MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timschmidt | 2025-10-17 21:36:41+00:00
> I do not now the meaning of something where badness != misuse.

Seems to me that you've demonstrated clearly through the course of the discussion that individual definitions of "badness" differ substantially enough for there to be significant disagreement.

> A lot of disagreements boil down to a different usage of a word

Here you are making the same case yourself.

> Would you agree to "Killing others is natural"?

Happens all the time in nature, including the last time you ate a hamburger or some beans or bread. Happens also in self-defense and territorial disputes.

We also observe predators and prey co-existing peacefully in nature at times. I can see the rhetorical corner you're attempting to back the discussion into, and it's a weak position devoid of nuance or understanding. Further, it's one which can only be argued by someone who's connection to their food ends at the grocery store. Wild that some folks have forgotten what they are giving thanks for at mealtime.

You may not consider animals or plants to be "others", but then you've only given me additional reason to discount your moral judgement as incomplete, narcissistic, and even further disconnected from the nature you invoke as justification.

P.S. drug use is also observed in nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use_in_anima...
by _pdp_ | 2025-10-17 21:36:45+00:00
This is exactly the direction I am seeing agent go. They should be able to write their own tools and we are soon launching something about that.

That being said...

LLMS are amazing for some coding tasks and fail miserably at others. My hypothesis is that there is some sort of practical limit to how many concepts an LLM can hold into account no matter the context window given the current model architectures.

For a long time I wanted to find some sort of litmus test to measure this and I think I found one that is an easy to understand programming problem, can be done in a single file, yet complex enough. I have not found a single LLM to be able to build a solution without careful guidance.

I wrote more about this here if you are interested: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/where-ai-coding-agents-go...
by o11c | 2025-10-17 21:36:54+00:00
> time was a Western construct

That really doesn't seem to make sense as written. Even if for "Western" you count all the way to the Middle East (where much of our chronometry originates), there's still a lot found in China and the New World. (From what I can tell, India does not seem to have a strong independent record here? Though they certainly borrowed from the inventors, just like Europe did.)
by mothballed | 2025-10-17 21:37:16+00:00
I don't think that's the case in the US. For instance, if you take a picture of a patient you are treating, go home and send that picture to your wife and say "treated this lady for syphilis today" you are violating HIPAA despite the fact you're telling 100% truth, conveying it privately with no expectation or desire it will ever impact the victim, and literally are only conveying it as information to be consumed and not acted on then it is still illegal.
by sublimefire | 2025-10-17 21:37:52+00:00
Another angle to look at it is that cars cost a lot, petrol and electric alike. The only way to reduce depreciation is for the folks to be able to buy used cars for a lot which means financing.

> A U.K.-based study found 3-year-old EVs lost more than half of their value compared with 39% for gas cars.

40-50% depreciation is crazy, there is little reason why this should happen as cars do not change that much in such a short time. I bet they would not depreciate that hard if a new car was sold at 30k.
by jibal | 2025-10-17 21:38:13+00:00
Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field" other than "the microtubule thing" and his collaborator, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is a crank among cranks.

Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ... he's been bothered by the notion that he is "just a computer" since then, but he didn't get into seriously addressing it until much later, and he's never studied it--he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.

> That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.

This is simply not accurate.

And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.

P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again, especially after seeing this comment: "I’m in the Penrose camp that Turing machines can’t be conscious which is required for true AGI" --- this is pure ideology. TMs are clearly adequate for AGI even if somehow "TMs can't be conscious" ... c.f. Chalmers' philosophical zombies.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-17 21:38:20+00:00
The idea of running old Windows games definitely doesn't go hand in hand with Linux. And I think GoG simply has way more Windows experience, lots of work to do, and little realistic chance of tapping some huge market if they spent all the time you need to support 2-3 major Linux distros - especially when you need to offer things like Multi-player support as well on those, plus maybe game recording and whatever else the overlay offers (GoG Galaxy is not just a storefront).
by imtringued | 2025-10-17 21:38:39+00:00
How would that work? You have a claim to a past output that no longer exists. If the nominal value of the claim stays the same, the real value of the denomination unit must change.

People don't understand that money is a time and location bound object and pretend it is infinitely liquid and fungible when it isn't. Money is kind of like electricity. When you borrow it into existence and spend it, it travels a path through society, but it must then travel along a return path back to the source. Inflation could be thought of as a form of resistive loss, where current stays the same but voltage drops.

There's a reason why demurrage (or its ugly brother inflation) is a necessary bitter pill if you want a working money system. It forces money to travel down the return path sooner than later.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 21:39:01+00:00
Point taken, it was just the loud ones ruining it. Though in my mind, when I think "anti-Tesla people" I am casually excluding the people who are not vocally so. Arbitrary, yes, but how I tend to think about it. I know a lot of people who are anti-Tesla in the sense that they will never buy one, but aside from that you will never hear anything from them.
by christopher8827 | 2025-10-17 21:39:15+00:00
Good question! I have added better UX features like the ability to record a voice memo at the end of the day to automate the logging. It would be helpful for someone like a busy professional who is having a hard time to take time out of the day to log his food at every meal... So during his downtime, or before he goes to bed - he can quickly jolt down what he ate and then AI would summarise log it for him.

Let me know what you think.
by dzikimarian | 2025-10-17 21:39:24+00:00
I use Windows for well over 20 years. I never had serious complaints - even Vista and 8 were pretty ok IMO.

Right now I seriously consider moving to Linux. Thing is, main issue before were either unfamiliar UI or bad performance. Windows 10/11 has fair share of these too with aggressive push for control panel replacements. But that's honestly minor obstacle. There are lots of pluses on functional front too like windows Terminal, winget, wsl.

Actual problem is Microsoft simply stopped understanding word "No". Always pushing some links that open Edge for no reason. Enabling click bait news I spend a while to get rid of. Randomly switching default save location to one drive. Full screen ads for O365 & One Drive every few updates.

I simply need OS to get out of my way and stay there.
by dijit | 2025-10-17 21:39:56+00:00
It's an extremely inconvenient situation that Americans find themselves in, a sort of self-perpetuating cycle of car dependency that they reinforce because alternatives require far too much investment to make worthwhile.

I'm really glad that I can live in a city without having to own a car if I don't want to. It makes a significant difference to my monthly expenses. And, honestly, it's a lot nicer and feels a lot more free in many ways. Places are more accessible not less.

I can't imagine being on the bottom rung of society and having yet another awkward expense, especially because you become unreliable if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing. Which might cause you to lose your income altogether.
by ReptileMan | 2025-10-17 21:40:02+00:00
Windows has been enshitified for a long long time now. While there are improvements from their best windows (choose Windows 2000 or 7), usually there are enough "features" to offset the improvements. Lets take two thing - they can't get file search right - they have some slow, tedious indexing functions that take forever, whereas Everything just reads directly from the NTFS index/Fat table.

The start menu is also going downhill - it is slower than ever before. why - because it is connected to some strange online functions that are almost impossible to be completely disabled. Even in my quite cleared windows install finding a program to launch takes around 5 seconds for something that should be instant.

Their appstore is a failure (thank god, we don't need another walled garden)

Their mobile tablet strategy failed gazzilion years ago and yet they still try to move the control panel to their modern settings menu while severely limiting it's functionality.

They try to push online accounts for no good reason.

There seems to be something in this corporation that just prevent the top people to understand that some things - they got them right 2-3 decades ago, so just don't fuck them up.

Windows still lags on interrupts - and we have such cute situations where task manager shows in details sub 10% CPU usage, but performance tab shows 90%. Why - usually the answer is some form of I/O hiccup.
by hansmayer | 2025-10-17 21:40:34+00:00
> I didn't say that MCP was too complex to take off - it clearly took off despite that complexity.

I did not say you said exactly that either. Read more carefully. I said you were discrediting them by implying they were too complex to take off due to resource and complexity constraints. It's clearly stated in the relevant section of your post (https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/#skills-...)

>I'm predicting skills will take off even more. If I'm wrong feel free to call me out in a few months time for making a bad prediction!

How the hell can you predict they will "take off even more" when the feature is accessible for barely 24 hours at this point? You don't even have a basic referent frame or at least a statistical usage sample for making such a statement. That's not a very reliable prediction, is it?
by ricardobeat | 2025-10-17 21:40:36+00:00
This is one of the myths that feeds React's popularity. The few times I had the chance to be part of a project using an in-house framework, it was actually quite pleasant.

You can (and they will) build a massive house of cards on top of anything, in reality that new React dev will the take the same amount of time to ramp up, or worse if you're not careful. Learning the extensive collection of libraries in use, how they are glued together, application architecture, entry points, data and state management, build, deployment, asset management, etc is what takes most of that time. Having documentation for APIs can't help you there.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-17 21:40:37+00:00
We used to leak approximate creation time all the time back when everyone used sequential keys. If anything sequential keys are far worse: they leak the approximate number of records, make it easy to observe the rate at which new keys are created, and once you know that you can deduce the approximate creation date of any key.

UUIDv4 removes all three of those vectors. UUIDv7 still removes two of three. It doesn't leak record count or the rate at which you create them, only creation time. And you still can't guess adjacent keys. It's a pretty narrow information leakage for something you routinely reveal on purpose.
by basilikum | 2025-10-17 21:40:48+00:00
Houses are physical objects. If you take it someone else has to lose it. E-Books are digital objects. You can have infinitely many copies of them without anyone losing anything.

And yes, DRM infringes on essential rights, it not only limits what you can do with something you supposedly bought, but takes away your control over your own hardware.

And even more basic is the right not to get frauded. If someone claims to be selling something to you, but then they only give you locked down, perhaps even revokable access to it, then they are defrauding you.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-17 21:40:57+00:00
Eh, not really.

I've working in spaces where I've run infrastructure ops including end user for huge orgs. Think >100k people, mostly in the US. What I am now, other than a pilot of a few thousand Copilot for O365, all of this crap is turned off. Nobody understands wtf this is, the terms are difficult to find, and both IT and end users struggle to figure out where one thing starts and the other ends.

We are growing non-windows platforms significantly. New task based workflows like call centers and shared devices are web on linux/chrome first these days - you have to justify Windows. Why? The arbitrary rate of change and re-engineering is way too high (ie. $$). Some populations can pick their own devices, and MacOS grows 25% year over year in those programs.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-10-17 21:40:57+00:00
I bought 2023 April after first price drops and EV rebate at its highest point (this is in NZ). I was looking at used ones which were about 3-4k usd cheaper at the time. After some timewaster I figured savings are not worth it and bought new. Tesla did another drop next week and refunded me about 2k USD without me realising.

Fast forward to now it’s worth about 30% less but thats what I saved on fuel.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-10-17 21:41:05+00:00
While fair to say, this is kind of pedantry looking past the actual point. So, to be clear what I'm saying:

Unless reasonably proven otherwise, quantum mechanics are not a magical land of souls and consciousness. It's a probabilistic space. Those probabilities obey things like wave interference, it's not total chaos. And with Bell's, any idea of a "grand plan" dictating outcomes is kinda moot, because there's no hidden variables that would imply any kind of long-term vision, or mechanism therefore, at play.

Then, when you scale up to classical physics, those probabilities amortize out to reasonably deterministic outcomes: The sun will continue burning for billions of years. Technically every QM interaction in the core could suddenly get unlucky and it instantly poofs out, but we don't seriously consider that a possibility. Just like technically virtual particles could spontaneously form a Mercedes in front of me with a title of ownership in my possession while solar rays bitflip the hard drives of government servers to register it for me.

In reality, if I drop a ball, it's going to fall and hit the ground. When something scares a human, they release hormones. Those hormones consistently affect mood and behavior. Pretty much all humans think like most other humans, and all other animals seem to think like their peers. Etc.

There has been no evidence of any kind to suggest that human brains are not deterministic (and plenty of examples of otherwise), despite the technicality that they have QM underlying the matter and signals. And the idea that the quadrillions of QM interactions each instant are working to some conscious goal, using secret physics that have never before been observed and fly in the face of what has, is voodoo magic nonsense that is not based on actual quantum physics in any way.

If you want to believe in religion, just do that! Don't try to misconstrue/miscommunicate actual science to justify it, just let it be magic. God or souls are no more justified by quantum mechanics than they are by just saying they alter reality in any other way. You're not getting away from them having a magic will-based being in an unmeasurable qualia-defined pocket dimension altering natural outcomes.

In fact, you've made it worse. Now every single person has an unbelievable supercomputer like no one has ever imagined hidden, doing the math needed to understand the exact quantum manipulations to enact their will on the brain physics of the person they are somehow bound to.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 21:41:21+00:00
I think I would eventually win the bet. I just don't think my timeline or funding is in a position where I want to wait it out. I think TSLA is detached from the fundamentals and I haven't heard a good rationalization that explains what I'm missing. I get that the stock market is aspirational, the price you see is the collective hopes & dreams for the future, but at some level there needs to be an explanation, a vision that seems plausible. What is Tesla doing today that leads to their current valuation, what does that path even look like?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-17 21:41:52+00:00
Almost a 3rd of users use ad blockers

https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

And just because you have users doesn’t mean it’s easy to create a profitable ad business - ask Yahoo. Besides we still don’t know how much inference costs. But there is a real marginal costs that wouldn’t be covered by ads. They definitely couldn’t make enough on ads to cover their training costs and other costs.
by benzible | 2025-10-17 21:42:50+00:00
Every attempt to formally define "general intelligence" for humans has been a shitshow. IQ tests were literally designed to justify excluding immigrants and sterilizing the "feeble-minded." Modern psychometrics can't agree on whether intelligence is one thing (g factor) or many things, whether it's measurable across cultures, or whether the tests measure aptitude or just familiarity with test-taking and middle-class cultural norms.

Now we're trying to define AGI - artificial general intelligence - when we can't even define the G, much less the I. Is it "general" because it works across domains? Okay, how many domains? Is it "general" because it can learn new tasks? How quickly? With how much training data?

The goalposts have already moved a dozen times. GPT-2 couldn't do X, so X was clearly a requirement for AGI. Now models can do X, so actually X was never that important, real AGI needs Y. It's a vibes-based marketing term - like "artificial intelligence" was (per John McCarthy himself) - not a coherent technical definition.
by jfengel | 2025-10-17 21:43:06+00:00
I'm surprised it has taken this long. Everything I thought I knew about economics (and basic finance) has pointed in the direction of imminent pain for consumers, but what I've been hearing is more of a dull ache at most.

I don't want a crisis, and if we avert one I'll happily update my beliefs. But even if the crisis comes I'll have to figure out why it has been so slow.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-17 21:43:15+00:00
None of this is accurate.

P.S. this response was merely a condensed version of he response to my reply. Here’s a longer one.

>Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field"

Quantum gravity, physics, and mathematical logic are clearly within his field. He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician

>Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ..

He says that he has.

>he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.

Disagreement with some members of a field isn’t the same as ignoring it.

>This is simply not accurate.

It is. I heard it from the horses mouth.

>And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.

It’s a field that has never produced anything concrete or beneficial to anyone outside the field. I’m unsure what relevance even means there.

>P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again,

Yet you did. I saw your edit.

>Clearly TMs can be conscious

I guess that’s that then.
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2025-10-17 21:43:44+00:00
Why are we taking claims like this seriously without actual witness confirmed evidence. It’s 2025, body cams are a thing and the entire purpose of them is to hold the government accountable. Why are we not demanding they be used for ICE or DEA enforcements? The atrocities that led up to world war 2, people had no idea because there was no flow of information or evidence. There was barely color photography at the time. This could happen all over again, swept under the rug and we’d have no idea, except this time, there’s 0 excuse.
by mmcnl | 2025-10-17 21:43:57+00:00
I find it strange AGI is the goal. The label AI is off and irrelevant. A language model is not AI, even a large language model. But language models are still extremely useful and potentially revolutionary. Labelling language models as AI is both under and overstating the value. It's not AI (insert sad trombone), but that doesn't mean it's amazing technology (insert thunderous applause).
by dijit | 2025-10-17 21:44:25+00:00
Due to the aforementioned car dependence: points of interest are further apart from each other than in other cities with solid cycling infrastructure (in Europe for example).

Enormous car-lots several times larger than the buildings that they serve for example, sprawling 6-lane roads that take 20s to clear a junction on a slow moving bicycle, these things contribute to it being infeasible for more poeple.

Connecting the bike lanes is not a problem, though people will fight it tooth and nail because they wan't all infrastructure spending to go to cars... hence, reinforcing the issue, because when all you have is a hammer...
by pessimizer | 2025-10-17 21:44:25+00:00
Windows 11 took four entire years to surpass the usage of Windows 10 (it's still only 20% higher.) It still isn't a majority, because fully 9% of Windows users refused to leave Windows 7.

This time around the Linux desktop is even getting marketshare, which is insane. 6%?! Firefox has less marketshare, and people bring it up in antitrust suits.

I think the secret is that they don't care about these users. Western markets have been bifurcating into, on one side, captured luxury markets where everything is grossly overpriced, low-quality, surveilled, censored, resold, walled-off and milked for every penny from a stupid, wealthy satisfied-enough clientele, and on the other side, people who don't matter and can do whatever who cares.

Getting 80% margin out of 20% of the market is better than getting 10% margin out of 80% of the market.
by harshreality | 2025-10-17 21:44:29+00:00
The HN thread began on Oct 16 at 20:22 Z. If you visited that github page instantly and took that screenshot instantly, even accounting for 21 hours due to rounding, the commit in that screenshot had to be after Oct 15 23:22.

The repo as I and many other people cloned it has the first commit ("first commit", not "initial commit") at Oct 12 23:20 Z, and the "done" commit at Oct 15 19:37 Z.

A likely explanation is that pixelmelt squashed both commits at or after they put up the blog post, but didn't force-push the rewritten history to github until it hit HN and blew up.
by simonw | 2025-10-17 21:44:39+00:00
> How the hell can you predict they will "take off even more" when the feature is accessible for barely 24 hours at this point?

That's what a prediction IS. If I waited until the feature had proven itself it wouldn't be much of a prediction.

The feature has also been live for more than 24 hours. I reverse-engineered it a week ago: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/claude-skills/ - and it's been invisibly powering the PDF/DOC/XLS/PPT creation features on https://claude.ai/ since those launched on the 9th September: https://www.anthropic.com/news/create-files