MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by don-bright | 2025-08-25 15:06:54+00:00
I'm missing the part where they solve for the collection problem. The article mentions the boy who gathered dangerous amounts of Americium from smoke detectors but doesn't provide any kind of mechanism to counteract that risk. It seems like any mass production of nuclear battery material risks an interested human or organizational collector amassing significant quantities of that material and that risk doesn't seem to have gone down.
by dimitri-vs | 2025-08-25 15:07:01+00:00
As someone that has used coding agents extensively for the past year, the problem is they "move fast and break things" a little too well. Turns out that the act of writing code makes you think through your requirements carefully and understand the full scope of the problem you are trying to solve.

It's created the problem that it's a little too easy to ask the AI agent to refactor your backend and migrate to a different platform at any time and have it wipe out months of hard learned business logic that it deems "obsolete".
by mmargenot | 2025-08-25 15:07:09+00:00
I think this is a neat approach. When I interact with AI tooling, such as Claude Code, my general philosophy has been to maintain a strong opinion about what it is that I actually want to build. I usually have some system design done or some picture that I've drawn to make sure that I can keep it straight throughout a given session. Without that core conception of what needs to be done, it's a little too easy for an LLM to run off the rails.

This dialogue-based path is a cool way to interact with an existing codebase (and I'm a big proponent of writing and rewriting). At the very least you're made to actually think through the implications of what needs to be done and how it will play with the rest of the application.

How well do you find that this approach handles the long tail of little things that need to be corrected before finally merging? Does this approach solve the fiddly stylistic errors that need to be made on its own, or is it more that the UI / PR review approach that you've taken is more ergonomic for solving them?
by mothballed | 2025-08-25 15:07:26+00:00
IIRC the "I eat ass" bumper sticker guy lost his attempt to sue the police because judges ruled obscenity is an exception to the 1A.[]

Other examples include "appeal to prurient interest" even when the "interesting" activity is not illegal.

[] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.36...
by zeta0134 | 2025-08-25 15:07:54+00:00
One of the most common issues we helped customers solve when I worked in web hosting was low disk alerts, usually because the log rotation had failed. Often the content of those logs was exactly this sort of nonsense and had spiked recently due to a scraper. The sheer size of the logs can absolutely be a problem on a smaller server, which is more and more common now that the inexpensive server is often a VM or a container.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-08-25 15:08:18+00:00
[dupe] of every discussion from last week or so:

Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548

Tech, chip stock sell-off continues as AI bubble fears mount

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187

Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715

AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944

95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104
by davepeck | 2025-08-25 15:08:30+00:00
There are many reasons that "I used AI to do it all and now I've got $REAL ARR" strikes me as unlikely. To name just two:

1. I code with LLMs (Copilot, Claude Code). Like anyone who has done so, I know a lot about where these tools are useful and where they're hopeless. They can't do it all, claims to the contrary aside.

2. I've built a couple businesses (and failed tragicomically at building a couple more). Like anyone who has done so, I know the hard parts of startups are rarely the tech itself: sales, marketing, building a team with values, actually listening to customers and responding to their needs, making forward progress in a sea of uncertainty, getting anyone to care at all... sheesh, those are hard! Last I checked, AI doesn't singlehandedly solve any of that.

Which is not to say LLMs are useless; on the contrary, used well and aimed at the right tasks, my experience is that they can be real accelerants. They've undoubtedly changed the way I approach my own new projects. But "LLMs did it all and I've got a profitable startup"... I mean, if that's true, link to it because we should all be celebrating the achievement.
by BurningFrog | 2025-08-25 15:08:35+00:00
Every group of people has violent criminals, but it makes a big difference if it's 5% or 50%.

It also matters if raping unguarded women is considered a crime or a fun hobby in your culture.

Law enforcement is important, but it can never catch close to all criminals, especially if it's politically sensitive to punish disproportionate numbers of ethnic groups.

The most famous example is the the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain, where authorities has mostly ignored the industrial scale raping for decades: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o
by bell-cot | 2025-08-25 15:10:00+00:00
Okay...but the article has far too little emphasis on wind's problem with polarizing cultural branding. If you're just trying to sell wind at small scales, in deep-blue areas - that can be quite useful. But at real scales, nationally, when 1/2 the population votes for Team Red? D'oh, no. Wind advocates should be talking "like drilling oil wells, but with thousands of tons of steel, going straight up into the air, and a 200-ton generator on every one, pumping out umpteen gigawatts of power, and proving that America can still build man-sized stuff, and ...".
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-08-25 15:10:29+00:00
> Supposing I accept that's a likely outcome, it's exactly the same thing that would have happened if a typical human shopper searched for Vitamin D and picked the top result, right?

Yeah sure, but humans (normally) only fall for a particular scam once. Because LLMs have no memory, they can scale these scams much more effectively!
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-25 15:10:41+00:00
The MIT report that found 90% of workers are regularly using LLMs at work, many of them even multiple times daily[1], somehow has become the spark of the recent explosion of "AI has failed" articles. Which is ironic, because it shows that the people we trust to write with integrity are either only reading the headlines or purposely misleading with their articles.

If that's the case, LLMs cannot replace these primary source summarizing clowns fast enough.

[1]https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf
by evaXhill | 2025-08-25 15:10:43+00:00
Really great introductory article on color space in general, I really appreciate that they touched on perceptual uniformity and how we all perceive colors differently. It’s great to find out that applications like Oklab came out recently to fix this by manipulating the distances between colors to try compensate for human perception while also being more straightforward to calculate so that it can be used in real-time applications. Also the UI of this blog post was so aesthetically pleasing, that it was worth burning my retinas with the light mode
by duxup | 2025-08-25 15:11:06+00:00
>Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses—built in collaboration with eyewear juggernaut EssilorLuxottica—have become a surprise hit. Since launching the second generation in October 2023, they’ve sold more than 2 million units.

This is news to me.

Does anyone know someone with them / how they're using them?
by HankStallone | 2025-08-25 15:11:23+00:00
I don't have a problem with holding companies responsible for the products they sell. But your analogy breaks down because the shop owner chooses the products to sell in his shop. The porn mags aren't in the shop unless he specifically arranges to sell them, so it's easy to say he's responsible for keeping kids away from them.

An ISP doesn't do that. A better match for an ISP would be the trucking company that hauls magazines (porn and otherwise) from publishers to shops, or the company that maintains the shop's cash register.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-25 15:11:26+00:00
> in 2025 how is it so hard to make a user interface that doesn't lag like a bastard on every scroll/click/...

Because everything is done in fucking React or Node or Blazor or whatever the newest flavor of this wRiTe oNcE rUn aNyWheRe bollocks is, because it always, always, always the exact same fucking thing: abstracting UI elements to fucking goddamn JavaScript and running it in a browser.

And heaven knows McDonald's can't possibly pay for proper software development, they only made like 14 billion last year. They're barely scraping by.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-25 15:11:50+00:00
What an excellent article. I can't think of anything (except the very esoteric) that it did not cover.

If I had to criticize, I wish it had talked a bit more about printer color profiles (although in this paperless, web-world we live in, perhaps printing is in fact esoteric).

Unlike displays, a printer can't be simply defined with three primaries and a white point. Printer profiles can be quite large as they rely on someone having printed out a copious number of swatches on a given paper type and then measured (with some kind of colorimeter) device independent color values for each swatch. Those are used to build a large table for mapping from device independent color spaces to the printer's gamut.

Those large tables make the profile so large. And then of course interpolation is still required when mapping from a device independent color space to the printer profile. (Now imagine too that you need a different profile for each type of paper you might want to print to since each can represent color differently — plain paper unable to get the levels of saturation that a coated paper can.)

What was shocking to me was just how small the gamut of a printer typically is when seen alongside that of a decent display.

Consider that, in print, you'll never see an image as vivid as you can display on a nice, modern display. (And then consider that there are colors in nature so vivid that even a modern display cannot represent them. Just look at how much color is outside the triangle on the CIE "shark fin" color representation.)

Also not touched on (did I miss it?), all the math presented to map from one color space to another, also allows for "soft proofing" — where in fact you might match to a printer ICC profile but then take the result and match again to the user's display to give you a "preview" of what will be lost when going to said printer.
by ecshafer | 2025-08-25 15:11:56+00:00
When I worked at McDonalds, a major thing I learned is that when 95% of people say they got an order wrong, the customer ordered it wrong without realizing it. Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-25 15:12:01+00:00
You touch on a very important part of the debate. DEFINE AGI.

>speaking of which: define AGI? It's a bold claim to say any company has it internally, and frankly given my definition of AGI if anyone has it they will definetly not be selling grok imagine for 99.5$ (autumn sale!), i can assure you that.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the business world. $3/hr rental prices on not-artificial general intelligence is available now. Many call centers worldwide are operated on this notion.

Just because you have general intelligence, doesnt mean you can do much of anything with it. It's general, it's not an expert in their field. It's not going to be great at the task you give it.

There's no 32B models that are close to AGI. but high reasoning giant models from the leading orgs absolutely can meet that general intelligence level.

>i can assure you that. AGI basically means: i don't care about sales, can i or should i go to Mars now since i can do it without a doubt?

No, that's super intelligence.

>ou'd be tormented by these kinds of questions even without ASI. I define ASI as something far more dangerous than a very powerful tool, an agent we cannot understand which will affect greatly the life of anyone/mostly anyone be it positively or negatively.

General intelligence helps you maintain your calendar; your minimum wage general labourer level intelligence is not at all difficult to achieve with LLMs.
by diggan | 2025-08-25 15:12:56+00:00
> It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?

If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)
by fwip | 2025-08-25 15:13:02+00:00
You can read about the BB5 winner here - it looks like the final tape state is 4,098 ones in a row:

https://bbchallenge.org/1RB1LC_1RC1RB_1RD0LE_1LA1LD_1RZ0LA?w...

https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/5-state_busy_beaver_winner
by alnwlsn | 2025-08-25 15:13:07+00:00
I run into this problem so often that I've been experimenting with rendering all the PDF pages to png images first, and a program that loads all of them on screen at once.

The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.

The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.

But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?
by thyristan | 2025-08-25 15:13:19+00:00
> How about the tons of products we don't even see? Those that tried to do it right on the first try, then never delivered anything because there were too slow and expensive.

I would welcome seeing a lesser amount of new crappy products.

That dynamic leads to a spiral of ever crappier software: You need to be first, and quicker than your competitors. If you are first, you do have a huge advantage, because there are no other products and there is no alternative to your crapware. Coming out with a superior product second or third sometimes works, but very often doesn't, you'll be an also-ran with 0.5% market share, if you survive at all. So everyone always tries to be as crappy and as quick as possible, quality be damned. You can always fix it later, or so they say.

But this view excludes the users and the general public: Crapware is usually full of security problems, data leaks, harmful bugs that endanger peoples' data, safety, security and livelihood. Even if the product is actually useful, at first, in the long term the harm might outweigh the good. And overall, by the aforementioned spiral, every product that wins this way damages all other software products by being a bad example.

Therefore I think that software quality needs some standards that programmers should uphold, that legislators should regulate and that auditors should thoroughly check. Of course that isn't a simple proposition...
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-08-25 15:13:26+00:00
Related:

Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45000894

Comet AI browser can get prompt injected from any site, drain your bank account

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45004846
by rurp | 2025-08-25 15:13:59+00:00
> There has been dozens of examples of tech companies losing money for years just to become highly profitable after.

Sure, but there have been thousands of tech companies that lost money year over year and went bust. Odds are that any given AI company will end up losing a lot of money. Maybe the asymmetric potential payoff is worth the risk in certain cases, but it's not crazy to be skeptical about Anthropic or any other hot company.
by diggan | 2025-08-25 15:14:17+00:00
> Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.

Isn't it up to the person who is receiving the order to ask clarifying questions then? Since they know it's potentially unclear/ambiguous, why not try to resolve the ambiguity before making the order?
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-25 15:14:21+00:00
Say you have a BPF-XDP program which processes the packet to figure out what client the packet is coming from and selectively drops those packets. Is that really going to be faster than just forwarding the packet from the edge router to the next hop? I find it hard to believe that running such a program would actually alleviate full queues when all the edge router is doing is just forwarding to the next hop?
by jhbadger | 2025-08-25 15:15:34+00:00
While I agree this seems overly bitter, the idea of such "pseudo-nostalgia" both fascinates and puzzles me. I get normal nostalgia for things from one's own youth, but not for things you never experienced. Not that this is limited to Zoomers being into (an idea) of Internet culture they never new - people too young to have experienced either the 1950s or 1960s often have wildly romantic idealized concepts of these decades for example.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-25 15:15:51+00:00
I use Space/Shift+Space and PageUp/PageDown and End¹ for vertical scrolling all the time. It’s nowhere near a disaster. I also disable JS by default, which… well, actually that might help sometimes. And hinder other times.

Rarely, I find a page that doesn’t use the document scroll area, but makes its own which is not focused, and so you have to focus that (by Tab as many times as necessary, or by clicking) before you can scroll by keyboard. But that’s rare.

Long ago, Firefox started compensating for sticky headers, reducing the amount it would scroll the page by, and it mostly works well, though it’s not flawless. I don’t think I’ve observed the same feature in other browsers. One amusing situation that can arise is when the header disappears when you go down and reappears when you go up, so that repeating PageUp and PageDown yields net movement in one direction.

—⁂—

¹ End, but not Home, which is Fn+Left on my laptop, but the Left key hasn’t worked for over a year now. I’ve contemplated replacing the battery and keyboard, but the laptop’s falling apart in enough other ways it doesn’t quite feel worth the investment…
by hoistbypetard | 2025-08-25 15:15:53+00:00
Because it a GUI that uses Mac-specific UI libraries that aren't available on Linux and Windows?

While the database stuff works on Linux and Windows, building UIs for the 3 platforms is very different, unless you use some cross platform wrapper layer. Which isn't the purpose of this one. You might want sqlitebrowser[1] if you're looking for something like that.

[1]:https://sqlitebrowser.org
by jabl | 2025-08-25 15:16:38+00:00
Sure, the details would certainly have been different, but my argument is that the end result would not have been that different from what we saw playing out.

My quick 5 cents for what might have happened in the interim:

- Without a separate high-end offering in the form of the Itanium, Intel is quicker to adopt x86-64, and produce high-end server chips with extra RAS etc. features.

- POWER and SPARC, being the last holdouts in the RISC market in our actual timeline and outliving Itanium, would likely not have been affected much wrt. Itanium existing or not.

- SGI with MIPS would likely have been the first one to fold. Would SGI have pivoted to x86-64 & Linux sooner than they historically did, or would the company have gone bankrupt first?

- HP/Compaq with PA-RISC and Alpha is perhaps the most interesting question. HP did a lot of early VLIW/EPIC research with an eye towards developing a successor to PA-RISC. Would they have thrown that R&D away and selected to focus on either PA-RISC or Alpha after failing to secure Intel as a partner in the Itanium? Or would they have tried to develop something Itanium-like without Intel?

Another interesting what-if, if Itanium didn't exist, would instead 3rd-party manufacturing of high end chips (similar to TSMC today) have been developed sooner than historical? Keeping in mind that a large reason for the Itanium was accessing the semi process R&D and chip manufacturing prowess of Intel, as the thinking at the time was that tight (vertical!) integration of the chip design and manufacturing was a requirement for the highest end CPU's. And it was the spiraling costs and volume required of chip manufacturing that was the boat anchor around the necks of the RISC vendors moreso than the chip design itself.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-25 15:16:50+00:00
Read on then — the author suggests a 4th camp that I believe you (and I as a matter of fact) can agree with.

"I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think…"

I suppose I disagree with "as good as it's going to get" … but for the time being (this decade?) this might be correct.
by RockyMcNuts | 2025-08-25 15:16:58+00:00
ok, that makes sense.

not indicated, and the general idea of dataviz is to communicate clearly. when you have a number, what it represents should be noted, and the units. if I see a number in that context, I assume it's calling out the value displayed.

the x axis is also a bit off, would ideally plot the date of the release and use a proper time axis.

a title is also good to have, maybe a data table.

sorry to be cranky but those who are downvoting , try to be clear, learn some standards, or stay away from publishing charts. you can even ask AI to clean up your code to conform to a standard. Soft skills are important for an engineer. You need to explain the work in clear, persuasive language and dataviz. or you can be, I'm a super-smart engineer, you figure out what I'm trying to say, I don't need to worry about making your eyes bleed. crikey.

https://www.datavizstyleguide.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Data-Visualizations-Scholars-R...

https://guides.library.jhu.edu/datavisualization/scientific

https://github.com/rougier/scientific-visualization-book
by reedlaw | 2025-08-25 15:17:39+00:00
Ironic to see this juxtaposed with another front-page story, "We put agentic AI browsers to the test – They clicked, they paid, they failed". The closing thoughts in the linked article ("feeling the AGI" and "very beginning of the exponential takeoff curve") leave me feeling skeptical considering this project prompted agents to port existing code into another language. Impressive, but it doesn't lead me to believe a singularity event is imminent.