MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-15 03:37:08+00:00
That depends what the startup costs look like. If the barriers to entry are low then you don't need a lot of investment to enter the market -- which is one of the things that causes margins to be lower, because otherwise people would keep doing it until the returns fell below the normal market rate of return.

The industries with excessive margins are the ones where the incumbents make it prohibitively expensive for anyone to invest in those industries by entering them as a new business, as opposed to buying the stock of the incumbents. Which is one of the risks to their investors -- their stock prices are thereby inflated and they're running the risk both that voters will never get mad enough to actually push through regulatory reform and that the huge market incentive to find a way to disrupt them will never actually find a way do it.
by PeaceTed | 2025-11-15 03:37:10+00:00
So much of this poverty is hidden because it makes people feel uneasy and yet it needs to be exposed, not as a means to shame them or to give you pity to feel bad about yourself but to realise, there is an imbalance and we are all part of it in a small way. That collectively, as nations, we don't need to give up a little to make a lot of change.

Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.

When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.

The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
by zahlman | 2025-11-15 03:39:03+00:00
> venv: Builtin but it is dependent on its host Python. You recreate venvs, you can't copy them.

If you're re-creating a container for the same platform etc. I can't see why it wouldn't work. Aside from third-party packages that include non-Python code, the only thing that really breaks is the paths. (Unfortunately those are all over the place with traditional venv setups, but I'm confident that all of them can be made relative with a bit of setup work plus cooperation from installer tools. Planning to demonstrate it with my own tools, in fact.)

> python-build-standalone requires a musl system installation.

Requires for what, exactly? I'm on a glibc Linux and uv has no problem using the python-build-standalone builds to provide me with Python (I already build it myself, but I thought I'd test it out for PyPy....)
by IncreasePosts | 2025-11-15 03:39:06+00:00
I grew up in an ultra rural part of Pennsylvania. I honestly thought my life was pretty good, and I had great parents and a great school with teachers who cared. My parents were(/are) great, but I later found out my school was ranked D- in the state. I think my parents didn't have huge earnings potential, but were really good at saving. So, my thoughts come directly from my life. A grade school friend of mine came home one day and told his parents that his little sister lost her retainer at school, and his parents were wailing and moaning for literally days over the $150 replacement. Meanwhile, my little brother did the same exact thing a few months earlier and my parents were able to deal with the issue, even though my mom and dad worked the exact same jobs as my friends parents.

My first job out of college I earned more than both of my parents combined and I felt pretty guilty about it for a while. Then I started earning 10x what they made while doodling on a computer all day, and the work:money conception lost all meaning to me.
by foo-bar-bat | 2025-11-15 03:39:35+00:00
Raccoons have been living literally inside of houses for centuries.

One was kept as a pet in Jamestown Virginia in the 1600s. Another lived in the White House in the 1900s. Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US? If living near humans changes animals, that started at least 25,000 years ago here in North America. Not recently.

My neighbors had a pet raccoon growing up. It lived inside but would come and go.

The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
by jleyank | 2025-11-15 03:39:47+00:00
Calling a spade a spade, while quite repetitive, is pertinent. The business and social environment needed to work in the field and more importantly start or maintain businesses in the field is inherently political. Politics ebbs and flows or a long time scale and the current trends really suck for most groups.

People who are comfortable with their views could and often are full of shit. Reality happens independent of one’s viewpoint.

The purpose of HN is to increase the gloss on Y Combinator, increase the allure of startups and get some more business heading their way. Any altruism is merely the price they pay for marketing.
by hopelite | 2025-11-15 03:40:04+00:00
What is the “normal” way? Is that defined in a technical specification? Did you provide the definition/description of what you mean by “normal”?

I would not have expected a language model to perform well on what sounds like a computer vision problem? Even if it was agentic, as you also imply how a five year old could learn how to do it, so too an AI system would need to be trained or at the very least be provided with a description of what is looking at.

Imagine you took an MRI brain scan back in time and showed it to a medical Doctor in even the 1950s or maybe 1900. Do you think they would know what the normal orientation is, let alone what they are looking at?

I am a bit confused and also interested in how people are interacting with AI in general, it really seems to have a tendency to highlight significant holes in all kinds of human epistemological, organizational, and logical structures.

I would suggest maybe you think of it as a kind of child, and with that, you would need to provide as much context and exact detail about the requested task or information as possible. This is what context engineering (are we still calling it that?) concerns itself with.
by rincebrain | 2025-11-15 03:40:25+00:00
Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves.

So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.

I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.

It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.

In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.
by amypetrik8 | 2025-11-15 03:40:48+00:00
exactly, the brain - what a concept! over here you have broca's area, there, wernicke, then Bowman's crest, sector 19, and undiscovered country.

if you put the brain in the shape of a tube you'd have a really long err, well, let's say it's not a good idea to do that. the brain gives me goosepimples, my brain too
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-15 03:41:00+00:00
More discussion:

Judge denies request to exempt Flock footage from Public Records Act

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861829

and a further development:

Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879101
by aeve890 | 2025-11-15 03:41:14+00:00
>Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement.

thinking about the consequences of consumer grade "organic computing" gets weird really fast. How do you interface biological matter with peripherals? What about toxicity? What about pathogens? Not only as targets, but as vectors too. What about senescence? Would my computer catch a cold or get Alzheimer's? What about energy? Would I have to buy proteins/sugar for my PC? Would a "beefy PC master race" kind of machine big enough to gain sentience? Would my PC need to literally sleep?!

Funny to think about it
by AaronNewcomer | 2025-11-15 03:41:24+00:00
The thinking models (especially OpenAI's o3) still seem to do by far the best at this task as they look across the document to see how the writer wrote certain letters where the word is more clear when it runs into confusing words.

I built a whole product around this: https://DocumentTranscribe.com

But I imagine this will keep getting better and that excites me since this was largely built for my own research!
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-15 03:41:25+00:00
> I wonder how many people actually believe this is for the kids and not for population control.

For most of my life, news orgs have been treating national IC/LEO as if they have a history of truth-telling. Whenever a press conference comes up, journalists/editors reliably forget that they've never been told a meaningful truth in one of these.

If the people's who's job it is to highlight the lies of the powerful - usually don't, what hope is there for the proletariat?
by serf | 2025-11-15 03:42:41+00:00
what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about things?

just need to fulfill some software necessity?

The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no?

also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.
by nicpottier | 2025-11-15 03:45:08+00:00
I once was chatting with an author of books (very much an amateur) and he said he enjoyed writing because he liked discovering where the story goes. IE, he starts and builds characters and creates scenarios for them and at some point the story kind of takes over, there is only one way a character can act based on what was previously written, but it wasn't preordained. That's why he liked it, it was a discovery to him.

I'm not saying this is the right way to write a book but it is a way some people write at least! And one LLMs seem capable of doing. (though isn't a book outline pretty much the same as a coding plan and well within their wheelhouse?)
by ChadNauseam | 2025-11-15 03:46:05+00:00
You're misinterpreting what they mean by "50% false positive rate". Let's say there are 10 child traffickers in the country. A 50% false positive rate might mean this system detects 7 of them, but then also detects 7 people who are not child traffickers. The reason it's an absurdly good rate is because the thing they are looking for is so rare. If one in a million people are child traffickers, and you have a false positive rate of 50%, it means that the average person has no more than a one in a million chance of being a false positive.

Let me put it another way. Let's say you are an Egyptian Pharaoh and a man tells you he can predict when solar eclipses will happen. You give him a calendar and he marks down 20 days in the next few decades where he claims there will be an eclipse. On 10 of those marked days, there actually is an eclipse. That would be a 50% false positive rate. By the standards of an Egyptian Pharaoh, that probably looks like an absurdly good false positive rate.
by tguvot | 2025-11-15 03:47:04+00:00
iphone 17 pro max been for sale in gaza for 2 weeks already https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sk600009gk11e . and there are open cafes and restaurants. and new one are build. for example this one called nova: https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/10/12/coincidence-beach-sid...

gaza is very uneven now. there are people who live in rubble and there are people who buy latest iphones and chill in restaurants
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-11-15 03:48:59+00:00
You have to realize AI is trained the same way one would train an auto-completer.

Theres no cognition. It’s not taught language, grammar, etc. none of that!

It’s only seen a huge amount of text that allows it to recognize answers to questions. Unfortunately, it appears to work so people see it as the equivalent to sci-fi movie AI.

It’s really just a search engine.
by anbcodes | 2025-11-15 03:49:05+00:00
I could see some of that idea (that a specific group needs to tell people what to do), although this podcast didn't seem to emphasize it too much.

I'm not sure what to think of that. On one hand, one group of people having power often ends up badly. But on the other hand, everyone doing as they wish doesn't seem to be working and ends up leading to groups having immense power anyway (capitalism, money, influence, advertising, etc.). Someone or something needs to have/will have power.

I would lean towards we need some sort of structure or culture that helps lead us in our choices. Part of culture is institutions which inherently have some level of power. If the institutions are created well, they can use their power to support some good values, instead of the whims of whoever happens to have power now. Kind of like a more values-focused culture instead of a more self-focused culture if that makes sense.
by famouswaffles | 2025-11-15 03:49:28+00:00
>I'm not expecting novel scientific theories today. What I am expecting are signs and hints of such genius.

Like I said, what exactly would you be expecting to see with the capabilities that exist today ? It's not a gotcha, it's a genuine question.

>And, I'm sorry, I don't buy the excuse that these tools are not "yet" as capable as the best and brightest humans.

There's nothing to buy or not buy. They simply aren't. They are unable to do a lot of the things these people do. You can't slot an LLM in place of most knowledge workers and expect everything to be fine and dandy. There's no ambiguity on that.

>They contain the sum of human knowledge, far more than any individual human in history.

It's not really the total sum of human knowledge but let's set that aside. Yeah so ? Einstein, Newton, Von Newman. None of these guys were privy to some super secret knowledge their contemporaries weren't so it's obviously not simply a matter of more knowledge.

>Are they not intelligent, capable of thinking and reasoning?

Yeah they are. And so are humans. So were the peers of all those guys. So why are only a few able to see the next step ? It's not just about knowledge, and intelligence lives in degrees/is a gradient.

>If all this is true, surely we should be seeing incredible results produced by this technology. If not by itself, then surely by "amplifying" the work of the best and brightest humans.

Yeah and that exists. Terence Tao has shared a lot of his (and his peers) experiences on the matter.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115306424727150237

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115420236285085121

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115416208975810074

>And yet... All we have to show for it are some very good applications of pattern matching and statistics, a bunch of gamed and misleading benchmarks and leaderboards, a whole lot of tech demos, solutions in search of a problem, and the very real problem of flooding us with even more spam, scams, disinformation, and devaluing human work with low-effort garbage.

Well it's a good thing that's not true then
by philwelch | 2025-11-15 03:50:52+00:00
Germany also spend the last couple decades buying as much Russian natural gas as possible, even to the extent of decommissioning their nuclear power plants, and only really stopped when someone (probably Ukraine) destroyed their pipelines. They also pressured the rest of Europe to admit a surge of ‘refugees’ that has incited a populist backlash and very likely materially damaged the national security of almost every European country, many of which already have fully endemic terror cells (e.g. the one in Belgium responsible for the Paris attacks in 2015).

The US has spent years begging, pleading, cajoling, and now threatening the Europeans to take responsibility for the defense of their own continent. It took the outbreak of war in Ukraine for anyone in Europe west of Warsaw to even start considering rearmament.

Also, the shitty anti-American attitude from Western Europe isn’t anything new, it existed for decades before Trump seriously entered politics. I’m just speculating here, since none of us actually know what’s said between world leaders behind closed doors, but the US wants Western Europe to rearm and Western Europe’s leaders probably recognized the necessity of doing so in 2022, so it’s pretty convenient for all parties involved that they can pretend they’re doing it to spite America rather than at America’s request.
by arp242 | 2025-11-15 03:51:05+00:00
"Solidarity" was the old word – at least in much of Europe – and was more than just a word but a value people held. It was already becoming rare when I was young in the 90s and while it's still mentioned on occasion, as a moral value it seems largely absent in today's political discourse.

When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
by SirGiggles | 2025-11-15 03:51:16+00:00
> https://github.com/zabbly/incus/issues/89#issuecomment-30764...

> I mean sure, it's the UI component only, and not on the lxc repo but the Zabbly one, and maybe they treat things widely differently depending.

This one is fair since Incus and Zabbly have had no desire to reimplement a web UI, they've instead opted to leave that to the community resulting in LXConsole for example.

Zabbly, for additional context, is Stephane Graber's company that he set up as a consultant service for Linux and Linux Container (both in terms of the Linux Container organization and the LXC project)

As a whole, the project has left the choice of web interface up to the user: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/incus-6-7-has-been-rel...

> But it's the same developer for both, and I'm willing to bet it's a similar mindset for projects.

This is getting dangerously close to a mischaracterization of events surrounding the Linux Containers and Canonical split.

See: https://stgraber.org/2023/12/12/lxd-now-re-licensed-and-unde... in addition to: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/announcement/

EDIT: I read this part to suggest that former LXD team members that are now on the Incus team potentially have the same mindset, if this is wrong, please correct me.

> And I swear I had a similar experience with regards to some other incus issues where there was a similar response about changes.

So far from my two years of interaction (both as a lurker and commenter) on the forums and purveyor on the issue tracker, I've yet to see anything that resembles treating Canonical LXD as any form of upstream especially since the split.
by BoorishBears | 2025-11-15 03:53:34+00:00
This is knock against you at all, but in a naive attempt to spare someone else some time: remember that based on this definition it is impossible for an LLM to do novel things and more importantly, you're not going to change how this person defines a concept as integral to one's being as novelty.

I personally think this is a bit tautological of a definition, but if you hold it, then yes LLMs are not capable of anything novel.
by nomilk | 2025-11-15 03:54:45+00:00
> It has been suggested that the thieves knew their art history: the method of the theft was an ironic homage to the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

In both cases, the thieves unscrewed the painting and took it. Feels a bit over the top to call it an homage, let alone an ironic one.
by MagicMoonlight | 2025-11-15 03:55:36+00:00
I just can’t get over the idiotic syntax.

Instead of “int x”

You have “var x int”

Which obscures the type, making it harder to read the code. The only justification is that 16 years ago, some guy thought he was being clever. For 99.99% of code, it’s a worse syntax. Nobody does eight levels of pointer redirection in typical everyday code.
by chanux | 2025-11-15 03:56:09+00:00
Care to elaborate on Terraform/HCL issues?

I have worked quite heavily with Terraform and went through the trough of despair myself. But after a while I realized

1. It does quite a good job at what it does, given the complexity it's handling for us.

2. We have been expecting more and more from the tool.

Mitchell himself called Terraform stuck in the past in some social media platform. However, I don't see Terraform sucking up all the interest and cash in infra, making the landscape barren so nothing else can grow. So, I hope something better will pop up. Until then, Terraform is good for what it does.
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-11-15 03:56:20+00:00
(1) ac.. I approx Foucault as a centrist, but 'fess that shit could be undecidable ( without reviewing the inputs ) Conservatives are self-destructive :)

(2) Countersignalling is older than your parlance makes it sound. See Fussell Class, hipsters, etc
by estearum | 2025-11-15 03:58:10+00:00
Eh I disagree. This is breaking through to more and more MAGA.

It doesn’t feel like it because with each fracturing off of the moderate end of MAGA (insofar as that exists), the core gets more committed, more extreme, and therefore more vocal.

This is on its way to being a very small but extreme group of citizens and a fairly large and extreme group of politicians (since backing up isn’t as easy as removing a yard sign and avoiding the topic in social engagements).
by binkHN | 2025-11-15 03:59:20+00:00
What made you leave Void? I tried Debian, but I just couldn't do it; too dated and too many workarounds for the dated bugs. I tried Testing and Sid as well, but the only taste that I was left with was that these, somewhat obviously, are not meant to be production distributions and, while they get newer stuff, they're simply too buggy for daily use.
by jgord | 2025-11-15 03:59:35+00:00
I feel the same frustration, seen from another angle : I think we can use current ML techniques to solve 3 or 4 hard problems in 3D reconstruction, and doing so would unlock a vast amount of value - we could turn lidar scans and photos of buildings and industrial plants into accurate 3D models automatically.

BUT I think the bottleneck is _funding_ of small early risky startups to do the needed engineering work.

My notes on this : https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2025/10/29/digital-twins-the...

LLMs, GPU datacenters attract all the big money, and the med and small VCs seem to be leaving their money in the bank earning high interest rates, unless there is a slam dunk opportunity with guaranteed traction and MRR growth.

We seem to be betting that only the large companies will innovate, when historically this has not been the case - Deepseek is a recent counterexample.