MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-20 20:25:35+00:00
> think we all know these kinds of things involve 100+ human work-years

No kidding! The customers differ, business/finance/governments, but the volume [systems/time/effort] was comparable to Amazon. The people involved in audits were consumed practically for a whole quarter, if memory serves. Not necessarily for testing itself: first, planning, sharing the plan, then dreading the plan.

Anyway, I don't miss doing this at all. Didn't mean to imply mitigation is trivial, just feasible :) 'AWS scale' is all the more reason to do business continuity/disaster recovery testing! I guess I find it being surprising, surprising.

Competitors have an easier time avoiding the creation of a Gordian Knot with their services... when they aren't making a new one every week. There are significant degrees to PaaS, a little focus [not bound to a promotion packet] goes a long way.
by leeroyjenkins11 | 2025-10-20 20:26:13+00:00
Get better camouflage so we don't get get found in the Dark Forrest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

>The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts". According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilization can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.
by adwn | 2025-10-20 20:26:19+00:00
> A maglev train is several centimeters from the rail […]

No maglev train I ever heard of travels at 36,000 km/h. This is about two orders of magnitude faster.

> We already have megavolt powerlines.

That's transmission over long distances, but you need to handle and transform all that power in a relatively small enclosure. Have you seen the length of isolators on high-voltage powerlines? What do you think is going to happen to your circuit if you have an electrical potential difference of 1 MV over a few centimeters?

Yes, you can handle large voltages with the right power electronics, but you need the space to do so. For comparison, light rail typically uses around 1 kV, while mainline trains use something like 15 kV. But a train is also 10 to 100 times as heavy as the 10t climber in my calculation, so you need to multiply the power (and therefore the electric current) by 10 to 100 as well.
by roryirvine | 2025-10-20 20:26:45+00:00
The MoCo/MoFo split happened for a reason: a non-profit couldn't do the big commercial deals that became available to MoCo.

If you went back to the pre-2005 situation, in which MoFo was all there was, it would have at most low single-digit millions in the bank rather than a billion. The AOL dowry was only intended to last a couple of years, and there's simply no way it could have sustained development of the browser beyond that. The Phoenix would have been consumed by the flames, and we'd be left with a stagnant IE/Chrome duopoly.
by sunrunner | 2025-10-20 20:26:55+00:00
> I don't think it is unreasonable for people who haven't run or worked for a hosting service to have opinions on the policy aspect or economic impact of hyperscalers.

Yeah, that's completely fair. My angle was more that firstly this doesn't come across as an opinion that needs the expert in question, and secondly this is yet another case of 'Talk is cheap, show me the code', particularly when quotes in the article include "We urgently need diversification in cloud computing."

I feel like the 'We' is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting and there's no mention of the costs of taking on such a task.

Additionally, and awkwardly, it's possible to be both a monopoly in the space but also technically a more stable solution, making the cost for competitors or people willing to use competitors doubly high.

Edit: Realised afer the fact I'm GP to your post, assumed it was mine, keeping the words anyway.
by fleabitdev | 2025-10-20 20:27:39+00:00
Emulators also struggle to faithfully reproduce artwork for the Game Boy Color and the original Game Boy Advance. Those consoles used non-backlit LCD displays with a low contrast ratio, a small colour gamut, and some ghosting between frames. Many emulators just scale the console's RGB colour values to the full range of the user's monitor, which produces far too much saturation and contrast.

It's a shame, because I really like the original, muted colour palette. Some artists produced great results within the limitations of the LCD screen. Similar to the CRT spritework in this article, it feels like a lost art.

However, there's an interesting complication: quite a lot of Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance developers seem to have created their game art on sRGB monitors, and then shipped those graphics without properly considering how they would appear on the LCD. Those games appear muddy and colourless on a real console - they actually look much better when emulated "incorrectly", because the two errors exactly cancel out!
by colechristensen | 2025-10-20 20:27:41+00:00
Morbid curiosity is maybe natural but I think it's bad form for a bunch of online speculation into cause of death by armchair researchers. He's a real person and his family and friends are real people and they deserve freedom from that kind of speculation running wild across the Internet. There's no benefit for anyone, it's just curiosity that shouldn't be engaged in.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-20 20:27:58+00:00
A big one that I've heard, is that they are funny about you developing with it under an open source license and then buying a commercial license. I.e. if you would potentially want to use something that's under the commercial license then you need to buy it when you start development instead of when you find you want the commercial side. I don't know if this is still the case, though.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-10-20 20:28:04+00:00
> I think there's two reasons: one, it makes them gobs of money. Two, it discourages customers from building architectures which integrate non-AWS services, because you have to pay the data transfer tax. This locks everyone in.

Which makes sense, but even their rates for traffic between AWS regions are still exorbitant. $0.10/GB for transfer to the rest of the Internet somewhat discourages integration of non-Amazon services (though you can still easily integrate with any service where most of your bandwidth is inbound to AWS), but their rates for bandwidth between regions are still in the $0.01-0.02/GB range, which discourages replication and cross-region services.

If their inter-region bandwidth pricing was substantially lower, it'd be much easier to build replicated, highly available services atop AWS. As it is, the current pricing encourages keeping everything within a region, which works for some kinds of services but not others.
by rkagerer | 2025-10-20 20:28:06+00:00
It's more important to have people who actively "own" each piece of the infrastructure, and are intimately familiar with it, the rationales, the tradeoffs, etc.

Then when new knowledge/technology/idle cycles come along they can take advantage to update/refine it in sensible ways.

Often the sensible way is "leave it, it works fine". But there's a big difference between arriving at that outcome via ignorance vs. deliberation. Too often management doesn't recognize the difference, but the former as your state of affairs will eventually lead your stuff to rot.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-10-20 20:28:12+00:00
Not that many Americans are worried about whether Europeans are allies. Only people who have fallen into some kind of information black hole, like the kind of people who email around 30 times forwarded jpegs of newspaper articles about the conspiracy behind covid or something. Sadly this has happened to many of the 80+ year old scions of my own family.

Anyway, I don't see this among the Americans who are still actively connecting with the world, the kind of people who aren't focused on ivermectin not taking vaccines or similar priorities.
by araes | 2025-10-20 20:28:28+00:00
The biplane part (Caproni ca 161) right after the "you should put on a spacesuit" comment got my notice, so I checked. Actually vaguely fascinating that in 1938 the Italians had Mario Pezzi wear an electrically heated pressurized suit [1], an airtight helmet [2][3], and sit inside of a pressure cylinder [4] to fly at 17,083 m (56,047 ft) in a propeller-powered biplane. Seems to have barely been mentioned afterward though, as it's difficult to even find imagery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Pezzi_(aviator)

[2] https://static.thisdayinaviation.com/wp-content/uploads/tdia...

[3] https://www.enricopezzi.it/fam_pezzi/mario_pezzi/images/MP_1...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F4...
by lordnacho | 2025-10-20 20:28:56+00:00
1) If OpenAI goes bankrupt, JPMC will get more than 0 on their loan. For some reason I have yet to comprehend, when I was sitting on a credit desk pricing CDS, they always used 40% as the recovery rate. I ran into a credit guy who taught finance at two very famous universities, and he also immediately said 40%, with no explanation.

2) It's a revolver, it's not all being used

3) If things go great and OpenAI ends up buying smaller guys or getting bought out (probably MSFT?) then JPMC will be right in there with those young bankers who don't sleep. They will pull in many many millions in fees with very little expense.

4) If things don't go great, OpenAI will be looking for more financing. Guess who will help them?

5) It's really only in case there's an Enron things are terrible for JPMC. Like if it turns out the whole thing was a bunch of guys in India answering every ChatGPT query, something like that. If there's actually an AI business, and despite JPMC's history of due diligence misses (Javice case) that's probably the case, then there's deals to be done.
by exceptione | 2025-10-20 20:29:16+00:00
Indeed. The article did mention that in a succinct way, but you do a good job of laying the machinery more bare.

This dynamic is hard to break, because this concept is so foreign to 'regular' people, they can't spot it, even if it is in front of their own eyes. Their have an ingrained concept of cooperative and constructive behavior in a social context, they derive their sense of dignity in part from it, they learn it is their path to success.
by Karliss | 2025-10-20 20:29:27+00:00
The chocolate is mentioned because some time ago people discovered that you can just use a piece of diffraction grating or holographic stickers as mold for molten chocolate and it will transfer the diffraction grating/hologram to chocolate. Now you can buy commercial silicon molds for creating chocolate with holograms, you can also get 3d printer build plates with similar idea. Just reproducing a hologram in DIY environment with easily available household items is unusual, doing it with food items is more amazing. Applied science channel has a video on that as well from few years ago although he wasn't first one to come up with similar idea.

This technique with laser seems to produces the diffraction grating by varying oxide layer thickness not by creating 3d texture so resulting surface is still flat and attempting to use it as mold will not transfer the pattern to chocolate.

The reason many commercially available diffraction gratings have 3d texture (and thus suitable for copying with chocolate) is because stamping a hot piece of metal into plastic is a very cheap way of doing it.
by antinomicus | 2025-10-20 20:29:29+00:00
I just want to pile on, to any Apple engineers here that might have some say: PLEASE STOP with the Liquid Glass. My god, what an unbelievably stupid ‘feature’. Warren Buffett famously talked about how Apple is so valuable because their moat is so strong. That if you were to pay someone 10,000$ to switch from iPhones - they wouldn’t. No other brand is like this.

I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have. This redesign is apple’s most colossal failure of the last decade and I desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling back these changes. It’s not just that everything is blurry and tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don’t tell me it’s indexing either it’s been weeks!). They completely broke my “dumb phone” layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly ugly borders to everything.

Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS. It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-10-20 20:29:34+00:00
> you keep attempting to shift terms to mean something they do not.

> The "right to healthcare" means that your government should do its best to make sure people can see doctors and receive healthcare related treatment when they need it.

Yeah ok. I'm gonna bow out of this discussion now, since you're just accusing me of doing what you're in fact doing.
by margalabargala | 2025-10-20 20:29:40+00:00
> ~5% of people in the US have experienced anaphylaxis, but I don't know your definition of rare.

What's your source here, and how many of those people actually experienced a non-allergic one-off angioedema that was misdiagnosed as anaphylaxis "just in case"? Or worse, wasn't even diagnosed, their parent saw them experience angioedema after eating something for the first time and assumed an allergy without any diagnosis ever?
by sailingparrot | 2025-10-20 20:29:42+00:00
> They rebuild the "long term plan" anew for every token

Well no, there is attention in the LLM which allows it to look back at it's "internal thought" during the previous tokens.

Token T at layer L, can attend to a projection of the hidden states of all tokens < T at L. So its definitely not starting anew at every token and is able to iterate on an existing plan.

Its not a perfect mechanism for sure, and there is work to make LLMs able to carry more information forward (e.g. feedback transformers), but they can definitely do some of that today.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-20 20:30:29+00:00
Am I right that your shadow banning technique is the post rate limiting? Why don't you make those decisions public or at least communicate them to the user?

The response to my post was just as dismissive as my reply to it. I get that you can enforce the rules however you want, so feel free to ban me for that.

If I write out multiple paragraphs of good faith reasoning and get a "lol, everything you said of wrong" reply, I get pretty disappointed. The guy is now derailing the conversation about why I use sources from my home country instead of talking about anything of substance.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-10-20 20:31:29+00:00
I'd say many people in the EU have similar views and ideas to about 2/3rds of the US (maybe I'm being generous on the US size), the half of the US that doesn't think the world is flat, that global warming might be happening, that following the rule of law is a good thing and we don't need to destroy the US to fix it.
by DontForgetMe | 2025-10-20 20:31:38+00:00
Yeah, I'm pretty cynical online but in real life I actively choose to err on the side of trust. It just makes things easier.

I've had some annoying incidents from it, but surprisingly few terrible consequences.

If you spend your time with people who don't value honesty, then you'd probably need to be less trusting. If you weren't great at spotting subtleties, vibes, norms etc, same. If you or the people around you had a reputation for being distrustful, if you looked unusually threatening / objectionable, if people had a specific distrust of you, then it could cause more trouble. Even in big cities, low-trust / high crime societies, dangerous circumstances or new environments, probably best to dial up the caution.

But in everyday life in a medium-large western European city? Your bag probably won't get stolen. The dodgy looking guy asking about your phone probably does just want to see the model. The pack of teens probably don't realise they're being so loud, and the acquaintance complaining about their bank glitch probably will pay you back the money if you loan it.

'Probably' isn't much consolation when you're being stabbed to death, but then, we assume that we 'probably' won't get hit by a runaway car or choke on this sandwich or slip on that ice, life is a series of calculated risks and in my opinion, most humans in real life are far nicer than one might think, from the internet.
by lunias | 2025-10-20 20:32:27+00:00
Mostly agree, but some people do consult religious texts for work. It doesn't strike me as categorically NSFW, but I think you and I agree that that's the issue: the definition of the NSFW category. Going further, I think it's not possible to define in a way that makes everyone happy; it's not as unambiguous as say, 18+ content, so we should just omit it altogether and let people make up their own minds as to what is safe in their workplace.
by mmaunder | 2025-10-20 20:32:28+00:00
I've chosen problems with non-negotiable outcomes. In other words, problem domains where you either are able to clearly accomplish the very hard thing, or not, and there's no grey area. I've purposely chosen these kinds of problems to prove what AI agents are capable of, so that there is no debate in my mind. And with Codex I've accomplished the previously impossible. Unambiguously. Codex did this. Claude gave up.

It's as if there are two vendors saying they can give up incredibly superpowers for an affordable price, and only one of them actually delivers the full package. The other vendor's powers only work on Tuesdays, and when you're lucky. With that situation, in an environment as competitive as things currently stand, and given the trajectory we're on, Claude is an absolute non-starter for me. Without question.
by ianburrell | 2025-10-20 20:32:35+00:00
It also assumes that it is nearby aliens. Our radio transmissions have only gone 100 light years, and probably not detectable beyond a few. But the aliens could be saying hello to everyone from thousand light years away.

It also could not be a message. I think we have ruled out nearby Dyson Swarm (as in thousands of light years), but we could find one in rest of our galaxy or even Andromeda. Dyson Swarms should be noticeably weird infrared stars.

It is also quite possible that we never decode their message. Even with one designed to be decoded, their thinking could be too different.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-20 20:32:55+00:00
> You place all your items on the white shelf with some space between them. Although they were clearly designed to be a self-checkout experience, the stadium had a staff member rearrange your items, then for about 30 seconds the kiosk would be thinking. After, it would pop up all items on the menu, and the staff member would have to tap to confirm what each item was.

Maybe we're just calling all forms of automation and computer vision "AI" these days because it's sexy. Anyway: any automation that requires a human staff member to intervene to complete every run is not automation: It's just adding unnecessary technology and making the process worse. Imagine if each grocery store self-checkout required a human staff member to scan items, re-arrange things, and confirm checkout.
by tgma | 2025-10-20 20:33:18+00:00
It was a waste of time to read. TLDR is if OpenAI were a random startup it’d be strange but because it has credible shareholders that stand to lose in a bankruptcy (weirdly constructed argument), it’s probably safe enough.

Duh. Basically the author wrote a word salad to say the bank calculated the probability of them losing money would be lower than what the author pulled out of their ass at the beginning of the article, refuting their own hypothetical point.
by vincefutr23 | 2025-10-20 20:33:22+00:00
- a company with 800m weekly actives is not going bankrupt

- existing models are profitable if cutoff future training and focused on inference

- debt is senior to equity

- if my life depended on one company not going bankrupt over the next decade I’d pick OAI over Citibank

- banks use revolving credit as a break even or loss leader for higher fee business

- high fixed cost businesses use debt and equity to scale

- lead investors would very rarely pay down the debt of an investment, that’s not the backstop

- unlikely for revolving credit, but a convertible structure could mitigate any perceived asymmetric downside
by Arathorn | 2025-10-20 20:33:52+00:00
This is really surprising. Can you do a clean launch (ie kill the app and relaunch it) and then submit a bug report from both apps and let me know what mxid to look for? (DM to @matthew:matrix.org if needed). The logs will say where the time difference is coming from. EX should always be way faster than classic Element.
by joezydeco | 2025-10-20 20:34:01+00:00
I work on equipment that can't open itself under LGPL3 rules. So I had to stop Qt use at 5.15, which went under maintenance support over 3 years ago.

I've switched to vanilla web technologies. Node, React, etc. It's painful and it sucks but hardware keeps getting faster and cheaper. I can find contractors easily and I don't need an increasingly expensive subscription^H^H^H^Hcontract with Qt to keep my developer seat hot. They tried multiple times to get me to abaondon my Qt5 license to switch to their new revenue model. I told them to fuck off.
by juancn | 2025-10-20 20:34:19+00:00
Right or left wing populism have the same effect. Populism is bad. Period.

The problem lies in that populist governments essentially make irrational decisions just to stay in power (appease the public), which makes most forms of government populist in one form or another and democracy in particular extremely susceptible to it.

This usually manifests as short-term actions with negative long term effects (i.e. taking too much debt, rather than being fiscally sound).

I always wondered if a random-cracy wouldn't be better in the end, just pick anyone that cares to have a position by lottery and have a limited term and basic checks and balances.

At least it statistically makes a mediocre government more likely, not just as an upper bound.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-20 20:34:36+00:00
Actually, due to using causal (masked) attention, new tokens appended to the input don't have any effect on what's calculated internally (the "plan") at earlier positions in the input, and a modern LLM therefore uses a KV cache rather than recalculating at those earlier positions.

In other words, the "recalculated" plan will be exactly the same as before, just extended with new planning at the position of each newly appended token.
by grafmax | 2025-10-20 20:34:37+00:00
Rentier capitalism is term that has been used to include mortgages for decades. It’s not my term. Mortgages and rent parasitize the working class. Rent extraction (broader than just literal rent) is nonproductive cashflows from the working class to the wealthy. You may cheer this on, that’s fine with me. I’m just calling a spade a spade.
by Someone1234 | 2025-10-20 20:34:41+00:00
I was recently at an events center, that has replaced all of their vending machines with machines that require me to install an app(!) to purchase a product. Literally, didn't take cash or credit - just via app.

Per the marketing on the side, this is meant to be for my benefit in order to earn "points" and get offered "deals." I don't think I have to tell you that I did NOT install the app, and just walked further to buy one from a vendor.

There is a massive arrogance problem within tech. Everyone thinks their product should be the center of everyone else's universe. The best products are invisible/get out of the way.