MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-12-22 01:19:01+00:00
> 5 years ago, the argument that AGI wasn't here yet was that you couldn't take something like AlphaGo and use it to play chess.

No; that was one, extremely limited example of a broader idea. If I point out that your machine is not a general calculator because it gives the wrong answer for six times nine, and then you fix the result it gives in that case, you have not refuted me. If I now find that the answer is incorrect in some other case, I am not "moving goalposts" by pointing it out.

(But also, what lxgr said.)

> But now, we have LLMs that can reliably beat video games like Pokemon, without any specialized training for playing video games. And those same LLMs can write code, do math, write poetry, be language tutors, find optimal flight routes from one city to another during the busy Christmas season, etc.

The AI systems that do most of these things are not "LLMs".

> It's literally as capable as a high school student for almost any general task you throw it at.

And yet embarrassing deficiencies are found all the time ("how many r's in strawberry", getting duped by straightforward problems dressed up to resemble classic riddles but without the actual gotcha, etc.).
by cpncrunch | 2025-12-22 01:19:19+00:00
Link to study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12700204/

Although I think the more interesting question is whether sunbed use increases or decreases overall mortality. The only study I can find is Lindqvist's:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/joim.12251?g...

Overall, sunbed use reduced the all-cause mortality by a ratio of 0.77 or 0.87 depending on the model used. It increased the risk of developing MM, and the risk of dying from MM, although all-cause mortality was not increased even in patients diagnosed with MM. (This seems to be because there is a very low overall risk of MM mortality, but UV light exposure seems to provide a greater overall health benefit than the small risk of increased MM risk).
by strken | 2025-12-22 01:21:36+00:00
I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.

Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
by komali2 | 2025-12-22 01:21:45+00:00
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!

Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
by nly | 2025-12-22 01:22:50+00:00
Dimson, Marsh and Staunton have been compiling the most comprehensive analysis of historical returns across all major asset classes for many years.

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/investment-bank/insights-and-d...

From the summary:

US real returns (1900-2024):

Stocks: 6.6%/yr annualized, Bonds: 1.6%/yr, Bills: 0.5%/yr

But it is noted:

> The 21st century is now 25 years old. Measured since the start of 2000, stock returns have been lower than over the 20th century, though global equity investors still enjoyed an annualized real return of 3.5% and an equity risk premium relative to bills of 4.3%
by dragontamer | 2025-12-22 01:23:18+00:00
> AV1 specifically analyzes the original noise, denoises the source then adds back the noise as a synthetic mask / overlay of sorts. Noise is death for compression so this allows large gains in compression ratio.

If said noise still exists after H265.

And there's no guarantee that these noise detection algorithms are compatible with H264, H265, AV1, or future codecs H266 or AV2.
by inkyoto | 2025-12-22 01:25:08+00:00
> I have seen pushback on this kind of behavior because "users don't like error codes" or other such nonsense […]

There are two dimensions to it: UX and security.

Displaying excessive technical information on an end-user interface will complicate support and likely reveal too much about the internal system design, making it vulnerable to external attacks.

The latter is particularly concerning for any design facing the public internet. A frequently recommended approach is exception shielding. It involves logging two messages upon encountering a problem: a nondescript user-facing message (potentially including a reference ID pinpointing the problem in space and time) and a detailed internal message with the problem’s details and context for L3 support / engineering.
by anyfoo | 2025-12-22 01:25:09+00:00
I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.

And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.

I’ve been depressed in the past, in my 20s even severely. Clinically, you could say. But in the end, every one of those depressive episodes were because something was not right in my life.

Whether I acknowledged it or not, whether I even realized that there was a problem, once I figured the issues out and took the sometimes very painful and exhausting steps to sort them out, the depression faded away.

Over time, I’ve become better at introspection to figure out what’s really bugging me, and also in recognizing a budding early depression as warning signs.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-12-22 01:26:27+00:00
Oh, you can't reach the items on the higher grocery shelves no matter how hard you stretch? That's just a deficit of tall-power. I also experience items on high shelves. No, you shouldn't use a stepping stool to grab those items; just stretch more, and grow taller, like me! Look how good I am at being a bit taller than you! Your failure to be slightly taller is a character flaw, feel bad.
by thefaux | 2025-12-22 01:26:45+00:00
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.

2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
by Telaneo | 2025-12-22 01:27:41+00:00
There are only really two big bloches when it comes to drivers these days: Wifi and Nvidia. And even Nvidia at-least works if you've got a modern card, so you won't be stuck with no output, you'll just get worse performance. Wi-fi you really should double-check though if you need that.

Some niche accessories also have issues, or at least niche features on those accessories.
by toast0 | 2025-12-22 01:27:51+00:00
I've not used AI to write code, but everyone who I've spoken to who has says it actually takes a lot of work. It sounds like you get intern level work out of AI, but without the hope that your investment in time results in skills and personal development for the intern.

All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.

If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-22 01:28:21+00:00
If you think this is simple, wait until you learn about oceans and forests do!

Trees are literally CO2 based solar batteries: they take CO2 + solar energy and store it as hydrocarbons and carbohydrates for later use. Every time you're sitting by a campfire you're feeling heat from solar energy. How much better does it get that free energy storage combined with CO2 scrubbing from the atmosphere!

When you look at the ocean, it's able to absorb 20-30% of all human caused CO2 emissions all with no effort on our behalf.

Unfortunately, these two solution are, apparently, "too good to be true" because we're increasingly reducing the ability of both to remove carbon. Parts of the Amazon are not net emitters of CO2 [0] and the ocean has limits to how much CO2 it can absorb before it starts reach its limit and become dangerously too acidic for ocean life.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/14/amazon-r...
by reactordev | 2025-12-22 01:28:22+00:00
I write a lot of go. I tried to write a lot of rust but fell into lifetime traps. I really want to leave C++ but I just can’t without something that’s also object oriented.

Not a dig at functional, it’s just my big codebases are logically defined as objects and systems that don’t lend itself to just being a struct or an interface.

Inheritance is why I’m stuck in C++ land.

I would love to have something like rust but that supports classes, virtual methods, etc. but I guess I’ll keep waiting.
by Santosh83 | 2025-12-22 01:28:27+00:00
The only Hard requirements are a CPU with SSE 4.2 and POPCNT. Win11 will simply not install on older CPUs. The rest of the requirements can be bypassed but Microsoft will block you from the annual major feature upgrades. You will have to do those manually too. They also claim that your stability and performance on pre-8th Gen CPUs will be degraded and they will give no support, but in reality it runs just fine. Win11 is sluggish on all CPUs anyway.
by satisfice | 2025-12-22 01:29:20+00:00
Speak for yourself. Maybe get a job that involves intellectual achievement. Then you’ll discover the importance of curiosity.

You are technically correct that no one is directly paid to be curious. But it is also true that no one is directly paid to sleep. Nevertheless, if you don’t sleep when you are away from work, your mind will not function when you ARE at work.

Curiosity is an evolutionary adaptation that enables the discovery of heretofore unknown resources.
by com2kid | 2025-12-22 01:29:46+00:00
> I'm not sure that 3% of the steam user base really qualifies as a 'mass' exodus.

Major tech reviewers are talking about Bazzite. Reddit gaming forums are full of people talking about Win11 vs Linux.

Microsoft only has two strangle holds on PCs - gaming and office apps. For home users they literally have 0 lock in now days other than familiarity. No one is writing native windows apps outside of legacy productivity apps and games. Even Microsoft is writing Windows components in React now days.

I moved to Linux earlier this year and literally none of my apps were unavailable. Everything is a browser window now days.

15 years ago that would've been crazy, I had tons of native windows apps I used every day.
by WanderZil | 2025-12-22 01:33:40+00:00
Thanks a lot for the kind words and the helpful suggestion! I’ve just added support for scaling the crop area by dragging the corners in Percentage and pixels mode. Edit: feature is now live.

Really appreciate you trying the tool and taking the time to give feedback. It helped improve the UX quickly Please let me know if you notice anything else that could be better.
by nradov | 2025-12-22 01:34:37+00:00
The Time Magazine cover story in 1984 where they falsely claimed that consuming cholesterol from eggs and other sources was dangerous was a real turning point. That misunderstanding has caused tremendous harm to public health for decades. I think the journalists acted in good faith but they believed junk science.

https://time.com/archive/6855517/hold-the-eggs-and-butter/

https://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,...
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2025-12-22 01:34:56+00:00
> big yikes for something coming out of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Besides the unit flub, there's an unpleasant smell of sales flyer to the whole piece. Hard data spread all over, but couldn't find efficiency figures. Casual smears such as "even the best new grid-scale storage systems on the market—mainly lithium-ion batteries—provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage" (huh, what, why?). I could also have used an explanation of why CO2, instead of nitrogen.
by jsight | 2025-12-22 01:35:05+00:00
Waymo will get better at this.

But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were zero waymo fatalities due to this.

That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least one fatality due to traffic light outages.

Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They are a great company that will do a lot of good for the world. One bad night (in which noone was hurt, in part because of their cautiuosness) shouldn't negate that.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-22 01:35:11+00:00
The better statement is 'Win 10 improved nothing directly user-facing over Win 7'. Sure, there are several technical improvements under the hood, but those are completely detached from what the user actually sees and experiences, and there's no real reason we couldn't have the Windows 10 technical improvements with a Windows 7 UI, other than Microsoft being the abusive parent that it is.
by MindSpunk | 2025-12-22 01:35:17+00:00
The push back on kernel level anti-cheat on security grounds has always felt odd to me. If you don't trust them to run kernel level code why do you trust them to run usermode code as your user? A rogue anticheat software could still do enormous damage in usermode, running as your user, no kernel access required.

Being in kernel mode does give the rogue software more power, but the threat model is all wrong. If you're against kernel anti-cheat you should be against all anti-cheat. At the end of the day you have to chose to trust the software author no matter where the code runs.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-22 01:35:33+00:00
The paper covers a lot, some are administrating vitamin D as a prevention measure, most are on vitamin D deficient patients. e.g

> Even in the small subgroup of subjects with a poorer vitamin D status (serum 25OHD < 20 ng/mL), no effect on fracture risk was observed (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.07; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.91–1.25).

> A large RCT in Mongolian children with severe vitamin D deficiency did not find a beneficial effect of vitamin D supplementation on the subsequent risk of subclinical or clinical tuberculosis.
by filleduchaos | 2025-12-22 01:36:12+00:00
What does the AF 449 crash have to do with the existence of a button to return the aircraft to wings level + zero vertical speed?

To answer your question though, LVL has been around for close to two decades now. IIRC there was a Cirrus/Garmin partnership that added it to the latter's G1000/GFC 700 and it's since trickled out to other consumer-grade autopilots.
by hamdingers | 2025-12-22 01:36:18+00:00
Each time they trot out one of these new robots they strongly imply, if not outright promise, that they will become part of the parks[1], that's the problem. Things like HoloTile are accurately marketed which makes me believe it's a choice they're making with the character robots.

1. The article states "he’s soon making his debut at Disney parks," which is misleading to a casual reader who may not realize that Olaf will only appear on the day of his debut.
by eterm | 2025-12-22 01:36:59+00:00
It's a signal they want to put out that they don't respect the rules of grammar.

They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.

It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).
by otterley | 2025-12-22 01:39:16+00:00
> In practice, this means that durability of that audit record “a thing happened” cannot be simply “I persisted it to disk on one machine”

As long as the record can be located when it is sought, it does not matter how many copies there are. The regulator will not ask so long as your system is a reasonable one.

Consider that technologies like RAID did not exist once upon a time, and backup copies were latent and expensive. Yet we still considered the storage (which was often just a hard copy on paper) to be sufficient to meet the applicable regulations. If a fire then happened and burned the place down, and all the records were lost, the business would not be sanctioned so long as they took reasonable precautions.

Here, I’m not suggesting that “the record is on a single disk, that ought to be enough.” I am assuming that in the ordinary course of business, there is a working path to getting additional redundant copies made, but those additional copies are temporarily delayed due to overload. No reasonable regulator is going to tell you this is unacceptable.

> Depending on the stringency, RPO needs to be zero for audit

And it is! The record is either in local storage or in central storage.
by Mr_Minderbinder | 2025-12-22 01:39:18+00:00
> Over-focus on the highest possible quality

This is not an issue in my view. I like the fact that I can download 100 MiB ultra-high resolution TIFF files of scans of photographs from the original negative from the Library of Congress and 24-bit/96kHz FLAC files of captures of 78 RPM records from the Internet Archive. In addition to maintaining completeness and quality of information, one of the main goals of preservation is to guard against further degradation and information loss. You should try to preserve the highest quality copies available (because they contain more information) and re-encoding (deliberate degradation) should only be used to create convenient access copies.

Inferior copies, in addition to being less informative, have the potential to misinform. Only the archivist will enjoy space savings. All the readers who might consult your library in the infinite future will bear the cost.

> ...(e.g. lossless FLAC). This inflates the file size...

This is entirely the wrong view. The file size of a raw capture compressed to FLAC should be thought of as the “true” or “correct” size. It is roughly the most efficient (balancing various trade-offs) representation of sampled audio data that we can presently achieve. In preservation we seek to preserve the item or signal itself and not simply what we might perceive thereof. This human-centric perception view is just wrong. There is data in film photographs which cannot be perceived visually yet can be of interest to researchers and be revealed with digital image analysis tools.

As an example of how much information celluloid can contain see: https://vimeo.com/89784677 (context: he is comparing a Blu-ray and a scan of a 35mm print)
by mindcrime | 2025-12-22 01:39:47+00:00
I agree with /u/AnimalMuppet, FWIW. As long as I've been doing this stuff (and I've been doing it for quite some time) AGI has been interpreted (somewhat loosely) as something like "Intelligence equivalent to an average human adult" or just "human level intelligence". But as /u/AnimalMuppet points out, there's quite a bit of variance to human intelligence, and nobody ever really specified in detail exactly which "human intelligence" AGI was meant to correspond to.

SuperIntelligence (or ASI), OTOH, has - so far as I can recall - always been even more loosely specified, and translates roughly to "an intelligence beyond any human intelligence".

Another term you might hear, although not as frequently, is "Universal Artificial Intelligence". This comes mostly from the work of Marcus Hutter[1] and means something approximately like "an intelligence that can solve any problem that can, in principle, be solved".

[1]: https://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
by nick4 | 2025-12-22 01:40:10+00:00
Communicating changes and communicating learning too! Every few years I rewatch one of my favorite videos on code reviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJjmw9TRB7s.

Asking questions on code reviews is one of the most powerful tools to learn more about a codebase, and fostering a culture where junior devs feel empowered to ask questions is one of the best ways to help junior devs succeed.
by nradov | 2025-12-22 01:40:57+00:00
Some people have literally been able able to overcome asthma — or at least significantly reduce symptoms — by learning to breathe better. Getting in better physical shape can be part of this. That doesn't necessarily work for all patients but at least some have been successful.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/547761/breath-by-ja...
by mindslight | 2025-12-22 01:41:08+00:00
I've used 3rd party retail gift cards to pay for consumer VPN service, which is only "grey market" because privacy is often criminalized. But I still 100% agree with what the AARP is saying. This is one of those things that sure, there is technically an exception, but by the time you get to the level of knowing enough to know when that exception applies, you end up agreeing with the common advice.
by ragequittah | 2025-12-22 01:41:14+00:00
>Was that before or after real people had their work scraped w/out permission or acknowledgement?

Well after. Ever notice how a good game was made and then suddenly 50 like it appeared? Everyone scraped id soft's ideas and tech. Everyone followed Blizzard's ideas. The amazing thing that happened IMO is when companies started putting up patents so that such scraping couldn't be done.

One that comes to mind is the Shadow of Mordor nemesis system. Great idea, would've been neat to see in other games. Nope not allowed for 11 years. If things like this were around at the start of gaming it would likely be in a very sorry state.
by amluto | 2025-12-22 01:41:15+00:00
As a long time C++ user, I’m curious why you like inheritance and virtual methods so much.

I maintain a medium sized, old-ish C++ code base. It uses classes and inheritance and virtual methods and even some multiple inheritance. I despise this stuff. Single Inheritance is great until you discover that you have a thing that doesn’t slot nicely into the hierarchy or when you realize that you want to decompose an interface (cough, base class) into a couple of non-hierarchically related things. Multiple inheritance is an absolute mess unless you strictly use base classes with pure virtual methods and no member variables. And forcing everything into an “is a” relationship instead of a “has a” relationship can be messy sometimes.

I often wish C++ had traits / or Haskell style type classes.
by Jigsy | 2025-12-22 01:41:55+00:00
The problem with "child abuse" is that some countries classify drawing things as "child abuse," or "rape," or "animal abuse." (Something I don't agree with.)

I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)

Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.

What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.

Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...