MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burkaman | 2025-10-28 15:21:19+00:00
The issue is not whether or not the White House needs a new room, it's that the private funding model is an incredibly obvious avenue for bribery. Every single "donor" has immediate business with the federal government, and they've seen how easily Trump will sell pardons or diplomatic favors or merger approvals to anyone who pays him enough. There is no other plausible explanation for the list of funders. If this were an important and practical addition to the building, then the government could pay for it without any corruption necessary.

An honest editorial might say something like "this addition is a good idea, but why are these specific people (including my employer) paying for it"?
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-28 15:21:25+00:00
Someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out that it's truly hard to open up to another human, especially face to face. Even if you know they're a professional, it's awkward, it can be embarrassing, and there's stigma about a lot of things people ideally go to therapy for.

I mean, hell, there's people out there with absolutely terrible dental health who are avoiding going to the dentist because they're ashamed of it, even though logically, dentists have absolutely seen worse, and they're not there to judge, they're just there to help fix the problem.
by mothballed | 2025-10-28 15:21:26+00:00
Anarcho-tyranny. In places like Brazil or California, thief is armed at will with ease, person defending themselves instead have to pass licensing and background check which is difficult for poor people or those convicted of BS crimes like possessing a pot plant 20 years ago when they lived in Texas.

Thief only faces lukewarm prospects at prosecution, and moves around from address to address, and stranger-on-stranger homicide conviction rate in places like Chicago well below 50%. Honest citizen has mortgage, child in school ,and a day job, very easy for police to fuck with them if they dare fight back, which makes criminals even more violent and bold as they rely on many of them overwhelming the tiny minority that will fight back.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-28 15:21:33+00:00
Hah! Ok, fair, I could see that. There are sooooo many misunderstandings about HIPAA that make me cringe every time I hear them. “I can’t tell you if I’m sick. HIPPA!” “It’s illegal for you to ask me if I’m vaccinated. HIPPA!” “You can’t bill me for this. HIPPA!”

It’s like the medical version of a sovereign citizen legal theory, where it simultaneously applies to everything and nothing, depending on what’s most convenient at the moment.
by lbschenkel | 2025-10-28 15:21:59+00:00
Check how Play Integrity works today (DEVICE and STRONG integrities) and how it uses a non-extractable hardware key fused into the chip or security processor. Or read the GrapheneOS attestation guide and their example code. It's un-spoofable hardware attestation.

The fact that you can make it pass in some cases using Magisk and so on is because it's spoofing an older device (launched before Android 8) without hardware-bound keys and Google is deliberately allowing that in order not to blacklist the genuine users.

However, once Google decides that the collateral damage is tolerable and those devices should no longer pass Play Integrity, then it's game over. You can't spoof any newer stuff, as you can't produce the desired signature -- only the hardware can do it and the hardware won't do it.

The only way would be if the manufacturer screwed up and it's possible to run unsigned code (or signed by a different key) and maintain a pristine bootloader, or if the hardware key leaks somehow. In either case, the key is per device so Google is always free to blacklist that device if it really wants to. (Verification of the signatures is always done off-device, through Google's servers.)
by enricotal | 2025-10-28 15:22:05+00:00
“OpenAI is now able to release open-weight models that meet requisite capability criteria.”

Was Microsoft the blocker before? prior agreements clearly made true open-weights awkward-to-impossible without Microsoft’s sign-off. Microsoft had (a) an exclusive license to GPT-3’s underlying tech back in 2020 (i.e., access to the model/code beyond the public API), and (b) later, broad IP rights + API exclusivity on OpenAI models. If you’re contractually giving one partner IP rights and API exclusivity, shipping weights openly would undercut those rights. Today’s language looks like a carve-out to permit some open-weight releases as long as they’re below certain capability thresholds.

A few other notable tweaks in the new deal that help explain the change:

- AGI claims get verified by an independent panel (not just OpenAI declaring it).

- Microsoft keeps model/product IP rights through 2032, but OpenAI can now jointly develop with third parties, serve some things off non-Azure clouds, and—critically—release certain open-weights.

Those are all signs of loosened exclusivity.

My read: previously, the partnership structure (not just “Microsoft saying no”) effectively precluded open-weight releases; the updated agreement explicitly allows them within safety/capability guardrails.

Expect any “open-weight” drops to be intentionally scoped—useful, but a notch below their frontier closed models.
by whitehexagon | 2025-10-28 15:22:05+00:00
>"The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences."

So we were originally predicted to hit 1.5C in 2040, and now it's predicted to be 2029, but last year was already globally 1.5C hotter.

I dunno, the whole thing makes me want to seek a forest to hide in, although I think Europe had record forest fires last year too.

It feels like the only game plan in town, is to rush build new fossil fuel power stations, and hope that AI reaches 'God in a Box' stage soon enough to be able to pray to her to save us all? Would such a solution even be shared with the world if it reduced profits?

And it is all about profits, right? So for November I have decided that I will reduce my spending down to essentials only. Needs not Wants. Anyway, nothing I bought this year really improved my quality of life, apart from some extra solar panels and an FM radio.
by nickff | 2025-10-28 15:22:12+00:00
It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it’s constantly losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it. This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two reasons: he can’t just put it in a conventional trust, because he has to constantly give the organization money (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so that it stops hemorrhaging money.
by josefritzishere | 2025-10-28 15:22:23+00:00
There is really no source that indicates greenhouse gas emissions are in decline unless the writer means over a very short, even immaterial period of time. With that opening gambit being either disengenusous or dishonest, it's hard to credit any of the deductions that follow. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
by ErikCorry | 2025-10-28 15:22:36+00:00
Most vitamins are a waste of time and money, some are even harmful[1], but there are a lot of people with D deficiency, especially in winter[2].

1 https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/17/2744#:~:text=highest%20...

2 https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/vitamin-d#edit-group-image--...
by garciasn | 2025-10-28 15:22:52+00:00
IANAMD.

It is my general understanding that unless you are severely deficient, Vitamin D supplementation generally takes weeks to bring levels up. It's unlikely that taking it for a few days is going to have any measurable impact on your recovery from illness unless you are severely deficient and/or taking MASSIVE doses, which may or may not be recommended depending on your prior levels and BMI.

See more here: https://www.ccjm.org/content/89/3/154

e: fixed broken URL
by eclark | 2025-10-28 15:23:09+00:00
> Why wouldn't something like an RL environment allow them to specialize in poker playing, gaining those skills as necessary to increase score in that environment?

I think an RL environment is needed to solve poker with an ML model. I also think that like chess, you need the model to do some approximate work. General-purpose LLMs trained on text corpus are bad at math, bad at accuracy, and struggle to stay on task while exploring.

So a purpose built model with a purpose built exploring harness is likely needed. I've built the basis of an RL like environment, and the basis of learning agents in rust for poker. Next steps to come.
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-28 15:23:16+00:00
>overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business.

With all due respect, setting up a Nextcloud instance for a government entity is not really rocket science requiring a 150 IQ, Stanford grad, PhD, galaxy-brain labor force, but it's a skill that's easily abundant in Austrian and can be easily transferred to more of the tech labor pool to achieve the same results of what Atos did.

We're talking about a Nextcloud instance here, not building an entire hyperscaler from scratch, like AWS or Equinix, which is indeed a skill next to inexistent in most of Europe, which does indeed require contracting FAANG corps to build because we lack that capability in Europe.
by jlarocco | 2025-10-28 15:23:27+00:00
What people thought about LLMs five years ago, and how close we are to AGI right now are unrelated, and it's not logially sound to say "We were close to LLMs then, so we are close to AGI now."

It's also a misleading view of the history. It's true "most people" weren't thinking about LLMs five years ago, but a lot of the underpinnings had been studied since the 70s and 80s. The ideas had been worked out, but the hardware wasn't able to handle the processing.

> True honesty requires acknowledging that we truly have no idea. Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before, but nobody has the slightest idea how much progress is needed to get to AGI.

Maybe, but don't tell that to OpenAI's investors.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-10-28 15:23:27+00:00
Agreed. I tried it on a simple game of exchanging colored tokens from a small set of recipes. Challenged it to start with two red and end up with four white, for instance. I failed. It would make one or two correct moves, then either hallucinate a recipe, hallucinate the resulting set of tiles after a move, or just declare itself done!
by georgefrowny | 2025-10-28 15:23:37+00:00
Food security in general does need governance and this does includes vulnerability to price fixing of non-GMO seeds and agricultural chemicals as well as safety.

It also includes vigilance against such things as agricultural equipment with expensive repair lockouts, antibiotic overuse, soil degradation, deforestation and poor disease control.

The original assertion was that rational self-interested agents would naturally find and migrate to optimum global outcomes for everyone. Not only is this not true in the abstract game theoretic sense, but it's especially not true when many of the agents are independent developing world smallholders and some are multibillion agritech transnationals.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-10-28 15:23:41+00:00
The problem with Postel's law is that people apply it to interpreting Postel's law. They read it as encouraging you to accept any input, and trying to continue in the face of nonsense. They accept malformed input & attempt to make sense of it, instead of rejecting it because the fields they care about are malformed. Then the users depend on that behavior, and it ossifies. The system becomes brittle & difficult to change.

I like to call it the "hardness principle". It makes your system take longer to break, but when it does it's more damaging than it would have been if you'd rejected malformed input in the first place.
by stefs | 2025-10-28 15:23:43+00:00
on the one hand you have the owner dictating his political bias to all his employees/journalists. on the other hand you have a person/journalist interpreting reality through their own political bias. what's the difference? in the first case the medium would only report biased in one direction, in the second case it'd report roughly split around the percentages of the (journalistic) population, e.g. 60% this, 40% that.
Show HN: Caddie AI – an AI caddie/therapist you can vent to after a bad round
by mjfoster | 2025-10-28 15:24:07+00:00
Hey HN

I built Caddie AI, a simple AI chat app for golfers to vent, reflect, and get calm feedback after a frustrating round.

It’s not a swing analyzer or stat tracker — it’s more like a friendly caddie who listens, reframes your thinking, and gives one small actionable tip (or just lets you blow off steam).

The chat is stored locally on device, no signups or data collection, and the backend just calls OpenAI’s Responses API with a golf-specific prompt.

Tech: UIKit + Laravel backend + OpenAI API

Website → https://caddie-ai.co

Would love feedback on: – whether the tone feels natural (not repetitive) – ideas to make it more habit-forming (right now it’s one endless chat) – pricing expectations (currently $2.99/month on the App Store) 3 free messages a day on freemium

Thanks for checking it out!
by seanhunter | 2025-10-28 15:24:09+00:00
The music of Newton’s age is Baroque music. Classical music either refers to the whole tradition of Western serious art music (starting approximately with Palestrina and continuing to the current day) or it refers to the period after Baroque.

So “ Baroque” is J.S. Bach, Handel, Charpentier, Purcell etc (1600-1750 ish), “classical” is mozart, J.C. Bach, Hayden etc up to Beethoven (1750ish-1800ish).

Classical mechanics as I was taught it is not to do with the time period,it means “mechanics when you don’t need to worry about relativity or quantum anything “.
by superice | 2025-10-28 15:24:18+00:00
Minor pedantic correction: 2.5gbit, 5gbit and 10gbit RJ45 is getting more affordable and more common, and for short runs should run over CAT 6 and CAT 6a fine, and plenty of reports it does ok on short runs even on CAT 5e. With devices like the USW Flex Mini 2.5 at ~50-60 EUR / USD, you can affordably outfit your home for higher than gigabit speeds without rewiring everything with new CAT cable or fiber.

Over here in NL we now get more and more access to >1gbps speeds, the office of my small business for instance has a 4gbps connection, and the ISP offers up to 8gbps on a standard consumer / small business package. We're in the process of upgrading our gear to take advantage of that. With WiFi 7 we've seen some real world throughput speeds of 1800-2000mbps going through a Ubiquiti U7 Pro straight to the ISP supplied router.

I wasn't really keeping up with networking gear, so I was pleasantly surprised when I looked into this stuff recently and figured out the gear has just magically gotten better and running 2.5gbit everywhere is surprisingly easy.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-28 15:24:43+00:00
"Why" is a fair question but are you surprised? Europe is consistently behind in tech.

Europe has about 1.3 times the population of the USA and about 75% of the GDP yet EU tech output is a very small percentage of US tech output. We are not talking about 70, 50, 30, or even 20%. It's a drop in the bucket.

>The seven largest U.S. tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.

https://eqtgroup.com/thinq/technology/why-is-europes-tech-in...

"Why" is a good question, but I definitely wouldnt expect significant competition in LLMs from Europe based on the giant tech disparity. Having 1 non-cutting edge model that isn't really competitive is pretty much what I would expect.
by leephillips | 2025-10-28 15:24:56+00:00
I don’t grok all your lingo, so I may be missing something, but if you’re blind to anything it’s this: if users don’t have to pay, they won’t. No matter how valuable they say the service is to them.

At least one super-famous bestselling author tried to serialize his novel online with voluntary payments, and had to abandon the experiment. Nobody payed.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-28 15:25:19+00:00
Vitamin D toxicity is a legitimate concern, so those dosing should be mindful of it, depending on dosage and existing serum levels. Don't action on medical advice from strangers on the internet alone, talk to you doctor or other credentialed medical practitioner you work with if needed.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by richard_todd | 2025-10-28 15:25:21+00:00
As a 1980's adventure game fan, I can only hope that whatever comes after AGI is called SCI. Maybe it could be "Soul-Crushing Intelligence".

Once we don't need people to make stuff anymore, we need to re-do society so people can get access to all the stuff that's being made. I doubt we do a very good job of that. But otherwise, there's no point in making anything. I guess if we are lucky, the AI overlords will keep us high on soma and let the population naturally decline until we are gone.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-28 15:25:44+00:00
I'd love to see that email. I received no such email and no instructions about how not to be migrated.

My plan renewed on 2025-05-04. On 2025-04-04 I received an email w/ the subject line "Upcoming Microsoft 365 price change". This email stated:

> Thank you for being a valued Microsoft 365 subscriber. To reflect the value we’ve added over the past decade, address rising costs, and enable us to continue delivering new innovations, we’re increasing the price of your subscription.

> Effective February 14, 2025, the price for Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions will increase from USD 99.99* per year to USD 129.99* per year. To continue with the new price, no action is needed—your payment method on file will be automatically charged. To make changes to your subscription plan or turn off recurring billing, visit your Microsoft account at least two days before your next billing date.

> By maintaining your subscription, you’ll enjoy secure cloud storage, advanced security for your data and devices, and cutting-edge AI-powered features, along with all your other subscription benefits. Thank you for choosing Microsoft.

> Learn more about how to manage your subscription, including how to cancel and switch your subscription.

> * Subscription prices listed do not include any discounts, promotions, or special offers that may be available.

The phrases "Microsoft Account", "subscription benefits", "how to cancel", and "switch your subscription" were all links to the same page. Those links redirect to here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-365-...

I don't have an archive of the page as it appeared on 2025-04-04. Right now it makes mention of the Microsoft 365 Family "Classic" plan at the old $99 rate.

My recollection is that the page, as of 2025-04-04, also made no mention of the "Classic" plan, and offered no instructions re: not being "upgraded".
by ErikCorry | 2025-10-28 15:26:17+00:00
That sounds like a lot:

To help prevent vitamin D toxicity, don't take more than 4,000 international units (IU) a day of vitamin D unless your healthcare professional tells you to. Most adults need only 600 IU of vitamin D a day https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
by cogman10 | 2025-10-28 15:26:54+00:00
> it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.

This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.

> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.

The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.

There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.
by Nek_12 | 2025-10-28 15:27:06+00:00
Fair point. Two of my Level 100+ users have zero subscriptions - the free tier works for them. But here's the twist: I DO have paywalls (alarms, AI chat, analytics, infinite history). They just don't care about those features, or work around them. The one power user who IS paying (CV 0.86, irregular schedule) stopped using it 7 months ago but forgot to cancel. So the question becomes: are the wrong features locked? Or do power users just not need premium features?

I even ran an A/B test (hard vs soft paywall):

- Started by "recommendation" from popular entrepreneur - 3 months, 3k users - Baseline (soft paywall, can skip): 0.8% conversion - Hard paywall (must activate trial): 0.6% conversion - Revenue tracking broken (Firebase showed $0 both variants) - Killed experiment yesterday.
by efsavage | 2025-10-28 15:27:18+00:00
You probably have to really try to take too much Vitamin D with any over the counter supplement (<=5,000 IU), especially if you live that far north. For reference, a prescription dose for someone who is low is usually 50,000 daily.

It should be part of your standard blood tests so you should know if you're running high or low and your doctor can recommend or prescribe a good dose.
by klaussilveira | 2025-10-28 15:27:51+00:00
I feel the complete opposite: AI sucked the boring out of programming. I don't have to write boring boilerplate anymore. I don't have to crawl for hours over terrible documentation just to get a library to spit something out. I can quickly iterate on any idea and realize it's a bad one and pivot. I can create benchmark comparison code in seconds and go for the best result. I don't have to write release notes, or write OpenAPI examples.

I get to do all the fun stuff. It's amazing.
by illegalsmile | 2025-10-28 15:28:02+00:00
I had a similar thing throughout last week dealing with relationship anxiety and I used that same model for help. It really did provide great insight into managing my emotions at the time, provided useful tactics to manage everything and encouraged me to see my therapist. You can ask it to play devil's advocate or take on different viewpoints as a cynic or use Freudian methodology, etc... You can really dive into an issue you're having and then have it give you the top three bullet points to talk with your therapist about.

This does require you think about what it's saying though and not taking it at surface value since it obviously lacks what makes humans human.
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-28 15:29:53+00:00
>Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.

If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of job.
by Nek_12 | 2025-10-28 15:30:06+00:00
This might be it. Free tier includes: habit tracking, ritual creation (no alarms), timers, journaling, basic history. Premium unlocks: alarms, AI chat, infinite history, analytics, extra quest.

Power users use alarms + timers heavily according to interviews. But two of them (Level 148 and 177) have zero subscriptions (never paid), so either they found workarounds or alarms aren't as critical as I thought.

The weird part: AI Chat has 11.54% conversion rate when users discover it (vs 0.8% overall). But only 2.4% of users even find it. So there's ONE feature that works, but it's buried and most power users never see it.

Maybe the answer is: make AI chat the core experience, not a locked bonus feature?