MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zer8k | 2025-04-17 14:50:09+00:00
This is decidedly not true on almost every account.

Europe has its own opioid crisis, and we absolutely can blame other countries who play host to the primary runners of heroin and synthesizers of fent. The pain industry is just the first baby step to hard drugs. We already handled our side after OxyContin - it’s impossible to get more than ibuprofen from a doctor without doing backflips through flaming hoops.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-17 14:50:27+00:00
You are mistaken. Talking about it is not a crime, and if you believe having an AI honeypot another AI is, please provide legal citations or a legal opinion. This is no different than generating adversarial text programmatically to trap a bot, as there is no intent. No one is suggesting terrorism, only poisoning chatbots. Of course, if honeypot chatbots are outlawed, only outlaws will have them. Interesting times ahead, for sure.
by Hobadee | 2025-04-17 14:50:33+00:00
I can guarantee you that miscommunication doesn't always require 2 people.

Source: Have been OH SO EVER PRECISCE AND EXACT in my communication with certain idiots, and they still screw it up. Several instances of "put this here carefully", only to return and find it all the way across the room upside-down and broken, come to mind.
by mirekrusin | 2025-04-17 14:50:38+00:00
Yes, there are some basic examples here [0] – otherwise it's just shebang and you're good to go; it can be a rabbit hole where you start liking it too much than what you really should (you wanted simple scripts, now you are finishing scheme book).

It's consistent, "infinitely" terse (you can create dsl-like apis for your problem domains), proper programming language.

First time I used it for scripting was when I had to process some xmls and do bunch of processing and gluing together – I was impressed how quick and easy it was without knowing anything about it and how readable the whole thing ended up being.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Scriptin...
by Xcelerate | 2025-04-17 14:50:41+00:00
There are a lot of parallels between rule-based games like Go and rule-based formal systems like ZFC. It’s interesting that the same techniques used for AlphaGo have not worked nearly as well for finding proofs of famous open problems that we suspect are both 1) decidable within ZFC and 2) have a “reasonable” minimal proof length.

What aspect of efficiently exploring the combinatorial explosion in possibilities of iterated rule-based systems is the human brain still currently doing much better than machines?
by mrkeen | 2025-04-17 14:50:47+00:00
Think about mutability in Java land this way:

// Using mutability. // `increment` is void, and makes 2 bigger for everyone. increment(2); // Typical Java "safety". // It's still void, but now it throws a RuntimeException // because the developers are saving you from making everyone's 2 bigger. increment(2); // Immutable // Returns 3 increment(2);
by gruez | 2025-04-17 14:51:13+00:00
>There is plenty of encryption used when you send any sort of message from an iPhone, even SMS. You can’t even turn the dang thing on and unlock it without encryption. Then when you send it, it’ll be encrypted by the radio before transmission. Then in transit it may or may not be encrypted at various points.

If your argument for encryption is "we need encryption because if it's banned overnight all our phones will turn into bricks!", then yeah sure I guess it's true. But even the diehard encryption opponents aren't arguing for this. My point is that you can very much have no encryption, but not "anyone could log into any of your accounts, take your money ...".
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-17 14:51:34+00:00
China will need to have 4 undercover agents meet in the same place at the same time. They won't all meet each other, but a series of hand offs.

Conveniently, a small local college asian club wants to have a stop asian hate rally on the weekend of the 17th, at a local park which would be an ideal location. Tiktok gets word from Bytedance, who by Chinese law have party members on their board, that this rally needs to be heavily promoted organically to other Asians who live in the area. No ads, if someone talks about it in their tiktok, push it. Push it especially towards beloved Asian influencers with a large follwing.

The day comes and the turnout is a total blowout. A sea of Asians filling the park to support a noble cause.

80% of them are there because the CCP wanted them there to cover their operation, but when asked, every single one laughs at the idea that "Tiktok is a tool for propaganda". They say "I have never seen anything that promotes red flag communism or CCP ideals."

The scenario above is why the US government wants tiktok banned. The privacy stuff is second and the screen addiction stuff a far far third.
by rappatic | 2025-04-17 14:51:36+00:00
Fair. I was exaggerating a little.

My point is this: I spend over 100,000 minutes per year listening to music. Any unnecessary friction in the experience is therefore extremely frustrating and has a disproportionate effect on my life. In all my experience self-hosting, it adds a certain level of friction that just isn't worth it considering how much time I spend listening.

I am not hostile to self-hosting in other cases. I am very satisfied with my self-hosted Plex server, for example. But I don't spend 30% of my waking hours watching TV.
by TiredGuy | 2025-04-17 14:51:43+00:00
Yeah I think I would say you're right to doubt if this resonates on HN. You're posing it to an audience which has very little GED-level representation. HN more often has people who did well in school and are at a much better disposition for higher-salary jobs.

I'm not part of the target population but my guess is that a large factor has to do with people's tendency to go down the path of life that is most similar to the path they've already tread. If you grew up in a 'cultural center' it's less of a paradigm shift to take the crappy job around the corner rather than move somewhere slightly more remote to start a new career even if in the long run it could actually lead to a more decent life.
by meltyness | 2025-04-17 14:51:51+00:00
Ok so diving in, The Guardian is reblogging a blog "lead safe mama".

"lead safe mama" is an activist and filmmaker, who does not appear to have a scientific background, and who may primarily be motivated by taking on legal cases. [0]

Furthermore, in the toothpaste (informal, blogger-led) study it appears that the testing was performed by "Purity Laboratories" using "ICP-MS" instrumentation. [1]

According to "Purity's" own marketing it's admitted the "ICP-MS" may cause interferences, though they aren't specifically quantified. [2] Other laboratories primarily market the technique specifically for testing raw for contamination[3] and discusses "dynamic range", rather than what I speculate is "a complex matrix" though I myself am not technical enough to recognize the meaning there.

According to an instrument vendor, Agilent, there are other considerable number of other constraints and variables where the laboratory process itself could introduce issues[4] and alarmingly, I'm unable to locate any details regarding specificity or FPRs, and there's some evidence of targeted advocate edits on Wikipedia regarding the viability of this application of this technique. Furthermore these advocate edits specify a different methodology for health-related detection, rather testing wastes for result of contamination than testing products themselves. Even furthermore Agilent, one vendor that has strategically been selected for my review of technical details about the technique specifies "ICP-MS is an elemental analysis technique, meaning it is used to measure elements, rather than the molecules" but it's difficult to determine whether the technique can avoid creating FPs with molecules. The process itself seems like it is not fool-proof, it would take some expertise in plasma chemistry to understand and predict completely which I cannot provide, or probably some pretty intricate calibration details which are not available for this study.

It's conceivable that testing products represents a misuse of the technique, it at least differs in scope from the use-case described throughout the Wikipedia article. There's a section on Wikipedia regarding use of the technique for Pharmaceuticals but it is vague, speculative, and drifts substantially from the actual topic at hand into usage for forensics.

[0] https://tamararubin.com/2023/07/lead-safe-mama-llc-rates-for...

[1] https://tamararubin.com/2025/04/orajel-kids-anti-cavity-toot...

[2] https://www.puritylabsinc.com/heavy-metals-testing

[3] https://www.eag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/High-Purity-R...

[4] https://www.agilent.com/en/product/atomic-spectroscopy/induc...
by santoshalper | 2025-04-17 14:51:52+00:00
I think your comment, while not especially constructively formed, is a good warning about alarm-ism. However, I think you should at least consider a few things:

1. The concerns about D&D were quite different. Most parents admired the creativity involved in role-playing. The concerns came from a relatively small subset of parents who were concerned about the morality of the subject matter (monsters, demons etc.). For the record, I thought at the time that these concerns were pretty silly and had little merit, and still do.

2. Just because there have been moral/social panics in the past, doesn't mean the concerns about social media today are invalid. Sometimes worries are wrong, sometimes they are right. Having been wrong before does not make it rational to never be concerned again.

3. It is entirely possible that concerns about high-volume TV watching were correct. Just because my generation (X) survived the TV era does not mean we came out of it unscathed. Much of the ignorance and obnoxiousness of our current age may very well be caused by today's middle aged people growing up watching television. (Or maybe it was the lead paint our parents grew up with?)
Show HN: InferX – an AI-native OS for running 50 LLMs per GPU with hot swapping
by pveldandi | 2025-04-17 14:51:53+00:00
Hey folks , We’ve been building InferX. an AI-native runtime that snapshots the full GPU execution state of LLMs (weights, KV cache, CUDA context) and restores it in under 2s. This lets us hot-swap models like threads. no reloading, no cold starts.

We treat each model as a lightweight, resumable process. like an OS for LLM inference.

Why it matters:

•Run 50+ LLMs per GPU (7B–13B range)

•90% GPU utilization (vs ~30–40% with conventional setups)

•Avoids cold starts by snapshotting and restoring directly on GPU •Designed for agentic workflows, toolchains, and multi-tenant use cases

•Helpful for Codex CLI-style orchestration or bursty multi-model apps

Still early, but we’re seeing strong interest from builders and infra folks. Would love thoughts, feedback, or edge cases you’d want to see tested.

Demo: https://inferx.net X: @InferXai
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-17 14:52:06+00:00
I think DMs get added thoughtlessly to every new platform but if I was starting one in 2025 I wouldn't. From Skype to Instagram I think they make all platforms worse.

I have a list of "expressions of hostility" that to train my agent for in social media profiles and one of the most common is "no DMs", "I will block you if you send me DMs if you don't know me...", etc. [1]

DMs attract all sorts of cringe like that behavior from Musk but particularly the "Romance Scams" where you get some message like "Hey!" which is probably an attempt to do something really terrible to you. As a photographer I would love to convert interest in my profile to gigs but I'd have to receive hundreds of cringegrams to get one message I want.

[1] Unlike the others (e.g. "no MAGA") this one doesn't result in a "do not follow" classification in that it is so common and I don't believe associated with negative emotional posts
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-17 14:52:12+00:00
> My only claim is that is false and misleading.

Well, according to what congress wanted when they were founded, this is neither false nor misleading and judicial precedents until now have agree with that.

The idea they are under the control of the president and his staff is a novelty (and a disgrace in my humble opinion) but given the sorry state of the Supreme Court anything is possible.
by yapyap | 2025-04-17 14:52:22+00:00
> Instead of just asking, “Can we train a model to solve X?”, we’re asking, “What should we be training AI to do, and how do we measure real progress?”

To say we are at a point where AI can do anything reliably is laughable, it can do much and it will tell you any answer whether right or wrong with full confidence. To trust such a technology in the big no-human decisions like we want it to is foolswork.
by perrygeo | 2025-04-17 14:52:38+00:00
That's what ignorant culture warriors claimed was harming children. There was never much evidence to support those claims; they were the ravings of clowns, not statements to be taken seriously.

The damage from social media is widespread, well-studied, and unequivocally harmful to millions of people. There is no equivalence, it's a different technology with objectively worse impacts.
by walthamstow | 2025-04-17 14:52:59+00:00
I live in the European country most like the USA, in a poor area of a major city. I'm not aware of any crisis. It was never that easy to get opioids here and our doctors work for the government, not themselves.

> We already handled our side

What did you do about the millions of Americans already hooked?

As I understand it, stopping the supply from pills mills lead to people hitting the street to buy product cut with fent. Some handling.
by sho_hn | 2025-04-17 14:53:13+00:00
I often wonder if we (the tech industry) have come up with anything actually good since about 2005 or so, in terms of being a net win for society or something people actually need.

Increasingly, we seem to provide solutions in search of a problem, or worse, substitutes for much healthier activities. The power we have to do so is staggering; we are changing the parameters and modes of how people relate to each other on a daily basis.

I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software engineering.

The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes adjacent to or one aspect of these concerns, but really we need a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-17 14:53:23+00:00
That's kinda unfair to the incel. (Musk has like 12 kids now, doesn't sound like an incel to me!)

If you are neurodivergent and were bullied in elementary school, dating in high school is a retraumatization where nothing seems possible and you might find that when you "grow up" there aren't any places to meet people your own age (e.g. go to a "rock concert" and you just meet boomers)

Feminist scholar Eva Illouz points out that many women chase men they find "easy to love" who have no interest in committing to them because they don't have to

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

meantime a lot of guys who have challenges get bitter and sucked into toxic social movements.
by rfoo | 2025-04-17 14:53:28+00:00
IMO they serve similar at a glance, but actually very different use cases.

SeaweedFS is more about amazing small object read performance because you effectively have no metadata to query to read an object. You just distribute volume id, file id (+cookie) to clients.

3FS is less extreme in this, supports actual POSIX interface, and isn't particularly good at how fast you can open() files. On the other hand, it shards files into smaller (e.g. 512KiB) chunks, demands RDMA NICs and makes reading randomly from large files scary fast [0]. If your dataset is immutable you can emulate what SeaweedFS does, but if it isn't then SeaweedFS is better.

[0] By scary fast I mean being able to completely saturate 12 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD at 4K random reads on a single storage server and you can horizontally scale that.
by radicalbyte | 2025-04-17 14:54:08+00:00
This x10000.

I really wish that the EU would step in and force Google to either kill Shorts or give us full control over the crap they're pushing down our throats.

As this is HN and full of smart people - if there are any workable (OSS) options to filtering YouTube to remove shorts (and the far-right/Nazi crap) then please let us know.
by jayd16 | 2025-04-17 14:54:12+00:00
SIMD has been somewhat of a massive failure in this regard. Unlike threads, most languages seem to ignore its existence and abdicate its usage to the sufficiently complex compiler.

I wish there was better author time feedback to the developer on where they're getting such a perf boost. As far as I'm aware there's no popular linting or blue squiggle to guide you in the right direction.

In games it seems like the popular pattern is to rewrite everything entirely in an entity component system framework.
by whatshisface | 2025-04-17 14:54:15+00:00
>“Supervisor [Cavanaugh] ultimately voted for the agreement because Massive Blue is alleged to be in pursuit of human trafficking, a noble goal,” a representative from Cavanaugh’s office told 404 Media in an email. “A major concern regarding the use of the application, is that the government should not be monitoring each and every citizen. To his knowledge, no arrests have been made to date as a result of the use of the application. If Overwatch is used to bring about arrests of human traffickers, then the program should continue. However, if it is just being used to collect surveillance on law-abiding citizens and is not leading to any arrests, then the program needs to be discontinued.”

It's a direct ultimatum: radicalize/encourage the targets, or lose the contract.

At least the government spokesperson is focusing on the actual crime, and not the "we'll report on political opponents" service.
by diggan | 2025-04-17 14:54:16+00:00
> HN is better than most, thankfully.

Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is factual and adds to the topic.

Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more, I guess.
by bgarbiak | 2025-04-17 14:54:20+00:00
Certainly not only TikTok, but - IMHO - the most damaging part of every other social media _is_ the one based on it: Reels, Shorts, etc. The endless swiping for the next dose of dopamine.

The YouTube's one (Shorts) is especially irritating, as you can't really ban children from using YT - there's stuff there they need to watch for classes and so on. I guess the only chance this will stop is a government regulation of some sorts.
by berkes | 2025-04-17 14:54:22+00:00
I too would love to learn more about that.

I am not sure about the current state. But "back then" all the components in Firefox were tightly coupled and almost impossible to extract on their own.

"Back then" being, IIRC, 2012 or so, when I briefly worked on the web and CMS side of a project that used HTML + CSS (and a tiny bit of JS) to render the UI of a media-box. The OS was basically a thing that could boot a "browser" and handle network stuff. Firefox was not an option, as it was near impossible to even remove things like the address bar, tab handling and all that. But the hardware was so underpowered, that a full browser was not an option. Yet "yet another khtml" wrapped in the most basic "executable" did just fine.

But this is a while ago, and only one project that chose not to use Firefox/gecko.
by gruez | 2025-04-17 14:54:24+00:00
>1. How often are people saying their bank login on their phone calls?

Have you ever called into a bank or brokerage? Most ask "security questions", often ones that you can't even choose, like your address or how many accounts you have with them. It's arguably far worse than speaking your password into the phone.

>2. Is there a way for phone call man in the middlers to get that info without wasting a ton of time listening to calls?

Automated speech recognition has been around for decades. Even before that signals intelligence agencies have shown that widespread wiretapping/eavesdropping is possible and effective.
by mindcrash | 2025-04-17 14:54:33+00:00
That's because Silicon Valley had actual story consultants from the Valley.

Among them:

- Todd Silverstein, founder Vizify

- Tsachy Weissman, Professor Electronic Engineering, Stanford University

- Dick Costolo, frmr CEO Twitter

- Jonathan Dotan, founding director of the Starling Lab and Fellow at the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, Stanford University

And more.
by darknavi | 2025-04-17 14:55:02+00:00
To some extent I feel the same about video games too.

I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes.

I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.
by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-04-17 14:55:10+00:00
> being controlled by the Chinese government is clearly problematic

I read it a lot, but it's actually highly dubious that that is the main issue or a problem at all.

The problem is how western kids react to TikTok content and why they do it that way.

TikTok is also present in many other parts of the World and it's not causing the same harm everywhere, it must mean something.

The title should actually be "TikTok is harming American children at an industrial scale" and the focus should be on why Americans are more susceptible to TikTok[1], whose content, BTW, is mostly created by fellow Americans and not directly by the Chinese government.

[1] the why is also somewhat explained in the article, even though I do not believe those are root causes, they're just symptoms

“It’s better to have young people as an early adopter, especially the teenagers in the U.S. Why? They [sic] got a lot of time.”

“Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience . . . . If you look at China, the teenage culture doesn’t exist — the teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don’t have the time and luxury to play social media apps.”

The latter being honestly quite worrying for a country that prides itself to be "the best place in the World", kids should not waste so much time on what is basically a reel of (highly discutibile) ads disguised by entertainment.

Chinese seem to understand it and have created a healthier environments for their kids, maybe we could learn a thing or two...?

It should be noted that in every major US corporation there's been a meeting where executives said or proposed something very similar. It's capitalism 101, first: profit, then, maybe, if you're forced to, ask for forgiveness .

EDIT: as a non American, it looks to me like the old guns don't kill people, people do except coming from a country where there are virtually no guns around, and very few people kill other people and usually the gun is not the weapon of choice, maybe the problem is actually the people living in the USA plus giving them guns.
by ta1243 | 2025-04-17 14:55:38+00:00
Then busting "Mal" also busts Eve

Eve is vouching for Mal. And when Mal1, Mal2, Mal3 etc are all vouched for by Eve, then they are all trivially linked.

The far bigger problem is "how do you vouch for a single entitiy". How do you prevent Eve having multiple unlinked accounts.