MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: IG banned me over my ex's retracted claim on a dog photo. Human review?
by smnrg | 2025-09-24 20:42:03+00:00
My Instagram account was disabled after my spouse (we are parting ways) filed a copyright claim over a 6-year-old photo of my dog.

I have since spoken with him, and he has formally retracted the claim through Meta's official channels. Despite this, my account remains disabled. Every appeal I submit is lost in an automated loop.

The problem has escalated beyond the initial account. It appears my identity is now permanently flagged. Any new account I create—regardless of the email, device, or network—is automatically disabled within minutes. The enforcement action is “stuck,” persisting even though its justification has been nullified by the claimant's retraction.

I understand actions like this one are born out of pain. However, this impulsiveness has severed my only connection to family members I'd just reconnected with after more than a decade. I rejoined Instagram for this very reason, and now I'm locked out during an already difficult time.

Case ID from email alias for appeal: aazri45mhxuime (or contact form is on my website in the bio for more info)

I'm looking for a way to escalate this to a human for a manual review. Has anyone found a successful path (e.g., Attorney General complaints, privacy requests, specific contacts) to get Meta to re-evaluate a ban when their automated correction process has clearly failed?
by brandall10 | 2025-09-24 20:43:07+00:00
One thing I like to do with sr+ engineers who will feel burned by a decision - esp. those very publicly against it - is to lead with some sort of concession... maybe a project they expressed interest in, greenlight for a week to research some POC.

Whatever it is, it tends to be considerably less value to the business than the decision itself, but it directly acknowledges their discontent and allows them to get something out of the process besides platitudes, (perceived) public embarrassment, and frustration.
by daft_pink | 2025-09-24 20:43:09+00:00
>Vaccines don’t work on a “everybody makes their own choice” basis.

In my experience they do work exactly that way, you take a vaccine and then you are far less likely to get the disease. It’s true that you cannot reach herd imunity or reduce the spread until you get a large enough population. I’m still think it’s a choice thing though.

>A pill or injection that was invented 60 years ago and costs less than a penny a dose is sold for hundreds of dollar a week.

Currently, I take 3 different generics popular generics that cost a few bucks a month. I could get it covered under my insurance, but I prefer to just pay cash without insurance to buy in larger quantities direct from Amazon as it works out to be about the same, but I don’t have to manage the inventory. I also take a semiglutide for weight loss, which costs thousands upon thousands a year that insurance brings down to $25 a month. But it wasn’t invented 60 years ago. Someday it will probably be available extremely cheap though.

I think most senior citizens would agree that most common medications that make it on the generic list really don’t cost much in the United States.
by neutered_knot | 2025-09-24 20:43:11+00:00
Your question made me curious so I tried to see what information about onion sites is available. It’s hard to measure onions sites by design, but

https://99firms.com/research/tor-stats

Says there seem to be about 65k onion sites.

This site:

https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-...

Has some varying numbers depending on the observation time, but in final month listed saw 30k sites that had they identified as having CSAM.

I’m not sure how accurate either number is or if they are directly comparable but that would be a 50% of all onion sites ballpark.

Not sure how to measure general sites vs dedicated abuse sites.
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-24 20:43:46+00:00
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45360318 (if you didn't read it already)

The important point:

> IE, the critical difference is that reference counting frees memory immediately; albeit at a higher CPU cost and needing to still perform a mark-and-sweep to clear out cyclic references.

Regarding:

> If your concern is total memory consumption, traditional reference counting uses more space (if only just to store counts)

But it also frees memory immediately, meaning that many processes will appear to use less memory (unless fragmentation is an issue.)

Don't forget that GC often adds memory overhead too: IE, mark and sweep sets a generation counter in each object that it can reach, and then objects that weren't updated are reclaimed.
by hmokiguess | 2025-09-24 20:44:11+00:00
I get what you are saying, and I think they are doing a good job there as well. That said, it still feels like something is missing in that whole workflow to me.

I sometimes worry if we are moving too fast for no reason. Some things are becoming standards in an organic way but they feel suboptimal in my own little bias bubble corner.

Maybe I am getting old and struggling to adapt to the new generation way of getting work done, but I have a gut feeling that we need to revisit some of this stuff more deliberately.

I still see Agents as something that will be more like a background thread that yields rather than a first class citizen inside the Editor you observe as it goes.

I don't know about you, but I feel an existential dread whenever I prompt an Agent and turn into a vegetable watching it breathe. — am I using it wrong? Should I be leaving and coming back later? Should I pick a different file and task while it's doing its thing?
by imajoredinecon | 2025-09-24 20:44:17+00:00
I agree it does a pretty good job of communicating that. I think the other commenters are pointing out that doesn’t show how to efficiently get all the smaller items left of the partition and larger ones to the right. While that’s probably second nature to most people who’ve taken an algorithms class or done a decent amount of programming, I guess it’s up for interpretation how obvious it would be to the “intended audience” of the ikea manual
by rotis | 2025-09-24 20:44:54+00:00
Reminds me of one of the stupidest hacks I discovered (In my mind). In one of my previous companies we had many similar Lotus Notes databases and one of them didn't allow to copy text from it. You could paste, I'm sure. You could select the text. But not copy. Turns out you could DRAG the selected text to other window. This copied the text over. So being able to highlight a text may mean you can indeed copy it ;)
by smachiz | 2025-09-24 20:46:16+00:00
The article you cited does not agree with your assertions. It specifically tells you how and when to evaluate the use of an anonymous source.

If you don't ever use anonymous sources, many fewer people will talk to you. Being on the record about something that will get you fired, will get you fired - and then no one talks to journalists.

What separates actual ethical journalists from the rest is doing everything the article you cited suggests - validating information with alternative sources, understanding motives, etc.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-24 20:46:39+00:00
The links you posted do not refute my statement. So I ask, how many times have you read the New York Times? As I stated above, I've read it almost daily for nearly 50 years. Do you subscribe? Do you read it regularly? Do you even read it at all? Or just parrot what you've seen on the internet?

The remainder of your comment is a non-sequitur, and has nothing to do with what I wrote.
by Animats | 2025-09-24 20:46:56+00:00
So here we are on Mastodon. There are three columns. One is an ad for the site, one is an ad for Mastodon, and the one in the middle has some content. The article is part 1 of 5, because there's some severe limit on article length. The rest of the article is comments in small type. There are no examples.

Is this LLM output?

And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above)

This is a real issue, but a poor posting. The classic on this is "Bowling Alone" (2000) [1] That book predates most social media. The author bemoans the decline of local organizations such as Rotary International, local Chambers of Commerce, Odd Fellows - all those organizations that have little signs on the outskirts of medium-sized towns. (In Silicon Valley, both Redwood City and Half Moon Bay have such signs.)

Here's a useful question for Americans: do you belong to any organization where the members can, by voting, fire the leadership? Small organizations used to have elected leaders. Today, they tend to be run by self-perpetuating boards. Being involved in such organizations is where people learned how to make democracy work.

When was the last time you went to a non-government meeting run by Roberts Rules of Order? Do you even know what that is, or, more important, why it is? The whole point of Roberts Rules of Order is that the group is in charge and the result is a decision to be acted upon. The Rules are intended to keep the loudest voice in the room from running over everyone else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
by alephnerd | 2025-09-24 20:47:25+00:00
> nothing's stopped offshoring for a few decades

Async development at scale (and especially for revenue generating IP) was still not proven until COVID.

Additonally, the reverse brain drain in much of China, CEE, Israel, and India only kicked off in the late 2010s, and the COVID layoffs and subsequent rehiring made it easier to open an office abroad.

> because if those companies thought those jobs could be done offshore, they'd already be there

Every job that would have gone to someone who requires some kind of work sponsorship can now be justified with a hiring abroad.

I'd recommend reading tfa, and as someone who is on a couple boards, trust me when I am saying that offshoring is now going to go in hyperdrive.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-24 20:47:47+00:00
Also, to save any further puzzling: In practice the very fast sort you use, even if it is labelled "Quicksort" probably doesn't actually do this "all the way down" even though that's the strict algorithm.

They'll have a highly optimised small sort and use that whenever sorting very small things. So e.g. IPN Sort the Rust stdlib unstable sort will do this for 16 items, even though for a big slice it'd quick sort them by default, once it's down to say 10 items they're going to the specialised small sort.

Any serious "fast" sort in 2025 will be a hybrid, using several of these classic sorting algortihms, plus other insights to produce the overall best solution to their problem on modern hardware.
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-24 20:48:32+00:00
One idea that I think is reasonable is to use some kind of actual meetings.

Dividing people into groups of 50 or 100. Initiatives are voted on in these groups, if they are passed they go to the next level, 1000 people.

Sort of like that idea in the Yes, Minister episode about 'genuinely democratic local government'. The idea here is the tree structure is to prevent people to push initiatives other than as individuals.
by aydyn | 2025-09-24 20:48:52+00:00
Only about 20-40% of the radioactive contaminants were spread before the fire was put out by firefighters wearing no protection. On top of that only 1 reactor burned, but it shared facilities with another reactor.

So if the fire was not put out, it could have easily been 5x worse. There were 4 reactors total, so in the absolute worst case it could've been 10x worse.
by unbalancedevh | 2025-09-24 20:49:20+00:00
> Chinese officials claim these new satellite networks will be used for Internet connectivity. That may be so, but Pentagon officials worry China can use them for other purposes, just as the Space Force is doing with Starlink, Starshield, and other programs.

I wish we lived in a world where it was good that others do the same things that we do; where leaders led by example, and encouraged others to do it better, so that when the inevitable change-over occurs, we're all better off.
by QuinnyPig | 2025-09-24 20:49:23+00:00
At some point it does come down to "we have to trust the provider isn't outright lying to us about what they're doing."

That was a hard bridge for me to cross for a long time; I got there via sustained in-depth conversations with folks there who simply wouldn't stand for something that breathtakingly opposed to everything AWS has strived to achieve from a trust perspective, that they'd sooner tear it all down than implement such a thing.

Some folks can't get there, and that's okay; if you don't have that level of trust, perhaps the cloud is not a fit for all of your workloads.
by ugh123 | 2025-09-24 20:49:42+00:00
From the link in the announcement: https://waymo.com/business

Provide safe and sustainable autonomous rides for your team with Waymo for Business. Easily set up commuter programs, events transportation, and corporate travel for a variety of industries and use cases.

With Waymo for Business, you’ll get access to our business portal to set program parameters, manage members, generate codes for events, and keep track of everything, from budget to program engagement.
by jfengel | 2025-09-24 20:50:08+00:00
It's a multilayered joke.

There's an old joke about the lack of randomized controlled trials for parachutes. The joke is deployed when people complain about the lack of formal studies for things whose benefit is obvious.

Then somebody went ahead and did it, just to be funny. But you can't actually do a randomized controlled trial on parachutes, so you get a third layer of joke, about studies that don't actually prove anything.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-24 20:50:23+00:00
Too little too late. They spent years happily censoring moderates and conservatives, and interfered in the democratic process of America as a result. It was highly motivated by the political bias of the company itself (its employees and leaders). They’re now claiming it’s all due to pressure from the Biden administration but I think most people believe they willingly agreed to that censorship.

When large tech companies enact these kinds of schemes it does affect all of society. A lot of our speech is online. Censorship online is no different than government censorship in terms of its impact. The solution is to break up these companies.
by williamtrask | 2025-09-24 20:51:35+00:00
Well, we're opining about a statement about the world. Is the universe only 200 terabytes of information?

"Biological lifeforms seem to be able to train/develop general intelligence from much, much less."

This statement is hard to defend. The brain takes in 125 MB / second, and lives for 80 years, taking in about 300+ petabytes over our lifetime.

But that's not the real kicker. It's pretty unfair to say that humans learn everything they know from birth -> death. A lot of that learning bias was worked out through evolution... which takes that 300+ petabytes and multiplies it by... many lifetimes.
by Const-me | 2025-09-24 20:51:51+00:00
> full-platter seek time: ~8ms; half-platter seek time (avg): ~4ms

Average distance between two points (first is current location, second is target location) when both are uniformly distributed in [ 0 .. +1 ] interval is not 0.5, it’s 1/3. If the full platter seek time is 8ms, average seek time should be 2.666ms.
by ttfvjktesd | 2025-09-24 20:52:03+00:00
I think one important point is missing here: more data does not automatically lead to better LLMs. If you increase the amount of data tenfold, you might only achieve a slight improvement. We already see that simply adding more and more parameters for instance does not currently make models better. Instead, progress is coming from techniques like reasoning, grounding, post-training, and reinforcement learning, which are the main focus of improvement for state-of-the-art models in 2025.
by nitwit005 | 2025-09-24 20:52:55+00:00
The fees will only bring in extra revenue if they're a surprise, or some sort of impulse buy. I'm not sure that'll keep happening.

We're already at the point where people don't trust the listed price of flights and hotel bookings (Vegas has made hotel resort fees globally famous). It just seems the long term result is everyone will use some app to calculate the real cost of their trip, and what those apps display will be the real list price.
by Razengan | 2025-09-24 20:53:06+00:00
God I absolutely abhor "UI takeovers":

Not allowing text selection, disabling scrolling where there should be scrolling, disabling autocomplete/text substitutions, or corrupting the Back/Forward buttons...

Websites are guilty of this more often than apps, which usually just do whatever the device OS allows.

Even worse are the outright LIES that even Apple has been guilty of for a while now:

• Refreshing a webpage doesn't really refresh it. (it's less fresh than entering the URL in a new tab/window)

• Going back doesn't really go back. (It loads the URL again..absolutely disgusting on YouTube when you want to go back to an interesting thumbnail you noticed too late, but it's not there anymore)

• Force-quitting an app doesn't really quit it. (Now iOS still gives them a noticeable bit of time to ponder which is annoying when you open that app again right away)

Not to mention the outright privacy and security violations like textboxes that send keystrokes home.
by bluGill | 2025-09-24 20:53:30+00:00
Define secure and good.

What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house, I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice", but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both parents working a full time job to get more luxury.
by williamtrask | 2025-09-24 20:53:45+00:00
(OP) the scaling laws / bitter lesson would disagree, but I tend to agree with you with some hedging.

If you get copies of the same data, it doesn't help. In a similar fashion, going from 100 TBs of data scraped from the internet to 200TBs of data scraped from the internet... does it tell you much more? Unclear.

But there are large categories of data which aren't represented at all in LLMs. Most of the world's data just isn't on the internet. AI for Health is perhaps the most obvious example.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-24 20:53:53+00:00
>luxury real estate, yachts, exclusive services, tax havens

All of that eventually has to flow back into, as you'd put it, non-elite segments of the economy. What, do you think shipyard workers eat yatchs? There's no subnetwork in the economy where money flows in and never comes back out. That just doesn't exist.
by Symbiote | 2025-09-24 20:53:56+00:00
I missed that — yes, sometimes someone says "anything in your pockets?" or similar, and someone else beckons me to walk through the metal detector. If I'm 'randomly' checked of course I have to speak.

I found American airports less hands-off (especially security, which is considerably more hands-on than I'm used to, "Sir, I will now rub your balls"). But then I'm almost always flying internationally out of the USA, so it's not a fair comparison against domestic (Schengen) flights in Europe.
by 9rx | 2025-09-24 20:54:22+00:00
Funnily enough, microservices. In the macro economy you don't have to have such strict coordination with Microsoft, or OpenAI, or Google, or whomever you interface with. You just figure out how to make your solution work within the confines of the service they give you. Like it or not.

Microservices is exactly the same concept except in the micro economy of a single organization. Each team is like Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, etc. You don't coordinate with them, you deal with what they give you. Like it or not.

I expect the earlier statement confused microservices with a multi-process application.
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-24 20:54:25+00:00
When you put it that way, the US constitution itself is about limiting the power of the federal government against the states (and individuals, in the bill of rights)

Nevertheless, state-level power, for a state government or business, is still far above the kind of sub-Dunbar number (~120 people) organisations that Tao is talking about, where everyone might know each other and the network can be organised by reputation and trust rather than through state-level laws or contracts (and the attendant forms of impersonal bureaucratic enforcement that come with those).

Edit: I don't mean to object to the general theme of your comment which is that power has become increasingly concentrated and unchecked, just to point out that even if those limitations that you mention had been retained it would still represent a society where the role of immediate trust-based relationships is diminished or eroded relative to the previous situation where these were the primary aspects of people's livelihoods and security
by chankstein38 | 2025-09-24 20:55:01+00:00
Wouldn't it be nice if they just told us so we didn't have to speculate? This is cool stuff and I'm glad I know about it but, as someone interested in this field of study, I'd love to try this out. But I guess I should stop being surprised when even a company like IEEE can't be bothered to write an article with any actual information. Just a bunch of simplified summarized crap.
by w10-1 | 2025-09-24 20:55:34+00:00
> Datalog type dialect would be more appropriate

I assume because datalog is more about composing queries from assertions/constraints on the data?

Nicely, queries can be recursive without having to create views or CTE's (common table expressions).

Often the data for datalog is modeled as fact databases (i.e., different tables are decomposed into a common table of key+record+value).

So I could see training an LLM to recognize relevant entity features and constraints to feed back into the memory query. Less obliviously, data analytics might feed into prevalence/relevance at inference time.

So agreed: It might be better as an experiment to start with a simple data model and teachable (but powerful) querying than the full generality of SQL and relational data.

Is that what RelationalAI has done? Their marketecture blurbs specifically mention graph data (no), rule-based inference (yes? backwards or forwards?)

As an aside, their rules description defies deconstruction:

bringing knowledge and semantics closer to your data, reduce your code footprint by 10x, improve accuracy, and drive consistency and reusability across your organizations with common business models understood by all

So: rules built on ontologies?
by neutered_knot | 2025-09-24 20:55:38+00:00
It is absolutely a design decision. I don’t understand though how allowing exit nodes to filter (by port and IP) doesn’t permit censorship but allowing internal nodes to not complete connections to onion sites does. I do understand that early nodes on the path are unaware of what the traffic but it seems pretty straightforward to allow nodes to not become rendezvous points for onion sites.
by palmotea | 2025-09-24 20:55:44+00:00
> Investigative journalism is really not that expensive. A lot of it boils down to needing a phone and money for gas.

Come on. It investigative journalism takes a lot of time, and in the mean time, the journalist has bills to pay.

An opinion-haver or second-hand news analyst can build a Substack following by picking a theme and pumping out a blog post every couple days, but that's not practical for someone who might only be able put out a story every couple months on varying topics (based on whatever scoops they get).