MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by namibj | 2025-09-18 17:12:36+00:00
I'd love to see something that can RL an agent (of sorts) that interacts with an interactive theorem prover (like Lean4, Coq, or Isabelle/HOL), (probably/likely via a harness instead of plain shell-like interaction), and actively exploits that discovery itself is not harmful beyond the inference and oracle cost of investigating an abondoned branch.

I.e., it's not at all like a typical game, because at no point is "success rate without relying on rollback/savestate-reloading" something that actually matters. An agent that spends evenly on abandoned (exploratory) branches, and on the path that becomes part of the solution that the formal verifier checks to confirm, while having a near-100% solve rate for problems fed to the agent, is a VERY GOOD agent.

That's because this task unlike most RL tasks is one where the agent shall utilize discovery to log an interaction trace that can be trivially mechanically trimmed to a verifiable proof for the provided problem. I.e., the hard part is finding ANY path that solves, without spending exponential amounts of compute to brute force the problem over the bounded state size of practical relevance. Because that would be something that takes longer than the heat death of the universe: i.e.,it's theoretically impractical.

Most RL tasks want an agent that is particularly good at it's task; and while effort spent to find a proof is certainly something that matters (if only because lower cost means the agent can train on more instances with the same training budget), it's much less relevant than the solve rate itself (fraction of problems for which any verifiably-correct proof sequence can be found at some definable level of effort, expressed as e.g. number of shots, total compute budget for the instance, ratio of exploration nodes to those nodes that become part of the final proof sequence, etc.).

Considering that non-benchmark usage would mostly entail semi-synthetic crowd-sourced datasets that are open sub-instances from practical applications of formal verification, as well as more-synthetic instances from very coarse high-level questions (that get mechanically broken down into more-manageable chunks before the RL agent gets to work) like "given these more-specific rules of what is _actually_ UB and what is only UB in ANSI but actually defined in the specific toolchain that we use: does that C program over there contain ANY UB?" or "is there ANY way that input at that file/network-socket over there to that program over here could execute arbitrary code", there'd not be economic incentive to solve any given instance more than once, beyond what is necessary to make the RL training process itself stable.

That task also lends itself to semi-online learning as every supplied instance essentially pays once for a verified solution and the overall process should deliver solid ROI. Running a single GPU cluster/pile for both training and inference would allow higher utilization at the cost of running with some variable amount of latency between rolling out an episode and training on the completed episode's oracle-verified rewards.
by zerodayai | 2025-09-18 17:13:04+00:00
I am creating something along these lines, https://github.com/zero-day-ai, it's meant for security testing, but probably has most of the functionality you need (and you can write plugins fairly easily if not); you can create a prompt repository, defined by a schema that are organized my domains (again, security testing domains, but they can be expanded). If you have any features you'd like to see, or have an ideal workflow feel free to ping me: anthony@zero-day.ai
by stanfordkid | 2025-09-18 17:13:26+00:00
This is a common framing by neo-liberal / centrist folks: That the US/West is intelligently and methodologically utilizing Israel for some tactical geopolitical advantage / force projection. It may have played out that way in the past... but at this point Israel is lobbying the US gov't heavily and has bought out most politicians via AIPAC. The myth of Israel being a "bastion" between the west and terrorist Arabs is pretty much a veneer... they are themselves responsible for generating much this terrorism. They bombed the shit out of Lebanon and who would've thunk it Hezbollah popped up.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-18 17:13:29+00:00
All you had to do was look at Reddit or BlueSky after the shooting; and I think they popped a nerve.

In the meantime, the CEOs of Discord, Reddit, Twitch, and Steam have been casually "invited" to Congress to have a little chat this October. Personally, I'm expecting Discord's CEO (considering his background at McKinsey, need for blame shifting, spotting the most vulnerable person in the room) to make Huffman look like an idiot and start acting like a Redditor. There's no way Huffman manages to overcome his lack of interview experience, 20 years of Reddit brain, and decade of being the CEO responsible for everything, when needled.
by dh2022 | 2025-09-18 17:13:33+00:00
Bowing your head in church and keeping your mouth shut when the pastor says something silly is very different than behavior in an advanced math class (I do not know about powerlifting gym).

In the advanced math classes I attended discussion and clarification was encouraged. In my stochastic calculus class the professor once made a mistake - which the brightest student caught. The professor thought about it for a few seconds, said this is a mistake indeed and he does not know how to fix at that time; then kept going. At the next class the professor came up with the solution to the mistake.

Imagine standing up in the middle of the church and saying something about evolution. Very different behavior / attitude. Like I said, to each his own.
by wyre | 2025-09-18 17:13:34+00:00
You're not making sense. People on the right actively spread stereotypes, racist cliches, and other antisocial, pro-violent opinions that they call the truth and won't budge on their opinion, but as soon as a leftist calls someone with actual authoritarian viewpoints a nazi they are the problem for spreading stereotypes and not debating ideas? lmfao
by derefr | 2025-09-18 17:13:39+00:00
I think the algorithm in the video is doing a very specific thing where there's a zero-width pixel-grid-clamped stroke (picture an etch-a-sketch-like seam carving "between" the bounds of pixels on the grid) moving about the grid, altering (with XOR?) anything it advances across.

So, sure, you could try to implement this by having a seam that is made to "reverberate" back and forth "across" the outlining pixels of a static shape on each frame. But that's not exactly the same thing as selecting the outline of the shape itself and having those pixels update each frame. Given the way this algorithm looks to work, pushing the seam "inwards" vs "outwards" across the same set of pixels forming the outline might gather an entirely different subset of pixels, creating a lot of holes or perhaps double-counting pixels.

And if you fix those problems, then you're not really using this algorithm any more; you're just doing the much-more-boring thing of taking a list of pixel positions forming the outline and updating them each frame. :)
by krapp | 2025-09-18 17:13:39+00:00
>What's significant though is the PREVALENT opinion. 100% of my religious friends want and have kids, while the majority of my secular friends do not.

Do all of your religious friends subscribe to the same religion?

If so, does this religion proscribe having children and raising families as a necessary, or desired, component of the faith or community?

Because you could be confusing religion and culture here. Secular values often abrogate traditional gender and sexual norms, so secular people may not feel compelled to "be fruitful and multiply." I wouldn't ascribe that to lack of religion per se so much as not being affected by the same cultural pressures. After all, plenty of theists are essentially forced into marriage and children because it's what's expected, not because it's what they want.
by dfxm12 | 2025-09-18 17:13:42+00:00
It's not, it never was in a meaningful sense. It's a poorly defined boogie man, an idea.

You know how the war on terror gives the federal government, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, etc., a ton of power and tax payer money, for pretty much no effort or return on investment because you can't wage war with an ethereal idea? Do you know how it gives the government power to jail people it perceived as its enemies, sometimes without due process?

This is the same thing. Trump is looking for justification, manufactured consent, pretense, etc., to use this power against his political enemies who might happen to not be Muslim.

He's also trying to act strong in a time of weakness, while Putin laughs at Trump and does incursions in Poland, Trump knows he can't lash out at him, so he takes it out on his own constituents.
by kjok | 2025-09-18 17:13:46+00:00
You're right that registries are under-resourced. But, if automated malware scanning actually worked, we'd already see big tech partnering with package registries to run continuous, ecosystem-wide scanning and detection pipelines. However, that isn't happening. Instead, we see piecemeal efforts from Google with assurance artifacts (SLSA provenance, SBOMs, verifiable builds), Microsoft sponsoring OSS maintainers, Facebook donating to package registries. Google's initiatives stop short of claiming they can automatically detect malware.

This distinction matters. Malware detection is, in the general case, an undecidable problem (think halting problem and Rice theorem). No amount of static or dynamic scanning can guarantee catching malicious logic in arbitrary code. At best, scanners detect known signatures, patterns, or anomalies. They can't prove absence of malicious behavior.

So the reality is: if Google's assurance artifacts stop short of claiming automated malware detection is feasible, it's a stretch for anyone else to suggest registries could achieve it "if they just had more resources." The problem space itself is the blocker, not just lack of infra or resources.
Ask HN: How do you keep AI assistants consistent with your personal preferences?
by harshithmul | 2025-09-18 17:13:47+00:00
I'm the founder of CORE (https://github.com/redplanethq/core) - an external memory system for LLMs that acts like a "memory OS." Instead of AI starting fresh every conversation, CORE lets you create persistent knowledge that any LLM can query and reference.

We've built "spaces" as scoped memory containers - think isolated knowledge environments for different contexts. You might have a 'coding-standards' space with your preferred patterns, a 'project-context' space with current work details, or 'personal-workflows' space with how you like things done. Any AI agent can pull from the relevant spaces to give consistent, contextual responses.

But I'm trying to nail the UX where both user and agent are crystal clear about what preferences are active. How do you make it obvious when AI is referencing your stored knowledge vs. responding generically? Should users explicitly choose which spaces are active, or should AI auto-select based on context?

What personal context do you find yourself repeatedly explaining to AI assistants? And how would you want to manage and be notified about which of your knowledge spaces the AI is actually using? Looking for insights from people who deal with AI consistency challenges daily.
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-18 17:14:10+00:00
That's reminiscent of a (possibly apocryphal?) method I once read about to get "clean" images of normally crowded public places - take multiple photos over time, then median each pixel. Never had the opportunity to try it myself, but I thought it sounded plausible as a way to get rid of transient "noise" from an otherwise static image.
by ruuda | 2025-09-18 17:14:41+00:00
From the application point of view, recently I'm converging on this: define data structures for your config. Ensure it can be deserialized from json and toml. (In Rust this is easy to do with Serde; in Python with Pydantic or dataclasses.) Users can start simple and write toml by hand. If you prefer KSON, sure, write KSON and render to json. If config is UI, I think the structure of the data, and names of fields and values, matter much more than the syntax. (E.g. `timeout = 300` is meaningless regardless of syntax; `timeout_ms = 300` or `timeout = "300 ms"` are self-documenting.)

When the configuration grows complex, and you feel the need to abstract and generate things, switch to a configuration language like Cue or RCL, and render to json. The application doesn't need to force a format onto the user!
by mdaniel | 2025-09-18 17:15:01+00:00
For fear of having dang show up and scold me, I'll just add the factual statement that I will never ever believe any open source claim in any Launch HN ever. I can now save myself the trouble of checking, because I can be certain it's untrue

I already knew to avoid "please share your thoughts," although I guess I am kind of violating that one by even commenting
Show HN: BloodMoney 2|A dark comedy SIM where you manage a human life for profit
by Jenny249 | 2025-09-18 17:15:03+00:00
BloodMoney 2, a free-to-play web game that I've been working on. It started as a satirical take on modern workplace culture, where employees are often treated as expendable resources. I wanted to explore this concept through a dark comedy lens. On the surface, it's an idle/clicker game where you manage a person's life to make a profit via the "Human Expenditure Program." But underneath, it’s a moral test disguised as a casual experience. You'll face difficult choices about your subject's work-life balance, health, and financial security, with each decision shaping a branching narrative that leads to one of seven different endings. The game is designed to be unsettling and thought-provoking, but also entertaining. It runs directly in the browser on desktop or mobile with no downloads required. I would love to get your feedback on the concept and the execution. Thanks for checking it out!
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-18 17:15:06+00:00
That's not quite true. There are huge in number, small in overall size, amounts of public land east of the Mississippi. They're mostly all state forests, nature preserves, etc, etc and 99.9% of them are wholly unremarkable and barely utilized because you can only hike in so many identical forests or walk to the top of comparable hills before you get bored.

50+yr ago they were far more utilized (per capita) because they weren't closed to motorized recreation and hunting and fishing hadn't yet been regulated with intent to discourage participation.

But yes, the vast BLM lands out west have no analogue in the east.
Ask HN: Replacement for Bitnami Helm Charts/Images
by sbrother | 2025-09-18 17:15:06+00:00
I knew this was going to happen, but the Bitnami docker images are now offline, and I just had to put some of my clients on docker.io/bitnamilegacy to stay online. That's not a long term solution though, so does anyone know what direction the community is going here? Is there a fork with a reasonable amount of mindshare? This is a pretty brutal rugpull.
by klabb3 | 2025-09-18 17:15:13+00:00
I distrust meta (and hate these voice assistants) as much as the next guy but to me it’s obvious that you would prepare the prompt and use pretty much the exact phrasing. Also, repeating yourself is normal if there’s no response at all. If it was truly all fake why not just cheat outright and just prerecord all of it?
by Synaesthesia | 2025-09-18 17:15:25+00:00
I feel the exact same way about the dock. That's.one thing I like about Ubuntu, their dock just makes sense for me. It's on the left by default and always visible (which is how I like it). But of course you can have it auto-hide.

Fun fact about Linux "docks". The reason why they can't do the exact effect Apple uses to auto-scale their dock on mouseover is that Apple patented that particular effect.
by acdha | 2025-09-18 17:15:50+00:00
Quite possibly - there have been several incidents recently and a number of researchers working together so it’s not clear exactly who found something first and it’s definitely not as simple to fix as tossing a tool in place.

The CEO of socket.dev described an automated pipeline flagging new uploads for analysts, for example, which is good but not instantaneous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257681

The Aikido team also appear to be suggesting they investigated a suspicious flag (apologies if I’m misreading their post), which again needs time for analysts to work:

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/npm-debug-and-chalk-packages-com...

My thought was simply that these were caught relatively quickly by security researchers rather than by compromised users reporting breaches. If you didn’t install updates with a relatively short period of time after they were published, the subsequent response would keep you safe. Obviously that’s not perfect and a sophisticated, patient attack like liblzma suffered would likely still be possible but there really does seem to be a value to having something like Debian’s unstable/stable divide where researchers and thrill-seekers would get everything ASAP but most people would give it some time to be tested. What I’d really like to see is a community model for funding that and especially supporting independent researchers.
by bigshot | 2025-09-18 17:16:01+00:00
Wait… you’re praising the audio? Mine must have something wrong with them. I cannot listen to music or any audio really unless I’m in a silent environment. If I’m outside and there are cars driving by, or wind, or any other ambient noise, the glasses speakers aren’t loud and full enough for me to actually hear anything at a level that I would deem appropriate. And when you max out the volume, the audio breaks down —- any bass gets squished and the whole soundstage sounds like crap.

Do yours actually sound decent? Maybe I need a new pair. Or maybe I’m just too picky.
by duxup | 2025-09-18 17:16:06+00:00
I remember in Murthy v. Missouri you had lawyers and politicans on the right arguing that even just a phone call to a reporter or social media company qualified as coercion. Even a few right wing SCOTUS judges agreed with them ...

Now we have every branch of government deployed by right wing politicians targeting individuals speech.

We have them placed as employees in news organizations, required by the government, as "bias monitors". https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fcc-cbs-ne...

We have the government forcing media companies to sell to their cronies ...

We have the FCC chairman making threats taking issue with speech they don't like.

Trump threatening reporters with investigation because they asked a question he didn't like.

I guess they're ok with that as long as it's their people.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-09-18 17:16:35+00:00
A red herring: Even the government hasn’t accused him of illegal speech, nor have they charged him with any criminal or (non-immigration) civil violation at all. If his speech was of that constitutionally unprotected kind, they very likely would have done so.

The government has made two accusations against Khalil, both related to immigration law only.

The one which motivated today’s ruling is the less legally interesting one, about misrepresentation in his permanent residence application. There are a bunch of questions over who intended what, what was or wasn’t material or willful, what would or wouldn’t have affected the decision to grant permanent residence, and who manages to meet what required burden of proof. It’s probably selective prosecution of that immigration law claim because of his protected speech, but unfortunately the Supreme Court has already upheld that in the immigration law context even though it’s usually unconstitutional otherwise.

The immigration law claim they started with against him is a very vague and broad one which basically lets the Secretary of State freely decide in his discretion that a noncitizen’s speech is sufficiently bad for foreign policy, even if it’s otherwise legal, and then render the person deportable. President Trump’s late sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a former US federal judge, previously ruled this provision unconstitutional, and her ruling was only overturned on procedural grounds that have nothing to do with the merits.

We will see what happens in Khalil’s case. He might get deported if he can’t overcome the misrepresentation claims, or he might get to stay if he manages both to overcome that and to get the scary broad foreign policy ground of deportability ruled as unconstitutional in his case (or in general). It will probably be one of those two outcomes.

Upholding the foreign policy ground of deportability as constitutional would give a frightening amount of unreviewable control to one political appointee. Permanent residents deserve more certainty than that about how to keep their status secure.

But none of that has to do with the kind of illegal speech that normally falls outside First Amendment protections in criminal court, since even the government hasn’t claimed that Khalil did that.
by legitster | 2025-09-18 17:16:37+00:00
People make Adam Smith to be some sort of blowhard absolutist, but his actual work is very observational and astute.

> “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.”

Adam Smith inferred that strict property rights were overall good for law and order and developing society, but that in the long run they would lead to inequality (which in his views was an acceptable tradeoff if the overall lot of the poor was improved).

More to your point, Adam Smith was skeptical of commons. The experience in England at the time was that commonly owned land was abused and neglected.

> “It is in the interest of every proprietor to cultivate that, which belongs to himself, and to neglect that, which belongs to all.”

There's really nothing about "capitalism" as a system that is mutually exclusive with also preserving nature. It just needs to be tied into an ownership structure (private or public) that is incentivized to preserve it.
by hellcow | 2025-09-18 17:17:01+00:00
For a historical reference of another famous censorship, here’s the front page of the NY Times in Feb 1939, reporting that Goebbels ended the career of 5 actors for “witticisms” made about the Nazis: https://www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/archives/goebbels-ends-ca...
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-18 17:17:12+00:00
Again, I don't think this is as useful as you're implying (although I do agree in magnitude of severity). We aren't Turkey or Hungary or Russia, and the place we're going is uniquely American. Some people who read this and look around expecting to see Turkey or Hungary or Russia are going to conclude you're being unreasonable, and like it or not, they still have as much say as the rest of us and are worth trying to reach.

And yes, this does require we adjust our understanding of politics to disengage with many or most media sources. On the upside I suspect that one person making a concerted effort to reach out to those who see the world differently can have enormous impact. I myself have many friends who have voted differently than me, and effectively communicating my specific concerns with them is not as difficult as e.g. social media interactions might have you believe. It does, however, require meeting them where they are today.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-09-18 17:17:44+00:00
> They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now.

But that's exactly what they started doing with Battlemage? It's competitive in its price range and was showing generational strides.

> Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA?

ML is starting to trend away from CUDA towards Vulkan, even on Nvidia hardware, for practical reasons (e.g. performance overhead).