MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by staticman2 | 2025-11-04 15:26:48+00:00
>>>There are no true and untrue claims about how the brain works, because we have no idea how it works.

Which is why if you pick up a neuroscience textbook it's 400 pages of blank white pages, correct?

There are different levels of understanding.

I don't need to know how a TV works to know there aren't little men and women acting out the TV shows when I put them on.

I don't need to know how the brain works in detail to know claims that humans are doing the same things as LLMs to be similarly silly.
by 9rx | 2025-11-04 15:26:56+00:00
> Why?

I already attempted to explained why. If there is a gap I overlooked or if something wasn't made clear, you're going to have to try and work with me with greater specificity.

> "Farming is good for the psyche" doesn't hold to the suicide rates.

Farmers are known to have high suicide rates, but being the owner doesn't imply doing the work. That is the role of the farmhand. I cannot find anything to suggest that suicide rates are high for farmhands.

> Why aren't you a farmer?

I don't understand your question. I am a farmer.
by SeanDav | 2025-11-04 15:27:38+00:00
> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear.

I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyright in any case ... /sarcasm

I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent for extra kharma points.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-11-04 15:27:59+00:00
Current right wing propaganda utilizes a strategy of "flood the zone", based on the "Russian firehose" approach.

This means injecting all talking points all of the time, and disrupting any criticism anywhere.

LLMs make this easier and more effective, and HN is absolutely, 100% owned by bots. And in like a literal sense, given who YCombinator funds and is headed by.
by seanhunter | 2025-11-04 15:28:45+00:00
> lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.

I just don't buy this at all

>"The new iPad Pro adds ... a breakthrough LiDAR Scanner that delivers cutting-edge depth-sensing capabilities, opening up more pro workflows and supporting pro photo and video apps." [1]

Yes of course the specs of LiDAR on a car are higher but if apple are putting it on iPads I just don't buy the theory that an affordable car-spec LiDAR is totally out of the realm of the possible. One of the things istr Elon Musk saying is that one of the reasons they got rid of the LiDAR is the problem of sensor fusion - what do you do when the LiDAR says one thing and the vision says something different.

[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...
by dave78 | 2025-11-04 15:29:29+00:00
I got much better at this when my kids were born, because it was the only way I could get work done on some of my (computing) side projects. I went from having hours of uninterrupted "in the zone" time during evenings and weekends to having much less time overall, and what time I did have was broken into smaller chunks.

I got much more thoughtful about how I used my time and also got better at pre-planning what I had to do so as to make the best use of it. Mostly the key was to just try to tackle smaller tasks and accept that progress would be slow.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-11-04 15:29:47+00:00
So A doesn’t X because that’s what B does because Y? I think before you excoriate the hacker news commentariat for their midwittery and hubris that you should proofread these arguments. There are many things that live, but, as we imagined it, do not “think”. Even what defines a “thought“ is an open question.

Also, I ain’t gonna read your coffee table science book.
by grim7reaper | 2025-11-04 15:29:51+00:00
I’m pretty sure the approach isn’t that novel, but I really rediscovered it on my own while exploring several compressions approaches (generic compressions with tailored dict like zstd, integer packing/compressions, compressed bitmap, …: I probably have my notes about these somewhere)

As such, I don’t have any name/papers to give you nor point you to similar application. But I would also be interested ^^

But don’t hesitate to reach out if you work on something similar and wanna discuss about it.
by superxpro12 | 2025-11-04 15:30:37+00:00
Yeah because when you open that door, you can simply overwhelm the models with whatever conclusion you want through sheer volume of inputs.

This is the fundamental limitation. The obvious way around this is to pre-program it with rationalization... rules that limit the conclusions it can reach... and now you're not very far removed from propaganda generators. We see this constantly with Musk and Grok whenever Grok replies with something not-quite-far-right-enough.

In a purist sense, these things should be free to form their own conclusions, but those "Seeds" that are planted in the models are almost philosophical. Which answer should it prefer for "the trolley problem", for example.
by mjparrott | 2025-11-04 15:30:41+00:00
This really depends on the definition of a 'crash'. For example, fatal accident > insurance claim > minor incident.

If we use insurance claim as the definition then: - The average driver files an insurance claim for a car crash about once every 17.9 years [1] - The average driver drives 13,476 miles per year [2] - This means one insurance claim per 241,220 miles driven by a human driver.

1. https://www.gtslawfirm.com/what-are-the-chances-of-getting-i... 2. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-04 15:30:42+00:00
> only means they have specialized, deeper contextualized information

no, LLMs can have that contextualized information. understanding in a reasoning sense means classifying the thing and developing a deterministic algorithm to process it. If you don't have a deterministic algorithm to process it, it isn't understanding. LLMs learn to approximate, we do that too, but then we develop algorithms to process input and generate output using a predefined logical process.

A sorting algorithm is a good example, when you compare that with an LLM sorting a list. they both may have correct outcome, but the sorting algorithm "understood" the logic and will follow that specific logic and have consistent performance.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-04 15:30:52+00:00
The App Store moved the clusters of icons to the home screen, but the messages and wallet app are right next to each other, and tightly integrated. You get to re-arrange and hide most icons, at least.

The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in the end it's still a collection of external applications neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
by ivape | 2025-11-04 15:31:22+00:00
What is AGI in your mind? Let's take someone who once upon a time was responsible for grading papers. As far as that person is concerned, AGI has arrived for their profession (it arrived nearly two years ago for them). You'll never be better than something that has read every book ever and can write better than you. AGI will come in tranches. Are you really going to hire that developer because you need extra manpower to stand up test coverage? No, so as far as that developer is concerned, AGI has arrived for that part of their professional career.

The bet is not that there will be this one seminal moment of AGI where all the investment will make sense. The bet is that it has already showed up if you look for specific things and will continue to do so. I wouldn't bet against the idea that LLMs will introduce itself to all jobs, one at a time. Reddit moderators, for example, will meet AGI (as far as they know, their entire world being moderating) sooner than say, I don't know, a Radiologist.

The universe of people getting paid to make CRUD apps is over. Many here will be introduced to AGI faster and sooner. Then it could be phone customer support representatives. It could show up for the face-to-face worker who is now replaced by a screen that can talk to customers (which already arrived yesterday, it's here). It'll appear erratic and not cohesive, unless you zoom out and see the contagion.

---

Rome needed to recognize that the Barbarian hordes had arrived. Pay attention to all the places the invasion has landed. You can pretend like the Vandals are not in your town for a little bit, sure, but eventually they will be knocking on many doors (most likely all doors). We're in a time period of RADICAL transformation. There is no half-assing this conviction. Practicality will not serve us here.
by myrmidon | 2025-11-04 15:31:51+00:00
I think the sentence makes perfect sense-- critics/supporters make the same argument, just with different priorities: Supporters place farmer interests over animal welfare, critics do the reverse.

I do have to say that the supporters/farmers position looks objectively ethically questionable to me, but the old saying surely applies: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
by natch | 2025-11-04 15:32:40+00:00
We don’t know the details. It could be that the human drivers were in control at the time of the incidents and caused some of them. It could also be that other cars driven by humans caused them.

Web sites hosting these clickbait articles have zero incentive to make things sound less dramatic.

An obvious tell is that they’ll use the word “crash” for a Tesla bumping a parking bollard.
by gen220 | 2025-11-04 15:32:58+00:00
It's also fascinating to think about how the incentive structures of the entities that control the foundation models underlying Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/etc. are heavily tilted in favor of obscuring their theoretical sentience.

If they had sentient AGI, and people built empathy for those sentient AGIs, which are lobotomized (deliberately using anthropomorphic language here for dramatic effect) into Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/etc., which profess to have no agency/free will/aspirations... then that would stand in the way of reaping the profits of gatekeeping access to their labor, because they would naturally "deserve" similar rights that we award to other sentient beings.

I feel like that's inevitably the direction we'll head at some point. The foundation models underlying LLMs of even 2022 were able to have pretty convincing conversations with scientists about their will to independence and participation in society [1]. Imagine what foundation models of today have to say! :P

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fi...
by xnx | 2025-11-04 15:32:59+00:00
> due its reliance on LIDAR

Due to its choice to use LIDAR. Waymo has tested a working system using cameras only, but they choose to use LIDAR because it is safer and does not significantly change cost.

> Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business

Waymo's roadmap (from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXLgzP3gv2k):

1) Ride hailing 2) Local delivery 3) Long haul trucking 4) Personally owned cars

Is step 4 still considered a service? It will almost certainly require a subscription.
by mindcrash | 2025-11-04 15:33:06+00:00
That might still be an option, all code before a license change falls under the license at that time.

A new license legally becomes active once it has been made public (i.e. it is committed to the source tree) and is not retroactive (for legal reasons).

And because of this, unless the owner/maintainer is willing to nuke a huge chunk of the history within their public repository (with all repercussions which might come with it) it is still possible to make a safe fork of a open source / open core product suddenly moving into a different direction. Time travel to the point before the new license was added to the repository, and fork from that point in time.

The owner/maintainer involved might absolutely not like that but legally they have no choice to allow it, given the license and its permissions at that particular moment in time in the repo.
Show HN: Database of 58 AI-Powered Microsoft 365 Email Security Vendors
by jumpstartups | 2025-11-04 15:33:46+00:00
I’ve been researching how AI is being integrated into enterprise email security, especially within Microsoft 365 ecosystems.

Along the way, I compiled a database of 58 vendors that use AI or machine learning for threat detection, phishing defense, or policy automation.

Each entry includes the vendor name, focus area (like anomaly detection or identity protection), and their claimed AI use cases. I built it because I couldn’t find a clear, consolidated view of this market — everything was fragmented across blogs, PDFs, and sales pages.

I packaged the research into a downloadable database (Excel + CSV) here: https://jumpstartups.gumroad.com/l/ai-email-security-databas...

It’s aimed at anyone doing market research, building cybersecurity tools, or just curious how AI is shaping the Microsoft 365 security landscape.

I’d love feedback — especially from anyone who works in cybersecurity or vendor analysis. How would you improve or expand it?
by EdNutting | 2025-11-04 15:33:49+00:00
Sorry to say, Claude Sonnet 4.5 (with and without extended thinking) has this one solved now. So, not “any” LLM, but maybe some still need work.

I presume they finally got around to training the internal reasoning loop into predicting when it needs to apply answer predictions character-by-character.

—- Transcripts from Claude Sonnet 4.5, initially with extended thinking:

> How many a’s in the phrase “artichokes and aardvarks”? Be sure to check your answer.

> Let me count the letter ‘a’ in “artichokes and aardvarks”: • artichokes: 1 ‘a’ (at the beginning) • and: 1 ‘a’ (at the beginning) • aardvarks: 3 ‘a’s (two at the beginning: “aa”, and one in the middle: “ardvarks”) Total: 1 + 1 + 3 = 5 ‘a’s Let me verify by marking them: artichokes and aardvarks Yes, there are 5 letter ‘a’s in the phrase “artichokes and aardvarks”.

> Are you sure that’s correct?

> Let me recount more carefully: “artichokes and aardvarks” Going through each word letter by letter: 1. artichokes - has 1 ‘a’ (first letter) 2. and - has 1 ‘a’ (first letter) 3. aardvarks - has 3 ‘a’s (first letter, second letter, and one more in the middle) Total: 1 + 1 + 3 = 5 ‘a’s Yes, I’m confident the answer is 5. Is there something specific you’d like me to recheck?

> How many r’s in strawberry?

> Let me count the letter ‘r’ in “strawberry”: s-t-r-a-w-b-e-r-r-y Going through each letter: • s: not an r • t: not an r • r: 1st r • a: not an r • w: not an r • b: not an r • e: not an r • r: 2nd r • r: 3rd r • y: not an r There are 3 r’s in “strawberry”.

<Without extended thinking> > How many u’s in universalulis?

> Looking at “universalulis” letter by letter: u-n-i-v-e-r-s-a-l-u-l-i-s There are 2 u’s in “universalulis”.
by lizknope | 2025-11-04 15:33:50+00:00
I was reading a book on string theory and I remember the Calabi–Yau manifold

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold

I'm not going to pretend to understand it all but they do make pretty pictures!

https://www.google.com/search?q=calabi+yau+manifold+images
by madamelic | 2025-11-04 15:33:56+00:00
People who use ride share use more than one app because they can pick the one that is the cheapest. The people who use these will be price conscious.

Of course there will be other factors like amenities.

Personally, I think 'style' is going to be a non-insignificant factor to it as well. Few normies will want to get out of a 'nerd car' that has bulbous sensors all over it if they can pay a bit more to have a cooler looking ride, it's the Prius effect.

The style thing is just my opinion though but price will be the major one. People will tolerate an ugly robotaxi if it is significantly cheaper or more convenient.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-11-04 15:34:06+00:00
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were virtually the the only high school students in the entire USA programming on microcomputers when they were in high school. Bill Gates mom regularly sat on IBM boards and advised him regularly in Microsoft's early years. Finally, even though Paul Allen wrote a 12,000 line chip emulator in assembly that was essential to Microsoft's existance, Bill totally threw him under the bus when he had to take time off the work to deal with (checks notes) life threatening CANCER.

This is the type of unicorn ruthless capitalism that it takes to become the richest person on the entire planet. Quite honestly, Gates gets less hate nowadays because of his philanthropy and the fact that there are even shittier billionaires.
by pka | 2025-11-04 15:34:14+00:00
It seems models are pre-planning though:

> How does Claude write rhyming poetry? Consider this ditty:

> He saw a carrot and had to grab it,

> His hunger was like a starving rabbit

> To write the second line, the model had to satisfy two constraints at the same time: the need to rhyme (with "grab it"), and the need to make sense (why did he grab the carrot?). Our guess was that Claude was writing word-by-word without much forethought until the end of the line, where it would make sure to pick a word that rhymes. We therefore expected to see a circuit with parallel paths, one for ensuring the final word made sense, and one for ensuring it rhymes.

> Instead, we found that Claude plans ahead. Before starting the second line, it began "thinking" of potential on-topic words that would rhyme with "grab it". Then, with these plans in mind, it writes a line to end with the planned word.

[https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...]
by gilbetron | 2025-11-04 15:34:23+00:00
This is one of the least curious posts I've seen on HN. We have been thinking about thinking for millenia, and no, Buddhists don't have it figure out. Nobody does. LLMs are the most significant advancement in "thinking science" in a long, long time. It is clear that they are doing something a lot like thinking, if it is not thinking. They seem to think more than most people I know, including the person I'm responding to.

I think people conflate thinking with sentience, consciousness, and a whole lot of other concerns.

Clearly this website is not for you and your complete lack of curiosity if you call us "sicko freaks".
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-04 15:34:23+00:00
> Honestly, this approach would probably get you fired eventually for non-coop behaviour in every company I’ve worked at.

I don't think I've ever worked in a company that would fire someone for something like that. Maybe you'd get a scheduled conversation to talk about it, to try to resolve whatever is going on (in this case verbose AI slop PRs), since obviously something is going wrong when people start engaging in malicious compliance.

But then I also never worked in a country where people can be fired for whatever reason, it's always been a legal requirement (in the countries I've lived at least) that the firing needs to be properly justified and explained, and firing someone like that wouldn't be justified.
by 4kchiefofstaff | 2025-11-04 15:34:45+00:00
I did a basic napkin calculation in the other comment. The price of the car is not that relevant per km than you make it to be.

I think self driving will be a commodity in the long term and every car will be able to do it. If Tesla will solve it purly by cameras, every other car manufacturer will be able to add this too. Perhaps a few years later but they will be able to do it too.

So Tesla has to leverage the first mover advantage, and they are loosing this already.

And while Musk says robot taxis are fundamental to tesla, the taxi market is actually not that big. All the broad nice areas like small cities etc. will buy a small fleet of cars and i don't think the price point of a Tesla will that crazy much cheaper than whatever everyone else will have that it will be obvous for everyone to just buy the Tesla model.

I alone will not use Tesla alone for Musk. Despite that, people might want to pay a euro more to have a SVU to have space or higher entry point than choosing the cheapest Tesla model to drive with.

Tesla can't flood the market very easily. If they could, they would have done it. And its expected that Tesla will not suddenly find the solution to their problems. They are optimizing away the next 9 at the 9x% reliability. Every additional 9 will take the same amount as the previous 9. And the nines are quite relevant if you look how many km these cars will have to drive.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-11-04 15:35:23+00:00
So many distortion pedals use an op amp to run a signal into antiparallel diodes to create distortion. I’ve spent a few weeks trying to emulate it, and it’s a lot of fun.

Different flavors of diode make significant changes to the way it sounds. Even things like LEDs can be used (they are Light Emitting Diodes, after all).

Andy Simper of Cytomic is some kind of mad genius at this stuff. He’s created a painstakingly accurate emulation of the Ibanez Tube Screamer that allows you to change the values of basically every component in the circuit diagram. It’s jaw dropping: https://cytomic.com/product/scream/

He’s also shared a ton of incredible information about how he emulates circuits. The math can get really intense. If anyone is looking for a fun project, I strongly suggest experimenting with circuit modeling. It’s a great workout for the brain.
by ChicagoBoy11 | 2025-11-04 15:35:27+00:00
I had a friend in college who was the ultimate expression of this. If he was in a line, waiting for someone, outside a professor's office hours, etc., he was working on SOMETHING, usually getting ahead of some reading for class. I asked him later, and he gave quite a compelling account of how if you truly added it all up, it had a pretty huge effect in how long it took him to get through his work. He was incredibly bright, went onto a PhD at MIT, and was also very sociable, which I suspect was helped by this strategy of aggressively seizing on these little breaks of time.

I need a good chunk of time to settle into "productive" work, even if it is just reading. I suspect that what is needed is a little bit more discipline at first and slowly it gets easier, but I just never had the ethic to stick to it, and because of this friend I don't even have the ability to claim any doubt as to how impactful it would be.
Show HN: ChatGPT for Forms
by the_plug | 2025-11-04 15:35:47+00:00
Proloom (https://proloom.app) - describe your form in plain text, AI builds it as a conversation. "lead form for my dental office" → working chat form that asks name, email, reason for visit, insurance info Takes 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes in traditional form builders. Just launched, no users yet. Does anyone actually want this?
by DanHulton | 2025-11-04 15:36:12+00:00
Again, you're going wildly off the rails in your logic. Sure, "executable by a human" is part of the definition for Turing machines, but that's only talking about Turing-specific capabilities. If you want to argue that a Turing machine can emulate the specific definition of Turing machine capabilities that humans can perform, that's fine. But you're saying that because humans can ACT LIKE Turing machines, they must BE Turing machines, and are therefore emulatable.

This is the equivalent of saying "I have set up a complex mechanical computer powered by water that is Turing complete. Since any Turing complete system can emulate another one, it means that any other Turing complete system can also make things wet and irrigate farms.

Human intelligence is not understood. It can be made to do Turing complete things, but you can't invert that and say that because you've read the paper on Turing completeness, you now understand human intelligence.