple TV box or AVP, or download them to my MacBook Pro for watching it while travelling, etc).

But suprisingly I am watching more content on a paid YouTube subscription. The Youtube Apple TV app sucks somewhat, but there is always YT-DLP.
by jMyles | 2025-10-27 01:23:53+00:00
No big surprise.

I don't agree with a lot of this guy's politics (especially his bizarre lean into intolerance for sexual identity deviance), but I do respect his willingness to calmly talk about his vision for hours.

I'm headed to Buenos Aires in a couple of weeks here, as I imagine many here are. Planning to play a couple of shows (sorry that the announcement is so late, but it's coming soon). What are must-dos while there, especially with respect to live music?
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-27 01:24:13+00:00
I’ve been involved in research that lead to major changes in TLS deployments across the Internet and so I can tell you that (1) research absolute can and should be structured to drive security improvements! You’re crazy if you think that isn’t an important goal. And (2) the way you structure, identify and disclose findings matters a lot when considering how well you achieve this goal.

Just to give an example of effective change-driving work: I would argue that persistent efforts via tools like Shodan and Censys have done a huge amount to clean up the Internet, at least as compared to one-off research efforts followed by “appoint activists to do the rest.” The reason is that companies respond to persistent measurement campaigns in a way that they don’t respond to one-off PR dings.

Most of the research you cite is pretty obscure and you’d have to search for it. Most of it didn’t get a lot of follow-up. When some of the firms with unencrypted backhauls were contacted by the current researchers, they didn’t even know that their backhauls were unencrypted. Finding and communicating this stuff, then following up on it relentlessly is the difference between “we knew and nobody did anything” and “it got fixed.”

Also don’t think for a second the vocal political types can do this work without constant communication from researchers who are willing to continue this work over a period of years.
by paulcole | 2025-10-27 01:24:18+00:00
Your data doesn’t show what you think it shows for a variety of reasons.

Let’s say I like fruit (particularly oranges) and usually buy $10 worth of them. I go to the store and they’re out of oranges but I still buy $10 worth of fruit (apples today). If you’re tracking how much I spend on fruit you’d think my buying habits didn’t change at all.

Additionally, aren’t countries notorious (particularly US) for fudging unemployment numbers?
by 3abiton | 2025-10-27 01:24:29+00:00
> Or, to put it another way, OpenAI’s 2025 revenue is on track to only be $3.1 billion more than last year, while its annual operational costs are set to be $24.1 billion more than last year. So, for every dollar of revenue growth OpenAI has, it is costing them $7.77! > > I cannot stress how unprecedentedly dreadful that is. It shows that the promised future investors were piling their money into is a fairy tale. This is a money black hole.

Isn't this a "startup blueprint" for tech companies? Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, etc ... More importantly, AI dominance is more important given the reward?
by anonnon | 2025-10-27 01:24:36+00:00
> House of Dynamite

This is easily the best, inadvertent advertisement ever for boosting the nation's missile defense capabilities, and it's ironic that it came out of progressive Netflix studios, given that progressives have insisted since the 80s that missile defense is a worthless, impossible ("like hitting a bullet with a bullet") MIC boondoggle. Thanks, Netflix!
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-27 01:24:50+00:00
> I assume you haven't read The Mythical Man-Month[0]?

Actually, I have read Brooks' seminal work.

> Your emphasis that surgeons "heavily rely on the surgical team" is just as important to Brooks' beliefs, in that the "Chief Programmer" is only able to do what they do via the support of the team.

What Brooks described as "Chief Programmer" would now be called an "Architect" or "Principal Engineer", amongst other similar titles. Programmers at that time defined and verified their solutions before submitting them to be "encoded." This task was typically performed by "coders," being the people who transcribed programs into punch cards (or equivalent) for execution. The role of "coder" has long since been eliminated by the ability of programmers to encode their solutions themselves.

>> I hate the idea of giving all the grunt work to some lower-status members of the team. Yes, junior members will often have more grunt work, but they should also be given many interesting tasks to help them grow.

> The author clearly sees less experienced programmers as mentees, rather than just some grunts whose work is beneath them.

This is not clear to me at all. How does "giving all the grunt work to some lower-status members of the team" convey a mentor/mentee relationship and not exactly what the author states? To be exact, the author explicitly identifies a class of team members as being "lower-status."

> The analogy may not be perfect, but their message about "AI coding tools" should be valued without judgement (and without accusations of egocentric thinking).

Anytime someone equates "junior members" to "lower-status members" and uses self-aggrandizement to describe their role in an effort, I am going to call that out using the most charitable description I can - a purely egocentric perspective.
by rswinkle | 2025-10-27 01:26:07+00:00
It currently clocks it at 12.5K but that includes stuff that could easily be stripped out. I suspect, even if I had it "finished" with everything I would ever want in it, it wouldn't be more than 15-20k. PGL saves a lot by not bothering with GLSL at all.

Glad you found it fun to play with, that's what it's for. Hoping to have a new release in the next week or so, and there have been some serious/breaking changes since the last so hopefully it goes well.

And on the topic of this thread, PGL is overkill for raylib's software rendering backend since they don't need arbitrary shader support, but I would still love to try making PGL a raylib backend someday because it would be cool and running the entire set of Raylib examples would be a great stress test. Plus then I could use raylib to make a game with PGL, win-win.
by narrator | 2025-10-27 01:29:21+00:00
Prompt Injection is an interesting difference between human consciousness and machine "consciousness", or what people try and liken to it. A human can easily tell when information is coming from his memory or internal thoughts and when it is coming from a possibly less reliable outside source. Gaslighting is essentially an attempted prompt injection and is considered psychological abuse. Interestingly, people complain about AI gaslighting them and AI doesn't seem to think that's a problem.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-10-27 01:30:30+00:00
So far 2 million illegal immigrants have left the US. Mass surveillance and enforcement technology is dismal to think about, though NSA and google have been doing it for years. I'm watching from my perspective in the UK where there is growing fury over the gross incompetence, negligence and mishandling of a mass immigration crisis which is so stupid it beggars belief. The various law enforcement agencies in the us don't cooperate that closely, so there's less scope for this to be abused against american citizens unlike in the UK.
by acdha | 2025-10-27 01:30:54+00:00
> chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human.

It can appear so, as long as you don’t check too carefully. It’s impressive but still very common to find basic errors once you are out of the simplest, most common problems due to the lack of real understanding or reasoning capabilities. That leads to mistakes which most humans wouldn’t make (while sober / non-sleep deprived) and the classes of error are different because humans don’t mix that lack of understanding/reasoning/memory with the same level of polish.
by cauliflower2718 | 2025-10-27 01:32:00+00:00
I think this depends on how you measure task.

One common kind of interaction I have with chatgpt (pro): 1. I ask for something 2. Chatgpt suggests something that doesn't actually fulfill my request 3. I tell it how its suggestion does not satisfy my request. 4. It gives me the same suggestion as before, or a similar suggestion with the same issue.

Chatgpt is pretty bad at "don't keep doing the thing I literally just asked you not to do" but most humans are pretty good at that, assuming they are reasonable and cooperative.
by peteforde | 2025-10-27 01:32:32+00:00
Fully agree with the "it depends".

FWIW, my slightly more than anecdotal evidence is that 1.6mm is the default thickness at JLCPCB and PCBWay, and they will subtly encourage you to switch to that width if you don't want to pay more or wait longer for them to fill a sheet.

Every IC prototype board (eg Proto Advantage) and all of those Adafruit breakout boards are 1.6mm.

For these reasons, 1.6mm sure seems like a default if there is one. Is there some JEDEC standard or similar which proves me officially wrong? Happy to learn if so.
by ck425 | 2025-10-27 01:32:48+00:00
The problem is once you look at the definitions it's actually quite hard to exactly define what's Fantasy vs Sci-fi. It's more a venn diagram, than strictly separate genres and everyone has their own definition of which is which. So when someone likes one but not the other, it's hard to discuss books because what one person considers sci-fi, another may consider fantasy pretending to be sci-fi, thus the complaints of the original commenter.
by sarimkx | 2025-10-27 01:34:49+00:00
+1 for taking as many photos as possible. I actually think physical photos are way better for memories and less risky long term. Hard drives fail all the time.

I would recommend getting a 35mm film camera and taking a LOT of pictures. Capture yourself, family, events, travel, life milestones.

You will only REGRET the ones you did not take.

Alternatively, something I am looking into, is printing a few hundred photos you have on your smartphone at the end of each year. Get the best ones in physical form to keep safe.
by cyberax | 2025-10-27 01:34:52+00:00
> $5.7 million contract for AI-driven social media surveillance

Yeah, that would just about cover the cost of a pizza party in the AI world. You also can look at "Zignal Labs". The website looks like 100% snakeoil.

I have no doubt that ICE would love to have some AI-based software to detect illegal immigrants, but I doubt it's more effective than just regular datamining.
by fmajid | 2025-10-27 01:34:53+00:00
Serious private set intersection uses full homomorphic encryption or equivalent mechanisms. Microsoft Edge's compromised password detection uses FHE, for instance:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/password-monit...

If anything, this article understates the problem. A single Nvidia RTX4090 can calculate 164 billion MD5 hashes per second running hashcat software:

https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb4...

That said, surprisingly few people are aware of this fact, even senior technical leadership at Big Tech companies, so I'm not surprised dodgy Ad-Tech companies are not either, and it might be an illustration of Hanlon's Razor: do not ascribe to malice what can be better explained by incompetence (even if ad-tech companies long ago forfeited the benefit of doubt).