MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-28 19:55:54+00:00
Dystopian and scary, and I hope versions of this don’t come to democracies - it’s already creeping in. To me this new policy looks like the CCP going further upstream to prevent thoughts that could eventually lead to criticism of leadership or the party. Or maybe a desperate attempt to suppress growing economic discontent in anticipation of things getting worse:

> On September 22, 2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) officially launched a two-month nationwide campaign to sweep the internet of content that, in the words of the regulator, incites hostility, promotes violence, spreads economic rumors, and “amplifies feelings of despair and pessimism.” The official language is not limited to overt attacks on the Party; it also encompasses posts that describe life as meaningless, express economic frustration in ways that discourage work and study, and materials that “maliciously interpret” social phenomena to promote a nihilistic view.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-09-28 19:56:04+00:00
There’s certainly some amount of propaganda effort being put in it on EU level into elevating the threat.

1. There are actors who would benefit from arms race. The money, the military careers etc. The whole NATO nearly became irrelevant before Russia started invading. Now all those generals have jobs again and Rheinmetall shares are going up.

2. There are actors for whom threat from the East is existential factor (it’s in the core of the political platform of nationalists in Baltic states - remove it and they are suddenly less competitive compared to neutral or pro-Russian parties). Current chief of EU diplomacy Kallas belongs to this group.

However I think Russia wants to make a point too. It’s hardly planning any war with NATO (I hope their intelligence isn’t as bad as in Ukraine), but they do need to convince European voters that war is possible if peace in Ukraine won’t come anytime soon (on their terms). And European voters are certainly not in the mood for big war, so the question really is, who is more convincing: von der Leyen & Co with their idea to support Ukraine until it wins, or Russia with it’s idea that further escalation may harm EU citizens directly.
by danielser | 2025-09-28 19:56:55+00:00
Correct, this is like giving the LLM full specs on your GraphQL endpoint, and telling it have fun, get only what you need.

Except it can use Typescript to manipulate the data mid stream.

So in reality this is MCP Middleware + MCP Orchestration + Tool Call Efficiency.

It will save tokens as well due to only returning what it needs, but more so just think of going from 10 consecutive tool calls, to 1 call that gives you everything you need and nothing you don't, with 1/10th the time taken to accomplish.
by peab | 2025-09-28 19:57:07+00:00
There's a Mulla Nasrudin joke that's sort of relevant here:

Nasrudin is on a flight, when suddenly the pilot comes on the intercom, saying, "Passengers, we apologize, but we have experienced an engine burn-out. The plane can still fly on the remaining three engines, but we'll be delayed in our arrival by two hours."

Nasrudin speaks up "let's not worry, what's 2 hours really"

A few minutes later, the airplane shakes, and passengers see smoke coming out of another engine. Again, the intercom crackles to life.

"This is your captain speaking. Apologies, but due to a second engine burn-out, we'll be delayed by another two hours."

The passengers are agitated, but the Mulla once again tries to remains calm.

Suddenly, the third engine catches fire. Again, the pilot comes on the intercom and says, "I know you're all scared, but this is a very advanced aircraft, and it can safely fly on only a single engine. But we will be delayed by yet another two hours."

At this, Nasrudin shouts, "This is ridiculous! If one more engine goes, we'll be stuck up here all day"
by owisd | 2025-09-28 19:57:26+00:00
There's no value in making insults for the sake of being insulting protected speech, but in the UK if you're making ECHR Article 10 protected speech that someone happens to find insulting or offensive then that's not a crime. It's unhelpful to permit insults as free speech to prevent some hypothetical future abuse, since all modern dictatorships pay lip service to free speech and instead lock up their political opponents for embezzlement or mortgage fraud or whatever.
by araes | 2025-09-28 19:58:02+00:00
If it hasn't been seen before, the International Meteor Organization has the Fireball Events reporting site for "flowers of the sky" all over the Earth. (has not made it onto HN in a couple of years) Not necessarily only natural meteors, since it takes any observation of type, and then makes determinations on whether its one of the "nowdays" frequent satellite reentries.

https://fireballs.imo.net/members/imo_view/browse_events

Just a few days ago, on Sept. 25th there was an impressive one over Santa Rosa and Sacramento California that had 200+ witnesses and a bunch of videos. Apparently the reentry of a Starlink satellite.

https://fireballs.imo.net/members/imo_view/event/2025/6246

Another really impressive satellite or rocket reentry with lots of videos and pictures was seen on February 19th over Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin and observed by 325 people over most of Northern Europe.

https://fireballs.imo.net/members/imo_view/event/2025/1019

Events that are witnessed can be reported at:

https://fireballs.imo.net/members/imo/report_intro
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-28 19:58:12+00:00
> I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.

No, that's true. But they could be worried about their lack of strength without the US and recognise that there's no domestic appetite to move public funds towards strengthening the militaries, so publicising the "potentially imminent dangers" posed by Russia could be a way to do that.

> It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims

What is "it" here?
by jijijijij | 2025-09-28 19:58:29+00:00
Doesn't answer the core fallacy. Historical "technological progress" can't be used as argument for any particular technology. Right now, if we are talking about AI, we're talking about specific technologies, which may just as well fail and remain inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, like most technologies, most things really, did in the past. Even more so since we don't understand much anything in either human or artificial cognition. Again and again, we've been wrong about predicting the limits and challenges in computation.

You see, your argument is just bad. You are merely guessing like everyone else.
by Isamu | 2025-09-28 19:58:48+00:00
>the whole idea that 'everything is a file' is so powerful that we ended up not believing it and the resulting hacks are all so ugly in comparison

I agree. People find it hard to wrap their heads around simple and uniform interfaces. They can’t simplify what they want to accomplish, they want to inflict their complexity on everyone.

Simplifying is maybe emotionally deflating, it makes for a less satisfying solution. Career-wise, it is better to propose complex solutions that take lots of manpower. That’s how you climb the ladder.
by _petronius | 2025-09-28 19:58:55+00:00
On my iPhone 16 Pro + Airpods Pro, when I start the game (tapping on the screen when it says "Tap to start") I get a message saying "Airpods Disconnected", even though the Control Center on the phone reports them as connected).

Tried restarting the app, and disconnecting and reconnecting the Airpods with no luck.

Love the concept, though!
by brudgers | 2025-09-28 19:59:22+00:00
To the degree that kind of tracking significantly matters to you, there are alternatives that scale better and are more under your control.

Personally, I doubt stripping the URL is going to meaningfully impact Google’s ability to track through Youtube. There are well paid, well funded, bonus motivated professionals who spend years throwing data science and computational expertise at the problem. They own search, the most popular browser, and handle a lot of DNS requests.

Never mind that people tend to remain logged into their Youtube accounts, their Google accounts, and operate from the same handful of IP addresses through ISP’s who are happy to monetize data.

Privacy theater is like security theater only less effective.
by dazc | 2025-09-28 20:00:05+00:00
"This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK."

For people who are already working illegally, or plan to, it would change nothing, as they could dodge any checks by sub-contracting through someone who seems to be legally employed.

The government cannot be so daft as to ignore how much illegal work happens this way, so there has to be some larger scheme at play here.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-28 20:00:56+00:00
I’m not sure what the other person meant by “less rootless,” and there’s definitely a lot of value to moving around and seeing new places. But, is it possible that you just put down roots somewhere better?

Like, in the US at least, most licensed professionals are not catastrophically bad at their jobs and you can probably get by with slightly worse contractors and lawyers for most day-to-day issues, for a couple years, while you get integrated into the local community. Especially in areas that you actually want to move to, which tend to have large populations of problem who’ve moved there recently and so are well organized to integrate them.
by Earw0rm | 2025-09-28 20:01:05+00:00
There's human behavioural factors yes, but I was kinda wondering about the virus itself, the R number seemed to fluctuate quite a bit, with waves peaking fast and early and then receding equally quickly.. I know there were some ideas around asymptomatic spread and superspreaders (both people with highly connected social graphs, and people shedding far more active virus than the median), I just wondered whether anyone had built a model that was considered to have accurately reproduced the observed behaviour of number of positive tests and symptomatic cases, and the way waves would seemingly saturate after infecting a few % of the population.
by kianN | 2025-09-28 20:01:24+00:00
This book is very relevant to those fields. There is a common choice in statistics to either stratify or aggregate your dataset.

There is an example in his book discussing efficacy trials across seven hospitals. If you stratify the data, you lose a lot of confidence, if you aggregate the data, you end up just modeling the difference between hospitals.

Hierarchical modeling allows you to split your dataset under a single unified model. This is really powerful for extracting signal for noise because you can split your dataset according to potential confounding variables eg the hospital from which the data was collected.

I am writing this on my phone so apologies for the lack of links, but in short the approach in this book is extremely relevant of medical testing.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-28 20:01:44+00:00
I use LLMs for coding and I like it the way I am using it. I do not outsource thinking, and I do not expect it to know what I want without giving it context to my thoughts with regarding to the project. I have written a 1000 LOC program in C using an LLM. It was a success. I have reviewed it "line by line" though, I do not know why I would not do this. Of course it did not spit out 1000 LOC from the get go, we started small and we built upon our foundations. It has an idea of my thinking and my preferences with regarding to C and the project because of our interactions that gave it context.
by bilater | 2025-09-28 20:01:57+00:00
About a decade ago, a famous Business professor looked at Uber, then valued at $17B as a private company. Even assuming Uber captured 100% of the US taxi market, his math didn’t get anywhere near that number. He concluded Uber was overvalued.

Bill Gurley, a General Partner at Benchmark (an early Uber backer), fired back. His main point: the professor’s critical mistake was assuming the TAM stayed fixed. When you remove friction, markets expand. Opening your phone to hail a ride in two minutes is a completely different product than hoping to flag a cab on a street corner.

Fast forward 10 years and Uber is worth ~$200B, about 10x higher so its safe to say Gurley was right. I love this story because it shows how making something easier can create massive first, second, and third-order effects on demand.

I think we’re about to see the same thing happen with agents. Most of the current conversation is about human-agent interaction (tech support, booking flights, etc.). But the real unlock will be the agent-agent economy. Agents can transact with each other 24/7, making millisecond-level decisions at global scale. This economy could be hundreds or thousands of times bigger than the human economy.

What makes this possible? - AI infrastructure (more chips, more energy) - Smarter, cheaper models - Payments (instant, low-fee transactions)

That last piece is crucial. Agents need seamless payments. This is where crypto, and especially stablecoins, come in. Blockchains like Base, Solana, or Ethereum L2s make micro-transactions feasible.

Coinbase understands this better than anyone. They recently launched x402, an open protocol for internet-native payments. It revives the unused HTTP 402 status code to let you pay for resources directly through APIs—no registration, no OAuth, no messy signatures. And because it’s literally HTTP, every client already supports it.

Vercel recently created a Nextjs starter showing how x402 works and I used it to build NickelJoke, a fun little app where you can buy a joke for a nickel using USDC on Base testnet. With Stripe this would have been impossible (the transaction fee alone is at least a nickel).

Stablecoins unlock true microtransactions. Imagine charging an agent a cent to read your blog, or giving an agent $10 to transact with others toward a goal. The agent-to-agent economy is just getting started and people who understand these protocols early will have a huge advantage.

You can find the starter code here: https://github.com/vercel-labs/x402-ai-starter
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-09-28 20:02:16+00:00
I contribute to a project called Sandstorm where the app data is directly associated with apps you can install on the server. I think it has the best approach for a lot of reasons, both in terms of security and making it easy to use if you are not a developer.

But almost any self-hosted app platform suitably exceeds the assurances Solid can meaningfully provide.
by marianoguerra | 2025-09-28 20:02:46+00:00
In case you are interested I wrote a minimal OOP runtime in wasm-gc (using wasm text format) here: https://marianoguerra.org/posts/bootstrap-post-collapse-oop-...

I also wrote a forth in wasm by hand here: https://github.com/marianoguerra/ricardo-forth

And a wasm compiler that fits in a tweet: https://wasmgroundup.com/blog/wasm-compiler-in-a-tweet/

I'm also the co-author of a book that shows you how to write a compiler that targets wasm for a small languaje using js: https://wasmgroundup.com/

Here's a direct link to the wasm text format for the OOP and forth implementations:

- https://github.com/marianoguerra/mclulang/blob/main/wat/fatt...

- https://github.com/marianoguerra/ricardo-forth/blob/master/s...
by strogonoff | 2025-09-28 20:03:05+00:00
It happened before, and it was an issue back then as well.

Mundane job may be mundane (though note that it is sometimes subjective), but it earns someone bread and butter and it is always economic stress when the job is gone and many people have to retrain.

If we were to believe those of us who paint this technology as mind-bogglingly world-changing, that someone is now nearly everyone and unlike the previous time there is no list of jobs you could choose from (that would last longer than the time it takes to train).

If we were not to believe the hype, still: when those jobs got automated back then, people moved to jobs that are liable to be obsolete this time, except there is also just more people overall, so even purely in terms of numbers this seems to be a bigger event.
by jacobgorm | 2025-09-28 20:03:06+00:00
I have extensive experience building hardware accelerated AI inference pipelines on Windows, including on the now retired DirectML (not a great loss). One thing I learned is that the hardware vendor support promised in press released is often an outright lie, and that reporting any kinds of bugs or missing functionality will only result in a infinite blame game loop between Microsoft developer support and the hardware vendors. It appears that Windows is no longer a platform that anyone feels responsible for or takes pride in maintaining, so your best hope is to build a web app on top of Chromium, so that at least you will have Google on your side when something inevitably breaks.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-09-28 20:03:08+00:00
Completely agree. I'm not too bothered Digital ID cards, I was mildly annoyed by the idea of actual ID cards (manly the cost) but as a free digital app, I don't have many objections. I've seen it from colleagues in Denmark. If they manage to build in some zero knowledge proof of age I might even support it.

But how this is supposed to stop immigration, illegal or otherwise, is beyond me.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-28 20:03:27+00:00
> ...powers of the government to require more identification for different things is orthogonal to the idea of digital ID > That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)

Yet also: a country's requirement for identification is orthogonal to it becoming a totalitarian police state.

In British politics, there is a strong current of opposition to international institutions and treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights[1][2] and the International Criminal Court[3]. The UK's commitment to human rights is enough in doubt that one encounters situations such as German courts being unable to extradite a suspected criminal because of the poor treatment of prisoners in Britain[4].

Countries like Germany and Belgium are able to have mandatory ID cards without too much issue because of characteristics including their written (and actively litigated) constitutions, judicial independence and proportionally representative election systems. ID cards might be make them lean more or less totalitarian - but it doesn't matter as much, as the rules about identification make up only a small part of a huge and robust framework of law and human rights.

With few constitutional protections for UK citizens, and what independent institutions there are under constant attack from various political parties, I don't think those who object to digital ID can be blamed for being suspicious of the government's motivations.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/tory-candid...

[2]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/21/labour-mp-eu...

[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/3/threats-and-intimida...

[4]: https://eucrim.eu/news/german-court-denies-extradition-to-uk...
by tdb7893 | 2025-09-28 20:03:50+00:00
Having worked for these companies some of the data is murky (e.g. did these ads they saw earlier lead to them buying the product later, perfect attribution is obviously impossible) but a lot of it is unambiguous where they tracked people straight from clicking on the ad directly to a purchase. People have their conspiracies but I've seen it in black and white, it's very very clear. The only way I could see the data not being clear is in the case of outright fraud, which I'm fairly certain wasn't happening within our own metrics (as it would not only lead to legal liability but even more importantly fuck up the machine learning models).

Edit: to be clear I would believe the effect of ads is overstated, it's just the idea they are ineffective is wrong and people claiming that you can get more effective ads without tracking people at all doesn't seem plausible based on what I know of the industry. I could see contextual ads working in niche use cases (which again we already see when searching for products. YouTubers have relevant sponsors all the time. We even have affiliate marketing, where it's not only contextual but part of the content).
by HiPhish | 2025-09-28 20:04:32+00:00
> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless.

I think this might simply be how the human brain works. Take autonomous driving as an example: while the car drives on its own the human driver is supposed to be alert and step in if needed. But does that work? Or will the driver's mind wander off because the car has been driving properly for the last half hour? My gut feeling is that it's inevitable that we'll eventually just shut out everything that goes smoothly and by the time it doesn't it might be too late.

We are not that different from our ancestors who used to roam the forests, trying to eat before they get eaten. In such an environment there is constantly something going on, some critters crawling, some leaves rustling, some water flowing. It would drive us crazy if we could not shut out all this regular noise. It's only when an irregularity appears that our attention must spring into action. When the leaves rustle differently than they are supposed to there is a good chance that there is some prey or a predator to be found. This mechanism only works if we are alert. The sounds of the forest are never exactly the same, so there is constant stimulation to keep up on our toes. But if you are relaxing in your shelter the tension is gone.

My fear is that AI is too good, to the point where it makes us feel like being in our shelter rather than in the forest.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-28 20:04:59+00:00
> There is no particular reason why AI has to stick to language models though.

There’s no reason at all. But that’s not the technology that’s in the consumer space, growing exponentially, gaining all the current hype.

So at this point in time, it’s just a theoretical future that will happen inevitably but we don’t know when. It could be next year. It could be 10 years. It could be 100 years or more.

My prediction is that current AI tech plateaus long before any AGI-capable technology emerges.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-28 20:05:10+00:00
I agree with you, but. The NEC has an 80% rule for continuous loads (over 3 hours) that use a typical circuit breaker as overcurrent protection. If you use fuses or a 100% rated breaker as your over current protection, then you can use all of the available ampacity. Anyways, devices that use a 15A receptacle (for example) will not draw more than 12A continuous if they’re meant to run continuously (3 hours or longer).

https://www.se.com/us/en/faqs/FA104355/
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-09-28 20:05:11+00:00
> Applications are written in the Limbo programming language, which provides static typing, garbage collection, and built-in concurrency features. Limbo code is compiled into architecture-independent bytecode executed by the Dis virtual machine. The Dis VM can interpret the bytecode or compile it just-in-time into native instructions, allowing applications to run consistently across different platforms.

Can you port existing software to it, or do you have to rewrite everything in Limbo? Because if you do, that right there almost completely kills it IMO.
by onion2k | 2025-09-28 20:05:22+00:00
Most of my initial prompts to agents start with "DO NOT WRITE ANY CODE YET."

Copilot has Ask mode, and GPT-5 Codex has Plan/Chat mode for this specific task. They won't change any files. I've been using Codex for a couple of days and it's very good if you give it plenty of guidance.