MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benreesman | 2025-07-03 21:33:16+00:00
Maybe we agree and maybe not, I'm unsure.

I don't think there is any justification for shipping software with exploitable security problems on purpose, and it sounds like I maybe gave you the impression I do. I think all software should be as secure as it's feasible to make it.

But I don't think that security should ever operate against the person who bought the device and is sitting in front of it. I don't think anything on my device or anyone's should be able to phone home in a way that is secure from me: and so I am very happy with things like eBPF that make root mean root.

I think that there are certain things you do not do as a professional, as a moral person, as a person who wants to be proud of what you've done. And both TLS and DoH are now routinely used by vendors to do things that users don't know about, don't want, wouldn't consent to if they knew, and I think people should go to jail over it.

I worked in big consumer internet during the period when it was beloved, and during the period where it was starting to get sketchy, and at some point I walked away from millions in unvested stock because a line had been crossed.

Near as I can tell a lot of us with reservations left, and those that remain are those with few if any qualms of any kind.
by llm_nerd | 2025-07-03 21:33:22+00:00
Basing anything on Google's pricing is folly. Quite recently Google offered several of their preview models at a price of $0.00.

Because they were the underdog. Everyone was talking about ChatGPT, or maybe Anthropic. Then Deepseek. Google were the afterthought that was renowned for that ridiculous image generator that envisioned 17th century European scientists as full-headdress North American natives.

There has been absolute 180 since then, and Google now has the ability to set their pricing similar to the others. Indeed, Google's pricing still has a pretty large discount over similarly capable model levels, even after they raised prices.

The warning is that there is no free lunch, and when someone is basically subsidizing usage to get noticed, they don't have to do that once their offering is good.
by markisus | 2025-07-03 21:35:42+00:00
Congrats on the launch!

Your current market seems to be "niche toys for rich tech people" and the future market seems very uncertain. I am impressed that you were able to get funding for this idea. How do you get around the "solution in search of a problem (SISP)" objection from VCs? In fact, your founding story indicates that you just liked the technology meaning you had to work backwards to find the business case.

I'm asking because I think many of us would like to get funding for ventures in areas of technology that we are passionate about, but for which the future market potential remains extremely speculative. How do you do it?
by dawnofdusk | 2025-07-03 21:35:58+00:00
Now that Google Maps has the AI summary for restaurants, I wonder if this can be queried in the API? It would probably have the keywords for Xinjiang food or whatever the OP wants to analyze. Checking two Central Asian restaurants I've been to in my area, one is tagged "Restaurant" and one is tagged "Pan-Asian Restaurant", so not very illuminating. However, in their AI summaries both have keyword "Central Asian" and one even says more specifically "Kyrgyz"
by bitcurious | 2025-07-03 21:37:18+00:00
Assuming you’re not a haywire LLM, if you’re alive and posting here, you eat. If you eat, you’ve already internalized and practiced the notion that it’s acceptable to kill other life forms to stay alive.

The study of biology also serves to keep people alive; our modern practice of medicine evolved from the understanding gained by scientists, studying in the name of science.
by blakespot | 2025-07-03 21:38:40+00:00
Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.

Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list

I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)
by pugio | 2025-07-03 21:39:53+00:00
When I was a kid I had a character that could fly. I realized that a Decanter of Endless Water put out a pretty powerful constant thrust. Then a Helmet of Freedom of Movement could be interpreted to remove all excess friction due to win resistance (forget the details but it was something about removing any factor that would inhibit your movement). Constant acceleration and no friction... Unlimited speed.

I actually sat down and worked out all the equations based on the mass of my character and the amount of thrust the decanter provided. Our party would be deep in the wilderness somewhere and I'd say " I nip back to town to pick up some supplies, with acceleration and deacceleration it takes me 17 minutes".

Looking back, I think I was a pretty annoying player, but my DM was very patient. I guess he could see I put a lot of work into the scheme. It was also probably the most exciting application of physics I had encountered in my life so far.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-03 21:40:25+00:00
That's a little like closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted because if you're concerned about security, then running any untrusted software in your terminal multiplexer is already a bad idea, regardless of whether your multiplexer is written in a memory-safe language or not.

...and before someone moans that I'm a C-fanboy, I'm really not. I've been writing software exclusively in memory-safe languages for 10+ years now. But I'm also pragmatic about when arguments about a RiR (rewrite-in-rust) are sensible and when they're not. In tmux's specific case, arguing about security misses the point.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-03 21:41:24+00:00
The problem is there is no such thing as a string type that doesn't have problems one way or another.

The very simplest and straightforward way is to use the gc to manage the memory. It works very very well. All the other schemes have serious compromises.

That's why you can use the method most appropriate in D for the particular usage. I routinely use several different methods.
by Archelaos | 2025-07-03 21:41:45+00:00
I like planetary trails, where the orbits of the planets (or other celestrial objects) are proportionally reduced and placed in the landscape.

For example, this image from a park in Halle (Germany) shows the inner solar system: https://dubisthalle.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Planetenwe... -- but one has to walk 500 meters to reach Pluto.

The German Wikipedia has quite a long list of planetary trails: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetenweg
by RHSeeger | 2025-07-03 21:41:57+00:00
Back when I was in college, we used to play various tabletop RPGs a lot. For one of them (DragonQuest), the rules we had were fairly complex (game rules + house rules) and covered a lot of situations. The general rule of thumb was that, if you came up with something that the rules said was ok, even if a bit ridiculous; you could do it. The caveat being, it would be discussed post-session to see if it should work going forward. But everything flies once.

One night, one of the characters was transformed into a frog and knocked off a roof. He triggered a spell, Shadow Wings, which grants the play large wings made of shadow, allowing them to fly. However, the wings are large enough to lift a human... I imagine on the order of a 15-20' wingspan. The DM made it known that it was not reasonable for a frog to fly using them. Much debate happened because... everything flies once. At the end of the discussion, the frog was _not_ allowed to fly.

The result being a new quote came out of that night.

Everything flies once, except a frog.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-07-03 21:42:58+00:00
Right, the current implementation is bad.

In theory though, I don't see any reason why client-side grain that looks identical to the real thing shouldn't be achievable, with massive bandwidth savings in the process.

It won't be, like, pixel-for-pixel identical, but that was why I said no director is placing individual grain specks anyway.
by benreesman | 2025-07-03 21:44:03+00:00
Right, and inb4 ads on ChatGPT to stop the bleeding. That's the default outcome at this point: quantize it down gradually to the point where it can be ad supported.

You can just see the scene from the Sorkin film where Fidji is saying to Altman: "Its time to monetize the site."

"We don't even know what it is yet, we know that it is cool."
by coldpie | 2025-07-03 21:44:57+00:00
> This is great.

Do you still feel that way knowing that it introduces a hard requirement for all users to have their private data managed by one of Apple, Google, or Microsoft[1]? I want to be excited about this, and about Passkeys, but the people working in this space keep fumbling this ball :(

[1] "Using the MDOC requires a signature from a hardware security key in the phone" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44458417
by WalterBright | 2025-07-03 21:45:39+00:00
I often hear a lot worse :-) No worries, it doesn't bother me. What pleases me are the people who use D, like it, and tell me they make more money using D because D is much more productive to write code in.

D also attracts expert programmers who are very comfortable using the GC when appropriate, stack allocation when appropriate, malloc/free, even ref counting. These are just tools in the toolbox, like I use socket wrenches, end wrenches, box wrenches, crow foot wrenches, pipe wrenches, monkey wrenches, etc. I don't try to use socket wrenches for everything.

BTW, the GC makes managing memory in compile time function execution trivial. Something that non-GC languages struggle with.
Twilio account suspended minutes after making a $20 payment
by fridaythe13thx | 2025-07-03 21:45:54+00:00
Twilio Support (Twilio)

Jul 3, 2025, 2:04 PM PDT

Hello Michael,

We appreciate your business and want to ensure the security of your account. As part of our ongoing efforts to protect your information, we have temporarily suspended your account until we can confirm some details about your intended use case. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and we are here to assist you in resolving this matter as quickly as possible.

The following accounts were affected: Account SID: AC337044601eac2f9865fea3006d82c88f

To reactivate your account, we kindly ask that you reply to this email with the following information:

Are you a developer creating an experience to engage with your clients and/or customers on behalf of your company? What Twilio products do you plan on using? Please outline your use case or what you intend to build. If you are using Twilio for your business and/or company, please provide a link to the website/app. If available, provide a public source (such as a LinkedIn profile, business registry, or other online verification such as GitHub, and any social media platform) that confirms your association with the brand/company. For support and guidance, we can assist you via this ticket. Additionally, please also visit our Trust Center. Once logged in, you'll find a self-service tool to guide you in securing your account, along with the option to connect with a representative through a dedicated Live Chat. This service is specifically designed to assist with unauthorized access suspensions.

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#you shouldn't have taken my money in the first place if you're not sure. This is big tech exploitation.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-03 21:46:41+00:00
This is a marketing blog[^1], written with AI[^2], heavily sensationalized, & doesn't understand much in the first place.

We don't have accurate price signals externally because Google, in particular, had been very aggressive at treating pricing as a competition exercise than anything that seemed tethered to costs.

For quite some time, their pricing updates would be across-the-board exactly 2/3 of the cost of OpenAI's equivalent mode.

[^1] "If you’re building batch tasks with LLMs and are looking to navigate this new cost landscape, feel free to reach out to see how Sutro can help."

[^2] "Google's decision to raise the price of Gemini 2.5 Flash wasn't just a business decision; it was a signal to the entire market." by far the biggest giveaway, the other tells are repeated fanciful descriptions of things that could be real, that when stacked up, indicate a surreal, artifical, understanding of what they're being asked to write about, i.e. "In a move that at first went unnoticed,"
by philosophty | 2025-07-03 21:48:29+00:00
"It does what took him 6 months in seconds."

It generated unusuable garbage code in seconds, which is nothing like what he wrote by hand in six months.

"Size is not a very useful metric."

Size is a very useful metric. Counting tokens is more accurate estimate of "size" but lines of code is a good first approximation.

The entire purpose of high level languages is to make it possible to do more with less code. Size isn't all that matters but it's very important.

Rust code is not only more verbose than C it's also much more irregular and complex. That 20% increase in lines of code is probably more like 50% increase in code complexity, and this is without safety.

Just compare tokens in the post's example:

// cmd-kill-session.c RB_FOREACH(wl, winlinks, &s->windows) { wl->window->flags &= ~WINDOW_ALERTFLAGS; wl->flags &= ~WINLINK_ALERTFLAGS; } // cmd_kill_session.rs for wl in rb_foreach(&raw mut (*s).windows).map(NonNull::as_ptr) { (*(*wl).window).flags &= !WINDOW_ALERTFLAGS; (*wl).flags &= !WINLINK_ALERTFLAGS; }
by lupusreal | 2025-07-03 21:49:37+00:00
The amount of time the station spends in orbit isn't relevant, the amount of time a person spends in orbit for an unbroken stretch is what's relevant. Three of the top five spaceflight duration records were set on Mir, including the top two (437 days and 379 days.) Nobody even thinks of getting close to that top Mir record anymore because it is already known that it fucks people up.
Ask HN: Should I use microservices or monolithic architecture?
by its_kritix | 2025-07-03 21:51:49+00:00
I’m building a SaaS application using an open-source project licensed under EPL 2.0, and I want to include my own AI functionality. For now, I plan to only offer the product as a service (not distribute the software), but in the future, I might want to create a separate desktop AI app. Given these plans, should I keep my AI code separate from the EPL 2.0 codebase from the start, or can I combine them for now and separate them later if needed? What are the pros and cons of each approach, especially regarding licensing, maintainability, and future flexibility? I am a solo developer.
by Teddydaguru | 2025-07-03 21:51:52+00:00
I would be very careful uploading personal information ID’s such as: Passports, Drivers Licenses, Birth Certificates, Social Security Cards, Healthcare Cards & Credit Cards to a third party company if you aren’t sure what they do with your data upon the completion of your account verification… Many of these companies retain all of your information & copies of your ID’s on their databases & servers indefinitely & many have had data breachs & client records stolen by hackers. With this type of personal information & actual copies of your ID’s it is very easy for them to steal your identity & apply for credit cards as you etc.
by azath92 | 2025-07-03 21:51:58+00:00
we came to this by looking at how a "user profile" in plain english could be both used and generated by LLMs, but once we were looking at this we did discuss traditional recsys. Two things against it for this usecase: bootstrapping preferences with a low number of data points, and no "unified" storage of all users preferences or pre-existing dataset is difficult with trad ML or statistical methods. Also having your preferences or "model" if you will in plain english gives a sense of agency, transparency and individuality to your recomendataions that are at least difficult, if not impossible to communicate with other types of models.

Id love to have those assumptions challenged though, if there are examples you could point me towards.
by ultimafan | 2025-07-03 21:52:56+00:00
How often do you see people trying to recreate the lifestyles or belief systems of extinct cultures / societies for themselves to live by in a genuine day to day manner, and not in a academic or archeological capacity?

The content of their belief system might be known and recorded in that scenario but the teaching of it as a genuine belief/truth to live by and to be passed on from generation to generation probably wouldn't be.
by TOGoS | 2025-07-03 21:53:43+00:00
There is a secret technique, called content-addressing[1], which elegantly solves both of them at once.

A lot of people haven't caught on, and try to cache things using ambiguous names, hence the struggle to invalidate their caches when the meaning changes.

[1] This can be applied even if you don't know the content yet; you just have to unambiguously name the inputs to the function that produces it. You might not know what all the inputs are, and then you have to start adding stuff like "unknown-unknown-2025-07-03T16", but it'll still basically work.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-03 21:54:14+00:00
Thanks for responding. I read that dude's review, and it kind of pissed me off in an "akshually I am very smart" sort of way.

Like his first argument was that you didn't have a test case covering every single MUST and MUST NOT in the spec?? I would like to introduce him to the real world - but more to the point, there was nothing in his comments that specifically dinged the AI, and it was just a couple pages of unwarranted shade that was mostly opinion with 0 actual examples of "this part is broken".

> Unfortunately I think a lot of people commenting on this topic come in with a conclusion they want to reach. It's hard to find people who are objectively looking at the evidence and drawing conclusions with an open mind.

Couldn't agree more, which is why I really appreciated the fact that you went to the trouble to document all of the prompts and make them publicly available.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-03 21:54:18+00:00
> Of course, this in turn makes Star Trek (and Star Wars, and Firefly...) look even sillier, because flying in a direction perpendicular to your deck layout means you need two magic gravity fields — one to cancel out the engines and one more to give your crew a place to stand.

Don't you just need one that does the required net change in gravity magnitude and direction? Of course, Star Trek actually has two (though I don't think the second is explicitly a gravity system, but it has that effect), a relatively steady state one that provides environmental gravity (gravity generators), and one that reacts rapidly to changing conditions to offset them for crew and other contents of the ship (inertial dampeners), which handles not only ship's drive thrust, but other externally-induced accelerations.

Of course, Star Trek is supposed to be vastly farther from our current level of technology and understanding of physics than the Expanse.
by its_kritix | 2025-07-03 21:54:35+00:00
I’m building a SaaS application using an open-source project licensed under EPL 2.0, and I want to include my own AI functionality. For now, I plan to only offer the product as a service (not distribute the software), but in the future, I might want to create a separate desktop AI app. Given these plans, should I keep my AI code separate from the EPL 2.0 codebase from the start, or can I combine them for now and separate them later if needed? What are the pros and cons of each approach, especially regarding licensing, maintainability, and future flexibility?

I am a solo developer.
by egypturnash | 2025-07-03 21:55:40+00:00
Is this a story about Kevin Kelly or is this an autobiography? It purports to be the former but it's largely about the author's work history. It sort of gestures vaguely at being an interview with Kevin but there's only about four paragraphs in the entire article that contain quotes from him in response to things the author asked, and most of these are about his collection of knick-knacks.

I kept on waiting for a series of questions that acted as springboards for long responses from Kelly that included him talking about the value of an approach to work that he calls "flounder mode" but they never came; the only appearance of "flounder" is in the title. It's an extended intro to an interview that never actually comes. You talked with Kelly all day and hooray, great for you meeting one of your idols! But you barely tell us a single thing he said.
by dnemmers | 2025-07-03 21:56:15+00:00
The continued critique seems a little bit empty…

Originally there was strong push to get permitting, even though they were operating legally by not having generators in place for a full calendar year.

Now that they’ve applied for (and been granted) permitting for 15 of 24 on-site turbines, you would think some appreciation of continued compliance (assuming the other generators are removed/permitted), instead of anger that the permits had even been allowed.
by ro_bit | 2025-07-03 21:56:20+00:00
What stops online gambling conglomerates from creating terms that say “you can’t hedge your promotional money bet on another gambling site” and cooperate with other sites to enforce it? Casinos already happily cooperate with each other to ban card counters from blackjack

Also for anyone confused by the article, the Wikipedia for matched betting is much better at explaining all this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matched_betting
by PlunderBunny | 2025-07-03 21:57:00+00:00
My very rusty physics tells me that walking one way along the inside of the wheel would make you weigh less, and the other way would make you weigh more - is this what you're referring to? Would trying to work 'normally' in this kind of situation induce nausea, or make your food fall off your tray etc? It would be a shame if you went to all the effort to make a Von Braun wheel in space to simulate gravity, only to find that you had to stand still to do anything practical.

(I assume the astronauts in 2001 A Space Odyssey jogged in the direction that made themselves weigh more, to make their workout more intense.)
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-03 21:57:04+00:00
Thrusters and impulse engines seem to generate force vectors, and warp drive usually doesn't but the continuity is not very strong on that point and it is sometimes implied, and at one point in Voyager fairly explicitly stated to create accelerations (in Voyager, this was in reference to requiring the inertial dampeners to be functioning to go to warp without plastering the crew into a thin paste on the wall.)
by azath92 | 2025-07-03 21:57:31+00:00
This is great to hear in such detial. One of the first cabs of the rank to improve this would be greater user control over what preferences to include, and/or smarter selection of the pool to select. This kind of focused preference is super important, especially as i use hackernews, and clearly for you and i suspect others as well.

In fact I would pose that I have a couple of disparate interests or "profiles" that i would like to have greater control over/support in generating, that are non overlapping sets of topics and types of content. The ability to have greater agency in creating them and managing them is something we are keen to explore.

The article comments one is a toughie, as LLM use skyrockets when you scrape and consume content from the links. It would be awesome to include it, but would likely need to be paid, just from a cost perspective.

Really appreciate the detail here, this makes it easier to turn your examples into a test/eval/feature case.