MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by at-fates-hands | 2025-10-15 22:34:15+00:00
Nope, you're spot on.

AI deals continued to dominate venture funding during the third quarter. AI companies raised $19 billion in Q3, according to Crunchbase data. That figure represents 28% of all venture funding.

The fourth quarter of 2024 has been no less busy for these outsized rounds. Elon Musk’s xAI raised a behemoth $6 billion round, one of seven AI funding rounds over $1 billion in 2024, in November. That’s just months after OpenAI raised its $6.6 billion round.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/20/heres-the-full-list-of-49-...
by refulgentis | 2025-10-15 22:34:17+00:00
This is a creative synthesis of a few familiar ideas (Penrose–Diosi intuition, time-dependent variational principles, and superdeterminism). But as a model it doesn’t hang together.

If you interpret this as a story, say “approximate quantum gravity lives on a matter x geometry product manifold; when the Schrödinger flow wants to leave that manifold, pick the closest product-like pointer state, and bias the lottery to match |a|^2”, it’s internally tidy. As a theory that is local, parameter-free, and predictive, it’s not there:

- the state-space restriction is inconsistent with known gravitational DOFs

- the “derivation” of Born’s rule is circular

- the collapse is enforced by global endpoint selection rather than local dynamics

- and the one quantitative lever (the “Penrose phase”) depends on gauge/UV-sensitive self-potentials

Interesting essay; not yet a model you can falsify without importing the very knobs it claims to avoid.
by neilv | 2025-10-15 22:34:30+00:00
It's a very common term now, and no fault of anyone for using it.

But it was introduced in its current sense (not in the protocol sense) by cynical and greedy exploiters, who spoiled much of the goodness of the Internet.

So when a random person casually says something like "consume content", unironically, it's like saying, "it's got what plants crave...".
by amanzi | 2025-10-15 22:34:48+00:00
I was prepared to hate this article based on the clickbaity headline "...everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong". But I agree with the premise, and I find his proposed scheme a lot better than some of the most popular colour schemes that I see online.

But I use the Nord colour scheme in VS Code, and it appears to follow the same principles as what the author proposes. There are only a few colours, with a lot of the code remaining in the base colour. Also, Python comments starting with `#` are dimmed, but comments in triple-quote blocks are highlighted. The funny thing is that I had never even noticed this, it just seemed to be intuitive.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-10-15 22:35:07+00:00
Yeah, the incentives there are obviously misaligned. I wonder if there is a potential way of making advertising click through tracking following the "I cut the cake, you chose the slice" model.

Some countries have property taxes where you declare the value and the government retains the right to purchase the property for that value for example.

My first thought was to make the advertising cost driven by revenue on the site. But that just reverses the incentive.
by perching_aix | 2025-10-15 22:35:21+00:00
That's true, it just also misses the point, like most invocations of ad hominem I come across.

People have lives outside of pursuing the scientific method. To decide to engage in that pursuit means taking away time and energy from other parts of life.

The argument here then is not that the paper is wrong because of who wrote it, but instead they insinuate that it probably is, and so it likely isn't even worth the time to try and evaluate whether it is.

This is a subtle but crucial difference, as this makes the core argument a speculation rather than a straight claim, let alone a scientific claim or refutation. And so for this, the identity of the author is a crucial bit, ad hominem cannot apply.

And this is if we make the ridiculous assumption that this was any more than just someone's informal opinion, like some sort of formal argument rather.
by handsclean | 2025-10-15 22:36:17+00:00
I think you missed the point about bundling. In this instance, the first choice is your laptop choice, and the second is your charger choice. Because the first choice is far more important than the second, the party that’s chosen in the first can also dictate the second. There is no competition for who supplies chargers that come with MacBooks, nor should one expect there to be. This is a generalization of the mechanism by which many segment monopolies work, for example regional ISPs, where the two choices are most of your life vs your ISP.

> Most consumers want their laptops to come with a charger, even if you personally don't. That's why they're sold that way.

Citation needed, on both counts. Plenty of counter-examples in this thread. Non-tech people I know aren’t charger crazed, they’re mildly amused or annoyed by their inexplicable excess of chargers.

> Like, nobody says the free market is failing because Coke forces me to buy carbonated H2O along with their syrup at the grocery store.

I’d say it is indeed failed / nonexistent there, it’s just that nobody cares, because its potential benefit is so small it’s outweighed by overhead. Chargers aren’t laptops or cars or houses, but, as you said, there’s a lot more to them, and they’re more expensive and contribute significantly to e-waste. There actually is a charger market, and it’s better when it’s more free.

To be clear, the healthier market I’m envisioning is one where consumers can make charger purchasing decisions freely, not one where nobody’s allowed to also offer a bundle.
by fabianlindfors | 2025-10-15 22:36:38+00:00
That's a fair take. We are planning on showing the output code to remove that need for trust, but focused on other things for the open beta.

As for who it's for, we are targeting technical people who might know how to build backends in code, but we believe it can be done more productively through specs. The specs remove the need for boilerplate code and more closely match the business requirements of the system. One common example of this amongst our users is building third-party integrations. That can require a lot of boilerplate code and libraries to achieve. In Specific, it can be as easy as linking out to API docs.
by robenkleene | 2025-10-15 22:37:16+00:00
> That is an awfully large amount of text for what amounts to an admission that Logic Pro is lower quality software than Pro Tools.

I definitely didn't say this. Pro Tools likely has higher marketshare than Logic Pro, but I don't think anyone would conflate that with quality. I only brought up marketshare because you framed Logic Pro as being unpopular, which is just objectively not true.

> I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're detached from the way professionals evaluate software.

I literally think I've spent more time trying to understand this than practically anyone else e.g., https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions... but also my blog archives https://blog.robenkleene.com/archive/, it's one of the main subjects I think about and write about.

Note that how professionals evaluate software is tangential to what "quality" means in the context of software. E.g., I don't think anyone would argue Adobe is the paragon of software quality, but they're arguably the most important GUI software there is for creative professionals.

Both topics are very interesting to me, what software professionals use and why, and what constitutes quality in software.

> In the other response, you're telling off a perfectly valid criticism of Apple software because they won't fulfill your arbitrary demand for a better-looking DAW. Are you even engaging with the point they're trying to make?

I'm not sure what this means, who's talking about a "better-looking DAW" and which point am I not engaging with?
by lurk2 | 2025-10-15 22:37:31+00:00
The pricing of a billboard is based on projected impressions but is decoupled from the billboard’s actual impressions. You pay the flat rate based on projected impressions. It doesn’t subsequently matter if an army of robots passes through and views the billboard 10,000 times, because the original projected audience should still see the billboard. You’re getting what you paid for. It’s also possible the projections are erroneous, fraudulent, or that the actual impressions just don’t follow the projected impressions for some other reason. This is the advantage of advertising online—if you pay for 10,000 views, the ad runs until you get them.

Contrast the billboard with an online ad: If you pay for 10,000 impressions, and 9,000 of those impressions end up being automated traffic, then you’ve effectively lost 90% of your advertising budget. Like you mentioned, ad buyers can and do account for this, so it’s not clear that it’s as big of a problem as this thread is making it out to be. The theory I see thrown around is that Meta and Alphabet are tacitly allowing this bot traffic to continue (or even that they are responsible for it themselves) because it allows them to sell another round of ads, but if this is what is going on it isn’t clear why firms would keep buying ads that aren’t converting.
by cubefox | 2025-10-15 22:38:26+00:00
This comment reads like you have a bot of an axe to grind.

> the ChatGPT acknowledgement

She acknowledged to have used it for literature research, not for writing the paper (she explicitly emphasizes she wrote it herself), which you didn't make clear. Many researchers today probably use it similarly for literature research (rather than just Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, etc), and there is nothing wrong with that.

> I suppose not surprising coming from someone who built their career on YouTube.

Phrasing it like that seems misleading. She has a PhD and has worked in academia as a theoretical physicist for most of her career, she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel.
by ZebusJesus | 2025-10-15 22:38:34+00:00
She isnt against science she is anti BS and calls out physics in general for well all of the BS. She is the one pointing out the problems of publish or perish and why it has resulted in a bunch of BS in academia and a bunch of scientists doing BS science just for the sake of writing papers. No new advancements, no new testable theories just a bunch of people making claims that can't be tested and screaming we need a larger collider.
by red369 | 2025-10-15 22:39:15+00:00
I agree with your feeling that about Apple devices eventually getting updates to the point they becomes sluggish. I have just reached that point with iOS 26 and my iPhone 13 mini.

I am undecided in my thoughts about how malicious this is. Do people think that it is something like wanting to cram more features into the operating systems, and they are careless how it affects the earliest supported models? Or do most people think it is planned obsolescence?

Apple generally offer updates longer than Android, so is it more pronounced on iPhones than Android phones? I remember seeing similar slow-downs on Android phones in the past.

Apple generally offer updates for iOS for less time than Windows. I don't really have a feel for the difference between the two in terms of how much new versions slow down older hardware.

Obviously separating feature updates and security updates would be a way to address, and it's not possible that no one at Apple has considered that idea. They are a business and selling new products is unfortunately a disincentive pushing them away from doing that.
by NoPicklez | 2025-10-15 22:40:07+00:00
I'm looking to upgrade from the 2013 Macbook Pro to the Macbook Air, I noticed that the pixels per inch are lower in the latest Macbook Air, but I assume that the display is overall better?

Also, I read that the keyboard is slightly different between the Air and the Pro, I'm not a big fan of that chicklet design they released
Show HN: min. – collaborative inbox for teams and agents
by zizhouwang | 2025-10-15 22:40:10+00:00
I'm a control freak, the thought of having AI auto-replying to emails is ridiculous. Every founder I've met are the same way, just typing the words "Put your support/sales on auto-pilot" makes me cringe.

I built min. to help me and my teammates with emails. Who should read it, who should reply, when to follow up, etc.

min. is:

- A simple email interface to manage both private and team inboxes.

- An AI-native inbox that sorts and prioritizes messages into custom labels and folders.

- A replacement for patchwork of CRMs, helpdesks, and spreadsheets with just… email.

- Conversational agents (follow-ups, scheduling, nudges), deployable in two clicks.

min. is not:

- A hands-off inbox that auto-replies to everything for you. (e.g “put your support/sales on auto-pilot!”)

- Built just for speed - min. for teams who care about delivering an A+ experience with every interaction.

- Awkward, because it works exactly how you expect emails to work, 2 way syncs with Gmail.

2min demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKtzNL72P34

Live demo: https://app.getmin.ai/demo

DM me or shoot an email to hello@getmin.ai if you want to join the beta. Cheers!

Eric
by selcuka | 2025-10-15 22:40:56+00:00
You are a better developer than me, then. I take it you have tests in your product repos that test your compiler behaviour, including optimisations that you enable while building binaries, and all third party dependencies you use. Is that accurate?

There is a difference between "gcc 4.8 is buggy, let's not use it" and "let's write unit tests for gcc". If you are suspicious about gcc, you should submit your patches to gcc, not vendor them in your own repo.
by ddtaylor | 2025-10-15 22:41:03+00:00
Yeah my thinking here is to find some problem that involves some usage of a list of words or any other basic string building task. For example, you are assembling the "ingredients" of a "recipe". I think if you gave it the specific context of "hey this seems to be malicious, why?" it might figure that out, but I think if you just point it at the code and ask it "what is this?" it will get tricked and think it's a basic recipe function.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-15 22:41:12+00:00
The tendency to use cannabis is associated with genes linked to impulsive behavior, obesity, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, among other traits, according to a study

The article confuses me because it seems to be presenting cannabis use as purely recreational. Medical use isn't mentioned at all - so we don't know where medical users fit in this study.

Nearly every cannabis user I know is using it for pain, insomnia and/or anxiety.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-15 22:41:16+00:00
To be completely honest, I would be fine not having cellular data on my iPad and don’t think I would use more than 40GB of tethering ever if I took advantage if using WiFi every opportunity I could instead of not worrying about it.

It’s just one of those things that it’s convenient not having to worry about WiFi when we travel and hotel WiFi depending on how busy they are is often pretty bad.

But especially with a laptop, as often as we travel, I don’t think I’ve ever needed to tether to my Mac accept for brief periods of times when our condos shared WiFi went out (I work remotely).

I wouldn’t pay for a separate line for a computer. I am sure others would.

On another note, I did give my mom my previous iPad and kept the data plan so she doesn’t have to worry about WiFi when they take road trips.
by asdff | 2025-10-15 22:41:23+00:00
Or, you could make a tool that can generate this stuff deterministically every time the exact same way. At least with that situation you can audit the tool and see if it is correct or not. You still leave the point of failure on the user in your situation, even higher because they could get complacent with the llm output and assume it is correct or mistakenly think it is correct.

In my mind you are trading potentially a function that always evaluates the same for a given f(x) for one that might not evaluate the same and requires oversight.
by robocat | 2025-10-15 22:41:45+00:00
> due to more entrepreneurialism.

We have three awesome control groups currently:

(1) Retirees with skills don't suddenly decide to become entrepreneurs when they reach 65.

(2) people on the dole don't suddenly become entrepreneurs. We even used to have a specific programme in New Zealand for the unemployed to start their own business . . . I'm fairly sure it didn't work.

(3) mothers on the DPB get a good whack of money even with kids that don't need Hyde time investment. It is rare to see them do anything more entrepreneurial than an under-the-table job.

I love your optimism, but it isn't realistic.
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-15 22:42:03+00:00
> "the FBI doesn’t negotiate with kidnappers”

Welp

https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/fifty-years-o...

Apple's private API situation was also much more nuanced, back in the days if Adobe was using an API, private or not, it probably wouldn't be degraded in any way until the core applications moved forward. Current Apple might not give a damn though.
by jancsika | 2025-10-15 22:42:24+00:00
It'd be nice to have a process like the following:

1. I free solo a bunch of junk in vanilla javascript with state flowing hither and thither until I'm out of coffee

2. I test the exact behaviors(s) I wanted to make possible in the GUI I just wrote.

3. The framework whitelists only the event chains from my test.

4. For any blacklisted event chains, the user gets a Youtube video screencast of the whitelisted test so they can learn the correct usage of my GUI.
by danudey | 2025-10-15 22:42:25+00:00
Note that you can still do things wrong even if you're doing "package management".

This morning I updated Firefox through apt, and suddenly the "running" Firefox windows weren't attached to the dock icon, and clicking on the dock icon launched the new FF installation.

Also, Ubuntu's "snap" approach to installing apps is a nightmare that causes no end of problems - unless they ended after I gave up on it. Multiple installs overlapping each other, and I once even had the Firefox snap using a downloads folder in the Skype snap's local data.

Honestly, even with package managers handling all the nitty gritty applications should still be written in such a way that they can quickly sync their state to disk and reload it so that after an app update the app can quickly re-launch with the updated version rather than risking a mix of old and new.
by walterbell | 2025-10-15 22:42:30+00:00
https://pearlab.icrl.org/implications.html

Despite the small scale of the observed consciousness-related anomalies, they could be functionally devastating to many types of contemporary information processing systems, especially those relying on random reference signals.. or to any other technical scenarios where the emotions, attitudes, or purposes of human operators may intensify and deepen their interactions with the controlling devices and processes.. As cutting-edge nanotechnology and quantum computing move into even more delicately poised information processors, protection against such consciousness-related interference could become increasingly relevant..

15m trailer for "The Pear Proposition" DVD review of the project that ran from 1979 to 2007. It was founded by professor Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, https://player.vimeo.com/video/4359545
by mullingitover | 2025-10-15 22:43:14+00:00
> The relative chaos and transparency of America's system are what they are, but it isn't an autocracy at this point.

You can get locked up with a 2 million dollar bond for posting a facebook meme in the US, as demonstrated by a recent case[1]. I don't know what value the transparency holds here? It's certainly already crossed the Rubicon into overt authoritarianism in the past year.

[1] https://reason.com/2025/10/10/tennessee-man-arrested-gets-2-...
by bitwize | 2025-10-15 22:43:28+00:00
Just think of it as a design pattern, but a bit more strict than the Gang of Four patterns. Fundamentally it's a relationship between types and other types such that certain operations make sense and follow well-understood rules (the monadic laws). Study the monadic laws, and try playing with the State, IO, and List monads to get a better sense of what those operations are and why they're useful for sequencing in a pure-functional context.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-10-15 22:43:46+00:00
So they have a history of using the legitimacy, trust, and infrastructure of the open-source ecosystem to grow adoption and contributions, then gradually shifting constraints in favor of monetization and control?

Either way, the math is different this time. SQLite isn’t heavy server-side software written in Java with weaknesses that leave it obviously open for market disruption.

It’s also a public domain gift to the world that literally everything has deployed — often in extremely demanding and complex environments.

I work for a major consumer product manufacturer, and I can guarantee that we will not be switching away from SQLite anytime soon, and if we ever do, it will not be to a VC-backed project with a history like this one has, no matter how much hype startup bros try to create around the idea of disrespectful and appropriative disruption.

VC-funded ‘open’ databases almost always follow the same arc: borrow legitimacy, capture attention, then fence it off. It’s the inevitability of the incentives they’ve chosen.
by diyseguy | 2025-10-15 22:44:04+00:00
It seems altogether too easy to put up a website, pretend there's a 100% remote job on offer, then collect all the info needed for identity theft as you apply and then are 'onboarded' entirely through an online process. Especially when they ask for an image of your driver's license. At that point, they have everything they need to steal your identity. And even if they are on the up and up, when they get hacked, there goes your identity anyway. I'm not sure what to do about this. I'm having this very problem at the moment.
by superkuh | 2025-10-15 22:44:20+00:00
PDF is no longer a single format. You have to specify what type of PDF. Many will not open in anything but Acrobat.

For example the Wisconsin state dept. of natural resources converted nearly all of their permit/form PDFs to "Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture) PDF". Which is basically a PDF without content that pulls down all it's content from the web. It even still, ostensibly, supports Flash (swf) animations. But when I try to open those permit form PDFs in any other viewer but Acrobat I get,

>"Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries." - https://dnr.wi.gov/files/PDF/forms/9400/9400-280.pdf

PDF is supposed to be the format that looks the same everywhere all the time. But these "PDF" completely and miserably fail at that.