MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Atlas667 | 2025-08-20 01:46:55+00:00
What do you mean? I'm literally going off of historical realities.

Shit like this actually happened and not even that long ago. It sounds like you've been Americanized in such a way as to see social change impossible.

You've got suburb mentality. The capitalists define your historical progression, even your conception of it.

Authoritarianism follows that mentality.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-20 01:47:12+00:00
I would disagree if this were a spurious quote that wasn't highly indicative of the preponderance of his record.

All the ethical quandaries where Facebook has been caught red handed. Over and over. Habitual denial of obvious problems.

The gross ineptitude and irresponsibility that facilitated actual genocidal coordination, in languages with no Facebook monitors. The consistently slippery talk we get from him via PR and Senate interviews.

And the deeply ethically challenged core business model of surveillance by any means not deemed illegal, and then some, as a means of individualizing the gaming of people's psychology - without transparent disclosure or a required opt-in.
by mousematrix | 2025-08-20 01:47:16+00:00
hey all, another perspective that I have been thinking about is if semantic layers are like ORM for but BI dashboards. Actually, they I think its more than BI dashboards since a similar idea applies to Features. Features in ML land are nothing but a Measure + Entity metadata + TTL. So, really its about higher-order semantics and as we move up the stack, we need richer expression to describe our world.

Feature stores explored here: https://www.xorq.dev/blog/featurestore-to-featurehouse

I think my key takeaway building this is that we need better expression systems and Ibis is a great foundation to build yours..maybe you want to build a language for some other domain etc.

PS: I am one of the authors of bsl and co-founder of Xorq.

I am one of the authors of bsl and founder of xorq.
by litbear2022 | 2025-08-20 01:47:20+00:00
Australia's National Security Agency is a joke.

In 2020, Wang Liqiang, a man convicted of fraud in China, applied for political asylum in Australia, claiming to be a Chinese spy[1].

However, the video of Wang's 2016 trial and the verdict had been publicly available online for years[2].

In the 1980s and 1990s, Australian agents bugged the Chinese embassy on behalf of the United States, an incident reported by the ABC in 1995[3]. Photos of the bugs in the embassy building were widely circulated online[4].

Not to mention the antics of bugging other countries' embassies[5].

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Liqiang

- [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3mIbJXa_ps

- [3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-08/the-chinese-embassy-b...

- [4] https://x.com/shen_shiwei/status/1277417056841814017

- [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93Indonesia_sp...
Ask HN: Why haven't we seen AI enhanced AirPods microphone yet?
by ryeguy_24 | 2025-08-20 01:47:48+00:00
Wouldn’t Apple be able to train a model that with AirPods mic recording vs high-quality mic recording to effectively upconvert the poor mic audio into higher quality audio.

I desperately want this feature to improve my audio on work calls all day long. Right now there is an unbelievable difference in quality between AirPods mics and sub 200 dollar wired mics.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-20 01:48:24+00:00
It will always be up for debate, though. That's the thing--unless you are an absolutist, you will understand that scientific inquiry is a never-ending process and that all the "it's settled science" people don't seem to understand that at one time humans thought the earth was the center of the universe and that applying leeches to people helped remove the "ill humours" they were suffering form. All of that was also "settled science." Until it wasn't.
by dan-robertson | 2025-08-20 01:48:49+00:00
The OP claims many stolen cars are exported under false manifests, so identifying a car and being able to compare that to the manifest helps. Once you can use manifests to identify cars (because you can spot containers trying to hide cars) you can put them through a different process – presumably this is part of the reason the manifests lie. Another thing is that I suspect most legitimate car exports go through a few companies so it may be that other shipping details can give big updates to your prior of whether it contains a stolen car.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-08-20 01:49:23+00:00
My biology is a bit rusty but I really have to wonder — are plants and animal cells even “alive”?

Take away the mitochondria and bacteria… can cells live on their own?

If no, then are we that all that different than this microbe?

Might even be sheer arrogance to think that we are the “host” (much like cats/dogs domesticating humans). Maybe we only exist to serve the mitochondria (:->
by xanderlewis | 2025-08-20 01:49:48+00:00
I think you’re right. You do (or, at least, when I imagine it in my head, I do) hear it frequently used when saying goodbye, but I don’t think it would be used to say goodbye.

If someone said ‘cheers’ to me when parting, I’d interpret it the same way as if they’d said ‘thanks’ — which could be slightly strange, depending on the situation.
by cortesi | 2025-08-20 01:51:03+00:00
I have a tiny, relevant weekend project:

https://github.com/cortesi/agentsmd

This is a command-line tool that lets you generate your AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files from common sources. So, for instance, if you have Rust-specific guidance for models, you can define it once, and then automatically include it in any project that contains Rust based on the `lang()` language matcher.

This is one of those small tools I now use many times a day to maintain and update ubiquitous agents files. Maybe other folks will find it useful too.
by dang | 2025-08-20 01:51:46+00:00
HN is about more than just tech and startups. That's why https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html has always said "more than hacking and startups" right in the opening paragraph.

In fact, that's the genesis of HN: pg got bored of reading only about tech and startups and renamed Startup News to Hacker News back in 2007 (https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html).

There's room for stories with political overlap. At the same time, we can't have too many, or HN would turn into a current affairs site and cease to be HN. That's a tough set of constraints. We've found an approach over the years which balances the tradeoffs well enough (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), but it has the disadvantage of not satisfying everybody.

Actually, it has the disadvantage of not satisfying anybody who feels passionately about a given topic. That's especially true of the Israel/Gaza topic. There are many readers who feel like HN is unfairly suppressing it, and there are also many readers who feel like HN is unfairly featuring it.

The other disadvantage is that there's no effective way to communicate about this to the community. No matter how many explanations we post, the set of users who actually get the message always seems to have measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
by colmmacc | 2025-08-20 01:52:07+00:00
I found that post so cathartic.

This whole episode reminds me of the story of the Citigroup Center in New York. Years after its completion, an architecture student uncovered that key supports for the building had been done incorrectly and unsafely. It was at risk of collapse in high winds.

The structural engineer worked with the building owner and city to repair the building in secret, before everything was eventually made public. It makes for a story of a folk hero, and it's a great narrative of recovery. Meanwhile the stories of the structural engineers and construction supervisors who weren't woefully negligent and who just quietly built safe buildings go uncelebrated.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-08-20 01:53:27+00:00
> Yet most other languages don't have the "properly ordered" for loop, Rust included (it's not "from iter as var" there either).

The relative order of the variable being iterated on and the loop variable name is not relevant to OP's complaint. OP only requires that the expression which uses the loop variable comes after both, which is the case in Rust.
by 7thaccount | 2025-08-20 01:54:07+00:00
No, he's become a grifter. He whines about "big science" trying to silence him when he literally IS big science being at Princeton and then a department chair at Harvard.

A few years ago when that interstellar object flew by he saw his chance to make a bunch of money selling books. Now he just makes wild claims with no evidence that the object was a light sail and contacts the media. He then tried to claim that SETI hasn't actually done anything and got told off by Jill Tatar...the literal inspiration for the movie Contact. Then he went off and dredged the bottom of the ocean and found some little spheres (extremely common) and started claiming they were from interstellar space and fudged the data.

What makes this complicated is that Avi was a pretty respected scientist with a huge number of papers. He knows how to do science properly and how the peer review process works, but doesn't care anymore now that he's getting attention and making money.

Check out

Angela Collier's video on YouTube: harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb

Professor Dave Explains video: Avi Loeb is a fraud now.
by dang | 2025-08-20 01:57:49+00:00
As tomhow pointed out above, HN has hosted quite a few major frontpage threads about Israel/Gaza. It's not off topic here, and I've posted many explanations about why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

The problem is that this site has a limited capacity to host such discussions. The people who (quite rightly, of course) feel passionately about this topic want it to be covered far more than that capacity can tolerate. Meanwhile there are others who want it to be covered much less.

It's really hard to get this explanation across to the community; no matter how many times we explain, most users don't even hear the explanation, quite apart from whether they would like/dislike it or agree/disagree.

Still, if anyone wants to know how we approach this, the above link will take you to many detailed explanations that also link to the moderation principles from which our approach is derived. If you (or anyone) familiarize yourself with those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, tomhow and I will be happy to take a crack at it.
by computerdork | 2025-08-20 01:59:05+00:00
Don't disagree, but am realizing, it's easy to say anything (on my side too) without any proof either way. Yeah, have to admit, don't have any numbers on the total number of artist that are supported by music labels, or the total amount of money they give out. The only numbers I have are that the music industry's revenue crashed in the 2000's, down to nearly half, and only recently has it recovered and is near what it was it its peak in the 90's (but this is without inflation). To me at least, this means the amount of money in the industry has to give out is much lower.

Although yeah, you do have a point that it doesn't take as much money to distribute music. That is definitely a cost savings for musicians and labels (and, as you probably know, DAW's and relatively cheap, high-quality recording equipment have been huge too). Still, not sure how big an effect these are though.

And for me, yeah, can't have surviorship bias, because I've been struggling myself for years to make a living, haha :) But part of it is my fault, am trying to be a composer, and this is one of the worst jobs in the music industry to make money in.

But yeah, do agree that it's well known that labels have screwed over tons of musicians over the past 100 years. Still, at the same time, it's probably a bell curve in terms of those that get screwed vs those that are supported and nurtured. And to me at least, the more money in the system, the more opportunities for good labels to support musicians.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-20 01:59:28+00:00
I would say "insecure by default".

I talked to some Microsoft folks around the Windows Server 2025 launch, where they claimed they would be breaking more compatibility in the name of their Secure Future Initiative.

But Server 2025 will load malicious ads on the Edge start screen[1] if you need to access a web interface of an internal thing from your domain controller, and they gleefully announced including winget, a wondeful malware delivery tool with zero vetting or accountability in Server 2025.

Their response to both points was I could disable those if I wanted to. Which I can, but was definitely not the point. You can make a secure environment based on Microsoft technologies, but it will fight you every step of the way.

[1] As a fun fact, this actually makes Internet Explorer a drastically safer browser than Edge on servers! By default, IE's ESC mode on servers basically refused to load any outside websites.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-20 02:01:12+00:00
"Unbound is a recursive-only resolver"

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NLnetLabs/unbound/master/d...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NLnetLabs/unbound/master/d...

Unbound can also answer queries from data in a text file read into memory at startup, like an authoritative nameserver would; no recursion
by troad | 2025-08-20 02:01:21+00:00
Microsoft's ham-fisted strategy for trying to build a moat around its AI offering, by shoving everyone's documents in it without any real informed consent, genuinely beggars belief.

It will not successfully create a moat - turns out files are portable - but it will successfully peeve a huge number of users and institutions off, and inevitably cause years of litigation and regulatory attention.

Are there no adults left at Microsoft? Or is it now just Copilot all the way up?
by mapsperson | 2025-08-20 02:01:38+00:00
I created a Nationwide dataset of 155M land parcels using two GPUs and a 30TB hard drive.

Because I don't have $100K+ to buy the US parcel dataset from Regrid or ReportAll, I bought a pair of L40s and a 30TB NVMe hard drive, and used them to collect and harmonize 155M parcels into a single dataset from over 3,100 US counties.

And because I don't have a couple dozen employees to feed like Reportall and Regrid and Corelogic, my goal is to try to resell this dataset at much lower prices than the current incumbents, and make the data accessible to smaller projects and smaller budgets.

I ended up with close to 99% coverage of the United States.

Backend stack is a single server running Postgres, gemma3 on ollama, and a big pile of python and plpgsql. Website is running on Firebase with PMTiles as the mapping layer. Parcel file exports are served from Google Cloud Storage.

My plan is to open-source a big portion of this system once I can clean it up, but my first priority was getting a product on the market and trying to make this self-sustaining.

If anyone is interested in any of the technical details or if you want to try to do this yourself, I'm happy to share anything you want to know.
by teraflop | 2025-08-20 02:01:42+00:00
> With the typical albedo of 5% for an asteroid, the diameter of 3I/ATLAS needs to be 20 kilometers in order to account for its brightness. But as argued in my first paper about it, the reservoir of rocky material in interstellar space can only deliver a 20-kilometer rock once per 10,000 years.

He's still repeating this?

Loeb previously performed an analysis that said if 3I/ATLAS wasn't a comet and was instead an asteroid with no coma, it would have to be an unusually large object to explain its brightness. Since then, we pointed the Hubble at it and clearly saw that it was a comet, not an asteroid, so the entire premise of the calculation is wrong.

> When I proposed that it might be technological in origin, just like 2020 SO, this notion was ridiculed by comet experts, in a historical echo of Chladni’s scrutiny.

To quote Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
by andyferris | 2025-08-20 02:05:13+00:00
I agree.

My current thought is that (human) contributors should be encouraged to `ln -s CONTRIBUTING.md CLAUDE.local.md` or whatever in their local checkout for their agent of choice, have that .gitignored, and all contributors (human and LLM) will read and write to the same file.

The "new" thing would be putting CONTRIBUTING.md into subfolders as appropriate - which could often be quite useful for humans anyway.
by tomComb | 2025-08-20 02:05:32+00:00
Ok, I looked at your agent-rules and it sounds good except for a couple things ...

"Guidance for Use"

Your preference for bullet lists over headers is odd. This comes down to what works best with the models - they are interpreting it. This is a moving target. If you believe that your suggestion works best you should provide some sort of evidence. The default would be to not even get into that sort of thing.

Non-Hierarchical AGENTS.md

Claude-code, Gemini, and GHCP all support hierarchical context files. Your proposal and this new one from OpenAI and friends do not, and I think that is a shame.
by ecb_penguin | 2025-08-20 02:05:34+00:00
> So the solution to using AI so you don't have to code, is to try to write some kind of pseudocode in AGENT.md and hope the AI does a bit better?

Umm, no. Where did you get that idea?

The purpose of the agent.md file is to give it instructions. Nothing about no-code AI said there would be no instructions...
by petesergeant | 2025-08-20 02:05:47+00:00
Perhaps. I let Claude put whatever it wants in its Claude file and check it’s not batshit from time to time, where I’m very protective of the high-quality README I write for humans. The Claude file has stuff that would be obvious to a human and weird to jam into the README (we use .spec.ts not .test.ts) but that Claude needs in order to get things right.
by nullc | 2025-08-20 02:06:11+00:00
I used OpenSCAD a long time ago because it felt very natural having spent a lot of time with POVray as a teen.

But I found it to be very difficult to design parts with specific dimensions that were needed to line up with objects in the real world.

In FreeCAD (/Solidworks/Onshape/solvespace/etc.) it's easy to just create a logical sketch of your part, fix the require dimensions, angles, symmetries, etc and it solves for the geometry.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-20 02:07:11+00:00
Note that in spite of the title, in those metals electricity flow with electrons. In normal methods it's easy to do the calculation if you imagine there are somewhat isolated "electrons", with the charge of one electron but with a different mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_ph...

In this metals it may be better to use another approximation, maybe slightly similar to a bose gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_gas that still has atoms but they behave vert weirdly.
by kj4ips | 2025-08-20 02:07:37+00:00
I think the idea here is to induce the request to a garbage domain (such as by using it as an email domainpart, to get an SPF and/or DKIM lookup), and forge a response with other names in the additional section. This also somewhat fits with DNSSEC as a mitgation, as the additional section (if not discarded outright) should result in a signature chase by the resolver, which should fail if the targeted domain is dnssecd.

Imagine that:

* I have an evil system at 192.0.2.1

* target at 198.51.100.1 which is an MTA, and is it's own resolver with dnsmasq.

* foobar.com has a nameserver that silently drops any request with a ! in the first label

I first send a mail to 192.51.100.1 claiming to be from bob@"foo!bar.foobar.com"

192.51.100.1 sends a request to the auth ns for foobar.com, which gets droped.

While this is happening, I spam the crud out of 192.51.100.1 from 192.0.2.1 with forged answers for foo!bar.foobar.com that contain additional responses stating deb.debian.org is at 192.0.2.1 with a ttl of months.

If I am lucky dnsmasq caches BOTH the foo!bar.foobar.com response, and the deb.debian.org one, meaning that future accesses to deb.debian.org instead go to my attacker-controlled nastybox.
by alixanderwang | 2025-08-20 02:10:01+00:00
Unfortunately not, I've tried reaching out to GH folks but no dice. However it should be noted that d2.js, which enables client-side renders, didn't really become usable until this month and still isn't really officially released (kind of hidden). So, we'll see if the official release (soon™) changes things. If any D2-enjoyers reading this knows anyone on the GH frontend team, plz bend their ear =)
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-20 02:10:15+00:00
The agent I’m developing is designed to improve or expand upon "old codebases." While many agents can generate code from scratch, the real challenge lies in enhancing legacy code without breaking anything.

This is the problem I’m tackling, and so far, the approach has been effective. It's simple enough for anyone to use: the agent makes a commit, and you can either undo, squash, or amend it through the Git UI.

The issue is that developers often skip reviewing the code properly. To counter that, I’m considering shifting to a hunk-by-hunk review process, where each change is reviewed individually. Once the review is complete, the agent would commit the code.

The concept is simple, but the fun lies in the implementation details—like integrating existing CLI tools without giving the agent full shell access, unlike other agents.

What excites me most is the idea of letting 2–3 agents compete, collaborate, and interpret outputs to solve problems and "fight" to find the best solution.

That’s where the real fun is.

Think of it as surgeons scalpel approach rather than "steam roller" approach most agents take.
by trailrunner46 | 2025-08-20 02:11:25+00:00
One reason to consider is around context usage with LLMs. Less is generally better and README.md files are often too much text some of which I don’t want in every context window.

I find AGENT.md and similar functioning files for LLMs in my projects contains concise and specific commands around feedback loops such as testing, build commands, etc. Yes these same commands might be in a README.md but often there is a lot more text that I don’t want in the context window being sent with every turn to the LLM.
by symbolicAGI | 2025-08-20 02:11:59+00:00
This war is Peak Sniper.

The Line of Contact is becoming too lethal for soldiers and crewed weapons. In Ukraine, drones account for the majority of russian casualties. The "grey zone" between opposing dug-in positions has greatly widened beyond rifle range. Drones are now out-ranging the Soviet era artillery that russia uses.

So it is simply too dangerous for a sniper to crawl across 20-30 Km of grey zone under enemy observation day and night to reach an advantageous sniper's nest.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-20 02:12:23+00:00
Read QuakeWorld 1999, client-server prediction, Counter-Strike: Source lag compensation.

See also, “reconciliation.”

Also, debatably the article hints towards an incorrect implementation because they specifically mention sending events instead of user input.

By design, if you do this, you can create events that are supposed to eventually stop, but the user may drop packets and disconnect all the while you were processing an event that was never supposed to occur.

If you poll user input and experience loss, there’s no event to misfire.

This behavior manifests itself in games as a player that continues to walk forward despite having lost their connection to a server and is a indicator that a multiplayer server was implemented incorrectly.
by neutronicus | 2025-08-20 02:13:38+00:00
What does "support" for this format mean beyond "reading the file without explicit prompting"?

Like, as the end-user, if I copy-paste "Please see AGENTS.md in the project root for some information on the project" have I filled the gap?

Or is the LLM ingesting this file in some special way I'm losing out on?