MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryao | 2025-04-20 15:46:23+00:00
That seems like a mistake, since PQAs are an objective downgrade from ECC in everything except for immunity to Shor’s algorithm. It is not clear that machines with the tens of millions of qubits needed to run Shor’s algorithm will be constructed since there is no quantum moore’s law that gives us a clear roadmap to making them. If they never are made, then all of these PQAs will have been a waste and we will have missed opportunities for improvements from improved curves. For example, the failure to deploy EdDSA certificates in PKI has been a missed opoortunity. I hope the industry reverses course and deploys them, since they are a clear improvement over the current ECDSA certificates.

I can see using hybrid PQAs for key agreement as a hedge against quantum machines actually being constructed, but with the upcoming 47 day certificates, there really is no need to avoid EdDSA. If we come anywhere near constructing a quantum computer that can crack the public keys, the industry could pivot to ML-DSA with the older EdDSA certificates expiring before there is any risk of them being cracked.
by mech422 | 2025-04-20 15:46:39+00:00
"Airbnb recently completed our first large-scale, LLM-driven code migration, updating nearly 3.5K React component test files from Enzyme to use React Testing Library (RTL) instead. We’d originally estimated this would take 1.5 years of engineering time to do by hand, but — using a combination of frontier models and robust automation — we finished the entire migration in just 6 weeks."

Color me unimpressed - it converted some test files. It didn't design any architecture, create any databases, handle any security concerns or any of the other things programmers have to do/worry about on a daily basis. It basically did source to source translation, which has been around for 30+ years.
by djha-skin | 2025-04-20 15:46:49+00:00
It should be remembered that in 2013 all the Edward Snowden stuff came out. This reads like a reaction to those revelations. Read in that context, it makes more sense: this is less a book review and more an accusation. Its portent is that the NSA will do anything it needs to to get at your data.

My father served in the military. He does not have a high opinion of Edward Snowden. He says that loose lips sink ships. He says that these kinds of leaks cause soldiers to die.

I have no patience for men who cause soldiers to die, but after that experience I do remain skeptical of the NSA and NIST.
by toast0 | 2025-04-20 15:47:28+00:00
> why does a child need to break through a plateau at anything?

Learning that they can hit a plateau and move beyond it with concerted effort is super important. After you've done it once, you can look back on that experience for inspiration when there's a plateau that you want/need to move beyond.

Having experience with struggling with something that is easy for some others is important too. Some kids are just naturally good at a lot of things when they're younger; which is nice in some ways, but makes it hard to learn skills to deal with challenges... It's great when they find something that challenges them (even if it doesn't seem great to them in the moment). Other kids have a hard time with most things; you've got to look out for things they can be good at.
by srveale | 2025-04-20 15:47:55+00:00
Books may not be good propaganda for the latest, localized issues, but they are fantastic propaganda for ideology.

I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen, and developed some pretty horrible notions about society and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!

Don't get me wrong, books-as-propaganda isn't necessarily bad. Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird... These are brilliant but are also such effective forms of propaganda that even mentioning their titles is a form of propaganda in itself.
by simonw | 2025-04-20 15:47:57+00:00
Interestingly the Gemma 3 docs say: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/model_card_3#:~:text=T...

> Total output context up to 128K tokens for the 4B, 12B, and 27B sizes, and 32K tokens for the 1B size per request, subtracting the request input tokens

I don't know how to get it to output anything that length though.
by throwanem | 2025-04-20 15:48:01+00:00
Yeah, I mean I haven't been to Vegas myself, but I've had pillow talk with some people who went.

(All illuminated signage could be said to draw on one's retinas, after all. The major differences I see with this method beyond improved gamut are first that it rasters, and second that I think we have to worry what happens if it fails to raster...)
by Swizec | 2025-04-20 15:48:44+00:00
I went to a technical high school for software engineering in Slovenia and it was fantastic. We learned C/C++, SQL, relational data modeling, basics of OOP, assembly for microcontrollers, IT administrator stuff, networking/internet, some basics of web development, a little about operating systems.

I did go to study CS after high school (despite getting a job midway through my senior year), but I still draw on the things I learned in high school every day. It was great. Gave me a lot of practical foundations.
by tyre | 2025-04-20 15:48:50+00:00
I don’t know, I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 for a bit. The daily quota caps at effectively $55/day. It’s not a ton of development but it’s definitely worth it compared to a human for projects that Claude 3.7 can’t yet wrap its mind around.

We’ll see if Gemini 2.5 Flash is good enough, but it definitely doesn’t feel like Google is selling for a huge loss post-training.

Yes the training is a huge investment but are they really not going to do it? Doesn’t seem optional
by Retr0id | 2025-04-20 15:50:26+00:00
If we assume cryptographically-relevant quantum computers will one day exist, you don't just need to worry about certs being cracked before they expire, but also the ECDH-established session keys being cracked. These keys are ephemeral, but if you store the ciphertexts long-term, you can crack them at any point in the future (aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later).
by tonestones | 2025-04-20 15:50:55+00:00
Attribution of ownership on projects is important, fair attribution doubly so. Think of Monty Python's parrot sketch, mostly written by Cleese, but fairly equally attributed to Chapman for just saying "let's make it a parrot". The Ritchie-Thompson/Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards model really works, and size of contribution must be measured on importance of outcome, not effort expended.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-20 15:51:01+00:00
I have an MLIS, and worked in libraries for years. It's a common misconception that librarians choose books they think are best, or most morally or intellectually instructive for readers. This never happens, or almost never happens. They buy and lend books that the community has asked to read, or which they believe the community wants to read, based on, e.g. popularity. There's not a council of elders deciding what you're allowed to read.
by 0manrho | 2025-04-20 15:51:47+00:00
Congrats on the launch OP.

Other's have already covered this so for you (OP) this will be redundant, but I do want to chime in regarding the general trend of apps/services everywhere (not just here on HN) focusing too much on the "Sell" of how their mcguffin will improve my life, but not actually saying what the heck their mcguffin actually is/does. To return to the post at hand, as an example, I'd change the byline uptop to say:

> An ethically designed financial management app to be the private and simple way to see your money, finally.

That maintains your pitch while also saying upfront and uptop in the first 6 words what it is/does.

Next, I'm not trying to be negative here, but rather acknowledge a very real problem that others have touched on and that anyone (myself included) launching any product will face in the current era:

Best Intentions != Best Practices. Security is hard. Earning trust is even harder. Especially when it comes to money. It's doubly difficult in early days as building out an app while maintaining security and respecting privacy is no minor task (even if "easy", it's still often tedious and easy to make mistakes), and in the context of finance/banking, there's unfortunately a large target on the app/services's proverbial back and impetus for users to have a far more critical and unforgiving eye given the potential fallout of someone leveraging or publishing an exploit.

There's also the ever looming potential of the original team selling the company/product/service to someone else (eg, Private Equity) who - despite claims to the contrary - rarely share the same ethos or respect for their newly acquired users as the founder/founding team does/did.

As to why people tend to be critical/suspicious: See another recent HN post "Everyone Knows your Location[0]" regarding all the practically systemic and endemic ways that applications/services expose/harvest data, and how difficult it can be to be aware of, mitigate and protect against these things. Exploiting user faith/data is unfortunately the norm now, not the exception, thus people's suspicions.

Wish you luck OP, because the market absolutely could use a privacy/user respecting app in this space.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716704
by bartread | 2025-04-20 15:52:00+00:00
I can sort of buy it but, honestly, this argument would be a lot more convincing with more concrete examples that are relateable to ordinary people. Some CEO getting busted for insider trading is not "ordinary people".

There's nothing in there that backs up this assertion: "The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day."

Like I say, I could buy it, but I need more concrete evidence - with examples - and less hyperbole, please.
by mlsu | 2025-04-20 15:52:12+00:00
I’ve been jokingly calling my electronics hobby of the past few years “getting my EE degree.”

Putting together PCBs, reading and replicating schematics, designing my own hardware. It’s been really fun and has paid dividends for my career (firmware). If the US is interested in bringing knowledge of manufacturing back this is a very very bad way to do it. How many undergrad projects are now impossible because the BOM has quadrupled? How many future mechanical/electrical engineers are not going to get into hardware because of this?

It’s all going to be gone. I’ve spent roughly $1200 last year having PCBs and ordering sensors etc. that goes to $4000 with these executive orders.

It’s insanity, pure insanity.
by staplung | 2025-04-20 15:52:20+00:00
Couldn't find this on Internet Archive but if you set your user agent to something that looks like google's crawler you can get past the paywall. It's easy on Safari if you already have the Develop menu enabled.

Develop > User Agent > Other...

Then use:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

Note that this works for most paywalls, not just Wired.
by tyre | 2025-04-20 15:52:23+00:00
I hope you’re able to find good managers. I prioritize paying down tech debt over feature development regularly, because it makes business sense.

Like even in a cold capitalist analysis, the benefits to developer velocity, ease of new feature development, incident response, stability, customer trust, etc.

It doesn’t always; there are certainly areas of tech debt that bother me personally but I know aren’t worth the ROI to clean up. These become weekend projects if I want a fun win in my life, but nothing terrible happens if there’s a little friction.
by yojo | 2025-04-20 15:52:32+00:00
The chatter around vibe coding to me feels a lot like the late 90s early 2000s FUD around outsourcing. Who would pay a high-cost American engineer when you could get 10 in South Asia for the same price? Media was forecasting an irreversible IT offshoring mega trend. Obviously, some software development did move to cheaper regions. But the US tech sector also exploded.

For some projects (e.g. your internal-facing CRUD app), cheap code is acceptable. For a high scale consumer product, the cost of premium engineering resources is a rounding error on your profits, and even small marginal improvements can generate high value in absolute dollar terms.

I’m sure vibe coding will eat the lowest end of software development. It will also allow the creation of software that wouldn’t have been economically viable before. But I don’t see it notably denting the high end without something close to AGI.
by tastyfreeze | 2025-04-20 15:52:33+00:00
2 provides 4 from the insitu minerals. It may be necessary to add minerals if you are growing plants that require something the native minerals dont have. But, the majority of minerals plants need are available everywhere. The soil biology is required to unlock it for plants to use.

If you see the macrobiota in soil it is an indicator microbiota is present. The more the merrier.
by mrob | 2025-04-20 15:52:36+00:00
The primary design goal for most traditional instruments was making them as loud as possible.

I was briefly made to play violin as a child, and I definitely hated it (fortunately my parents recognized this and didn't push too hard). The reason is in retrospect obvious: violins are loud and piercing and played close to the ear. Nobody considered hearing protection back then. I learned recorder as an adult and the loud notes can exceed 100dB(A) measured at the ear (both alto and soprano recorders, and recorders have very limited dynamics). Violins seem to be at least as loud. I would hate to play without hearing protection no matter how skilled I become.

Even in instruments where you can more easily play softly like a piano, the design for loudness can cause suffering. Pianos are much bigger than they need to be now that we have amplification, with correspondingly wide and finger-straining keys. Steel string guitars are louder than nylon but hurt more to play (and even nylon can hurt depending on your individual hand size and shape). I expect there are many children suffering hand/finger pain from being forced to play various instruments and genuinely hating it regardless of their skill level.

When a child hates something, there's often a good reason for it that isn't obvious and that they don't have the communication skills to explain.
by parched99 | 2025-04-20 15:52:44+00:00
I think Powershell is a bad test. I've noticed all local models have trouble providing accurate responses to Powershell-related prompts. Strangely, even Microsoft's model, Phi 4, is bad at answering these questions without careful prompting. Though, MS can't even provide accurate PS docs.

My best guess is that there's not enough discussion/development related to Powershell in training data.
by ryao | 2025-04-20 15:52:52+00:00
The pivot is occurring on both key agreement and signatures. Hybrid schemes currently only exist for key agreement. Perfect forward secrecy means that as long as the key agreement schemes are secure against Shor’s algorithm, we can afford to do a much more leisurely roll out of PKI with PQ signing algorithms. Whether people will opt for “hybrid” signatures is yet to be seen.
by NickC25 | 2025-04-20 15:54:56+00:00
As a counterpoint, look at how the Polgar sisters were raised.

Yes, Lazlo and his wife were both education professionals, and spent an inordinate amount of time dedicated to developing the girls. But look how it turned out.

On a different note, I used to hate sport when my parents forced me to play it. I liked screwing around on the computer or playing video games. However, when I found tennis naturally around 12 or 13, I couldn't get enough of it, and vastly improved on my own because I had a lot more fun playing than most of my peers did, who were forced into it by their parents. Most of them don't even play for fun anymore with friends, and I'm in my mid 30s and still play frequently.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-20 15:56:05+00:00
back around 2002 I had some T shirts from the Gap (so, pretty mainstream) that had the visible stitching and tags look like the shirt was inside out; sort of a duplicate in that if you actually wore them inside out they still looked inside out. the only way to really tell was the little washing instructions tag on the inside.

i really liked them, was sad when they went away
by simonw | 2025-04-20 15:56:22+00:00
It makes intuitive sense to me that this would be possible, because LLMs are still mostly opaque black boxes. I expect you could drop a whole hunch of the weights without having a huge impact on quality - maybe you end up mostly ditching the parts that are derived from shitposts on Reddit but keep the bits from Arxiv for example.

(That's a massive simplification of how any of this works, but it's how I think about it at a high level.)
by hermannj314 | 2025-04-20 15:57:25+00:00
I asked if I could pay cash for an MRI rather than wait for insurance approval just to speed up the process of booking. I offered to manually file a reimbursement later if it was approved or pay cash if it wasn't.

Apparently, in the United States that is considered insurance fraud or something, whereas when I lived in Luxembourg that is how the system worked. I don't even understand what world we have constructed in the US.
by sinenomine | 2025-04-20 15:58:05+00:00
The existence of this article is explained by simple fact of nature: regression to the mean applies, on average, to heritability of various quantitative human traits, such as general intelligence and mathematical aptitude (and to more specific parameters such as working memory and attention span).

Talented mathematicians are visibly disappointed when their child turns out more re average than them and try to compensate via clever early education schemes that are unlikely to work out given what we know about heritability of these traits.
by cellular | 2025-04-20 15:58:27+00:00
I am terraforming my limestone rocky terrain using leaves.

I believe they have trace minerals and the grub larve eat the oak leaves and poop amazing soil.

I now have 6" of black soil with earthworms!

This is in dry central Texas. Moisture helps microbial/fungal life. Leaves retain moisture.

Another key ingredient is pressure/compaction of leaves.

I have results on my YouTube channel: theRainHarvester
by 0manrho | 2025-04-20 15:59:06+00:00
> a lack of competition allowed the company to shift its focus away from users—and toward its bottom line

Competition or lack there-of had fuck all to do with it. Meta was always focused on it's bottom line and never gave a damn about it's users beyond what value they could extract from them. It certainly was never your "friend", fair-weather or otherwise. Just because their marketing and PR tried to tell you otherwise didn't mean it was indicative/authentic to their actual corporate/internal ethos.
by rjbwork | 2025-04-20 15:59:57+00:00
In terms of aspects I try to keep it limited to already existing framework touch points for things like logging, authentication and configuration loading. I find that writing middleware that you control with declarative attributes can be good for those use cases.

There are other good uses of it but it absolutely can get out of control, especially if implemented by someone whose just discovered it and wants to use it for everything.
by comment_anon | 2025-04-20 16:00:19+00:00
I would agree. Kumon wasn't my son's favorite thing and he eventually decided/asked to stop. But the repetition and discipline of working at it every day had an influence. It didn't manifest until undergraduate but he ended up switching majors to math and is now pursuing a math PhD. Probably not common, but like learning to play the piano, I think it gave him a comfort with the basics and an intuition that allowed him to explore his own interests.
by pandemic_region | 2025-04-20 16:00:34+00:00
> ostensibly nontechnical people are able to contribute to codebases with seasoned engineers.

Who is the contributor then? The AI or the prompt writer?

I mean I'd be more at ease if they would just contribute their prompt instead. And then, what value does that actually have? So many mixed feelings here.

At work I had a React dev merging Java code into a rather complex project. It was clearly heavily prompt assisted, and looked like the code the junior Java developer would have written. The difference is that the junior Java developer probably would have sweated a couple of days over that code, so she would know it inside out and could maintain it. The React dev would just write more prompts or ask the AI to do it.

If we're confident that prompting creates good code and solid projects, well then we don't need expensive developers anymore do we?
by mountainriver | 2025-04-20 16:01:24+00:00
There hasn’t been an AI winter since 2008 and there sure isn’t going to be one now. In spite of everyone saying it every couple of months since then.

Also what tech debt? If you have good engineers doing the vibe coding they are just way faster. And also faster at squashing bugs.

I was one-shotting whole features into our Rust code base with 2.5 last week. Absolutely perfect code, better than I could have written it in places.

Then later that week o3 solved a hard bug 2 different MLEs failed to solve as well as myself.

I have no idea why people think this stuff is bad, it’s utterly baffling to me
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-20 16:02:02+00:00
> and another AI winter will settle in with the upcoming

Oh, please. Even if every cent of VC funding dries up tomorrow we'd still have years of discovering how to use LLMs and "generative models" in general to do cool, useful stuff. And by "we" I mean everyone, at every level. The proverbial bearded dude in his mom's basement, the young college grad, phd researcher, big tech researcher, and everyone in the middle. The cat is out of the bag, and this tech is here to stay.

The various AI winters came because of many reasons, none that are present today. Todays tech is cool! It's also immediately useful (oAI, anthropic, goog are already selling billions of $ worth of tokens!). And it's highly transformative. The amount of innovation in the past 2 years is bonkers. And, for the first time, it's also accessible to "home users". Alpaca was to llama what the home computer was to computers. It showed that anyone can take any of the open models and train them on their downstream tasks for cheap. And guess what, everyone is doing it. From horny teens to business analysts, they're all using this, today.

Also, as opposed to the last time (which also coincided with the .com bubble), this time the tech is supported and mainly financed by the top tech firms. VCs are not alone in this one. Between MS, goog, AMZ, Meta and even AAPL, they're all pouring billions into this. They'll want to earn their money back, so like it or not, this thing is here to stay. (hell, even IBM! is doing gen ai =)) )

So no, AI winter is not coming.
by fastaguy88 | 2025-04-20 16:02:23+00:00
Not a lawyer, but there are a lot of crimes that are not felonies. Speeding 10 mph above the limit in a 65 mph zone - not a felony. Reading hacker news for an hour during work time and not being paid $800/hr - not a felony. Calling in sick when you are hung over - not a felony. There is no federal tax on gifts for the giftee. Indeed, I suspect there are a surprising number of crimes that could get you jail time that are not felonies. Insider trading - it’s a felony, which is why people in companies with insider trading information are told they cannot trade at certain times.

I’m pretty comfortable believing I have probably not committed more than two or three felonies in my life. (Don’t want to find out I am wrong.)