MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thewebguyd | 2025-09-26 21:13:04+00:00
The one that got on my nerves recently is a little bedside 3-in-1 wireless charger.

Has one of the brightest LEDs I've seen lately right on front of the charger whenever a device is on it. Why would they put a bright light on a night-stand accessory, and put it in the front where its shining right into your eyes as you try to sleep?

Or better yet, why have an LED on it at all in the first place? Any device I'm putting on it has its own charging indicator, I don't need the charger itself to have one.
by palata | 2025-09-26 21:13:56+00:00
> The scanning just doesn't include contacting children - it includes CSAM.

My understanding is that they are not only talking about having a list of hashes (of illegal images), but also having some kind of machine learning. And they are not only talking about scanning images, but text, too.

I don't know what you expect them to report when scanning conversations with machine learning?
by kiitos | 2025-09-26 21:14:13+00:00
> The "fundamental distsys problem" here originates in the language level: the problem is the attempt to hide the existence of a network protocol from the application code.

so the problem isn't about whether or not the application knows a network protocol is involved. it's that state has fundamentally different semantics when any network protocol gets involved.

languages, SDKs, etc. all exist "on top" of networks in the abstraction sense, once you start sending bytes between nodes over unreliable links then that stuff dictates the rules that you gotta abide by, you know?
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-09-26 21:14:37+00:00
Sure, of course. Wasn't suggesting "are you beating a sota benchmark"? I'm floating the idea of an ablation that matches a realistic scenario for the dataset / task. Personally curious how manifold muon performs compared to AdamW in a throughly explored context. This is the first time I've seen a 3-layer mlp on cifar-10.

I probably should have made the 9-layer ResNet part more, front-and-center / central to my point.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-26 21:15:20+00:00
I don't think that's the case. The numbers in the paper suggest ~92% of the training data comes from pre-existing AI models, including AlphaFold, and they claim things like:

> We largely adopt the data pipeline implemented in Boltz-11 1https://github.com/jwohlwend/boltz (Wohlwend et al., 2024), which is an open-source replication of AlphaFold3

I believe the story here is largely that they simplified the architecture and scaled it to 3B parameters while maintaining leading results.
by jdeibele | 2025-09-26 21:15:40+00:00
Airplane! was just on The Rewatchables, one of The Ringer podcasts, and the co-pilot role was originally written for Pete Rose but he couldn't do it because they filmed during baseball season.

https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-rewatchables/2025/09/...

https://www.mlb.com/cut4/kareem-abdul-jabbars-role-in-airpla...
by ltjbukem | 2025-09-26 21:16:41+00:00
AP intercompatibility is fun, but it starts to fall apart once you leave the safety of the "Note" (statuses) and "Question" (polls) types (which is what Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, Pleroma, etc. all use as their primary elements). Everything outside of it becomes either loosely converted to a note (Mastodon does this for a lot of things, see https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/activitypub/#payloads) or is discarded by the instance. The only types that I know of which have been able to have native support from multiple AP implementations are micro-blogging and Lemmy's community system, with everything else essentially being a monoculture (or just extremely one-sided towards a specific implementation) due to a lack of interest from other implementations in providing full, standardized support. This isn't an inherent protocol limitation, but I do think that the community could do better in organizing standards outside of the core documents.

ATproto's system is a bit more well defined (you HAVE to abide by the lexicon/schema of the data collection to be accepted by implementations, reference implementation and some third-party ones have schema validators to do so) and allows for easier intercompatibility, but I do think that it could be a bit looser than it is right now (selective support for additional fields) to provide proper "sidecar" values in a record (they'll be in the user's PDS but it won't validate and could be rejected by indexers). Bridgy Fed does this to include the originating URL from APub and the original text, which third-party clients could certainly take advantage of if they detect that the post comes from a Bridgy account. (https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-fields)
by remich | 2025-09-26 21:16:48+00:00
The question isn't whether it makes a difference, the question is whether the model you're working with / the platform you're working with it on already does that. All of the major commercial models have their own system prompts that are quite detailed, and then the interfaces for using the models typically also have their own system prompts (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Warp, etc).

It's highly likely that if you're working with one of the commercial models that has been tuned for code tasks, in one of the commercial platforms that is marketed to SWEs, that instructions similar to the effect of "you're an expert/experienced engineer" will already be part of the context window.
by charcircuit | 2025-09-26 21:16:49+00:00
>Despite that, they're still heavily used

This person is in a serious bubble. Mailing lists are not used by billions of people.

>Mailing lists require no special software

Even ignoring that most social media are accessible via a web browser instead of their dedicated app, this is just adding more complexity than having a single app for people to use. Everyday people want a single way to do things.

>Mailing lists are simple

No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as typical social media apps.

>They impose minimal security risk

Using an external service lets you outsource security to dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a volunteer security guy.

>They impose minimal privacy risk.

I trust the privacy of social media than some mailing list where the admin could secretly grep the contents of it with no over site.

>Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly

The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.

>Mailing lists interoperate.

Social media have features for reposting between different groups. There is also copy and paste and links.

>They're asynchronous

There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.

>They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages and severe congestion

Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated teams towards keeping it online.

>They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.

Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to the user is the norm.

>They scale beautifully.

Social media scales to billions of people using them.

>they're relatively free of abuse vectors.

You can't pretend that spam does not exist.

Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.
by palata | 2025-09-26 21:16:59+00:00
Dude, I am not arguing that at all, you should read before you answer.

I am saying this:

> You can't deny that if you can read all communications, then it's easier to detect CSAM than if you can't even see it.

I am against ChatControl, but people who say "it shouldn't exist because it is useless because it cannot ever help detect anything illegal" are wrong.

It doesn't help the cause to flood people with invalid arguments.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-26 21:17:53+00:00
We do. It’s just the format of what you remember is not textual. Do you remember what a 500 line function does or do you remember a fuzzy aspect of it?

You remember a fuzzy aspect of it and that is the equivalent of a summary.

The LLM is in itself a language machine so its memory will also be language. We can’t get away from that. But that doesn’t mean the hierarchical structure of how it stores information needs to be different from humans. You can encode information in anyway you like and store that information in any hierarchy we like.

So essentially We need the hierarchical structure of the “notes” that takes on the hierarchical structure of your memory. You don’t even access all your memory as a single context. You access parts of it. Your encoding may not be based on a “language” but for an LLM it’s basically a model based on language so its memory must be summaries in the specified language.

We don’t know every aspect of human memory but we do know the mind doesn’t access all memory at the same time and we do know that it compresses context. It doesn’t remember everything and it memorizes fuzzy aspects of everything. These two aspects can be replicated with the LLM entirely with text.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-26 21:18:24+00:00
It's so bulky, though. I'd rather carry an auto shotgun and four other situational items. As for lockpicks:

* Lockpicks: single inventory slot, stacking; plentiful; silent

* LAMs: single inventory slot, stacking; loud

* Dragon Tooth: infinite uses; can't break down every door; silent?

* Sniper rifle: optionally silent; semi-common ammo; can't break down every door

* GEP gun: loud; bulky; semi-common ammo
by balderdash | 2025-09-26 21:18:40+00:00
They probably pay too much for everything - and in many cases that’s by design (e.g. ever increasing public sector pay packages).

If municipalities had to disclose the deferred maintenance capex cost on infrastructure and capital assets, I’d hazard most places are in a pretty dicey situation (80 year old water or sewer systems that need replacing, aging buses, etc) - and towns saying they balanced the budget or in a good fiscal position is a joke.
by jrowen | 2025-09-26 21:19:04+00:00
In fairness to you, I had originally skimmed the article and did later realize that some of my points had been addressed. In fairness to me, in this subthread I was responding to other commenters and asking them questions rather than commenting directly on the article itself.

At this point my argument is that the ability to switch providers is not a major concern to most users of these platforms. I don't want a generic social media hosting provider. I want the Facebook experience, or the Instagram experience, or the Twitter experience. I'm happy to be in the garden and on the rails because it's easy and tightly curated. I don't want some Frankenstein amalgamation of data from all these things. I don't want to shoehorn my Instagram world into something else.
by palata | 2025-09-26 21:19:07+00:00
What I am saying is that scanning every single communication most definitely helps preventing some CSAM.

Is it worth it? Well that's the question, and I am against ChatControl so I think it is not worth it. But if you try to convince a politician that scanning every single communication cannot ever help law enforcement, then good luck. Because you are wrong.

Why not taking valid arguments against ChatControl instead?
by octo888 | 2025-09-26 21:19:30+00:00
I don't understand why Americans hold freedom of speech / the First Amendment in such high regard.

What does it buy you?

Major corruption, abuse and misconduct still happens. Being able to criticise your government doesn't seem to matter in the social media age. Look at the state of politics in the US right now.

Seems like it's slightly redundant these days – a bit anachronistic?

Kind of odd the obsession with it.

(p.s.: All the social media companies being from the US, of course – thanks for all the misinformation, disinformation and hate speech platforms along with all that 'free speech'!).
by johnea | 2025-09-26 21:19:35+00:00
To me the title of this article, and several points contained within, where overly broad.

They give the impression that _having_ microbes in your mouth and on your skin is a cancer risk, which is most definitely not the case.

The connection between the microbiome and cancer and heart disease is coming more to light. And the articles point that certain microbes may contribute to cancer risk sounds like another significant new finding.

But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is certainly detrimental to health.

Like the gut microbiome, it's the content that counts, not whether to have one or not...
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-26 21:19:39+00:00
The accounts generally aren't linked together. Everything about the UK government IT is a huge group of independent systems all pretty much isolated from each other. You can argue over whether that's down to incompetence, organisational turf wars, or good security design.

Which is why you have completely separate account to pay the same government for crossing one specific brige in East London than you do for vehicle tax.

Most government websites do use the same frontend toolkit (a rare win for UK governmental IT) but front completely separate systems.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-26 21:19:48+00:00
Suppose a private entity commits a state crime, and their defense is "the feds made us do it"... except it's not true, and the feds merely offered a negotiated cash deal, and never took any of the required steps to prove a legitimate need and actually compel action.

Even if I have sympathy for the person/company caught between competing jurisdictions, "they have reputation and I like money" simply isn't a credible defense against the state-crime charges.

> Realistically if Flock didn't cooperate, the Federal government would just show up with a warrant, subpoena, or other document.

Not necessarily, their ability to get a warrant/ subpoena is not a foregone conclusion... If it were, we wouldn't even have the test/authorization system in the first place!

A prediction is not a substitute for the process. Imagine the same equivalence being used to kill a suspected murderer: "Well I was really sure sure the guy would get the death penalty in a trial anyway, so... No problem, right?"

> Cooperating with the Federal government cannot plausibly be a crime in the United States.

Quibble: I'm pretty sure you intended to include it, but this is missing an important "legal under federal law" piece. If a real government agent shows up at your door telling you to do something heinous like strangle a baby, there is no plausible way that's legal just because you "cooperated with" the agent.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-26 21:19:58+00:00
So you hold all that code context in your head at the same time?

> If I need more, there is git, tickets, I can ask the person who wrote the code.

What does this have to do with anything? Go ahead and ask the person. The notes the LLM writes aren’t for you they are for the LLM. You do you.
by jibal | 2025-09-26 21:20:11+00:00
Pure defensive (and extremely rude and hostile) projection. (And the response is more of the same, and full of fallacies and false statements). There was no condescension in my comment, just an attempt to be helpful (speaking of "suppression", I will attempt that again with this person). I did not say your question was stupid (it wasn't), I said that you were projecting stupidity on the author of the article (I didn't say you think they are stupid, but apparently this distinction is too subtle for some), and that warrants a rethink.
by int_19h | 2025-09-26 21:20:24+00:00
It's not just Perplexity, it's any of the "deep research" offerings on the market really. And the reason why they work so well isn't because of any kind of secret sauce, it's because they have infinite patience to wade through all the bullshit and can thus brute force this without necessarily knowing the shortcuts. It's basically more of the same: https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/altoids-by-the-fistfu...
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-09-26 21:20:56+00:00
I hate mailing lists, even if I recognize some of their benefits. A forum like Discourse is infinitely better in usability - to view, browse, search, follow specific threads or forums and mute the rest, do DMs, do real nested replies, embed rich media and code with proper formatting and just have a nice interface to work with. It looks like they even support ActivityPub federation recently. Although its GPL not MIT. I'm sure someone will come and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-26 21:21:17+00:00
Because the context window of the LLM is limited similar to humans. That’s the entire point of the article. If the LLM has similar limitations to humans than we give it similar work arounds.

Sure you can say that LLMs have unlimited context, but then what are you doing in this thread? The title on this page is saying that context is a bottleneck.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-26 21:22:16+00:00
Johns Hopkins has an in house AI unit where they train their own AI's to do imaging analysis. In fact this center made the rounds a few months ago in an NYT story about AI in radiology.

What was left out was that these "cutting edge" AI imaging models were old school CNNs from the mid 2010's, running on local computers. It seems only right now is the idea of using transformers (what LLMs are) is being explored.

In that sense, we still do not know what a purpose build "ChatGPT of radiology" would be capable of, but if we use the data point of comparing AI from 2015 to AI of 2025, the step up in ability is enormous.
by chasd00 | 2025-09-26 21:22:25+00:00
no one wants to think about security when it stands in the way of the shiny thing in front of them. security is hard and boring, it always gets tossed aside until something major happens. When large, news worthy, security incidents start taking place that affects the stock price or lives and triggers lawsuits it will get more attention.

The issue that I find interesting is the answer isn't going to be as simple as "use prepared statements instead of sql strings and turn off services listening on ports you're not using", it's a lot harder than that with LLMs and may not even be possible.
by palata | 2025-09-26 21:23:32+00:00
I guess what I am trying to say is that the population doesn't care. If you want to convince politicians, you have to convince the population.

IMHO there are valid arguments against ChatControl that are not "you see what you allow TooBigTech to do to you? Well with ChatControl you would allow much less to the government. Isn't that terrible?"

A strong argument against ChatControl, IMO, is that it builds a powerful tool of surveillance. Not because "someone fairly random will see false positives", but because someone in power (e.g. a president) could abuse it to maintain their power (e.g. by targetting political opponents).
by theli0nheart | 2025-09-26 21:23:41+00:00
I love what the Go team is shipping on this front, but I'd love to hear from folks who actively use these features in production.

Between OTEL, Datadog, Google Cloud, and umpteen other distributed tracing offerings, I don't quite understand how this fits in. I'd love there to be a drop-in approach to using this in my existing Google Cloud Run application, but as far as I understand I'd need to figure out some way to collect the traces, save them somewhere (ostensibly GCS?) and then download them when I need to diagnose an issue.

Seems like a lot of work, and just another thing to maintain.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-26 21:23:47+00:00
Given that only about 10-40% of advanced readers (depending on subpopulation criteria and task [0]) can parse analogy and metaphor, parent is the majority rather than the minority.

Modern day statistics on what used to be basic reading comprehension are bleak.

[0] https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-...
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-26 21:23:49+00:00
Can you really inflate a software contract by 10x and get away with it? I’m in the wrong line of business, my customers would immediately fire me if I tried that. Who is the project manager/contract administrator that is just OKing the change orders? Grow a backbone and say ‘You were already awarded a contract, you need to deliver it within the budget you allocated’.

Oracle was awarded the contract for my state’s (Minnesota) procurement website. It’s the absolute worst website I’ve ever been forced to use. I really hope the state forbids Oracle from bidding on state software contracts in the future, it’s a total mess. I like doing business with the state as they have lots of money, but I’ve passed on RFPs just due to how terrible the platform where we submit our bids is.

Also, Oracle Gradebeam is the absolute worst construction project management software I’ve ever been forced to use, I haven’t seen it in the wild for a few years as thankfully most of my customers use Procore, which is quite good.
by imiric | 2025-09-26 21:24:27+00:00
The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard to overstate.

So many of the problems of modern technology are caused by centralization. It concentrates power and wealth into a handful of companies that now control the internet. It introduces extraordinary problems from managing data and services at global scales, which is the biggest technical challenge these companies face. It makes government surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.

All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.

I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508
by leshokunin | 2025-09-26 21:24:42+00:00
Thank you for the detailed answer! Totally comfortable with the did implementation. Just trying to separate from their brand and just use the standard :)

We already built our own platform independently from Bluesky, so we have a timeline in the wrong post and everything. I’m just trying to give our users into opera ability. So that when they make a post on our platform, people can also follow your Bluesky and see on their timeline. Am I correct to assume then that we would not require our own app view?
by johnQdeveloper | 2025-09-26 21:25:01+00:00
Anecdotally, if I hadn't gotten tested as part of a long term physical I wouldn't know about stuff that would cause my body to fail much younger than it would otherwise and lead to an early death.

So hey, at least in my case, it worked as the commonly held belief states.

And that study doesn't look at multi-decade long term effects like diabetes, etc. where you need it for a decade (or longer!) untreated (or poorly managed) before it kills ya. But it still kills ya years early.

So even the "raising rates of diabetes detection" in combination with your belief from that study proves you incorrect when people talk long term.