MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goalieca | 2025-08-07 14:05:35+00:00
> “This is exactly what happens when billion-dollar companies refuse to modernize,” one aviation analyst tweeted. “You wouldn’t trust a 30-year-old car to drive cross-country. Why are we trusting it to fly planes?”

While i sympathize, the world does rely on high quality 30+ year old software. I think it's time, as an industry, to stop seeing software as disposable and start designing for longevity.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-08-07 14:05:53+00:00
Unfortunately I think it is too late. The time to make any sort of rules around AI ethics has already passed, the US has AI so embedded into its economy now that any legislation with teeth is practically impossible. Companies and people running them are not on our side, or even humanity's side, they're on their own.

It's staggering how quickly this has happened.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-08-07 14:05:56+00:00
I don't know. I'm always confused when social media accounts ask to report issues over different channels when it's so much easier to just reply to customer and ask for additional (non PII) information there. In this case it's unlikely that this was the only or even first report about this issue. So why place the initial burden on a paying customer? If your social media is just a marketing channel, at least make that clear so i don't even bother reporting issues that route.
by HsuWL | 2025-08-07 14:06:26+00:00
I really liked your Detroit Tigers + lettuce in Berlin example. It nails one of the core problems: language models are still dealing with “relatedness” in a super linear and flat way. They can’t really hold a jump like that.

When I brought up topology, I wasn’t talking about anything spatial. I meant more like a model’s thinking path needs to form its own system, a kind of closed semantic topology map.

Each node is a meaning unit, all linked by invisible threads. The input sentence is like a little pacman moving through the map⸜( ´͈ Ⱉ `͈ )⸝ pulled along by those threads until it reaches the node that resonates the most. That’s where the answer comes from.

So it’s not calculating, it’s being guided. Kinda like gravity, but made out of meaning.

What you described feels super close to this. Maybe that’s what context modeling is really heading toward… We just haven’t found the right way to talk about it yet. Σ(๑Ⱉ⸝⸝Ⱉ๑;)੭⁾⁾
by kbolino | 2025-08-07 14:06:41+00:00
Bcrypt alone is unfit for purpose. Argon2 does not need its input to be predigested.

It's easy for somebody who knows this to fix bcrypt, but silently truncating the input was an unforced error. The fact that it looks like and was often sold as the right tool for the job but isn't has led to real-world vulnerabilities.

It's a classic example of crypto people not anticipating how things actually get used.

(Otherwise, though, I agree)
by CodingJeebus | 2025-08-07 14:06:52+00:00
Absolutely shameful behavior by the state here. I can only imagine the kind of fear that stories like this must strike in parents, as if it's not worrying enough to consider to possibility that your child could meet an unfortunate end, but that the system will make sure that you, the parent, will be punished for it.

If something as banal as crossing the street can yield major knock-on legal consequences, what's really off the table at this point?
by nreece | 2025-08-07 14:06:57+00:00
Landing pages can still save time to validate an idea/concept, build a leads list, and with cold outreach even.

Dev tools or B2C: landing page (collect email) with app/product tour video or mockup screenshots

B2B: landing page with video or mockup screenshots, and 'book a demo' link/form (collect as much info)
by adityaathalye | 2025-08-07 14:07:12+00:00
:hugops:

"Things Happen", in production, to the best of us (and FM's pretty damned good at their job). Pretty sure someone's pager duty has been going off like mad.

A little over half an hour ago, the mail UI broke for me on Android, and then I panicked and went to desktop web and it broke there too. Also on different networks.

As far as I can tell, stuff from their CDN is 404-ing, and a JSON api POST request appears to be going in infinite loop with 200 OKs.

The webmail piece seems to be borked... Calendar, Files, Notes etc. are at least rendering.
by svara | 2025-08-07 14:07:45+00:00
This is really strange to me...

Of course you don't trust the answer.

That doesn't mean you can't work with it.

One of the key use cases for me other than coding is as a much better search engine.

You can ask a really detailed and specific question that would be really hard to Google, and o3 or whatever high end model will know a lot about exactly this question.

It's up to you as a thinking human to decide what to do with that. You can use that as a starting point for in depth literature research, think through the arguments it makes from first principles, follow it up with Google searches for key terms it surfaces...

There's a whole class of searches I would never have done on Google because they would have taken half a day to do properly that you can do in fifteen minutes like this.
by jerf | 2025-08-07 14:08:10+00:00
A lot of people resist the idea that programming is intrinsically mathematical, but this is one of the places it pops out. The power of programming lies precisely in the way it brings together text that "represents" something with text that "does" something. That is, at the core, the source of its power. You can still draw the distinction philosophically, as you just did, but at the same time there is also a profound way in which there is in fact no difference between "using" computers and "representing" your use of computers.
by tim333 | 2025-08-07 14:08:11+00:00
I guess you could simulate the effect but getting a 1 diopter pair of reading glasses and knocking one of the lenses out. I have a stack of £1 reading glasses - I'll see if have have a pair that has independently modified itself thus.

Actually you can simulate it just by holding the current pair to one side. Kind of works but is a bit annoying compared to normal reading glass useage.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-07 14:08:24+00:00
Speculation is less profitable than development. If you're getting speculation it's because the roi vs risk of development isn't justifiable.

You can't "tax magic carrot stick <buzzword1>, <buzzword2>, blah, blah, <dogwhistle>" your way around this fundamental economic reality. But you absolutely can screw it up more.

Now, in a low regulation environment you probably could just up the taxes and let owners make do. A bunch of random low end income earning crap (storage lots or whatever, heavy on the whatever) will pop up to pay the tax bill. But Baltimore is not that so you'll probably just get the city owning a bunch of that vacant property instead which is a lateral or a step backward due to increased friction of development.

Tangentially, the author forgets that the reason cities like Baltimore adopted such policy was to encourage the bulldozing of uninhabitable structures lest they become less than legally inhabited. I get that a certain type of people love to screech about tax intake being an unalloyed good here but what's really happening is that the city is amortizing the cost of bulldozing crack dens over time via tax incentive for owners of "teardown" quality structures to take that step (which up's adjacent property values).
by Mistletoe | 2025-08-07 14:08:27+00:00
I’d really like those. My Mom got them and she said it didn’t help her near vision, which I didn’t understand. I guess she was a weird case because yeah I had just assumed that a new lens would fix the hardening of the lens with aging problem. Thanks for letting me know!

How long should your new lenses last? Did they say? Will they eventually get hard like the human body’s lens or are you set for the rest of your life? It’s really cool you are part cyborg. Did you get a monofocal or multifocal lens?
by mvieira38 | 2025-08-07 14:08:49+00:00
>"I’d rather granny needs to visit the bank to get access to her account again, than someone phishes her and steals all her money."

More like abuelita gets robbed at gunpoint and made to unlock and clear out her bank account, then has no recourse at home because her device was taken. I live in a third world country and even 2FA simply isn't viable for me due to how frequent phone robberies are. I've had to do the process once and it was a nightmare, whereas with passwords I can just log into Bitwarden wherever and I'm golden
by SamWhited | 2025-08-07 14:09:13+00:00
FYI this is not a new major release, this is work starting on a new major release. At least two more versions of 2.x are planned and 3.0 is not yet actually scheduled.

May not have been what you meant, but I wanted to clarify for others reading this comment: 3.0 is quite a ways off.
by leephillips | 2025-08-07 14:09:14+00:00
The drops work by selectively acting on the muscles that control pupil size, constricting the eyes’ aperture. As anyone who knows photography is aware, this increases the depth of field (a larger range of distances from the eye will be approximately in focus). Of course this also reduces the brightness on the retina, so things will be darker, an effect confirmed by the linked FDA data. In that data it’s claimed that the perceived dimness is “temporary”; I guess because of accommodation that kicks in after a while. So this is like increasing your f-stop and your ISO.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-08-07 14:09:16+00:00
In my opinion, I get the desire to create some sort of specification for an LLM to interface with [everything else], but I don't really see the point at doing it on an inference level by smashing JSON into the context.

These models are usually very decent at parsing out stuff like that anyway; we don't need the MCP spec, everyone can just specify the available tools in natural language and then we can expect large param models to just "figure it out".

If MCP had been a specification for _training_ models to support tool use on an architectural level, not just training it to ask to use a tool with a special token as they do now.

It's an interesting topic because it's the exact same as the boundary between humans (sloppy, organic, analog messes) and traditional programs (rigid types, structures, formats).

To be fair if we can build tool use in architecturally and solve the boundary between these two areas then it also works for things like objective facts. LLMs are just statistical machines and data in the context doesn't really mean all that much, we just hope it is statistically relevant given some input and it is often enough that it works, but not guaranteed.
by Hackbraten | 2025-08-07 14:09:27+00:00
> If you put a code you get from GOOD.com into BAD.com, it's like you put a password from GOOD.com into BAD.com - don't do that.

A password manager will protect me from doing the latter. There’s no way it can protect me from doing the former.

Any human can be tricked, no matter how smart they are. A bad actor just has to wait for the right moment. No amount of “don’t do that” can change that fact.
by artdigital | 2025-08-07 14:09:28+00:00
We use async agents heavily. The key is to have proper validation loops, tests and strong/well phrased system prompts, so the agent can quickly see if something is broken or it broke convention.

We have proper issue descriptions that go into detail what needs to be done, where the changes need to be made and why. Break epics/stories down into smaller issues that can be chopped off easily. Not really different to a normal clean project workflow really.

Now for most of the tickets we just assign them to agents, and 10 minutes later pull requests appears. The pull requests get screened with Gemini Code Assist or Copilot Agent to find obvious issues, and github actions check lint, formatting, tests, etc. This gets pushed to a separate test environment for each branch.

We review the code, test the implementation, when done, click merge. Finished.

I can focus on bigger, more complex things, while the agents fix bugs, handle small features, do refactorings and so on in the background. It's very liberating. I am convinced that most companies/environments will end up with a similar setup and this becomes the norm. There really isn't a reason why not to use async agents.

Yeah sure if you give a giant epic to an agent it will probably act out of line, but you don't really have these issues when following a proper project management flow
by Bender | 2025-08-07 14:09:35+00:00
- I would hope that by some future version it is automagically fixing all the CVE's so that every CVE database is empty. Submit a new CVE and it should be resolved at the code level before one refreshes the page. Bonus if it can detect state sponsored back doors that require a dozen different pieces of highly obfuscated code working in concert with hardware designs to enable the back door.

- I would expect a future version to scan all the published scientific papers and find the liars and cheaters, automagically unpublishing all the budy-bro back-scratching pencil-whipped papers and papers that were not replicated by multiple people with proof.

- A future version should prevent slop, lies, misinformation and schizo output even if that is what it learned from.
by ivape | 2025-08-07 14:09:38+00:00
Yeah I don’t know. Let’s a say a org wants to do discovery of what functions are available for an app across the org. Okay, that’s interesting. But, each team can just also import a big file called all_functions.txt.

A swagger api is already kind of like an MCP, or really any existing REST api (even better because you don’t have to implement the interface). If I wanted to give my LLM brand new functionality, all I’d have to do is define out tool use for <random_api>, with zero implementation. I could also just point it to a local file and say here are the functions locally available.

Remember, the big hairy secret is that all of these things just plop out a blob of text that you paste back into the LLM prompt (populating context history). That’s all these things do.

Someone is going to have to unconfuse me.
by kqr | 2025-08-07 14:09:50+00:00
As long as the planes don't leave, the airline will know exactly where staff and equipment are: right where they were when the system broke. Once things get moving it becomes really complicated to figure out where everything is again.

During previous similar outages it has taken days to track down staff and equipment once the systems are up again. During this time delays and cancellations continue. It's possible the system is much faster to bootstrap given correct locations of things from the start.
by lloeki | 2025-08-07 14:09:56+00:00
> The system manages flight information like crew scheduling, weight-and-balance calculations, and aircraft movement logs

You wouldn't want to fly an airplane whose weight and balance has been miscalculated (or maybe properly calculated but can't vet if it has)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_de_Aviación_Flight_0972

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Midwest_Flight_5481
by zackangelo | 2025-08-07 14:10:42+00:00
GPT-OSS will run even faster on Blackwell chips because of its hardware support for fp4.

If anyone is working on training or inference in Rust, I'm currently working on adding fp8 and fp4 support to cudarc[0] and candle[1]. This is being done so I can support these models in our inference engine for Mixlayer[2].

[0] https://github.com/coreylowman/cudarc/pull/449 [1] https://github.com/huggingface/candle/pull/2989 [2] https://mixlayer.com
by hijakr | 2025-08-07 14:10:45+00:00
Cold outreach f*cking sucks. I hated it so much I built something to make it tolerable.

Vexping lets you paste any LinkedIn or X profile and get a human sounding DM designed to actually start a conversation, not get ignored. No scraping, no spamming, no auto-sending.

It's built to help makers, solo founders, and teams pitch better, without burning out.

Would love feedback, roast, or questions.

Cheers
Cognitive Telecommunications
by oliveiracwb | 2025-08-07 14:11:03+00:00
We're a telecommunications company. Look at the aging market. Like a former addict, they tried to re-experience profits by revamping the same old ideas that made them grow in the 90s and 2000s—without success. They want to innovate with old formulas. We build cellular networks like car manufacturers build vehicles. We're a mid-to-large company (outside the US). I believe we're still a technological frontier for ordinary people. Old services like "who called?", "voicemail," "voicemail," "SMS," and data packages are still trying to be monetized as if they were gold. But for me, it's crystal clear: the only future is cognitive. Why the hell are audio still compressed at 8 kHz? Who cares about audio transcription at the end of the call? Have you considered enhancing the voices of people who don't like their own voices? Or native image enhancement? Personal agents? Automated customer service responses for companies and retailers? Gamification products? I'm not young, but I feel the field needs renewal. An automotive designer working in Detroit decades ago. Can you comment on your feelings in your fields?
by tantalor | 2025-08-07 14:11:11+00:00
This is not a reliable source. Reeks of AI-generated text and fake author bios.

There are plenty of real sources for this story:

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/united-airlines-halts-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/business/united-airlines-...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/united-airlines-flights-res...
by hopelite | 2025-08-07 14:11:12+00:00
> But what if the government’s own policies were quietly making the problem worse?

That is usually the case, outside of the very few core competencies and purposes of government which simply are not what our governments in the West focus on at all anymore. In many, if not all cases western governments even actively undermine the beneficial things they should be engaged in because they are all corrupt, captured, and at the very least borderline illegitimate.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-08-07 14:11:19+00:00
Not sure I get the point; of course monads reduce to a functor with two natural transformations (η/μ) that satisfy the monad coherence conditions. That's ... literally what a monad is.

- η[i]: i → t i: this is return/pure.

- μ[i]: t (t i) → t i: this is join.

Now conform to the coherence conditions (aka the monad laws), and you have ... a monad. So why not call it that? It's convenient to have a name for it, and nothing stops you from passing around return/join as freestanding natural transformations if you really want to.
by dale_glass | 2025-08-07 14:11:34+00:00
> While I know that styles are not copyrightable for good-faith reasons, massive abuse of good-faith is a good siren for regulation in that area.

Nothing having to do with "good faith", but that style isn't really definable. There's thousands of artists that produce very similar outputs.

Also it'd be very stupid, because suddenly it'd turn out that if there's two people that draw nearly identically, one could sue the other even if that happened by chance.

> After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred.

Nothing blurry about it. OpenAI is within full legal right to do it. It's kinda in bad taste, that's about it. Anyone can do it. Disney could make a Ghibli style movie if they ever wanted to.

I'm not sure why all the drama, because who even cares? The reason why I watched Ghibli movies wasn't ever about the particular looks.

> Then there's Universal and Disney's lawsuits against Midjourney.While these are framed as character-copying, when you read between the lines, style appropriation is also something being strongly balked at

You better hope it stays at characters, or we're going to have a mess of lawsuits of people and organizations suing each other because they draw eyebrows this particular way. I fail to see why is that at all desirable.

And of course the big corporations will come on top of that.
by derf_ | 2025-08-07 14:12:12+00:00
> ...it's hardly a robust strategy.

I disagree. Video is such a large percentage of internet traffic and licensing fees are so high that it becomes possible for any number of companies to subsidize the development cost of a new codec on their own and still net a profit. Google certainly spends the most money, but they were hardly the only ones involved in AV1. At Mozilla we developed Daala from scratch and had reached performance competitive with H.265 when we stopped to contribute the technology to the AV1 process, and our team's entire budget was a fraction of what the annual licensing fees for H.264 would have been. Cisco developed Thor on their own with just a handful of people and contributed that, as well. Many other companies contributed technology on a royalty-free basis. Outside of AV1, you regularly see things like Samsung's EVC (or LC-EVC, or APV, or...), or the AVS series from the Chinese.... If the patent situation were more tenable, you would see a lot more of these.

The cost of developing the technology is not the limitation. I would argue the cost to get all parties to agree on a common standard and the cost to deploy it widely enough for people to rely on it is much higher, but people manage that on a royalty-free basis for many other standards.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-07 14:12:31+00:00
I think it is the opposite. If you want to double the pay of your CEO every year then you're going to have to find that money somewhere, so it reduces the money available for other things. 'Slightly less' was never an option. That's why employees are often expected to work unpaid overtime and yet management gets ridiculous bonuses. And if it all goes bust: the taxpayer will make up the difference. These are all asymmetrical bets, CEOs pocket the gains and society ends up with the losses.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-08-07 14:12:47+00:00
Yup exactly. It's all just state machines. Really nothing more than that.

It's like all these lang* frameworks are pretending that they can solve core deficiencies in the model, whereas most stuff is just workarounds.

We do have to glue model stuff together _somehow_ but there's no reason that it needs to be as complex as most of these frameworks are setting out to be.
by sensanaty | 2025-08-07 14:12:57+00:00
Isn't this worse, though? You said it yourself, it's an even blacker black box that nobody truly understands. And we even have an attempt at setting rules for these things akin to Asimov's laws, those "system prompts" that people are fascinated by are testament to that and they tend to be THOUSANDS of statements long (and they're not very good at following them).

People often misunderstand Asimov's laws, the entire point of the laws and the stories they're set in was that you can't just throw a simple "Don't hurt people" clause at a black box like AI and expect good results. You first have to define "Don't", then you have to define "hurt" and perhaps the hardest of all is you have to define "people". And I mean really define it, to the smallest most minute detail of what exactly all those words mean. Otherwise you very quickly run into funny, tragic and even contradictory situations, and those situations are endlessly unique.

Is feeding grossly unhealthy food to a starving person harm? Perhaps not, you can argue it's better to eat something unhealthy than to starve. What about feeding someone on the brink of a cardiac arrest that same meal? Now what about all the other gray areas involved here, you have to define every single possible situation in which an unhealthy meal might affect someone.

It's kinda funny, because it really is almost prophetic considering it's a story written quite a long time before we were even close to it being a reality...