MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by camel-cdr | 2025-10-28 16:42:37+00:00
> nobody had figured out any downsides to PCG's yet

BTW, people have broken PCG already: https://hal.science/hal-02700791/file/main.pdf

It takes up to 20000 CPU hours to break the seed from 512 output bits with an unknown state, increment and multiplier. (the multiplier is usually fixed constant)
by phatfish | 2025-10-28 16:43:07+00:00
Nokia never executed on a touch screen OS. If i remember their final attempt with a Linux based OS was considered "good", but it was too little, too late. It was already over when they were scooped up by Microsoft, who were desperate themselves.

Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.
by js2 | 2025-10-28 16:43:19+00:00
The only thing that works for me is DIY tips.

I buy Comply 600 Core Series (size medium), tear the comply foam off the plastic tube, then place the foam around the Apple silicone tips (size large).

None of the Apple tips on their own seal correctly, nor do any of the numerous third-party tips that I've tried, including hybrid silicone/foam tips.

I get about 6 months out of the foam and they fit in the charging case modified like this.
by tonymet | 2025-10-28 16:43:20+00:00
We suddenly woke up in the Kafka-esque purgatory of critical American healthcare billing. We’re in our 50s and had been perfectly healthy, then suddenly we got diagnosed with what will be over $500k in treatment over the next 12 months— and multiple millions for the foreseeable future. We have insurance, but many of the required procedures are “out of network” and there’s no way to tell (we have “the best” insurance, supposedly). Even with insurance it will be at least $50k/yr out of pocket

But the raw numbers like $200k for this poor gentleman’s heart attack or $500k aren’t the most alarming. It’s the Terry-Gilliam-level of absurdity of the billing process. Absolutely no one will tell you how much things are, and when you ask, they sass you that it is a ridiculous question. Even though one of my providers just recently started offering estimates, those are off by 100-200% , and completely missing for about half of what has been ordered.

We are both very strong accountants, and despite trying to do audits of these services, it’s impossible. There are 3-4 levels of referred services, bundled codes, nested codes, complication / technical / professional codes , exceptional status codes . Providers overbill, double bill. On accident and on purpose. When we call to get it corrected there is no way to make corrections.

You’ll be asked to take a diagnostic not knowing whether it will cost $10 or $15000 . Even if you try to be responsible and call the provider (who isn’t your doctor, clinic, or hospital ) – they won’t be able to tell you.

The point I’m trying to make isn’t to make you sympathetic. It’s to reinforce in all of the great technical minds here that healthcare billing is the most complicated spaghetti code cluster flock of a system that you’ve ever imagined. It’s far worse than any piece of software you’ve ever seen. And we all just accept the bills and pay them.

Supply and demand and finding a better vendor doesn’t work. There are some rare exceptions like elective MRIs – but those aren’t the norm. Nearly every service is something time sensitive or your disease will get significantly worse. Moreover, signing up a new provider has $1000+ in billing and a few hours in paperwork to make the transfer. is it worth saving $500 for one MRI when $250k worth of services are unaccountable?

The only thing I’m sure of is that there has to be tremendous amounts of incidental and deliberate corruption . Auditing a single patient’s billing is impossible – so a population’s worth is a goldmine .
by sylware | 2025-10-28 16:43:45+00:00
proton/wine has no official technical support hence illegal in tons of countries.

Since proton/wine is unreliable in time, this is a disaster.

And there is a lot of BS around that: if some devs support their game on elf/linux via proton, they will have to QA it on a linux system anyway, so it does not change that much, even less with a game engine which has everything linux already... it only add the ultra-heavy-complex and then bug inducing proton/wine layer... an horrible mess to debug. One unfortunate patch, proton/wine side or game side, and compat is gone, and you are toast... and those patches do happen.

Conclusion: the only sane way is PROTON = 0 BUCKS.

I play only F2P games with proton (mostly gachas), no way I'll pay bucks for a game without technical support.

Valve should allow to pay games _only_ for the games with official elf/linux/proton support (aka the game devs do QA on elf/linux with valve proton... which would be no better than stupid if their game engine has elf/linux support already in). Why not let elf/linux users play all games which do not have official elf/linux support for free, well, those which run, and run decently, and until an unfortunate patch...
by aconbuilds | 2025-10-28 16:43:46+00:00
I've spent 2 years implementing AI across Fortune 500 companies. The most important pattern I've observed: the same AI tool in the same role produces opposite outcomes depending on how people use it.

One person's prompts get vaguer over time, they ship first outputs without refinement, they forget how to do the work. They're being replaced.

Another person's prompts get more sophisticated, they refine outputs with domain expertise, they document what AI misses. They're being augmented.

The technology isn't making that choice. The users are, often without realizing it.

The debate is stuck asking "will AI replace us OR augment us?" The answer is "and" – both are happening right now in the same organizations.
by scottbez1 | 2025-10-28 16:44:08+00:00
Dropbox recently broke (accidentally or intentionally) hosted images/thumbnails from their Paper docs product (which they're quietly but noncommittally killing off) and that was a good wakeup for me to stop trusting hosted storage. And I'm saying this as a former Dropbox engineer of ~6 years who has plenty of free Dropbox storage for life. The brain drain and profitability crunch is real.

Recently bought a 14TB HDD and downloaded my entire Dropbox, Google Photos, and Lightroom photos. Planning to set up an off-site copy as well, and will probably build out a proper NAS within a few years.
by tinco | 2025-10-28 16:44:12+00:00
Yeah no, it's just not how it works. They're trying to support fundamental research and they have limited resources to accomplish them. Some random dude who wants to build a company that generates pretty AI pictures is just not the target audience, and he rightly got rejected.

And frankly, the dream scenario that Pieter describes where he somehow would qualify for these resources also wouldn't help kickstart the tech industry, and it's also not how it works in the states.

What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US. Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
by plastic3169 | 2025-10-28 16:44:19+00:00
I recommend the book and the new research. It reflects on the rat park study and makes what I think are good arguments that addiction is not a simple thing we can fix only by fixing the enviroment even though it is part of it. OP was asking for evidence so I thought I’d chip in with a modern source. There are no socities that have solved addiction. Obviously it is a gnarly problem.
by ferguess_k | 2025-10-28 16:44:25+00:00
> No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.

If this is true then why your wife is going to be happy about it? I found it really hard to understand. Do you prefer your wife to be jobless and her employer happily cut costs without impacting productivity? Even if it just replaces the line workers, do you think your wife is going to be safe?

I don't get it.
by kwanbix | 2025-10-28 16:44:26+00:00
Having lived in Europe 10 years (I am from south America), it is crazy that the rest of the world doesn't follow Europe's health coverage: everybody is covered, all the time, you can be covered either by public insurance (was my case) or private. There are no preconditions. Kids get covered for almost everything up until they are 18 or 21 (don't remember), drugs for adults is only 5 euro each. No matter the cost. And it just works.

By the way, Private is cheaper when you are younger, gets more expensive when you are older. So if you choose private, under very phew circumstances you can switch to Public.

In the other side, you have the US health care which is probably one of the worst in the world. Crazy.
by CodesInChaos | 2025-10-28 16:44:40+00:00
For me SQL feels like PHP. Sure it's usable, but it doesn't spark joy.

Syntactically PRQL is much simpler, cleaner and more flexible. You simply chain pipeline stages instead of having a single monolithic query statement.

Data model wise EdgeQL is close to what I want (links instead of joins, optionality instead of null, nesting support), but it's syntax is almost as bad as SQL.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-28 16:44:44+00:00
It's possible. Systems like the AMD AI Max 395+ with 128GB RAM thing get close to being able to run good coding models at reasonable speeds from what I hear. But, no, I'm given to understand they couldn't run e.e. the DeepSeek 3.2 model full size because there simply isn't enough GPU RAM still.

To build out a system that can, I'd imagine you're looking at what... $20k, $30k? And then that's a machine that is basically for one customer -- meanwhile a Claude Code Max or Codex Pro is $200 USD a month.

The math doesn't add up.

And once it does add up, and these models can be reasonable run on lower end hardware... then the moat ceases to exist and there'll be dozens of providers. So the valuation of e.g. Anthropic makes little sense to me.

Like I said, I'm using the Claude Code tool/front-end pointing against the page-per-use DeepSeek platform API, it costs a fraction of what Anthropic is charging, and feels to me like the quality is about 80% there... So ...
by ModernMech | 2025-10-28 16:44:51+00:00
> where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field?

I won't say they are particularly effective, but the group behind the LIVE workshop is at least self-aware enough to try and build things that neurotypical people might use. There binding force in that group is best expressed by Jonathan Edwards (author of subtext) when he said something along the lines of "most programming languages are built by high functioning autists for high functioning autists", the upshot being if we want more people to be able to use programming languages they will probably have to pay more attention to usability and alternative representations.

I think Bret Victor does a good job with this "seeing spaces" in the form of Dynamics Land: https://dynamicland.org

Also the Logo programming language was a good example of designing a language for where the users are, where in that case the users were gradeschool children. Obviously children can't build programming languages for themselves, so they used cognitive development principles to design a language which was approachable given their cognitive abilities as 7 year olds.
by mwigdahl | 2025-10-28 16:45:01+00:00
This is solely my own anecdote, but I used to get bad seasonal depression every winter. I tried a number of interventions short of medication; none moved the needle very much. I started supplementing with vitamin D probably 8 years ago and haven't had any issues with seasonal depression since.

I'm pretty personally convinced that it was the supplements that helped here.
by torginus | 2025-10-28 16:45:12+00:00
That is a staggering number - if an engineer makes $100k per year, and let's say OpenAI can do a 20% profit margin on running an engineer-equivalent agent, that means it needs $600B profit or 6 million fully-equivalent engineer years.

I think you can rebuild human civilization with that.

I feel like replacing highly skilled human labor hardly makes financial sense, if it costs that much.
by harrall | 2025-10-28 16:45:22+00:00
I’m not sure there is regulatory capture at play necessarily.

I notice regular doctors and dentists do this too. They’ll bill my insurance for extras in case they’ll pay and when insurance says no, the doctor doesn’t bill me either.

Everyone is just trying to suck the most money out of everyone else. It sucks if you’re self-pay because you don’t have the weight of a whole company to do that due diligence for you.
by matwood | 2025-10-28 16:45:28+00:00
Same. I've been on a number of long haul flights since getting my 3's and they have been great. They do fit very different than the 2's, and took me a few hours to get used to them.

I understand though that not everyone wins the ear hole lottery. For some the 2s may fit better than the 3's and vice versa. It's interesting to me that Apple made such a large fit change without considering 2's are simply better for some people fit wise.
by watwut | 2025-10-28 16:45:52+00:00
The article is using weird definition of "weird".

I do not remember high school students drinking alcohol being "weird". It was basically "normal". Most adults would pretend they do not see it, fair amount of them even facilitated it. It was only when things got noisy and too visible the rule was used.

Moving away was weird in America? I perceived economic mobility as something Americans were proud of and seen as superior over nations more likely to stay. It was not weird to move away, it was the expected action for quite a lot of people.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-28 16:46:21+00:00
This sounds quite similar to Amazon Ion which is one of the few binary JSON formats that allows sparse reads, and deduplicated keys.

However I found that in cases where you have the requirements of streaming/random access and every entry is the same... SQLite is a really great choice. It's way faster and more space efficient than it has any right to be, and it gets you proper random access (not just efficient streaming), and there are nice GUIs for it. And you can query it.
by drysart | 2025-10-28 16:46:26+00:00
That's a truism in general. If you're liberal in what you accept, then the allowances you make effectively become part of your protocol specification; and if you hope for interoperability, then everyone has to be follow the same protocol specification which now has to include all of those unofficial allowances you (and other implementors) have paved the road to hell with. If that's not the case, then you don't really have compatible services, you just have services that coincidentally happen to work the same way sometimes, and fail other times in possibly spectacular ways.

I have always been a proponent for the exact opposite of Postel's law: If it's important for a service to be accommodating in what it accepts, then those accommodations should be explicit in the written spec. Services MUST NOT be liberal in what they accept; they should start from the position of accepting nothing at all, and then only begrudgingly accept inputs the spec tells them they have to, and never more than that.

HTML eventually found its way there after wandering blindly in the wilderness for a decade and dragging all of us behind it kicking and screaming the entire time; but at least it got there in the end.
by BurningFrog | 2025-10-28 16:46:35+00:00
In real life tradeoffs always have to be made, and some of them are tough for the public to know about.

The classic case is road construction. Road design A will cost $120M and 3 people per decade will die. Design B costs $180M and kills 2 people per decade. Which one do you build?

The USDOT uses $13.7M as the "Valuation of a Statistical Life": https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
by noamteyssier | 2025-10-28 16:47:10+00:00
Yes you're right, it's not trying to do what `sort` is doing, it's trying to reproduce the output of `sort | uniq -c | sort -n` which is a more specialized but common task.

But you're right - it will be limited by RAM in a way the unix tools are not.

I did add a test with sort using a larger buffer size to the benchmarks as well.
by parliament32 | 2025-10-28 16:47:10+00:00
AGI is pretty clearly defined here: https://openai.com/charter/

> OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.

So, can you (and everyone you know) be replaced at work by a subscription yet? If not, it's not AGI I guess.
by tmuhlestein | 2025-10-28 16:47:14+00:00
Smarter AI Starts with Consensus

The next frontier in AI isn’t about bigger models — it’s about smarter collaboration.

At GoDaddy, we’re exploring Consensus of LLMs (CoL) — an orchestration approach that brings multiple Large Language Models together to reach agreement before producing an answer.

By combining diverse perspectives from different models — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and others — CoL helps us:

• Reduce hallucinations in AI-generated outputs • Increase factual accuracy and transparency • Make AI safer for real-world, high-stakes business decisions

From customer support bots to security guidance and website content creation, this approach is making AI more reliable, explainable, and aligned with customer trust.

Read more from Jay Gowdy on how GoDaddy is pioneering trustworthy AI at scale: Consensus of LLMs: Scaling Accuracy Beyond a Single Model https://www.godaddy.com/resources/news/consensus-of-llms-sca...

Curious to hear from the AI community: could consensus between models be the key to more trustworthy systems? Share your thoughts — we’d love to continue the conversation.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-10-28 16:47:16+00:00
> Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.

I'm not debating that. I have no moral issue with shooting a clay duck, I just see using explosives to shoot anything as an act of violence. I would say the same about fishing and archery. There seems to be some confusion here about the moral aspect of this, I'm not saying it's anti-social or anything like that, only that the use of guns is inherently violent.
by Marshferm | 2025-10-28 16:47:19+00:00
The transition from burning bush to UFO to UAP...

I wonder of we modernized our relationship to phenomena in technology and shift from spectral beings to extraterrestrial beings as a built-in problem of explanations, based in some simplistic reliance of cause and effect.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X2...
by pogue | 2025-10-28 16:47:25+00:00
There MUST be consequences for data breaches. It simply can't go on like this. There have to be rules & regulations for how personal data is stored.

How many of you have received notices in the mail your data has been leaked and the only restitution is a free year long credit check? Then maybe a few years down the road you get $20 from a class action lawsuit.

Last year alone, both AT&T and my health care company were breached and all my data was leaked, including details of my personal medical history.

This kind of thing just can't continue. There has to be someone to set standards for how your personal and "private" information is stored or it won't be possible to know who is who going forward in the future. Even state DMV's have been breached.[1] Imagine a point in the future where identity theft has become so rampant that a US ID card or passport can't be trusted because anyone anywhere at anytime can steal another person's identity with ease because everyone's data is out there and available for purchase through some black market.

It's a dystopian thought, but a lot of things from dystopian fiction that I only thought would continue to be fiction seem to be coming to pass on a regular basis these days.

[1] Account compromise leads to crash records data breach https://www.txdot.gov/about/newsroom/statewide/account-compr...
by daveguy | 2025-10-28 16:47:32+00:00
> I think with ARC-AGI 2 this was the kind of compute budget they spent to get their models to perform on a human-ish level.

It was ARC-AGI-1 that they used extreme computing budgets to get to human-ish level performance. With ARC-AGI-2 they haven't gotten past ~30% correct. The average human performance is ~65% for ARC-AGI-2, and a human panel gets 100% (because humans understand logical arguments rather than simply exclaiming "you're absolutely right!").
Show HN: EchoStack – Deployable Voice-AI Playbooks (p95 < 300 ms)
by solomonayoola | 2025-10-28 16:47:48+00:00
Hi everyone — I’ve been working on EchoStack, a project that turns Voice-AI playbooks into deployable solutions for real business outcomes (e.g. After-hours Answering, Lead Qualification → Auto-Booking).

Why?

After building real-time apps in fintech and healthcare, I noticed that most “AI voice” projects never make it to production — not because the models are weak, but because latency, integrations, and rollout safety are under-engineered.

Most teams can make a demo; very few can keep it stable under 250–300 ms p95 barge-in latency.

EchoStack is an attempt to codify what production actually requires — including latency budgets, configuration blueprints, and a controlled deployment workflow.

What it does?

Each “playbook” is a deployable Voice-AI setup that includes:

Preflight → Plan → Apply (Blue) → Smoke test → Switch (Green) → Rollback

Latency-audited pipelines (ASR, LLM, TTS budgeted at p95 < 300 ms)

Exportable configurations for no-code and code-based integrations

KPI tiles for outcomes (AHT, bookings, self-serve rate)

Two early examples:

After-hours Answering — handles missed calls, FAQs, and escalations

Lead Qualifier → Auto-Book — filters inbound leads and books meetings automatically

Status

Early Access only — no public demo yet. We’re currently validating latency budgets, rollout safety, and adapter design (CRM, telephony, calendar).

Feedback I’d love

Are these latency targets realistic in your experience?

How do you test reliability in real-time LLM pipelines?

What signals do you track before rolling out voice changes to prod?

Full details: https://getechostack.com/playbooks
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-28 16:47:51+00:00
>I don't think Cook is into cost cutting.

Check the box contents of the first iPhone versus the latest iPhone.

>4. Burnt $5B on Apple Park; Original budget was $1B

Apple Park started under Steve Jobs.

>5. And, so many other research areas.

Their research is also mostly to cut costs. Develop a modem, not to sell modems and beat Qualcomm on the market, but to stop giving Qualcomm money and keep it for themselves as extra margins. Etc.
by ianbutler | 2025-10-28 16:48:15+00:00
Others are saying the end of leaded gasoline, I’ll add that around 2008 when the trend accelerates schools started becoming more locked down and consequences for being a kid can now follow you into adulthood much easier due to social media.

I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.

You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.