MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2025-09-23 20:50:22+00:00
Hmm... For example, say you have a machine that must decide whether a monetary transaction is allowable or not. The state at any given time could be the balances of all accounts, plus some metadata about past states (but not the past states themselves). Then if A has $5 in their account and tries to transfer $5 to B, the contents of the metadata would be the deciding factor of whether the transaction goes through or not. The machine still only operates on the present state, but the present state depends indirectly on past states.
by dhorthy | 2025-09-23 20:50:24+00:00
i think the general take away for all of this is the model can write the code but you still have to design it. I don't disagree with anything you've said, and I'd say my advice is engage more, iterate more, and work in small steps to get the right patterns and rules laid out. It wont work well on day one if you don't set up the right guidelines and guardrails. That's why it's still software engineering, despite being a different interaction medium.
by hatthew | 2025-09-23 20:51:07+00:00
Anything can be a markov chain if you define "memory of the past" as a component of the current state and include a big enough memory to hold all of the past for any practical amount of time. Personally, I feel like in most contexts it's not helpful to think of LLMs that way, since their state space (context length) is so large that they are extremely far removed from what we normally think of as markov chains. One might as well define humans as markov chains, since the brain has a finite memory.
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-23 20:51:08+00:00
Yes, I think it really only works in a side-effect free language. Otherwise after the first "failure", while every resulting value also turns to None, allocation, file access, database calls still happen, so you are now in a weird limbo state where everything was done, but no handle retained and in a weird position in control flow, kind-of between the lines, which isn't expressed by any of your code.
by danaris | 2025-09-23 20:51:45+00:00
This is a very complex question.

Part of the answer is that they think the surveillance will be magically omniscient, because it's technology they don't understand.

Part of the answer is that they think that if there's a tool they could possibly have to give law enforcement more power, they must have it.

Part of it is that they don't care so much about actual bad guys, but about exercising absolute control over the general populace.

Part of it is that they don't believe that crime can actually be eliminated, but they do believe that they have to continue to take all possible measures against it.

And part of it is just that they don't think it's politically safe for them to oppose a measure like this (similar to, but not quite the same as, the second point above).
by bitwize | 2025-09-23 20:51:50+00:00
This is to avoid trademark dilution, which in the USA can invalidate a trademark. Aspirin, for instance, used to be a trademark of Bayer, but these days is generic.

I did not regularly hear the term "game console" until the late 90s. I used to think the promotion of this term was done by Nintendo in a trademark-protective maneuver to avoid rival systems being called "Nintendos" by granny, but it seems I was mistaken. Nevertheless, in the 80s we called them systems. Which system do you have, Nintendo or Sega?

Recently in my retrogaming media habit I've heard "console" used occasionally to describe video game consoles in advertisements dating back to the early 80s, but at that time it was also used by Texas Instruments to refer to the TI-99/4A computer. TI was naming all of their home products to give a space-age technical feel to them. They marketed joysticks as "Wired Remote Controllers", and cartridges for the TI-99/4A as "Command Modules" or "Solid State Software". So I don't think "console" referring to a gaming device specifically was a term of art back then.
by elevation | 2025-09-23 20:52:44+00:00
> Even after leaving Iran, you still face many similar problems. [...] like having a bank account or simply opening a personal account on different services—you’ll encounter problems.

When you grant access/resources to expats of a hostile country, you have to limit them as if they were agents of the foreign country. Even if they like your country, you make them vulnerable to threats of torture/imprisonment of their loved ones back home.
by to11mtm | 2025-09-23 20:52:46+00:00
> The only extra overhead is of the network, which is something a distributed lock would also have.

Well, There's also the 'overhead' of connection pooling. I put it that way because I've definitely run into the case of a 'hot' key (i.e. imagine hundreds of users that all need to download the same set of data because they are in the same group). Next thing you know your connection pool is getting saturated with these requests.

To your point however, I've also had cases where frankly querying the database is always fast enough (i.e. simple lookup on a table small enough that the DB engine practically always has it in memory anyway) so a cache would just be wasted dev time.
Mass phishing emails pretending to be Y Combinator right now
by Tremeschin | 2025-09-23 20:52:51+00:00
Just received quite a smart phishing email/notification coming from "GitHub" by a user created less than a week ago (1) which is currently creating multiple issues a minute tagging many random usernames in a repository (2) with a "ycombinatornotify" app (3). The usual - asking to verify wallets, deposit for authorization as I've been selected for funding, etc. All issues contains the content of the email received, so I'll not paste them here (they're gone, but still, a bad idea to paste it).

- (3m in) They seem to have been rate limited or reached a target of 500 issues

- (5m in) Repository was just taken down, hope they automate back a warning

- They have typo-squatted the "y-comb[l]nator [dot] com" domain (with hyphen and L)

Quite urgent actions are needed to stop it, or warn the affected. Will update the submission with more information as time goes.

- [1]: https://github.com/ycombinato/

- [2]: https://github.com/ycombinato/rorg/

- [3]: https://github.com/apps/ycombinatornotify
by jampekka | 2025-09-23 20:53:03+00:00
> In other words, it seems as if you can take any past state and fold it into one large concatenated present state - and, by that logic, call basically anything a Markov chain?

Essentially yes. Given complex enough state, more or less any process is Markovian. Some do require infinite state, which would be maybe stretching the definition a bit. In practice Markov formulation may not be a very good analysis perspective if the required state would be very large/complex.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-23 20:53:04+00:00
Also consider that maybe people do not want to party and the kind thing is not persistently inviting them, but rather actually find something to spend time with that person.

Not wanting to go out "to party" is not a moral failing, a problem, a fault, something which someone needs to overcome. If you like that person you can find something to do on a Friday night you both enjoy, if you don't then I doubt that you really care for that person at all.
by westurner | 2025-09-23 20:53:43+00:00
Here's this about x402 and ILP and HTAs: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45348242

Docs, Specs, Use Cases;

ILP terminology from Rafiki: https://rafiki.dev/overview/concepts/interledger/ :

> Packet, Peer, Connectors (Sender, Connector, Receiver), Payment pointer, SPSP Simple Payment Setup Protocol, STREAM Protocol, STREAM receipt

ILP finds routes from Senders through Connectors to ILP Receivers. An ILP Connector does Pathfinding, Quoting, and Forwarding. There are ILP Addresses, but there is no global routing table.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-23 20:53:44+00:00
If you've never actually used an excavator, front-end loader, or any other large equipment, you'll really never know how satisfying it can be. They are powerful equipment that can move a lot of dirt in a short amount of time, but only if you're good at it. It takes skillz to do things fast and smooth in a way that's not going to tear up the equipment or injure someone. Crane operators are impressive too. Watching crews keep tonnes of load under control flying through the air and placing it down softly (while sometimes not in line of sight of the operator) is impressive to watch. Why more people are not fascinated/impressed with it is beyond me. I think people assume it's all automated and a cushy job and do not realize how much manual control is required. Kind of like those "I could build it in a weekend" comments discrediting the amount of work someone else did.
by text0404 | 2025-09-23 20:53:45+00:00
Nope, once again you are misconstruing my words. I don't take kindly to being called a liar by a fool. I originally said the following:

> Kirk was ultimately "cancelled" by the same society that he fomented. He was against empathy, used his platform to disparage and attack vulnerable groups, against gun control, and literally said that gun deaths are a worthy price for the 2nd amendment. He was a victim of a violent society he actively encouraged and campaigned for.

I am talking about the kind of society that Charlie Kirk wanted. One without empathy, where vulnerable people are attacked, and there are no guardrails on access to firearms, which he encouraged. Yes, political assassinations exist, but that doesn't change the fact that Charlie Kirk died because he encouraged a violent society; one that ultimately made him a victim.

You've decided to focus on one aspect of what I said, creating a strawman claiming that it's my entire argument, and continue to engage in ad hominem. Please use more critical thinking skills, as I'm tiring of you projecting your own insecurities and motivations onto me. I suggest reading more books from experts in their fields, instead of right-wing blogs like the one you linked (focus on sociology and anthropology may help with this specific topic). A course on formal logic may also help, along with introductory philosophy.

You seem to think I'm trying to "score points" in some kind of game here. I don't consider this a game at all and it says a lot that you do.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-09-23 20:54:32+00:00
...but why not by voice? "Vibe editing" images by voice doesn't offend my 20+ years of developing Photoshop skills the way that typing-out an imagined conversation between MacGyver and a 1980s image-editing-computer does. Oddly, I can't explain why either.

----

What I dislike the most about "prompts" being the default input for AI models thesedays is the inability to "browse" its featureset to see what it's actually capable of. I don't want to spend minutes/hours throwing different natural-language commands at it to seeing if it understands chroma-keying from chromatic-aberration - or if it can do lossless JPEG block-level transformations. It's when something stops being a useful tool but a hinderance or even a toy (perhaps even with Achievements and microtransaction unlockables).
by nemothekid | 2025-09-23 20:54:39+00:00
This is a historically ignorant take, especially when you consider the country being talked about is Iran. As an American it's very easy to assume that a "government revolution" is something that can executed by the will of the people.

Iran had a democratic government. That democratic government voted to do something against Britian's economic interests. In response America dissolved it's government.

If I lived in a nation where any government instability would be used by wealth foreign powers who didn't care if I lived or died, I would also be hesitant in brewing any anti-government fervor.

You can't hold them wholly responsible when they don't even have the power of true self determination.
by xmprt | 2025-09-23 20:54:44+00:00
> paying more than a fair price by deceptive business practices

I see product X is $10/month. I subscribe. I'm not sure where the deception is there? The alternative is likely either the cost of the product is exorbitantly high like $500 for lifetime. Or the developer makes it more affordable but sales peter out and they end up having to go out of business and can't afford to maintain the product after a couple of years. Likely both. And hackernews will complain either way.

The only sustainable model I've seen is lifetime licenses but updates for a single year.
by skissane | 2025-09-23 20:55:23+00:00
Yes, but in my past experience, one often wants to be edit those files to make them more generic… Valgrind struggles to distinguish which parts of the call stack are essential to a “known leak” versus which are coincidental.

I have never tried asking an LLM to do this-but it seems like the kind of problem with which an LLM might have some success, even if only partial success.
by wavemode | 2025-09-23 20:55:27+00:00
I don't think this is correct. Go is a language with structs, arrays, value semantics and pointers, and an `unsafe` package for performing low-level operations on those pointers and deal directly with the layout of memory. And in practice Go and Rust have found use in a lot of the exact same systems programming and network programming domains, as replacement languages for C.

Go is certainly a higher-level language than C, but to say it's at all similar to Python or Ruby is nonsensical.
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-23 20:56:32+00:00
Obviously I don't care about that freedom. Just like I don't care about the freedom to put up ugly billboards on your land. That's why we bought a home in an area that bans those things. It also requires ugly parking lots to be set back behind a tree line, and new residential developments must have bike trails that connect to the wider network. I'm happy for you to live somewhere where you have that freedom though. I know "no rules" appeals to some!
by pier25 | 2025-09-23 20:56:52+00:00
> Most use cases? I'm interested if you have any examples.

Basically anything isn't an in-house tool. Captive users don't have much of an alternative.

Blazor is specially bad for anything that is public and/or needs to run on mobile.

> This strikes me as a premature optimization

Avoiding shipping 10-20MB of WASM code is not premature optimization... it's just common sense.

I can agree that for C# teams it might be better to use Blazor but objectively JS/TS solutions are just better. Again, look at the objective hard data:

https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

Blazor uses 45x the memory compared to vanilla JS and up to 3000x the KBs.
by janalsncm | 2025-09-23 20:57:01+00:00
You are describing a garbage in, garbage out problem. However, LLMs introduce a new type of issue, the “valid data in, garbage out” problem. The existence of the former doesn’t make the latter less of an issue.

“Just” checking a million rows is trivial depending on the types of checks you’re running. In any case, you would never want a check which yields false positives and false negatives, since that defeats the entire purpose of the check.
by toast0 | 2025-09-23 20:57:03+00:00
> Are there ways to prevent this kind of thing using GrapheneOS or FLX1s?

Prevent what exactly?

> If you are on a phone using a network vanilla provider like tmobile or otherwise, is there any way to prevent your phone from trying to connect to a fake network?

LTE and beyond have mutual authentication. Your phone will attach to any network for an emergency call, but attachment to LTE requires the network trusts your sim and your sim trusts the network. [1] No trust on first use necessary, because the SIM includes its private keys and public keys for the network.

[1] https://www.sharetechnote.com/html/Handbook_LTE_Authenticati...
by circadian | 2025-09-23 20:57:43+00:00
I'm in my 40s now, but when I was very young I had quite a rough time living in shared accommodation. It was people reaching out and asking me if I wanted to go out, whether or not I could, that in the same way stuck with me as helping to deal with being lonely. I still have the memory of peoples kindness and this story reminded me of those kindnesses. It's kind of a beautiful memory to have, even when the times were dark.

My interpretation is that Alexei might well have understood that Anna felt lonely / homesick. The reaching out could well have been simply sympathetic and well thought through to help include someone. That's what people did for me when I was young and out of my depth. Those people probably helped steer me into a good place when it could've gone bad.

It's always nice to reflect on the kindness of others. :)
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-23 20:57:46+00:00
However bad you think it is it's safe to assume it's way worse. Radar (not visible light) algorithms that I wasn't privy to the details of could track hundreds of vehicles and dismounts circa 2010. Our "test data" was a recording taken over a Washington DC suburb (so not downtown Manhattan, but still thousands of cars, hundreds upon hundreds of pedestrians joggers, cyclists, etc.) This was done with a single bajillion dollar military radar. This was a production system and not even the latest and greatest at the time. Imagine what far more far cheaper, albeit with worse receiver hardware drones can do in the visible spectrum.
by kgeist | 2025-09-23 20:58:09+00:00
But a conversation with an LLM doesn't only depend on the last message, it depends on all previous messages. Sure the number of messages is limited by the context window, so you can indeed say it's a high-order Markov chain (it can only see N states back), but theoretically, what an actual non-Markovian LLM would look like? Something which has an infinite context? It's not physically possible... At this point it sounds like "it's a Markov chain" is not a very useful statement.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-09-23 20:58:14+00:00
For contrast, here's how I'd handle the example given on the front page in Lil[0]:

i:"%j" parse shell["curl -s https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/BOU/63,62/forecast"].out t:i.properties.periods..temperature o.average:(sum t)/count t o.minimum:min t o.maximum:max t show[o]

Lil doesn't have implicit parsing of .json arguments like Blots- certainly a nice feature for the niche Blots is aimed at. Lil also doesn't have an arithmetic average as a builtin like Blots, but in this case it's easy enough to do without.

The biggest difference here is how Lil handles indexing: The ".." in that second line can be read as "for every index"; a wildcard. I can follow the mapping that occurs in Blots' "via" expression, but I find it less clear in this example.

It can also be nice to treat lists-of-objects as proper SQL-like tables:

select number name temperature windSpeed from table i.properties.periods +--------+-------------------+-------------+---------------+ | number | name | temperature | windSpeed | +--------+-------------------+-------------+---------------+ | 1 | "This Afternoon" | 54 | "14 mph" | | 2 | "Tonight" | 46 | "3 to 12 mph" | | 3 | "Wednesday" | 69 | "5 mph" | | 4 | "Wednesday Night" | 45 | "3 mph" | | 5 | "Thursday" | 79 | "5 mph" | | 6 | "Thursday Night" | 49 | "5 mph" | | 7 | "Friday" | 83 | "2 to 6 mph" | | 8 | "Friday Night" | 52 | "6 mph" | | 9 | "Saturday" | 81 | "3 to 8 mph" | | 10 | "Saturday Night" | 53 | "3 to 8 mph" | | 11 | "Sunday" | 81 | "3 to 7 mph" | | 12 | "Sunday Night" | 54 | "3 to 7 mph" | | 13 | "Monday" | 77 | "3 to 7 mph" | | 14 | "Monday Night" | 53 | "3 to 7 mph" | +--------+-------------------+-------------+---------------+

I hope you continue to tinker and evolve Blots; a personal scripting language guided by the use-cases you encounter naturally can be very rewarding and useful.

[0] http://beyondloom.com/tools/trylil.html
Show HN: RapidFire AI: 16–24x More Experiment Throughput Without Extra GPUs
by kamranrapidfire | 2025-09-23 20:58:15+00:00
We built RapidFire AI, an open-source Python tool to speed up LLM fine-tuning and post-training with a powerful level of control not found in most tools: Stop, resume, clone-modify and warm-start configs on the fly—so you can branch experiments while they’re running instead of starting from scratch or running one after another.

- Works within your OSS stack: PyTorch, HuggingFace TRL/PEFT), MLflow.

- Hyperparallel search: launch as many configs as you want together, even on a single GPU

- Dynamic real-time control: stop laggards, resume them later to revisit, branch promising configs in flight.

- Deterministic eval + run tracking: Metrics curves are automatically plotted and are comparable.

- Apache License v2.0: No vendor lock in. Develop on your IDE, launch from CLI.

Repo: https://github.com/RapidFireAI/rapidfireai/

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/rapidfireai/

Docs: https://oss-docs.rapidfire.ai/

We hope you enjoy the power of rapid experimentation with RapidFire AI for your LLM customization projects! We’d love to hear your feedback–both positive and negative–on the UX and UI, API, any rough edges, and what integrations and extensions you’d be excited to see.
by jltsiren | 2025-09-23 20:58:42+00:00
It depends on if you already had experience in using large Markov models for practical purposes.

Around 2009, I had developed an algorithm for building the Burrows–Wheeler transform on (what was back then) very large scale. If you have the BWT of a text corpus, you can use it to simulate a Markov model with any context length. It tried that with a Wikipedia dump, which was amusing for a while but not interesting enough to develop further.

Then, around 2019, I was working in genomics. We were using pangenomes based on thousands of (human) haplotypes as reference genomes. The problem was that adding more haplotypes also added rare variants and rare combinations of variants, which could be misleading and eventually started decreasing accuracy in the tasks we were interested in. The standard practice was dropping variants that were too rare (e.g. <1%) in the population. I got better results with synthetic haplotypes generated by downsampling the true haplotypes with a Markov model (using the BWT-based approach). The distribution of local haplotypes within each context window was similar to the full set of haplotypes, but the noise from rare combinations of variants was mostly gone.

Other people were doing haplotype inference with Markov models based on similarly large sets of haplotypes. If you knew, for a suitably large subset of variants, whether each variant was likely absent, heterozygous, or homozygous in the sequenced genome, you could use the model to get a good approximation of the genome.

When ChatGPT appeared, the application was surprising (even though I knew some people who had been experimenting with GPT-2 and GPT-3). But it was less surprising on a technical level, as it was close enough to what I had intuitively considered possible with large Markov models.
by Bender | 2025-09-23 20:59:17+00:00
Be sure to email this to Daniel dang hn@ycombinator.com and flag the email as high priority. Be sure to include all the email headers.

Also report it to github [1] and the Feds [2] in the off chance someone takes it seriously. Be sure to include all the email headers here too.

[1] - https://docs.github.com/en/communities/maintaining-your-safe...

[2] - https://www.ic3.gov/
by LightBug1 | 2025-09-23 21:00:03+00:00
Just read DHH's Sept 15th Heyworld post ... what an absolute sh1t spiral ... it reads like someone who's bubble of information has defeated them. Is that what getting old looks like? .... terrifying .... he sounds like the wanker corner of our local pub .. the only difference is he has the platform and money to amplify his semi-drunk sounding, ignorant views ... how the mighty have fallen. RIP.
by tleyden5iwx | 2025-09-23 21:00:11+00:00
API clients can already easily identify the user during the authentication process. What’s currently “missing” is a way for an API client to pay a service via the API call “on the fly”, without having a credit card on file or some prior account balance.

Maybe a better example is an image generation api. Your agent chooses one based on its research, and without any account or credit card on file, it buys you an image using a x402.