MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by butlike | 2025-12-19 19:04:59+00:00
I often think of the USA as a melting pot in the truest sense. You have a little bit of different cultures percolating and bubbling in the fondue pot. Interesting things can come out of it...

But when the fondue "decides" to melt in a certain way, you get the unified ideas which seem impossible (like your airstrip example). Perspectives from all cultures aligned under one roof, while also aligned in direction.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-19 19:05:12+00:00
Theoretically a good fuzzer could discover this value by itself, but I don’t believe anything like that exists that could run JS code and explore VM-level branches, at least not for JS code that’s even this complex. Otherwise, yes, PBT is less trivial than it seems, though I’m guessing a simple `strings jsc` coupled with general knowledge of special values of other types[1,2] could get you quite far.

[1] https://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric-value-2...

[2] https://www.exploringbinary.com/java-hangs-when-converting-2...
by wvenable | 2025-12-19 19:05:15+00:00
Maybe the problem with understanding the benefits of AI is that you are relying on other people to use AI properly. As the direct user myself, I don't have that problem.

I'm using it to make things better rather than just producing. Even just putting it in agent mode and saying "look at all my code and tell me where I can make it better" is an interesting exercise. Some suggestions I take, some I don't.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-12-19 19:05:48+00:00
I think we've topped out on how good GPUs realistically need to be. The games industry is embroiled in layoffs. AAA games as we knew them are ending because they're just not compatible with our current macroeconomic situation. My current GPU is an RX590 (released in 2018, I bought it new in 2019) and I have no plans to upgrade any time soon.

Realistically, I think that if AMD and NVIDIA both abandon the gaming market entirely (unlikely, IMO) then Intel or some Chinese no-name brand will pick up the slack. Video cards for gaming don't need to be bleeding edge any more. 99.999% of experiences gamedevs want to create don't require that horsepower, and consumers can't afford it anyway (at least not when effectively bidding for fab capacity against billionaires who are convinced they can be immortal Gods if they win the auction). Most likely, no-name chips from non-frontier fabs (or by Chinese fabs trying to claw their way upmarket) will be badge-engineered as AMD/Nvidia/Intel.

Alternatively, we have WW3 and either advanced, PC-gaming civilization ends completely, or we at least have to sacrifice consumer goods like video cards for the duration.
by andai | 2025-12-19 19:06:15+00:00
Yesterday Anthropic released their video on the vending machine experiment:

https://youtu.be/5KTHvKCrQ00

It's a bit sparse on details, but it did have what in a human we would call a psychotic break.

I find this very amusing in light of OpenAI's announcement that GPT now solves >70% of their knowledge work benchmark (GDPVal). (Per ArtificialAnalysis, Opus is roughly on par.)

The economy is about to get... Interesting ;)
by pjscott | 2025-12-19 19:06:23+00:00
The delta there is because the Rust 1.92 version uses the straightforward iterative code and the 1.94-nightly version explicitly uses std::simd vectorization. Compare the source code:

https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison/blob/master/...

https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison/blob/master/...
by FloorEgg | 2025-12-19 19:06:36+00:00
If that's happening then you're most likely not using the best tools (best model and IDE) for agentic coding and/or not using them right.

How an experienced developer uses LLMs to program is different than how a new developer should use LLMs to learn programming principles.

I don't have a CS degree. I never programmed in assembly. Before LLMs I could pump out functional secure LAMP stack and JS web apps productively after years of practice. Some curmudgeon CS expert might scrutinize my code for being not optimally efficient or engineered. Maybe I reinvented some algorithm instead of using a standard function or library. Yet my code worked and the users got what they wanted.

If you're not using the best tools and you're not using them properly and then they produce a result you don't like, while thousands of developers are using the tools productively, does that say something about you or the tools?

Also, if you use an LLM haphazardly and it introduces a security flaw, you as the user are responsible. The LLM is a power tool, not a person.

Whether the inexperienced dev uses an LLM or not doesn't change the fact that they might product bad code with security flaws.

I'm not arguing that people that don't know how to program can use LLMs to replace competent programmers. I'm arguing that competent programmers can be 3-4x more productive with the current best agentic coding tools.

I have extremely compelling valid evidence of this, and if you're going to try to debate me with examples of how you're unable to get these results then all it proves is you're ideologically opposed to it or not capable.
by mikeocool | 2025-12-19 19:06:53+00:00
And they know when it’s right and wrong.

Recently I asked Claude if I should convert my LLC to an S Corp for tax savings, and it sang the praises of how much I’d save if I did this.

When asked my accoutant, he pointed out that since I live in NYC, the S corp would be taxed in such a way that would completely wipe out the tax advantage I’d get elsewhere, and I’d likely end up paying more if I did this.
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-12-19 19:06:53+00:00
> The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine?

This feels forced, there are obvious and good reasons for running that experiment. Namely, learning how it fails and to generate some potentially viral content for investor relationship. The second one seems like an extremely good business move. It is also a great business move from WSJ, get access to some of that investor money in an obviously sponsored content bit that could go viral.

Having said that, I do feels the overall premise of the blog - the world dynamics seems exceedingly irrational in recent times. The concerning fact is that irattionality seems to be accelerating, or perhaps it is keeping pace with the scale of civilization... hard to tell.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-19 19:07:23+00:00
> Samo assures me, he counts Karl Marx among his personal influences, and says Palladium has in fact published a Marxist. What he doesn’t mention is that they prefer to publish monarchists and white supremacists.

Genuine monarchists are pretty rare in America. Not nonexistent but.. Can these claims be substantiated or am I reading breathless hyperbole?

Rated as centrist: https://www.allsides.com/news-source/palladium-magazine-medi...

Rated as right-center: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/palladium-magazine-bias-and-c...

(No idea if either of those are credible; they're just what DDG gave me. I did skim the headlines on Palladium's website and it looks like center-right pretentious slop to me.)
by jerf | 2025-12-19 19:07:46+00:00
I gave up understanding GPU names a long time ago. Now I just hope the efficient market hypothesis is at least moderately effective and as long as I buy from a reputable retailer the price is at least mostly reflective of performance.

They've hyperoptimized all these marketing buzzwords to the point that I'm basically forced into the moral equivalent of buying GPU by the pound because I have no idea what these marketers are trying to tell me anymore. The only stat I really pay attention to is VRAM size.

(If you are one of those marketers, this really ought to give you something to think about. Unless obfuscation is the goal, which I definitely can not exclude based on your actions.)
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-19 19:07:49+00:00
The contactless chip in your credit card is a full computer that powers up via inductive charging when tapped. It then negotiates 2 way public/private key encryption to verify you. These usually run jme which requires a lot more power than the lunar lander.

Another good one is the many little computers on cars such as the TPMS sensor in each tyre valve.
by turingbook | 2025-12-19 19:08:12+00:00
Discussion 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39720388

The similiar course in

- Stanford: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs208e/cgi-bin/main.cgi/

- MIT https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-080-great-ideas-in-theoretical...

- Harvard https://beta.my.harvard.edu/course/COMPSCI1/2026-Spring/001
by jfengel | 2025-12-19 19:08:19+00:00
TFA was written in October. Since then, there has been a (rather ugly) ceasefire.

So it is no longer the worst time to release such a report. We are now stuck reconciling ourselves to a situation where both sides behaved atrociously -- literally, committing atrocities.

Issuing the report will not materially shift history's judgment one way or the other. But it might help Amnesty's reputation as being able to fight for justice no matter who the victim is.
by zkmon | 2025-12-19 19:08:50+00:00
Any pure information-processing profession will be affected - programming, legal, teaching, financial, medical diagnosis, research, writing, videos, movies, music, art, design, architecture, business consulting, marketing, gaming, dating, chat, voice, customer support, real-time monitoring, ...

Any physical world interaction might survive for more time - cooking, goods delivery, transport, construction, medical testing, field work, lab work, class room work, handyman jobs, factory work, farming, mining, fishing, travel & tourism, retail shops, offices, gym, sports, fashion, hardware,..
by atmavatar | 2025-12-19 19:09:19+00:00
> I want a lawyer armed with LLMs, who's more effective than the previous generations of lawyers.

From what we've seen thus far, there's a non-zero chance the lawyer armed with LLMs will submit a brief generated by said LLM without reviewing it, which makes the judge none too happy.

Look at how people handle bringing their cell phones with them while driving. Some people won't use it at all. Some will play music (unrelated to driving but overall neutral as long as they aren't fiddling with it). Some will use it for GPS driving assistance (net positive). But, many will irresponsibly use it for texting/talking while driving, which is at least as bad as being inebriated and can lead to harming themselves and others.

Don't expect people to be any more or less responsible with LLMs.
by bena | 2025-12-19 19:09:19+00:00
Someone also believed the moon was made of green cheese. They were wrong.

And some of those beliefs they were wrong about is about when and how it will change things.

And my post is not about who is correct. It's about discerning what people truly believe despite what they might tell you up front.

People invested money into the internet. They hired people to develop it. That told you they believed it was useful to them.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-19 19:10:10+00:00
When a manager at GE decided to turn into a bank and get rid of all the making stuff, how was the consumer supposed to continue buying quality things that didn't exist?

When Sears was looted by management, how were consumers supposed to continue purchasing quality stuff from a historic company?

You've got your cause and effect backwards. American companies fired everyone who was paid enough to afford good stuff, and replaced them with workers in other countries, and then those people didn't really have a choice but to buy the junk because it was the only option left on the market and they couldn't afford anything else

What happened was that American business theory abandoned the American worker.
by aghilmort | 2025-12-19 19:10:19+00:00
there’s decent work on computational reasoning power of transformers, SSMs, etc.

some approximate snippets that come to mind are that decoder-only transformers recognize AC^0 and think in TC^0, that encoder-decoders are strictly more powerful than decoder-only, etc.

Person with last name Miller iric if poke around on arXiv, a few others, been a while since was current top of mind so ymmv on exact correctness of above snippets
by jmyeet | 2025-12-19 19:11:30+00:00
Part of this is just class interests. We now have a bunch of billionaires who--shock, horror--align with billionaire interests. The days of the maverick operating out of their garage are long over.

But another part of this is transhumanism, which is a weirdly popular movement in tech circles.

The core tenet is transhumanism is that humans will eventually transcend their current form and becomes who knows what exactly? Some view this as the singularity, which in part explains the AI hype.

But part of this is the latest incarnation of the prosperity gospel, an early (and now pervasive) idea that wealth is a demonstration that you are favored by God. Another version of this is the myth of meritocracy under capitalism. So if you're wealthy, it's because you're better than all "the poors", by definition.

How does this relate to transhumanism? Well, if you're better than everyone else, you think your genes should be passed on to this ultimate transhumanist future by, say, having a ton of children. Even if you're a completely absent father, it doesn't matter. You believe in the supremacy of your genetic heritage.

Another way to put all this is simply eugenics.
by eszed | 2025-12-19 19:11:33+00:00
Huh. I may be younger than you are. By the time I got online in the early to mid-nineties the very strong zeitgeist was never to use your real name, nor to post identifying details into (the resultingly anonymized) fora. This was the "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" era, which cartoon (I just looked it up) was from 1993 - way earlier than I'd have guessed!

Social media - starting with the very early ones: Six Degrees, Friendster, maybe MySpace? - weakened that expectation, but (someone tell me if this is accurate) my recollection is that Facebook was the first platform to require realname accounts. I agree with you about the current danger, and though I've never posted anything anywhere that I wouldn't stand behind - trolling just isn't my style - I have, reflecting the pov of my "internet generation", always felt super weird publicly posting anything under my real name.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-19 19:12:12+00:00
I imagine it would involve 1000s of LLMs outputting a judgement and then if there were significant disparities it would get flagged in some manner.

That's actually the plot of Minority Report, a lot of people think it is about "what if computers could predict crime" but it is really about "What do you do when your 'omniscient' machines disagree with each other".

Either way the idea of getting sent to prison and having 0 human interaction is terrifying.
by amatecha | 2025-12-19 19:12:15+00:00
That's kinda my point, this was already argued like 80 years ago.

> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
Show HN: Agent-playground – a minimal sandbox to compare AI agent outputs
by mirai_lucky_dev | 2025-12-19 19:12:43+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this because I wanted a very small, readable way to compare AI agent outputs locally. Most agent tools are powerful but heavy. This project intentionally avoids frameworks, configs, and abstractions. An "agent" is just a function, and a "scorer" is just a function. The goal is not to be production-ready, but to make experimentation and learning easy.

Feedback welcome. Especially on what’s missing or what should stay out.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-12-19 19:13:32+00:00
This seems like a reach:

> Print inevitably precipitates a face-to-face community, giving it the capacity to represent and in turn catalyze real-world movements.

I've never gone to a people-who-read-$PERIODICAL party. Ever. Maybe it's common for pro-union zines that the author used to contribute to, but Popular Science, Newsweek, or the like don't have any corresponding community associated with them. There's no Architectural Digest-affiliated underground interior decorating scene.

I think the author far overestimates the importance niche zines like the one they were a part of, or Palladium for that matter, have in the national dialogue.
by mywittyname | 2025-12-19 19:13:46+00:00
> To make the distinction more clear; if the carpenters goal is to produce chairs they may be inclined to use power tools, if their goal is to work with wood then they might not want to use power tools.

I'd say it's closer to carpenters using CNC machines.

You can be a "successful" carpenter that sells tons of wood projects built entirely using a CNC and not even know how to hold a chisel. But nobody is going to call you a good woodworker. You're just a successful businessman.

For sure, there's gradients, where people use it for the hard parts and manually do what they can. I.e., CNC templates and use those as router guides on their work. People will be impressed by your builds, but Paul Sellers is still going to be more considered more talented.
by dehugger | 2025-12-19 19:13:53+00:00
Better idea, how about you just put a link to a csv dump of your inventory data and label it "AI Agents/Scrapers, click here to get all the inventory data", embed that on every page, then call it a day?

When you are being scraper there are two possible reactions: 1 - good, because someone scraping your data is going to help you make a sale (discoverability) 2 - bad, work to obfuscate/block/prevent access.

In the first case, introducing a complex new standard that few if any will adopt achieves nothing compared to "here's a link for all the data in one spot, now leave my site alone. cheers".

In the second case, you actively don't want your data scraped, so why would you ever adopt this?

If you are reading all the inventory data into context then you are doing it wrong. Use your LLM to analyze the website and build a mapping for the HTML data, then parse using traditional methods (bs4 works nicely). You'll save yourself a gajillion tokens and get more consistent and accurate results at 1000x the speed.
by kakacik | 2025-12-19 19:13:54+00:00
Its harder and harder to see US from outside (aka 95% of the world) as force of any good, apart from some amount of self-serving. So what you claim is largely invalid, like it or not. Maybe it will change in 3 years, but nobody is holding their breath.

Its just another side, with its own motivation, these days backstabbing and insulting those few friends that stubbornly still linger around for historical reasons, changing opinions frequently. Unreliable as are its sophisticated warfare products. Morals what?
by igor47 | 2025-12-19 19:14:03+00:00
> For the untainted, effective altruism (EA) is a very online social movement popular in tech circles, which was originally concerned with how to get rich philanthropists to donate to the most “effective” charities

Man this really makes me mad. Why do people love to hate on EA so much? Why is effectiveness a bad things? Is the author really advocating giving money to random charities? Or do they prefer no giving at all? Is it just that EAs make people feel guilty about their own charitable giving? Is there even a reasoned critique here, or is the author just picking up on a vibe against EA and going with it to give an air of smug knowing sophistication? A little wink and nod to the audience, who will of course have heard of EA, I mean who the hell is supposed to be reading this piece?

I stopped reading there. So frustrating.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-12-19 19:14:46+00:00
That’s a little harder to disentangle for a work of art. There is only one and if you want to experience it, you have to take the good with the bad. Plenty of people may hate a particular actor, but will still watch a film featuring them.

Owing to network effects, games can be extra sticky because you want to consume the same media as your friends.

I would prefer a mushy human was responsible for the art I consume, but I am probably not going to boycott a game because it uses AI for some assets.
by Verdex | 2025-12-19 19:14:55+00:00
Legal representation is the sibling of security.

Security itself is a journey, not a destination. To say that you are secure is to say that you have been so clever that nobody else in the history of ever again will ever be as clever as you just were. Even knowing that they can study you being clever.

Even a super intelligent AI might not be able to replace lawyerhood unless it is also dynamically going out into the world and investigating new legal theory, researching old legal theory, socializing with the powers that be to ensure that they accept their approach, and carefully curating clients that can take advantage of the results.
by sanjayjc | 2025-12-19 19:15:44+00:00
The court relied on Google's TOS to conclude that users opted to use the service, fully aware of their data being stored:

* when a person performs a Google search, he or she is aware (at least constructively) that Google collects a significant amount of data and will provide that data to law enforcement personnel in response to an enforceable search warrant. For present purposes, what Google does with that information, including the standards it imposes upon itself before providing that information to investigators, is irrelevant. For Fourth Amendment purposes, what matters is that the user is informed that Google—a third party—will collect and store that information.

IANAL and can't understand whether now, every 3rd party storing my data is obligated to share it without a warrant.
by guizadillas | 2025-12-19 19:16:03+00:00
America this america that, it's called US! You are US citizens! What's good for America? for the US to stop forcing every other country in America to add tariffs for any product coming from China

I'm tired of this "China is exploiting Gen Z", the US is a propaganda machine and has been for decades. Now they are mad that China is taking their space.
by some_furry | 2025-12-19 19:16:38+00:00
> But I was discussing it with some techies once and someone mentioned to me that it had less entropy (I think they mentioned 256 bits of entropy) whereas they wanted 512 bits of entropy which pgp supported

> I can be wrong about what exactly they talked about since it was long time ago so pardon me if thats the case, but are there any "issues" that you know about in age?

Entropy bikeshedding is very popular for PGP / GnuPG enthusiasts, but it's silly.

age uses X25519, HKDF-SHA256, ChaCha20, and Poly1305. Soon it will also use ML-KEM-768 (post-quantum crypto!). This is all very secure crypto. If a quantum computer turns out to be infeasible to build on Earth, I predict none of these algorithms will be broken in our lifetime.

PGP supports RSA. That's enough reason to avoid it.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/07/08/fuck-rsa/

If you want more reasons:

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/
by Der_Einzige | 2025-12-19 19:16:40+00:00
Hypergamy is eugenics but socially acceptable. The left is trying to embrace its own "prosperity gospel" with "abundance theory", quite a bit before that it was it was "dialectical/historical materialism" with its inevitable contradictions which would eventually lead to a boom/bust cycle too large for capitalists to overcome it, guaranteeing the transition to a socialist state.

I don't see them clearly trying to go transhuman, I see them clearly trying to build AGI. Closer to "I have no mouth and I must scream" than any other particular dystopia IMHO.