MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mhashemi | 2025-09-15 18:32:25+00:00
Relatable. While I doubt I'd have been able to do all the frontend myself without an agent, it's still pretty early for LLMs + money.

It depends on where you're starting a thread, but assuming you're starting the thread in a view, then we prime the chat with:

- The user's configured financial literacy, education level, etc.

- The reasoning and actual results of the calculator as you see them

- Summary metrics from the space that the view is saved in

The last point is pretty critical. The idea is that you build your own context from the bottom up, exposing as much or as little as you want for the scenario you want to explore. Add the relevant assets/liabilities/income/expenses, and we have a little cash-basis accounting simulator that projects all that into a "scope" usable by the Views, as well as the chatbot ("Finn" http://finfam.app/finn).

Handing these metrics to the chat unlocks a lot of the magic of the chatbot as a "neutral explainer". Any creator can upload a spreadsheet, but as we've currently exposed it, Finn is meant to be moderate and just there to close any explanatory gaps that the creator may have left out, or not considered. If you're looking at a view about buying a second house, Finn's supposed to give you a gut check if you have particularly low cash reserves.

A lot of a financial advisor's time and role is filling gaps in your financial literacy, and a 24/7 chatbot is honestly just better at explaining the difference between a credit and debit card.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-15 18:33:11+00:00
This plant [0] and others like it were all subsidized by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) [1].

If our tax dollars are going to subsidize the construction and development of these factories, then they better follow our laws.

Hyundai is the only malcontent. Every other IRA project has not had a similar kind of scandal.

If Hyundai doesn't want to participate in American Industrial Subsidizes by following our laws, they can return the billions of dollars in subsidizes provided.

> I'm seeing a lot of demands

Follow our laws if you want our subsidizes.

Hire American if you want our subsidizes.

Biden literally told Hyundai's leadership this same thing point blank. [2]

[0] - https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/press-releases/sen-ossoff-lg-e...

[1] - https://e2.org/announcements/

[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/c677b9aa-2e89-4feb-a56f-f3c8452b3...
by numpad0 | 2025-09-15 18:33:27+00:00
My point is that the list should include more of those stations with China, India, as well as various South Asian countries such as Indonesia in mind.

As in, not necessarily artificially dethroning Shinjuku, but as in someone should just take all public per-station boarding/disembarking data(I think even China would not have issues with that so long it's genuinely compiled for scientific research purposes), run it through LLM or something to build a big CSV of all train stations on the world, sort that, and take top hundreds. This type of crowdsourced review work is only done for Japan due to Japan being Japan for better and worse - e.g. having high mental shares, thin and wide basic knowledge of English, having obsessive cultures, etc etc, and I can't believe it's simple reflection of reality, even accounting for such things as the first point in your comment in mind.
Mirai Variant "Gayfemboy" Infecting 15K+ Devices Daily – Mitigation Ideas?
by garduno_AA | 2025-09-15 18:33:34+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a pentester and recently came across a new Mirai-based botnet called Gayfemboy (yes, the name sounds like a meme, but the threat is real). It’s currently infecting over 15,000 devices daily, mostly targeting routers and network gear from Cisco, TP-Link, DrayTek, and Raisecom.

What it does:

Launches DDoS attacks (UDP, TCP, ICMP) Mines Monero using XMRig Acts as a proxy for malicious traffic Installs backdoors and evades analysis (e.g., UPX header tampering, nanosecond delays)

Vulnerabilities exploited (At this moment):

CVE-2025-20281 (Cisco ISE) CVE-2023-1389 (TP-Link AX21) CVE-2020-8515 (DrayTek) CVE-2024-7120 (Raisecom MSG)

Mitigation ideas I’m testing:

Scanning client networks for vulnerable firmware Blocking known malicious domains and IPs at the firewall level Writing scripts to detect outbound traffic to those IOCs Recommending disabling remote admin access on routers I’d love to hear what others are doing to detect or contain this botnet. Has anyone seen it in enterprise environments? Any creative or effective mitigation strategies you’d recommend?
by mikestew | 2025-09-15 18:33:56+00:00
If, in MacOS, I can drag a file onto a taskbar icon to open the file in whatever program I dropped it on...

MacOS already does that. You're not going to drag a video file to the spreadsheet app icon with much success, but if the app knows how to handle it then it will work. I can't imagine using an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-15 18:34:23+00:00
Correct. To the extent "hate speech" has legal meaning, it's that its presence in a defendant's history where they are accused of another crime (such as assault) could raise that crime to the level of "hate crime." A hate crime differs from a regular crime in that the plaintiff must prove that the defendant had a racially-motivated mens rea: they weren't transgressing against a victim for reasons such as personal grudge, but because they have a broad hatred of people in a category the victim is a member of and committed the crime because of that.

Saying "America is better off without black people in it" is not a crime by itself. Having a prosecutor dig up the Twitter post where you said that while you're defending a battery charge can turn a six months in jail / $2,000 fine crime into a one year / $5,000 fine crime.
by vkou | 2025-09-15 18:35:23+00:00
The problem is that there are two parties in any transaction, and power users/casual users swayed by marketing will be the ones that will choose the medium on which the transaction will take place.

So while you may want a self-sovereign exchange, your counterparty doesn't give a shit about your preferences, or is actively happy with using PayPal (Because their dispute resolution is better biased towards their side of the transaction, or because they just never gave it a second thought.)
by jerf | 2025-09-15 18:35:51+00:00
It is not quite so terrible as to need to make everyone distrustful.

There is an old saying: "You can't scam an honest man." I think a lot of people misunderstand this; it is not that being honest somehow lets you just know when you're being scammed. Indeed the natural "surely they'd be even more vulnerable" probably has some truth to it in some sense.

What it means is that the vast bulk of scams involve convincing the mark that they are dishonestly pulling off a scam. You pay $400 and you're going to get $millions. She misidentified you as someone else but hey you're just so amazingly charismatic that she's into you anyhow, and if you just pour a few more hundreds in she's totally going to let you sleep with her. You know you never entered that lottery, but hey, if they're going to make a mistake and say you won who are you to argue, right?

Not everything fits into this; one classic that affects businesses more than individuals is Ye Olde Just Issue An Invoice And Hope They Pay It. There are also some scams around posing with varying degrees of fidelity as a specific individual you know, such as by hacking their emails and sending this out as them, although in many cases that's still just a delivery mechanism for a scam based on convincing the mark they're going to pull a scam.

A solution that will make you highly resistant to scams, though as I am saying outright, not immune, is to realize that you will not get anything for free, to refuse to participate, to be aggressively honest even if it seems to hurt you. Perhaps ironically, or perhaps counter to your intuition, in the modern world, such aggressive honesty will on the net benefit you by protecting you from these scams. The same ethics that make you give $5 back to the cashier that they gave you in extra change will save you hundreds of thousands in a pig butchering scam.

In the modern era it probably is getting more important to verify identities even of people you know, which is a new and developing angle.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-09-15 18:35:56+00:00
what's the end goal of stablecoins, besides the immediate grift?

do they think countries' populations will "opt in" into dolarizing that country econony (a la argentina in the 80s) bypassing their central bank opinions?

or is this much simpler and is just "ebay now works as crypto escrow for your bids"?
by steveklabnik | 2025-09-15 18:35:57+00:00
As I said, the initial piracy was an issue. That is what they settled over. Your link covers this:

> A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

With more details about how they later did it legally, and that was fine, but it did not excuse the earlier piracy:

> But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees’ internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.

> With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn’t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.
by 0manrho | 2025-09-15 18:36:17+00:00
I remember that post. Typical Tom's quality (or lack there of).

The only insight you can gleam from that is that bad flash is bad, and worn bad flash is even worse, and that's frankly a stretch given the lack of sample sizes or a control group.

The reality is that its non trivial to determine data retention/resilience in a powered off state, at least as it pertains to a coming to a useful and reasonably accurate generalism of "X characteristics/features result in poor data retention/endurance when powered off in Y types of devices," and being able to provide the receipts to back that up. There are far more variables than most people realize going on under the hood with flash and how different controllers and drives are architected(hardware) and programmed(firmware). Thermal management is a huge factor that is often overlooked or misunderstood and that has substantial impact on flash endurance (and performance). I could go into more specifics if interested (storage at scale/speed is my bread and butter), but this post is long enough.

All that said, the general mantra remains true: more layers per cell generally means data per cell is more fragile/sensitive, but that's generally in the context of write cycle endurance.
by kashunstva | 2025-09-15 18:36:30+00:00
> ~75-80% of farmers voted for this administration.

It’s a curious study in the psychology of cognitive blind spots I suppose. Surely farmers in the course of their work understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. Why is it so difficult then to port that to the political sphere? This is a man, who regardless of one’s own position on the political spectrum, seems so grossly under-equipped - both in terms of education and disposition -to steer a large complex economy, that it beggars comprehension as to how these farmers could have made the decisions that most did.
by charliea0 | 2025-09-15 18:37:41+00:00
I'd only really be worried about barriers to entry and composition.

One limit on wages is $ of value / hour. If AI makes existing programmers more efficient, then you would expect total wages to go up.

If AI makes it easier for folks to become programmers, then the value produced could be split over more people. Alternatively, if you need fewer programmers then more value could be captured by a few superstar winners.
by theologic | 2025-09-15 18:37:50+00:00
I don't think you probably have the history to frame this correctly.

Apple was dying. Somehow Steve got his foot in the door at the beginning of '97, and kicked out Gil in around 7 months. It was insane. Steve then immediately launched the Think Different, and personally narrated the ads. He then kills around 70% of the SKUs, killed the Newton, and got out the iMac in '98.

The reason why it was brilliant is because Steve said that we "lost our core." If there was a criticism about the think different campaign is that Steve was retreating to "the core groupees" therefore indicating that Apple was about the niche and not the mainstream. To Steve this was idiotic observation. You build from the devoted first. The campaign was brilliant as it wasn't about market growth, it was about stemming the blood loss and reclaiming the core. Then the MSFT deal was booed when announced. But it was classic Steve at his best.

To call the iMac "a piece of furniture" and the reason for its success is not to understanding how to deliver products and how to drive sales. Steve had an incredible aesthetic sense, and understood that he needs to segment his market an move away from the beige box. If you were in the market, you admired and were shocked at what he did.

But do you understand why suddenly there was an "i" in front? This wasn't about a piece of furniture, it was about portraying a device as your access to the outside world.

Then somehow you believe that the iPad and iPhone changed the formula, but I don't think you understand the iMac was the original example of how to apply the formula of being a product company that delivers a brand promise.

While Steve started as a PC person with Woz, he came back as a product person that had lived the glorious life of NeXT and Pixar. I think his banishment was helpful not hurtful. He understood that iMac was a product and not a PC.

He started asking "what products and what markets will Apple play in." The change was not iPhone or iPad. If you want to ask "when did the formula get copied outside of iMac?"

It was the iPod. It was iTunes. It was owning your own music. However, it was seen as a natural product extension from the iMac. Local storage of music was key.

Once they had a culture of products, then were able to build toward iPhone (iPad is a simple extension and has a much smaller impact on revenue.) However, it wasn't a pivot. It was a build.
by triceratops | 2025-09-15 18:38:21+00:00
> [companies] don't force anything onto anyone

They don't force at gunpoint. They use cash and lies to convince. And the legal system to cow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger

You aren't wrong that we should choose better. But what do you do when so much money and effort has been expended to ensure so many people don't know what better even is.
by ku1ik | 2025-09-15 18:39:15+00:00
asciinema.org is currently being hugged to death! The btop stream is from one of the servers, currently reporting 95% CPU usage: https://asciinema.org/s/olesiD03BIFH6Yz1

But it's chugging along!

asciinema server is Elixir/Phoenix, runs on BEAM, and even with lots of connections and high CPU usage it serves request fine. Power of the BEAM. Phew.

Currently it runs on just 2 VMs, 2 GB of RAM each, so I will probably need to scale it up very soon anyway :)
by recroad | 2025-09-15 18:39:28+00:00
Yeah it sounded like Kent just discovered Jevons' paradox and decided to shoehorn it into the article. Nothing here became cheaper, and if by cheaper he means that paying a programmer was more expensive than paying for an AI, even that's not necessarily true once you account for re-work and a host of other things.

If we're going to go with economic/strategy models, I think the Laffer Curve is more relevant. Seriously extrapolating here: AI is optimal for many tasks which if used in those contexts can maximize productivity. Over-using it on unsuitable tasks destroys productivity.
by nathan11 | 2025-09-15 18:39:33+00:00
"React by Default is Killing Front End Innovation" is probably a better headline for the post. It looks towards the present and the future, not how we got here.

All in all, this story has played out many times before, and will again. I think you either have adoption or you have a modern solution without technical debt. React had constraints that don't exist anymore that shaped its architecture, and now it has an enormous community that cannot turn on a dime.

Svelte, Solid, and Qwik have the benefit of hindsight and browser advancements. In 10 to 15 years time we'll be talking about a new batch of frameworks that have the same advantages over Svelte/Solid/Qwik.
by juancn | 2025-09-15 18:40:18+00:00
It could be a good thing.

Front end engineering has been a perpetual chase for The Shiny Thing™, constantly changing, with good excuses, but way too often throwing everything away and starting from scratch, forcing a perpetual catch up and periodic rewrites of everything.

Some maturity and a slower pace of change could be a good thing.

I mean, innovation is still happening, but it's not compelling enough to drop React for most apparently (at least not yet).
by mhashemi | 2025-09-15 18:40:20+00:00
Haha, re: finances, everyone wants to know this! Give or take, yeah! I just felt obligated to go all in with the dogfooding. It's probably TMI for most folks, but other users don't have to do the same: https://finfam.app/faq#faq-data_visibility

FinFam is private by default, but publishable by design. It's also totally valid to build/publish hypothetical/prototypical scenarios for the sake of demonstration.

Re: manual entry, the income and expenses were, yeah. The balances from the accounts are all ingested via our "Magic Sync" which is really just parsing from screenshots. Works with Monarch Money, works with spreadsheets. And you don't have to deal with the nightmare of "open banking" (I helped build the first version of Stripe's Financial Connections product and I'd like to delay using it as long as possible...)
by GMoromisato | 2025-09-15 18:40:24+00:00
Agreed. Doctorow doesn't believe reverse-centaurs should exist. That's a fine but very shallow position.

He's not saying reverse-centaurs should be banned, because he knows that's both untenable (how do you define "reverse-centaur") and counter-productive (reverse-centaurs will be out of a job, but VCs and billionaires will still exist).

At best he's complaining about a system that requires people to be reverse-centaurs instead of centaurs. But he doesn't examine the properties of the system that cause that. Why can't the listicle author be a centaur like Doctorow? Why are they paid so little that they need to use AI to produce entire articles instead of just a minor citation? Maybe it's because of the power-law rewards to talent, in which the few people, like Doctorow, who attract a wide readership, end up taking all the money.

In a "fair" system, maybe all authors should be paid the same flat rate. Then authors would work for the sheer joy of writing instead of to make more money. Of course, they might have to supplement their income in other ways, but at least it's fair, right? Right? I can't imagine Doctorow could disagree with that.
by paddleon | 2025-09-15 18:40:26+00:00
or roll your own.

This M5 Stack ASR unit costs $7.50, and has a vocab of about 40-70 words. That's enough to turn on/off lights and timers. You might need to come up with your own command language, but all of the ASR is extremely local

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/asr-unit-with-offline-voic...
by wormius | 2025-09-15 18:40:33+00:00
LOL as I'm reading the bit about the minimum (and before I get to the part linking the proof (which spawned the blog post)) my brain says "Ok, but have you done a formal proof extrapolating out to... maybe there's another dip, a pattern of dips..."

I haven't clicked the link, but I guess this is a well written blog post, since the place where I asked the question is precisely where they link to the paper. Nice.
by jerf | 2025-09-15 18:40:33+00:00
Fair enough. I've gotten out of the habit of thinking exponentially about computer performance. Modify my original post to that 1980s 8-bit era of personal computing. I did intend to compare it on the basis of the RAM available, which as is observed in another correction puts this more in the VIC-20 era...

... for those of us old enough to even have a mental distinction between "the VIC-20 era" and the "Commodore 64" era rather than just being a smear of bittyboxes all equally uselessly small....
by squigz | 2025-09-15 18:40:47+00:00
Well it's not that you have to be an AI to Sublime, but GP was (correctly) referring to the fact that any Mind that was created without any "training" (I forget the exact phrasing used) would invariably and immediately Sublime.

Anyway Subliming is the only aspect of The Culture series I did not enjoy. Much too handwavey for my liking. Still, made for some interesting stories.
by sensodine | 2025-09-15 18:40:52+00:00
I'm a huge fan of Asciinema, and this is awesome work.

Regarding the live streaming feature, I hacked a similar thing on top of s2.dev streams[1] (disclaimer: I am a co-founder), which could alleviate the need for a relay in this architecture[2]. Naturally showing off `btop` was the highlight for me as well :-D.

[1]: https://s2.dev/blog/s2-term [2]: https://docs.asciinema.org/manual/server/streaming/#architec...
by rconti | 2025-09-15 18:40:55+00:00
We have a small roof with 1/3 of our panels facing east, 1/3 facing west, and 1/3 facing south. Given a sufficiently large roof, it would theoretically make sense to have all of the panels facing south.

However, due to the fact that PG&E keeps shifting our peak hours, we actually get more credit for producing in the afternoon, so when we expand our house, I'm planning on having all the panels (as much as possible) on the west-facing roof.

Also, we plan to install air conditioning at that time, so it will be helpful to be able to handle that peak demand.
by int_19h | 2025-09-15 18:41:33+00:00
Banks does have an unfortunate tendency to wade into straight up torture porn to make a point of how awesome Culture is compared to everything else. The stuff in Phlebas is actually fairly mild in comparison to some of the other things in the series. E.g. in "The Player of Games", the entire story is about an explicitly sadistic culture where torture is normalized as entertainment. In "Surface Detail", we're introduced to the notion of virtual Hells - simulated environments into which mind-states of the deceased (or sometimes living) people is placed specifically to torment them for as long as the simulation continues.
by vkou | 2025-09-15 18:41:37+00:00
Is a vocal anti-vaxxer dying from a 2% mortality disease, where a vaccine reduces it to 0.05% mortality a predictable consequence? Is someone standing on a rooftop during a thunderstorm, and getting struck a predictable consequence? Is inciting your country into going to war, and then being one of the small % of the population dying in that war a predictable consequence?

I wouldn't put 'high probability' money on a <2% probability event, but I would not be surprised by it.
by thesz | 2025-09-15 18:41:37+00:00
>The amount of people actually able to meaningfully read code, somehow identify what was so incredible it should be analysed despite being unfamiliar with the code base, maintain a list of their own likely error and self review is so vanishingly low it might as well not exist.

List of frequent mistakes gets collected after contributions (attempts). This is standard practice for high quality software development and can be learned and/or trained, including on one's own.

LLVM, I just checked, does not have a formal list of code conventions and/or typical errors and mistakes. Could they have that list, we would not have the pleasure to discuss that. That PR we are discussing would be much more polished and there would be much less than several dozens of comments.

> If that’s the bare a potential new contributor has to cross, you will get exactly none.

You are making very strong statement, again.