MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globular-toast | 2025-10-18 18:57:35+00:00
So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you. Try getting hard copies of some books you think you should read. Personally I can never read text books on screens, but I devour them in paper format.
by tim333 | 2025-10-18 18:58:57+00:00
I took that as he's excited to be working towards AGI. The one word answer is fairly ambiguous. For context in the same interview he says:

>... from here to building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work there are some known unknowns but I think we basically know what to go what to go do and it'll take a while, it'll be hard but that's tremendously exciting... (38:59)

which to me doesn't sound like we'll be done within a year.
by alessandru | 2025-10-18 18:59:00+00:00
tesla's cars literally just got remodeled what on earth do you mean bz4? toyota? yes they made their terrible impractical car actually practical in its latest form.

the teslas are newish, with new parts and better sound suppression. they also improve marginally in efficiency every year. so the 2023 will have slightly better mechanicals than the 2021 etc.

not too different ... they are very different. much improved. go read a review comparing them.

how much different is today's durango from last year's or here lemme remind you durango hasn't been updated in 15 (count them!) FIFTEEN years. other zombie gas models are out there too.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-18 18:59:27+00:00
I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in, like your bookshelf or ebook directory. The only caveat when it comes to paper is not to buy shit e.g. bestsellers, or software books that you're not going to read and use right away. If you don't buy shit (this is also true with board games and guitars), you can resell likely for about what you paid (or sometimes unexpectedly far more), whenever you want.

Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-18 18:59:30+00:00
>As someone already mentioned before, I don't think you are talking about the same terminal as others are.

People know perfectly well that I am talking about the way in which a terminal emulator can be used to display 2D graphics. By utilizing specific escape sequences to draw arbitrary glyphs on the terminal grid.

>What are those hacks.

Everything is a hack. TUIs work by sending escape sequences, which the terminal emulator then interprets in some way and if everything goes right you get 2D glyph based graphics. Literally everything is a hack to turn something which functions like a character printer into arbitrary 2D glyphs. Actually look at how bad this whole thing is. Look at the ANSI escape sequence you need to make any of this work, does that look like a sane graphics API to you? Obviously not.

>As far as I can remember, TUIs ran faster on ancient hardware then anything else on today's modern computers.

This is just delusional. Modern 2D graphics are extremely capable and deliver better performance in every metric.
by Barrin92 | 2025-10-18 18:59:31+00:00
Not really a fan of this econ 101 language given that it if anything drastically understates the importance of attention. I prefer Ian McGilchrist's framing of attention as a moral act:

"Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. The fact that a place is special to some because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit, in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences"

A good friend of mine is an Imam and he explained to me that in Islam heedlessness is even described as a sin(Al-Ghaflah). Attention is not just a luxury good, and forgetfulness just some waste of time or money, it destroys a person's ability to distinguish between what's real and what isn't.

One of the reasons why we seem to be so ineffective at combating distraction is I think because we've even lost that kind of language that makes clear how consequential lack of attention is.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-10-18 18:59:46+00:00
I think he is bearish about agentic workflows because he works at the very highest level of coding. An agentic Karpathy is a few doubling cycles beyond an agentic junior engineer. Agents (or just LLMs on a loop that correct their errors) are very reliable for less complex tasks now, and theyre still getting better at an exponential rate.

We are still on trend by projections to reach human parity in many domains by 2027-2028, the only thing that would prevent this is a major unexpected slowdown in AI progress.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-18 19:00:47+00:00
The UK government is not cracking down on AI porn generally but has started to crack down on the distribution of certain things, like:

- AI generated CSAM (out of a concern that it might cause people to seek to produce actual CSAM)

- AI generated rape and abuse images of real adults, again out of concern it will cause violence and its distribution is actually degrading and is experienced as and combined with threatening behaviour

- some extreme AI generated rape/abuse images of non-real people.

Despite what internet libertarians say, there is evidence to suggest that porn is changing people's sexual behaviours, particularly young people, both for good and ill.

At the moment there is no good reason to believe that AI-generated alternatives to harmful content are meaningfully less harmful to society.

There's more than enough evidence in articles posted on HN alone that people are beginning to experience psychosis brought on by spending too much time with AI content.

I don't really care if governments ban it; I'd like to see governments being much braver about criminalising AI generated misrepresentation, AI generated hoax content etc.

Sane governments should IMO absolutely ignore the ultra-libertarian angles; there is at least no reason that AI-generated content should be treated any differently under existing obscenity laws just because there are no real people in it.
by throw10920 | 2025-10-18 19:01:29+00:00
> In other words are the two pointers actually pointing to the same variable?

This statement is incorrect. You can't have pointers to a variable. You can have pointers to a memory address, and most people would be fine with a tool that is correct up to the level of being unable to differentiate that.

This is a disingenuous redefinition of what the GP is looking for in order to shill Rust.
by acuozzo | 2025-10-18 19:01:48+00:00
> You'd see people who really knew the interface fly through tasks being multiple keystrokes ahead of the UI.

I remember.

This, unfortunately, killed people: Therac-25. Granted, the underlying cause was a race condition, but the trigger was the flying fingers of experts typing ahead, unknowingly having been trained to rely on the hardware interlock present in older models.
by btilly | 2025-10-18 19:01:52+00:00
My personal best guess is no. That a low-level shingles infection getting into your brain can cause Alzheimer's. And therefore a shingles infection creates a risk of Alzheimer's.

The way that the vaccine preserves us is by reducing the odds of there being a shingles infection in the first place.

That said, this is only my guess. We do not actually know the mechanism by which the vaccine helps. Nor do I have any evidence or data supporting my guess.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-10-18 19:02:53+00:00
I don't think a modern LLM is necessarily less complicated than a squirrel brain. If anything it's more engineered (well structured and dissectable), but loaded with tons of erroneous circuitry that is completely irrelevant for intelligence.

The squirrel brain is an analogue mostly hardcoded circuit. It can take about one synapse to represent each "weight". A synapse is just a bit of fat membrane with some ion channels stuck on the surface.

A flip flop to represent a bit takes about 6 transistors, but in a typical modern GPU is going to need way more transitors to wire that bit - at least 20-30. multiply that by the minimum amount of bits to represent a single NN weight and you're looking at about 200-300 transitors just to represent one NN param for computing

And that's for actual compute. The actual weights in a GPU are stored most of the time in DRAM which needs to be constantly shuttled back and forth between the GPU's SRAM and HBM DRAM.

300 transistors with memory shuttling overhead versus a bit of fat membrane, and it's obvious general purpose GPU compute has a huge energy and compute overhead.

In the future, all 300 could conceivably replaced with a single crossbar latch in the form of a memristor.
by cobzilla | 2025-10-18 19:02:57+00:00
Thanks, I fixed the title.

The production quality of the videos is very high. Much higher than most click bait. Great lighting, great camera, great editing.

The subject matter is pretty esoteric though. So why go through the trouble?

I’ve seen some of those perpetual motion videos and they’re low effort, low quality.

This one is high effort, high quality. But on an esoteric subject. Also, he’s selling schematics for circuits that are completely imaginary.

I think anyone with a basic understanding of electronics would see the absurdity of these circuits and wouldn’t buy the schematics.

Plus, this guy spent all the time and effort fabricating these pedals with nonsensical circuits, to show them off with fake demonstrations to DIYers who absolutely would know in a second the whole thing is a farce?

The content is pure fiction.

Very low effort scam, esoteric subject not very useful for clickbait, the videos are trying to sell fictional things for low dollar amounts to people who will immediately know these are fictional.

But the quality is really high. If it’s real, it was clearly created by one or more highly competent people.

Why would highly competent people write a script, fabricate fake devices, light, film and edit videos with almost no chance to actually make money.
by andy99 | 2025-10-18 19:03:11+00:00
YMMV, to me there’s nothing I would watch an ad in order to use, given the choice. As in there are things I value enough to pay for, and things I don’t care if they go away. No ad-supported middle ground.

Unfortunately “normies footing the bill” means in many cases we’re stuck with engagement optimized drivel instead of actual thoughtful content, which is largely the point of the original post. I’d love a world where this was driven out of existence because people stopped watching ads.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-10-18 19:03:53+00:00
Well said. There's an odd suspicion of empathy at this point (even some right-wing Christians calling empathy evil which is really odd considering what the founder of their religion taught). There's so much grievance on all sides that's being fueled by various media outlets and algorithms. Grievance says "I've been uniquely wronged". And it leads to giving up on empathy so as to get even.
by asadotzler | 2025-10-18 19:04:18+00:00
• Don't get out my debit card while shopping.

You take out your phone though. How is taking your phone out of your pocket, logging in, and tapping it on a terminal significantly different from pulling a credit card or cash from your pocket and tapping the terminal or handing it to the checker?

• Don't get lost exploring a new city. You're young, I guess. We had GPS in cars well before iPhone. GPS navigation in cars was taking off mid-90s to mid-2000s. I had a Garmin in 2002.

• Have zero-cost video calls with anyone I want. I was doing that on my laptop and desktop before iPhone. Heck, I was doing free video conferencing with European friends in 1995.

• Use most spare moments of my time I did much of this filling in empty times on my laptops years before iPhone but you are right, not as much of it as with smartphones. Cramming my day full of even more noise, however, rather than having more breaks from it, feels like devolution to me.

• Have a real-time augmented-reality translator This is an improvement over pocket electronic translators I was using in Japan in the early 2000s, but really the improvements are mostly in fidelity and usability, not in function.

Don't get me wrong, smartphones changed a lot, but it seems like you're eliding at least a decade of pre-iphone advancements here and focusing on when these tasks became easy and in everyone's hands, rather than when the tasks actually became possible and were in reasonably widespread use. You're not a youngster like many here, so I can't attribute that to naivete and that leaves me thinking haste was at work here. Happy to hear back why I'm wrong and willing to change my mind on any of these.
by weavejester | 2025-10-18 19:04:46+00:00
Static typing is a useful constraint, but it's not the only constraint. Focusing too much on dynamic vs. static typing can make one miss the more general problem: we want code that's expressive enough to do what we want, while being constrained enough to not do what we don't.

Immutability, for example, is another great constraint that's not considered in the article, but should certainly be on your mind if you're deciding between, say, Rust and Java.

The article delves into some of the drawbacks of static typing, in that while it can be more expressive, it can also contain a lot of information that's useful for the compiler but decidedly less useful for a reader. The Rust example that loads a SQL resultset into a collection of structs is a standard problem with dealing with data that's coming from outside of your static type system.

The author's solution to this is the classic one: we just need a Sufficiently Smart Compiler™. Now, don't me wrong; compilers have gotten a lot better, and Rust is the poster child of what a good compiler can accomplish. But it feels optimistic to believe that a future compiler will entirely solve the current drawbacks of static typing.

I was also slightly surprised when templates were suggested. Surely if you're aiming for rigor and correctness, you want to be dealing with properly typed data structures.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-18 19:04:57+00:00
>. If you cannot understand that and grasp how having representatives in both groups helps the state then I can’t help you.

So you're fine with one group kowtowing to the other to "help the state", as one group is illegally withholding congressionally allocated funds on their own whim? L

et's stop being coy and just say what you really think of the current atmosphere as of late. Are you personally done with Unitary Executive Theory in action? If you approve of that then just say Al instead of pretending that we're in a government that is functioning democratically.

>It is also undemocratic but let’s not pretend that matters to those involved.

Let's put it in a more extreme way. If war breaks out and we had a ballot to give the president plenary powers until the war concludes l, is that not still democratic if it is voted for? The action weakens democracy, yes. but the power of democracy includes the ability to dismantle it, As long as that is the will of the voters.

So I see prop 50 as the exact tools of democracy being used. In this case as a way to recognize that everyone else broke the glass illegally, so people doing it "the right way" vote to break the glass.

>Those involved in this who work for the state (people like Gavin) should care about the fate of the state they are supposedly working for more than their own presidential ambitions, no?

What do you think the fate of the state is if it doesn't redistricting, given the event described above? You're being very accusational but aren't addressing the fact that the federal government is in fact attacking the state.

You haven't actually told me anything bad about prop 50 except that "it's undemocratic" and that you think it's stupid. I address the democratic part. If people want to vote for stupid stuff, that is also democratic. We did so in 2024 nationals.
by exabrial | 2025-10-18 19:05:11+00:00
XLR is a perfect: it'd literally designed for differential signal transmission, they're in plentiful supply on the jobsite, and 48v isn't a concern if you understand how differential and phantom feeds work anywwy.

Fortunately the audio industry isn't plagued with Apple-like "engineers" removing headphone jacks, SD card slots, USB ports, and replaceable batteries. Sure something could be "better", but there doesn't need to be.
by chuckadams | 2025-10-18 19:05:55+00:00
I find static types actually speed up writing new code, since that's when I'm most likely to make typos in fields -- just today I had to fix some goofs where I used snake_cased fields when it was expecting camelCase. LLMs love types, and any hallucinations are instantly red-lined. Agreed on gradual typing, but I'd rather approach it from a strict language with an opt-out dynamic type like TS's 'unknown' rather than a duck-typed language with type "hints" the runtime has to always check anyway.

Structural subtyping usually hits the sweet spot for me: I can just create random structures on the fly, the type system makes sure I use them consistently, and my IDE helps me extract a named type out of them after the fact with just a few keystrokes.
by FuckButtons | 2025-10-18 19:05:55+00:00
Im not sending the rest of the world signals to because of how I choose to spend my time. Nor is the alternative optimized adaptive survival. I can’t figure out if I’m the one with the alien mind or he is. I go to music events because the experience is qualitatively different than listening to music at home, when I choose to do things, it’s because I want to, not because I have any interest in what other people think of me for engaging in those activities.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-18 19:06:06+00:00
In my own little world, I saw this first with mail and news readers. It was fast and simple to read mail and news with pine and tin: The same keystroke patterns, over and over, to peruse and reply to emails and usenet threads.

As the network ebbed and flowed, email too-often became unreadable without a GUI, and what was once a good time of learning things on usenet became browsing web forums instead. It sucked. (It still sucks.)

In the greater world, I saw it happen first at auto parts stores.

One day, the person behind the counter would key in make/model/year/engine and requested part in a blur of familiar keystrokes on a dumb terminal. It was very, very fast for someone who was skilled -- and still pretty quick for those who hadn't yet gotten the rhythm of it.

But then, seemingly the next day: The terminals were replaced by PCs with a web browser and a mouse. Rather than a predictable (repeatable!) series of keystrokes to enter to get things done, it was all tedious pointing, clicking, and scrolling.

It was slow. (And it's still slow today.)
by ux | 2025-10-18 19:06:27+00:00
What you described in your first message seemed similar to the approach used in the degree N root solving algorithm by Cem Yuksel; splitting the curve in simpler segments, then bisect into them. I'd be happy to explore what you suggested, but I'm not mathematically literate, so I'll be honest with you; what you're saying here is complete gibberish to me, and it's very hard to follow your point. It will take me weeks to figure out your suggestion and make a call as to whether it's actually simpler or more performant than what is proposed in the article.
by gloosx | 2025-10-18 19:07:31+00:00
You underestimate the reality of some "modern jobs" out there. There are garment workers in Bangladesh locked inside factories so we can enjoy cheap clothing. There are miners in the Congo working under militia control. There are migrant laborers in Gulf states with their passports seized, forced to work 12 hour shifts every day.

Some modern jobs absolutely contain elements of coercion, abuse, and exploitation that are comparable to forms of slavery.
by bsimpson | 2025-10-18 19:07:47+00:00
I've always been someone who hears high pitched noises that "normal" people don't. I'm also in my 30s, and I'm sure those "teenage alarms" in Japan would work on me. I was the one who would walk up to a CRT and turn it off when everyone else thought it already was.

What helped me accept (and ignore) tinnitus was realizing that I had already grown accustomed to tolerating that sound indoors. When's it's something you have no agency over (like "it's an old house and the wires just make that sound sometimes"), you learn it's part of the environment.

Accepting it as part of the environment gets you past the "OMG my body is ruined forever" anxieties and back to normal life.
by ramses0 | 2025-10-18 19:08:04+00:00
Exactly! Grandparent response says (without sources) that "Alzheimer's might be leftover shingles", where my original misinterpretation of it was that "shingles antibodies prevents Alzheimer's".

Of course real research or sources needed, but just some idle curiosity to update my mental map of what's going on.
by samhclark | 2025-10-18 19:08:38+00:00
I went to a b-sides yesterday (so: small, local, cybersecurity-focused) where someone described their feelings toward GenAI as "praying for Star Trek, but planning for Terminator." Someone else described AGI as a short term inevitability.

Not many others addressed it directly. The vibe I got from offhand remarks was that people felt it was a thing being forced upon them that they are resistant to use.