MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aachen | 2025-08-07 14:32:14+00:00
I had the same issue on a useless old account. Could see the IP addresses of the sign-in attempts, they came from all over the world, all different ISPs, mostly residential. Nearly every request was from a unique /16! If botnets are used for something this useless, I dread to think what challenges at-risk people face

Adding 2FA was the solution

I couldn't find the method they were using in the first place, because for me it always asks for the password and then just logs me in (where were they finding this 6-digit email login option?!), but this apparently blocked that mechanism completely because I haven't seen another sign-in attempt from that moment onwards. The 2FA code is simply stored in the password manager, same as my password. I just wanted them to stop guessing that stupid 6-DIGIT (not even letters!) "password" that Microsoft assigns to the account automatically...
by troyvit | 2025-08-07 14:32:17+00:00
> There are plenty of places to place the blame, but this is a function of any LLM, and a funcamental way LLMs work, not just a problem created and profited from by Google- for example the open-weight models, where no-one is actually profiting directly.

One problem with monopolies is their massive multiplicative effects on otherwise manageable problems.
by comrade1234 | 2025-08-07 14:32:19+00:00
We have these too in Switzerland, ranging from simple like in the article to full farm stores like this: https://www.leimbihof.ch/bio-laden

Last time I was there they had a milk cow full fillet/tenderloin (among many other things) for around $280 (converted from chf). The store is completely unmanned and you pay electronically. If there are cameras they're not obvious.
by Milpotel | 2025-08-07 14:32:33+00:00
> exception in Ireland is Lidl

Sorry but this is UPF bread and their rolls are sometimes made in China.

> sell at supermarkets in Ireland or the UK

At least in London there are many shops now that sell bread that at least looks like bread (Ole & Steen, Gail's, ...). I can't remember any ingredient lists, so likely UPF as well...
by antonf | 2025-08-07 14:32:49+00:00
> You wouldn’t trust a 30-year-old car to drive cross-country.

The main difference between software and physical objects like cars is that they degrade with the passage of time (due to wear, corrosion, etc...). If we would magically be able to get a brand new 30-year-old car, it would make absolute sense to use one for a trip where reliability is paramount, as the failure modes of such a car are better understood compared to a brand new design, and can be mitigated.
by sp527 | 2025-08-07 14:32:49+00:00
> This is why Python or JavaScript are great languages to start with (even if JavaScript is a horrible language)

The author was hemorrhaging credibility all along the way and then this comment really drove home what he is: a bike shedder who probably deliberately introduces complexity into projects to keep himself employed. If you read between the lines of this post, it is clearly a product of that mindset and motivation.

'AI is only good at the simple parts that I don't like, but it's bad at the simple parts I do like and that are my personal expertise and keep me employed.'

Yeah okay buddy.
by electric_muse | 2025-08-07 14:33:19+00:00
This is 100% a problem with the MCP spec: it does not currently provide a way to narrow what tools, and therefore context, flow into the LLM.

I don't really think there's an easy solution at the protocol level, since you can't just make the LLM say what tools it wants upfront. There's a whole discovery process during the handshake:

LLM(Host): Hi, I'm Claude Desktop, what do you offer?

MCP Server: Hi, I'm Salesforce MCP, I offer all these things: {...tools, prompts, resources, etc.}

Discoverability is one of the reasons MCP has a leg up on traditional APIs. (Sure, OpenAPI helps, but it's not quite the same thing.)

I'd be interested in hearing other recommendations or ideas, but when I saw this, I realized that the spec effectively necessitates a whole new layer exist: the gateway plane.

Basically, you need a place where the MCPs can connect & expose everything they offer. Then, via composability and settings, you can select what you want to pass through to the LLM (host), given the specific job it has.

I basically pivoted my company to start building one of these, and we're getting inundated right now.

This whole thing reminds me of the early web days, where the protocols and standards were super basic and loose, and we all just built systems and tools to fill those gaps. Just because MCP isn't "complete" doesn't mean it's not valuable. In fact, I think leaving some things to the community & commercial offerings is a great way for this tech to keep winning.
by jdbernard | 2025-08-07 14:33:27+00:00
They don't deserve punishment. But they should understand that this is not just "their product" but it is also my tool. Tools like this do not need to change and absolutely should not change without there being prior notification. Yes, in many ways the UI changes are trivial. They don't fundamentally change what's possible. But my keyboard never changes on me without input. My workbench doesn't rearrange itself without my input. If they want this to continue to be my tool (I've been happy to pay them for it) it needs to respect my time and attention.
by dathinab | 2025-08-07 14:33:40+00:00
the "the app tries to trick me into using the service of the company behind it so that they can consolidate the market" problem

it's not quite new, as a dump example depending where in android contacts you click on a address it might always force open google maps (2/3 cases) or (1/3 cases) propelry goes through the intend system and gives users a choice

stuff like that has been constantly getting worse with google products, but it's not like Microsoft or apple are foreign to it
by lemonberry | 2025-08-07 14:33:41+00:00
Plenty of 30-year old cars can and do drive across the country. The analogy makes me wonder: in 30 years will 30-year-old cars be able to drive across the country? I suspect 60-year-old cars will still be able to make that trip, but will the current crop of cars with all of the electronics and onboard computers? I suspect they won't, but that's an opinion formed by bias and not facts.
by vidarh | 2025-08-07 14:33:53+00:00
AmigaBASIC was both great and awful at the same time. On one hand it integrated quite well - you could write an interface definition that'd let it call system libraries relatively easily, and so could do a lot with it - but it was also buggy, and fell by the wayside pretty quickly on the Amiga in favour of AREXX (which was awful as a language, but the ability to script all your applications was fantastic)
by natch | 2025-08-07 14:34:05+00:00
Yes the reason Grok is the go to is that it has live data from X conversations so it’s very good for finding answers backed by threads on brand new topics.

In the old days we would search twitter for “sirens Potrero hill” and find users talking about what they were seeing live out their window that was the cause of the siren. Now grok has that same info.

I don’t live on (in?) Potrero hill, just an example.
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-08-07 14:34:16+00:00
I am not switching blame here. Just to remind some people what the first comment for the article says, why is to err on the right side:

"the couple left three devices on their sofa, all plugged in and charging for the following day...

Nothing which is being charged should be left on a heat insulating surface which is itself flammable. The draining board next to your kitchen sink is a much safer place."
by Ancapistani | 2025-08-07 14:34:16+00:00
> Even if i talk to a senior engineer, i'm trying to be specific as possible to avoid ambiguities etc.

Sure - but you're being specific about the acceptance criteria, not the technical implementation details, right?

That's where the models I've been using are at the moment in terms of capability; they're like junior engineers. They know how to write good quality code. If I tell them exactly what to write, they can one-shot most tasks. Otherwise, there's a good chance the output will be spaghetti.

> There are so many subtle things/understandings of the architecture that are just in my head or a colleagues head.

My primary agentic code generation tool at the moment is OpenHands (app.all-hands.dev). Every time it makes an architectural decision I disagree with, I add a "microagent" (long-term context, analogous to CLAUDE.md or Devin's "Knowledge Base").

If that new microagent works as expected, I incorporate it into either my global or organization-level configs.

The result is that it gets more and more aligned with the way I prefer to do things over time.
by thrance | 2025-08-07 14:34:18+00:00
> > Without AI, US economic growth would be meager.

> The assumption here is that, without AI, none of that capital would have been deployed anywhere. That intuitively doesn't sound realistic.

That's the really damning thing about all of this, maybe all this capital could have been invested into actually growing the economy instead of fueling this speculation bubble that will burst sooner or later, bringing along any illusion of growth into its demise.
by dragontamer | 2025-08-07 14:34:31+00:00
I think the explosive growth that people want is in manufacturing. Ex: US screws, bolts, rivets, dies, pcbs, assembly and such.

The dollars are being diverted elsewhere.

Intel a chip maker who can directly serve the AI boom, has failed to deploy its 2nm or 1.8nm fabs and instead written them off. The next generation fabs are failing. So even as AI gets a lot of dollars it doesn't seem to be going to the correct places.
by n4te | 2025-08-07 14:34:41+00:00
Swing layout was bad then (gridbaglayout!) and is bad now. The framework's approach is bad. Components provide min, pref, max sizes that are very often just ignored. Components need a layout mystery object in order to participate. The mechanisms to measure and constrain components sizes and positions is bad. None of the layouts are sane and it's difficult to add your own. 95% of layouts are nonoverlapping components arranged in row and columns, but provided layouts do other things.

Swing was themeable but good luck if you ever try to do it. Customizing an existing theme is too hard. All components have opaque theme objects that are part of the complexity problem I mentioned and often hide functionality and parts you want to customize.

It's easy to shit on everything, but I really think UI could be done much better and that most or all toolkits make big mistakes that hurt productivity and cause a lot of suffering.
by goopypoop | 2025-08-07 14:34:59+00:00
I don't see courtesy or an answer in your comment. I see a refusal to answer, in a condescending tone. I explained myself in good faith and you chose to educate me about the existence of property portfolios, following up with how, actually, my question is stupid.

You refused to accept even the premise of any thing I've said. I believe I have matched your respect, but hopefully with more zing.
by insignificntape | 2025-08-07 14:35:14+00:00
It's a self-evident truth. Even if today, at this very moment AI hits a hard plateau and there's nothing we can do to make AI better, ever, then this still holds true. It simply means we'll keep what we have right now. Any new model will be a step back and thus be discarded. So what we have today is the worst, and the best it will ever be. But barring that extremely unlikely scenario, like GPT-3 to GPT-4 and Claude 3 to Claude 4, we will see improvements (either incremental or abrupt) over the coming weeks/months/years. Any failed experiments will never see the light of day and the successful experiments will become Claude X or GPT X, etc.
by diggan | 2025-08-07 14:35:17+00:00
I tend to use my own "prompt management CLI" (https://github.com/victorb/prompta) to setup somewhat reusable prompts, then paste the output into whatever UI/CLI I use at the moment.

Then rewriting/pruning is a matter of changing the files on disk, rerun "prompta output", create a new conversion. I basically never go beyond one user message and one assistant message, seems to degrade really quickly otherwise.
by nunez | 2025-08-07 14:35:34+00:00
I saw this coming ages ago when Atlassian acquired them. Trello and Jira co-existing never made any sense. I moved everything to Notion for a while, but that had its own (extremely annoying) quirks and features. I use Google Sheets now and am happy. The UI isn't flashy, but for tracking whether something's backlogged, WIP or Done, it does the job. Plus, if/when Google decides to pull the rug and RIP Sheets, I can export into an immortal copy of Excel 2010 somewhere and use it til the end of days!
by fartfeatures | 2025-08-07 14:35:38+00:00
The skills required to maintain old codebases atrophy and we are barely training new people to do it so the skills pool shrinks. That means it doesn't get regular maintenance and it means disaster response in situations like this is slow and expensive.

Whilst it would be a major upheaval to switch to a clean room engineered implementation using 2025 best practices it would at least increase the talent pool that can work on it effectively.

There does likely come a point where it is cost effective to rebuild it both in reduced unplanned downtime and reduced maintenance costs.
by phatskat | 2025-08-07 14:35:59+00:00
I think the “must” is probably a bit much, however we could have something similar to Energy Star but call it something like “Child Star” (I mean, POTUS would back it).

If you want to be Child Star certified, you need to provide access controls that conform to whatever standard web hosts implement. Parents could be encouraged to buy such products, and this would market well to the parents who complain about what their kids watch on YouTube but also can’t be bothered to _parent_ and actually curate said content.

I think age verification is a losing battle that does what most similar schemes do: make it harder for legitimate users while not having a large impact on the purported problem. All while providing another way to track user data and create huge privacy risk. I’m all for some kind of opt-in or certification system that allows websites that care and parents who care _enough_ to work together to address whatever problem they perceive while letting the rest of us go about our business not even noticing a change in the online landscape.
by licyeus | 2025-08-07 14:36:02+00:00
I am the OP.

I admit my second message was terse, but the correct social media response for a critical outage is "we're looking into it". Not "if you want support, go here".

Like I said, I do not have time to hunt for whatever support channels exist and file a ticket. I pay $50 a year so they can deliver a working product, including triaging their own issues.
by simonw | 2025-08-07 14:36:12+00:00
A frustrating thing about paywalls on news sites is that they discourage linking to, because what's the point of linking to something if you don't know if the people you share the link with will be able to read it?

Which sadly leaves a gap in the market for AI slop. A few times recently I've tried to find a good news article to link to and had to chose between paywall sites, obvious AI slop or second-tier publications plastered with ads. I usually pick the third category.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-07 14:36:22+00:00
1. People aren't going to take on risk and deploy capital if they can't get a return.

2. If people think they can get an abnormally high return, they will invest more than otherwise.

3. Whatever other money would've got invested would've gone wherever it could've gotten the highest returns, which is unlikely to have the same ratio as US AI investments - the big tech companies did share repurchases for a decade because they didn't have any more R&D to invest in (according to their shareholders).

So while it's unlikely the US would've had $0 investment if not for AI, it's probably even less likely we would've had just as much investment.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-08-07 14:36:32+00:00
They don’t. But as a Fastmail customer, I am _really_ tiring of how much they iterate on their UI/UX without notice and seemingly decreasingly solid testing. They push stuff to prod that doesn’t hit beta (at least the public beta environment) regularly. I just stopped using the beta environment because they only test “big” stuff there, it seems.

But for the past year they’ve been nitpicking their GUIs and UX and it’s maddening. They take away or move intuitive and accessible features with no replacement, or end up making you do more clicking/tapping to get there.

I have sent feedback to support many times. Sometimes they revert changes within a week, and sometimes it’s just the canned “we strive to always enhance our customer experience” copy.

Either way, it’s disruptive and unwelcome. Their 2021 era UI was perfect. When they started announcing partnerships with other companies I think they also ended up with more users that are consumers and that creates tension with prosumers and professionals.

Fastmail used to be a haven for people who cared about email and privacy, and many of us chose them based on our own professional experiences running email infrastructure. But now it’s quickly “consumerizing” and their designers clearly have the “to enhance is to remove” mentality.

And as a reseller — don’t get me started on their new billing system and model, which is less reliable than what came before, less flexible, and was launched with no real supporting documentation.

/rant.

The service is still fantastic though in terms of speed, infrastructure, etc. I trust their technology a lot. Their UX/UI people need a time out. Whoever replaced their “Moonpig” billing system with Paddle did the users a disservice.
by breckognize | 2025-08-07 14:36:34+00:00
Kinda related - our product, rowzero.io, is a browser-based spreadsheet with a 2 billion row limit. We initially built the client as anyone would, using a div per cell. We tried to use an off-screen div to take advantage of the browser's native scrollbars but ran into document height limits. Firefox's was 6M pixels iirc. The solution was to do rendering in canvas and draw the scrollbars ourselves.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-07 14:36:37+00:00
I've written fuel estimation software for 747 cargo planes for one particular airline. Pilot would relay all of the info about plane identity, route, load and destination, fuel estimate would be computed externally and then be sent back through text message or voice call, pilot would then do his own check. This is really not something you want to get wrong, having multiple go-arounds or a late abort to an alternate for whatever reason should never result in a low fuel condition.

Obviously planes already leaving the gates are fueled up so that's most likely not the case here but that's one example of how those systems can be still integrated. Now, today - with far more computing power - it is very well possible that that whole system runs on the plane side, but the amount of external data and various exceptions and almanac information that was pulled in for those computations was pretty impressive. Most likely that sort of thing is now done on an iPad or something similar.
by xyst | 2025-08-07 14:36:42+00:00
This country bailed out this industry multiple times in the past 20-25 years. Yet they continue to ignore investment in their own operations, and instead use it towards executive bonuses and stock buybacks.

Anybody else tired of this broken hypercapitalistic system that only serves to benefit the few? Enshittification is a symptom of a much more disgusting disease.
by amluto | 2025-08-07 14:36:43+00:00
What’s the application where you want to stream out the logits for each consecutive token while still sampling each token according to the usual rule? Keep in mind that, if you are doing the usual clever tricks like restricting the next token sampled to something that satisfies a grammar, you need to process the logits and sample them and return a token before running the next round of inference.
by hopelite | 2025-08-07 14:36:44+00:00
You are somewhat correct, even though I’ve never heard anyone say that or allow it to affect their decision in a major way. I do also suspect you may be in a place that is under rather oppressive government regulation.

The problem is a far more fundamental one, because just as I’m trying to get people to understand related to this movement or initiative to do away with property taxes, certain government and asset holder support for that is likely more about personal enrichment and/or expanding total tax receipts by other means, i.e., ulterior motives.

The fundamental issue here is the very premise of how the tax system functions not what kind of taxes are stolen and extracted where; and then redistribute to whom, usually for corrupted reasons and purposes.

The effectively unlimited and unbounded, detached, and inconsequential nature of the tax system now is really the core problem. It’s currently other people’s money and mostly even future people’s money, squandered without any meaningful limits, barriers, or even rules regarding conflicts of interests; and there are virtually zero actual and real, immediate consequences for malfeasance by people charged with the duty of responsible allocation of funds. It’s a corrupt and rotten system from the very top to the very bottom.

Unfortunately not enough people care, understand, or might even like it because they benefit from it and think they will die before the music stops. That’s how we get $37 trillion in national realized debt, another $74 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and another $9 trillion in state and local debt for a total national debt of $120 trillion in America’s public debt burden as of today.
by buran77 | 2025-08-07 14:36:55+00:00
Not "necessarily", but "realistically". I think we need to start by clarifying what "processed" means from a practical (legal/commercial) perspective rather than common sense. What you call "processing" as a normal person, like boiling, frying, smoking, canning, fermenting, baking aren't necessarily even considered "processed" in the commercial sense. They're considered "preservation" (e.g. smoked fish) or "cookery" (e.g. bread). So almost every process that humans applied to food until the 19th-20th century was basic cooking and preservation, with a few exceptions of convoluted foods.

The modern interpretation of "processing" only begins at the next level. When the process has a lot more added steps and ingredients which in practice are almost guaranteed to be less healthy. But when we say "ultra-processed" it's guaranteed that it has significant health downsides. Ultra processed food has decreased nutritional content due to the processing, and high levels of unhealthy ingredients or components (like sugar, salt, trans fats, preservatives, and all kinds of other additives). Many ultra processed foods have more sugar, salt, or trans fats than they have the purported main ingredient. I'm just looking at a jar of "pistachio cream" that has 50% more sugar than pistachio.

So for all intents and purposes, in practice, processed food makes it less healthy and ultra-processed is synonymous with very unhealthy.
by daemonologist | 2025-08-07 14:37:15+00:00
Fo me, a few additional things:

Lots of boilerplate platitudes, especially towards the end of the story.

Some of the quotes appear to be fabricated. I can't find the "aviation analyst" tweet, and I'm pretty sure Maria Cantwell hasn't commented (unless it was video/audio only, and this is the only outlet that printed it). She's also no longer committee chair, being a member of the minority party in the Senate.

It very closely follows the AP article on this - like they copied their homework but changed some words - https://apnews.com/article/united-airlines-flights-grounded-...