MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2025-08-05 20:24:39+00:00
I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department cultures.

One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor.

Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
by nonhaver | 2025-08-05 20:24:58+00:00
Absolutely horrendous - well and truly. Ignoring the dystopic undertones of a product like this - the audio quality is low and filled with artifacts and destroyed transients. Voices are robotic and generic with basically zero emotion. Lyric generation is frankly embarrassing. Everything about this is horrible. Additionally the UI broke for me multiple times and I couldn't play the track without downloading it.

What is going on at ElevenLabs? Is everything vibe coded now? Is there nobody testing these products before pushing them out? This is the first time I'd characterize a product from a top AI company as complete slop from a conceptual and implementation perspective.

I feel like there's some sort of disconnect between the minds of tech CEOs and the general population's wants/needs especially in regards to creative domains. What kind of human wants this? Is there some grudge of tech people who never learned music/art/etc so their solution is to optimize it and create models so they can feel something?
by lubujackson | 2025-08-05 20:25:10+00:00
Be comforted by the fact that no matter how good the AI gets, people crave human connection. Just like AI can generate music there is an uncanny valley effect where you quickly deduce there's no true humanity behind any of it, and ultimately undervalue it. At best you can have something like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress where the generated worlds CAN be inspiring to a degree, but that is because the rules around generation are incredibly intricate and, ultimately, human.

Yes, AI can make music that sounds decent and lyrics that rhyme and can even be clever. But listen to a couple songs and your brain quickly spots the patterns. Maybe AI gets there some day, but the uncanny valley seems to be quite a chasm - and anything that approaches the other side seems to do so by piling lots of human intention along the way.
by securesaml | 2025-08-05 20:25:21+00:00
I am working on an SAML Attacker (that basically tests web apps against all known SAML exploits). It includes all the test cases.

I can share you the repository if you want to integrate it in RubySAML (or any other library). Email me [alex]@[securesaml.com] (without the [ ])
by coltonv | 2025-08-05 20:25:32+00:00
What I'm saying is that the model will get into one of these loops where it needs to be killed, and I'll look at some of the intermediate states and the reasons for failure and they are because it hallucinated things, ran tests, got an error. Does that make sense?

Deleting and re-prompting is fine. I do that too. But even one cycle of that often means the whole prompting exercise takes me longer than if I just wrote the code myself.
by rglover | 2025-08-05 20:25:50+00:00
> That said, we are at a point where people are overweight enough that getting exercise has its own risks, and taking a medication that allows you to be more active is likely to cancel out some of those downsides.

And yet we rarely ask or say "maybe I should just eat fewer calories?" Unless you have some other disorder that prevents normal bodily function, that does work (and would be viable I'd imagine for the majority of people being prescribed).

But it requires patience and discipline which are basically non-existent for the majority of the population.
by hunter2_ | 2025-08-05 20:26:54+00:00
So it's ok to block someone "because you didn't include a session token I gave you in exchange for knowing the password" but it's not ok to block someone "because you didn't stick to manually-operated user agents as I told you via robots.txt"? What about not letting someone play level 42 "because you didn't complete level 41"?

A web server providing a response to your request is akin to a restaurant server doing the same. Except for specific situations related to civil rights, they are free to not deal with you for any reason.
by nxobject | 2025-08-05 20:27:48+00:00
> I feel like I've seen and heard more of the opposite: The trend is to avoiding anything that might make someone feel blame for arriving in their situation.

> I've heard countless people explain to me that dieting doesn't work for them.

I think you're being a tad reductive – "dieting right now doesn't work for me for reasons I can't control" and "reducing calorie intake will help me reduce weight" aren't necessary contradictory, and don't imply "I'm going to attribute it all to biology/blame it on something general".

Anyway, let me assert the opposite: as a partner of a nutritionist who's talked (with anonymity) about her clients, the majority of the people she's worked with, who struggle with sustainably reducing calorie intake over the course of years, come to dieting with that logic, and _then_ struggle against specific barriers, and _then_ blame themselves. (A recent example: "because of my work schedule I don't get enough sleep, which leads to weight gain and time only for frozen food – on top of my predispositions".)

In that case, GLP-1 inhibitors as an intervention _complements_ the way her clients think about dieting.
by coltonv | 2025-08-05 20:28:01+00:00
Has happened to me before. It seems they change anything that has a negative connotation to try to take something more positive out of it. I don't love that they do that without asking or confirming with the author. But this title is also fine with me. I actually thought about naming it "Curing your AI 10x Imposter Syndrome", but it felt like a stretch that someone would understand what the content would be about.
by netsharc | 2025-08-05 20:28:14+00:00
Good knowledge, now explain why it's like that.

{" is ASCII 01111011, 00100010

Base64 takes 3 bytes x 8 bits = 24 bits, groups that 24 bit-sequence into four parts of 6 bits each, and then converts each to a number between 0-63. If there aren't enough bits (we only have 2 bytes = 16 bits, we need 18 bits), pad them with 0. Of course in reality the last 2 bits would be taken from the 3rd character of the JSON string, which is variable.

The first 6 bits are 011110, which in decimal is 30.

The second 6 bits are 110010, which in decimal is 50.

The last 4 bits are 0010. Pad it with 00 and you get 001000, which is 8.

Using an encoding table (https://base64.guru/learn/base64-characters), 30 is e, 50 is y and 8 is I. There's your "ey".

Funny how CS people are so incurious now, this blog post touches the surface but didn't get into the explanation.
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-05 20:28:28+00:00
Yes, but they have to fit it around the judgements of the different European courts, and they really can't do it, so they try to say 'Oh, this is totally voluntary' and then when realise that that won't work they decide to go after companies, etc.

They have some political power, but they don't have all of it and they are quite constrained.
by pc86 | 2025-08-05 20:28:46+00:00
There's a lot of unanswered questions from the article which is seems anyone with even mediocre skills as a journalist should be willing and able to answer.

It mentions the mine "collapsed" in 1989. Does that mean literally? Just financially? Was there an insurance payout? Did everyone lose their investment? Did Errol Musk own 1% or 90%?

* In quoting another article, it does say: "Errol Musk, an engineer, owned a small percentage of an emerald mine and had a couple of good years before the mine went bust and wiped out his investment."

Elon graduated from college less than 10 years later but says he was $100k in debt. Was he actually in debt? Did he spend years paying that off or did he (or someone else) pay it off shortly after in a lump sum or very quickly?

His dad provided $20k of a $200k seed round for Zip2, was the rest also from friends and family or more institutional investors? Did his dad receive equity for that or was it a gift?

Reading through the article again (and a little more closely than before) it doesn't seem Elon had "an incredibly privileged upbringing" but maybe that's a mix of good PR and this now being 40-some years ago? They're referred to as upper middle class but if that's all it takes to be "incredibly privileged" then 90% of the kids born to people reading HN are also incredibly privileged.

Arnold's piece seems to contradict basically everything else in the article so I'm not sure what to make of it, but it also sounds like he made about $350k profit over the lifetime of his ownership in the mine? Certainly not nothing but it's not opulence and it doesn't sound like most (any?) of that made its way to Elon.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-08-05 20:29:16+00:00
might it not be the other way round? For all we know its mediocre devs who are relishing the prospect of doing jack shit all day and still being able to submit some auto generated PRs. Being "amazed" at what it produces when someone with higher standards might be less than amazed.

I find it impossible to work out who to trust on the subject, given that I'm not working directly with them, so remain entirely on the fence.
by kulahan | 2025-08-05 20:29:27+00:00
We didn't even know what "junk DNA" did until like 25 years ago. We've discovered a couple new body parts in the last 50 years. We don't have any real understanding of how basic, foundational parts of medicine work - things like anesthesia and antidepressants and even pain differences between men and women. Tests are regularly performed on highly homogenous groups, or even tested on groups completely different from the target audience. The US allows us to advertise medicines on TV, and this gets people thinking they have some vague understanding of medicine - which they do not. I mean, maybe the unreasonably smart audience of this site may, but for the extreme majority of Americans, they do not.

I think our massive advancement in the computer industry has confused people into thinking other industries which use computers are also advanced, but this is not the case. Pharmacology is an extremely immature field.

Edit: I think the only field more immature than this would be psychology? And I don't think many are silly enough to trust a field who still worships a dude that believed every thought you had was somehow actually about sex, and has made zero advancements beyond borrowing meditation and a few other ideas from other cultures.
by Topfi | 2025-08-05 20:29:41+00:00
I am still very early, but output quality wise, yes, there does not seem to be any noticeable improvement in my limited personal testing suite. What I have noticed though is subjectively better adherence to instructions and documentation provided outside the main prompt, though I have no way to quantify or reliably test that yet. So beyond reliably finding Needles-in-the-Haystack (which Frontier models have done well on lately), Opus 4.1 seems to do better in following those needles even if not explicitly guided to compared to Opus 4.
by acc_297 | 2025-08-05 20:29:51+00:00
The number was correct to a reasonable degree under the assumptions stated by the author in the paper that tweet references since they obtained estimates from consumer grade hardware and the carbon intensity associated with average kilowatt produced in the United States not a hyperscale datacentre run using "ML best practices" although this distinction is left out of various lay media citations. The number also did not pertain to inference it was associated with training a particular model from pre-2019.
by rob_c | 2025-08-05 20:30:09+00:00
> Is typing speed a bottle neck for people?

Yes, if it isn't your being overpaid in the view of a lot of people. Step out of the way and let an expert use the keyboard.

How can you not read and understand code but spend time writing it? That's bad code in that situation.

Source: try working with assembly and binary objects only which really do require working out what's going on. Code is meant to be human readable remember...
by mchiang | 2025-08-05 20:30:46+00:00
sorry that you feel the way you feel. :(

I'm not sure which package we use that is triggering this. My guess is llama.cpp based on what I see on social? Ollama has long shifted to using our own engine. We do use llama.cpp for legacy and backwards compatibility. I want to be clear it's not a knock on the llama.cpp project either.

There are certain features we want to build into Ollama, and we want to be opinionated on the experience we want to build.

Have you supported our past gigs before? Why not be more happy and optimistic in seeing everyone build their dreams (success or not).

If you go build a project of your dreams, I'd be supportive of it too.
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-08-05 20:31:09+00:00
It’s really not. They’re saying they didn’t do it themselves, but aren’t ruling out it being done by proxy, which is exactly what Valve are saying happened. Actually, it’s a triple weasel, since they also didn’t evaluate any games, they went off unverified 3rd party reports, and aren’t targeting ‘game creator’ sites, but game distribution sites. It could be a potential quadruple weasel, since they could have not ‘required’ any restrictions, but presented such onerous alternatives that it was a de-facto requirement that still fell short of the strictest definition of the word.

And yet there is still porn on Steam, so clearly this is more than just Stripe.
by dsign | 2025-08-05 20:31:09+00:00
I started using Kagi more than a year ago, but kept Google in some of my iOS devices because if I need to do some online shopping, Google has all the ads of the local shops :-) . I mean, I know that I can order cheaper in Amazon or Temu, but I want to support the local merchants as much as possible.

Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.
by TuringNYC | 2025-08-05 20:31:24+00:00
>> Watching ollama pivot from a somewhat scrappy yet amazingly important and well designed open source project to a regular "for-profit company" is going to be sad.

if i could have consistent and seamless local-cloud dev that would be a nice win. everyone has to write things 3x over these days depending on your garden of choice, even with langchain/llamaindex
by krapp | 2025-08-05 20:32:00+00:00
In some ways, yes, they were.

Subsistence farmers weren't cramped in filthy disease ridden workhouses, getting paid in company scrip, getting mangled by machines (OK they were but probably not as often) or being locked into burning buildings because preventing theft of stock was more important to owners than the lives of employees. And subsistence farmers owned what they produced and the means by which it was produced, whereas industrial workers owned nothing but the pennies in their pocket, and likely owed more than that to the company.

It took years of often violent protest for workers to return to even the basic level of dignity and rights once afforded to craftsmen and farmers. Not that the lives of subsistence farmers and craftsmen were good, but they were better than what the dehumanization of mass production and automation created.

But then comparing farmers and workers in this context is a bit specious. It would be more fair to compare, say, textile workers before the automated loom and textile workers after. Obviously the former had it much better off, which was precisely the problem automation was intended to solve.
by api | 2025-08-05 20:32:11+00:00
> Repackaging existing software while literally adding no useful functionality was always their gig.

Developers continue to be blind to usability and UI/UX. Ollama lets you just install it, just install models, and go. The only other thing really like that is LM-Studio.

It's not surprising that the people behind it are Docker people. Yes you can do everything Docker does with Linux kernel and shell commands, but do you want to?

Making software usable is often many orders of magnitude more work than making software work.
by aleksejs | 2025-08-05 20:32:46+00:00
This is neat! We're building something similar at work, but instead of hand-rolling specific checks (like "first signature must be direct child of Response" in samlshield) we're fingerprinting the structure of the SAML response and checking if it matches what we've previously seen from that IdP. We figured that would be more likely to catch any exploitation attempts we didn't anticipate while giving us some flexibility to not have to hardcode specific IdP behaviors. Having specific hard checks seems really valuable too, though, especially for applications that might not have many SAML responses to backtest on. And kudos for sharing a great corpus of test cases!

One thing that would worry me when deploying this in the Proxy mode is that you'll likely end up with two different XML parsers in play: xmldom in samlshield and then whatever the actual application is using. As we saw with CVE-2025-25292, it may be possible to exploit different parser behavior to construct a document that will be interpreted differently between the two applications, potentially bypassing the checks in samlshield.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-08-05 20:32:50+00:00
> Haven’t these types of drugs been in use for ~15 years?

The predecessor of semaglutide, liraglutide has been sold since 1998. GLP-1 has been studied since the 70s. The first human was injected with GLP-1 agonists in 1993 IIRC.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-05 20:33:01+00:00
> Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.

I'm not a google user but - are you sure you don't have malware or something? I guess probably not as you said iOS, but I'm failing to imagine this being true in the way I'm reading it.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-08-05 20:33:16+00:00
you're assuming way less action from the US than there would actually be. it's not about the exports, it's about the supply chain to supply a fab. they need euv machines, wafers, thousands of specifically sourced chemicals etc.

it's not about what China wants, it's just not feasible to operate a fab in a warzone
Show HN: Tezcat – local-first AI recall in Obsidian via a remembrance agent
by mmargenot | 2025-08-05 20:33:27+00:00
Tezcat is a POC implementation of a remembrance agent (https://www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/remembrance.html) in Obsidian. It uses text embeddings and vector similarity search (or hybrid search) to do recall of fragments of notes that you've written in the past based on what you're writing right now.

I don't like AI chat interfaces in knowledge management tools and I have been looking to implement something that would integrate better with the flow of actually writing. This operates best with Ollama on your machine, for a local-first experience, but can work with OpenAI embeddings.

Try it out and let me know what you think!
by dguest | 2025-08-05 20:33:28+00:00
Short summary: the actual paper doesn't say anything about historians or translators being replaced by AI.

It says AI could be impactful to those fields. Modern chemistry is impactful to medicine but it didn't replace doctors.

So unfortunately the article this post linked to, while it has its own merits, starts off by citing a clickbait tweet and wildly misinterpreting the paper in the first sentence. Still, I hope people give both article and paper a generous reading. Even if the article starts off terribly it has interesting points which we shouldn't disregard just because of a lazy hook. The intermediate tweet, by contrast, is just lazy clickbait: half-truths and screencaps, the bread and butter of modern disinformation.

The sad thing is that it's easier than it's ever been to follow up on references. Even in this case, where the tweet itself provides no citations at all, I had to search for less than a minute to find the original paper.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-08-05 20:34:49+00:00
FWIW it's probably because a lot of us have been following along and trying these things from the start so the nuances seem more obvious but also I feel that some folks feel your question is a bit "stupid", like "why are you suddenly interested in the frontier of these models? where were you for the last 2 years?"

And to some extent it is like the PC race. Imagine going to work and writing software for whatever devices your company writes software for in whatever toolchain your company uses. Then 2-3 years after the PC race began heating up, asking "Hey I only really write code for whatever devices my employer gives me access to. Now I want to buy one of these new PCs but I don't really understand why I'd choose an Intel over a Motorolla chipset or why I'd prioritize more ROM or more RAM, and I keep hearing about this thing called RISC that's way better than CISC and some of these chips claim to have different addressing modes that are better?"
by rob_c | 2025-08-05 20:34:57+00:00
> "what is the correct security model for this application given this use case".

Frankly I've seen LLMs answer better than people trained in security theatre so be very careful where you draw the line.

If you're trying to say they struggle with what they've not seen before. Yes, provided that what is new isn't within the phase space they've been trained over. Remember there's no photographs of cats riding dinosaurs but SD models can generate them.
by colesantiago | 2025-08-05 20:35:10+00:00
No matter if a project is "open source" as long as they announce that they have raised millions amount of dollars from investors...

It is completely compromised, especially if it is an AI company.

How do you think ollama was able to provide the open source AI models to everyone for free?

I am pretty sure ollama was losing money on every pull of those images from their infrastructure.

Those that are now angry at ollama charging money or not focusing on privacy should have been angry when they raised money from investors.
by Fomite | 2025-08-05 20:35:14+00:00
Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments.

It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration).

Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.