MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jlokier | 2025-08-12 17:06:16+00:00
It's the Three network in the UK, not an MVNO, and I'm paying for the "unlimited data" plan. They don't offer a higher tier as far as I know.

I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.

But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting.

When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.

I tried three different 4G/5G routers, four different accounts, and two phones. All showed the same behaviours at the same times of day. At first folks in the Three store said I need newer 5G capable equipment, then it was a new SIM, but I tried all their options. In the end I returned everything to them, cancelled contracts, and they said it was most likely congestion, which fits the observations.

I'm amazed they haven't fixed it, as it must have been affecting thousands of customers for months, in a way that's surely obvious to any monitoring equipment.

With regard to the earlier poster's point about latency, when it worked perfectly my latency (both at home and in the office) was always at least 35ms or so, spiking randomly on a timescale of seconds up to about 400ms. Good for many things, but not the kinds of low-latency gaming, interactive streaming or other services some people take for granted. SSH felt annoyingly slow, but usable.
by sofixa | 2025-08-12 17:06:22+00:00
> Especially on Android - which is the most used OS in the world.

In the EU, they're forced to ask you which browser and which search engine you want.

> It seems strange to ban Google from offering a Search Engine, when all the other big tech companies can get into any field just fine, but the legal system is primarily a weapon for corruption these days, so who knows.

Letting one instance of blatant anti competitive and anti consumer behaviour fly because others are allowed isn't the way to go. Google are a bit monopolistic abuser, fix that. Apple are too? Good, that's the next job.

> I mean, sure, if you want to start limiting what big companies do, and there's some fairness in how it's applied, fine.

> But that's not what will happen.

That's how the EU is approaching with the DMA and DSA.
by SkyBelow | 2025-08-12 17:07:05+00:00
Information tradeoff. Even if you could keep the entire code base in memory, if something else has to be left out of memory, then you have to consider the value of an abstraction verses whatever other information is lost. Abstractions also apply to the business domain and works the same.

You also have time tradeoffs. Like time to access memory and time to process that memory to achieve some outcome.

There is also quality. If you can keep the entire code base in memory but with some chance of confusion, while abstractions will allow less chance of confusion, then the tradeoff of abstractions might be worth it still.

Even if we assume a memory that has no limits, can access and process all information at constant speed, and no quality loss, there is still communication limitations to worry about. Energy consumption is yet another.
by elevatortrim | 2025-08-12 17:07:50+00:00
I think there are two broad cases where ai coding is beneficial:

1. You are a good coder but working on a new (to you) or building a new project, or working with a technology you are not familiar with. This is where AI is hugely beneficial. It does not only accelerate you, it lets you do things you could not otherwise.

2. You have spent a lot of time on engineering your context and learning what AI is good at, and using it very strategically where you know it will save time and not bother otherwise.

If you are a really good coder, really familiar with the project, and mostly changing its bits and pieces rather than building new functionality, AI won’t accelerate you much. Especially if you did not invest the time to make it work well.
by j_da | 2025-08-12 17:07:57+00:00
All great points. A limitation with human feedback is that once you start asking for more than binary preferences (e.g. multiple rankings or written feedback), the quality of the feedback does decrease. For instance, many times humans can give a quick answer on preference, but when asked "why" they prefer one thing over the other, they might not be able to full explain it in language. This in general is very much an open area of research on collecting and incorporating the most optimal types of feedback.

I definitely agree with your second point. One idea we're experimenting with is adding a human baseline, in which the models are benchmarked against human generated designs as well.
by echelon | 2025-08-12 17:08:07+00:00
> Why

This is why VCs won't fund consumer. It's frothy, fickle, and the incumbents have saturated the network effects market. And that totally sucks.

I'm a believer in strong antitrust and that a fire every decade or so clears the forest of dead growth and renews the ecosystem. Evolution and reinvention staves off ossification. Instead of working on hyper-optimization of things like better ad targeting in search of more growth, we're working on more important problems and lifting bigger weights.

More startups means better compensation for ICs and innovators. Rewards for capital risk rather than extremely large wealth funds and pension plans.

Look at your Fords and Boeings. Totally stagnant. Newer international competition is refreshing and energized.

Or Google of just two years ago, before they had their "come to Jesus" moment. Where they witnessed visions of the loss of their single largest cash flow flashing before their eyes.
by jmkni | 2025-08-12 17:08:31+00:00
There's nothing more frustrating than when you type the word you want to type, it changes it to a different word, you delete it and type the word you wanted to type again and then rinse/repeat 3 to 4 times before you have the word you actually wanted.

And if you're not paying attention, your message ends up looking like you're having a stroke.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-12 17:08:37+00:00
Yeah, one of the main reasons I switched my tooling over to default to Anthropic models despite starting out with OpenAI for months prior, was because I often switch between different model sizes depending on the complexity of the prompt vs the speed I want the result.

I would frequently spend time going back to OpenAIs site to remind me of their different models. There’s no consistency there whatsoever. But with Anthropic is was easy.

If I have to spend 5 minutes picking a model then I might as well do the task myself. So Claude became a natural solution for me.
by raattgift | 2025-08-12 17:08:43+00:00
The relevant quantities are the curvature scalars near the horizon, and for a sizable black hole they are small there. As an example, consider the Kretschmann scalar (KS). The KS is the sum of the squares of all components of a tensor. In Schwarzschild spacetime KS looks like R_{\mu\nu\lambda\rho}R^{\mu\nu\lambda\rho} = (48 G^2M^2)/(c^4r^6), where R is the Riemann curvature tensor, and we can safely set G=1 and c=1 so (48 M^2)/r^6. In this setting, KS is proportional to the spacetime curvature. At r = 2M, the Schwarzschild radius, the number becomes very small as we increase M, the black hole's mass. However, for any M at r = 0, the Kretschmann scalar diverges.

For a large-M black hole, there is "no drama" for a free-faller crossing the event horizon, as the KS gradient is tiny.

Since the crosser is in "no drama" free-fall he can raise his hands, toss a ball between his hands, throw things upwards above his head, and so forth. The important thing though is that all these motions are most easily thought of in his own local self-centred freely-falling frame of reference, and not against the global Schwarzschild coordinates. His local frame of coordinates is inexorably falling inwards. Objects moving outwards in his local frame are still moving inwards against the Schwarzschild coordinates.

You might compare with a non-freely-falling frame of reference. Your local East-North-Up (ENU) coordinates let you throw things upwards or eastwards, but in less-local coordinates your ENU frame of reference is on a spinning planet in free-fall through the solar system (and the solar system is in free-fall through the Milky Way, and the galaxy is in free-fall through the local group). That your local ENU is not a freely-falling set of coordinates does not change that the planet is in free-fall, and your local patch of coordinates is along for the ride.

A comparison here would be a long-running rocket engine imparting a ~ 10 m s^-1 acceleration to a plate you stand on. In space far from the black hole, you and the rocket engine would tend to move away from the black hole, but you'd be able to do things like juggle or jump up and down, and it'd feel like doing it on Earth's surface. This is a manifestation of the equivalence principle. Inside the horizon the rocket would still be accelerating the plate and you at ~ 10 m s^-1, but you, the plate, and the rocket would all be falling inwards.
by henriquegodoy | 2025-08-12 17:08:59+00:00
This is actually really needed, current ai design tools are so predictable and formulaic, like every output feels like the same purple gradients with rounded corners and that one specific sans serif font that every model seems obsessed with, it's gotten to the point where you can spot ai-generated designs from a mile away because they all have this weird sterile aesthetic that screams "made by a model"
by Zenst | 2025-08-12 17:09:08+00:00
I gave it a puzzle recently to test it out "An Ex-cop lost has home, his car and his girlfriend. What did he loose first?"

The AI thought and concluded that he had lost his job first, until I pointed out that it was not the first thing he had lost - which was his umbilical cord, a far better answer, in the AI's opinion.

Which raises many aspects - Can an AI disagree with you? Will AI develop solid out-of-the-box thinking as well as in-the-box thinking, will it grasp applying both for a thru the box thinking and solutions...

After all, we have yet to perfect the teaching of children, so the training of AI, has a long way to go and will get down to quality over quantity, just deciding what is quality and what is not. After all - Garbage in, Garbage out, is probably more important today than it ever was in the history of technology.
by lossolo | 2025-08-12 17:09:09+00:00
> What is true is that the performance of LLMs at OOD tasks changes with scale.

If scaling alone guaranteed strong OOD generalization, we’d expect the largest models to consistently top OOD benchmarks but this isn’t the case. In practice, scaling primarily increases a model’s capacity to represent and exploit statistical relationships present in the training distribution. This reliably boosts in-distribution performance but yields limited gains on tasks that are distributionally distant from the training data, especially if the underlying dataset is unchanged. That’s why trillion parameter models trained on the same corpus may excel at tasks similar to those seen in training, but won’t necessarily show proportional improvements on genuinely novel OOD tasks.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-12 17:09:11+00:00
CSV literally stands for Comma Separated Values, so I don't know what you expect. For the most part, you should have (double)quotes around your values that contain commas and double the double-quotes for literal instances.

UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.

Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.
by rvz | 2025-08-12 17:09:17+00:00
What I call backwards is Mozilla paying their executives multi-millions of dollars for failure and the decline of Firefox.

Maybe had they ran the company competently, they could to afford to pay their engineers and offer larger bounties instead.

> Is monetary expenditure on vulnerability payouts really the primary determinent of who's taking security more seriously.

Many such researchers would rather sell their 0day to the black market if the effort + price offered is too low and not worth it. It is up to the vendor (Mozilla) to set a fair price to prevent that exploit from reaching the black market for a much higher price.

So given all the above, Mozilla is not serious.
by sdesol | 2025-08-12 17:09:25+00:00
Yes there is a context window limit, but I've found for most frontier models, you can generate very effective code if the context window is under 75,000 tokens provided the context is consistent. You have to think of everything from a probability point of view and the more logical the context, the greater the chances of better code.

For example, if the frontend doesn't need to know the backend code (other than the interface) not including the backend code to solve a frontend one to solve a specific problem can reduce context size and improve the chances of expected output. You just need to ensure you include the necessary interface documenation.

As for the full fledged app, I think you raised a good point and I should add a 'No lock in' section for why to use it. The app has a message tool that lets you pick and choose what messages to copy. Once you've copied the context (including any conversation messages that can help the LLM), you can use the context where ever you want.

My strategy with the app is to be the first place you goto to start a conversation before you even generate code, so my focus is helping you construct contexts (the smaller the better) to feed into LLMs.
by wetw0rk | 2025-08-12 17:09:26+00:00
GOOOOD MORRRRNING HACKER NEWS!!! Incase some of you missed it this year at Black Hat Arsenal I presented Sickle a payload development framework that I designed for both Red Team Operators and Exploit Developers. However, it has modules that may assist in the reverse engineering process so don't be discouraged to check it out if you're looking at assembly in any capacity.

In this talk I present a live demo of reflectively loading Ransomware (Windows) and a Rootkit (Linux). This means our malware is installed without touching disk!

I made sure to make this talk as verbose as possible, so it was created for everyone to enjoy no matter their technical capabilities.

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT ENGAGE NOR SUPPORT ILLEGAL ACTIVITY OF ANYKIND. ALWAYS OPERATE WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE LAW
by agloe_dreams | 2025-08-12 17:10:23+00:00
I'm about to sound crazy.

Github's problem is that it isn't a SPA. It is a massive Ruby on rails project that is all server-rendered. Everything you do needs to be synchronous and almost everything requires a reload. A react or angular app with great restraint would be dramatically faster at all of this as viewing a file is just an API call - not a page reload. They are stuck with their hands tied as loading large data would cause the whole page load to be delayed - thus silly limits.

Many things should not be webapps... but an app on the web like this...probably should.
by nicce | 2025-08-12 17:10:26+00:00
> I build full stack web applications in node/.net/react, more importantly (I think) is that I work on a small startup and manage 3 applications myself.

I think this is your answer. For example, React and JavaScript are extremely popular and aged. Are you using TypeScript and want to get most of the types or are you accepting everything that LLM gives as JavaScript? How interested you are about the code whether it is using "soon to be deprecated" functions or the most optimized loop/implementation? How about the project structure?

In other cases, the more precision you need, less effective LLM is.
by ninininino | 2025-08-12 17:10:28+00:00
From what I can tell (I have a coworker I get lunch with who works in the Risk & Policy side of TNS at a tech major), it's not necessarily a "here's the top-down orders of what our new policy will be" as much as:

1) the people in this sub-industry role attend conferences and network and make friends and build professional relationships (for job referrals if there are layoffs at one tech co but hiring in the same area at different tech co)

2) at conferences, in group chats (w/ friends made at other companies in previous roles or friends from said conferences), common news events, developments in the field, and trends are discussed and ideas bounced off each other, which means even if there's no top-down order, there's sort of an averaging-effect and consensus building and battle-testing of ideas and approaches

3) there's a revolving door of people who work at one company in this area developing real-utility experience that translates well to working at another, so people move about and policy ideas cross-pollinate and spread. if you plucked someone off the street, even if it helped ideologically diversify the pool, they would truly be less effective as they ramped up and learned.

You don't actually need anything nefarious to happen, just an insular, small community with similar educational backgrounds, shared values, etc. Not a lot of Repubs from Alabama decide to attend Barnard and study _relevant_humanities_field_slash_law_ and then join tech to try to fight injustice/CSAM/bias/misinfo/election interference at the right time during ZIRP and then build the resume to then continue to land those roles.

These people are all doing what they think is right, they just aren't a super diverse group ideologically and there are social channels that tend to create more cross-brand homogeneity.

And even if you disagree with their moderation policy, there are huge, non-controversial areas you never see or think of that they are fighting everyday too (anti-terrorism, anti-suicide, connecting victims to resources, anti-CSAM, etc).

Probably the same way in physics departments, String Theorists hire other String Theorists and over time it grows and grows and grows. Or how economists all arrive at modern monetary theory.
by olddustytrail | 2025-08-12 17:10:28+00:00
I think it's key to not give it contradictory instructions, which is an easy mistake to make if you forget where you started.

As an example, I know of an instance where the LLM claimed it had tried a test on its laptop. This obviously isn't true so the user argued with it. But they'd originally told it that it was a Senior Software Engineer so playing that role, saying you tested locally is fine.

As soon as you start arguing with those minor points you break the context; now it's both a Software Engineer and an LLM. Of course you get confused responses if you do that.
by thimabi | 2025-08-12 17:10:41+00:00
Oh, well, ChatGPT is being left in the dust…

When done correctly, having one million tokens of context window is amazing for all sorts of tasks: understanding large codebases, summarizing books, finding information on many documents, etc.

Existing RAG solutions fill a void up to a point, but they lack the precision that large context windows offer.

I’m excited for this release and hope to see it soon on the UI as well.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-12 17:10:46+00:00
I'm loving and being astonished by every moment of working with these machines, but to me they're still talking lamps. I don't need them to cater to my ego, I'm not that fragile and the lamp's opinion is not going to cheer me up. I just want it to do what I ask. Which it is very good at.

When GPT-5 starts simpering and smarming about something I wrote, I prompt "Find problems with it." "Find problems with it." "Write a bad review of it in the style of NYRB." "Find problems with it." "Pay more attention to the beginning." "Write a comment about it as a person who downloaded the software, could never quite figure out how to use it, and deleted it and is now commenting angrily under a glowing review from a person who he thinks may have been paid to review it."

Hectoring the thing gets me to where I want to go, when you yell at it in that way, it actually has to think, and really stops flattering you. "Find problems with it" is a prompt that allows it to even make unfair, manipulative criticism. It's like bugspray for smarm. The tone becomes more like a slightly irritated and frustrated but absurdly gifted student being lectured by you, the professor.
by mrweasel | 2025-08-12 17:10:54+00:00
Basically anyone who would want to make an offer for Chrome should be banned for purchasing it.

It's not a profitable business to be in, and Perplexity would just do the exact same thing that might force Google to sell Chrome.

The only companies that should be allowed to buy Chrome are non-profits and companies promising to sell it for a fee (preferably not a subscription).
by ygjb | 2025-08-12 17:11:05+00:00
Canadians have Freedom of Expression, which is a stronger protection than Freedom of Speech, but the Canadian legal interpretation of that freedom allows for constraints based on hate, obscenity, and a few legal constraints that are common across most "Free Speech" jurisdictions (libel, defamation, etc).

There are cases where people have been charged, fined, and even jailed for "expression", but those are largely limited to cases where folks are promoting violence against specific groups (including hate speech, for example, teaching holocaust denialism, promoting anti-semitism or pro-racist ideologies calling for violence).

There are certainly cases where there has been government over-reach, but that is why we have courts, and in general, the courts in Canada tend towards a more broad interpretation of Freedom of Expression. Are there specific cases in Canada that you can cite where people haven't enjoyed Freedom of Expression (including freedom of speech, which is protected under the broader umbrella of Expression).
by chrisngonzales | 2025-08-12 17:11:07+00:00
Congrats on launching! Really neat idea, excited to see my kids' reactions when it arrives.

Notes - It wouldn't let me type a message until I uploaded a photo.

- The card preview did not render the Sender or Recipient values, until I went to the next page.

- UI validation (of name fields) should trigger after each key stroke. It still showed an error until I submitted.

- Would be nice to create an account and view/manage all my cards.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-12 17:11:21+00:00
Pretty clear this was faked, but continuing the previous discussion, a vehicle lock doesn't have to be as dangerous as you're thinking.

I've implemented limp modes before and the easiest way is to prevent acceleration to over a certain speed without enabling regen. If you're already at highway speeds, you'll simply coast down to the limp speed and have plenty of time to pull over.

I suspect that wouldn't fall afoul of FMVSS either, but it's never come up for me.
by tharmas | 2025-08-12 17:11:21+00:00
Thanks for the recommend. I have considered watching it. Just haven't gotten around to it.

I guess the proper term is "Social Darwinism". Trump will do whatever he can get away with. That's his only code.

Supposedly architect Andrew Tesoro did some work on one of Trump's golf courses. He invoiced Trump for $140,000. Trumps lawyers offered $50,000. They threatened to drag it out in the courts otherwise. He agreed to charge $50k. Trump didn't pay. Tesoro contacted Trump. Trump offered half that, $25,000. Tesoro got $25k. Trump's transactions are all about leverage.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestreptalks/2016/07/13/this...