MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alganet | 2025-10-26 23:49:08+00:00
Absolute definitions are weak. They won't settle anything.

We know what we need right now, the next step. That step is a machine that, when it fails, it fails in a human way.

Humans also make mistakes, and hallucinate. But we do it as humans. When a human fails, you think "damn, that's a mistake perhaps me or my friend could have done".

LLMs on the other hand, fail in a weird way. When they hallucinate, they demonstrate how non-human they are.

It has nothing to do with some special kind of interrogator. We must assume the best human interrogator possible. This next step I described work even with the most skeptic human interrogator possible. It also synergizes with the idea of alignment in ways other tests don't.

When that step is reached, humans will or will not figure out another characteristic that makes it evident that "subject X" is a machine and not a human, and a way to test it.

Moving the goalpost is the only way forward. Not all goalpost moves are valid, but the valid next move is a goalpost move. It's kind of obvious.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-26 23:49:14+00:00
I'm also frustrated by the lack of clear definitions related to AI.

Do you know what's more frustrating, though? Focusing so heavily on definitions that we miss the practicality of it (and I'm guilt of this at times too).

We can debate definitions of AGI, but given that we don't know what a new model or system is capable of until its built and tested in the real world we have more serious questions in my opinion.

Debates over AI risk, safety, and alignment are still pretty uncommon and it seems most are happy enough to accept Jevons Paradox. Are we really going to unleash whatever we do build just to find out after the fact whether or not its AGI?
by derriz | 2025-10-26 23:50:33+00:00
> Of course nuclear is much more complex as a whole, because it comes with at least two, sometimes three different business sections attached by default: Production and sale of rare isotopes, on-site laboratories and research and recycling of spent fuel.

That misses my point. Managing fuel and waste is more complex for nuclear. Producing heat using a nuclear reactor is more complex than producing it with coal and gas. And extracting useful energy from the heat is also more complex (given the low-grade heat that reactors provide).

At every step of the way you have more complexity in engineering and operations.

These engineering realities are independent of the regulatory environment or other activities occurring around the plant.
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-10-26 23:51:48+00:00
And there are 2 varieties of this "revenge" poster, too. Both of which were in this collection. One without the date, and one with [0] which sells for ~1/3 as much. Even though these were printed in reasonably high quantity and distributed straight to the collector market at the time of the movie's promotion, since the franchise was by then quite popular.

[0]https://auctions.emovieposter.com/Bidding.taf?_function=deta...
by gambiting | 2025-10-26 23:52:05+00:00
>>no way a reasonable person can perceive Autopilot as a feature where the car drives itself point to point

And I hope no one does. But I'm sure we both agree that any reasonable person should be able to expect a Tesla to drive itself on a straight road without driving into a truck stopped sideways on said road. Or not be confused in really weird and unusual situations like driving against the sun on a bright summer day.

>>Drivers messing with sensors is irrelevant

Which again, I have no proof was done in those cases, but it's certainly a trend on social media and on other kinds of websites to show all the activities that you can do while the car is "clearly" driving itself. And even outside of things clearly done for attention, there isn't a lack of reports of people being arrested for reading, watching films, playing games and yes, being fully asleep in Teslas behind the wheel. We're not talking about influencers farming likes, we're talking normal people.

>>Also, plenty of other companies offer the same feature under a different name like lane assist and enhanced cruise control, and they don’t even monitor the driver’s eyes.

Uhm....good? That's great in fact?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-26 23:52:10+00:00
> I read sci-fi but not fantasy

I used to be the same. Ask yourself why.

Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.
by fleeting900 | 2025-10-26 23:52:12+00:00
An effective targeted ad platform is also expensive to develop and keep current.

They either build something as effective and invasive as what Google and Meta have, and prioritise ad revenue as much as those companies do.

Or they stay closer to the ineffective ad network they already have in News, App Store, etc, neither putting their money where their cultural mouth is nor becoming an ad revenue behemoth.
by PopePompus | 2025-10-26 23:52:23+00:00
> If elon musk makes interstellar car that can reach the nearest star in 1 second and priced it at 1k, I guarantee within a year people will be bored of it and finding some angle to criticize it.

Americans were glued to their seats watching Apollo 11 land. Most were back to watching I Dream of Jeanie reruns when Apollo 17 touched down.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-26 23:52:31+00:00
(2014) At least that was the first submission, popular in 2022 (52 points, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33103007

Related (Since this link was posted 13 times there) A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool (626 points, 455 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45708292
by fingerlocks | 2025-10-26 23:55:21+00:00
There is nothing inherently special about code, than say, a confidential marketing deck or sales plan. If they can go a network drive, or a service like One Drive , why can't we put our code there? I'm not talking about the Xbox firmware or the entire Windows source. This is about little one-off projects, highly specialized tooling, or experimental proof-of-concepts that are blocked by bureaucracy.

It's a misguided policy that hurts morale and leaves a tremendous amount of productivity and value on the floor. And I suspect that many of the policies are in place simply because a number of the rule makers aren't aware of how easy it to share the code. Look how many in this thread alone weren't aware of inherent distributability of git repositories, and presumably they're developers. You really think some aging career dev ops that worked at Microsoft for 30 years is going to make sensical policies about some software that was shunned and forbidden only a decade ago?
by kragen | 2025-10-26 23:56:08+00:00
I don't see it as a problem that everyone's workflow is different, and, separately, I don't see it as a problem that it takes reading such a long manual to understand all the possibilities of Git. There is no royal road to geometry. Pro Git is a lot shorter than the textbook I learned calculus from.

Unlike calculus, though, you can learn enough about Git to use it usefully in ten minutes. Maybe this sets people up for disappointment when they find out that afterwards their progress isn't that fast.
by bentley | 2025-10-26 23:56:46+00:00
> That is the wonder of BSD like licenses for big corps.

You mean any free software license, BSD or otherwise.

Notice how NetBSD isn’t asking for code contributions, but for monetary contributions. The GPL doesn’t cover that either. Observe the current rugpulling fad to relicense free software (both permissive and copyleft) to nonfree protectionist licenses like BUSL and SSPL in order to monetize.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-26 23:57:11+00:00
Kind of always wished Alan Kay had spent some time playing with LambdaMOO back in the day. I know he was aware of it, but I think if he had really dug into it he would have dug it.

In a system like that, prototype OO makes so much sense. Objects are embodied "things" in the world. You can literally walk up to a "prototype" and touch it, move it, etc and dynamically inspect it (much like you'd do in Self, but in a form which is more narrative). And when you make things, you are building them on the basis of the other things, so.

Kay, Ingalls', etc work was really focused on getting pictures on the screen, and "objects" also made a lot of sense there.

I think the subsequent uses of object-orientation... everywhere else... and their conflation everywhere with (static) types ... has been problematic. I don't like the mixture of the C++/Java static early binding system with class hierarchies. At all.
by jonway | 2025-10-26 23:57:42+00:00
If we’re here (buying another layer of the panopticon) then the next logical step is to create an ADSBexchange-like citizen network, and let people track back.

You can already slap together something with an RTSP stream and Frigate on an individual level. Some people have great views of the road, and some people could just count cars.

Frankly, I can see a lot of benefits for citizens if they could understand and verify which locations police enforce with their physical presence.

As an aside, where the public transparency and oversight for these schemes? It seems like such a powder keg.
by parineum | 2025-10-26 23:59:27+00:00
I think the key factor is amount of rides. On a one to one comparison, obviously an ebike is less work but how much more often are ebike riders riding?

I don't own one but there have been plenty of times in my life where I go somewhere ina car that's in biking distance but don't because maybe there's a decent hill on the way and I don't want to arrive sweaty.

The easy ride an ebike offers opens up more opportunities to ride.
by buu700 | 2025-10-26 23:59:41+00:00
Pretty much. Capabilities we now consider mundane were science fiction just three years ago, as far as anyone not employed by OpenAI was concerned.

We already had a definition of AGI. We hit it.

Are you sure about that? Which definition are you referring to? From what I can tell with Google and Grok, every proposed definition has been that AGI strictly matches or exceeds human cognitive capabilities across the board.

Generative AI is great, but it's not like you could just assign an arbitrary job to a present-day LLM, give it access to an expense account, and check in quarterly with reasonable expectations of useful progress.
by empath75 | 2025-10-27 00:01:52+00:00
> tl;dr; Their definition: "AGI is an AI that can match or exceed the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult."

Is a 9 year old child generally intelligent? What about a high school drop out? Someone with a 90 IQ? A large percentage of people who ever lived wouldn't qualify as being generally intelligent with that benchmark.
by arthurcolle | 2025-10-27 00:02:14+00:00
It has access to a compressed representation of some subset of the information it was trained on, depending on training regime.

By this, what I mean is. Take an image of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight#/media/File:T..., change the file name to something like image.jpg and pass it into Qwen 3 4B, 8B, 30B and look at the responses you get:

It has no idea who these guys are. It thinks they are the beatles, the doors. If you probe enough, it'll say it's IBM cofounders. In a way, it kinda sees that these are mid-1900s folks with cool haircuts, but it doesn't recognize anything. If you probe on the F the model in question becomes convinced it's the Ford racing team with a detailed explanation of two brothers in the photo, etc.

The creation of autoregressive next token predictors is very cool and clearly has and will continue to have many valuable applications, but I think we're missing something that makes interactions with users actually shape the trajectory of its own experience. Maybe scaffolding + qlora solves this. Maybe it doesn't
by andy_ppp | 2025-10-27 00:03:50+00:00
I overheard a TFL worker talking about the Bakerloo line (here in London) apparently having vast sections of the tunnels covered in asbestos and it would be too expensive and too dangerous to ever remove so every few years they spray the inside of the line with basically glue to stop it from breaking up. I try to avoid taking the Bakerloo line these days...
by kragen | 2025-10-27 00:04:46+00:00
Yes, SSH is used as a mechanism for authentication, and it still requires some further specialized server due to some protocols you don't know about. The server is git-upload-pack or git-receive-pack, depending on whether you're pulling or pushing. Your inference that a Linux distribution could conceivably put these in a separate package does seem reasonable, since for example git-gui is a separate package in Debian. I don't know of any distros that do in fact package Git that way, but they certainly could.
by SmellTheGlove | 2025-10-27 00:05:00+00:00
I came here to say almost the same thing - except I don't think there's more space between the puzzles. From the post:

Why did the number of days per event change? It takes a ton of my free time every year to run Advent of Code, and building the puzzles accounts for the majority of that time. After keeping a consistent schedule for ten years(!), I needed a change. The puzzles still start on December 1st so that the day numbers make sense (Day 1 = Dec 1), and puzzles come out every day (ending mid-December).
by nis0s | 2025-10-27 00:05:29+00:00
If a woman feels that wearing a burqa is an expression of her faith (though wearing a burqa is not explicitly mandated in the Quran), then I won’t argue with the woman who chooses to do this.

Of interest in case anyone is wondering about different Islamic veils, https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/24118241. The burqa, if forced on someone (like Afghani women), is not an expression of that person’s choice in how to exercise their faith, and so in that case I’d agree with the author in the OP.

I am in favor of letting people decide how to express their faith (if it doesn’t harm another), though I’d prefer if people would generally become less religious.
by jMyles | 2025-10-27 00:06:26+00:00
I don't think I agree with the basic thrust of this post, as I do think that there is a necessity to recognize the role of privilege in scientific bias and to adjust through inclusivity.

However, I do agree with its conclusions: Nature seems to have been broken in this past decade, and a reader can no longer count on scientific rigor being its bedrock. In fact, some pieces that make it through to publication are wholly incorrect in an empirical sense, and since Nature covers such a wide array of topics and approaches, it is impossible to know which unless you happen to be reading an article in an area of frequent and recent domain study.

As was discussed extensively here on HN when it happened, Nature seems to have (justly, I think) lost a whole lot of credibility due to its bizarre and difficult-to-follow publication policies during the COVID19 pandemic, culminating with the unusually boorish headline, "Face masks for COVID pass their largest test yet" in response to a study which decidedly showed no such thing, and which in part prompted the publication of a re-assessment which comes to the opposite conclusion [0].

Most epidemiologists I know - including those who continued to hold out hope for mask efficacy through this time - quietly found this article to be below the standards for a serious scientific publication.

Just re-reading - I'm glad I can laugh about this now - I had forgotten that, even though the article acknowledges that "cloth makes fall short" (whatever that means), it also says "The study linked surgical masks with an 11% drop in risk, compared with a 5% drop for cloth", __without mentioning that the latter was not statistically significant__. I don't recall ever seeing such a thing in Nature prior to COVID19.

It was surreal at times to see the stark difference between, for example, BMJ, whose tone and timbre remained much more consistent, and Nature, which seemed to become an entirely new and different publication.

0: https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
by parineum | 2025-10-27 00:06:31+00:00
I think the turing test suffers a bit from the "when a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement."

An AI that happened to be able to pass the turing test would be pretty notable because it probably implies much more capabilities behind the scenes. The problem with, for example, LLMs, they're essentially optimized turing test takers. That's about all they can do.

Plus, I don't think any LLM will pass the turing test in the long term. Once something organically comes up that they aren't good at, it'll be fairly obvious they aren't human and the limits of context will also become apparent eventually.
by tranqy | 2025-10-27 00:07:51+00:00
Author here. We built Fluxwing to solve a frustrating problem: *design iteration is too slow*.

*The problem:* Figma forces you to start at high fidelity. You're making pixel-perfect decisions before you know if the structure is even right. Want to try 5 different layouts? Hours of dragging and resizing. AI can't help because binary files.

*The workflow we wanted:* 1. Start LOW-fidelity (ASCII) → iterate instantly with AI 2. Add fidelity PROGRESSIVELY as design solidifies 3. Generate HIGH-fidelity outputs (Figma, React) FROM the spec

*The format:* Built on *uxscii* (open standard). Two files: `.uxm` (JSON metadata) + `.md` (ASCII template).

*The magic:* Both humans AND AI understand ASCII natively. No vision models. Instant feedback loop through conversation.

*Progressive fidelity:* - Level 1: ASCII layout (structure) ← start here, iterate fast - Level 2: Component metadata (states, behavior) - Level 3: Design tokens (colors, spacing) - Level 4: Generate outputs (Figma, React)

*The implementation:* Six Claude Code skills. Natural language activation. "Create a login screen" → ASCII in seconds → iterate through conversation → add metadata → done.

*Roadmap:* Building generators that create Figma components and React code FROM .uxm specs. One spec → multiple outputs. Change once, regenerate everything.

*Stack:* Plain text + JSON Schema. No dependencies. Version control friendly. Open source (MIT).

This isn't replacing Figma. It's a *different starting point*. Fluxwing for rapid iteration at low fidelity. Figma for final polish. Or generate Figma FROM Fluxwing when we ship the plugin.

Built by Trabian. Came from internal needs (fintech UIs, lots of iteration with clients).

Happy to answer questions
by SmellTheGlove | 2025-10-27 00:08:11+00:00
I came here to say almost the same thing - except I don't think there's more space between the puzzles. From the post:

Why did the number of days per event change? It takes a ton of my free time every year to run Advent of Code, and building the puzzles accounts for the majority of that time. After keeping a consistent schedule for ten years(!), I needed a change. The puzzles still start on December 1st so that the day numbers make sense (Day 1 = Dec 1), and puzzles come out every day (ending mid-December).

Honestly, I prefer this. I've never had time to finish AoC because as we get later into December, I'm crunched with wrapping up work things so that I can do more family things and prep for the holidays. I look forward to this every year, and every year, I can see that I stop around day 11 +/- 1 day (except for 2021 when I somehow got to day 17).
by simonw | 2025-10-27 00:09:22+00:00
That site just gave me a 503 but here's the Internet Archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20251023095538/https://www.adaml...

This isn't the first Mermaid prompt injection exfiltration we've seen - here's one from August that was reported by Johann Rehberger against Cursor (and fixed by them): https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/cursor-data-exfilt...

That's mentioned in the linked post. Looks like that attack was different - Cursor's Mermaid implementation could render external images, but Copilot's doesn't let you do that so you need to trick users with a fake Login button that activates a hyperlink instead.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-27 00:09:40+00:00
Ha. I guess for me the other whatever is iCloud, but that corrupts too.

But have you ever found a cloud sync tool that doesn't eventually corrupt with git? I'm not aware of one existing, and I've looked.

Again, to be clear, I'm not talking about the occasional rsync, but rather an always-on tool that tries to sync changes as they happen.
by SalmoShalazar | 2025-10-27 00:09:52+00:00
I find the nature of AGI discussion to be so narrow and tedious. Intelligence is incomprehensibly more than being able to generate text that looks convincingly like a human wrote it. The coordination of a physical body, the formation of novel thoughts, the translation of thoughts to action, understanding the consequences of those actions, and so on. There’s so much missing that is required to even approach a literal human infant’s “intelligence” that it feels like I’m going crazy entertaining people’s arguments that we are approaching “AGI”.
by gosub100 | 2025-10-27 00:11:21+00:00
I'm a bit late to comment on this, but people might find it interesting. The title is "programming in assembly without an operating system", but it gives really good insight to how the early boot process works, and how to begin interacting with it.

Thank you to the author:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHnbozz7b4
by parineum | 2025-10-27 00:12:41+00:00
> We already had a definition of AGI. We hit it.

I'm curious when and what you consider to have been the moment.

To me, the general in AGI means I should be able to teach it something it's never seen before. I don't think I can even teach an LLM something it's seen a million times before. Long division, for example.

I don't think a model that is solid state until it's "trained" again has a very good chance of being AGI (unless that training is built into it and the model can decide to train itself).
by walterbell | 2025-10-27 00:13:56+00:00
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-camera...

> uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250

https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround

> adversarial noise attacks on license plate recognition systems (see my PlateShapez demo).. create an output dataset to train more effective attack models.. small, hardly-noticeable, random gaussian shapes to confuse AI license plate readers

"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers", 70 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452

"Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices", 250 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698

"Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When", 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
by tux1968 | 2025-10-27 00:15:08+00:00
What about aliens? When little green critters finally arrive on this planet, having travelled across space and time, will you reject their intelligence because they lack human biology? What if their biology is silicon based, rather than carbon?

There's really no reason to believe intelligence is tied to being human. Most of us accept the possibility (even the likelihood) of intelligent life in the universe, that isn't.
by Neywiny | 2025-10-27 00:15:36+00:00
I'm torn on the quest. I don't own any VR. The cost of a lot of these systems is much higher than the quests. However, I feel like I'd use it tethered to my PC a lot. Do you notice loss in quality for that? I haven't been able to find out if it's actually sending a high bit rate or even uncompressed video stream or what