MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Fake research is doubling every 1.5 years
by recoveringphd | 2025-09-29 22:43:29+00:00
Paper mills, which are companies that sell fake papers to academics desperate for publications, have industrialized scientific fraud.

A new study shows paper mills now double their output every 1.5 years. Real research, by contrast, only doubles every 15 years. If you follow the math, fake science eventually outnumbers real science.

This is a huge problem because scientific literature is upstream of everything: drug discovery, clinical guidelines, and increasingly, AI training data.

If fake papers keep scaling, we’re polluting downstream systems, including scientific AI.

Peer review was designed for a world where misconduct was rare and individual. It has no defenses against industrialized fraud.

Scientific publishing is collapsing. So what comes next?
by SantiagoVargas | 2025-09-29 22:44:01+00:00
Imported all of the available research on AI, ML, and NLP for the past 10 years. The map is massive but it is still queryable. Posted it on reddit as an AMA, feel free to drop any questions related to those topics and I'll send back the answers with the citations. Happy to answer some questions about the tech behind it on here as well.
by Bukhmanizer | 2025-09-29 22:44:09+00:00
Of course, but how do you become a monopoly? By selling your software, often implicitly through eyeballs and clicks. I disagree that devs aren’t important to this process. You want to make your software as ridiculously low- friction as possible. If making your software 10% faster/smoother/better is going to result in more users, you should be willing to throw as much money (within reason) at that problem as it takes until you have strong network effects.

Once you have a monopoly it becomes less necessary to do anything, which is maybe where we find ourselves today.
by drivers99 | 2025-09-29 22:44:42+00:00
That's pretty cool. It's nice to see this exists.

For me, I'll probably send an email later to support to ask (no rush, since it's out of stock anyway), but I was checking for info on compatibility with Yamaha (e.g. my Cross Connect) ebikes. It's not on the compatibility list. They make their own (mid-drive) motors (PW-SE on mine I think) and proprietary batteries. They pulled out of the United States market altogether so getting more batteries from them again is doubtful. (Mine currently charges to ~85% and then throws an error code, but it still works for now.) It is a Yamaha 500Wh36V battery pack on the down tube with 3 wires (I just unscrewed where the battery plugs in to see).
by ThrownOffGame | 2025-09-29 22:46:08+00:00
Do Englishmen frequently refer to “Blighty” in ordinary conversation?

I refer to my homeland as “The States” out of courtesy to those from Canada, UK, Australia, but I had to rack my brains, and Wikipedia, about “Blighty” because it seems archaic, stilted, and arcane in a tech forum.

I’ve heard England called a lot of things by its citizens, but I was under the impression that “Ol’ Blighty” died out with Queen Victoria.
by miguelspizza | 2025-09-29 22:46:22+00:00
I left my job to work on my side project (MCP-B: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515403) full time. I set out with the goal of making the ability to vibecode a webMCP server for your website and inject it via userscript.

While building that, I basically wrote a modern version of Tampermonkey with its own marketplace built in. So you can vibe code any userscript and publish it to the marketplace all within the extension.

The automation stuff is still the core value-prop, but this is a fun bonus feature while I work on solidifying the automation features.

I'm writing a HN post for it. Excited to show everyone in a couple weeks here.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-09-29 22:46:58+00:00
In general, young naive entrepreneurs are easier to exploit due to desperation in a sucker VC deal, and tax or school credits often subsidize youth labor costs in many places.

No tech bro or VC wants experienced people around telling younger versions of themselves what to avoid. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE
by bsder | 2025-09-29 22:47:26+00:00
> Genuinely curious: what concrete negative consequences are there from appearing in the background of other people’s photos/videos, in a full face mask no less?

How about if you're overweight, doing airsoft to try to get into shape, and bellyflop into some mud on video?

That's social media crack right there, boys and girls.

Can you understand why someone might not want that kind of thing posted?
by zie | 2025-09-29 22:47:45+00:00
28yrs for an appeals chain is a bit longer than most realities I'm aware of. More like a dozen years at the top end would be more in line with what I've seen out there.

In general though, it's easier to just comply, even for the companies. It helps with PR and employee retention, etc.

They may fudge the reports a bit, even on purpose, but all groups of people do this to some degree. The question is, when does fudging go too far? There is some gray, but there isn't infinite amounts of gray.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-09-29 22:47:55+00:00
I’m building TypeQuicker: https://www.typequicker.com

Typing is an extremely underrated skill and especially in the age of LLMs, it is the bottle neck in a lot of cases.

I’ve never been fond of existing typing apps; excessive ads, typing random words, etc so I built my own.

You can practice typing code, use your own text, etc

We have a paid plan for features where you can type natural text that targets your weak points (via SmartPractice) and many others. Other than that, it’s both free to use (and ad-free)
by Myrmornis | 2025-09-29 22:47:59+00:00
I used to work at a US healthcare company selling a product that doctors prescribe in a medical consultation in a serious medical context that occurs very rarely in a person's life. Everything the marketing/product side of the company did was predicated on the notion that the product would be something that people would have an emotional connection to and would be an important part of people's mental landscapes for a non-trivial proportion of their lifetime.

Given that the product people concerned must have accepted that the people involved (the patients) would have hundreds or thousands of involvements of similar profundity with other commercial products, I'm not sure what's more worrying: the misjudgement of the role of medicine, or the implication that they think that normal people's brains are teeming with 1000s of emotional attachments to random commercial products.
by ajross | 2025-09-29 22:48:47+00:00
> - The USD is definitely losing value. That also means stocks from US companies would be cheaper from a foreigner's point of view.

That's actually not quite right. You can only buy securities on US markets with US dollars. You'd have to buy dollars on the money market to make that trade. So to the extent that "cheaper dollars" are driving investment in dollar-valued securities, they're increasing the value of the dollar on the global market by the same amount.

All markets seek toward efficiency. The situation you posit would be subject to a money-printing arbitrage loop if it actually existed.
by natebc | 2025-09-29 22:49:57+00:00
What?

What's the secret that you know which makes poor people have a better life after 50? I'd love to hear it and quit working so damn hard. Hell these days the middle class is getting their ass kicked at the grocery store. I can't even imagine how hard it would be if you cut my income by what it would take to get me to the poverty line. That amount won't even cover my rent.
by withinboredom | 2025-09-29 22:50:28+00:00
And in some cases, there isn't a reason to continue to step 2 or 3. Software generally has a shelf-life. Most businesses write code that should be rewritten every 5-10 years, but there's that kernel of code that _never_ changes... that's the code that really needs step 2 and 3. The rest, probably only runs occasionally and doesn't explicitely need to be extremely tested and fast.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-29 22:51:07+00:00
>I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic. 5-10 years ago it was a hot topic in online tech spaces (HN, Reddit, Slashdot and adjacent sites) about preserving your rights to take photos and videos in public spaces.

I don't know about that. Aroudn this time was the peak of "Glassholes" for those who remember that phenomenon. People really didn't want someone to be potentially, passively recording their conversation. Would that not be a thing should Google re-launch Google Glass today? That might be a real factor given how Meta is trying to push AR glasses.
by MichealCodes | 2025-09-29 22:51:52+00:00
> I'm sure some of it could be in the parallelization of processing that has to occur to service the large amount of requests. and more and more traffic are spreading it thin?

Even if this is the case, benchmarks should be done at scale too if the models suffer from symptoms of scale. Otherwise the benchmarks are just a lie unless you have access to an unconstrained version of the model.
by te0006 | 2025-09-29 22:51:56+00:00
If you have a south (or SE or SW) facing wall without much shadowing from nearby buildings or trees, vertikal mounting does work OK. Do not expect to reach the panel's nominal Wp rating though, output will peak at 50-70% of that. But panels are cheap - if there's enough room, just overprovision twofold. Just take care to buy an inverter that is OK with such a bigger configuration. And vertically mounted panels will generate more power off-season than tilted ones.
by cloverich | 2025-09-29 22:51:58+00:00
It's actually not arbitrary! I measure my PR rate / ticket close rate before and after, which are generally tied to agreed on features / bugs (often user requested / reported ones). I think if it were commit rate or lines of code it would be less meaningful, but at least a (non refactoring) PR should indicate some level of increased user value / bug fix. Sure we could categorize it further and break it down more effectively, I'll not die on the sword of 3x, maybe its 1.5x, maybe its 4x. Neither seems a very meaningful difference when the comparison being discussed is 0x or even -X. The latter I think _most_ of the time is going to be prompt or task related, which is why I think its so important to share and discuss (particularly the negative case!)
by hatthew | 2025-09-29 22:52:20+00:00
I made a random 30-line bash script that filled a small but critical niche (reimplementing an existing semi-niche tool to work with ipv6). I am bad at bash, but I put it on GitHub anyways, with a descriptive name.

Occasionally I check in on it, and see it's still getting pageviews, clones, and sometimes forks. A few people raised issues about something beyond the 20% I built, and I say "go do it yourself", and then they do but at least they didn't need to start from scratch.
by CMay | 2025-09-29 22:52:34+00:00
I absolutely know people who love companies and products. Like LOVE them, they will be put into tears like a child at Christmas, but they're adults. They grew up with them or their family members died and those companies or products bring back those memories. They played their favorite game while eating that food, etc.

You never know. I'm not sure I've ever loved a company exactly, but I've really really liked a product, or sometimes just a type of food. If I like a certain food enough and only a certain company sells it, some of that feeling relates with the company too. Like the company cheers you up, BECAUSE they sell it. You can see how that might be valuable in spreading appeal for the company and helping preserve the thing you enjoy, so it has social/natural selection value.

I think when companies refer to this, they really are referring to real people, it's just aspirational that other people could feel that way if they let themselves. Most people won't.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-29 22:52:51+00:00
That is so neat. I built something a little bit like this for a simulator of a 3D portal mill. Trying it on real wood got expensive fast so for debugging runs and trials of designs I would run a simulation where the toolbit would hack out the shape out of a three dimensional array of voxels. This was then displayed using a very simple engine built with PyGame. I got a lot of use out of that and it saved days (and a small forest).

Great to see something along those lines but with much better visuals.
by michaelt | 2025-09-29 22:53:07+00:00
If you have a sufficiently broad definition of 'product', then yes.

Millions of people are passionate about brands like the "Dallas Cowboys" and "Star Wars" and will dress up in costumes and go to events with like-minded people.

But for normal products, like USB headsets? Nobody's dressing up as the Jabra 20 Stereo USB-C Headset to go to the big Jabra Convention.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-29 22:53:55+00:00
Every index you add uses a whole lot more disk space (a big deal) and slows down writes (usually not a big deal).

The idea of a tool automatically adding indexes scares me a little.

Sometimes you specifically want a query to take 0.003s instead of 0.001 because you don't want to use another 10GB of disk space.
by drivebyhooting | 2025-09-29 22:53:59+00:00
All of them are trained on copyrighted data. Why is it okay for a model to serve up paraphrased books but verbatim copies from the Pirate Bay are illegal?

I don’t deny the utility of LLMs. But copyright law was meant to protect authors from this kind of exploitation.

Imagine instead of “magical AGI knowledge compression”, instead these LLM providers just did a search over their “borrowed” corpus and then performed a light paraphrasing of it.
by klaussilveira | 2025-09-29 22:55:00+00:00
After that Deus Ex remaster fiasco, I wanted to see how the famous Unreal 1 dithering technique would look on Quake's software renderer. Getting a clean build of it on Linux was fun in itself: https://github.com/klaussilveira/exp-quake

I can't take much credit for anything really, all of the meat came from Tim Sweeney himself: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Texturing_As_In_Unreal.sht...

I miss the golden days of flipcode.
by imiric | 2025-09-29 22:55:13+00:00
> Add in the narrow exceptions like child porn and true threats, and that's it.

You're contradicting yourself. On the one hand you're saying that governments shouldn't have the power to define "safety", but you're in favor of having protections against "true threats".

How do you define "true threats"? Whatever definition you may have, surely something like it can be codified into law. The questions then are: how loose or strict the law should be, and how well it is defined in technical terms. Considering governments and legislators are shockingly tech illiterate, the best the technical community can do is offer assistance.

> The government doesn't get to create new categories of "dangerous speech" just because the technology is new.

This technology isn't just new. It is unlike any technology we've had before, with complex implications for the economy, communication, the labor market, and many other areas of human society. We haven't even begun to understand the ways in which it can be used or abused to harm people, let alone the long-term effects of it.

The idea that governments should stay out of this, and allow corporations to push their products out into the world without any oversight, is dreadful. We know what happens when corporations are given free reign; it never ends well for humanity.

I'm not one to trust governments either, but at the very least, they are (meant to) serve their citizens, and enforce certain safety standards that companies must comply with. We accept this in every other industry, yet you want them to stay out of tech and AI? To hell with that.

Frankly, I'm not sure if this CA regulation is a good thing or not. Any AI law will surely need to be refined over time, as we learn more about the potential uses and harms of this technology. But we definitely need more regulation in the tech industry, not less, and the sooner, the better.
by nokya | 2025-09-29 22:55:42+00:00
Yes, I can agree with you, did not think of that and it seems to be a perfectly valid motive.

Still, I wonder: who would fall in the "highly susceptible" category? Wouldn't these people need to be tested prior to actually knowing they should be tested? (what would push someone to be tested for susceptibility of birthing malformed children before being tested?)
by tresil | 2025-09-29 22:56:24+00:00
I'll add another really positive review here. Sonnet 4.0 had been really struggling to implement an otel monitoring solution using grafana's lgtm stack. Sonnet 4.0 had 4 or 5 different attempts - some of them longer than 10 min - troubleshooting why metrics were supposedly being emitted from the api, but not showing up in Prometheus. Sonnet 4.5 correctly diagnosed and fixed the real issue within about 5 min. Not sure if that's the model being smarter, but I definitely saw the agent using some new approaches and seemingly managing it's context better.
by shoobiedoo | 2025-09-29 22:56:57+00:00
This is so incredibly important, well done. The problem of our food being steeped in plastic hits the news here and there, but it should be front and center in my opinion. Testosterone has been plummeting for decades and it scares the heck out of me. The hormone whose job is "form goals, shrug off failure, and try again!" is being destroyed and corporations are given a free pass to pump us full of phthalates and bisphenol. It's infuriating.
by michaelt | 2025-09-29 22:57:01+00:00
> it's a slow path to monetize OpenAI if they don't support some kind of channel to get paid by the sell-side.

Seems like an express route to irrelevance, to me.

If I wanted AI-generated shill reviews, written without laying eyes on the product, hoping to get me to click on an affiliate link? I'd go to Google.
by righthand | 2025-09-29 22:57:10+00:00
I disagree. The topic is rsync which is well documented. The path forward might not work in every situation but the manual has good examples too. This is probably true for what Llm users use it for 90% of the time. To hack together things that are well known and well documented into a result. Llms arguably only work because these tools ffmpeg, rsync, etc were already solving problems and widely used and documented. So burning energy to have a computer look up commands because you couldn’t spend 10 minutes reading yourself could be a waste of time and money. Where as having to spend time researching is likely only a waste of time only.
by roncesvalles | 2025-09-29 22:57:15+00:00
Same. I went to a fairly middle-tier CS program, graduated in the mid 2010s. A good chunk of my CS class just never got CS jobs. One is a car salesman, one is a math teacher, one went into academia for linguistics, many went into IT or helpdesk, many work odd jobs or generic white collar jobs. I would guess only about 10-15% of CS grads ever land into the cushy six-figure Bay Area SWE career at well-known companies that people associate with the term "Software Engineer".

Becoming a SWE is hard and it was never easy. You needed projects, internships, hundreds of hours invested in interview prep, aggressive networking and, even after all that, excellent luck. It is not something that naturally follows a CS degree. Maybe it does for the kids at the Stanfords and MITs (who, might I remind you, have already won wars to even get there). Not for the average Joe Jr from University of Flyover State.
by Devasta | 2025-09-29 22:57:19+00:00
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/startup-ceo-charlie-jav...

> In addition to the prison term, JAVICE, 31, of Miami Beach, Florida, was sentenced to three years of supervised release. The district court also imposed a forfeiture judgment of $22,360,977.48 and ordered restitution in the amount of $287,501,078.00 that is joint and several with AMAR.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-29 22:57:25+00:00
It's difficult to come up with a comprehensive name that encompasses the oil-rich lands within eastern / middle-eastern / central Asia, north Africa, and south-eastern Europe.

I'm strongly reminded of Peter Adamson's Google Lecture on philosophy in the Islamic World, which is almost entirely dedicated to the matter of why he calls it the Islamic World, rather than Arabic, Persian, Islam, or several other possible names.

Ideas are maps, and here the map fits the terrain fairly poorly. Any term is going to have its inaccuracies, and will inflate or neglect one or more parties.

Ultimately, though, that specific matter is of very limited interest or discussion potential.
by nsavage | 2025-09-29 22:57:54+00:00
I'm working on Zettelgarden: https://zettelgarden.com.

It's a personal knowledge system. It's a zettelkasten with an LLM substrate. It uses LLMs to build a model of the theses, arguments and facts used in cards, and uses these to both summarize the information on the card and to automatically link cards together based on shared concepts.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-29 22:58:06+00:00
> ... Most disagreements in the hard sciences don’t stem from people’s feelings obfuscating math.

I didn't clarify my point sufficiently, we ended up "talking past each other" a bit because of this.

I'm not referring to people within the hard sciences having arguments! That happens, but like you said, typically for good and valid reasons.

I was referring to the general population of office workers and the like, outside of the highly-selective Silicon Valley startup bubble that many HN readers might find themselves in.

> many of the autists I know hate people beating around the bush

I'm not on the spectrum, but I do appreciate "direct" communication!

More to the point, you seem to be in the bubble I mentioned, so you may not even be aware of what a typical large corporate or government office worker's experience is like.

In my $dayjob I regularly see objectively bad projects moving forwards effortlessly with zero resistance. I see dozens of supposedly important people just "going with the flow" and nodding in agreement with their superiors because they're terrified of taking an objective stance against the "tribe leader". There are zero pointed questions asked. No technical analysis of any kind. No objective metrics or numbers, ever. No graphs. No charts. Nothing you might recognise as "science".

Just a few weeks ago I was in a meeting where they were presenting a new network security design that had already been signed off and approved for implementation by dozens of senior leaders including the CIO, CTO, CISO, etc...

This multi-million dollar project was already in motion for six months, and I was the only one to ask pointed questions: "Won't routing all outbound traffic via another cloud provider tank network performance? Won't that result in hairpin networking where we go out and back in to talk to ourselves? Won't this break out server-to-server firewall rules? What about egress bandwidth costs, have they been estimated? Has anyone tested any of this?"

"No, we didn't test it, the vendor selling it to us assured us it was good, its in the top right Gartner magic quadrant, and it has been signed off, so there's no concerns."

Translated: "Authority, authority, authority."

This is what the "rest of the world" is like, the vast majority of the general population out there working in typical jobs.

You yourself said you know "many autists". You're in the 5% highly selected weird corner of the world, probably a startup or something akin to it.
by nullderef | 2025-09-29 22:58:11+00:00
Building an app where 1 pushup = 1 minute of scrolling allowed [1]. We've fiiinally started to grow and reached a whooping $30k in the last month!!

I was literally thinking about quitting in August. My motivation is now at an all-time high - some users have done >8k pushups :)

As always, the key has been the marketing (10M views on Instagram). But we have to improve the product to make people love it even more. So the roadmap is more full than ever.

[1] https://pushscroll.com