MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Andrex | 2025-11-29 13:00:32+00:00
Spinning up an all-new ad network is pretty tough. I would think OpenAI would need to beat Meta/Google on basics like CPM in order for the network effects to make it desirable for ad vendors over Meta/Google. Ad budgets are fixed and zero-sum and vendors (in my head, I don't know) would prefer to spend their money on the best network giving the best results. I don't know if ads in LLM chats can get there.
by RandomBacon | 2025-11-29 13:00:55+00:00
Your post seems like F.U.D.

#1: "between 2019 and 2023"

#2: the author wrote "This attack is not realistic. ... This is why everyone needs to run their own node"

#3: "digital forensic approach can still reveal sensitive information by examining off-chain artifacts such as memory and wallet files"

So...

#1 seems to have been mitigated.

#2 seems to not be an issue if you run your own node.

#3 seems to not be an issue if you don't let others do forensic analysis on your own computer (not the Blockchain).

It's good that people do this research to help make Monero better. I am not criticizing the people that published what OP linked to. But of course OP's post is like saying "What makes you think paint is safe? Here's a post about how paint used to include lead."
Show HN: Lightweight macOS menu bar Pomodoro Timer
by berkaycit | 2025-11-29 13:01:13+00:00
I was using an app called Notch Flow, but even though I was a licensed user and paying every month, it kept asking me to re-enter my license from time to time.

So I used Claude Code and built a similar Pomodoro app in about an hour. My goal was to have something super minimal that could run for long hours without putting any load on the Mac.

I’m leaving the GitHub link below. I’d really appreciate it if you try it out and share your feedback.

https://github.com/berkaycit/pomodo-timer
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-11-29 13:01:39+00:00
I agree 100% with you.

In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.

Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.

Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
by degamad | 2025-11-29 13:02:41+00:00
You're assuming that we know that the length of vector (a, -b) is a²+b². We don't know that.

We start by assuming that the position vector (a, -b) has length c. This implies that we can rotate that vector until it becomes the position vector (c, 0).

As you note, we can create the two vectors above from (1, 0) using linear transformation matrices [(a, b), (-b, a)] and [(c, 0), (0, c)]

So we could create the position vector (c, 0) by starting at (1, 0), applying the linear transformation [(a, b), (-b, a)], then applying a rotation to bring it back to the e1 axis.

Thus for some rotation matrix R,

R × [(a, b), (-b, a)] = [(c, 0), (0, c)]

The determinant of a rotation matrix is 1, so the determinant of the left side is 1×(a²+b²), while the determinant of the right side is c², which is how we end up with a²+b²=c².

Now the only thing which I'm not sure of is whether there's a way to show that the determinant of a rotation matrix is 1 without assuming the Pythagorean identity already.
by throawayonthe | 2025-11-29 13:02:59+00:00
No, and I don't want to rely on f-droid for anything important due to their shoddy security practices (+ as a sibling comment says there's no official signal binaries on fdroid)

For apps i do install from f-droid repos (official or otherwise) i prefer https://github.com/Droid-ify/client
by dkdcio | 2025-11-29 13:03:49+00:00
I don’t disagree but want to go on the record predicting this will collapse on itself spectacularly and OpenAI will still “fail” commercially

for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product
by aurareturn | 2025-11-29 13:04:41+00:00
I'm betting that they can.

Here's an idea that just popped into my head:

ChatGPT shows a sponsored entry in chat history list with a colorful border around it to get users to click. This product is something that ChatGPT knows the user desperately needs from previous chats. The user can chat directly with the product and learn more about it. The advertiser specifically sent OpenAI information (like a RAG) about their products buyers might have questions for.

When the user is ready, they can open a link to the product's website or just buy directly in ChatGPT.
by satisfice | 2025-11-29 13:05:12+00:00
Sounds like the author is trying revive Behaviorism.

It also brings to mind a question: what sort of practice does the paper itself represent? Although it is possible to live by numbly walking through a set of practices, the evidence that we also reason is abundant. For instance, someone wrote that paper, and someone else is reacting to its ideas.

Even the child in the dialog is an agent capable of many other reactions than the one showcased. And some of them could be driven by explicit reasoning via mental models rather than intuitive reaction from an acquired pattern recognition system.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-11-29 13:05:42+00:00
I remember as a kid visiting the home of a relative who had an old oven for wood/coal heating, even though the primary heating was now a gas (natural gas not gasoline) heater.

The old oven remained though, and was used as a self-emptying trash can. When it filled up, a fire was lit to empty it. I don't remember what the sorting rules were (I assume "does it burn well and not smell up the apartment too badly when lighting it") and how common plastic packaging was back then, but I'm sure that the emissions coming out from the chimney were not a concern.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-29 13:06:00+00:00
Why don't they just write a thin layer that interfaces Windows library calls to native Linux calls, possibly with a thin wrapper to shim it where nothing else quite fits? You could re-implement maybe some of the Windows libs as a "clean room project", given the functional description, that then hands off to an equivalent in Linux.

There's probably a cool and snappy acroynm you could use, like Virtual Interface (with nearly) No Overheard, or "Vino".
by lupire | 2025-11-29 13:06:13+00:00
Draw it on graph paper:

Set B as the origin, and let BC (the 'a' side), be on the the positive side of the x-axis. Let AC be on the positive side of the y-axis.

The left matrix is a clockwise rotation and scaling. This is clearly seen if you draw the transformation applied to the two axis basis vectors. (The scaling factor isn't obvious yet.)

Then the left matrix varies (1,0) to the side AB, which has magnitude c. Z and carries (0,1) to an perpendicular line of the (importantly) same magnitude,

So it's a rotation and a scaling by c.

The right matrix obviously is a scaling by c.

> If you can see that you obtain one of these vectors by rotating the other, then you've shown that their lengths are equal (i.e. a²+b²=c²), which is what we want to show in the first place.

Yes, that's the point!
by kqr | 2025-11-29 13:07:03+00:00
I want to pull two quotes from the article.

> “Our findings emphasise that exercise remains beneficial even in polluted environments,” lead researcher Professor Po-Wen Ku said in a statement. [...] “We don’t want to discourage people from exercising outdoors,” said Co-author Professor Paola Zaninotto.

The health effects of exercise outdoors are combined from two effects:

- Positive effects due to exercise. These start out strong but level off after a while.

- Negative effects due to pollution. These increase almost linearly with time spent outside.

One might ask, is there an amount of daily exercise at which the negative effects overpower the positive ones? Yes, in a handful of cities around the world, after a few hours of exercise, the pollution makes additional outdoors exercise actually harmful.

But almost everywhere a marginal minute of exercise provides a positive effect on health regardless of time already spent exercising, and there is nowhere in the world where something like an hour of exercise a day is a net negative. Get out there. Pick an active means of commuting (cycling, running, walking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding, unicycling) and don't worry so much about pollution unless you live in one of those single-digit cities which I forget where they are, but probably concentrated in Asia.

(I feel bad about typing this out without linking to the source. I'm looking for it in my notes!)
by aniou | 2025-11-29 13:07:04+00:00
A note from someone who specializes in long-term system maintenance:

There is also one, very important aspect, that is - (un)suprisingly - rarely mentioned in comments: a lack of dependence between sloppy work and personal comfort of particular person, responsible for problematic changes.

What I mean? A badly installed or configured system would be a problem in next three, maybe five years: to time of major OS upgrade, HW replacement or refresh, framework deprecation and so, and so... In current, corporate culture, there is almost impossible to being bite by own laziness - almost no one is working in particular company or for particular project so long. Especially, when installation is conducted by external party in model "grab the money and run!"

So, very basic motivation for good work, that comes from awareness, that today technological debt would lead to personal, painful experience in future, doesn't exists at all in modern, corporate environment. The things are even worse - there are multiple relations about negative career consequences resulting from concern for the quality of work: "because we want that product fast a we don't like troublemakers and defensive thinkers".

In consequence, one cannot throw a rock without hitting a dozens of such a cases, like that one: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/release-26-04-lts-without-the...
by softwaredoug | 2025-11-29 13:07:39+00:00
Before people freak out about their morning run, I’m very hard pressed to find 25 PM2.5 on this map of the US. (Note these numbers are AQI, you have to zoom into the bad AQI numbers and look at their PM2.5). Albeit it’s a Saturday morning, not rush hour.

China and India look rough though.

https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map
by iLoveOncall | 2025-11-29 13:08:01+00:00
Trust in LLMs is easily broken, and many users are starting to see the cracks. Once those AI companies start rolling out ads inserted in the answers, the quality will go down even more, and they will burn the last good will of the people.

There is no moat because their only way to make money is to self-destruct.

Talking on a more practical POV, your cost to display the ads needs to be lower than what companies pay you for advertising. And while companies might be willing to pay a small premium for "better" targeting because the LLM supposedly has more personal data about users, the cost to deliver those ads (generating answers via LLMs) is several orders of magnitude higher than for traditional ads served on websites.

So even sticking to a purely technical aspect, ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.

Combine the two aspects, and OpenAI is all but a dead company.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-29 13:08:20+00:00
Absolutely.

Once I got over the embarrassment hurdle of asking “dumb” questions, I grew a lot in my early career. Then people saw me as highly engaged, and my questions and understanding got better over time.

In particular, I encourage all the new joiners on my team to play the “newbie” card to allow them to ask as many questions as they want.

“Hey, new guy here… what is X?”

I even tell them to set a goal of one question per day if it helps.

I think it’s so important not to be passive because you absorb / understand less that way.
by redhale | 2025-11-29 13:08:55+00:00
You've brought in "require" from nowhere. Neither the parent comment nor OP's article mentioned _requiring_ in-office attendance for everyone on earth. Many people make this leap, so I don't mean to single you out.

I think this is one reason this topic is so touchy -- it's hard to even express an opinion without someone assuming you mean to impose that opinion on everyone else (e.g. mandatory RTO), and then taking offense to that imagined imposition.

Perhaps in the long run we can self-organize into companies or groups within companies that universally prefer in-office or remote work.

I prefer at least some % (e.g. 50%) of my work to be in person. But I also don't like working with people who don't want to be there, or for whom being there is a huge burden. So I personally really hate RTO.

Instead, I'll choose a team or company that is open about requiring in-office time (and has been open about it for years), and is therefore staffed by people who also like that environment. It would be ludicrous to join a remote-first or remote-only company and then try to start imposing my in-person preference on others.
by DoctorOW | 2025-11-29 13:10:27+00:00
> but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google?

No, it doesn't.

Obviously Mu could exist without Go, if Google stopped development on the language, its current state could be forked (Go 2). Lots of programming languages exist without Google's support, there are even programming languages older than Google.
by vintermann | 2025-11-29 13:10:35+00:00
Where would the trust come from? I mean the trust that people really do what they say they're going to do in the real world - like ship you the goods, do the work you paid for, don't immediately kick you out of the servers you paid to access etc. A shadow economy doesn't run itself, who's going to stick their neck out to even try to make it work?
by mrweasel | 2025-11-29 13:11:56+00:00
There's probably a bit more to it. It really only takes one company to bet on optimizing infrastructure, to the degree that the author suggests to undermine the entire house of cards being built on Nvidia GPUs currently, yet not one AI company is willing to take that bet?

The author could also be correct. Investors tend to be herd animals, and if you're not buying into the same tech as everyone else, your proposal is higher risk. It might very well be easier to say to an investor that you're going to buy a million Nvidia GPUs and stuff them in a datacenter in Texas like everyone else.

I'm interested in the one company that does take the bet on infrastruture optimization. If that works, then a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money really quickly.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-11-29 13:12:12+00:00
This seems like a false equivalence. We all have the capacity for great good and great evil. And most of us have probably done very good and occasionally very bad things, objectively speaking.

Framing matters and context too, but some things are just objectively bad in any light. Some are objectively good.

I think that truth (or at least belief in it) underlies why we collectively punish folks perceived as getting away with something that looks undeniably bad. Then add other phenomenon like the bandwagon effect and it can be crushing to the target.
by kragen | 2025-11-29 13:13:12+00:00
This is very insightful. I remember the epoch of clueless startups wasting venture capital on Sun servers. I worked at one of those startups. Warden is clearly correct that if you want to train your AI faster then the optimal amount to spend on software optimization is at least a substantial fraction of your hardware budget.

However, clueless people who don't know how to optimize probably don't know where to spend money on optimization, either. So maybe it's just not a great fit for outsourcing, especially in a realm where there's no standard of correctness to measure the results of the supposedly "optimized" training against. And Warden seems to be pitching outsourcing rather than trying to get acquihired.
by hagbard_c | 2025-11-29 13:13:21+00:00
Instead of throwing epithets you could explain what is wrong about my comments on the DEI bureaucracy and gender ideology. Explain why the DEI offices which have popped up left and right are not a new bureaucracy and why those who study gender ideology [1] have angry men whin[ing] about it.

Thus far all you've achieved is affirm the statement which started this thread.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/gender-...
by deaddodo | 2025-11-29 13:13:27+00:00
Win98 was head and shoulders above System 9, from a stability perspective. It had protected memory, actual preemptive multitasking, a somewhat functional driver system built on top of an actual HAL, functional networking, etc, etc.

To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8-9 were so bad.
by Schiendelman | 2025-11-29 13:13:43+00:00
EVs generate far, far less brake pad dust, most of their braking is regeneration via the motors.

Tires get more efficient every year, dust has reduced as the companies compete to make them last longer, and we're finally seeing the tire industry respond to pressure to reduce toxic runoff. Michelin's been removing phenols, for instance: https://resicare.michelin.com/news/michelin-resicare-resin-1...
by lupire | 2025-11-29 13:13:45+00:00
> Now the only thing which I'm not sure of is whether there's a way to show that the determinant of a rotation matrix is 1 without assuming the Pythagorean identity already

You can define the determinant that way. Now the question is why the cross multiplication formula for determinant accurately computes the area.

You can prove that via decomposition into right triangles https://youtu.be/_OiMiQGKvvc?si=TyEge1_0W4rb648b

Or you can go in reverse from the coordinate formula, to prove that the area is correctly predicted by the determinant.
by Gracana | 2025-11-29 13:13:52+00:00
That is literally the thing the parent poster wants to avoid by running open models.

[edit] I was a little unfair -- lack of access to training data is a bit of an issue (perhaps moreso for analysis than for for actual use, considering what it takes to train these models). I'm thankful that some of them are also distributed as base models, which should be relatively unbiased compared to what happens later during finetuning.
by redhale | 2025-11-29 13:15:15+00:00
I agree. I think, at least for me, it's because I know my colleagues know my overall capability, so admitting I don't know a specific thing isn't a big deal because I've already proven I'm capable of overcoming any specific gap. But to strangers, perhaps that may be all they know of me -- that I don't know this one thing. There's no preexisting relationship or past body of work (in other words: no trust) to balance that gap out or put it in perspective.

I think this is objectively mostly a silly and counter-productive worry. But I still feel it.

Kudos on publishing this piece!
by todd8 | 2025-11-29 13:15:17+00:00
I'm running the latest MacOS right now on a modest m4 Mini and it doesn't seem slow to me at all. I use Windows for gaming and Linux for several of my machines as well and I don't "feel" like MacOS is slow.

In any case, Chrome opens quickly on my Mac Mini, under a second when I launch it from clicking its icon in my task bar or from spotlight (which is my normal way of starting apps). When Chrome is idle with no windows, opening chrome seems even faster, almost instant.

This made me curious so I tried opening some Apple apps, and they appear to open about the same speed as Chrome.

Gui applications like Chrome or Keynote can be opened from a terminal command line using the open command so I tried timing this:

$ time open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app

which indicated that open was finished in under 0.05 seconds total. So this wasn't useful because it appears to be timing only part of the time involved with getting the first window up.
by shmel | 2025-11-29 13:15:28+00:00
I really hate that the desktop app unlinks after a relatively short period of time. I rarely use Signal, so few of my friends are there, so I have to relink the desktop app almost every time I open it. I wouldn't mind scanning a qr code every now and then, but then the history refuses to sync because security. So far I haven't find how to change it.

The Android app is stable enough, but the UX of having to look at the phone while typing a reply on a normal keyboard is annoying. This is why I prefer Telegram every time.
by rs186 | 2025-11-29 13:15:44+00:00
Why would OpenAI want to use and pay for any of Microsoft's products unless mandated by a contract?

OpenAI has the talent to roll out and run their own ad product that is better and more efficient. Why pay Microsoft for a core part of their (future) business?

P.S. In case you haven't noticed, OpenAI demos are done on Macbooks. Microsoft could not even get them to use Windows.
by bdangubic | 2025-11-29 13:16:14+00:00
I don't think their will be massive unemployment based on actual "AI has removed the need for SWEs of this level..." kind of talk but I was specifically commenting on eventually all that will smooth out and late adopters who decide want to use the tools will be able onboard themselves plenty fast. ... If this actually did happen (it won't) then we'd all have to worry about being unemployed
by nickjj | 2025-11-29 13:16:54+00:00
Yep, VirtualBox had it too with guest additions. Once VMWare Player stopped receiving updates I switched over to it.

Since WSL became a thing I stopped using this method since getting a "native" Linux terminal through Windows was enough for me for most things.

Although now that Windows 10 is not receiving updates and my hardware can't run Windows 11, and RAM prices alone cost almost as much as my entire computer did 10 years ago I'm going to be switching to native Linux and not look back, even if it means losing certain video editing capabilities and certain games.
by haar | 2025-11-29 13:17:50+00:00
Why do companies lie about their uptime?

I'm not trying to call out Sentry.io specifically here, I'm just using them as the example because it happened today. In fact, in general I'm a happy customer of theirs.

I'm trying to understand the motivations behind companies that aren't open about their uptime (or other issues, such as data breaches etc).

Why is it not encouraged/rewarded (or perceived as such) to be up front and open about these things? It seems that amongst the HN crowd it has been valued, and folks are appreciative and supportive of these things (vocally and with their wallets) - so why is it not more common practice?
by mikaeluman | 2025-11-29 13:18:02+00:00
It was unavoidable and inevitable.

Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information".

Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product.

Pretty sure that will change very quickly.
by coolbean | 2025-11-29 13:18:34+00:00
The "Organization" field is provided by the submitter themselves. It is not based on an IP (geo)location feed. I have deduced this based on a comment where the organization field is "federal police" in lower case [1].

There are a total of 19 comments with the same content. The claim that they were submitted by a botnet is easily dismissable. Especially given the fact that a "botnet"/troll farm would likely use different IP addresses, names, organizations and comment content ...

What remains open is whether these 19 commenters were instructed to submit these comments or if they did so on their own. If they did do it on their own, was it in their free time? If so, is it okay to do so under their employers name?

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...