MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kyboren | 2025-08-06 18:03:05+00:00
Precisely. It's important to understand what modern digital advertising really is: Population-scale digital pimping. They put your ass on the RTB street to turn tricks. You get mindfucked by--and maybe catch some viruses from--any John who wants to take a crack at you. In return, you get this nice cheap TV/Youtube/Gmail/article.

Now imagine the value of ChatGPT with a similar mindfucking-as-a-service business model. People are using ChatGPT as therapists, virtual partners, an always-reaffirming and helpful companion. They aren't just exposed fleetingly to ads, they're in bed with them, anthropomorphizing them, "talking" to them more than they talk to their own mother. The opportunity to exert influence over the bitch's behavior and thought patterns is an astronomical-scale goldmine.

Population-scale digital pimping is worth trillions. How much is population-scale digital grooming worth?
by cogman10 | 2025-08-06 18:03:51+00:00
Maven builds are deterministic (so long as you don't have SNAPSHOT dependencies). The version resolution is insane but deterministic. You'll only break that determinism if you change the dependencies.

That's precisely because maven doesn't support version ranges. Maven artifacts are also immutable.

Maven also supports manual override when the insane resolution strategy fails that's the "dependencymanagement" section.
by cthalupa | 2025-08-06 18:03:55+00:00
These hormones occur naturally in the body. We found an analog in nature that behaves a bit differently in that it is longer lasting. Now we have synthetic versions based on that understanding.

And the gila monsters have their own circulating serum levels of exenedin-4. It's produced in their salivary glands - it's a component in their venom, yes, but they also ingest it themselves, particularly when eating.

But these are fundamentally analogs to our own hormones that have been tweaked to increase desirable properties. It's not like we isolated some random compound that our body has never had to deal with before. (Not that I think that that would necessarily be an indicator we shouldn't use it, either. I don't see why any of this is a strong argument to you, even if your understanding was correct.)
by patcon | 2025-08-06 18:04:13+00:00
I love this article for how it gets the thinking, and I love your response.

I've been aware of similar dynamic in politics, where the collective action/intelligence of the internet destroyed all the old signals politicians used to rely on. Emails don't mean anything like letters used to mean. Even phone calls are automated now. Your words and experience matter more in a statistical big data sense, rather than individually.

---

This puts me in sci-fi world-building mode, wondering what the absurd extension is... maybe it's just proving burned time investment. So maybe in an imagined world where LLMs are available to all as extensions of thought via neural implant, you can't be taken seriously for even the simplest direct statements unless you prove your mind sat and did nothing (aka wasted it's time) for some arbitrary period of time. So if you sat in the corner and registered inactive boredom for 2h, and attached a non-renewable proof of that to a written word, then people would take your perspective seriously, because you expended (though not "gave") your limited attention/time to the request for some significant amount of time
by Alupis | 2025-08-06 18:05:03+00:00
You think the population of Japan will be ok with banning iPhones because their governments thinks other web browsers should run on the devices too?

How many iPhone users, outside of a small group of "techies" are even aware there are other mobile browsers?

Think about your parents or grandparents - not you, someone who has vastly more knowledge in this area. How many "normals" really care... I'd wager near zero.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-06 18:05:15+00:00
I'm wondering what kind of technological change would be large enough to force the popping of this bubble, as opposed to the likely economic or other triggers?

Would another order of magnitude decrease in the amount of compute for a model do it?

Would the cost of compute falling by an order of magnitude in a black swan event?

Or, perhaps Jevan's paradox[1] kicks in, and we just eat up the extra capacity in new uses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Ask HN: Should schools have a subject where students can think about whatever?
by amichail | 2025-08-06 18:05:39+00:00
Specifically, schools could have a subject called "Unstructured Thinking", where students spend 30 minutes thinking on their own — without external sources — about whatever they want, and then write about any interesting (non-private) thoughts or ideas they come up with.

Would this be a good idea?
by whimsicalism | 2025-08-06 18:05:39+00:00
You can see not from clicking on their name, I wouldn’t assume every positive comment about China is a ‘shill’ - there are many people unhappy with our current neo-cold war.

Astroturf/shill accusations are also against the HN ethos. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11257034
by generalizations | 2025-08-06 18:05:49+00:00
I made an STT tool (guess who wrote it for me) and have a bluetooth mic. I spend 10 minutes pacing and telling the AI what I need it to build, and how to build it. Then it goes off and builds it, and meanwhile I go to the next Claude Code instance on a different project, and do the same thing there. Then do the same for a third, and maybe by that time the first is ready for more direction. Depending on how good you are with context switching and quickly designing complex systems and communicating those designs, you can get a whole lot done in parallel. The problems you're describing can be solved, if you're careful and detailed.

It's a brave, weird and crazy new world. "The future is now, old man."
by o11c | 2025-08-06 18:06:07+00:00
First, note that this complexity is actually worse for highly dense graphs, where `m` (number of edges) dominates rather than `n` (number of nodes) [note that a useful graph always has `m > n`, and often `m <= 2d n`, where `d` is the number of dimensions and the 2 is because we're using directed edges. Ugh, how do we compare log powers?].

Additionally, the `n` in the complexity only matters if for the Dijkstra approach you actually need a frontier of size proportional to `n` [remember that for open-grid-like graphs, the frontier is limited is limited to `sqrt(n)` for a plane, and for linear-ish graphs, the frontier is even more limited].

Also note that the "sorting barrier" only applies to comparison-based sorts, not e.g. various kinds of bucket sorts (which are easy to use when your weights are small integers). Which seems to be part of what this algorithm does, though I haven't understood it fully.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-06 18:06:08+00:00
You misunderstand what an argument from authority is if this is your justification for it. It's not "authority" meaning they can tell you what to do but instead meaning they are an expert on the subject matter. It is valid when a consensus of experts all say the same thing but if there is not an expert consensus then it starts to become more questionable.

In this context, if many independent legal experts and scholars are looking at the decisions being made by the three branches of government and saying there could be bad ramifications, the argument from authority falls flat; there is another authority saying the first authority is wrong.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-06 18:06:12+00:00
But that part is on Apple. They could have made it Japan SKU exclusive. It isn't solely because it's their policy that an iPhone is universally an iPhone and there will never ever be Verizon backplates or brown box CostCo specials with plastic backplates. No one else cares, so everyone else make FeliCa enabled versions as Japan specials.
by m463 | 2025-08-06 18:06:54+00:00
I think the early french film - A Trip to the Moon - was pirated by edison and others in the united states and the original filmmakers didn't make any money

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon

specifically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon#Release
by lelele | 2025-08-06 18:06:59+00:00
>> I'm curious what emacs users are doing these days.

Still using it because of the massive amount of customizations accumulated in a time span close to yours. I'm often tempted to switch, but if I look back, what other editor would have served me for ~20 years, mostly unchanged? I remember writing lots of macros for Visual Studio 6 and then Microsoft revamped the object system of their IDE with .NET. My understanding is that Visual Studio plugins may not work from an IDE version to the next. Yes, customizing Emacs requires time, but so does relearning a new environment every few years.

I do use other editors, however, for things that would require too much time to configure in Emacs, or for which I prefer a GUI interface. For example, at the moment I'm working on a C++ project in Emacs, yet for debugging and a Git GUI I have VSCode open.

>> Is neovim better in this space?

Maybe, because of the bigger use base of NeoVim/Vim.

>> Should I be learning how to debug elisp better to understand how the commands interact with my environment?

Definitely.

>> I've been using emacs keybindings (in Dvorak at that)

Hi, mate! (^_^)

>> for so long I don't know if I'd enjoy the neovim editing experience.

What? No [Neo]Vim user has ever ported Emacs keybinding to Insert Mode? O_o
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-06 18:07:51+00:00
This points to a software best-practice: "Don't leak types from your dependencies." If your package depends on A, never emit one of A's structs.

Good luck finding a project of any complexity that manages to adhere to that kind of design sensibility religiously.

(I think the only language I've ever used that provided top-level support for recognizing that complexity was SML/NJ, and it's been so long that I don't remember exactly how it was done... Modules could take parameters so at the top level you could pass to each module what submodule it would be using, and only then could the module emit types originating from the submodule because the passing-in "app code" had visibility on the submodule to comprehend those types. It was... Exactly as un-ergonomic as you think. A real nightmare. "Turn your brain around backwards" kind of software architecting.)
by ap-andersson | 2025-08-06 18:08:30+00:00
If you want an easy to use project to get a map and feed to different sites like adsbexchange and flightradar24, I would recommend checking out: https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-adsb-ultrafeeder https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-flightradar24 https://adsb.im/home

There is a good community out there on github and discord that have flight tracking as a hobby. In addition to ADS-B there is also voice radio transmissions from aircraft (airband) and text messages (ACARS) etc. If you get hooked there is lots of different things to tinker with.
by CMay | 2025-08-06 18:08:36+00:00
Maybe both? I tried using different animals, scenarios, solvable versions, unsolvable versions, it gave me the correct answer with high reasoning in LM Studio. It does tell me it's in the training data, but it does reason through things fairly well. It doesn't feel like it's just reciting the solution and picks up on nuances around the variations.

If I switch from LM Studio to Ollama and run it using the CLI without changing anything, it will fail and it's harder to set the reasoning amount. If I use the Ollama UI, it seems to do a lot less reasoning. Not sure the Ollama UI has an option anywhere to adjust the system prompt so I can set the reasoning to high. In LM Studio even with the Unsloth GGUF, I can set the reasoning to high in the system prompt even though LM Studio won't give you the reasoning amount button to choose it with on that version.
by rookderby | 2025-08-06 18:09:06+00:00
I like this tool a lot and think it's superior to my own automation tools to generate giant host file blocklists. So, I'll be looking into switching to sinkzone. That said, my understanding is that applications can still make direct connections where an application connects using an IP address (without looking it up via DNS). I guess I use firewalls for that but haven't gotten around to adjusting anything from the defaults. Also could use a reverse proxy but haven't taken the time to set one of those up yet either. Does anyone have recommendations for a 'second step' on the network security path? Setup a PF router?
by broken_broken_ | 2025-08-06 18:09:14+00:00
I agree with the premise, just use a specific version of your dependencies, that’s generally fine.

However: You absolutely do need a lock file to store a cryptographic hash of each dependency to ensure that what is fetched has not been tampered with. And users are definitely not typing a hash when adding a new dependency to package.json or Cargo.toml.
by Shog9 | 2025-08-06 18:10:17+00:00
Text selection is such a great example precisely because it is incredibly useful to have in many unexpected situations (and a great many more that should be expected), but UI designers as a rule do not think about these situations!

It is so bad that one of the most impressive operating system features to be added in recent years is the ability to select and copy arbitrary text from app UIs, using either accessibility APIs or (more recently) straight-up OCR (because of course accessibility is another thing UI designers forget).

It's not like adding text selection in native apps is even hard; it's just not on the radar, and never has been. The number of old-school apps that added some form of "open log file" to either support instructions or as an actual function in the UI instead of making error messages selectable / copyable is depressing; I've seen programmers spend more time mocking end users for not knowing how to take proper screenshots than it would have taken to implement selectable UIs.

...and by historical accident, this problem is now solved in the vast majority of new applications. A small mercy!
by Catbert59 | 2025-08-06 18:10:26+00:00
That was a huge drama during Covid-19 as weather forecasters heavily rely on these automated weather reports for feeding their models. In Europe there are also special equipped Airbus/Boeings for collecting WMO-grade weather data while flying their standard routes - they were mostly grounded during the pandemic.

They partially replaced the data with the experimental Aeolus satellite which made its data into the productive forecasts within months due to their high quality.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-06 18:11:47+00:00
It reminds me of the costs and benefits of RollerCoaster Tycoon being written in assembly language. Because it was so light on resources, it could run on any privately owned computer, or at least anything x86, which was pretty much everything at the time.

Now, RISC architectures are much more common, so instead of the rare 68K Apple/Amiga/etc computer that existed at the time, it's super common to want to run software on an ARM or occasionally RISC-V processor, so writing in x86 assembly language would require emulation, making for worse performance than a compiled language.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-06 18:11:57+00:00
> Are these libraries just incompatible now?

Python says "Yes." Every environment manager I've seen, if your version ranges don't overlap for all your dependencies, will end up failing to populate the environment. Known issue; some people's big Python apps just break sometimes and then three or four open source projects have to talk to each other to un-fsck the world.

npm says "No" but in a hilarious way: if lib-a emits objects from lib-x, and lib-b emits objects from lib-x, you'll end up with objects that all your debugging tools will tell you should be the same type, and TypeScript will statically tell you are the same type, but don't `instanceof` the way you'd expect two objects that are the same type should. Conclusion: `instanceof` is sus in a large program; embrace the duck typing (and accept that maybe your a-originated lib-x objects can't be passed to b-functions without explosions because I bet b didn't embrace the duck-typing).
by WalterBright | 2025-08-06 18:12:24+00:00
> ARM assembly is orthogonal and almost as high-level as C.

The AArch64 is wacky in its own, different, way. For example, loading a constant into a register, dealing with an offset to an index, etc. It also has special purpose registers, like the zero register.

The PDP-11 architecture remains the best gem of an orthogonal instruction set ever invented.
by generalizations | 2025-08-06 18:12:50+00:00
It's not documented - that's the whole point. They can scale it back and forth opaquely, letting the high volume users get more usage whenever the low-volume users aren't using it much. If it's explicit and transparent, you don't get the benefit of that, since it would be gamed by unscrupulous power users.

Also there's a cli argument that lets you specify the model. try `claude --help`.
by neko_ranger | 2025-08-06 18:13:02+00:00
Lots of discussion on this and not much comparison to another democratic country (South Korea) that already implement this type of control. Account creation for non-critical services (games, etc) requires a SSN type equivalent during signup, so they very clearly know who is associated with the account.

They also implement child specific locks, such as limiting the duration kids can play a game, and for only specific hours (not during night time).
by neillyons | 2025-08-06 18:13:28+00:00
Crunchbang was such a good distro! I ran linux for about seven years. Ubuntu and then Crunchbang. Had my 2012 MacBook Pro dual boot into Crunchbang. Battery life was awful. It had no automatic fan control, so the laptop got so hot I could barely touch it. I ended up writing a bash script to manually control the fans using function keys https://gist.github.com/nwjlyons/b29ee6f7e26595f55a2a

As cool as it was, I can't be bothered with any of that these days. Just give me a Macbook Pro, as I know it will work and have amazing battery life!
by enolan | 2025-08-06 18:13:31+00:00
Location: New York, NY

Remote: Preference for in-office/hybrid, open to remote

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: machine learning, LLMs, flow matching, JAX, PyTorch, Python

Resume: https://www.echonolan.net/resume/cv.pdf

Email: echo@echonolan.net

I'm an ML engineer/ML research engineer looking for roles where there are gradients to descend, models to build, and/or datasets to gather. In general I want to advance the frontier of what's possible. My credentials are more towards research engineering than applied work, but I'm open to both. My last job was as a contract research engineer doing AI safety work at Redwood Research. I spent about half my time on our synthetic datasets of safe & unsafe LLM behavior, and the other half on fancy finetuning. I finetuned an LLM to exhibit unsafe behavior while fooling logistic probes trained to detect it, but only in deployment. Weird multi-part composite loss. My other big project is independent research in text-to-image models that are trained solely on unlabeled image data, exploiting CLIP embeddings for the link between text and images. If nothing goes horribly wrong I'll be submitting a paper for ICLR in about 7 weeks.

If you need help getting ML systems up and running, getting them fast and correct, or if any of that stuff sounds interesting to you, get in touch.
by a022311 | 2025-08-06 18:13:38+00:00
Looks really streamlined!

Currently, when I need to focus, I use a separate device configured to block everything except 2-3 domains I really need to minimize distractions. What really makes Sinkzone interesting is the scheduling with focus mode which can be incredible useful. My current firewall, OpenSnitch only lets you toggle all rules at once, so Sinkzone could be useful for allowing just the focus domains.

I think a useful feature to consider is having different profiles which would essentially be collections of domains to allow. So you could have "focus", but also "work" or "kids" as well allowing for more flexibility.

As I previously mentioned, I'm currently using OpenSnitch [1] as a system-level firewall that has a similar allowlist-only functionality. While the popups to allow/reject a connection initially disturb your workflow, after a short period of usage, you end up with a small collection of rules and you'll pretty much only see them again when browsing new websites. The advantage over DNS-level blocking is that you also get to block per process and not just device (or network). Since it uses eBPF, processes can't get around it by using a different DNS server or something. I'm really missing profiles and scheduling though, so I hope you can build a viable alternative to switch to!

[1]: https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
by numbsafari | 2025-08-06 18:13:50+00:00
... no mention of golang and minimal version selection?

https://go.dev/ref/mod#minimal-version-selection https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs

Instead of a "lock" file, go includes a "sum" file, which basically tells you the checksums of the versions of the modules that were used during a build happened to be, so that you can download them from a central place later and ensure you are working from the same thing (so that any surreptitious changes are identified).
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-08-06 18:15:03+00:00
I agree that Chrome won mostly on merit, but I think it stays winning on inertia and marketing. There's just not that big of a difference now to the end user when using Safari or Firefox vs Chrome based browsers in my opinion. Safari's performance is fine. Let's not forget that Google retired their public benchmark suite because V8 wasn't beating JSC.

I can't say the same about the Trident based Edge though, it just wasn't as nice to use.

> The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.

If I was making the decision to make browser, and finances were on the line, I'd pick Chromium just because other people have already done it. If I was doing it for fun, I'd rather just contribute to Ladybird.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-06 18:15:41+00:00
In this scenario, are you in the country illegally? If so, how is this any different than an immigration court serving you for a hearing?

The US and most other countries have a legal concept called presumption of innocence, where you're not guilty of illegal actions until you've been through due process. A hearing would be the beginning of due process. An officer showing up at your door is not due process, so you also can't be "illegal" at that point.
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-08-06 18:15:47+00:00
> It seems like you really missed the point

Yeah, I guess I don't really know what your point was if it wasn't to ask why we get cancer. Maybe that's my fault?

> A medication may have side effects

... beyond the initially understood ones. Tylenol has been around for a long time. When it first came out, people were probably popping it like candy until they realized the limits, and now it's pretty well understood.

And who cares if people are "clutching their pearls"? What harm does that do?

> Is someone trying to force you to take Ozempic?

Not yet, but I won't be surprised if people start pushing for it. Think about things like soda laws and seatbelt laws. If my being obese is costing you tax or insurance dollars and we have this magic pill, it's only a matter of time before the machine does its thing.
by alpha_squared | 2025-08-06 18:15:51+00:00
I'm sorry, but I feel like I have to amend your scenarios to reflect the accuracy of LLMs:

> Quick [inconsequential] fact checks, quick [inconsequential] complicated searches, quick [inconsequential] calculations and comparisons. Quick [inconsequential] research on an obscure thing.

The reason that amendment is vital is because LLMs are, in fact, not factual. As such, you cannot make consequential decisions on their potential misstatements.