MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jongjong | 2025-08-25 13:02:08+00:00
This is a brave move by Walmart. If all companies follow suit, I suspect this will affect almost every major tech company. This is not an isolated case, but the norm in the industry. I've seen this over and over; specific SaaS providers being given preferential treatment because somebody high up in the tech leadership of a major corporation is either receiving kickbacks or they've been promised a future highly paid job at the SaaS provider. That's why you see a lot of corporate folks get hired into leadership positions by smaller SaaS providers who received business from the corporation.

The corporation almost always overpays and it's the same providers getting all the money from all the corporations because they have a similar strategy for all of them.

It's been going on for a LOT longer than 2023.
Show HN: Multi-hop WireGuard chaining, speed-tested and API-controlled
by a904guy | 2025-08-25 13:02:14+00:00
Hey HN, I built VPN-Chainer to make multi-hop WireGuard setups a bit easier for the average VPN user.

It can chain multiple WireGuard endpoints together, and can run speed tests with `--fastest`, installs as a systemd service (hooks included), and lets you rotate tunnels via a lightweight API. Imagine in the movies where they say they connection is bouncing around the world. Similar but not exactly like that.

Grab it from the repo or install via the systemd-ready installer, no signup, landing pages, or cart required. Stack is shell (pre/post hooks) + Python + WireGuard.

It’s early-stage, so hook integrations and rotation policies could use polish, your feedback would help steer improvements.

Thanks, and take it easy!
by gustafla | 2025-08-25 13:03:16+00:00
It can discard with the proper SD commands (use `--discard`), if your SD adapter supports that. So not with USB card readers, but with many built-in SD card slots. The main reason to use this formatter instead of the OS built-in formatter (or mkfs) is that this creates the correct type of file system (FAT or exFAT depending on card size) and uses correct allocation sizes etc. for devices expecting a factory-formatted card.
by padolsey | 2025-08-25 13:04:29+00:00
This is why I've found the safety research conducted by the likes of Anthropic and OAI to be so confusing. Like when they said that models are likely to blackmail developers in order to avoid being 'turned off' [1]. What an utterly and obviously contrived and inevitable derivation of narratives from humans (science fiction and others) in the corpus. Nothing surprising or interesting. However, their hypothesis is presumably(??) that a bad completion from an LLM leads to a bad action in the real world, even though what counts is, as the OP says, the actuators or levers to harm.

Actual LLM completions are moot. I can convince an LLM its playing chess. It doesn't matter as long as the premise is innocuous. I can hook it up to all manner of real world levers. I feel like I'm either missing something HUGE and their research is groundbreaking or they're being performative in their safety explorations. Their research seems like what a toddler would do if tasked with red-teaming AI to make it say naughty words.

EDIT/Addendum: The only safety exploration into agentic harm that I value is one that treats the problem exactly the same as we've been treating cybersecurity vectors. Defence in depth. Sandboxing. Principle of least privelege, etc.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
by incomingpain | 2025-08-25 13:05:24+00:00
Multiple AGI have already happened. IQ tests on GPT5 have it pushing the genius level. Which is the next step after AGI, super intelligence.

The proposed final stage proving AGI is having a personal agent that does everything for you is what chatgpt just released.

I'm fairly confident anthropic and grok have agi internally. Im not as confident about google or microsoft.

>Assuming most such people would use LLMs even the more exotic ones, I'd say anywhere under 1000 people worldwide will be fair guess?

You're not even attempting AGI without datacenter gear. We're talking >20 H100s.

You dont need a massive datacenter, that's only needed if you have the masses of people querying you and running up your load.

Besides the giants like google or gpt. There's several groups who seem to be working on it. It's less clear if they've achieved it. Deepinfra, novitaai, cerebrus, parasail. They'd be crazy not to be attempting it, but they are also the groups who cant keep it quiet. They'd come out immediately.
by gruez | 2025-08-25 13:05:26+00:00
>CGNAT exists which is "much privacy" by your logic. So anyone interested, starting with Google, is already fingerprinting you anyway, so the whole idea what "ipv4+NAT is more private than ipv6" is moot at best.

It's still an extra fingerprinting signal, and all things being equal you'd want less fingerprinting vectors. Otherwise you fall into defeatist line of "google already probably knows my interests quite well, so I might as well not bother trying to obfuscate my advertising history".

It's an extra signal that's basically impossible to spoof

>NB: your useragent already sends enough info to effectively distinguish your from the other users behind the same ipv4 address

???

User-agent provides very limited set of information. Two chrome users on windows have the same user agent. Unless you think everyone in a household uses a different browser/OS combo, user agent isn't enough to distinguish users. You'd need to get into canvas/webgl fingerprinting to uniquely identify a device, and even then that can't distinguish identical devices (eg. two people using iPhone 16)
by alphazard | 2025-08-25 13:06:02+00:00
I'm always a little surprised to see how many people take robots.txt seriously on HN. It's nice to see so many folks with good intentions.

However, it's obviously not a real solution. It depends on people knowing about it, and adding the complexity of checking it to their crawler. Are there other more serious solutions? It seems like we've heard about "micropayments" and "a big merkle tree of real people" type solutions forever and they've never materialized.
by imiric | 2025-08-25 13:06:22+00:00
Yeah, I suppose it's something like that. Except that my solution wouldn't rely on Google, would be open source and self-hostable. Are you aware of a similar project that does this? Would save me some time and effort. :)

There also might be similar solutions for other cloud providers or some Kubernetes-adjacent abomination, but I specifically want something generic and standalone.
by jdiff | 2025-08-25 13:07:04+00:00
You can't easily convince a remote computer to curl | bash itself. Worms spread because remote code execution was laughably easy back then. Also because computer hygiene was abysmal.

LLMs are more than happy to run curl | bash on your behalf, though. If agents gain any actual traction it's going to be a security nightmare. As mentioned in other comments, nobody wants to babysit them and so everyone just takes all the guardrails off.
by asoneth | 2025-08-25 13:07:07+00:00
> whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...

Agreed. If your operating system requires that you occasionally search for instructions and copy-and-paste executable strings from the internet, that seems less efficient, less learnable, and less secure than any GUI I know of.

Perhaps at some point terminals will bake in an LLM as an intermediary to convert between human-readable instructions and terminal commands, and then we just have to worry about the alignment of those LLMs...
by amszmidt | 2025-08-25 13:08:04+00:00
Dan Ingalls answer is much more interesting than anything I could explain ...

From https://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998...

Ralph - Many times I have browsed past your article "About the Smalltalk Balloon" and been tempted to add to the little bit of history that you have there. While your link is entitled "Why a hot-air balloon is the symbol of Smalltalk," you never really answer the question. The time has come to tie up that loose end. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, and The Real Story About the Smalltalk Balloon Everyone in our group wanted to challenge the ivory tower image in Byte's special issue on Pascal, because in fact we were all working intensely to get Smalltalk-80 out the door from Xerox at the time. The cover of that issue depicted the "land of Smalltalk" as a remote island, and that triggered a connection for me out of which was born the fanstasy of liberating Smalltalk from the ivory tower by balloon ascent. Here is the connection... My favorite book from youth was The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne. It is the story of an engineer, Cyrus Harding, who gets blown far afield in a storm during a balloon surveillance mission in the 1860's. He ends up stranded on an island but, through ingenuity and a bit of luck, he manages to recreate most of the accomplishments and comforts of civilization on his own (with a little help from an amiable orangutan ;-). Cyrus Harding became my childhood standard for resourcefulness and the conviction that anything can be accomplished if you are clever and persistent. The fantasy of a balloon as the vehicle for Smalltalk's release stuck with me from then on. When the opportunity came to design the cover for the Byte issue on Smalltalk, I made the suggestion of the balloon lifting off from the island shown on the Pascal cover, and everyone picked up on it. Robert Tinney executed the wonderful graphic that we know so well, and the rest is history. - Dan P.S. There is a further coincidence in this particular literary allusion: It is revealed at the end of The Mysterious Island that the island is actually the base of operations for a more well-known Verne character, and that character happens also to be the childhood hero of a more well-known figure in the history of Smalltalk.
by aeve890 | 2025-08-25 13:08:11+00:00
>Then I created HugstonOne Enterprise Edition 1.0.7 and it fundamentally changed how I think about AI.

Who uses versioning numbers like that?

>It’s a paradigm shift.

But we have local LLMs already

>You’re locked into a platform (with no easy way to switch)

I've never think about LLMs providers like a cloud provider. I can jump providers whenever I want. I jumped from OpenAI to Anthropic to Open router. Given the parity of tooling and quality of SOTA models I fail to see where the vendor lock is.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-25 13:08:35+00:00
It makes perfect sense.

He literally asked fossil fuel interests for a billion dollars and said they'd make more than that back because of his changes.

I don't know why we all have to pretend that this is some personal Quixotic quest of his rather than open corruption:

> But Mr. Trump told executives they were not fighting hard enough. He also went on a rant about windmills, the attendees said. Mr. Trump has falsely claimed that wind turbines cause cancer and that offshore wind farms are “driving whales crazy.”

> Mr. Trump did not request money in exchange for killing Mr. Biden’s climate regulations, the two people in the room maintained. Rather, the former president told executives that he was determined to squash what he considered anti-business policies, and that the oil industry should therefore want him to win and should raise $1 billion to ensure his success.

> He told the executives that the amount of money they would save in taxes and legal expenses after he repealed regulations would more than cover a billion dollar contribution, the people said.

From the New York Times
by adverbly | 2025-08-25 13:08:51+00:00
Long-term thermal storage is something I've been fascinated with the last year or so.

Heat loss inside of dirt is so incredibly slow it's hard to wrap your head around. One fact that I find helps is the fact that after an entire winter of extremely cold temperatures, you only need to go down 10 ft or so before you hit the average annual temperature. 4 months of winter buffered by 10 ft of ground!

Obviously there is incredible potential to this even if you just keep the energy as heat. The amount of electricity we use on heating and air conditioning is huge. If we could just create hot and cold piles or underground wells or something that we could tap into 4 months later when the temperature has changed, you would have completely solved heating and cooling.

Really excited by companies looking into this and wish them the best of luck!
by flkiwi | 2025-08-25 13:09:02+00:00
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you, but between (a) Apple giving in to landscape orientation on their tablets as the default and risking the rise of angry zombie Steve Jobs from the grave in the process and (b) the increasing availability of desktop-like UI features in iPadOS--something I welcome for my use cases but that might be confusing for Aunt Jennifer--I have to wonder if that's still the case. Of course, some people insist they want a computer, so even if an iPad is a better option, it might not be a choice they're happy with.
by albertzeyer | 2025-08-25 13:09:40+00:00
I don't really need the versioning aspect too much, but sometimes I modify the photos a bit (e.g. rotating or so). But all the other things are relevant for me, like having it distributed, syncing, only partially having the data on a particular node, etc.

So, what solution would be better for that? In the end it seems that other solutions provide a similar set of features. E.g. Syncthing.

But what's the downside with Git-annex over Syncthing or other solutions?
by szszrk | 2025-08-25 13:09:55+00:00
Because they don't care.

I can play a 3d game with online elements using a bluetooth gamepad, directly on my 8yo "smart tv", but somehow it's impossible to conveniently display text.

It's annoying and it's not just a problem of tvOS.There is just no incentive to make ToS easily readable to users of any hardware platform.
by kartoffelsaft | 2025-08-25 13:10:24+00:00
I'm sure you can find people making arguments about a lack of quality from machines about textiles, woodworking, cinematography, etc., but digging holes? If you have a source of someone complaining about hole quality I'll be fascinated, but I moreso am thinking about a disconnecion here:

It looks like you see writing & editing as a menial task that we just do for it's extrinsic value, whereas these people who complain about quality see it as art we make for it's intrinsic value.

Where I think a lot of this "technophobia" actually comes from though are people who do/did this for a living and are not happy about their profession being obsolesced, and so try to justify their continued employment. And no, "there were new jobs after the cotton gin" will not comfort them, because that doesn't tell them what their next profession will be and presumes that the early industrial revolution was all peachy (it wasn't).
by lazide | 2025-08-25 13:10:43+00:00
Apparently the insulation value (R value) of dirt and soil is between .25 and .8 per inch (depending on moisture content). That wouldn’t be great if it was a material like fiberglass, but since it’s dirt cheap (ba-dum-tssh) and easy to pile up in large quantities with little to no ongoing maintenance in this kind of context, it matters.

A 10 ft pile of dirt (assuming 10 ft between heat exchanging pipes and the outside air) has an R value of 24 to 96, which is extremely significant.

I expect there would still be notable losses trying to keep it at 1100F indefinitely, but 10 ft of dirt will have insulation values approximating many feet of fiberglass insulation.

You’d want a very large mass to heat however, scaling matters a lot. You’d want the ratio of surface area to mass to be as small as possible, and that means as large a volume with as thermally dense a material as possible inside. Surface areas increases by the square, while volume increases by the cube.

Also, no matter what you do, you would eventually cook whatever was at the surface or underground, so don’t do this where you want trees - or where there are underground coal seams
by camgunz | 2025-08-25 13:11:18+00:00
Coding is how I build a sufficiently deep understanding of the problem space--there's no separating coding and understanding for me. I acknowledge there's different ways of working (and I imagine this is one of the reasons a lot of people think they get a lot more value out of LLMs than I do), but like, having Cursor crank code out for me actually slows me down. I have to read all the stuff it does so I can coach it into doing better, and also use its work to build a good mental model of the problem, and all that takes longer than writing the code myself.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-08-25 13:11:51+00:00
It's hilarious to watch people try to pretend that "crony capitalism" and "capitalism" are different things, as if the greed to rig the system once you've won is fundamentally different from the greed that pushes you to compete in an un-rigged system.

No, sorry, it's not only the same emotion, it's the same system and the same rules: if greed is good, why shouldn't one seek network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, vertical and horizontal integration that block competition, engage in FUD and dumping and regulatory capture and so on and so on? The answer that the entire business community and an increasing fraction of the general population seems to agree to is that one should, and this has prevented the sort of gardening that can keep the system actually competitive and working for the people, rather than working for the people on top, which is what it overwhelmingly wants to do when left to its own devices.
by abdusco | 2025-08-25 13:11:56+00:00
> In a statement, the Israeli military says it “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and does not target journalists as such".

I guess they were targeting supposed Hamas operatives being treated in an operating room. It's too bad that five journalists were there. They are very sorry that journalists' bodies got in the way of the bomb.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn725ny0ryjt?post=asset%3Abdd2...
by os2warpman | 2025-08-25 13:12:01+00:00
There is a difference.

Excavation is an inherently dangerous and physically strenuous job. Additionally, when precision or delicateness is required human diggers are still used.

If AI was being used to automate dangerous and physically strenuous jobs, I wouldn't mind.

Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse.

Imagine an AI-powered excavator that fucked up every trench that it dug and techbros insisted you were wrong for criticizing the fucked up trench.
by DimitriMikadze | 2025-08-25 13:12:26+00:00
I open-sourced a project called Mira, a system for automating company research.

You give it a company website and it pulls public data from the site, LinkedIn, and Google Search, then puts everything together into a structured profile with sources and confidence scores.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8HdHOMvoNY
by pjmorris | 2025-08-25 13:13:17+00:00
What's funny to me is that, not only is this also how the financial industry is structured, but that a) this is the currently fashionable means of reducing risk and b) it is seen as a feature not a bug.

Citation: Any book about the 2008 financial crisis, or the 1998 crisis, or the 1987 crisis, e.g.

[0] 'The Quants', Scott Patterson

[1] 'When Genius Failed', Lowenstein.

[2] 'Demon of Our Own Design', Richard Bookstaber.
by jaimebuelta | 2025-08-25 13:13:46+00:00
I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us.

I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars"

But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff.

How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list set as a recurring purchase? Sure an agent may help in shaping the list, but I don't see how allowing the agent to do purchases directly on your end is way more convenient, so I'm fine with taking the risk of doing something really silly.

"Hey agent, find me and compare insurance for my car for my use case. Oh, good. I'll pick insurance A and finish the purchase"

And many of the purchases that we do are probably enjoyable and we don't want really to remove ourselves from the process.
by reddalo | 2025-08-25 13:15:21+00:00
ReVanced also has the additional benefit of blocking ads, allowing background play and auto-skipping sponsorships thanks to SponsorBlock.

Also, if you have an Android TV, I'd suggest SmartTube, it's way better than the original app and it has the same benefits of ReVanced: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
by rossant | 2025-08-25 13:16:12+00:00
I'm a white guy working in science and tech, and I only avoided jail by sheer luck (believe it or not, one day my 4-month-old baby vomited at the nanny’s, and if it had happened a few hours earlier I would have been the one arrested by the police).

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

I know several HNers who went through the same situation. By my calculations, the risk is about 1 in 3,000 among young parents.

tl;dr: I'll NEVER be alone with a baby under 12 months. Everyone I know who learns about this issue ends up thinking the same.
by ralferoo | 2025-08-25 13:17:31+00:00
What's worse is when you get bots blasting HTTP traffic at every open port, even well known services like SMTP. Seriously, it's a mail server. It identified itself as soon as the connection was opened, if they waited 100ms-300ms before spamming, they'd know that it wasn't HTTP because the other side wouldn't send anything at all if it was. There's literally no need to bombard a mail server on a well known port by continuing to send a load of junk that's just going to fill someone's log file.
by rollcat | 2025-08-25 13:17:39+00:00
Engineering is making sure stuff works first, art distant second.

Even if the text is a simple article, a personal touch / style will go a long way to make it more pleasant to read.

LLMs are just making everything equally average, minus their own imperfections. Moving forward, they will in-breed while everything becomes progressively worse.

That's death to our culture.
by jimbo808 | 2025-08-25 13:18:48+00:00
> suspicion that they have been written by AI

"By AI" or "with AI?" If I write the book and have AI proof read things as I go, or critique my ideas, or point out which points do I need to add more support for, is that written "by AI?"

When Big Corp says 30% of their code is now written "by AI," did they write the code by following thoughtful instruction from a human expert, who interpeted the work to be done, made decisions about the architectural impact, outlined those things and gave detailed instructions that the LLM could execute in small chunks?

This distinction I feel is going to become more important. AI tools are useful, and most people are using them for writing code, literature, papers, etc. I feel like, in some cases, it is not fair to say the thing was written by AI, even when sometimes it technically was.