MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by evil-olive | 2025-09-14 21:05:18+00:00
> To generate what is called synthetic data, researchers train generative AI models using real human medical information, then ask the models to create data sets with statistical properties that represent, but do not include, human data.

famously, "garbage in, garbage out"

but thanks to AI, we now have the exciting innovation that you can inject garbage into the middle of the process.

you have data from actual humans. it has some statistical properties.

you could look at those statistical properties, and do research on them, looking for hidden correlations or whatever. that's been possible for decades, no need for LLMs.

or, you can take those statistical properties, ask a chatbot to generate synthetic data based on them, and then do research on that synthetic data. but...why?

any valid conclusions from the research will be based on the statistical properties that were already there in the original data. the extra step of using the LLM gains nothing, and adds risk of the research being faulty because it found some correlation that the LLM made up.

this is like taking an image, saving it as a JPEG with 5% quality (or some other lossy process), and then asking an AI to upscale and enhance it for you. in the best-case, all you get is a reconstruction of the original. and realistically you'll almost certainly introduce misleading artifacts and noise.

or, scramble an egg, take a picture, and ask the chatbot to generate a picture for you of what the unbroken egg might have looked like. maybe it'll do a decent job of it...but 5 minutes ago you had the unbroken egg in your hand.

LLMs cannot reverse entropy. they cannot unscramble the egg. you can easily add randomness to a data set, but you cannot easily remove it.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-14 21:05:24+00:00
That's a fair point, but different arguments work with different audiences.

For what it's worth, they're not making up the CSAM thing. It has never been easier to disseminate/acquire CSAM in a way that you're never caught. That wasn't really possible before, which means there's a larger market for the production of such material.

I didn't bring up CSAM here because HN is militantly against think-of-the-children arguments.
by saulpw | 2025-09-14 21:05:27+00:00
I dunno, I've done it myself, and I would say that it's qualitatively different than other "banging your head against the wall" software development. At least it's an order of magnitude more painful, due to lack of integrated tooling, questionable documentation, and a more delayed feedback loop.

Single-threaded kernel bringup is easier than most distributed systems though.
by codingdave | 2025-09-14 21:06:06+00:00
I mean, AI generated content on HN is against the guidelines. I don't know if there are more recent statements by our fearless mods on it, but this is a well-known one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747

So linking to an AI-generated book may not be the same situation, so technically not against the rules... but probably is against the spirit of the site, so is probably not going to be appreciated by the community.
by macmac | 2025-09-14 21:06:48+00:00
Our "minister of Justices" is a scared little boy, deeply traumatised by a childhood characterised by the lack of a basic sense of safety. This trauma has never been addressed and with age he has unfortunately become a politician and earned a law degree. His rational faculties and academic degree are of course a faint echo compared to his childhood trauma, so he has no reservations destroying any personal liberty in the name of safety. I feel deeply for the boy, but fear the man.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-09-14 21:06:50+00:00
Of course, I almost forgot.

No better way to quench your thirst for power than to choose to go into Danish politics and move up to EU politics to herd 500 cats to be in favor of some legislative surveillance scheme that, if implemented, you'll immediately lose all control over to different technocrats.

I'm sure you'll find somebody who fits that bill, but since it's a democracy, we're more interested in why the other 45% went along with it because they can be reasoned with.
by coderedart | 2025-09-14 21:06:50+00:00
Local reasoning is the foundation of everything formal (this includes type systems) and anyone in the type-system-design space would know that. Graydon Hoare (ex-rust dev) wrote a post about it too (which links to another great without-boat's post in the very first line): https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/312681.html

The entire point of having a static-type-system, is to enable local reasoning. Otherwise, we would just do whole program analysis on JS instead of inventing typescript.
by moduspol | 2025-09-14 21:07:31+00:00
Men with higher testosterone has been linked to cheating in various studies--honestly I thought this was common knowledge. And treatments for "low t" (targeted at middle-aged and older males) have been more and more common over the past few decades. I guess it just seems fairly plausible.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31326436/

[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/dec06/testosterone

[3] https://uk.style.yahoo.com/men-high-testosterone-more-likely...
by martin-t | 2025-09-14 21:09:14+00:00
> good intention or have good goals

People need to understand that some people are abusers by nature and mentality, some from birth, some by upbringing. And they crave power.

The sayings like "those who want power rarely deserve it" exist for a reason, except until the last few decades we didn't have a good enough understanding of psychology to explain why. Now we do. Some people have anti-social traits and they should never be allowed in positions of power because they are mentally ill.

Difference is "normal" mental illness like psychosis is harmful to the individual who has it. Anti-social mental illness is harmful to those around them, especially those under them in hierarchical power structures.
by nickjj | 2025-09-14 21:09:25+00:00
I've been wearing glasses for short sightedness for my whole life and also don't wear contacts because the idea of putting them in freaks me out.

I always think about it from the point of view of what would happen if I want to do extended travel. Which method minimizes risk around something going wrong.

For example:

If you put your contacts in luggage and that gets lost or stolen now you have a really big problem with your sight in a foreign country.

If you're dependent on drops, it's the same problem as contacts.

In both cases, even if you do things to minimize losing them they have a limited supply. What if you want to travel for a year, are you comfortable getting the same type you have at home sent to you in a foreign country?

If you're dependent on glasses, typically you wear them all the time so the risk is them getting broken somehow which is rare. I've been wearing glasses my whole life and have never once broke or damaged them. The biggest risk is falling asleep with them on and rolling over them so it's critically important to move them off to the side somewhere. That also means being extra careful if you're sleeping on a bus or outdoors, you need to be really mindful of where your glasses are at all times if you're not wearing them.

The downside to glasses is they can prevent you from experiences. Casual swimming is annoying, especially alone where you also want to watch your bag that could be hundreds of feet away. Also practicing martial arts with sparring is a problem. Showering without being able to see clear isn't too bad in practice but it's a daily thing.

Surgery has the highest potential upside since you effectively become "normal" but the surgery has to go well so there's a risk factor to think about now. I only know 3 people who have gotten lasik in the last ~15 years. 1 of them sees massive halos at night time with lights so they can't drive at night. 1 of them has to use eye drops for dryness even 2 years after surgery. 1 of them had it done about 10 years ago and has no negative side effects but the effects of the surgery are slowly wearing off to where they will need another surgery in the next few years since their eyes have changed.

Personally if I knew surgery had a 99.999% side effect free success rate and at worst I would only need to do it every 10-15 years I would do it but I just can't get past the risk factor. Sight is just too important. I look forward to a day where this is a fully solved problem in a non-invasive way.

Until then I compromise with glasses.
by delusional | 2025-09-14 21:09:46+00:00
OK, so the risk were worried about here is internal communications platforms, only available inside an organization like the EU or a company, being used for sharing CSAM? So officials sharing CSAM exclusively with other officials on the company chat server?

I don't believe that's what people think of when they hear "law enforcement is excluded". Officials will still be subject to the law when interacting with anybody else. They will still be subject when interacting on public services. Crucially, everybody will be excluded from private messaging servers, also non law enforcement.

Do we have any reason to believe CSAM is being distributed on the internal EU communication networks?
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-09-14 21:10:12+00:00
Sure, you could make unauthorized, fully encrypted communication illegal. But what would be the punishment for using it? Worse than for smuggling, human trafficking, murder? I seriously doubt it. If you're a criminal risking decades in prison for major crimes, using some illegal software is 100% worth it, if it significantly reduces the risk of getting caught for the real crimes you're committing.

You can't make laws that govern how criminals behave. All chat control will really accomplish is maybe a momentary string of arrests(which is meaningless in the long term; there's always someone to take over), and longer term, worse privacy and security for everyone except the criminals.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-14 21:10:16+00:00
What is progressive about rampant decontextualized chat? I read these anti-control statements by what appear to be tech zombies who know nothing about the tech being promoted. LLMs/ML are based on faulty, Western units that are about defining reality in individualistic, material terms, lacking interdependence and relying on arbitrariness to destroy that chance for shared experiences.

If governments are leery of LLMs for the wrong or right reason and the industry and technology lacks any kind of grasp of what it is and what the inputs are, then BOTH are wrong and the tech needs dismantling.

If the decontextualizing of communication is epidemic, as it appears to be in Chat, then the industry has failed not grasping the first thing about the technology.
by npteljes | 2025-09-14 21:11:55+00:00
Software tamperproofing. Or, at least an attempt to it. Apps can request the info from Android: "hey, is this a legit Android system? Everything in factory condition?" and this mechanism would respond. Some apps request this in the name of security. In an attempt to ensure that the user and their data via the app are safe.

Normal, unmodified Android systems report back that they are untouched. The system detects LineageOS, /e/OS, Graphene etc as modifications though, so then it reports that the system is compromised. As an option, it can be hacked, so it reports A-OK even on a modified phone - but this hack is prone to breaking, and not the easiest to do to begin with.

It's not straightforward which apps need this thing. I found a compilation here:

https://xdaforums.com/t/apps-games-need-pi-list.4677050/

But the list has YouTube, and I can report that I'm happily using that for years on a phone without this mechanism, so, I cannot vouch for this list.
by palata | 2025-09-14 21:12:32+00:00
Criminals get access to all sorts of illegal things, from drugs to weapons through stolen cars.

Are you telling me that you genuinely believe that they won't be able to download an open source, actually end-to-end encrypted app?

The stupid ones already use Telegram, which is not E2EE. There is no need to change anything for them. Those who are smart enough to choose a secure messenging app today will still be able to do it, even if that app is made illegal.
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-14 21:13:50+00:00
IMO the best possible outcome of this AI hype is better documentation.

It's proven that (agentic) LLMs work better and more efficiently when they have the proper context for the project (AGENT(S).md), the documentation is accessible and up to date (docs/ directory with proper up to date markdown) and the tooling is smooth (git hooks that prevent secrets from being pushed, forced style checking and linting).

...surprise! All of this makes things easier for actual humans too!
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-14 21:13:54+00:00
This is conspiracy thinking. Parliament and HMG specifically allow car thieves to impoverish every car owner because ... why?

The previous Prime Minister suffered a bout of unemployment because he was unable to get a handle on the cost of living crisis. Would have been great if he could have gotten car insurance premium downs before the election. Ditto with the current Prime Minister.
by runjake | 2025-09-14 21:14:37+00:00
Gotta go with Jtsummers’ comment. This looks like it was written by an LLM and contains many, many factual errors.

It does not appear to have any relation to the O’Reilly book of the same name.

I recommend people flag this submission. Check out something like the Modern Perl book by chromatic instead.

https://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html
by tombert | 2025-09-14 21:16:30+00:00
> Out of interest, why have you been considering Logseq?

Primarily because it's FOSS; I love Obsidian (I even pay for it) but I have to consider the possibility that they'll be bullshit and start charging for stuff or start restricting things arbitrarily. If Logseq becomes bullshit then I (or someone else) can fork it and maintain/grow it. It's also written in ClojureScript, so legally I have to kind of like it :).

I've also kind of grown to like the way that the "unit" of Logseq is the "block" instead of the "page". Pages are more about aggregation than "units" of information, and as a result of this I find that the graph view is actually useful, instead of just something pretty in Obsidian.

There are some things I really don't like about Logseq (the lack of proper Vim keystrokes being a big one for me), but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people try software for five minutes, make zero effort to understand what the application is actually trying to do, give up, and declare the software as "bad". I felt like that's what happened with Gnome Shell, for example.

I will likely eventually go back to Obsidian, but I figured that I should give Logseq a fair shake, and it's different enough from Obsidian that I felt it's only fair to spend a few weeks properly learning it.
by ursula_gren | 2025-09-14 21:16:54+00:00
Do you have any resources that helped you come to that realization or helped make habitual the process of noticing your DMN is being activated?

I've had varying success with other "mindfulness" work and meditation like you have mentioned that I employ to help with spinning/stewing/looping thought cycles. The process you are describing seems like it may be more helpful so I'm curious to learn more and try something new.
by mopenstein | 2025-09-14 21:16:55+00:00
Why bother tracking just the cars? Just track every person. When you're born some government agent can implant a tracker in your sphincter. When a car is stolen, they arrest everyone in the area where the crime occurred and then sort it out downtown.

If you've got nothing to hide, then you shouldn't object to having a sphincter implant to track your every movement. And if you happen to be in an area during a crime, you'll certainly be vindicated, so just a little inconvenience in order to ensure that no car will ever be stolen again.

And just think how environmentally friendly that'll be. Maybe people will stop having so many babies to protect their sphincters from being implanted. That'll be super good for the environment.
by ReluctantLaser | 2025-09-14 21:16:59+00:00
perhaps its something you missed, but you can use a work profile. put all your google apps in there and its a tap of a button (quick setting pull down) to jump into. then another to turn it off. you get the benefits of sandboxing a bunch of apps, while using the same user profile. its very convenient.

I personally don't use the separate user profiles at all. I agree they are clunky, due to how segregated they are. though with a work profile, and if needed (I don't use it atm) the newly added android feature, a private space, I feel there are plenty of compartmentalisation/sandboxing options available within a single user profile.
Show HN: AI-powered web service combining FastAPI, Pydantic-AI, and MCP servers
by Aherontas | 2025-09-14 21:17:56+00:00
Hey all! I recently gave a workshop talk at PyCon Greece 2025 about building production-ready agent systems.

To check the workshop, I put together a demo repo: (I will add the slides too soon in my blog: https://www.petrostechchronicles.com/) https://github.com/Aherontas/Pycon_Greece_2025_Presentation_...

The idea was to show how multiple AI agents can collaborate using FastAPI + Pydantic-AI, with protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) for safe communication and orchestration.

Features:

- Multiple agents running in containers

- MCP servers (Brave search, GitHub, filesystem, etc.) as tools

- A2A communication between services

- Minimal UI for experimentation for Tech Trend - repo analysis

I built this repo because most agent frameworks look great in isolated demos, but fall apart when you try to glue agents together into a real application. My goal was to help people experiment with these patterns and move closer to real-world use cases.

It’s not production-grade, but would love feedback, criticism, or war stories from anyone who’s tried building actual multi-agent systems. Big questions:

Do you think agent-to-agent protocols like MCP/A2A will stick?

Or will the future be mostly single powerful LLMs with plugin stacks?

Thanks — excited to hear what the HN crowd thinks!
by GregarianChild | 2025-09-14 21:18:00+00:00
I don't rate Furber as a "complete amateur", but he's the exception in this milieu.

> Neuromorphic just means brain-like or brain inspired,

I don't even see any evidence that 'neuromorphic' architecture is brain inspired in a non-trivial sense. Can you please provide evidence, for example, a non-trivial mapping between 'neuromorphic' architectures (say SpiNNaker) and the SOTA models of the brain that we have, e.g. the existing data-driven model simulating C. elegans brain (the MetaWorm project)?

As Steve Furber also says (personal communication): we don't know enough of how the brain works to have computer architectures that can meaningfully inspired by brains. The "neuro-" prefix is marketing. [1] documents this use and dates it back to the 19th century. See also

• Neuroergonomics

• Neurotypical

• Neurodivergent

• Neurodiverse

• Neurosis

• Neuroethics

• Neuroeconomics

• Neuromarketing

• Neurolaw

• Neurosecurity

• Neuropsychology

• Neuropsychoanalysis

• Neurotheology

• Neuro-Linguistic Programming

• Neurogastronomy

I have seen all the above used without irony.

> brains operate in asynchronous dataflow type fashion.

That's a questionable statement. To the best of my knowledge, there is no consensus as of 2025 of how to model even a single neuron. (Function of synapse is even less understood).

When I asked Steve Furber what 'neuromorphic meant, he said: "There are many things today described as neuromphric. Mead would not call SpiNNaker as neuromorphic!"

Furber also said: "Neuromorphic status: attracts no money, but works (in the sense of accelerate in niche domains)". Upon my asking what niche domains, he said: "brain simulation but nothing else". (He was referring to SpiNNacker). I asked him if SpiNNaker can accelerate back-propagation and he said: "no, because the brain does not do back-propagation".

> async (dataflow) processor design, while complex, clearly isn't an impossible task

I did not say it was impossible. It has been done many times, see my references to Arvind's lab at MIT (I spent some time there). The problem with async (dataflow) processor design is that it consistently fails to live up to its promises (PPA). There are specific technical reason for that that are quite well understood.

> why you focus on "general purpose processors" given that we're talking about ANNs and neuromorphic systems.

Because the 'neuromorphic' marketing often reads like they want to build more efficient 'brain-inspired' general purpose computers. Certainly the dataflow architectures (a la Arvind/MIT) tried to. This is one of the many issues with the 'neuromorphic' milieu: they are really vague about their goals. If they would restrict their claims to certain classes of accelerators, then their claims would be less delusional.

> the goal is to minimize power usage.

If that is the goal, they are also not very successful. On CMOS silicon changes from 0 to 1 or 0 to 1 is what consumes most of the power, this would make the constant spiking expensive, no?

[1] K. S. Kendler, A history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03053-6
by martin-t | 2025-09-14 21:18:06+00:00
I am perfectly OK with the current level of crime and the current level of freedom. In fact, I'd be OK with slightly more crime in exchange for more freedom. Truth is the police often don't even act on the crimes that are provable using good old-fashioned detective work. So they have no leg to stand on.

In fact, freedom to break the law, revolt and even kill people is necessary for a functioning democracy. The fourth box of freedom is the final check and balance. If enough people (over half the population) determine that the government is corrupt, they need to be able to overthrow it.

And that required and armed population and the ability to organize. Yes, this also helps criminals. Yes, sometimes innocent people will die because the wrong people also have access to guns. That's all the more reason to be able to fight back, both against bad people and against the government.

History repeats itself (with minor variations). People don't value their freedoms, let them be eroded by those who are attracted to power for power's sake, they get abused, and finally either they get fed up and start a revolution or the state functions so poorly it gets invaded.

We're at the stage where freedoms are getting eroded more and more noticeably. I would very much prefer to break the cycle before it comes to rifles and drones.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-09-14 21:20:17+00:00
I’m rather confident you’re not really familiar with Charlie Kirk’s speeches. Sounds like you’re attacking a caricature pieced together from carefully edited snippets you saw on social media. Next time you feel the urge to denounce someone, please take the time to study their actual views.

I can’t claim to know Kirk’s entire body of work -- just watched a couple of debates and his RNC speech -- but since of us two I’m the one who’s actually read Mein Kampf, I can say with a significant degree of confidence their views could hardly be more different:

Hitler pushed authoritarian control, racial hierarchies, and expansionist wars. Kirk was advocating for small-government conservatism and anti-woke culture fights. Even Barack Obama, with his big-government moves, like the ACA or his stimulus plans, had more in common with Hitler’s state-heavy policies, than Charlie!