MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanwilson | 2025-07-17 19:42:39+00:00
> We started off with SSL/TLS being used for payments systems and logins ... If it says the certificate for your bank is expired, you need to stop. If it says the certificate for the 10 year old public blog post that was linked by a 5 year old Reddit post as describing the solution to your problem, that should not matter

Non-HTTPS pages can be tampered with to inject any content into them e.g. into a blog post page, you could inject a login form ("sign in via Google to unlock this post"), a donation payment form ("donate for more content like this!"), or malware installers ("your browser is out of date, click to update" banner).

I think pushing to protect non-tech savvy users makes sense here. I see even a lot of developers not understanding risks like the above, so it's a losing battle thinking non-techy users can be educated about it and be cautious enough.
by jjcob | 2025-07-17 19:43:08+00:00
It's relevant because that's what most people in Austria remember him for.

First he got famous for the Sky Dive from space

Then he made headlines for his facebook posts, sharing questionable opinions with the media, and supporting right wing politician like Strache (who is currently on trial for embezzling party money to fund his lavish lifestyle).

It's a part of his public persona, not mentioning it would be weird. It's not like he shared his questionable views in private.
by anon291 | 2025-07-17 19:43:10+00:00
Oregon and California were roughly on par. However, the once bustling downtown where you'd normally find people socializing after work, or hanging out, or doing tech-oriented meetups (I.e., the sorts of things that lead to business creation), was beset by 'fiery but peaceful' riots for almost an entire year. Now, the entire industry of after-work social hours, meetups, etc is dead. It is beginning to be revived but on the east side and suburbs, which is more residential and 'suburban' (although east side portland, is definitely more urban than most places). Suburban is okay, but you really need downtowns to create the sort of bustle that leads to that bay area zeitgeist.

One of the underappreciated things about the bay area is that, while it is very suburban, there are several respectably sized downtown cores -- Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and of course the Big Kahuna - San Francisco -- all connected by relatively speedy (and from what I understand, much speedier now) rail.
by unclad5968 | 2025-07-17 19:43:16+00:00
I've never thought about it like that. To me, this is the most interesting part:

> If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"

I wonder how different people decide on different metrics. For me, I probably don't even realize I'm deciding, making it mostly emotionally based I guess. Thanks for sharing with me!
by shagie | 2025-07-17 19:43:17+00:00
I do have some that I iterate on a few times, though their contents aren't ones that I'd be as comfortable making public.

In general, however, I'm looking for the sources and other things to remember the "oh yea, it was HGS-1" that I can then go back and research outside of ChatGPT.

Flipping a coin and then considering how one feels about the outcome and using that to guide the decision is useful. Asking ChatGPT and then accepting its suggestion is problematic.

I believe that there's real damager in ascribing prophecy, decision making, or omniscience to an LLM. (aside: Here's an iterative chat that you can see leading to help picking the right wording for this bit - https://chatgpt.com/share/68794d75-0dd0-8011-9556-9c09acd34b... (first version missed the link))

I can see it as something that's real easy to do. And even back to Eliza and people chatting with that, and I see people trusting the advice as a way of offloading some of their own decision making agency to another thing - ChatGPT as a therapist is something I'd be wary of. Not that it can't make those decisions, but rather that it can't reject the responsibility of making those decisions back to the person asking the question.

To an extent, being familiar with the technology and having the problems of decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) that, as a programmer, I struggle with in the evening (not wanting to think anymore since I'm all thought out from the day)... ChatGPT would be so easy to let it do its thing and make the decisions for me. "What should I have for dinner?" (Aside: this is why I've got a meal delivery subscription so that I don't have to think about that because otherwise I snack on unhealthy food or skip dinner).

---

One of the things that disappointed me with the Love, Death & Robots adaptation of Zima Blue ( https://youtu.be/0PiT65hmwdQ ) was that it focused on Zima and art and completely dropping the question of memory and its relation to art and humanity (and Carrie). The adaptation focuses on Zima's story arc without going into Carrie's story arc.

For me, the most important part of the story that wasn't in the adaptation follows from the question "Red or white, Carrie?" (It goes on for several pages in a socratic dialog style that would be way too much to copy here - I strongly recommend the story).
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-17 19:43:17+00:00
Hence why I said potential applications. Each new generation of models is capable, according to evaluations, of doing things that previous models couldn't that prima facie have potential commercial applications (e.g., because they are similar to things that humans get paid to do today). Not all of them will necessarily work out commercially at that capability level; that's what the Gartner hype cycle is about. But because LLM capabilities are a moving target, it's hard to tell the difference between things that aren't commercialized yet because the foundation models can't handle all the requirements, vs. because commercializing things takes time (and the most knowledgeable AI researchers aren't working on it because they're too busy training the next generation of foundation models).
by variadix | 2025-07-17 19:44:17+00:00
For the majority of the questions asked and answered on StackOverflow, LLMs are undeniably better. I’m thinking of things like ‘How do I do X in Python’, ‘How do I do X on Linux’, etc., questions that are small in scope, not open ended, and can be easily verified. For everything else LLMs range from rarely useful to outright misleading and counterproductive.

LLMs also don’t really enable coincidental discovery like search engines do. Having to RTFM or read a spec or a book or a blog post to figure out the answer to your question sometimes also teaches you about related and important concepts that you wouldn’t have come across otherwise, and usually there will be suggestions for further reading or a side bar with other interesting topics etc. Completely replacing search feels like a a bit like a trap, where what you get in immediate answers you lose in an unseen opportunity cost.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-07-17 19:44:46+00:00
"also it is amazing to me that shells still exist in more-or-less the same form. dear god can I just get a terminal that runs something like Python directly?"

But what does this have to do with programming

Is this suggesting that operating a computer via a shell is "programming"

(It's possible to administer a computer running UNIX by using a shell, without knowing any programming languages^1)

"dear god, can i just get a terminal that runs soemthing like Python directly?"

Assuming "dear god" is a figure of speech, who would be the person(s) responsible for delivering on this request

Many years ago, during experimentation, I changed the program launched by init to a program other than a Bourne shell by editing one line of init.c

That "shells still exist in more-or-less the same form" is probably one of the reasons I like them so much

1. Assuming one believes the shell is not a programming language
by vslira | 2025-07-17 19:45:23+00:00
> Yet, elites who come from countries where their assets are likely to be seized due either to a lack of civil rights or a government with effective regulations tend to use a “concealment strategy” to remain anonymous.

Not to be a defender of criminal money laundering, but this is an important caveat. When all money is traceable, digital and controlled, good luck funding anything against the government in an authoritarian setting.

Unfortunately that's a catch-22

I'm well aware of the impact of corruption and organized crime and how it affects billions worldwide, I've read more than one book on the subject. but it's analogous to the issue with cryptography, privacy and protecting people, especially minors, on the internet for example
by itake | 2025-07-17 19:45:25+00:00
I think we are saying the same thing. Companies chase high risk high reward over low risk low reward.

Presumably, curing a genetic disorder for a very small number of people using existing technology is low risk and low reward.

> Why wouldn't it be sold if it were available?

Just because something works in a small lab doesn’t mean it’s ready to sell. To launch a product, companies need to do a lot more: testing, certifications, licenses, marketing, training, and more. Sometimes, even when a product is finished, companies decide not to launch it if their budget or priorities shift elsewhere.

A related example could be unreleased movies like Batgirl Or Coyote vs. Acme. The films were completed, but they felt their marketing dollars would be better spent on other projects.
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 19:45:28+00:00
This comment is the opposite of nuance. They literally argued that everything you do has a CO2 impact, therefore you either shouldn't try at all or should just kill yourself.

That's, like, the least nuanced and most caveman-brained take on climate change you could possibly develop.

Also: appealing to edge-cases as a distraction isn't nuance, it's derailing. I can find fucking exceptions to anything. ANYTHING. How many people in the West are growing their own chickens? Give me a fucking break man.
by chriscardoz | 2025-07-17 19:46:11+00:00
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I have been reading and writing more because of LLMs; not less. Granted, I was a voracious reader in my teens. But, during college, I lost interest in reading. The reason was that I was reading for the sake of reading, and often boring stuff. With the advent of LLMs, I am asking the models interesting questions, getting to know more about the world, going off on adventures and rabbit holes for a topic. Its just like my teens again; voraciously reading interesting stuff. Thats the trick I guess, just read stuff that you find interesting and you will want to read more.
by JadoJodo | 2025-07-17 19:46:28+00:00
The one that kills me is when a financial institution or healthcare facility calls and says, "Hi, this is so-and-so from The Place. I was calling about your request/account/etc"

→ "Oh, ok"

→ "Before we get started, I need to verify your social security number/address/other personal information"

→ "Yeah, you called me and I have no way of knowing if you are who you say you are. I'm not going to give you that information. Can you give me your name, and I'll call the number on the website and ask for you?"

→ "Flabbergasted Well, our system doesn't work like that, so you'll have to submit another request"

→ Repeat ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by 0xEF | 2025-07-17 19:46:29+00:00
Remember the Palm (palm.com, not to be confused with Palm PDAs of a much earlier era) for Verizon networks? That answered all my requests at the time; about the size of an iPhone 5S but running Android 8, but with the caveat that I had to have a "big" smartphone so the Palm could piggyback off the line, even though I could just leave the "big" smartphone at home.

I have no idea why that was the case and can't even speculate since I don't know enough about how the networks worked, but I would love to hear an explanation. I was pretty annoyed by the fact that I still needed to own what I considered a phablet, which was sitting collecting dust on my bedside table at home just so I could have the type of phone I really wanted. Seemed like a punishment-by-design for trying to step off the typical customer rails.

My tastes have changed slightly these days, and I'm okay with a 5.X" screen or whatever, but now I want it to be eInk or something similar and focus more on text/sms as I've gotten pretty minimalism with my phone use.
by rubidium | 2025-07-17 19:46:41+00:00
You’ve taken a very small slice of the total workflow to develop cas9 crispr edits. Yes some components are “not crazy expensive”, but that’s not therapeutic production levels. And no sequencing. And no bioinformatics. And then zero tissue targeting/ delivery or safety studies.

So $5k is a massive stretch. I do think costs are coming down. But don’t want to oversell current state of “garage hacking” either.
by searine | 2025-07-17 19:46:49+00:00
The issue isn't a technical one with gene-therapy. The issue is ethical.

Editing your DNA can be dangerous or even deadly if it doesn't work. Modern methods have mostly solved this, but there is still a lot of hesitancy due to prior failures/tragic deaths.

It is also ethically foggy. Somatic edits, edits that will die with you and do not change your sperm or eggs, are one thing, but when you start making germline changes, that impacts everyone who may inherit your genes. You may consent to a germline change, but will your children? Or your children's children's children? You may have the money now to make they change, but will they have the money to change it back?

Small genetic changes also have a complex spectrum of phenotype outcomes. If you start making germline changes that are not found in nature or are under-studied, that can have compounding unintended consequences. For example, if you spec into a dozen intelligence SNPs, that may also increase your risk for a pandora's box of mental illnesses.

So no, economies of scale will not solve this. It would be a disaster.
by zevon | 2025-07-17 19:46:58+00:00
Not really. At least not in the past and probably also not in the future if they are already in the country legally. These things a) take a lot of time (especially in Germany) and b) all the right-wing pandering of the current government is relatively new and will probably be moderated drastically by court decisions.

edit: As to your other points - I would argue that stuff like the Böhmermann affair is a good example that free speech more or less works in most parts of Europe. Yes, there were - very old - laws about insulting royalty and heads of state. However, a state-financed comedian was able to push on those issues enough for those paragraphs to be changed/struck (as far as i remember, at least) - and he's still state-financed, still has his head and his freedom and still happily insults important people.

edit2: It's not really correct to state that the phrase "from the river to the sea" is forbidden, specifically. There are no legal means to ban specific phrases on a whim in Germany. There are, however, blanket bans on using phrases/slogans of organisations that are unconstitutional such as terrorist groups. The argument has been made that "from the river to the sea" is a Hamas-slogan but as far as I've kept up with the discussion, there are different legal oppinions on that and there's no final court decision yet.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-17 19:47:46+00:00
It sucks when you find out an artist you like or someone who accomplished something you find impressive, is actually a terrible person. I suppose it's useful to be able to separate the artist from the art, appreciating the thing while acknowledging the person is flawed. This happens all the time with historical figures, authors, musicians, and so on. They build up this library of great work and achievement, but they somehow can't keep their opinions to themselves and end up outing themselves as bigots or worse. We can admire their works while condemning their beliefs.
by snickerdoodle12 | 2025-07-17 19:48:24+00:00
> Non-HTTPS pages can be tampered with to inject any content into them e.g. into a blog post page, you could inject a login form ("sign in via Google to unlock this post"), a donation payment form ("donate for more content like this!"), or malware installers.

Who cares? The blog author could be malicious. The blog might have been sold 5 years ago and now hosts malicious content.

Stop trying to nanny people, it's unbecoming.
by orforforof | 2025-07-17 19:48:34+00:00
It would be more relevant to look at reading scores for children who specifically tuned into Reading Rainbow. I suspect the number of viewers was a small fraction of all children in the US, in which case the show's ability to affect the nationwide reading scores would be low. In other words, I don't believe the data you cited supports a conclusion that the show was ineffective at educating individual viewers.
by drdeca | 2025-07-17 19:49:10+00:00
I am assuming that the LLM has no interiority (which is similar to the conclusion that the Chinese Room argument argues for). My argument is that the character that the LLM (or a Chinese Room, or a character that a person is role-playing as) not having any interiority does not prevent the causal structure of how its interaction with the broader world having essentially the same kinds of effects as if there was a person there instead of a make-believe-person. So, if the fictional character, if they were real, would want to deceive, or launch a missile, or whatever, and would have the means to do so, and if there's something in the real world that is acting how the fictional character would act if the character were real, then the effects of the thing that acts like the fictional character would be to cause [the person the fictional character would deceive if the fictional character were real] to come to the false belief, or to cause the missiles to be launched.

If something outwardly acts the same way as it would if it were a person, then the external effects are the same as they would be if it were a person. (<- This is nearly a tautology.) This doesn't mean that it would be a person, but it does mean that the concerns one would have about what outward effects it may cause if it it was a person, still apply.

(Well, assuming an appropriate notion of "outwardly" I guess. If a person prays, and God responds to this prayer, for the purpose of the above, I'm going to count such prayer as part of how the person "outwardly acts" even if other people around them wouldn't be able to tell that they were praying. So, by "outwardly acts", I mean something that has causal influence on external things.)

If something lacks interiority and therefore has no true intent to deceive, what does it matter that there was no true deception, if me interacting with that thing still results in me having false beliefs that benefit some goal that the thing behaves as if it has, to the detriment of my own goals?
by ctoth | 2025-07-17 19:49:21+00:00
Sometimes, you'll just have a really productive session with Claude Code doing a specific thing that maybe you need to do a lot of.

One trick I have gotten some milage out of was this: have Claude Code research Slash commands, then make a slash command to turn the previous conversation into a slash command.

That was cool and great! But then, of course you inevitably will interrupt it and need to do stuff to correct it, or to make a change or "not like that!" or "use this tool" or "think harder before you try that" or "think about the big picture" ... So you do that. And then you ask it to make a command and it figures out you want a /improve-command command.

So now you have primitives to build on!

Here are my current iterations of these commands (not saying they are optimal!)

https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/make-comm...

https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/improve-c...
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-17 19:49:47+00:00
I think people vastly underestimate the degree to which having a necessary 3rd party interpret the tax code down to plain-ish english serves as a liability transfer from the government to that 3rd party and the taxpayer.

Basically no taxpayers like the current situation. It persists because the government itself likes it hence why seemingly flimsy low effort lobbying is all it takes to persist the status quo.

If the government says "check this box if you X" and people are mislead and check the box and the government fucks them for it they will complain to politicians who will (pretend to) fix it, likely at the expense of the bureaucracy.

If the 3rd party "check this box if you X" and people are mislead and check the box and the government fucks them the government can say "well it's your responsibility" and the 3rd party can say "well you signed the liability waver" and the racket can basically go on to infinity as long as they keep tweaking it to prevent a class action.
by bakkoting | 2025-07-17 19:49:51+00:00
Kontext is probably better at this specific task, if that's what Mistral is using. Certainly faster and cheaper. But:

OpenAI just yesterday added the ability to do higher fidelity image edits with their model [1], though I'm not sure if the functionality is only in the API or if their chat UI will make use of this feature too. Same prompt and input image: [2]

[1] https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1945538534884135132

[2] https://i.imgur.com/w5Q0UQm.png
by pj_mukh | 2025-07-17 19:50:17+00:00
There have been 3-4 different comprehensive reports linked in this thread laying out that actually holding costs (please search), legal fees are one of the main drivers of cost along with the 2 others you mentioned.

But specifically, it's the worst one because it's unbounded (labor and materials is really costly now, but its a known cost) especially in states with heavy environment regulations or other zoning regulations. In those states, usually any one person can bring in a lawsuit alleging a lack of environment studies or alleged personal damage to slow down construction, so how much holding costs do you budget for? How much lawyer fees? How many people will bring lawsuits? You have no idea!

Most projects just don't start if they have a bracket for unbounded costs like that. So now you have fewer and fewer parties willing to take on these projects with more and more people (neighbors, bureaucrats etc.) having the bandwidth to pour over each individual project looking for an opening to sue and stop. It's a doom-loop of red-tape.

Do you think the California legislature (not the San Francisco legislature mind you) is wasting its time dealing with this, if it's "not that big of a deal" [1]. The governor ransomed the whole state budget to get this passed. Similar things happened in Minnesota. This is a huge deal.

I encourage you to read the various books laying out example after example of these issues and the background data [2], [3].

[1]: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...

[2]: https://www.philipkhoward.com/the-rule-of-nobody

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...