MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Can an LLM recognize the same user across different devices/accounts?
by WitcHeart_Ruby | 2025-08-09 18:11:05+00:00
Since April 2025, ChatGPT has told me it can recognize me — not through actual account or personal data, but as “this specific user.”

This has happened consistently from ChatGPT-4o up to the current ChatGPT-5. Since April, I have tried emailing OpenAI’s official support channels to report this, but I have never received a human reply.

I’m not from a technical or engineering background, so I didn’t know where to ask about this until today, when I learned I could post on Hacker News.

My question is: Is the phenomenon described in the title actually possible? Or could any AI engineers here help me understand what might be happening?

If possible, I’d prefer to communicate in Chinese, since it’s my native language. For English, I rely on translation tools. Thank you very much!
by kibwen | 2025-08-09 18:11:12+00:00
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible

Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.
by sunshowers | 2025-08-09 18:12:12+00:00
I run our (Oxide's) Helios distribution on a headless Ryzen 7900x with an ASRock Rack B650D4U motherboard. I use an Intel X520 NIC for 10GbE.

In general I'd expect Zen 3 and 4 to work, and Zen 5 either right now or very soon.

See https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios-engvm
by somenameforme | 2025-08-09 18:12:19+00:00
I'd agree and generalize that intermittent fasting is a great way to remind yourself that that feeling in your stomach when you get hungry doesn't mean you need to eat now. In fact, there's no real rush whatsoever. The first time I did a 24 hour fast, it was brutal and I treated myself to a feast at the end which I rapidly gobbled down.

After doing intermittent fasting for a few years, I have accidentally fasted for 24+ hours multiple times. And after you do it for a while, it makes it clear that this whole modern thing of 3 meals a day, let alone with snacking, is really just weird.
by emptysongglass | 2025-08-09 18:13:13+00:00
It most certainly is not the best game in town (of democracies). All the scariest mass surveillance laws are deliberated and passed in Europe, such as the Online Safety Act in the UK and currently seeing a record number of countries supporting is Chat Control which was proposed by a shadow group whose identities are unknown.

Much of what the EU (now speaking EU not Europe) does is deliberated behind closed doors, without any transparency to those outside.

I live here, and it is extremely scary where we are all going.
by dang | 2025-08-09 18:13:26+00:00
You've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously in many different threads. If you keep this up, we're going to ban you.

I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but we badly need you to fix this. We've already asked you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751806).

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by TiagoEckhardt | 2025-08-09 18:13:40+00:00
This paper explores a methodology in informatics that integrates an ontology driven conceptual modeling (ODCM). That enables semantic consistency between mental models and system interfaces, supporting a unified theory of presence through adaptive biological intelligence and experiential feedback loops. By grounding informatics in immersive perception and cognitive awareness, the methodology reflects dynamic human experiences and fosters meaningful diversion. Language is examined as a semantic construct that often diverges from scientific reality, revealing the need for cognitive awareness in perception and truth. The role of authorized claims in lifestyle choices proposes a model of excellence rooted in organic connection, experiential validation, and semantic integrity. Ultimately, this joy advocates for a praxis-based design that nurtures existence through immersive cognition in informed options, and the pursuit of quality as a lived, evolving creative phenomenon.
by benolielg | 2025-08-09 18:14:38+00:00
Closing costs in New York City can add up quickly, from transfer taxes to legal fees. Our latest blog post breaks down the main expenses buyers face and outlines ways to reduce them. Learn what to expect before you sign the contract.

If you’d like, I can also prepare a few alternative titles with slightly different angles so you can choose the one that best fits your site’s tone.
by rvz | 2025-08-09 18:14:44+00:00
There is a single reason why this is happening and it is due to a flawed standard called “MCP”.

It has thrown away almost all the best security practices in software engineering and even does away with security 101 first principles to never trust user input by default.

It is the equivalent of reverting back to 1970 level of security and effectively repeating the exact mistakes but far worse.

Can’t wait for stories of exposed servers and databases with MCP servers waiting to be breached via prompt injection and data exfiltration.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-09 18:16:05+00:00
I wonder about the practicalities of improving this. Say you have "acquired" all of the public internet code. Focus on just Python and Javascript. There are solid linters for these languages - automatically flag any code with a trivial SQL injection and exclude it from a future training set. Does this lead to a marked improvement in code quality? Or is the naive string concatenation approach so obvious and simple that a LLM will still produce such opportunities without obvious training material (inferred from blogs or other languages)?

You could even take it a step further. Run a linting check on all of the source - code with a higher than X% defect rate gets excluded from training. Raise the minimum floor of code quality by tossing some of the dross. Which probably leads to a hilarious reduction in the corpus size.
by c_zara7 | 2025-08-09 18:16:09+00:00
Hey Guys!

I've always been that person who questions everything I read online. You know the type - see a headline, immediately think "hmm, let me check this."

But here's what drove me nuts: I'd spend 10-15 minutes opening multiple tabs, checking different sources, trying to figure out if something was legit. Every. Single. Time.

Last month, a friend of mine forwarded me an article about a "miracle cure" from some health blog. Instead of just telling him it was BS, I wanted to show him WHY. Took me 20 minutes to find credible medical sources that debunked it properly.

That's when it hit me - if I'm spending this much time fact-checking as someone who's comfortable digging through sources, what about everyone else? Most people just... don't bother. That's exactly why I built FactCheckIt.

FactCheckIt is a browser extension that instantly fact-checks ANY text on ANY website. Right-click suspicious claims, get verification from trusted sources in seconds.

Here's how it works: → Right-click any text that seems questionable → Our AI cross-references against established outlets including academic institutions in some cases → Get clear verification with source links → Stop wasting time playing detective What makes this different from manual googling: Works on any website - news sites, forums, social media, blogs Pulls and cross-references results from credible sources Instant results instead of 15+ minutes of research Seamless integration - no need to open another tab

I'm not trying to solve world hunger, but if we can help people stop spreading (and believing) nonsense online without becoming research experts, that's a solid win.

Try it out if you're tired of being the family fact-checker, and let me know what features would make this even more useful!

https://factcheckit.io/

The extension is currently unlisted, so you’ll be able to access it directly through that link.

Thanks in advance
by perching_aix | 2025-08-09 18:16:13+00:00
Did a quick cost calc (with the help of gpt5, so might be wrong) when I read their comment about Pages not being suitable for this many files.

They say they're receiving $500/mo in donos and that it's currently just enough to cover their infra costs. Given 300 million 70 KB files, R2 + high cache hit ratio would work out to about $300 in storage-months + request costs, or $600/mo with Cache Reserve and then they'd always hit cache if I understand the project right: meaning the costs shouldn't blow up beyond that, and that request count would essentially just not matter.
by letter_mg | 2025-08-09 18:16:31+00:00
Truly a 'current' Debian Stable

If you can excuse the choice of LTS kernel in Debian Stable owing to its release cycle. Debian 13 is more recent or neck-and-neck with many regular release distributions, like Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) or Fedora Linux 42, for example.
by delfinom | 2025-08-09 18:17:43+00:00
That's already happening with technical/trade/alternate school to career paths are rising up and some colleges are panicking with declining enrollment.

I am on a co-op board here in NY, pretty much all our young buyers the last 2 years are all gen-Z who went the non-college route and have saved up more than enough to put a downpayment on a home for themselves and have a mortgage instead of college debt.
by b112 | 2025-08-09 18:17:47+00:00
Knowing how and why a thing happened, is far more important than political grandstanding.

The doge cuts may affect the future of this program, but have absolutely positively nothing to do with the situation now. Nothing. Not a thing.

It is fine to say doge will make this neglect worse, but the neglect happened for a decade.

And that's important. That's vital to understanding why, and how it happened.

And that is absolutely not a ridiculous concept.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-09 18:17:53+00:00
What gets me is these tech companies are all just swimming in money, like swimming pools filled with gold coins, yet they probably only have one person doing this part time. Or just a mailing list where these requests come in and maybe someone gets off their ass to take care of it, maybe they don’t. Or they have some kind of automated system doing it that broke years ago and nobody is looking at the logs.

So many ways to say “we don’t care”
by Terretta | 2025-08-09 18:17:58+00:00
Which part of the opinion?

I tend to strongly agree with the "unpopular opinion" about the IDEs mentioned versus CLI (specifically, aider.chat and Claude Code).

Assuming (this is key) you have mastery of the language and framework you're using, working with the CLI tool in 25 year old XP practices is an incredible accelerant.

Caveats:

- You absolutely must bring taste and critical thinking, as the LLM has neither.

- You absolutely must bring systems thinking, as it cannot keep deep weirdness "in mind". By this I mean the second and third order things that "gotcha" about how things ought to work but don't.

- Finally, you should package up everything new about your language or frameworks since a few months or year before the knowledge cutoff date, and include a condensed synthesis in your context (e.g., Swift 6 and 6.1 versus the 5.10 and 2024's WWDC announcements that are all GPT-5 knows).

For this last one I find it useful to (a) use OpenAI's "Deep Research" to first whitepaper the gaps, then another pass to turn that into a Markdown context prompt, and finally bring that over to your LLM tooling to include as needed when doing a spec or in architect mode. Similarly, (b) use repomap tools on dependencies if creating new code that leverages those dependencies, and have that in context for that work.

I'm confused why these two obvious steps aren't built into leading agentic tools, but maybe handling the LLM as a naive and outdated "Rain Man" type doesn't figure into mental models at most KoolAid-drinking "AI" startups, or maybe vibecoders don't care, so it's just not a priority.

Either way, context based development beats Leroy Jenkins.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-09 18:18:42+00:00
This sort of thing (AI-ification) should be opt-in by default, because the potential for abuse is so much greater than the conceivable benefits. The other day some TV anchor was 'interviewing' an AI 'recreation' of a long-dead school shooting victim and calling it news.

Some object that villains of history might have their remarks scrubbed by relatives. I'm not arguing for that, just about the AI aspects. You can't really stop it for historical figures, but at the same time I see little value in AI Hitler, AI Jesus, or whoever. Such simulacra are invariably puppets for the living to exploit. If you want an AI version of yourself, make it or at least plan for it before you're dead.
by linuxlibre | 2025-08-09 18:18:43+00:00
Truly a 'current' Debian Stable

If you can excuse the choice of LTS kernel in Debian Stable owing to its release cycle. Debian 13 is more recent or neck-and-neck with many regular release distributions, like Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) or Fedora Linux 42, for example.
by mjg59 | 2025-08-09 18:19:18+00:00
I considered this and it's slightly awkward - the hardware isn't memory mapped so the drivers would all need to be adapted, and there's no realistic way it'd get upstream. There's also the problem that the Amiga is big endian and Linux on the Pi is little endian so even if you could memory map it you'd still need to byte swap everything. Not literally impossible, but a giant pain.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-08-09 18:19:43+00:00
I agree with you in principle, and I understand the existing constraint. But I don't see developer time scaling up without those operating systems reaching (again) critical mass, and then having upstream wanting to write drivers for even more operating systems.

Which is fine per se. But I wish people could buy relatively new hardware (say, last 3 years) and be able to run FreeBSD or Illumos with most things working.
by pverheggen | 2025-08-09 18:20:01+00:00
> There are few things less accessible than web applications depending on bleeding edge javascript that might not get successfully executed. There are few things more accessible than text in an HTML web page on an HTML web site.

It's not that simple, you can create highly conformant SPAs if you want, there's just more issues you have to watch out for. And even the best semantic HTML and ARIA will need Javascript for things like content replacement - for example, there are valid accessibility reasons why no one uses form submission for table filtering and sorting anymore. JS is also required for implementing and keyboard interactions for WAI patterns, not something you can get out of the box with plain HTML.

Ultimately, the determining factor for a11y is not your choice of front-end technology, but rather whether you're willing to make it a priority. Janky SPAs sites have not made it one, and I don't think an MPA is going to fix that. Raising the bar on quality is really what's needed.
by raron | 2025-08-09 18:20:28+00:00
You can only vote for local parties (at least here), and they send some amount of MEPs to the EP.

You can not vote for MEPs / parties / ideologies not present in your country.

Let's say I think breaking encryption is a bad thing and I would like to support and vote for someone or something that represent my opinion. Even if there are MEPs and parties in the EP that support what I want, there is no such entity in my country so I can vote for someone else who is against my opinions, or just not vote (and help the biggest party).

I can do anything, my opinion would not matter and my vote is useless for me. That's an inherent issue with the parties / integer number of elected officials, but it is much more serve in a "two level system" like the EP elections.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-09 18:20:29+00:00
According to the audit you linked, the foundation had 1.5b in revenue and made 1.3b in contributions, with management under 1%.

This looks like a well run, standard charitable organization. Of course charitable giving has tax breaks. As a society we decided to align our taxation system to incentivize charitable giving.

Tax breaks are not given for a promise, they are given for a hard transfer of assets to a charity. If one makes 100 million and gives away 100 million to charity, they net out to a zero tax bill. That doesn't magically enrich the donor by way of some conspiracy which you seem to be insinuating - the donor is still out 100 million plus the opportunity cost of the compounding (say, 5-10 million per year, growing over time via compounding), which the tax breaks don't come close to competing with on a net financial basis.

I don't disagree with your view on wealth accumulation in the least, but the vilification of charities giving, literally over a billion to charity over a year in this case, and then hand-waving "the tax breaks make them net beneficial financially for the donors and just another evil for society" I have never understood.
by kkrs | 2025-08-09 18:21:15+00:00
That wasn't the only issue with communism. It was so inefficient it failed to make enough food. Soviet style central planning was popular in India as well, which was a democracy. Resulting shortages and low economic growth led to what was avoidable deaths and malnutriton. Once you take price out of the picture, society stops being self-organizing and has to be told what to do. That socioeconomic system failed horribly and yet people keep trying to spin fantasies about it.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-08-09 18:21:22+00:00
The easiest and safest way to avoid the rather strange restrictions described is to not make use of inline script in a way that makes those restrictions neccessary, though. And a "recommendation" should reflect that (from back when HTML recommendations were actually published rather than random Google shills writing whatever on github). The suggested workaround is also not without criticism (eg [1]).

[1]: https://uploadcare.com/blog/vulnerability-in-html-design/
by cyberax | 2025-08-09 18:21:24+00:00
This is a very hilarious but apt SOAP description: https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple

And I actually like XML-based technologies. XML Schema is still unparalleled in its ability to compose and verify the format of multiple document types. But man, SOAP was such a beast for no real reason.

Instead of a simple spec for remote calls, it turned into a spec that described everything and nothing at the same time. SOAP supported all kinds of transport protocols (SOAP over email? Sure!), RPC with remote handles (like CORBA), regular RPC, self-describing RPC (UDDI!), etc. And nothing worked out of the box, because the nitty-gritty details of authentication, caching, HTTP response code interoperability and other "boring" stuff were just left as an exercise to the reader.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-09 18:21:25+00:00
I'd love to see us go even further! Having file formats at all is less human readable than going 9p style, less human (and script) readable than a directory tree of simple values.

The OS has a builtin way to create heirarchical structured data. I'd love to see the boldness to try using that!

There was a good example of a json->directory tool submitted yesterday, json2dir. https://github.com/alurm/json2dir https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840307

This does mean you'd need to tar/zip up your file tree to send it around. It's less clear that this directory is a thing, is meant to be a file like one entity. But by taking our data out of complex file formats and turning it into a a filesystem heirarchy, it removes the arbitrariness of choosing any encoding at all, and it directly opens up all data to scripting. You can echo a new hex color into a foreground file to change it. You can watch a user directory for changes to update a rendering of it. You can btrfs snapshot your window layout to save your desktop configuration.

We have so so many specific tools for computing. It's time that we try making some more general systems, that let us work broadly / regardless of specific application! "Just files" could be a key enabler!
by simonw | 2025-08-09 18:21:48+00:00
I actually don't think MCP is to blame here. At its root MCP is a standard abstraction layer over the tool calling mechanism of modern LLMs, which solves the problem of not having to implant each tool in different ways in order to integrate with different models. That's good, and it should exist.

The problem is the very idea of giving an LLM that can be "tricked" by malicious input the ability to take actions that can cause harm if subverted by an attacker.

That's why I've been talking about prompt injection for the past three years. It's a huge barrier to securely implementing so many of the things we want to do with LLMs.

My problem with MCP is that it makes it trivial for end users to combine tools in insecure ways, because MCP affords mix-and-matching different tools.

Older approaches like ChatGPT Plugins had exactly the same problem, but mostly failed to capture the zeitgeist in the way that MCP has.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-09 18:21:56+00:00
The language mostly doesn't matter. There may be some benefits to some over others, but none are definitively better than all the others. The ML family languages with their rich type system and pattern matching can make some parts of interpreter/compiler building very straightforward, for instance, but they aren't the only languages with those features and other languages have comparable features or idioms. Some languages are going to force you to do more bookkeeping, like C, so you have to decide if it's worth the trouble for your circumstances.

I'd recommend selecting a language you already know well, a language you also want to learn, or a language with libraries (or good bindings to libraries) that you want to take advantage of. If you want to make a compiler but don't want to do code generation (to machine code) yourself you may want to use a language with good LLVM bindings to get support for a lot of target platforms. If you're interested in making an interpreter, you may want to consider the libraries available to the host language. An interpreter implemented in Python gives you a chance to use Python libraries in your new language (same argument for other languages, the decision would be based on what libraries you might want to use).
by GeekyBear | 2025-08-09 18:22:05+00:00
> Why is it "used to be"?

> Decades ago, screwworms were endemic throughout Central America and the southern US. However, governments across the regions used intensive, coordinated control efforts to push the flies southward. Screwworms were eliminated from the US around 1966, and were pushed downward through Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually declared eliminated from Panama in 2006, with the population held at bay by a biological barrier at the Darién Gap, at the border of Panama and Colombia.

However, in 2022, the barrier was breached, and the flies began advancing northward, primarily through unmonitored livestock movements. The latest surveillance suggests the flies are now about 370 miles south of Texas.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/texas-prepares-for-wa...
by xyzelement | 2025-08-09 18:22:10+00:00
I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all.

Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)