MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericb | 2025-06-08 17:12:25+00:00
Is the percentage meaningful, though? If an LLM produces the most interesting, insightful, thought-provoking content of the day, isn't that what the best version of HN would be reading and commenting on?

If I invent the wheel, and have an LLM write 90% of the article from bullet points and edit it down, don't we still want HN discussing the wheel?

Not to say that the current generation of AI isn't often producing boring slop, but there's nothing that says it will remain that way, and a percent-AI assistance seems like the wrong metric to chase to me?
by vpribish | 2025-06-08 17:13:01+00:00
wow, seems he still doesn't get it, maybe he's too wealthy to understand. (this article might actually be satire, i just realized)

exciting, bold proclamations from the techno-king might be really fun for him - but sound awfully different from out here.

In his defense, the people who he pays thought it was just fine, a great idea.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-08 17:13:53+00:00
> Or maybe browsers would just let JavaScript connect to any port, which would be terrifying from a security standpoint.

Isn't this just WebRTC?

Also, why does everything have to be done in a browser? We're talking about name resolution. That's supposed to be done by the OS regardless so you don't have a thousand separate configuration options to change if you want to change your DNS server.
by iamleppert | 2025-06-08 17:14:25+00:00
What do we even need to be sending people into space for? It seems like a lot of savings could be had if we just completely shut down the entire manned space program. Unless there is some direct business case for it, why do it at all? Don't tell me some vague definition of "science". This isn't some new frontier that needs exploring, its well understood at this point. There needs to be a direct benefit to the american tax payer to justify the cost of putting a person up there. I don't see a reason to send people to space, if something needs to be done, it can be automated and sent as an autonomous payload. Sending people to space feels wasteful in the age of robotics, fast data links and autonomous systems. If we can operate a rover on mars, we can do whatever needs to be done in orbit or the moon or deep space, without human aid.

It feels like a vanity and an anachronism to an era from the past. Manned space travel is risky, expensive, environmentally destructive, and for what? For some human being to manually manipulate scientific instruments in orbit that should have been, or could have been automated and get the same results?

Gone are the days where people actually think we could be living in space. From what we know now, not only is it impractical, dangerous, inefficient, its also unhealthy. This isn't a question of some new technology that needs created to support it, it's a limitation of physics and millions of years of evolution on earth.

Send satellites to orbit? Yes. Collect power from space? Yes. Conduct scientific research? Okay. But we don't need to send people to do that anymore. Manned space travel had its place in time, and it no longer makes sense to do it, so lets have the maturity to move on from the past.
by tredre3 | 2025-06-08 17:15:03+00:00
> A full-featured ad blocker (uBlock Origin original, not the neutered Lite version that runs on Chrome now) will intercept requests at the network level and prevent your browser from requesting the advertisers' JavaScript code.

You're trying to imply that ublock lite doesn't do that. It does, including javascript files. The full uBlock does more things to prevent tracking that lite cannot do. But "intercept requests at the network level" isn't one of those things.
by Joker_vD | 2025-06-08 17:15:07+00:00
> most people find it difficult to remember the exact orientation of the frame.

Isn't it Δ∇Λ welded together? The bottom left and right vertices are where the wheels are attached to, the middle bottom point is where the big gear with the pedals is. The lambda is for the front wheel because you wouldn't be able to turn it if it was attached to a delta. Right?

I guess having my first bicycle be a cheap Soviet-era produced one paid off: I spent loads of time fidgeting with the chain tension, and pulling the chain back onto the gears, so I guess I had to stare at the frame way too much to forget even by today the way it looks.
by simonw | 2025-06-08 17:15:25+00:00
I had the LLM write a bash script for me that used my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool - on the basis that it was a neat opportunity to demonstrate another of my own projects.

And honestly, even with LLM assistance getting Image Magick to output a 1200x600 image with two SVGs next to each other that are correctly resized to fill their half of the image sounds pretty tricky. Probably easier (for Claude) to achieve with HTML and CSS.
by awalsh128 | 2025-06-08 17:15:26+00:00
I was not as surprised. It is a lot like the pattern in his previous term with people that he brought on and then had a fallout with and they became the enemy like cabinet members, VP, etc. This second term is markedly different in that he appointed only due hard yes men. I think the only difference is that Musk was very useful for his money and independent sway.
by piva00 | 2025-06-08 17:15:47+00:00
It's quite different if it happens in 2-3 years time or spread across 10-20. You don't want a sizeable percentage of your workforce to lose jobs in a short span, there's no capacity for retraining so many people for them to be productive, governments gets higher dissatisfaction, and a diminished tax base.

The rest getting decent cheaper cars might not be worth the trade-off of also getting a more unstable society.
by josephcsible | 2025-06-08 17:15:50+00:00
> If I check up right now, form the top 10 links in HN right now, it is trivial to distinguish the top-level domain from just the IPv4 or IPv6 address.

Two of the top 10 links in HN right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44215603 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44212446) are to different subdomains of github.io that resolve to the exact same IP addresses, so reverse DNS doesn't tell you which one is being visited.

And you can't even tell the TLD, because the TLD is "io", but the reverse lookup on the IPs will give you a TLD ending in "com".

> Heck, even _for this website itself_ the current IPv4 reverse DNS points to ycombinator.com.

That's because HN isn't behind the kind of CDN I'm talking about. But a lot are. Is your argument "since your ISP can see some of the sites you're going to, we should remove all protections and let them see all sites you're going to?"
by univacky | 2025-06-08 17:16:00+00:00
An aircraft on a flight may not maintain the same identifier/callsign for the entirety of that one flight.

Famously, President Richard Nixon departed Washington DC on Air Force One bound for California. In flight over Missouri, his resignation took effect and Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. When that happened, the callsign of the flight changed to SAM 2700.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One#SAM_27000
by analog31 | 2025-06-08 17:16:04+00:00
The odd thing is that if our industry has failed, so has Japan, Korea, and Europe, because they all make electrics, and we can buy them in the US.

I don't know the extent to which demand plays a role. Ford makes F150s because people buy F150s. They have to be forced to make smaller cars, and lose money on them.
by hinkley | 2025-06-08 17:17:38+00:00
Fatal errors tend to blow up in production rather than test.

One of the simplest solutions for detecting cyclic graphs is instead of collecting a lookup table or doing something non-concurrent like marking the nodes, is to count nodes and panic if the encountered set is more than an order of magnitude more than you expected.

I came onto a project that had done that before and it blew up during my tenure. The worst case graph size was several times the expected case, and long term customers were growing their data sets vertically rather than horizontally (eg, ever notice how much friction there is to making new web pages versus cramming more data into the existing set?) and now instead of 10x never happening it was happening every Tuesday.

I was watching the same thing play out on another project recently but it got cancelled before we hit that threshold for anything other than incorrect queries.
by nine_k | 2025-06-08 17:17:49+00:00
Have you tried giving a kid a vector-drawing tool?

I did that to my daughter when she was not even 6 years old. The results were somehow similar: https://photos.app.goo.gl/XSLnTEUkmtW2n7cX8

(Now she's much better, but prefers raster tools, e.g. https://www.deviantart.com/sofiac9/art/Ivy-with-riding-gear-...)
by zahlman | 2025-06-08 17:19:51+00:00
> A normal person spending as much time as they like gets you the pictures that I linked to in the previous post, because they don't really know what a bike is. 45 examples of what normal people think a bike looks like: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/

A normal person given the ability to consult a picture of a bike while drawing will do much better. An LLM agent can effectively refresh its memory (or attempt to look up information on the Internet) any time it wants.
by brabel | 2025-06-08 17:19:54+00:00
Exactly, this thread is full of ignorant comments. I was talking about a certain class of race conditions that can be completely prevented in some languages, like Rust (through its aliasing rules that just make it impossible to mutate things from different threads simultaneously, among other things) and languages like Pony, for example, as the language uses the Actor model for concurrency, which means it has no locks at all (it doesn't need them), though I mentioned Dart because Dart Isolates look a lot like Actors (they are single-threaded but can send messages and receive messages from other "actors", similarly to JS workers).
by leakycap | 2025-06-08 17:19:59+00:00
I use a meeting-minder that is LLM-backed. We use it specifically to avoid pro/con bedlam in meetings with opinionated and excellent engineers and devs who think they have the right answer, but we need to settle and support one.

The LLM-led pro/con discussion has been extremely helpful to curtail individuals in meetings from taking over a discussion when pros and cons come up, which has helped reign in some valued and valuable but ... sometimes unhelpful teammates.
Show HN: Chaum Pedersen ZK Protocol Using gRPC
by tryzs | 2025-06-08 17:20:44+00:00
Here is the protocol worklow. Let us define g as the generator of the multiplicative cyclic group G of order q. Let us define p = 2q + 1 (a safe prime). The values p, g, a1, b1, c1 are publicly available to the prover and the verifier. a1 = g^a mod q b1 = g^b mod q c1 = g^ab mod q where a and b are cryptographically secure randomly generated numbers. prover wants to prove he knows a secret x. the prover computes y1 = g^x mod q and y2 = b1^x mod q. the prover sends y1 and y2 to the verifier. The verifier then computes a challenge value s and sends it to the prover. the prover then computes z = (x + as) mod q. the prover sends z to the verifier. The verifier then does two checks, g^z mod q = a1^s * y1 mod q and b1^z mod q = c1^s * y2 mod q. If the checks are satisfied that means the prover has proved that he indeed knows x. It can be mathematically proven that these checks are indeed true if and only if the prover knows a valid x.
by mplanchard | 2025-06-08 17:20:46+00:00
This is tangential to the discussion at hand, but a point I haven’t seen much in these conversations is the odd impedance mismatch between knowing you’re interacting with a tool but being asked to interact with it like a human.

I personally am much less patient and forgiving of tools that I use regularly than I am of my colleagues (as I would hope is true for most of us), but it would make me uncomfortable to “treat” an LLM with the same expectations of consistency and “get out of my way” as I treat vim or emacs, even though I intellectually know it is also a non-thinking machine.

I wonder about the psychological effects on myself and others long term of this kind of language-based machine interaction: will it affect our interactions with other people, or influence how we think about and what we expect from our tools?

Would be curious if your experience gives you any insight into this.
by antisthenes | 2025-06-08 17:20:59+00:00
I don't think I have driven my car 400 miles in a single leg.

400 miles is the range where I

1. Seriously consider flying

2. Plan it in such a way that I can have lunch as a long break between driving sessions.

3. Rent a car and carpool with other people if it's a road-trip type thing.

It just so happens that my friends are either all within 150 miles of me, or so far away that driving isn't a real option.
by zinekeller | 2025-06-08 17:21:07+00:00
> A normal middlebox can't even tell the difference between DoH and DoT because they both just look like TLS.

You forgot the "let's intercept in a public place (e.g. public Wi-Fi hotspots)" one where blocking port 853 is super trivial while blocking port 443... is impossible. Sure, Google DNS will be blocked easily but there a lot of DoH providers!
by Scrapemist | 2025-06-08 17:21:47+00:00
When it comes to risk-reward decisions, I think humans are pretty bad at this. Individual circumstances often influence decisions more than statistical reasoning. The chance that a human will need the expertise of a health professional at some point in their life is close to 100%, but it’s impossible to predict when and in what capacity.

I baffled that you think a society is better off leaving it up to individual choice whether to have any healthcare at all. That’s actually one of the main reasons why healthcare is so expensive and out of reach for many people in the US: leaving healthcare decisions to individuals leads to fragmented risk pools, higher administrative costs, and generally worse outcomes.
by imiric | 2025-06-08 17:22:10+00:00
Language matters. Using language that accurately describes concepts and processes is important. It might not matter to a language model which only sees patterns, but it matters to humans.

So when we label the technical processes and algorithms these tools use as something that implies a far greater level of capability, we're only doing a disservice to ourselves. Maybe not to those of us who are getting rich on the market hype that these labels fuel, but certainly to the general population that doesn't understand how the technology works. If we claim that these tools have super-human intelligence, yet they fail basic tasks, how do we explain this? More importantly, if we collectively establish a false sense of security and these tools are adopted in critical processes that human lives depend on, who is blamed when they fail?

> This statement is factually correct and yet the equivalent of describing a computer as nothing more than a collection of gates and wires so shouldn't be discussed at a higher level of abstraction.

No, because we have descriptive language to describe a collection of gates and wires by what it enables us to do: perform arbitrary computations, hence a "computer". These were the same tasks that humans used to do before machines took over, so the collection of gates and wires is just an implementation detail.

Pattern matching, prediction, data generation, etc. are the tasks that modern AI systems allow us to do, yet you want us to refer to this as "intelligence" for some reason? That makes no sense to me. Maybe we need new higher level language to describe these systems, but "intelligence", "thinking", "reasoning" and "wit" shouldn't be part of it.
by joshuajooste05 | 2025-06-08 17:22:17+00:00
Does anyone have any thoughts on privacy/safety regarding what he said about GPT memory.

I had heard of prompt injection already. But, this seems different, completely out of humans control. Like even when you consider web search functionality, he is actually right, more and more, users are losing control over context.

Is this dangerous atm? Do you think it will become more dangerous in the future when we chuck even more data into context?
by josephcsible | 2025-06-08 17:22:46+00:00
> Normal people have no idea that this even exists, much less how to do it, so they're still having all their queries routed to Cloudflare by default.

This goes the other way too. Normal people don't know about DNS at all, and without DoH, are leaking all of their DNS queries to their ISP without knowing.

> A normal middlebox can't even tell the difference between DoH and DoT because they both just look like TLS.

DoT uses port 853, which can just be blocked wholesale. It's not feasible to do the same for DoH since it uses port 443.

> And fallback isn't required in either case. If some network is blocking encrypted DNS, the client device can be configured to fail rather than use the insecure DNS, at which point the user knows that the network is adversarial and can switch to a VPN or a cellular connection etc.

It can be, but it's not the default on any mainstream system. Normal people won't change defaults, and they deserve privacy too.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-08 17:23:16+00:00
Sorry if that was confusing. I was trying to communicate a generality about multiple very different means of accessing the memory: the way we currently build GPUs is a local maximum for performance. Changing anything, even putting dedicated memory on sockets, has a dramatic and negative impact on performance. The latest board I've worked on saw the layout team working overtime to place the memory practically on top of the chip and they were upset it couldn't be closer.

Also, other systems have similar technologies, I'm just mentioning Nvidia as an example.
by sarchertech | 2025-06-08 17:23:17+00:00
Almost none of what you said about the past is true. Automated looms, and all of the other automated machinery that replaced artisans over the course of the industrial revolution produced items of much better quality than what human craftsman could produce by the time it started to be used commercially because of precision and repeatability. They did have quantitative measurements of quality for textiles and other goods and the automated processes exceeded human craftsman at those metrics.

Software is also not remotely similar to textiles. A subtle bug in the textile output itself won’t cause potentially millions of dollars in damages, they way a bug in an automated loom itself or software can.

No current technology is anywhere close to being able to automate 50% of PRs on any non trivial application (that’s not close to the same as saying that 50% of PRs merged at your startup happens to have an agent as author). To assume that current models will be able to get near 100% without massive model improvements is just that—an assumption.

My point about synthetic data is that we need orders of magnitude more data with current technology and the only way we will get there is with synthetic data. Which is much much harder to do with software applications than with chess games.

The point isn’t that we need a quantitative measure of software in order for AI to be useful, but that we need a quantitative measure in order for synthetic data to be useful to give us our orders of magnitude more training data.
by ednite | 2025-06-08 17:24:49+00:00
An amusing Sunday read.

It reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a friend who went on a family road trip and decided to turn the ride into a Spanish practice session for the kids. Seemed innocent enough… until they started using an AI chatbot to help with translations.

At first, it was helpful. Then it got creative. Very creative.

Suddenly, “Where is the bathroom?” became something like " follow the dark path to the eternal chambers of mystery" “And “Please pass the salt” morphed into something about offering sacred minerals to the goddess priestess.

Needless to say, I strongly advised them to stick to Google Translate next time. Sometimes you want a translator, not a hallucinated poet on your road trip.

Thanks for sharing.
by to11mtm | 2025-06-08 17:24:55+00:00
> seems like a 75mile battery + gas is both more practical and requires less infra

I think it's hard to economically hit that and give a car that folks are OK driving within limitations.

Mazda tried to do a range extender setup on the MX-30, however it didn't sell that well and my understanding is the range extender wasn't good for hills or highway cases.

Non Range Extender setups, actually typically work better if you're stuck in gas mode than a range extender, mostly because you can use the mechanical energy from the ICE more directly than the losses of something feeding energy directly into the drivetrain. However, once you hit that point anything after 2 or 3 KWh of battery is just dead weight on the car. I'm guessing that's why even the Prius prime is only around 40 miles of range.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the US addiction to huge vehicles (which need even bigger batteries...)

Edit:

Seeing the edit of what I'm replying to, I'll add that yes PHEVs are probably a 'better' option than BEVs for many people, but the cost of a PHEV can be as much or more than a BEV. Look at a Chevrolet Equinox EV vs a Rav4 Prime. The Rav4 Prime is 10K more expensive. Happy to consider a different comparison here but overall nobody has figured out how to make a PHEV that is cheaper than a similar EV.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-08 17:25:10+00:00
Nobody is forcing anybody to live anywhere. The problem right now is that you have areas where 90% of the land is zoned exclusively for single family homes and the areas that aren't have already been developed, so there is nowhere that new higher density development is allowed.

How about we make it so that only 50% of the residential land is zoned for single family homes and let people build whatever they want on the rest of it? The newly rezoned land will be worth more, so if you want to live in a single family home, sell yours at a profit and buy one in the area still zoned for it.
by II2II | 2025-06-08 17:28:10+00:00
> I remember feeding disk number 27 out of 33 only to get a "bad sector" error an hour into a software install.

I love this fixation on floppy disks. The article likely brought it up because it is a recognizably obsolete technology, but didn't cite why (or even if) it was a problem. I'm sorry, but a nightmarish software installation scenario doesn't cut it. It is highly unlikely that they are doing in situ software installations from floppy diskettes.

The danger in such armchair quarterbacking is that it undermines the authority of the agencies that are in charge of making decisions. If there are legitimate reasons to question their authority, by all means do so. Yet, when doing so, understand their requirements and provide evidence as to why their authority should be questioned. Also be prepared to be unsatisfied by some of their answers due to differences in perspectives.
by msabramo | 2025-06-08 17:29:13+00:00
I did this partly to build a hopefully useful tool and partly to explore what one can build with AI-assisted coding tools.

The tool is a bit rough. It can probably use more features and probably needs some bug fixes. A lot of both of those can be done with AI-assisted coding, but AI-assisted coding still needs human ideas to kickstart the process. This is why I posted it, I’m hoping to get a bit of interest and that people will think of interesting ideas and that it will help drive the MCP ecosystem forward.
by zinekeller | 2025-06-08 17:29:32+00:00
> How does this prevent a random application from making an HTTPS request to a random hard-coded IP address? Similarly, how does this prevent an application from making an HTTPS request to a generic host (e.g., api.example.com)?

I think that, franky, even without DoH, that ship has sailed. WhatsApp and Telegram (to name a few) is known to embed IP addresses into their applications. It is silly to assume that not standardizing DoH will not result in the same situation, and I imagine there are custom DNS bootstraping happening, for good or evil.