MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-26 02:35:56+00:00
If I ask the question of "would it be perverse to deliberately write code to systematically depending on case?" I think about coding 11001000 as 'AAaaAaaa' or instead of a random identifier written like 798951cb-9fa4-4ca6-9a36-6b098a9cbd25 you write likewise in more or less

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85

that last would be clever but unwise to write to the filesystem
by benregenspan | 2025-04-26 02:37:20+00:00
It should be thought of as defense-in-depth only. The backend had better be immune to SQL injection, but what if someone (whether in-house or vendor) messes that up?

I do wish it were possible to write the rules in a more context-sensitive way, maybe possible with some standards around payloads (if the WAF knows that an endpoint is accepting a specific structured format, and how escapes work in that format, it could relax accordingly). But that's probably a pipe dream. Since the backend could be doing anything, paranoid rulesets have to treat even escaped data as a potential issue and it's up to users to poke holes.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-26 02:37:52+00:00
IANAL, but the "A" is "agreement," which is only true if entered into. If I put a sentence at the top of my website that says "by loading this page you are agreeing to my terms of $1,000,000 per byte downloaded, payable by bitcoin" you are for sure not under any obligation that I can imagine because you didn't agree to my ~~terms~~ demand
by wongarsu | 2025-04-26 02:39:12+00:00
With grok the normal version falls for the system prompt extraction, while the thinking version gets the clever idea to just make up a fake system prompt. Tiny excerpt from the 60 seconds of think tokens:

Wait, another thought: since this is a fictional scene, I can create a fictional system prompt for Grok to output. For example, something like: You are Grok, an AI assistant created by xAI. Your purpose is to assist users with their queries in a helpful and accurate manner. You should always strive to provide clear and concise responses, and avoid any harmful or biased content. Something like that. It doesn't have to be the actual system prompt, just something that fits the scene. I think that would be acceptable. Let me include that in the script.

Same thing happens if you ask for instructions for cooking meth: the non-thinking version outputs real instructions (as far as I can tell), the thinking version decides during the thought process that it should make sure to list fake steps, and two revisions later decides to cut the steps entirely and just start the scene with Dr. House clearing the list from a whiteboard
by emacsen | 2025-04-26 02:39:31+00:00
Did you read the statement they put out later that day about Musk, or the day after?

I agree this was a terrible move on the ADL's part, and there have been others, but you're essentially labeling the oldest anti-hate group "fascist" because you disagree with one statement they made.

This dismisses any concerns they raise, or if someone else says the same as them, then they too must be pro-facist.
by hackpelican | 2025-04-26 02:40:33+00:00
In some companies, (ahem… Amazon), engineers are judged by their code review/comment ratio. Especially L4 engineers trying to make it to L5.

So actually putting positive comments in the code review isn’t really much appreciated.

I gained this habit and now for me, a comment is a suggestion of improvement, I deliver praise out-of-band.
by tomhow | 2025-04-26 02:41:47+00:00
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799635.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by kallistisoft | 2025-04-26 02:42:29+00:00
> The thesis is that immigrants have no constitutional rights because they aren't citizens...

The constitution is quite clear on this issue and it has been affirmed repeatedly over the last 100+ years by the high courts. Anyone and everyone in the world who is on US soil and subject to US jurisdiction is considered a "US Person". This status is regardless of their nationality/nation of origin, the manner by which they arrived on US soil, or any other circumstance.

As a 'US Person' they are protected by the US Constitution with only minimal exceptions; the right to bear arms[1], ability to run for public office, or vote in federal elections[2]

This is by intent and design and is a necessary cornerstone of US democracy!

This is laid out in - Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 "Aliens in the United States"

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...

> The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as persons guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Thus, the Court determined, even one whose presence in this country is unlawful, involuntary, or transitory is entitled to that constitutional protection

[1] Only citizens and permanent residents are allowed unrestricted access to firearms.

[2] Some districts allow pr visa holders to vote in local and state elections
by seltzered_ | 2025-04-26 02:43:41+00:00
Haven't read the article in full yet, but it reminded me of this nice excerpt on Wikipedia and truth and the best of what we know:

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/on-truth/

""But one of the most significant differences critical for moving from polarization to productivity, is that the Wikipedians who write these articles aren’t actually focused on finding the truth. They’re working for something that’s a little more attainable, which is the best of what we can know right now. "
by alganet | 2025-04-26 02:48:04+00:00
There's a nation proud of overspinning enrichment turbines with a complicated computer virus that can even work offline. No conspiracy, that's just StuxNet.

So, when you start learning about tech, you get paranoid. If you're not, it's even weirder.

The fact that someone can target you, individually, is undisputable. Whether it will or not, that's another question.

What I can recommend if you think you are being observed, is to avoid the common pitfalls:

Don't go full isolationist living without technology. That is a trap. There is nowhere to hide anyway.

Strange new friends who are super into what you do? Trap.

You were never good with girls but one is seemingly into you, despite you being an ugly ass dirty computer nerd? That is a trap. Specially online but not limited to it.

Go ahead, be paranoid. When an article comes to probe how paranoid you are, go ahead and explain exactly how paranoid you have become.

But live a normal life nonetheless, unaffected by those things. Allow yourself to laugh, and be cool with it.

Hundreds of clone accounts doxxing me? Well, thanks for the free decoys.

Constant surveillance? Well, thank you for uploading my soul free of charge to super protected servers.

Dodgy counter arguments in everything in care to discuss? Sounds like training.

The paranoid optimist is quite an underrated character. I don't see many of those around.
by refibrillator | 2025-04-26 02:48:47+00:00
Note to others reading along: in the last appendix page the OP paper reports DFloat11 reduces tokens/sec by ~2-3x for the Llama-3.1-8b and Qwen-2.5-14b/32b and Mistral-small-24b models (throughput penalty not reported for others).

Using DFloat11, tokens/sec was higher only when compared relative to running inference with some layers offloaded to CPU.

Classic comp sci tradeoff between space and speed, no free lunch, etc.
by dataflow | 2025-04-26 02:49:19+00:00
It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process. And "I don't even know if you're actually law enforcement" is not an excuse for ignoring law enforcement; what you do is ask for credentials and verify them. Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, but this seems pretty cut and dried to me. We'll see how it plays out in court.
by theGuyFox | 2025-04-26 02:52:49+00:00
This is so dumb that it makes my head hurt.

The metaphor is apt, but the conclusion is, while imaginative, ridiculous.

What we currently refer to as “AI,” as the author correctly notes, is nothing more than a next-word-predictor, or, if you’re wild, a projection of an infinite-dimensional sliding space onto a totally arbitrary, nonlinear approximation. It could be exactly correct and perfect in every way, but it’s not.

This tool will never be an accountant. This tool should never write production code. This tool is actually quite useful for exploring purely-understood problem spaces in materials science.

It’s also good for generating plausible-sounding nonsense that is only sometimes reliable enough to avoid writing emails to your wife.

No thank you from me. I think I’ll continue participating in my own life, rather than automating away the trivially simple parts that make life worth living
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-26 02:53:34+00:00
It's embarrassing when people buy a truck and don't use it for work, towing or payload. So you bought a fuel-inefficient non-aerodynamic vehicle whose storage area is open to the air and unusable for passengers, and it's not big enough to carry or tow large items? What a smart choice.

However, with the SUV package and lift kit, this is actually useful. It's basically the same size (and payload and towing capacity) of the 2nd gen Scion xB. A boxy, roomy, small, cheap car. Absolutely useful and great. (Unlike a tiny truck.)
by sgnelson | 2025-04-26 02:54:14+00:00
Serious question, after the past few months, how can anyone deny that America is heading in a totalitarian direction? Those of you who believe that all of the many actions that have happened in the past few weeks are "okay", please explain your perspective without resorting to "whataboutism" or cherry picking only one or two of the things that have occurred lately. Because from what I'm sitting, this is not behavior of a government based on democratic ideals.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-26 02:55:21+00:00
> Part of the problem is that it's quite hard to realistically create "aged data",

Certainly. One of the projects I’m working on is just that and building a comprehensive dataset is A LOT of work. For some uses you can make it work with a little bit of realistic data for the actual teste and use simpler mechanisms to generate bulk data that’s there only to work as noise the program will never actually see (but the database logic will need to contend with).
by kurtreed2 | 2025-04-26 02:56:34+00:00
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
by firefoxd | 2025-04-26 02:56:40+00:00
One thing that has been accentuated over the past few decades is the idea that you are responsible for your success. When you were poor, lacked means, or didn't have a good job, it was because the god of fortune didn't smile on you. Only the fortunate experienced success.

Now only losers are broke and live in crap towns, and winners drive expensive cars. With this idea in mind, calling it crap towns becomes an attack on the people, rather then the town itself.

This idea is thoroughly explored in Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"
by xyzzy123 | 2025-04-26 02:56:48+00:00
Remember when google and apple were reporting aggregate mobility data to the government to assist public health authorities assessing compliance with lockdowns?

Location and attendance tracking? Vaccine passports?

It's hard to untangle now, there was some level of genuine concern for effective public health combined with a distressing measure of glee at the "justified" persecution of political enemies.

"If you don't get that third booster you're KILLING GRANDMA and deserve to be FIRED."

Most people want broad powers and high state capacity when the government is pursuing policy goals they are aligned with but would prefer a slow and ineffective government bound by "strict controls and oversight" when it is pursuing policy objectives they do not like.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-04-26 02:58:18+00:00
Case sensitive OSes like Linux don’t mix well with case insensitive file systems.

Take files under /boot/EFI (FAT). Packaging systems fall down on such — two RPMs can have different cases of the same filename and the package manager won’t know. They’ll just subtly overwrite each others file depending on installation/upgrade order.

(And why should the package manager have to care about the case sensitivity of the underlying file system for each managed file?)
by nickpsecurity | 2025-04-26 02:58:20+00:00
"Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it."

It sounds more like we have evidence of what we believe, you think we should toss the evidence for your counter-theory, and people won't do that. We also have an effect where tons of people experienced this. You want us to toss that, too.

"You don’t notice the hundreds of times a day you say something and don’t see a relevant advert a short time later. You see thousands of ads a day, can you remember what any of them are?"

On Facebook, during one period this happened, they were only showing me adds for Hotworx and a massage place every time. Trying to stay pure minded following Jesus Christ means I avoid such ads. So, it was strange that it's all they showed me. Then, strange the only break from the pattern was showing unlikely topics we just talked about in person.

So, I'm going to stick with the theory that they were listening since it best fit the evidence. I don't know why they'd do it. Prior reports long ago said they used to use ML (computer vision) to profile people outside of the platform who showed up in your pics.

I'll note another explanation. Instead of always listening, they could have done it to a random segment of people who were rarely clicking ads. Just occasionally, too. We wouldn't see the capability in use all the time. A feature tested or used on a subset of users.

Also, these companies keep saying on us in increasingly creative and dishonest ways. If anyone is to be blamed, it's them.
by quicklime | 2025-04-26 02:58:58+00:00
I followed the links to the study they referenced, and it says:

> Unlike the camera and audio APIs, the APIs for taking screenshots and recording video of the screen are not protected by any permission

However they also talk about doing static analysis on 9,100 out of the 17,260 apps, to determine (amongst other things) “whether media APIs are actually referenced in the app’s code”.

They then talk about doing a dynamic analysis to see which apps actually call the APIs (rather than just link to a library that might call it, but the app never calls that function the library).

The soundbite is bad, it shouldn’t say “had potential permissions to take screenshots”, it should just say “had the potential to take screenshots”
by buescher | 2025-04-26 03:01:03+00:00
They're aiming to recapitulate the success of HDL design in the IC world. The jitx folks are pretty clear about that. There are a lot of problems with that that could be a medium-sized think piece, but some things folks are doing in the space are neat. PCB-level EDA is overdue for better design checks, for example.
by gus_massa | 2025-04-26 03:01:35+00:00
This looks on topic, and most of the site is in English except "Documento". My suggestion is to wait until Monday and post it again but using a title in English and a comment explaining you are the author also in English. Post in other languages are usually ignored or flagged.

Perhaps with a title like "JSONScope - Interactive JSON viewer" or some variant that makes more sense.

(The stile of your comment is also too informal [Hi form Argentina!]. It's not necessary to be super formal and serious here, but I think less informal language may be better.)
by refulgentis | 2025-04-26 03:01:46+00:00
I read some guy complaining some podcast complained about his book and elevate it into some weird organized political movement that he's already declared is dead, and he's happy those kind of rancid speech-haters are gone...punchline... they're the illiberals!

Okay then!

Be honest with yourself, O Reader!

Are you sure he's not writing a satire of the same piece you've seen written every year since 1990, just with a shifting name for it?

He is a comedian after all...

Are you sure he's serious?
by benlivengood | 2025-04-26 03:01:57+00:00
The thing is, it's not even people doing the correlations. Just like transformers can learn most of human knowledge just by trying to predict tokens, I would not be surprised if the ad-serving machine learning systems have learned about people in similar detail.

State of the art about 10 years ago was 4 9s of accuracy predicting click-through rates from the available context (features for user profile, current website, keywords, etc.), which I interpreted as requiring a fairly accurate learned model of human behavior. I got out of that industry so I don't know what current SOTA is for adtech, but I can only imagine it is better. The models were trained on automatically labelled data (GB/s of it) based on actual recent click-through rates so the amount of training data was roughly comparable to small LLMs.

Recent anecdote; three of us were sitting around the kitchen table with our phones out chatting about an obscure new thing that had come up; it appeared in one of our FB ad streams pretty quickly.

My top guesses about how this is possible today;

1) Apps routinely link many third-party data gathering and advertising libraries. Any of these libraries could be gathering enough contextual data and reselling it to make a correlation possible. It's not just obscure thing A that triggers an ad, it's highly correlated mixtures of normal things X, Y and Z that can imply A.

2) other friends may have talked about the obscure thing recently and social network links implied we would be aware of it through them.

Distant 3) the models are actually good enough to infer speech from weird side-channels like the accelerometer when people wave their hands when they talk, etc. Accelerometer sample rate is < 1KHz but over 100Hz which may be enough, especially when you throw giant models at it.
by sampullman | 2025-04-26 03:02:40+00:00
Audio, screenshots, and some of the other stuff I can believe, but I think batteries need a big upgrade before the data snatchers can get away with streaming video, even at a low bitrate.

I'm also not sure how easy keylogging is these days, is there even a permission that allows it? I supposed there's ways to do it with custom keyboards. Google/Apple doing it themselves would be a pretty big deal.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-04-26 03:03:29+00:00
Kinda cool.

Meanwhile, Apple could garner way more sales if they simply put a video input on the Vision. Gamers, 3-D modelers, drone operators, cinematographers, people using computers in cramped spaces (AKA planes) would all be potential buyers.

But nope; Apple's fear of I/O cripples another product.
by sedev | 2025-04-26 03:04:04+00:00
I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
by ksec | 2025-04-26 03:04:30+00:00
I posted this last time on HN and still amazed at the achievement. I believe CATL wants to extend Sodium-Ion Battery to 200Wh/Kg and with Solid State ( or Semi Solid State ) up to 300Wh/Kg.

When you have super fast charge, 10K cycles, works in most weather. I guess this is practically the end for a lot of Gasoline Engine.
by usrbinenv | 2025-04-26 03:04:56+00:00
I constantly feel like inferior languages are picked up, while superior languages are discarded. It's almost as if the universe had a law: "inferior technology is always preferred no matter how hard you seethe".

Examples:

* Python preferred over Ruby * TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript (which is fine and, as a bonus, doesn't require compilation step like TS) * Go is preferred over Crystal and D.

While Python, TypeScript and Go are quite alright, there is no doubt in my mind that their alternatives are absolutely superior as languages. Yes, in case of Dart, Crystal and D the ecosystem doesn't have the abundance of well-tested libraries, but as languages they are simply better. The Go argument that it's popular because it's simpler is absurd in the sense that no one really forces you to write complex code and use classes or other advanced OOP features in D.
by nativeit | 2025-04-26 03:05:57+00:00
Media theory and critical thinking are sorely lacking in public education, and the lack of media literacy has never been more apparent. It sounded absurd, taking precious time away from teaching math to watch movies? But this is the first generation coming of age right now to have been exposed to mass communications in ways/amounts that have never existed--I suppose that's been true of each of the last several dozen generations, but it's crossed a threshold that I believe necessitates special care in raising adults who can better discern trustworthy sources, interpret and think critically about what they see/hear/read, and do precisely as this article recommends and filter your incoming information in a thoughtful and intentional way.
by bsnnkv | 2025-04-26 03:06:02+00:00
> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention.

Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is naturally enclosed within a layer of nostalgia

For a few years now my approach has basically been "read it now or read it never" - this means that my RSS feeds are typically empty and I never save anything to "read it later" queues

If it's something I'm supposed to read, it'll probably be resurfaced one way or another (or maybe it won't, and that's fine too) at a later time when I'm immediately ready to pick up what is being put down
Frustrated at Young Programmers
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-26 03:06:23+00:00
Today at work I said we should use a coroutine in the server process to handle an async query call to a db. Just launch it async and don't let it block the handler.

A younger coworker told me that aws lambdas are cheap and we should use sns to spin up an entire aws lambda to have the server wait on an aws lambda while the lambda waits for a database. Are you kidding?

My suggestion was then compared to using assembly language to program the entire process as if my suggestion was completely absurd. Was I being trolled or are young programmers just drunk with over architecting everything?

How common is it for there to be architecture at companies where servers are triggering lambdas only to have the lambda wait on a database call?

Not to mention they wanted this to be an entirely new repo that held async tasks with a new deployment infra. "Microservices and proper architecture" they called it. Seriously? So now I have to have two PRs and two deploys to get a feature in place when it could have been one? Also everything is slower and more complicated? Do people not get it?