MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeffhuys | 2025-06-05 17:09:58+00:00
I think this might be a reaction to the previous moderation which seemed to be extremely biased. The moderation that’s currently in place seems much less so, however some people seem to argue it’s now the same, just the other way around.

In my opinion a free-for-all is what the online world needs. But it’s just that, an opinion. Feel free to not participate. I’m interested in what you do participate in, except for HN, though - is there something better that doesn’t ban me for defending Elon, for instance? To put question marks by global policy? etc etc. That’s at least as popular as X is? We can just talk to huge names there, and call them out on their bullshit, if they spew it. That’s unbeatable.
by Teever | 2025-06-05 17:09:59+00:00
I don't think it'll be straight forward as the Anna Karenina principle.

While a lot of physical characteristics are indicative of some sort of underlying health defect and those defects can have effects on IQ/personality and humans are very evolved to detect these things, that doesn't mean that the absence of these defects through genetic modification will necessarily lead to similar looking people.

For an example of this take a look at the picture of The Martians[0], a group of individuals considered to be astoundingly intelligent. Despite coming from the same time and place and small ethnic group they bear a passing resemblance and many of them look quite different.

Now this doesn't get into the possibility that humans will use genetic modification to impart superficial aesthetic choices on their children that will be subject to the fleeting whims of fashion as we're already seeing with cosmetic surgery and injectable fillers/botox that kind of stuff will be subject to the cyclical nature of fashion/style and not intrinsic to the any sort of physiognomy.

If anything we're likely to see people who look radically different than any traditional expectations of beauty and the traditional correlations between appearance and intelligence will be totally out the window. Sooner or later we'll be able to create people who have feathers instead of hair and someone (probably the kind of person who currently has gauge earrings, split tongues, and eyeball tattoos) will decide that this is what they want for their kids.

There isn't going to be clean mapping between intelligence and someone who has feathers for hair, or purple eyes, or three breasts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
by microtonal | 2025-06-05 17:10:27+00:00
The sideloading restriction is easily solved by installing GrapheneOS, which has all the security benefits of Google's Android on Pixel.

In parallel, Google has rolled out its Play Integrity API, which allows developers to limit app functionality when sideloaded, effectively pushing users to install apps only through the Google Play Store.

The issue is even bigger. Even when using Play Store on GrapheneOS with a locked bootloader (which is the recommended configuration by the GrapheneOS project), Google refuses to let apps use the hardware attestation support in the Play Integrity API [1], which blocks certain banking apps, Google Wallet, etc.

It's insane that Google lets Android vendors that have a lot of dubious security practices (months-late security updates, etc.) pass, while an OS that implements more security mitigations than PixelOS and is sometimes faster than Google rolling out security updates is excluded.

The move, developed in partnership with Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency, is designed to prevent fraud and malware-enabled scams.

Time to block the Facebook/Instagram apps then, given https://localmess.github.io ?

[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112878070618462132
by Game_Ender | 2025-06-05 17:10:46+00:00
I am not sure there is too much value for this article for the typical hacker news conversation on LLM based tooling. Here we generally focus on if the tooling is effective, and can it be used make software quicker or more cheaply. The problem is the author is opposed using the cutting edge models on privacy and ethics grounds. So they say:

> I have woefully little experience with these tools.

> I do not want to be using the cloud versions of these models with their potentially hideous energy demands; I’d like to use a local model. But there is obviously not a nicely composed way to use local models like this.

> The models and tools that people are raving about are the big, expensive, harmful ones. If I proved to myself yet again that a small model with bad tools was unpleasant to use, I wouldn’t really be addressing my opponents’ views.

Then without having any real practical experience with the cutting edge tooling they predict:

> As I have written about before, I believe the mania will end. There will then be a crash, and a “winter”. But, as I may not have stressed sufficiently, this crash will be the biggest of its kind — so big, that it is arguably not of a kind at all. The level of investment in these technologies is bananas and the possibility that the investors will recoup their investment seems close to zero.

I think a more accurate take is this will be like self driving, huge investments, many more losers thank winners, and it will take longer than all the boosters think. But in the end we did get actual self driving cars, but this time it's with LLMs it is something that anyone can use by clicking a link vs. waiting for lots of cars to be built and deployed.
by cannonpr | 2025-06-05 17:10:57+00:00
I don’t disagree, and I also have some unique genetic conditions that I won’t get into, they are depressing. However I will say that humanity is peppered with radical choices that did a lot of damage because we “thought” we understood, and we are barely scratching the surface of how life really works, epigenetics alone is barely explored. There likely is no gene for the human soul, there likely is an incredibly complex systemic interaction…
by julienchastang | 2025-06-05 17:11:06+00:00
I did not read the entire blog post (it is pretty long), but from what I read, I actually disagree with the author. You want to provide the right amount of prompting, but not too much either. Also the LLM can derive a huge amount of information from the context you give it (e.g., you don't have to say it is looking at a k8s log, it will figure it out immediately from the information entered). However, in other situations, you do want to be more specific. Good prompting ends up being as much of an art as a science which you realize as you gain experience with it.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-05 17:11:16+00:00
What a weird thing to write a blog post about now. Did someone forget to hit publish on this back when it was written? The programme in question, announced a year and four months ago: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/02/piloting-new-ways-to...

AFAIK this only applies within Singapore (not sure if this applies to visiting devices) for apps requesting certain permissions (RECEIVE_SMS, READ_SMS, BIND_NOTIFICATIONS, and accessibility) downloaded outside of app stores (F-Droid is fine) and opened directly on the device (adb install is fine).

You can probably bypass the restriction by just disabling Play Protect if you don't want Google to tell you what you can and cannot install, but I'm not in Singapore so I can't confirm if that will work or not. That said, Google has made it impossible to disable Play Protect while on a call, that's probably a smart move.

Based on this article from the Singapore police, the approach doesn't seem to have helped much: https://www.police.gov.sg/media-room/news/20250417_police_ad...

> In some cases, before downloading the malicious APK file, victims would also be guided to disable Google Play Protect that helps to prevent harmful downloads. Once Google Play Protect is disabled, victims would not receive alerts that there is malware introduced into their mobile phones. Victims may also be asked to download Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications from Google Play Store which would facilitate scammers’ connection to their Android device. Scammers would then be able to bypass the banking anti-malware measures and remotely access the victims’ banking accounts with the phished ibanking login credentials.
by shadowgovt | 2025-06-05 17:11:46+00:00
Sure, but by the same logic old roads were safer because we used horses on them instead of cars and a horse won't generally plow into the oncoming lane if you fall asleep at the reigns.

It feels like this analysis really downplays some advantages making sandboxes and Windows defender and realtime protection got us in the average case (even if in the edge case someone can get hurt).
by MuffinFlavored | 2025-06-05 17:12:52+00:00
What would you say to somebody who doesn't trust Cursor to "take the reigns off" and go "agent mode" and do such large changes? Even with "checking/approving/having the final say" as a user, I feel there is time lost if the AI does not do the changes the right way/makes small pesky mistakes.

Autocomplete: yes

Asking questions: yes

I know everybody is all into agent mode and it isn't a Cursor specific thing, I'm just confused why everybody is into it.
by f1shy | 2025-06-05 17:12:55+00:00
Actually in computers, there are also „safeward“ criping in… It is imperative to avoid the term. It is just installing sw in the device you pay and own. I do not want any big-(brother)-tech protecting me. At most I would find ok if there is a config option, so I can set it to my parents, but no more than that.
by BugheadTorpeda6 | 2025-06-05 17:13:02+00:00
It would be interesting to see the hypothetical "return to fax machines" scenario.

If Solows paradox is true and not the result of bad measurement, then one might expect that it could be workable without sacrificing much productivity. Certainly abandoning the cloud would be possible if the regulatory environment allowed for rapid development of alternative non-cloud solutions, as I really don't think the cloud improved productivity (besides for software developers in certain cases) and is more of a rent seeking mechanism (hot take on hacker news I'm sure, but look at any big corpo IT dept outside the tech industry and I think you will see tons of instances where modern tech like the cloud is causing more problems than it's worth productivity-wise).

Computers in general I am much less sure of and lean towards mismeasurement hypothesis. I suspect any "return to 1950" project would render a company economically less competitive (except in certain high end items) and so the EU would really need to lean on Linux hard and invest massively in domestic hardware (not a small task as the US is finding out) in order to escape the clutches of the US and/or China.

I don't think they have the political will to do it, but I would love it if they tried and proved naysayers wrong.
by tptacek | 2025-06-05 17:13:12+00:00
Software security has been running off large-scale automation for over a decade. LLMs might or might not be a step change in that automation (I'm optimistic but uncertain), but, unlike in conventional software development, the standard arguments about craft and thoughtfulness aren't operative here. If there was an argument to be had, it would have been had around the time Google stood up the mega fuzzing farms.

A fun thing to keep in mind about software security is that it's premised on the existence of a determined and amoral adversary. In the long-long ago, Richard Stallman's host at MIT had no password; anybody could log into it. It was a statement about the ethics of locking down computing resources. That's approximately the position any security practitioner would be taking if they attempted to moralize against LLM-assisted offensive computing.
by empath75 | 2025-06-05 17:13:15+00:00
There is a split between people who think of labor as an end in itself and people who think of a labor as a means of achieving some other end and people in the former category are going to always dislike any kind of automation.

Even though I've written a bunch of code, I don't really enjoy writing code. I enjoy building systems and solving problems. If I never have to write another line of code to do that, I couldn't be happier.

Other people have invested a lot of their time and their self image in becoming a good "computer programmer", and they are going to have a really hard time interacting with AI programmers or really any other kind of automation that removes the part of the job that they actually enjoy doing.

Really, it's not much difference between that and musicians that got mad at djs for just playing other people's music, who then got mad at djs that use ableton live instead of learning to beat match. Do you think the _process_ of making music is the important part, or the final sounds that are produced?

Just like DJ's and collage artists can be inventive and express ideas using work created by other people, people who use AI to code can still express creative ideas through how they use it and combine it and manipulate it.
by hedora | 2025-06-05 17:13:35+00:00
I tried graphene, and came to the conclusion that it’s not a viable alternative to iOS.

1) Apps like uber, lyft, ev charging and parkmobile would crash with null pointer exceptions some weeks but not others, so for the use cases that force me to carry a phone, it doesn’t work.

2) There isn’t a modern e2e sync ecosystem, and backup is completely broken.

3) The camera sort of worked out of the box (pixel pro 6), but to get all the modes, I had to install sandboxed google play services, which halved the standby battery life.

Has this changed in the last 3-4 years?
Show HN: Run 30B model in 4GB Active Memory
by vkkhare | 2025-06-05 17:13:52+00:00
We have built fused operator kernels for structured contextual sparsity to avoid loading and computing activations with feed forward layer weights that eventually zero out by the activation.

The result? We are seeing 5X faster MLP layer performance in transformers with 50% lesser memory consumption avoiding the sleeping nodes in every token prediction. For Llama 3.2, Feed forward layers accounted for 30% of total weights and forward pass computation resulting in 1.6-1.8x increase in throughput:

Sparse LLaMA 3.2 3B vs LLaMA 3.2 3B (on HuggingFace Implementation):

- Time to First Token (TTFT): 1.51× faster (1.209s → 0.803s) - Output Generation Speed: 1.79× faster (0.7 → 1.2 tokens/sec) - Total Throughput: 1.78× faster (0.7 → 1.3 tokens/sec) - Memory Usage: 26.4% reduction (6.125GB → 4.15GB)

Find the operator kernels with differential weight caching open sourced at github.com/NimbleEdge/sparse_transformers. Lets get LLMs sprinting!
by avidiax | 2025-06-05 17:14:16+00:00
> OTOH it would be cool if random websites were able to open up and use ports on my computer's network

That's what WebRTC does. There's no requirement that WebRTC is used to send video and audio as in a Zoom/Meet call.

That's how WebTorrent works.

https://webtorrent.io/faq
by bostik | 2025-06-05 17:15:01+00:00
> Your argument seems to be that it's fine to break the law if the net outcome for society is positive.

In any other context, this would be known as "civil disobediance". It's generally considered something to applaud.

For what it's worth, I haven't made up my mind about the current state of AI. I haven't yet seen an ability for the systems to perform abstract reasoning, to _actually_ learn. (Show me an AI that has been fed with nothing but examples in languages A and B. Then demonstrate, conclusively, that it can apply the lessons it has learned in language M, which happens to be nothing like the first two.)
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-05 17:15:31+00:00
Though not really as the title may suggest:

> the strength of activity in the fusiform gyrus could predict whether people judged an experience as real or imagined, irrespective of whether it actually was real

So, it's more like "Brain mechanisms that shows belief that experience is within reality, as opposed to imagination, discovered".

> ...sometimes when participants imagined very vividly, activation of the fusiform gyrus was very strong and participants confused their imagination for reality
by Maultasche | 2025-06-05 17:15:38+00:00
This app has been great. I've used it a lot to identify the birds that inhabit my back yard.

I tried using it in New Zealand last year, and it wasn't as effective as in the US: I think it hasn't been trained as well on the native New Zealand birds, many of which aren't found anywhere else.

Amusingly, it identified turkeys when we were in New Zealand, which I was irritated with because there clearly weren't any turkeys in New Zealand. It turned out I was wrong when we came across a flock of them in the Waikato area running around in a sheep field. A local told me that they were brought there around a hundred years ago and are mostly left alone because nobody eats turkey in New Zealand.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-05 17:15:58+00:00
I think you're dismissing legitimate concerns without fully understanding them, because through the right lens you realize how this can be anticompetitive in the mass market.

Even if some technically inclined folk can install what they want, the masses will stay in the walled garden so that Google can get their cut and exert ideological control. Even now, both Google and Apple engage in practices across their product that are designed to scare people away from third party applications. From Google's terminology when describing Google in banners as "a more secure browser" etc, to Apple requiring a secret incantation in order to run unsigned apps.

All of this kind of mind control bullshit should be eradicated via regulation. Companies should not have a license to be deceptive towards their users.
by mmooss | 2025-06-05 17:15:58+00:00
Always the techno-anarchist - or ironically, the techno-fascist - dream: Technology is somehow inevitable. But somehow we have prescription controls on drugs, many materials and tools are illegal, nuclear weapons are limited to a few countries.

As a society, we have power if we want to use it. It's never perfect, but it can be very effective. Saying it's impossible is just a means - intentionally or not - of preventing people from using that power.
by IbreakLLMS | 2025-06-05 17:16:23+00:00
AI (Anthropic's Claude) exhibits an "algorithmic observer effect," changing its responses on bias when it senses it's being scrutinized. Raises questions: is this sophisticated pattern matching or a form of AI "code-switching"? If an AI doesn't have a neutral stance but tailors it based on conversational cues, what are the implications for trust and transparency?
by skissane | 2025-06-05 17:16:24+00:00
Those are ways of emulating reading files backward using other language features, not explicit language features for reverse-reading of files.

Actually now I realise z/OS stdio has support for backwards-reading of VSAM files: you can fopen with mode “r,type=record,acc=bwd” and “acc=bwd” sets file read direction to reverse. And you can put an open type=record file in reverse reading mode by calling flocate() with __KEY_LAST, __KEY_EQ_BWD, etc

But going just by the docs, that only works for VSAM not BSAM. Whereas COBOL’s OPEN INPUT REVERSED definitely works for BSAM, but not sure if it works for VSAM
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-05 17:16:33+00:00
They don't, and they don't even block F-Droid. You can also just disable Play Protect (though Google won't let you while you're on a call, probably a smart move). According to the Singapore police, scammers also have victims download VPNs of Google Play to work around the regional restrictions.

I don't think the restrictions are doing much for victims. I assume Google was pressured into doing this by the authorities, or may be doing this to get in a good spot politically.
by jdbohrman | 2025-06-05 17:16:48+00:00
YES!!!! I've actually been thinking about starting a studio specifically geared to turning complex RFPs and protocols into usable tools with AI-assisted coding. I built these using Cursor just to test how for it could go. I think the potential of doing that as a service is huge:

https://github.com/jdbohrman-tech/hermetic-mls https://github.com/jdbohrman-tech/roselite

I think it's funny that Roselite caused a huge meltdown to the Veilid team simply because they have a weird adamancy to no AI assistance. They even called it "plagiarism"
by nlpnerd | 2025-06-05 17:16:50+00:00
Perplexity just rolled out direct access to the SEC EDGAR database across all their interfaces (Search, Research, and Labs). That means retail investors and researchers now have LLM-friendly access to 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, etc., with real-time Q&A and summarization layered on top.

Has anyone tried this out? Curious what the technical implementation might be and what future use cases this unlocks (e.g. automated 10-K comparators, anomaly spotting, regulatory change detection).

Would love to hear thoughts from professionals and serious investors, as well as technologists working in the space.
by taylodl | 2025-06-05 17:17:12+00:00
Reason #6 - we still teach kids arithmetic even though we've had cheap calculators capable of doing that for the past 40 years

Honestly, you could apply all the arguments against learning to code to mathematics. Why learn math when you can just ask AI to solve your problem?

The answer, of course, is insight: there's value in knowing and understanding how and why things work the way they do - that's what fuels curiosity; and if we lose our curiosity then we will have already gone extinct. Doesn't matter if there are shells of our former selves still walking upon the earth.
by allturtles | 2025-06-05 17:18:27+00:00
> In any other context, this would be known as "civil disobediance". It's generally considered something to applaud.

No, civil disobedience is when you break the law expecting to be punished, to force society to confront the evil of the law. The point is that you get publicly arrested, possibly get beaten, get thrown in jail. This is not at all like what Open AI is doing.
by mmooss | 2025-06-05 17:18:29+00:00
That can help, but I don't know that Ukraine wants to carry out an assassination campaign against what look like civillian targets. The cost in support and morale could be much greater than the gain.

I wonder if such targets are considered civillian or military under the laws of war. The factory is almost certainly a military target.

Also, while blueprints or code won't help shut down the enterprise (which isn't functioning anyway), they could help with countermeasures.
by wildpeaks | 2025-06-05 17:19:08+00:00
As much as I hoped Blue Sky might succeed where Mastodon didn't, it's by far the platform where I've gotten the most unwanted dickpics and thirst traps, and the general vibe feels so shallow and performative.

The signal to noise ratio is so low even when curating feeds, it feels pointless to post anything meaningful anymore, it just gets drowned in the noise and bots.