MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nivertech | 2025-07-12 08:22:40+00:00
AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ early on, and it was a preprocessor inserting ("weaving") aspects in the function entries/exits. Mostly was useful for logging. But that can be somewhat emulated using C++ constructors/destructors.

Maybe it can be also useful for DbC (Design-by-Contract) when sets of functions/methods have common pre/post-conditions and/or invariants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Cr...
by disillusioned | 2025-07-12 08:24:16+00:00
I've been using "off-by-one" errors to describe one of my biggest concerns with LLMs replacing search, or acting as research agents, or functionally being expected to be reliable narrators in general. If you ask ChatGPT when George Washington was born, and it comes back with March 4th, 2017, you'll reject that outright and recognize it's hallucinated a garbage response, presuming you have enough context to have understood who George Washington was in the first place and that your brain hasn't completely succumbed to rot yet.

But if it returns February 20th, 1731... that... man, that sounds close? Is that right? It sounds like it _could_ be right... Isn't Presidents' Day essentially based on Washington's birthday? And _that's_ in February, right? So, yeah, February 20th, 1731. That's probably Washington's birthday.

And so the LLM becomes an arbiter of capital-T Truth and we lose our shared understanding of actual, factual data, and actual, factual history. It'll take less than a generation for the slop factories to poison the well, and while the idea is obviously that you train your models on "known good", pre-slop content, and that you weight those "facts" more heavily, a concerted effort to degrade the Truthfulness of various facts could likely be more successful than we anticipate, and more importantly: dramatically more successful than any layperson can easily understand.

We already saw that with the early Bard Google AI proto-Gemini results, where it was recommending glue as a pizza topping, _with authority_. We've been training ourselves to treat responses from computers (and specifically Google) as if they have authority, we've been eroding our own understanding and capabilities around media literacy, journalism, fact-checking, and what constitutes an actual "fact", and we've had a shared understanding that computers can _calculate_ things with accuracy and fidelity and consistency. All of that becomes confounded with an LLM that could reasonably get to a place where it reports that 2+2=5.

The worst part about the nature of this particular pathway to ruin is that the off-by-one nature of these errors are how they'll infiltrate and bury themselves into some system, insidiously, and below the surface, until days or months or years later when the error results in, I don't know, mega-doses of radiation because of a mis-coded rounding error that some agentic AI got wrong when doing a unit conversion and failed to catch it. We were already making those errors as humans, but as our dependence and faith on LLMs to be "mostly right" increases, and our willingness and motivation to check it for errors dwindles, especially when results "look" right, this will go from being a hypothetical issue to being a practical one extremely quickly and painfully, and probably faster than we can possibly defend against it.

Interesting times ahead, I suppose, in the Chinese-curse sense of the word.
by progbits | 2025-07-12 08:25:37+00:00
I've been thinking about this for a while and did a bunch of research and planning, though had no time for building yet.

Stepdown transformer or 12V AC power bricks with barrel jack output are easy to get and cheap. Lower voltage, easier to measure and you outsource the safety/galvanic isolation.

Zero crossing ICs tied to GPS PPS signal. Add on ADC to measure voltage swings. Esp32 can record and compress data locally, only sending summary frequency, phase/time alignment.

This is obviously nice for outage detection too. For some extra cost add SD card for longer storage buffer and ability to backfill data once connection is restored. Small battery to not lose 1-2 minutes of time sync from GPS on powerup.

My last rough estimate was ~$40 for minimal single phase version and ~$100 for kitted out three phase battery backup, in volume of tens of units. That's pretty decent, I could then mail a couple dozen to people for free to get global coverage.

My main unsolved concerns were: liability (I don't want anyone to sue me if their house burns down), trust in data (it's easy to send spoofed garbage, so initially I would want only trusted parties to send, all data would be public of course), and the most important one: finding time and motivation next to my day job to do this.
by rovr138 | 2025-07-12 08:25:45+00:00
Did you look at the FAQ page they created afterwards?

'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
by aucisson_masque | 2025-07-12 08:27:20+00:00
What is propaganda for one is truth for another, how could LLM tell the difference ?

LLM are not journalist fact checking stuff, they are merely programs that regurgitate what it reads.

The only way to counter that would be to feed your LLM only on « safe » vetoed source but of course it would limit your LLM capacities so it’s not really going to happen.
by Thorrez | 2025-07-12 08:28:04+00:00
Oh, there's an arrest warrant for him. That's different from what I had thought. I thought he had been arrested and released on bail pending the outcome of a trial, which is quite common in the US.

Does he "still travel everywhere"? The article mentions him travelling to Hungary and not being arrested despite Hungary having signed the treaty. The article doesn't mention him travelling anywhere else.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-12 08:28:04+00:00
I don't use AI at all, primarily because I believe its harmful and I am quite mindful of things.

I've observed colleagues who have used it extensively, I've often been a late adopter for things that carry unspecified risk; and AI was already on par with Pandora's box in my estimation when the weights were first released; I am usually perceptually pretty far ahead of the curve naturally (and accurately so).

Objectively, I've found these colleagues attitude, mental alacrity, work product, and abstract reasoning skills have degraded significantly in reference to their prior work pre-AI. They tried harder, got more actual work done, and were able to converse easily and quickly before. Now its, let me get back to you; and you get emails which have been quite clearly put through an LLM, with no real reasoning happening.

What is worse, is its happened in ways they largely do not notice, and when objective observations are pointed out, they don't take kindly to the feedback despite it not being an issue with them, but with their AI use, and the perceptual blindspots it takes advantage of. Many seem to be adopting destructive behaviors common to junkies, who have addiction problems.

I think given sufficient time, this trend will be recognized; but not before it causes significant adverse effects.
by soraminazuki | 2025-07-12 08:28:46+00:00
Citation needed that your neoliberal views are anything other than bad faith voodoo economics. We have decades' worth of proof that it's toxic for society, both politically and economically. Your whole talking point is an excuse for the ultra rich to get even richer through mass exploitation, which ironically is the embodiment of entitlement that you're so opposed to.
by Y_Y | 2025-07-12 08:29:37+00:00
My hobby: monetizing cynicism.

I go on Polymarket and find things that would make me happy or optimistic about society and tech, and then bet a couple of dollars (of some shitcoin) against them.

e.g. OpenAI releasing an open weights model before September is trading at 81% at time of writing - https://polymarket.com/event/will-openai-release-an-open-sou...

Last month I was up about ten bucks because OpenAI wasn't open, the ceasefire wasn't a ceasefire, and the climate metrics got worse. You can't hedge away all the existential despair, but you can take the sting out of it.
by ztq121121 | 2025-07-12 08:29:44+00:00
Hey HN –

We (at Microsoft Learn) published this MCP server to help people ground their LLMs and agents on official Microsoft documentations.

What it is: • A server that implements the remote MCP spec with streamable HTTP transport • Pure public and free • Provides public document search tool and many other tools to come.

Quick try: ```json { "microsoft.docs.mcp": { "type": "http", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/api/mcp" } } ``` We’ve seen teams use it for:

- quick Q&A - helping coding agents find correct package and API

We’d love to hear from you: • What tools you want to see next? • Are there blockers in using it in your scenarios? • Where does it work well — or not so well?

The project: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/mcp
by Mawr | 2025-07-12 08:29:50+00:00
> This is not "reasoning from first principles".

It literally is. Accidental/malicious activation can be catastrophic, therefore it must be guarded against. First principles.

The shutoff timer screen given as an example is a valid way of accomplishing it. Not directly applicable to aircraft, but that's not the point.

> "ugh can't you just do what garmin did"

That's your dishonest interpretation of a post that offers reasonable, relevant suggestions. Don't tell me I need to start quoting that post to prove so. It's right there.
by saluki | 2025-07-12 08:31:01+00:00
Everyone has their typical 'work day' so you just get used to everyone's schedule and planned zooms around that and use slack for general communication. Occasionally I would msg or zoom outside of my core hours but we also had flex time so it worked out well. We generally always scheduled meetings through google calendar so timezones were handled there for coordination. If we mentioned a time in slack or on a zoom it was always given as NYC. It was a non-issue, motivation, sleep, food aren't related to this. Some team members worked later in the day in their local time zone by choose to overlap more with NYC.
by sneak | 2025-07-12 08:31:29+00:00
Fun fact: the cost of the ketamine in that $2000 treatment is about $1. Even factoring in trained staff to monitor, you’re up to a few hundred bucks for the hour. It’s mostly just the failings of the US medical establishment, and, of course, arbitrarily constrained supply that results in gouging.

Just go buy $100 in street ketamine (still marked up 100x, fwiw, also because laws) from someone reputable, test it for fentanyl, and blow lines of it. Same deal, $1900 less cost. Breaking some dumb rules is far preferable to living with untreated depression.
by Arcorann | 2025-07-12 08:32:09+00:00
Somewhat related is the work done in "Falling with Style: Factoring up to 255 “with” a Quantum Computer" published in the proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2025 [1]. The author, Craig Gidney [2], successfully factored all odd composite numbers up to 255 using Shor's algorithm, even though the quantum circuits involved were such that any meaningful output would be overwhelmed by noise (and indeed, performance was maintained when the circuits were replaced by a random number generator).

> To my knowledge, no one has cheated at factoring in this way before. Given the shenanigans pulled by past factoring experiments, that’s remarkable.

[1] https://sigbovik.org/2025/; standalone paper is also available in the code repository https://github.com/strilanc/falling-with-style

[2] Who has previous experience in cheating at quantum factoring: see "Factoring the largest number ever with a quantum computer", posted April Fools' Day 2020 at https://algassert.com/post/2000
by meroes | 2025-07-12 08:32:12+00:00
LLMs are “taught” two kinds of “truth”. One is 100% adherence to a reference text. If the text says the Coliseum is in Antarctica or 1+1=716, model must too. The other is adherence to reputable outside sources.

Not sure if it’s embarrassing or a fundamental limitation that grooming and misunderstanding satirical articles defeat the models.
by thephyber | 2025-07-12 08:33:37+00:00
The town that was flooded rejected _free funds_ from the federal government during Covid because they were choking on a red pill of conspiranoia. Destiny (the streamer) did a recent streaming session where he watched the video of the town feedback regarding accepting / rejecting federal government funds from the American Recovery Act (for sirens and standardized first responder comms systems). The short version of the plot is the people were propagandized to distrust the Biden Admin, so they rejected the free upgrades. The voters pressured the town council (one was an actual threat of violence, followed by threats of “consequences”) if the town council accepted the federal funds.

There are consequences to voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.

I don’t blame the little girls, but with freedom comes responsibility. Their parents were responsible for choosing the camp they went to. The camp owner and staff made the risk evaluations of allowing them to sleep in a flood plain during a storm. The local town voted for their representatives and those representatives rejected federal funds which would have given them a chance to survive without cell coverage.

Ultimately your parent comment wasn’t necessarily assigning individual blame. In a democratic republic, the voters / citizens / residents (in aggregate) are ultimately responsible for the actions that elected representatives take in their name.
by quartesixte | 2025-07-12 08:35:55+00:00
Ah the Myriad system. Curious how the sinosphere adopted this alongside the Greeks.

These do converge I think at

10^12 = Short Trillion/Long Billion

Which makes for some non-frictionless translating since 10^6 and 10^9 are all in-between words, and 10^12 is not a commonly used number to count anything in everyday life.
by sneak | 2025-07-12 08:36:17+00:00
You can do this yourself in userspace if you really want it:

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/attrsum

I use zfs where I can (it has content checksums) but it sucks bad on macOS, so I wrote attrsum. It keeps the file content checksum in an xattr (which APFS (and ext3/4) supports).

I use it to protect my photo library on a huge external SSD formatted with APFS (encrypted, natch) because I need to mount it on a mac laptop for Lightroom.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-12 08:36:32+00:00
> This is a machine that enables you to work for about four years. [...] Penny pinching.

But that wasn't the argument. In "your time is more valuable", the time is what it takes to remove a dozen screws, replace a card, and format it. Plus any increased risk of data loss, but that should also be quite small if it exists. So for saving hundreds of dollars or more, your expected time is like an hour if you have backups (you'd better have backups!), hard to say for sure if you don't.
by xiphias2 | 2025-07-12 08:36:41+00:00
They are somewhat self regulated, as they can cause permament damage to the company that releases them, and they are meant for general consumers without any training, unlike table saws that are meant for trained people.

An example is the first Microsoft bot that started to go extreme rightwing when people realized how to make it go that direction. Grok had a similar issue recently.

Google had racial issues with its image generation (and earlier with image detection). Again something that people don't forget.

Also an OpenAI 4o release was encouraging stupid things to people when they asked stupid questions and they just had to roll it back recently.

Of course I'm not saying that that's the real reason (somehow they never say that the problem is with performance for not releasing stuff), but safety matters with consumer products.
by klemenvod | 2025-07-12 08:37:35+00:00
Medical triage in our context means whether symptoms require emergency care, urgent care, or can be managed with self-care. This matters because LLMs are increasingly becoming the “digital front door” for health concerns—replacing the instinct to just Google it.

Getting triage wrong can be dangerous (missed emergencies) or costly (unnecessary ER visits).

We’ve open-sourced TriageBench, a reproducible framework for evaluating LLM triage accuracy. It includes:

- A standard clinical dataset (Semigran vignettes)

- Paired McNemar’s test to detect model performance differences on small datasets

- Full methodology and evaluation code

GitHub: https://github.com/medaks/medask-benchmark

As a demonstration, we benchmarked our own model (MedAsk) against several OpenAI models:

- MedAsk: 87.6% accuracy

- o3: 75.6%

- GPT‑4.5: 68.9%

The main limitation is dataset size (45 vignettes). We're looking for collaborators to help expand this - the field needs larger, more diverse clinical datasets.

Blog post with full results: https://medask.tech/blogs/medical-ai-triage-accuracy-2025-me...
by norupo | 2025-07-12 08:38:05+00:00
The biggest problem here is the differentiation between objective and relative truth. As long as relative truth is part of ai we can't fully trust it's output. The relative truth for one individual might be perceived as propaganda by another individual, relative to their surroundings and the narrative that is dominant in their social group. It's problematic that truth is not a neutral object but exactly this when it comes to non logical subjects.
by crabbone | 2025-07-12 08:38:27+00:00
Now come on... for code golf? Why on Earth would anyone want extra syntax in a language with already tons of bloat in the syntax that contribute nothing to language's capabilities? It's, in Bill Gates words, like paying to make airplanes heavier...

This package is a funny gimmick, to illustrate, probably, unintended consequences of some of the aspects of Python's parser. Using this for anything other than another joke is harmful...
by diggan | 2025-07-12 08:39:02+00:00
When I play around with changing various GCs for Java (via Clojure), then I always setup benchmarks measuring what kind of thing I want to improve, run all GCs via that benchmark to chose which to use for that service/project and call it a day. There is a lot of theorizing and navel-gazing around GCs it seems to me, and in the end it is the results that count so setup some way to measure, find the differences then move on from there :)
by grndn | 2025-07-12 08:39:07+00:00
Personal anecdote: I had a subscription to the Philly Inquirer. They made it very easy to sign up online, but there was no way to cancel online. The website only said "call the sales team to cancel".

I changed my home address to California, and shortly after, a new "Cancel Subscription" button appeared on the PI website, which worked great.
by thro1 | 2025-07-12 08:40:31+00:00
Federal officials in 2014 paused 18 projects before releasing 2017 guidelines that allowed work to move forward. But the debate flared again during the COVID-19 pandemic, when some scientists and Republican politicians, including Trump, alleged that the

coronavirus responsible came from GOF work at a lab in Wuhan, China,

that had received NIH funding.
by thecupisblue | 2025-07-12 08:40:42+00:00
I've worked at one of those companies where software quality was paramount.

They did TDD for a long time, they wrote Clean Code™, they organised meetups, sponsored and went to conferences, they paid 8th Light consultants to come teach (this was actually worth it!) and sent people to Agile workshops and certificates.

At first, I was like "wow, I am in heaven".

About a year later, I noticed so much repetition and waste of time in the processes.

Code was at a point where we had a "usecase" that calls a "repository" that fetches a list of "ItemNetworkResponse" which then gets mapped into "Item" using "ItemNetworkResponseToItemMapper" and tests were written for every possible thing and path.

They had enterprise clients, were charging them nicely, paying developers nicely and pocketed extra money due to "safety buffers" added by both engineers, managers and sales people, basically doubling the length of any project for "safety".

The company kept to their "high dev standards" which meant spending way more time, and thus costing way more, than generic cookie-cutter agencies would cost for the same project.

This was great until every client wanted to save money.

The company shut down last year.
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-07-12 08:40:48+00:00
On the other hand, we can also diagnose LLM itself: the activation value is their EEG, the gradient is their BOLD - if you are at the cost, you can even calculate their true variational free energy - that is, KL divergence.

"Don't just train your model, understand its mind."

https://github.com/dmf-archive/
by diggan | 2025-07-12 08:41:16+00:00
I agree, but also think it's less important. I don't want a big fat LLM that memorized every API out there, and as soon as the API changed, the weights have to updated. I like the current approach of Codex (and similar) where they can look up the APIs they need to use as they're doing the work instead, so same weights will continue to work no matter how much the APIs change.
by numpad0 | 2025-07-12 08:42:27+00:00
[1]:

name tfic% pop pop% B/D Taiwan 0.1056 23112793 0.0028 37.61x Japan 0.0822 123103479 0.0150 5.50x Vietnam 0.0413 101598527 0.0123 3.35x USA 0.0367 347275807 0.0422 0.87x Brazil 0.0229 212812405 0.0259 0.89x Others 0.7112 7423710059 0.9019 0.79x (total) 0.9999 8231613070 1.0000 1.00x

Looks like, Taiwan took it, maybe Japan too.

I'm guessing that the moral of the story is, social media cannot be multilingual/multinational. Either one culture dominates, or the system don't work.

1: https://www.similarweb.com/website/threads.net/#geography

edit: edited to add column C, D, E from [2]; Column E, B/D, is traffic divided by population count as share of world's, which I think should indicate how much differences in popularity there is.

2: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...
by submeta | 2025-07-12 08:43:18+00:00
I work at a company with over 700 employees. And there are tons of use cases where a simple CRUD app is sufficient. Or where glue code needs to be written / changed for legacy systems. Or where an OS system like Camunda is deployed and needs to be configured, workflows developed, etc

The reality of companies out there is much simpler than the challenges of a startup that needs to build systems that are state of the art, scale for millions of users, etc There are companies out there that make millions, in areas you‘ve never heard of, and their core business does not depend on software development best practices.

In our company we have an IT team with the median age of fifty, team members who never have developed software, just maintain systems, delegate hard work to expensive consultants.

Now in that setting someone coming from a startup background is like someone coming from the future. I feel like a wizard who can solve problems in days, instead of weeks or months waiting for a consultant to solve.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-12 08:43:28+00:00
Server GC is a tradeoff between latency and throughput. It makes a ton of sense for a web server where a small additional overhead of a few milliseconds on some responses won't matter.

Workstation GC is what you want when latency is critical. This is what you'd use if you were developing a UI or game engine.

I've seen workstation GC stay in the microsecond region when strategically executing GC.Collect at allocation batch boundaries.