MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Amezarak | 2025-10-17 20:25:17+00:00
> And... you are absolutely repeating seed oil panic claims in your comment.

Maybe we have different definitions of "seed oils" or "panic claims". Nothing I said is controversial: canola oil as food did not exist before the 1970s, the standard method of creating canola oil involves crushing a massive amount of canola and then using a solvent like hexane to maximize extraction, vegetable oils are one of the primary sources for 21st century calories and are hugely present in UPFs.

I would consider a "panic claim" to be something like "seed oils cause cancer", "seed oils cause heart attacks", "seed oils cause inflammation", "the hexane in canola is poisoning people", or even "seed oils are definitely responsible for the obesity epidemic", etc. I am sure there is (limited) evidence for these claims, and that's fine: it's nearly impossible to get high-quality nutritional research showing long-term dietary impacts because of the nature of the problem. What do you do? Interviews are unreliable, you can't feed people controlled diets for a lifetime, population/consumption studies are beset by thousands of confounders. Thus, I don't have any reason to place a lot of belief in any study saying "seed oils bad!"; some other study explaining how they're great is just as likely to be true, in my mind.

All I can go by is the simple heuristic I explained earlier.

> But that wouldn't change the calorie content of the final product compared to chips fried in canola or sunflower oil.

Because I don't think calories are likely to be the real explanation behind the public health problems. Every food item, even 100% unprocessed, has all sorts of pharmacological side effects besides turning into cellular fuel. Most of them are very subtle, have different effects in different populations, etc. Most people have had access to plentiful high-calorie low-satiety foods for a long time and this didn't happen. Perhaps the "hyperpalatable" part is involved, but lots of sugary and high-fat treats fall into this category and we still didn't have this problem. What we didn't have was modern UPFs or vegetable oils. So if the cause is dietary, it seems reasonable to look in askance at these, and it's obvious that we don't "need" flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and the various preservatives we now have except to enhance the profitability of Kraft and General Mills. My second point was that this would have the side effect of rendering uneconomical or unpalatable whole categories of products that presumably tptacek does have a problem with, even if he doesn't align with the reason for doing so. So if he thinks chips are a public health menace, this makes them rarer and more expensive.
by wk_end | 2025-10-17 20:26:02+00:00
The lockout chip isn't related to the converters, per se. The converter has a lockout chip, but so does every official NES game.

The Famicom didn't have any kind of protection scheme, so unlicensed and bootleg games were commonplace; Nintendo added the lockout mechanism for the international release precisely in response to that. Each cartridge contains a "key" chip that unlocks the "lock" chip on the NES main board, which then releases the reset line on the CPU allowing it to operate.

Naturally, this means that Famicom carts don't have the lockout mechanism, so those signals need to come from the converter.
by famouswaffles | 2025-10-17 20:26:08+00:00
Free users can still be monetized or else Google Search would be a money loser. Open AI's free users are at the moment not monetized in any way. It's clear they plan to change this, given recent hirings and the value they'd need to extract from their free active userbase to be profitable is pretty low, so it's not really a problem.
by jsnell | 2025-10-17 20:26:16+00:00
OpenAI don't monetize the vast majority of their users yet. But the unit costs are really low, and once they start monetizing the free tier with ads, they'll be wildly profitable.

"OpenAI cannot actually afford to pay $60 billion / year" the article states with confidence. But that's the level of revenue they'd be pulling in from their existing free users if monetized as effectively as Facebook or Google. No user growth needed.

And it seems this isn't far off, given the Walmart deal. Of course they'll start off with unobtrusive ad formats used only in situations where the user has definite purchase intent, to make the feature acceptable to the users, and then tighten the screws over time.
by Retric | 2025-10-17 20:26:30+00:00
> it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science

Why? There’s a lot of Nobel laureates over time who collectively made many such claims, so you can easily pick examples in both directions.

My point is more such ideas aren’t accurate enough for anything beyond preliminary testing by actual scientific investigation which sometimes does validate them but also commonly disproves them. There’s zero reason for the average person to consider their validity.

Your example is a perfect demonstration of why most people ignoring such things is a good idea, these things don’t simply disappear without investigation.
by jocaal | 2025-10-17 20:26:48+00:00
> I'm a paid subscriber of open AI, but it's really just a matter of convenience. The app is really good, and I find it's really great for double checking some of my math.

That right there is why they are valuable. Most people are absolutely incompetent when it comes to IT. That's why no one you meet in the real world uses ad blockers. OpenAI secured their position in the mind share of the masses. All they had to do to become the next google was find a way to force ads down the throats of their users. Instead they opted for the inflated bubble and scam investors strategy. Rookie mistake.
by dysoco | 2025-10-17 20:26:49+00:00
> Playing video games apparently prints money these days. People stream it to audiences and get paid ad money

Paying video games alone doesn't print money [0], it's being a great entertainer that does, and it's not easy and usually requires quite a bit of talent and the right personality.

And as others have said, just go into Twitch pick a category and check how many channels are streaming that have 0 viewers... it's staggering, I would argue that perhaps only 2% or so of Twitch channels have more than 1 viewer.

Making bank streaming requires not only grueling work of putting video after video, empty streams, etc. for years but also probably being quite lucky, we only see a tiny fraction of people making content out there.

I agree though that this didn't exist 15 years ago, so it's definitively a possibility when before it wasn't!

[0]: Okay you can be a pro-gamer but I think that's even more niche and harder than making content.
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-10-17 20:26:58+00:00
Securing methods of transmission so that interception of data is impossible is one of my many dreams. Being able to not have to worry your transmission is being intercepted, be it wireless or via a physical tap on the fiber would bring huge peace of mind.

I know plenty see quantum as a hype cycle for certain groups, but the real benefit I see is that as our understanding of the most basic fundamental parts of reality grows, and our ability to manipulate on that scale emerges, we see large advancements in many fields as a result.
by KingFelix | 2025-10-17 20:26:58+00:00
Yup, even the Dioso-Penrose limit has two sides. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490

Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ.

Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper.

Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers.

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
by zkmon | 2025-10-17 20:27:09+00:00
>> but deep problems aren't being solved

There is no problem to solve. These days, solutions come in a package which includes the problems they intend to solve. You open the package. Now you have a problem that jumped out of the package and starts staring at you. The solution comes out of the package and chases the problem around the room.

You are now technologically a more progressed human.
Show HN: Privacy-first work journal with no backend
by napping_penguin | 2025-10-17 20:27:49+00:00
Hi HN! I built Scribe Notes to solve a problem I kept having: to get organized with my daily work and solve the "explain what you did today and why you should still be employed" problem.

It's a 5-minute daily work journal that runs entirely in your browser. Zero backend, zero tracking, zero data leaving your machine. Everything is stored locally using IndexedDB and local storage.

Key features: - Daily notes with @organization and #project tagging - 30-minute time block tracking (click to toggle) - Auto-generated weekly summaries for standups - Stats and visualizations for performance reviews - Export/import for backups

The idea is you bookmark it and spend 2-5 minutes at end of day jotting down what you worked on. Then when performance review season comes around, you're not desperately trying to remember what you did 6 months ago.

Tech stack is intentionally simple - it's a pure client-side app with no server dependencies. You can even run it offline once loaded.

Would love feedback from the community! What features would make this more useful for your daily workflow?

Live at: https://scribe-notes.com/
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-10-17 20:27:51+00:00
Is anyone _not_ short Oracle? The downside risk for them is that they’ll lose a deal worth 10x their annual revenues.

Their potential upside is that OpenAI (a company with lifetime revenues of ~$10bn) have committed to a $300bn lease, if Oracle manages build a fleet of datacenters faster than any company in history.

If you’re not short, you definitely shouldn’t be long. They’re the only one of the big tech companies I could reasonably see going to $0 if the bubble pops.
by iyn | 2025-10-17 20:28:06+00:00
Solid post, thanks for sharing. Zitron occupies his own echo chamber. I've seen some people share links to his articles with a smirk as a "proof" of how "bullshit LLMs are" — and I know for a fact that they have no understanding of LLMs or how to evaluate limitations, saying nothing about unit economics. Sadly, I don't think it's possible to reason with them.

To be clear, I do expect that the bubble will burst at some point (my bet is 2028/2029) — but that's due to dynamics between markets and new tech. The tech itself is solid, even in the current form — but when there's a lot of money to make you tend to observe repeatable social patterns that often lead to overvaluing of the stuff in question.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-17 20:28:22+00:00
> If you get rear-ended, the liability is on the other driver, your insurer need not be involved

Not in jurisdictions with no-fault insurance.

> The extra care and maintenance is something that can get factored into condition. If you disagree with a valuation, they typically will entertain an argument for a higher valuation, if it is grounded in reality and especially if you have comparables. They know that it is better to pay more when it is fair, than to get dragged into court, and be told to pay more and told to pay for lawyers, etc.

Maybe, or they might win in court, and then it's you who should have known it was better to just accept less rather than get dragged into multiple appeals and be told to pay for lawyers etc.

e.g. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/vehicles-insurance-accident...

"The judge awarded him $6,000 in damages but when the insurance company appealed, his award was cut to $1,500 and he was ordered to pay legal costs for the other side. In the end, he was $1,000 in the hole."
by VBprogrammer | 2025-10-17 20:28:22+00:00
Yeah, but not just that. I don't expect my mum to go find some high end consumer GPU and install it on a home server in order to run her own local LLM. I expect that people will be throwing chat interfaces running remixed versions of open weight models out on the internet so fast that it's impossible for anyone to monitise it in a reasonable way.

I also wonder whether, similar to bitcoin mining, these things end up on specialist ASICS and before we know it a medium tier mobile phone is running your own local models.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-17 20:28:46+00:00
Yes, my ICE required those things, but not including tires, those other things were only like 1/3 of the total maintenance costs. The ICE components ran under 5 cents per km and the non-ICE components ran over 9 cents per km.

I don't see that I was especially lucky with the ICE components, I did all the scheduled maintenance plus some other misc things (water pump x2, bad transmission bushing, etc.) (Oil and filters just don't add up to all that much - I followed the maintenance schedule using high mileage synthetic and high-mileage filters and the total cost was under $100/year at a dealership.)

I also don't see that I was especially unlucky with the non-ICE components, I've got a 13-year sample size of steady, unremarkable maintenance to tires, paint, brakes (these always corroded from salt before they wore down, so no real EV savings to be had on brakes), misc trim pieces, etc. Looking at my Excel sheet of maintenance, I'd expect these costs to be higher on nearly any EV, just because the ICE was a cheap econobox with cheap parts (e.g. tires were small, TPMS sensors were cheap, only 4 lug nuts, etc.), and any newer vehicle is going to have more parts that need replacement/repair, and those parts are going to be more expensive.
by meindnoch | 2025-10-17 20:28:50+00:00
People keep talking about AGI as if it's some mystical leap beyond human capability.

But let's be honest; software development at a modern startup is already the upper bound of applied intelligence. You're juggling shifting product specs, ambiguous user feedback, legacy code written by interns, and five competing JS frameworks, all while shipping on a Friday. Models can now do that. They can reason about asynchronous state, refactor a codebase across thousands of lines, and actually explain the difference between useEffect and useLayoutEffect without resorting to superstition.

If that's not general intelligence, what exactly are we waiting for - self-awareness?
by TMWNN | 2025-10-17 20:28:57+00:00
>What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so.

What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
by kelnos | 2025-10-17 20:29:26+00:00
A friend of mine bought a used car in 2007 for ~$4500 in 2025 dollars.

In my mid-20s I bought a 3-year-old Accord for $16k (using a $12k loan) and that was a big stretch for my finances at the time, despite having a good early-career tech job.

Your $17k figure is a lot of money for most folks in the US.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-17 20:29:40+00:00
> This seems hyperbolic to me. Sometimes companies just want to make money.

It's not hyperbolic at all. The entire moat is brand lock-in. OpenAI owns the public impression of what AI is- for now- with a strong second place going to Claude for coders in specific. But that doesn't change that ChatGPT can generate code too, and Claude can also write poems. If you can't lock users into good experiences with your LLM product, you have no future in the market, so data retention and flattery are the names of the game.

All the transformer-based LLMs out there can all do what all the other ones can do. Some are gated off about it, but it's simulated at best. Sometimes even circumvent-able with raw input. Twitter bots regularly get tricked into answering silly prompts by people simply requesting they forget current instructions.

And, between DeepSeek's incredibly resource-light implementations of solid if limited models, which do largely the same sort of work without massive datacenters full of GPUs, plus Apple Intelligence rolling out experiences that largely run on ML-specific hardware in their local devices which immediately, full stop, wins the privacy argument, OpenAI and co are either getting nervous, or they're in denial. The capex for this stuff, the valuations, and the actual user experiences are simply not cohering.

If this was indeed the revolution the valley said it was, and the people were lining up to pay prices that reflected the cost of running this tech, then there wouldn't be a debate at all. But that's simply not true: most LLM products are heavily subsidized, a lot of the big players in the space are downsizing what they had planned to build out to power this "future," and a whole lot of people cite their experiences as "fine." That's not a revolution.
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-10-17 20:30:18+00:00
I have yet to pitch to investors. That said, when I am pitching an idea or concept to others I always try to know what my end goal is, get my verbal or visuals all figured out so my conveying of ideas and such is as smooth as can be.

I want people who are willing to explore ideas and random concepts, but who also have faith in trying and failing. I am not looking for someone who is insincere in their interest or support nearly because of financial opportunity.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-17 20:30:21+00:00
You say keeps getting edited out but I see one instance of that happening 15 years ago.

The talk is unavailable, but that and a chapter in Landau’s book hardly seem like appropriate sources for “everyone disagrees with him”.

The vast majority of critiques of his argument that I’ve read are by people who are actively working in AI not professional logicians.
by colechristensen | 2025-10-17 20:30:28+00:00
You're going to negotiate with the structure of an entire corporation?

Excuse me CEO your budgeting process is inconvenient to my work, please change it all to be more responsive.

This is not how things work and not how changes are made. Unless you get into the C-suite or at least become a direct report of someone who is nobody cares and you're told to just deal with it. You can't negotiate because you're four levels of management away from being invited to the table.

An organization that can make agile capital expenditures in response to the needs of an individual contributor is either barely out of the founder's garage or a magical fairyland unicorn.
by AdenHQ | 2025-10-17 20:30:40+00:00
We kept hearing the same story from companies across industries — endless training manuals, safety PDFs, and SOPs that no one actually reads. So we built Aden Training Agent, a tool that transforms any document into an interactive AI-powered course — ready for onboarding, compliance, or certification.

What it does:

Converts existing training materials into adaptive AI lessons

Adjusts content to each worker’s role, skill level, and learning pace

Tracks progress and keeps teams audit-ready automatically

With Aden, workforce training finally feels human again - fast, engaging, and personalized.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-17 20:30:50+00:00
I notice that they don't propose an "Alaska-Siberia tunnel", nor a "Russia-US tunnel", nor an "Asia-America tunnel". No, it's a "Putin-Trump tunnel". It's about personal egos and putting their names on things, not about usefulness.

Now, in fairness, this wasn't actually Trump's idea, nor his ego that pushed it (so far).
by ljm | 2025-10-17 20:31:32+00:00
Turns out guilt by association is problematic whether it’s a Gestapo tactic or a terminally online one.

People need to step back and breathe. It’s possible to feel one thing about a (frankly shite) blog post and its author without tarring everybody within six degrees of separation with the same brush, and it’s quite unsettling that people find such nuance so difficult.
by labcomputer | 2025-10-17 20:31:55+00:00
> EV are progressing fast so they lose value quick,

Are they really, though?

A 2021 Model 3, Mach-e, Polestar 2, Model Y, F-150 Lightning, e-Tron, or ID.4 (to name just a few) are not too different from the ones sold today. Aside from software updates and minor refinements (mostly DFM), I don't see much progress. That's not a problem, since they're all competent vehicles for single-car households.

Several 2025/26 models have even been de-contented compared to their 2021 selves.

Trying to steel-man your argument a little, the only models I can think of with significant progress are the bZ4X/Solterra (widely panned due to initially uncompetitive specs and pricing), Leaf (which has been getting small, incremental improvements for more than a decade) and the now-discontinued Bolt (which was the cheapest road-tripable EV).

I think you really have to be looking compliance cars that entered the market before the Model 3 and/or models that were acknowledged as uncompetitive when new to find significant/fast progress.

No, the real problem is that the true market-clearing price for most of these vehicles was $7500-$10000 less than MSRP (which was set knowing the regulatory environment), combined with the false calculation of depreciation based on MSRP instead of market price.
by dismalaf | 2025-10-17 20:32:29+00:00
Arko kind of did address it in his most recent blog post. He claims he was doing what was in Ruby Central's best interest.

Unfortunately for him he basically admitted to a crime because it came after he was terminated. He tried appealing to community and whatnot but anyone who's ever worked for a corporation knows that once you're terminated, it doesn't matter if HR forgot to take away your credentials or not, you simply don't attempt to access anything ever again. Having keys to something doesn't make you the owner.
by drnick1 | 2025-10-17 20:32:37+00:00
I love Arch, but suggesting that even an above average Windows 10 user migrate to Arch without prior Linux experience is just irresponsible. They may be left with an unusable machine if they format their "C:" drive but don't manage to properly install Arch and a DE. Mint or even plain Debian seem far better for this, and updating such systems is usually more predictable.
by darth_avocado | 2025-10-17 20:32:41+00:00
> MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wrong problem

My fairly negative take on all of this has been that we’re writing more docs, creating more apis and generally doing a lot of work to make the AI work, that would’ve yielded the same results if we did it for people in the first place. Half my life has been spent trying to debug issues in complex systems that do not have those available.