MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by samdoesnothing | 2025-12-13 01:11:01+00:00
Whoever owns the device can do what they want with it, Apple cannot tell you what you're allowed to do with your phone. You're making up a scenario in your head.

This goes both ways - when Apple produces a phone, they own it and they're also free to load whatever software they want onto it. They then enter into voluntary transactions with others, in which the ownership of the phone is transferred along with the right to load whatever software is desired.

If you can't figure out how to load your desired software onto an iPhone, don't buy one. But it's certainly not Apples problem at that point since, as you said, they no longer have a right to any say in how that device is used, and thus also give up any responsibilities you seem to desire.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-13 01:11:14+00:00
“A computer in every home” (from the original post I was replying to) does not mean “A computer with the highest priced version of the highest priced optional accessory for computers in every home”

I’m talking about the hundreds of affordable models that are perfectly suitable for everything up to and including AAA gaming.

The existence of expensive, and very much optional, high end computer parts does not mean that affordable computers are not more incredible than ever.

Just because cutting edge high end parts are out of reach to you, does not mean that perfectly usable computers are too, as I demonstrated with actual specs and prices in my post.

That’s what I’m talking about.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-12-13 01:12:29+00:00
>You say that like it’s even remotely feasible at the frontier of mathematics and not a monumental group effort to turn even established proofs into such.

Is it really known to be the frontier as long as its not verified? I would call the act of rigorous verification the acknowledgement of a frontier shift.

Consider your favorite dead-end in science, perhaps alchemy, the search for alcahest, the search for the philosophers stone, etc. I think nobody today would pretend these ideas were at the frontier, because today it is collectively identified as pseudoscience, which failed to replicate / verify.

If I were the first to place a flag on some mountain, that claim may or may not be true in the eyes of others, but time will tell and others replicating the feat will be able to confirm observation of my flag.

As long as no one can verify my claims they are rightfully contentious, and as more and more people are able to verify or invalidate my claims it becomes clear if I did or did not move the frontier.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-13 01:13:03+00:00
"It's ridiculous to complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a good name."

I never really understood what was "wrong" with the NaCl library that it needed another version that does not have the string "nacl" somewhere in the name

I also remember Google named some heavily promoted non-cryptography project "NaCl" subsequent to the NaCl library's release making any searches for "NaCl" biased toward Google's software

I still use original NaCl, e.g., for CurveDNS, tinysshd, dq and dqcache, not libsodium
by lhmiles | 2025-12-13 01:13:12+00:00
The author asked me to mention that it's possible to maliciously cause a (64-bit) hash collision. In other words, you can make changes to safe file.py and evil file.py until they have the same hash. Then if you read file.py on cmt abc123 in normal git land, then run python /commits/abc123/file.py, it is possible to read the safe one and run the evil one. I think this is only a risk if you are reading from an external source but executing inside the mount, which is a weird thing to do.
by hexaga | 2025-12-13 01:13:37+00:00
Do selection dynamics require awareness of incentives? I would think that the incentives merely have to exist, not be known.

On HN, that might be as simple as display sort order -- highly engaging comments bubble up to the top, and being at the top, receive more attention in turn.

The highly fit extremes are -- I think -- always going to be hyper-specialized to exploit the environment. In a way, they tell you more about the environment than whatever their content ostensibly is.
by btilly | 2025-12-13 01:14:12+00:00
You appear to be deliberately ignoring the point.

Currently, in 2025, it is not possible in most fields for a random expert to produce a machine checked proof. The work of everyone in the field coming together to create a machine checked proof is also more work for than for the whole field to learn an important result in the traditional way.

This is a fixable problem. People are working hard on building up a big library of checked proofs, to serve as building blocks. We're working on having LLMs read a paper, and fill out a template for that machine checked proof, to greatly reduce the work. In fields where the libraries are built up, this is invaluable.

But as a general vision of how people should be expected to work? This is more 2035, or maybe 2045, than 2025. That future is visible, but isn't here.
by bilekas | 2025-12-13 01:14:45+00:00
> Skills are a keeper #

Good thinking, I agree actually, however..

> Skills are based on a very light specification, if you could even call it that, but I still think it would be good for these to be formally documented somewhere.

Like a lot of posts around AI, and I hope OP can speak to it, surely you can agree that while when used for a good cool idea, it can also be used for the inverse and probably to more detrimental reason. Why would they document an unmanageable feature that may be consumed.

Shareholder value might not go up if they learnt that the major product is learning bad things.

Have you or would you try this on a local LLM instead ?
by simonw | 2025-12-13 01:14:46+00:00
ChatGPT has had a full Linux container system available to it for nearly three years now.

OpenAI keep changing their mind on what to call it. I like the original name, "ChatGPT Code Interpreter", but they've also called it "advanced data analysis" at various points.

Claude added the same feature in September this year: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter...

In both ChatGPT and Claude you can say things like "use your Python tool to calculate total mortgage payments over a 30 year period for X and Y" and it will write and execute code to do so - but you can also upload files (including CSVs or even SQLite database files) into that container file system and have them write and execute python code to process those in different ways.

Skills are just folders full of markdown files that are saved in that container when it first boots up.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-13 01:15:20+00:00
I think an always-installed bike rack is going to be the "safest" solution.

Here in Tennessee I'm also thinking about making a "frame" which extends out about 12 inches from the rear of the bumper, blocking aerial observation (but still in compliance with Tennessee law, "visible from rear at 100ft").

Our photo tickets aren't legally enforceable (across the entire state, except for automated school/bus citations), but the Flock cameras have really started being deployed over the past year.

Most of our new Flock cameras have additional security cameras prominently recording, nearby (like you'd see in a bigbox parking lot for security). I hope we can legislate these out of existance, pronto.
by josh_p | 2025-12-13 01:16:09+00:00
Yes, and..

Each EO tests the waters a bit more with what the public and other branches will tolerate. As we’ve seen with numerous orders already, Congress and business will comply early because they think it will benefit them.

Trump thinks himself a king. He acts like it. He’s attempting to normalize his behavior. He can’t deal with the legislature because it turns out white supremacy isn’t that popular. Who knew?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-13 01:16:19+00:00
That's post-training

No, it is not. Read the paper. They are discussing an emergent property of the context itself: "For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model."

I'm talking about tasks like multiplying two 4-digit numbers (let's say 8-digit, just to be safe, for reasoning models), which 5th or 6th graders in the US are expected to be able to do with no problem - without using a calculator.

So am I. See, for example, Karpathy's discussion of native computation: https://youtu.be/7xTGNNLPyMI?si=Gckcmp2Sby4SlKje&t=6416 (starts at 1:46:56). The first few tokens in the context actually serve as some sort of substrate for general computation. I don't pretend to understand that, and it may still be something of an open research topic, but it's one more unexpected emergent property of transformers.

You'd be crazy to trust that property at this stage -- at the time Karpathy was making the video, he needed to explicitly tell the model to "Use code" if he didn't want it to just make up solutions to more complex problems -- but you'd also be crazy to trust answers from a 5th-grader who just learned long division last week.

Feeling quite comfortable being classed in the same camp with the greatest living physicist, honestly.

Not a great time for you to rest on your intellectual laurels. Same goes for Penrose.
by _dan | 2025-12-13 01:16:50+00:00
Yeah I have a couple of recent Samsung OLEDs and they're fine without an internet connection despite reports that they wouldn't be. If I press one of the annoying streaming service buttons on the remote it'll give me a setup popup which needs to be dismissed, otherwise they work fine, albeit without any built in streaming support.

I'd read reports that Q-Symphony (audio from the TV speakers and soundbar simultaneously) wouldn't work, but it does.

I stuck an OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) box to the back of both of them so they can play stuff from my NAS. They're not the cheapest solution and I realise Kodi/XBMC on which they're based isn't everyone's jam (I grew up with XBMC on an Xbox so it is very much mine) - but they play everything, have wifi, HDMI-CEC, integrated RF remote, and work out of the box.

Model numbers if anyone cares: Samsung QE65S95C, Samsung QE77S95F. I believe S95, S90 and S85 (at least up to F) are all very similar so they should all work but ofc ymmv.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-13 01:17:52+00:00
People that can reliably predict the future, especially when it comes to rising markets, are almost always billionaires. It is a skill so rare that it can literally make you the richest man on earth. Why should I trust your prediction of future markets that this pricing is the new standard, and will never go down? Line doesn’t always go up, even if it feels like it is right now, and all the tech media darlings are saying so.

If everything remains the same, RAM pricing will also. I have never once found a period in known history where everything stays the same, and I would be willing to bet 5 figures that at some point in the future I will be able to buy DDR5 or better ram for cheaper than today. I can point out that in the long run, prices for computing equipment have always fallen. I would trust that trend a lot more than a shortage a few months old changing the very nature of commodity markets. Mind you, I’m not the richest man on earth either, so my pattern matched opinion should be judged the same.

> B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.

I didn't say I could build one from parts. Instead I said buy a mini pc, and then went and looked up the specs and price point to be sure.

The PC that I was talking about is here[https://a.co/d/6c8Udbp]. I live in Canada so translated the prices to USD. Remember that US stores are sometimes forced to hide a massive import tax in those parts prices. The rest of the world isn’t subject to that and pays less.

Edit: here’s an equivalent speced pc available in the US for $439 with a prime membership. So even with the cost of prime membership you can get a Ryzen 7 32gb 1tb for $455. https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-P3-Gigabit-Ethernet-Computer/...
by BobbyJo | 2025-12-13 01:18:56+00:00
> If we don't think the candle in a simulated universe is a "real candle", why do we consider the intelligence in a simulated universe possibly "real intelligence"?

A candle in Canada can't melt wax in Mexico, and a real candle can't melt simulated wax. If you want to differentiate two things along one axis, you can't just point out differences that may or may not have any effect on that axis. You have to establish a causal link before the differences have any meaning. To my knowledge, intelligence/consciousness/experience doesn't have a causal link with anything.

We know our brains cause consciousness the way we knew in 1500 that being on a boat for too long causes scurvy. Maybe the boat and the ocean matter, or maybe they don't.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-13 01:19:19+00:00
Why oh why isn’t 'uecker still pushing his GCC patch[1] enabling -fno-trampolines (i.e. function descriptors) for C. I know it’s an ABI break, but it would be so nice :(

Long story short:

# (*funp)(); testl #1, %eax jz 1f movq 8(%eax), r10 movq (%eax), %eax 1: callq *%eax

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-patches/2018-12/msg00853.h...
by simonw | 2025-12-13 01:20:03+00:00
These work well with local LLMs that are powerful enough to run a coding agent environment with a decent amount of context over longer loops.

The OpenAI GPT OSS models can drive Codex CLI, so they should be able to do this.

I have high hopes for Mistral's Devstral 2 but I've not run that locally yet.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-13 01:20:04+00:00
I was refuting the refutation by tomrod.

I didn't say that the nationalism and border sovereignty that exist in 2025 are exactly what prehistoric humans practiced. That would obviously be absurd.

What I said was:

> Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation

In other words, we have the same instincts operating whether it's with a group of 300 people or 300,000,000. People occupy a geographic area and call it theirs and control who can live there. Many primates do the same.

And is your case of someone traveling down a river trying to contradict me? My example was of that being allowed if they weren't threatening. And the modern equivalent would be something like like a transit visa or connecting international airports.

I really don't know what you're arguing. We're not talking about people traveling anyways, the subject is whether tribes would just let random people come in and share their land. They didn't. They had a concept of group sovereignty, the same idea as national sovereignty, and of land they occupied.

If you want to insist that modern national sovereignty and borders drawn on maps are completely and utterly unrelated to tribal sovereignty and tribal borders -- if you don't see the obvious similarity, the same human group instinct and human territorial instinct -- then I really don't know what to tell you.
by matt_kantor | 2025-12-13 01:21:25+00:00
I think this philosophy only reasonably applies behind the public-facing API gateway. So the GraphQL API server wouldn't be part of the microservice graph that you're trying to make into a polytree (you also wouldn't consider the client-side software to be part of this graph). You can use GraphQL delegation or similar to move more responsibility to the other side of the line.

The only alternative I can think of is to have a zillion separate public-facing API servers on different subdomains, but that sounds like a headache.
by dadoum | 2025-12-13 01:22:54+00:00
Uranium is very power dense. If there is a supply chain disruption, it is problematic but France keeps around at least 5 years worth of nuclear production, which gives it some time to react and adapt. Also, Uranium is not very rare nor expensive, so reliance on one producer is not that worrying I think. Enrichment facilities are rarer, but there is also one in France, so I can see French nuclear tech work on its own.
by zarzavat | 2025-12-13 01:24:09+00:00
This isn't about whether Apple allows outside payment links or not. It's about whether Apple takes a percentage cut from outside payments.

Is Apple actually checking outside payments for scams outside of review times? Do they check non-payment links for scams outside of review times? How often?

The point is that they should only be able to charge a fee for work they are truly doing, and it shouldn't be retaliatory.
by kenjackson | 2025-12-13 01:24:29+00:00
I think really more than anything it’s become clear that AGI is an illusion. There’s nothing there. It’s the mirage in the desert, you keep waking towards it but it’s always out of reach and unclear if it even exists.

So companies are really trying to deliver value. This is the right pivot. If you gave me an AGI with a 100 IQ, that seems pretty much worthless in today’s world. But domain expertise - that I’ll take.
by everforward | 2025-12-13 01:24:46+00:00
GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.

It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.

I don't care about closed-course cars, though. Do whatever you want to your track/drag car, but cars on the highway should probably have stock software for functional parts.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-12-13 01:24:54+00:00
One doesn't need to be an expert in machine readable mathematics, to understand how to formalize it to a machine readable form.

If one takes the time to read the free book accompanying the metamath software, and re implements it in about a weekend time, you learn to understand how it works internally. Then playing around a little with mmj2 or so you quickly learn how to formalize a proof you understand. If you understand your own proof its easy to formalize it. One doesn't need to be "an expert in machine readable mathematics".
by atonse | 2025-12-13 01:25:13+00:00
You can have access to a supercomputer for pennies, internet access for very little money, and even an m4 Mac mini for $500. You can have a raspberry pi computer for even less. And buy a monitor for a couple hundred dollars.

I feel like you’re twisting the goalposts to make your point that it has to be local compute to have access to AI. Why does it need to be local?

Update: I take it back. You can get access to AI for free.
by em-bee | 2025-12-13 01:26:06+00:00
well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application?

assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video.

now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?
by rolph | 2025-12-13 01:26:42+00:00
we trained our kids to avoid bad words we taught them to be ashamed of bad pictures, we put porn mags in a hidden location, we put sextoys in hidden location, we locked the pay channels on the cable box, but this internet thing came along and all of that is on there, we didnt lock the computer, or put it somewhere hidden, or the router, or the modem, we didnt lock the box for the service dropline, or for the starlink terminal, we decided to complain until pushing the entire service for everyone into the lock up, not only the kids.
by johnfn | 2025-12-13 01:26:43+00:00
Literally yesterday we had a post about GPT-5.2, which jumped 30% on ARC-AGI 2, 100% on AIME without tools, and a bunch of other impressive stats. A layman's (mine) reading of those numbers feels like the models continue to improve as fast as they always have. Then today we have people saying every iteration is further from AGI. It really perplexes me is how split-brain HN is on this topic.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-13 01:27:26+00:00
As a Plex user I'd recommend a used last-gen game console as a TV source. In my AV room upstairs I've had an XBOX ONE S for a long time and more recently I got a PS4 Pro for the spare room downstairs -- both at Gamestop. I have some games for both of them but I am more likely to game on Steam, Steam Deck or mobile.

Every Android-based media player I've had tried just plain sucks, the NVIDIA Shield wasn't too bad but at some point the controller quit charging. You can still get a game console with a built-in Blu-Ray player too and it's nice to have one box that does that as well as being an overpowered for streaming.

I have a HDHomeRun hooked up to a small antenna pointed at Syracuse which does pretty well except for ABC, sometimes I think about going up on the roof and pointing the small one at Binghamton and pointing a large one at Syracuse but I am not watching as much OTA as I used to. It's nice though being able to watch OTA TV on either TV, any computer, tablets, phones, as well as the Plex Pass paying for the metadata for a really good DVR side-by-side with all my other media.

As for TVs I go to the local reuse center and get what catches my eye, my "monitor" I am using right now is a curved Samsung 55 inch, I just brought home a plasma that was $45 because I always wanted a plasma. I went through a long phase where people just kept dropping off cheap TVs at my home, some of which I really appreciated (a Vizio that was beautifully value engineered) and some of which sucked. [1]

[1] ... like back in the 1980s everybody was afraid someone would break into your home and take your TV but for me it is the other way around
by nvch | 2025-12-13 01:27:29+00:00
The best solution I've found a few years ago is one Venta LW 45 for every 30 m² of space. That's enough to run them on the lowest speed while maintaining acceptable humidity and CO₂ levels.

Higher speeds are too noisy. Smaller machines evaporate less.

For sub-zero outside temperatures, it's necessary to add at least 5 g of water to each cubic metre of air coming from outside.

The recommended ventilation rate of 30 m³/h per person requires to evaporate 4 liters of water per day.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-13 01:27:46+00:00
What regular home workload are you thinking of that the computer I described is incapable of?

You can call a computer a calculator, but that doesn’t make it a calculator.

Can they run SOTA LLMs? No. Can they run smaller, yet still capable LLMs? Yes.

However, I don’t think that the ability to run SOTA LLMs is a reasonable expectation for “a computer in every home” just a few years into that software category even existing.
by seniorsassycat | 2025-12-13 01:28:03+00:00
I really want something like this to be built into the language or runtime, I don't want to juggle configuration for 4 different libraries. Log4j and tracing seem to be well established without being built in, but it feels too late for js.

I'm curious if this is enough https://nodejs.org/api/diagnostics_channel.html

I don't like the js hotel libraries, their docs feel deliberately obtuse