MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kortex | 2025-12-08 17:00:41+00:00
"I conducted an experiment where I instructed experienced drivers to follow a path in a parking lot laid out with traffic cones, and found that we were able to predict the trajectory of the car with greater than 60% accuracy. Therefore drivers do not have free will to just dodge the cones and drive arbitrarily from the start to the finish."

Clearly, that conclusion would be patently absurd to draw from that experiment. There are so many expectation and observation effects that go into the very setup from the beginning. Humans generally follow directions, particularly when a guy in a labcoat is giving them.

> At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately. [0]

Wow. TWO whole choices to choose from! Human minds tend to pre-think their choice between one of two fingers to wiggle, therefore free will doesn't exist.

> It's pretty hard to argue that you're really "free" to make a different decision if your body knew which you would choose 7 seconds before you became aware of it.

To really spell it out since the analogy/satire may be lost: You're free to refrain from pressing either button during the prompt. You're free to press both buttons at the same time. You're free to mash them rapidly and randomly throughout the whole experiment. You're free to walk into the fMRI room with a bag full of steel BB's and cause days of downtime and thousands of dollars in damage. Folks generally don't do those things because of conditioning.

[0] - http://behavioralhealth2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/U...
by jborak | 2025-12-08 17:00:48+00:00
Our services were used for C2 as well. I investigated it a bit but eventually decided to just drop TCP forwarding from our free-tier and that reduced our abuse/malware reports for C2 over TCP to zero essentially.

One path I looked at was to use the VirusTotal API to help identify C2's that other security organizations were identifying and leverage that to automatically take down malicious TCP endpoints. I wrote some POCs but did not deploy them. It's something I plan on taking up again at some point next year.
by 2b3a51 | 2025-12-08 17:00:54+00:00
I'm on Firefox and when I right click and open image in new tab I see an svg file with pale blue text colour and cut-off lettering. The source of the svg suggests that the letters are drawn paths rather than a font.

Saving the svg file down and loading into Inkscape shows a grouped object with a frame and then letter forms. The letter forms are not fonts but a complete drawn path. So I think the chopping off of the descenders is a deliberate choice (which is fine if that is what's wanted).

The whole page looks narrow and long on my landfill android phone so the content is in the middle third of the browser but can pinch-zoom ok onto each 'cell' or section of text or the graphs.

Thanks to tirreno and reconnecting for posting this interesting page markup.
by gruntledfangler | 2025-12-08 17:00:57+00:00
At one time I worked at a research institute. It had a huge library that was only partially filled. One of the directors wanted to buy every developer their own Safari subscription. The cost was quoted at around $4K/mo IIRC.

I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at the time.

We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.
by beambot | 2025-12-08 17:01:02+00:00
This is classic Buffett year, being fearful when others are greedy & building a massive war chest for when a correction inevitably occurs.

When it comes to Buffett (and Berkshire), it's really only reasonable to look at 5-year returns. 1-year or YTD are too susceptible to market sentiment rather than true value. Eg the Buffett indicator (stock market value / GDP) is 2x std dev above the norm right now -- way overpriced by historical standards.
by wyck | 2025-12-08 17:01:03+00:00
Imagine you have a home on Airbnb , your guest sends you a payment, but its not directly to you, the payment goes through the payment rails stipulated and controlled by airbnb. This amounts to what is often 25-35% of your listening fee (payment charges, visa network, listing fee, etc, etc.) This is the middle men crypto is supposed to replace.

Only a trustworthy network can replace the current system, it must be something public, immutable and participatory , otherwise it will just centralize back to the above scenario, regardless of any intent. Essentially crypto is network code, it creates the primitives on transmission. And thus anyone (really anyone) can run a node and get a reward for supporting this security model. That's not a scam or even just pragmatic, its literally how money operates, as a incentive/disincentive mechanism.

People forget the early stock market was filled to the brim with scams, the original intent was good, but it attracted bad actors piggy backing in its lack of regulations, and it took years to clean-up, one can make an easy argument that's its still filled with fraud.
by eviks | 2025-12-08 17:01:03+00:00
What are the exact timings? And what OS? For a Windows example, a proper native framework would be fractions of a second, Electron would be many seconds (especially on first run), iced would be a few seconds (as also noted in the issue linked), but that's still way closer to the Electron range, not the "instant" native feel.

Runtime speed is something different, even Electron is not that bad since the UIs are mostly too primitive to cause much of a visible slowdown, here the styling/animation capabilities are usually more prominent.

> including the community on discord

that's not a good baseline to cover the basics due to variable latency and predictability.
Legion Health (YC S21) is hiring a founding engineer (SF, in-person)
by the_danny_g | 2025-12-08 17:01:11+00:00
Legion Health (YC S21) operates a psychiatric practice and is building the AI-native operations layer for mental health care. We focus on the operational backend: scheduling, intake, documentation, billing, and care coordination. These workflows—not diagnostics—are the main bottlenecks in mental health delivery.

We run our own clinic, so the systems you build ship directly into real patient care. Our agent infrastructure currently supports more than 2,000 patients with one human support lead.

We’re hiring a Founding Engineer (in-person, San Francisco). You’d work directly with the founders on:

event-driven backend systems (Node.js, TypeScript, Postgres/Supabase, AWS)

LLM agent tooling (tool use, retries, memory, context management)

internal operations tools for both humans and agents

state/coordination logic that represents a patient’s journey

HIPAA-compliant data and audit pipelines

We’re open to backend or full-stack/product engineers who think in systems and have owned real workflows end-to-end. Prior experience with LLMs is optional; interest is required.

Details: full-time, in-person SF, salary $130k–$180k, equity 0.1–0.6%.

Apply here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/legion-health/jobs/oc6...
by uplifter | 2025-12-08 17:01:29+00:00
Let's be clear that Bostrom and Omohundro's work do not provide "clear theoretical answers" by any technical standards beyond that of provisional concepts in philosophy papers.

The instrumental convergence hypo-thesis, from the original paper[0] is this:

"Several instrumental values can be identified which are convergent in the sense that their attainment would increase the chances of the agent’s goal being realized for a wide range of final goals and a wide range of situations, implying that these instrumental values are likely to be pursued by many intelligent agents."

That's it, it is not at all formal and there's no proof provided for it, nor consistent evidence that it is true, and there are many contradictory possibilities suggested from nature and logic.

Its just something that's taken as given among the old guard pseudo-scientific quarters of the alignment "research" community.

[0] Bostrom's "The Superintelligent Will", the philosophy paper where he defines it: https://nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf

EDIT: typos
by ojr | 2025-12-08 17:01:35+00:00
Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks.

I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.

Pivoting to AI has better unit economics and I have a handcrafted app architecture because of my crypto venture aspirations.

Doing nothing for years and trying to vibe code an equivalent AI app now wouldn’t be fun.
by lostlogin | 2025-12-08 17:01:44+00:00
> Petrol cars at most marginally more likely to catch fire, if at all.

“An American insurer found that just 25 out of 100,000 EVs suffer fire damage.

By comparison, 1530 per 100,000 ICE cars experience fire, and hybrid vehicles suffer a much higher risk of 3475 per 100,000 .”

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/electric-cars/how-much-fi...
by troupo | 2025-12-08 17:01:58+00:00
> So you are saying there would be a limited resource becoming exponentialy more expensive over time?

I'm not saying it. It is literally what Bitcoin is, and other deflationary "currencies".

> And mayhaps in that case the holders might decide to exchange it for some other assets they desire?

Keyword is "some".

In 2010 when bitcoin was novelty and had no value at all, someone paid 10 000 (yes, that's ten thousand) bitcoins for two pizzas. Now imagine bitcoin becomes a currency, as some cryptobros still prophesize. You have a constant pool of money for all "assets", and no way to get more money.
Show HN: PyAtlas - Interactive map of the 10,000 most popular PyPI packages
by flo12392 | 2025-12-08 17:02:24+00:00
PyAtlas is an interactive map of the top 10,000 most-downloaded packages on PyPI.

Each package is represented as a point in a 2D space. Packages with similar descriptions are placed close together, so you get rough clusters of the ecosystem (web, data, ML, etc.). You can:

- simply explore the map - search for a package you already know - explore points nearby to discover alternatives or related tools

Useful? Maybe, maybe not. Mostly just a fun project for me to work on. If you’re curious how it works under the hood (embeddings, UMAP, clustering, etc.), there are more details in the GitHub repo!
by DannyPage | 2025-12-08 17:02:45+00:00
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.

That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-08 17:02:46+00:00
The argument is not that the color index is a perfect replica of GDP, but that it is an independent, higher-frequency proxy for economic activity that captures dimensions missed by traditional reconstructions.

The value of the index lies precisely where it converges with broad historical trends and where it diverges, suggesting new information. The observation that the color index frequently changes before GDP is a sign of its validity, not a weakness - e.g. shifting consumer demand/sentiment or supply chain shocks and a leading indicator of GDP
by crackercrews | 2025-12-08 17:03:41+00:00
The author makes a good point about how dating dynamics vary based on gender balance. There was a recent study that showed how much more power men have in the dating/hookup scene when there are more women, and how much less women like/trust men under these circumstances. Even if women are put at a disadvantage in the admissions process, there may be a net benefit to women (who end up attending) because they have more power in the dating market.
by helsinkiandrew | 2025-12-08 17:04:05+00:00
If your paying $500 for an O’Reilly subscription, then the $99 membership plus $75 add-on for O'Reilly would seem to make it so even if you don't use any of the other facilities:

> unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, video courses, interactive sandboxes, practice labs, and AI-enabled tools from O'Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio
Show HN: I built an AI copilot for SEO
by adamclarke | 2025-12-08 17:04:11+00:00
Hi!

I got tired of AI tools that claim to do SEO but just fill sites with AI slop articles.

And it's always bugged me that developers have AI copilots (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) but SEOs don't have anything similar - especially one that works with live search data.

So I built one. It plugs into live search data - Google keyword databases, backlinks, SERPs - and you can just chat with it. It interprets the data the way an SEO consultant would and makes recommendations.

And no - it doesn't do mass AI article generation. That's the whole point.

I'm curious how people actually use it in practice. Would love feedback.

Cheers, Adam
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-08 17:04:27+00:00
If there was ever a stock to invest in where the investors are satisfied for management to carefully do nothing, wouldn't it be Berkshire? Will they automatically go nutso-stupid once Buffet is gone? It's not exactly like it's a day-trader stock, the share price went from merely ridiculous to absurd-beyond the last few decades.
by hypeatei | 2025-12-08 17:04:34+00:00
Not giving them money is a start, and for alternatives I'd recommend finding another taxi service. Either the traditional yellow cabs or another private company/single owner-operator ones (like the ones that drive black SUVs/cars)

For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.
by collingreen | 2025-12-08 17:04:38+00:00
You just keep saying things are absurd or obvious but not putting anything behind it.

I hope this isn't a semantics game where things like "1 - 6 months" counts as an estimate in this context.

The point way back up this thread was accurate timelines for complicated, novel work have large error bars but those error bars aren't as bad as the equivalent error bars on estimating whatever "return" it is being pitted against.
by Ancapistani | 2025-12-08 17:05:25+00:00
> All materials ultimately succomb when exposed long enough at some high enough temperature.

I'm not a material scientist, but I don't believe that to be true. Metals don't to my knowledge; they suffer oxidation, which is allayed by the presence of oil.

If you mean plastics in particular, then PEEK would be ideal to my knowledge - it's suitable for immersion in gasoline and similar solvents, and I've used it in the past for a fuel pump mounting bracket that sits inside the fuel tank of a (gasoline) vehicle. I checked it after a year and it doesn't seem to be any worse for wear.

It's just a huge pain to print!

> What is the temperature range to match here?

I'm not sure, and likely couldn't be sure without a fair amount of research. If I had to print this for a plane, I'd want to do that and measure temperature in use and under high load and destructively test several drafts to ensure performance.

From what I've seen in this instance though, the failed part showed a Tg (glass transition temperature) of 55ºC - basically exactly that of PLA-CF. The pilot believed it was ABS-CF, which has a Tg of ~100ºC. If we assume that 100ºC was at least higher than the expected operating temperature, PEEK (Tg: 143ºC) would have given a ~50% safety margin.
by cauliflower99 | 2025-12-08 17:05:28+00:00
Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work.

The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one.

Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
by benced | 2025-12-08 17:05:35+00:00
"You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper" - you can't just say things. You could very well be right but you need to actually look at their margin profile over time to know if this is true.

To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
by Levitz | 2025-12-08 17:05:50+00:00
The rest of the world is the one thing that gives me hope in this regard, really.

It feels like year by year, Asia, even China, is becoming more and more culturally relevant. Western media is just too damn stagnant.

Hollywood used to be known as possibly the most important cultural powerhouse history has seen. It might still be that, but it certainly doesn't feel like it anymore.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-08 17:05:59+00:00
When I did it, vanilla Claude (Max5, default Opus 4.5, no special skills loaded, etc) had playwright up and running for screenshots in minutes (after intervening to tell it to use python 3.13 after noticing python 3.14 seems to be missing a lot of wheels and uv was rebuilding numpy for some reason) without me telling how to screenshot at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fluidcruft#46185996

(One fun wrinkle I enjoyed watching was I created the target screenshot in Firefox, and Claude was using playwright with Chrome. Ultimately, I have no idea whether either Firefox or Chrome has the correct actual fonts and I'm not a webdev and don't remember how to figure that all out)
by coldtea | 2025-12-08 17:06:05+00:00
>Humans/animals are embodied, living in the real world, whose design has been honed by a "loss function" favoring survival. Animals are "designed" to learn facts about the real world, and react to those facts in a way that helps them survive.

Yes - but LLMs also get this "embodied knowledge" passed down from human-generated training data. We are their sensory inputs in a way (which includes their training images, audio, and video too).

They do learn in a batch manner, and we learn many things not from books but from a more interactive direct being in the world. But after we distill our direct experiences and throughts derived from them as text, we pass them down to the LLMs.

Hey, there's even some kind of "loss function" in the LLM case - from the thumbs up/down feedback we are asked to give to their answers in Chat UIs, to $5/hour "mechanical turks" in Africa or something tasked with scoring their output, to rounds of optimization and pruning during training.

>Animals are predicting something EXTERNAL (facts) vs LLMs predicting something INTERNAL (what will I say next).

I don't think that matters much, in both cases it's information in, information out.

Human animals predict "what they will say/do next" all the time, just like they also predict what they will encounter next ("my house is round that corner", "that car is going to make a turn").

Our prompt to an LLM serves the same role as sensory input from the external world plays to our predictions.
by aseipp | 2025-12-08 17:06:08+00:00
To be technical, it's more that it can read and write the on-disk Git format directly, like many other tools can.

I think the easiest way to conceptualize it is to think of Git and jj as being broken down into three broad "layers": data storage, algorithms, user interface. Jujutsu uses the same data storage format as Git -- but each of them have their own algorithms and user interface built atop that storage.
by mindslight | 2025-12-08 17:06:35+00:00
Not say things like "it's always political", and otherwise both-sides the topic as if the current regime is not a watershed break with American norms, however flawed and imperfectly-adhered-to they were. Yes, our government has been decaying towards authoritarianism for quite some time and yes, there is plenty of blame to go around. But if we earnestly care about individual liberty, now is the time to throw our backs into stopping it.
by jononor | 2025-12-08 17:06:42+00:00
If we could only complement that battery with a small nuclear reactor, then we'd be in business. Come to think of it, shipping would be quite interesting for a SpaceX style disruption - there is a market for many many thousands of units - enough to actually get good at building them in a repeatable fashion. Of course there are considerable engineering and political challenges, to put it mildly.
by rzerowan | 2025-12-08 17:06:51+00:00
If deployed with hybrid sails [1] this could be even more competitive to Bunker fuel for bulk/container carriers and even RoRo car carriers.

IMHO a hybrid approach would achieve similar to superior perfomance to the current state viz a viz cost/perfomance and enviromental impact.

Additionally as has been deployed for some longhaul trucks battery swaps can also cut down on the time to redeploy after offloading the cargo.

[1] https://gcaptain.com/berge-bulk-launches-worlds-most-powerfu...
by NeuroTinkerLab | 2025-12-08 17:07:20+00:00
Natural language is costing you money. I created Synt-E, a simple protocol that cuts LLM token usage by up to 80% with structured commands. Run it locally with @ollama_ai. GitHub: https://github.com/NeuroTinkerLab/synt-e-project #AI #DevTools #PromptEngineering #Ollama #LLM
by neandrake | 2025-12-08 17:07:22+00:00
Worktrees are useful particularly because they look like entirely separate projects to your IDEs or other project tooling. They are more useful on larger projects with lots of daily commits. If you just use branches then whenever you switch, in the worst case, your IDE has to blow away caches and reconstruct the project layout or build the project fresh. On large projects this takes significant time. But switching your IDE to a different project, there are now two project and build caches to switch between.
by samiv | 2025-12-08 17:07:23+00:00
That's a very cynical take. Unfortunately likely correct.

It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.

So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.

More here:

https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...
by tgma | 2025-12-08 17:07:33+00:00
IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere.

That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-12-08 17:07:45+00:00
That's just one example sure, but yes, it does still take up brain cycles. There are many areas in philosophy that are exploring better paths. Wheeler, Floridi, Bartlett, paths deriving from Kripke.

But we still have papers being published like "The modal ontological argument for atheism" that hinges on if s4 or s5 are valid.

Now this kind of paper is well argued and is now part of the academic literature, and that's good, but it's still a nerd snipe subject.