MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 6d6b73 | 2025-10-17 18:08:24+00:00
Even without AGI, current LLMs will change society in ways we can't yet imagine. And this is both good and bad. Current LLMs are just a different type of automation, not mechanical like control systems and robots, but intellectual. They don't have to be able to think independently, but as long as they automate some white-collar tasks, they will change how the rest of society works. The simple transistor is just a small electronic component that is a better version of a tube, and yet it changed everything in a few decades. How will the world change because of LLMs? I have no idea, but I know it doesn't have to be AGI to cause a lot of upheaval.
by nyrikki | 2025-10-17 18:08:24+00:00
For those who are frustrated with the lack of a fleshed out limitations section, it seems well covered under the peer review which is in the link above or directly below [0]

To me the paper is still very interesting, but concerns about computationally intractability and the hardness of approximation questions made me dig deeper.

> Specifically, our model aims to bridge biological circuits and computations of uncertainty in a tractable manner.

> To address this, we have carefully reframed our claims throughout the manuscript to emphasize that the model is a hypothesis generator rather than a definitive representation of biological circuitry.

Under the "All models are wrong, some are useful" I have no doubt this will be useful to some. But I will admit that their claims in the response to Reviewer Comment 4.5 that they "emphasize that the model is a hypothesis generator" doesn't match the published paper IMHO; and that negatively impacted my view of the claims in an admittedly probably unfair manner.

[0] https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414...
by adastra22 | 2025-10-17 18:08:49+00:00
I don’t know if I buy that. Object-relational mapping can in principle be a broad spectrum of possibilities. SQLAlchemy (the original, not Core) is an ORM that still exposes some of the underlying relational aspects.

It is still basically a query generator, just with the helpful step of converting selected tuples into objects, and tracking changes to those objects. This means that it is often possible to solve ORM-related performance issues without too much work.

It’s been a long time since I worked with SQLAlchemy though (or even touched Python), so my memory or knowledge of the current ecosystem might be off.
by nradov | 2025-10-17 18:08:56+00:00
No, there cannot (at least not legally). Aircraft are subject to strict maintenance and inspection requirements based on both calendar time and operating hours, and a certified mechanic must sign-off on the completed work. Out in rural areas there are a few private pilots who fly poorly maintained "beater" light airplanes and get away with it because authorities never show up at the local grass strip but this is never going to be tolerated in urban areas.
by Lammy | 2025-10-17 18:09:06+00:00
I 'member scouring flea markets for one of these back in the 2000s by bringing a non-adapter copy of Gyromite with me and weighing them by hand until I found one that was ~25% heavier: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/23/how-t...

> NES and Famicom cartridges

They are Game Paks and cassettes, respectively. Of course it's obvious what the author is referring to, but I really enjoy seeing the term “cassette” used for something that doesn't contain magnetic tape, so please pardon my pedantry :)

Peep the Famicom system manual where the cartridge connector is straight-up labeled in English as 「ＣＡＳＳＥＴＴＥ ＣＯＮＮＥＣＴＯＲ」with katakana furigana (カセット / kasetto): https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_198...
by Imnimo | 2025-10-17 18:09:10+00:00
>What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines. Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine. While I was at Tesla for five years or so, we went through maybe three nines or two nines. I don’t know what it is, but multiple nines of iteration. There are still more nines to go.

I think this is an important way of understanding AI progress. Capability improvements often look exponential on a particular fixed benchmark, but the difficulty of the next step up is also often exponential, and so you get net linear improvement with a wider perspective.
by reissbaker | 2025-10-17 18:09:16+00:00
Qwen3 Coder unfortunately isn't on par with Sonnet, no matter what the benchmarks say. GLM-4.6 does feel pretty competitive though.

You'll need a pretty expensive home lab to run it though... I'd be surprised if you could do it at long context with only 20 months of Sonnet usage.
by codegeek | 2025-10-17 18:09:29+00:00
THink of this way. AI shouldn't detect WHAT/WHY to do, you should. AI should just do the HOW.

One example. Lets say you want to add caching to your application. You shouldn't let AI decide everything on the architecture. Instead, you should dictate to the AI what it should look like. Then lets AI just write the equivalent code.

An example prompt that I would do "Let's add caching functionality. Use Redis as a caching store and lets start with storing these 3 API results in cache".

This ensures that AI only does what you need it to do and not making too many decision on its own. If you let it be too loose, you are giving too much control to AI and will then slowly lose what you are building.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-10-17 18:09:32+00:00
From the attorney's post:

> The infinite character of that power was most famously summed up by English lawyer Sir Ivor Jennings, who once said that “if Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence”. This line is taught to every first-year English law student.

Initially this seems like disrespect for another country's sovereignty. But really the crucial thing is:

> We explained to the UK that the Online Safety Act had a snowball’s chance in hell of being enforced in the United States

Ofcom has to go through the motions of telling 4chan they can't smoke in Paris because of the (very on-brand) nanny law.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-17 18:09:39+00:00
The most important difference between this and Kim Dotcom is the US has a lot of weight to throw around, evidently having enough to lean on the governments of small countries like NZ. In the case of 4chan though, it's a once-great but now relatively minor country trying to have their way with an American company, meanwhile America has laws explicitly for the purpose of telling the British to fuck off with the imposition of any of their free speech violating antics against Americans.
by frankc | 2025-10-17 18:09:42+00:00
So far I am in the skeptic camp on this. I don't see it adding a lot of value to my current claude code workflow which already includes specialized agents and a custom mcp to search indexed mkdocs sites that effectively cover the kinds of things I would include in these skills file. Maybe it winds up being a simpler, more organized way to do some of this, but I am not particularly excited right now.

I also think "skills" is a bad name. I guess its a reference to the fact that it can run scripts you provide, but the announcement really seems to be more about the hierarchical docs. It's really more like a selective context loading system than a "skill".
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-17 18:09:46+00:00
Regardless, it performed as admirably as could be expected in at least one edge case.

I declined so fast in 30 seconds, it failed to catch that. Doesn't claim to so you have to give some credit.

I guess it does what it says on the tin as far as that 60 seconds goes, and you certainly get what you pay for ;)
by gbacon | 2025-10-17 18:10:05+00:00
Lots of topics that we discuss on HN require careful thought and other difficult efforts but somehow do not extinguish our curiosity. Going back to the ancient Romans, an ounce of gold has always been able to purchase a suit of clothes. As the market becomes more efficient at producing goods and services, we should expect prices to decrease, not inflate. In some sectors, we do see this outcome but not in others. Yes, the analysis required to explain why is difficult, and perhaps more difficult is having to face conclusions that challenge one’s priors.
by akerl_ | 2025-10-17 18:10:24+00:00
I'm struggling to grok what the use case is for IP allowlists, passwords, or expiry on shortlinks. Presumably if you need the content that's being referenced to be restricted to only specific people, you'd need to do that at the layer the content is being served?

If you apply the restrictions to the shortlink, they're lost the moment the first person bookmarks the resulting page.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 18:10:26+00:00
I've told this story before, but I like telling it, so here goes.

I once went shopping for a Mustang Cobra, back when they were cool and I was young and into those kinds of cars. The local Ford dealer had their new car lot next door to the used lot, literally separated only by a driveway.

I went to look at the 2004 Cobras they had a half dozen of, and they were marked down (IIRC) $8000 off MSRP. I thought "Cool, the 04 is no different from the 03, so I wonder what I can get one of those on the used lot for." And walked over to look. The 03s were priced higher than the marked-down price on the 04s a couple hundred feet away. At the same dealer.

I brought it up with the used car manager, incredulous at what he was asking for the used ones. His response was "Yeah, go buy one of the new ones, these will sell just fine." I asked why and he said there is a whole class of buyer that won't even look at new cars. That the new car market and the used car markets are not in fact sharing the same space, even if it seems like it would make sense for people to cross-shop. So he priced his used cars at whatever the market would bear, which turned out to be higher than Ford would unload the new ones for.

Does this happen often? Perhaps not. But over the years I've bought new cars on several occasions where the used equivalent was going to save me a whopping $3-4K for a car that was two or three years older and with some miles. It did not make any financial sense whatsoever to buy the used one for such a small discount.
by bpt3 | 2025-10-17 18:10:33+00:00
Exactly what words did I put in your mouth?

This is your statement: "just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property"

That statement is incorrect, no matter what your definition of "modern police force" is. That's it. It's not complicated, despite your attempts to deflect from the invalidity of that statement.
by awongh | 2025-10-17 18:10:51+00:00
Now that Nvidia is the most valuable company, all this talk of actual AGI will be washed away by the huge amount of dollars driving the hype train.

Most of these companies value is built on the idea of AGI being achievable in the near future.

AGI being too close or too far away affects the value of these companies- too close and it'll seem too likely that the current leaders will win. Too far away and the level of spending will seem unsustainable.
by immibis | 2025-10-17 18:11:10+00:00
There aren't many words in the first amendment, and none of them are "unless you're telling someone how to commit a crime"

The current regime (before it was a regime) got away with a lot of very bad speech because "the first amendment says all speech is allowed, no matter what" and should be made to hold everyone to the same standard they hold themselves to.
by mulmen | 2025-10-17 18:11:12+00:00
Why doesn’t Toyota make their powertrain warranty 80k miles? Or 200k?

The warranty is there to cover failures. If a pack has a defect it will drop under 70%. If it doesn’t then it will continue working beyond the warranty term.

You’re assuming linear decay and that Tesla has fit the warranty coverage tightly to that line. It seems more likely to me that Teslas warranty is designed to address unexpected exponential decay. This is consistent with ICE powertrain warranties.
HomeFront – An AI CRM that runs your home service business
by Homefront | 2025-10-17 18:11:19+00:00
We built HomeFront to help home service pros (plumbers, HVAC, electricians, etc.) run their business without the daily admin stress. It answers calls, captures leads, books jobs, and automates invoicing. Would love your feedback — what do you think about using AI for service-based businesses?
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-17 18:11:27+00:00
How you feel is also very geographically dependent, and quality of life dependent.

The government published nationwide inflation measures are completely irrelevant to anyone who had a goal of buying land in a tier 1 metro, or in the higher end suburbs of tier 2 metros. And you will feel very different based on if you have kids or not.

Land, healthcare, and education pretty much eclipse everything else.
by YesBox | 2025-10-17 18:12:28+00:00
It's been 2-3 years since I've thought about this. I dug around and found an article that said the time complexity (for topological sorting of sprites) was O(N^2) [1]

It appears there are O(n log n) algorithms though, I just didnt come across them at the time :)

EDIT: Or maybe not! I dont have time to dig into this, but it may not be accurate enough

Im not sure that would work for my use case though, since you can see inside the buildings in my game (and there's see thru windows!). A bunch of high density buildings will be drawing tens of thousands of sprites within the camera's field of view.

For anyone who's interested, here's the scope of the problem:

Isometric projection is simulating a 3D world by layering 2D sprites in a specific order. Notably, units/vehicles in the game have smooth (floating point) movement, so they can be e.g. partially occluded by a wall or another object. My game also has pixel thin walls that can be placed on any edge of a tile.

So imagine sorting a vehicle sprite behind two wall sprites (the vehicle sprites are twice as wide) as it's moving across them. All you have are rectangles to work with. Now add in a stationary plant in front the wall, and a person walking in front of the plant, the two walls, and the vehicle.

e.g. There will be a time when the front the vehicle (the bottom of the rectangle sprite) is lower (i.e. closer to the camera) than a wall sprite, but the vehicle would still be occluded by the wall.

[1] https://mazebert.com/forum/news/isometric-depth-sorting--id7...
by unethical_ban | 2025-10-17 18:12:36+00:00
(political opinion incoming)

Other than his mention of Tommy Robinson, it is not radical or unacceptable to say "Wow, my city has changed radically in the past 20 years and is losing its identity".

If the center and the left completely reject the validity of national identity and the expectation of immigrant integration to British identity, then you leave people with those sentiments running into the only open arms left: the far-right and the rest of their agenda.

As a liberal, even a progressive in my own mind, I still recognize that completely open borders are a problem and that we should expect all people coming to a country to want to learn the language and integrate with the native community and customs. This concept is compatible with respecting cultural diversity and immigrant populations and their civil rights.

And the UK really seems to have a free speech problem. Support Palestine too much? Jail. Support immigration controls too much? Believe or not, jail.

FINALLY - I don't see how this kind of hard-fork-over-politics maneuver helps change minds in the long run. It only generates bitterness.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-17 18:12:53+00:00
Once you're in another country's jurisdiction, all bets are off. You're subject to those laws, unless there's a treaty or similar saying that you're not. In another post, I mentioned writing nasty blog posts about Kim Jong-un. If you do that, it's probably a very bad idea to visit North Korea.

In this case, the operator of 4Chan is free to blow off the UK's law. They may wish to account for that in future travel plans, though.
by rjsw | 2025-10-17 18:13:16+00:00
The author is an anthropologist, I think she knows the original meaning of "cargo cult".

The 'cult' behaviour described in the article is that of building big data centres without knowing how they will make money for the real business of the tech companies doing it. They have all bought AI startups but that doesn't mean that the management of the wider company understands it.
by antiterra | 2025-10-17 18:13:17+00:00
I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind when I was younger. It suggested quantum processes as a last ditch effort for a non-deterministic brain. At the time, I thought it was a fascinating prediction of how our minds might work and that reading it made me a smarter person.

I have since come to view it more as an interesting lesson in the pitfalls of hypothesis formation, popular non-fiction, and vanity.

Even so, as a layperson, it's entirely understandable to perk up whenever someone discovers 'tubules' in the brain, even if none of that sufficiently supports any of the collapse requirements of the Penrose/Hammeroff quantum microtubes.
by trehalose | 2025-10-17 18:14:07+00:00
Airplanes don't need roads either, but airports do a lot more than just provide hangars to store them and runways for them to take off and land. There's all kinds of systems to help planes avoid collisions too.

You might think it'll be very easy for flying cars to avoid crashing because they can just fly above and below each other, but that's also more directions for them to crash into each other from, more directions the drivers might have to rely on potentially faulty sensors where their vision is blocked. There might have to be invisible "lanes", maybe even with something like traffic lights, rather than having cars just flying every which way without external coordination.
by rchaud | 2025-10-17 18:14:17+00:00
As an old millennial whose source of new music is now Tiktok, I disagree there are better ways to get new music. The concept of a 24/7 music video channel exposed me to all kinds of music in the '90s and early '00s that I would have simply skipped over if it played on the radio, or came up on Spotify (unsubscribed years ago).

Part of the reason AI bands can rack up millions of listens on streaming platforms is because real bands are largely anonymous outside of the tiny album art thumbnail. To learn about them, you have to follow them on a separate social media platform. On MTV, there would be shows that interviewed bands before premiering their video, or had programs like like Pop-up Video that showed band trivia underneath the music video. I discovered Beck while watching the Pop Up video for "The New Pollution".

The visual identity of a band or artist presented through the music video was key to introducing new sounds to me. The music video now is dead for all but the largest, best known artists, and their videos are predictable fodder made only to distribute on Youtube.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 18:14:21+00:00
All of this is just a way of saying that the market does not agree with someone's personal opinion on value. "That's a mistake" sounds right but if the market is willing to pay, then was it really a mistake?

> I've only ever found good deals on used stuff by pure chance or by watching the market over weeks. It takes both patience and decisiveness, otherwise someone else swoops in before you.

That sounds like it is exactly how things are supposed to work. If the average price were a good deal, it would by definition not be a good deal. It should take some work or some waiting, if you want that price.
by tcgv | 2025-10-17 18:14:41+00:00
Good read, but it stretches "data model" a bit. It's really about the product's conceptual/domain model, the primary entities you elevate and design around, and how that choice cascades into UX, pricing, and go-to-market. The examples (Slack channels, Notion blocks, Figma’s canvas, Toast's menu items) show how a strong model can compound value across features.

Where it blurs things: data model != UX strategy != business model, and success isn't only about a novel model, execution and distribution still matter greatly.

My takeaway: read "data model" here as "core conceptual model", and ask whether your product has a clear center that lets new features inherit context instead of becoming one-offs.
by Root_Denied | 2025-10-17 18:14:44+00:00
Except AI already had a clear definition well before it started being used as a way to inflate valuations and push marketing narratives.

If nothing else it's been a sci-fi topic for more than a century. There's connotations, cultural baggage, and expectations from the general population about what AI is and what it's capable of, most of which isn't possible or applicable to the current crop of "AI" tools.

You can't just change the meaning of a word overnight and toss all that history away, which is why it comes across as an intentionally dishonest choice in the name of profits.
Show HN: Langr: a daily language guessing game
by raymondtana | 2025-10-17 18:14:52+00:00
"Langr" is a language guessing game, similar to other Wordle variants, and is unique for its multimodality. The game provides a sample of a given language of the day, revealing more clues about that sample as the game goes on:

Audio -> Phonetic -> English -> Family -> Written

Your job is to use a list of world languages to identify the language behind the sample.

The inspiration came after one-too-many-times of hearing a random language on the street and not being able to confirm what it was...

Spoken samples, sentence text, and other speaker metadata are sourced from the open-source Mozilla CommonVoice. Language metadata was mainly sourced from Glottolog, including a language's family lineage. Phonetic transcriptions are generated using eSpeak. English translations needed to be generated by Google Translate. The langcodes library helps to translate between each library using standard ISO 639‑3 codes.

Hope you enjoy! Feel free to try out today's game as well as some from the previous few months.
by thomasdziedzic | 2025-10-17 18:15:10+00:00
> stop repeating that. first, it isn't true that intelligence is barely defined. https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639

I don't think he should stop, because I think he's right. We lack a definition of intelligence that doesn't do a lot of hand waving.

You linked to a paper with 18 collective definitions, 35 psychologist definitions, and 18 ai researcher definitions of intelligence. And the conclusion of the paper was that they came up with their own definition of intelligence. That is not a definition in my book.

> second a definition is obviously not a prerequisite as evidenced by natural selection

right, we just need a universe, several billions of years and sprinkle some evolution and we'll also get intelligence, maybe.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-17 18:15:31+00:00
If you get rear-ended, the liability is on the other driver, your insurer need not be involved, and will never be the one paying out, barring an underinsured motorist claim. The legal obligation to property is that you are made whole, that you have what you had before the crash (which is a used car). The party at fault/their insurance have to give you the amount of money that it would take to buy a comparable car (year, condition, options). You are legally entitled to the amount of money that will get you back into a practically identical car.

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.