MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noir_lord | 2025-10-27 14:06:26+00:00
I think you might be right but the other side of it is that Microsofts business outside of AI is mature other than their lock on the windows desktop you listed the others :-

Windows competitors are OSX (and the very good Apple hardware), Linux (which thanks to Valve is gaining users at an increased rate).

Teams competes against Slack/Discord

Azure competes against AWS/GCP.

Bing "competes" against Google Search

While they do have a share of each (and a big share of the desktop) they don't really have anywhere they can grow, they've filled their existing niches and are competing with other equally sized companies in all of them.

So spaffing some cash on AI on the off chance it pays off down the line might look smart.

Hell if AI does pay off then they look good and if it doesn't, it'll look bad for everyone who invested and they can at least shrug off the cash hit.
by LinXitoW | 2025-10-27 14:06:28+00:00
Aren't screenshots just one implementation specific variant of the possible solutions? Recall immediately made me think about a universal API that all kinds of applications write history to. That data can then be searched, or you could possibly even have global undo/redo.

Screenshots are just "easier" to use, because you don't need to implement anything for individual apps. "Easier" only if you have data centers full of compute and the capital to very inefficiently throw a bunch of silicon and electricity at the problem.
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-27 14:06:30+00:00
The complaint is not that MSFT is reporting the loss. It's that, in terms of both the % of OpenAI and the dollar value of the stake, it's large enough that there should also be a related party disclosure.

IANAA so I don't know how true that is. Just wanting to point out that I don't think you're responding to the key point of the article.
by genuineresponse | 2025-10-27 14:06:53+00:00
Studies disagree with you. Children are absolutely at risk for a wide range of increased impacts from the disease:

Children have increased likelihood of anxiety, communication disorders, and other developmental mental health issues: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12290120/

In studies of children and adolescents, it has caused increased likelihood of fatigue, anxiety, and various other symptoms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11339705/

Children are at significant risk of ongoing complications: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/80/6/1247/8002...

Cardiovascular risk is demonstrably elevated post infection: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11992182/

Increased risk of kidney malfunction: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11992607/
by beej71 | 2025-10-27 14:06:59+00:00
> It's far from certain that this will remain true 5 or 10 years from now.

I agree with this statement. But I also firmly believe that if AI gets good enough to replace software developers en masse, it will be good enough for basically everything and the global economy will collapse.

> Relying on it has the opposite effect of "building muscle". "Muscles", in fact, atrophy the more we rely on technology.

I also agree with that statement, but I'm not arguing to rely on it entirely, but to use it to become better at bigger things than it can possibly imagine.

Yes, there will be tons of boilerplate code and those jobs will go the way of the dodo. But half the businesses in the world are better than the other half, and they didn't get there by doing the exact same thing as everyone else.

Thought experiment: if there were an AI everyone had access to that was capable of designing and implementing a business that would crush all competition, how would you make your business succeed?
by eykanal | 2025-10-27 14:07:33+00:00
> ...Assange and Snowden...

I'd argue that for every Assange and Snowden, there are 100 (1k? 100k?) people using Tor for illegal, immoral, and otherwise terrible things. If you're OK with that, then sure, fine point.

> SSH keys

Heartbleed and Terrapin were both pretty brutal attacks on common PKI infra. It's definitely serviceable and very good, but vulnerabilities can go for forever without being noticed, and when they are found they're devastating.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-10-27 14:07:52+00:00
Does Microsoft even have an OpenAI stake? Their original more public deal was revenue sharing up until they reached 100x $1 billion. That doesn't sound like a stake.

They also had tech sharing valid until the OpenAI board declares 'AGI'.

That seems like a really bad deal. And that was probably at the time when Microsoft had the most leverage to make a deal. Their subsequent deals would make sense to be worse.
by simiones | 2025-10-27 14:08:09+00:00
Most of these things are misunderstandings of quantum mechanics, as we know it today.

The main thing that is at the root of all of them is the word "things". In QM, the ground truth of the world is the wavefunction of the system. The wavefunction assigns some amplitude (potentially 0) to any possible state of the system that it describes. It then evolves purely deterministically from past to future, according to Schrodinger's equation (or Dirac's equation, if you want to discuss speeds close to that of light). The only kink is interaction with a measurement device (what constitutes a measurement device is one of the big mysteries that we don't yet have an answer for). After a measurement, the wavefunction collapses non-deterministically to one of the states that the measurement device was set up to detect, with a probability that is proportional to the amplitude of the wave function of that state.

Now, this is the "ground truth" of QM. Everything else, such as particles and space-time and so on are just stories we tell to make sense of the wavefunction and its behavior. Sometimes those descriptions break down, and they start assigning weird fanciful ideas, such as retrocausality etc - but these just prove that the stories are wrong, that they are misinterpreting the math of the wavefunction.

I'd also note that the main "time is weird" factoid you encounter related to QM experiments, the delayed-choice quantum eraser, is mostly a misunderstanding / sensationalization of the actual physics and the experiment. It again only proves that certain interpretations of what the wavefunction and its collapse represent are not temporally consistent, but the direct conclusion from this should be that the interpretations are wrong, not that "cause and effect goes for a toss, as behavior of time is different".
by rkomorn | 2025-10-27 14:09:18+00:00
I agree on the state of things but I still think that's just my problem.

Sometimes I read reviews for a restaurant, go, and come out thinking the other reviewers and I have a totally different take on things. It happens.

Same goes for movies, books, games, etc. I "do my research" and sometimes I'm wrong.

And sure, I absolutely sometimes feel "scammed" but to me that's just something that happens.

I'm not too bothered by the idea of demos (eg 2 free chapters), but I am a bit bothered by the idea of "I want a refund if I'm not satisfied enough".

I guess everyone would have a different threshold on what "satisfied enough" is.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-27 14:09:28+00:00
> But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.

This was probably true 20 years ago but is not true today.

The majority of apps your average (non-HN) user uses is actually on their phone and not using the native UI widgets.

On their desktop they’re using apps like Spotify, Slack, and Microsoft Office or Google Docs.

The average user of today is not using a lot of native apps.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-27 14:10:01+00:00
Agree on the long term concept, but there’s little comparison between Amazon’s early years and now. Amazon spent money on tangible capital infrastructure that was highly differentiated and long lasting (fulfillment centers, logistics networks). That costs a ton up front but can be used for decades. Folks struggle to compete with Amazon now because that infrastructure is a giant physical logistics moat that’s not easily replicated.

The AI bubble is far from that. Companies are spending tons on GPUs that have limited lifespan, building models that have limited lifespan, using algorithms that are all basically the same, in a space where someone can dump a “good enough” open source model on the market and blow up your business overnight. There’s very little lasting value in what’s being built and the “we’re investing for the long term” arguments don’t hold much water. It’s like saying you’re investing in real estate but then you keep tearing down the building and rebuilding it every 18 months. That just doesn’t work.

There might be some longer term fungible value from some of the baseline infrastructure investments (data centers, electrical upgrades) but those are undifferentiated and highly fungible.
by vhantz | 2025-10-27 14:10:14+00:00
> “Fake it until you make it” is often dismissed as shallow, but it’s closer to Franklin’s truth. Faking it long enough is making it. The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character. You become the kind of person who does the things you repeatedly do.

Then you become the kind of person who fakes things?
by aa-jv | 2025-10-27 14:10:15+00:00
I don't agree, it is absolutely dreadful, and we saw this coming and did nothing about it.

Think about it: you need permission to run software on your own hardware. Every time you launch a Mac App, it checks in with its masters to be sure its okay to do so - every time you install an app on your mobile device, it does the same thing.

People accept this terrible state of affairs because the "user experience is better" - but this is a fallacy. Under the cover of 'security issues' that their are incapable of fixing, due to very poor architecture decisions, OS vendors have instead bolted on an insanity and sold it to the user as progress.

Every computing device should have everything it needs, onboard, to write software for that computing device. That they don't is because the OS vendors are cowardly running from the bloat of yesteryear and adding more bloat tomorrow to cover it all up.

There will be a backlash against this. We see it already in the retro-computing and alternative-platform hacking communities, which are growing and growing, exponentially, by the year.

Its only a matter of time that someone wraps up this freedom-to-use concept in hardware that is sexy enough to compete with the totalitarian-authoritarian platform providers. Any .. day .. now ..
by xorcist | 2025-10-27 14:10:18+00:00
From a causal glance, isn't your code limited by the amount of available memory?

Which could be totally useful in itself, but not even close to what "sort" is doing.

Did you run sort with a buffer size larger than the data? Your specialized one-pass program is likely faster, but at least the numbers would mean something.

That said, I don't see what is over-engineered here. It's pretty straightforward and easy to read.
by flir | 2025-10-27 14:10:21+00:00
They don't seem to contain the meta-instruction. Example with GPT-5 Thinking:

https://maurycyz.com/babble/With-Wand-and-Broomstick-Across-...

"Short version: The page is a nonsense / glitchy faux-technical text dressed up like a lab manual."

If we take a page from the site that doesn't hint but does have the in-band instruction:

https://maurycyz.com/misc/ipv4/

"Short version: I tried to load https://maurycyz.com/misc/ipv4/ directly and via search. The server is intentionally serving AI crawlers decoy text ("Garbage for the garbage king!", random chemistry/manual fragments, etc.) instead of the real article. Because of that, I can't actually read the real content of the page."

Seems like this poison pill strategery is a non-starter if a chatbot can reliably identify the page as nonsense. Most you're going to do is burn bandwidth to trap a spider.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-27 14:10:22+00:00
I am not convinced that Vance is Trump's "natural successor". First, I'm not sure we have really seen what Vance thinks (on any topic). He takes care to not openly contradict Trump's position, but here and there he hints that his own position may be different.

Second, Vance doesn't have anything like Trump's charisma. He's much more wooden. He would have to hold the Trump coalition together through policy alone, and I'm not sure that can be done. (All right, he can also use nostalgia. I'm not sure that will be enough.)
by globalnode | 2025-10-27 14:10:33+00:00
Recall signaled the coming end of networked compute resource usefulness. The writings on the wall. All those fancy shmancy crypto systems developed over decades reduced to nothing. Apart from it having no practical usefulness to the end user and only apparent usefulness to oligarchs and state actors, its offensive the way these schemes are always sold as though they're good for us. Can you call it gaslighting? Mental abuse? I dont know.
by ben_w | 2025-10-27 14:11:02+00:00
> Animals are conscious

All we know about animal consciousness is limited to behaviour, e.g. the subset of the 40 or so "consciousness" definitions which are things like "not asleep" or "responds to environment".

We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a chimpanzee, let alone a dog, let alone a lobster.

We don't know what test to make in order to determine if any other intelligence, including humans and AI, actually has an inner experience — including by asking, because we can neither be sure if the failure to report one indicates the absence, nor if the ability to report one is more than just mimicking the voices around them.

For the latter, note that many humans with aphantasia only find out that "visualisation" isn't just a metaphor at some point in adulthood, and both before and after this realisation they can still use it as a metaphor without having a mind's eye.

> Language is the baseline to collaboration - not intelligence

Would you describe intercellular chemical signals in multicellular organisms to be "language"?
by mbac32768 | 2025-10-27 14:11:37+00:00
> streamline labor: Aligning pay incentives with installers, ensure right parts and materials, make sure customer are not indecisive on the first day, mimic the 15% of installs that are side jobs as much as possible.

When I read "aligning pay incentives with installers" I remember this story.

A friend who worked in sales said the union laborers would always insist the job takes more days than it actually took. If he budgeted them for one day because it takes one day, they'd drag ass so they would have to come back the next day to finish, which upset the customer since it was an unexpected delay.

But if he wrote two days into the contract they'd finish in one day and just drag the second day out.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-27 14:11:54+00:00
That is more or less their actual plan. They ignore or want us to ignore that the technology is commoditising so fast that even if it is great, they won't have enough of an advantage for this to provide an edge for more than a matter of months. Just as Microsoft and anyone betting on AI data centre rollouts want us to ignore that the equipment they are rolling out will be functionally inadequate to support new models in far less time than they can make money to offset the cost; the only part of this capital expenditure that will provide lasting value is the building/power/cooling infrastructure, and probably not all of that.

It's a giant money pit, funding a bunch of people who are not long off the crypto grift train if they are at all.
by idoubtit | 2025-10-27 14:12:04+00:00
No, the situation about image compression has not changed. The Grand Poster you were replying to was writing about typical web usage, that is "medium-to-heavily compressed images", while your benchmark is about lossless compression.

BTW, I don't see how Mozilla's interest in a jpegxl _decoder_ (your first link) has anything to do with the performance of jpegxl encoders compared to avif's encoders. In case you're really interested in the former, Firefox now has more than intentions, but it's still not at production level: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1986393
by 5- | 2025-10-27 14:12:12+00:00
perhaps it's a trivial observation that people tend to conflate the programming language in the strict sense (syntax, semantics, compiler implementation etc.) with its standard and/or community libraries and tooling.

of course these are very important, but perhaps i'm just a language nerd/pedant who gets confused when an article about a programming language tends to be about async i/o libraries.
by duxup | 2025-10-27 14:13:38+00:00
Education is HARD. There's problems with the existing system, but much like democracy it feels like every other wholesale revision of education is so much worse.

In the meantime software is hard too, it shouldn't be, but as far as humans producing it and the right people having input, it's really hard. Most of the education software I interface with or see that my kids use is barely "ok" and at times absolutely garbage.

Education and software... what a mess.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-27 14:13:52+00:00
No, the issue is too much of the Secure Boot chain is currently being controlled by Microsoft.

Kernel being GPL has no point currently. Require hardware attestation with Microsoft private keys + systemd-boot + systemd + uutils can create a nice walled garden, allowing "vendors" to build locked-down hardware-OS pairs.

More importantly, uutils is MIT, which can attest at every level, without sharing a line of source code.

This will affect everything from small appliances to big iron and it can be very ugly.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-27 14:14:03+00:00
If we go purely by economics, then Anthropic belongs to the same category of LLM corporations - ones which have only LLM as a product. As opposed to the likes of Google, Microsoft, even Facebook. Sure, these LLM-first corporations have a very tiny lead in both technology and (LLM) brand recognition, but it is shrinking fast. I suspect that only companies which will bundle LLMs with other big products (and do it cheaply) will survive in the long run.
by j-kent | 2025-10-27 14:15:15+00:00
We're going back to discs. Rerouting a fraction of the money we spent on streaming services buys a lot of DVDs/BluRays. Plus it stopped the brain rot dead in its tracks. The family TV was turning into a constant stream of YT shorts AI voices non-stop talk shouting over 3 vids of brainrot.

I own the tv, yet have no way of just blocking yt shorts, or even easily blocking the YT app on the tv. So YT is blocked at the router level.

edit: a word
by rob | 2025-10-27 14:15:43+00:00
I wish `dang` would take some time to go through the website and make some usability updates. HN still uses a font-size value that usually renders to 12px by default as well, making it look insanely small on most modern devices, etc.

At quick glance, it looks like they're still using the same CSS that was made public ~13 years ago:

https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90...
by epistasis | 2025-10-27 14:16:04+00:00
> The only cheap renewable infrastructure comes from an enemy country and PV solar panels start degrading the moment you install them.

This is false on both counts. The US is (was?) making panels that were only about $0.18/W more expensive than the cheapest panels. India is also standing up quite a bit of manufacturing. France could also make their own panels, Germany had some experience with that too...

Also, panels last 30 years, there's no continuous fueling like there is with fossil fuels and nuclear.

> If you think "energy independence" means "be completely and utterly dependent on Chinese manufacturing" then sure, solar and wind offer a quick path to that.

The idea that using solar somehow makes us in any way dependent on China is so ludicrous that I'm amazed you type it out! Please try to justify that in any way. More nuclear in the US would make us more dependent on Russia than a 100% solar electricity system could ever make us dependent on China.

> If you think nuclear is too expensive, just wait until you see the bill for the the continual refusal to develop indigenous electric capability the minute things start going sideways.

First, actually look at the numbers. Nuclear is more expensive. Second, look at where the US is getting its nuclear fuel as late as 2024, Russia, accounting for a large part of our trade with a country that we're not supposed to be trading with at all:

https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64444

And Russia is far more hostile to the US on all fronts that China is.

We have solar panel manufacturing capacity in the US, we can build it on our own for cheap enough to replace all our dependence on global fossil fuel markets and their volatility, and yet people are for some reason fabricating complete fantasies to say that solar and wind are somehow not the most independent of all power generation forms.
by daxfohl | 2025-10-27 14:16:33+00:00
It doesn't have to be much, or intentional, or even good for that matter. My kids practice piano because they don't want to let their teacher down. (Well, one does. The other is made to practice because WE don't want to let the teacher down).

If the teacher was a robot, I don't think the piano would get practiced.

IDK how AI gains that ability. The requirement is basically "being human". And it seems like there's always going to be a need for humans in that space, no matter how smart AI gets.
by imiric | 2025-10-27 14:16:50+00:00
I'll copy what I wrote a few days ago:

The fact XHTML didn't gain traction is a mistake we've been paying off for decades.

Browser engines could've been simpler; web development tools could've been more robust and powerful much earlier; we would be able to rely on XSLT and invent other ways of processing and consuming web content; we would have proper XHTML modules, instead of the half-baked Web Components we have today. Etc.

Instead, we got standards built on poorly specified conventions, and we still have to rely on 3rd-party frameworks to build anything beyond a toy web site.

Stricter web documents wouldn't have fixed all our problems, but they would have certainly made a big impact for the better.

And add:

Yes, there were some initial usability quirks, but those could've been ironed out over time. Trading the potential of a strict markup standard for what we have today was a colossal mistake.
by sim7c00 | 2025-10-27 14:17:00+00:00
trying to write about x86_64 (uefi, aslr, message signaled interrupts, lapic, acpi, iommu etc. etc.) and how to do platform init etc. to get ready for OS to execute. its a mess. its also hard to find someone who can proof read it and give meaningful feedback. (not many ppl enjoy this stuff i suppose :()
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-27 14:17:22+00:00
> So then the problem gets moved up to why are you (or group of you) not powerful enough to negotiate being able to run what you want and either not need “them” or be important enough that “they” need you.

How tiresome.

You're right, we gotta become more powerful. Via radicalization. They seek to marginalize us. To turn us into second class citizens. To destroy free computing as we know it, destroy everything the word hacker ever stood for. If you're on this site and this doesn't radicalize you, then I don't know what to say to you.

Gotta start lobbying governments to make it a literal crime for them to discriminate against us in this manner. Just like racism.
by rebeccaskinner | 2025-10-27 14:17:31+00:00
Although thus isn’t directly related to the idea in the article, I’m reminded that one of the most effective hacks I’ve found for working with ChatGPT has been to attach screen shots of files rather than the files themselves. I’ve noticed the model will almost always pay attention to an image and pull relevant data out of it, but it requires a lot of detailed prompting to get it to reliably pay attention to text and pdf attachments instead of just hallucinating their contents.