MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nottorp | 2025-08-27 08:11:57+00:00
Hmm. I got a delivery failure notification in my gmail, purportedly from Google. DKIM signed, headers looked legit.

Probably related to this since it had a 'click here to fix' link that went to some aws url.

Of course, since Google never contacts you except when they want to slurp more personal data out of you [1], it was suspicious from the start.

[1] See what happened when I tried to recover an old unused gmail account:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952830
by zipy124 | 2025-08-27 08:12:13+00:00
IBM is still a serious player in research, just not in actual output. They make a substantial sum from IP licensing/consulting to the more modern players.

They do for example a large amount of foundational silicon research that other fabs can license.

Industry analysts like Dr. Ian Curtis are good to keep tabs on this space such as IBMs 2nm wafers https://youtu.be/PpBagorVtC0?si=CB8-2e3KbFgZQqFH .

Or his interview with the IBM research VP of hybrid cloud. https://youtu.be/Dl6oGdLhCvk?si=RZ8KLUAqSRWcFHDJ .
by simoncion | 2025-08-27 08:14:30+00:00
> But they are quite clear that they do consider it harmful both to oneself and others to run nonfree software, even if it is useful.

As we're seeing, time and time and time again, it is harmful. The benefits may outweigh the harms today, but unless the steward of that nonfree software is extraordinarily careful and forward-thinking (as it were), those relationships inevitably go bad and become coercive over time. As we know, Stallman is (and always has been) right about this.

> That, to me, is very much refusing to make concessions to practicality within their ideology.

1) The last paragraph of the opening section is a plain and obvious concession to practicality: "But there is one special case where using some nonfree software ... can be a positive thing. That's when the use of the nonfree software aims directly at putting an end to the use of that very same nonfree software."

2) I'm not sure how saying "We'd be sad and would all be worse off if you used nonfree software, but do understand that there can be compelling real-world reasons to do so. Please don't use nonfree software, or -if that's not possible- consider small ways to avoid using it whenever opportunity presents itself." is anything but a concession to practicality. A hard-liner that refuses to make concessions to practicality wouldn't incorporate such a thing into their philosophy!

Respectfully, are you sure you're not letting knowledge of how Stallman uses/manages/etc his personal computing devices influence your interpretation of what these essays and the FSF's philosophy are about?
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-27 08:14:52+00:00
> suppose the system firmware itself just doesn't know what to do with them.

Anything since socket 1155 can work and even Westemere/Nehalem should work too, except you don't really want a system that old.

I have a 4Tb M.2 drive in x1 slot in my GA-Z77X, works fine.

Not a boot drive and I didn't bother to look if the BIOS supports booting from NVMe, though a quick search says the support for that was started with Z97 chipset/socket 1150.

> use a little sata SSD as /boot

For Linux you can even use some USB thumbdrive, especially a small profile like Kingston DataTraveler Micro G2.

https://www.aorus.com/motherboards/ga-z77x-ud3h-rev-10/Key-F...
by silverliver | 2025-08-27 08:15:59+00:00
This was always going to be the logical conclusion to US hostile policy regarding the the proliferation of IC fabrication. The US, not cost, was the primary factor that discouraged many countries from pursuing their own IC fabrication capabilities. Had they not been so hostile, many countries would have had enough capacity to cover for the US until it rebooted its own industry.

This is also the same trap that China is barrelling into right now and they will absolutely find themselves in the same position eventually.
by freen | 2025-08-27 08:16:02+00:00
In order to make a government “small enough to down in a bathtub” you need to convince the general public that it is corrupt and incompetent, which has been the GOP play all along.

If your core argument about why you should govern is that government is the problem, is it any surprise that you sabotage any attempt at good governance?

Effective government is an existential risk for the GOP.
by bpye | 2025-08-27 08:18:00+00:00
Adapting a PCIe slot to a single M.2 slot should always work, so long as the SSD is actually using the PCIe lanes and not the SATA port that M.2 can also support.

Depending on how old the motherboard, or UEFI, is - it may not be able to directly boot from NVMe. Years ago I modified the UEFI on my Haswell-era board to add a DXE to support NVMe boot. You shouldn’t need to do that to see the NVMe device within your OS though.

As the other reply mentioned, if you want to run multiple SSDs on a cheap adapter your platform needs to support bifurcation, but if it doesn’t support bifurcation hope is not all lost. PCIe switches have become somewhat cheaper - you can find cards based on the PEX8747 for relatively little under names like PE3162-4IL. The caveat here is that you’re limited to PCIe 3.0, switches for 4.0+ are still very expensive.
by variadix | 2025-08-27 08:18:00+00:00
The strategy is fine, the problem is there aren’t enough domestic competing players in cutting edge semi nodes for it to work anymore. The US had many competing foundries before its semi industry was hollowed out by Japan and Korea. Now the only player in the US is Intel and, having been mismanaged for the last decade or more, it’s at risk.

I don’t think propping up Intel is going to work though, they’re a sinking ship and their management seems too risk averse and incompetent. It might be better for the US, long term, to let them collapse and sell off strategic parts to different domestic players (NVIDIA, AMD, micron, TI, etc) and use tariffs or other trade policy to force some amount of leading edge semi fabrication to use domestic manufacturing.
by benrutter | 2025-08-27 08:18:14+00:00
> software quality doesn't appear because you have good developers. It's the end result of a process, and that process informs both your software development practices, but also your testing. Your management. Even your sales and servicing.

If you only take one thing away from this article, it should be this one! The Therac-25 incident is a horrifying and important part of software history, it's really easy to think type-systems, unit-testing and defensive-coding can solve all software problems. They definitely can help a lot, but the real failure in the story of the Therac-25 from my understanding, is that it took far too long for incidents to be reported, investigated and fixed.

There was a great Cautionary Tales podcast about the device recently[0], one thing mentioned was that, even aside from the catasrophic accidents, Therac-25 machines were routinely seen by users to show unexplained errors, but these issues never made it to the desk of someone who might fix it.

[0] https://timharford.com/2025/07/cautionary-tales-captain-kirk...
by worldsavior | 2025-08-27 08:18:57+00:00
You could also blame Wikipedia for providing suicidal methods for historic reasons or other. Whoever roams the internet is at it's own responsibility.

Of course OpenAI is at fault here also, but this is a fight that will never end, and without any seriously valid justification. Just like AI is sometimes bad at coding, same for psychology and other areas where you double check AI.
by michaelt | 2025-08-27 08:19:11+00:00
I'd be interested in knowing how many of y'all are being taught about this sort of thing in college ethics/safety/reliability classes.

I was taught about this in engineering school, as part of a general engineering course also covering things like bathtub reliability curves and how to calculate the number of redundant cooling pumps a nuclear power plant needs. But it's a long time since I was in college.

Is this sort of thing still taught to engineers and developers in college these days?
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-27 08:19:33+00:00
>"preponderance of evidence,"

Yes, which as I said above, is the act of distribution in most cases. If you don't distribute it or sell a service around it, it isn't worth my time to sue.

>Napster cases, the RIAA had to show people actually violated copyright, not that they just had Napster installed or used it for non-copyrighted works.

Yes, and if someone distributes an LLM or sells access to an LLM, and then someone uses that to reproduce my copyrighted work, or I go to the model/service and have it reproduce my copyrighted work, then I can show to the court that it has been done, not merely can be done.

>you could only sue Megaupload for knowingly not complying with copyright law

That's the really fucked up part of Megaupload, which is why I brought it up as an example of how tilted the law is in favor of copyright holders: They did not prove Megaupload nor Kim Dotcom knowingly did that, and Megaupload and Dotcom proved they did comply with the law, promptly and in full. They did the exact same level of diligence that I'd expect from any competing storage bucket company, yet Dotcom's house was raided by a joint US/NZ team at his house in NZ as if he was some terrorist.

They are still trying to extradite him for "crimes", where his "crimes" are that he complied with the same laws Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc comply with, with the same diligence that they do.

Given all of what I've said, you cannot actually make the argument that I can't sue. If someone reproduces my copyrighted work, I can, in good faith, sue them for that. Doing it through an LLM does not give them a free pass, they cannot argue to the court that they didn't know the LLM was trained on pirated works, they cannot argue to the court that they didn't understand how LLMs work. They still reproduced and distributed the copyrighted work, which is what damns them.

Again, you seem to think suing people for copyright violations is a free money cheat code, and you've been unable to tell me why doing it with an LLM is different than any other copyright violation, while I've given examples of case law for both sides on how this might play out. If suing someone that violated copyright is a free money cheat code, then companies like Disney are the biggest cheaters in history.

>I'm not going to respond to this thread anymore IANAL, IANYL, but I think that's a good choice.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-27 08:21:04+00:00
I think the "encouraging someone to take a non-criminal action" angle is weakened in cases like this: the person is obviously mentally ill and not able to make good decisions. "Obvious" is important, it has to be clear to an average adult that the other person is either ill or skillfully feigning illness. Since any rational adult knows the danger of encouraging suicidal ideation in a suicidal person, manslaughter is quite plausible in certain cases. Again: if this ChatGPT transcript was a human adult DMing someone they knew to be a child, I would want that adult arrested for murder, and let their defense argue it was merely voluntary manslaughter.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-08-27 08:22:06+00:00
All this is true about Linux on desktop, though my bank still allows me to log in to online banking.

At least for now.

I'm not aware of any major issues this has caused.

The trust isn't the issue. Google and Apple has made DRM easy for these companies to integrate, and therefore they do it. There isn't more to it than that.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-27 08:22:06+00:00
> 2. 2.5" 8TB SSDs are 4x as expensive as 8TB NVMEs.

Huh?

870 QVO 8 TB SSD SATA III 2.5 inch: $629.99

Which is in the same range as M.2 ones.

Sure, you are getting gouged if try to buy it on Amazon but then... just don't buy it on Amazon?

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st...
by dotancohen | 2025-08-27 08:23:00+00:00
If the DSM merely described sets of symptoms and gave them names, I'd buy that. But by also mentioning (e.g. suggesting) specific treatments, the book is used as a prescription tool, not just a diagnostic tool.

> But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself

Quite so. I just as we judge people by their actions, not their words, I judge the DSM by how it's actual content is structured, not by its introductory quip.
by rvz | 2025-08-27 08:23:36+00:00
We're more likely to get a similar incident like this very quickly if we continue with the cult of 'vibe-coding' and throwing away basic software engineering principles out of the window as I said before. [0]

Take this post-mortem here [1] as a great warning and which also highlights exactly what could go horribly wrong if the LLM misreads comments.

What's even more scarier is each time I stumble across a freshly minted project on GitHub with a considerable amount of attention, not only it is 99% vibe-coded (very easy to detect) but it completely lacks any tests written for it.

Makes me question the ability of the user prompting the code in the first place if they even understand how to write robust and battle-tested software.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44764689

[1] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...
by isopede | 2025-08-27 08:23:43+00:00
I strongly believe that we will see an incident akin to Therac-25 in the near future. With as many people running YOLO mode on their agents as there are, Claude or Gemini is going to be hooked up to some real hardware that will end up killing someone.

Personally, I've found even the latest batch of agents fairly poor at embedded systems, and I shudder at the thought of giving them the keys to the kingdom to say... a radiation machine.
by echelon | 2025-08-27 08:25:48+00:00
The 737 Max MCAS is arguably a bug. That killed 346 people.

Not a "bug" per se, but texting while driving kills ~400 people per year in the US. It's a bug at some level of granularity.

To be tongue in cheek a bit, buggy JIRA latency has probably wasted 10,000 human years. Those are many whole human lives if you count them up.
by benrutter | 2025-08-27 08:26:47+00:00
Probably many rather than a single bug, but the botched London Ambulance dispatch software from the 90s, is probably one of the most deadly software issues of all time, although there aren't any estimates I know of that try to quantify the number of lives lost as a result.

http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/a.finkelstein/papers/lascase....
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-08-27 08:27:06+00:00
The French far right only cares about anti-Semitism, women's rights and even LGBT+ rights when it allows them to bash immigrants and Muslims. In a bizarre twist, activists from the far-right National Rally party set up a fake LGBT+ association that marched in the Paris Gay Pride parade with anti-Palestinian slogans.

It was such a mess that they were protected by three rows of riot police. You'd have to be very naive to believe that such false and hateful people could be allies to anyone.

We sometimes make fun of Americans, but we also have some great bingo cards too.
by stinos | 2025-08-27 08:27:39+00:00
makes it too easy to have way too much goddamn light in every corner of every street

That's essentially correct, but modern tech also makes it relatively easy (and in the end cheaper compared to non-LED) to

- make lights with a properly focused well directed beam instead of flooding the whole place; we have a new one close to our house and it sheds light only on the street itself to the point you can almost see a nice straight line where the light beam stops and beyond that line it's markedly darker than it used to be even though the light beam itself has a higher intensity

- make lights which emit in wavelengths which are less environmentally harmful for flora/fauna

- make each lantern remote controllable (on/off/dimming); main street lights here dim after 11pm and are truned off in all secondary streets

(there's a website dedcated to listing the best models for all of this but I cannot find it anymore)

The thing which is lacking here mostly is awareness and governments willing to implement this properly. We live in a rather small rural village which did implement all of this - too bad there's no research project assesing before and after but since it counters most of the negatives I assume it should turn out positive for the environment. Birds are definitely positively affected by it: execpt for owls I don't hear any singing in the middle of the night anymore. And in any case it feels pretty 'normal' to come home at night while it's properly dark.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-27 08:27:47+00:00
I don't think they would win, the law specifies a class of "information content provider" which ChatGPT clearly falls into: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/section-230-wont-protec...

See also https://hai.stanford.edu/news/law-policy-ai-update-does-sect... - Congress and Justice Gorsuch don't seem to think ChatGPT is protected by 230.
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-27 08:27:55+00:00
> TSMC’s foundries — and Samsung’s — are within easy reach...

To be honest, every foundry is in easy reach of something that can take it out. If there's a conflict that results in missiles hitting Korean factories, someone will be drone-bombing the power interconnects or driving trucks into water purifiers or whatever and taking out foundries in Texas.

It doesn't take much to ruin semiconductor foundry throughput. Wafers spend weeks or even months progressing from stage to stage. If you can cause a power failure, for example, you can scrap the whole content of the line and there will be no output until the pipeline refills: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2019/07/05/nand-fab...

Perhaps process robustness is better now, but in the constant scrambling state of semiconductor manufacturing, I doubt it is better enough to be able to shrug off concerted, deliberate attacks rather than just accidents, fuckups and bad luck.
by pembrook | 2025-08-27 08:28:16+00:00
This is dumb. Nobody is writing articles about all the times the opposite happened, and ChatGPT helped prevent bad stuff.

However, because of the nature of this topic, it’s the perfect target for NYT to generate moral panic for clicks. Classic media attention bait 101.

I can’t believe HN is falling for this. It’s the equivalent of the moral panic around metal music in the 1980s where the media created a hysteria around the false idea there was hidden messages in the lyrics encouraging a teen to suicide. Millennials have officially become their parents.

If this narrative generates enough media attention, what will probably happen is OpenAI will just make their next models refuse to discuss anything related to mental health at all. This is not a net good.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-27 08:28:32+00:00
Do you think an invasion of Taiwan brings risk of a new, worse status quo? I think that's primarily why China doesn't invade. If it were possible to just achieve an easy, total victory then there is no reason to wait for Taiwanese people to change their mind about joining China.

In my humble opinion, if China wanted to, they could win it now. China's vast resources and manpower will be overwhelming. Doesn't matter if they lose a few battles or takes a few years.

The reason China doesn't want to is because they want a peaceful reunification. They want to wait when it's so obvious that Taiwan would lose and lose quickly that Taiwan simply gives itself up.
by t_mahmood | 2025-08-27 08:28:47+00:00
Unfortunately, I can say with 100% confident, the customer service of my bank will not freaking understand what is a rooted phone, or LineageOS ...

And my bank's web app developer couldn't even fix their log in bug for several months. I realize, now, it's because they want to sunset their web portal.

Which is extremely annoying ... what if I don't have my mobile!!

Lazy, and greedy corporates, just trying to save their costing with shortcuts, never realizing security is never achieved by taking shortcuts.
by autoexec | 2025-08-27 08:29:19+00:00
Exciting and even emergency situations don't cure ADHD or allow people with ADHD to magically function "normally" (or even effectively enough to avoid serious harm to themselves/others). The amount of importance a person with ADHD attributes to a task doesn't tell you if they'll be able to complete it as well as they would if they were being treated with medication or even if they will be able to complete it at all.

People with ADHD cannot all just "force themselves" to function. Novelty, excitement and interest can help, some of the time, but the rest of the time it's disaster. Depending on severity, the result of not getting the treatment they need can often include things like an inability to keep a job, homelessness, prison sentences, and accidents/injury. Those kinds of outcomes are pretty damn important to avoid, extremely stressful (exciting) to experience or be in imminent danger of, and certainly more than enough to motivate people to do the best that they can, but some percentage of people will never be able to avoid those outcomes by trying to will themselves into "cognitive adaption".

Others may be able to stave off the absolute worst outcomes without medication, but only through exhaustive efforts that prevent them from accomplishing the things they want in life. Why should someone constantly and needlessly push themselves to their absolute limit just to accomplish what comes easily for most people? For what? Bragging rights about how they reshaped their brains by sheer force of will? If medication for a mental condition can make people's lives better they should be free to take it.

To whatever extent you've been able to function without medication, that's great. Don't assume that what worked for you is applicable to everyone else, or even to most other people.
by NeutralForest | 2025-08-27 08:29:22+00:00
Little tooling: you need to use Emacs and there's no LSP, no great debugging capabilities, no great testing libs, etc Bad docs for beginners: the docs are very complete in terms of coverage and yet have no tutorials or explanations in how to use Guile properly.

Very little visibility as well, Scheme is already a niche. By catering to only the most FOSS oriented/adamant part of the public, your pool of devs is very tiny.

Most guile libs can also only be installed through Guix or failing that, tar files.

The ergonomics of the language are bad and there no concerted community story and publicity around it either imo.

It's sad because it's a cool language and the efforts Wingo and people like the Spritely institute have put into it, are amazing.
by simoncion | 2025-08-27 08:29:29+00:00
> [H]e would prefer to see copyright abolished altogether, at least for software...

Oh? From the "Finding the right bargain" section of this 2002 essay [0]

> So perhaps novels, dictionaries, computer programs, songs, symphonies, and movies should have different durations of copyright, so that we can reduce the duration for each kind of work to what is necessary for many such works to be published. Perhaps movies over one hour long could have a twenty-year copyright, because of the expense of producing them. In my own field, computer programming, three years should suffice, because product cycles are even shorter than that.

Has his opinion changed since then?

[0] <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...>
Show HN: A simple web extension to save ChatGPT responses
by atsy | 2025-08-27 08:29:59+00:00
I found that copying and pasting ChatGPT responses into a Notion/Google doc was tedious, so I built this little Chrome extension over the weekend to save them.

No login required. It saves everything in localStorage, and you can export too. There's also a Firefox build available (my mom uses Firefox lol).

I'd totally appreciate feedback, bugs, or feature requests!