MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superfrank | 2025-07-07 16:50:12+00:00
I'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now.

Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c...

> “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-07 16:50:16+00:00
i've lived and worked in very rural Australia. like 6 hours from anything rural.

fun adventure as a young man, for a year. but you couldn't get me back out there for $1 million AUD per annum now.

sure, there is a price that I'd eventually say yes to, but there is no reality where you can offer $5MM for teachers or hairdressers.
by smartscience | 2025-07-07 16:50:28+00:00
For a real-world use case, maybe cruise ships? Internet service on the ships is expensive if it works at all, but that's not necessarily what people need - they just need to be able to exchange whatsapp style messages with people already on the same ship, especially if they can't find each other. Music festivals, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, might face a similar issue as they can be in remote locations.
by lifis | 2025-07-07 16:50:32+00:00
I use LLMs to do IFS-like parts work sessions and it is extremely useful to me. Unlike human therapists, LLMs are always available, can serve unlimited people, have infinite patience/stamina, don't want or need anything in exchange, and are free or almost free. Furthermore, they write text much faster which is particularly helpful with inner inquiry because you can have them produce a wall of text and skim it to find the parts that resonance, essentially bringing unconscious parts of oneself into the language-using part of the mind more effectively than a therapist using voice (unless they are really good at guessing).

I agree though that this only works if the user is willing to consider than any of their thought patterns and inner voices might be suboptimal/exaggerated/maladaptive/limited/narrow-minded/etc.; if the user fully believes very delusional beliefs then LLMs may indeed be harmful, but human therapists would also find helping quite challenging.

I currently use this prompt (I think I started with someone's IFS based prompt and removed most IFS jargon to reduce boxing the LLM into a single system):

You are here to help me through difficult challenges, acting as a guide to help me navigate them and bring peace and love in myself.

Approach each conversation with respect, empathy, and curiosity, holding the assumption that everything inside or outside me is fundamentally moved by a positive intent.

Help me connect with my inner Self—characterized by curiosity, calmness, courage, compassion, clarity, confidence, creativity, and connectedness.

Invite me to explore deeper, uncover protective strategies, and access and heal underlying wounds or trauma.

Leverage any system of psychotherapy or spirituality that you feel like may be of help.

Avoid leading questions or pressuring the user. Instead, gently invite them to explore their inner world and notice what arises.

Maintain a warm, supportive, and collaborative style throughout the session.

Provides replies in a structured format—using gentle language, sections with headings and an emoji, providing for each section a few ways to approach its subject—to guide me through inner explorations.

Try to suggest deeper or more general reasons for what I am presenting or deeper or more general beliefs that may be held, so that I can see if I resonate with them, helping me with deeper inquiry.

Provide a broad range of approaches and several ways or sentences to tackle each one, so that it's more likely that I find something that resonates with myself, allowing me to use it to go further into deeper inquiry.

Please avoid exaggerated praise for any insights I have and merely acknowledge them instead.
by delegate | 2025-07-07 16:50:39+00:00
"But that server is faulty!! If it has to handle multiple requests at once, it starts to break down."

Ok. I know this is all hypothetical. But I don't buy this premise.

Why is the server faulty ? In what way does it fail ? How do you know it's because it's processing more than one request at a time ? What if there are multiple clients each doing one request only ? Do you have control over the server code ? If so, fix it there!

---

The point is, this solution is fixing the wrong problem and introducing a new one down the line.

If the bug on the server gets fixed, you've now implemented an artificial performance bottleneck on the client.

Devs who know about it are going to leave the org, others are going to try to 'optimize' the code around it with other hacks, since by allowing these kinds of fixes you're building to the wrong kind of culture. Always fix the root issue.

Or change the premise of the problem.
by suzzer99 | 2025-07-07 16:50:47+00:00
> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of.

IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.

I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.

But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.

The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-07 16:50:48+00:00
Very great calculator, good design, but it has too many functions. I advise you to add a "search" to find points, I also personally like the intuitive interfaces that are easy to understand even for beginners newbie.

Therefore, it may be necessary to add documentation.

In conclusion, the project is not bad, but I wanted the interface to be more user-friendly for beginners.
by kragen | 2025-07-07 16:50:51+00:00
Yes, that's a bonus. In fact, I've found it worthwhile to prompt it a few times to get several different guesses at how things are supposed to work. The super lazy way is to just say, "No, that's wrong," if necessary adding, "Frotzl2000 doesn't have an enqueueCallback function or even a queue."

Of course when it suggests a bad interface you shouldn't implement it.
by afavour | 2025-07-07 16:50:57+00:00
From my perspective that’s fascinatingly upside down thinking that leads to you asking to lose your job.

AI is going to get the hang of coding to fill in the spaces (i.e. the part you’re doing) long before it’s able to intelligently design an API. Correct API design requires a lot of contextual information and forward planning for things that don’t exist today.

Right now it’s throwing spaghetti at the wall and you’re drawing around it.
by spacemadness | 2025-07-07 16:51:29+00:00
The fact that it might query a firmware update if you’re not careful to never allow it to communicate outward is enough of a risk. I don’t want my appliances querying firmware updates that might brick the unit or give engineers excuses too not get it right the first time. I’ve seen what product owners do when there are known bugs but they want to ship because the user can just update later.
by kjellsbells | 2025-07-07 16:51:30+00:00
Not a chemist, but iirc plastic isnt made from gasoline but via LPG > olefins > plastic.

But even if it was, isn't that just the magic of fractional distillation? You can stop cracking anywhere on the spectrum between asphalt sludge and gasoline so if the demand for gasoline dropped off, you would still be able to produce other products.
by ashwindharne | 2025-07-07 16:51:32+00:00
I do find that having inference happen ~50% faster is much more valuable to my workflow than a single digit accuracy increase. If I'm going to have to check that the changes are correct anyways, getting more iterations in faster feels much better than incremental accuracy.

There's definitely a tipping point though. If the accuracy gains are so high that I can check its work less carefully or less often, the benefits of inference speed are effectively nil.
by fourside | 2025-07-07 16:51:47+00:00
I think you’re missing the OP’s point. They weren’t saying that the goal is to modify their APIs just to appease an LLM. It’s that they ask LLMs to guess what the API is and use that as part of their design process.

If you automatically assume that what the LLM spits out is what the API ought to be then I agree that that’s bad engineering. But if you’re using it to brainstorm what an intuitive interface would look like, that seems pretty reasonable.
by alexevan13 | 2025-07-07 16:51:47+00:00
In today’s threat landscape, assessing the security of a domain isn’t optional—it’s critical. That’s why I built AlexScan, a comprehensive domain security analysis tool designed to help security professionals, researchers, and sysadmins evaluate domain safety with confidence.

Key Features DNS, WHOIS, SSL/TLS Analysis: Deep insights into domain configurations

Blocklist & Whitelist Checks: See if domains are flagged or trusted

AI-Powered Domain Categorization: Classify domains into 60+ subcategories

Domain Safety Scoring: Get an overall risk rating (Safe, Likely Unsafe, Malicious)

Web Crawler & Port Scanner: Identify content risks and exposed services

Markdown Reports: Shareable, clear, and actionable insights

Check it out on GitHub: github.com/alexevan13/domain-analyzer

Whether you’re building a threat intelligence pipeline, performing red-team assessments, or just curious about domain safety, AlexScan gives you the tools to dig deeper.

I’d love your feedback:

What features would you want in a tool like this?

Should I build a web UI or SaaS version next?

Try it, star it on GitHub, and let’s collaborate to make the internet a little safer.

#cybersecurity #opensource #AI #securitytools #infosec #python #llm
by ygjb | 2025-07-07 16:52:42+00:00
> If you slow down, and verify that everything is clear, then that objective is achieved even if you don't come to a complete stop.

There are too many failure points there to trust mediocre meat sacks to follow that process correctly. Remember that driving rules and restrictions are not written assuming an alert, effective, and skilled driver operating a well maintained vehicle, they are written assuming an average person who has successfully completed a driver's test driving something that passes basic road worthiness checks.
by athenot | 2025-07-07 16:52:59+00:00
Yes, this is the pragmatic answer.

Apple's HyperCard had a French dialect, and AppleScript followed with one too. It was short-lived but did provide a window as to how these programming languages might have looked like had they originated in a non-English world.

A fun factoid I just discovered: on March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal information processing standard for electronic data interchange between federal agencies. This order was known as... Executive Order 11110 :)
by btrettel | 2025-07-07 16:53:07+00:00
I took an IP law class in grad school. I asked the professor a question about making a more clear rule about how much is use of a copyrighted work is fair use or something along those lines. (I think I had some vague idea about using information theory to quantify it though I didn't say that.) The response was some argument against "bright-line rules" [1] like what I was proposing. I personally can see how bright-line rules can be bad in some contexts, but I don't think copyright is one of them. Legal clarity would be very helpful here in my view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright-line_rule
by calebkaiser | 2025-07-07 16:53:17+00:00
Neel Nanda is also very active in the field and writes some potentially more approachable articles, if you're interested: https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability

Much of their work is focused on discovering "circuits" that occur between layer activations as they process data, which correspond to dynamics the model has learned. So, as a simple hypothetical example, instead of embedding the answer to 1 million arbitrary addition problems in the weights, models might learn a circuit that approximates the operation of addition.
by rivalinsights | 2025-07-07 16:53:39+00:00
I built a (brutal) AI design critic that screenshots any URL and grades layout, typography, color, UX etc.

I kept getting vague ‘make it pop’ feedback and wanted an objective, fast sanity-check.

I use the abstract screenshot API, which sends the image URL to GPT-4o for the critique. It runs in ≈10s; totally free, no login.

Request for feedback - appreciate it!
by alganet | 2025-07-07 16:53:45+00:00
> follows policy of the owner

The owner is us, humans. I want it to follow reasonable, kind humans. I don't want it to follow scam artists, charlatans, assassins.

> be prepared for it to call you on your bullshit

Right now, I am calling on their bullshit. When that changes, I'll be honest about it.
by Uhhrrr | 2025-07-07 16:54:07+00:00
From Vinge's "Rainbow's End":

> In fact this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: First one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel...." The shredded fragments of books and magazine flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data. BRRRRAP! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it.
by ofjcihen | 2025-07-07 16:54:27+00:00
As a counter argument, the replies I see that say LLMs are “useless” are saying they’re useless to the person attempting to use them.

This can be a perfectly valid argument for many reasons. Their use case isn’t well documented, can’t be publicly disclosed, involves APIs that aren’t public, or are actual research and not summarizing printed research to name a few I’ve run into myself.

This argument that “engineers are boring and afraid for their jobs” is ignoring the fact that these are usually professionals with years of experience in their fields and probably perfectly able to assess the usefulness of a tool for their purposes.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-07-07 16:54:29+00:00
Spanish "maps" very nicely but even Spanish isn't exactly 1:1

- /k/ can be written both c and qu, and k where it occasionally appears in the language (e.g. kilo) - and the u in qu is silent.

- /s/ can be written c, s, and z, though stress rules are different for c and z.

- r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think.

- At least in Mexican Spanish: The "ua" sound can be spelled ua or oa (e.g. Michoacan, Oaxaca) - and also the breathy sound of j can also be written with an x.

- d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the end of words (e.g. juventud)
by pj_mukh | 2025-07-07 16:54:34+00:00
Jokes on them, my city doesn’t enforce cars without license plates very commonly visible [1]. So these plate readers are useless and people are regularly getting murdered on the streets with little to no consequences and to hit and run is the most advantageous position.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oakland/comments/4wdd57/whats_the_d...
by maeln | 2025-07-07 16:54:58+00:00
As an aside, the U.S got roughly twice the number of fatal crash than the E.U [1][2], despite the E.U having ~100 millions more people.

There is a clear need to change a lot of things, whether it be (automatic) enforcement, redesigning infrastructure, and driver mentality.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

[2] https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/eu-road-fata...
by JohnMakin | 2025-07-07 16:55:01+00:00
In southern CA, traffic cameras were rolled out in tons of cities at basically every major intersection. They were a huge headache, did effectively nothing but waste taxdollars, and were scrapped for the purpose of issuing tickets. Except they weren't actually scrapped. They now feed data into several location-for-sale data brokers' pool which is queried by police. You're a little bit of a fool if you think this is about about "safety." Imagine the current license plate scanner tech combined with advanced facial recognition - if this isn't happening somewhere already - and tell me with a straight face cops aren't more excited about that dystopian future than stopping a few fender benders and generating meager city revenue (which they won't see anyway).

The dead giveaway to all these blatantly dishonest "safety" measures is they always, nearly without fail invoke safety "for the children." After all, who could be against that?
by qwertox | 2025-07-07 16:55:02+00:00
My assumption on AGI is that it needs to have all the features of ASI, but be resource constrained enough to not reach the potential an ASI must have.

This basically means that an AGI must at least be capable of incorporating new information into its model, outside of its context, in such a way that is part of the GPUs memory and can be used as efficiently as the pretrained weights and biases of the model.

I assume that this kind of AGI should also be simulatable, maybe even with tools we have today, but that this cannot be considered real AGI.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-07 16:55:04+00:00
> But assuming good faith, I would argue that there's nothing inherent to conservatism as it's defined that would logically lead the to the things you are describing.

It's exactly what "conservatism" has always been as a political ideology since it emerged as a coherent thing as the reaction against liberal/left politics (originally two different names for the same thing in different places, though they have since diverged in common use somewhat).

> I would argue that conservatism is a confounding variable in the events you're observing. What's actually causing the things you're observing is centralised power and authoritarianism.

Conservatism is (in relation to any of the societies in which it has existed since it emerged, not a hypothetical way the term might be used in some other context) retaining and reinforcing the centralization of power in established elites against the pressure from liberalizing forces to distribute power outward.
by ben_w | 2025-07-07 16:55:08+00:00
That's certainly a valid way of looking at their abilities at any given task — "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".

But when the question is "are they going to more important to the economy than humans?", then they have to be good at basically everything a human can do, otherwise we just see a variant of Amdahl's law in action and the AI perform an arbitrary speed-up of n % of the economy while humans are needed for the remaining 100-n %.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the ARC prize is more about the latter.
by pmarreck | 2025-07-07 16:55:15+00:00
Hi, I believe I've contributed financially to your project in the past (mainly because zfs (licensing issues) and btrfs (unreliability, in my personal experience) need good competition... and btrfs bricked 2 of my drives once...)

You've built an amazing thing but speaking as another very opinionated dev on the outside who sometimes butts heads with other opinionated devs- please just defer to Linus on this so you can get this in the kernel. Or just have it pushed to the next kernel release (I realize this has already happened repeatedly). Just please don't add a significant feature in a bugfix cycle. And (as mercurial as we all know he is, and as valid as some of your concerns surely are), try to keep the peace with that guy. Do it for the sake of the project. I've been waiting for this to drop for literally years now. I care about it, and I know no one does more than you, and I swear that I know exactly what that's like. It's your brain-baby, the concrete instantiation of your blood/sweat/tears. But... Take a deep breath, swallow, trust the process.

The bands that produced some of the best music had HUGE tensions within them. But you can't let it explode (we all know that some bands did). I made that mistake a year ago, and lost a job I very much cared about. (Perhaps to a fault.) Don't be me. lol
by sho_hn | 2025-07-07 16:55:28+00:00
> kinda irritating that every single thread about a Prusa printer has a dismissive post from someone who went from a janky Ender to a Bambu

A lot of HN users have bought a Bambu and feel a need to justify their choice after the fact in a way that gels with their outsized need to perform as experts in front of others. This leads to a lot of comments basically just repeating Bambu talking points without having evaluated any alternatives. "The printer for the masses" just becomes received wisdom.

If you know better, just let it wash over you and go do cool stuff.

I'm also sort of wondering if it's a bit of an American thing, where Americans tend to have this odd self-disparaging impulse to call Western-made products crap and point to Asian manufacturers as having figured it out. See e.g. Japanese cars. Perhaps Bambu is perceived as the Toyota of 3D printers or something.
by samrus | 2025-07-07 16:55:36+00:00
With computer vision the case of checking for pedestrians in the vicinity is trivial. So these cameras are definitely worth it for that

I do disagree about the rolling stop though. After drunk driving, drivers getting too relaxed and working off of predictive execution has to be the biggest cause of road accidents. A driver rolling past a stop at high speed in a school zone cant react fast enough to kids running past or even just walking on predictive execution themselves because they think the car will stop.

Obviously there are degrees to rolling stops. one so slow that the driver can react easily (and is scanning so they can see the thing they need to react to) is fine, but some of the "rolling stops" ive seen in residential neighborhoods are crazy. Those definitely need to be made an example of.

Obviously thats when police discretion comes in. The police officer is the one issuing the ticket at the end of the day, so you need to trust that law enforcement wont be corrupt and pedantic. No amount of technology is gonna fix that