MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-29 23:57:53+00:00
When the state passes bad laws -- laws that the majority of the populace are surely going to circumvent, or laws that require absolute tyranny to strictly enforce -- the inevitable result is that people come to treat the law itself with disrespect or revulsion. The idea that one should be law-abiding as an ethical rule goes right out the window. The concept of the law is debased.

There are very few things that do more harm to society.
by nailer | 2025-07-29 23:57:57+00:00
It’s not one child among many - this thread has already shown you three. if you’re not following the conflict closely, you should also be aware that children from other Middle Eastern conflicts and AI are also frequently used, as well as Pallywood style films scenarios where you can occasionally see behind the scenes (you mind find #mrfafo entertaining). You can also just look at social media from Gaza to see supermarkets, dessert stores, and comments like “we have no bread so we had to eat rice” which are hardly indicative of a starving population. Meanwhile, there are actual atrocities happening in Syria and Yemen, but it’s not on the news because Jewish people are not involved.

The New York Times has just admitted the child on their cover was already ill: https://x.com/nytimespr/status/1950311365756817690?s=46
by its-kostya | 2025-07-29 23:58:00+00:00
> If [deadlines] start to slip, begin the passive-aggressive comments and veiled threats.

> Email, slack and call them late at nights and/or weekends. This is key to keeping up momentum through the long-weekends and holidays.

lmfao what? Can't tell if this is serious or shitpost. But don't care enough to read it again.
by breve | 2025-07-29 23:58:26+00:00
> Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical

Except these systems will still confidently lie to you.

The other day I noticed that DuckDuckGo has an Easter egg where it will change its logo based on what you've searched for. If you search for James Bond or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader or Shrek or Jack Sparrow, the logo will change to a version based on that character.

If I ask Copilot if DuckDuckGo changes its logo based on what you've searched for, Copilot tells me that no it doesn't. If I contradict Copilot and say that DuckDuckGo does indeed change its logo, Copilot tells me I'm absolutely right and that if I search for "cat" the DuckDuckGo logo will change to look like a cat. It doesn't.

Copilot clearly doesn't know the answer to this quite straightforward question. Instead of lying to me, it should simply say it doesn't know.
by MarkusQ | 2025-07-29 23:58:37+00:00
Except "black body" here is a technical term, and doesn't really correlate with "an object that's black".

You could, for example, design something that absorbed well in the UV/visible/near infrared where sunlight energy peaks (sat, 250-1000nm) but has low emissive power in the far infrared of the ambient Martian surface temperature at or below the target temperature (say 2-100μm). Thus it would absorb a lot in the day but radiate far less in the night, all with no need for electronics, etc.

The wind powered heaters (as I recall) had a similar issue; if the wind wasn't harvested to run heaters, it would have dissipated through friction with the ground, generating exactly the same amount of heat.
by tptacek | 2025-07-29 23:58:47+00:00
Part of the problem here and across all municipal finance is that excepting megaprojects (building a new police HQ, refitting every single fire station with new trucks, that kind of thing), capex costs like these are just swamped by the opex costs and, in particular, payroll. How much work are you really going to put into saving <1% of the total municipal budget when you could instead be doing benefits management stuff that will pay out double digits over the next 10 years? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's a thing.

(Before anyone says it: no, all these dumb capex things probably don't add up to that much relative to the total budget. But it would be easy to show I'm wrong, since all this data is public.)
by gosub100 | 2025-07-29 23:59:04+00:00
I even regret using the word "jerks". Even better would be that people get entranced in a tactical mindset of "how do I most efficiently dismantle and invalidate this input?" Which certainly sounds like a jerk, but in reality they aren't even "considering the human" (can't remember which website used that in their guidelines, maybe early reddit?) in the first place. That's all just my pet theory and speculation.
by physix | 2025-07-29 23:59:39+00:00
A game changer in which respect?

Anyway, this makes me wonder if LLMs can be appropriately prompted to indicate whether the information given is speculative, inferred or factual. Whether they have the means to gauge the validity/reliability of their response and filter their response accordingly.

I've seen prompts that instruct the LLM to make this transparent via annotations to their response, and of course they comply, but I strongly suspect that's just another form of hallucination.
by tanelpoder | 2025-07-30 00:00:11+00:00
On Linux this is not true, on an IO heavy system - with lots of synchronous I/Os done concurrently by many threads - your load average may be well over the number of CPUs, without having a CPU shortage. Say, you have 16 CPUs, load avg is 20, but only 10 threads out of 20 are in Runnable (R) mode on average, and the other 10 are in Uninterruptible sleep (D) mode. You don't have a CPU shortage in this case.

Note that synchronous I/O completion checks for previously submitted asynchronous I/Os (both with libaio and io_uring) do not contribute to system load as they sleep in the interruptible sleep (S) mode.

That's why I tend to break down the system load (demand) by the sleep type, system call and wchan/kernel stack location when possible. I've written about the techniques and one extreme scenario ("system load in thousands, little CPU usage") here:

https://tanelpoder.com/posts/high-system-load-low-cpu-utiliz...
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-30 00:00:54+00:00
I have no idea how you could actually be confused about this.

- I can sell 100 units of product for $2. I feel good I am ethical and responsible.

- I can sell 300 units of product for $1. Everyone buys from me and I make more money, but I poison the land.

Capitalism does not account for externalities. Because businesses never have to pay the cost of poisoning water supplies or destroying ecosystems until he societal bell tolls - and because "if I don't, they will and I will go out of business" - unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism.

I mean, for real? Are you confused why mine operators encouraged taking more material at the expensive of structural integrity? Are you confused why gas barons don't like paying the cost to cap NG wells? Are you confused why big agri uses petrochemical fertilizers to grow subsidized ethanol and HFCS?
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-30 00:01:33+00:00
Maybe, I'm not an HTMX user, but looking at hx-swap-oob I think that solves another issue. My need was when other links can exist in any place, and they need to match the URL after its clicked. I didn't want to have the performance hit or remember to add extra swaps just to get links up to date. The feature basically is "when a param is marked to be synced, ensure all links on the page are updated to match the changed param"
by creddit | 2025-07-30 00:01:54+00:00
> The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.

What an odd thing to infer. Just a really large leap.
by jibal | 2025-07-30 00:01:57+00:00
All I see is that I've been personally attacked and mischaracterized. If I could downvote such comments I would do that rather than respond. Calling my response here aggressive or an attack is simply not factual, it is hypervigilance against me. Where is your criticism of "Good faith argumentation, or really argumentation in general, went out the window when you started treating whether syntax matters (for this language and in general) as a universal truth / (binary) logical statement rather than just an opinion." ?? I can't flag that outrageous personal attack and no one else has.

As for Pony, I'm not here to defend it or explain it ... I simply responded to casual dismissals of it on trivial grounds.

P.S.

A personal attack is a personal attack ... it's not the target's fault for perceiving it that way. If you're saying something negative about someone then that's a personal attack. Just talk about the subject and the substance, not people. For example, do not write things like "You seem to be struggling with the whole fallacy thing by the way". And FWIW, I think I have a very good grasp of fallacies ... e.g., I know that "no true Scotsman would put sugar on his porridge" is a No True Scotsman fallacy but "certain Scotsmen put sugar on their porridge" is not.

"Why wouldn't you be able to flag it?"

Ask dang ... as I said, I do not have that capability.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-30 00:02:36+00:00
If you truly feel that way, please do flag and downvote rather. Surely you can appreciate that their comment was not written in agreement with or in support of you, and that hijacking their thoughts to sarcastically taunt me really doesn't serve you, your point, or this community. At least I certainly struggle to find what's good faith about this comment of yours specifically.

Edit:

> No, I disagree;

Sure, costs me nothing to take your word for it, so it shall be that way then. Definitely came across like that to me though, so if that was not intentional, maybe it's something for your later consideration.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-30 00:03:32+00:00
I have access to the highest tier paid versions of ChatGPT and Google Gemini, I've tried different models, tuning things like size of context windows etc.

I know it has nothing to do with this. I simply hit a wall eventually.

I unfortunately am not at liberty to share the chats though. They're work related (I very recently ended up at a place where we do thorny research).

A simple one though, is researching Israel - Palestine relations since 1948. It starts off okay (usually) but it goes off the rails eventually with bad sourcing, fictitious sourcing, and/or hallucinations. Sometimes I actually hit a wall where it repeats itself over and over and I suspect its because the information is simply not captured by the model.

FWIW, if these models had live & historic access to Reuters and Bloomberg terminals I think they might be better at a range of tasks I find them inadequate for, maybe.
by kristofferR | 2025-07-30 00:04:00+00:00
Nah it's not that rare.

This is one I got today:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6889605f-58f8-8011-910b-300209a521...

(image I uploaded: http://img.nrk.no/img/534001.jpeg)

The correct answer would have been Skarpenords Bastion/kruttårn.
by gcanyon | 2025-07-30 00:04:49+00:00
N=1, but: I read that carbs lower HDL, and I was eating a very carb-heavy diet.

So over about two months I switched to an informal low-carb diet. e.g. I stopped drinking milk, I ate Carl's Jr. six-dollar burgers as lettuce wraps for lunch, and sometimes just roast beef and mayo.

Over three months I lost something like 30 pounds, hitting a body fat percentage around 12% -- this wasn't the goal, but FWIW.

My HDL before was 17, after those three months, 25.

Then I added in various forms of exercise and got it up to about 55.

I've since engaged in various diets, and levels of exercise -- although I've never gone back to the original diet where whole meals consisted of a quart of ovaltine. My HDL has never dropped below 40, nor been higher than 65.
by wahern | 2025-07-30 00:05:17+00:00
IME it's far more likely for a program to run in an environment lacking /proc (e.g. some containers) than for argv[0] to be NULL, empty, or lying. Even /proc/self/exe can been used in an exploit chain (https://lwn.net/Articles/920384/). And there have been many other /proc-related exploits, which is why it's often a good idea to not even mount /proc at all rather than just mask /proc subtrees.

But even if /proc/self/exe is visible, it might not be possible to open it. For example, you can execute a binary residing in anonymous memory (memfd) using fexecve(2), or the executable file could have been deleted immediately after execution. AFAIU, /proc/self/exec is generated as a symlink rather than exposing the file object directly (cf. BSD /dev/fd), so opening it can fail.

The easy fix is to just simply fail if argv[0] is NULL or empty, but if one is a glutton for punishment and wants to be "robust", /proc/self/exe support could be added as a (preferred) alternative rather than a substitute mechanism.
by const_cast | 2025-07-30 00:05:20+00:00
That's just because there's a lot of humans and we're doing a lot of things, all the time.

Humans are pretty good at not making mistakes in high-reasoning scenarios. The problem is that humans make mistakes in everything pretty constantly. Like, even saying a word - people say the wrong word all the time.

So when we look at really easy tasks that can be trivially automated, like say adding 2 + 2, we say "humans are so stupid! Computer is smart!".

Because humans get 2 + 2 wrong 1% of the time, but computers always get it right.

But, as we know, this isn't how it works. Actually, humans are much smarter than computers, and it's not even close. Because intelligence is multi-dimensional. The thing is, that failure rate for humans stays pretty constant as the complexity of the task increases, to a degree. Whereas computers start failing more and more, and quickly. It's a very, VERY sharp cliff for algorithms.

LLMs take the cliff further, but they do not eliminate it.
by dekhn | 2025-07-30 00:05:25+00:00
i got a slow start on using coding agents but dove into it recently and it's allowed me to make more progress on some of my longest-term projects than I have in years! I also used to work for Google and this tool would have made my life tremendously better. I originally expected the coding agent to mostly handle boilerplate, but it produces initial prototypes that are often close to complete.
by mediaman | 2025-07-30 00:05:54+00:00
This is endlessly brought up as if the human operating the tool is an idiot.

I agree that if the user is incompetent, cannot learn, and cannot learn to use a tool, then they're going to make a lot of mistakes from using GPTs.

Yes, there are limitations to using GPTs. They are pre-trained, so of course they're not going to know about some easter egg in DDG. They are not an oracle. There is indeed skill to using them.

They are not magic, so if that is the bar we expect them to hit, we will be disappointed.

But neither are they useless, and it seems we constantly talk past one another because one side insists they're magic silicon gods, while the other says they're worthless because they are far short of that bar.
by dataflow | 2025-07-30 00:05:55+00:00
> you'll have to believe me when I say they are not leaning. They were just standing there posing for the photo.

I mean, if believing your words were enough to convey the message, then there'd be no point in taking the second photo and comparing them.

The point here isn't whether you're telling the truth (of course you are), it's about being able to see what's going on and get an intuitive feel for what changes and what stays the same. When I said "who's to say they're not leaning" my point wasn't to call you a liar; it was to say that that question is what immediately arises in your audience's brain, and it's completely distracting. Trust can't correct for the visual discrepancy, even if I had taken for the photo myself.
by billforsternz | 2025-07-30 00:08:02+00:00
I find it strangely pleasing how a bunch of boutique(ish) companies from the UK, France, USA, Japan (others maybe?) all make plastic model kits of a variety of classic aeroplanes, WW2 planes in particular, in a series of scales.

When I was a kid I was quite interested and I could have reeled off the manufacturer names easily (um... Airfix, Revell, Heller, Frog, Tamiya, I want to say Haya-something-or-other, others). I will still look at the displays in hobby stores on occasion and many of them survive, so they've been doing this for 50+ years at this point.

I have no particular point, I just find it cool. I wonder if there are rock-star like artisan mold makers known to everyone in the industry. "Ah, this 1-50 scale Messerschmidt BF-109 vertical stabiliser is unmistakably the work of Pierre McFloogle ... chef's kiss!"
by Animats | 2025-07-30 00:08:37+00:00
> Things like LRC circuits don't make sense without an oscilloscope. I have one now but REALLY wish I had one as a kid, even a crazy-cheap incredibly low quality one would have been amazing.

Yes. Especially since oscilloscopes now start at $43 at WalMart.[1] $36 on Amazon. There are $12 oscilloscopes on Alibaba. Bandwidth is low, but plenty for audio, motors, etc.

Here's an electronics kit recommended on Reddit.[2] That plus a cheap scope and you can do most of the basics. All for under $100.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Osdhezcn-Pocket-Size-Oscilloscope...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/1k06mpz/sho...
by lorenstewart | 2025-07-30 00:09:08+00:00
Four part blog series, start here: https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/llm-tools-1-chatbot-to-agent

Full application with authentication and streaming is all set up. All you need is an Open Router API key. Then update the logic in the MCP servers to suit your needs. You'll have your own system up and running quickly.
by trentnix | 2025-07-30 00:10:43+00:00
I’ve been building a Golang web platform for my own web apps and I wired up toaster notifications using hx-swap-oob. I just populate a ‘notifications’ slice in my view model and hx-swap-oob makes sure my toaster messages get loaded irrespective of what content is actually being swapped.

It sounds like a similar use case to yours.
by standardUser | 2025-07-30 00:10:51+00:00
Maybe if the age limit was lower, and maybe if the law was less strict. But the delta between this law and the society its being imposed on is way too big to not cause serious unintended consequences. The younger kids will find ways to achieve many of the same interactions, only totally unregulated, and in doing so will be forced to create distance between themselves and 'adult' society.
by dekhn | 2025-07-30 00:12:11+00:00
Interesting. I interviewed at Meta a decade ago and was put off by the process (inexperienced devs who memorized leetcode medium problems). But I still get daily requests from their recruiters to try again (I am a senior leader in ML engineering). I would need to spend a fair amount of time thinking about what it would be like to do an interview with LLMs.

But honestly, I'd rather spend that time on figuring out how to use LLMs to interview people better (for example I already had an LLM write a collaboritive web editor with built-in code runner, so I don't need to license coderpad). I could see updating my prompt to have the coding agent generate a text box for entering prompts during the interview. Either way, I still expect candidates to be able to explain what a hash table is in their own words.
by ahachete | 2025-07-30 00:12:16+00:00
This is conceptually similar to what we did for Postgres extensions at the StackGres [1] project. I gave a talk at a Kubecon about it [2].

However, this scheme is not perfect. Some Kubernetes security solutions enforce immutable containers, and once the agent pulls any additional file into the container, it will be flagged. It's also harder to reason about the security of the image (think CVEs, etc), given that its true contents are not known ahead of time.

We have also worked on a solution for this, which is to create dynamic container images. It still requires (as of today, may change in the future) restarting the container, but it keeps container images immutable. Apologies for the self plug, but I believe it may be interesting that I'll speak about it in the Container Days conference in September [3].

[1]: https://stackgres.io

[2]: https://aht.es/#talks-postgres_extensions_in_kubernetes

[3]: https://www.containerdays.io/containerdays-conference-2025/a...

(edit: formatting)
by ggreer | 2025-07-30 00:12:22+00:00
USB-C has an unsupported tab in the middle of the port. It's pretty easy for that tab to bend or break, especially if the plug is inserted at an angle.

Lightning doesn't have that failure mode. Also Lightning ports only use 8 pins (except on the early iPad Pros), so reversing the cable can often overcome issues with corroded contacts. That workaround isn't possible with USB-C.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-30 00:12:23+00:00
Sure, but there are limits here. Thats what I'm talking about, limits. The memory isn't infinitely expansive. I still have found it doesn't backtrack well enough to "remember" (for lack of a better term) that it told me something already, if its old enough, for example.

It also doesn't seem to do a good job of building on "memory" over time. There appears to be some unspoken limit there, or something to that affect.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-30 00:12:27+00:00
I find the stated goal of alerting downstream a bit odd. Most downstreams scan upstream web pages for releases and automatically open an issue after a new release.

Project zero could also open a mailing list for trusted downstreams and publish the newly found announcements there.

The real goal seems to be to increase pressure on upstream, which in our modern times ranks lowest on the open source ladder: Below distributors, corporations, security pundits (some of whom do not write software themselves and have never been upstream for anything) and demanding users.
by const_cast | 2025-07-30 00:12:56+00:00
But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either, that comes with a cost.

The fallacy I hear often is that because something like AWS is sooo much more expensive than co-location or VPS, that it must be easier.

Yeah, it can be... sometimes. It almost never is. You trade off the complexity for new complexity. You replace your sysadmins with Dev Ops. It's not like it just magically gets better.

It's the same way with a lot of things. A more expensive car is not necessarily better. It can be, sometimes, if you're very careful and know what you're doing. More expensive clothes aren't better either. Popularity factors into this, too. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. Plenty of really shitty things become popular.

You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much. I'm not saying you need to go rogue, but you also don't need to use every single Google feature under the sun to, like, display some photos. And, if you do that, that's actually probably way worse and more expensive (effort + money) than if you didn't.
by r3trohack3r | 2025-07-30 00:13:23+00:00
Most (all?) AI models I work with are literally deterministic. If you give it the same exact input, you get the same exact output every single time.

What most people call “non-deterministic” in AI is that one of those inputs is a _seed_ that is sourced from a PRNG because getting a different answer every time is considered a feature for most use cases.

Edit: I’m trying to imagine how you could get a non-deterministic AI and I’m struggling because the entire thing is built on a series of deterministic steps. The only way you can make it look non-deterministic is to hide part of the input from the user.