MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: The Little Chronicles of Mathematics, Data and the Mind of Machines
by tamnd | 2025-09-30 16:08:24+00:00
I've been working on a book called "The Little Chronicles of Mathematics, Data, and the Mind of Machines", this is a 100 sections journey from counting stones to thinking silicon.

This book is more like a storybook for curious builders. I wrote it for people who love see how things connect, how math become language, how data become memory, and how machines learned to reason. If you enjoy clear ideas, and big arcs of history, this book is for you.
by int_19h | 2025-09-30 16:08:37+00:00
Go pointers can point at the stack or inside objects just fine, they are exactly as expressive as C# unsafe pointers (i.e. more expressive than `ref`).

What Go can't do is create a single-element slice out of a variable or pointer to it. But that just means code duplication if you need to cover both cases, not that it's not expressible at all.
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-09-30 16:08:51+00:00
I don't quite understand why those activists expect companies to watch kids. It's parents' job. Facebook and Instagram are like big malls. Don't leave your child unattended. A mall is not a kindergarten. Educate parents on how they can protect their kids and make them responsible for it. That is how it's supposed to work. Now internet companies are forced to become nannies for both children and their parents, this is ridiculous. And we must suffer with the the UK fascist laws regarding internet and upcoming EU chat control nonsense because some parents can't watch their children.
by sixhobbits | 2025-09-30 16:09:12+00:00
One side of the equation is definitely that we'll get more 'bad' code.

But nearly every engineer I've ever spoken to has over-indexed on 'tech debt bad'. Tech debt is a lot like normal debt - you can have a lot of it and still be a healthy business.

The other side of the equation is that it's easier to understand and make changes to code with LLMs. I've been able to create "Business Value" (tm) in other people's legacy code bases in languages I don't know by making CRUD apps do things differently from how they currently do things.

Before, I'd needed to have hired a developer who specialises in that language and paid them to get up to speed on the code base.

So I agree with the article that the concerns are valid, but overall I'm optimistic that it's going to balance out in the long run - we'll have more code, throw away more code, and edit code faster, and a lot of that will cancel.
by soiltype | 2025-09-30 16:09:27+00:00
This is a really cool project for a teen and an ambitious goal, so congratulations!

That said, I think the goal and the approach are misguided. It's probably better to take this experience and use it on a different problem, or join forces with an organization that has more momentum.

1. How would you sustain this without ads? If you take subscriptions, that will hamstring growth. You'd be threading a needle even if your app was objectively the most secure, private, and authentic social network. To date, this is an unsolved problem.

2. There are other non-commercial social networks like bluesky or mastodon. Why wouldn't people use that instead?

3. Face verification is a hard limit for me and probably most other people who avoid commercial social media. I don't see any reason to trust a random new app with sensitive PII.

4. Is face verification even meaningful anymore in the age of unchecked generative AI?
by tamnd | 2025-09-30 16:09:54+00:00
https://github.com/little-book-of/maths/blob/main/books/en-U...

I've been working on a book called "The Little Chronicles of Mathematics, Data, and the Mind of Machines", this is a 100 sections journey from counting stones to thinking silicon. This book is more like a storybook for curious builders. I wrote it for people who love see how things connect, how math become language, how data become memory, and how machines learned to reason. If you enjoy clear ideas, and big arcs of history, this book is for you.
by naabb | 2025-09-30 16:10:04+00:00
You're saying that ICE only targets illegal immigrants? how do they know who's an illegal immigrant? skin colour? Because that's the criteria they're applying right now.

Also what do you say about ICE detaining legal residents? you stated "equating illegal immigrants with Jews [...]" as if ICE is only detaining illegal immigrants. They're not. They're detaining anyone who isn't white enough. Members of the Trump regime have also threatened to deport legal citizens who are just exercicing their free speech. You're anti free speech as well?

When is your moral framework going to kick in and call a spade a spade?
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-09-30 16:10:15+00:00
Sometimes I wonder if there is a lot of scrutiny in small things but when things get large and complex they basically give up and wave it through.

I see a similar thing at my work in medical devices. In theory we have to validate all libraries we are using. So if you want to share some code you have to create a ton of documents. But when we use something like nodejs with hundreds of dependencies the whole process basically gets handwaved away because validating everything would be too much work.
by sorcercode | 2025-09-30 16:10:23+00:00
fair point.

but i'm not proficient != i don't know (i.e. i have worked on javascript many moons ago, but i wouldn't consider myself an expert at it today).

i like to think i can still spot unmaintainable vs maintainable code but i understand your point that maybe the thinking is to have an expert state that opinion.

the code is [oss](https://github.com/kaushikgopal/ff-container-traffic-control) btw so would love to get other takes.
by clcaev | 2025-09-30 16:10:32+00:00
What is the business model / exit strategy for Kagi's founders and investors? What is the news curation process and its relation to the public interest?

Are these articulated in a manner which gives stakeholders (investors, users, and staff) assurances and standing?

...

What are competitors and collaborators in this space? Semafor seems to have a similar product, what are the differentiators and/or collaboration opportunities?

...

Netflix was subscription only, till it was "pay to get rid of ads". Then there is the whole business of profiling customer interest, etc.

We have product labeling for food, why not web services?
by captainkrtek | 2025-09-30 16:10:33+00:00
> Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from strangers into your eyeballs) is the synthetic CDO of content, with about the same underlying utility.

This is a great way to put it. Much of the social media content is a derivative/synthetic representation of actual engagement. Content creators and influencers can make us "feel" like we have a connection to them (eg: "get ready with me!" type videos), but it's not the same as genuine connection or communication with people.
by simonw | 2025-09-30 16:10:37+00:00
If you don't fetch data from external sources then you're safe from prompt injection.

But that's a very big if. I've seen Claude Code attempt to debug a JavaScript issue by running curl against the jsdelivr URL for a dependency it's using. A supply chain attack against NPM (and those aren't exactly rare these days) could add comments to code like that which could trigger attacks.

Ever run Claude Code in a folder that has a downloaded PDF from somewhere? There are a ton of tricks for hiding invisible malicious instructions in PDFs.

I run Claude Code and Codex CLI in YOLO mode sometimes despite this risk because I'm basically crossing my fingers that a malicious attack won't slip in, but I know that's a bad idea and that at some point in the future these attacks will be common enough for the risk to no longer be worth it.
by conductr | 2025-09-30 16:10:51+00:00
Used to work for a major implant company, we had a cadaver lab at company headquarters and flew in doctors for training. The rep in the OR is mostly just for support. They carry in a bunch of hardware in case the doctor needs to pivot midway through, they may need different sized screws or something. They can show doctors how the device is meant to connect together without bone/tissue but they often have little to no medical training, they are sales representatives.
by fidotron | 2025-09-30 16:10:56+00:00
The fun part is what looks like the core assumption here, that the current AI thing will actually work, doesn't even need to be true; it just needs enough people to believe it for the negative effects of it to become true.

Even without AI the software industry is not in a good state for a range of reasons. The big tech companies barely sell software - it's custom software operated to perform some other much stickier function, but the value is not in the software per se beyond it enabling selling the other thing.
by ddahlen | 2025-09-30 16:11:05+00:00
Its an implementation of a pretty standard integrator used by astronomers informally called "RADAU", but it is not exactly the same RADAU you would find elsewhere. Basically it is about as good as you can typically get for multi-step integrators, tuned for speed not precision though.

Note that how the code is laid out you cant really simulate non-solar system masses. Its really aimed at massless objects in the solar system, your 3-body simulations are actually quite difficult to do given the design.
by bravetraveler | 2025-09-30 16:11:36+00:00
I have to constantly adjust my comfort level regarding what 'production' means. Consider the prep conditions, or 'prod', for your typical Chef or Butcher!

Anyway, fair question IMO. Another point I'd like to make... migrating away from this filesystem, disabling secure boot, or leaning into key enrollment would be fine. Dealer's choice.

The 'forced interaction' for enrollment absolutely presents a hurdle. That said: this wouldn't be the first time I've used 'expect' to use the management interface at scale. 200 is a good warm up.

The easy way is to... opt out of secure boot. Get an exception if your compliance program demands it [and tell them about this module, too]. Don't forget your 'Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery' of... everything. Documents, scheduled procedures, tooling, whatever.

Again, though, stability is a fair question/point. Filesystems and storage are cursed. That would be my concern before 'how do I scale', which comparatively, is a dream.
by Argonaut998 | 2025-09-30 16:11:37+00:00
I generally hate social media and their antics but the one thing I’m taking their side on, is this. Children’s exposure to content on the internet is a parenting issue. It is impossible for Meta, ByteDance etc to filter any and all possible content that may not be suitable for minors. Parents should know that.

Zuckerberg famously doesn’t (didn’t?) let his children use Facebook. Perhaps everyone else should take a hint.
by gengstrand | 2025-09-30 16:11:43+00:00
I am currently building a lot of AI models for predicting both individual athlete and team based performance for https://www.higherscoresdfs.com/dfs/spa/welcome/

Like the rest of online mass media, HN covers generative AI a lot but there is still plenty of value in predictive AI. Both forms provide plenty of technical challenges to the AI engineer. I miss the days when you could get a stack trace to when debugging an issue.
by jcynix | 2025-09-30 16:11:43+00:00
>The problem is camera marketing [...]

IMHO marketing is almost always (part of) the problem. They shouldn't drink or smoke that stuff …

Equating "lossless" with "visually lossless" or some other phrase is newspeak. We could call a JPEG of quality >= 95 (or 96 .. 99) visually lossless too then.

Losslessness is easy to define: compress something, then uncompress it again and both the original and the uncompressed file should compute to the same (cryptographic) checksum.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-30 16:12:46+00:00
I don't really know man half the population doesn't know what open source means or cares whereas a lot of people seemingly have lots of opinions about AI.

One can liberate people from big tech and the other ties them to it in sorts. And there are very very more conversations about the latter than the former.

The point of discussion is to bring change. There has been a real change in how usable Linux has been lets say compared to past but now its really about user adoption I suppose. I genuinely think that we might need to reopen that discussion window as a lot of people are getting interested in linux/homelabbing /realizing that they can degoogle and what not to really get privacy.

Those discussions brought a change into how open source software is written today (git) etc. but now we probably might need discussions about the awareness of these open source products to the general public if we truly want mass adoption I suppose.

What are your thoughts?
by romaniv | 2025-09-30 16:13:00+00:00
No, this is not a pre-existing problem.

In the past the problem was about transferring a mental model from one developer to the other. This applied even when people copy-pasted poorly understood chunks of example code from StackOverflow. There was specific intent and some sort of idea of why this particular chunk of code should work.

With LLM-generated software there can be no underlying mental model of the code at all. None. There is nothing to transfer or infer.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-09-30 16:13:02+00:00
AI is the pinnacle of everything that came before it on HN.

It is the logical conclusion to all our efforts before it to build machines that do work for us; every idea pursued to get computers to do more for us, in every possible way, in every possible location, ALL at once and in synchrony, faster, better, stronger.

Artificial intelligence IS HN.

Resistance to that truth, is resistance to a coming singularity that already always was.
by tonymet | 2025-09-30 16:13:14+00:00
I removed Disqus 7 years ago when I noticed their Javascript+HTML embeds ballooned my 75kb static blog into 3mb+ with sluggish loading times. It also failed every Performance test like Chrome Devtools Lighthouse Perf Tab.

We need to ruthlessly audit third party deps for privacy, perf, spam etc.
by randycupertino | 2025-09-30 16:13:31+00:00
My favorite thing about this case is how she bragged to her lead engineer she wouldn't go to prison, "“Don’t worry — I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit" when she was trying to convince the engineer to fabricate their user data.

From the complaint:

> In particular, CC-1 and JAVICE asked Engineer-1 to supplement a list of Frank’s website visitors with additional data fields containing synthetic data.

> Engineer-1 was uncomfortable with the request and stated, in sum and substance, “I don’t want to do anything illegal.” JAVICE and CC-1 claimed to Engineer-1 that it was legal. JAVICE stated to Engineer-1, in sum and substance, “We don’t want to end up in orange jumpsuits.” Engineer-1 declined the request from JAVICE and CC-1.

> shortly after Engineer-1 had declined the request to create a synthetic data set—CHARLIE JAVICE, the defendant, contacted Scientist-1 and asked him to create the synthetic data set. In JAVICE’s communications with Scientist-1, she falsely represented that the data she provided to Scientist-1 was a random sample of a much larger database of Frank users.

> Also on or about August 3, 2021, JAVICE forwarded to Scientist-1 the Access Link Email sent to her by Engineer-1. JAVICE wrote, “here is the link. will share credentials offline.” Based on Scientist-1’s communications with JAVICE, Scientist-1 understood that the data available via the Access Link Email—a data set of approximately 142,000 people—was a random sample of a larger database which contained data for approximately 4 million people.

source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1577861...
by charcircuit | 2025-09-30 16:13:31+00:00
I think Kagi's target audience is people who want to see news, and not people who want a RSS reader for news. The average person does not care how news gets to them. The fact that it uses RSS is a technical detail they should not have to worry about. Kagi should not be artificially restricting themselves to RSS feed when there is news that exists outside the RSS ecosystem which they should consider including.
by siim | 2025-09-30 16:13:55+00:00
I'm working on https://X11.Social, a voice-first content creation tool for X.

The initial idea was "call to tweet", the ability to compose posts on the go by having a natural conversation with an AI assistant over a simple phone call. This is useful for turning thoughts from a walk or drive into a polished "brain dump" post, or for engaging with user lists without being at a computer.

It has since evolved into a broader system:

Chrome Extension: A context-aware assistant that lives in the browser. It has a Quake-style console (activated by opt+space) for quick chat and can analyze the content of any page you're on (e.g., YouTube transcripts, articles, other tweets) to help you create relevant content.

Engagement Predictor: A feature that scores tweet drafts in real-time to predict their potential for engagement. It's built on a model trained on my own dataset pulled from the X API and other public dataset from Kaggle[0].

Scheduled AI Calls: The system can call you on a predefined schedule to proactively brainstorm content ideas.

Here is the tech stack:

- Frontend: React, Tailwind, shadcn/ui

- Auth: X OAuth

- Payments: Stripe Subscriptions

- Voice AI: ElevenLabs Conversational AI, Twilio

- Engagement Predictor ML: Python, scikit-learn, XGBoost on a data pipeline from X API v2 and a base dataset from Kaggle.

- Chrome Extension: Same as Frontend and Chrome Extensions API

- Blog: Jekyll

- Infrastructure: Deployed on AWS Fargate using AWS Copilot for orchestration (ECS).

I'm building solo and just got the first trial user after 87 days of building in public. It's a long road but the feedback so far is encouraging.

[0] https://www.kaggle.com/code/shpatrickguo/tweet-virality-pred...
by cush | 2025-09-30 16:13:56+00:00
> If you have a sufficiently broad definition of 'product', then yes.... people are passionate about brands like the "Dallas Cowboys" and "Star Wars"....

Some people are passionate about coffee, others knitting. I'm not sure it's a broad definition of product you need, but more like a broader definition of people. They probably don't all fit into your sports nerd bubble. Most people are passionate about something.
by seec | 2025-09-30 16:13:59+00:00
Yes but that's because our current system with the providence state has created "unnatural" pressures where being smarter doesn't correlate that well with wealth past a certain point. In a system where everyone has to be obedient and follow the same solutions as everyone else, you lose agency and that greatly reduces your capacity to make a difference, since those are averaged out on purpose by the system.

In the end what is successful is high-functioning sociopaths, that we can find in all high-power places nowadays. Funnily enough, inequality has increased, and now the wealth of your parents determines your life trajectory much more than even 30 years ago. This is really not surprising, once the exploitative sociopath gets in power, they really don't like fair competition that much.

And this is why both IQ and fertility is going down, it is not a future oriented system. It has a lot to do with the capitalist mindset, where we exploit the earth to the point of making it inhabitable at some point...
by kellystonelake | 2025-09-30 16:14:02+00:00
Over 20% of adolescents met criteria for “pathological” or addictive social media use, with an additional ~70% at risk of mild compulsive use. Teens themselves often recognize the problem—many say social media makes them feel “addicted” or unable to stop scrolling, even when it negatively affects their mood. The Surgeon General highlighted that teens commonly report social media makes them feel worse “but they can’t get off of it“
by rc5150 | 2025-09-30 16:14:04+00:00
A little tired of seeing young people introduce ideas starting with their age. Your age literally doesn't matter, it doesn't make you a brilliant developer. Your product should speak for itself. Furthermore, being a teenage developer doesn't tend to signal intelligence as much as it tends to signal naivete.

What AI is powering the face recognition? Did you train it or is it an out-of-the-box product sold by someone else? Is their security up to snuff? Does your platform differentiate actual faces from images? Can it tell the difference between a human face and an AI generated face? What is done with the facial data? How is it stored? Are the "private" chats encrypted? To what standard?

You've told us how old you are, and you have a link to your product, but there's nothing to demonstrate that your product is safe to use, actually private, or doing anything different than just collecting more data to hand to AI.
by amalcon | 2025-09-30 16:14:24+00:00
The military is similarly dominated by the other party. Somehow, we expect them to be professional. Professionalism here means to faithfully execute lawful orders even when a Democrat is in the white house. There were no personal loyalty tests for the military under Obama, or loyalty purges.

That went fine (in that the military did in fact follow lawful orders under Democratic presidents, not in that those orders were necessarily good). It also went fine for the civil service under Republican presidents other than Trump. There are a number of explanations for the difference in perceived (and possibly real) professionalism, which I will not try to speculate on here - but this is not a partisanship problem. It seems to be something specific to Trump-as-President.
by HuaraHuara1 | 2025-09-30 16:14:55+00:00
When a woman enters a traditionally male role, she's celebrated. When a man enters a traditionally female role, he becomes an intruder, thought of as a predator even. Why would a man bother to work in terribly paying jobs such as teaching, especially when there's a real risk of being accused? Not to mention, why would men work when there's no incentive to own a house, or have a family?
by ndiddy | 2025-09-30 16:15:02+00:00
If you zoom out (https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...), the size of the federal workforce has been at around 2.7-3 million people since the late 1960s, while the US population has gone from ~198 million in 1967 to ~343 million in 2025. We've gone from 14.39 federal employees per 1,000 people in 1967 to 8.78 federal employees per 1,000 people in 2024. Given that many of these employees do things like maintain infrastructure, regulate goods and services, and provide healthcare, you would expect the federal workforce to scale with the population.

> The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget.

Most of the budget increase (~80-85% depending on whose projections you look at) comes from entitlements (social security, medicare/medicaid) and interest payments on the federal debt rather than any new spending. Of course interest payments are caused by past irresponsible spending, but it's hard to avoid debt if whenever the "party of fiscal responsibility" is in power, it does loud and flashy budget cuts that don't meaningfully reduce federal spending, followed by massive tax cuts to juice the economy. This is basically the equivalent of quitting your job and buying a ton of stuff on a credit card because you won $1000 on a scratch-off.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-09-30 16:15:10+00:00
I used Kagi search for awhile but eventually switched back to google because Kagi location aware search sucks. It might be better nowadays. I’ve been living on their browser Orion for a few weeks now though and it’s great. It works about 90% of the time which is impressive for a browser that isn’t tested alongside the big 4