MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by artingent | 2025-12-08 18:09:47+00:00
Microsoft doesn't just have a shoddy AI problem. Microsoft has a direction problem. I'm no fan of Ballmer, but his Microsoft seemed like they knew what they were doing, and were actually trying to be good at it. Nadella seems extremely clueless and seems happy to just ignore and later axe consumer products that don't generate immediate revenue.

And noone should actually be shocked about his ineffectiveness. Covid was a great example of how clueless his leadership has been. Skype used to be a verb people used in common parlance, and yet they dropped the ball and let Zoom take over both consumer and enterprise segments while focusing on "restructuring" Skype into Teams for no reason whatsoever.

Prior to Covid, he was ready to let Windows run its course and axe that too. The sudden demand for sub-$500 laptops during the pandemic showed him that people still liked Windows and wanted a good OS from Microsoft. But instead of capitalizing on it to give customers what they wanted, he just gave us an ad-filled spyware with AI slop.

I have zero hope in any product with a Copilot in its name (including GitHub). At this point, unless there's a change in leadership, it's only a matter of time before XBox faces the axe.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-08 18:09:57+00:00
This is happening over and over and over. The example of prompt engineering is just a form of protocol. Context engineering is just about cache management. People think LLMs will replace programming languages and runtimes entirely, but so far it seems they have been used mostly to write programs in programming languages, and I've found they're very bad interpreters and compilers. So far, I can't really pick out what exactly LLMs are replacing except the need to press the individual keys on the keyboard, so I still struggle to see them as more than super fancy autocomplete. When the hype is peeled away, we're still left with all the same engineering problems but now we have added "Sometimes the tool hallucinates and gaslights you".
by rglover | 2025-12-08 18:10:08+00:00
I think this is for the best. Let the "confident idiot" types briefly entertain the idea of competency, hit the inevitable wall, and go away for good. It will take a few years, lots of mistakes, and billions (if not trillions) wasted, but those people will drift back to the mean or lower when they realize ChatGPT isn't the ghost of Robin Leach.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-08 18:10:14+00:00
Sure, and again, that someone is also a 34-time convicted criminal and rapist. He wouldn't be doing these things if he wasn't predisposed to criminality and abusing people over which he has disproportionate power, or if he wasn't a malignant narcissist and glorified reality tv show egomaniac, with a track record of amoral transactional relationships aimed at improving his position at the expense of others.

So, your points and others' are all 'pretty relevant': we now have the means (provided by the article), the motive (provided by others), and the opportunity (provided by you). Thank you for your useful and equal contribution to the trifecta.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-08 18:10:18+00:00
I don't think that 24/7 availability is universally perceived as "a normal way". A large number of my contacts will answer several days after a message. In my experience it is usually only inside the nuclear family that people expect answer within 2 hours and these are the kind of people who can always choose to call instead of text if they know their child/sibling/parent is not usually text available.
by sylens | 2025-12-08 18:10:31+00:00
I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.

Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.

The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 18:10:51+00:00
> So your comment boils down to; plagiarism is fine as long as I don't have to think about it.

It is actually worse: plagiarism is fine if I'm shielded from such claims by using a digital mixer. When criminals use crypto tumblers to hide their involvement we tend to see that as proof of intent, not as absolution.

LLMs are copyright tumblers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler
by jakelazaroff | 2025-12-08 18:11:28+00:00
You are the lottery winner, extolling the virtues of the lottery. There are many other people who also made singular choices, that — by pure chance — did not pan out.

It's good that you were in a financial position such that you could easily spend $1000 on a dumb investment, but that doesn't make it less of a dumb investment.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 18:11:32+00:00
> Paramount is dead?

Paramount broke its tradition of barely treading water [1] in 2023 by booking multibillion cable losses [2] before being acquired in a de facto LBO [3] at half the price it traded at in 2005 [4]. (90% off its 2021 peak, though that may have been meme-y.)

Paramount Skydance–the one bidding for Warner–has $15bn of debt on $600mm operating cash flow supporting $15bn of equity trading above book value while still posting losses [5].

It's not dead. But it's at least necrotic.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/cbs:us:net-income

[2] https://www.filmtake.com/distribution/paramounts-financial-t...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Skydance

[4] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/para/history/

[5] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PSKY/key-statistics/
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-08 18:11:57+00:00
Smoking and TSA are unrelated.

You provided an example of where arguing against regulation was ill-conceived in hindsight. I offered an obvious example of the opposite (everyone against plane hijacking -> regulation -> air travel is made worse for everyone without much improvement for the primary issue).

> Rationalization driven by new regulation can actually reduce [paperwork] instead.

Ha! Anything is possible, I suppose.

I'd point out that the TBM were not ratified by committee (much less a government) and were rammed through by unilateral Mozilla fiat.
by leftouterjoins | 2025-12-08 18:12:18+00:00
I was saddened when crypto took this direction and became an industry. To me the interesting part was always the idea of someday having a digital medium for value exchange that cannot be controlled by any one or groups of government, billionaire, or corporate entities and to be able to transact privately and anonymously if needed.

Monero is still in this game but the entities listed above are doing everything they can to kill it so they can retain power. They claim we should think of the children and worry about crime, but they really only care about their power. The benefit to the economy if money could flow freely around the globe instantly would far outweigh any real harms.
Show HN: Kernel-Cve
by letmetweakit | 2025-12-08 18:12:32+00:00
Hi HN,

Not too long ago, I learned that longterm Linux kernels contain a lot of known and unpatched CVEs, in hindsight this makes sense, I was just a bit surprised at the time.

Long story short, I've made a website that lists all the known CVEs for all kernel versions since 2.6.11.

It makes use of the output of tooling provided by the kernel maintainers, so the list of CVEs should be accurate.

The system has an API that's documented under the 'Docs' section.

Let me know if you find this useful and how I can improve it or add features.

Cheers
by InitialBP | 2025-12-08 18:12:34+00:00
"If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?"

That is literally the system that exists today, except instead of in the open (e.g. salary) it's through stocks with insider information and who knows how else.

The point isn't to optimize for people who are most incentivized through money, the point is to make the position more accessible for anyone who actually wants to do the "service" part, and to minimize the reasons that it's hard. As the previous commenter pointed out, right now independently wealthy people are some of the only ones who are actually capable of running, and someone who isn't independently wealthy who wins is even more susceptible to bribes because they may be in a tenuous financial position.

I would agree with you that we want individuals who's goal is to do "service" for their society, but our current system obviously isn't working and there are a lot of solid reasons why something like this _could_ improve the situation, what alternatives would you recommend?
by dogman144 | 2025-12-08 18:12:41+00:00
Understanding crypto from this type of international context focused on these sorts of issues is where it indisputably makes much sense and is seeing indisputable adoption. Low and slow but end of the day to a very large and growing problem, bitcoin+ adoption or a mass civics readjustment in the US are the solutions. Which is more likely?

So it’s an inefficient tech with a mess of problems and uneven adoption but if you want to send $1-$1mm anywhere in the globe you can. That’s very powerful tech and the implications are about as important as anything else from cryptography hitting public adoption. And all of those have been consequential.. see 30 year fight about e2ee.
by storus | 2025-12-08 18:13:03+00:00
Another article that wants to impose something on a tech we don't really understand and that works the way it works by some happy accident. Instead of pushing the tech as far as we can, learning how to utilize it and what its limitations are to be aware of, some people just want to enforce a set of rules this tech can't satisfy and which would degrade its performance. EU bureaucratic way, let's regulate ascent industry we don't understand and throw the baby out with the bathwater in the process. It's known that autoregressive LLMs are soft-bullshitters, yet they are already enormously useful. They just won't 100% automate cognition.
by munificent | 2025-12-08 18:13:10+00:00
> You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten.

But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying.

Any transaction requires some level of trust to function. Crypto is a pipe dream for people who want to participate in society without confronting their pathological aversion to trusting and depending on others.
by ratrocket | 2025-12-08 18:13:23+00:00
Not commenting on the larger gist of the comment, only:

> I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions

If you can, try using a left-hand vertical mouse. I use an Evoluent but there are a million brands. Get a cheapo and try it out. I figure it took me about a week to adjust and my wrists have been happier ever since.
by jsheard | 2025-12-08 18:13:31+00:00
> So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling?

Satya Nadella insists that Bing365Pilot has supercharged his productivity, but determining if he's high on his own supply or lying through his teeth is an exercise for the reader.

> Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...
by vatsachak | 2025-12-08 18:13:49+00:00
Yeah, it's definitely a huge bubble right now. I think a lot of crypto bros have marketed it more as a casino than a solution to a decentralized currency.

A hypothetical good use case: one can have a "science crypto" where the transaction fees go to funding science. By using the cryptos you want you can essentially pay taxes to causes you think are important
by observationist | 2025-12-08 18:15:32+00:00
It's fascinating when you look at each technical component of cognition in human brains and contrast against LLMs. In humans, we have all sorts of parallel asynchronous processes running, with prediction of columnar activations seemingly the fundamental local function, with tens of thousands of mini columns and regions in the brain corresponding to millions of networked neurons using the "predict which column fires next" objective to increment or decrement the relative contribution of any functional unit.

In the case of LLMs you run into similarities, but they're much more monolithic networks, so the aggregate activations are going to scan across billions of neurons each pass. The sub-networks you can select each pass by looking at a threshold of activations resemble the diverse set of semantic clusters in bio brains - there's a convergent mechanism in how LLMs structure their model of the world and how brains model the world.

This shouldn't be surprising - transformer networks are designed to learn the complex representations of the underlying causes that bring about things like human generated text, audio, and video.

If you modeled a star with a large transformer model, you would end up with semantic structures and representations that correlate to complex dynamic systems within the star. If you model slug cellular growth, you'll get structure and semantics corresponding to slug DNA. Transformers aren't the end-all solution - the paradigm is missing a level of abstraction that fully generalizes across all domains, but it's a really good way to elicit complex functions from sophisticated systems, and by contrasting the way in which those models fail against the way natural systems operate, we'll find better, more general methods and architectures, until we cross the threshold of fully general algorithms.

Biological brains are a computational substrate - we exist as brains in bone vats, connected to a wonderfully complex and sophisticated sensor suite and mobility platform that feeds electrically activated sensory streams into our brains, which get processed into a synthetic construct we experience as reality.

Part of the underlying basic functioning of our brains is each individual column performing the task of predicting which of any of the columns it's connected to will fire next. The better a column is at predicting, the better the brain gets at understanding the world, and biological brains are recursively granular across arbitrary degrees of abstraction.

LLMs aren't inherently incapable of fully emulating human cognition, but the differences they exhibit are expensive. It's going to be far more efficient to modify the architecture, and this may diverge enough that whatever the solution ends up being, it won't reasonably be called an LLM. Or it might not, and there's some clever tweak to things that will push LLMs over the threshold.
by traverseda | 2025-12-08 18:15:38+00:00
No answer I give will be satisfying to you until I could come up with a rigorous mathematical definition of understanding, which is de-facto solving the hard AI problem. So there's not really point in talking about it is there?

If you're interested in why compression is like understanding in many ways, I'd suggest reading through the wikipedia article on Kolmogorov complexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
by mlsu | 2025-12-08 18:15:50+00:00
Y-yeah. HYPOTHETICALLY, this is something an adversary to the USA might attempt to do, and it would really kneecap the US if they were successful.

But would only happen if USA decided to totally financialize all sectors of its economy and make a small set of oligarchic corporations THE load-bearing element of its strategic capacity, leading us to chase market returns even if those returns totally kneecapped our ability to build anything at all of actual value.

Good thing we haven't done that!
by rogerrogerr | 2025-12-08 18:16:14+00:00
Dude, go buy a used Mac mini for $150, sign your stuff with it, and move on.

We can talk all day about how this _shouldn’t_ be necessary, but you are tilting at windmills trying to get Apple signing to work without Apple hardware. You’ve definitely spent more of your time trying to make this work than if you’d just buy a cheap Mac mini.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-08 18:16:42+00:00
People have an actual world model, though, that they have to deal with in order to get the food into their mouths or to hit the toilet properly.

The "facts" that they believe that may be nonsense are part of an abstract world model that is far from their experience, for which they never get proper feedback (such as the political situation in Bhutan, or how their best friend is feeling.) In those, it isn't surprising that they perform like an LLM, because they're extracting all of the information from language that they've ingested.

Interestingly, the feedback that people use to adjust the language-extracted portions of their world models is how demonstrating their understanding of those models seems to please or displease the people around them, who in turn respond in physically confirmable ways. What irritates people about simpering LLMs is that they're not doing this properly. They should be testing their knowledge with us (especially their knowledge of our intentions or goals), and have some fear of failure. They have no fear and take no risk; they're stateless and empty.

Human abstractions are based in the reality of the physical responses of the people around them. The facts of those responses are true and valid results of the articulation of these abstractions. The content is irrelevant; when there's no opportunity to act, we're just acting as carriers.
by bwahah4 | 2025-12-08 18:16:50+00:00
As an EE working in engineering 30 years, I ran out of fingers and toes 29 years ago trying to count the number of asocial, incompetent programmer Dark Triads who can only relate to the world through esoteric semantics unrelated to engineering problems right in front of them.

"To add two numbers I must first simulate the universe." types that created a bespoke DSL for every problem. Software engineering is a field full of educated idiots.

Programmers really need to stop patting themselves on the back. Same old biology with the same old faults. Programmers are subjected to the same old physics as everyone else.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-08 18:17:23+00:00
"Neurotypical"/"Neurodivergent" does the same thing, it just specifies the domain of abnormality. It is still better than "normal", but the difference is of degree rather than kind.

If you are specifically distinguishing autistic and not-autistic, "allistic" is more specific than "neurotypical" (one can be neurodivergent and not autistic) and also avoids any implication than one side is normal and the other is not. (Unfortunately, there is no very good direct replacement for "neurotypical"/"neurodivergent", but one can minimize the impact of that problem by not using them when the real concern is about presence or absence of a particular trait that is within the broad array deemed "neurodivergent".)
by larkost | 2025-12-08 18:17:34+00:00
China uses Capitalism as a tool where the Party feels it would be beneficial (for the Party), and crushes it mercilessly when it gets in the way (other than this real estate problem they have right now).

In the U.S. we have mistaken Capitalism for a religion, and so it wags the dog, so to speak. Since our founding we have made some attempts at finding a balance between our use of the tools of Capitalism and socialism (in more the Democratic Socialism style, rather than the Communism style), and we had a good run in the decades after WWII. But starting with McCarthyism, and really picking up under Regan we have prided ourselves on adopting Capitalism as a religion, and it really shows up in both the income inequality as well as the increasing role of (and corrupting influence of) money in our politics/government.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-08 18:18:19+00:00
The recent interview with Arvind had the “grapes are too green, anyway” energy. They missed the train because they were licking their Watson wounds. Then sorta regretted it but it’s too late.

Same thing happened with their cloud offering. They laughed at AWS, then tried to catch up, then missed and pivoted to “hybrid” (cloud and local).
by leftouterjoins | 2025-12-08 18:18:25+00:00
This is the same, nonsensical argument against monero that is used against end-to-end encrypted messaging. "app of choice for criminals" "makes enforcement harder" etc.

It completely ignores the benefits of Monero. Crime exists. Its not going anywhere. It is not societies job to make the crime fighter's job a walk in the park. Crimninals use cars to commit crimes, we don't outlaw cars. They use masks, the store sells masks.

The benefits of a global, decentralized and truly private and free medium of value exchange would be massive to the average person, but deterimental to those in power so they must use FUD to squash it.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-08 18:18:25+00:00
iq is "polygenetic" with the consensus estimates at 50-80% based on genes

success has components of luck as in "right place, right time" for someone with the right qualities and connections, and many of the very successful are quick to admit this

I am a 3rd generation machinist along the paternal line, and although the machines I operate are in expensive labs, those my father and grandfather operated were probably just as challenging. Engineering also seems to often run in the family. How much is nature and nuture? "It varies" is a safe response
by mindslight | 2025-12-08 18:18:50+00:00
It's not "handwavy logic". It called reasoning based on heuristics developed from many observations (ie wisdom).

From what I've seen here now on Earth, large scale coordination of projects where the benefits end up mostly diffuse is effectively impossible, especially in the modern environment. Thus private ownership of scaled back projects, organized by corporate authoritarianism as we see for most businesses here now on earth.

Could we possibly have an Earth country/company developing open-space terraforming, investing with the idea they will develop owned colonies, but then a popular revolt throws off the authoritarian control and institutes distributed rights (ala the American Revolution) ? Sure, that's possible. But that also just seems unlikely to be given modern information systems facilitating large scale surveillance, sentiment control, and promoting singular authoritarian perspectives. Like we're currently in the process of rolling back those hard-won distributed rights here now on Earth ("slowly at first, then all at once").