MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graemep | 2025-11-16 18:52:57+00:00
So, you can find a few isolated quotes in a series of documents written over thousands of years that support the idea that religion is the problem.

Have you read these works considering historical and cultural context? Can you find anything in the New testament that supports this? Do you know about the history of how Christianity shaped European culture? There are excellent books on the subjects (Dominion by Tom Holland is brilliant on the lats of these).
by analog31 | 2025-11-16 18:53:45+00:00
I don't think a way of teaching has been found, that doesn't require a willingness to be at least moderately bored, and that isn't to some extent disconnected from everyday life.

Even using computers in class, which I endorse, involves acceptance that many of the uses will seem boring.

Making everything as entertaining as commercial media is too much to ask.
by zkmon | 2025-11-16 18:54:03+00:00
Thanks for providing some positive examples. But these examples are dwarfed by the negative effects brought in by internet, in my view. Sure, a modulated signal can be used for broadcasting weather report or some propaganda. But the rush to push technology was done mostly by not talking about the negative effects. Same is happening with AI. Sales prospects are the positive benefits driving it. No one want to say that the tiger which they are bringing back to life, because they can, is an enemy of humans.
by mctt | 2025-11-16 18:54:13+00:00
Not a book, but a 'fact'book; https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/iran/

Religions

Muslim (official) 98.5%, Christian 0.7%, Baha'i 0.3%, agnostic 0.3%, other (includes Zoroastrian, Jewish, Hindu) 0.2% (2020 est.)

Compared to the United Kingdom; https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-king...

Religions

Christian (includes Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) 59.5%, Muslim 4.4%, Hindu 1.3%, other 2%, unspecified 7.2%, none 25.7% (2011 est.)
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-11-16 18:54:21+00:00
> Is a better de-noisier algorithm in Adobe Lightroom worth $500 billion?

No.

But: a tool that allows me to de-noise some images, just by uploading a few samples and describing what I want to change, just might be? Even more so, possibly, if I can also upload a desired result and let the "AI" work on things until it matches that?

But also: cool, that saves me several hours per week! Not: oh, wow, that means I can get rid of this entire department...
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-16 18:54:24+00:00
You can do that just fine in Rust too, for example the Makepad[1] developers take a pretty extreme non-invented-here stance, and builds a full UI toolkit with no external dependencies (and a major focus on clean-build compile times).

However, it isn't really part of the Rust OSS culture to operate like that. The culture typically values safety over compile times, and prefers to lean on a deep stable of battle-hardened abstractions.

[1]: https://makepad.nl, https://github.com/makepad/makepad
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-16 18:55:03+00:00
> if they had one Israel and the US wouldn't have bombed them

If Iran had one nuke we’d bomb them relentlessly.

Their delivery mechanisms and ground infrastructure aren’t advanced enough to guarantee launch, and a single Fisher Price nuke is not game over. Iran with the capacity to build a bomb can be dealt with now or later. Iran with an actual nuke has to be dealt with now, or else be accepted as a regional nuclear power. (Which would mean a Saudi nuke. Which would mean a Qatari nuke, and probably also Emirati nuke.)
by gruez | 2025-11-16 18:55:18+00:00
>The key problem is that data center evaporative cooling permanently removes water from local systems, unlike irrigation or golf courses where some water returns to groundwater, evaporated cooling water is lost to the atmosphere and must be continuously replenished.

But farms and golf courses suffer from evaporation as well, so that argument really only means you can discount farm/golf water usage by some fraction (eg. 50%). Considering the consumption figures are 0.08% for datecenters and the 8% for golf courses, the argument still holds up.
by kazinator | 2025-11-16 18:55:36+00:00
Reference counting does not trace dead objects. Most of its activity is concerned with maintaining reference counts on live objects.

When a reference count hits zero, that's when refcounting begins to be concerned with a dead object; and that part of its operation corresponds to the sweep activity in garbage collection, not to the tracing of live objects.

It is not a dual to garbage collection concerned with its negative spaces; it's simply a less general (we could legitimately say lesser) garbage collection that doesn't deal with cycles on its own.
by carsoon | 2025-11-16 18:56:04+00:00
Recent articles seem only to mean LLMs when they reference AI. There are tons of commercial usecases for other models. Image Classification models, Image Generation models (traditionally difusion models, although some do use llm for image now), TTS models, Speach Transcription, translation models, AI driving models(autopilot), AI risk assessment for fraud, 3D structural engineering enhancement models.

With many of the good usecases of AI the end user doesn't know that ai exists and so it doesn't feel like there is AI present.
by koliber | 2025-11-16 18:56:08+00:00
I sometimes get contracts, NDAs, or terms and conditions which normally I would automatically accept because they are low stakes and I don't have time to read them. At best I would skim them.

Now I pass them through an LLM and ask them to point out interesting, unconventional, or surprising things, and to summarize the document in a few bullet points. They're quite good at this, and I am can use what I discover later in my relationship with the counterparty in various ways.

I also use it to "summarize" a large log output and point out the interesting bits that are relevant to my inquiry.

Another use case is meeting notes. I use fireflies.ai for some of my meetings and the summaries are decent.

I guess summarization might not be the right word for all the cases, but it deals with going through the hay stack to find the needle.
by jamamp | 2025-11-16 18:56:10+00:00
I would argue that the author has no obligation to engage with more counter-arguments, or provide something "new" (to you) to the conversation.

This is a blog. Blog posts are a way to show the voice of the author, share their thoughts on the matter, perhaps work through their own thought processes and come to a nice conclusion for themselves that they choose to share with the public.

I would find the internet and the community incredibly dull if the first person to post a criticism was it and everyone else always referred to their article. There'd be no further discussion whatsoever.

I found this article to be enlightening and a wonderful way to frame my disdain for AI-generated art and other content in a framing that I hadn't thought of so explicitly before. The analogy to alchemy is a welcomed and fresh take. I appreciate this article. Perhaps I'm one of today's lucky 10,000 to have made this connection.

I also appreciate this article because the author put effort into it and voiced their opinion. Voicing opinions don't have to be novel, since this isn't academia necessarily where you have to fight for uniqueness and new takes.
by dtagames | 2025-11-16 18:56:56+00:00
People have tried (pretended) to talk to dead people as long as people have been around. They've used every tech and tool that was ever invented.

Many people claim that they hear or talk to dead people on the regular, know how they think or would act, etc., and some of them get donations (or charge money) for saying that.

So for me, this must go in that bucket. If you are interested in talking to dead people at all, that feels unscientific and unhelpful.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-16 18:58:19+00:00
Is it truly either-or? Obviously the root of anti-cheat needs to be totally locked down, aka the TPM. But almost all "open" computers have a locked down TPM. The TPM doesn't need to prevent you from running an unsigned firmware, kernel, modules or user software, it only needs to report on whether you are / have. You can reboot your computer into "trusted" mode and run your games with anti-cheat. Then when you're done playing you can as much unsigned software as you want.
by monocasa | 2025-11-16 18:58:52+00:00
Alternatively, one component of a superintelligence that makes it super might be a tiered mind that's capable of processing far more input streams simultaneously to get around the core human inadequacy here, that we can only really focus on one thing at a time.

The same way we can build "muscle memory" to delegate simple autonomous tasks, a super intelligence might be able to dynamically delegate to human level (or greater) level sub intelligences to vigilantly watch everything it needs to.
by mbreese | 2025-11-16 18:59:30+00:00
I’ve often thought about writing a script to use those bot attacks as a bit of a honey pot. The idea would be if someone is viewing a site with a brand new SSL certificate, that it can’t be legitimate traffic, so just block that ip/subnet outright at the firewall. Especially if they are looking for specific URLs like Wordpress installations. There are a few good actors that also hit sites quickly (ex: I’ve seen Bing indexing in that first wave of hits), but those are the exception.

Sadly, like many people, I just deal with the traffic as opposed to getting around to actually writing a tool to block it.
by toast0 | 2025-11-16 18:59:35+00:00
Most places get freshwater from rivers or acquifers, sometimes lakes, use it for whatever, some large amount of that used water is collected as sewage, treat the sewage and discharge it downstream/into large bodies of water/the ocean.

Many systems also output reclaimed water; it's clean, but not up to environmental standards for discharge or drinking; typically excess clorination. This is often used for municipal irrigation sometimes toliet flushing, etc; uses where water below drinking standards is fine.

A handful of systems discharge treated water into their reservoirs or into acquifer recharge ponds. But there's an ick factor, even when discharge water is often held to higher standards than drinking water, so it's only done when the situation outweighs the ick.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-16 18:59:46+00:00
Only works with their own products is lock-in.

Lock-out is Apple preventing third parties from making accessories that can match the first party ones in feature parity and seamlessness.

Apple Watch only working with iPhones=lock-in

No third party watch being allowed to use the same APIs the Apple Watch does or not being allowed to access iMessage, Apple Pay, etc = lock-out.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-11-16 18:59:47+00:00
Old Apple Newton had a feature, I don't remember how they called it, but on any screen you could write "please", and then describe what to do, e. g. using one of their examples: "please fax this to Bob". And it worked. Internally it was a rather simple keyword match plus access to data, such as the system address book. New applications could register their own names for actions and relevant dictionaries.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-16 19:00:13+00:00
> The 40 year old who won't date a real girl because he is in love with a bot I'm more concerned with.

Interestingly, I don't find this concerning at all. Grown adults should be able to love whomever and whatever they want. Man or woman, bot or real person, it's none of my business!
by dfee | 2025-11-16 19:00:15+00:00
> That trend is a consequence. A consequence of people being too lazy to think for themselves. Critical thinking is more difficult than simply thinking for yourself, so if someone is too lazy to make an effort and reaches for an LLM at once, they're by definition ill-equipped to be critical towards the cultural/moral "side-channel" of the LLM's output.

Well, no. Hence this submission.
by koliber | 2025-11-16 19:00:34+00:00
I hate what LLM spit out and would never accept the whole output verbatim.

I love how they occasionally come up with a turn of phrase, a thought path, or surprising perspective. I work with them iteratively to brainstorm, transform, and crate compose content that I incorporate into my own work.

Regarding spotting AI-generate content, I was once accused of posting AI-generated content where I bona-fide typed every single letter myself without as much as glancing at an LLM. People's confidence in spotting AI content will vary and err on fake-positives and fake-negatives too. My kids now think all CG movies are AI generated, even the ones that pre-date image and video gen. They're pretty sure it's AI though.
by mattmaroon | 2025-11-16 19:00:39+00:00
Is that just because imported Dubai food is insanely expensive? I don't believe the math on anything but maybe indoor farming here is going to work out if the water costs anything at all.

Indoor farming can be extremely water-efficient, often at the cost of energy inefficiency, but with low solar prices and the level of sun they have in the Southwest perhaps that can become economical?

I don't know, I just do know that water shortages are a problem, are going to continue to become more of a problem, and there's currently just one technology that's affordable enough that some nations currently use it at scale. So let's get started.
by alwillis | 2025-11-16 19:00:40+00:00
Yes, Cook was the COO during Jobs’ tenure.

Before Cook, Apple’s supply chain and manufacturing was a mess—too many of some products and not enough of others.

Back in the day, it was a running joke trying to buy products as an organization—they would announce a new Mac but you couldn’t buy it for 4-6 weeks.

It was Tim Cook who implemented Apple’s build to order system after Dell demonstrated its success. We take it for granted now, but it was a huge development at the time.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-11-16 19:00:42+00:00
> This is extremely important work thank you for sharing it.

How so?

If you modify an LLM to bypass safeguards, then you are liable for any damages it causes.

There are already quite a few cases in progress where the companies tried to prevent user harm and failed.

No one is going to put such a model into production.

[edit] Rather than down voting, how about expanding on how its important work?
by dang | 2025-11-16 19:00:43+00:00
> Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse

> religion itself is the problem

Religious flamewar isn't allowed here, so please don't post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

---

Edit:

It also looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological/political/religious battle. That's not allowed here (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), and we ban accounts that do it.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-16 19:01:06+00:00
They become political footballs when you do it wrong. If you make a tax credit for solar then it's partisan and the Republicans are going to try to get rid of it. If you make a tax credit for all manufacturing and some companies are using it to manufacture solar and lithium batteries then everybody still wants to keep it because there are also companies using it to manufacture trucks and gas turbines and mining equipment.
by trebligdivad | 2025-11-16 19:01:28+00:00
Looks like someone is trying to push for it: https://ukenergystorage.co.uk/

Good if they can get it to work; there's also a hydrogen/ammonia storage scheme being planned; https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2025/statkraft-shares-p...

I think it's going to take a while, but certainly worth trying.
by Rotundo | 2025-11-16 19:02:24+00:00
S03E20 "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place"

Reverend Will Dexter: "You know before I got married Emily he used to come by sometime to help me clean out my apartment well I asked her how come here so he could help clean up my place when your place is just as bad she said because cleaning up your place helps me to forget what a mess I made a mind and when I sweep my floor all I've done is sweep my floor but when I help you clean up your place I am helping you."
by y-c-o-m-b | 2025-11-16 19:02:38+00:00
Why are we using "arabnews.com" as a source? It's owned by the Saudi government isn't it? This topic is hitting the front-page of more reputable news sources.

BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4172yl0l1o

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/pictures/iranians-pray-rain-drought-...

EDIT: yeah, let's not use arabnews as a news source please: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_News
by simonw | 2025-11-16 19:02:59+00:00
> The author dismisses 905M gallons in Maricopa County as "only 0.12%" of county use, but in a desert already overdrawing groundwater, that's 905M gallons unavailable for human needs.

Can you help explain what 905M gallons of water means?

My biggest problem with the data center water debate continues to be people throwing around big scary numbers like that without attempting to provide context for them.

(I found one estimate that the average US resident uses 30,000 gallons per year, which would make 900,000,000 gallons the same as 30,000 people.)
by hylaride | 2025-11-16 19:03:01+00:00
To be fair, there was not much Dell could do as their PERC cards were all rebranded Adaptec and later LSI. Adaptec was the gold standard for ages, but I assume was enshitified somewhere along the way. The long term result was that the entire hardware raid world ditched Adaptec for LSI and/or software RAID (eg ZFS). Dell (in those days, not sure if it's still the case) had excellent support. There was a bug on another server model where the onboard video card would eventually fail and fry the motherboard. Even years later out of support, Dell would for free replace it if it failed with whatever new model equivalent existed.

I left the company before things were totally resolved, but I think dell ultimately gave people who complained LSI cards, but it took awhile for those to be designed and manufactured to fit the internal drive slot. Most people who were also using external arrays moved to third party ones or other hardware.

Some background from an OpenBSD dev:

https://nickh.org/warstories/adaptec.html
by card_zero | 2025-11-16 19:03:04+00:00
Willpower - or not. Some of us learned languages unhesitatingly, with delight. So what? Do the other people have to take part too?

(Actually I remember hating C when I got to the part of K&R about pointers. I threw the book across the room. I hated it for about 12 hours. Then I woke up the next morning and was all like "pointers are brilliant", it was weird.)

I guess you can guide people into a subject, assuring them the whole way through that the subject is probably going to get enjoyable, and in the meantime making the experience enjoyable through social effects and entertainment - while allowing them freedom to back out if in fact you're boring them. But that doesn't demand their willpower. It hinges on their interest.
by lyelibi | 2025-11-16 19:03:29+00:00
It's not just curve fitting because basis functions have characteristics which make them desirable for the kind of decomposition one is trying to find. We typically assume in factor analysis that factors are gaussian random variables without clear and repeating patterns. Fourrier transforms force us to think in similar terms but accounting for specific dynamics factor (I. E. Basis functions) should capture.

Also how do we construct those orthogonal basis functions for any downstream task is an interesting research question!
by Dilettante_ | 2025-11-16 19:03:36+00:00
You tell me that not having agency is not applicable to asteroids?

The opposite: Having agency is not applicable to non-asteroids, any more than to asteroids. The asteroid was a metaphor for humans. I recognize I am not at my best at explaining right now.

I think we can't really disregard quantum mechanics

Then we can allow that there is a magical being outside our observable reality that is influencing the result of random-seeming quantum processes, itself unbound by deterministic physics. You may call this being "your self" and this being would indeed have agency that transcends "chain-of-dominoes" causality. I cannot disprove such a theory. But is that an interesting conversation to have?
by jcranmer | 2025-11-16 19:04:33+00:00
Emojis are complicated from a font rendering perspective. But from a string processing perspective, they're generally going to be among the simplest characters: they don't have a lot of complex properties with a lot of variation between individual characters. Compare something like the basic Latin characters, where the mappings for precomposed characters are going to vary wildly from 'a' to 'b' to 'c', etc., whereas the list of precomposed characters for the emoji blocks amounts to "none."
by lisper | 2025-11-16 19:04:56+00:00
> you only trace when you hit cycles

How do you tell when you've hit a cycle?

> hopefully design your language semantics to discourage cycles

Why? Cyclical structures can be very useful. For example, it can be very handy in many situations for a contained object to have a back-pointer to its container.

[UPDATE] Two responses have now pointed out that this particular case can be handled with weak pointers. But then I can just point to a general graph as an example where that won't work.
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-16 19:05:05+00:00
> Kids are dressing up as wizards. A fake chatbot girlfriend they make fun of. Kids like to pretend.

this is normal for kids to do. do you think these platforms don’t have a responsibility to protect kids from being kids?

Your answer was somehow worse than I expected, sorry. Besides the fact you don’t somehow understand causal factors of suicide or the fact that kids under 12 routinely and often commit suicide.

My jaw is agape at the callousness and ignorance of this comment. The fact you also think a 40 year old not finding love is a worse issue is also maybe revealing a lot more than you’d like. Just wow.
by dtagames | 2025-11-16 19:05:08+00:00
This article is late to the party. I would hardly call SETI leading edge alien detection tech today. Our best bet would be to look at our recent interstellar visitor 3I/Atlas and to use other modern instruments to detect remnants or signatures of past intelligent activity.

It's very likely given the age of the universe and the number of known habitable zone planets that other life forms did evolve and live there (or come by here) at one time. It would be unscientific to deny that.

This is exactly what Avi Loeb[0] is complaining about with the way the scientific community is approaching Atlas (and how it approached 'Oumuramura before it). These are not farmers in a field who saw a UFO. They're not even pilots who reported UAPs. These are real, observed objects in our solar system which did not come from our solar system. They're worthy of serious attention.

[0] https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
Show HN: Artifactguesser
by technomoloch | 2025-11-16 19:05:37+00:00
Hi y'all,

Was playing geoguesser and thought, "Would it be fun to guess artifact locations like this, and add a time element?" And behold, it was fun. Its just a side-project, but has all the trimmings, multiplayer, timed rounds, various modes (Ea-Nasir Mode is my fav). Completely free to play, though any artifact image is buyable as a form of apparel for anyone wanting to support me making weird fun stuff instead of actual products (please, I'm tired).

The database is mostly from the MET artifact API, but am going to add artifacts from the British museum, the Smithsonian 3D Artifact API, and elsewhere soon. Might end up being one of the biggest aggregated artifact databases once I'm done. Am a computer vision engineer by day, so artefact search by visual similarity and other fun things are being planned, when I feel like it.

Please be careful with it, I have a shock-collar on that's hooked up to the sentry API. But if you do find a way to break things, or have any fun suggestions, shoot me a message here. Cheers!