MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-08-25 14:06:38+00:00
As powerful as they are, this is something that I don't think we can trust LLMs with. With the architecture of an LLM, and the fact that at the core there is no such thing as an "out of band" with them no matter how hard you try to put one in, it's intrinsically an arms race, and in the scamming arms race, the scammer side has a loooooot of resources. I've written before about this: [1] You need to think of the scammers as perhaps not hiring PhDs at scale, but making up for it in the ability to just try every possible permutation you can think of and thus making up for the lack of PhDs by leveraging the ability to evolve attacks against the system, and having resources and motivation roughly comparable to at least a company the size and sophistication of Google to do so. They don't need to derive from first mathematical principles a way to figure out how to fool LLMs at a deep neural level... they just need to try a lot of things and then continue in the direction of what works.

And they have a track record of good success at fooling full-on human intelligences too, which does not bode well for creating AIs with current technologies that can win against such swarm evolution.

I make no strong claims about what future AI architectures may be able to do in this domain, or whether we'll ever create AIs that can defeat the scamming ecosystem in toto (even when the scamming ecosystem has full access to the very same AIs, which makes for a rather hard problem). I'm just saying that LLMs don't strike me as being able to deal with this without some sort of upgrade that will make them not described by "LLM" anymore but as some fundamentally new architecture.

(You can of course adjoin them to existing mechanisms like blocklists for sites, but a careful reading of the article will reveal that the authors were already accounting for that.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533609
by thom_nic | 2025-08-25 14:06:39+00:00
DOD Cyber Exchange, home of DISA STIGs among other resources, appears to be signed by a root CA "US DoD CCEB Interoperability Root CA 2" which does not appear to be in any browser list of trusted root CAs. This seems to have changed at some point, because public.cyber.mil used to be accessible without any browser warnings. Certificate chain:

$ gnutls-cli --print-cert public.cyber.mil 443 </dev/null Processed 150 CA certificate(s). Resolving 'public.cyber.mil:443'... Connecting to '23.9.224.83:443'... - Certificate type: X.509 - Got a certificate list of 2 certificates. - Certificate[0] info: - subject `CN=comm-cyber.mil,OU=DISA,OU=PKI,OU=DoD,O=U.S. Government,C=US', issuer `CN=DOD SW CA-74,OU=PKI,OU=DoD,O=U.S. Government,C=US', serial 0x087ef6, RSA key 2048 bits, signed using RSA-SHA256, activated `2025-08-11 17:51:06 UTC', expires `2026-09-12 17:51:06 UTC', pin-sha256="zqDELcwzXa0DHRYN6o+J5FGm2fSFXYb3O0knmjH3MrE=" Public Key ID: sha1:2925dac566b06932f1995cc904f1e723e26d6f5d sha256:cea0c42dcc335dad031d160dea8f89e451a6d9f4855d86f73b49279a31f732b1 Public Key PIN: pin-sha256:zqDELcwzXa0DHRYN6o+J5FGm2fSFXYb3O0knmjH3MrE= -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- ...snip -----END CERTIFICATE----- - Certificate[1] info: - subject `CN=DOD SW CA-74,OU=PKI,OU=DoD,O=U.S. Government,C=US', issuer `CN=DoD Root CA 6,OU=PKI,OU=DoD,O=U.S. Government,C=US', serial 0x4a, RSA key 2048 bits, signed using RSA-SHA384, activated `2023-05-16 16:05:29 UTC', expires `2029-05-15 16:05:29 UTC', pin-sha256="NJVFdvvbhMFMXyUHKDk1RLnMkkY5Qt9eP3Q0Q8QHPUk=" -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- ...snip -----END CERTIFICATE----- - Status: The certificate is NOT trusted. The certificate issuer is unknown. *** PKI verification of server certificate failed... *** Fatal error: Error in the certificate.
by ghuntley | 2025-08-25 14:06:59+00:00
> So it’s better to work on problems that get progressively more complete towards a known objective rather than problems that require exploration.

Yes. The longest I've had a self-directing agent loop running is a cumulative of three months. One goal, one purpose. Every now and then I modify the prompt in the background, and the agent picks up the updated prompt on the next loop.
by sonium | 2025-08-25 14:07:24+00:00
TLDR: There are two versions of the Parquet file format, but adoption of Version 2 is slow due to limited compatibility in major engines and tools. While Version 2 offers improvements (smaller file sizes, faster write/read times), these gains are modest, and ecosystem support remains fragmented. If full control over the data pipeline is possible, using Version 2 can be worthwhile; otherwise, compatibility concerns with third-party integrations may outweigh the benefits. Parquet remains dominant, and its utility far surpasses these challenges
by schneems | 2025-08-25 14:07:30+00:00
I don’t think you realize that you’re making demands on an author who doesn’t owe you anything. And what you’re asking for is quite difficult. I think it’s okay to frame it as a wish or a desire. “I wish more articles include …”

Or as frustration on a community who keeps upvoting things you consider “not a decent article.”

Or as an opportunity “Has anyone investigated a scientific framework for modifying these prompts…”

> a decent article would have included all of that.

My retort that you can write such an article suggests that it’s more difficult than you might realize and the absence of such articles in our feeds suggests what you’re asking for might be impossible (providing hard, empirical data about a soft, non deterministic system). If you have an article that acts as a bright spot for how to write such an article, that would also be a helpful comment.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-25 14:07:56+00:00
When asked "On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today?", 64% of Republicans state it is a good thing. [1] And note that that question has dubious phrasing since it simply says immigration. Change that to legal immigration and the number will probably be more in the 90% range.

Notably this (64%) is higher than even the Democrat level up until about 2012, after the Occupy Wallstreet movement.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-25 14:08:13+00:00
It is not accepted among modern society to point out we are not exclusively alone in our own minds and lore tells me one in six is born sensitive however absolutely anyone’s mind may be “changed” through Power.

Schizophrenia is a very real disorder (an instability) and should be understood.

The voices in our minds and the influences of third parties upon our “synchronicities” and the behavior of others towards us is also real and must be considered.
by metalman | 2025-08-25 14:08:29+00:00
the reason that thermal storage is becoming very atractive is that electrical power from PV, wind, and other sources has become increadably cheap, and there is litteraly no where to put it, so prices go negative now, which is a new thing. so 500x cheaper may be an understatement, considering the nature of how cheap, mature and availible the technology to build a thermal storage battery is, any municicipal civil engineering team can build one from off the shelf and localy sourced materials, and the basic battery "housing" could be a re purposed industrial building, cheap does not begin to describe it.
by scrumper | 2025-08-25 14:08:53+00:00
I was pretty shocked by this. I recently bought an old PC laptop to use in my workshop, to run some engine diagnostic software and machine control stuff that doesn't work on Mac. Of course one of the first things it needed was some PDF reading tool so I went for Reader, figuring Adobe's tool would be the least scummy. Installed it and suddenly I was getting McAfee popups? God knows what else it installed along with it. It's horrible. And the shop manual I'm trying to navigate while covered in oil keeps getting obscured by AI popups and ads. F'ing hell.

Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.
Show HN: I created a screenshot editor for your social media
by AdamAkhlaq | 2025-08-25 14:08:55+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a small tool called [PrettyPost](https://www.prettypost.io/) that takes social media posts—or even your own uploaded screenshots—and turns them into clean, visually pleasing images you can share anywhere.

The motivation came from frustration with messy manual screenshots: cropping out UI clutter, engagement counts, or random background distractions. With PrettyPost, you just drop in a link (or upload a screenshot), and it generates a polished, minimal graphic you can use for newsletters, blogs, LinkedIn, Instagram, or just to archive your own content.

Key points:

Works with posts from major social platforms

You can also upload your own screenshots

Removes distracting UI and adds a minimal, professional look

Great for cross-posting content, personal branding, or content marketing

Includes a generous free tier (no credit card required)

It’s still early, so I’d love feedback from the HN community—especially around what features would be most useful for creators, developers, and marketers.

Try it here: https://www.prettypost.io/ Also sharing my journey: https://x.com/AdamAkhlaq
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-25 14:09:04+00:00
There is a company that claims they can store energy by lifting and lowering heavy blocks with a crane

https://www.energyvault.com/products/g-vault-gravity-energy-...

I like the picture, but the the size of the construction is enormous, especially if you're considering a tank for some kind of pumped hydro. Hydroelectric power is practical because a dam in a strategic location can back up much more than 1000x of its volume in water. If you had to build all those walls forget about it.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-25 14:09:16+00:00
Agreed. The hue changes completely from blue to cyan.

If that's a correct implementation of OKLCH, then it's not something I would ever touch. Something seems to be deeply wrong with however they're calculating hue.

HSL/HSV have issues with perceptual lightness. But not with hues. The hue is constant and doesn't need any correction depending on saturation or lightness.
by miningape | 2025-08-25 14:11:35+00:00
Doesn't this imply that what we're seeing today and calling tyranny is more free than what came before? (anyone can become an individual broadcaster)

Put another way - is this a case of the tyrannical calling the free tyrants? If Orwell or Huxley taught us anything it's that this how a state maintains its illusion/power - manipulating language and perception to make their control seem necessary/liberating.
by croes | 2025-08-25 14:11:54+00:00
"A spark of excitement ran through me imagining this applied to writing online: my articles receiving instant, supportive refinements the moment I hit publish, and manuscripts arriving to editors already thoughtfully polished—elevating clarity while letting our distinctive voices shine even brighter. The result is a consistently smooth, natural reading experience that feels confidently authentic, faithfully reflecting what I wrote while enhancing it with care."
by more_corn | 2025-08-25 14:11:54+00:00
It doesn’t really antagonize liberals. It just doesn’t make sense because they cost $10B and take a decade to build. The payoff time is absurdly long for an investment of that size. I attribute the pernicious persistence of nuclear sentiment to a well funded astroturfing campaign. Nobody who has actually thought through the costs and timelines thinks it makes sense.

Sure, some people are pushing for small “cheap” and quicker to construct, but those words are all relative since they’re still expensive and slow to build. I imagine in a decade we’ll know which of the new varieties were boondoggles and which made a little bit of sense. My prediction is it’ll go about fifty / fifty.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-25 14:11:54+00:00
> an array of ten 10-ton concrete blocks lifted 10m in the air could power a house for a day

No, that's only 2.7 kWh. Most homes use 10-20 kWh/day. A battery of that size is easily under $1k. Good luck building your ridiculous concrete block system for that.

Batteries are really good. Gravity, not so much. It only works when you can lift & store a tremendous amount of stuff "for free" because nature has done most of the work, e.g. in valleys, mountains, aquifers, caves, etc. If you have to build the whole thing it will never be viable.
by lakkal | 2025-08-25 14:12:02+00:00
That's interesting. I was also born in 1966, but in the US. WW2 didn't seem/feel all that recent to me, probably because it had mostly happened far away. I was interested in learning about it and read lots of books, and watched movies. The drive to visit relatives did go by an aircraft carrier (USS Essex) at the scrapyard, but other than that physical artifacts of the war were rare. And the only relative I had who fought in the war was a great-uncle, but he passed away when I was very young.
by tayo42 | 2025-08-25 14:12:03+00:00
>Eat trash, be free, test directly against the filesystem. Why not.

You might run into weird environment or permission issues when you run your tests in a ci job.

Omg, the comment about getting lectured. Relatable about anything testing related. It's happening this comment section. Someone hand waving testing away with pure functions, I'm sure someone will say pattern matching will solve all the problems thanks to the compiler.
by immibis | 2025-08-25 14:12:34+00:00
Let's suppose I'm running a residential proxy. Of course my home IP address changes every day, so you'll end up blocking my entire ISP (a major one) or city (a major one) one by one.

And what if I'm behind CGNAT? You will block my entire ISP or city all in one go, and get complaints from a lot of people.
by tech234a | 2025-08-25 14:12:59+00:00
Ads and many online features can be removed before installation of Adobe Reader by customizing the installer using the Adobe Reader Customization Wizard for Windows [1], where there is an optional labeled "Disable Upsell" [2]. There might also be a version for macOS [3]. It might also just be possible to just directly set the appropriate "FeatureLockDown" options in the registry/preferences in your system [4].

[1]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/in...

[2]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/on...

[3]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/AdminGuid...

[4]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/PrefRef/W...
by xenotux | 2025-08-25 14:13:17+00:00
> I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us.

Why not? Offload the entire task, not just one half of it. It's why many well-off people have accountants, assistants, or servants. And no one says "you know, I'm glad you prepared my taxes, but let me file the paperwork myself".

I think what you're saying isn't that you like going through checkout flows, just that you don't trust the computer to do it. But the approach the AI industry is "build it today and hope the underlying tech improves soon". It's not always wrong. But "be dependable enough to trust it with money" appears to be a harder problem than "generate images of people with the right number of fingers".

No doubt that some customers are going to get burned. But I have no doubt that down the line, most people will be using their phones as AI shoppers.
by kjok | 2025-08-25 14:14:29+00:00
> In short, it's not consumers who want robots to buy for them, it's producers who want robots to buy from them using consumers dollars.

This. Humans are lazy and often don’t provide enough data on exactly what they are looking for when shopping online. In contrast, Agents can ask follow up questions and provide a lot more contextual data to the producers, along with the history of past purchases, derived personal info, and more. I’d not be surprised if this info is consumed to offer dynamic pricing in e-commerce. We already see dynamic pricing being employed by travel apps (airfare/uber).
by singleshot_ | 2025-08-25 14:14:32+00:00
If you were a lawyer, you’d think something slightly different when you heard the word agent than you would if you were a computer guy. The delta is the fact that under the law of agency, an agent has the power to bind the principal to a contract.

If the lawyers didn’t have this definition in their head there would be no drive to make the software agent a purchaser, because it’s a stupid idea.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-25 14:14:40+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding. AI is not a black-box, and neither is a compiler. We(as a species) know how they work, and what they do.

The 'black-boxes' are the theoretical systems non-technical users are building via 'vibe-coding'. When your LLM says we need to spin up an EC2 instance, users will spin one up. Is it configured? Why is it configured that way? Do you really need a VPS instead of a Pi? These are questions the users, who are building these systems, won't have answers to.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-25 14:14:52+00:00
Nice, a new update. I remember playing with both small-js and Amber a longtime ago. Very cool projects but I am not a JavaScript developer so I always had friction using both projects so I settled on Pharo. Off topic: if you like long running image based development you can also get that with some lisps, for example, SBCL with frequently writing a new core image file - easy to do and good for applications where you have a massive amount of in-memory persistent data you work with.
by GZGavinZhao | 2025-08-25 14:15:23+00:00
The Haskell tooling already supports statically linking in the dependencies, I maintain the Haskell stack for Solus and for pandoc we just have a single binary that only depends on libc, all other Haskell dependencies are statically linked inside the binary just like how Rust dependencies work. So it's definitely doable.

I think it's more of the distro's maintainers' choice. For Solus the amount of dependencies was just too much for me to handle so we resorted to static linking.
by sdeframond | 2025-08-25 14:15:26+00:00
Sure.

How about the tons of products we don't even see? Those that tried to do it right on the first try, then never delivered anything because there were too slow and expensive. Or those that delivered something useless because they did not understand the users' need.

If "complaints start pouring in", that means the product is used. This in turns can mean two things: 1/ the product is actually useful despite its flaws, or 2/ the users have no choice, which is sad.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 14:15:40+00:00
I don't think parking an old steam shovel is much of a monument, but I'll give that one to you. No one built it for display, but they did put one there for that purpose, so I'll meet you halfway. I was wrong to suggest no one would do so, and there is clearly interest in such a thing, but I can't say that I agree that a statue exists. The song exists, the steam shovel monument exists. Appreciate the correction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Steam_Shovel_(Le_Roy,_N...
by olavgg | 2025-08-25 14:15:40+00:00
Before I knew about Keycloak, I need to figure out how to use Spring Boot to authenticate via Azure Entra Id. I could't use Spring Boot Security OAuth2 as I couldn't figure out how to bind Entra ID groups to roles in Spring Boot. I saw a great video from Okta where they broke down all details down to each http request (don't remember the link to the video), and then implement each http request/redirects to Entra ID. Finally I got the token and could then use the Graph API to get group memberships for binding a Spring Boot role.

I still used Spring Sessions though, where a successfull authed user got a new Spring Session. The reason was that I liked the idea of having beans with session scope, for example where each user/role has access to a specific database schema.
by Nemi | 2025-08-25 14:15:51+00:00
Worked great for us, but I had to turn it off. Why? Because the IP databases that the two services I was using are not accurate enough and some people in the US were being blocked as if they had a foreign IP address. It happened regularly enough I reluctantly had to turn it off and now I have to deal the non-stop hacking attempts on the website.

For the record, my website is a front end for a local-only business. Absolutely no reason for anyone outside the US to participate.
by drweevil | 2025-08-25 14:16:01+00:00
> Equally, sh remains a problematic scripting language but at least it’s reliably there

I too still have a hard copy of this from way back. This book was my introduction to Unix, as I shifted from programming for DOS/Windows/NT to SunOS, and later, Linux. Despite the many issues (humorously) exposed by this book, the one thing that hooked me is what that quote above implies: It was accessible, durable, and thus worth taking the time to learn, warts and all.
by mikece | 2025-08-25 14:16:26+00:00
"...finding that half of these physics textbooks have Kindle editions priced higher than their hardcover counterparts is a word against everything we were promised about the affordability and accessibility of digital books."

Textbook publishers certainly never made this promise! Why textbooks cost as much as they do -- and how colleges get away with mandating buying new editions when virtually nothing changes (in order to deter buying/selling used books) could be a contentious debate by itself...
by felineflock | 2025-08-25 14:17:20+00:00
YouTube has responded:

> We hear you, and want to clear things up! This is from an experiment to improve video quality with traditional machine learning – not GenAI. More info from @YouTubeInsider here:

> No GenAI, no upscaling. We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video)

> YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features

https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1958286550229541158
by rbanffy | 2025-08-25 14:17:26+00:00
> There are tons of code-literate engineers but way less who would be sympathetic with developer community building, code sharing, licensing discussions, etc., that are more common in communities from US/EU

I find these cultural differences very interesting. I wonder why it’s that way. I noticed some lower willingness to share work (and any form of bad news) in more competitive societies, but I’m unsure this would be the case.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS
by __bb | 2025-08-25 14:17:38+00:00
I recently released v3 of Base, my SQLite editor for macOS.

The goal of this app is to provide a comfortable native GUI for SQLite, without it turning into a massive IDE-style app.

The coolest features are

- That it can handle full altering of tables, which is quite finicky to do manually with SQLite.

- It has a more detailed display of column constraints than most editors. Each constraint is shown as an icon if active, with full details available on clicking the icon.

This update also adds support for attaching databases, which is a bit fiddly with macOS sandboxing.

I'd love to hear any feedback or answer any questions.