MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vonneumannstan | 2025-08-29 14:45:12+00:00
>Soon we will probably arrive at a point where these huge training runs must stop, because the performance improvement does not match the huge cost increase, and because the resulting model would be so expensive to run that the market for it would be too small.

I think we're a lot more likely to get to the limit of power and compute available for training a bigger model before we get to the point where improvement stops.
by 4MOAisgoodenuf | 2025-08-29 14:45:21+00:00
Sig Sauer Inc in Exeter, NH is a completely different company than SIG Sauer AG in Switzerland.

The Swiss Sig's have a sterling reputation. The P226 that entered the XM9 trials (against the Beretta 92) was imported from Switzerland by SAKO.

The US company didn't really start manufacturing until the 90s with the P229 and the Sig Pro series (where they were only tasked with making the plastic frames, not the more intricate lock work).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-29 14:45:38+00:00
This is true.

I knew a guy who used to record all his calls with companies, and would let them know they were being recorded, if they didn't have that disclaimer.

He would say "This call is being recorded." He told me that most of the companies hung up immediately, when he said that.

I never heard him say that his recording ever did him any good, though.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-29 14:45:45+00:00
Agree. I stopped using it because its basically frozen, I dont think they've done any updates, the lights are on but nobody's home.

If anyone who was an original stakeholder for Keybase is reading this, please bring it back in some way someday. I'm assuming Zoom probably made you guys sign some insane non-compete sadly.

In a sea of garbage chat services all built using Electron and other bloatware, Keybase was a breath of fresh air.
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-29 14:45:47+00:00
>The irony of this, is that Microsoft was trying to push CoPilot everywhere, however eventually Apple, Google and JetBrains have their own AI integrations, taking CoPilot out of the loop.

What is the irony? Microsoft integrated copilot in Vscode, bing, etc. Apple is integrating claude in Xcode, Jetbrains has their own AI.

Microsoft moved first with putting AI into their products then other companies put other AI into their products. Nothing about this seems ironic or in any way surprising.
by vorpalhex | 2025-08-29 14:45:59+00:00
> Over the past decade, I've been striving to spread joy, to do good, to be better. I'm trying so hard.

To give some advice that is loving but entirely unkind: knock it off.

No amount of spreading joy or do gooding is going to make you feel better. It can not, anymore than doing math homework will convince yourself that you are smart.

The problem is not what you want, it's how you want it. Or to put it another way, be the ocean not the wave.
by jmward01 | 2025-08-29 14:46:26+00:00
I just opted out. And then canceled my plan. The 5 year retention isn't part of the opt out and represents way too juicy of a target for them. Some time in the next 5 years another TOS change will happen, and another and another and eventually there won't be an opt out or I won't realize it and accidentally click yes. Privacy first. Period. Pay me to opt in and I may consider it.
by bArray | 2025-08-29 14:47:07+00:00
Reading the paper [1], I disagree, I think we are actually seeing an economic downturn due to the infinite spending during the COVID-19 pandemic. Borrowing was high, and now the interest on that borrowing is high.

> The patterns we observe in the data appear most acutely starting in late 2022, around the time of rapid proliferation of generative AI tools. They also hold for both occupations with a high share of college graduates and ones with a low college share, suggesting deteriorating education outcomes during COVID-19 do not drive our results.

The economic downturn was a delayed effect after high spending at low interest rates during COVID 19. In the UK [2], interest rates were as low as 0.1% (19 Mar 20). Whilst interest rates are low, it makes sense to invest heavily – and one of the largest investments most companies make is in employment. In late 2022 we saw interest rates raise above 1%, then 2%, and by mid-2023 they are above 5%. The largest cost to cut when borrowing is high is again, employment. For every employee, the overhead cost (at medium to large businesses) are 1.5x – 2x their wage. If you’re a big tech firm with 5 employees at $100k each, you could save $1mn a year cutting the right staff down. Apparently Microsoft have sacked some 15k employees this year [3], assuming an average of $100k a year wage, they may have just wiped up to $3bn off of their burn rate.

As the paper itself concedes:

> One possibility is that our results are explained by a general slowdown in technology hiring from 2022 to 2023 as firms recovered from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

AI is being trialled as an approach to maintaining growth despite significantly deep cuts. The Microsoft CEO is under the impression that up to 30% of their code is now written “by software” [4] (are we talking about automatically generated files at compilation, or LLMs?), apparently Google’s code is greater than 30%. I do not believe that AI has yet been linked with job losses convincingly.

[1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

[2] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/Bank-Rate.a...

[3] https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/microsoft-is-filte...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-3...
by Breza | 2025-08-29 14:47:12+00:00
Given how easy it is to spin up GCP resources with a text file, I'm surprised Gemini doesn't already offer this service. The prompt below gave me a 167-line file that uses Cloud Run, Cloud Built, Artifact Registry, Firestore, Maps, and IAM.

>I'm creating an app for dog walkers to optimize their routes. It should take all client locations and then look for dog-friendly cafes for the walker to get lunch and then find the best route. I'm vibe coding this on GCP. Please generate a Terraform file to allocate the necessary resources.
Tell HN: Crazy sloppiness in X.com Content Security Policy
by plehoux | 2025-08-29 14:48:31+00:00
TL;TR Just uncovered a backdoor into http://X.com’s stack... or more likely some giant sloppiness.

First let's define CSP, Content Security Policy. In simple terms, CSP is a browser-side firewall: it lets websites tell the browser exactly which domains it may load scripts, images, or exchange data with; blocking rogue code and data leaks. In my book, it’s one of the greatest inventions of the modern web.

When configured well, CSP can make your web app practically immune to XSS and data exfiltration.

A few weeks ago I was pondering if allowing “.yourdomain.com” or “.thirdparty.com” wildcards in CSP was risky, especially if you run side projects on sub-domains. A marketing microsite left to rot for years, with user upload capability could become an attacker’s exfil gateway.

Curious, I wondered how the big players handled their CSP. Were they whitelisting entire subdomain trees? I opened the dev console. First check: X… and to my surprise, I found hundreds of domains in their CSP.

I pasted the list into Grok and asked it to flag anything suspicious, and indeed, it found a few "connect-src" directives whitelisting three SnappyTV sub-domains, an old video product Twitter shut down in 2019.

The gotcha is that the domain expired in 2023 and is now controlled by unrelated third party pushing Korean casino ads. (see screenshots here https://x.com/plehoux/status/1961170683439853875)

That means if the new owner of this domain is a bad actor, with the right XSS, they can exfiltrate data from X, all with CSP's blessing.

I reported the finding through X's bug-bounty program. Their verdict: “best practice, not a vulnerability.” Maybe true in isolation, but still crazy they are not cleaning the mess (reported 45 days ago).

“Not exploitable today” can become “critical tomorrow” when conditions align.

I mean X threat model must include state actors...

I would suggest a business to:

1. Never let any business domain name expire. 2. Have their most conspiracist developer review their CSP on a recurring basis.

I'm crazy or, shouldn't this be fixed ASAP?
by 34679 | 2025-08-29 14:48:50+00:00
>If an LLM is often going to be wrong anyway, then being able to try prompts quickly and then iterate on those prompts, could possibly be more valuable than a slow higher quality output.

Before MoE was a thing, I built what I called the Dictator, which was one strong model working with many weaker ones to achieve a similar result as MoE, but all the Dictator ever got was Garbage In, so guess what came out?
by socksy | 2025-08-29 14:49:10+00:00
> The level of performanace of AI solutions is heavily related to the experience level of the developer and of the problem space being tackled - as this thread points out. > > Unfortunately the marketing around AI ignores this and makes every developer not using AI for coding seem like a dinosauer, even though they might well be faster in solving their particular problems.

You're not necessarily wrong, but I think it's worth noting that very few developers are only ever coding deep in their one domain that they're good at. There's just too many things to be deeply good at everything. For example, it's common that infra and CI tasks are stuff that most developers haven't learned by heart, because you don't tend to touch them very often.

Claude shines here — I've made a lot more useful GitHub Actions jobs recently, because while I could automate something, if I know I'm going to have to look up API docs (especially multiple APIs I'm not super familiar with) then I tend to figure that the automation will lose out the trade-off between doing the task (see https://xkcd.com/1205/). Claude being able to hash out those rapidly, and in a way that's easily verifiable that it's doing the right thing, has changed that arithmetic for me substantially.
Ask HN: Avoiding AI slop in music services
by kermatt | 2025-08-29 14:49:20+00:00
TL;DR - Are any of the music streaming services less prone to obvious AI generated garbage?

I have been a user of Spotify since their early days. The "Release Radar" was the first thing I looked at on Friday mornings, and was a great way to keep up with favorited artists, and discover new related ones.

Today, it is full of AI generated trash. The trick I see is established artists used as the second in the list of collaborators, but in the first 5 seconds of a stream it is obvious this is false.

I suppose it's possible Spotify has a revenue driven interest to let this continue, given the number of articles I have seen about this trend. But when it comes to music, I am less inclined to be a community moderator of obvious spam. Allowing anyone to upload tracks under another band's name is a terrible idea.

My Spotify subscription won't be renewing in the next billing cycle, and in the meantime I'm looking into alternatives that provide a good, curated discovery feature.

Recommendations?
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-29 14:49:26+00:00
I don't defend it but the specifics never bothered me. They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before. So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.

In my mind it's like suddenly declaring that blue cars are illegal, and they made a color-shifting car that is blue except when the authorities are looking at it.

It is wrong in the sense that it is normalizion of deviance, however. We live in a society and if we don't like a law or regulation the correct response is to get it legally changed, not to ignore it and cheat.
by jamincan | 2025-08-29 14:49:36+00:00
I drive a VW with lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking. It won't change lanes for me, but aside from the requirements that I have my hands on the wheel, could otherwise drive itself on the highway.

I commute mainly on the highway about 45-1hr each way every day and it makes a big difference for driver fatigue. I was honestly a bit surprised. Even though, I'm steering, it requires less effort. I don't have my foot on the gas and I'm not having to adjust my speed constantly.

Critically, though, I do have to pay attention to my surroundings. It's not taking so much out of my driving that I can't stay engaged to what's happening around me.
Ask HN: Is any logic instinctive, or all trained?
by davidajackson | 2025-08-29 14:49:51+00:00
Is there evidence that understanding causality (action -> reaction, cause -> effect, etc.) is instinctive or does it need to be trained in humans? It seems obvious that humans need to be taught some forms of logic, like logical fallacies, but are there some that are instinctive? How has this been 'proved'?
by ilc | 2025-08-29 14:49:57+00:00
You be you. You will find your people and your place.

It may just be that Anthropic isn't it.

I had a company that was like a white elephant for me for a long time. Got in there, and I will say: It was one of the worst experiences I had in my career.

Not all that glitters is gold, and happiness is often only discovered when it is gone. If you can avoid those two pitfalls in life. You'll do well better than me.
by anonfordays | 2025-08-29 14:50:19+00:00
>Who is opposing the terms allow/deny and why?

I am. As a BIPOC, we've been denied rights since the founding of the US. When I read "denylist," I can see my ancestors there, on a list to be denied the right to vote. It's not inclusive to use words like "deny" in the capacity of denying access to things.
by Zanfa | 2025-08-29 14:50:19+00:00
> I click “add photo”, the system dialog opens, I select a photo, and then that gets sent to the app. Somehow, Apple managed to screw that up.

That’s exactly how it works for me in iOS at the moment.

In addition, I can see the list of photos each app has been granted access to in Settings > Privacy & Security > Photos.
by RyanMu | 2025-08-29 14:50:33+00:00
Gemini Storybook is an AI-powered platform that brings stories to life. Users can create, customize, and explore interactive storybooks with just a few clicks. Whether you’re a parent looking to craft bedtime tales, an educator designing engaging classroom materials, or a creator building your own narrative world, Storybook makes storytelling simple and inspiring.

With advanced AI, Storybook can generate vivid plots, charming characters, and beautiful illustrations tailored to your ideas. You can edit, personalize, and share stories instantly, making it a perfect tool for learning, entertainment, or creative expression.

Our mission is to make storytelling accessible to everyone—no writing or drawing skills required. From children’s picture books to interactive adventures, Storybook empowers imagination and helps stories travel across cultures, languages, and generations.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-29 14:50:33+00:00
Hang in there, it gets better and the skills come back. From my github:

2,350 contributions in 2021 2,661 contributions in 2022 381 contributions in 2023 <--- burnout 794 contributions in 2024 <--- recovery 1,632 contributions in 2025 (so far)

My recovery took about 18 months. It took time, and a lot of rest. I'd have to sleep like 12 hours a day sometimes.
by malicka | 2025-08-29 14:50:34+00:00
No obligation, obviously, no one argues that. The issue is tone.

> Clueless software developers should not be messing with kernel settings like irq bindings. Software that does that is not worth my time.

Come on, man. If you don’t want to help, just don’t respond. If you want to warn someone against something, just be bare-minimum polite. It’s easy.
by jstrieb | 2025-08-29 14:51:02+00:00
Nobody that I'd be using this analogy with is currently using LLMs for tasks that are covered by RLVF. They're asking models for factual information about the real world (Google replacement), or to generate text (write a cover letter), not the type of outputs that are verifiable within formal systems—by definition the type of output that RLVF is intended to improve. The actor analogy is still helpful for providing intuition to non-technical people who don't know how to think about LLMs, but do use them.

Also, unless I am mistaken, RLVF changes the training to make LLMs less likely to hallucinate, but in no way does it make hallucination impossible. Under the hood, the models still work the same way (after training), and the analogy still applies, no?
by terminalshort | 2025-08-29 14:51:04+00:00
I'm curious as to what's different about any of the autopilot deaths and the 40,000 non-autopilot car wreck deaths that happen every year in the US other than the fact that one is considered news and the other isn't. I'm also curious as to how this would ever affect anyone's decision to buy a Tesla given that use of autopilot / FSD is entirely optional.
by Razengan | 2025-08-29 14:51:04+00:00
I wanted to try it out so I bought a Pro subscription. No way to purchase through iOS so I had to enter my card number. I cancelled renewal and tried to remove my payment method as per usual practice, but I couldn't. Tried to find a way to get support but the send button on their chatbot box was disabled for me (on Safari if that matters). Regardless of the quality of the AI, that experience ticked me off enough to file a "F you" chargeback with my bank.
by mallowdram | 2025-08-29 14:51:37+00:00
It's science challenging CS. If there are no such things as symbols and metaphors in reality, and these are arbitrary, how possibly does it stay referential? It can't. It falls apart, language can't produce itself. It was denoted by Aristotle, the cognitive mapping people Okeefe, Moser, Kandel deciphered this in 1973 and now it feeds from mythological thought into AI "psychosis". Solve the problem at the source units, these descriptions like Alexander are arbitrary.
by londons_explore | 2025-08-29 14:51:56+00:00
I would far prefer the service use my data to work better and take a few privacy risks.

People die all the time from cancer or car accidents. People very rarely die from data leaks.

Some countries like Sweden make people's private financial data public information - and yet their people seem happier than ever. Perhaps privacy isn't as important as we think for a good society.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-29 14:52:12+00:00
If a take-home or anything else (automated half-hour online test or whatever) taking more than a couple minutes and not requiring as much time investment from them as you comes before they've winnowed down much of the field—if it's used as any kind of screener—I'd be out. That time's better spent sending more applications (or, IDK, drilling leetcode) if there are more than a very-few candidates still in the running for a given position.

If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-29 14:52:16+00:00
Say $5/lb (retail price, surely they don't pay this): $3000 for 600lb.

Using cost as a proxy for the intrinsic value of things, I think just the glass in a cow-sized display case will be more than that, let alone with a refrigeration system built into it.

And if we want to go further, think of the embedded costs of the building it's in, and then include staffing, energy, maintenance, etc that's being "burned" by this exhibit!
by clipclopflop | 2025-08-29 14:52:34+00:00
Following up on this - the actual 'self driving' part of the HW stack is an entirely separate board with 2x custom ARM chips on it. The HW/SW is much more locked down and the OS/Data is not accessible. I believe a lot of the self-driving info gleaned by types like green were built up from the first generation of Model S cars where the 'self driving' HW was much less defensible and it was much easier to gain access to it.
by __loam | 2025-08-29 14:52:52+00:00
I wonder if the popularity of a language that is dynamically typed, interpreted, and incapable of using OS features like threads has wasted more money than its proponents claim to have saved in so called development time. Languages like Go have existed for over a decade but we're still writing critical services in Python because we insist on teaching new programmers this garbage first before throwing them into the wilderness with no other tools.
by sippeangelo | 2025-08-29 14:53:01+00:00
Was the whole lib and website vibe coded? I can't find any instructions on how to use it, the repo is for the website itself and the readme is AI blurb that doesn't make me any wiser.

// Test your AI system const results = await injector.runTests(yourAISystem);

???

Even the "prompt-injector" NPM package is something completely different. Does this project even exist?
by adamfisk | 2025-08-29 14:53:17+00:00
You're dramatically underestimating the sophistication of these groups. Think about it: these people are risking their freedom by working on this technology in any capacity. They are not naive to the risks of the work nor are they naive to the technical threats facing the software. In fact, the opposite is true. Western VPN companies are very much naive because the risks their users face are much less severe, and at a technical level they don't require anywhere near the same level of sophistication. They're primarily just WireGuard and OpenVPN, which are trivial for censors to block.

Tor is great, and they do great research on censorship circumvention, but it isn't used at any significant scale in these countries.
by sunrunner | 2025-08-29 14:53:17+00:00
I really like this idea. Every so often I’ll come across a weeks, months or years old thread that I’d like to have been able to participate in at the time or that has interesting or useful information.

I guess you haven’t figured out the time travel issue yet, but being able to find quality older threads is definitely something I like.

Perhaps a filter option to help people find specific kinds of topic could be added? :)
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-29 14:53:20+00:00
I never thought of it like this before, but I think you are absolutely correct. 'Laws are for other people' might be the best descriptor of this phenomena. Its how American exceptionalism manifests at the level of the individual. Or maybe the other way around, this is core American ethic and exceptionalism at the national level is just the aggregate result.
by mindslight | 2025-08-29 14:53:38+00:00
They answer is that they're both funded by and held hostage by entrenched corporate interests. The Democrats in safe blue states are allowed to say and propose whatever lofty reforms they'd like (more fuel for the fire), but when it comes time to vote on a bill, the "moderates" in purple states fall in line to kill it and/or add enough loopholes and pork that the reforms end up pretty hollow. They're also fully supported when they ham up the identity politics and other divisive topics that encourage the plebs to fight one another.

The voting public gets tired of the squabbling and seeing the constructive type of reform fail, and switches its attention to the other professional party. The "reforms" then put forth by Republicans are all about getting rid of restrictions on corporate interests, appealing to a fallacy that restrictions on corpos are akin to restrictions on individuals (from the same vein as Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"). When the Republicans get the green light, it's then full speed ahead for sidelining the US government in favor of unaccountable corporate power - as we've seen demonstrated in stark relief with Trump.

People will then slowly realize they've been had, and support for Democrats will grow. But any attempt to rebuild what got destroyed then fails (the original dynamic), and the cycle repeats.
by braza | 2025-08-29 14:53:44+00:00
Of course, languages always have their pivotal moment when they become a factor widely adopted in the whole world.

I cannot say for the back and general usage, but at least for AI/ML definitely that moment happened between 2014 and 2016 when Theano, Caffe, and later 2015/16 Tensorflow cemented Python as the default for ML applications.