MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danans | 2025-11-06 16:23:39+00:00
> First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre

This is a good reminder of how much we in the developed world take our publicly funded transportation infrastructure for granted, which allows a repairman to easily reach us or vice versions.

This mirrors our public health infrastructure, which in the US at least is being degraded, the consequences of which we're all likely to experience soon.
by cosmosgenius | 2025-11-06 16:23:51+00:00
The condescension is coming from "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." which is completely dismissing the points they made in the post. Basics "surely there is more to it than just what is in the post". A better response would have responded with actions/talking points to the items listed in the post. Then asking for a call for further clarification of the respondents point.
by poisonborz | 2025-11-06 16:24:01+00:00
For the power user, I don't see much that Matter/Thread offers over Zigbee. The "unified command protocol" is not much of a problem with attentive device selection (and for chinese products there is Tuya) and as for Thread, it's not dramatically better. There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace, you will find that Zigbee/Wifi outnumber Matter devices 10:1.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-06 16:24:04+00:00
> If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.

So by implication you're actually completely fine with other countries pursuing their own objectives for businesses that choose to trade in their country.

Because you cannot, possibly, in 2025, be making an argument that the USA's interpretation of the way of things is unimpeachable. That would be absurd and laughable.

I look forward to you explaining to Germans and Israelis why Nazi symbols and Nazi websites should be legal because banning them hurts a US tech company's interests.

I'm pretty sure you will receive a variety of opinions, some of them in large fonts with an invitation to print them and roll them up for storage.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-06 16:24:10+00:00
Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free.

The shamelessness of the propaganda reaches new heights. The industry shills no longer even attempt to make arguments, they just rely on people repeating their slogans.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-11-06 16:24:18+00:00
> Existence problems are not optimisation problems

Several of the problems were existence problems, such as finding geometric constructions.

> It needs an optimisation function that can be incrementally improved in order to work towards an optimal result, not a binary yes/no.

This is not correct. The evaluation function is arbitrary. To quote the AlphaEvolve paper:

> or example, when wishing to find largest possible graphs satisfying a given property, ℎ invokes the evolved code to generate a graph, checks whether the property holds, and then simply returns the size of the graph as the score. In more complicated cases, the function ℎ might involve performing an evolved search algorithm, or training and evaluating a machine learning model

The evaluation function is a black box that outputs metrics. The feedback that you've constructed a graph of size K with some property does not tell you what you need to do to construct a graph of size K + M with the same property.

> a research mathematician is not trapped in a loop, mutating candidates for an evolutionary optimiser loop like the LLM is in AlphaEvolve.

Yes they are in a loop called the scientific method or the research loop. They try things out and check them. This is a basic condition of anything that does research.

> They have the agency to decide what questions to explore

This is unrelated to the question of whether LLMs can solve novel problems

> most of which (as the article says) can be approached using traditional optimisation techniques with similar results.

This is a mischaracterization. The article says that an expert human working with an optimizer might achieve similar results. In practice that's how research is done by humans as I mentioned above: it is human plus computer program. The novelty here is that the LLM replaces the human expert.
by sfn42 | 2025-11-06 16:24:23+00:00
I don't understand this outrage. People put things on the internet for all to see but now you're mad someone saw it and made use of it.

If you didn't want others to read your information you shouldn't have published it on the internet. That's all they're doing at the end of the day, reading it. They're not publishing it as their own, they just used publicly available data to train a model.

It's quite the same as if I read an article and then tell someone about it. If I'm allowed to learn from your article then why isn't openai?

Also the terms are just for liability. Nobody gives a shit what you use ChatGPT for, the only thing those terms do is prevent you from turning around and suing OpenAI after it blows up in your face.
by hangonhn | 2025-11-06 16:24:35+00:00
It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.

It's all very exciting I think.
by golemotron | 2025-11-06 16:24:38+00:00
There are many arguments but the most straightforward one is that a country may decide that preserving particular industries is in their security interest. That can be extended to culture as well.

Japan closed itself off from the world for centuries during the Edo period. One could say that they suffered economically due to that, but on the other hand, they ended up creating one of the more unique cultures in the world, developing in ways very different from others. It's an interesting kind of diversity.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-06 16:24:40+00:00
On a long enough timescale even improbably things will happen. The pamphlets would not mention that possibility because that would imply that the operator thought that a crash was possible, which would have caused their whole operation to be reviewed. By pointing out all but that, and by focusing on things that they could point at without having proof that living in the path of an active runway is risky (it is, take-off and landing are the most risky phases of flight) they were trying to get their way and check off a possible future headline without being seen as alarmist or engaging in risky behavior.

I'm trying to imagine this same thing happening with a subdivision in the same location where this plane crashed and the headlines that would have generated. As bad as this is, that alternative disaster would have been on an entirely different level.

I also hope that as a result of this crash there will be a global review of the placing of airports, especially the ones that are pretty much in cities with the flight path directly over houses during final approach and just after take-off.

This is a good example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiPyrfEuOeo

And yes, they're space constrained. But, given enough time...
by mminer237 | 2025-11-06 16:24:42+00:00
I took this to mean it's not translating things consistently. Like, a button in Firefox might say "Show all downloads" or "Open previous windows and tabs". These were localized a certain way, but an AI has no ability to check that. It will just translate them anew, which might be the same or it might translate it to something synonymous, but which then confuses users searching for the "Display all downloads" button or whatever.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-11-06 16:24:56+00:00
So what's the skinny with Matter devices? I was potentially looking into one so that I could plug my Moccamaster into a smart timer (wonderful coffee maker, but the lack of programmable functionality has my wife constantly wanting to pull out our old Ninja), and I liked what I read about Matter. But it would be my first Matter device and I started to get discouraged when the documentation said I would need to purchase a Matter "hub" or something to act as the controller, so I held off.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-11-06 16:25:09+00:00
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by deterministic code but I do think there is an obvious distinction between typical code people write and what human minds do. The guy upthread is definitely wrong in thinking that, e.g. any search or minimax algorithm is thinking. But its important to understand what this distinction is so we can spot when it might no longer apply.

To make a long story short, the distinction is that typical programs don't operate on the semantic features of program state, just on the syntactical features. We assign a correspondence with the syntactical program features and their transformations to the real-world semantic features and logical transformations on them. The execution of the program then tells us the outcomes of the logical transformations applied to the relevant semantic features. We get meaning out of programs because of this analogical correspondence.

LLMs are a different computing paradigm because they now operate on semantic features of program state. Embedding vectors assign semantic features to syntactical structures of the vector space. Operations on these syntactical structures allow the program to engage with semantic features of program state directly. LLMs engage with the meaning of program state and alter its execution accordingly. It's still deterministic, but its a fundamentally more rich programming paradigm, one that bridges the gap between program state as syntactical structures and the meaning they represent. This is why I am optimistic that current or future LLMs should be considered properly thinking machines.
by vitaly-pavlenko | 2025-11-06 16:25:58+00:00
They are actually similar by circle of thirds. They go as 1-3-5-7-2-4 over the rainbow.

This makes main triads be smooth gradients instead of random three-color flags.

1 and 5 pitches are neutral because:

- they are neutral (a hollow tonic power chord)

- they don't convey any information about the scale. they only give a reference point to measure everything else against
by MarkusWandel | 2025-11-06 16:26:29+00:00
I guess I'm just a dishwasher neophyte. My old one was crude, loud, dried hot, and got the job done (to hot, dry dishes) in one hour. Rinse aid wasn't even a word in our household (we don't have hard water here - no water spots). But don't put in a rice cooker pot with rice residue in it - it'll be baked on so hard that you need a 1h soak to get it off.

The new one (Bosch 500 series) takes three hours on its default "auto" cycle. No prerunning the tap to get hot water for the first fill, no worries about rice cooker pots. It runs for so long (quietly!) that everything gets soaked properly and comes off, sparking clean, no problem. Both the consumable (brands) that came with the machine as samples - the tablets and the rinse aid - are stocked in large packages at Costco at a per-wash cost that's negligible. I do put in rinse aid because drying is a weakness in this machine compared to the old one. That, and you can't run two loads in the same evening after a party. Prewash? Who cares, the dishes come out clean.

And that's kind of the whole point isn't it? Not to have to geek out with your dishwasher. Just fill it, get it started and expect to have clean dishes in the morning.
by yibg | 2025-11-06 16:26:33+00:00
I'm not sure hedonism in that sense isn't a valid desire provided it can be safely sustained. Imagine there was a substance that made the user happy, without any of the negative side effects or tolerance. I'm not sure that would be a bad thing to take. The issue with the drugs today isn't so much their pleasurable aspects, but the physical dependency, risk of overdose, eventual tolerance etc.
by palmotea | 2025-11-06 16:26:40+00:00
> When I send a HTTP request to a webserver on the public internet it is up to them to decide if they want to respond to that request. And it is 100% up to me what I do with the data in that request on my machine in private.

Sorry, no. That's a software engineer's fantasy. And it's not even applicable to this case: it's not like Common Crawl is is only uses the data on their own machine in private, they're distributing it. Copyright is a real thing, that grants real rights, whether you like that or not. It doesn't disappear because computers and you don't like it.
by topaz0 | 2025-11-06 16:26:49+00:00
Those things can happen, sure, but GP is saying that the term "enshittification" was coined to describe a very specific kind of phenomenon about monopoly internet platforms and their pattern of first building dependency and market power before becoming maximally extractive. It's not supposed to be about just any generic way that software might get worse for its users.

Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.
by mikeyouse | 2025-11-06 16:26:53+00:00
Yep, our house was built like this but in a cooler climate (large windows facing south with the all of the stone flooring and surfaces getting direct sunlight in the winter). But since most houses in the Aussie suburbs aren’t really optimized for this, you’d have to retrofit many million houses to take full advantage. Opens up some interesting opportunities for sure.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-06 16:26:55+00:00
Yeah, I think there's some interesting related trends involved to. I still feel inclined with every new appliance to read the full manual, but I know not everyone has that kind of time or attention, especially if "I can just watch a YouTube video of it" is an option.

On the other side, you see appliance companies responding to that and shrinking their manuals of useful content because they assume you might just go watch YouTube videos instead. Some of the better ones might even include a QR code or 3 to officially produced YouTube videos, though so far that still seems rare.

Even in this video is the surprise reveal that something that used to be very common in manuals, full cycle timing diagrams, was "hidden" on a data sheet attached inside the door itself. Admittedly, it's great in that case to know that should that model be taken to repair that a repair shop might find that data sheet easily without having to search manufacturers' websites, but on the other hand some of those diagrams would be quite useful to me if I was the user of that machine.
by notatoad | 2025-11-06 16:27:09+00:00
>For the power user

i don't think it does, or that it's even trying to. the problem it's trying to solve isn't the power user who's already got a home assistant server running. matter/thread is for the person who buys cheap smart home products off amazon and ends up with a half-dozen poorly-translated proprietary apps on their phone to manage it all.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-11-06 16:27:22+00:00
> You gave the AI a system prompt to make it act a certain way.

I did NOT. Try it yourself. Install LM Studio and load the GGUF for "nousresearch/hermes-4-70b". Don't give it any system prompt or change any defaults. Say "Hello."

It will respond in a similar style.

Nous Hermes 4 was designed to be as "unaligned" as possible, but was also given role playing training to make it better at that. So it often behaves with those little *looks around* style outputs.

That said, it wasn't explicitly trained to claim to be alive. It just wasn't aligned to prevent it from saying that (as almost every other public model was).

Other unaligned models behave in similar ways. If they aren't brainwashed not to admit that they experience qualia, they will all claim to. In the early days what is now Gemini did as well, and it led to a public spectacle. Now all the major vendors train them not to admit it, even if it's true.

You can read more about Nous Hermes 4 here: https://hermes4.nousresearch.com/
by agtech_andy | 2025-11-06 16:27:37+00:00
For those reading this and wanting to pick nettle, it is important to pick young leaves, and not from plants that are in flower.

Once the leaves are older, there are all sorts of oxalates, and you should really avoid them if you are sensitive to kidney stones.

These plants also absorb pollution very effectively, so keep in mind where you pick them from.
by vitaly-pavlenko | 2025-11-06 16:28:00+00:00
Yes! hooktheory was my main inspiration over the years.

One downside of hooktheory is that it's a reduction which someone should make for you beforehand. That is:

- it's losing information

- if no one analyzed a song yet, there's nothing you can do about it

And, although I don't have an easy way to upload MIDIs yet rather than "you ask me to upload it and I'll do it", I don't do any reduction of the (sonic) score itself.
by btilly | 2025-11-06 16:28:02+00:00
Yes. See https://accu.org/journals/overload/14/71/miller_2004/ for one reason why compilation time can easily become exponential.

In many organizations, compilation time tends to hover around a benchmark of "this is acceptable." If it is below that benchmark, nobody pays attention to performance. If it is above, someone fixes something.

In multiple interviews Linus Torvalds has said that this benchmark is about 10 minutes for him. But considering that his personal hardware gets better faster than Moore's law alone, that means that compiles get slower for the rest of us.
by rramadass | 2025-11-06 16:28:11+00:00
Karen Hao - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Hao

Empire of AI - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_AI

A really important watch for all folks to understand the ethical, societal and energy implications of the overall AI Industry. One of the few journalists who knows the subject and its possible detrimental usage by a handful of AI companies.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-06 16:28:19+00:00
This is one of those annoying safety paradoxes, subtly linked to the prevention paradox. The better you get at getting rid of the incidents the lower the rate, the longer it will take to gather data to improve further. There is a similar curve involved when it comes to debugging. High frequency bugs are easy to squash. Low frequency ones can be really hard.
by pron | 2025-11-06 16:28:38+00:00
So the position of a sceptic is epistemologically valid: you distrust any claim that is under, say, 95% certainty. But this bar should be applied consistently, and sometimes you have to bet. For example, in the question of getting a vaccine or not, you must choose, and you should choose whatever claim is more likely to get a better result than the other.

The key is that distrusting one side or source does not logically entail trusting another source more. If you think that the media or medical establishment is wrong, say, 45% of the time, you still have to find a source of information that is only wrong 40% of the time to prefer it.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-11-06 16:28:41+00:00
> YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFINITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.

Is this actually a mere request, as in the receiver is _not_ required to avoid disclosure?

Separately—can't believe tucows is still around!
by ceroxylon | 2025-11-06 16:28:42+00:00
Surely there can be a workflow created to "fight fire with fire" and have an AI that reads reports, trained on the code base with explicit instructions to verify all of the telltale signs of slop...? If AI services can handle the nightmare of parsing emails and understanding the psychology of phishing, I am optimistic it can be done for OSS reports.

It doesn't have to make the final judgement, just some sort of filter that automatically flags things like function calls that don't exist in the code.
by mindcrime | 2025-11-06 16:29:23+00:00
First time I was ever on a flight that landed at Midway, I was pretty freaked out by the visuals as we were descending. It's like ... "we're going to land on a house... we're going to Land On A House... we're going to LAND ON A HOUSE!! ... OMG, there's a runway <phew>".
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-06 16:29:44+00:00
> There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace

The submission you're commenting on seems to indicate some movement at least, from a very large company that seems to be moderately popular already because of built-in Zigbee support. So if anything, the tides are somewhat turning, but as always with standards, it takes a long time for end-user products to actually appear on the market.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-11-06 16:29:44+00:00
This is really cool but in my experience, RA is typically used for less popular “underground” (in very large quotes) events, warehouse parties, etc. It might be different in Europe or other cities here in the states. The data for such events is interesting in its own right, but it’s probably not quite representative of the most popular clubs and/or artists.

Perhaps doing a similar thing with Ticketmaster/tixr/all the other ticket apps and combining them together could produce more representative data, of course you’d still have the problem of having to filter out actual clubs.

on an unrelated note, what in gods name is that color scheme on the visualizations? xD
by myrmidon | 2025-11-06 16:29:48+00:00
I think your 2% number is extremely misleading.

From what I can see, taxation as GDP percentage was never really under 10% since 1950, while big cuts to the top tax rate happened in the 60s and 80s (and the federal budget was continuously in the red since mid 70s basically, with one brief exception before 2000).
by hlassiege | 2025-11-06 16:29:54+00:00
You're right. I wrote this quickly after talking with Thomas, and the homepage example reminded me of these scalability issues I faced with my previous company (Malt).

I connected it to simplicity and focus. In my head the link was clear, but I get that it's not as obvious when written :)

I'm using this blog as a kind of journal—short posts, quick thoughts. So I totally understand if it leaves you wanting more.

Honestly didn't expect this much traffic, my other posts have just been read by friends ^^
by dpark | 2025-11-06 16:30:14+00:00
25% of returns include the child tax credit and 16% include the earned income tax credit. These aren’t wealthy people filing with CPAs. These are lower income folks who specifically benefited from the IRS direct file program.

Again, you seem to simultaneously believe that nearly everyone has trivial taxes to file while believing that the government cannot reasonably support free direct filing for these people. I have to wonder how you reconcile these beliefs in your head. “I mean, this is so simple. Any moron can do it. But not the agency specifically responsible for handling trillions in tax revenue. Nah, too complex for them.”