MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by px43 | 2025-08-13 14:26:27+00:00
This was my 23rd DEFCON, and was just as counterculture as it was decades ago if you know where to go, and don't get distracted by the big pretty signs. DEFCON has always been about feds, policymakers, corpos, kids, and straight up black hat criminals partying together and shaping the future of infosec.

The author of the article decided to wander down the Military Industrial Complex track, and seems to be complaining that it had too much Army stuff. I didn't see any of that this year, because that's not what interests me. I met up with a large number of cipherpunks and activists that I don't get to see very often, and had some extremly productive conversations regarding various projects we're working on for the next year.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-08-13 14:26:33+00:00
My current intuition on this topic is that they are right about scaling but they are training on the wrong data.

LLMs were not intended to be the core foundation of artificial intelligence but an experiment around deep learning and language. Its success was an almost accidental byproduct of the availability of large amount of structured data to train from and the natural human bias to be tricked by language (Eliza effect).

But human language itself is quite weak from a cognitive perspective and we end up with an extremely broad but shallow and brittle model. The recent and extremely costly attempts to build reasoning around don't seem much more promising than using a lot of hardcoded heuristics, basically ignoring the bitter lesson.

I've seen many argue that a real human level AI should be trained from real-world experience, I am not sure this is true, but training should likely start from lower-level data than language, still using tokens and huge scale, and probably deeper networks.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-13 14:26:55+00:00
There might be a very important difference between automation pursued because we don't have enough workers to do all the work we would like to see completed, and automation pursued because it is cheaper for the gigantic corporations who will profit from employing fewer workers. But since we are still in the phase where there are too many jobs and not enough people to do them, I think we don't have to worry about those yet. We should revisit this issue in 300 years.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-13 14:27:08+00:00
I maintain a packet of encrypted data that contains an inventory of all of my data repositories along with the credentials needed to access them. It is kept in a physically separated, secure location. I have designated one person to be, effectively, my executor for these things. They have a cert that allows them to decrypt that data. Their task will be to decrypt the inventory list and determine who gets access to what.

For data that I don't want to survive me, I keep it on a server that has a dead-man's switch mechanism that will erase it if I don't reset the switch regularly.

I also make it a point to minimize the amount of this stuff that has to be dealt with (the dead-man's switch is part of this effort). I have no social media accounts anymore, for instance, so nothing needs to be done for that kind of thing.
by cmcaleer | 2025-08-13 14:27:31+00:00
Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.

What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer?

Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"?

Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
by theptip | 2025-08-13 14:27:33+00:00
Agreed. I think the latency wins could be meaningful for many of the obvious phone-centric usecases (Siri, app-/browser-enrichment, etc.) but the capability gap is definitely a hindrance.

Privacy is already a key differentiating feature for iPhone which is why I think they will continue to try to make this option viable. (They already do ChatGPT fallback which is a pragmatic concession to the reality that you highlight here.)
by NelsonMinar | 2025-08-13 14:28:08+00:00
I love plotter art and have dabbled a bit myself. The really fun part is how pen-on-paper is not completely reliable or a perfect line. You get a little texture if the pen skips. You can use watercolor pens that bleed. You can get crazy with something like Copic markers on Yupo paper so the whole thing stays wet and smears for minutes. It's part of the art.

This bit from the article made me laugh ruefully though: "it's as simple as buying some black paper and a white gel pen." You can get some beautiful effects with white ink on black paper but it is notoriously difficult to get looking good. White ink is tricky stuff. But that's part of the fun!
by energy123 | 2025-08-13 14:28:13+00:00
How can you say progress has stalled two weeks after LLMs won gold medals at IOI and IMO?

How can you say progress has stalled without having visibility on the compute costs of gpt-5 relative to o3?

How can you say progress has stalled by referring to changes in benchmarks at the frontier over just 3.5 months?
by naasking | 2025-08-13 14:28:14+00:00
> I want it to have empathy so that it can understand what I'm getting at when I occasionally ask a poorly worded question.

I'm not sure what empathy is supposed to buy you here, I think it would be far more useful for it to ask for clarification. Exposing your ambiguity is instructive for you.

Some recent studies have shown that LLMs might negatively impact cognitive function, and I would guess its strong intuitive sense of guessing what you're really after is part of it.
by izzydata | 2025-08-13 14:28:52+00:00
There is no plan in place at all for the outcome of most work becoming redundant. At least in the US I highly doubt we will be capable of implementing some system such as UBI for the benefit of all citizens so everyone can take advantage of most work being automated. Everyone will be left to pick up scraps and barely survive.

But I am extremely skeptical that current "AI" will be capable of eliminating so much of the modern workforce any time soon if ever. I can see it becoming a common place tool, maybe it already has, but not as a human replacement.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-08-13 14:29:09+00:00
> Sam recently said only 7% of Plus users were using thinking (o3)

Thinking or just o3, and over what timeframe? There were a lot of days where I would just rely on o4-mini and o4-mini (high) b.c. my queries weren't that complex and I wanted to save my o3 quota and get faster responses.

> That means 93% of their users were using nothing but 4o!

Also potentially 4.1 and 4.5?
by schneems | 2025-08-13 14:29:18+00:00
In human learning we do this process by generating expectations ahead of time and registering surprise or doubt when those expectations are not met.

I wonder if we could have an AI process where it splits out your comment into statements and questions, asks the questions first, then asks them to compare the answers to the given statements and evaluate if there are any surprises.

Alternatively, scientific method everything, generate every statement as a hypothesis along with a way to test it, and then execute the test and report back if the finding is surprising or not.
by tengwar2 | 2025-08-13 14:29:28+00:00
Back in ?1990, I was working on a collaborative project for multivariable control for heating and blowing plastic bottles. I think I was writing the back end, and a colleague in Germany was writing the front end, both to run on the same QNX system. The back end could be written in ANSI C, but the windowing system required K&R C. We didn't have email connection, so the only way to coordinate development was a write down an integration interface, develop to that, then head over to Germany holding a floppy disk. The thing was up and running in five minutes. Very nice OS to work with!
by milesjag | 2025-08-13 14:29:39+00:00
LEGO | London (Farringdon) | Hybrid (3 days a week in the office)

* Lead engineer on the personalisation / recommendation engine

* Python, Node JS / TS, Databricks, Aurora RDS, AWS, API Gateway

* Experience required in both data engineering and back-end engineering spaces

* Experience welcome in ML engineering and data science spaces

I've worked on this team for a year or so now and it's fair to say that there's been no shortage of things to work on - you'll be immersed in the challenge of computing and distributing personalised recommendations across the business via operational and analytical workloads.

You will also become a part of a company which adopts a lot of the nice danish working practices (family first).

The office culture is an important aspect of the business so 3 days a week is a needs-must.

If this sounds like your bag - apply :)
by Feuilles_Mortes | 2025-08-13 14:30:03+00:00
for doing laboratory work in my PhD, I've found no better app than OmniFocus. It's particularly valuable in its ability to create tasks via a templating system. This is crucial, for example, for managing 10+ genetic crosses at a time. Each cross takes weeks to move to the next step, but when that next step occurs, I need to be on top of the cross 2x / day. Juggling different crosses at different stages would be impossible for my brain without a system I can rely on. Other lab work follows similar workflows.
by monkpit | 2025-08-13 14:30:23+00:00
I think you’re right - even if we accept the premise that there’s only room for minor marginal improvements, there’s vast amounts of room for improvement with integrations, mcp, orchestration, prompting, etc. I’m talking mostly about coding agents here but it applies more widely.

It’s a completely new tool, it’s like inventing the internal combustion engine and then going, “well, I guess that’s it, it’s kinda neat I guess.”
by ryao | 2025-08-13 14:30:25+00:00
The idiom “X loves to Y” implies frequency, rather than agency. Would you object to someone saying “It loves to rain in Seattle”?

“Malicious compliance” is the act of following instructions in a way that is contrary to the intent. The word malicious is part of the term. Whether a thing is malicious by exercising malicious compliance is tangential to whether it has exercised malicious compliance.

That said, I have gotten good results with my addendum to my prompts to account for malicious compliance. I wonder if your comment Is due to some psychological need to avoid the appearance of personification of a machine. I further wonder if you are one of the people who are upset if I say “the machine is thinking” about a LLM still in prompt processing, but had no problems with “the machine is thinking” when waiting for a DOS machine to respond to a command in the 90s. This recent outrage over personifying machines since LLMs came onto the scene is several decades late considering that we have been personifying machines in our speech since the first electronic computers in the 1940s.

By the way, if you actually try what you suggested, you will find that the LLM will enter a Laurel and Hardy routine with you, where it will repeatedly make the mistake for you to correct. I have experienced this firsthand so many times that I have learned to preempt the behavior by telling the LLM not to maliciously comply at the beginning when I tell it what not to do.
by komali2 | 2025-08-13 14:30:39+00:00
This is excellent, but I always wonder at the way cities seem to bend over backwards for the worst technology for moving people ever invented, and don't dare do anything that deprioritizing the use of this technology.

Here, I found some street parking for cars: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Quai+Turrettini/@46.205451...

Alongside a gorgeous canal, with bike lanes there as well as what appears to be a train station a few blocks away, as well as what may be some kind of street car station? I can't imagine a more phenomenal waste of space given the far superior transport options surrounding this area. Go west just a bit and you can see a much more useful use of that space: some greenspace https://maps.app.goo.gl/xmDdqxob4LegGvwt5 (I don't understand why this business' pin is there but so be it).

Go east a bit and see how an entire bridge is wasted on giving cars some complicated spaghetti to let them go either north or west. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GQNMabh7d9cEf7MC7 Instead that entire middle portion could be further bike parking (you can see some is already there) or a wonderful greenspace to enjoy the river as you cross the bridge. Hell, you could probably fit a few food stands there if you really wanted to get jiggy with it.

In the era of the hyperdense city and the perfections we've brought to non-car transportation technologies, it's time to let cars go. They were a bad idea, we can see that now from how they clog our cities, kill our kids, and cause us to choke on their exhaust, let's be done and aggressively remove them!

Edit: more examples, look to the river near here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/45iLSKpVa4kLwuM69 Everyone's view of the river spoiled, and precious space wasted, all so that 28 cars, just 28 cars, can park on the street.

Or, compare this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xobo9E5jjQU2Pv2f8 to this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SAEYTGBqFDZXUkMn9 Note how much more dense, how much more housing and businesses, fit in the former, how much easier it is to walk around and get places. Notice how in the latter, they turn all their space in the pavilions into parking lots , whereas in the former, they use them for gardens and trees. The former is for humans, the latter is for cars, which aren't people! So why do we build a city for them?
by cyphar | 2025-08-13 14:30:43+00:00
This is called linguist relativity (nee. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and the strong form you describe has fallen out of favour in modern linguistics.

A surprising number of monolingual people think their own language is the most adaptable and modern language, but this is obviously untrue. All languages evolve to fit the needs of speakers.

Also, the idea that people "think in language X" is heavily disputed. One obvious counterargument is that most people have experienced the feeling of being unable to express what they are thinking into words -- if you truly did think in the language you speak, how could this situation happen? My personal experience is that I do not actively hear any language in my head while unless I actively try to think about it (at least, since I was a teenager).

(This is all ignoring the comments about ESL speakers that I struggle to read as anything but racism. As someone who speaks multiple languages, it astounds me how many people seem to think that struggling to express something in your non-native language means that you're struggling to think and are therefore stupid.)
by thwarted | 2025-08-13 14:30:53+00:00
> It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.

Ah, Genuine People Personalities from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

> It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.

This reminded me of a critique of UNIX that, unlike DOS, ls doesn't output anything when there are no files. DOS's dir command literally tells you there are no files, and this was considered, in this critique, to be more polite and friendly and less confusing than UNIX. Of course, there's the adage "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all", and if you consider "no files found" to not be nice (because it is negative and says "no"), then ls is actually being polite(r) by not printing anything.

Many people interact with computers in a conversational manner and have anthropomorphized them for decades. This is probably influenced by computers being big, foreign, scary things to many people, so making them have a softer, more handholding "personality" makes them more accessible and acceptable. This may be less important these days as computers are more ubiquitous and accessible, but the trend lives on.
by dasil003 | 2025-08-13 14:30:53+00:00
Agreed, and ultimately it's fine because they're talking about products not technology. If these products go in a completely different direction and LLMs become obsolete the AI label will adapt just fine. Once these things hit common parlance there's no point in arguing technical specificity as 99.99% of the people using the term don't care, will never care, and language will follow their usage not the angry pedant.
by negrecio | 2025-08-13 14:31:02+00:00
> that's the wrong visa type to apply for

What other mechanisms are there to move to a country that has a quality of life you seek, and work for a company that you feel excited about? Because that's most of the motivation from the people (like me) that lived in an under-developed country, are qualified, and wanted to work on the top of the industry.

You work a bit out of college, some day you get an invite to an interview from a FAANG, you take the interview, and next thing you know you're moving to another country, working for a great salary, and in a huge company. You do life. You meet people, maybe a partner, maybe get married, maybe have a kid (after all, life doesn't stop). All this while on a temporary status with no easy way to progress out of it other than via time.

I have felt this pressure of not wanting to switch jobs and/or having to be extra careful in order to not put myself at risk of losing it. Specially with the current state of the industry. It has put me (and still does) at a disadvantage with my local peers. I am not saying this is necessarily good or bad, but it is a reality. The 'visa choice' is fictional, and not the most relevant part of the process.
by ghostfoxgod | 2025-08-13 14:31:10+00:00
Wow, that's quite well-thought-out plan. So you mentioned that this encrypted data and its credentials are kept at a physical location and designated one person to be the executor? Is this person someone you know or some firm which handles things like these?

And I don't want to sound rude, but what if the executor passes away before you and you are not aware about it, what's the backup plan?
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-08-13 14:31:16+00:00
You do 10 things at a small conference, everyone says "we need more of X{0}..X{9}", you have more things next year, more people, everyone wants more of whatever, more people, more problems with more people (security, cost, sponsors,..), more attention of mainstream media, more people next year, more push for politics, more people, more issues with more people, etc., and in the end, you get a boring business conference like many others.

I'm pretty sure that each of the niches could make their own conference now, at some small venue where a 100, 200, 500 people would come... SNES hacking and development? Sure, a small, really nice conference... but then someone would want NES too, and N64, and sega, and PS1, and corporate sponsors, and you end up with E3 instead of 50 retro developers and 150 curious people doing interesting stuff.
by flykespice | 2025-08-13 14:31:31+00:00
> The root cause: Google’s new aapt2 binary in AGP 8.12.0 started requiring CPU instructions (SSE4.1, SSSE3) that F-Droid’s build farm hardware doesn’t support. This is similar to a 2021 AGP 4.1.0 issue, but it has returned, and now affects hundreds of apps.

I don't know why they have enabled modern CPU flags for a simple intermediary tool that compiles the apk resources files, it was so unneccesary

Welp there goes my plans on savaging an old laptop to build my android apps.
by thmsths | 2025-08-13 14:31:36+00:00
How effective do they expect a measure like this to be? Once a car and its insurance are paid for, the marginal cost of a single trip is quite low. I seriously wonder how many people woke up that day and thought "instead of driving I will take the train today because they are waiving the $3 fee" not many I bet. If we want to encourage people to take public transports we need to keep them competitive against the car at all times not one random week per year.
Show HN: Claude Control – Run Claude Code from Slack and Discord
by pmihaylov | 2025-08-13 14:31:46+00:00
Hey,

I'm really excited to release Claude Control today.

You can check it out here - https://claudecontrol.com

It's an app which connects claude code to your Slack & Discord and lets you open PRs and iterate on them without leaving the chat app.

More importantly, it lets you share this with your whole team or community.

Quite frequently, non-technical people on the team or support engineers would like to understand how something in the product works, so this lets them get their answer without setting up anything, just by chatting with Claude Code.

I think it also unlocks a lot of other capabilities, a few that come to mind: - run it in your docs repo & let it answer questions for your slack/discord community - connect notion via mcp and let it work as an always available knowledge base in your slack

There's probably a lot more interesting use-cases.

It's currently free in open beta and I can't wait for you to try it out. I'm actively iterating on it and looking for some engaged early users to help me shape the app direction.

Hope you like it & find it useful!
by eqvinox | 2025-08-13 14:31:50+00:00
> Annual LIR fees at RIPE are around 2000€

This is a recent 2025 change; we (minimum size ISP) started around 1k, it went to 1.5k in 2023 and 1.8k in 2025.

> and includes trainings and tickets to meetings.

Only one or two (don't remember) tickets are included with the initial becoming a member, none thereafter.

> this seems easily doable.

It's not negligible but not a massive expense either. Even a minimum size ISP is quickly going to be ≥1k€/month on operational expenses. Uplink is the majority for us, location rental & electricity roughly equal at ca. a quarter to third of uplink cost each.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-13 14:32:00+00:00
> A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles

There is no “autonomous tractor law”, the headline is misleading. There is a farm safety law that has been in place since long before any autonomous production farm equipment existed which prohibits self-propelled equipment without the operator seat occupied at all times while in operation. It was not unheard of for people to get on and off low-speed self-propelled (that was not self-driving) farm equipment while in operation, in an attempt at efficiency/multitasking, with attendant safety risks. That’s what the law was directed at.