MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graemep | 2025-08-09 12:29:26+00:00
I do not think the argument is that ALL data should be in human readable form, but I think there are far more cases of data being in a binary form when it would be better human readable. Your example of a case where it is human readable when it should be binary is rarer for most of us.

In some cases human readable data is for interchange and it should be processed and queried in other forms - e.g. CSV files to move data between databases.

An awful lot of data is small - and these days I think you can say small is quite a bit bigger than 10Mb.

Quite a lot of data that is extracted from a large system would be small at that point, and would benefit from being human readable.

The benefit of data being human readable is not necessarily that you will read it all, but that it is easier to read bits that matter when you are debugging.
by nchmy | 2025-08-09 12:30:03+00:00
And when your avian ISP dies, how do you make requests?

If everything you need - application logic, css, media, data etc... - is cached on your device, you can carry on.

You're being far too myopic about all of this. There's many different use cases and solutions, all of which have their tradeoffs. Sometimes ssr is appropriate, other times local first is. You can even do both - SSR html in the service worker with either isomorphic JavaScript, or WASM.

We can all agree, though, that React and it's derivations are never appropriate.
by proc0 | 2025-08-09 12:30:11+00:00
The issue with current AI train hype in general is the gap between a cool demo and thinking that it means you can prompt anything just because the demo worked. This is really obvious with images or video. There are some amazing examples, beautifully rendered, and it gives the impression you can prompt anything that comes to mind and it will work. The reality is most prompts don't work as expected. Many concepts don't work as expected. There is a space of "viable prompts" that produce acceptable outputs and anything outside of it is unusable. Similarly with code there is a "space" of languages, projects, features, etc., that will produce decent output, but of course the vast majority of things that are possible and novel are not in this space.
by _diyar | 2025-08-09 12:30:39+00:00
With current LLMs, is meaningless because the current state is stored in the "context" (system prompt, user prompt, chat output so far). So if you apply a backspace token, you just end up where you started a second ago.

I.e. At state A, you have decided to append token i to move to state B. Removing token i just sets you back to state A, where you would again just pick token i. (Note that this is ignoring the fact that there's a small probabilistic component to next token selection).

In the RL/reasoning world of LLMs, you can instead just reward correct final output without policing the reasoning steps, and a strong model should learn to backtrack on their "thoughts" as appropriate (without removing it from the context).

Edit: wording.
by bsenftner | 2025-08-09 12:31:08+00:00
This analysis is not complete, it needs to continue with an analysis of how many people, and critically how many business owners, believe the lies and non-truths propagandized by that article and the entire marketing push of LLMs.

That article is not for developers, it's for the business owner, their management, and the investor class. If they believe it, they will try to enforce it.

This is serious, destroy our industry type of idiot logic.
by coatmatter | 2025-08-09 12:31:20+00:00
Well the sub that post is from is called "r/MyBoyfriendIsAI" so who knows how often they try their hand at self-parody.

It does however remind me of all the numbers of novice chess players who would rather play against "AI" or chess bots than face up against humans, for reasons of fear or shame in playing against (anonymous) human opponents, and risk looking "stupid" or being silently judged by someone they'll never meet or interact with.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-09 12:31:26+00:00
The UI for taskmanager was never great. Your link says so too. It's full of stuff like

"If all your titlebars disappear and you just have a graph, double-click dead client space to switch back to normal mode"

and

"If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc."

and

"If Task Manager ever becomes internally corrupted, kill/close it. Restart it while holding down CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT, and Task Manager will reset ALL internal settings to factory fresh"

How to discover any of this except by reading a reddit post by the developer?

"There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed."

Why is this even necessary? It's a part of the OS, it should not need One Weird Trick to kill processes.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-09 12:33:15+00:00
They can afford it but it probably won't increase Windows revenue, which is anyway only ~10% of their income. If they could make upgrades that people would pay $$$ for like in the Win95 days they'd be motivated to try but desktop OS is a mature segment, and people expect updates to be free now, so it kills the incentives to do anything.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-09 12:33:20+00:00
I have some science-fiction story ideas I'd love to flesh out. However, it turns out that I'm a terrible writer, despite some practice at it. Also, I can never be surprised by my own writing, or entertained by it in the same way that someone else's writing can.

I've tried taking my vague story ideas, throwing them at an AI, and getting half a chapter out to see how it tracks.

Unfortunately, few if any models can write prose as good as a skilled human author, so I'm still waiting to see if a future model can output customised stories on demand that I'd actually enjoy.
by kjellsbells | 2025-08-09 12:33:36+00:00
There are some harsh truths in here, but I dont necessarily agree with the conclusions.

The dominance of horizontal companies like Microsoft and categories like system of record is really telling. Slide 6. Salesforce and SAP are notable by their absence here but they would be for example the SoR par excellence. Theyre also kind of crappy, but so sprawly that they are exceptionally hard to dislodge. (I think there should be a word for software that dominates a market by virtue of having a little bit of everything and being complex enough that its too daunting to replace.)

For the worker bees on HN, I also note the authors' admiration for companies that have both positive business outlook and shitty work like balance (slide 32). Generally the tenor of this deck is that SaaS is burning money and is not going to sustain at this rate and therefore needs to get a grip on comp and productivity. I dont know that I agree with the conclusion but I can certainly see that if SaaS business, which by definition has a reliable income stream, is spending more than is coming in, that is a problem. But it's more a failing of the CFO and management team than it is of the lowly Software Developer II drone, no?
by Zigurd | 2025-08-09 12:34:26+00:00
Neuralink's first patient was turned into a kind of Cronenberg-esque horror. xAI claims to have a first-tier AI but has no revenue, not that anyone else has enough revenue to make back the over-investment. National security launches are probably cash flow positive on an individual launch basis. But Starship has been a predictable disaster. It's not plausible that SpaceX as a whole is profitable and evidence for that is in that they require big new investments every year.

Tesla is a particularly tragic story. The vertical integration they had to do because of unavailability of suitable suppliers and car industry corruption and supply chain cartels is an under-appreciated success. Throwing that and all the other goodwill away by going mask off fascist is an amazing act of brand destruction.
by davidhyde | 2025-08-09 12:35:26+00:00
The consensus appears to be that this is theft but it’s worth considering that it could also be many other things. It could be paperwork mixup with the purchase of a legitimate plane. The previous owner could have had his plane sold without him knowing about it (identity theft). There could be all sorts of reasons. The fact that the alleged is not hiding this newly acquired plane is a little strange to me.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-09 12:36:24+00:00
Something that used to annoy me about all previous models is that if I asked for a fix to something in a code file (i.e.: fix this method in this class), invariably they would return the entire thing with a bunch of small edits.

GPT 5 is the first model I've used that has consistently done as it is told and returned only the changes.
by bsenftner | 2025-08-09 12:38:01+00:00
Those bootcamps create assembly line capable people, and nothing else. If your work is so static and unchanging that you can use such people, great, for those people doing that kind of limited scope work they are being used and discarded with little to no economic ladder to better their situation. It's exploitation of others, which is commonplace today, but I'd try to do better. It's still a poor way to treat others.
by dleeftink | 2025-08-09 12:38:24+00:00
I'm a bit different then, maths only started to make sense well after picking up a calculator; Wolfram notebooks, Excel and SQL were much easier for me to grok than attempting the equivalent by heart/head/hand.

Nowadays, math concepts or papers only makes sense when I can properly implement them as query, it's somehow a basic translation step I need.
by LoganDark | 2025-08-09 12:38:44+00:00
The thing is the government doesn't need that money as much as the people do. The government can just manufacture as much money as it needs to do whatever it wants. So if you're a billionaire and you decide to give all your money to the government thinking that'll do any good, that's a huge skill issue. You could've done a lot more good with that money than to just throw it in the money hole Onion-style.
by fsflover | 2025-08-09 12:39:25+00:00
This is completely missing the point of why one needs privacy. Lack of it harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-09 12:39:52+00:00
From Wikipedia:

> KeeLoq is a proprietary hardware-dedicated block cipher that uses a non-linear feedback shift register (NLFSR).

Pretty much any proprietary encryption algorithm is going to qualify as "rolling your own".

"Not the most modern" is a gross understatement.

I can forgive the original authors since it dates to the 1980s and AES wasn't standardized until 2001. (Only just barely though given that DES dates to 1977.) I can't forgive vehicle manufacturers that are _still_ using it (or things significantly like it) 25 years later.

I hope that products manufactured post 2005 use strong publicly available cryptography. After 2010 I fully expect it. After 2015 I view any failure in that regard as gross negligence that ought to be legally actionable.

> it's just fundamentally possible to pair a key with physical access which is easy to get.

I don't follow?
by nickd2001 | 2025-08-09 12:41:06+00:00
A friend bought a 14-yr-old one of these for little at an auction in 1999. As someone who knew little about cars, her logic was, it "looked OK' and had had one owner, and crucially, the radio was tuned to a NPR classical music station and therefore anyone who listened to that would have treated their car responsibly. ;) Suffice to say, this was an excellent purchase, reliable and inexpensive to run, in fact in order to find out whether some maintenance was due or not she managed to track down the previous owner who turned out to be a middle-aged woman who was just as responsible as my friend imagined. ;)
by techpineapple | 2025-08-09 12:41:13+00:00
I wonder if one reasons new versions of GPT appear to get better - say at coding tasks is just because they have new knowledge.

When ChatGPT4 comes out, new versions of API’s will have less blog post / examples / documentation in their training data. So ChatGPT 5 comes out and seems to solve all the problems that ChatGPT4 had, but then of course fail on newer libraries. Rinse and repeat
Show HN: I made a Google images clone for Pixiv (Japanese art website)
by nameislonjuin | 2025-08-09 12:42:13+00:00
Upload one anime image to search for similar images. It's different from other sites like IQDB and Sauce NAO, because it can find images with similar content, not just exact matches.

Behind the scenes the search works like this: a finetuned siglip model is used to extract vector embeddings and then faiss is used to search for the closest matches.
by diggan | 2025-08-09 12:42:18+00:00
I'm guessing the "Show HN" part isn't Kimi K2 (the model itself, released ~30 days ago, featured here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533403) but something else, perhaps the UI shown in the screenshots?

It really isn't clear, and right now it looks like you're claiming to be the author of Kimi K2 the model, and the website isn't making it much clearer what your thing actually is.

The testimonials are obviously misleading too, people there are talking about the model, not whatever software you've built that is using the model.

Overall, seems misleading at best.
by mc32 | 2025-08-09 12:43:06+00:00
It's possible. It's probably too early to tell and things will settle in due time.

One possible outcome is that if high minimum wages are placed across the board in all states and the feds enforce e-verify that we'll become a bit like Switzerland where everyone nominally earns more compared to other OECD countries but also things (good and services) are relatively more expensive too. It potentially could pull people who've been out of the labor pool (undercut by low wages/cheap labor) back in to it, if the right policies are put in place.

It's probably not a bad deal for US workers as we all would have a higher standard of living but also live in a more expensive society --in the end that's probably better for everyone (in the US).
Countries with most GPT-5 users, esp. in advanced computation and reasoning?
by mzk_pi | 2025-08-09 12:43:59+00:00
I’m very satisfied with GPT-5, especially with its responses to advanced computation and complex reasoning. It made me wonder: which countries have the most users who regularly engage in this kind of work? Does the depth of questions significantly influence AI development? I haven’t found any public statistics, so if you have insights, data, or reasonable guesses, I’d love to hear them.
by raphinou | 2025-08-09 12:44:44+00:00
I was initially enthousiastic about sandstorm when I encountered it, but in the end my preferred solution for self hosting has been Docker Swarm. Dead simple setup, low maintenance, everything easily deployable within Swarm (crons, backups, first deployment setup, reverse proxy config incl. certificates, etc).

Additionally a lot of projects provide a Docker compose file which is mostly compatible with swarm. I started using Swarm [1] when k8s was already ruling, but never regretted my choice.

1: https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-09 12:45:18+00:00
> I think it’s more plausible that all that money was spent on strippers and cocaine

These secret private military-style contractors were given “debt cards” (to the tune of trillions which could be spent right off the national debt.)

And they did indeed build secret facilities which they rented back to the CIA as domestic safe houses, and licensed secret prisons, and more.

When China hacks the secret phone infrastructure, these third party contractors own it (purchased with debt cards post 9/11), and they rent it back to the NSA.

There is so much more. I call it an onion layered shit cake. The more you cut it the more you cry and it all smells like shit!
by sunshine-o | 2025-08-09 12:45:44+00:00
I have been thing a lot about why none of those self-hosting solutions never took off and most of them died off over the last decade.

Why are we going dehydrated in the middle of the ocean, with docker and so many open source alternative to the common software and services ?

My conclusion is this: just pick the distro you like, whether it is Debian, Fedora, Arch or FreeBSD. Preferably one with the selection of package you need. All those will be maintained in a few years too, you just need to upgrade.

Because in the end the solution was the problem. A Debian for example was meant to host Internet services, it is well put together and has a large selection of software and can be trusted. It is more than enough security features for hosting your own apps, especially if you access them through something like tailscale.

A lot of people (me included) thought that since containers were the hype we should build something new and setup everything like a corporation would do. Looking back it was a bad idea and it did not work (fact).
by qcnguy | 2025-08-09 12:45:56+00:00
There's no need. The BLS themselves check their own numbers and huge revisions have become normal. The idea that the BLS is getting things wrong isn't controversial and has been flagged by economists for years. If you want to understand this POV read this:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-169836476

Others and I mercilessly criticized the BLS during the Biden Administration for the huge downward revisions that occurred every month under the prior administration. Reporting good numbers one month, only to revise them down significantly over the next two months, when no one was paying attention. Frankly, at the time, it looked political. Now it appears to be just gross incompetence.

Understand, the revisions to the employment data last Friday were the largest revisions in my lifetime. More than 90% of the initially reported jobs didn’t exist. Combined with the revisions over the past three years, it is clear that something at BLS is broken. I have spent a career building statistical forecast and prediction models. If my models produced 90% errors, I would have adjusted them, or I would have been fired. Ms. McEntarfer didn’t make adjustments….so she was fired.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-09 12:47:00+00:00
What's the deal with Exo anyway? I've seen it described as an abandoned, unmaintained project.

Anyway, you don't really need a lot of fast RAM unless you insist on getting a real-time usable response. If you're fine with running a "good" model overnight or thereabouts, there are things you can do to get better use of fairly low-end hardware.
Exposing Satcom in the Sky: Aircraft Systems Vulnerable to Remote Attacks
by hacker_might | 2025-08-09 12:47:11+00:00
My research reveals how internet-facing SATCOM systems in aircraft could be exploited — using only publicly available scan data like Censys, Modat, and FOFA

https://medium.com/@hacker_might/exposing-satcom-in-the-sky-how-aircraft-systems-are-vulnerable-to-remote-attacks-analysis-of-47676e3dda83
by fullstackwife | 2025-08-09 12:47:45+00:00
Using GH Copilot Agent to vibe code a LLM+Docker omnitool for my coding assistant: https://github.com/gtanczyk/genaicode/pull/25

The idea is to give it a task, let it do whatever it decides and expect to produce a result *inside container*. I'm still exploring this idea whether it makes sense, and is cost effective.
by sickcodebruh | 2025-08-09 12:47:50+00:00
My approach to Claude Code is evolving.

I’m still unable to get Claude Code to contribute meaningful features directly my large web app at work. Specs will sometimes help it get close but it eventually veers off course and enters a feedback loop of bad decisions. Some of this might be attempting tasks it’s not suited well for, or perhaps my specs just aren’t precise enough, but I had enough failed attempts that I stopped trying to do anything that I’d describe as “challenging” or need too much domain knowledge.

A friend recommended I try it for less brainy backlog tasks, especially the kinds of things I can run casually in the background and not feel too invested in. This keeps failure from being too frustrating because there’s minimal effort and success becomes a pleasant surprise.

My first attempt with this was writing Playwright tests of the large web app in a new workspace within the monorepo. It was a huge success. I explained some user experiences the way I’d walk a person through them, pointed it at a path on my dev server, and told it the process I wanted it to follow: use Playwright MCP to load the page and discover the specifics of using the feature, document execution steps, write playwright tests based on what it learned from discovery, run the tests and debug errors with Playwright MCP. I instructed it to seek out the UI code within the project and add data-testid selectors as needed. I had it write this process to a master task.md, then make more task markdown files for each feature to be tested. It was very effective. Some of the features were somewhat complex, requiring two users with two browsers interacting in non-trivial ways. Not 100% accurate and more complex features needed more contextual and code corrections, but overall it probably saved days of frustrating work.
by self_awareness | 2025-08-09 12:48:53+00:00
I'm not sure the author knows much about binary formats.

Binary formats are binary for a reason. Speed of interpretation is one reason. Usage of memory is another reason. Directly mapping it and using it, is another reason. Binary formats can make assumptions about system memory page size. They can store internal offsets to make incremental reading faster. None of this is offered by text formats.

Also, the ability to modify text formats is completely wrong. Nothing can be changed if we introduce checksums inside text formats. Also if we digitally sign a format, then nothing can be changed despite the fact that it's a text format.

Also, comparing CSV files to internal database binary format? It's like comparing a book cover to the ERP system of a library. Meaning, it's comparing two completely different things.
by Too | 2025-08-09 12:48:55+00:00
Let’s say that hypothetically one were to disagree with this. What would be the best alternative format? One that has ample of tooling for editing and diffing, as though it was text, yet stores things more efficiently.

Most of the arguments presented in TFA are about openness, which can still be achieved with standard binary formats and a schema. Hence the problem left to solve is accessibility.

I’m thinking something like parquet, protobuf or sqllite. Despite their popularities, still aren’t trivial for anyone to edit.
by throwanem | 2025-08-09 12:49:17+00:00
Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the rest!
by mk_stjames | 2025-08-09 12:49:33+00:00
> Anything you buy from AliExpress for the cost of a couple of pints is bound to be a bit crap.

This line kinda got me down, because, well, last night I went out for a few pints and paid €16 for two drinks; Here we have a miracle of modern technology available shipped to your door for about the same price of what it now costs to just go out and do the thing people have done when socializing for the last 1500 years.

We're subsidizing the costs of all this modern tech by heavily taxing ourselves on the things once taken as nearly the bare minimum lifestyle.