MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by web3-is-a-scam | 2025-11-08 15:35:37+00:00
> At an event this week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar seemed to suggest that the government could act as a “backstop” for the company’s commitments

She said the quiet part out loud? This was always the play, it is obvious. Too big to fail. National security concerns. China/Russia veer scary. Blah blah blah.

Altman’s libertarian pontification is so obviously insincere it’s laughable.
by kccqzy | 2025-11-08 15:35:43+00:00
Strong disagree here. Many apps don't implement dark mode in the way I want. They seem to think dark mode is for conserving battery life on OLED displays and make the majority of their UI #000000. That's not what I want. I want a subtle shade of grey. I'd rather choose light mode for an individual app if that app doesn't implement dark mode correctly.

Another point is that some types of content just don't work with dark mode. Maps for example. I have used multiple apps that use maps or present data on a map. None of the maps look good when dark. As such I always turn off dark mode if an app displays maps as part of its main user journey.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-08 15:36:09+00:00
Let me put it this way: when ChatGPT tells me I've hit the "Free plan limit for GPT-5", I don't even notice a difference when it goes away or when it comes back. There's no incentive for me to pay them for access to 5 if the downgraded models are just as good. That's a huge problem for them.
by giorgioz | 2025-11-08 15:37:09+00:00
"$1 trillion in stock value has been wiped from several of Silicon Valley’s heaviest hitters, all of which are heavily enmeshed in generative AI. Oracle, Meta, Palantir, and Nvidia"

I just checked the stock Oracle Palantir and Nvidia and they don't seem particularly down. Only Meta seems down from 750$ to 620$ which is a 21% drop (to the value it had this year in April 2025 (which would be a drop in 277B$ billions dollars).

Is there any data supporting the article claims for 1T$ stocks value drop?
by audunw | 2025-11-08 15:37:38+00:00
It’s hard to do something that is truly novel these days. Though I’d argue that Zigs upcoming approach to Async IO is indeed novel on its own. I haven’t seen anything like it in an imperative language.

What’s important is the integration of various ideas, and the nuances of their implementation. Walter Bright brings up D comptime in every Zig post. I’ve used D. Yet I find Zigs comptime to be more useful and innovative in its implementation details. It’s conceptually simpler yet - to me - better.

You mention Ada. I’ve only dabbled with it, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t have anything as powerful as Zigs comptime? I think people get excited about not just the ideas themselves, but the combination and integration of the ideas.

In the end I think it’s also subjective. A lot of people like the syntax and combination of features that Zig provides. I can’t point to one singular thing that makes me excited about Zig
by ants_everywhere | 2025-11-08 15:37:48+00:00
A realistic child linguistic corpus for a 2 year old starting to form sentences would be about 15 million words over the course of their lifetime. Converted to LM units that's maybe about 20 million tokens. There are small language models trained on sets that small.

Some LMs are specifically trained on child-focused small corpora in the 10 million range, e.g. BabyLM: https://babylm.github.io.

Keep in mind that before age 2, children are using individual words and getting much richer feedback than LMs are.

Humans can and do echolocate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation. There are also anatomical differences that are not cognitive that affect the abilities like echolocation. For example, the positioning and frequency response of sensors (e.g. ears) can affect echolocation performance.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-08 15:38:14+00:00
> So you're ok with permanent confusion of 0 vs O because "boring/expected" doesn't add a dot for zero?

0 and O are not actually confusing in any of the fonts I use. As I’m typing this comment without any custom font changes, the 0 has a slash through it. In other fonts I use there’s an option to add a dot. These are all normal and common.

Redrawing the ^ character to not be elevated would be unexpected.

> This is not (such) a (n absolute) thing, there are different contradictory norms that persist for decades,

Fonts are expected to show common characters as those character, not something different to satisfy a singular edge case at the expense of every common use case.

If someone wants vertical arrows they should use Unicode vertical arrows, not try to force everyone looking for a ^ character to see something unusual.
by shawn_w | 2025-11-08 15:38:18+00:00
Insertion-ordered hash tables are a thing, though they usually don't allow duplicates any more than other hash table designs.

Ocaml hash tables have the interesting property where each entry is treated like a stack; inserting an existing key pushes the new value and deleting pops. I've always assumed this is for use with lexically scoped symbol tables in the compiler.
by thenthenthen | 2025-11-08 15:38:23+00:00
Every point. Everything is an app, everything needs your phone number, everyone drives with their high beams on + every 10 second you get photographed by plate readers, everything tries to subscribe you, every app is full of ad splash screens + point systems, all fonts are mini/dense info overload. Oh yeah multiply this times 100x your expectation.

Edit: lets add my own boomer complain: everything is a video <3
by dangus | 2025-11-08 15:38:34+00:00
You don’t even have to read the article. There is no such thing as a CEO held accountable.

Just look at Elon’s insane pay package, approved in a landslide. The skulls of the average shareholder must echo like a cave.

And the rich accuse the poor of their poverty being their own fault, because they are just being irresponsible, making bad decisions, and spending unwisely. They should look in the mirror.
by marcyb5st | 2025-11-08 15:38:41+00:00
But imagine how much money will it create for shareholders for a little bit /s

Seriously though, there's a part of me that hopes that the technology can help with technological advancement. Fusion, room temperature superconductors, working solid state batteries, ... which will all help in leaping ahead and make sure everyone on the planet has a good life. Is the risk worth it? I don't know, bit that's my reason for wanting AGI
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-11-08 15:39:04+00:00
> But I've been told by Eric Schmidt and others that AGI is just around the corner—by year's end even

It was this time last year we were told “2025 will be the year of the agent”, with suggestions that the general population would be booking their vacations and managing their tax returns via Agents.

We’re 7 weeks from the end of the year, and although there are a few notable use cases in coding and math research, agents haven’t shown to be meaningfully disruptive of most people’s economic activity.

Something most people agree is AGI might arrive in the near future, but there’s still a huge effort required to diffuse that technology & its benefits throughout the economy.
by ethbr1 | 2025-11-08 15:39:43+00:00
This is part of the K-shaped economy.

Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.

But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.

And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.

(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)
by techblueberry | 2025-11-08 15:40:07+00:00
I mean 20 years ago it was intelligence that could be used in multiple domains; the ability to reason in natural language. Which is what we have? Really, beyond this fantastical; AGI is when we have luxury automated space communism, I sort of legitimately don’t understand why ChatGPT 5 isn’t AGI. (Other than the fact that it would be super disappointing, which is maybe my point) Maybe it’s AGIv1? Maybe it’s AGI with an IQ of 47? But it’s super bipolar since it can also talk like someone with an IQ of 150x
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-11-08 15:41:46+00:00
> so the current stock price is mostly irrelevant to the shares that aren't moving.

If it moves enough, shares that aren't moving might become shares that are though. Unless a company's stock is all held by Die Hard True Believers who will HODL through the apocalypse and beyond, the market price can matter.

We'd also have to run the same argument on the upside too. Does the current stock price matter to those who aren't selling when it goes 2x in a year?
by freedomben | 2025-11-08 15:41:59+00:00
To be clear, I agree with you that WWE is not a sport.

But the counter argument that I have heard which I find the strongest, is pointing out the extreme physical endurance and strength that they have in order to complete their routines. It does take a pretty high level of athleticism to accomplish what they do.

I think that's a strong argument, but I don't think it's enough to make it a sport. It takes an extreme level of athleticism to do plenty of things that we don't consider sports
by primer42 | 2025-11-08 15:42:06+00:00
> And then there’s Microsoft, which—despite being one of the most powerful and prominent companies in Silicon Valley—seems to be having one of its biggest losing streaks ever. Bloomberg reported Friday that its stock had slumped 8.6 percent over eight days, a decline that evaporated some $350 billion in market valuation.

I find it strange and upsetting when articles talk about the "evaporation" of "market valuation". Market value is already meaningless vapor - it's not like real money was created when the stock price went up, nor has anything of concrete value disappeared.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-11-08 15:42:54+00:00
These “commitments” aren’t generally contractual obligations beyond some clawback or penalty for not fulfilling them. Don’t forget Microsoft and oracle retain the infrastructure built. It’s generally reserved capacity with minimum spend and a maximum spend as the quoted $1.5T. The spend also typically ramps and there are triggers and out clauses built in. These aren’t bonds or debt or what they imply as “coming due” in the article.

People keep drawing parallels to the housing crisis and ensuing financial crisis. Those were hundreds of millions of individual contracts spread across thousands of banks and debt holders. There was little understanding at any individual institution of the correlation risks with subprime or the systemic counterparty risk (I know I sat in the center of core risk at one of the big systemic banks at the time). In this the institutions are all large, know their counterparts well, know OpenAI, etc. Despite all outward appearances none of them are signing up for insolvency, and none expect a bailout, and none WANT a bailout. It’s not good for any CFO’s career to be the one forced to give up the companies ownership to the US government and they at minimum will avoid this at all costs.

I’m not saying this isn’t all a giant bubble, but it’s more akin to the dot com bubble which was more of a shakeout than long term consolidation. It’s hard to say the www isn’t an intensively valuable set of infrastructure and services even if pets.com went out of business (and its business model has turned out to be pretty viable since).
by Ologn | 2025-11-08 15:43:31+00:00
Yes...NVDA closed at $188.15 yesterday, a price it was never at until October. It did hit $212.19 last week, but retreated.

After spring 2023, Nvidia stock seems to follow a pattern. It has a run-up prior to earnings, it beats the forecast, with the future forecast replaced with an even more amazing forecast, and then the stock goes down for a bit. It also has runs - it went up in the first half of 2024, as well as from April to now.

Who knows how much longer it can go on, but I remember 1999 and things were crazier then. In some ways things were crazier three years ago with FAANG salaries etc. There is a lot of capital spending, the question is are these LLMs with some tweaking worth the capital spending, and it's too early to tell that fully. Of course a big theoretical breakthrough like the utility of deep learning, or transformers or the like would help, but those only come along every few years (if at all).
by coliveira | 2025-11-08 15:43:56+00:00
US Ai companies are fixated on low value activities, that's the problem. Creating more garbage for the internet or summarizing text is useful, but not that fantastic or transformative. I have a new version of MS Word where at the start screen it will suggest a bunch of BS topics that it can generate for me. What is the benefit of this other than the appearance that I'm doing real work? Most companies will be inundated by this nonsense created by people who are now 5 to 10 times more "productive" because they use Ai, and corporations will pretty much stop doing any real work.
by boomlinde | 2025-11-08 15:44:00+00:00
> No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.

And if that little Mastodon server ends up hosting some content that is embarrassing or offensive to the Danish authorities, laws like this will surely not be used to retaliate...

Arbitrarily and selectively enforced laws seem like an obviously bad thing to me. If the government can nail me for anything, even if they practically don't, I'll be very wary of offending or embarrassing the government.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-08 15:44:25+00:00
I'll respond by quoting the authors themselves:

> "The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees [in the study] was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry). We should have been agnostic on the conclusions."

---

It gets back to the main issue here. You can't expect an open and good faith discussion on this topic when any one can suffer major career and other consequences for not adopting the politically correct view. And indeed extremely compelling evidence to the contrary of such is immediately met with a mixture of logically flawed arguments (e.g. - various groups have suffered tremendous discrimination with no apparent impact on IQ or later achievement, Jews being the obvious example) and ad hominem.

The study results are obviously not what the author's expected to find, which left them in a very difficult place. I think that is also why this was the last effort to try to experimentally prove that genetics don't matter. This is also likely why they continue to insist that the almost exactly ~20% of the mixed race individuals were misclassified by accident. Had they shown an environmentally favorable argument, I suspect it would have been revealed as a rather cleverly concocted control group. As is, it's extremely difficult to explain this (the mixed race individuals believed they were black and appeared as such, yet tested in accordance with their genetics) with a typical environmental argument.
by gametorch | 2025-11-08 15:45:34+00:00
Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.
by dahart | 2025-11-08 15:45:46+00:00
Yes, that’s what I’m thinking of. Search says it’s sometimes called Adaptive Driving Beam or Dynamic Light Assist.

Ah too bad if it doesn’t apply to low beams… LED low beams are still extremely problematic.

The search results are telling me that dynamic masking in the US will only apply to low beams and not high beams. Maybe that’s a good thing? I’m just hoping the situation will get better somehow.
by NicoJuicy | 2025-11-08 15:45:53+00:00
Why skeptical?

No matter what, LLM'S are here to stay. Companies are doing huge investments do that they can get ahead early on.

Will it need to be more efficient, yes.

But a lot of money of repetitive tasks are going to llm's. Additionally, most companies are constraint by capacity atm.

I really can't imagine what could revert this trend.

Yes, body shops like Palantir are hugely overrated.

But the big tech? No. They can carry those infra investments. Just curious who will come out on top.
by amarcheschi | 2025-11-08 15:45:55+00:00
Your salad may have a non pre determined amount of olives, vinegar, and tomatoes.

The unpredictability of salad composition is what makes our products so unique and loved by people all around the world!*

*While on average it's a very good salad, there's a non zero chance that the salad may contain asbestos, plutonium, chalk, antimonium, rubber, NaN, steel rods
by afavour | 2025-11-08 15:46:02+00:00
As always it’s hype vs reality. Today we’re told AGI is just around the corner. It isn’t. You’re right that a lot of tools are improving iteratively and that’s great but the hyped up valuations we’re seeing are valuing coding assistants, they’re valuing a fictional reality where AGI solves everything and the first one there gets all the rewards.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-11-08 15:47:53+00:00
Interesting, this is the first time I've heard that opinion. For myself, I get annoyed whenever a dark mode isn't #000000; it's not about saving battery, it's about the pixels being off, which I find more readable. (I got an OLED specifically because it makes it more comfortable spending time in a terminal.)

Can you say more about your use case and why you prefer gray over black?
by retrac | 2025-11-08 15:47:58+00:00
Asian domesticated rice isn't the only kind of rice. Several related species grow wild in central North America, particularly in the wetlands around the Great Lakes and on the Prairies. Naturally cold-adapted rice. It may have been domesticated at some point in the past by the indigenous peoples, which might explain its favourable properties. Despite the common name "wild rice" most wild rice consumed today is commercially cultivated.
by badsectoracula | 2025-11-08 15:48:11+00:00
I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and while it is decently stable, it is far from perfect.

For example i think the first issue any new user will face is with many codecs not being available in the official repository distros, making various sites (and video plays) unusable. The solution to that one is simple, add packman, which is a community repository that contains all codecs - but IIRC packman is not mentioned anywhere during the install, it is something you need to search for (it is in the wiki). However, packman very often conflicts with the official repos when it comes to updates, making all GUI-based ones (that do not seem to handle cross-repo conflicts like zypper) pretty much unusable as they always give up in the presence of a conflict. And unfortunately some comments i've seen (mainly on Reddit) from people working on the distro seem to indicate at least a minor hostility towards using packman, so i do not see this being solved any time soon.

For an experienced Linux user this is a trivial issue, something that i doubt most (long time) openSUSE Tumbleweed users would even think about, but for someone new to Linux it can be a larger issue they wont find in distros like Debian (though they may find other issues :-P).

There have been other issues i had with openSUSE Tumbleweed, like -e.g- at some point after an update every 3D game had some significant input lag regardless of vsync state. I never solved that one, i just rolled back updates (snapper is great for that, but again an advanced Linux user feature) until at some point -months later- the problem stopped happening. Though now i have another issue where the X server randomly starts not updating the screen for random numbers of milliseconds - essentially it feels as if the entire thing is stuttering - but weirdly enough there are no CPU or GPU usage spikes and it doesn't seem to be relevant to CPU/GPU usage at all. If anything, it does not happen at all if there is some OpenGL or Vulkan program running in a window (so it doesn't affect games at all, just regular desktop use) and sometimes i just end up running vkcube in another virtual desktop (it doesn't matter if the output is visible or not) to avoid it. My guess is that there is some sort of scheduling bug in the modesetting driver as i never had that issue with the amdgpu driver (my guess is the modesetting driver doesn't get as much testing as the amdgpu driver on AMD GPUs), but the amdgpu driver causes the X server to hang after i suspend and resume my desktop since i got a RX 7900 XTX (it did not happen with my RX 5700 XT, which was rock solid), so it is choice between the lesser evil.
by Netcob | 2025-11-08 15:48:12+00:00
If Windows keeps going in this direction, I will try again.

But in the past 20 years I tried using Linux on the desktop a couple of times.

It always ends the same way - out of the blue it refuses to boot. Of course there's usually a solution, but I just really don't like that my PC can just suddenly decide that I'll be troubleshooting for the rest of the day, usually in front of some very minimal "maintenance" CLI. And that's if I got the time - I may have to use my laptop for the rest of the week, now dreading the weekend instead of welcoming it.

Right now I'd have to do a bunch of research first. Would I still be able to play all the games I play with my friends once a week? I have 3 monitors, one of them has a different DPI than the others, did they fix that by now? I got a stream deck, will that be essentially useless? Is my webcam / mic supported? Do I need to learn about various audio architectures before I can ever use a mic again? Which ones of the dozens of apps I use every day can be made to run under Linux?

It'll probably take a 40-hour work week to get to like 90% of where I was on Windows, and then I'd consider myself lucky that I got that much to work at all. And then I'd start waiting for the first "troubleshooting day".

With all that negativity I have to also say that I adore Linux on the server. When all you need in terms of hardware is basically a CPU and any number of storage devices and all you get in terms of UI is SSH, Linux is far superior to anything else.
by dredmorbius | 2025-11-08 15:48:13+00:00
High density -> large populations.

Density, generally, makes service provision easier.

Contrarywise, Starlink (or other broadcast-based services) perform poorly in high-density areas, where there's high bandwidth contention. Building out to serve such locations, which are by definition few and fairly sparsely distributed, as your map indicates, increases total system costs markedly.

Starlink at scale is optimised for sparse, low-income populations, rather than dense, high-income ones. That's probably a significant liability eventually, though for now I'll have to note I'm impressed with the technical accomplishments, regardless of reservations on persons involved.