MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-07-23 02:43:09+00:00
Copilot works with various backend LLMs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a few others I think.

We authenticate through a GitHub via SSO, which has a whole RBAC model behind it.

Maybe it would work with something else, but it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth, and depending on the source of the plugin for the other editors, could set off alarms with the security organization, and maybe legal as well. We have a lot of rules around our use of AI.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-23 02:43:20+00:00
Not really true. Gemma from Google with quantized aware training does an amazing job.

Under the hood, the way it works, is that when you have final probabilities, it really doesn't matter if the most likely token is selected with 59% or 75% - in either case it gets selected. If the 59% case gets there with smaller amount of compute, and that holds across the board for the training set, the model will have similar performance.

In theory, it should be possible to narrow down models even smaller to match the performance of big models, because I really doubt that you do need transformers for every single forward pass. There are probably plenty of shortcuts you can take in terms of compute for sets of tokens in the context. For example, coding structure is much more deterministic than natural text, so you probably don't need as much compute to generate accurate code.

You do need a big model first to train a small model though.

As for running huge models locally, its not enough to run them, you need good throughput as well. If you spend $2k on a graphics card, that is way more expensive than realistic usage with a paid API, and slower output as well.
by const_cast | 2025-07-23 02:43:26+00:00
> You are attacking the concept of marketing / advertising as a fundamental evil

It is. It's exploitation of the human mind, like a drug. It exists to hit the right triggers to open the gates of a person's decision making.

It's like a backdoor. Except, not really. Because the human mind is much easier to exploit than a computer.

We can do it very obviously, maybe with nicotine. But we don't even need substances. Just some bright lights and a bar you pull is enough to get people to drain their entire savings. You can even tell them "this doesn't work, you won't win" - it doesn't actually affect the exploit, because the exploit is occurring on a physiological, survival level, and logic is at a higher level than that. It's like trying to stop an active rootkit with Windows Defender.

Advertisement is gambling, but normalized. The goal is to develop an exploit to compel humans to work against their interests, to actively harm themselves in hopes of something they require.

It's typically simple things like joy or love. They might appeal to the innate desire for socialization, the innate need to be recognized and respected.

But, actually, you don't even need that. Even just exposing a brand image, over and over again, with no messaging creates an exploit. Now, they are primed to buy from you as opposed to competitors. Not based on logic, or even emotion - no, something much more intrinsic, much more fundamental to how neurons operate. Pattern recognition.

The exploit is so effective and deep-seated that you cannot even be aware if it has occurred, nor can you undo it. Some people believe the point of advertising is to get people to buy things. No, not at all. The point of advertising is for people to buy things all on their own, and make them believe it was done on their own accord. That's the golden goose. Any idiot can hold a gun to someone's head. But true manipulation doesn't require a gun.
by furyofantares | 2025-07-23 02:43:32+00:00
Everything Gemini did is really bad here, but I also noticed the author is doing things I simply wouldn't have done.

I have never even tried to run an agent inside a Windows shell. It's straight to WSL to me, entirely on the basis that the unix tools are much better and very likely much better known to the LLM and to the agent. I do sometimes tell it to run a windows command from bash using cmd.exe /c, but the vast majority of the agent work I do in Windows is via WSL.

I almost never tell an agent to do something outside of its project dir, especially not write commands. I do very occasionally do it with a really targeted command, but it's rare and I would not try to get it to change any structure that way.

I wouldn't use spaces in folder or file names. That didn't contribute to any issues here, but it feels like asking for trouble.

All that said I really can't wait until someone makes it frictionless to run these in a sandbox.
by komali2 | 2025-07-23 02:44:55+00:00
This and your other question are fair and good.

First, I'll answer the post ipso facto aspect: The USA did meddle, and was that good? In the case of Pinochet, no, because he was a brutal authoritarian and was obviously the worse alternative to the leftist, not even communist, government he overthrew. Also, if the people voted for communism, then, that's self determination, let them have it. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't, that's no business of America's. A military coup is "might makes right," an unethical ideology. So if we compare the two forms of meddling, actually, the USSR's was more ethical, since it was aligned with the will of the people. Overall though I still think neither country should have meddled.

What should have been done instead? If the USSR is meddling, the USA as a nation state should do nothing more than leverage its platform to expose any instances of meddling, especially if they were against the will of the people (e.g. fraudulent votes). The people in the USA is a different thing entirely, if I knew what direct action people could take to resist nation state meddling entirely I'd write it here, since I don't, I'll just say the usual: form subversive relationships with neighbors in opposition to authority, mutual aid in opposition to capital-derived infrastructure, mutual education, mutual bonds.

As for Hitler, who also rose to power undemocratically I might add (Reichstag fire and the like), he was committing a genocide, any and all means to stop that is ethical, including full invasion by other nation states. On the other hand, I can't think of an ethical way for a nation state to prevent him coming to power. After all, at the time, I'm not sure it was possible to predict what he was about to do - an anti-semitic politician wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and nobody had ever seen a Holocaust before. If Germany can't prevent itself from becoming a fascist hellhole I don't really see America's responsibility there other than to offer safe haven to any fleeing Jewish people, gays, trans people, communists, etc. Since time machines don't exist, I can't think of an ethical justification for USA meddling in Germany pre-Holocaust or pre-invasion of Poland.

What do you think? I think an interesting question is, "what is ethical and allowed if Hitler 2 arrived today and began seeking power?" Such questions could have interesting answers depending on what you think America should be allowed to do to the current person and nation conducting a genocide, Netanyahu in Israel.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-23 02:45:04+00:00
Pretty obscure. And are they not arm chair experts? Tell me how do I speak the truth if the truth is by its very nature condescension?

If someone doesn’t know what they are talking about. I prefer to tell them without dancing around some bs.

If I don’t know what I’m talking about I want to be told and proven wrong. It goes both ways.
Show HN: Paradigm – Run any AI model locally with a single .exe
by Xitiz | 2025-07-23 02:45:54+00:00
Paradigm is a desktop tool (Windows-first) that lets you run any Hugging Face AI model (text, audio) locally with GPU/CPU fallback for low end gpu devices. You can also bring your own hugging face model. The initial releases will be scrappy but will work with some models. We are iteratign to make Paradigm the universal platform for highly optimized local inference. Join the waitlist if you're interested.
by nic_wilson | 2025-07-23 02:47:18+00:00
The EPA recommends home owners mitigate with radon levels of 4 pCi/L and above, and the EPA recommends home owners mitigate ”consider” mitigation at levels 2-4. Often you will see people post radon results in the 10+ or even 50+ range, which may lead you to think 4 pCi/L is not too bad, but in fact exposure to that level is the equivalent of 8 cigarettes a day or 200 chest X-rays/year.
by mystraline | 2025-07-23 02:47:40+00:00
The proper color of an image would be a multispectral radiograph similar to a waterfall plot for each point. Each FFT bin would be 100GHz in size, and the range would be over 1000THz. And in a way, that'd what a color sensor is doing at the CCD level too - collapsing and averaging the radio energy its susceptible to a specific color.
by rachofsunshine | 2025-07-23 02:48:19+00:00
Assuming the bands are narrow, that should allow approximately true-color images, shouldn't it?

Human S cone channel = sum over bands of (intensity in that band) * (human S-cone sensitivity in that channel)

and similarly for M and L cone channels, which goes to the integral representing true color in the limit.

Are the bands too wide for this to work?
Show HN: Next.js and C# Project – App for limiting access to web sources
by Skorobogatkoa | 2025-07-23 02:48:37+00:00
Hi all, I’m a web developer mainly working with JavaScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, and related tech. Currently preparing for interviews, and I wanted to create something better than the usual CRUD apps that everyone creating. Something I could actually show during interviews and aslo use it by myself, and that would challenge me to learn new things. And I made this small app - Guard- a two-part, open source(C# part) app, which allow me to set rules via online account for blocking access to web resources on remote(in my case my kid’s) windows device: 1. Web App (Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, Prisma, PostgreSQL, Tailwind CSS, NextAuth): The web dashboard lets you set up a PIN, create custom rules and schedules, and choose categories of sites to block (like social media, gaming, etc.). It uses server actions, secure API endpoints, and advanced state management (custom context providers) for a smooth and responsive experience. Authentication supports both JWT and Google OAuth. 2. Windows Client App (C#): (Open source - i made it open source to apply for open source certificate, but was declined, because project needs to show more activity to apply.) Wanting to learn something beyond my usual stack, I built a native Windows client in C#. This app syncs with your Guard dashboard, receives instructions, and enforces them locally by updating the hosts file and Windows firewall according to your chosen schedules. It includes a two-process architecture for reliability, time integrity checks, secure uninstall with PIN, and event logging. 3. A dedicated Express.js API endpoint connects the two, allowing the web app and Windows clients to work together independently. I tested it for all possible conditions and protect by uninstaller functions from any leftovers - it run cleaning functions on uninstall. Added it to my portfolio while job hunting—and I also needed a way to manage my kid’s YouTube time! Rather than yet another simple web app, this project let me combine my main skills with a real exploration of C# and system-level programming. I will be very thankful if someone will try it out and provide some feedback. Maybe will be able to find some issues. https://github.com/ganjie/guard-windows-client/ https://guard.alexweb.app/ I’d love your feedback: Thanks for checking it out and for any feedback you can share!
by deltaburnt | 2025-07-23 02:48:47+00:00
I don't understand this? The comment is next to the code it's mentioning. If the comment doesn't have enough context then the comment isn't long enough. Worst case you should be able to find necessary context in the blame.

I agree that for particularly complex issues you need to file a ticket, explain all the context, maybe give reasons on why it wasn't solved in the original commit. But for forced issues you can easily have the _opposite_ problem to what you're describing. That is: you're left with a bunch of skeleton issues filed only for the sake of shoving it into a TODO comment. Those tickets end up getting auto closed after X time anyways.

Obviously have guidelines, maybe even have a linter warning. But don't implement strict rules. It's a comment.
by florianherrengt | 2025-07-23 02:49:23+00:00
I know what the code should be doing. But it's not doing it. Now I have to deep dive into a codebase that's far less familiar to me than if I'd written it. This isn't usually such a frequent issue because systems typically have dedicated owners. We structure it this way precisely because debugging someone else code is just harder.

As for the broader responsibilities. Things like architecting systems, shaping their structure and behavior, planning their evolution and keeping everything clean with regular refactoring. These sound exactly like what I've been doing for the past 15 years. So what's actually different here?
by minraws | 2025-07-23 02:50:30+00:00
Personally I can understand tariffs on high end goods but taxes on low-end goods or raw materials is insane. Any country doing it has hobbled it's industry for decades and some might prove that they don't work even if you keep these tariffs on for centuries...

But politicians will politic what can we do huh... Really feels like no side, opinion or thought of every day folks matters anywhere.
by danaris | 2025-07-23 02:51:14+00:00
Retirement used to be an age, when we had defined-benefit pensions.

As long as you were at least (say) 65, if you retired, you got $X/month for the rest of your life.

None of this "you only get to retire if you were lucky enough to make enough your whole life to save enough that it won't run out before you die—and don't guess wrong about when that happens!" None of this "too bad, the stock market crashed just when you were starting to pull out benefits."
by gs17 | 2025-07-23 02:51:29+00:00
I've had similar behavior through Github Copilot. It somehow messed up the diff format to make changes, left a mangled file, said "I'll simply delete the file and recreate it from memory", and then didn't have enough of the original file in context anymore to recreate it. At least Copilot has an easy undo for one step of file changes, although I try to git commit before letting it touch anything.
by jsrozner | 2025-07-23 02:51:47+00:00
Interesting. I have been thinking that with these high dimensional representations that we have nearly infinite nearly orthogonal dimensions.

One thing that's interesting to me is where / how the model stores the info about a preference for a particular animal, and that this (presumably small) weights change leads to a difference in random numbers that then leaks into a student model.

The fact that this does not happen on models that are separately initialized/ trained could be seen to provide counter evidence to the recently published Platonic hypothesis paper.
by danielhanchen | 2025-07-23 02:53:24+00:00
Yes! 3bit maybe 4bit can also fit! llama.cpp has MoE offloading so your GPU holds the active experts and non MoE layers, thus you only need 16GB to 24GB of VRAM! I wrote about how to do in this section: https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/qwen3-coder#improving-generat...
by brailsafe | 2025-07-23 02:53:39+00:00
> But ultimately, the easiest and cheapest option for me was still to pay. The chance that it was taken further and the potential cost in terms of money, time, energy from me was too high, higher than the license fee — even if I didn't feel it was justified. So I paid the fee and moved on.

Although it's an interesting and relevant writeup/intellectual property conundrum, I'd feel like the move would have at most been to pull the archive offline and delete or mark the email as spam, assuming the unlikely case that it's not actually automated extortion. There's a few likely angles I thought about hypothetically having taken, but ultimately I firmly don't believe my lack of having read an email or my actual mail constitutes having taken any action at all. If I was interested enough in the problem, I'd just let them decide to track me down some other way afterward. Things are only as enforceable as they are.

That said, I've had collections calls ending up in my voicemail for years, and they are sure as hell not getting paid and haven't tried to take me to court afaik.

Edit: Incidentally, I quite like the dynamic background graphic. A neat art style and reminds me of recent macos backgrounds.
by esperent | 2025-07-23 02:54:09+00:00
> Not all of them have gui options.

Well, I just run a tool like ShutUp10 once after installing Windows and 99% of these problems are gone.

However, I'm well aware of those problems with Windows. I switched, after all. However, you know what Windows doesn't do? Force me to keep opening my laptop screen to get a login on my external monitor, which I don't think is fixable. Or reset my laptop screen brightness to minimum every day so that I can't even see the login prompt without closing the curtains.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-23 02:57:27+00:00
Given the average level of radon in the air outdoors is 10% of that, being outdoors is 20 chest x-rays per year, eh? That’s almost a cigarette per day being outdoors!

https://www.epa.gov/radon/what-epas-action-level-radon-and-w...

The EPA doesn’t make such creative claims. But the sites that do will also conveniently sell you stuff.

https://radonbegone.com/what-does-your-radon-number-mean/

https://www.nationalradondefense.com/radon-information/radon...
by kjellsbells | 2025-07-23 02:58:10+00:00
I wondered that, too. The scalability of cloud is ok when you are growing but truly wonderful when you are shrinking.

Stack Overflow used to serve over half a billion page views per month on only 25 servers[0]. I wonder how much traffic they get now, excluding crawlers?

Anecdotally, one of the reasons for SO's decline is that an LLM gives you the SO answer without the condescending snark. SO could have fixed that years ago, but didn't. So perhaps it might turn out to be yet another example of the dictum that culture eats strategy for breakfast.

[0] https://highscalability.com/stackoverflow-update-560m-pagevi...
by furyofantares | 2025-07-23 02:59:03+00:00
I'm with you on wanting to quantify.

https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon

Scroll down to "Radon Risk If You Have Never Smoked". Looks pretty worthwhile to take it from "very high" to "almost nil". If "very high" was in the range of the 2nd highest level listed here, that's 2% chance. That's for lifetime exposure but there's also multiple people living in the house.

If you DO smoke, the numbers look VERY good for spending some cash to get rid of radon. (Of course you should also stop smoking.)
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-23 03:00:33+00:00
It's 1 (official from Mozilla) extension to install (easily, from a simple marketplace) or 1 url and/or 2 command line flags to learn just long enough to bookmark them/add them to a shortcut file somewhere.

I don't feel like that is "so many steps". Two choices, one easy thing to do whichever path you chose.

The one thing is an extension still because Mozilla still doesn't think the UX is right and doesn't want to include it out of the box until they think the UX is 100% solid, especially for general users, not just power users. The other thing has active improvements to its out-of-the-box UX already in beta testing/slow rollout.

The only activity Firefox shares with Google is if you leave Google the default search, which is a real easy to change at the top of the Settings page.

Sponsored bookmarks are dumb but easy to ignore. It is also easy to replace the New Tab page with a Blank Page (also right at the top of the Settings page) if you really don't want to see it, and there are extensions for other New Tab Page options.

Sure, making a bit of money by setting the default search to Google and showing a couple icons of brands isn't exactly "user-focused" but it's just business, and it doesn't seem to be getting in the way of prioritizing user features.
by all2 | 2025-07-23 03:00:58+00:00
> So, if the core insight is "just add more neurons and treat it like hardware expansion," then the real challenge is being understated by several orders of complexity.

I wouldn't say it's an insight as it is an ah-ha moment I had. And yes, I hand-waved a bunch of stuff.

> The idea that the "revolution" is a hardware layer that just plugs into the brain and expands it with new neurons assumes a very naive model of how neural integration works. Brains don’t just recognize foreign neurons like USB devices. Synaptic plasticity, metabolic compatibility, glial interactions, all of that matters a lot more than signal translation.

We don't have hardware like this. Our hardware is 'fixed' once its burned to silicon. I think you're pointing in the direction I was trying to express; that the bionic hardware necessarily will act like a biological system, at least near enough that whatever it is 'plugged into' cannot tell the difference.

> Also, calling it a "data layer" glosses over the fact that neurons don't pass around clean, structured data. There’s no JSON over axons, information in the brain is messy, noisy, and deeply contextual—less like a protocol stack, more like a wet, self-rewriting spaghetti code.

I know, I know. This is just me trying to apply what I do understand to something I know little to nothing about.
by simurgh_beau | 2025-07-23 03:01:30+00:00
Apologies for the very slow reply; I had mistakenly assumed this thread was inactive.

Hi discarded1023! Thank you for the kind words and for the excellent pointer to Professor Ehud Shapiro's work.

I've had a chance to look through his website. His work on designing protocols for large-scale collective decision-making is clearly very relevant and fascinating.

To your question, I think his protocols are very much aligned in spirit. The main difference in purpose seems to be that his models often focus on a group making a specific decision or recommendation. My project's immediate goal is slightly broader: to create a continuous, large-scale "map" of public opinion across many topics simultaneously. The underlying principles of fairness and structured debate, however, are very much the same.

Your note about his use of French political philosophy is also very insightful, and I'll keep that in mind as I explore his work further.

Thank you again for a very thoughtful and helpful pointer!
by nothacking_ | 2025-07-23 03:01:30+00:00
> Are the bands too wide for this to work?

For wideband filters used for stars and galaxies, yes. Sometimes the filters are wider then the entire visible spectrum.

For narrowband filters used to isolate emission from a particular element, no. If you have just the Oxygen-III signal isolated from everything else, you can composite it as a perfect turquoise color.
by teleforce | 2025-07-23 03:02:20+00:00
Fun facts the venerable Border Gateway Protocol or BGP is using distant-vector algorithm for global Internet routing calculation based on Bellman-Ford dynamic programming approach due to its scability in updating the routing table [1].

For intranet routing however shortest path algorithm based on Dijkstra approach underlies the OSPF and IS-IS protocols.

In the old days distant-vector protocol like Routing Information Protocol protocol or RIP is also used but it's now becoming obsolete and humorously known as Rest In Peace protocol.

Distant-vector now is making a comeback for intranet in the form of mobile ad hoc and mesh networks (guerilla networks for routing without infrastructure) with Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing protovol or AODV [2]. This setup can be very beneficial for disaster and also for mobile group or platoon communication.

[1] Distance-vector routing protocol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance-vector_routing_protoc...

[2] Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_On-Demand_Distance_Vect...