MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-11-29 14:09:48+00:00
I've started to believe that language is often anti-thought. When we are doing what LLMs do, we aren't really thinking, we're just imitating sounds based on a sound stimulus.

Learning a second language let me notice how much of language has no content. When you're listening to meaningless things in your second language, you think you're misunderstanding what they're saying. When you listen to meaningless things in your first language, you've been taught to let the right texture of words slip right in. That you can reproduce an original and passable variation of this emptiness on command makes it seem like it's really cells indicating that they're from the same organism, not "thought." Not being able to do it triggers an immune response.

The fact that we can use it to encode thoughts for later review confuses us about what it is. The reason why it can be used to encode thoughts is because it was used to train us from birth, paired with actual simultaneous physical stimulus. But the physical stimulus is the important part, language is just a spurious association. A spurious association that ultimately is used to carry messages from the dead and the absent, so is essential to how human evolution has proceeded, but it's still an abused, repurposed protocol.

I'm an epiphenomenalist, though.
by picardo | 2025-11-29 14:09:56+00:00
I'm curious how the unit economics actually play out here compared to traditional search. With Google, the compute cost to serve a query is negligible, so even low-CPM ads are profitable.

With an LLM, the inference cost per query is orders of magnitude higher. Unless thy have a way to command significantly higher CPMs -- perhaps by arguing intent signal is stringer in a conversation than a keyword search -- it feels like a difficult margin to sustain.
by simianwords | 2025-11-29 14:10:29+00:00
Few open questions

- ads only on free version?

- why the need for ads at all if llms can literally get you to the exact product? push vs pull marketing

- will models be rlhf'd to align towards preferred products or would the advertisements run ads at the prompt level? (based on some dynamic opaque configuration)

my predictions

- yes

- i assume they are trying both ends but need to justify free tier someway

- i think there will be some type of commitment to not bias the model itself and keep it clean. maybe a separation? i'm also curious as to how they will ensure this during training when the user data itself would be biased towards past ads
by asah | 2025-11-29 14:11:31+00:00
well... it's a certain KIND of reality... one where numbers fight with "common sense"...

examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...

(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)
by bdangubic | 2025-11-29 14:12:11+00:00
7 out of 4 million active SWEs sounds about right :) how many codebases have you personally seen and went "holy shit, this is masterful/flawless/..."? even just libraries as codebases is most definitely 0...? our industry is basically few solid competent people followed by an ocean of mediocrity and incompetence... always been that way and always will be the way
by astura | 2025-11-29 14:13:48+00:00
This is straight up just a bold faced lie.

Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.

AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
by LastTrain | 2025-11-29 14:13:50+00:00
I just got back from Thanksgiving holiday with my family. Grade schools kids all the way up to great grandparents up to 81 years old. Engineers, active military, a nurse, high schoolers, two in college. Both coasts represented and Texas. Republicans, Democrats, and in-between. The one and only thing every single person had in common was an utter hatred of AI. And it wasn’t for a lack of understanding of how it will be used.
by materielle | 2025-11-29 14:14:00+00:00
I think investors would certainly love this. So why hasn’t it already happened?

My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.

Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.

But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.

After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.
by lazide | 2025-11-29 14:15:10+00:00
And they own the platform. And then you came to the platform (with those rules), and wrote your comment on it. So you agreed to the rules.

At least that is what the TOS usually says. You can always get around that by making your own service or the like.

Think of it like visiting a foreign country. Like it or not, their rules apply one way or another. If they can enforce them, anyway.
by gmac | 2025-11-29 14:15:14+00:00
For context: hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people in the UK have now been arrested for carrying banners with messages supportive of Palestine Action, which was 'proscribed' as a 'terrorist organisation' for some acts of property damage.

MPs celebrated the suffragettes -- who burned and blew things up in the name of securing political change -- in the same week that they voted for this outrageously repressive measure[1].

[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/25287205.westminster-celeb...).
by gausswho | 2025-11-29 14:15:14+00:00
In the SCARY SHIT!!! Things I find genuinely terrifying section:

> Switzerland: I think I must have experienced some awful childhood trauma in view of a mural of snow capped peaks and Lake Geneva. I live with a persistent dread of alpine vistas, chalet architecture, Tyrolean hats, even cheese with holes in it. You will notice I have never been there. That’s because Switzerland frightens me.

Huh. He was just over the border from there when he was finished.
by glenstein | 2025-11-29 14:15:49+00:00
>Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea?

I mean I do. And you do. Probably a lot of people in this thread. I felt that way about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on.

I think you're right that these ads will be, in a sense, worse, but not by the metrics that matter to OpenAI.
by cgriswald | 2025-11-29 14:16:36+00:00
I’m not certain about that, but it’s all very abstract to people. It is also tied to their phones for most people which they’d never give up anyway.

The more direct connection on something they don’t (yet) value as much as they value their phones might be a bridge too far.

An LLM feels like a person to a lot of people. It might be surprisingly difficult to avoid people feeling betrayed or creeped out by this “person”. No one has ever done this before and it doesn’t seem easy or like a straightforward win.
by bdangubic | 2025-11-29 14:16:47+00:00
been hacking 3 decades so exponentially north of 1,200 hours ... in my career the one trait that always seems to differentiate great SWEs from decent/mediocre/awful ones is laziness.

the best SWEs will automate anything they have to manually do more than once. I have seen this over and over and over again. LLMs have take automation to another level and learning everything they can be helpful with to automate as much of my work will be worth 12,000+ hours in the long run.
by jedimastert | 2025-11-29 14:17:25+00:00
I'm unaware of how other platforms work, but for Google you can just see what buckets have been associated with your account:

https://myadcenter.google.com/controls

I'm not sure how that would work from an ad-buying perspective, from what I understand you essentially choose which buckets you'd like to show ads to? Like I don't think ad-buyers get the whole dossier for the person they're showing ads to, the platform just decides "from what you've told us, this person seems likely to like your ads"
by card_zero | 2025-11-29 14:18:11+00:00
I was saying two separate things. Thing 1, the non-square shapes are relevant to Einstein's nice proof. Thing 2, considering squares now if you like, pythagoras's theorem has a magical quality which proofs can't dispel.

If you travel some distance, square it, travel some other distance perpendicularly, square that too, and add the results, you get the square of the straight distance from start to finish. Every proof just seems like a reformulation of this freaky fact.
by Bluecobra | 2025-11-29 14:18:56+00:00
I loved the MBP’s from that era. That was my first (easy) upgrade as well in addition to more memory. Those 5400 RPM hard drives were horrible. Also another slick upgrade you could do back then is to swap out the super drive with a caddy to have a second SSD/HDD.

It still works fine today, though I had install Linux on it to keep it up to date.
by snowfield | 2025-11-29 14:19:06+00:00
I often find myself clearing the context when dealing with llms to get a fresh take. Often it just has so much context reinforcing its previous decisions.

Not sure if the author tried to just start a new thread. But anyway, for now you always need to keep an eye on these things and manage it if it follows red herrings or ends up in some logical loop

Sidenote : newlines is one thing tat can be quite tricky for llms in general.
by kryogen1c | 2025-11-29 14:19:28+00:00
> “It’s shocking to see people blocking traffic, taking possession of the public space without a permit, without warning, and then turning our streets, our parks, our public squares into places of worship,” said Roberge.

It is fucking insane that the response to people blocking traffic in prayer is to outlaw prayer.

Secularism is giving equal treatment to all religions; this isn't Secularism, this is a thinly veiled, fanatical, Crusade against religion.
by rainsford | 2025-11-29 14:19:55+00:00
I'm amazed how many grown ass adults on airplanes act like little kids when it comes to seat belts and basically everything else.

Not just ignoring flight crew advice and common sense to generally stay buckled in order to gain maybe a minor amount of comfort and convenience being unbuckled, but unbuckling even when the seat belt sign is on and again common sense says being buckled in is the smart move. On my most recent flight I heard quite a few people unbuckling their seat belts while the plane was still rolling down the runway after landing. You couldn't wait 5 more minutes until the plane is at the gate?
by afavour | 2025-11-29 14:20:08+00:00
> ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI

I agree but how many consumers actively purchase Bandaid or Kleenex over cheaper store brands? Becoming a generic term doesn’t always translate to great business. “I’ll put it into chat” could easily end up meaning “enter into Google’s AI prompt” for many people.
by yardie | 2025-11-29 14:21:31+00:00
> It also bans communal prayer on public roads and in parks, with the threat of fines of C$1,125 for groups in contravention of the prohibition.

I'm a stoopid American but I thought Canadians enjoyed freedom of speech. Since they remind us they have Charter that protects speech. I'd like to know how they differentiate between public speaking and public prayer?
by DrewADesign | 2025-11-29 14:21:38+00:00
You know, I thought stories of law enforcement and the military targeting people using commercially collected data, effectively skirting the sanity boundaries we applied to surveillance, would raise a little bit of awareness in the US. It didn’t. Then when the political scene got really into deliberately targeting political opposition, I thought that might raise more eyebrows about all of this data being out there, but it didn’t. Same with ICE and border patrol. I think the risk and mechanisms will remain too abstract for people to grasp until they’re one of the unlucky people staring down the barrel of a gun because they, or someone they were associated with, had the wrong opinions.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-29 14:22:52+00:00
Oh, that's a shame, just when I thought KDE was looking quite good. Back to Xorg and Gnome then, because I need accelerated graphics.

A very basic functional test, with NVidia drivers 580.95:

Gnome and Xorg - Minecraft with a heavyish shader gives 60fps, Kerbal Space Program gives 60fps, DaVinci Resolve works

KDE and Wayland - Minecraft with the same shader gives 4fps, KSP gives 2fps, DaVinci Resolve does not work

Gnome and Wayland: Minecraft gives 3fps, KSP gives 3fps, DaVinci Resolve does not work.

So, acceleration is not supported, it seems. Bummer.

Maybe next year Wayland will be relevant.
by itsmeangelos | 2025-11-29 14:23:20+00:00
I've been working on a Rust rewrite of the WebRTC aec3 (echo canceller) which is written in c++ and wanted to share the project. This is mostly a 1 to 1 rewrite but I tried being as idiomatic as possible for when things didn't quite fit. Works pretty well! It doesn't include the latest stuff though as as a tensorflow based nonlinear echo cancel.
by i3oi3 | 2025-11-29 14:23:21+00:00
You bet I do. That's an hour of rubber-ducky time working through new architectures with someone who won't get tired of my endless blathering. I've worked through a bunch of bad ideas that way, without embarrassing myself in front of my colleagues.

I also use it to explore topics that I wouldn't spend desktop time on, but that I was curious about. It's like having a buddy who's smarter than me on their special interest, but their special interest is "everything you don't know.". And your buddy's name is Gell-Mann. : - )

It beats passively listening to the radio.
by merryocha | 2025-11-29 14:23:24+00:00
I wish more people paid attention to air quality. I'm a delivery driver and air quality has a noticeable effect on my energy levels throughout the day and also my mood. Slightly rainy days are probably my favorite days to work because no one is outside digging up roads and kicking up tire dust with leaf blowers and the rain seems to clean the air a bit.
by la_fayette | 2025-11-29 14:23:31+00:00
I don't get your point here. User targeted ads are the main business model of the internet? Yes, few days ago it was revealed how billions of user data points could be gathered from Meta [1], did anybody care, outside a small privacy community? So indead these things are not surprising... My thoughts don't go so far to consider the effects on society, idk, do you?

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/3-5-Billion-Accounts-Complete-W...
by xtiansimon | 2025-11-29 14:23:39+00:00
Just a small digression on the singular notion of “emotional reasons”.

One can be dispassionate and distant from one’s beliefs and still difficult to convince, because we all harbor some forms of _private reasoning_ about how the world works. If I have strong personal beliefs, they may be gathered from experience of decades. Not going to easily change my world view.

Add maybe a few _false beliefs_ for the xtra complication? (Not even considering the paradox of lying).

Finally, the emotional spin appears as _cynical reasoning_, that toxic mix of anger and resentment. The logic-warrior who ventures here is brave indeed.
by r-johnv | 2025-11-29 14:24:39+00:00
Probably a better title would be "Found a way to make people aware of opportunities for kindness"

The hypothesis that they propose is that 'the addition of an unusual character like Batman on the subway made people who otherwise may have been lost in their own thoughts or podcast look around and be more aware of people around them, and this more likely to notice the pregnant woman and offer their seat'

I'm looking forward to the follow up paper to test the hypothesis.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-11-29 14:25:13+00:00
Someone implied that people were evil if they gave away software with nothing asked in return. I didn't think the author deserved that. I'm also starting to think such people are at war with both private property and generosity for political reasons leaning toward socialism or communism. That segment also tries to pressure others to adopt their ideas.

So, I defended the author and the concept of generosity. I also tried to help FOSS people reframe what their doing as collective property or work so everyone understands the tradeoffs better. They confuse people by advocating for "free" or "freedom" with licenses that take away freedoms from authors. It's like they're redefining words to have non-standard meanings but get angry when people act on standard morals or word usages.

I'm also starting to think the confusion was intentional because many of their arguments look like socialism or communism disguised as software advice. We also see the same failure modes across most projects and products. Like communist nations (eg Shenzhen), we see the GPL projects succeed best when they relied on capitalists instead of communist principles for code contributions. So, I'll eventually look to see if people like Stallman were communist and if this was sneaky, ideological warfare or subversion. Like we see with critical theory ("woke") proponents constantly repacking their ideas (eg DEI, Codes of Conduct) to snesk them in where they'd be rejected after peer review. I feel like so much fighting online started with people doing something evil built on a conflict-oriented philosophy (Marxism/Communism) that causes the same destructive effects everywhere people promoted it.
by bookofjoe | 2025-11-29 14:26:01+00:00
>The EV company sold fewer than 39,000 Cybertrucks in 2024, according to Cox Automotive data — far below the company’s eventual goal of 250,000 per year. As of October, Tesla had delivered just 17,317 units in 2025, a 42% drop compared to the same period in 2024.
by zkmon | 2025-11-29 14:27:27+00:00
Seems the page is down. So, yes, Reality is where money is. For money to reach you, you need to setup the pipelines, or poke a hole in an existing pipeline.

Maybe that's old-school. Youngsters seem to argue that they don't need to move out of their den, to start and run a business. And they were right some times.
by throw0101a | 2025-11-29 14:27:31+00:00
For those that think that the popular indexes (e.g., cap-weighted S&P 500) are too heavily concentrated, there are equal weight indexes and funds available:

* https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/equity/sp-500-equa...

* https://www.ishares.com/ch/professionals/en/products/328658/...

* https://www.invesco.com/ca/en/financial-products/etfs/invesc...

US equity markets / stocks look to have outperformed other markets over the last few years, it may be more that US tech stocks have been the outperformers (rather than US stocks generally):

> Looking at this data, there are two distinct periods of extended U.S. outperformance—the late 1990s and today. And what do these two periods have in common? The rise of U.S. technology stocks. Bespoke Investment Group recently created this chart illustrating this phenomenon:

> Now that the U.S. technology sector makes up over 30% of the S&P 500 (as it did back in 2000), this begs the question: Is U.S. outperformance just a technological fad?

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/do-you-need-to-own-internationa...

Reminder that US stocks can do badly (and the only thing that could save US domestic investors is bonds):

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...
Show HN: MacGlow – macOS app to sync brightness across Mac and all Monitors
by lovish888 | 2025-11-29 14:28:55+00:00
I built MacGlow - A MacOS app to sync brightness across your Mac and all connected Monitors.

Supports every Macbook Air, Pro, iMac and Mac Mini models ever released running MacOS 12.4 and above.

Demo: https://youtu.be/_lOyThemhPA Website: https://lovi.sh/macglow
by Y_Y | 2025-11-29 14:28:55+00:00
When you call your product "(Chat) Generative Pretrained Transformer" then I don't think you have a great defense against genericisation.

The legal history of these is interesting, lots of household names have lost their trademarks, and lots of seemingly generic names are still trademarked. This way to the rabbit hole -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-29 14:31:39+00:00
I am not exactly a great example ( exposure to work model, ollama, local models play ) and I actually liked gemini upon try in google search ( which is amusingly now banned at work ), but the nice quickly fell into not nice, when it started giving me weird pushback on operation paperclip book ( I am assuming chapter discussing tabun triggered something. This is my only real problem with gemini. By comparison, I am not running into guardrails with gpt nearly as often.
by Thorrez | 2025-11-29 14:32:06+00:00
Wikipedia is pretty convinced Berkeley sockets are from 1983[1]. Here's another site saying the same thing[2]. Do you have a source saying 1979?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets

[2] https://medium.com/theconsole/40-years-of-berkeley-sockets-8...
by isodev | 2025-11-29 14:32:27+00:00
Why stop there? You want to refactor your codebase? Sure, but you need to adopt this dependency and this cloud service.

Mixing Ads or sponsorships to influence LLMs is a really, really bad idea. Especially when they're competing with Search ... which means that for some, "AIs" are the only window into the world when looking something up.
by throw0101a | 2025-11-29 14:32:41+00:00
> So a viable strategy would be to only buy the best 7 stocks? Like the Dogs of the Dow, but reversed? (The Gods of the Dow?)

Or go with a NASDAQ 100 index: you'll generally get higher returns than the S&P 500 or Russell 3000, but you'll also get higher volatility. How well would you sleep at night with drops of -20% more often?

* https://www.investopedia.com/nasdaq-100-or-s-and-p-500-the-b...

Reminder that US stocks can do badly (and the only thing that could save US domestic investors is bonds):

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-29 14:33:34+00:00
I would laugh my ass off if Coca Cola Company ends up being the company that solves alignment - so that it can align an "open weight" AI with its corporate interests.

Without that though? Our ability to manipulate LLMs is so shaky I would be really surprised if anyone managed to pull off this kind of model manipulation and have it remain undetected.
Show HN: Open Video Overview – Generate narrated videos from text with AI
by arbayi | 2025-11-29 14:34:17+00:00
I loved NotebookLM's Video Overview but ran into four issues: it puts its own logo on the videos, the voices are not good as ElevenLabs, I want to have music and sounds (I'll add it later) and I wanted to create a YouTube channel called "Science Anime Hub" to automate educational content.

So I built this as a local alternative. Takes text, generates MP4s with AI narration and images. Uses Nano Banana Pro for images, ElevenLabs for voice, ffmpeg for assembly.

Currently supports 25 visual styles (watercolor, anime, retro-style, etc.) and 16 languages.

It's rough but works for my use case. Sharing in case others want something similar or want to help add more styles and improve it.

I’m hoping it will improve over time and I think the next must be making this fully Open using open alternatives for image and voice.

https://github.com/baturyilmaz/open-video-overview