MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChuckMcM | 2025-10-17 21:11:41+00:00
Sigh, "bought" a copy of Dark Reign which I had a lot of fun with back in the day, but is doesn't run. Click on 'Play' and it briefly says "Syncing 0%" then the play gets shaded for 3 or 4 seconds and then lights up again like it has never been selected. Not a lot of direction on the 'support' page about where to go from there. So not a great initial experience.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-17 21:11:41+00:00
> it reduces the state’s representation in the GOP power structure

Compared to now, where the GOP power drained the reservoirs, seized the states national guard without authorization to roam the streets and then migrate to Oregon, and overall labeling the state as everything wrong with thr democratic party? How much did it cost the state or federal to pull off all those stunts?

The redistricting goes back to normal during the 2030 census, and clearly the state needs to work fast against these clear oversteps in power against it. This really isn't the time to play moderatism. The GOP power hasn't these past 9 months. 300m in advertising to make sure the people know this is chump change for the 4th largest economy.

-----

Now all that said, how is advertising for a ballot initiative on any way "rigged"? Even if you think it's dumb and harmful, this is going by thr books, which says the people get to vote on any amendments to the state constitution. Where's the foul play here?
by vidarh | 2025-10-17 21:12:30+00:00
I notice you've avoided addressing the issue of whether you were on a shared instance, where the point very much is that they're not meant for workloards that will pin the resources on an ongoing basis. On the dedicated servers they won't know whether you max it out or not.

That you're being evasive makes it very much sound like you used them in ways you should have expected would be treated accordingly.

If you've run into this multiple times, it very much sounds like a "you problem".
by PaulRobinson | 2025-10-17 21:12:36+00:00
Not quite.

Ofcom in their reply make their point clear: "The [Online Safety] Act explicitly grants Ofcom the legal authority to regulate online safety for individuals in the United Kingdom [...]"

They are stating that companies operating in the UK and providing services to UK individuals, are required to conform with UK regulations in relation to those services, under UK law.

As an American business, you can choose to ignore that, but that has consequences if any of your board of directors ever sets foot in the UK.

The US does this, and US lawyers understand this. If I open an online poker and sports bookmaking site in the UK (where such sites are completely legal), and take business from all over the United States thereby breaking federal law, I can expect to be met at the plane door the next time I take a shopping trip to NYC. Arguing that my servers and my business are located in the UK is not going to impress the federal judge I'd appear in front of in the morning. Stating the US laws against my activities have a snowball's chance in hell of being enforced in the UK is surely going to risk me being charged with contempt.

The Online Safety Act is ridiculous on many levels, but in the same way that Google does certain things in relation to Tiananmen Square searches in China, and every tech company engages in regulatory alignment for the entire Middle East, the UK has asked that US companies do certain things in the jurisdiction of the UK. I'd argue, less harmful and egregious things in some respects.

Should the UK do this? No, probably not. I think it will just make VPN software vendors richer, and UK citizens - particularly children - barely any safer.

Are Ofcom claiming jurisdiction in the US? No, they're claiming jurisdiction in the UK. Which, I hasten to add they are legally required to do by the Online Safety Act, by the government they are an agency of. If they didn't, the government would literally be breaking its own law.

TIL that 4chan's lawyer is about as grown up, mature and able to engage in critical thinking about the law as the people who post on his client's site.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-17 21:12:37+00:00
Or it could be the simple explanation:

That current EVs just depreciate faster than ICE cars (in the US).

The article's chart is about used ICE vs EV prices in the US...

New EVs are definitely not 2x as good as a few years ago at half the price. Not sure if you've seen the price of new EVs in the US without subsidies.

ICE cars don't have a ~20% range depreciation after 5 years. EVs do. One would expect them to depreciate faster, until there's a solution for that.

That's not really a problem if they depreciate faster if the total operation cost is lower - which it almost certainly is for the Chinese EVs (relevant to most of the world).
by markhahn | 2025-10-17 21:12:39+00:00
sure. but there are very tangible bounds on the sorts of physical interactions that can cause any effect.

for instance, lots of people love the idea of "brain waves". in general, neurons are event-driven, not given to "waving". indeed, the mystique of brainwaves is counter-physical, in that when there is synchronized activity, it produces EM signals that are fairly hard to pick up (EEG, MEG have gains O(1e6)). a neuron simply lacks a physical mechanism to be affected by such a wave.

not unlike Tegmark pointing out that the brain is dense and warm and that means short/fast decoherence.
Show HN: Globe Viz: Global sea surface temps over time
by darkstarsys | 2025-10-17 21:13:12+00:00
I'm passionate about climate change, so as a sci viz practitioner, I want to communicate it accurately and clearly to a wide audience. I started by doing my own analysis of the OISST sea surface temp dataset (which is brilliant, updated daily) and soon realized I had to visualize it on a real 3d globe, without maps' areal distortions. So here it is. All open source, MIT licensed. Yes, a significant amount of it is AI-assisted, but all designed and code-reviewed by me. Please share if you like it! Comments welcome.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-10-17 21:13:15+00:00
Not... really? It's no more difficult than finding the correct buffer sizes for nginx, or finding the correct sizes for the ebpf connection table tracking map if you're using cilium on k8s, or kernel tcp buffers or any other other myriad services one could run.

Being a bit obtuse to tune doesn't really justify going all-in on cloud. It's all there in the documentation.
by roflcopter69 | 2025-10-17 21:14:23+00:00
I'd be really interested in what you mean. Are the any studies that quantify this difference in model performance when using JSON or XML? What could be a good intuition for why there might be a big difference? If XML is better than JSON for LLMs, why isn't everyone and the grandma recommending me to use XML instead of JSON? Why is Google Gemini API offering structured output only with JSON schema instead of XML schema?
by mustaphah | 2025-10-17 21:14:36+00:00
Self-managed Talos K8s, self-managed CloudNativePG, and the operational overhead of networking, DNS, etc. All of these were used to be fully managed by AWS for them; zero operational cost.

I'd guesstimate a 2× increase in their operational complexity. So, if they previously required 0.5 DevOps of a full-timer, they'll now need one more DevOps full-timer just to handle the added complexity.

Does that make sense to you?
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-10-17 21:14:48+00:00
How the hell does one spend $2 Billion on sales and marketing!!!

I really don’t get it. If AI is hot and profitable, can’t they fund their own expansion?

Either the $400B will be a piece of cake or they are wildly overestimating the demand and have an impractical business model.

Sure, there are those would like to have a car wash where the walls are made of crystal, organic artisan soaps, and only ultra pure water is used to wash the car. But such wouldn’t be a profitable business, no matter how much money is invested. No amount of marketing will change that.
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-17 21:15:09+00:00
> While an electric vehicle is ideal for shorter trips in urban areas with moderate temperatures, they aren’t as effective as traditional cars for long-distance travel or when the temperature is very high or very low

On long trips, I plug in at bathroom breaks about once every 2-3 hours. I don't wait for a full charge because (surprise surprise), I'm going to need to pee before I deplete the battery.

Now that I've adjusted, I actually prefer it to gas, because I can just plug in and walk away instead of needing to babysit the car at the pump.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-10-17 21:15:29+00:00
>I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended.

By almost any definition available during the 90s GPT-5 Thinking/Pro would pretty much qualify. The idea that we are somehow not going to make any progress for the next century seems absurd. Do you have any actual justification for why you believe this? Every lab is saying they see a clear path to improving capabilities and theres been nothing shown by any research I'm aware of to justify doubting that.
by meonkeys | 2025-10-17 21:15:47+00:00
I noticed I was on 8 today. Running in Docker. In case this helps anyone else: Upgrade from 8 to 9 worked fine (just by switching the Docker label), then from 9 to 11 worked, and since 11 is LTS I'll stay on that for a while.

https://forgejo.org/releases/ says 11 is supported until July 16, 2026.
by markhahn | 2025-10-17 21:15:51+00:00
everything is quantum. it's just convenient to deal with the emergent behavior instead (like "chemistry").

yes, photosynthesis is quantum. so is vision, smell, etc. heck, metabolism is quantum!

but these are fast and local, because most of the world is decoherence-friendly. the quantum effects of a photon in your rod cell is not going to cause any quantum weirdness in a smell receptor in your nose.
by rcfox | 2025-10-17 21:15:52+00:00
Your comment heavily implied (to me) scaling databases horizontally. Yes, it's not necessarily "Google scale" either, but it's a ton of extra complexity that I'm happy to avoid. But a Google employee is probably going to approach every public-facing project with the assumption of scaling everything horizontally.

With multiple servers talking to a single database, I'd still prefer to let the database handle generating IDs.
by hibikir | 2025-10-17 21:15:53+00:00
I thought the main issue, ICE or not, was that a low energy crash after 10 years makes it a total loss, insurance wise. So drive enough miles in, say, a random US urban highway/stroad environment and you'll find yourself having to change cars regardless.

It's a bigger problem with a Tesla, as there is no sensibly priced repair network, and getting original parts has lead times that will lead to replacing the car.
by ip26 | 2025-10-17 21:16:39+00:00
If writing a good document and a strong API had to happen anyway, and now you can write just that and the rest will take care of itself, we may actually have progressed. Plus the documents would then have to be there, instead of skipped like today.

The counter-argument is that code is the only way to concisely and unambiguously express how everything should work.
by SR2Z | 2025-10-17 21:16:50+00:00
The "pelican on a bicycle" test has been around for six months and has been discussed a ton on the internet; that second example is fascinating but Wikipedia has infoboxes containing coordinates like 48°51′24″N 2°21′8″E (Paris, notoriously on land). How much would you bet that there isn't a CSV somewhere in the training set exactly containing this data for use in some GIS system?

I think that "modeling the world" is a red herring, and that fundamentally an LLM can only model its input modalities.

Yes, you could say this about human beings, but I think a more useful definition of "model the world" is that a model needs to realize any facts that would be obvious to a person.

The fact that frontier models can easily be made to contradict themselves is proof enough to me that they cannot have any kind of sophisticated world model.
by whinvik | 2025-10-17 21:17:13+00:00
I feel like this is how normal work is. When I have to figure out how to use a new app/api etc, I go through an initial period where I am just clicking around, shouting in the ether etc until I get the hang of it.

And then the third or fourth time its automatic. Its weird but sometimes I feel like the best way to make agents work is to metathink about how I myself work.
by threecheese | 2025-10-17 21:17:28+00:00
-ish; while you can be fairly certain it reads the docs, whether they’ve been used/synthesized is just about unknowable. The output usually looks great, but it’s up to us to ensure its accuracy; we can make it better in aggregate by tweaking dials and switches. To mitigate this we’re asking AIs to create plans and todo lists first, which adds some rigor but again we can’t know if the lists were comprehensive or even correct. It does seem to make the output better. And if the human doesnt read the docs, they can be beaten!
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-17 21:17:54+00:00
> However, that is completely independent from what is emitted from a computer screen

We may just be working under different definitions. Are you claiming that when I type things into, say, Hacker News and hit reply, the words you read aren't the words I wrote?

Or are you asserting the "person" of the words in the computer is not the same person I am behind the keyboard?

I'd argue that the latter is the disproven hypothesis. It turns out people who said awful things online were actually awful people; they may not show it as often in public, but they weren't different human beings. Broadly speaking, they believed the things they said and tended to act on them in real life.

Laughing off things on the computer as not real was how at least one shooting went unchecked.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-17 21:18:06+00:00
I want to say in light of all the down votes you’re getting on this, that I agree with you.

I believe everything is a field and a probability. That objects have no defined borders, but our brains create these borders to reconcile with the probability of a thing being in a certain area. I think the proof this comes when we understand that we never really touch anything, it’s only the electromagnetic field that we are experiencing from another object.
by angelgonzales | 2025-10-17 21:18:36+00:00
I genuinely believe NASA funding should be reduced to 0% then ramped back up to eliminate the old blood and introduce people with new ideas and ways of thinking. NASA is also incredibly inefficient with their quantity of centers and conflicting specifications. People forget that NASA has been so mismanaged since Apollo that they designed the deadliest spacecraft ever - the Space Shuttle. If there’s a synergy between NASA and industry I don’t know about it and I don’t benefit from it! All the models and theories I use in my daily life were pioneered by IBM, DoW/AF and universities. I can’t actually think of a single model I use that came from NASA. Near-future I see Lunar Gateway as a debacle, distraction and money pit, likewise with SLS. In recent memory incumbent milaero companies flubbed Orion heat shield tiles (NASA could have prevented this if they actually had institutional know of this old technology), Starliner thrusters and SLS solid rocket boosters. They also binned nuclear thermal propulsion.
by downrightmike | 2025-10-17 21:18:47+00:00
England was cooked in WW2. While the USA was landing on hte moon and back, the UK borrowed $1Billion dollars because they caused a deficit after the war. Rather than moving forward, the monarchy held the UK back from progress. And they still are, Brexit was the latest scheme. charlie isn't going to help them get out of the 18th Century.
by benjiro | 2025-10-17 21:18:52+00:00
> I wish there was a way to buy windows 11 LTSC with a version of MSOffice stripped of copilot, OneDrive, and all the modern windows fluff.

Its called Windows 10 LTSC + cleanup script + any old office ... I am still using Office 2007 + pdf plugin. Thing uses no resources, still works perfectly.

Do you really have a reason to upgrade? Probably not... So unless Microsoft start forcing people with DX13 or whatever, there is no reason to give up on Windows 10.

> the browser based Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook are getting better all the time

Again, why? Same privacy issues anyway and AI will get pushed in those also, you can bet on it.

Just find a old version of Office, and use that. Or LibreOffice or whatever. Word, Excel etc are things that really did not change in the last 20 years beyond a ton of corporate fluff and spyware/"cloud".

> It’s wild how unreliable and complex windows has become

Because Microsoft wants to keep all the users locked into their eco system. So the more used you are to their products, the harder it is for the average person to jump ship (for any product, not just windows).
by duskwuff | 2025-10-17 21:20:06+00:00
With regard for the first two - that's good for zip.js, but the problem is that support for those features isn't universal. There's been a lot of fragmentation over the last 36 years (!).

As far as the last (file type detection) goes, the generally agreed upon standard is that file formats should be "sniffable" by looking for a signature in the file's header - ideally within the first few bytes of the file. Having to search through 64 KB of the file's end for a signature is a major departure from that pattern.
by 827a | 2025-10-17 21:20:25+00:00
One idea I'm toying with right now: My company has some internal nodejs libraries, some of which are quite large (think: codegen API library, thousands of types). When a new version is published: task claude code to distill the entire library down to a skill, then bundle that in with the npm package. Then when the package is installed, postinstall a script that copies the skill from the dependency to the parent project that's doing the installing.

I'm still getting this set up, so I'm not sure yet if it'll lead to better outcomes. I'd say, there's reason to believe it might, but there's also reasons to believe it won't.

If the library is like 50,000 lines of code long, thousands of types, hundreds of helper functions, CC could just look into the node_modules folder and bundle all of this into its context. But, this might not be feasible, or be expensive; so the SKILL.md distills things down to help it get a high level understanding faster.

However, the flip side of that is: What if its too general? What if CC needs specific implementation details about one specific function? Is this actually better than CC engaging a two-step process of (1) looking at node_modules/my-lib/index.ts or README.md, get that high level understanding, then (2) look at node_modules/my-lib/specificFunction.ts to get the specific intel it needs? What value did the SKILL.md actually convey?

My feeling is that this concept of "human-specified context-specific skills" would convey the most value in situations where the model itself is constrained. E.g. you're working with a smaller open source model that doesn't have as comprehensive intrinsic knowledge of some library's surface, or doesn't have the context windows of larger models. But, for the larger models... its probably just better to rely on in-built model knowledge and code-as-context.
by lmeyerov | 2025-10-17 21:20:33+00:00
I'm a bit unclear what's different here from how vibe coders already work?

Pretty early on folks recognized that most MCPs can just be CLI commands, and a markdown file is fine for describing them. So Claude Code users have markdown files of CLI calls and mini tutorials on how to do things. The 'how to do things' part seems to be what we're now calling skills... Which we're still writing in markdown and using from Claude.

Is the new thing that Claude will match & add them to your context automatically vs you call them manually? And that's a breakthrough because there's some emergent behavior?
by simonw | 2025-10-17 21:21:36+00:00
I don't know if the XML is better than JSON thing still holds with this year's frontier models, but it was definitely a thing last year. Here's Anthropic's documentation about that: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-eng...

Note that they don't actually suggest that the XML needs to be VALID!

My guess was that JSON requires more characters to be escaped than XML-ish syntax does, plus matching opening and closing tags makes it a little easier for the LLM not to lose track of which string corresponds to which key.
by delaminator | 2025-10-17 21:22:24+00:00
As a bonus you can get Claude to create the SKILL.md file itself.

Which kind of sounds pointless if Claude already knows what to do, why create a document?

My examples - I interact with ElasticSearch and Claude keeps forgetting it is version 5.2 and we need to use the appropriate REST API. So I got it to create a SKILL.md about what we used and provided examples.

And the next one was getting it to write instructions on how to use ImageMagik on Windows, with examples and trouble shooting, rather than it trying to use the Linux versions over and over.

Skills are the solution the problems I have been having. And came just at the right time as I already spent half of last week making similar documents !
by bcrl | 2025-10-17 21:22:54+00:00
It is economic. Significant amounts of advertising dollars were once spent on ads in local newspapers and TV stations. That is no longer the case. Expecting media content to remain high quality when the revenue stream that once supported investigative journalism has dried up makes no sense.

Any time you read or view a piece of content, follow the money trail that got it in front of your eyeballs, ears or fingertips -- it may well be enlightening.
by Bender | 2025-10-17 21:23:05+00:00
Some of the text and PDF's by congress discuss some of the findings but there are other sites that reported on it in the last couple years. [1] Some documents try to justify it [2]. There are countless more documents, mostly in PDF form because people can't HTML for whatever reason. Just use "site:.gov usaid 4chan" on Google. I have more of them bookmarked on my workstation. There are also disinformation documents to counter every document. If this sounds like conspiracies I have some rabbit holes for you. Start with DHS and the Ministry of Truth.

Speaking of misinformation, there are efforts to suggest USAID is actually US AID inferring they are some type of AID organization including putting "AID" in a different color in their logo. A few times a year they contribute small amounts of resources so they can get away with saying it but they are actually the United States Agency for International Development [3] originally meant to sway public opinion in other nations but started targeting people in the USA and its allies.

I think the take-away is that everything on the internet including references and citations are probably misinformation of misinformation of misinformation. I have sympathy for AI trying to ingest all of it.

[1] - https://unherd.com/newsroom/documents-reveal-us-government-a...

[2] - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA14/20190521/109537/HHRG...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...
by mcmcmc | 2025-10-17 21:23:39+00:00
Their investors and investments. Artificially increasing the demand for AI by ramming it down users’ throats is great for the bottom line.

Edit: To give an actual contrarian view, this could be useful for people who are completely computer illiterate, but need to use a computer for work/school etc and have no desire to learn the basics of using a desktop OS.