MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-15 18:17:08+00:00
I asked you to point out her achievements and you just glazed her further on the basis that "you can't possibly fail upwards to a high level leadership position" when a lot of people in recently history have, and in her position it's not even that hard to do when business interests use their money and influence to guarantee that their preferred puppet sorry I meant candidate gets there, especially that the process for the position she's in is appointed by committee selection and not by direct election by the people.

And maybe some of the media portray her as incompetent because it's their job to investigate politics and they notice more of her fuckups than you do, especially given your lack of positive examples for her.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-15 18:17:14+00:00
Good. I actually tried walking back the scare quotes in my posts and actively tried defending slop (which you proceeded to attack me for, for some reason), but you are right. I really am judgemental, condescending and elitist, I just wasn't honest with myself. I despise slop, reading for the sake of reading is worthless and the idea of reading as torture inflicted upon oneself seems very appealing.
by myrmidon | 2025-10-15 18:17:16+00:00
How has the feasibility of AI anything to do with science fiction?

Unless you believe in some kind of magic (soul/divine spark/etc.), it seems completely inevitable to conclude that human cognition can be replicated by a machine, at the extreme end simply by simulating the whole thing.

I would argue that "language" was a defining characteristic of human intelligence (as opposed to "lesser animals") long before we even conceived of AI, and hitting language processing/understanding benchmarks that far exceed animal capabilities is a very strong indicator by itself.
by al_borland | 2025-10-15 18:17:19+00:00
Every time I’ve gotten rid of an old laptop the charger goes with it. They are a package deal in my book.

I actually have very few USB-C chargers. With everyone leaving them out of the box, I don’t happen to have a bunch of them by chance. They took them out of the box before giving time for people to acquire them organically. I never bought a single lightning cable, but almost all my USB-C cables had to be purchased. This is not great, considering how confusing the USB-C spec is.

Other than the one that came with my M1 MBP (which I will lose when I sell it), I have had to purchase every charger I have.

Not being able to charge a $1,500+ laptop without buying a separate accessory is crazy to me. I’ve also seen many reports over the years comparing Apple chargers to cheap 3rd party ones where there are significant quality differences, to the point of some of the 3rd party ones being dangerous or damaging. I don’t know why Apple would want to open the door to more of that.

I assume a lot of people will use a phone charger, then call support or leave bad reviews, because the laptop is losing battery while plugged in. Most people don’t know what kind of charger they need for their laptop. My sister just ordered a MacBook Air a couple weeks ago and called me to help order, and one of the questions was about the charger, because there were options for different chargers, which confused her and had her questioning if one even came with it or if she had to pick one of the options. This is a bad user experience. She’s not a totally clueless user either. She’s not a big techie, but in offices she used to work with, she was the most knowledgeable and was who they called when the server had issues. She also opened up and did pretty major surgery on her old MacBook Air after watching a couple YouTube videos. So I’d say at least 50% of people know less than her on this stuff.

Apple positions themselves as the premium product in the market and easy to use for the average user. Not including the basics to charge the internal battery is not premium or easy. I can see it leading to reputational damage.
by brap | 2025-10-15 18:17:33+00:00
I don’t know if this is a good rule of thumb, I think it really depends on what you use the dependencies for, how often you need them, etc.

Consider for example a single DB dependency. Should the server be close to the DB or the client? It depends. How often does the client need the server? How often does the server need the DB? Which usecases are expected to be fast and which can be sacrificed as slow? What can be cached in the server? What can be cached in the client? etc etc.

And then of course you can split and do some things on the server and some in the edge…
by myth_drannon | 2025-10-15 18:17:56+00:00
What did you expect. 2000 mass murderers and rapists were released from Israeli prisons back to Gaza. Do you think they are going to finish their physics Phd? Hamas promised to kill all men of the opposing clan and "blow up" their women's vaginas. Reminds me of USSR, when Stalin died in 1953. They released from Gulags not the political prisoners but all the criminals, murderers, thieves... What followed that was an unprecedented wave of crime. There is a good movie about it, it's called "The cold summer of 1953" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Summer_of_1953
by ddtaylor | 2025-10-15 18:18:19+00:00
What I have noticed is that when I read something I often deeply connected enough to the material that at some point I disengage and go DO SOMETHING with that information. If I'm reading something about a guy coding something and I get an idea I am going to play around.

Most of the YouTube and short-form content doesn't inspire anything like that. The "job" is to sit and watch the content for 30 seconds and repeat. Almost every form of "engagement" is to manipulate the audience into "doing the algorithm".

I think they have differences that are significant.
by umanwizard | 2025-10-15 18:18:24+00:00
There are other nice things about Rust over OCaml that are mainly just due to its popularity. There are libraries for everything, the ecosystem is polished, you can find answers to any question easily, etc. I don't think the same can be said for OCaml, or at least not to the same extent. It's still a fairly niche language compared to Rust.
by marssaxman | 2025-10-15 18:19:18+00:00
It doesn't matter how useful the tools are if the companies providing them don't make enough money to justify their investment. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are being spent building datacenters which produce only tens of billions of dollars in revenue, and those datacenters are depreciating assets. This cannot continue indefinitely. Is it reasonable to expect the AI industry to be produce revenue at the rate of a trillion dollars a year or so, within the next five years, as it will have to do to avoid a crash? I very much doubt it.
by mrandish | 2025-10-15 18:19:24+00:00
Good reply. While #2 and #4 are certainly possible, I find it hard to believe this guy gets this far for this long without being sufficiently paranoid and street smart.

I think the most likely is a combo variant of #5 and #6. Maybe the USG (or a cooperating government) got leverage on one of his lieutenants - like lieutenant's adult kid goes to NYC to party for a weekend with friends without telling daddy and despite it being against dad's rules. USG quietly holds the kid under some immigration pretext (much easier these days) and forces the lieutenant to put a USB thumb drive in his boss's 'special' PC.

Alternatively, a probable weak point with most overtly criminal kingpins who accumulate literal billions is they really can't trust anyone around them to not steal it. So the guy probably has to keep the crypto keys to his 'big wad' physically with him on a mobile device or memory stick, maybe protected only by a password short enough he can remember it. In that scenario, the USG just does a 'sneak and peek' and images the device, maybe while the guy is transiting a third country. Then it's just a matter of either using one of the NSA's tier 1 vulns on the mobile device image or deploying the NSA's super-computer farm to crack the 'human-memorable' password. If so, it would have been much smarter for the guy to control access to the 'big wad' with split keys separated on multiple devices - and only keep one required part around his neck. Then neither the 'sneak and peak' nor the 'crowbar to the balls' methods would work.

In any of those scenarios, the very interesting part is it shows the Trump admin and Trump's new FBI head Kash Patel are willing to cross some new lines which haven't been publicly crossed before - like using secret intelligence assets for purely criminal enforcement. Note: I think the USG has done this before but it's been pretty rare and always been in ways that were unseen or otherwise deniable, because the CIA/NSA have been extremely resistant to using their best toys for fear of losing their best toys. I suspect the Trump admin has crushed this resistance. A potentially relevant fact is Kash Patel was previously on the National Security Council during Trump's first term, so he'd be familiar with intel assets. Obviously, in the near-term that's bad news for a handful of major international criminals and in the long-term it may be bad for US intelligence capabilities (as the reasons for CIA/NSA resistance weren't baseless).
by prewett | 2025-10-15 18:19:26+00:00
Having lived through those days... well, it was good for the time, mostly. MacOS was definitely better than Windows 3.11, and a lot more whimsical, both the OS and Mac software in general, which I miss. The featureset, though, was limited. Managing extensions was clunky, and until MacOS 10, applications had a fixed amount of RAM they could use, which could be set by the user, but which was allocated at program start. It was also shared memory, like Windows 3.11 and to some extent Windows 95/98, so one program could, and routinely did, take down the whole OS. With Windows NT (not much adopted by consumers, to be fair), this did not happen. Windows NT and 2000 were definitely better than MacOS, arguably even UI-wise.

I do miss window shading from MacOS 8 or 9, though. I think a whimsical skin for MacOS would be nice, too. The system error bomb icon was classic, the sad-Mac boot-failure icon was at least consolation. Now everything is cold and professional, but at least it stays out of my way and looks decent.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-15 18:19:37+00:00
People keep insisting this but

1) It's been doable for years and yet AR/VR doesn't take off

2) It will only ever be a hyper niche use case of an already hyper niche market. People do not want a giant screen glued to their face.

Have you actually tried "working" in VR? It is awful and pointless and zero percent of my work is limited by the size of my screen FFS. Are you one of those people that keep 100 terminal windows open with random TOPS and log watchers but never actually uses them? Those people always seem to have lots of monitors. They don't actually seem more productive though.

I even downgraded from two external monitors to one because all the extra monitor was doing was making me hurt my neck from looking back and forth.

A 30 inch monitor with 1440p resolution can do everything you want from django and is like $200
by astrange | 2025-10-15 18:19:43+00:00
> As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely.

It's a bad idea to add an option entirely for the purpose of making the product not work anymore.

https://limi.net/checkboxes

> Window management sucks

I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.

> there's no device manager! Not even cli tools!

`ioreg -l` or `system_profiler`. Why does this matter?

> There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ac...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/XCUIAutomation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript

https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-15 18:19:46+00:00
This coming on the heels of American erotica writers getting systematically debanked by Visa/MC and friends really sucks. Insane that one can sell a machine trained on copyrighted erotica (without licensing it) to produce reams of machine erotica but one can’t sell actual erotica written by actual human beings.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-15 18:19:49+00:00
I don't know what else I can write without repeating myself.

I already wrote that even under the assumption that intelligence is a purely biological phenomenon, it does not follow that computation can produce intelligence.

This isn't a matter of probabilities. We know what computation is, because we defined it as such and such. We know at least some essential features of intelligence (chiefly, intentionality). It is not rocket science to see that computation, thus defined, does not include the concepts of semantics and intentionality. By definition, it excludes them. Attempts to locate the latter in the former reminds me of Feynman's anecdote about the obtuse painter who claimed he could produce yellow from red and white paint alone (later adding a bit of yellow paint to "sharpen it up a bit").
by zone411 | 2025-10-15 18:19:49+00:00
I've benchmarked it on the Extended NYT Connections (https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections/). It scores 20.0 compared to 10.0 for Haiku 3.5, 19.2 for Sonnet 3.7, 26.6 for Sonnet 4.0, and 46.1 for Sonnet 4.5.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-10-15 18:20:34+00:00
Its not that spacex did anything novel really. People act like the shuttle died when it has been continually developed to this day. The shuttle always had a dual use as a commercial and military technology. The commercial activity was not economically viable. The military activity was and remains an important capability. That is why the shuttle still flies. Only it is called the x37b and does not require the complexity of sending humans into space.
by janalsncm | 2025-10-15 18:20:46+00:00
One pretty concrete way this could manifest is in replacing the components of a multinational corporation with algorithms, one by one. Likely there will be people involved at various levels (sales might still be staffed with charismatic folks), but the driver will be an algorithm.

And the driver of this corporation is survival of the fittest under the constraints of profit maximization, the algorithm we have designed and enforced. That's how you get paperclip maximizers.

What gives this corporate cyborg life is not a technical achievement, but the law. At a technical you can absolutely shut off a cybo-corp, but that’s equivalent to saying you can technically shut down Microsoft. It will not happen.
by leakycap | 2025-10-15 18:20:50+00:00
What a nice way to talk to another person who... didn't attack you?

A typical passenger car driving 12,000 miles puts out about 5 metric tons of C02

The person driving that passenger car likely has a 1,000 sq ft or larger home or apartment, which can vary widely but could be reasonably estimated at another 5 metric tons of C02 (Miami vs. Minnesota makes a huge difference)

So we're at 10 metric tons for someone who doesn't live in a van but still drives like a suburbanite

Care to be a little kinder next time you feel whatever compelled you to write you response to the other user? Jeesh.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-15 18:21:06+00:00
Some developers accept it as a reality, but it's only a reality if you're doing it. I think the time to figure this out is before your project gets a mess of hundreds or thousands of dependencies. Bringing in even a single dependency should be a big deal. Something you agonize over. Something you debate and study. Something you don't do unless you really, really mean it. Certainly not a casual decision. Some languages/environments make it too easy. Easy like: A single command line command and you now have a dependency. Total madness!
by boulevard | 2025-10-15 18:21:07+00:00
Your suggestion of actuator.rotateTo(Degrees(90)) is precisely the right way to engineer a robust, idempotent command for the physical world.

I used the simpler, non-idempotent rotate(90) example intentionally to illustrate the default trap. How a pure software mindset can dangerously oversimplify a physical action.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-15 18:21:23+00:00
> I have to be extremely careful and make sure nothing unwanted or addition that I am unaware of has been added.

I've started getting desperate to the point of saying 1) "never. never, ever add or remove features without consulting me first and getting approval." Then eventually, 2) appended to the previous "The last rule is the most important rule, because you keep doing it and I need you to stop doing it." Then finally 3), "THE LAST RULE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE, BECAUSE YOU KEEP DOING IT AND I NEED YOU TO STOP DOING IT."

3/4 of my AI bugs are the AI making changes to the functionality of the code when I'm not looking, or repeatedly reinserting bugs that had been previously removed. The most valuable thing I'm getting it to do is to refactor the code it already wrote into shorter well-named functions (during which it still inevitably adds and removes behavior), because it means that I can just debug by hand and stop demanding over and over again that it not ignore what I said.

But, of course, it's not ignoring me, it's not thinking at all. Trying to look for the magic words to keep it from ignoring me and lying about it is just an illusion of control. The thing that will knock it off it's dumb track is likely just a lucky random seed during the 13th attempt. Then, like a sports fan, I add the lucky underwear to my instructions.

edit: the "I'll get AI to write the AI prompt so it will be perfect" stuff is so much voodoo. LLMs have no special insight into what will make LLMs work correctly. I probably should have stopped that last sentence after the word "insight." Feed them a sample prompt that you say doesn't work, and it will explain to you exactly why it's so bad, and could never work. Feed them the same prompt and ask why it works so well, and it will tell you how perfectly crafted it is and why. Then it will offer to tell you how it could be improved.
by dwood_dev | 2025-10-15 18:22:20+00:00
8th Gen iPad is about the same on iPadOS 26 as 18 for me, which is slow. The 32GB really handicapped it for even being usable as to even upgrade it, I have to factory reset it first. I'm replacing it with a Mini.

The iPad Air 13 with a M3 is a really nice experience. Very fast device.
by boulevard | 2025-10-15 18:23:16+00:00
There is absolutely no substitute for an engineer seeing, smelling, and hearing the environment where their code will actually run. The number of times a mysterious software glitch on a remote device has been traced back to insect nests, rodent chewed cables, or just a thick layer of industrial grime is not zero. It gives a whole new meaning to flushing the cache :)
by leptons | 2025-10-15 18:23:32+00:00
I've been doing AWS Lambda since it started up over 10 years ago. It solves a lot of problems for me. I don't ever have to worry about load balancing or scaling. I don't have to maintain a server. When it isn't being used, I am not paying for it. I've been running a pretty sophisticated project on Lambda for years, and I pay about $0.00/month for it. Most of the ~$0.45/mo I pay to AWS is in S3.

Lambda code is extremely easy to test locally, if you write it that way. I just run the file locally and it does what it would do in the cloud, there is literally no difference. But of course, YMMV depending on how you approach it.

I created my own build tools for Lambda about a month after Lambda was introduced as a product. It's been working great ever since. The workflow is very simple. When I update a file locally, it simply updates the Lambda function almost instantly. I can then test the Lambda live in the cloud. If I want to run the function locally, I just run it and it behaves the same way it would in the cloud. There's no need to run the function in AWS, if you write the code so it can be run locally. It's really, really easy to do, but I guess some people haven't figured that out yet.

I've never liked containers. It's always been way more opaque than writing Lambdas that can run locally as well as in the cloud.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-15 18:23:37+00:00
I can train an asshole LLM that would parse your question and tell you to "fuck off" if it doesn't like it. With "like it" being evaluated according to some trained-for "values" - and also whatever off-target "values" it happens to get, of which there are going to be plenty.

It's not hard to make something like that. It's just not very useful.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-10-15 18:23:46+00:00
To what extreme do you take this? Would you rather be killed than scam someone? That’s a principled stance if so, but I’d personally rather you try to scam me if the alternative is you being beaten up, or worse

> I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims

That’s an interesting moral philosophy. Do you think that no one ever deserves sympathy for something they were forced to do? If a Mexican drug cartel threatens to kill someone’s entire family if they don’t perform a reprehensible act, no one should feel the tiniest bit bad for them if they don’t stand on principle?

I assume you don’t actually think that, but when you hear that people are being kidnapped, trafficked abroad, and forced to work in clandestine Burmese call centers, what do you think their options are?
by yalogin | 2025-10-15 18:23:56+00:00
All current use cases, the ones that caught the public eye, just don't have a need for locally run LLMs. Apple has to come up with functionality that can work with on-device LLMs and that is hard to do. There aren't that many use cases for it as the input vectors all map to an app or camera. Even then a full fledged LLM is always better than a quantized, low precision one running locally. Yeah, increased compute is the way, but not a silver bullet as Vision and Audio bound LLMs require large amounts of memory
by platevoltage | 2025-10-15 18:24:08+00:00
More pixels? Thats the only reason I can think of. 13/14 inch is what I tend to go for since I use my laptop as a desktop 80% of the time. 16 is really too big for my needs.

I also think the 15 inch MacBook Air filled the non-power-user-but-likes-big-screen niche.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-10-15 18:24:25+00:00
> don't add to the discussion

For sure, I'm against it as well, it's just that in this case the transcription provided in the article was so terse that it was more or less useless. LLMs are good at expanding it to make more sense as prose. If you open the link, that is what the prompt asks it do as well. I'd argue that's useful and not just padding.

> Add content

Yes, I mentioned this in my original comment "not the why" "surface level" etc
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-10-15 18:24:44+00:00
I have an M1 12.9" iPP -- I find it's almost useless for reading because it weighs so much. I ended up buying a $ 90 Android 11" tablet which has a 'good enough' screen for reading. (Obv also does email, photos, AI, etc).

If I could develop on the iPP, FOR the iPP --- build professional-quality apps on the iPP --- I would be happier. The Logitech detachable kbd is remarkably good, I have no complaints typing on it all day. iOS is a straightjacket.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-15 18:24:56+00:00
But arguably that’s part of the problem. Not so much performance but for a long time you had improvement in the price/performance ratio and now you don’t… except for Apple Silicon! The PS5 costs more, not less, than it cost at launch years ago. Studios are in deep trouble because several years ago they assumed the average gamer was going to have a better machine (be it PC or console) than they do so now everyone is complaining new games suck.

X86 is going the way of the VAX and 68k but ARM ex. Apple is always underpowered at any price. If the rest of the industry was keeping up with Apple Silicon we would not be locked into what Apple thinks is fashionable we’d be seeing a lot of innovation.