MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-08-24 15:31:29+00:00
> the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.

This is the soft fraud mentality: If a company offers meal delivery for people who are working late who need to eat at the office and then people start staying late (without working) and then taking the food home to eat, that’s not consistent with the policies.

It was supposed to be a consolation if someone had to (or wanted to, as occurred with a lot of our people who liked to sleep in) stay late to work. It was getting used instead for people to avoid paying out of pocket for their own dinners even though they weren’t doing any more work.

Which is why we can’t have nice things: People see these policies as an opportunity to exploit them rather than use them as intended.
by BeauNer | 2025-08-24 15:31:41+00:00
Brave researchers have revealed a troubling vulnerability in Perplexity’s Comet that shows just how risky AI-powered browsers can be. The flaw, known as an indirect prompt injection, allowed attackers to trick the browser into carrying out hidden commands.

The research was led by Brave engineer Artem Chaikin and detailed with VP of Privacy and Security Shivan Kaul Sahib. They found that Comet could not tell the difference between a user’s instructions and malicious text hidden inside a webpage. That oversight opened the door to serious account takeovers and data theft.

In their demonstration, a Reddit comment with invisible text instructed Comet to visit Perplexity’s account page, grab the user’s email, intercept a one-time password from Gmail, and then send the stolen data back to the attacker. Once the victim clicked “summarize page,” the AI did the rest automatically. No additional input was required from the user.

This kind of attack bypasses traditional web safeguards such as same-origin policy and CORS. Those protections normally prevent websites from stealing data across different domains, but when an AI assistant has full control of the browser, the rules break down. Because the AI operates with the full privileges of a logged-in user, it can move freely between services and access sensitive accounts without the user realizing what is happening.
by somewhereoutth | 2025-08-24 15:32:12+00:00
> genuinely incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy

Having spent some time in the US, my theory is that things have got so complicated over there (or more precisely nobody is incentivized to make them simple), that it has fried people's minds. They just respond to the last stimulus, having given up trying to make sense of anything, as they attempt to get through each day as best they can.

Healthcare is the obvious example, but I'd say that that is representative of most things in the US, in terms of being a minefield where one foot wrong can wreck your life.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-08-24 15:32:26+00:00
Beyond being a warning about AI, which is helpful, you really should be taking proper security precautions anyway. Personally, I have a separate browser that runs no extensions set aside that's solely dedicated to doing finance- and other PII-type things. It's set to start on private browsing mode, clear all cookies on quit and I use it only for that. There may be more things that I could do but that meets my threat threshold for now. I go through this for exactly the reason in the tweet.
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-24 15:32:34+00:00
So just for context about 10% of solar in the US depends on NEPA approval [1]

Then 4% relies on Federal lands [2]

1 -https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/how-long-does-it-ta...

2 - https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/program/2025/vast-federal-l...
by fluidcruft | 2025-08-24 15:33:09+00:00
Granted I've only been using Claude for a short time, but in my experience it tends to write code that matches the style of the code it's editing. Which is sort of a "no duh" thing in retrospect but I hadn't considered that. That is to say old crappy code I wrote long ago when I was dumber gets old-crappy dumber code style suggestions from Claude. And newer better-practices code that is very careful gets Claude to follow that style as well.

It wasn't something I considered at first but it makes sense if you think about text prediction models and infilling and training by reading code. The statistics of style matching what you are doing against similar things. You're not going to paint a photorealistic chunk into a hole of an impressionist painting, ya know?

So in my experience if you give it "code that avoids the common issues" that works like a style it will follow. But if you're working with a codebase that looks like it doesn't "avoid those common issues" I would expect it to follow suit and suggest code that you would expect from codebases that don't "avoid those common issues". If the input code looks like crappy code, I would expect it to statistically predict output code that looks like crappy code. And I'm not talking about formatting (formatting is for formatters), it's things like which functions and steps are used to accomplish whatever. That sort of thing. At least without some sort of specific prompting it's not going to jump streams.

Edit: one amusing thing you can do is ask Claude to predict attributes of the developers of the code and their priorities and development philosophy (i.e. ask Claude to write a README that includes these cultural things). I have a theory it gives you an idea about the overall codesmell Claude is assigning to the project.

Again I am very new to these tools and have only used claude-code because the command line interface and workflow didn't make me immediately run for the hills the way other things have. So no idea how other systems work, etc because I immediately bounced on them in the past. My use of claude-code started as an "okay fine why not give these things the young guns can't shut up about a shot on the boring shit and maybe clear out some backlog" for making chores in projects that I usually hate doing at least a little interesting but I've expanded my use significantly after gaining experience with it. But I have noticed it behave very differently in different code bases and the above is how I currently interpret that.
by chermi | 2025-08-24 15:33:13+00:00
My optimistic take is that the left takes this + the slight momentum from books/ideas like Abundance and coalesce into a pro-build anti red-tape yimby party.

That's very optimistic. And yeah, I see how this comment is kind of the equivalent of bringing up Obama or Hillary or something when it's about Trump's bullshit. To be very clear, I hate any efforts to impede energy build out.
by 05 | 2025-08-24 15:33:45+00:00
> Thanks to Zephyr.

That only gets you proper support for a couple vendors (Nordic, ST), everything else is a nightmare. Even with better-supported vendors, there are whole swaths of things that aren't properly supported and you need to directly call code from underlying vendor SDK to make things work. That bodge makes the whole project non-portable. Even some simple things like ADC DMA on ST F1 series..
by syntacticsalt | 2025-08-24 15:34:18+00:00
My opinion of Gwern's piece is that some of the arguments he makes don't require correlations. For example, A/B tests of differences in means using a zero difference null hypothesis will reject the null, given enough data.

In that A/B testing scenario, I think if someone wants to test whether the difference is zero, that's fine, but if the effect size is small, they shouldn't claim that there's any meaningful difference. I believe the pharma literature calls this scenario equivalence testing.

Assuming a positive difference in means is desirable, I think testing for a null hypothesis of a change of at least some positive value (e.g., +5% of control) is a better idea. I believe the pharma literature calls this scenario superiority testing.

I believe superiority testing is preferable to equivalence testing, and in professional settings, I have made this case to managers. I have not succeeded in persuading them, and thus do the equivalence testing they request.

I don't think the idea of a zero null hypothesis is necessarily mathematically unsound. In cases like the difference in means, a zero null hypothesis is well-posed. However, I agree with you that there are better practices, like a null hypothesis incorporating a nonzero effect.

I don't entirely agree with the arguments Gwern puts forth in the Implications section because some of them seem at odds with one another. Betting on sparsity would imply neglecting some of the correlations he's arguing are so essential to capture. The bit about algorithmic bias strikes me as a bizarre proposition to include with little supporting evidence, especially when there are empirical examples of algorithmic bias.

What I find lacking about Gwern's piece is that it's a bit like lighting a match to widespread statistical practice, and then walking away. Yes, I think null hypothesis statistical testing is widely overused, and that statistical significance alone is not a good determinant of what constitutes a "discovery". I agree that modeling is hard, and that "everything is correlated" is, to an extent, true because the correlations are not literally or exactly zero. But if you're going to take the strong stance that null hypothesis statistical testing is meaningless, I believe you need to provide some kind of concrete alternative. I don't think Gwern's piece explicitly advocates an alternative, and it only hints the alternative might be causal inference. Asking people who may not have much statistics training to leap from frequentist concepts taught in high school to causal inference would be a big ask. If Gwern isn't asking that, then I'd want to know what a suggested alternative would be. Notably, Gwern does not mention testing for nonzero positive effects (e.g., in the vein of the "c > 0.3" case above). If there isn't an alternative, I'm not sure what the argument is. Don't use statistics, perhaps? It's tough to say.
by karmakaze | 2025-08-24 15:34:22+00:00
Maybe this is a misconception or misrepresentation of pair-programming, at least compared to my experience. One person isn't supposed to be doing both. You're either navigating/explaining or driving/doing. Pair programming isn't about one person doing everything and another person watching and trying to keep up. It's about communicating and sharing an understanding, like a realtime/interactive PR description/review while writing. Of course there are times where one person will simply say "let me write this out and discuss after" and go at it for a short while, but it should be the exception rather than the rule in settings where it worked best for me.
by reikonomusha | 2025-08-24 15:34:29+00:00
S-expressions make the user interface to code generation, a component to hot-reloading, more facile. It's not a triviality or gimmick in this context.

We can see from OP that it's actually quite annoying to specify code in a non-S-expression language (or really any language lacking a meta-syntax), usually requiring either

- stuffing and interpolating strings

- building ASTs with API functions provided by the implementation in a tiresome or verbose manner

But you're right that there are more aspects to hot-reloading than just the syntax and data structure.

Common Lisp gets away with it because it actually defines the semantics of redefinition of functions and classes. For instance, the standard says what will happen to all existing FOO object instances in memory if I change

(defclass foo () ((a :initarg :a)))

to

(defclass foo () ((a :initarg :a) (b :initarg :b)))

and even lets the programmer customize the behavior of such a redefinition.

Few if any languages go through the trouble of actually defining these semantics, especially in the context of a compiled language (like Common Lisp), making all but the simplest instances of reloading code well defined.
by eliaspro | 2025-08-24 15:34:30+00:00
The Germany municipality of Tübingen implemented a "Verpackungssteuer" (tax on single-use packaging, utensils). It was fought by the local McDonald's franchisee up to the highest relevant court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) and finally approved.

Dozens of other German municipalities were just waiting for the final decision to implement their own local tax.
by taormina | 2025-08-24 15:34:33+00:00
Grok hasn't gotten better. OpenAI hasn't gotten better. Claude Code with Opus and Sonnet I swear are getting actively worse. Maybe you only use them for toy projects, but attempting to get them to do real work in my real codebase is an exercise in frustration. Yes, I've done meaningful prompting work, and I've set up all the CLAUDE.md files, and then it proceeds to completely ignores everything I said, all of the context I gave, and just craps out something completely useless. It has accomplished a small amount of meaningful work, exactly enough that I think I'm neutral instead of in the negative in terms of work:time if I have just done it all myself.

I get to tell myself that it's worth it because at least I'm "keeping up with the industry" but I honestly just don't get the hype train one bit. Maybe I'm too senior? Maybe the frameworks I use, despite being completely open source and available as training data for every model on the planet are too esoteric?

And then the top post today on the front page is telling me that my problem is that I'm bothering to supervise and that I should be writing an agent framework so that it can spew out the crap in record time..... But I need to know what is absolute garbage and what needs to be reverted. I will admit that my usual pattern has been to try and prompt it into better test coverage/specific feature additions/etc on the nights and weekends, and then I focus my daytime working hours on reviewing what was produced. About half the time I review it and have to heavily clean it up to make it usable, but more often than not, I revert the whole thing and just start on it myself from scratch. I don't see how this counts as "better".
by SamuelAdams | 2025-08-24 15:34:44+00:00
I am speculating, but I think the real motive for cancelling renewables is to appeal to coal counties in the USA.

Coal is in a scary place right now in the US, see this as an example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1mmqwd3/i_live_in...

Basically coal is less profitable and more expensive in places that have always been coal counties. The only thing to do in these areas is mine coal, so the concern is that entire regions will be rendered worthless if coal collapses.

Which means local residents cannot sell their homes without taking significant losses, and they probably lose their jobs in coal, which manifests into a poverty trap for the entire town.

And there are hundreds of these towns all through Appalachia.

So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
by programmersn | 2025-08-24 15:35:18+00:00
I've read posts online complaining about the same thing. I just don't know how widespread is it ?

Privacy-wise, I wanna use the rise of high-end local LLMs (gemma 270M, HRM, LFM2, etc.) to make it viable fully locally.

I also want it to be highly customizable, so other techy people can plug their favorite models, tinker with system prompts, fine-tune the model to their own projects, etc.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-08-24 15:35:54+00:00
The protocols already exist. Deploy an I2P router for an effective darknet on the internet, or set up Yggdrasil for a next-generation decentralized & private internet alternative.

An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.

At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
by declan_roberts | 2025-08-24 15:36:03+00:00
CPI energy prices have risen for the last 10 years steadily, and is now going parabolic.

Maybe some forms of green energy have helped in some areas and times of day, but they have done nothing to stop the climb.

It's time to try something other than solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices, and may be making it worse (TOU energy plans are becoming the norm because of the broken duty cycle of solar)
by Aurornis | 2025-08-24 15:36:30+00:00
If a company says you have permission to spend money on something for a purpose, but employees are abusing that to spend money on something that clearly violates that stated purpose, that’s into fraud territory.

This is why I call it the soft fraud mentality: When people see some fraudulent spending and decide that it’s fine because they don’t think the policy is important.

Managers didn’t care. It didn’t come out of their budget.

It was the executives who couldn’t ignore all of the people hanging out in the common areas waiting for food to show up and then leaving with it all together, all at once. Then nothing changed after the emails reminding them of the purpose of the policy.

When you look at the large line item cost of daily food delivery and then notice it’s not being used as intended, it gets cut.
by sylware | 2025-08-24 15:36:52+00:00
Finally fixing gov web interop? Aka noscript/basic (x)html browser support for critical online services (at least)?

They have to keep in mind, 99% of the time won't be writing web stuff... but keeping the sites available and safe, where the real job is for any public site... and with the current mess of software and hardware... GOOD LUCK WITH THAT! (I dropped the ball years back already, unless with gigantic-enormous resources exclusively allocated to that, which usually never the case, or does not last long)
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-24 15:37:40+00:00
> Fun fact, people in California are paying nearly twice the price for energy than the rest of the US.

People in California are paying massive amounts for power distribution. The utilities themselves are paying very little for power generation -- for example, they pay 4c/kWh for a solar+batteries plant build in 2022.

> but doesn't put out anywhere near the power of nuclear.

We have > 250GW of solar and 97 GW of nuclear. Nuclear produced 779TWh and solar 303TWh in 2024. They are quite comparable.

> If California wants to do solar, it can! Though it will likely go the way of the rail project, the firefighting org etc

California already has a lot of solar and batteries.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-24 15:37:57+00:00
> Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?

I don't get your point.

What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.

It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
by LeafItAlone | 2025-08-24 15:38:06+00:00
>If you travel every week for work, I would be booking full fare (refundable), not non-basic restricted fares.

Why? I don’t fly that much, especially for work, and I’ve never had a problem getting to use my credits from cancelling flights. The price difference between credit-refundable and full refundable is usually significant and doesn’t offer me anything.
by baq | 2025-08-24 15:38:07+00:00
it's absolutely the wrong approach.

software should be performance tested, but you don't want a situation when time of single iteration is dominated by duration of functional tests and build time. the faster software builds and tests, the quicker solutions get delivered. if giving your developers 64GB or RAM instead of 32GB halves test and build time, you should happily spend that money.
by nowittyusername | 2025-08-24 15:38:58+00:00
Correct me if I am wrong, but by the looks of things on that chart the reduction in token use and the better score are all related to the fact that this method used 512 samples.... This doesn't seem to be of any use for local running agents or anything that has severe vram restrictions such as local models that people can run at home. So this would only benefit enterprise level systems no?
by whatisthiseven | 2025-08-24 15:39:01+00:00
This is what-aboutism and sealioning taken to a disingenious level

Total world oil revenues: $4.2 trillion in 2025, market cap of $7.2 trillion in 2023

Total world solar/wind revenues: estimate $500 billion, so 1/8th. Market cap between $1.02 trillion and $1.51 trillion in 2024.

Oil, gas, and coal have spent: $150 million on federal lobbying in 2024, and has consistently spent over $100 million annually since 2006.

At the state level, hard to get data for. In CA alone, it was estimated $40m in 2024.

For the renewables industry in 2024: $60 million in federal lobbying in 2024. That has increased over the years, unlike oil and gas.

At the state level, renewables spent in CA: $4.68 million on state-level lobbying, or 1/10th.

In conclusion: oil and gas have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince politicians alone to support their cause for years, whereas renewables has been increasing their spend and is only a fraction of it.

Yes, both sides are putting money into it. No, both sides are not equal. FWIW, democrats support oil and gas just fine: under Obama oil and gas exports and refining grew to record highs, just as they did under Trump, and as they did under Biden.

The US is the largest oil exporter in the world. That has happened despite the mix of politicians holding majority of SCOTUS, Congress, and President. That has happened despite the small fraction of spending from renewables.

We prefer renewables because, unlike oil and gas, they aren't rejecting their role in climate impact: renewables do studies to understand them, and they are always far lower than oil and gas, an inconvenient truth the anti-renewable crowd wants to deny because they want to shout a wind turbine killing some birds is somehow equivalent to the millions of birds coal kills every year, along with the cancers it causes in humans, and the climate change, and the dirty business of mining the coal, and the water needed to cool the turbines. Yes, renewables obviously have some environmental impact. Its always less in total.

We prefer renewables because they aren't profitting to TRILLIONS of dollars and poisoning political discourse to spread lies about climate change. We prefer renewables because it means less cases of asthma. It means less control over the world's stage by extractive autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. It means less cancer, less pollutants, less damage overall. Less oil spills.

Maybe we prefer renewables because we have a lot of reasons to prefer them, despite the relatively small amounts of cash flows desperately trying to prevent oil and gas from KILLING their industry. Which, btw, oil and gas have now successfully done. Renewables are significantly hampered under this administration.
by chermi | 2025-08-24 15:39:31+00:00
I'm pretty sure residential solar is harder for a utility to handle that commercial/utility-scale. Residential solar was a silly thing to prioritize, given the other options. I mean, it's overall good, but given the (in)competency of the utilities and the state of the grid, we'd be much better off we hadn't been idiots about nuclear for 50 years.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-24 15:40:03+00:00
The thing is, if you’re burning fossil fuels to generate power there’s not much reason to prefer coal over natural gas. The latter is cheaper and cleaner and once pipelines are in place, you don’t need to truck it around.

Coal is dead and it’s not coming back. Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.

Speaking frankly, the way politicians keep selling the fantasy of it making a comeback is cruel.