MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Legend2440 | 2025-10-23 20:20:56+00:00
>I claim that when o1 multiplies large numbers, it generates Python code rather than calculating internally. I don't have full transparency into o1's internals. Is this accurate?

Both reasoning and non-reasoning models may choose to use the Python interpreter to solve math problems. This isn't hidden from the user; it will show the interpreter ("Analyzing...") and you can click on it to see the code it ran.

It can also solve math problems by working through them step-by-step. In this case it will do long multiplication using the pencil-and-paper method, and it will show its work.
by mxkopy | 2025-10-23 20:21:03+00:00
Not affiliated with anyone, but I think the likes of OptNet (differentiable constraint optimization) are soon going to play a role in developing AI with precise deductive reasoning.

More broadly I think what we’re looking for at the end of the day, AGI, is going come about from a diaspora of methods capturing the diverse aspects of what we recognize as intelligence. ‘Precise deductive reasoning’ is one capability out of many. Attention isn’t all you need, neither is compression, convex programming, what have you. The perceived “smoothness” or “unity” of our intelligence is an illusion like virtual memory hiding cache, and building it is going to look a lot more like stitching these capabilities together than deriving some deep and elegant equation.
by TrackerFF | 2025-10-23 20:21:05+00:00
Some problems: Trump has already argued that if what he does falls under official acts, it's essentially absolute immunity. Trump also tried to argue that everything he did while during his presidency, was official acts. The supreme court agreed that if something is and official act, it is protected by absolute immunity.

So my guess is that whatever Trump is doing now, he'll later argue was done as a president.

Second, should be convicted of anything, the best shot is if it's a state law violation. I'm going to bet everything I own that Trump will either pardon himself, all his cronies, and/or when the time comes, step down and have Vance pardon him. So with that all federal crimes become pardoned.

The supreme court has been very frank about this: The only, and I do mean the only mechanism is a successful impeachment. And even if Trump by some miracle is successfully impeached, we have no way of knowing how that will play out. The current supreme court majority are seemingly true believers of the unitary executive theory, so I'm guessing that with time - we'll just see Trump get more and more unchecked power. And since it's going to be done via the shadow docket, it'll likely be valid for Trump only.

I think for all intents and purposes - and I don't mean to sound defeatist when I'm saying this - people should just accept the fact that Trump will be untouchable for the rest of his life.
by retinaros | 2025-10-23 20:21:17+00:00
the facist rant is insanity. money isnt free and DEI is old news. even blackrock understood he couldnt milk it. If you want to solve women in tech you need to make more women study tech and not favor them for the jobs they don’t deserve if they are not fit for it. its statistics 101. they are overrepresented in tech jobs vs the number of women graduating in tech.
by phoronixrly | 2025-10-23 20:22:02+00:00
> Don't shift your goal as you like.

I was just confirming the point you made -- the definition of ethical is not absolute, and there are people that consider questionable things ethical.

> Obsidian here is a prime example of one which is not harmful and could be even considered as beneficial, despite being closed source

All proprietary software is unethical. It's as simple as that. No matter whether it's free or paid, no matter whether it's useful or harmful. If you have a right to use it but are deprived of the right to alter it, it is not ethical.
by nomel | 2025-10-23 20:22:41+00:00
There's a whole community (with world tournaments [1]) around finding places from pictures: geoguessers. The top people are absolutely incredibly [2]. There are also AI trained for this purpose. Although, the perspective they use is usually from street level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3sVtwexp0o

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@georainbolt
by pessimizer | 2025-10-23 20:22:48+00:00
I just think that LLM calls are the new transistor. Transistors don't do much, but you build computers out of them. LLMs do a lot more than transistors.

LLMs are very good at imitating moderate-length patterns. It can usually keep an apparently sensible conversation going with itself for at least a couple thousand words before it goes completely off the rails, although you never know exactly when it will go off the rails; it's very unlikely to be after the first sentence, far more likely to be after the twenty-first, and will never get past the 50th. If you inject novel input in periodically (such as reminding and clarifying prompts), you can keep the plate spinning longer.

So some tricks work right now to extend the amount of time the thing can go before falling into the inevitable entropy that comes from talking to itself too long, and I don't think that we should assume that there won't ever be a way to keep the plate spinning forever. We may be able to do it practically (making it very unusual for them to fall apart), or somebody may come up with a way to make them provably resilient.

I don't know if the current market leaders have any insight into how to do this, however. But I'm also sure that an LLM reaching for a calculator and injecting the correct answer into the context keeps that context useful for longer than if it hadn't.
by MrRadar | 2025-10-23 20:22:53+00:00
Every generation of the production Nissan Leaf has used lithium batteries. AFAIK no modern (~post-2000) mass-produced (>10k units sold) EV has ever used NiMH or lead-acid batteries.

Edit: Checking Wikipedia to verify my information, I found out that Nissan actually sold a lithium-battery EV in 1997 to comply with the same 90s CARB zero-emissions vehicle mandate that gave us the GM EV-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-23 20:23:28+00:00
Nope, you need something more systemic than that. Every incumbent politician has voted for shitty laws because if you don't vote for the omnibus full of shitty laws when your party is in the majority and they need your vote then you become a pariah and then your constituents vote you out because pariahs can't accomplish any of the other things they want. And fresh faces wouldn't inherently change the incentives there.

You need something like, ban omnibus bills with a single subject matter rule. Replace first-past-the-post with score voting to dissolve the two-party system. Add new checks and balances so that someone with a better structural incentive to reject bad laws is in a position to veto them, like the US Senate used to be before the 17th amendment.

Or in the EU the structural problems will be different and you may need something different, but you still need something or the status quo tomorrow will be what it was yesterday.
by Balinares | 2025-10-23 20:23:43+00:00
Interesting, isn't it? There you are, and yet none of those dozens are garnering anywhere near the same amount of attention and enthusiasm as jj. And yet, it's genuinely mostly just that -- a novel CLI on top of the same storage backend as git. Sometimes it doesn't take that much to bring about a paradigm shift, I suppose. Just a few new ideas with a great implementation, and there you are -- they've just got to be the right new ideas. That being the hard part.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-23 20:23:43+00:00
The funny thing is the annoying popups on Windows look like advertising copy from the web post Microsoft getting grid and flexbox into HTML to support HTML-based applications. They at least try to be visually enticing.

Annoying popups on MacOS look like the 1999 remake of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac, I guess with some concessions to liquid glass.

Funny that a lot of people seem to have different Liquid Glass experiences, are we being feature flagged? I don't see the massive disruption to icons that the author seems but it does seem to me that certain icons have been drained of all their contrast and just look bleh now, particularly the settings icon on my iPhone. I don't see a bold design based on transparency, I just see the edges of things look like they've been anti-antialiased now. It's like somebody just did some random vandalization of the UI without any rhyme or reason. It's not catastrophic but it's no improvement.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-23 20:23:58+00:00
> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe

They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.

Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.
by sam0x17 | 2025-10-23 20:24:10+00:00
If you subscribe to extended mind theory and Merleau Ponty's brand of phenomenology, tools are just an extension of your cognitive process, and "shelling out" in this way is really to be expected of high intelligence, if not consciousness. Some would say it might even be a prerequisite for consciousness, that you need to be a being-in-the-world etc etc

Not to say that GPT is conscious, in its current form I think it certainly isn't, but rather I would say reasoning is a positive development, not an embarrassing one

I can't compute 297298*248 immediately in my head, and if I were to try it I'd have to hobble through a multiplicaion algorithm, in my head... it's quite simlar to what they're doing here, it's just they can wire it right into a real calculator instead of slowly running a shitty algo on wetware
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-23 20:24:27+00:00
No.

Right from the beginning it was a handout to groups who built the scanning equipment, who were basically personal friends with people in the admin. We paid absurd prices for niche equipment, a lot of which was never even deployed and just sat in storage.

Several of the hijackers were literally given extended searches by security that day.

A reminder that what actually stopped hijackings (like, nearly entirely) was locking the cabin door, which was always doable, and has not ever been breached. Not only did this stop terrorist hijackings, it stopped more casual hijackings that used to be normal, it could also stop "inside man" style hijackings like that one with a disgruntled FedEx pilot, it was nearly free to implement, always available, harms no one's rights, doesn't turn airport security into a juicy bombing target, doesn't slow down an important part of the economy, doesn't invent a massive bureaucracy and LEO in the arms of a new american agency that has the goal of suppressing domestic problems and has never done anything useful. Keep in mind, shutting the cockpit door is literally how the terrorists themselves protected themselves from being stopped and is the reason Flight 93 couldn't be recovered.

TSA is utterly ineffective. They have never stopped an attack, regularly fail their internal audits, the jobs suck, and they pay poorly and provide minimal training.
by mike2872 | 2025-10-23 20:24:29+00:00
Great questions.

Neighbor detection: I haven't had issues with neighbor movement affecting detection in my testing. The devices form a mesh within your defined zone, so they're primarily sensing disruptions between your own nodes. If you do experience false positives, there's a sensitivity adjustment in the dashboard.

Privacy/spying: In TOMMY, I've explicitly disabled the ability to use devices outside your own network - it only works with ESP32s you've flashed and added to your system. Someone would need physical access to place their own devices in your space.

That said, Wi-Fi sensing as a broader technology could theoretically be used for surveillance if someone controlled devices on both sides of your walls. It's similar to other wireless technologies in that regard. The key is controlling your own hardware.
by cthalupa | 2025-10-23 20:24:31+00:00
I'm not sure you understand the point. It isn't that CZ himself was specifically putting forth the effort to launder money. It isn't that he was specifically doing things to try and make it easier. The point is that he had a legal duty to actively attempt to prevent money laundering. Binance was legally required to do this to operate in the US, and did not. The court case produced messages from the Chief Compliance Officer pointing out a myriad of ways in which they were not complying with various laws of this nature and they were ignored.

The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
by bjourne | 2025-10-23 20:25:27+00:00
> Monarch lets you program distributed systems the way you’d program a single machine, hiding the complexity of distributed computing:

There are some infamous tech based on the "hiding" paradigm. PHP comes to mind. By hiding how the http request/response cycle actually works it fostered a generation of web developers who didn't know what a session cookie was, resulting in login systems that leaked like a sieve. Distributed computing is complicated. There are many parameters you need to tweak and many design decisions you need to take to make distributed model training run smoothly. I think explicit and transparent architectures are way better. Distributed model training shouldn't "feel" like running on a single device because it isn't.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-10-23 20:25:45+00:00
In addition to my sibling comment: The cost of the panels is a rather small fraction of the total cost of a typical installation. Most of that cost ist labor, some regulatory requirements and the inverter. Whether you pay a factor of 2 for the panels or not typically doesn't matter. In other words: Reusing used panels will only ever be able to safe you a minuscule amount.
by PastWipe | 2025-10-23 20:25:54+00:00
PastWipe — Founding Sales Partner (US, Remote) — Cybersecurity/Data Privacy — Commission + Milestone Equity We neutralize stolen/exfiltrated data so it can’t be reused (RepSec™). Sell to MSSPs/VARs, IR firms, mid-market/enterprise, public sector pilots. Profile: 3–7 yrs B2B tech sales (security/privacy), technical enough for SE-level convos, commission-first. Comp: 20–30% on yr-1 revenue collected + SPIFFs + 0.5–2.0% milestone equity. Email partners@pastwipe.com with “HN – Sales Partner” + 3 relevant wins.
by crispyambulance | 2025-10-23 20:26:07+00:00
> ...it’s a tool for him and his cronies to make dodgy money?

It's a vehicle to sell "access". The greed is only half of it.

The worst part is that they're selling access to foreign interests who pay them off. These people can't exactly show up with bags of gold to bribe King Sh*t Gibbon (yet), crypto is the next best thing.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-23 20:26:52+00:00
With this iOS 26 update, they set dynamite to my bridge.

I’m switching to android because why not? I mean, I have to install Google maps anyway because Apple Maps is horrible. But the UI on 26 is way worse than a pixel experience in my opinion. Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user.

I was working on Apple since 1996 and started off as a computer support person. Now it pains me to help people with their computers because everything is siloed and proprietary and just makes no sense.

And I mean, I’m also annoyed that their voice to text is just horrible. I can’t even tell you how many mistakes I’ve had to correct in this comment alone.
by m463 | 2025-10-23 20:27:04+00:00
I think apple had a trajectory, and the best time was at the end of the steve jobs era. After he left, they have plummeted.

I think they were in their own little world, and when they got past that with unix-based OSX and moved from powerpc to intel, they entered the best time.

The PC-based macs were very interoperable and could dual-boot windows. They had PCIe and could work with PC graphics cards, they used usb bt and more. Macs intereoperated and cooperated with the rest of the computing world. The OS worked well enough that other unix programs with a little tweaking could be compiled and run on macs. Engineers, tech types and scientists would buy and use mac laptops.

But around the time steve jobs passed away they've lost a lot of that. They grabbed control of the ecosystem and didn't interoperate anymore. The arm chips are impressive but apple is not interoperating any more. They have pcie slots in the mac pro, but they aren't good for much except maybe nvme storage. without strong leadership at the top, they are more of a faceless turn-the-crank iterator.

(not that I like what microsoft has morphed into either)
by pottering | 2025-10-23 20:27:16+00:00
AU support grew because Logic Pro only loads AU, Logic userbase is a attractive enough market for plugin devs.

On the other hand, there is not a single DAW that only loads CLAP.

That's the same problem Steinberg faced with VST3 years ago, every host/DAW/plugin supported VST2 (including Cubase), there was no reason for devs to switch to VST3.

Steinberg forced the issue killing the VST2 licenses, any new plugin and host had only access to the VST3 license, even then devs resisted, only recently Steinberg announced future Cubase/Nuendo versions won't support VST2 anymore (plugin devs may hate Steinberg, but they won't simply leave Cubase/Nuendo users without support, they are not to blame for Steinberg's stupidity).

CLAP can't force the issue the same way Steinberg did with VST3, there is no CLAP-only DAW either.
by janalsncm | 2025-10-23 20:27:39+00:00
In any system, there are false positives and false negatives. In some situations (like a high recall disease detection) false negatives are much worse than false positives, because the cost of a false positive is a more rigorous screening.

But in this case both are bad. If it was a false negative students might need therapy for a more tragic reason.

Aside from improving the quality of the detection model, we should try to reduce the “cost” of both failure modes as much as possible. Putting a human in the loop or having secondary checks are ways to do that.
by crowcroft | 2025-10-23 20:27:52+00:00
I find this less true where I live (New Zealand) where there are a lot of small takeaway shops that are often competitive on price.

In general though the ease at which the market can recall a brand has a direct connection to market share, loyalty and in turn pricing power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy_(marketing)
by linguae | 2025-10-23 20:27:53+00:00
Yes! I wholeheartedly agree!

I teach C++ programming classes as part of my job as a professor. I have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and I make heavy use of Terminal.app. One of the things that annoy me is always having to click on a dialog box whenever I recompile my code and use lldb for debugging. Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?

It wasn't always like this on the Mac. I had a Core Duo MacBook that ran Tiger (later Leopard and Snow Leopard) that I completed my undergraduate computer science assignments on, including a Unix systems programming course where I wrote a small multi-threaded web server in C. Mac OS X used to respect the user and get out of the way. It was Windows that bothered me with nagging.

Sadly, over the years the Mac has become more annoying. Notarization, notifications to upgrade, the annoying dialog whenever I run a program under lldb....
by Pannoniae | 2025-10-23 20:28:20+00:00
Sometimes, people do need a metaphorical kick in the butt though. Of course, that doesn't mean behaving like a jerk, and certainly not on a regular basis, but if you value politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems, the culture in your environment will quickly deteroriate towards no one taking responsibility for anything. Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable?

In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap, not much usually gets done. This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop.

And even if you don't agree with what I'm saying here, "avoid criticising people" quickly turns into "avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket and the product would be greatly improved.
by kazinator | 2025-10-23 20:28:35+00:00
Simply opening a case saying that this is our website not impersonating anyone else is unlikely to get anything resolved.

Just because it's your website, and you're not a bad agent doesn't prove that no part of the site is under the control of a bad agent, and that your site isn't accidentally hosting something malicious somewhere, or have some UI that is exploitable for cross-site scripting or whatever.
by trhway | 2025-10-23 20:28:56+00:00
I feel there is some perversion happened - the American culture in particular has been strong on a hero cutting through and going across the laws and rules toward his goals (and the recent years super-hero craze is an epitome of it). And i feel that in some perverse way Trump got tuned into such a hero storyline and naturally abusing it to no end for his own gain.
by westurner | 2025-10-23 20:28:57+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Antislop: A Comprehensive Framework for Identifying and Eliminating Repetitive Patterns in Language Models" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 :

> Abstract: [...] Our approach combines three innovations: (1) The Antislop Sampler, which uses backtracking to suppress unwanted strings at inference time without destroying vocabulary; (2) An automated pipeline that profiles model-specific slop against human baselines and generates training data; (3) Final Token Preference Optimization (FTPO), a novel fine-tuning method that operates on individual tokens, surgically adjusting logits wherever a banned pattern has appeared in an inference trace.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546037#45585680 , an additional potential method:

>> Could build a simple heuristic: if similar memory content gets created/updated N times within short timeframe, flag it as potential loop
by suprnurd | 2025-10-23 20:29:50+00:00
What makes me feel frustrated is how even when your card expires, all merchants can still keep charging your card even though you didn't provide the new expiration date/info.

It's really great for merchants to keep charging I guess, and I'll admit it's annoying to have to put your card in every place when it expires, but it seemed to protect everyone against subscriptions building up indefinitely forever... am I wrong?
by yongjik | 2025-10-23 20:29:59+00:00
It's also a rhetorical trick. The moment you admit "Yes, Bill Clinton should go to jail if he's on the list," they will start to pester you, "You admitted Clinton should also go to jail, so why are you only protesting Trump? You hypocrite!"

I think it's best not to engage. These people aren't here for logical arguments, and they won't be persuaded by logic.