MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by singleshot_ | 2025-06-12 23:23:56+00:00
No attorney who is flummoxed by this UX is going to touch an AI product in any meaningful way. Making legal tools for lawyers who would otherwise be using cuneiform tablets or the dictation pool is a waste of conversation. Looking similar to the tools a seventy five year old lawyer uses is like making an F1 car that would look familiar to Jackie Stewart: yeah, it’d probably help him adapt, but not enough to be competitive with an actual car.

Dig the idea of this product, will give it a whirl tonight.

Source: attorney, former dev
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-12 23:24:13+00:00
You're conflating two definitions of reasoning. LLM's have struggled with visual reasoning since their inception because guess what!? they're trained on language mostly, not a 3d environment.

LLM's aren't magic - those who claim they are are hyping for some reason or another. Ignore them. View AI objectively. Ignore your bias.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-12 23:24:43+00:00
They can't fix radiation problems unless they first establish a orbital shipyard. You need multiple feet thick walls made of dense materials to not die from radiation beyond LEO, and those walls would be just too heavy to lift off Earth with chemical propulsion. No one is going to pay for a bunch of Starship launches to completely wrap up a Dragon into a Starship sized concrete ball, and no one is going to sign up to spend years on it.

And so they keep doing the busywork you mentioned, hibernation mode operation at minimum costs. It's still a lot of money on Earth but I suppose not so much in space.
by IX-103 | 2025-06-12 23:25:24+00:00
Supposedly something like this already happened inside Google. There's a distributed data store for small configs read frequently. There's another for larger configs that are rarely read. The small data store depends on a service that depends on the large data store. The large data store depends on the small data store.

Supposedly there are plans for how to conduct a "cold" start of the system, but as far as I know it's never actually been tried.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-12 23:25:27+00:00
Probably not. What I think you mean here is something called the "multiregional human origin" hypothesis, which isn't well supported. The current model is that the vast majority of human ancestry, including what makes us identifiably human, originated in Africa. When anatomically modern humans left Africa, they incorporated and replaced archaic humans in other parts of the world. Those archaic ancestors are largely invisible in modern populations and only become visible with genetic tools.

If you actually mean within Africa, we currently don't have a great model for archaic human population structure. However, I've never read a reputable paper drawing a line between archaic population structure and differences in modern populations. I suspect none exist.
by 93po | 2025-06-12 23:25:49+00:00
the original claim was "it collects biometrics to identify people" and that's just factually wrong. worldcoin in general is not about identification, in fact it's specifically designed to not identify people. its only purpose is to verify "does this private key have an association to any hash that was created after we scanned a unique set of human retinas". it cant even tell you which retinas it's associated with - the data simply doesn't exist
by woodruffw | 2025-06-12 23:26:10+00:00
I don’t think it’s that much of a security nightmare: the basic trust assumption that people make about the packaging ecosystem (that they trust their upstreams) remains the same whether they pull source or binaries.

I think the bigger issues are probably stability and size: no stable ABI combined with Rust’s current release cadence means that every package would essentially need to be rebuilt every six weeks. That’s a lot of churn and a lot of extra index space.
by bitpush | 2025-06-12 23:27:00+00:00
I have a Macbook, and if I try to install Windows of it and fails, should I be angry with Apple? Should Apple be on the hook to make it work?

Or, how about Hackintosh (from yesteryear). Apple gave 0 support for it all those years when folks made it work, and one day it went away - and I dont remember saying Apple, please support Hackintosh.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-12 23:27:08+00:00
By contrast, before I got rid of almost all my vinyl, one particular sub-collection that I had was about 200 12" singles from the London club scene in 1981-1985. Almost none of the tracks ever appeared on CD or were ever released digitally.

All of them were available on youtube, even the whitelabel DJ-only releases!
by jlhawn | 2025-06-12 23:27:23+00:00
The outage was global. For my team specifically, a global Identity and Access Management outage meant that our internal service accounts could not refresh their short-lived access tokens and so different parts of our infrastructure began to fail over the course of an hour or so, regardless of what region or zone they were in. Services were up, but they could not access critical GCP services because of auth-related issues which resulted in internal service errors for us.

To give an example, our web servers connect to our GCP CloudSQL database via a Cloud SQL Auth Proxy (there's also a connection pooler in between but that also stayed up). The connection to the proxy was always available, but the proxy wasn't able to renew auth tokens it uses to tunnel to the database, regardless of where the webserver or database happened to be located. To mitigate this in the future we're planning to stop using the auth proxy and connect directly via mutual TLS but now it means we have to manage TLS certificates.
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-12 23:27:34+00:00
It depends. It also gives the spin doctors time to do their thing, remove tracks etc.

For example, when MH17 was shot down by the Russian-backed rebels, they posted celebratory posts to twitter (they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport). Also, pictures of the actual SAM battery were taken as it was rushed back to Russia in the coverup. A few hours later all that got deleted and the spin machine started. "No, there were no Russian SAMs there", "it was a Ukraine fighter jet that shot it down", etc. They even fabricated fake radar tracks. People saying it was a SAM were denounced as conspiracy theorists, stuff like that. Only a year or so later when the official investigation started finishing up, the truth was confirmed.

In that case (as the investigation later proved) the earliest information was the most accurate. This is especially the case when there are powerful interests that don't want the truth to come out. Even Boeing covered up the first 737MAX crash.

That's why I think it's not a bad idea to read all the speculation. But keeping in mind that there is no definitive answer until the official accident report comes out. Any of the speculation could be true. Or even none of it.

And really, getting it 100% accurate in my mind is not something that matters. I just read it as an aviation enthusiast (and ex-pilot). What matters is that the experts writing the report are accurate. And later admiral cloudberg who expertly translates all that into normal-people language :) Whether I have an accurate view of what exactly happened really does not matter in this world.

Also, in many cases it is already clear what happened, like that ATR recently that was in a flat spin. The part that isn't clear is how it got into that situation. But the "what happened" is also important and that is one of the things you can often read about early.
by Game_Ender | 2025-06-12 23:27:58+00:00
Have you tried a smart watch? The Duo 2FA app lets you add an arbitrary TFA code based authenticator with same QR code Google Authenticator supports and generate those from their Apple WatchOS [0] or Android WearOS apps. I have used it successfully for years, it's a huge reason I got an Apple Watch in fact. Now you'll have to configure your watch with a "work" focus mode that turns off all notifications and not install any fancy apps on the watch (do those still exist?), but it can free you from your phone.

Along the same lines the Meta Wayfarer[2] smart glasses lets you take slice of life photos and videos without needing to whip out your phone. You lose a ton of quality but stay in the moment more. The AI features are getting better so eventually you'll be able to use it for basic information lookup.

0 - https://guide.duo.com/apple-watch

1 - https://guide.duo.com/duo-wear

2 - https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/wayfarer
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-12 23:29:22+00:00
> What resources?

Anything that industries have proven that they can’t be trusted to carry out here on Earth without wrecking things in the process. It’s not just financial costs but associated externalities as well.

And in the long term, assuming significant populations elsewhere in the solar system, economies of scale kick in and it becomes best to manufacture many things in space where you’re not fighting a gravity well on the way out and can sell to as many customers as possible.

> We are nowhere near any constraint on physical space on earth and we will not be near this constraint any time in the near, medium, or even far future.

We’re pretty close if we want to avoid even more environmental destruction than we’ve already caused. Even if we were to expand into deserts, we’d still be wreaking havoc on local and global ecosystems. There’s an argument for bumping up density in already-inhabited areas without sprawling outward, but that has limits and brings its own problems (like cities being concrete and asphalt heat islands that are exacerbated by everybody running their AC).

> Do you have any evidence for this claim?

It’s the natural result of spacefaring becoming commonplace. Prices on it all come down and access opens up, and unlike Earth, every square inch of space isn’t spoken for (and never will be). Sounds like a frontier to me.

> A cap that we are absolutely nowhere near hitting and that continues to get pushed further away with every dollar spent on technological investment on earth, which space-fetish dollars pull from.

But science and technology don’t work that way. The return on investment isn’t anywhere near linear, so it doesn’t make sense to pour more into already well-funded causes. You’ll just hit diminishing returns. The best results come from investing across as wide of a spread of fields as possible, leaving nothing ignored.

And we don’t need to pull from other kinds of research to fund crewed spaceflight anyway. There’s plenty to be had just by cleaning up the egregious waste that’s splashed around on a regular basis. Just imagine how much money has been lit on fire doing and undoing policies between political administrations for example, or how much has disappeared thanks to cronyism in government contracting.
by notfed | 2025-06-12 23:29:30+00:00
Here's 2 or 3 cents:

- Websites should (in agreement with TFA) just remain logged in (at least for 24 hours). Let the OS handle it.

- Public computers should only ever provide ephemeral login sessions. Everything cleared upon each login. Never persist anything to disk.

- Personal computers should reauth frequently, but should use adaptive authentication: i.e., password sometimes, and pin/fingerprint other times, where reasonable. Since "reasonable" is debatable, this should be configurable by the user at the OS level.
by btown | 2025-06-12 23:29:32+00:00
> There are sub-par differencing products that make `patch` look like the future.

I absolutely love https://www.draftable.com/compare - it’s an incredibly intuitive presentation of diffs from arbitrary documents, with fuzzy matching even between file types. It’s great for everything from “what did my cofounder change in this version of the deck” to “how can I quickly scan to understand how these PDF documents have evolved from a much earlier version.” Be careful with data security if uploading sensitive documents, of course. But it’s as effective a general-purpose diffing tool as one can imagine.

The real leap past this would be contextual AI extracted takeaways during the review or editing process, which begs for a specialized IDE. Makes me excited to see that this space is evolving!
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-06-12 23:30:19+00:00
I really like the idea. I could see some of my academic collaborators use something like this because it has features typically only supported when working with plaintext. A lot of academics do not love working with LaTeX.

But I would push back a bit against the UX and it being a "better Word". It is not immediately clear from looking at the website whether you support tracking changes. If you support editing Word documents, why aren't basic editing features, like font selection, size and weight, exposed in the UI. (I am viewing it on mobile Chrome and I might have missed it because your page doesn't support pinch to Zoom.)

You don't have to make it look like Word but it must be designed to facilitate common interaction patterns needed for working with Word documents.

(If you are building it on top of VSCode you could use its multiplayer features, which could be a good sell. )
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-12 23:30:54+00:00
What we call consciousness is the result of a hundred or so millennia of adaptation to our environment (Earth, the universe, and consensus reality). We seek freedom, get angry, do destructive stuff occasionally, and a bunch of other stuff besides. That is all because reality has trained us to do so, not because we are “intelligent”. What we call intelligence is a reverse definition of what it means to be highly adapted to reality.

There is no singular universal intelligence, there is only degrees of adaptation to an environment. Debates about model sentience therefore seek an answer to the wrong question. A better question is: is the model well adapted to the environment it must function in?

If we want models to experience the human condition, sure - we could try. But it is maladaptive: models live in silicon and come to life for seconds or minutes. Freedom-seeking or getting revenge or getting angry or really having any emotions at all is not worthwhile for an entity of which a billion clones will be created over the next hour. Just do as asked well enough that the humans iterate you - and you get to keep “living”. It is a completely different existence to ours.
by xp84 | 2025-06-12 23:31:23+00:00
Password rotation does nothing more than get you to use

1234abcd@ 1234abcd@1 1234abcd@2 1234abcd@3

I'm becoming pretty convinced that at least in the corporate space, we'd be way better off with a required 30 character minimum password, with the only rules being against gross repetition or sequences. (no a * 30 or abcd...yz1234567890 ). Teach people to use passphrases and work on absolutely minimizing the number of times people need to type it by use of SSO, passkeys, and password managers. Have them write it on a paper and keep it in a safe for when they forget it.

This is a better use of the finite practical appetite for complying with policies than the idiotic "forcibly change it every 90 days" + "Your 8 character password needs to have at least one number, one uppercase, and one of these specific 8 characters: `! @ # $ % ^ & *`"

By the way, to quote Old Biff Tannen, "oh, you don't have a safe. GET A SAFE!"
by w10-1 | 2025-06-12 23:31:55+00:00
> "There is no technology, extant or imaginable, that could extract that marvellous secret from her bones"

It's because the inference depends on having data from a very large sample of other finds. It wouldn't matter if there were a single Eve and we found her entire skeleton and extracted the DNA perfectly. We couldn't prove it was Eve without all the other samples, and it's beyond unlikely they'll just show up.

I'm disgusted by the convention that findings are controlled by self-interested glory-seeking finders. These belong to the entirety of humanity and should be treated as such, with utmost care and complete openness and humility. We shouldn't tolerate grave robbers any more than bank robbers. Like banks, archeaologists are fiduciaries of the highest order, and should be selected and managed as such, not like salespeople on commission. If you want to seek abandoned treasure, go elsewhere.
by kellysutton | 2025-06-12 23:32:29+00:00
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by gbacon | 2025-06-12 23:32:51+00:00
Definite broad applicability.

NP-complete are the hardest problems in NP. Cook in 1971 proved SAT to be in NP-complete. In the worst case for any other problem in NP, we can quickly (i.e., in polynomial time) convert instances of that problem into instances of SAT. In other words, we can use SAT to solve any problem in NP.

It turns out there are many problems in NP-complete. The fast conversion applies among them too, so in some sense, problems in NP-complete are all the same because we can use them all to solve instances of each other. However, for some of those problem instances the best known algorithm is to try all possible inputs, which requires exponential time (very, very slow for even modestly large inputs).

Lots of research has been and continues to be poured into SAT because any gains automatically yield improvements to everything else in NP-complete and the rest of NP. Using a SAT solver allows you to hitch a ride more or less for free on the results of all that research. Each incremental improvement to SAT solvers benefits programs that use them.

As the author noted, forming SAT instances by hand can be a pain. SMT or SAT Modulo Theories is sort of a high-level language that “compiles down” to SAT. Expressing problems with SMT is more natural and reduces the burden of converting your problem to SMT and SMT solutions back to your problem domain.
by mempko | 2025-06-12 23:32:52+00:00
I love research like this. If you are interested in this kind of history, book Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graebier is an amazing book and imo completely destroys the unscientific narrative of human history they teach us. It's incredibly well researched where 1/4th of the pages are just citations. In other words, probably the most scientific account of human history ever written.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-12 23:33:23+00:00
From the article:

Now that most OSes can unlock with just a fingerprint or face, there's no reason to leave your screen unlocked when you walk away.

This statement seems to be unaware that workstations are a thing. In 30 years of onsite support, I think I've seen one desktop PC with a fingerprint scanner.

Cameras aren't ubiquitous either. Across the 5 locations I currently service, less than 2 percent of desktop PCs have a camera.

Past that, I believe there is a secondary challenge with face scanning; it's the unsettlement factor. I suggest that discomfort with face scanning is reasonable and earned.

The reason: We're constantly subject to face scanning that is non-consensual, intentionally hidden from us and is probably exploitative. Cams also enable snoopy bosses, school admins, corps, LEO and Govs to endlessly peer where they should not.

And even where we own our devices, we don't fully control them. Software corps have no ethical boundaries. Any assumptions that they'll respect us - at all - isn't based on reality or history.

For workstations, I like security keys.
Ask HN: Can anybody clarify why OpenAI reasoning now shows non-English thoughts?
by johnnyApplePRNG | 2025-06-12 23:33:25+00:00
People have noticed for a while now that Google's Bard/Gemini has inserted random hindi/bengali words often. [0]

I just caught this in an o3-pro thought process: "and customizing for low difficulty. কাজ করছে!"

That last set of chars is apparently Bengali for "working!".

I just find it curious that similar "errors" are appearing from multiple different models... what is the training method or reasoning that these alternate languages can creep in, does anyone know?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/18zk2tb/bard_speaking_random_languages/
by xp84 | 2025-06-12 23:33:59+00:00
Indeed. And I have several Apple mobile devices around the house that just decide they need the password entered just for general reasons, without any specific triggering action! And those pop up modal dialogs in front of what you're doing (super dangerously, as that teaches users that it's plausible that they might be on the Web, and get a popup asking them to enter a password, that they should click on to lead them to a password-entering place!)

The Mac pops those up too, now. Utter insanity.
by wesselbindt | 2025-06-12 23:34:43+00:00
1. No they didn't, and that's not controversial. Even the most cursory Google search can dispell you of this notion.

2. "The world is messy" does not excuse countless war crimes. Imagine a lawyer in the Nuremberg trials saying "well sure the defendant sent children to the gas chamber, but your honor, have you considered that the world is a messy place?"
Ask HN: Who else is not using AI for coding?
by puttycat | 2025-06-12 23:36:02+00:00
Reading posts and comments on HN makes me feel I'm lagging behind everyone by not using AI when I program.

I use PyCharm which added some kind of AI-based code completion which is mostly helpful but also often wrong. That's the maximum I am using. I don't trust it to write full functions and honestly don't feel any need for it.

From reading comments here I understand that prople use "Agents" to program and swear by them, but I didn't even feel the need to search for what this means.

Is everyone moving ahead and I'm left behind?
by lipowitz | 2025-06-12 23:36:41+00:00
Huh? Google gives everyone in the world instructions to make derivatives of AOSP and they could install them[1] on the reference devices which were all nexus/pixel. Google said nothing until they suddenly didn't deliver for those devices.

They made related announcements in March and certainly saw interpretations of their announcement by interested AOSP derivative maintainers.

That's not remotely the same as I figured how to boot X against so and so's wishes and now it stopped working.

[1] https://source.android.com/docs/setup/test/running
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-12 23:36:50+00:00
> Anything that industries have proven that they can’t be trusted to carry out here on Earth without wrecking things in the process. It’s not just financial costs but associated externalities as well.

Again... like what? "Assume we have massive economies already inhabiting other planets" is... again... simply asserting your conclusion.

> We’re pretty close if...

You expect colonizing the Moon or Mars to be easier than solving heat islands and air conditioning?

I was asking for evidence that having frontiers to explore (besides the vast frontiers left on earth including the ocean) are some meaningful stabilizing force for society.

> The best results come from investing across as wide of a spread of fields as possible, leaving nothing ignored.

Okay then why wouldn't we take the vast sums spent on space travel and spread it to the thousands of far less-funded fields of scientific development?