MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jorl17 | 2025-10-31 02:42:06+00:00
Our AI systems "work" because we can derive meaning from the words that we feed into it, right? We put words in, train, and words come out. How would that exactly work with animals?

"Woof in, woof out" still means not knowing what the woof's all about.

Don't get me wrong, I have often thought about this exact question: that surely we are close to finding a way to communicate with animals or at the very least study them at greater lengths through the use of LLMs and similar systems. However, I have yet to find the exact way in which we can do this.

I'm sure we can create an LLM that mimics the expressions and behavior of animals (much like we have created LLMs that "mimic" us). But that will still give us very limited interpretability. It will definitely allow us to tinker with the inputs without needing a real animal, but that still gives us a very limited understanding of what exactly is going on.

I would definitely pour my heart and soul into such a project :)
by Daub | 2025-10-31 02:42:51+00:00
For those of you puzzled as to how three separate apps (Photo, Designer and Publsher) have become one (Studio), as a long-time user it was always clear that under the hood this was always the case. Indeed such interoperability has clearly been built into the Affinity suite from the ground up.

This is 100 miles away from the interoperability of Adobe's Dynamic Link whereby apps such as Premier and After Effects are 'united' in a manner that feels clunky and forced. Almost all Adobe apps were acquisitions, and most of them are now horrendously long in the tooth. Uniting them seamlessly would be impossible.

I adore Affinity photo for its top to bottom support for high dynamic range images. Editing RAW images is a buttery smooth dream, compared to Photoshop, which feels like I am banging my head against the software.
by sunir | 2025-10-31 02:44:21+00:00
Even if their introspection within the inference step is limited, by looping over a core set of documents that the agent considers itself, it can observe changes in the output and analyze those changes to deduce facts about its internal state.

You may have experienced this when the llms get hopelessly confused and then you ask it what happened. The llm reads the chat transcript and gives an answer as consistent with the text as it can.

The model isn’t the active part of the mind. The artifacts are.

This is the same as Searles Chinese room. The intelligence isn’t in the clerk but the book. However the thinking is in the paper.

The Turing machine equivalent is the state table (book, model), the read/write/move head (clerk, inference) and the tape (paper, artifact).

Thus it isn’t mystical that the AIs can introspect. It’s routine and frequently observed in my estimation.
by ryao | 2025-10-31 02:44:48+00:00
This depends on the PIO in the RP2040/RP2350. As far as I know, that is an innovation exclusive to the Raspberry Pi company, so it would not be possible to do this on another microcontroller:

https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/articles/what-is-programmab...

The microcontroller has additional cores called state machines in the PIOs that are specifically designed for bit banging and have their own custom ISA that reportedly only has 9 instructions.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-31 02:45:30+00:00
Since it is looooong (even by my aging standards), an excerpt:

> Many regular people who get the [bank's] offboarding letter are confused and upset. Most people who get this letter are insufficiently expert in the financial system to understand what is going on. Many of them are (perhaps sensibly) enraged that the bank seems reluctant to offer answers. If they successfully pry answers out of the bank, the answers sound like nonsense or change constantly.

> Here, advocates often say that banks lack fundamental humanity, regard for their customers, or simple competence. I’d tell them that is neither here nor there, but the challenges described in Seeing like a Bank drive far more of this than malice, apathy, or incompetence as such. It is a systems issue.

[...]

> Very soon after making the decision to close your account the bank does not know specifically why it chose to close your account.

> This strikes many people as Kafkaesque. (Me, too!) It is the long-standing practice of banking in the U.S. and allied countries. It is downstream of laws passed by duly elected representatives. It was not capriciously developed as a political tool in the last few years. (We’ll get to those.)
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-31 02:45:57+00:00
All clicks are click fraud, don't you forget it!

This season I am complaining that I have a choice of 5 candidates for 5 offices each of whom is running on both the Democratic and the Working Families Party line and at best I can leave a subtle trace in the numbers by giving my vote to candidates I believe in and withholding it from the others.

A few years back my congressional district was one of the few competitive districts in the whole country and boy were the airways saturated with ads against one or another of the candidates... And that's almost as bad as not having a choice.
by ashishb | 2025-10-31 02:46:29+00:00
> A compromised neovim or vscode gives you plenty of user permissions, a full scripting language, ability to do http calls, system calls, etc. Most LSPs are installed globally, doesn't matter if you downloaded it via a docker command.

Running `npm` inside Docker does not solve this problem. However, running `npm` inside Docker does not make this problem worse either.

That's why I said running `npm` inside Docker reduces the attack surface of the malicious NPM packages.
by BrouteMinou | 2025-10-31 02:46:35+00:00
M'yea, good luck finding such occurrence with NuGet or Maven for example. I would rephrase your "anywhere else".

NPM is a terrible ecosystem, and trying to defend its current state is a lost cause. The energy should be focused on how to fix that ecosystem instead of playing dumb telling people "it's all ok, look at other, also poorly designed, systems".

Don't forget that Rust's Cargo got heavily inspired by NPM, which is not something to brag about.[0]

> "Rust has absolutely stunning dependency management," one engineer enthused, noting that Rust's strategy took inspiration from npm's.

[0]https://rust-lang.org/static/pdfs/Rust-npm-Whitepaper.pdf
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-10-31 02:47:18+00:00
Related:

Can Substrate disrupt ASML using particle acceleration?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/technology/can-a-start-up... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732431)

See also:

Return to Silicon Valley

https://substrate.com/our-purpose

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741489)
by ineedasername | 2025-10-31 02:48:45+00:00
Precisely. Even inflated if the inflated 16,000 api calls was accurate for how much the cost of mediocre GPU would get you, that’s not an endless store of api calls. I’m also on a 4080 for lighter loads, and even just writing benchmarks, exploring attention mechanisms, token salience, etc, without image gen being my specific purpose I may trash half a thousand generations from output every few days. More if I count the stuff that never made it that far too.
by chii | 2025-10-31 02:48:48+00:00
> treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.

may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.

With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.
by delfinom | 2025-10-31 02:50:05+00:00
Flights are delayed, however since planes are choreographed by airlines for maximum utilization, long enough delays and you will see mass cancellations, potentially across large swaths of the country.

i.e. a plane for one route might go between various different cities in 24 hours, with different crew each time of course before it gets back to the first route.
by MangoToupe | 2025-10-31 02:50:24+00:00
Putting aside quibbling over what constitutes language, talking, etc, animals do clearly communicate to us and understand us (to some limit). They read our facial expressions, hear our tones, can distinguish words and names. Similarly: any pet owner who pays attention can learn to read the body language of their animal companions, their tone of voice, and sometimes even distinguish what the pet wants or how they feel from individual vocal articulations. We've managed to teach great apes to use signs to communicate to us.

All this is to say: is there value in pretending like we can "translate" to english with complex grammar? Maybe not. But it might be interesting to learn and track, say, which sort of meow is "play with me", which is "feed me", which is "I'm stressed", which is "I want another toy", which is "I'm worried about you", etc.

There have been claims of teaching dogs to use buttons to communicate complex things; some of it is easy to believe (eg I have taught my own dogs to press a button when they want to go out—relatively straightforward conditioning), but some of it might be a performance for social media. I understand the skepticism, but it's surely worth researching to what extent the dogs actually are "communicating" versus seeking specific things, or even indicating concerns or emotions to us.

This gets even more interesting with animals with complex socialization of their own: whales, dolphins, birds, etc. Domesticated animals and our close relatives already have a genetic edge in communicating with us; but intraspecies communication of animals can be opaque or literally outside our ability to hear or differentiate. Surely algorithms and automated recording/correlation could reveal the complexity of these relations.
by rconti | 2025-10-31 02:52:04+00:00
they mailed me a thing a few months ago saying "we're lowering rates!" and then another thing more recently saying "See, we're lowering rates and plan to lower them again soon!"

I haven't actually looked at the real bills to see if it's happening, but the expectation they're setting up is that 2026 will be lower than 2025. we'll see!
by dlubarov | 2025-10-31 02:52:28+00:00
In all likelihood there's just language like "to the extent permitted by law", which The Guardian isn't telling us about. Even if they didn't write that explicitly, it's implied anyway - Israel knows any US court would void any provision requiring Google/Amazon to commit criminal acts (illegality doctrine). It's also not really possible for Israel to be break laws of foreign states, since it's not bound by them in the first place.
by thomspoon | 2025-10-31 02:53:37+00:00
I thoroughly enjoy uv, having used poetry and requirements.txt prior, but it does come with its faults in a large codebase. Admittedly, I don’t know whether they re due to uv’s infancy, or PEP restrictions.

For example:

1. uv sync should update by default (like poetry) 2. uv lock revision and dependency resolver keep changing and it makes it hard to figure out if changes to our uv.lock are real or due to separate versions of uv among developers 3. uv pre-release dependency rules should be able to be disabled with either a sys_marker or specific case like pinning a version

Some other pain points but I can’t remember them all at the top of my head..
by antonvs | 2025-10-31 02:54:03+00:00
I can prove I can remember the shape, because I can draw it.

I think you're putting too much importance on the ability to visualize it. I can have a high-resolution image of a candle, but it's not useful for understanding that there's a candle in the picture - for that, you need to have parsed the image and understood what it contains. The visualization is just the source material. Similarly, when you read a book, you're not remembering what entire pages look like with all the words on them.

The problem with these kinds of things is that so much happens unconsciously that we're not aware of. You think remembering the image is important because you're unaware of all the processing that allows you to understand the image.
by munchler | 2025-10-31 02:54:29+00:00
> Making almost every variable const at initialization is good practice. I wish it was the default, and mutable was a keyword.

It's funny how functional programming is slowly becoming the best practice for modern code (pure functions, no side-effects), yet functional programming languages are still considered fringe tech for some reason.

If you want a language where const is the default and mutable is a keyword, try F# for starters. I switched and never looked back.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-10-31 02:54:46+00:00
Been wondering what's going on with this Agentic Commerce stuff. Yesterday they announced some joint thing with PayPal https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-10-28-OpenAI-and-PayPa...

....but then PayPal also annouced some thing with Google powered by A2A https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/financial-services/intr...
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-10-31 02:55:43+00:00
In the UK I have a single person Ltd. I use a virtual office as my registered address (a standard practice) and my home as my trading address. My UK banks and insurance all list my trading address (knowingly - that is the one they want) and my regular bills are personal, not under the company.

When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.

In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.
by ashishb | 2025-10-31 02:56:05+00:00
> The above simple alias may work for node/npm, but it doesn't generalize for many other programs that are available on the local system, with resources that would somehow have to get mounted into the container ...

Thanks. You are right, running inside Docker won't always work for local commands. But I am not even using local commands.

Infact, I have removed `yarn`, `npm`, and several similar tools already from my machine.

It is best to run them inside Docker.

> I use sandbox-run: https://github.com/sandbox-utils/sandbox-run

How does this work if my local command is a Mac OS binary? How will it run inside Docker container?
by noduerme | 2025-10-31 02:56:25+00:00
It seems crazy to me that any country would outsource storage of military intelligence data to a foreign corporation. But my reading of the article is that the data is physically stored in Amazon and Google datacenters on Israeli soil.

If for some reason the US were storing sensitive data in US-based datacenters operated by a foreign corporation, don't you think they would try to take measures to prevent that data from being exfiltrated? It would be idiotic for Israel not to take what measures it could.

As for the idea that Amazon is acting treasonously - is warning someone that your country is spying on them treasonous? I think they should warn anyone and everyone whose data is being shared with any government, as long as they stay within the letter of the law in the places they operate.
by chemotaxis | 2025-10-31 02:56:59+00:00
> Will everyone's worse fears come true?

I mean, it's sort of inevitable. Eventually, Canva will find itself under pressure to grow revenue (or even just weather a downturn). The maintenance of a complex desktop application is expensive and there will be pressure to increase "conversions" by putting more and more of the useful functions behind a paywall.

That said, their immediate goal is probably to take away customers from Adobe, and right now, the product is free, has more features than the old Affinity, doesn't need to talk to activation servers on an ongoing basis, and doesn't auto-update. So we should enjoy it while it lasts.
by lmm | 2025-10-31 02:57:07+00:00
> Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.

There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).
by retouch | 2025-10-31 02:57:59+00:00
Hi HN — we built an AI Rap Generator that turns a topic or mood into rhythm-aware drafts. Looking for product/UX feedback.

What you can try

1. Enter a topic or mood to generate a rap. 2. Make a full song or go with just the instrumental.

What we’d love feedback on

1. Is this useful or fun for brainstorming/practice? 2. Does the result match the rap you had in mind? 3. What presets and lengths feel right for a first draft?

Known limitations

1. Lyrics display is not available yet. 2. Backing track is a guide, not a full arrangement. 3. Early flow control; outputs can feel similar.

We’ll be in the comments to gather real-world use cases and onboarding/sharing suggestions.
by glxxyz | 2025-10-31 02:58:01+00:00
> I’m guessing you’re not counting the fact that if you buy a stock for $100 you still have the $100 (you can sell the stock)

Your guess is wrong. A better term for what I calculated is the IRR of a series of cash flows. You're correct that stock is a liquid asset, I'm obviously aware that I can't liquidate the panels attached to my roof.

This whole thread got out of hand, I was just giving the anecdote that I saw a much better return on a heatpump than a solar installation. I don't care who believes or doesn't believe my calculations.

> Easy to verify though: what was your install cost and how much is it saving you on energy bills?

A rough estimate is given on my original comment in this thread.
Show HN: Hot or Slop – Visual Turing test on how well humans detect AI images
by setrf | 2025-10-31 02:58:24+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Hot or Slop (https://hotorslop.com) - a visual Turing test where you swipe through photos and guess if they're AI-generated or real. It's part game, part crowd-sourced research experiment.

After 50 players and ~3,600 guesses, the early data is fascinating:

* Average human accuracy: 65% (barely better than random) * Top performers hit 85–90% accuracy * FLUX and Imagen models fool people 80%+ of the time * Speed matters - rushed guesses drop accuracy ~15%

Every guess feeds a transparent dataset tracking which AI models are hardest to detect and how our collective detection abilities evolve as models improve. Think of it as real-time measurement of the human-AI perception gap.

Tech stack: React 19 + Vite (frontend), Express + SQLite via sql.js (backend), Hugging Face datasets (OpenFake for synthetic images, COCO–Caption2017 for real photos). The game tracks ~15 metadata points per guess (model, prompt length, latency, confidence, etc.) for analysis.

Current challenge: sql.js loads the entire DB into memory, so I'm hitting memory limits at ~3,600 guesses. Planning to migrate to better-sqlite3 or Postgres for scale, but wanted to ship fast and iterate based on usage patterns.

The visual indicators during swipes use gradient overlays (red for AI, green for real) with EB Garamond typography for a clean aesthetic. Simple but effective UX - most people play 50+ rounds in their first session.

Curious to hear:

1. What accuracy do HN folks hit? (I suspect higher than average) 2. Any ideas on detection patterns? Some claim texture/lighting tells, others focus on compositional "tells" 3. Thoughts on scaling the analytics without moving to a full DB service?

Try it: https://hotorslop.com

(Fair warning: weirdly addictive)
by pron | 2025-10-31 02:58:30+00:00
First, in all benchmarks but two, Java performs just as well as C/C++/Rust, and in one of those two, Go performs as well as the low-level languages. Second, I don't know the details of that one benchmark where the low-level languages indeed perform better than high-level ones, but I don't see any reason to believe it has anything to do with virtual threads.

Modern Java GCs typically offer a boost over more manual memory management. And on latency, even if virtual were very inefficient and you'd add a GC pause with Java's new GCs, you'd still be well below 1ms, i.e. not a dominant factor in a networked program.

(Yes, there's still one cause for potential lower throughput in Java, which is the lack of inlined objects in arrays, but that will be addressed soon, and isn't a big factor in most server applications anyway or related to IO)

BTW, writing a program in C++ has always been more or less as easy as writing it in Java/C# etc.; the big cost of C++ is in evolution and refactoring over many years, because in low-level languages local changes to code have a much more global impact, and that has nothing to do with the design of the language but is an essential property of tracking memory management at the code level (unless you use smart pointers, i.e. a refcounting GC for everything, but then things will be really slow, as refcounting does sacrifice performance in its goal of minimising footprint).
by torton | 2025-10-31 02:59:29+00:00
As a personal Wise customer, I have a small issue with a name mismatch. It happens every time, I need to submit extra documentation every time, and when I raise the issue with support I get the same response every time - they got the documents and the transfer can go ahead, so there's no problem. They are incapable of the simple act of looking the history and realizing there is an issue. Wise excels at low fees, not at customer support.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-31 03:00:00+00:00
It's far more likely such users will just pirate Pro/Enterprise (select "Work" instead of "Home" during the OOBE) than revitalize the customized install media scene around Home. Alternatively, configure the user in autounattend.xml

If you mean when no edition of Windows allows local users... I mean, there's a lot of other things which have to come to Enterprise before we get there. I wonder if Windows will lose relevance before that level of change occurs.
by hyperhello | 2025-10-31 03:00:10+00:00
> I wish it was the default, and mutable was a keyword.

I wish the IDE would simply provide a small clue, visible but graphically unobtrusive, that it was mutated.

In fact, I end up wishing this about almost every language feature that passes my mind. For example, I don't need to choose whether I can or can't append to a list; just make it unappendable if you can prove I don't append. I don't care if it's a map, list, set, listOf, array, vector, arrayOf, Array.of(), etc unless it's going to get in my way because I have ten CPU cores and I'll optimize the loop when I need to.