MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theginger | 2025-07-03 05:46:57+00:00
Is this anything to do with them taking passwords without consent? I rarely use windows, and when I do one of the first things I do is switch from edge to chrome. I think I set up edge and used it once to see what it was actually like, but I was pretty careful about the data syncing / sharing settings. I have the Microsoft authenticator app on my phone, I was pretty careful about the privacy settings on that too, but it's been through a couple of phone upgrades. Somehow all of my passwords were making their way into Microsoft authenticator, so I must have missed something somewhere. I can only imagine how many millions of people must have had their passwords unintentionally slurped by Microsoft if they have been that aggressive with it.
by hollerith | 2025-07-03 05:47:52+00:00
>There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people.

If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China.

DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-07-03 05:48:24+00:00
Well, statistically speaking, Americans are more likely to be children or grandchildren of immigrants than, say, Europeans.

The language thing is real, and shared with other anglophone countries. Though there is an upside; almost everyone else speaks English, so it's likely that when you get to your new home you'll be able to be understood while you learn their language.

I spent a few years in Berlin, and worked there for two different German companies while struggling to learn the language. Everyone smoothly switched to English, sometimes mid-sentence, when I entered the chat. A German moving to the USA (or any anglophone country) would not have this experience and would have to get fluent in English really quickly.
by ttctciyf | 2025-07-03 05:49:43+00:00
> top 10 domains that the White House Wire links to (by occurrence), from May 8 to June 24, 2025:

youtube.com (133) foxnews.com (72) thepostmillennial.com (67) foxbusiness.com (66) breitbart.com (64) x.com (63) reuters.com (51) truthsocial.com (48) nypost.com (47) dailywire.com (36)

jfc.
Show HN: I made a tool to reduce customer support time by 50%
by whitefang | 2025-07-03 05:51:10+00:00
At Formester were facing a problem. Our 50% plus time was going into customer support.

And the question were mostly about how to do something in the app. Which we have already documented well through videos, blogs and documentation.

I created Chakam for this purpose. We are starting to use it internally and also looking for other medium to large organization would could benefit from it.

Key features:

- Run on your own/dedicated infrastructure

- Use popular LLM or self hosted LLM

- Integrates with popular chat application in case you want to use directly in intercom etc

- Gives you a report every month on the gaps in your knowledge base

I'm looking to show you what I've built and understand if it can benefit your business.
by LexiMax | 2025-07-03 05:53:14+00:00
There is nothing preventing you from writing an abstraction that supports both the fancy middleware as well as direct IP connections.

I can say this with certainty because I've also worked on multiplayer in several shipped multi-region cross-platform games, and this sort of arrangement is precisely what we have shipped. Granted, Direct IP connections are usually only supported on PC, but they are there, they do work, and our PC players appreciate that piece of mind.
by dodslaser | 2025-07-03 05:54:35+00:00
Personally I don't mind spending several hours solving a problem over "async communication" if that means I'm free to work on other stuff while the other party is formulating a response. Then I also get the benefit of having something in their writing to refer back to.

The kind of person who takes hours to explain something in written form are unlikely to explain it in 3 minutes in person. More likely, they set up a meeting where they waffle on about an issue, expecting the receiving end to distill some valuable information from their ramblings, and then inevitably end up complaining when the solution doesn't match their expectations (which of course were never formalized anywhere).
by zeta0134 | 2025-07-03 05:54:57+00:00
An LLM can certainly try to consume an extremely poorly specified bug report, in half English half the user's native language, then consume the entire codebase and guess what the devil they're actually referring to. My guess is the humans are better at this, and I mostly speak from experience on two separate support floors that tried to add AI to that flow. It fails, miserably.

It's not really possible for an LLM to pick up on the hidden complexities of the app that real users and developers internalize through practice. Almost by definition, they're not documented! Users "just know" and thus there is no training data to ingest. I'd estimate though that the vast, vast majority of bugs I've been assigned originate from one of these vague reports by a client paying us enough to care.
by troupo | 2025-07-03 05:55:16+00:00
> knowing how the models behave, simply providing more/better context and instructions can fill this gap

No.

--- start quote ---

prompt engineering is nothing but an attempt to reverse-engineer a non-deterministic black box for which any of the parameters below are unknown:

- training set

- weights

- constraints on the model

- layers between you and the model that transform both your input and the model's output that can change at any time

- availability of compute for your specific query

- and definitely some more details I haven't thought of

https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering

--- end quote ---
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-03 05:56:10+00:00
I appreciate the video and generally agree with Fei-Fei but I think it almost understates how different the problem of reasoning about the physical world actually is.

Most dynamics of the physical world are sparse, non-linear systems at every level of resolution. Most ways of constructing accurate models mathematically don’t actually work. LLMs, for better or worse, are pretty classic (in an algorithmic information theory sense) sequential induction problems. We’ve known for well over a decade that you cannot cram real-world spatial dynamics into those models. It is a clear impedance mismatch.

There are a bunch of fundamental computer science problems that stand in the way, which I was schooled on in 2006 from the brightest minds in the field. For example, how do you represent arbitrary spatial relationships on computers in a general and scalable way? There are no solutions in the public data structures and algorithms literature. We know that universal solutions can’t exist and that all practical solutions require exotic high-dimensionality computational constructs that human brains will struggle to reason about. This has been the status quo since the 1980s. This particular set of problems is hard for a reason.

I vigorously agree that the ability to reason about spatiotemporal dynamics is critical to general AI. But the computer science required is so different from classical AI research that I don’t expect any pure AI researcher to bridge that gap. The other aspect is that this area of research became highly developed over two decades but is not in the public literature.

One of the big questions I have had since they announced the company, is who on their team is an expert in the dark state-of-the-art computer science with respect to working around these particular problems? They risk running straight into the same deep, layered theory walls that almost everyone else has run into. I can’t identify anyone on the team that is an expert in a relevant area of computer science theory, which makes me skeptical to some extent. It is a nice idea but I don’t get the sense they understand the true nature of the problem.

Nonetheless, I agree that it is important!
by motorest | 2025-07-03 05:56:16+00:00
> AWS and GCP started by engineers building products for engineers and later post success moved into enterprise sales (which AWS is doing well with, GCP not so much).

I think that product managers are AWS' and GCP's unsung heroes. One of the best things about AWS is how in contrast everything is designed to integrate exceptionally well with everything in the AWS ecosystem, and all services are designed to be simple, kept simple, and kept backwards compatible even when subjected to major upgrades. Which are always seamless.

In contrast, can anyone explain why Azure has Table Storage but also Cosmos DB, and Cosmos DB is actually half a dozen storage services? Why isn't Table Storage also Cosmos DB, then? Table Storage shares SDKs with CosmosDB, too.

The same applies to messaging. You have Storage Queues, Service Bus queues, Event Hub, and Event Grid. Even when you ask Azure experts what's the difference between, say, Storage Queues and Service Bus Queues, the answer is never clear, simple, straight-forward, or understandable.

It's a mess, and those who have to deal with it are left to navigate this mess.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-03 05:56:23+00:00
On Twitter some of the founders discussed this. He would give references to people who answered the phone and then praised his work generically. One person said they thought it was strange that both of his reference checks seemed like really young guys, but it's the startup world so they overlooked it.

There was one Tweet from someone who said they did a reference check from someone who said he did good work when he was working, but he was working multiple jobs at the same time so he wasn't working much. Maybe he assumed his references wouldn't be checked often, and maybe he was right?
by Llamamoe | 2025-07-03 05:56:58+00:00
Before RLHF, they're just a fancy autocomplete engine trained on the entire web and countless books, and text including stupidly wrong information is simply more common than text which goes "Hold up, that's wrong, it's actually X" midway.

Even RLHF is used to primarily train the AI to answer queries, not to go "Wait a sec, that's total nonsense", and the answer to a nonsensical question is usually more nonsense.
by noduerme | 2025-07-03 05:57:11+00:00
yet an incredibly basic and stupid oversight when the only point of your site is to show the phase of the moon.

I'm voting that this was vibe-coded by an LLM on behalf of someone who not only didn't write the code but didn't bother to look at a picture of the moon or look at the sky before deploying it. If so, it's almost the perfect Platonic example of "what could possibly go wrong?"
by akoboldfrying | 2025-07-03 05:58:43+00:00
> But you can't ignore the cultural consideration.

We can and should, the same way we ignore the corresponding "cultural consideration" that mothers who have undergone female genital mutilation themselves will feel alienated from their daughters if they do not inflict the same treatment on them. In this case, most people have no problem recognising that the rights of the daughter to enjoy her own sensory experience far outweigh the (quite real) emotional isolation that would be experienced by the parent -- so why is deafness treated differently?

Denying another person sensory experience is abuse. If that person is a child, it's child abuse. For me the harm inherent in this has nothing to do with whether sign languages are perceived as "real" languages on par with spoken languages. It's obvious to me as a hearing person that sign languages are indeed "real, full" languages, the same way written languages are, and, more generally, the same way that languages I don't personally understand but other people do, are. Sign languages are real, full languages -- and preventing a person who would be able to hear from hearing is still abuse.

I think the reason this is not called out more frequently and stridently by hearing people is that many of us fear being labeled "prejudiced" or worse, and being associated with the political right, who have a long history of making absolute moral claims about outgroups. It's simply an unusual quirk of our times that this specific quality of being seen as culturally presumptuous is the thing that no Right-Thinking Person wants to be seen doing right now, resulting in many otherwise intelligent people bending over backwards to avoid the stigma, even to the point of denying obvious realities like "a life that includes access to more sensory experience is a richer life".

ETA: To anyone who maintains that deaf parents should be able to prevent their children from being able to hear: Should illiterate parents be able to prevent their children from going to school? Should parents who grew up poor be able to starve their children?
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-03 05:58:54+00:00
The big problem is people tend to look at history as a singular event, or the final consequence of a series of events.

When such events are clearly ongoing, people roll their eyes and say you're overreacting. Then when it all ends and consequences happen, people say now is the time for healing, nobody could've foreseen this, and it's too bad nothing could've been done.

It's the same as being sober and trapped in a car with a drunk driver and their drunk friends. To them, it's fine. They're comfortable with what they're doing. You're the one being annoying for complaining. But their every action is not only endangering you and themselves, but it's endangering people on the perimeters who don't even know about the crisis that's happening within that 2 ton box. Some can see the swerving from far away, but there's nothing they can do. The only hope is the passenger trying to reason with an angry drunk to pull over, but it'll never happen. They'll just get more pissed off and drive more erratically to mess with you and to get some laughs from their friends. So it's a struggle between closing your eyes and hoping it's over soon, or trying to fight back and hope you can stop them. But neither option is easy and both shift the responsibility to someone other than the ones causing the chaos.
by raphael_l | 2025-07-03 06:00:10+00:00
Slightly off topic, but the Microsoft Authenticator app on iOS is - in my opinion - the probably worst designed app by a large corporation. Nothing in there works the way you’d expect it to work.

And my absolutely favorite thing was when it itself came in the way of seeing the 2FA code for a modal entry and you had the option on the screen to hide the modal for 10 seconds in order to remember the number underneath…

See screenshot here: https://ibb.co/5Wh05rsd
by p_l | 2025-07-03 06:01:59+00:00
Naughty Dog's GOAL was PS2 specific and essentially chock full of what would be called intrinsics these days that let you interleave individual assembly instructions particularly for the crazy coprocessor setup of Emotion Engine.

My understanding is that the mental model of programming in PS2 era was originally still very assembly like outside of few places (like Naughty Dog) and that GTA3 on PS2 made possibly its biggest impact by showing it's not necessary.
by moomin | 2025-07-03 06:02:22+00:00
Yes, but you can’t write something that’s generic over “things that support Select” because that’s not expressible via the type system.

So you can’t write a function, then get a version that works on lists, then a version that works on tasks, then a version that works on nullables, then get a version that works on parsers. One if the big secrets on monads is that Haskell users don’t spend very much time thinking about them, while people without monads have to think about them all the time.
by ddahlen | 2025-07-03 06:02:45+00:00
This is an announcement from the Minor Planet Center (MPC). They are the official international clearing house for observations of solar system objects.

The top indicates that the object has two names (this is common): 3I/ATLAS = C/2025 N1 (ATLAS)

ATLAS was the telescope that made the discovery.

The list of data are individual observations of the object by different telescopes. This observation format has been in use for a long time, but is being phased out. A row is meant to fit on a single punch card...

These observations are then used to calculate orbits, the MPC calculates the orbit as well, but this list of observations is also ingested by JPL and their Horizons service.
by GZGavinZhao | 2025-07-03 06:03:14+00:00
Mostly wrong place at the wrong time, I guess :(

Plus the chicken and the egg problem. This is mostly from the AerynOS experience : it seems like if you want to write some moderately complicated code then you're becoming the upstream of many libraries. Especially now with Rust's popularity and ecosystem maturity on the rise, it's super hard to convince people (e.g. your boss) that you'd be better of with D compared to e.g. Rust.
by baalimago | 2025-07-03 06:03:32+00:00
>if the issue with deterministic generation would be solved

This can be achieved by utilizing tests. So the SWE agent will write up a set of tests as it understands the task. These are the functional requirements, which should/could be easily inspected by the BI (biological intelligence).

Once the functional requirements have been set, the SWE agent can iterate over and over again until the tests pass. At this point it doesn't really matter what the solution code looks like or how it's written, only that the functional requirements as defined via the tests are upheld. New requirements? Additional tests.
by mirsadm | 2025-07-03 06:04:05+00:00
Initially I felt anxiety about AI and it's potential to destroy my career. However now I am much more concerned about what will happen in 5 or 10 years of widespread AI slop. When humans lose motivation to produce content and all we're left is AI continually regenerating the same rubbish over and over again. I suspect there'll be a shortage of programmers in the future as people are hesitant to start a career in programming.
by fluidcruft | 2025-07-03 06:05:57+00:00
Honestly when watching I had figured The Crown was playing it up for drama or invented it whole-cloth because the whole thing was so foreign vs what I was taught about WW2 British monarchy. And that's why the way they calmly deliver receipts (artifacts from the Windsor File/Marburg Files) in the credits triggered a rabbit hole of surreal bewilderment. In fact you will find historians of the British royalty who say The Crown was very lenient in its handling. But specifically about S2E6 there's a section here that summarizes what was in the episode

https://www.history.com/articles/history-behind-the-crown-qu...
by jgord | 2025-07-03 06:06:18+00:00
makes sense - humans have evolved a lot of wetware dedicated to 3D processing from stereo 2D.

I've made some progress on a PoC in 3D reconstruction - detecting planes, edges, pipes from pointclouds from lidar scans, eg : https://youtu.be/-o58qe8egS4 .. and am bootstrapping with in-house gigs as I build out the product.

Essentially it breaks down to a ton of matmulls, and I use a lot of tricks from pre-LLM ML .. this is a domain that perfectly fits RL.

The investors Ive talked to seem to understand that scan-to-cad is a real problem with a viable market - automating 5Bn / yr of manual click-labor. But they want to see traction in the form of early sales of the MVP, which is understandable, especially in the current regime of high interest rates.

Ive not been able to get across to potential investors the vast implications for robotics, AI, AR, VR, VFX that having better / faster / realtime 3D reconstruction will bring. Its great that someone of the caliber of Fei-Fei Li is talking about it.

Robots that interact in the real world will need to make a 3D model in realtime and likely share it efficiently with comrades.

While a gaussian splat model is more efficient than a pointcloud, a model which recognizes a wall as a quad plane is much more efficient still, and needed for realtime communication. There is the old idea that compression is equivalent to AI.

What is stopping us from having a google street-view v3.0 in which I can zoom right into and walk around a shopping mall, or train station or public building ? Our browsers can do this now, essentially rendering quake like 3D environments - the problem is with turning a scan into a lightweight 3D model.

Photogrammetry, where you have hundreds of photos and reconstruct the 3D scene, uses a lot of compute, and the colmap / Structure-from-Motion algorithm predates newer ML approaches and is ripe for a better RL algorithm imo. Ive done experiments where you can manually model a 3D scene from well positioned 360 panorama photos of a building, picking corners, following the outline of walls to make a floorplan etc ... this should be amenable to an RL algorithm. Most 360 panorama photo tours have enough overlap to reconstruct the scene reasonably well.

I have no doubt that we are on the brink of a massive improvement in 3D processing. Its clearly solvable with the ML/RL approaches we currently have .. we dont need AGI. My problem is getting funding to work on it fulltime, equivalently talking an investor into taking that bet :)
by kadhirvelm | 2025-07-03 06:06:53+00:00
Totally agree - I'd bet there will be a bigger emphasis on functional testing to prevent degradation of previously added features. And I'd bet the scope of tests we'll need to write will also go up. For example, I'd bet we'll need to add latency based unit tests to make sure as the LLM compiler is iterating, it doesn't make the user perceived performance worse
by gregzeng95 | 2025-07-03 06:07:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I built N-Back.net, a lightweight and responsive Dual N-Back task for working memory training.

I was frustrated by the clunky UI and heavy design of most existing n-back tools, so I made something clean, fast, and distraction-free. No login, no ads, no tracking – just cognitive training in your browser.

Key features: • Dual mode: visual + auditory • Adaptive difficulty: level up as you improve, drop down if needed • Dark mode and keyboard-only mode • Clearly differentiated letter sounds, carefully selected to avoid confusion • Performance tracker (WIP: I’m working on streaks and detailed history) • Mobile-friendly (works well on phones & tablets)

I’m planning to add: • Custom training modes (single-modality, color, etc.) • User-defined N range • Optional accounts for progress saving (but always optional)

Would love your feedback on: • UX flow and performance • Cognitive challenge balance • What would make you come back and use it regularly?

Site: https://n-back.net

Thanks for checking it out!
by hellojesus | 2025-07-03 06:12:00+00:00
> that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible

But by definition it is inefficient. Redistribution of money from Person A to Person B necessarily means Person A can't spend that money. If their optimal utility was to give that money to Person B, you wouldn't need such a policy governmentally.

Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.

As an annecdotal example, my state offers 12 weeks of parental leave. The maximum they are willing to pay is about $550/week. My company provides two weeks of paid leave. So for 10 weeks, I get the $550 from the state. But my w2 income is about 2k/week post tax, post 401k max. So I would forgo about $1400 a week to stay home. Daycare costs $550/week, so it's far better for me to work. But then I don't get the time off. And yet I still pay for others. This is an example of a terrible implementation of the already bad policy.
Show HN: ConferenceDatabase – find who sponsors any tech event
by rdoyle | 2025-07-03 06:12:03+00:00
https://conferencedatabase.com

*What it is*

A searchable database of ~12 k tech & business conferences with:

• Full sponsor lists + tier + $ when public

• Quick links to each sponsor’s partnerships/contact person

• Filters by category, dates, city radius, ticket price, etc.

• Fresh data: I scrape more and more event pages daily

*Tech*

Next.js + Supabase (Postgres, RLS) Python scrapers (Playwright + GPT-4o for messy HTML → JSON)

Thanks! – Ryan