MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by munificent | 2025-07-29 18:01:41+00:00
Everyone has a complex relationship with their muse.

Fetishizing gear such that you use lack of the right gear as an excuse to not create, or spend all your time acquiring gear and not using it is definitely toxic.

But, also fetishizing minimalism such that you end up with a process that is all self-flagelating toil and misery is also toxic.

Everyone's gotta navigate the boundary between those themselves.
by rsync | 2025-07-29 18:01:46+00:00
Our common, accepted knowledge - and what we should demand - is that all KYC be concentrated in actual banks.

Actual banks (not fintech barnacles) enjoy a very privileged position in terms of verifying identity and legal mechanisms afforded to them.

If a non-bank actor can verify against an actual bank, that should be enough…

It is absurd that, for instance, a small saas/iaas provider should perform any form of KYC when we can match a successful payment against a bank.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-29 18:02:05+00:00
This is the premise of all of the ML research I've been into. The only difference is to replace the wormhole with linear genetic programming, neuroevolution, et. al. The size of programs in the demoscene is what originally sent me down this path.

The biggest question I keep asking myself - What is the Kolmogorov complexity of a binary image that provides the exact same capabilities as the current generation LLMs? What are the chances this could run on the machine under my desk right now?

I know how many AAA frames per second my machine is capable of rendering. I refuse to believe the gap between running CS2 at 400fps and getting ~100b/s of UTF8 text out of a NLP black box is this big.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-29 18:02:41+00:00
> to this day, majorities support Oct 7th attack, both in Gaza and West Bank

Likewise, to this day, majorities of israelis support the israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

> That's like saying in WW2, we can't attack Berlin because there are innocent Germans who don't support Nazis.

There's a difference between collateral damage and the israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That said, the intentional firebombing of German civilians was arguably a war crime, so you're arguing against your point here. Indeed, the geneva conventions are partially motivated by the atrocities that occurred during WWII, with the aim of making sure they happened "never again".

> So how exactly do you propose to fight Hamas in an urban environment when it's blending in to the population that largely supports them

That's not my problem, but ethnic cleansing is obviously an illegal and wrong way to go about it. Still though, an answer to your request can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718080
by wodenokoto | 2025-07-29 18:02:55+00:00
I'm currently learning Janet and using ChatGPT as my tutor is absolutely awful. "So what is the difference between local and var if they are both local and not global variables (as you told me earlier)?" "Great question, and now you are really getting to the core of it, ... " continues to hallucinate.

It's a great tutor for things it knows, but it really needs to learn its own limits
by nyrikki | 2025-07-29 18:02:55+00:00
Often, even outside of software, unit testing means testing a component's (unit‘s) external behavior.

If you don't accept that concept I can see how TDD and testing in general would be challenging.

I general it is most productive when building competency with a new subject to accept the author's definitions, then adjust once you have experience.

IMHO, the sizing of components is context, language, and team dependent. But it really doesn't matter TDD is just as much about helping with other problems like action bias, and is only one part of a comprehensive testing strategy.

While how you choose to define a 'unit' will impact outcomes, TDD it self isn't dependent on a firm definition.
by owisd | 2025-07-29 18:03:06+00:00
There's a cognitive dissonance to the opposition to this:

a) Content controls don't work, what are the government thinking? b) This is parents' problem, they should use content controls.

Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses. There's also obvious workarounds such as VPNs and a teenager walking into a pawn shop with £50 for a second hand smartphone without parental controls.

It also makes no sense that parents can't be bothered to turn on parental controls yet can be bothered to run a national grassroots campaign for this stuff (see e.g. http://smartphonefreechildhood.org)

See also- I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway: https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-our-fourth-graders-on-pornhu... 8-year old watches violent porn on friend’s iPad: https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/32857335/son-watched-viole...

Although your idea of an OS-level age flag is also being pushed by the Anxious Generation's Jonathan Haidt, so definitely has merit/traction as an alternative.
by crawfordcomeaux | 2025-07-29 18:04:14+00:00
As someone who abandoned rightness/wrongness 9+ years ago (except in the idea of alignment with the cosmos), I can say that "genocidal rhetoric" doesn't necessarily imply rightness or wrongness. There exist language patterns that indicate a perspective that, when culturally carried and compounded for years, has the effect of cultivating behaviors that lead to extinguishing a people, whether intentional or not. This is genocidal rhetoric. As for options as to what to do with it, I find this useful for finding more.

https://thenightgarden.substack.com/p/the-story-state-action...

I'm curious how people think maintaining genocidal rhetoric is aligned with serving life, when it literally serves the destruction of a group.
by gnulinux | 2025-07-29 18:04:25+00:00
Do you still have this problem if you add a comment before declaring the variable like "Note: thingsById is not a dictionary, it is an array. Each index of the array represents a blabla id that maps to a thing"

In my experience they under overvalue var names, but they value comments even more. So I tend to calibrate these things with more detailed comments.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-29 18:05:01+00:00
> "they can just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy enough. Tread carefully"

True, and worse, they're hungry because it's increasingly seeming like "hosting LLMs and charging by the token" is not terribly profitable.

I don't really see a path for the major players that isn't "Sherlock everything that achieves traction".
by pjmlp | 2025-07-29 18:05:31+00:00
It could eventually provide some, if Safe C++ (nee Circle) proposal had gotten a warm welcome by the WG21 committee unfortunately they rather go with the mythical profiles approach.

Not only didn't they made it into C++26, it isn't clear what could land in C++29, this ignoring the assumptions regarding capabilities that static analysers are yet to provide nowadays.
by diego_moita | 2025-07-29 18:05:46+00:00
This is one of those ideas that makes so much sense that you'd ask why didn't it catch on before: WASM as a modules for all sorts of platforms

It could become a competitor for a lot of existing technologies. Some examples:

* embedded script languages (e.g.: Python in Blender and Gimp, Lua in games, VBScript in MS applications).

* add-on modules (e.g. COM on Microsoft platforms or COM-like for non-MS)

* finally, a run-anywhere platform? (what the JVM and .Net always wanted to be)
by altruios | 2025-07-29 18:06:12+00:00
Christian Nationalists are extremists, nationalistic, and xenophobic. They have a strong desire to force other's to conform to their world view, including the use of force, mis/dis information, and bribery. They work by an in-group which their laws protect and any evil inside is excused, and an out-group which must be converted or destroyed and any evil those people commit is proof of such. They are individuals so long as they conform to the tenets of their religion, They vote as a single block.

So... national socialists and National Christians have a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram... to deny or miss those parallels seems disingenuous or ill informed.

I'm not informed of the British political landscape, so I can't speak to that.

And no, not every Christian is a NACHRIST, and it also isn't a coincidence that NAZI's co-oped and used Christianity opportunistically when it suited them.
by dguido | 2025-07-29 18:06:19+00:00
In case anyone is looking for them, here are the exploits for these EOL devices. I avoided allowing Trail of Bits to release exploits for 13 years, but I decided it was finally time for a policy change. We'll be dropping a lot more as time goes on now.

Here's the exploit for the Netgear WGR614v9: https://github.com/trailofbits/exploits/tree/main/junkyard-2...

Here's the exploit for the BitDefender Box 1: https://github.com/trailofbits/exploits/tree/main/junkyard-2...

There's a lot of included detail so you can learn how to write your own and really understand every decision we made in writing them.
by alwaysanon | 2025-07-29 18:06:20+00:00
It is a bit of a different thing than pipelines because in every organisation I've worked at you're expected to have a peer review via pull request for anything going to production - and that is before the change is merged/pipeline triggered. The idea is that anything super-nefarious should be caught by the peer during the PR review and questioned/denied before it can happen.

I doubt we'll want each prompt we make that could leverage an MCP to be peer reviewed beforehand in the same way.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-29 18:06:42+00:00
Some good points. And I do agree with your general opinion of this law. Albeit not all of specific points you've made:

> I think the impact is a lot worse than that. There are still compliance costs especially for volunteer run sites. Ofcom says these are negligible, because they its unlikely to be more than "a few thousand pounds". Then there are the risks if something goes wrong if you have not incorporated.

What are these "compliance costs"? There's no forms that need to be completed. Sites don't have to register themselves. For smaller sites, the cost is just what I described: the time and effort of volunteer moderators who already moderate the site. If they're already removing adult content, then there's no extra work for them.

> HN has already has discussed things like the cycling forum that hit down. lobste.rs considered blocking UK IPs. I was considering setting up a forum to replace/complement FB groups I help admin (home education related). This is enough to put me off as I do not want the hassle and risk of dealing with it.

None of this proves your point though. It just proves that some sites are worried about potential overreach. It's an understandable concern but it a different problem to the one the GP was describing in that it doesn't actually make it any harder for smaller forums in any tangible way. Unless you called "spooked" a tangible cost (I do not).

> I think what you are missing is that this does not just cover things like porn videos and photos.

I didn't miss that. But you're right to raise that nonetheless.

There's definitely a grey area that is going to concern a lot of people but no site is going to be punished for mild, or occasional "breaches". What the government are trying to police is the stuff that's clearly inappropriate for under-18s. The UK (and EU in general) tends to pass laws that can be a little vague in definition and trust the police and courts to uphold "the spirit of the law". A little like how US laws can be defined by past cases and their judgments. This ambiguity will scare American sites because it's not how American law works. But the UK system does _generally_ work well. We do have instances where such laws are abused but they're infrequent enough to make national news and subsequently get dropped because of the embarrassment it brings to their department.

That all said, I'm really not trying to defend this particular law. The Online Safety Act is definitely a _bad_ law and I don't personally know of anyone in the UK (outside of politicians) who actually agrees with it.
by CJefferson | 2025-07-29 18:07:20+00:00
These things are moving so quickly, but I teach a 2nd year combinatorics course, and about 3 months ago I tried th latest chatGPT and Deepseek -- they could answer very standard questions, but were wrong for more advanced questions, but often in quite subtle ways. I actually set a piece of homework "marking" chatGPT, which went well and students seemed to enjoy!
by tsumnia | 2025-07-29 18:07:40+00:00
IT can be beneficial for making your initial assessment, but you'll need to dig deeper for something meaningful. For example, I recently used Gemini's Deep Research to do some literature review on educational Color Theory in relation to PowerPoint presentations [1]. I know both areas rather well, but I wanted to have some links between the two for some research that I am currently doing.

I'd say that companies like Google and OpenAI are aware of the "reputable" concerns the Internet is expressing and addressing them. This tech is going to be, if not already is, very powerful for education.

[1] http://bit.ly/4mc4UHG
by gh0stcat | 2025-07-29 18:07:46+00:00
I have been testing it for the last 10 mins or so, I really like it so far, I am reviewing algebra just as something super simple. It asks you to add your understanding of the concept, ie explain why you can always group a polynomial after splitting the middle term. This is honestly more than I got in my mediocre public school. I could see kids getting a lot out of it especially if their parents aren’t very knowledgeable or cannot afford tutors. Not probably a huge improvement on existing tools like kahn academy though. I will continue to test on more advanced subjects.
by matthewowen | 2025-07-29 18:07:51+00:00
but cycling races are won by being able to put out a critical extra 50 watts for a few minutes at a key point in the race. I don't think anyone is trying to motor the whole way up a climb, but I can imagine how you could have a useful motor if you're just trying to run for ten minutes total? at that point it's analagous to the <250g drones that are out there.
by politelemon | 2025-07-29 18:08:08+00:00
> Passkeys, particularly when bound to a physical security key

And _only_ when bound to a physical security key. Unfortunately by tying into the marketing of passkeys, there is going to be a pervasive assumption that ecosystem/on-device passkeys are just as secure.

Overall a good set of points, and I think it highlights the issues with a lot of the lauded 'convenience' factors in the Apple ecosystem.
by hmry | 2025-07-29 18:08:16+00:00
I remember thinking this post was outdated when I first read it.

"Safe strings and unsafe strings have the same type - string - so we need to give them different naming conventions." I thought "Surely the solution is to give them different types instead. We have a tool to solve this, the type system."

"Operator overloading is bad because you need to read the entire code to find the declaration of the variable and the definition of the operator." I thought "No, just hit F12 to jump to definition. (Also, doesn't this apply to methods as well, not just operators?) We have a tool to solve this, the IDE."

If it really does turn out that the article's way is making a comeback 20 years later... How depressing would that be? All those advances in compilers and language design and editors thrown out, because LLMs can't use them?
by tough | 2025-07-29 18:08:21+00:00
wasm is the perfect abstraction to build a -modular- and pluggable codebase (say grpc/proto as contracts) so you can just swap any part of it as long as the wasm module abides to such contract.

I keep going more and more to it when I try to design systems, in my mind at least, hoping I can put some to use
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-29 18:08:38+00:00
Yeah, back when I had a Canon my only lens was a wide angle prime. I really like that Sony 90mm prime, DxO says it is Sony's best lens and I think it is.

Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.

The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here

https://www.yogile.com/537458/all

but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.

To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lv32zudu2c2d

was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.
Show HN: A teardown electronics quiz app made by me and a friend Ive never met
by 0dKD | 2025-07-29 18:09:03+00:00
I found a partly broken electronic doorbell on the ground and realized I never would have guessed that this was a doorbell. So I posted in my sideproject community (relentlessly.no) an idea to make a quiz app where we break open many gadgets, take pictures and let people guess what gadgets they are! Ive been working on and off for about three months on this with a fullstack and a designer that i met in our sideproject community <3 We know its pretty basic but would love to see if anyone finds it interesting. there are like five free tasks before a 3 usd season 1

Whats crazy is two things: Ive never met the designer. And we didnt have ONE single meeting digitally or physically while making this. all asynchronous work through slack. Man I LOVE that. And now i own 33% of a basic app. Time of my life!
by dcbb65b2bcb6e6a | 2025-07-29 18:09:08+00:00
> and it was wrong sometimes, sure. A known limitation.

But that's the entire problem and I don't understand why it's just put aside like that. LLMs are wrong sometimes, and they often just don't give you the details and, in my opinion, knowing about certain details and traps of a language is very very important, if you plan on doing more with it than just having fun. Now someone will come around the corner and say 'but but but it gives you the details if you explicitly ask for them'. Yes, of course, but you just don't know where important details are hidden, if you are just learning about it. Studying is hard and it takes perseverance. Most textbooks will tell you the same things, but they all still differ and every author usually has a few distinct details they highlight and these are the important bits that you just won't get with an LLM
by thefaux | 2025-07-29 18:09:54+00:00
I don't know how to do that is a great answer that I wish people would give more often.

> Most corporate leaders are expecting and even demanding that their employees use AI tools to get their work done.

Imagine for a second that I am an aspiring monopolist. Wouldn't a great way to achieve this be to make people believe that I am their agent, when I am really their adversary? Would I really offer them in good faith a tool that they could use to compete against me? Or would I try to get them to accept a trojan horse that destroys their profits from within. Once, I have siphoned enough profit to significantly damage the business, I can come in, borrow money to buy the company that I basically destroyed and then sell off the parts to an ignorant buyer who doesn't realize who badly I have wounded this once good business, or I just write off the loss for tax purposes.
by CharlesW | 2025-07-29 18:10:00+00:00
They may be thinking of the "uni Jetstream 4&1 Metal Edition" with black/red/bluegreen Jetstream ballpoints, plus a 0.5mm Mechanical Pencil: https://www.amazon.com/uni-Jetstream-Ballpoint-Mechanical-MS... or https://www.jetpens.com/Uni-Jetstream-4-1-Metal-4-Color-0.5-...
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-07-29 18:10:03+00:00
> It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed

No, not really.

> Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you.

Your experience isn't universal. Some students learned how to do research in school.
by subscribed | 2025-07-29 18:10:13+00:00
You still don't get any better support than with Pixel though. I wish it was different. And I'll be using my Pixel 9 with GOS until its no longer supported (so several more years), and if then there are no viable Android options? Well, so be it, iOS (which i despise but Android with Google pervasive surveillance is unusable. I know, iOS is not much better but at lease is about as secure as gos).
by sarchertech | 2025-07-29 18:10:24+00:00
Ever read an article on a subject you’re very familiar with and notice all the mistakes?

When I ask ChatGPT* questions about things I don’t know much about it sounds like a genius.

When I ask it about things I’m an expert in, at best it sounds like a tech journalist describing how a computer works. At worst it is just flat out wrong.

* yes I’ve tried the latest models and I use them frequently at work
by x187463 | 2025-07-29 18:10:30+00:00
I'm really waiting for somebody to figure out the correct interface for all this. For example, study mode will present you with a wall of text containing information, examples, and questions. There's no great way to associate your answers with specific questions. The chat interface just isn't good for this sort of interaction. ChatGPT really needs to build its own canvas/artifact interface wherein questions/responses are tied together. It's clear, at this point, that we're doing way too much with a UI that isn't designed for more than a simple conversation.
by crashprone | 2025-07-29 18:10:34+00:00
Bait : "For 200$ a month you get to use Claude 20x more than what the Pro users are entitled to. You don't know how much exactly though, but neither do we. We may limit your usage with weekly and monthly limits. Sounds good?"

Switch: "We limited your usage weekly and monthly. You don't know how those limits were set, we do but that's not information you need to know. However instead of choosing to hoard your usage out of fear of hitting the dreaded limit again, you've kept it again and again, using the product exactly the way it was intended to and now look what you've done."
by scarmig | 2025-07-29 18:10:36+00:00
A few weeks ago I was asking an LLM to offer anti-heliocentric arguments, from the perspective of an intelligent scientist. Although it initially started with what was almost a parody of writing from that period, with some prompting I got it to generate a strong rendition of anti-heliocentric arguments.

(On the other hand, it's very hard to get them to do it for topics that are currently politically charged. Less so for things that aren't in living memory: I've had success getting it to offer the Carthaginian perspective in the Punic Wars.)