MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by octoberfranklin | 2025-11-20 03:18:15+00:00
I am shocked when I talk to college kids about AI these days.

I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation.

They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you"

They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and nothing else matters.

Academic fraud really is the killer app for this technology. At least if you're a 19-year-old.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-20 03:19:32+00:00
Your linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto.

Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.
by phil21 | 2025-11-20 03:21:36+00:00
One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime. The other does not, and currently is headed in the opposite direction. If things ever get fixed it will be my great great grandchildren that see the results.

I don’t know if crypto is the solution, but watching even supposedly technologically literate places like HN largely cheer for cashless societies where every transaction is monitored and gatekept, while limits continue to be dialed downwards is all anyone needs to see to realize working within the system is a plan for failure.

Transacting money is not a crime, it’s simply a lazy way to fight it. It enables enforcement of trivial policies and more or less removes a key pillar of human freedom.
by scottshambaugh | 2025-11-20 03:22:12+00:00
Thanks for adding it! I think anaglyphs are super underused in 3D visualization. The grid lines look pretty good in 3D but the orbits themselves aren't as sharp - it might be the coloring or it might be that the angular distance between the eye views is too large.

There's some math at the bottom of my matplotlib extension for anaglyphs if you want to play around: https://github.com/scottshambaugh/mpl_stereo
by Terr_ | 2025-11-20 03:22:19+00:00
From the name I expected it to be a list of dead companies and investor losses, kind of like https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

> Bitcoin has died 450 times. If you invested $100 each time, you'd have $96,489,717 today.

I think this would be more interesting if the same sequence of $100 infusions were also applied to various popular stocks, comparing those hypothetical returns. If we're going to have survivorship bias, we might as well at least compare multiple survivors.
by quuxplusone | 2025-11-20 03:22:36+00:00
Or, for that matter, "I unironically believe"? ;)

From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."

The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.

> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
by hliyan | 2025-11-20 03:22:42+00:00
This is where a lot of people are. In my case, every time I open a PDF in Google Drive, it forces an AI summary of the doc with no way for me to switch it off. I try to close it mid-generation, but I suspect not fast enough to keep it from getting counted in the usage stats, which is probably what some product manager is trying to maximize and demonstrate ("X number of PDF summarizations this quarter").
by dpark | 2025-11-20 03:24:32+00:00
What alternatives actually scale to the level that they could seriously replace fiat currency?

I feel like every time I hear about scaling crypto the answer is to build a system that’s actually decoupled from crypto and occasionally writes back a little bit of info.

Edit: It seems like Solana was actually built for decent scale and claims ~3k tps. This is surprisingly high, though, given, that Visa does about 7k tps on average. What are all these transactions on Solana?
by int_19h | 2025-11-20 03:24:38+00:00
> Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.

Have you missed all the large AI companies in US loudly demanding and otherwise lobbying for more regulation?

Regulations can be good for companies when you can make sure that they are written in a way that entrenches them against any new competitors.
by mrandish | 2025-11-20 03:25:18+00:00
I agree. For our teen it's a combo of taking the phone during homework & sleep time and limiting daily time in certain apps using parental controls.

I would mod the YT app to remove 'autoplay next' and algo recommendations but unfortunately my kid is on iOS where modding isn't possible. The best thing we did was not get her a phone until after she turned 13.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-20 03:25:53+00:00
I love the rebranding of corporate villainy as “Blame as a Service”; it makes it easier to discuss these sleaze-bags in the open without getting into nitty-gritty technicalities that derail the core conversation.

Also fitting that McKinsey (and by extension, most “business consultancy” companies) get the first shoutout as a prime example of BaaS. Despite lending their support to decades of awful, and at times morally evil decisions, the arrangement allows both business elites and McKinsey themselves to escape blame via simple finger-pointing, the masses largely unaware that said negative outcomes were the goal all along.

To fix broken systems, we must find ways of distilling complex and nuanced topics into simple-to-communicate concepts, vocabulary, and slang. Blame-as-a-Service accomplishes that nicely, and will hopefully allow a redirection back towards the core point of many such discussions: accountability, or lack thereof.
by ikkun | 2025-11-20 03:27:47+00:00
seems like it's just that element (the official, and most popular client) will ignore messages from unverified devices, but since it's part of the spec, other clients that want to be spec-compliant will implement this too. I don't think most other clients follow the spec that closely though.

I'm in favor of the change, the only downside I can think of is users with esoteric clients or simple bots that don't support verification won't be able to post to encrypted rooms with element users.

I feel like I'm alone in having good luck with matrix. I've been self hosting for nearly a decade to a handful of users, and it was a bit rough troubleshooting the encryption problems back when element was still called riot, but it's been a number of years since any of us have had a single encryption issue, and we added a new user recently with no trouble. we're still on 'element classic' though, the new 'element x' is a bit of a mess and loses the background sync feature, you need to set up a unified push server which I'm not looking forward to.
by zlonmask | 2025-11-20 03:28:08+00:00
My name is Sara Parker, founder of llcclass. My mission is simple: Make Opportunity as Ubiquitous as Talent.b. Right now, a "wall" blocks global founders from the US financial ecosystem (Stripe, Amazon, VCs). c. I've spent 1000 hours researching how to tear it down. Did you know the absolute minimum state fee to register a US company and get ein,bank account with 30 min CPA talk can be just $267? So why do services (ours included) charge $1000+?
by neilv | 2025-11-20 03:28:27+00:00
Finding students with integrity is hard now, because the culture is already full of poo.

But one starting point is to communicate that you expect and require integrity, explain what that means, and then expect it. Trying to make metrics or tests or whatever to detect, rate, rank, etc. it just turns it into a game, like the same load of poo.

Though here is one thing you can do. Explain that you expect integrity, and then watch the students raise their hands and ask how they will be tested on this. You say it's expected. Back and forth a few times, until eventually some of them start crying, and then their heads explode, because they can't figure out how to game that. Those students sadly were too far gone.

Then, after that first semester of integrity culture, some of the students who didn't explode will cheat, and they will be expelled with the fury of an angry god, and everyone on campus will know why. News stories will be written, word will spread, college guides will be updated. The next batch of applicants after that will have fewer cheaters than before, and will have disproportionately attracted students who aspire to integrity and who wouldn't have known to apply to this school before the news.

A school with an honor code that students and faculty take seriously wasn't that newsworthy decades ago, but it's news now.
by tock | 2025-11-20 03:28:44+00:00
I think crypto is finally maturing. Consumers directly using it is just not going to happen. But institutions using it as a settlement layer seems to have traction. I'm curious to see what Stripe does with Tempo.

For all the crap that is in the crypto ecosystem I do think a lot of people underestimate its potential. Defi can replace entire institutions like banking. Combine it with regulated local stablecoins and governments dont seem too unhappy with it either.
by jaennaet | 2025-11-20 03:28:51+00:00
What about content that is illegal in the country that your "silo" is hosted in, like, say, CSAM (but you can really really substitute anything else illegal there, like eg. planning terrorist attacks)? If a "silo" is CSAM-friendly or its express purpose is posting it and its moderators don't want to remove illegal content, what then?
by AIorNot | 2025-11-20 03:30:11+00:00
I’m confused - Whats the point of a study for this, for Pete's sake, this could have been a blog post - why does the AI world need a paper for everything?

We all know how easy it is to generate emails etc at a minimum level to fool the elderly and doing that via ai is not really “jailbreaking” anyway..

Doing a study is only to get PR value and its frustrating to me why the AI world has this cargo cult world of studies and fake benchmarks with every advancement a new academic paper instead of doing normal engineering…
by protocolture | 2025-11-20 03:30:59+00:00
>Seems to me the only effective and enforceable redundancy that can be easily be imposed by regulation would be mandatory tug boats.

Way it worked in Sydney harbour 20+ years ago when I briefly worked on the wharves/tugs, was that the big ships had to have both local tugs, and a local pilot who would come aboard and run the ship. Which seemed to me to be quite an expensive operation but I honestly cant recall any big nautical disasters in the habour so I guess it works.
by g-b-r | 2025-11-20 03:31:43+00:00
> Pretty quick and easy in most cases

The experiences reported here seem to say otherwise...

As others, anyhow, I haven't tried again recently

> (Gripe: The recovery key approach was unfortunately made painful and error-prone in recent Element releases, by disabling the option to choose a passphrase instead, but most people can simply use one of the other two approaches.)

I last tried Element about six months ago, but for years using the recovery key was either impossible or close to it, and mostly just for idiotic UI mistakes that were never corrected (something like you had to enter the key where they wanted the passphrase or the opposite).

To my recollection the version from six months ago worked better in that regard, but it was still asking to enter the passphrase where you actually had to enter the recovery key.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-11-20 03:32:31+00:00
How about the most obvious ones? AWS? Cloudflare outage? I saw nobody get anything other than a grunt this week. Who cares? What can we do? It'll be up when it's up.

I also had a client this week have a physical server catch on fire and burn down everything. Backups don't count when they're in the same room.
by doiskoh | 2025-11-20 03:32:32+00:00
If by "Ultra", you're referring to the Google AI Ultra plan, then I just want to let you know that it doesn't actually take Google AI plans into consideration. It seems like the product will have its own separate subscription. At the moment, everyone is on the same free plan until they finalize their subscription pricing/model (https://antigravity.google/docs/plans).

On a separate note, I think the UX is excellent and the output I've been getting so far are really good. It really does feel like AI-native development. I know asking for a more integrated issue-tracking experience might be expanding the scope too much but that's really the biggest missing feature right now. That and, I don't like the fact that the "Review Changes" doesn't work if you're asking it to modify reports that are not in the current workspace that's open.
by highfrequency | 2025-11-20 03:32:42+00:00
The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times.

What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underlying technology is improving rapidly, but because it hasn’t cusped the viability threshold you don’t feel it at all. From this vantage point, it is easy to dismiss the whole thing and forget about the slope, because the whole line is under the surface of usefulness in your context. The author has identified two cases where current AI is below the cusp of viability: design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly).

The hard and useful thing is not to find contexts where the general purpose technology gets a 0, but to surf the cusp of viability by finding incrementally harder problems that are newly solvable as the underlying technology improves. A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices by starting with expensive sports cars, then luxury sedans, then normal cars. You can be sure that throughout the first two phases, everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars. By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead.
by danaris | 2025-11-20 03:32:50+00:00
> One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime.

One of those things actually works, period.

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not going to lead to a better system overall. It may fix a few of the specific problems with the current system, but it introduces enough other problems that it becomes, at best, a wash.

And in practice, it's abundantly clear that cryptocurrency does not work. People don't want it. The only reason it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity now is because Trump, under the influence of various cryptocurrency scammers (note: this is not me saying "all cryptocurrency is a scam"; this is me saying "the specific people influencing Trump on this are scammers"), has been promoting it in order to feed their scams.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-11-20 03:33:01+00:00
There probably is if you look hard enough. Closest thing I can think of is the MKS-DLC32 motor control boards that are generally used in 3D printers and laser engravers. You can buy just the board and reprogram it. They just run grbl with serial and web interfaces anyway and have an arduino bootloader.
by dang | 2025-11-20 03:34:18+00:00
Yes, a bunch of positive comments from accounts without much posting history appeared in this thread. I assume that the OP's friends got wind of their launch.

We tell founders to avoid that (scroll down to the bold part of https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html for how we try to scare YC founders into not doing it!) - but to be fair, (1) this is not always easy to control, and (2) people posting such comments think they're helping and don't have enough experience of HN to realize that it has a counter-effect.

I'm going to move the overly sus ones to a collapsed stub now. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988584)
by airstrike | 2025-11-20 03:35:08+00:00
That's disingenuous and uninformed, sorry. You're trying to refute my claim but kind of just proving my point.

The current price is indeed an indication of what the market believes will happen to the company's performance. It doesn't matter if their estimates will eventually be proven right or wrong. Looking at forward P/E will serve precisely to express what the market's "crystal ball" is saying! That's what we want to know. What do people think this company is worth?

Conversely, the current price and their past earnings are not related, so dividing one by the other is mostly just noise.
by danaris | 2025-11-20 03:35:50+00:00
Some of us can recognize that the fascist takeover of our specific government doesn't change the fundamental truths about how governments function.

Yes, antitrust enforcement in the US is a joke right now. It was actually ramping up to be pretty darn good under Biden. Now it's not, and we have several other problems to solve before we're going to be able to get to it.

None of that makes cryptocurrency a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency with proper antitrust controls. Frankly, it's not even a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency without proper antitrust controls.
by ewoodrich | 2025-11-20 03:35:55+00:00
> It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude

It definitely didn't help back when my manager asked me to recommend a subscription to buy everyone on our team that Anthropic didn't offer any plan with a predictable monthly cost for Claude Code with SSO/externally managed billing (I think that changed fairly recently).

Github Copilot for Business with an easily digestible flat monthly rate + straightforward per request rate beyond the quota (for devs who actually ended up using it heavily) made it extremely painless to get approved.

Cursor was really the only other subscription offering that checked all those boxes but our team uses the official Microsoft VS Code extensions and there was 0% chance of getting buy-in if it meant disrupting everyone's workflow for a 6 month trial period.
by sbierwagen | 2025-11-20 03:36:22+00:00
I built a meter around a SCD30 six years ago. The self-calibration routine was not very good, for two reasons.

1) It had an unrealistically low default level, something like 380 ppm. The atmospheric concentration keeps going up! The linked pdf says "The automatic selfcalibration algorithm assumes that the sensor is exposed to the atmospheric CO2 concentration of 400 ppm at least once per week." Atmospheric CO2 definitely is not 400 ppm anymore.

2) As far as I could tell it made no effort to choose a local minima. In a regularly ventilated space, if it decided to "calibrate" when a door was closed, it could abruptly declare 600 ppm to be 380. I just hard coded an offset value and disabled ASC.
by furyofantares | 2025-11-20 03:36:47+00:00
When I'm writing web services I think I handle almost every error and I don't have this complaint there.

When I'm writing video games there's lots of code where missing assets or components simply mean the game is misconfigured and won't work and I would like it to loudly and immediately fail. I often like just crashing there. There are better options sometimes too, making a lot of noise but allowing continuation. But LLMs seem to be bad at using those too.

Actually to go back to web services, I do still hate the way I've had LLMs handle errors there too - too often they handle them silently or worse, provide some fallback behavior that masks the error. They just don't write code that looks like it was written by someone with 1) some assumptions about how the code is going to be used 2) some ideas about how likely their assumptions are to be wrong or 3) some opinions about how they'd like to learn their assumptions are wrong if so.
by quantummagic | 2025-11-20 03:37:53+00:00
I hope there are no legal jurisdictions that are actually CSAM-friendly. But this isn't a unique problem, there are many situations in the world where legal jurisdictions are muddy. For example, when over-the-air television signals can be received across country borders. Just let the law sort it out. Admittedly, it's more difficult for companies that operate in multiple countries, but they're already managing to do it today. The main hope is, that companies will not add any additional censorship themselves, and that an attitude of free exchange and tolerance, would be the default position for more of us than it is today.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-20 03:37:54+00:00
I wouldn't characterize Signal as "absolute most possible safety" as you are implicitly doing here.

I would probably characterize Signal as "most possible safety for the average nontechnical user" which entails trade-offs against absolute safety for certain UX affordances (and project governance structures that allow for these decisions to be made), because if said affordances are not given, the average nontechnical user either simply won't use Signal or will accidentally end up making themselves even less secure.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-20 03:38:03+00:00
Search is all you need!

If you have the time.

Or if we can expand quantum superposition algorithms from 2^N states, for quantum circuits with N control qubits, to 2^(T*N) superpositions over T time steps, via some kind of superposition tree recursion. The number of superpositions increasing exponentially for T steps (and then reducing for another T steps) on a single recursive physical circuit.

That is not supported by the physical laws we have, but it is an interesting idea.
by tombert | 2025-11-20 03:38:08+00:00
I don't use spreadsheets much anymore, and I end up just writing scripts for everything I would use Excel for. This isn't a brag, in fact it's sort of the opposite; I often miss the simplicity of Excel and I think for a lot of my scripts I would save time if I did them in in a spreadsheet.

One of these days, I should probably go through a tutorial series for LibreOffice and Star BASIC and properly learn it.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-20 03:38:27+00:00
While it’s easy to dismiss one story, stablecoin payments are gaining legitimate adoption.

> monthly B2B volume has more than doubled since February, rising 113% to about $6.4 billion. The expansion lifted the cumulative value of stablecoin payments since 2023 to over $136 billion, representing that on-chain money is no longer a niche settlement tool.[1]

And $9T in annual payment volume[2].

As it turns out stablecoin payments are actually a real thing, especially B2B.

I cannot for the life of me articulate why, because I actually don’t understand its value prop (despite lengthy conversations with ChatGPT and people on HN about it) or see any reason for its growth, but it is a thing whether we admit it or not.

[1] https://beincrypto.com/stablecoin-payments-surge-real-world-...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/roomykhan/2025/11/16/stablecoin...
by malfist | 2025-11-20 03:38:42+00:00
There's a reason we call them judges. Selective enforcement is there for a reason. Lawmakers can't anticipated everything. Just look at how bad of an idea zero tolerance policies in schools have been with thinks like getting expelled for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun.

The world isn't black and white. Flexibility, including selective enforcement, is necessary in a just system.