MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gormo | 2025-10-21 19:13:58+00:00
A Hollywood production often involves a huge number of distinct business entities in a complicated network of relationships with each other. Oftentimes, a specific business entity is set up to coordinate a single production, and that is the entity that reports the profit/loss for the entire project -- the project's revenues can be spread across lots of other entities, while its expenses are concentrated in that central entity, producing a nominal loss in their accounting records even if the movie as a whole was extremely profitable.
by sixtyj | 2025-10-21 19:13:59+00:00
The difference between openAI and Google is that openAI has only 2 percent of customers paying for their service and bleeding financially - so theoretically they will run out of money one day when investors lose patience. Google, on the other hand, is a 25+ year old company that has a range of products; so it will very likely stand up to this, even if some of it is not profitable. And we'll always need search in that flood of data.
by nucleardog | 2025-10-21 19:14:03+00:00
To be clear, I'm not advocating for this or trying to suggest it's a good thing. That's just reality as I see it.

If my site's offline at the same time as the BBC has front page articles about how AWS is down and it's broken half the internet... it makes it _really_ easy for me to avoid blame without actually addressing the problem.

I don't need to deflect blame from my customers. Chances are they've already run into several other broken services today, they've seen news articles about it, and all from third parties. By the time they notice my service is down, they probably won't even bother asking me about it.

I can definitely see this encouraging more centralization, yes.
by logifail | 2025-10-21 19:14:08+00:00
> I suspect that the introduction and then disappearance was worse than not introducing it at all

I'm not convinced that we understand the human immune system quite that well.

Speaking as someone with three kids and (sadly) quite the handful of apparently inherited medical conditions in the family.

As it stands we have:

* coeliac (me, plus two of the three kids... and the third kid already tested positive on the coeliac genetic test)

* childhood asthma (me, plus one of the three kids)

* severe allergies (me, plus two of the three kids)

No nut allergies, so far. We're still counting :/
by selfhoster11 | 2025-10-21 19:14:43+00:00
You're much better off accessing Llama 3 through a third party hoster. Some have a web UI if you don't want to deal with API calls. It's much more transparent this way, since you know that the only moderation layer/system prompt are coming directly from the model itself + what you set. Ask around on /r/LocalLlama, somebody will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-21 19:14:44+00:00
When I try to access sharepoint files in my browser, the site goes through 37 redirects (thanks single sign on) shows all the files, then despite me very obviously being fully authenticated, it pops up a modal that says "sign in to see files", and I click "Cancel" and then I get to actually interact with the files.

What?

Gee, who would have guessed this isn't secure.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-21 19:14:47+00:00
Boeing has been pretty blatant about just not caring about performance on SLS, because, by being legally required to keep funding it, there isn't really anything NASA can actually do to hold Boeing responsible for underperforming.

IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact reason.

SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so bad after all).
by mmooss | 2025-10-21 19:15:10+00:00
Post-truth means a couple of things to me:

It indicates that it's a follow-on to postmodernism. To a significant degree the post-truth era is built on a reactionary attack on postmodernism - you can see it on HN, where many people reflexively attack like a mob anything they perceive is postmodern. You can see it in so many people who will accept lies and disaster over postmodernism.

And post-truth is a postmodern term - ironic, ridiculing, makes you think, has some energy to it. How absurd to be literally //post-truth//.

> era of lies

That's a post-postmodern term. No irony or wit; a term of despair. :)
by internetter | 2025-10-21 19:15:15+00:00
> Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business?

Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? You will frequently see a 5k word article used for a couple of sentences in a Wikipedia page, with the entire Wikipedia page itself being smaller than one paper it cites for one small corner of said page. When I’m researching events, I frequently go to Wikipedia to find sources as search engines have a drastically larger recentism bias.

> Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and LLMs

No comparative research on this specific topic has been conducted afaik, and most comparative research is aging (likely, to Wikipedia’s own detriment–general consensus is that Wikipedia’s reliability has increased over time). However at the time of research publication, the consensus seems to be that Wikipedia is generally only slightly less reliable than peers in a given field (ie textbooks or británica), although Wikipedia is often less in depth. The most frequently cited study is a 2005 comparison in Nature which found 4 major errors in both Wikipedia and Británica, and 130 minor errors on Británica whereas 160 on Wikipedia. All studies are documented on Wikipedia itself, see [[Reliability of Wikipedia]]. LLMs… do not have this same reputation.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-10-21 19:15:30+00:00
I had Ubuntu Touch installed on an older OnePlus phone. It did everything, but they haven't figured out how to work with VoLTE. I considered just saying "screw it" and using it anyways, but then remembered that my Mum calls twice a week to chat me up so I went back.

But 100% you can still find alternatives, its just about how much stuff you wanna carry around with you right?
by m4rtink | 2025-10-21 19:15:57+00:00
Yeah, the atmosphere complicates things a bit during launch but much bigger issue is gravity - Earth having the highest gravity in the Solar System among solid surface bodies.

For landing hovever it makes things signifficantly easier! You can break full arrival speed from lunar or interplanetary space (successfully done by Apollo missions) with a relatively light passive heatshield & land on parachutes. You can even brek to orbit instead or use the atmosphere to change incliunation of your orbit and other tricks (there are proposals for air breathing ion engines, etc.).

Lack of sufficient atmosphere is what makes landing on Mercury (no atmosphere, need to break to zero using rcoket thrust) and Mars (enough atmosphere to break from arrival speed, not enough to use parashutes or gliders for a soft landing) so difficult .
by Simulacra | 2025-10-21 19:16:01+00:00
Isn't that what the movie Contact was about?

In all seriousness, I think if we did receive something, it would be classified immediately, and the government, or governments, will move very swiftly with a heavy hand to silence the discovery. At the very least until they know exactly what it is, what it is conveying, and how to respond.

That said, I think that if it got out, a lot of people would absolutely lose their snot. Completely. It would be chaos in some places.
by glenstein | 2025-10-21 19:16:08+00:00
>we'd actually benefit more from refocusing it into software (like it used to be).

Firefox was spending $40MM on software and development in 2009. Adjusted for inflation that would be ~ $60MM today. They're spending upwards of $262MM today. So they're spending more than quadruple what they used, to directly on software + development.
by eterm | 2025-10-21 19:16:22+00:00
They've managed to mess up sharepoint even worse lately.

I went there to try to find where company meetings got recorded to.

I went to my sharepoint bookmark, which weirdly is www.office.com after some previous nightmare rebrand.

Except what used to be the way into your sharepoint files, is now just a full page copilot screen with no hint of where the fuck your files are.

Even though you've been visiting this bookmark for years, to get to your sharepoint files.

Ok, so you search bing sign into sharepoint.

Top result is office.com . You ignore it.

Next result is:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/sign-in-to-sharep...

This links you to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/

Ok great. Nope! Redirects you back to copilot.

I do NOT want to ask copilot to dig out my files every time you want a file. I want to get back to the directory listing so I can find the directory listing to find the company meeting recording.

How does MS not understand that replacing all UX with copilot is not an improvement, and is not helping sell copilot.
by anon291 | 2025-10-21 19:16:59+00:00
That's because its post industrialized peers are failing states though. Assuming you are speaking of Europe, Japan and the anglosphere (Canada, Australia, and NZ), they are all having serious existential issues

The European countries cannot pay for their own defense and rely on America, thus their definition of even existing as nations is up for debate really. They're more like protectorates of the United States. If they actually had to pay for the defense resources they consume, they would quickly fail.

Canada is similar to a degree and while it is its own country, really depends on the US to protect its basic existence

Japan is dying as is Korea.

Australia and NZ maybe but they're having real economic trouble and are nothing to emulate.

Ironically it's the fact that our economy is forced to be large enough to pay for everyone else's defense that forces the economy into more inequality than there would be were America only responsible for its own sovereignty.

Basically, if other countries had robust economies that were strong enough to provide for its own defense, they would be as unequal as the United States since inequality happens as economies grow and the benefits are not shared.

If you can show me a real country that provides for its own defense and does not depend on America that is more equal then please. Off the top of my head there are really only a few countries that even meet the criteria of being independent states. Of those, Russia, China, and India are the only important ones. Maybe Iran. Literally none of these are countries to emulate. America has higher social mobility than all of them, which is what really matters, not the difference between the richest and poorest
by lukeschlather | 2025-10-21 19:17:02+00:00
I pay ChatGPT money and I have more confidence they've thought about XSS and what might happen with malicious payloads. I guess ChatGPT is less deterministic. Maybe you're right and I'm not paranoid enough, but I would prefer to use an offline tool (and using an LLM does seem worthwhile since it can do more, I can guess it's base64, the LLM can probably tell me if it's something more exotic, or if there's something within the base64 that's interesting. I can do that by hand but the LLM is probably going to tell me more about it faster than I can do it by hand. So it's worth the risk, while pasting it into base64decode.org doesn't seem worth the risk vs. something offline.)

If you think that there's obvious answers to what is and isn't safe here I think you're not paranoid enough. Everything carries risk and some of it depends on what I know; some tools might be more or less useful depending on what I know how to do with them, so your set of tools that are worth the risk are going to be different from mine.
by chermi | 2025-10-21 19:17:08+00:00
Shouldn't it be minimized? I think it's increasing on Wikipedia. I think there's too high of a barrier for actual experts to write/edit. What's left is primarily idealogues with a certain leanings resulting in a positive feedback loop to more bias. I don't think anyone should want an echo chamber where an encyclopedia is supposed to exist. It's not there yet, but this is exactly how they form - see reddit.

Yeah, yeah, let me guess, the truth has a liberal bias.

But continue to insist that everyone pointing should just move somewhere else, that will certainly make it less biased and more factual.
by stackskipton | 2025-10-21 19:17:18+00:00
As usual with all these types of posts, people go "HA HA, MICRO$OFT SUCKS" without understanding business practices that keep them afloat.

Don't use Exchange? Cool, what should we use instead? Does it support 15 people all the way up to 150000 people? I used to run Exchange cluster for 70k people, is there other mail software out there complete with non-shared disk redundancy? Where the users connect to single endpoint and software figures it out from there?

Sharepoint with another 2 RCEs. Not shocked, the software is terrible. However, it's only software that will stand up under load and let us shard it easily. All open-source software is one of those, runs fine in Homelab, likely falls down under load. Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free.

Finally, it's somewhat backwards compatible. Most businesses are filled with ancient software that no one has worked on in 20 years. That Excel document with Macros from 1997. With some registry changes degrading security posture, still works. I doubt you will find Office software with level of backwards compatibility unless they are using Microsoft Office level of compatibility.

Microsoft has real gordian knot here and few solutions besides "Backwards compatibility is OVER. Upgrade to modern or GTFO". Meanwhile, I get hit up by $ThreeJobsAgo over some Exchange Web Services solution I slapped together for them in Python they wanted me to upgrade to GraphAPI since Microsoft turned off Exchange Web Services in Office365.
by sokoloff | 2025-10-21 19:17:33+00:00
Whatever was implemented as this poorly-thought-through fail-safe would be implemented in the furnace itself, thus that furnace implementation could manage any safety-related concerns, though heating equipment is overwhelmingly rated to 100% duty cycle already. (My goal for my boiler is to have at least 22 hours per day of heating demand to ensure that I'm using the exact minimum temperature water to maintain temp in the house, to maximize efficiency.)
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-21 19:17:46+00:00
that's fair, I was kinda just inferring as someone whose space travel experience is limited to Kerbal Space Program. The point still stands though: whether it's atmo or gravity the moon has a lot less of it than the earth, but still has a lot more local resources and space to put things semi-permanently. Long distance slower than light space travel has a Sahara problem and at least in the solar system the same sol'n could be used: leapfrogging from cache to cache. The ISS is a better cache than the nothing that was there before it, but a functioning moon base would be an amazing cache from which to launch ops into the deep solar system.
by ianbicking | 2025-10-21 19:17:47+00:00
Oh, I got confused at first, I think it's writing the story out in Chinese on purpose as a kind of hidden state...? Clever approach. I can't tell what the background color shifts represent, and they are a bit abrupt, but I like the concept.

It's possible to have a more structured substrate to an LLM text adventure, though also a lot of work... I wrote up my own thoughts on an experiment here: https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure

The default with LLMs are more collaborative storytelling than what we'd normally call a "game", but I think there's some new game genre waiting to be discovered.
by mrob | 2025-10-21 19:17:51+00:00
As somebody who uses both, I personally think a rowing machine is better for general cardiovascular exercise than a bicycle. The work is better spread over your whole body instead of mostly the legs. You can get cheap ones with magnetic resistance that work fine for exercise purposes (the main advantage of more expensive rowing machines is more accurate simulation of rowing in a real boat).

Cycling is however a lot more interesting if you have somewhere good to ride.
by tadfisher | 2025-10-21 19:17:57+00:00
Correct, there are several aspects to voting that blockchains don't address:

- The Human Identification Problem (not sure if there is a more official name): uniquely identifying a human being. If you solve this, you solve many forms of fraud (anything rooted in identity fraud) and eliminate entire industries dedicated to reducing fraud losses. Best attempt so far has been the Estonian ID system [0]; Sam Altman tried with Worldcoin but that ended up being yet another crypto grift. Incidentally, Estonia uses its identity system for electronic voting.

- Proof of citizenship; citizenship in the US for most people is a birth certificate issued by a hospital or other authority several decades ago, or a proxy to this document such as a passport. Naturalized citizens have it easier here because they have a state-issued document declaring their citizenship.

- Proof of residence: This is also something not verifiable via a blockchain or smart contract, because it depends on the state and relies in part on your physical location and your intent. Legally you can only vote from one voting address, but there are countless people registered with multiple addresses across states as they move residences.

- Secret ballots: You cannot tie votes back to voters in a free election. Blockchains are open and publicly-verifiable, which is good; but cast ballots cannot be verified _even by the voter_. Blockchain doesn't bring anything to the table here over, say, a database; because the recorded ballots must not be tied back to human identities, you cannot use any of the work done to verify the three previous points to verify the election outcome. Blockchain would boil down to replacing or augmenting paper ballots with a provably immutable record, where you still need to place trust in the system recording votes on the chain.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
by BizarroLand | 2025-10-21 19:18:33+00:00
HP Fury laptops have a metal shell, 16" or 18" screen and the cheapest one comes with an 8gb Blackwell P1000 for about $2600.

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-zbook-fury-g1i-16-inch-...

Also, you should never be paying the MSRP unless you're getting a kickback. Your employer may be stupid but that is not the default.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-21 19:19:10+00:00
> And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.

What signs? Projects like LIGO that measure gravitational waves are still measuring cataclysmic collisions of ultra massive bodies. Maybe once the detector is good enough to detect exoplanets and smaller objects we can start drawing some conclusions.

I don’t believe FTL is possible, but on the off chance that it is, we’d be so deep into technology-as-magic territory that any speculation on detectability is totally pointless.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-10-21 19:19:36+00:00
>It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them. That what OpenAI is trying to do with Sora, and with Codex, Apps, "Agent" flows, etc. I don't think there's more to read into it than that.

It makes them look desperate though. Nothing like starting tons of services at once to show you have a vision
by fragmede | 2025-10-21 19:19:43+00:00
Haha I mean if you’re asking for doomerism, I’ve got that too! Once robots can do it all, why keep any of the poors alive? Implement human breeding programs based on attractiveness and intelligence, and cull the rest. You know who don't riot? The dead. Once there's robot soldiers and baristas, everyone who's not super intelligent (but none of that autism) tall white and blonde, with blue eyes, is of no use to the overlords in this dystopian scenario, and is just a waste of resources. Better, then, to make it quick and painless for all of them. So they'll select "the good ones" among the poor to escape away on nuclear submarines, nuke the planet, get the rest of humanity to die off, then resurface once it's safe and repopulate the Earth in their own image. We're firmly in to writing science fiction now though, so we might as well add in a time machine and a cure for aging and bioengineering so I can have extra arms and also gills for breathing underwater.

If you want to go to conspiracies theory land, the world is already controlled by 100 families, or corporations, or the Jews or the lizard people. We’re all just toys for them to play with.

At the end of the day, you have three options and a choice to make: corporations, government, or billionaires. Which one are you going to throw your lot in with to survive the upcoming upheaval?
by mmooss | 2025-10-21 19:19:53+00:00
> Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business?

Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example, I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which likely you've never heard of.

> This is documented on Wikipedia itself

Maybe there's a little bias there? Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source?

I've heard that claim, but having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very much to me.

> LLMs… do not have this same reputation.

They don't with you, but many people obviously use them that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly with reality.
by raffael_de | 2025-10-21 19:19:54+00:00
you're making the mistake to assume that leaving the structure of the communication and game play to the LLM is the only option. the LLM just is a tool serving a specific purpose in the game play. the LLM cannot forget to query if the query/state-management task is simply an imperative step in a loop. it's not left to the LLM to remember it.
by klodolph | 2025-10-21 19:20:29+00:00
I agree but the article doesn’t explain why.

I’ve been using Magit at work because it’s what everyone uses, and it just does useful shit I need to do, like help me revert specific chunks from an old commit, or migrate chunks to a different branch, or whatever. Stuff that I know how to do in Git, but I’m tired and it turns out Magit is just a lot faster and more interactive.

I have a long history of hating Git UIs but somehow Magit is the one exception. I’ve done a lot of surgery on Git repos in the past so I’m no slouch on the command-line, Magit just lets me do it all faster.
by president_zippy | 2025-10-21 19:20:35+00:00
I don't think you understand the fundamental difference in motivation between you and most of us here. Most people here would rather be the CEO of a garage with a couple computers than an SVP at Amazon. Nobody needs Amazon to have a door desk.

Do you know why? It's because most programmers don't like being told what to do, let alone by people who are not programmers. Most people around here DESPISE corporate HR, and Amazon has it in spades.

As for the pyramid scheme comment, my reasoning is not only sound; it's Puget sound...

Amazon entices new grad hires with RSUs on a backloaded vesting schedule and then fires them very shortly before the vesting cliff. If "they should have read the fine print" is Amazon values, I think you need a new set of values.