MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ruszki | 2025-08-25 08:44:44+00:00
Okay, but this causes me about 90% of my major annoyances. Seriously. It’s almost always these stupid country restrictions.

I was in UK. I wanted to buy a movie ticket there. Fuck me, because I have an Austrian ip address, because modern mobile backends pass your traffic through your home mobile operator. So I tried to use a VPN. Fuck me, VPN endpoints are blocked also.

I wanted to buy a Belgian train ticket still from home. Cloudflare fuck me, because I’m too suspicious as a foreigner. It broke their whole API access, which was used by their site.

I wanted to order something while I was in America at my friend’s place. Fuck me of course. Not just my IP was problematic, but my phone number too. And of course my bank card… and I just wanted to order a pizza.

The most annoying is when your fucking app is restricted to your stupid country, and I should use it because your app is a public transport app. Lovely.

And of course, there was that time when I moved to an other country… pointless country restrictions everywhere… they really helped.

I remember the times when the saying was that the checkout process should be as frictionless as possible. That sentiment is long gone.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-25 08:44:54+00:00
> as it was a nightmare to replace.

I suspect this is the problem with all aging infrastructure; 100 years ago or more, water, sewage and electricity was deployed everywhere, but then they just kept building and rerouting and now the systems have become unmaintainable.

I wonder if this has improved in any way since then in newly constructed areas / cities. I'm thinking a service tunnel underneath roads with all the pipes and lines clearly marked and installed in a highly accessible fashion. Said service tunnel can also be used for daring heists and escapes and the like.
by seanwilson | 2025-08-25 08:45:01+00:00
Hi Alexei, thanks for your work on HSLuv! I love the simplicity of it, where you can use HSLuv as mostly a drop-in replacement for HSL which most designers are familiar with.

I keep seeing new tutorials on designing accessible palettes that still use HSL, where the WCAG2 contrast breaks and goes all over the place as you vary the hue and saturation. HSLuv makes life so much easier here and lets you focus on exploring colors that you know will pass, using a familiar looking color picker.
by i_am_proteus | 2025-08-25 08:45:01+00:00
It's thwartable with adequate proctoring. I know about this mode because I found students doing it, and the students in question endured substantial academic consequences.

Large lectures have hundreds of students, and to properly proctor an exam for one of these classes, one needs dozens of proctors.

It can be done, but observe: for most faculty, maintaining the integrity of their course does not aid them on the path to tenure/advancement.
Ask HN: Which LLM is competent, reasonably objective and not a sycophant?
by mettamage | 2025-08-25 08:45:29+00:00
Personally, I've tested ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek and Gemini. Other than Gemini, the other LLMs are way too much of a sycophant to the point that they're unusuable other than basic questions and coding (Claude).

Gemini feels a bit like a sycophant, but based on my testing, it can be argued that it's being diplomatic while staying objective. At least, in the small tests I've (Gemini Pro 2.5). And that's a lot better than the other 3.

What are your experiences? I'm getting a bit sick of this behavior. I haven't had the money and time to test Grok and others.

At least, no LLM would budge when I insisted on saying that 2 + 2 = 5. But give them actually ambiguous stuff and they will bend the knee to even the most silly/obvious/transparent challenges.
by dmesg | 2025-08-25 08:46:16+00:00
Yes and it makes reading your logs needlessly harder. Sometimes I find an odd password being probed, search for it on the web and find an interesting story, that a new backdoor was discovered in a commercial appliance.

In that regard reading my logs led me sometimes to interesting articles about cyber security. Also log flooding may result in your journaling service truncating the log and you miss something important.
by dev0p | 2025-08-25 08:47:45+00:00
Hard disagree. I would love for moderation to be opt-out, for example. I might not agree with moderator actions, so I would very much prefer to see an unfiltered HN instead of having someone else dictate what I am allowed to see or not. The same applies to other websites, especially Reddit.

Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.

While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.
by benterix | 2025-08-25 08:47:49+00:00
> Or, at least, not from North Africa, and I don't really see any other place to get them.

I have many excellent and hard-working colleagues from India, for example. North Africa is not the only option, and just taking these people out of Africa and instantly placing in a completely different context will only create trouble. These things really need to be done properly but I guess we're past that point thanks to Merkel & co.
by lewhoo | 2025-08-25 08:48:25+00:00
"Now the only reason why I won't post this as an arxiv note, is that the humans actually beat gpt-5 to the punch :-). Namely the arxiv paper has a v2 arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10138v2 with an additional author and they closed the gap completely, showing that 1.75/L is the tight bound."

I really don't know what to make of this. The conclusion is that a model could still do this without the paper containing the exact info on how to do this ?
by ludston | 2025-08-25 08:48:32+00:00
No I wouldn't class the artists as choral artists at all, I'm just pointing out that there are examples of polyphonic singing with multiple voices in pop music, it's just that it's usually accompanied with a rhythm section. Pieces that feature choral singing can be very accessible, although acapella music usually isn't. But take the example of Pentatonix someone mentioned earlier (which isn't really choral singing either because of the lack of voice doubling). What makes them accessible is that they use beat-boxing to provide the rhythm line for the punters.
by swatson741 | 2025-08-25 08:48:57+00:00
They certainly came up with a lot of good one-liners for this book.

I wonder why Dennis Ritchie was so infuriated though. He criticizes them for wanting simple functionality, but it's not because language is a powerful tool for solving problems it's because it limits the potential of the platform to it's functionality (which has been simplified and in of itself limited).

So this is confusing to me. Using language to solve problems is the advantage that Unix offers. But, neither the authors nor Dennis care about this? Or they do care in limited ways, but ultimately it's about something else?
by sylware | 2025-08-25 08:49:23+00:00
Won't help: I get scans and script kiddy hack attempts from digital ocean, microsoft cloud (azure, stretchoid.com), google cloud, aws, and lately "hostpapa" via its 'IP colocation service'. Ofc it is instant fail-to-ban (it is not that hard to perform a basic email delivery to an existing account...).

Traffic should be "privatize" as much as possible between IPv6 addresses (because you still have 'scanners' doing the whole internet all the time... "the nice guys scanning the whole internet for your protection... never to sell any scan data ofc).

Public IP services are done for: going to be hell whatever you do.

The right answer seems significantly big 'security and availability teams' with open and super simple internet standards. Yep the javascript internet has to go away and the app private protocols have too. No more whatng cartel web engine, or the worst: closed network protocols for "apps".

And the most important: hardcore protocol simplicity, but doing a good enough job. It is common sense, but the planned obsolescence and kludgy bloat lovers won't let you...
by deniscartin | 2025-08-25 08:49:24+00:00
The whole system runs on its own blockchain built with Hyperledger Besu. Transactions are completely free, and the network runs at a speed of 1 block per second.

The main goal of the webapp is to generate smart contracts for product tracking while also creating a user interface to interact with them.

I’m putting a lot of effort into it, and every day I find something new to integrate or improve. But since I often see posts suggesting to launch early and start collecting feedback, I decided to put together a demo and release it for testing.
by dev0p | 2025-08-25 08:49:45+00:00
It’s a good idea for grocery stores to not sell children alchohol. It’s a bad idea for grocery stores to not sell alcohol to ANYONE, adults included, because children might buy it by faking their IDs. That’s the difference here.

Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.

The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.
by bapak | 2025-08-25 08:52:11+00:00
> "From a sysadmin and operations perspective: What a stupid change. In the perfect cloud native, fully automated fantasy land, this might work and not even generate that much overhead work. In the real world, this will generate lots of manual work. At least, until folks replace their legacy hardware and manufacturers patch their shit."

Give me a break. This is your literal job description, something you should be able to do blind.

If any random FE developer can put a proxy in front of their servers so can you.
by adzicg | 2025-08-25 08:52:13+00:00
We solved a similar issue by blocking free user traffic from data centres (and whitelisted crawlers for SEO). This eliminated most fraudulent usage over VPNs. Commercial users can still access, but free just users get a prompt to pay.

CloudFront is fairly good at marking if someone is accessing from a data centre or a residential/commercial endpoint. It's not 100% accurate and really bad actors can still use infected residential machines to proxy traffic, but this fix was simple and reduced the problem to a negligent level.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-08-25 08:52:43+00:00
One doesn't "setup a read-only access to the internet". But for information access, I imagine something like Kiwix[1] or El Paquete Seminal (without the piracy of course)[2] would be useful to a lot of people

Another option would be to mitm all web requests from a custom web-browser (install a root cert on all devices) and drop all POST, PUT, and DELETE requests. Prohibit the browser from storing cookies or localStorage, and perhaps maintain an allow-list of sites which can be accessed.

This is obviously not foolproof, but it'd certainly make real-world "request smuggling" much more difficult.

Of course, a better question is if there's really even value to providing read-only internet access in the first place? I understand that for some inmates there might be concerns of them contributing to illicit operations in the outside world, but the rationale I usually hear for why inmates are prevented from computer/internet access has more to do with the "dangerous" information they might access (how to commit crimes in the future, avoid getting caught, etc). And I think both of these arguments are worth our skepticism.

[1]: https://kiwix.org/en/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
by martin-t | 2025-08-25 08:54:06+00:00
1) They absolutely do sometimes repeat training data verbatim.[0]

2) That's not even the point. The point is being trained on stolen data without permission, pretending that the resulting model of the training data is not a derived work of the training data and that the output of the model plus a prompt is not derived work of the training data.

Point 1 is just an extreme edge case which is a symptom of point 2 and yet people still have trouble accepting it.

GPL was about user freedom and now if derived work no longer applies as long as you run code through a sufficiently complex plagiarism automator, plagiarism is unprovable and GPL is broken. Great, we lost another freedom.

[0]: I recall a study or court document with 100 examples of plagiarising multiple whole paragraphs from the New York Times, don't have time to look for it now
by dns_snek | 2025-08-25 08:54:11+00:00
> If they white listed their products, competition laws would step in to force them to consider other providers too.

Uh, you're describing SafetyNet and at least a dozen similar anti-competitive measures by big tech. They've been doing this for years and regulators have basically been ignoring it. DMA over on the EU side hints at this changing but it's too little too late.
by benterix | 2025-08-25 08:54:25+00:00
As for 3, regardless if it's true or not as it's also quite subjective, you need to also ask yourself the question whether that's really desired, or, whether the society has the moral right to ask that. Think about Jews during the ages - they survived, their culture survived in exile thanks to that.

In an ideal world, the majority would just appreciate the variety, in the actual world the minority will always suffer by just being different, though. (Grave incompatibilities aside, such as underage marriages and other ways of harming people.)
by kolektiv | 2025-08-25 08:55:17+00:00
It always surprised me somewhat that there isn't a set of traits covering some kind of `fs` like surface. It's not a trivial surface, but it's not huge either, and I've also found myself in a position of wanting to have multiple implementations of a filesystem-like structure (not even for the same reasons).

Tricky to make that kind of change to std lib now I appreciate, but it seems like an odd gap.
by michaelt | 2025-08-25 08:55:20+00:00
Here's how I imagine it went:-

1. See that AI upscaling works kinda well on certain illustrations.

2. Start a project to see if you can do the same with video.

3. Develop 15 different quality metrics, trying to capture what it means when "it looks a bit fake"

4. Project's results aren't very good, but it's embarrassing to admit failure.

5. Choose a metric which went up, declare victory, put it live in production.
by dotancohen | 2025-08-25 08:55:24+00:00
I was thinking maybe joules/year e.g. energy/time might be some brightness indicator for some astronomical definition of brightness - especially in the non-optical wavelengths.

But that's division, not multiplication. Another thread in my brain thought maybe the product of the two could be useful for people in that field, sort of how ISP is useful to people in rocketry but us normal people need to divide it by G(earth) to get something intuitive.
by dhosek | 2025-08-25 08:56:27+00:00
Not really mentioned, but I suspect that at least part of the time, the leaky pipes are caused by the trees. I used to own a house in southern California with a sprinkler system and a couple Chinese elms. Trying to track down why some sprinkler heads weren’t sprinkling, I discovered that the trees had sent roots into some of the (PVC) piping, going as far as six feet of the pipe. I ended up digging up and replacing a lot of piping on that project, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese elms (which are nasty nasty trees that I will hate until I die) didn’t pull the same stunt on subsequent owners of the house.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-25 08:56:33+00:00
> The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged?

Much the same as we do today in games and film both, something saccharine and mediocre built to appeal to a wide majority. Worse, if this process becomes streamlined and widely accessible, you're competing with a hundred other saccharine and mediocre built to a wide majority games. AI generated shovelware, it's like the shovelware of today where anything remotely popular generates dozens of cheap clones, but with AI.

The best games take risks and aren't min/maxed.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-08-25 08:56:53+00:00
If your shallow (and dismissive) comments along these lines weren't so, well, shallow and dismissive, I might be inclined to put a little more effort into it.

But they're not, so I didn't.

By all means, congratulate yourself for putting this bigoted "culture warrior" in their (obviously) well deserved corner of shame.

I'm not exactly sure how decrying bigotry while pointing out that demanding language unrelated to such bigotry be changed seems performative rather than useful or effective is a "childish culture war provocation."

Perhaps you might ask some folks who actually experience such bigotry how they feel about that. Are there any such folks in your social circle? I'm guessing not, as they'd likely be much more concerned with the actual violence, discrimination and hatred that's being heaped upon them, rather than inane calls for banning technical jargon completely unrelated to that violence and hatred.

It's completely performative and does exactly zero to address the violence and discrimination. Want to help? Demand that police stop assaulting and murdering people of color. Speak out about the completely unjustified hatred and discrimination our fellow humans are subjected to in housing, employment, education, full participation in political life, the criminal "justice" system and a raft of other issues.

But that's too much work for you, right? It's much easier to pay lip service and jump on anyone who doesn't toe the specific lines you set, despite those lines being performative, ineffective and broadly hypocritical.

Want to make a real difference? That's great! Whinging about blacklists vs. denylists in a network routing context isn't going to do that.

Rather it just points at you being a busybody trying to make yourself feel better at the expense of those actively being discriminated against.

And that's why I didn't engage on any reasonable level with you -- because you don't deserve it. For shame!

Or did I miss something important? I am, after all, quite simple minded.

Perhaps you could explain it to me?
by koliber | 2025-08-25 08:58:48+00:00
Newspapers used to be printed on paper and no one batted an eye when they were asked to fork over a few quarters per issue. It was not considered ritzy or posh to read about what is going on. Someone needs to pay those people who create the papers.

Now that newspapers are online, somehow it's ritzy to be able to read and the fact that people have jobs which involve creating newspaper content is a bitter lesson.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-25 09:00:34+00:00
To add, Concord had been in development for eight years at that point, had multiple leadership and direction changes, and then the studio was aquired by Sony because they wanted more big live service games and this game ticked all the boxes and was nearly done. So more money was pumped into it.

And sometimes it works; Apex Legends came out of nowhere and became one of the big live service titles. Fortnite did a battle royale mode out of nowhere and became huge.
by aredox | 2025-08-25 09:00:50+00:00
We should just sacrifice more people's savings[0] to fund innovation. This is truly an efficient way of doing things.

[0] "millions of ordinary investors watched their retirement accounts and college funds evaporate. The same middle-class Americans who had been told they were foolish not to participate in the ‘new economy’ now faced financial ruin. Teachers’ pension funds were halved. Family savings meant for homes and education vanished"

And pray we don't enter a "lost decade" (which is closer to 30 years, now) like Japan.
by lan321 | 2025-08-25 09:01:27+00:00
I don't see the issue?

Get on a toll road, pay for a ticket, done. Drive on a normal road, pay for gas, done.

I guess you could make it extremely specific, but then the problem isn't the surveillance, but the price of the cost analysis of driving 1,7 miles on a road in bumfuck nowhere with a J lbs vehicle, exerting X pressure on the road at a standstill going at [Y] speeds, thus generating Z total pressure over time H. In addition the road was I% wet due to rain the day prior.
by pmig | 2025-08-25 09:02:21+00:00
These kind of gateways showcase that larger organizations will equip their employees with tools the same way employees are currently granted access to specific SaaS applications.

One of the bigger challenges we are currently observing is missing authorization for MCP servers.

We actually also just released a mcp-gateway[1] initially focusing on adding OAuth authorization to streamable HTTP MCP servers.

[1]: https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway
by dns_snek | 2025-08-25 09:02:33+00:00
I'm sorry but that's a pathetic excuse for what's going on here. These aren't some unpredictable novel threats that nobody could've reasonably seen coming.

Everyone who has their head screwed on right could tell you that this is an awful idea, for precisely these reasons, and we've known it for years. Maybe not their users if they haven't been exposed to LLMs to that degree, but certainly anyone who worked on this product should've known better, and if they didn't, then my opinion of this entire industry just fell through the floor.

This is tantamount to using SQL escaping instead of prepared statements in 2025. Except there's no equivalent to prepared statements in LLMs, so we know that mixing sensitive data with untrusted data shouldn't be done until we have the technical means to do it safely.

Doing it anyway when we've known about these risks for years is just negligence, and trying to use it as an excuse in 2025 points at total incompetence and indifference towards user safety.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-25 09:03:41+00:00
My own shitty personal website that is so uninteresting that I do not even wish to disclose here. Hence my lack of understanding of the down-votes for me doing what works for my OWN shitty website, well, server.

In fact, I bet it would choke on a small amount of traffic from here considering it has a shitty vCPU with 512 MB RAM.
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-25 09:04:08+00:00
I had always assumed that fstream flushes on destruction, but after digging through the standard all I can conclude is that I'm confused.

According to the standard, fstream doesn't have an explicit destructor, but the standard says "It uses a basic_filebuf<charT, traits> object to control the associated sequences." ~basic_filebuf(), in turn, is defined to call close() (which I think flushes to disk?) and swallow exceptions.

However, I can't seem to find anything that explicitly ties the lifetime of the fstream to the corresponding basic_filebuf. fstream doesn't have an explicitly declared destructor and the standard doesn't require that the basic_filebuf is a member of fstream, so the obvious ways the file would be closed don't seem to be explicitly required. In addition, all of fstream's parents' destructors are specified to perform no operations on the underlying rdbuf(). Which leaves... I don't know?

cppreference says the underlying file is closed, though, which should flush it. And that's what I would expect for an RAII class! But I just can't seem to find the requirement...
by bob1029 | 2025-08-25 09:04:28+00:00
Thousands of requests per hour? So, something like 1-3 per second?

If this is actually impacting perceived QoS then I think a gitea bug report would be justified. Clearly there's been some kind of a performance regression.

Just looking at the logs seems to be an infohazard for many people. I don't see why you'd want to inspect the septic tanks of the internet unless absolutely necessary.