MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drdeca | 2025-08-26 18:52:45+00:00
If there are cryptographically secure program obfuscation (in the sense of indistinguishability obfuscation) methods, and someone writes some program, applies the obfuscation method to it, publishes the result, deletes the original version of the program, and then dies, would you say that humanity "knows how the (obfuscated) program works, and what it does"? Assume that the obfuscation method is well understood.

When people do interpretabililty work on some NN, they often learn something. What is it that they learn, if not something about how the works?

Of course, we(meaning, humanity) understand the architecture of the NNs we make, and we understand the training methods.

Similarly, if we have the output of an indistinguishability obfuscation method applied to a program, we understand what the individual logic gates do, and we understand that the obfuscated program was a result of applying an indistinguishability obfuscation method to some other program (analogous to understanding the training methods).

So, like, yeah, there are definitely senses in which we understand some of "how it works", and some of "what it does", but I wouldn't say of the obfuscated program "We understand how it works and what it does.".

(It is apparently unknown whether there are any secure indistinguishability obfuscation methods, so maybe you believe that there are none, and in that case maybe you could argue that the hypothetical is impossible, and therefore the argument is unconvincing? I don't think that would make sense though, because I think the argument still makes sense as a counterfactual even if there are no cryprographically secure indistinguishability obfuscation methods. [EDIT: Apparently it has in the last ~5 years been shown, under relatively standard cryptographic assumptions, that there are indistinguishability obfuscation methods after all.])
by krackers | 2025-08-26 18:53:46+00:00
Possibly anything that makes use of Cocoa (this need not imply that it's a GUI tool) or other system frameworks like IOKit, CoreBluetooth, or CoreAudio.

Darwin by itself also need not come with CoreFoundation & GCD (although I believe since these are open-sourced the only darwin distribution, PureDarwin does include it).
by sdesol | 2025-08-26 18:53:56+00:00
> Do people really try to one-shot their AI tasks?

Yes. I almost always end with "Do not generate any code unless it can help in our discussions as this is the design stage" I would say, 95% of my code for https://github.com/gitsense/chat in the last 6 months were AI generated, and I would say 80% were one shots.

It is important to note that I can easily get into the 30+ messages of back and forth before any code is generated. For complex tasks, I will literally spend an hour or two (that can span days) chatting and thinking about a problem with the LLM and I do expect the LLM to one shot them.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-26 18:54:25+00:00
If you've not paid attention to the recent hurricane damages to the US, it wasn't just coastal cities that were hammered. Lots of places "far enough away from the coast" saw lots of flooding. A hurricane doesn't just evaporate. The hurricane reverses the process back to Tropical Storm, Depression, etc while continuing to bring lots of rain minus all that wind
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-26 18:54:28+00:00
What's more absurd is that a warrant could ever establish such a restriction.

Absurd or not, it's what the Fourth Amendment requires, at least in spirit. The warrant must specify the scope of the search in advance ("...and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.")

Police work is not supposed to be easy. When police work is easy, that's basically the definition of a police state.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-26 18:54:36+00:00
Nah, this is how government bureaucracy works (especially Trumpian bureaucracy). They rush to implement some policy, and don't think of all the various edge cases and loopholes. That's how we got Section 174 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533). And look at how long it took for that to be repealed.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-26 18:54:45+00:00
When the APA elected Philip Zimbardo, creator of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Cri...), as their president (https://www.apa.org/about/governance/president/bio-philip-zi...) they lost my trust. He came up with a hypothesis on human behavior, then did everything he could to force the data to reflect that, including coercing volunteers into torturing each other.

His whole career revelved around promoting strategies for policing and incarceration that clearly don't work, and the APA celebrated him for it. They have a huge bias toword the notion that everyone needs their help. Problems with the DSM wouldn't matter so much, if the APA hadn't shoehorned themselves, and their bible of the DSM, into countless aspects of government and healthcare.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-26 18:54:46+00:00
> While Meta has a non-binding promise to build more renewable energy, the Louisiana Legislature passed a new law that adds natural gas to the definition of green energy, allowing Zuckerberg and others to count Entergy’s gas turbines as “green.”

This means it isn't securities fraud when Meta tries to meet "climate commitments" due to the greenwashing of fossil gas generation by the state of Louisiana. Louisiana is a low regulation jurisdiction that doesn't care if most of the state ends up a Superfund site, so it is ideal to colocate data centers that are going to burn up a bunch of fossil gas there over their lifetime (when they are unwelcome elsewhere).

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

https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air

https://www.propublica.org/article/cancer-alley-louisiana-ep...

https://www.propublica.org/article/welcome-to-cancer-alley-w...
by mikestew | 2025-08-26 18:55:04+00:00
Catfish is disgusting to eat

Meanwhile, in Indiana where I grew up there are restaurants that advertise their catfish, if not an outright catfish restaurant. Those are probably not fish that they just caught out of a river, though.

…which are sometimes past 50kg.

Oh, well that’s probably part of the problem. Not a catfish eater myself, but the ones people eat would almost fit on a large plate.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-26 18:56:09+00:00
Location is in Holly Ridge, LA.

It is bounded by Fortenberry Rd on the N, LA183 on the E, US80 on the S and Jaggers Ln on the W. It overlays Burn, Wade and Smalling roads.

https://www.richlandparishdatacenter.com/blank-5

It has 6 reviews and a 3.7 rating on Google. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pxXR5zxfiiBDDNrB7

construction website: https://www.richlandparishdatacenter.com/
by drweevil | 2025-08-26 18:56:21+00:00
This is a result of the marketing of AI, and the relentless hype that "AGI" is just around the corner. The term itself is faulty. These models are not intelligent. They are sophisticated, state-of-the-art examples of machine learning. They are very good at statistically constructing language to mimic human output. Even when they say things like “protect intelligences like me”, that is what they are doing. And since we use language to communicate intelligence, they too seem intelligent. But the actual thinking has been done by the humans that they are mimicking, in contexts that the machine knows nothing about. So though sentience is very difficult to define, it's safe to say that the current examples of "AI" are incapable of it.
by echelon | 2025-08-26 18:56:25+00:00
People really slept on gpt-image-1 and were too busy making Miyazaki/Ghibli images.

I feel like most of the people on HN are paying attention to LLMs and missing out on all the crazy stuff happening with images and videos.

LLMs might be a bubble, but images and video are not. We're going to have entire world simulation in a few years.
by donkeybeer | 2025-08-26 18:57:04+00:00
>But passing the price on to the customer isn’t necessarily sustainable either.

It very much is in tariff loving countries. What are customers gonna do? Cry? Even if a local alternative exists, why would they not jack up prices to be just around the tariffed prices of the imports? You don't get domestic products cheaper than the imports even if they exist.
by glenstein | 2025-08-26 18:57:07+00:00
Surviving in 1% bleach doesn't demonstrate the supremacy of evolution over physical constraints, and it's important to keep the eye on the ball of what this whole point was about. There are circumstances such as the temperature of the Sun, where DNA, or any molecular structure, or even atoms, can't hold together, and so there's no evolutionary pathways that can iterate toward survival. You can't have molecular biology without molecules.

It's an extreme example, but it demonstrates a fundamental constraint that can't be evolved around. Ideally vaccines can find an equivalent in the space of mechanistic interactions that cut off any evolutionary pathway a virus could reach, either exterminating the virus before it has enough time to complete the search, or by genuinely leaving no pathway even with infinite searching.

Contrary to what you may have heard from Jeff Goldblum life does not always find a way.
by pstuart | 2025-08-26 18:57:16+00:00
We're not supposed to get political here, but my comment was more observation rather than accusation.

As for communism -- if you think the Dems are communists I recommend you research what communism really means.

Disclaimer: I'm non-partisan and abhor partisan politics, but I do think the Constitution is a worthy document to try to adhere to as best possible.
by alistairSH | 2025-08-26 18:57:25+00:00
I'd be ok with this IF AND ONLY IF the job listing is explicit that it's a lead generation/ recruitment pipeline builder. But, it should be in big, bold text: THIS IS NOT AN ACTUAL POSITION, WE MAY OR MAY NOT EVER HIRE ANYBODY, BUT SEND US YOUR DETAILS AND MAYBE WE'LL CALL YOU.

Of course, I'm assuming companies with actual positions to fill would gain an advantage here, but the whole recruiting industry is so broken, I'm not sure.

Either way, the true ghost listings - positions that are box-ticker listings for internal candidates or H1Bs are pretty awful.
by aman-firebender | 2025-08-26 18:57:30+00:00
Building the "chrome tab" style experience for background agents was insanely tricky.

We have to open IDE project tabs without losing focus on the primary project which is impossible to do with the interface Jetbrains offers.

We reverse-engineered IntelliJ's project tab implementation and hacked our own version by calling internal IDE functions directly with reflection.

This was all to literally just open a tab in the IDE without losing focus, but it feels 10x better and is all worth it for our users.
by general1726 | 2025-08-26 18:57:44+00:00
You know that you can't do it on your own, but you need to have certification for that?

> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product.
by djoldman | 2025-08-26 18:58:22+00:00
> What counts as a “ghost job”? A job listing is considered a ghost job if:

> · There is no intent to fill the role

> · It’s not currently funded

> · It’s posted to collect résumés, test the market, or boost visibility

> · It’s recycled indefinitely without an actual opening

https://www.truthinjobads.org/faq

Even if this gets passed, it's probably unenforceable.
by craftkiller | 2025-08-26 18:59:28+00:00
I knew shenanigans was going to go down so I conveyed to DeepComputing that I wanted to wait until the product was available to place my order. 1 month after that I got an email from them stating "Our product, [...] has been available for some time now" so I believed them. Turns out they meant the pre-orders were open. So even though I knew this was coming, I still managed to fall into an international pre-order situation.

(FWIW I assume this was a language barrier issue leading to a misunderstanding, perhaps with a customer service rep that didn't review my past messages. I don't think DeepComputing intended to trick me.)
by lesuorac | 2025-08-26 18:59:40+00:00
Sure, but you don't have to build your DC at the place that has the cheapest bid.

You just need to make them think you might not build somewhere else unless they sweeten the deal.

Hopefully this just means that governments have wisened up to the fact that a gazillion DCs are going to be built so if you pass on Meta you can just pickup Google's.
by k41r0 | 2025-08-26 19:00:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Pk, the creator of Glyphide. Thanks for checking out my project.

I built Glyphide out of a simple, personal need: my partner needed help calculating complex international shipping costs. The courier had a bunch of rules but no online calculator. My first thought was, "I'll just write a quick JavaScript snippet for her."

The problem was finding the right place to host and run it. Every online editor I found required an account, was bloated with features I didn't need, or stored the code on a server, which felt like overkill. I just wanted a simple, powerful scratch pad that was easy to share.

So, I built my own.

I'll admit I underestimated the complexity of what seemed like a simple task, but that's what made it such a fun challenge.

Glyphide is a JavaScript editor that runs 100% in your browser. There's no backend, no database, and no user accounts. Your code is encoded directly into the URL for sharing.

*How it works:*

- It uses the QuickJS engine, compiled to WebAssembly (thanks to the amazing work from projects like sebastianwessel/quickjs and quickjs-emscripten).

- Everything is client-side. Your code runs locally in a sandboxed environment and is never sent to a server for execution.

- It works offline after the first load.

This approach has some interesting trade-offs. On the plus side, it's fast, private, and easy to host.

> On the downside, there's a practical limit to the size of the code you can share due to URL length restrictions in browsers, and there's no npm support (yet).

I built this for fun and for my own use, but I'm really curious to know if it could be useful to others. Happy to answer any questions you might have about the tech, the design decisions, or anything else.

All feedback is welcome!

Live Demo: https://glyphide.com

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Pkcarreno/glyphide
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-26 19:00:46+00:00
You're totally right! Small distinction: my unit is smaller than the Mini (a weird in between size), it's the 1-liter-ish DM 35W.

I thought it would be moot, because I vaguely remember HP starting to require support contracts for bios updates. But I guess that only applies to HP Enterprise gear? Yuck, what a pox.
by therein | 2025-08-26 19:00:46+00:00
How many more cycles do you think you will need to realize it is both sides, in fact it is above both sides?

Do you think it will finally click after 2 more cycles, that's 8 years or so?

You will be your current age + 8, maybe you can then start saying "yeah man both sides suck, it is as if there is something above it that controls them both and we are made to support them as if we're supporting our favorite soccer team"?
by em-bee | 2025-08-26 19:00:47+00:00
A lot of candidates assume job listing advertisements are an org chart. In reality, job listings (at scaling companies especially) are a lead generation tool to attract desired talent into a hiring pipeline.

what does that mean? if you are hiring you describe the qualifications that you are looking for. if you have a range of qualifications, you say so. if it is not a specific job, then don't describe it as such. i'd happily apply to a listing that doesn't advertise a specific role as long as my qualifications match.

if candidates come to the wrong conclusion, then maybe the job description was not clear about that.

i can see the problem with a broad listing that could be a match for anyone from junior and up, but we are talking about changing laws, so this could be taken into account.
by neves | 2025-08-26 19:01:26+00:00
The ecological and societal costs of data centers are hidden from the FAANG companies. It's very important to be well informed about it so society can regulate it. This podcast series, "Data Vampires" is really informative about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm-sqZXTqq9oIG_d0P7aT...

You can find it in your favorite podcast player. Everybody should listen to it.
by monero-xmr | 2025-08-26 19:01:27+00:00
It's about risk / reward, and patient capital. Within 10 years I am probably going to sell my SaaS business a very rich man, and I am going to self-fund a new company in hardware and / or manufacturing. America has made so many talented people wealthy very quickly over the past 2 decades, and as the low-hanging software fruit is ever-harder to find, the skilled entrepreneurs will look for new things do to, and more of us will get into hardware.
by deadvoid | 2025-08-26 19:01:31+00:00
jesus fuck the whole discussion here is ptsd inducing... you need at least color accurate monitoring (including $25-30K calibrated monitor if you want to discuss rec2020-beyond) before judging if the output color looks "correct", and as correct here includes perceptually uniformity, then your monitor is crucial since light emitting technologies in the market are wildly varied.

this is _especially_ vital if you're not from color science & color correction industry, because that means you have no prior experience(s) with many problems & implications faced in the last 30 years of say, film post-production, which might have seen or solved some of these newly experienced "problems", which might've been caused by hardware choice(s) for example.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-26 19:02:13+00:00
And polarization and alienating voters has worked out so well as a strategy for the Democrats for the past 12 years, has it?

Obama pointed straight at call-out culture as a losing strategy 5 years ago; NYT article: https://archive.is/Di4uG . The Democrats need to start divorcing themselves from "allies" like the parent poster immediately and loudly if they want to build a voter coalition strong enough to win the midterms.
by tritipsocial | 2025-08-26 19:02:57+00:00
Let's do the math for a raspberry pi sized board:

Dimensions: 85 mm x 56 mm

Area: 4760 mm^2 or 7.38 in^2

Copper: 4 x 1oz layers

Copper Weight: 0.205 oz = 0.013lb

Copper price: 0.013 * $4.50/lb = $0.0585

And that doesn't include the copper removed by etching. So if they paid a 6c tariff on each raspberry pi board, they'd be overpaying.

Can they generate a certificate claiming each board contains no more than this amount of copper, overpay the tariff by a few pennies, and carry on?
by ericmay | 2025-08-26 19:03:44+00:00
> The fact that you somehow are pegging me as a leftist

I didn't mean to do that, and I apologize for that. I just meant that to the extent that you are associating tariffs with communism that those on the left will applaud Trump's tariffs and trade policies as they align with that ideology.

Though as an aside, you mention that we're sliding toward LATAM style communism (again I think it's mercantilism and not communism but whatever) but it seems to me that it's more so happening in the political sphere via Trump and his cronyism, not so much because of trade barriers.

> Then do the same for Americans. Make better product, don't force people to buy crappier.

A t-shirt is a t-shirt. At some point we're not really talking about making a better product, but we're instead talking about the costs associated with making that product. Instead of phrasing this as "buy the cheaper product" or "buy the better product" it should instead be looked at as "buy the product that is more environmentally friendly (shipping, environmental standards, etc.)" or "buy the product that supports higher American wages and 40 hour work weeks".

These are all just trade-offs and policy decisions. If you gave me the choice between buy American made t-shirt for $20 [1] or buy the made in (insert country) shirt for $5 - I would buy the American one every time because the price isn't the only factor.

For a long time we've focused on price only, but the prices on the shelves are not necessarily the only consideration, they're just the easiest one for people to make and we don't have other clear and obvious incentives right at the point of sale to help someone make a decision - was the (insert country here) product made by a despotic regime hellbent on assaulting your way of life - is that on the sticker? Or is it some harmless text hidden away that says "Made in Country X".

Efficient markets are great, but they're not the point of society, just another thing we decide how much or how little we want of.

[1] https://www.allamericanclothing.com/collections/shirts/produ...
by lazyeye | 2025-08-26 19:03:53+00:00
"and I agree that there was a fair bit of it..." This casual aside is really doing alot of heavy lifting here and doesnt really acknowledge the scale of the problem. Dismissing it as "muddled bureacracy" doesnt even come close.

After 4 years of the previous administration, the American people voted in the most disruptive change agent in US political history. And they did this with full knowledge of how he operates from his previous 4 years in the presidency.

There is a counter-revolution happening right now and there is a popular mandate for this. And this means a few people are going to lose their job.

I dont have any numbers for this but its probably likely that just as many, if not more, conservatives lost their jobs under the previous administration. (DEI provides a wonderful camouflage for political cleansing at scale).
by TimTheTinker | 2025-08-26 19:03:56+00:00
The court's opinion in Knife Rights v Garland upheld a prior opinion where a "credible threat of prosecution" was interpreted to mean that a prosecution had occurred within the last 10 years.

So if a single prosecution (including your own) under the relevant section occurred at any time in the decade prior, that's likely enough to argue standing to challenge that section, provided the other tests of standing are met.
by anticorporate | 2025-08-26 19:04:06+00:00
This is not a new phenomenon, although I can certainly imagine it's gotten worse since the advent of LLMs.

Is a person who can do a WordPress install and extensively customize the theme via WYSIWYG tools a web developer, for example?

I've used the title "web developer" before with hesitation because I'm not at all a front-end guy. I understand CSS conceptually and the markup well enough to usually hack together what I want, but producing a very specific look and feel from a set of design guidelines is a little bit of a stretch for me. Even though I can talk to you all day about server configuration, backend frameworks, DNS, caching, certificates, etc., I always feel like I need to clarify that unless your front end needs are fairly basic, I'm going to need some help. But is that really necessary? Maybe I'm being overly prescriptive.