MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tiahura | 2025-05-12 17:58:30+00:00
It's hard to know what to make of an article like this because of the lack of context. Killing the kids of your enemy is bad, but was happening long before humans showed up. So, the question is, given comparable conditions, how did SAS perform vs others? Are they 1/2 as cruel as the French and 1/4 as cruel than they used to be? If so, we should be happy they're improving. We don't know.

This seems like a systemic problem with war fighting and requires system improvements. The Heinlein in me is uneasy with a prosecutorial focus. Improve the culture, make it easier to take a couple of weeks off, whistleblow, whatever--but telling someone who volunteered to fight for their country to go get shot at and dodge bombs for a few hours, watch their friends get their faces blown off, and then flip a switch, seems unreasonable.
by paddy_m | 2025-05-12 17:59:19+00:00
What does require in person enforcement is making sure license plates aren't obscured, defaced, or removed. The left in this country needs to reconcile that enforcement of laws is a good thing. Matthew Yglessias talks about this a lot.

This requires the most enforcement in front of NYC precincts. I truly don't know how such a corrupt organization could be reformed.

https://x.com/hashtag/CriminalMischief

https://x.com/GershKuntzman
by sybercecurity | 2025-05-12 18:00:06+00:00
That sentiment isn't shared across the whole of the US. One area is in kid stuff. Thrift/secondhand stores selling baby/small child clothes are very common in most suburbs. Kids outgrow stuff very quickly so a lot of parents go to stores that specialize in baby clothes, toys, and various stuff. New designer kid's clothes are mostly bought by grandparents or first time parents. There are some stores the specialize in secondhand sports equipment too - so parents can have a trial run to see if their kid really likes a new sport before investing in it.

Online marketplaces seem to dominate the secondhand market in the US though. Or there is a storefront but also has a big online presence.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-12 18:00:07+00:00
> I remain skeptical that fusion will ever be a commercially viable energy source. I'd love to be wrong.

I’m also skeptical, but I think the emphasis of my skepticism is on “commercially viable” as opposed to an available energy source. That is, I think fusion development will (and should) proceed anyway.

There’s a good argument that nuclear fission is not really commercially viable in its current form. Yet it provides quite a lot of commercially available electricity. And it also powers aircraft carriers and submarines. And similar technology produces plutonium for weapons. In other words, I don’t think fission’s continued availability as a power source is a strictly commercial decision.

I think there’s a quite a lot of technology that is not directly commercially viable, like high energy physics, or the space program. But they remain popular and funded. And they throw off a lot of commercial side benefits.

The growth of solar for domestic consumer power will certainly continue and that is a good thing. But I bet we’ll have fusion too in the long run. There’s no lack of ideas for interesting things to do with extreme amounts of heat and power. For example I’m hopeful that humanity eventually figures out space propulsion powered by fusion.
by Balgair | 2025-05-12 18:00:10+00:00
Those are vanishingly small jobs these days in the US at least. Most companies and guys will specialize in electrical or drywall or something as they become faster at it and time is money in the trades. These skilled jobs typically require more than a single truck's worth of equipment to do quickly.

Like, tying rebar is really hard to do by hand, but they make a gun that will do it for you in seconds: https://amsalesinc.com/products/rebar-tying-gun-makita-xrt01... . You can do a whole pad of concrete in an hour that would take you days otherwise. But that gun is thousands of dollars (supply and demand baby). So having a truck of these time saving gadgets for a bunch of job types isn't feasible. Hence the specialization.
by huhkerrf | 2025-05-12 18:00:13+00:00
When I read about terrible things done in a group like this, my first thought is: would I have done the right thing?

I like to think I'm a good person, but these people probably do, too. It sounds like there's something rotten in the culture of the special forces that encouraged or at least overlooked these actions. What would I have done if I had been there? Would I have stood up against people I saw as my brothers in arms?

Before anyone gets this twisted, this is not an excuse of their behavior or saying that it should be discounted.
by genewitch | 2025-05-12 18:00:30+00:00
I'd not heard of Charles Proxy nor gobuster.

Years ago there was a firmware for mango travel routers that let you MITM anything connected to it, and i bought two of them, and then the information about how to set it up disappeared (i can't find it). the GL.iNet mango travel routers, is what i mean. I have one wireguarded with the switch set to shut off access or wireguard only; the other one is for IOT devices and is connected via 10mbit, so even if someone managed to hack one of the two IOT things here they couldn't exfil very much, and i'd notice the blinking.
by andrewflnr | 2025-05-12 18:01:08+00:00
Right, the interesting case would be the formal proof. Though, I suspect there are fewer high-level languages where memory bugs are actually impossible than you would naively think. I've segfaulted Python by accident, only using the standard library (concurrency shenanigans if I recall). You can probably do worse if you try. To make a truly memory-safe language, you would need to carefully design and implement the standard library, disallow all native code extensions, and probably more I'm not smart enough to figure out. So, not Java, not Python. Maybe some Schemes?
by squigz | 2025-05-12 18:01:15+00:00
Fines that are enough to actually hurt, and regulations that force companies to actually secure PII.

If they're scared of such things, then maybe they shouldn't be making and marketing a dating app. It's not 2003 anymore, and this isn't some innocent app - they're collecting information on passports and sexual preferences for thousands of people. They should be aware of the responsibility that ought to come with that.
by luke-stanley | 2025-05-12 18:01:16+00:00
"starting from an embedding and working backwards to generate a piece of text that is semantically close by?" Apparently this is called embedding inversion and Universal Zero-shot Embedding Inversion https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00147 Going incrementally closer and closer to the target with some means to vary seems to be the most general way, there are lots of ways to be more optimal though. Image diffusion with CLIP embeddings and such is kinda related too.
by rcoveson | 2025-05-12 18:01:44+00:00
No disagreement here, but where the literal rubber hits the road, you still have to decide how to act when the ambient semi-aggressive driving population continues to behave in the way that they do. Will you blamelessly be road raged at 50-100% more often than a more moderate driver (who drives at the most popular speed, though it may be over the limit) just because if an accident does happen it will be the road rager's fault?

It's a very frustrating social problem. Obviously we can't let ourselves be held collectively hostage by bad actors in all situations. But I would still predict that there are some situations where the bad actor population is so large and "mildly-bad" that indefinitely giving in to their implicit demands is the right game theoretic choice.
by Remnant44 | 2025-05-12 18:02:19+00:00
Great timing on this paper. I actually just started tackling a problem that is essentially exactly what is under discussion here (creating a coherent UV set for implicit geometry), so I'm very looking forward to reading it in depth.

At a first glace through, it seems to be written at a good blend between concept and implementation followthrough, something that notoriously is not always there for CG papers :) And it's also refreshing to read something that is not neuro-AI-generation of this or that for a change!
by rvz | 2025-05-12 18:02:31+00:00
Let's all just admit it instead of dodging multiple AGI definitions like "reaching human-level reasoning and cognition", "taking over economically significant tasks which benefits humanity", "$100B profits" or "raising more money until AGI", etc.

This is the actual true definition of "AGI" (and ASI and so on) which is actually happening.

The ultimate replacement of humans with AI systems (and to an increase of 10% global unemployment by 2035)
by khuey | 2025-05-12 18:02:35+00:00
IMO the implication that the "in-person conference" nature of the forum is what led to its demise rather than its capture by academics/abandonment by industry practitioners is incorrect. I think a better summary of the cause is that most academic research is not that relevant to industry but academics need the prestige of forums like Usenix ATC in a way that industry does not which naturally leads to squeezing industry (and thus much of the relevance) out of the forum over time. I think the same would have happened to a virtual conference/printed journal/etc.
by clan | 2025-05-12 18:02:37+00:00
Super rare is untrue. Rare would even be a stretch. I live in Copenhagen and use a helmet. I would claim it is common to use a helmet. Not everyone - but many do. And it is not even mandatory.

Helmet usage is actually increasing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...

We recommend it for tourists as well. Though it is rare with helmets for that group who might need it the most: https://www.visitcopenhagen.com/sites/visitcopenhagen.com/fi...

Helmets are not compulsory and interest groups works to keep it that way: https://www.cyklistforbundet.dk/english/use-of-helmet

But less scary F150s and good bike infrastructure, yes.
by zamalek | 2025-05-12 18:02:46+00:00
I think the sentiment (at least my sentiment) is that "mainstream ML" has fallen into the transformer local minimum, and given the weight of the players in that space it will take a huge amount of force to move them out of it.

The likes of this, Mercury Coder, and even RKWV are definitely hopeful - but there's a pitch black shadow of hype and speculation to outshine.
by phyzix5761 | 2025-05-12 18:03:04+00:00
Imagine every time you entered a specific physical location you would increase your exposure to a detrimental disease. After only entering a couple of times you've contracted this disease and each subsequent visit to this place makes the illness worse.

A few people try to warn you but you choose not to listen and, in fact, you recruit the government to make it easier to enter such places with safeguards that don't actually protect you from the disease and encourage you to enter more frequently.

You're then surprised why you're ill to the brink of death and blame the location as the sole cause for your ails. Yes, the location is to blame but so are you for continuing to enter even after getting sick.

Why do you do this? Because you want something. Convenience, pleasure, a distraction, etc. But you refuse to acknowledge that its killing you.

This is how we should view optional services that require us to give our PII data in exchange for hours of attention-grabbing content. They're designed to sell your eyeballs and data to advertisers. You know this already but you can't say no. You're sick and refuse to acknowledge it.
by jetsnoc | 2025-05-12 18:03:11+00:00
We chose Tailscale as our mesh zero-trust platform primarily for its 4via6 subnet routing. Many of our interfacing networks reuse CIDR ranges, and we had no interest in maintaining a custom WireGuard implementation to handle subnet overlaps. The hidden operational cost of bespoke networking solutions is never trivial. Tailscale’s combination of 4via6, fine-grained ACLs, lightweight agents, and a customer-friendly licensing model made it an easy decision for us—especially given their flexibility around node licensing, which erred in favor of the customer and our custom use cases that would have otherwise inflated our COGS.
by michaelteter | 2025-05-12 18:03:46+00:00
Ah that's a shame.

It's hard to tell these days what is real.

Linkedin shows 2024 founded, and 2-10 employees. And that same Linkedin page has a post which directly links to this blurb: https://www.readfeedme.com/p/three-college-seniors-solved-th...

The date of this article is May 2025, and it references an interview with the founders.
by kmarc | 2025-05-12 18:03:54+00:00
This would more or less follow the brown-signaled bike path at Letziground:

https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=47.390987,8.478737...

(I can't tell by heart how it is beyond that, I just follow the signs :-) )

But cycle.travel seems truly amazing! It's super fast to add detours.
by vladms | 2025-05-12 18:04:10+00:00
Not sure how we define violence, but I found 2 links that show that in USA there are quite some more police killings per capita than in western Europe.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124039/police-killings-...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...

Of course some killings might be reasonable (very dangerous people, etc.) and violence is more than killings, but there does seem to be some signal there.

The reality and the laws are what people ask repeatedly. Maybe if they don't think it can be different they will not ask.
by tlavoie | 2025-05-12 18:04:15+00:00
Capsicum looks very cool, but looks like support never got finished in Linux. It's still in FreeBSD, though, other BSDs as well? From what I understand (admittedly little), capabilities in Linux are more about ways to apply granular use of permissions that would otherwise need root. Not around limiting the ambient authority within one process. Seccomp can drop permissions, but again for the whole process.

On a related note, I found Thomas Leonard's blog post (2023) on Lambda Capabilities to be a very interesting approach: https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2023/04/26/lambda-capabilitie...
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-05-12 18:04:44+00:00
Threats with the goal to prevent publication are incredibly common.

Following up on the threat is much less common, and the best way to prevent that (IMO) is to remove the motivation to do so: Once the vuln is public and further threats can not prevent the publication, just draw more negative attention to the company, the company has much fewer incentives to threaten or follow up on threats already made.

It's not a guarantee, you can always hit a vindicative and stupid business owner, but usually publishing in response to threats isn't just the right thing to do (to discourage such attempts) but also the smart thing to do (to protect yourself).
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-05-12 18:04:45+00:00
No, because it is not “natural” to have to drive long distances — this was a deliberate choice by the US. The goal is not to get people to drive long distances and then make sure they don't start dying too much more than if they had walked instead. Rather, by removing the need to drive, other countries have reduced their traffic fatalities per capita, which was the goal all along.
by hulitu | 2025-05-12 18:04:52+00:00
> One aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit.

Oh really ? They didn't had any problem when people installed copyrighted Windows to come after them. BSA. But now Microsoft turns a blind eye because it suits them.
by halkony | 2025-05-12 18:05:03+00:00
If you want to make the most of your reading time, some sparse journaling is very helpful. I started journaling with logseq two years ago. I started by pasting in an HN link, marking it with the #interesting tag, then writing down a few surface level thoughts/questions. It's nice to know that I can revisit the memories or parse my notes with AI when I'm writing or designing.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-12 18:05:13+00:00
> If you're talking about major city-to-city high speed rail an LA-to-NYC rail system would be like putting in rail from Paris to northern Kazakhstan. San Diego to Chicago would be like London to Kazan (845km east of Moscow). Iowa is a medium-sized state most in the US never visit and never think about, and it's almost twice the size of Austria. Europeans who rail (pun intended) about how it's so dumb the US doesn't have high speed rail haven't taken the requisite 5 minutes to understand the difference in scale when you're talking about connecting the east and west coasts of the US.

I find these "but it's so big!" excuses really lame when the crown jewel of our rail transit network, the Acela, in a large and very dense region... still kinda sucks.

Who cares about coast-to-coast when we can't even get Boston-DC to reach the lower edge of the same category as what's considered good developed-world passenger rail? This is clearly an area we could improve on significantly, and the excuse of "it's not dense enough" doesn't apply there.
by mrighele | 2025-05-12 18:06:44+00:00
If you build your infrastructure in a way that people have to drive much more to do the same, should you really discount this difference ?

I rarely drive the car because I can reach by walk any place required by my daily necessities... of course I don't risk a fatal accident as much as somebody that drives daily for work and has to take the car for any kind of shopping.

Put in another way: if are considering ways to lower traffic fatalities, lowering the time that people need to spend in their car is one way to do it.
by tsimionescu | 2025-05-12 18:06:45+00:00
That case is entirely irrelevant to what I'm saying for one simple reason: Google had obtained all of the physical books they were scanning legally. They had bought or borrowed at least one physical copy of every book they were scanning.

What OpenAI and the others are doing, by contrast, is the equivalent of stealing every book in a book store, making a digital copy, retaining that copy, and returning the original book. This is completely and obviously illegal, and has been tested in court many times - for example in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial .
by repelsteeltje | 2025-05-12 18:07:17+00:00
I'm basing this mostly off first hand and anecdotal evidence - but through the years I've found that the major contribution of audits lies in having to think about the checkboxes every now and then. And what they mean in the context of my organization or project.

Rarely have I found that compliance to the goals was an issue in themselves. Or that making changes to tick a checkbox correlated to material improvements.

That is to say that if this leads to more efficiency and makes it easier for compliance audits and such, I fear is stream lining the least impactful part of its goals.
by bombcar | 2025-05-12 18:07:20+00:00
There are certainly “innocent” poor if you want to use the term - those who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own and are working hard to get out of it.

And just as certainly being poor can be a result of bad choices and other things. Denying that either is possible is a recipe for disaster.

What we should do is work on the things that will work for those who need help and help them improve their skills or provide them a structured environment where are those skills are not necessary.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-05-12 18:07:32+00:00
> Another proof that the legality of right VS wrong, good VS evil, has less to do with morals and more to do with whether you're on the victorious side of history.

I'd say more that "legality" and "morals" are not necessarily related. Morality cannot be imposed by laws, and laws aren't usually driven by morality. This applies to both secular and religious laws.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-05-12 18:08:21+00:00
A few European countries' "masters of computer science" is just a normal "engineering" degree with a focus on software for any speciality credits. I can call myself an "engineer", even though my software profession does not value the distinction.

Though I'm sceptical it would help. API design is generally not taught in university courses, and perhaps shouldn't (too specific).

I instead feel that GDPR has already done a lot of heavy lifting. By raising the price of "find out", people got a bit more careful about the "fuck around" part. It seems to push companies to take it seriously.

The step two is forcing companies to take security breaches and security disclosures seriously, which CRA (Cyber Resilience Act) may help.... at the cost of swamps of byrocratic overhead that is also included ofcourse.
by voytec | 2025-05-12 18:08:44+00:00
I'm flagging this submission. Look at the author[0], at the "Georgetown students..." (won't backlink again) post linked below stating that Cerca was 2 months old in April, and OP's post from April stating that they hacked this thing two months earlier.

It's some self-promo or whatever scheme/scam bullshit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=alexschapiro.com
by xnx | 2025-05-12 18:09:04+00:00
Certainly some unknowns, but I'm optimistic.

> No pedestrian crossings.

Everywhere is a pedestrian crossing when you know that every vehicle sees you and will slow/stop if it anticipates you will enter its path.

> No bike lanes.

I'm an urban bike commuter and would be delighted to share the road with autonomous vehicles instead of human-driven ones.

> No escape from the noise of thousands of tires going at high speed.

I live 60 ft from a highway and would trade the noise of 1 speeding, honking, revving, modified-exhaust having human driven car for 100 well-maintained speed-limit obeying Waymo's.

> No escape from the air pollution of eroding tires and brakes.

Gentle starts and stops from a well-maintained (e.g. proper tire inflation) autonomous vehicle will create less of both of those than the average human-driven vehicle.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

I like a diversity of viewpoints, and glad there are people advocating for pedestrian and cyclist use of roads, but I find very little I agree with in Not Just Bikes pessimism.
by smokel | 2025-05-12 18:09:46+00:00
Not an expert in the field, but apparently there has been some research into this. It's called inference-time intervention [1], [2].

[1] "Steering Language Models With Activation Engineering", 2023, https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10248

[2] "Multi-Attribute Steering of Language Models via Targeted Intervention", 2025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12446
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-12 18:10:03+00:00
That may be true overall, but it depends on the tool. I've bought a lot of my tools for a few bucks at farm and estate auctions. I have two large Craftsman adjustable wrenches. The older one, made in the US, is heavier and there's a lot less play in the mechanism, so it's the one I reach for first. That's been typical for me.

Generally, newer tools are lighter, which is nice when you're carrying them around, but sometimes it means they're more fragile. I have a 1955 McCulloch chainsaw, and it's a beast, must weigh 40 pounds and have about 200 parts in it. The carb is a complicated thing with a lot of moving parts, and there's a gearbox between the engine and the chain. But I bought it for $12, cleaned it up a little, got a stuck part in the carb unstuck, and it started. Not bad for a 70-year-old piece of equipment that looked like it'd been gathering dust for years.

My 2024 Stihl is a much better saw. It's far lighter, which is important when you're carrying it all day. It's much simpler, with fewer things that can go wrong with it. It runs higher RPMs, so it cuts wood faster. But there's enough plastic in it that there's no way it's going to be around in 70 years. I'll be happy if I get 10 out of it.

The ideal would be the design quality of the Stihl, with all the legitimate improvements they've made over the decades, with the materials quality and manufacturing care of the McCulloch. That combination is probably available in a high-end line, just not at consumer prices.