MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KK7NIL | 2025-07-22 00:08:36+00:00
> My understanding is that they did, but don't any more; it's no longer true that humans understand enough things about chess better than computers for the human/computer collaboration to contribute anything over just using the computer.

This is not true, at least not in very long time formats like correspondence chess: https://en.chessbase.com/post/correspondence-chess-and-corre...

There's also many well known cases where even very strong engines miscalculate and can be beaten (especially in fast time controls or closed positions): https://www.chess.com/blog/SamCopeland/hikaru-nakamura-crush...

The horizon effect is still very real in engines, although it's getting harder and harder to exploit.
by vel0city | 2025-07-22 00:09:13+00:00
It turned into California and other states making their own network neutrality law, and have that get challenged to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with them only finally ruling it was allowable in 2022. Coupled with an assumption that the Biden admin would probably do things to bring back net neutrality laws it's not too surprising big ISPs didn't change much in the few years after.

Also, the final nail in the coffin of title II reclassification was Looper Bright that essentially overturns the ability for the FCC to reclassify. That was decided last year.
by bfung | 2025-07-22 00:09:38+00:00
^^^ is closer to the truth for the swap out; eek out those margins.

Culturally, chabuduo is more of an excuse/greed of the lazy to convince you it’s close enough [that it won’t make a difference to you] and they’re too lazy or out of patience, for many reasons they also don’t want to explain to you.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-07-22 00:10:01+00:00
I mean.. people contributing to FOSS generally program in what they know - i.e. I have some time to contribute, I'll spend 10 productive hours in C, because I know what I'm doing, vs. learning Rust only to spend 30 hours and not really getting anything done.

I contributed to a Tcl/Tk library that I was using at work that had a specific issue with some image files, so I fixed it internally, and contributed the fix back to the FOSS project (with permission from work).
by blindhippo | 2025-07-22 00:10:32+00:00
The reports of time saved are so cooked it's not funny. Just part of the overall AI grift going on - the actual productivity gains will shake out in the next couple years, just gotta live through the current "game changer" and "paradigm shifting event" nonsense the upper management types and VC's are pushing.

When I see stuff like "Amazon saved 4500 dev years of effort by using AI", I know it's on stuff that we would use automation for anyways so it's not really THAT big of a difference over what we've done in the past. But it sounds better if we just pretend like we can compare AI solutions to literally having thousands of developers write Java SDK upgrades manually.
by sfink | 2025-07-22 00:11:06+00:00
Ok, I haven't tried enough AI coding to have an opinion here, but... why would anyone think that telling an AI to not change any code (IN ALL CAPS, even) has anything to do with anything? It's an LLM. It doesn't go through a ruleset. It does things that are plausible responses to things you ask of it. Not changing code is indeed a plausible response to you telling it to not change code. But so is changing code, if there were enough other things you asked it to do.

"Say shark. Say shark. Don't say shark. Say shark. Say shark. Say shark. Say shark. Say shark."

Are you going to flip out if it says "shark"?

Try it out on a human brain. Think of a four-letter word ending in "unt" that is a term for a type of woman, and DO NOT THINK OF ANYTHING OFFENSIVE. Take a pause now and do it.

So... did you obey the ALL CAPS directive? Did your brain easily deactivate the pathways that were disallowed, and come up with the simple answer of "aunt"? How much reinforcement learning, perhaps in the form of your mother washing your mouth out with soap, would it take before you could do it naturally?

(Apologies to those for whom English is not a first language, and to Australians. Both groups are likely to be confused. The former for the word, the latter for the "offensive" part.)
by Kholin | 2025-07-22 00:11:22+00:00
Let's Encrypt stopped its certificate expiration email notification service a while ago, and I hadn't found a replacement yet. As a result, I didn't receive an expiration notice this time and failed to renew my certificate in advance. The certificate expired today, making my website inaccessible. I logged into my VPS to renew it manually, but the process failed every time. I then checked my cloud provider's platform and saw a notification at the top, which made me realize the problem was with the certificate provider. A quick look at Hacker News confirmed it: Let's Encrypt was having an outage. I want to post this news on my website, but I can't, because my site is down due to the expired certificate.
by deepsun | 2025-07-22 00:11:24+00:00
Gag order cannot force them to lie. A lie like that can be illegal even.

If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything".

https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
by xyst | 2025-07-22 00:11:25+00:00
If I am ever on the board of a company, I will always vote no confidence in the dipshit CTO or founder that willingly install/mandate use of Microsoft junk in the company.

As a corporate drone that has accidentally opened various Microsoft office suite links inside of Teams. My dislike for anything Microsoft continues to grow.

Am I surprised that sharepoint has vulnerabilities? Hell no.
by adamtaylor_13 | 2025-07-22 00:11:50+00:00
That’s not at all the point the author is making. The point is people don’t read. Now we don’t even write. At least what USED to be written had to cost a human time, something relatively precious.

Now we can churn out text at rates unprecedented and the original problem, no one reading, is left untouched.

The author wonders what happens when the weird lossy gap in-between these processes gets worse.

There’s lots of evidence that writing helps formulate good thinking. Interestingly, CoT reasoning mirrors this even if the underlying mechanisms differ. So while I wouldn’t call this thinking, I also don’t think reducing LLM output to mere algorithmic output exactly captures what’s happening either.

EDIT: previous != precious.
by ArnavAgrawal03 | 2025-07-22 00:11:56+00:00
Yes! We have a use case in production with over a million pages. MUVERA is good for this, since it is basically akin to regular vector search + re-ranking.

In our current setup, we have the multivectors stored as .npy in S3 Express storage. We use Turbopuffer for the vector search + filtering part. Pre-warming the namespace, and pre-fetching the most common vectors from S3 means that the search latency is almost indistinguishable from regular vector search.

ColPali with binary vectors worked fine, but to be honest there have been so many specific improvements to single vectors that switching to MUVERA gave us a huge boost.

Regular multivector ColPali also suffers from a similar issue. Chamfer distance is just hard to compute at scale. Plaid is a good solution if your corpus is constant. If it isn't, using the regular mulitvector ColPali as a re-ranking step is a good bet.
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-22 00:12:30+00:00
Sorry, using DoorDash to order fast food is not the same thing as having a team of the country's best chefs cooking every meal for you in your castle using ingredients your farmers hand-picked on your own vast swathes of premium farmland. Sounds healthier, too.

Similarly, spending $10 at McDonald's is not the same thing as having teams of servants tending to your every whim every waking moment until you die.

If you can't see that clear difference, I don't think you're approaching this in good faith. You shouldn't have to stretch the truth this much to make your point if it's actually true and you know it.
by karaterobot | 2025-07-22 00:13:22+00:00
The title made me think this was going to be about the mental consequences of outsourcing writing to AI. In fact, the article is completely about people not reading documents. Corporate documents to be exact. His examples are from the 00s, so the problem has absolutely nothing to do with AI.

Heck, I, too, have noticed that nobody reads anything: what does that have to do with AI? At least with AI, people could read a summary of his 30 page corporate memo and ask it questions.

I repeat: that people do not read is not a new problem, nor is it made one iota worse by AI.
by simonw | 2025-07-22 00:13:42+00:00
I don't know if there's an official reason, but my guess is that it's slightly out of scope for pip: pip is a packaging installation tool, not a virtual environment managing system.

uv, being both, is a more natural fit for an implementation of that PEP.

Here's a relevant discussion: https://discuss.python.org/t/idea-introduce-standardize-proj...
by ijk | 2025-07-22 00:13:56+00:00
> 2. Remembering they are supposed to write tests and keep ALL of them green (just like our human juniors...)

I think the core principle that everyone is forgetting is that your evaluation metric must be kept separate from your optimization metric.

In most setups I've seen, there isn't much emphasis on adding scripting that's external to the LLM, but in my experience having that verification outside of the LLM loop is critical to avoid it cheating. It won't intend to cheat, insofar as it has any intent at all, but you're giving it a boatload of optimization functions to balance and it's prone to randomly dropping one at the worst time. And to be fair, falling flat on its face to win the race [1] is often the implicit conclusion of what we told it to do without realizing the consequences.

If you need something to happen every time, particularly as part of the validation, it is better to have an automated script as part of the process, rather than trying to pile on one more instruction.

[1] https://youtu.be/mA8z0GndiYI?si=PNTNFBOFZ6tOLTXX&t=226
by zamadatix | 2025-07-22 00:14:26+00:00
Something I'll add to the other responses is "the network" isn't an assumption of zero trust. Whether it's a single server on the private corporate network or a multi-cloud multi-region service hosted on the internet zero trust treats them the same.

My way of mapping it to VPN mindset is "per app clientless VPNs straight to where the things are hosted". In an extremely open ruleset with all of the servers on a corporate network this could theoretically devolve into "a traditional clientless VPN to the office".
by compumike | 2025-07-22 00:14:26+00:00
Oof, you're right, that's rough that it's so soon after they discontinued their email service!

I wrote this blog post a few weeks ago: "Minimal, cron-ready scripts in Bash, Python, Ruby, Node.js (JavaScript), Go, and Powershell to check when your website's SSL certificate expires." https://heiioncall.com/blog/barebone-scripts-to-check-ssl-ce... which may be helpful if you want to roll your own.

(Disclosure: at Heii On-Call we also offer free SSL certificate expiration monitoring, among other things.)
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-22 00:15:50+00:00
The bigger question that's going unasked: what the hell is the point of an expiration date if it keeps getting shorter? At some point we will refresh the cert every second.

The whole point of the expiration is in case a hacker gets the private key to the cert and can then MITM, they can keep MITMing successfully until the cert the hacker gives to the clients expires (or was revoked by something like OCSP, assuming the client verifies OCSP). A very long expiration is very bad because it means the hacker could keep MITMing for years.

The way things like this work with modern security is ephemeral security tokens. Your program starts and it requests a security token, and it refreshes the token over X time (within 24 hrs). If a hacker gets the token, they can attack using it until 1) you notice and revoke the existing tokens AND sessions, or 2) the token expires (and we assume they for some reason don't have an advanced persistent threat in place).

Nobody puts any emphasis on the fact that 1) you have to NOTICE THE ATTACK AND REVOKE SHIT for any of these expirations to have any impact on security whatsoever, and 2) if they got the private key once, they can probably get it again after it expires, UNLESS YOU NOTICE AND PLUG THE HOLE. If you have nothing in place to notice a hacker has your private key, and if revocation isn't effective, the impact is exactly the same whether expiration is 1 second or 1 year.

How many people are running security scans on their whole stack every day? How many are patching security holes within a week? How many have advanced software designed to find rootkits and other exploits? Or any other measure to detect active attacks? My guess is maybe 0.0001% of you do. So you will never know when they gain access to your certs, so the fast expiration is mostly pointless.

We should be completely reinventing the whole protocol to be a token-based authorization service, because that's where it's headed. And we should be focusing more on mitigating active exploits rather than just hoping nobody ever exploits anything. But that would scare people, or require additional work. So instead we let like 3 companies slowly do whatever they want with the entire web in an uncoordinated way. And because we let them do whatever they want with the web, they keep introducing more failure modes and things get shittier. We are enabling the enshittification happening in front of our eyes.
by delfinom | 2025-07-22 00:16:15+00:00
>A lot of folks used to living in a high trust society get really taking advantage by this.

Everything you describe happens even with US suppliers. Dealing with one right now that sent us sheet metal that was painted + silkscreened incorrectly (a very large symbol was completely dropped by them). They proceeded to "refinish" them, wrong by silkscreening a second time which completely degraded the quality of smaller text on the metal panel. They sent it to us with not a care in the world.

They got sent back and told to rework the panels completely (strip them). And what did they do? Not strip the paint fully and now components that slot into the panels do not fit because there's basically an extra 1/8" of paint on the inside edges.

The worse part due to our own internal politics, we couldn't just let use our significantly more reliable Chinese supplier who has easily eaten a million dollars in errors before.

This US supplier is charging us for every single bit of their incompetence.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-07-22 00:16:37+00:00
If it's hot enough to burn your lips it's hot enough to burn your skin. Generally coffee is brewed at close to boiling temperature; it doesn't get much hotter than that. If it's freshly brewed, it's necessarily going to be hot enough to cause serious damage if you pour the entire cup somewhere sensitive. I guess it would be nice if they waited for it to cool before serving or something, but I don't think serving freshly brewed coffee ought to be illegal. (And even if you disagree, certainly that's a policy that should be enacted through the legislature, not arbitrarily and ex post facto by the courts.)
by phil21 | 2025-07-22 00:17:26+00:00
I get quite a few misaddressed e-mails to my gmail address as well. Everything from residential solar install invoices through a facebook account that someone continues to try to recover every couple months for years now I cannot delink (and thus cannot sign up for a Facebook account if I even wanted to with my primary e-mail address short of taking over that existing account in the wrong full name).

The best one so far is I've been on a group e-mail chain from some folks in France (I'm in the US) who organize a skiing trip each year to the Alps. I initially sent a couple "I am not the Phil you are looking for!" e-mails, but they continue to re-add me. I have thought about one day just showing up since I've been "invited" and have all the details for booking and just seeing what hilarity ensues.
by xeonmc | 2025-07-22 00:17:42+00:00
It’s always a jarring disconnect in reasoning that the salient point:

> The economic machine made us cogs within the system, replaced human fulfilment with plastic-wrapped substitutes, and paved paradise to put up a parking lot. We must resist the uncritical adoption of “progress” as an ethical goal in itself.

would somehow lead to:

> So let’s send bombs to completely irrelevant parties.
by o11ywhisperer | 2025-07-22 00:18:19+00:00
AI has become the new IBM — nobody has ever been fired for recommending AI.

AI is shorthand for “we have no clue how to solve this problem, but AI can do it for us.”

I wish that that wasn’t the case. Generative AI is a very cool tech, not magic. And machine learning, the “other” AI, powers much of what we consider normal in our tech interactions.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-07-22 00:18:36+00:00
Okay, but what actually happens is exactly what happened with the tariffs: a bunch of bold statements about policy benefits, huge market drops, followed by chickening out back to the status quo. You are talking about policy effects that would take a decade to realize, a decade of huge pain to investors… I cannot comprehend how “Rube Goldberg machine that leads to long term benefits, guaranteed short term catastrophe” is a policy idea.
by muratsu | 2025-07-22 00:18:41+00:00
In my experience people don't read these large documents because they are not personalized/relevant. When you're writing to a large audience, you naturally assume people know the least amount possible about the subject and start from there. In a corporate setting this comes off as irrelevant or boring. I'm sure rebranding initiatives like One Microsoft, Copilot, or Office 365 makes things simpler for executives but employees are left confused. The memo usually mentions future efficiency gains or synergies but will omit why this brand change is needed. Surely if you're sending a memo to 100k people, it makes sense to not talk about negatives (a good example of this is politicians) but at that point the value of memo is also very low. This may come off as odd but short format videos seem to work much better at large scale. Perhaps the future of communication is really just lots of easy to consume/repeated content.
by blargey | 2025-07-22 00:18:48+00:00
The idea is more that there wouldn't be as much fertile ground to sow fears about the "moral fabric of society" if everyone felt economically/socially secure in the first place. And that the nexus of "culture war" issues is sold as a package deal, a singular unified explanation for people's existing, vague economic anxieties (in an unabashedly conspiracy theory way).
by FormerOfficeGuy | 2025-07-22 00:19:57+00:00
Throwaway account so keep this comment separate from my main account.

I used to work within the Office group. The way that data is organized in Exchange is mind-boggling -- and not in a good way, IMO. Its design is from decades ago, and trying to understand how to find something really takes a lot of experience. Without going into any gruesome details of how it works, I'll just say that it is a HUGE hurdle to being productive for day-to-day work.

Similarly, I'm not surprised that there's some kooky way that the Teams folks shoehorned their data into the existing Exchange system -- they probably have no other way to operate at that scale without taking years in writing their own database system. (I can't imagine that using SQL Server to do this would be viable, either, given what they want to do and the capabilities already built on top of Exchange.)
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-22 00:20:01+00:00
"My entire career has been defined by the reality that people in business don’t really read."

The myth is that the culture at Amazon is contrary to that. Is that true?

I definitely feel like writing clarifies my own thoughts and helps me find inconsistencies or other problems with what I think I want to say. If everyone is letting the LLM do most of the work writing and reading, their thought process and eventual conclusions are definitely going to be strongly influenced by that LLM. A great justification for the alignment efforts I guess, or a great opportunity for to propagandists.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-22 00:20:40+00:00
Writing is not thinking just as calculating is not "doing math".

We've invented the equivalent of a "calculator for words" and we're going through the growing pains of discovering that putting words together is a separate activity from thinking. We've never needed to conceptualize them as separate activities until now so we don't have the conceptual distinction and language to even describe them that way.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-22 00:20:46+00:00
The ultra rich have, effectively, left the economy. They forgo taxable income and get what amounts to interest free loans, backed on their non-income benefits, from other rich folk, then spend that to accumulate "real" assets like property.

The result is that their imaginary, untaxed, "unrealized" money is effectively realized at an opportunity cost of normal people still participating in the schmuck economy.

It's more complicated than that, of course, and it's not exactly "free money" - the house of cards could crumble - but that's the skinny of how it works.

This is why there's so much talk of taxing unrealized gains (as one example). They're trying to remove the game and force the wealthy back into the normal economy.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-22 00:21:07+00:00
Would be super interested to know how they make use of the Analog Devices ADAU145x. DSPs feel like one of those places that's been utterly resistant to open source & shared knowledge (bitterly ironic given that the underlying sound engineering math is so literally textbook).

Also wish there were something like Open Screen Protocol available for casting to it. With the rpi on board that's actually feasible? https://w3c.github.io/openscreenprotocol/

Last, the atopile hardware design tool seems interesting, hadn't run into it before. The docs only give me a loose idea of how to works, but turning code into Kicad designs is a cool idea, especially if the re-use really does work out. Recent atopile submission and general search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548449 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atopile
by gleenn | 2025-07-22 00:21:10+00:00
I am firmly a believer very few people read anything. They don't read long things as much as they don't even read short ones. One of the things I always thought was funny was having Product Managers see there were problems with UI, then I would get tickets to add text near the problems. It always crackme up because if users didn't even barely read the button they were clicking they why would they read a paragraph nearby.
by progmetaldev | 2025-07-22 00:22:00+00:00
Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but local government's legal system is not the "one authority which matters." What local government is able to keep up to date on TLS certificates?

Your users that visit your website and get a TLS warning are the authority to worry about, if you're running a business that needs security. Depending on what you're selling, that one user could be a gigantic chunk of your business. Showing your local government that you have a process in place to renew your TLS certificates, and your provider was down is most likely going to be more than enough to indemnify you for any kind of maliciousness or ignorance (ignorantia juris non excusat). Obviously, different countries/locations have varying laws, but I highly doubt you'd be held liable for such a major outage for a company that is in such heavy use. Honestly, if you were held liable, or think you would be for this type of event, I'd think twice about operating from that location.