MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bityard | 2025-08-26 17:10:47+00:00
I've heard multiple opinions that traditional spam filtering techniques work well enough. And as someone who has implemented many of them for work and personal email systems, that is true only if you consider low-effort spam that comes from dodgy networks and domains, doesn't get past a graylist, and fails simple content analysis.

High-effort spam is quickly becoming the norm and comes from spammers who take the time and expense to warm up their domain, correctly configure their DNS records, use TLS certificates and ports, are careful not to send too many messages to one provider at a time, address and format their emails to make them look like newsletters, and so on. Traditional spam mitigation system are not very effective against these techniques because it was always believed that spammers could never justify the expense of high-effort spam. That may have been true at one point, but it was silly to think it would always be true.

An LLM that can read an email and quickly perform sentiment/classification analysis on the content itself is the only thing that I can see which will fill that gap. (Aside from just choosing to live with it, of course.) I'm just getting into this myself but my understanding is that very small models can do this surprisingly well.

As to why it's not ubiquitous yet, I suspect it's only a matter of time. My Outlook (for work) has been automatically summarizing all of my emails for months now (something I can't opt out of, by the way). Hooking that up to an action that sends spam messages into the Junk Email folder is just a few lines of code on Microsoft's part.
by akho | 2025-08-26 17:10:52+00:00
> the first batch with the bios battery issues

This was some seriously infuriating bullshit. I remember them blaming it on intel on the forums, even though no other laptop had the issue.

In my case, replacing the battery with a random aliexpress ine fixed the issue, and they could have just said so.

Really made me lose trust in the company.
by echelon | 2025-08-26 17:10:54+00:00
I'm unclear as to which side of the argument you're taking.

If you think that these tools don't automate most existing graphics design work, you're gravely mistaken.

The question is whether this increases the amount of work to be done because more people suddenly need these skills. I'm of the opinion that this does in fact increase demand. Suddenly your mom and pop plumbing business will want Hollywood level VFX for their ads, and that's just the start.
by 0x3f | 2025-08-26 17:10:58+00:00
Oh, yeah, I mean that's what happens in the short term. Long term, I suspect it's either a quiet climb down from his current position, or a complete engineering disaster for the company if he's unwilling to do so.

At least the interim lying buys him more time to accept reality. If AI starts actually writing 50% of the code, I assume it asymptotically tends towards a codebase that no human beings actually want to work on.
High rate of LLM (GPT5) hallucinations in dense stats domains (cricket)
by sp1982 | 2025-08-26 17:11:11+00:00
Disclaimer: I am not a ML researcher, so the terms are informal/wonky. Apologies!

I’m doing a small experiment to see whether models “know when they know” on T20 international cricket scorecards (cricsheet.com for source). The idea is to test models on publicly available data they likely saw during training, and see if they hallucinate or admit they don't know.

Setup: Each question is from a single T20 match. Model must return an answer (numeric or choice from options) or `no_answer`.

Results (N=100 per model):

- gpt-4o-search-preview • Answer rate: 0.96 • Accuracy: 0.88 • Accuracy (answered): 0.91 • Hallucination (answered): 0.09 • Wrong/100: 9

- gpt-5 • Answer rate: 0.35 • Accuracy: 0.27 • Accuracy (answered): 0.77 • Hallucination (answered): 0.23 • Wrong/100: 8

- gpt-4o-mini • Answer rate: 0.37 • Accuracy: 0.14 • Accuracy (answered): 0.38 • Hallucination (answered): 0.62 • Wrong/100: 23

- gpt-5-mini • Answer rate: 0.05 • Accuracy: 0.02 • Accuracy (answered): 0.40 • Hallucination (answered): 0.60 • Wrong/100: 3

Note: most remaining “errors” with search are obscure/disputed cases where public sources disagree.

It seems for domains where models might have seen some data, it’s better to rely on abstention + RAG vs a larger model with more coverage but worse hallucination rate.

Code/Data: https://github.com/jobswithgpt/llmcriceval
by qwytw | 2025-08-26 17:11:12+00:00
My only point was that mobile chips are pretty much a commodity these days and not a particularly lucrative market if you want to maximize margins and growth. The fact that there are way more ARM chips sold in a year than x86 servers doesen't prove much.

> Qualcomm is a bigger seller of processors

Yes, even for their highest end mobile chip (Snapdragon 8 Elite) the estimated OEM price seems to be under <$200.

A midrange AMD EPYC 9004 chip is $4000-6000. Presumably the gross margin is also higher. So hardly a fair comparison. Of course Intel seems to be propping up it's server marketshare by dropping its margins, so I wouldn't be surprised if they are lower than Qualcomm's.

> But you notice in the case of Google

They design their own mobile SoCs though which seems like a fairly serious effort for a hobby project (although being an off the shelf design like almost all ARM chips besides Apple's maybe not)
by jchw | 2025-08-26 17:12:37+00:00
I think the bigger issue is that even the "cloud" stuff seems pretty stupid. Meanwhile while I wouldn't really trust any of these companies very much in actuality, it's not like nobody else is doing "edge" AI: Google is basically treating Gemma models like A1 steak sauce and pouring them on everything. (And although I don't know that any of those use cases really are particularly interesting, Gemma itself can be pretty impressive IMO.)
by username332211 | 2025-08-26 17:13:17+00:00
Actually, in social science you really can't test a hypothesis with data. What's true under one set of conditions won't be true under another and conditions change all the time. Famously, there's the Lucas critique - the idea that a relationship (or the lack thereof) between variables may break, if a policy that exploits the relationship is implemented.

Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.
by danudey | 2025-08-26 17:13:20+00:00
On a laptop with multiple GPUs (Intel and nvidia Quadro) running Ubuntu and Wayland, trying to get the nvidia card working has been a nightmare. Until a recent reinstall, I couldn't load the nvidia driver or I wouldn't be able to log in to my system (graphically, I mean). If anything changed on my system to remove the blacklist I had for those modules I'd have to spend an hour trying to figure out what changed so that I could get back to work.

Now that I have it working I see random glitches here and there that I can't pin down. Some Electron apps I have to turn off GPU acceleration or they won't get any windows showing up - they launch, the process exists, they're in the dock as active, but the window doesn't appear at all.

Getting a new laptop from work to replace this one and I'm really hoping it won't have nvidia hardware - or at least, if it does I can disable it and the Intel GPU will work fine also.
by juris | 2025-08-26 17:13:46+00:00
if you do find an .apk and didn't obfuscate it with proguard (I can't remember if proguard ran default in the release pipeline in Eclipse ADT...which...ew) you can use jadx to decompile your .apk and recover the structure of your source code!

https://github.com/skylot/jadx
by busyant | 2025-08-26 17:13:53+00:00
OT: Just replying to myself to ramble a little bit more.

The Crick, Brenner et al. paper that I cited above

* studied mutations in a viral gene called "rIIB"

* the authors used those rIIB mutations to determine that the genetic code was a non-overlapping triplet (now called codons) -- a pretty fundamental discovery.

* What's amazing to me is that they still have NO IDEA what the rIIB gene actually _does_, mechanistically.

It's like learning a little bit about God using an enigma machine (sorry, shitty simile).
by lushy-typeable | 2025-08-26 17:14:11+00:00
Issue is that the circuitry to convert the USB-C PD 20V to e.g. 12V and 5V for componenets results in a power loss - so realistically take 5-10% off any USB-C adapter's wattage.

Gaming/productivity laptops of similar size ship with 300W power bricks now (e.g. MSI Vector 16 HX AI with RTX5090 ships with a 330W adapter to satisfy its 240W system power). It's also why most still use their own connector (ASUS decided to use their own connector due to conversion efficiency and heat issues with USB-C at high wattage).

Still, 330W pales in comparison of the TGP of a desktop-class RTX5070 (requires 250W). Nevermind the RTX5090's requirements (575W).
Human-like RAG – with no vectors
by page_index | 2025-08-26 17:14:23+00:00
Not all improvements come from adding complexity — sometimes it's about removing it.

PageIndex takes a different approach to RAG. Instead of relying on vector databases or artificial chunking, it builds a hierarchical tree structure from documents and uses reasoning-based tree search to locate the most relevant sections. This mirrors how humans approach reading: navigating through sections and context rather than matching embeddings.

As a result, the retrieval feels transparent, structured, and explainable. It moves RAG away from approximate "semantic vibes" and toward explicit reasoning about where information lives. That clarity can help teams trust outputs and debug workflows more effectively.

The broader implication is that retrieval doesn't need to scale endlessly in vectors to be powerful. By leaning on document structure and reasoning, it reminds us that efficiency and human-like logic can be just as transformative as raw horsepower.
by starkparker | 2025-08-26 17:14:33+00:00
> Additionally, and non-trivially, the laptop's battery life is not good, and it drains very quickly on suspend

Drain on suspend in particular has largely been resolved on newer mainboards, firmware, and kernel updates, though I don't have an 11th-gen Intel and haven't run Ubuntu for a long time.

Kernel updates fixed this on my 12th-gen, firmware updates fixed it on my 7040, and my Ultra 7 155H never experienced this issue.
by fsiefken | 2025-08-26 17:15:37+00:00
The German 'iX magazine fuer professionelle IT' is pretty good, but it also has devops, the whole stack from networking, data storage, compute, cloud, development en ops. I bought one on holiday. It's nice to browse through pages for a change. A fixed A4 keeping your attention on 1 page. https://www.heise.de/select/ix

I think it's only in German, but perhaps the AI can auto-translate the pdf's.
by echelon | 2025-08-26 17:15:42+00:00
David Holz mentioned on Twitter that he was considering a Midjourney API. They're obviously providing it to Meta now, so it might become more broadly available after Midjourney becomes the default image gen for Meta products.

Midjourney wins on aesthetic for sure. Nothing else comes close. Midjourney images are just beautiful to behold.

David's ambition is to beat Google to building a world model you can play games in. He views the image and video business as a temporary intermediate to that end game.
by mattlutze | 2025-08-26 17:16:00+00:00
Perhaps you've misread the quote? It and your counter affirm each other.

The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools.

That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.
by cikito2131 | 2025-08-26 17:16:01+00:00
The key Nextgrid pasted is correct, I got the coins under email kiknubesti@necub.com. I got the key by pasting into the text input line in the HTML input types demo and adding spaces after the text. The box blocking the view moved to the left and uncovered some characters. I then selected these characters and while dragging left, the key was revealed one by one, which I then OCRd from the screencap. Though at some point after it, typing spaces after the text wasn't possible anymore with an error message saying that editing is prohibited.
by roguecoder | 2025-08-26 17:16:04+00:00
That might be true, but this paper is wildly unconvincing. Cross-country comparisons have way too many confounding factors. Not least that economic growth reduces population growth.

As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-26 17:16:05+00:00
"…separate data-only device…"

Likely so, methinks. I can't see any other long-term solution that'd be workable and actually benefit users. Moreover, if implemented properly (sensibly) with the user in charge it would be useful for much more than just banking.

For example, it could incorporate a hierarchical key system with the user/owner having access to all data. Privacy would be assured as each entity you'd communicate or transact with would only have access to information on a need-to-know basis.

Your bank would only have access to your name and necessary authentication data; only you and your doctor would have access to your medical records; government/tax would have access to your financial records for tax purposes but not be able to access other data.

General shopping could be done anonymously—even without your bank being aware of what you were buying or from whom you were buying it (it'd be like a cash withdrawal to spend as you wish). The bank would issue you money as a cash advance which you'd add to a local pool of cash, you'd then withdraw funds to pay the vendor (this would likely involve crypto currency to isolate the payment from the bank). And so on, there'd be as many options to such a scheme as a user would need.

Such a system would not only give users almost complete control over their privacy but also give them autonomy. Of course, opposition to such a scheme would be absolutely fierce, governments would demand higher access levels for nefarious and or unnecessary reasons, the Googles of this world would be furious as they'd lose access to meaningful data—what'd be left would be anonymized junk data that'd be effectively worthless to advertisers and data brokers.

Clearly, something that powerful which would give users considerable control over their lives wouldn't be allowed to happen! As Rousseau said in the opening sentence of his Social Contract "Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains". That was in 1762, seems nothing much has changed, the citizenry is still well under the thumb, and the rich and powerful remain so.
by Bender | 2025-08-26 17:16:12+00:00
There's so much more that can be picked apart here because it's an absolute rabbit hole of a topic

That pretty much sums it up and I agree with everything you stated. There are countless variables that one could spend a lifetime trying to understand, tune and compensate for and all of that changes with each combination of hardware and refreshing hardware is inevitable. It can be a never ending game. I just tune for good enough for my needs that being slightly better than defaults.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-26 17:16:24+00:00
> Says who?

Uh, labor costs? I guess we could work to lower those, though. Like, a lot lower.

Meanwhile if the $2 wholesale-in-China shirt costs $30 on the shelf due to tariffs and the identical-quality US-made one costs $40 because that's just what it costs, the latter won't even be made, zero factories will start up to manufacture them. You'd have to raise prices a lot for it to make sense to even try, clothes are (relatively—still far less than once-upon-a-time, which is why the poor can afford to wear clothes that aren't third-hand and much-mended) labor-intensive despite lots of automation because machines remain terrible at manipulating cloth, despite decades of effort at solving that problem.

It's really expensive to make clothes in the US, and skimping on quality doesn't save all that much, percentage-wise. Being that they're also a necessity, we'd truly have to drive quality of life way down for a large chunk of the population to get that industry making low-end clothes.
by danudey | 2025-08-26 17:16:45+00:00
Apple's palm rejection is also top tier, though other systems have been getting better. My current Dell seems fine so far, but at my last company the Dell I had was almost unusable due to my cursor just teleporting around my document randomly if my hands got too close to the trackpad (which is where they have to be to type).

Not sure if it's a hardware (Dell) or software (Ubuntu) improvement, but thank god.
by gruez | 2025-08-26 17:17:04+00:00
>I do not get the argument of "if nothing happens when an ant bites you then I can shot you with a cannon be cause it is the same thing just larger".

this argument fails because at least in the examples provided, it's closer to the non-gen ai denoising/upscaling algorithms than telling chatgpt to upscale an image.

>The impact on society matters for me, and it is very different. Justifying AI at any cost is a marketing strategy that will hurt us long-term.

There's no indication it's AI, except some vague references to "machine learning".
by pona-a | 2025-08-26 17:17:18+00:00
Forgive me for being reductive, but aren't these leaked accounts a lost cause? The vulnerability in question is attackers being able to log into user accounts with leaked credentials. The only mitigation for this is to lock out users identified in other password breeches and reconfirm identity out-of-band, like through a local bank branch, add a second factor like a hardware token, or use restrictive heuristics like IP geolocation consistency between visits.

If 3 attempts per hour is enough to gain access, then it doesn't seem attestation can save you. I imagine a physical phone farm will still be economically viable in such case.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-26 17:17:31+00:00
If the number is only 17%, I'm not sure we need to ban them.

From my experience the big issue is hiring managers who either 1) are very casual about hiring (i.e. they're willing to wait 6 months and waste everyone's time), or 2) people who like the idea of hiring but keep changing what they want to hire for (like this month we're having issues with testing, so we want a test engineer, but next month we're having issues with embedded software, so we need a new embedded engineer.

I really don't think there are bands of hiring managers posting fake job ads to make their company look more impressive, I think it's just bands of hiring managers who want a senior engineer with direct experience for <140k
by didibus | 2025-08-26 17:18:10+00:00
> It has a meaning already

Natural language tends to work like that, many words take on different meaning in different context, and the dictionary often needs to add alternate definitions as language evolves.

If you come to a software engineering interview and take the mathematical meaning and answer O(n^3), you won't get the job. You need to know the linga franca of the trade, not just the textbooks.

I know this can be frustrating, I just wouldn't really recommend staking your ground on this mountain.

The other mistake, is to assume the interviewer doesn't know better, and you do, and try to explain their mistake. A lot of them know very well, you simply didn't understand correctly the ask because you got confused with the context of the problem statement, and it shows you didn't adapt to the working environment successfully.

And if you think that's bad, wait till you talk to product ;)
by duped | 2025-08-26 17:18:13+00:00
I would argue that federal and state governments play even shorter games than investors in the stock market. They're constantly putting their thumbs on whichever scales are politically expedient to claim they did something every 2/4/6 years when it's time for reelection.

Just as an example, the calculus for "where should I build a factory" comes down to "which politicians give the biggest tax incentives" and not any market dynamics.
by KaoruAK | 2025-08-26 17:19:12+00:00
DIAC ∞ 2 is an novel asymmetric encryption system that I designed specifically to be resistant even if P=NP, and it is a post-quantum cipher. Here is the OSF link, where the repository contains the PDF explaining DIAC ∞ 2 and its demo code in Colab: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/YSMK9
by pil0u | 2025-08-26 17:19:17+00:00
I got scammed similarly (although $10, because I tested first), because 1. it was on YouTube, on a channel called "SpaceX" with verified logo 2. with hundreds of thousands of viewers live 3. with a believable speech from Mr. Musk standing next to its rockets (and knowing his interest in cryptocurrencies).

This happened as I was genuinely searching for the actual live stream of SpaceX.

I am ashamed, even more so because I even posted the live stream link on Hacker News (!). Fortunately it was flagged early and I apologized personally to dang.

This was a terrible experience for me, on many levels. I never thought I would fall in such a trap, being very aware of the tech, reading about similar stories etc.
by lysace | 2025-08-26 17:19:22+00:00
(!)

I only have a few issues that I bought as a kid. I've been re-reading them lately and I noticed that that while e.g. a 1987 issue is (still!) deeply intellectually stimulating, a 1989 issue is kind of boring in comparison.

It seems like it went from being focused on computer science/engineering to commercial uses of computing quite quickly.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-26 17:20:07+00:00
Plenty of reasons, but the big one would be integration, especially RAM. Apple M series processors are exclusively designed for Apple products running the Apple OS, none of them extensible. It means it can be optimized for that use case.

RAM in particular can be a big performance bottleneck, Apple M as way better bandwidth than most x86 CPUs, having well specified RAM chips soldered right next to the CPU instead of having to support DIMM modules certainty helps. AMD AI MAX chips, which also have great memory bandwidth and the most comparable to Apple M also use soldered RAM.

Maybe some details like ARM having a more efficient instruction decoder plays a part, but I don't believe it is that significant.
by mothballed | 2025-08-26 17:20:19+00:00
If you create regulation you can't effectively enforce it can actually make things worse. This is why you can buy fentanyl on every corner, but now the people supplying it have small nation-state tier armies of guys in hiluxes with machine guns and truck mounted .50 cal anti-armor guns.

Not saying that will happen with ghost jobs, but it's not a given things will improve.
by avs733 | 2025-08-26 17:20:20+00:00
same - left the industry after 2 years. Made more as a startup founder while working better hours.

It's not just the pay, a fab operates 24x7x365 and how management turns that into work practices and life for employees.

I once interviewed at a fab that offered 'better work life balance'...and what they meant was you weren't allowed to access any email or information off site so they couldn't bug you as much. In reality, it just meant you had to actually go in to the plant if anythign went wrong.