MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by overfeed | 2025-10-17 18:15:31+00:00
> How are ICEs quieter than EVs? Are you talking about the artificial noise EVs put out at low speeds so they don't sneak up on people?

I think your second sentence answers your first. Car noise = tire noise + motor noise. EVs have very low motor noise compared to IC.

EVs also tend to have better cabin dampening on average, but that likely has to do with price-band consumer expectations, and not inherent to the method of propulsion.
by chasd00 | 2025-10-17 18:15:50+00:00
> do not imagine you'll keep it long term or hand it off to a kid or whatever.

i don't agree, my friend has been driving the same Toyota LandCruiser for 20 years. I will have no problems handing my 2016 4runner down to my kid who turns 16 this December. The 4runner will last another 10 years easy.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-10-17 18:15:57+00:00
I don't know if it's possible to ever be completely free of outside influence. If anything, I think standards for publishing have become so low that any incentive model that helps keep a majority of facts straight should be the goal. The loss of traditional publishing gatekeepers has just generated a lot of noise and in that noise non-mainstream viewpoints have thrived.
by fair_enough | 2025-10-17 18:16:00+00:00
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:

Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.

Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
by sdenton4 | 2025-10-17 18:17:35+00:00
I see a fair amount of bullshit in the LLM space though, where even cursory consideration would connect the methods back to well-known principles in ML (and even statistics!) to measure model quality and progress. There's a lot of 'woo, it's new! we don't know how to measure it exactly but we think it's groundbreaking!' which is simply wrong.

From where I sit, the generative models provide more flexibility but tend to underperform on any particular task relative to a targeted machine learning effort, once you actually do the work on comparative evaluation.
by gchamonlive | 2025-10-17 18:18:01+00:00
On the one hand if you police what people say and think you risk moderation being weponized into censorship. On the other hand if you don't you risk big corp weaponizing free speech into misinformation.

It's not a simple problem to solve, and it's not like having one problem is better than the other, because both devolve outside the boundaries of democracy.
by jacobolus | 2025-10-17 18:18:01+00:00
Altman recently said, in response to a question about the prospect of half of entry-level white-collar jobs being replaced by "AI" and college graduates being put out of work by it:

> “I mean in 2035, that, like, graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be, like, leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job, and feeling so bad for you and I that, like, we had to do this kind of, like, really boring old kind of work and everything is just better."

Which should be reassuring to anyone having trouble finding an entry-level job as an illustrator or copywriter or programmer or whatever.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-17 18:19:07+00:00
Legal e-bikes are not really capable of wheelie-ing using their power alone since they are limited to 750 watts.

These bikes are already illegal, so lets not introduce another silly regulation that adds expense and a point of failure just because teenagers do wheelies.

Also, teenagers doing wheelies on bicycles is not illegal, nor should it be. Let people have some fun!
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-17 18:19:10+00:00
You know you can disable that. It might be against the law though, and it isn't the EVs that demand noise, it is the society that demands them not to be silent killers. Even Hybrids have to make this noise when they are running on their electric drive trains.

But let's say ICEs were made as quiet, they would be demanded to make noise as well. Also, no one has done anything about tire noise yet, so at high speeds, EVs and ICEs are about the same.
by chaps | 2025-10-17 18:19:20+00:00
Friend, I'm not suggesting that at all. I could, though: in no way did you describe any of what you considered to be bad from them. You left it conclusory in such a way that leaves the reader (me) to try to fill the gaps in what you mean. Your aggressive tone doesn't leave much room. And personally, I would never feel confident in being sure that I understand the context of a conversation that I'm not invited to.

Everything you described, like I've said about 10 times now, is economically rooted. Donate to your local investigative nonprofit.
by immibis | 2025-10-17 18:19:32+00:00
None of this has any logical consistency, sorry. You weren't able to provide a rational argument for why using drugs is bad - only a circular one (it's bad because it's misuse; it's misuse because it's bad). I've heard this "nature of" and "natural law" line of argument before and it's very similar: strict heterosexuality is the nature of things because you said so despite all actual evidence to the contrary. There's no science experiment you can do to prove that, and many you can do to prove it wrong, but natural law proponents still insist it's true because they said so. "Natural law" / "nature of" is a meaningless word game.

Killing others is natural. That's a factual statement.

"I would define misuse of a drug by motivation (high or low) and by application (whether the dose fits the motivation)" is indecipherable, and therefore devoid of semantic content. It seems the war on drugs has created a problem of nobody knowing the slightest thing about drugs.
by bbor | 2025-10-17 18:19:33+00:00
How does this vindicate Penrose in any slight sense?? This is using "nanotubular" in the sense of "ultrathin membrane bridges" that serve as "long-range intercellular transport" for macro objects in the um range, NOT "polymers of tubulin" that "provide platforms for intracellular transport" with an inner diameter in the low nm range. (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule)

More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic).

IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun...

(More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)
by Noaidi | 2025-10-17 18:20:01+00:00
I agree, and I was about to post the same thing. The idea of quantum processes fueling consciousness is my latest obsession. Specifically because I have genetic polymorphisms in the DNM3 gene that help maintain the functionality of these microtubules.

https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry

And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.

Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain
by martin-t | 2025-10-17 18:20:14+00:00
The evolution of governance of online communities mirrors that of the real-world.

First, everyone did what they wanted. As conflict became more common, power hierarchies started to emerge. we're now at a stage where every place needs to be governed, yet its members have no influence over who does it.

I have online communities will transition into something resembling democracy where moderators are elected from members by members.

---

While HN is fairly lenient, moderators in pretty much all online spaces are effectively dictators, they are not elected and they cannot be removed by ordinary users, no matter how many disagree.

And of course, such positions attract people who want power for its own sake and who have agendas they want to push.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 18:20:18+00:00
> Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started

That is a fair point. Maybe where it went off the rails is when we (collectively) were able to tie attention directly to the stories, and optimize for that. An old school newspaper has a much looser connection between subscriber behavior and advertising choices.

> editorial–advertising firewall

This is a mechanism I am not familiar with, thanks for mentioning it. Now I need to go learn something new!
by rootnod3 | 2025-10-17 18:20:28+00:00
To be fair, as much as Rust macros are nice, it is a losing battle to go up against the Lisp macro system. Lisp might have its flaws, but macros in Lisp are second to none.

When to use them is a whole different story. But examples of macros I like are `when` and `unless`. Yes, simple, but they show a nice example of their power.

For more complicated once, love it or hate it, but the `loop` macro is probably THE prime example of a powerful macro.
by 9rx | 2025-10-17 18:20:44+00:00
People have always acted upon their (awful) ideas. In fact, the internet (DARPANET) itself was created as a tool to help combat exactly that. However, that is completely independent from what is emitted from a computer screen. To try to somehow bind them together is logically incoherent. Which technically-minded folks understand, but now that the technology has become so accessible that anyone can use it...
by saddington | 2025-10-17 18:21:15+00:00
i've been working on a small saas product helping folks figure out how to manage their social media accounts when they die. yeah. pretty esoteric, but, i'm a bit stuck at this point on how i should grow it. i don't want to pay money for ads and i don't want to have to pseo stuff or try to "hack" a subreddit. https://deathnote.ai
by hatmanstack | 2025-10-17 18:21:43+00:00
That's exactly what it is - formalizing and creating a standard induces efficiency. Along with things like AGENTS.md, it's all about standardization.

What bugs me: if we're optimizing for LLM efficiency, we should use structured schemas like JSON. I understand the thinking about Markdown being a happy medium between human/computer understanding but Markdown is non-deterministic for parsing. Highly structured data would be more reliable for programmatic consumption while still being readable.
by wk_end | 2025-10-17 18:21:45+00:00
TBH even as a native English speaker who grew up with them, I never realized that "cassettes" were (only) supposed to contain magnetic tape; I just internalized that audio and video tapes were "cassettes" and games came on "cartridges" (regardless of what Nintendo wanted us to call them). A Japanese audience was probably even less inclined to learn yet another loanword to preserve that technical distinction.
by andy_ppp | 2025-10-17 18:21:59+00:00
I think AI is great and extremely helpful but if you’ve been replaced already maybe you have more time now to make better code and decisions? If you think the AI output is good by default I think maybe that’s a problem. I think general intelligence is something other than what we have now, these systems are extremely bad at updating their knowledge and hopelessly at applying understanding from one area to another. For example self driving cars are still extremely brittle to the point of every city needing new and specific training - you can just take a car with controls on the opposite side to you and safely drive in another country.
by miladyincontrol | 2025-10-17 18:22:14+00:00
I think the general curation by some mods is less pushing some agenda, more just enabling the shitposters they're friends with at the cost of genuine discussion.

Least thats what happened with a scene I'm rather involved in, the threads in recent years became nothing but a cesspool of negativity and most people knew who was behind the constant drama. What people didnt expect was the leak revealed one of the mods was among the group constantly causing it.
by Yaina | 2025-10-17 18:22:17+00:00
I think what we're seeing, and what the article describes, are company leaders across industries reacting to the AI hype by saying "we need AI too!" not because they've identified a specific problem it can solve, but because they want to appear innovative or cut labor costs.

Right now, the market values saying you're doing AI more than actually delivering meaningful results.

Most leaders don't seem to view AI as a practical tool to improve a process, but as a marketing asset. And let’s be honest: we're not talking about the broad field of machine learning here, but mostly about integrating LLMs in some form.

So coming back to the revenue claims: Greenhouse (the job application platform) for example now has a button to improve your interview summary. Is it useful? Maybe. Will it drastically increase revenue? Probably not. Does it raise costs? Yes; because behind the scenes they’re likely paying OpenAI processing fees for each request.

This is emblematic of most AI integrations I've seen: minor customer benefits paired with higher operational costs.
by fsckboy | 2025-10-17 18:22:22+00:00
>Tangential point... rebrand to BEEFY server

idea for an ad campaign:

"mmm, beefy!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6ImwKMRq98&t=21s

i don't know how "worldwide" is the distribution of Chef "Boyardee" canned spaghetti (which today is not too good), but the founder's story is fairly interesting. He was a real Italian immigrant chef named Ettore Boiardi and he gets a lot of credit for originally evangelizing and popularizing "spaghetti" and "spaghetti sauce" in America when most people had never tried it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Boiardi

you know, "spaghetti code..."?
by mkbelieve | 2025-10-17 18:22:25+00:00
I don't understand how anyone can believe that we're near even a whiff of AGI when we barely understand what dreaming is, or how the human brain interacts with the quantum world. There are so many elements of human creativity that are still utterly hidden behind a wall that it makes me feel insane when an entire industry is convinced we're just magically going to have the answer soon.

The people heralding the emergence of AGI are doing little more than pushing Ponzi schemes along while simultaneously fueling vitriolic waves of hate and neo-luddism for a ground-breaking technology boom that could enhance everything about how we live our lives... if it doesn't get regulated into the ground due to the fear they're recklessly cooking up.
by patrickmay | 2025-10-17 18:22:34+00:00
This is the right framing. No site, including 4chan, is forcing their content on innocent Brits. The only way people in the UK see 4chan is by proactively establishing a connection to the site and requesting the download of data. Those users, not 4chan, are the active agents. If the UK government wants to control what its subjects request online, they should pass laws regulating that behavior.
by cootsnuck | 2025-10-17 18:22:47+00:00
Kinda. It's just an LLM that performs function calling (i.e. the LLM "decides" when a function needs to be called for a task and passes the appropriate function name and arguments for that function based on its context). So yea an "agent" is that LLM doing all of that and then your program that actually executes the function accordingly.

That's an "agent" at its simplest -- a LLM able to derive from natural language when it is contextually appropriate to call out to external "tools" (i.e. functions).
by tedunangst | 2025-10-17 18:22:50+00:00
That article is very confused. They're saying that transglutaminase, street name meat glue, extracted from bacteria is literally the same thing as pink slime. Lean finely textured beef, street name pink slime, comes from cows. However processed, it's still beef. You can't squeeze it out of bacteria.

Reading the Wikipedia articles it's pretty clear these are different things, even if both are added to beef in some way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transglutaminase
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-10-17 18:23:20+00:00
I wouldn’t say that any specific skill (like literacy) is required to have intelligence. It’s more the capability to learn skills and build a model of the world and the people in it using abstract reasoning.

Otherwise we would have to say that pre-literacy societies lacked intelligence, which would be silly since they are the ones that invented writing in the first place!
by sho_hn | 2025-10-17 18:23:34+00:00
Is there any indication they are actually working on this and Altman is any good at pursuing this goal? I'm seriously asking, please inform the uninformed.

My impression is that I hear a lot more about basic research from the competing high-profile labs, while OpenAI feels focused on their established stable of products. They also had high-profile researchers leave. Does OpenAI still have a culture looking for the next breakthroughs? How does their brain trust rank?
by drdaeman | 2025-10-17 18:23:35+00:00
Is Ring camera encryption actually independently audited and known to be implemented correctly and provide all the desirable security properties?

Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.

My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.
by observationist | 2025-10-17 18:23:41+00:00
Kurzweil has been eerily right so far, and his timeline has AGI at 2029. When software can perform any unattended, self directed task (in principle) at least as well as any human over the sum total of all tasks that humans are capable of doing, we will have reached AGI.

Software can already write more text on any given subject better than a majority of humanity. It can arguably drive better across more contexts than all of humanity - any human driver over a billion miles of normal traffic will have more accidents than self driving AI over the same distance. Short stories, haikus, simple images, utility scripts, simple software, web design, music generation - all of these tasks are already superhuman.

Longer time horizons, realtime and continuous memory, a suite of metacognitive tasks, planning, synthesis of large bodies of disparate facts into novel theory, and a few other categories of tasks are currently out of reach, but some are nearly solved, and the list of things that humans can do better than AI gets shorter by the day. We're a few breakthroughs away, maybe even one big architectural leap, from having software that is capable (in principle) of doing anything humans can do.

I think AGI is going to be here faster than Kurzweil predicted, because he probably didn't take into consideration the enormous amount of money being spent on these efforts.

There has never been anything like this in history - in the last decade, over 5 trillion dollars has been spent on AI research and on technologies that support AI, like crypto mining datacenters that pivoted to AI, new power, water, data support, providing the infrastructure and foundation for the concerted efforts in research and development. There are tens of thousands of AI researchers, some of them working in private finance, some for academia, some doing military resarch, some doing open source, and a ton doing private sector research, of which an astonishing amount is getting published and shared.

In contrast, the entire world spent around 16 trillion dollars on world war II - all of the R&D and emergency projects and military logistics, humanitarian aid, and so on.

We have AI getting more resources and attention and humans involved in a singular development effort, pushing toward a radical transformation of the very concept of "labor" - while I think it might be a good thing if it is a decade away, even perpetually so until we have some reasonable plan for coping with it, I very much think we're going to see AGI within the very near future.

*When I say "in principle" I mean that given the appropriate form factor, access, or controls, the AI can do all the thinking, planning, and execution that a human could do, at least as well as any human. We will have places that we don't want robots or AI going, tasks reserved for humans, traditions, taboos, economics, and norms that dictate AI capabilities in practice, but there will be no legitimacy to the idea that an AI couldn't do a thing.
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-17 18:23:47+00:00
Learning != Training.

Thats not a period, it's a full stop. There is no debate to be had here.

IF an LLM makes some sort of breakthrough (and massive data collation allows for that to happen) it needs to be "re trained" to absorb its own new invention.

But we also have a large problem in our industry, where hardware evolved to make software more efficient. Not only is that not happening any more but we're making our software more complex and to some degree less efficient with every generation.

This is particularly problematic in the LLM space: every generation of "ML" on the llm side seems to be getting less efficient with compute. (Note: this isnt quite the case in all areas of ML, yolo models working on embedded compute is kind of amazing).

Compactness, efficiency and reproducibility are directions the industry needs to evolve in, if it ever hopes to be sustainable.
by schlauerfox | 2025-10-17 18:24:21+00:00
I'm fortunate to live in Los Angeles where we have KCRW and KCSN. Matt Pinfield is back on the air and of course Nick Harcourt was previously of Morning Becomes Ecclectic. Music discovery is enriched by these public radio stations, I hope they can keep going with public radio being so disfunded federally.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-17 18:24:21+00:00
Not necessarily leading-edge stuff, but the work he did on Voyager 1 decoding with GNU Radio was fascinating (e.g. https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/ ). Same with 802.11ah ( https://destevez.net/2025/01/decoding-ieee-802-11ah/ ). The fact that he puts so much care and attention into describing the methodology as well as the results makes his blog a great educational resource for GNU Radio and communications DSP in general.

Estevez pretty much does for DSP what Karpathy does for ML, sans the latter's videos.

I also just noticed a post on the Remez algorithm for FIR filter design, where he ran into some of the same problems with 1970s-era legacy code that I have and (unlike me) actually addressed them. That one, I'm going to have to bookmark for sure.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-17 18:24:38+00:00
> "For the pre-Fed period (1790-1913), the average annual inflation was 0.4 percent with a coefficient of variation of 13.2. During the period 1941-2016, these figures changed to 3.5 percent and 0.8, respectively. If we look at the post-Volcker era (1988-2016), annual inflation was 2.2 percent on average with a coefficient of variation of 0.4." -

Citing an average number is misleading since the chart of the value of a dollar during that time looks like a zig-zag with some massive swings in both directions. This means periods of severe deflation, too, which can be very bad for people.

It definitely was not flat or consistently near zero, though citing an average number is a great way to give that impression.