MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by socketcluster | 2025-10-18 14:34:19+00:00
TBH. I don't think we actually need AGI. It's not a win-win.. It's a civilization-altering double-edged sword with unclear consequences.

I'm quite satisfied with current LLM capabilities. Their lack of agency is actually a feature, not a bug.

An AGI would likely end up implementing some kind of global political agenda. IMO, the need to control things and move things in a specific, unified direction is a problem, not a solution.

With full agency, an AI would likely just take over the world and run it in ways which don't benefit anyone.

Agency manifests as thirst for power. Agency is man's inability to sit quietly in a room, by himself. This is a double-edged sword which becomes increasingly harmful once you run out of problems to solve... Then agency demands that new problems be invented.

Agency is not the same as consciousness or awareness. Too much agency can be dangerous.

We can't automate the meaning of life. Technology should facilitate us in pursuing what we individually decide to be meaningful. The individual must be given the freedom to decide their own purpose. If most individuals want to be used to fulfill some greater purpose (I.e. someone else's goals), so be it, but that should not be the compulsory plan for everyone.
by chongli | 2025-10-18 14:34:51+00:00
When working with larger enterprise software, it is common to have large CASE WHEN statements translating application status codes into plain English. For example, status code 1 could mean the item is out of stock.

Why wouldn’t you store this information in a table and query it when you need it? What if you need to support other languages? With a table you can just add more columns for more languages!
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-18 14:35:08+00:00
I'm guessing they left right around the time of Elsagate. Youtube Kids (a separate "kid friendly" version of YouTube) was almost entirely bizarre permutations of software-assembled videos. I hear it still is, but most of my friends banned unsupervised youtube for their young kids around this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-10-18 14:36:34+00:00
That's not how I'd describe it- it's not meant to centralize servers, it's the idea: maybe you don't need to build and distribute a separate downloadable thing for users to interact with your service/product/whatever via agent, and instead they continue to use your website via an appropriate interface for agents.

(Here's another comment with an explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45623782)

The npm package is only there as the browser doesn't natively support the behavior (yet). Similarly MCP clients don't have built in support. So it's a bridge/proxy to demonstrate what could be done.
by brazukadev | 2025-10-18 14:36:57+00:00
The LLM can only use MCP tools, but the Client you use the model can access resources, prompts, elicitation and sampling, which are tools to help with querying the model. So one MCP server that implements some or all these features can act as an agent for the LLM dispatching tasks IF the client is also an MCP host/client.
by MattRix | 2025-10-18 14:37:35+00:00
Sam Altman never said that, except as a joke. An interviewer asked “what are you excited for in 2025” and he said “AGI”, then said “having a kid” as his real answer.

It’s also worth noting that even when he does talk about AGI, he makes a strong distinction between AGI (human level) and ASI (super human level) intelligence. Many people in these kind of discussions seem to conflate those two as being the same.
by alganet | 2025-10-18 14:38:13+00:00
Would I tell my layman friends to use a crypto product or program? Definitely not. It has been abused extensively by scammers, money laundrers and all sorts of bad people. I can't say to them "trust this". On the contrary. My advice is: if you see crypto (coin, identity or anything), get away from it. That's a sensible advice to give to non-technical people.

People that know a little bit more, also know blockchains are not invulnerable. No technology is. And the whole technology stack is too damn complex for a single person to understand. You can sort of trust by principle, but there could be all sorts of practical issues (implementation, networking, keeping keys secure, majority attacks, and so on). Definitely can't trust my identity to it.

Trust, is gone. It's only a downhill from here. From crypto, to AI, to anything really... the perception on technology is only going to get worse.

That's a genie that got out of a bottle. I cannot see a path to change the increasing mistrust.
by 3836293648 | 2025-10-18 14:38:44+00:00
Rust binaries + all their dynamic libraries are the same size as C++ binaries + their linked libraries (when stripped, this isn't default in Rust)

The main issue is that Rust binaries typically only link to libc whereas C++ binaries link to everthing under the sun, making the actual executable look tiny because that's not where most of the code lives.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-18 14:39:00+00:00
Not a citizen, but yes, I've had a shift in perspective lately and noticed a similar shift among other immigrants of keeping backup options in mind rather than thinking of America as a reliable place to be.

Even if we view the current situation as temporary and it goes away in 4 years, the knowledge that a large chunk of the population is just looking for an excuse to harass immigrants and destroy their life regardless of citizenship status, pulls America down to the level of many other places, which maybe have similar issues but do much better on other things.
by keiferski | 2025-10-18 14:39:09+00:00
Yeah as an American that has been living abroad for a decade and will be a dual citizen soon: I don’t agree with that take at all.

The vast majority of people in the US still see their future in the US. Dual citizenship, much less actually living abroad, is still an extremely niche topic and basically only a thing amongst upper middle class and above professionals and tech workers.

And as chaotic and concerning as many political events may be, the idea that the US will become “a failed state” is pretty divorced from the actual reality of what that term means. If the US becomes a failed state, trust me, the rest of the world will be too.
by 4b11b4 | 2025-10-18 14:39:44+00:00
Recent install of Emacs 30 and Doom 3.0 via https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds (MacOS) is feeling very nice.

Emacs actually is friendly! apropos and all of the describe commands make it /discoverable/.

Literate configs and tangling?! I finally feel the end game.

Yes, you probably should read a book at the same time on the side to give you a higher perspective on fundamentals. Sure, some other tools are simpler to get started.

If I could drop everything I'd make a simple emacs config for kids with like a turtles mode and maybe a sound sequencer, then teach them functional programming first. Hah
by hugey010 | 2025-10-18 14:40:03+00:00
Your second example of a choice is a consequence of a choice. Those companies chose not to comply with new reporting rules which resulted in having their Pentagon access revoked. This is an important distinction when given "choices" that aren't really choices but mandates.

As far as how this YouTube scenario is different, people can host their content elsewhere, but there's only one Pentagon in the US.
by rbanffy | 2025-10-18 14:40:12+00:00
> It could even be argued it's not involved in exporting it either.

It is providing content to IPs located in the UK, therefore, it's knowingly exporting content. If the user bypasses controls using VPNs or proxies, it's a different thing, but I would expect 4chan to make a reasonable effort on their side in order to prevent a sitewide block.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-18 14:40:32+00:00
>One thing that's nearly impossible to replicate on modern systems is the extremely tight feedback loop these TUIs

Why? Yes, VSCode is slow. But Zed and many neovim GUIs are extremely responsive. Why would achieving that even be impossible or even that hard? You "just" need software which is fast enough to render the correct output the frame after the input. In an age where gaming is already extremely latency sensitive, why would having a text editor with similar latency performance be so hard?

Do you have any actual evidence that zed or neovide are suffering from latency problems? And why would putting a terminal in the middle help in any way in reducing that latency?
by maratc | 2025-10-18 14:41:59+00:00
That's what I've addressed already: you're not interested in history as a journey of discovery which is taken in order to broaden your horizons -- you're only interested in it as a way to support your pre-existing opinions. Anything that can't support your pre-existing opinions is of no use to you.

It's as if the people in the antebellum South were only reading history books that proved to them how Blacks are inferior, while skipping over books on topics like Roman Empire or early Muslim empires (that could actually prove to them that some of very capable emperors/caliphs were actually Black.) They had no use for that information as it couldn't support their chattel slavery system.
by Argonaut998 | 2025-10-18 14:42:47+00:00
No it really doesn't matter. This crap is just a vanity metric to make people feel better about themselves or to feel self-righteous.

You just need to look at the countries that require a tourist(!) visa of Americans, the vast majority are irrelevant. I can't wait to go to Eritrea, too bad I need a visa :(

Tourism is not a big deal either, I think freedom to work/live is a much better metric, but obviously the USA is not great in that regard. The USA is the strongest passport because it is the only passport that allows permanent residency and/or visa free travel in the US, aside from Canada and a few billionaire tax haven islands or other stragglers.

>maybe even culturally

Yes, in my country young women have an American accent from watching TikTok.
by tauwauwau | 2025-10-18 14:43:06+00:00
> but the LLM is not sensing actual photons, nor experiencing actual light cone stimulation

Neither is animal brain. It's processing the signals produced by the sensors. Once the world model is programmed/auto-built in the brain, it doesn't matter if it's sensing real photons, it just has input pins like a transistor or arguments of a function. As long as we provide the arguments, it doesn't matter how those arguments are produced. LLMs are not different in that aspect.

> nor generating thoughts

They do during the chain-of-thought process. Generally there's no incentive to let an LLM keep mulling over a topic as that is not useful to the humans and they make money only when their gears start turning in response to a question sent by a human. But that doesn't mean that LLM doesn't have capability to do that.

> Its "world model" is several degrees removed from the real world.

Just because animal brain has tools called sensors that it can get data from world without external stimuli, it doesn't mean that it's any closer to the world than an LLM. It's still getting ultra processed signals to feed to its own programming. Similarly, LLMs do interact with real world through tools as agent.

> So whatever fragment of a model it gains through learning to compress that causal chain of events does not mean much when it cannot generate the actual causal chain.

Again, a person who has gone blind, still has the world model created by the sight. This person can also no longer generate the chain of events that led to creation of that sight model. It still doesn't mean that this person's world model has become inferior.
by brucehoult | 2025-10-18 14:43:21+00:00
The thing is that emacs predates Apple developing cmd-z/x/c/v and Microsoft copying Apple in Windows. Before that, the most commonly copied keystrokes in programmer's editors were the freaking Wordstar ones e.g. in all the Borland products.

Also OP apparently has no knowledge of the far better IDEs we had 30-40 years ago including but not limited to:

- Apple MPW, 1986. GUI editor where every window is (potentially) a Unix-like shell, running commands if you hit Enter (or cmd-Return) instead of Return. Also the shell scripting has commands for manipulating windows, running editing actions inside them etc. Kind of like elisp but with shell syntax. There's an integrated source code management system called Projector. If you type a command name, with or without arguments and switches, and then hit option-Return then it pops up a "Commando" window with a GUI with checkboxes and menus etc for all options for that command, with anything you'd already typed already filled out. It was easy to set up Commando for your own programs too.

- Apple Dylan, 1992-1995. Incredible Lisp/Smalltalk-like IDE for Apple's Dylan language

- THINK Pascal and C, 1986. The Pascal version was orginaly an interpreter, I think written for Apple, but then became a lightning-fast compiler, similar to Borland on CP/M and MS-DOS but better (and GUI). The C IDE later became a Symantec product.

- Metrowerks Codewarrior, 1993. Ex THINK/Symantec people starting a Mac IDE from scratch, incorporating first Metrowerks' M68000 compilers for the Amiga, then a new PowerPC back end. Great IDE, great compilers -- the first anywhere to compile Stepanov's STL with zero overhead -- and with a groundbreaking application framework called PowerPlant that heavily leaned on new C++ features. It was THE PowerPC development environment, especially after Symantec's buggy PoS version 6.

- Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp (later dropped the "Allegro"), 1987. A great Mac IDE. A great Lisp compiler and environment. Combined in one place. It was expensive but allowed amazing productivity in custom native Mac application development, far ahead of the Pascal / C / C++ environments. Absolutely perfect for consultants.

Really, it is absolutely incredible how slick and sophisticated a lot of these were, developed on 8 MHz to 33 or 40 MHz M68000s with from 2-4 MB RAM up to maybe 16-32 MB. (A lot of the Mac II line (and SE/30) theoretically supported 128 MB RAM, but no one could afford that much even once big enough SIMs were were available.)
by OJFord | 2025-10-18 14:43:52+00:00
The 'cheddars' are a weird colour and look rubbery, the 'mozzarella' is a hard block(‽), the 'Swiss cheese' is... I don't know what, which Swiss cheese is it?

I didn't look further than that; the parmesan looked most plausible - though '10 months' stood out, I don't think I've seen less than 24 in UK supermarkets, possibly it's a PDO related thing regulating the process. (Whereas the US doesn't respect PDO and linked one possibly made in US anyway.)
by raddan | 2025-10-18 14:44:17+00:00
I am an avid functional programmer (it’s my default when working on solo projects) and I teach a PL class that covers the lambda calculus, LISP, etc. But the bulk of the course uses F#. I’ve been using F# regularly for the last 13 years.

It’s pretty easy to stick to pure F# if what you want is the pure functional programming experience. But what I like about it is its pragmatism, and this is a big reason why it’s the language I chose for the course. It is by-value, eagerly evaluated by default, and has an easy-to-learn idiomatic syntax. It has a large and well-behaved standard library, and you can use C#’s excellent standard library if you need additional things (e.g., mutable data structures). I have used F# in many performance-sensitive applications, and the fact that I can say “you know, inside this function, I’m going to use mutability, raw pointers, and iteration” has been a lifesaver in some places. But because it is a functional language, I can also abstract all that away and pretend that it is functional.

I understand why other FP folks dislike this approach. But the insistence on purity makes many problems artificially difficult. Debugging a lazily evaluated program is a nightmare. There are lots of times I want a well-behaved language but I am not willing to do CS research just to solve common algorithmic problems. The generally pragmatic streak from the SML family makes them easy to love.
by mxuribe | 2025-10-18 14:44:27+00:00
I'm not a watch enthusiast, but i do like the what i'll call old school look and appeal of Casio watches. If Casio hasn't already done so, it feels like they have chances to tap into both nostalgia audiences plus geeks audiences...and this watch - if they were to acquire it - would be awesome! Casio has its decades of manufacturing, distribution and marketing experience, and they get these novel, innovative ideas from others...and if they keep tapping into these geek topics, they could really be that niche maker for geeks - like what Apple products historically have been for creative types...sort of a default purchase for such an audience. (Again, i don't follow this stuff, so its possible they already do this.)
by grafmax | 2025-10-18 14:44:38+00:00
The UK is much like the US in that democratic processes are co-opted and undermined by special interests to the point that governments engage in suppression of free speech and mass surveillance against their populations. (What’s unique to the UK is that it’s government is largely subservient to the US in the international dragnet.) We are all human and share the same human rights regardless of our nationality.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-18 14:45:56+00:00
> No, only containerized things need to be in a container. For everything else you are just using Windows except it feels more Linux like with git bash and has most basic Linux tools.

But developer focused software is trash on Windows, if I want to remain productive I need a Linux environment so I can just run stuff without having to fuck around to configure it for Windows and what not.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-18 14:47:12+00:00
I guess it depends on what you understand "learn" to mean.

But in my mind, if I tell the LLM to do something, and it did it wrong, then I ask it to fix it, and if in the future I ask the same thing and it avoids the mistake it did first, then I'd say it had learned to avoid that same pitfall, although I know very well it hasn't "learned" like a human would, I just added it to the right place, but for all intents and purposes, it "learned" how to avoid the same mistake.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-10-18 14:47:18+00:00
Entirely executing within the browser sandbox is one way to mitigate this. And that is the current scope of the official w3c proposal for this.

https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webmcp

I attempted to acknowledge the security implications and am not trying to push this as a product/service - this was just a proposal.

Despite it being a proposal, I added token based authentication to mitigate potential abuse by forcing users to intentionally authenticate with a website before it can be used.
by layer8 | 2025-10-18 14:47:28+00:00
The keys I enumerated are sufficient to discover and execute all available operations in that style of TUI. You don’t have to type commands or command-specific keyboard shortcuts, like you have to in Emacs. It’s analogous to how in a traditional GUI you can discover and execute everything just using the mouse.

Like in the GUI analogy, you can then choose to remember and use the displayed keyboard shortcuts for frequently used operations, but you don’t have to.
by tim333 | 2025-10-18 14:47:32+00:00
Photons can hit my iphone's sensor in much the same way as they hit my retina and the signals from the first can upload to an artificial neural network like the latter go up my optic nerve to my biological neural network. I don't see a huge difference there.

I'll give you the brain is currently better at the world modelling stuff but Genie 3 is pretty impressive.
by driverdan | 2025-10-18 14:47:53+00:00
Your in-laws are correct and your friend is wrong. Historically the largest depreciation hit on new cars is in the first few years. Getting a low mileage used car that's a few years old is typically the sweet spot for value. You have to price out new and used to understand where the best deals are but generally it's true.

That did go strange for a while during COVID but has mostly become true again.
by leptons | 2025-10-18 14:48:06+00:00
I have been running this for at least a year, it works great. I have it resizing video, and save to raw pixel data that I use to extract pixel color info for use in my web application. Anything ffmpeg does (except streaming because it doesn't have network access) can be done in the browser.

https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm
by sojournerc | 2025-10-18 14:48:25+00:00
Having recently traveled through the UK as a US citizen, it was a 5 minute process in an app. Nothing to be concerned about. Honduras, where I travel frequently, already does fingerprints as the EU is about to do. It's just not a big deal or a barrier to travel. Currently going from Scandinavia to Northern continental Europe and it couldn't be easier. So much FUD for so little change.
by whitehexagon | 2025-10-18 14:48:52+00:00
It's a nice thought experiment, but for finished software we would need finished, and well documented hardware, like the gameboy example, and that would be in conflict with most of the profit models of BigTech. It's a shame because we probably already have 100x the processing power at our fingertips than we'll ever use, and certainly more than we 'need'.

But let's not forget to include a finished programming language (other than C89), finished tools, and a finished OS. Although these days it seems like modern programming languages are just academic playgrounds for feature experimentation. And outside of open-source, OS 'enhancements' seem designed mostly for delivering more ads or subscription services.

But even if all that could be solved, I have never worked anywhere that would be willing to pay for more than 80% of what an engineer considers 'finished'. Because we kinda know that the last 20% would be 80% of the budget. Those long term support and stability savings of a well engineered solution are impossible to sell upfront.
by exe34 | 2025-10-18 14:48:59+00:00
Even normal windows applications used to be like this (outside of crashing). I could alt-tab, type stuff and click where I know a button would show before I even saw the application window. It never missed a key stroke or type into the wrong window. Nowadays you load a webpage and start typing, and half you text appears and then the other half just never shows up.
by raddan | 2025-10-18 14:49:29+00:00
Cool. I’ll have to check this out. I often find myself rolling my own “option type” when writing C#.

Agreed with getting developers to see the value. The most convincing argument I’ve been able to make thus far has been “isn’t it embarrassing when your code explodes in production? Imagine being able to find those errors at compile time.” The few who actually understand the distinction between “compile time” and “run time” can usually appreciate why you might want it.
by musebox35 | 2025-10-18 14:50:36+00:00
And that last 5% is the toughest nut to crack. There is a reason waymo is way ahead even if they can not scale. Cameras are passive devices with relatively poor dynamic range and low light behavior. They are nowhere near a match/replacement for the human eye. Just try to picture a 5 year old at dusk or indoors and what you see will not be what you get.
by jrmg | 2025-10-18 14:50:41+00:00
While I don’t disagree with your point on lineup and quality (and they’ve cancelled a new car model to work on humanoid robotics‽), I think you’re underestimating the Elon effect.

Basically everyone I am close with is in the demographic Tesla targeted pre-rightening-of-Elon. All of them would’ve considered a Tesla at that point in time.

Now, none would. And of those with Teslas - very satisfied with their cars - none are replacing them with Teslas.

I just bought an Honda Pologue and didn’t even test drive a Model Y or X. We recently got solar installed in our house (also the right demographic for that…) and didn’t even look at quotes for Tesla systems.

Sure, I live in a left wing bubble, but it’s that same bubble that was (enthusiastically) Tesla’s prime demographic ten years ago.