MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Romario77 | 2025-10-15 15:45:42+00:00
you could make the same argument about humans - we run the cycle of "find food", "procreate", "find shelter" ...

Some people are better at it then others. The progress and development happens naturally because of natural selection (and is quite slow).

AI development is now driven by humans, but I don't see why it can't be done in a similar cycle with self-improvement baked in (and whatever other goals).

We saw this work with AI training itself in games like Chess or Go where it improved itself just by playing with itself and knowing the game rules.

You don't really need deep thoughts for the life to keep going - look at simple organisms like unicellular. They only try to reproduce and survive withing the environment they are in. It evolved into humans over time.

I don't see why similar thing can't happen when AI gets to be complex enough to just keep improving itself. It doesn't have some of the limitations that life has like being very fragile or needing to give birth. Because it's intelligently designed the iterations could be a lot faster and progress could be achieved in much shorter time compared to random mutations of life.
by atropoles | 2025-10-15 15:46:23+00:00
Unfortunately there is not much to name. Someone going by Xin Jia reached out to me over email saying they had seen some of my work and that they had something similar they were working on and asked if I'd like to meet to discuss. He sent me a calendly link to schedule a time. The start of the meeting was relatively normal. I introduced my background and some things I am interested in.

It became clear that it was a scam when I started asking about the project. He said they were a software consulting company mostly based out of China and Malaysia that was looking to expand into the US and that they focused on "backend, frontend, and AI development" which made no sense as I have no experience in any of those (my who wants to be hired post was about ML and scientific computing stuff). He said as part of my evaluation they were going to have me work on something for a client and that I would have to install some software so that one of their senior engineers could pair with me. At this point he also sent me their website and very pointedly showed me that his name was on there and this was real.

After that I left. I'll look for the site they sent me but I'd imagine it's probably down. It just looked like a generic corporate website.
by jncfhnb | 2025-10-15 15:46:26+00:00
That is more or less the concept I meant to evoke by updating an emotional state every tick. Emotions are in large part a subconscious system dynamic to organize wants and needs. Ours are vastly complicated under the hood but also kind of superficial and obvious in its expression.

To propose the dumbest possible thing: give it a hunger bar and desire for play. Less complex than a sims character. Still enough that an agent has a framework to engage in pattern matching and reasoning within its environment.

Bots are already pretty good at figuring out environment navigation to goal seek towards complex video game objectives. Give them an alternative goal to maximize certainty towards emotional homeostasis and the salience of sensory input changes because an emergent part of gradual reinforcement learning pattern recognition.

Edit: specifically I am saying do reinforcement learning on agents that can call LLMs themselves to provide reasoning. That’s how you get to AGI. Human minds are not brains. They’re systems driven by sensory and hormonal interactions. The brain does encoding and decoding, informational retrieval, and information manipulation. But the concept of you is genuinely your entire bodily system.

LLM-only approaches not part of a system loop framework ignore this important step. It’s NOT about raw intellectual power.
by IainIreland | 2025-10-15 15:46:32+00:00
One clear use case for GC in Rust is for implementing other languages (eg writing a JS engine). When people ask why SpiderMonkey hasn't been rewritten in Rust, one of the main technical blockers I generally bring up is that safe, ergonomic, performant GC in Rust still appears to be a major research project. ("It would be a whole lot of work" is another, less technical problem.)

For a variety of reasons I don't think this particular approach is a good fit for a JS engine, but it's still very good to see people chipping away at the design space.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-15 15:46:35+00:00
or a terminal

Here ya go: https://panic.com/prompt/

There have been terminal programs for the iPad since at least 2017, when I started using the one above.

As for "custom bespoke software," why would you try to run that on an iPad in the first place? My company has plenty custom in-house programs, but I don't complain that they won't run on a toaster, or a Commodore 64, or a Cray. That's like saying you won't buy a speedboat because it can't carry all the iron ore that your company's dump truck can haul. It just makes no sense.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-15 15:46:38+00:00
Your assertion is underpinned by a false equivalence between scale and efficiency that does not hold in reality.

A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-15 15:46:41+00:00
What LLM programs do has zero resemblance to the human agency. That's just a modern variation of very complex set of GoTos and IfElses. Agency would be an LLM parsing your question and answering you "fuck off". Now that is agency, that is independent decision making, not programmed in advance and triggered by keywords. Just an example.
by jraph | 2025-10-15 15:46:42+00:00
> It's not a viable business model.

> You can do it obviously, but it's effectively just a different way of soliciting donations at that point; the fair market value of the software is ~$0

It is a viable business model. At XWiki SAS¹, they do this for their "Pro apps" [1] which are paid extensions for XWiki targeted to businesses and that are free software (under the LGPLv2 license) with license checks.

Businesses won't bother removing the license checks, it's easy enough to pay, and far easier than donating.

It is not XWiki SAS's only business strategy nor the one that brings the most money, but still, that's not a possibility to discard too fast.

You can also find paid open source Android apps on the Play store, and people (individuals!) will totally pay for them even if you can have them for free from F-Droid, like OsmAnd+ [2] or Conversations [3].

[1] https://store.xwiki.com/

[2] https://osmand.net/

[3] https://conversations.im/

¹ I work for them
by drcongo | 2025-10-15 15:46:56+00:00
I specifically use my iPad for the music because it's not the MBP I spend all day on for work. I'm sure there's music stuff that would be much easier to achieve on the laptop than the iPad, but the second I open my laptop I'm basically on-call and the distractions too great - the separation helps.

Do agree with the ergonomics point though - it can be hard to spend a lot of time actually working on it.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-10-15 15:47:03+00:00
> Literally untrue for variable mortgages that are now the rule.

This is incorrect. 92% of US mortgages are fixed-rate [1].

> Then if the house goes up in price and you sell it, old and depreciated,

How can a house go up in price and become depreciated? If your home value goes up and you need to make repairs to it, you can take out a loan on the surplus value of your home also known as a reverse mortgage.

> You never mentioned anything about the income curves by decile - inflation is a redistribution tool, it results in increasing income inequality which we observe. I gave you the explanation for that correlation.

Yes this is largely because lower income deciles tend to hold more cash than assets [2] and inflation affects the purchasing power of cash directly while asset prices are "secured" by the value of the asset itself. Because the richer tend to hold more in assets they eat less impact with inflation.

Now that home ownership rates are so low among folks younger than 40, a big source of inflation-decoupled assets is unavailable. Though there's a greater question around whether it's even possible for homes to both appreciate and be affordable at the same time.

Honestly this discussion could use more sources and less pontificating.

[1]: https://fortune.com/article/current-arm-mortgage-rates-09-22...

[2]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/october-2023-cha...
by matthew-wegner | 2025-10-15 15:47:10+00:00
> You're not able to virtualize the build machines.

Sure you can. And officially, too. Apple still ships a bunch of virtualization drivers in macOS itself. Have a look:

/System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleVmxnet3Ethernet.kext

Whether or not you're using ESXi, or want to, is an entirely different question. But "you're not able to" is simply incorrect. I virtualize several build agents and have for years with no issues.

macOS 26 is the last major version to support Intel, so once macOS 28 is latest this will probably become impossible (macOS 26 should be able to use Xcode 27, but maybe the platform removal will change this previous year's OS support from continuing).
by jmull | 2025-10-15 15:47:25+00:00
So silly.

Of course humans are (by far) the source of the biggest problems humans face.

The argument here is that since humans are the scariest, we should ignore problems AI might cause.

Pure nonsense, since (1) AI is human-created — so just another piece of what makes us scary; (2) this kind of binary thinking makes no sense anyway — as if there can’t be multiple things to be concerned with.

> Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is trying to distract you.

A particularly poor bit of argumentation. Barely above sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, “Blah, blah, blah! I can’t hear you!”

What is is about AI that makes people lose their minds?

edit: seeing the engagement this is getting, maybe it’s a false flag operation of sorts? Making such bad anti-ai arguments that the argument for ai gets stronger? That would at least make some sense.
by kelas | 2025-10-15 15:47:31+00:00
oh, gosh. sorry for your loss.

if you don't mind me asking, do you also remember the day when you wrote some non-trivial program in any language and it "worked" the first time, whatever that means (i presume "correctly")? what was the language? are you sure you've made a full recovery from that shock as well?

on a serious note, APL (and, by proxy, its descendants) invented REPL (dubbed "dialogue approach") long before the people who coined "REPL" even came to be. When that happened, C lanugage wasn't around either. Fortran was, granted, and sure enough it "worked" every time. you didn't even have to try, just punch it up on a punchcard, stick it in, wait a while. done. flawless.

on a closing note: writing correct programs takes skill and happens in iterations. the faster you can iterate, the faster you can justify your money's worth. the less you type, the more you think. less code less bug.

does that help?
by leshenka | 2025-10-15 15:47:41+00:00
I was very surprised, and pleasantly too, that Cyberpunk 2077 can maintain 60FPS (14", M4 Pro, 24gb RAM) with only occasional dips. Not with full resolution (actually around FullHD), but at least without "frame generation". Turning frame generation on, it now can output 90-100 FPS depending on environment, but VSync is disabled so dips become way more noticeable.

It even has "for this mac" preset which is good enough that you don't need to tinker with settings to have decent experience.

The game is paused, almost like becomes "frozen" if it's not visible on screen which helps with battery (it can be in the background without any noticeable impact on battery and temperature). Overall way better experience than I expected.
by neogodless | 2025-10-15 15:47:46+00:00
I'm not a subject matter expert, but I do find it a little odd to read the second half of that. I'd expect, beyond development/debugging, there's certainly a phase of testing that requires hardware that matches your target system?

Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which is probably running Windows. Especially for consoles like XBOX One or newer, and PS4 or newer, which are essentially PCs. And then builds get passed off to a team that has the hardware.

Is anyone developing games for Windows on Apple hardware? Do they run Parallels and call it a day? How is the gaming performance? If the answers to those 3 questions are "yes, yes, great", then Apple supports PC game development better than they support Apple game development?
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-10-15 15:47:58+00:00
Turing machines have been universal as far as we have found. So while I acknowledge it’s possible, I would definitely not say it’s more likely that brains cannot be simulated by TMs. I would personally weight this as under 10%.

Of course it doesn’t speak to how challenging it will be to actually do that. And I don’t believe that LLMs are sufficient to reach AGI.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-15 15:48:09+00:00
Why doesn't ON CONFLICT(column_name) accept multiple arguments, i.e., multiple columns

One stupid workaround is combining multiple columns into one, with values separated by a space, for example. This works when each column value is always a string containing no spaces

Another stupid workaround, probably slower, might be to hash the multiple columns into a new column and use ON CONFLICT(newcolumn_name)
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-10-15 15:49:00+00:00
And in the last 48 hours, Steam peaked at 39.5M users online, providing a highly pessimistic lower-bound on how many PC gamers there are.

https://store.steampowered.com/stats/stats/

If you consider time zones (not every PC gamer is online at the same time), the fact that it's not the weekend, and other factors, I'd estimate the PC gaming audience is at least 100M.

Unfortunately, there's no possible way to get an exact number. There are multiple gaming PC manufacturers, not to mention how many gaming PCs are going to be built by hand. I'm part of a PC gaming community, and nearly 90% of us have a PC built by either themselves or a friend/family. https://pdxlan.net/lan-stats/
by bee_rider | 2025-10-15 15:49:00+00:00
I think my main mistake, which I agree is a legitimate mistake, was to write “the existing laws of physics.” It is definitely possible that our current understanding of the laws of physics is insufficient to build a brain.

Of course the actual underlying laws of the universe that we’re trying (unsuccessfully so far, it is a never ending process) to describe admit the existence of brains. But that is not what I said. Sorry for the error.
by hdseggbj | 2025-10-15 15:49:03+00:00
The distinction is irrelevant. No one thought the nukes would blow themselves up, but here we are on the precipice of destruction. We aren't going to bury ai in 20 story bunkers to protect llms.

Everyone knows the real evil are the people building the ai. We aren't afraid of agi we are afraid of Boston dynamics (aka Google). We are afraid of Bill gates, Sam altman, Jeff bezos, Larry Ellison and elon musk.

These are dangerous people. Their mind set. Their unstoppable lust for money and power. We are afraid of their ability to convince humans to do unspeakable things for this imaginary thing we call money.

With agi they don't have to persuade anyone with anything. There's not Even a human conscience to stop them. We know these folks have no conscience of their own. The world is still here because other people have them.

Agi won't have a conscience or the integrity to stop evil.

Human society is collapsing because Good people are doing nothing.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-15 15:49:30+00:00
Can you critique my understanding of his argument?

1. Any formal mathematical system (including computers) have true statements that cannot be proven within that system.

2. Humans can see the truth of some such unprovable statements.

Which is basically Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

Maybe a more ELI5

1. Computers follow set rules

2. Humans can create rules outside the system of rules in which they follow

Is number 2 an accurate portrayal? It seems rather suspicious. It seems more likely that we just havent been able to fully express the rules under which humans operate.
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-10-15 15:49:30+00:00
I use AVP every day for work. I spend 8+ hours a day wearing the thing. It's amazing the screen real estate you get when you share your Mac screen. It's terrible that it's only one screen, but with good enough window (pun intended) management app, you can tile the windows/app inside this giant curved floating screen. That works for me because I always preferred using a single screen. It's possible to share a single desktop/window, but it's not officially supported. Sometimes the screen sharing bugs out and, instead of gigantic curved screen, I get a tiny small app/window. If someone is interested in looking into this, this happens (sometimes) when, instead of starting the screen sharing from AVP, you share (mirror) the screen from Mac display/mirroring settings.
by simonw | 2025-10-15 15:49:41+00:00
No.

In the USA it's actually not legal for companies to pay for promotional content like this without disclosure. Here's the FTC's FAQ about that: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

(It's pretty weird to me how much this comes up - there's this cynical idea that nobody would possibly write at length about how they're using these tools for their own work unless they were a paid shill.)
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-15 15:49:54+00:00
I don't think that is true either. There have been despots throughout all of human history that have killed huge amounts of people with technology that is considered primitive now.

Whereas much of the technology we have today has a massive positive benefit. Simply access to information today is amazing, I have learned how to fix my own vehicles, bicycles and do house repairs from simply YouTube.

As I said being cynical is being intellectually lazy because it allows you to focus on the negatives and dismiss the positives.
by nyeah | 2025-10-15 15:49:55+00:00
This is pleasant to read, but it's missing a logical step. We are great at dealing with the stuff we evolved to deal with. Sure.

But anything outside that evolutionary process? Who knows? For example we don't do so good on top of Mt Everest. We seem to have totally unsolved problems with refined opiates. Even computer games can be a trap.

Agentic AI? Who knows?
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-15 15:50:01+00:00
They do produce movies. I think comparing them to producing addictives to keep a mafia and money washing system operating is a bit disingenuous. I also think movies in general do not remove your ability to form clean thoughts, having goals in life and invoke hallucinations and make you paranoid.

Maybe I shouldn't have used a bunch of euphemisms that sound ridiculous when taken literally.
by 1-more | 2025-10-15 15:50:04+00:00
My relaxing on the couch creative activity is writing code in compiled languages, running a server, and seeing it go in the browser. This is impossible on an iPad.

There are many other creative workflows possible on an iPad, but I'm not really interested in getting good at those when I have the one that I'm already working on, you know?

And I own exclusively Apple hardware; I'm not some contrarian anti Apple fanboy, I promise.
by nostrademons | 2025-10-15 15:50:09+00:00
But there's also a big difference between 18 months and 4 years.

There are definitely preschools in Silicon Valley where the kids are reading chapter books by 4. We chose not to send our kids to one (we don't want them to miss out on play and socialization for academics), but we have a few friends that have sent their kids there.
by dismalaf | 2025-10-15 15:50:18+00:00
I mean, trash is subjective. Certainly a lot of abandoned gems. Case in point, for one project, I needed to pull some financial data. So used an unofficial gem for that provider. It was a mess of spaghetti and object patterns for what could have been simply a few helpers, also dependencies that clashed with another gem I was using so I simply replicated the functionality myself in like, 100 lines of code.

Btw, still worth it because Ruby is an amazing language and Rails is great. Just can't blindly trust other people's code.
by jerf | 2025-10-15 15:50:33+00:00
There's the old story about Charles Babbage and his not understanding how you can feed garbage to a computer and people will believe the output, but in a sense it goes deeper than that; put a number in front of someone and I think a good 75% of the population at least will simply believe it. Not only believe it, but if someone comes along 15 seconds later with a different number, they'll argue with the new guy, even though in a parallel universe where the second guy got there first they'd have argued equally vociferously with the first guy! When objectively they have no real basis for either number, or any other.

I can also say that with every passing year I see that when the Bible talks about people who love lies it's a lot less metaphorical than I thought it was when I was younger. The stories in this very thread about managers demanding that the original, bot-inflated numbers be put back up on their internal metrics rather than have the correct and accurate one is just an example, and one particularly vivid and easy to see.

Though there is also a business opportunity there... I am also reminded of one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons where the boss is viewing a defective spreadsheet that has a higher profit for the year the farther down he scrolls into it. Why not just multiply your click stats by e^(number of months since start / 20) or so? I mean, if the click counts don't have to match any particular reality, go for the gusto.
by garciasn | 2025-10-15 15:50:39+00:00
In my extensive experience, you take irrefutable evidence back to the ad platforms and they provide 'make goods' after the fact for those fraudulent visitors.

The entire premise of the article is quite accurate and most companies are spending money on third-parties to do what this guy has done to recoup fraudulent spends; so, none of this is new to the industry. Everyone knows it's happening and it's all part of the gig; it benefits everyone except those spending so little is truly done to correct it.
by coldtea | 2025-10-15 15:50:47+00:00
>The OS also has weird rough edges when used from the terminal - there are read-only parts, there are restrictions on loading libraries, multiple utilities come with very old versions or BSD versions with different flags than the GNU ones you might be used to coming from Linux, the package manager is pretty terrible.

You use nix or brew (or something like MacPorts).

And they are mighty fine.

You shouldn't be concerned with the built-in utilities.