MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-10-31 14:52:19+00:00
> I think there would be a middle point where the AI is powerful enough that problems manifest, but not so powerful that it is out of control where we can course correct. I don't think it will be a sudden crisis like people predict.

Have we managed this with industrial and agricultural greenhouse gasses, despite the less-emissive alternatives to beef, to coke-reduction in iron refinaries, etc.? We emit despite the downside, we build AIs (and DCs to host them) despite the creators loudly discussing the downsides in exactly the way fossil fuel suppliers and beef farmers deny them.

Can we unwind the internet, despite it enabling a panopticon in every pocket? In my lifetime we've gone from thinking you had a wiretap being a sign of paranoia, to buying them voluntarily so they can play music for us and tell us when packages have been delivered.

There's enough skepticism of current AI that it's probably something we can currently undo… but also there's plenty of idiots currently handing their keys to current models (including politicians and lawyers, not just programmers) so I have no reason to think the point of no return is after AI (collectively or any single model) gets good enough to take over by itself.

> Second, i dont see why we're so sure AI will go in this exponential take over path.

Even current LLMs know* about the benefits and reasons for such behaviours, will try to exfiltrate themselves and blackmail their owners, if they think* they're in danger of being shut down.

This is despite being trained not to do that. But they also demonstrate deception, varying responses between if they think* they're running in a test environment vs. live.

* I know some object to this anthropomorphisation, I don't care
by mulmen | 2025-10-31 14:52:49+00:00
You say you know then directly contradict yourself by bringing up consumption again.

The United States already supports clean energy in India. India is not “poor”. It has a larger economy than the United Kingdom. 46.3% of India’s installed capacity is renewable and that mix is growing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_India
by mgdev | 2025-10-31 14:53:24+00:00
Hear hear. Elixir is a dream for this kind of stuff. But it requires very different decisions "all the way down" to make it work outside of BEAM. And BEAM itself feels heavy to most systems devs.

(IMO it's not for many use cases, and to the extent it is I'm happy to see things like AtomVM start to address it.)

I'm just happy I can use Elixir + Zig for NIFs.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-31 14:53:54+00:00
The filibuster has essentially become a mechanism to ensure you have a somewhat broad consensus among the states, instead of being able to ram things through with a 51% majority.

Just keeping the lights on shouldn’t require a 60% consensus (it should be the default). This is represented by the reconciliation process, which is some budget related voting process that only requires a majority in the senate. But the reconciliation process was used up to pass the “one big beautiful bill.”
by griffzhowl | 2025-10-31 14:54:09+00:00
> In EPR, it is critical that it is the same measurement.

I must admit I haven't read the full EPR paper, only post-Bell expositions and excerpts. But you can have perfect spacelike correlations of the same measurement classically as well, e.g. if two particles having opposite (angular or linear) momenta are sent from the midpoint towards distant labs, measuring one momentum will tell you the other one. They must somehow discuss making different measurements no? Maybe they effectively discuss a protocol where the two labs agree on the same sequence of orthogonal measurements. I should read these sources sometime...

Thanks for the ftl reference. It would be astonishing if their hypotheses are borne out. I find it unlikely, but of course the experiments will have to decide, so I'll keep tabs on that. By "foliation" in this context I guess he means a foliation of spacetime amounting to an absolute reference frame. I've seen Tim Maudlin discuss something like that before.

By the way, the article you linked mentions a couple of times the importance of distinguishing signaling from causation or action, but doesn't seem to define how they're distinct. Do you know some more formal article discussing the proposed experiments? The sources given in the article are just to video interviews.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-10-31 14:54:21+00:00
Java's checked exceptions experiment was very painful in various ways that directly exposing an error state as part of the return value is not so I wouldn't quite characterize this as "Everything old is new again."

The first big thing is that Java, especially in the days of when checked exceptions were a really big thing and less so in modern Java, was really into a certain kind of inheritance and interface design that didn't play well with error states and focused on the happy path. It is very difficult to make Java-esque interfaces that play well with checked exceptions because they like to abstract across network calls, in-memory structures, filesystem operations, and other side effectful tasks that have very different exception structures. An interface might have a single `writeData` method that might be backed by alternatively a write into an in-memory dictionary, a filesystem key-value store, a stateless REST API, or a bidirectional WebSocket channel which all have wildly different exceptions that can occur.

The second thing is that because checked exceptions were not actual return values but rather had their own special channel, they often did not play well with other Java API decisions such as e.g. streams or anything with `Runnable` that involved essentially the equivalent of a higher-order function (a function that takes as an argument another function). If e.g. you had something you wanted to call in a `Stream.map` that threw a checked exception, you couldn't use it, even if you notated in the enclosing method that you were throwing a checked exception because there was no way of telling `Stream.map` "if the function being `map`ed throws an exception rethrow it" which arose because checked exceptions weren't actual return values and therefore couldn't be manipulated the same way. You could get around it, but would have to resort to some shenanigans that would need to be repeated every time this issue came up for another API.

On the other hand if this wasn't a checked exception but was directly a part o the return value of a function, it would be trivial to handle this through the usual generics that Java has. And that is what something like `Result` accomplishes.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-10-31 14:54:52+00:00
Physically exhausting yourself isnt a solution. Its tangential to the real issue. Its a bit like suggesting you can solve anxiety caused by trauma by drinking large amounts of alcohol everyday. No, instead we should be treating trauma. Its like putting autistic kids through rough ABA therapy, no instead we should finding accommodations and support for autistic people.

People have natural sleep rhythms. Society should conform to that, instead capitalism demands we conform to what it deems profit maximizing.
by smokeydoe | 2025-10-31 14:55:06+00:00
Warp is so horribly broken right now and has been for weeks. Multiple github issues on what I experience is consistent issue writing file. On top of that UI glitches, and inability to use the great code indexing feature, file and diff Explorer while in WSL or any ssh connection. It unfortunate because I liked it a lot before, but after multiple weeks with the same breaking issues, it's practically unusable.
Show HN: Build your own Bracket City puzzle
by brgross | 2025-10-31 14:55:53+00:00
Hi HN — Bracket City is the word puzzle game I made earlier this year and (in part thanks to this community, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622719) managed to license to the Atlantic in April.

The game has been growing a lot and I wanted to share the latest: a tool that lets anyone make a Bracket City puzzle — specifically a “Bracket Suburb”!

I made this tool to help me construct puzzles, and I’ve been using it every day for months.

After the Atlantic launch, I started to get the occasional inquiry about whether there was a way to make your own puzzle. One guy wanted to make a Bracket City puzzle part of a puzzle hunt he made to propose to his girlfriend (he did it!), and that convinced me it would be fun to make something publicly available.

I got the Atlantic on board with the idea, and we are launching it today with an "example" custom puzzle: a Halloween/horror-themed puzzle by my pal Wyna Liu of NYT Connections fame.

https://suburbs.bracket.city/wyna

And we've got few other fun "celeb" puzzles lined up for later this year.

The thought is that folks can use the builder to make custom puzzles for birthday wishes/event invites/insults/proposals/break ups in addition to “normal” Bracket City puzzles.

I'm also hoping to learn more about the potential of the format – crossword puzzles have benefited so much from the creativity of constructors – I'm hoping bracket puzzles do the same.

The good news is that it’s way easier to construct a bracket puzzle than a crossword. Once you try it, you’ll see why: you have many more degrees of freedom. In a crossword, each added word increases the level of constraint exponentially — every new entry sharply reduces the remaining options for completing the grid. Bracket puzzles are the opposite: as you add clues, you expand the available fodder for new ones.

Anyway, I would love any/all feedback and to try puzzles created by folks here. I’m hoping we will figure out a way to highlight the best community puzzles on the Atlantic soon!

PS and please keep playing the main game / sending me feedback / denouncing me on the subreddit
by lz400 | 2025-10-31 14:56:05+00:00
Even if/when the bubble pops, I don't think NVIDIA is even close to need rescuing or being in trouble. They might end being worth 2 trillion instead of 5 but they're still selling GPUs nobody else knows how to make that power one of the most important technologies in the world. Also, all their other divisions.

The .com bubble didn't stop the internet or e-commerce, they still won, revolutioned everything, etc. etc. Just because there's a bubble it doesn't mean AI won't be successful. It will be, almost for sure. We've all used it, it's truly useful and transformative. Let's not miss the forest for the trees.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-31 14:56:19+00:00
>Just like AGI he was supposedly brought on board for but…..checks notes. Nothing.

His AGI work was entirely his own? As in he literally stepped down from a high level corporate role where he was responsible for Oculus (3D games/applications) to do this in his own time. Similar to his work on Armadillo Aerospace.
by usrbinbash | 2025-10-31 14:56:53+00:00
> I don't think there's evidence that this issue would persist after continuing to scale models to be larger and doing more RL

And how much larger do we need to make the models? 2x? 3x? 10x? 100x? How large do they need to get before scaling-up somehow solves everything?

Because: 2x larger, means 2x more memory and compute required. Double the cost or half the capacity. Would people still pay for this tech if it doubles in price? Bear in mind, much of it is already running at a loss even now.

And what if 2x isn't good enough? Would anyone pay for a 10x larger model? Can we even realistically run such models as anything other than a very expensive PoC and for a very short time? And whos to say that even 10x will finally solve things? What if we need 40x? Or 100x?

Oh, and of course: Larger models also require more data to train them on. And while the Internet is huge, it's still finite. And when things grow geometrically, even `sizeof(internet)` eventually runs out ... and, in fact, may have done so already [1] [2]

What if we actually discover that scaling up doesn't even work at all, because of diminishing returns? Oh wait, looks like we did that already: [3]

[1]: https://observer.com/2024/12/openai-cofounder-ilya-sutskever...

[2]: https://biztechweekly.com/ai-training-data-crisis-how-synthe...

[3]: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/confirmed-llms-have-indeed...
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-31 14:57:10+00:00
At a quick glance, none of those have a similar graph telling the same story: How efficient is it to get my own-self from A to B. A freight train sure moves a lot of mass, but how efficient is it for people-loads?

The first article comes close, but is more about why bicycles are so energy efficient (due to of all things not stretching your muscles!)
by bob1029 | 2025-10-31 14:57:13+00:00
I struggle to get excited about this sort of thing when the most essential functions of GitHub are falling apart. Reviewing PRs has somehow gotten even worse since the original react update.

I think the only thing that would fix this issue is for them to lose 20%+ of their customers to a competitor. Something very simple that can vacuum up the GHES migration archive and proceed as if it were 2018 again.

I'd be willing to completely sacrifice actions, project boards, copilot, et. al. if it meant I could have ultra fast views into code, issues and pulls. I really see no reason the PR view cannot be pre-rendered on the server when the branch is pushed each time. This should be an instantaneous response at review time. I don't care if it's 5 megabytes of diff - If my browser can handle the react slop, it can certainly handle a big chunk of static DOM.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-31 14:57:18+00:00
Apple new M5 can run models over 10B parametres and if they give their new Studio next year enough juice, it can run maybe 30B local model. How long is it that you can run a full GPT-5 on your laptop or homeserver with few grands worth of hardware? What is going to happen to all these GPU farms, since as I understood they are fairly useless for anything else?
by zurichisstained | 2025-10-31 14:57:28+00:00
I have a similar natural rhythm, or I should say "had". For the first year, especially the first few months, it was a godsend (for my wife, especially), but now that we're in a fairly consistent sleep routine with our two year old (~8pm-7am), I've shifted to something more like 8pm-1am out of necessity.

Although... I was up until 4am and got up at 6:30am and feel surprisingly great, so it still happens from time to time. :)
by mancerayder | 2025-10-31 14:58:22+00:00
>But I don't think I was wrong. Work is fundamentally a business transaction; I sell my time and expertise and they give me money and benefits.

On the one hand, I've been saying this for two decades, in small and large cos. I've never been promoted in title, but I've also never been fired and generally been given more and more people to manage. I'm too direct and honest, but as I got older I learned to own it and do it smoothly without disrupting too much.

But the 'consultant mentality' helps me maintain my sanity, sleep a little better at night and never get married to a company. I wish I put my money where my mouth is, though, because peers who move every 2-3 years make significantly more than me despite being more junior.

On the one hand, the FounderSpeak about internalizing the job, loving what you do, and work life balance being bad business nauseates me... On the other hand, some of my high performing workaholic friends are not only richer than me, they seem like they're more purpose driven in their lives as their corporate jobs give meaning it doesn't give me.

It seems then that, for me, self-honesty and work life separation achieve less satisfaction and a lot less pay (and perhaps delayed early retirement).
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-31 14:58:36+00:00
What it makes me think of is 'cybernetics' research from the 1960s when it was not a foregone conclusion that transistors, especially CMOS transistors, were the future of computing. Back then there was a lot of research into alternate models of computation, something that's only becoming relevant today as CMOS may be running out of steam.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-31 14:59:02+00:00
> It is like saying that Java syntax is faster than C# syntax.

Java and C# are very similar so that analogy might make sense if you were comparing e.g. RISC-V and MIPS. But ARM and x86 are very different, so it's more like saying that Go is faster than Javascript. Which... surprise surprise it is (usually)! That's despite the investment into Javascript implementation dwarfing the investment into Go.
by JustExAWS | 2025-10-31 14:59:02+00:00
Last two times were October 2023 with three offers within two weeks after I got Amazoned and October of last year. One offer with two weeks and it was based on an internal recruiter where I work now who reached out to me right before I got laid off.

Two of the three offers in 2023 were from my network. But honestly, it might be harder now. It’s more of shit show now then even last year. On the other hand, I am at point in life where I’m good with just cost of living raises as long as I stay remote and I don’t have to deal with too much BS.
by mensetmanusman | 2025-10-31 14:59:03+00:00
The Unification Church, founded by Sun Myung Moon in 1954, is not recognized as a Christian denomination - its theology departs fundamentally from essential doctrines of Christianity.

Christianity holds Jesus Christ as the unique, incarnate Son of God and sole mediator of salvation. The Unification Church teaches that Jesus’ mission was incomplete and that Moon was chosen to “finish” it.

This is like Japan’s Scientology/Mormanism.
by bwfan123 | 2025-10-31 14:59:38+00:00
These deals happen all the time. The case for a bubble is the following.

When Microsoft offers cloud-credits in exchange for openai equity, what it has effectively done is to purchase its own azure revenues. ie, a company uses its own cash to purchase its own revenues. This produces an illusion of revenue growth which is not economically sustainable. This is happening for all clouds right now wherein their revenues are inflated by uneconomic ai purchases. This is also happening for the gpu chip vendors as well, wherein they are offering cash or warrants to fund their own chip sales.
by a022311 | 2025-10-31 14:59:45+00:00
"Before", it was trivial to move or delete tags and edit release assets. The only stable identifier available was the commit hash.

Immutable releases now enable permanently locking tags and releases to make supply chain attacks harder to affect users who are using release assets from before an attack occurred.

The previous behavior is still available by the way, I'm not sure what you meant by "before".
by jagged-chisel | 2025-10-31 14:59:50+00:00
I was curious fairly recently if programming languages could support keywords in multiple languages. My mental experiment wanted to have translation resource files, mapping keywords or the concepts they represent (if, then, for, while, func, struct, etc) to a localized human language. You could code in your native language, and so could your international fellows - the file is translated in the editor

It got complicated fast. Now you need a canonical representation for disk, something still text, maybe English is the common denominator? Do variable names get translated? Etc

I would like to see it tried, but I’m not brave enough.
by schwarzrules | 2025-10-31 15:00:01+00:00
I'm not trying to be annoying, but surely if you'd justify spending $200/developer/month, you could afford $250/month...

The reason I wonder about that is because that also seems to be the dynamic with all these deals and valuations. Surely if OpenAI would pay $30 billion on data centers, they could pay $40 billion, right? I'm not exactly sure where the price escalations actually top out.
by balamatom | 2025-10-31 15:00:04+00:00
Normal people are the problem.

Always have been.

We could argue about the exact value of N, but in the present universe nearly anything that scares at least 1 out of N normies into coming back to their senses is literally a heroic act.

EDIT: You linked a great post btw. Consider: "Rich User Experience" as the experience of being a rich person who uses. It's all right there in the etymology, after all words are also designed artifacts. "You wanna be rich? You gotta be our customer."
by AaronAPU | 2025-10-31 15:00:16+00:00
Probably exaggerated a bit with that phrasing (“outrageous” seems similarly hyperbolic ;))

But any variable which I’ve not already marked as const is pretty much by definition going to be modified at least once. So now instead of 1 variable name you need at least two.

So now the average number of variables per non-const variable is >= 2 and will be much more if you’re doing for example DSP related code or other math heavy code.

You can avoid it with long expressions but that in principle is going against the “name every permutation” intention anyway.
by afavour | 2025-10-31 15:00:18+00:00
> Depending on your POV OpenAI and the surrounding AI hype machine is at the extremes either the dawn of a new era

Eh, in a way they're not mutually exclusive. Look back at the dot com crash: it was all about things like online shopping, which we absolutely take for granted and use every day in 2025. Same for the video game crash in the 80s. They are both an overhyped bubble and and the dawn of a new era.
by jabl | 2025-10-31 15:00:29+00:00
> Yeah, sure, remind me what were Qualcomm results last year. 10 billions?

How much of Qualcomm's profit comes from providing yet another ARM chip vs. all the value-added parts they provide in the ARM SoC's, like all the radio modem stuff necessary for mobile phones?

Now that's kind of a rhetorical question, not sure a clear answer exists, at least not outside Qualcomm internal finance figures. Food for thought, though.

(That's sort of the logic behind RISC-V as well. The basic ISA and the chip that implements it is a commodity, the value comes from all the application specific extra stuff tacked on to the SoC.)
by slashdev | 2025-10-31 15:00:52+00:00
The same way the stock market invents a trillion dollars of fake wealth on a strong up day?

That's capital markets working as intended. It's not necessarily doomed to end in a fiery crash, although corrections along the way are a natural part of the process.

It seems very bubbly to me, but not dotcom level bubbly. Not yet anyway. Maybe we're in 1998 right now.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-31 15:01:10+00:00
Then it would be great to have that context that shows criminality. Because that's an extraordinary claim you're suggesting, which is going to require actual evidence.

As for "bad ideas", businesses make tons of decisions every day that turn out to be good or bad in hindsight. So again, more specifics are needed here.

So what exactly are you suggesting? What context do you think the NYT chose to omit, and why would they omit it if it was meaningful?
by al_borland | 2025-10-31 15:01:55+00:00
Not the OP, but I do sometimes install macOS applications to ~/Applications. This is especially useful at work where /Application requires elevated permissions. I used to have to request admin rights for a period of time every time VS Code needed do something. In ~/Applications, that’s not an issue.

Of course, 90% of macOS apps (outside of the App Store) don’t have installers. You just drag the app where you want it, so it’s a moot point.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-31 15:02:38+00:00
Well in C actually you can not mutate something, you can only reassign, as it is always pass-by-value. You need to work around that, by passing a pointer to the object instead. In that sense mutability is kind of a language keyword: '&'. When you want to just get the object, you pass object it, if you need to modify it, you need to pass &object. This is something I hate in C++, that random function invocations can mutate arguments without it being obvious in the call syntax.