MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by measurablefunc | 2025-12-13 04:13:03+00:00
Meta sells ads in exchange for keeping people hooked to their various digital platforms. Meta will never produce any worthwhile AI progress other than how to sell more ads & how to better keep people glued to their digital properties. Their incentives are not structured for anything else other than that. If you believe they will be successful in the mission incentivized by their corporate structure (I don't) then you should buy their stock & sell it later when they make more money by getting more people addicted to useless engagement spam.
by marwamc | 2025-12-13 04:13:06+00:00
My understanding is this: A skill is made up of SKILL.md which is what tells claude how and when to use this skill. I'm a bit of a control freak so I'll usually explicitly direct claude to "load the wireframe-skill" and then do X.

Now SKILL.md can have references to more finegrained behaviors or capabilities of our skill. My skills generally tend to have a reference/{workflows,tools,standards,testing-guide,routing,api-integration}.md. These references are what then gets "progressively loaded" into the context.

Say I asked claude to use the wireframe-skill to create profileView mockup. While creating the wireframe, claude will need to figure out what API endpoints are available/relevant for the profileView and the response types etc. It's at this point that claude reads the references/api-integration.md file from the wireframe skill.

After a while I found I didn't like the progressive loading so I usually direct claude to load all references in the skill before proceeding - this usually takes up maybe 20k to 30k tokens, but the accuracy and precision (imagined or otherwise ha!) is worth it for my use cases.
by zerocrates | 2025-12-13 04:13:15+00:00
It's right in the text of the EO: they intend to argue that the state laws are preempted by existing federal regulations, and they also direct the creation of new regulations to create preemption if necessary, specifically calling on the FCC and FTC to make new federal rules to preempt disfavored state laws. Separately it talks about going to Congress for new laws but mostly this lays out an attempt to do it with executive action as much as possible, both through preemption and by using funding to try to coerce the states.

There's a reasonable argument that nationwide regulation is the more efficient and proper path here but I think it's pretty obvious that the intent is to make toothless "regulation" simply to trigger preemption. You don't have to do much wondering to figure out the level of regulation that David Sacks is looking for.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-13 04:13:18+00:00
I have a bet with a friend that in 6 years there’ll be autonomous-only highway lanes somewhere, like HOV lanes we have today. It makes perfect sense to me. If you have part of the road where you can predict how every vehicle will act, especially if they can coordinate, you could end up with basically a high speed train of tightly packed vehicles zipping along at record traffic densities.
by windexh8er | 2025-12-13 04:14:10+00:00
Sure. And this is not that. This says: before we begin to think about our policy let's make sure to remove any barriers for Mr. Altman and friends so that they don't get sucked down with their Oracle branded boat anchor.

If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
Show HN: OAuth-style authorization for AI agents
by Pukuta | 2025-12-13 04:14:58+00:00
What would you want to control about AI agents in your life?

Would you let an AI agent send emails on your behalf?

Most people say "no" - too risky.

But what if you could set rules like: • "Only send to people in my contacts" • "Never spend over $50" • "Only book meetings between 2-4pm" • "Block domains: competitor.com"

That's what I built.

Introducing PIA (Personal Identity Agent) - an authorization platform for AI agents.

It's like IAM for your life: - Define policies (what agents can/can't do) - Agents authenticate via OAuth flow - LLM verifies every action against your rules - Full audit trail

Built an SDK and 5 production agents to prove it: Email • Calendar • Contacts • Files • Tasks

All live. All production-ready. All at: digital-embodiments.vercel.app

The SDK is on NPM: npm install @variant96/pia-sdk

Tech: Next.js, TypeScript, Prisma, NextAuth, Groq/Gemini

This is my bet on how we'll safely delegate to AI agents.

Thoughts? What would make this more useful?
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-13 04:15:27+00:00
I can see "no progress in 50 years" in fundamental physics where the experimental frontier seems to be running away from us (though recent gamma astronomy results suggest a next generation accelerator really could see the dark matter particle)

In biology or chemistry it's absurd to say that -- look at metal organic frameworks or all kinds of new synthetic chemistry or ionic liquids or metagenomics, RNA structure prediction, and unraveling of how gene regulation works in the "dark genome".

Progress in the 'symbolic AI' field that includes proof assistants is a really interesting story. When I was a kid I saw an ad for Feigenbaum's 3-volume "Handbook of AI" and got a used copy years later -- you would have thought production rules (e.g. "expert systems" or "business rules") were on track to be a dominant paradigm but my understanding was that people were losing interest even before RETE engines became mainstream and even the expert system shells of the early 1980s didn't use the kind of indexing structures that are mainstream today so that whereas people we saying 10,000 rule rule bases were unruly in the 1980s, 10,000,000 well-structured rules are no problem now. Some of it is hardware but a lot of it is improvements in software.

SAT/SMT solvers (e.g. part of proof assistants) have shown steady progress in the last 50 years, though not as much as neural networks because they are less parallelization. There is dramatically more industrial use of provers though business rules engines, complex event processing, and related technologies are still marginal in the industry for reasons I don't completely understand.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-13 04:15:29+00:00
What am I missing? https://i.imgur.com/YpcnlCH.png

(Edit: interesting, thanks. So the underlying OS APIs that supply the power-consumption figures reported by asitop are just outright broken. The discrepancy is far too large to chalk up to static power losses or die-specific calibration factors that the video talks about.)
Show HN: Flowctl – Self-service workflows with approvals and SSO. Single Binary
by cv_h | 2025-12-13 04:17:25+00:00
I built Flowctl as a lightweight alternative to Rundeck for turning scripts into secure self-service offerings. Single Go binary, workflows defined in simple YAML/HUML config. Free and open-source, Apache 2.0.

Users fill out forms to trigger workflows. The workflow config defines the inputs and Flowctl renders them as forms. Inputs can use expr expressions for validation.

Workflows are sequences of actions. Each action can run locally or on remote nodes via SSH. Each action uses an executor and can wait for approvals before proceeding.

Executors provide the runtime environments for the actions. Right now 2 executors are available (Docker and Script). Executors are modular but I'm working on making them pluggable via gRPC plugins.

I built this because I needed a simple tool to manage my homelab while traveling, something that acts as a UI for scripts. At work, I was also looking for tools to turn repetitive ops/infra tasks into self-service offerings. I tried tools like Backstage and Rundeck, but they were either too complex, or the OSS versions lacked important features.

Example use cases:

- Database migrations: Wait for DBA approval, run migration on remote DB host via SSH, post-migration validation.

- Self-service infra provisioning: Terraform plan runs in Docker container, outputs plan as artifact, pauses for approval, applies on approval.

- Emergency disk space cleanup: On-call engineer triggers via UI. Workflow SSHs to server, identifies safe-to-delete files (old logs, temp files, Docker cache) and cleans up.

Features:

- SSO with OIDC and RBAC

- Namespace isolation

- Execution on remote nodes with SSH

- Approvals

- Cron-based scheduling

- Encrypted credentials and secrets store

- Docker and Script executors

- File and variable passing between actions

- Parallel execution on multiple remote nodes

Tech stack: Go, SvelteKit, PostgreSQL

Demo: https://demo.flowctl.net (optimized for desktop)

Homepage: https://flowctl.net

GitHub: https://github.com/cvhariharan/flowctl

I'd appreciate any feedback on features, use cases, or issues you encounter. Happy to answer questions!
by dylan604 | 2025-12-13 04:18:20+00:00
I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.
by josh_p | 2025-12-13 04:19:23+00:00
I think the GOP, the right, etc. do propaganda very well. And they’re good at spinning scandals into things their voter base wants to hear. Or just burying them in a way that makes it hard for their base to find.

Even the centrist TV networks are still treating Trump like a normal president. News like the NYTimes does the same, while platforming horrible people in their op ed section.

Edit: anec-data - I have an embarrassing number of family members that voted for him. I asked why and the surprising common thing among all of them was they just didn’t know. The felonies, convictions, scandals, the racism and transphobia. They were just surprised. And they’re not very good at thinking critically about much of it.

Instead they’re voting for some nostalgia and the idea that they felt safer and more secure in their country when they were younger.
by Veserv | 2025-12-13 04:19:30+00:00
No, you should run every program with only the privileges it needs. The very concept of running your programs with all your privileges as a user by default is wrong-headed to begin with. To strain the "user" model you should have a distinct "user" for every single program which has only the resources and privileges needed by/allocated to that program. The actual user can allocate their resources to these "users" as needed. This is a fairly primitive version of the idea due to having to torture fundamentally incompatible insecure building blocks to fit, but points in the direction of the correct idea.
by class3shock | 2025-12-13 04:20:52+00:00
I'm less bothered by the ever present smart tv and more bothered that there is no way to just turn on the tv and go straight to input from a certain port. Would love to know TV's that just do that. My old Samsung constantly forces me to click through sources and out of smart features to get to the hdmi from my computer everytime I turn it on.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-13 04:21:20+00:00
>> Understanding, when used in its unqualified form, implies people possessing same.

> You can, of course, define understanding as a metaphysical property that only people have.

This is not what I said.

What I said was unqualified use of "understanding" implies understanding people possess. Thus it being a metaphysical property by definition and existing strictly within a person.

Many other entities possess their own form of understanding. Most would agree mammals do. Some would say any living creature does.

I would make the case that every program compiler (C, C#, C++, D, Java, Kotlin, Pascal, etc.) possesses understanding of a particular sort.

All of the aforementioned examples differ from the kind of understanding people possess.
by derbOac | 2025-12-13 04:21:53+00:00
I've often wondered about the actual effect of caffeine on blood pressure for an individual. This case is pretty extreme, but the literature repeatedly suggests that if you consume caffeine regularly, the effect on blood pressure is pretty minimal — that the significant effects are found if you do not usually consume caffeine and then do so.

This always seemed a little suspicious to me because there are obviously limits to this reasoning, like this case, and the effects probably vary from person to person.

I'm tempted to wean myself off caffeine to see if there's a difference for me, but I'm not sure if it is worth the trouble based on the literature. Anecdotally reading through forums it seems some people have dramatic decreases in blood pressure from doing so, but others actually report increases. I'd be interested to see the distribution of individual effects across people in a rigorous large-N ABA type study, but I can see how that would be difficult to do.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-13 04:24:02+00:00
No. I was replying to a parent comment that said:

> You just take the bus to the store, because you don’t pay extra money for someone to go there for you. You don’t have that money.

They said this in response to a comment comparing the cost/benefit of instacart vs overpriced shrinkflation products from Dollar General.

Neither alternative was starvation. The alternatives under discussion were Dollar General, Instacart, and the bus.

I pointed out that the bus is often not an option, because the person who advocated it seemed to be using it to dismiss the fact that instacart groceries from a real grocery store are cheaper than buying them from a place like Dollar General which is objectively true.
by simonw | 2025-12-13 04:24:52+00:00
Yeah, that means that the body of that file will not be injected into the context on startup.

I had thought that once the skill is selected the whole file would be read, but it looks like that's not the case: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/ad7b9d63c326d5c92049abd...

1) After deciding to use a skill, open its `SKILL.md`. Read only enough to follow the workflow.

So you could have a skill file that's thousands of lines long but if the first part of the file provides an outline Codex may stop reading at that point. Maybe you could have a skill that says "see migrations section further down if you need to alter the database table schema" or similar.
by nitwit005 | 2025-12-13 04:25:38+00:00
It doesn't seem possible to maintain the property.

Let's say legal tells us we need a way to let a user delete all of their data. All data is directly or indirectly user data, so we need a request to go to all services.

Examine the first polytree example: https://bytesauna.com/trees/polytree.png

The delete request must go to at least n1 and n4, which can pass below in the heirarchy. If we add some deletion service that connects to both, it's no longer a polytree.

I suppose you could redesign your services to maintain the property, but that would be quite the expense.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-12-13 04:26:01+00:00
When do we jump the shark and replace the stakeholders with ai acting in their best interest (tm)? Seems that would come soon. It makes no sense to me that we’d obsolete engineering talent but then keep the people who got a 3.1 gpa in a business program around for reasons. Once we hit that point just dispense with english and have the models communicate to each other in binary. We can play with sticks in caves.
by t23414321 | 2025-12-13 04:26:10+00:00
That's right when saying selecting not calculating a chess move - assuming you are outside of Plato's cave (Popper).

But now, I see this: the truth is static and non-profit, but calculating something can be sold again and again, if you have a hammer (processing) everything looks like a nail, to sell well the word thinking had to be used instead of excuse for every time results being different (like the shadows) - then, we can have only things that let someone else keep making profits: JS, LLM, whatever.. (just not.. "XSLT" alike).

(yet, I need to study for your second sentence;)
by simonw | 2025-12-13 04:28:26+00:00
Huh! I had not noticed that trend at all.

Here's the Google Maps article: https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-al... - note that the Hacker News title left that word out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343

It's possible I was subconsciously influenced by that article (I saw it linked from a few places yesterday I think), but in this case I really did want to emphasize that OpenAI have started doing this without making any announcements about it at all, which I think is noteworthy in its own right.

(I'm also quite enjoying that this may be the second time I've leaked the existence of skills from a major provider - I wrote about Anthropic's skills implementation a week before they formally announced it: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/claude-skills/)
by psidium | 2025-12-13 04:31:23+00:00
This was 2008 when they were fighting for titles still (turns out they were robbed and the FIA knew about it and let it play out).

That said I imagine what Jonathan Wheatley would be able to achieve in a task similar to this since he had the Red Bull team maintain a consistent sub-2 second pit stop at Red Bull and he was able to significantly quicken the Sauber one this year.
by albert_e | 2025-12-13 04:32:22+00:00
Thanks for the details!

Is embedding intelligent logic inside of SVGs for animation a common thing -- feels very novel to me. Kudos for the idea and execution!

I am wondering if it is possible to push it even further and bring more and more creative logic -- say to create some unique patterns / designs etc that render differently each time. Say a swirling ripples animation that keeps changing over time but never feels like it is "pre-recorded".

Also, can animated SVGs be embedded in powerpoint and the like -- so we get crisp vector animated design elements in a compact portable format?

I do worry that this can also open some possible attacks -- malicious URLs in a dynamically generated QR, for example.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-13 04:32:36+00:00
Do you have the background to do what QM/wiki does, but for HN?

Eg breakdown the explanation of the Hodge diamond on P6 of the paper LI5

Here's how en.wiki (with diagram!!) does it -- which I thought could have been handwaved better in TFA:

Mirror symmetry translates the dimension number of the (p, q)-th differential form h^(p,q) for the original manifold into h^(n-p,q) of that for the counter pair manifold.

(n=4 for the paper)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homological_mirror_symmetry#Ho...

To call this an idea from string theory, is giving string theory too much credit (imho)
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-12-13 04:32:55+00:00
The point is that it is an option they have which subtly costs them significantly more money than it advertises. It makes itself appear to be a roughly equal option with a known, easily calculable fee. It can be budgeted, and might for someone working long hours who doesn't have the time to walk however far or travel however long on public transit to get to the grocery store and back (or who simply sees a roughly equal option which saves them a lot of time).

The reality is that the algorithmic prices are always higher than they'd be in store. InstaCart would never lower their prices below what's in the store, algorithmically or otherwise; they would have to foot the difference. Using software hides these price increases, especially when the nature of it means the customer won't be in the store to see the differences in real time. (They could enlist help but why would they even think to do that?)

It seems to be a reasonable option even though their grocery bill will (apparently) be about 7% higher. That could seem the same as prices rising; it's surely noticeable and will make them drop a couple items from their cart but they can still checkout. Their cost would remain consistent over time and with actual price increases while always being that barely significant amount more. All while they believe they know exactly how much their decision is costing them.
by TypeDeck | 2025-12-13 04:34:56+00:00
I think this framework explains why the best presentations aren't the ones packed with the most information. Like a slide full of bullet points feels kind of like a frictionless wall to me - there's nothing for the audience to grab onto. But a slide with one provocative question, or a single surprising statistic, is covered in doorknobs. It gives people something to mentally reach for.

The flip side: slides designed by committee oftem tend to remove all the doorknobs. Every bold claim seems to gets softened, every interesting aside gets cut for time, etc., until you're left with something that nobody can disagree with but nobody finds very interesting either.
by adastra22 | 2025-12-13 04:36:04+00:00
“Intelligence” has technical meaning, as it must if we want to have any clarity in discussions about it. It basically boils down to being able to exploit structure in a problem or problem domain to efficiently solve problems. The “G” and AGI just means that it is unconstrained by problem domain, but the “intelligence” remains the same: problem solving.

Can ChatGPT solve problems? It is trivial to see that it can. Ask it to sort a list of numbers, or debug a piece of segfaulting code. You and I both know that it can do that, without being explicitly trained or modified to handle that problem, other than the prompt/context (which itself natural language that can express any problem, hence generality).

What you are sneaking into this discussion is the notion of human-equivalence. Is GPT smarter than you? Or smarter than some average human?

I don’t think the answer to this is as clear-cut. I’ve been using LLMs on my work daily for a year now, and I have seen incredible moments of brilliance as well as boneheaded failure. There are academic papers being released where AIs are being credited with key insights. So they are definitely not limited to remixing their training set.

The problem with the “AI are just statistical predictors, not real intelligence” argument is what happens when you turn it around and analyze your own neurons. You will find that to the best of our models, you are also just a statistical prediction machine. Different architecture, but not fundamentally different in class from an LLM. And indeed, a lot of psychological mistakes and biases start making sense when you analyze them from the perspective of a human being like an LLM.

But again, you need to define “real intelligence” because no, it is not at all obvious what that phrase means when you use it. The technical definitions of intelligence that have been used in the past, have been met by LLMs and other AI architectures.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-12-13 04:37:27+00:00
Reversing it? We're on the cusp of the LLM era. You're on a site full of people trying to sell one kind of summarization or another as so thoroughly a replacement for reading full original texts that it can't be questioned without raising hackneyed accusations of objecting to the invention of the calculator. Before long people who read full novels will be seen the way we now see people who listen to music on vinyl.
by Fannon | 2025-12-13 04:38:20+00:00
This is nice, but that it goes into its vendor specific .codex/ folder is a bit of a drag.

I hope such things will be standardized across vendors. Now that they founded the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) and also contributed AGENTS.md, I would hope that skills become a logical extension of that.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...

https://aaif.io/
by asdff | 2025-12-13 04:39:12+00:00
It isn’t even the smart tv prospect that concerns me with new tvs. My current TV is technically a smart TV but you can’t tell. It has never been connected to the internet.

My concern is the framerate. Some of these TVs, even in the 1080p era, will turn a cinematic masterpiece into feeling like a cheap soap opera. I’m not even sure what to look for to avoid this issue. Limiting myself to maybe 48hz tvs?