MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by js8 | 2025-09-01 11:16:22+00:00
I don't think my post is a non-sequitur. Politicians and thinktanks (and rich incumbents) are still selling laissez-faire (free market) policies as the remedy for the direct incumbent-friendly policies.

My point is, they are not the remedy. One example is the "abundance" framing from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
by tremon | 2025-09-01 11:17:03+00:00
Bigger scale allows for better efficiency.

This is dogma, not proven fact, and most people that argue this tend to use self-serving metrics and a tailored definition of "efficient". Some counterexamples: early Google was much more efficient in responding to market changes than the current top-heavy organization; small hospitals tend to have better health outcomes (both per patient and per dollar) than large chains. Tesla was able to innovate much faster than established behemoths.
by yubblegum | 2025-09-01 11:17:15+00:00
Does the New York Times (which is a national paper) have a section in German language? Does it have one in any other non-English language besides Spanish?

Why is Spanish singled out? Why was "bilingualism" being promoted so heavily? Meaning no offense, wtf has the Spanish speaking community contributed to American history to get this special perch? So yeah, there are all sorts of little pockets here and there, and grandpas and grandmas of various flavor speaking the old country's tongue but only one was promoted.

The phenomena is obviously political in nature and to construe is as anything else, including "prejudice" or "xenophobia", is disengenuous.
by lyu07282 | 2025-09-01 11:18:21+00:00
The caste system itself is wildly considered to be exacerbated and promoted by British colonial rule in post colonial studies, not unlike the US empire promoting sectarianism in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

The caste divisions did exist before British rule but it wasn't as systematic and unified across India as after.

Boy how do we even talk about neocolonialism today if there are still people with full on colonialist sympathies holy shit
by binary132 | 2025-09-01 11:18:28+00:00
Ironically this is a pretty good point in favor of GP, since the “powers that were” in Soviet Russia retained a great deal of their power and connections, as sibling comment noted. That said, I don’t think there is even a remote resemblance between the imperial might of Old Rome and its remnants in Italia. What did and does remain are the lineage of Romanized nations that succeeded it in Western Europe, and as many others have noted, the Church, which is a whole other subject in itself.
by chippiewill | 2025-09-01 11:18:39+00:00
I agree, although I think one of the disadvantages in the UK is that the suppliers aren't paying the cost for their own volatility. A renewable supplier can add 1GW supply to the grid, but 1GW of natural gas generation capacity is still required.

Fixed costs and capital costs end up being shouldered by the consumer which ironically ends up pushing overall costs up.
by foldr | 2025-09-01 11:18:58+00:00
I’ve found Fil-C 0.670 to be around 30x slower than a regular build, with -O1 vs. -O2 not making much difference. Perhaps it is very dependent on the kind of code. IIRC the author of Fil-C (which I think is an incredible project, to be clear) wants it to be possible to run Fil-C builds in production, so I think the comparison to a regular non-ASAN build is relevant.
by s2l | 2025-09-01 11:19:07+00:00
1. Aegis has a setting for creating secure backup on every change. 2. Autosync that backup directory via syncthing to your PC. 3. Run a compatible desktop software (e.g. linux has authenticator) to import aegis backup files manually.

Since totp addition is not a frequent activity, the last manual import step was not a hassle to do whenever needed.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-01 11:19:09+00:00
Framing it as compression is reductive (intended). Yes compression of information is a proxy measure of Kolmogorov complexity, however it's really more accurate to say you're accurately mapping the conditional probability distribution, since it's a stochastic machine that produces samples from a distribution, not a literal compressed representation of anything (you have to do work to extract this stuff and it's not 100% in all cases).
by kelnos | 2025-09-01 11:19:19+00:00
I hate to play the "you're holding it wrong" card, but when I started, I had more or less the same experience. Eventually you start to learn how to better talk to it in order to get better results.

Something I've found useful with Claude Code is that it works a lot better if I give it many small tasks to perform to eventually get the big thing done, rather than just dumping the big thing in its lap. You can do this interactively (prompt, output, prompt, output, prompt, output...) or by writing a big markdown file with the steps to build it laid out.
by hnbad | 2025-09-01 11:19:31+00:00
The problems are actually not the oversight but the motivation: the point of outsourcing is cost-cutting, not finding equally talented developers elsewhere.

This is especially evident in manufacturing: China can produce extremely sophisticated technology with excellent quality and well thought-out design but that's not what foreign customers look for when outsourcing to China. They want cheap, so they get cheap.

"Oversight" in this case only solves the problem of the quality problems being intentionally hidden initially to get the sale. This might be where the actual parallels with AI models lie: quality of results going down after the initial launch because maintaining the quality is too expensive.
by jlengrand | 2025-09-01 11:20:08+00:00
As someone who was hiring recently and received 350 irrelevant generated applications within 3 hours of opening the position form people using the same techniques you described, I disagree. Ended up closing it altogether and use my local network instead. Found people in a couple weeks with much higher signal to noise ratio. I hate it because it gives less chances to people out there, but it was just too much randomness.

I'm in Europe though, it might be a difference.
by hiatus | 2025-09-01 11:20:34+00:00
This person keeps banging the drum of agents running on untrusted inputs doing unexpected things. The proof of concept doesn't prove anything and doesn't even have working code. It's not clear why this is classed as a markdown rendering bug when it appears cline is calling out to a remote server with the contents of an env file as parameters in a url.

edit: are you the author? You seem to post a lot from that blog and the blog author's other accounts.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-01 11:20:37+00:00
I find YouTube kinda baffling; I never really had any use for it (I will occasionally use it to watch an old music video, but that's about it), but some people do seem to get really properly addicted to it.

Are you using it to watch people you subscribe to, or things it suggests to you, or something else? If you're primarily going on its suggestions, you might want to try using an extension to block that; social media suggestion thingies are very much _designed_ to hook people.
by agentcoops | 2025-09-01 11:21:25+00:00
Not an answer to your original question, but I think you’d be surprised how much high quality historical linguistic content was hiding in the dusty old corners of the internet. I’ve been doing some work recently with LLMs on historical languages (various forms of Latin, Ancient Greek and medieval European languages) and the out-of-the-box performance of state of the art LLMs is shockingly good. It isn’t that surprising when you remember all these archive digitization projects that took place in the early 00s, but ended up either as stale links, preserved only by archive.org, or stored in arcane CRMs essentially unusable by humans. I assume the same is especially true for various historical Yiddish corpora.

I ran some tests and, without fine-tuning, GPT can translate medieval German, for example, considerably better than well-known scholars today.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2025-09-01 11:22:03+00:00
This reminds me of Steve Gibson storing his 2FA seeds by printing them out [1].

> "Steve: So in my drawer I have all of my QR codes printed."

> "Steve: They're in a safe place. And if it ever comes to the point where I need to set up a new authenticator, not a problem. I just scan the QR codes once again, and we're back in business. So the other thing to look for is an authenticator that will allow you to do that because it is nice to have hard copy backup."

---

I'm not sure what TOTP app he's using currently, since this was said 2 years ago [1].

> "Steve: OTP space Auth, and the logo is a simple gray padlock. Very modest logo. And it does all of this correctly."

[1]: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-921.htm
by freehorse | 2025-09-01 11:22:18+00:00
What is the reasoning that google makes it so complicated to export the TOTPs? Is it just to make it harder to migrate to other authenticators (which does not make much sense because other authenticators just build their tool to import this anyway) or is it just a bad case of "security through obscurity"? I cannot imagine any minimally dedicated attacker that has already put the effort to get the export qr code not being able to actually read it, but it just makes it harder for "common" people to actually get their codes. I remember I had to go through what the article describes to access my TOTPs and migrate to another authenticator.
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 11:23:14+00:00
If you move the secret tokens onto the same device (like in that emulator that presumably runs where your password manager also runs), we're again back to the oathtool solution that is described in the OP, that doesn't have the same security benefits as the original intent of supplying you with a 2FA token. Not saying you shouldn't do this, just something to be aware of when you use the export mechanism in this way
Show HN: We started a no-bs engineering company
by abielefeld | 2025-09-01 11:23:19+00:00
Hi HN! I'm Augustin, Engineer and co-founder of Eilbek Research.

In the midts of dozens of posts about AI startups and vibecoding, I bring you a no-frills, rigorous engineering company.

In 2025 it might seem quaint, but we all know we are in the age of entshittification, in the end stage of "move fast and break things".

We believe true innovation comes from solid engineering. While we embrace modern technologies and frameworks, we don't believe in explosive growth. We know that there is a difference between the appearance of progress, and actual progress: There are some things one just cannot rush.

This approach comes from years of experience working on embedded systems, industrial machines, scientific equipment and more.

I wanted to share this work with you, as it is a voice seldom-heard these days.

Our front-page highlights our philosophy and functions as an article of sorts (until we release our blog). I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.
by darkwater | 2025-09-01 11:23:44+00:00
> No, I'm challenging the metaphor. Working the trades isn't exercise - it's a grind that wears people out.

If your job is just grinding out code in a stressful and soul-crushing manner, the issue lies elsewhere. You will be soon either grinding out prompts to create software you don't even understand anymore or you will be replaced by an agent.

And by no way I'm implying you are part of the issue.
by enether | 2025-09-01 11:23:46+00:00
If there is a big enough market for 1), shouldn't it exist?

The problem in my eyes seems to be that there isn't enough capital interested to sufficiently fund 1) to compete and create a comparable product. Thus, at best, we end up with much inferior products which even people semi-interested in 1) are not willing to adopt due to the extreme trade offs in usability.
by Okawari | 2025-09-01 11:23:47+00:00
It's not about being defeatist, atleast not for me. It's about what is considered good enough.

Sure, locking down the OS in this way is more secure, but it's also very restrictive and personally I don't think the added security justifies this. Lock picks do exist, but I am still entirely content with a single lock on my front door. I do not need an extra biometric sensor or camera or security representative standing outside my door to check id's of people passing by in order to consider myself reasonably safe.

Maybe this is cultural/geographical, but I've yet to hear of anyone who lost access to their mail or had unauthorized access to their bank account as a result of malware. I'm sure you can find examples, but I do not consider this an attack vector that is prevalent enough to warrant requiring signed apps or preventing manual installation.
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-01 11:23:48+00:00
> git stash is not that simple.

It's a stack of diffs.

Anyway, I've probably used this to transfer changes between branches thousands of times. Once you grasp the underlying data model all these abstractions introduced by jujutsu seem more confusing.

That said, I do understand most people aren't going to take the day or so to read through any of the hundreds of detailed "explain the data model" articles online.
by Hilift | 2025-09-01 11:23:54+00:00
A similar project in Australia used Tesla megapack batteries, which are lithium ion.

Another form of stored energy uses thermal. A large scale project to plug ~50,000 idle and abandoned oil wells in Kern County, California.

Probably worth noting that for states and utilities, consumer solar without batteries has become a liability and doesn't scale up. So effectively, all future consumer solar installations in California will likely have batteries. So there will be batteries at the consumer point, and centralized large scale battery farms like this one to address peak demand and prevent situations where blackouts may need to occur.

https://eepower.com/news/engineers-repurpose-oil-wells-as-so...
by mcv | 2025-09-01 11:24:20+00:00
Good point. The current security model of desktop OSs sucks. I was recently reminded of this by an issue at work. I'm used to devs having admin rights on their laptops, but here they closed that down: you have to request admin rights for a specific purpose, and then you get them for a week.

I recently requested those rights again because I needed to install something new for a PoC I was working on, and that wasn't allowed anymore. But during onboarding I had those rights and installed homebrew to more easily install dev tools, and homebrew keeps its admin rights to install stuff in a directory owned by admin. So that circumvents this whole security model (and I did, for my PoC).

The problem is that it's all or nothing. Homebrew should have the right only to install in a specific directory. Apps shouldn't automatically get access to potentially sensitive data. Mobile OSs handle that sort of thing more granularly. Desktop OSs should too.

Because the overly restrictive security rules at my work are little more than security theatre when it's so easy to circumvent.
by Rochus | 2025-09-01 11:24:35+00:00
In what specific programming language/toolchain/technology is your experience? Why do you think that "everybody can tell that chat gpt wrote your code"? Meanwhile I looked at a lot of LLM generated code in different languages, and I wouldn't generally subscribe to your statement. And you still didn't explain why Claude should fail. I think it is rather an advantage (when it reliably works in future).
by adrian_b | 2025-09-01 11:25:31+00:00
The Harvard Mark I and its successors, and especially the IBM SSEC were "stored program general purpose computers".

Mark I was an electro-mechanical computer, while SSEC was hybrid, including both electro-mechanical parts and parts with vacuum tubes. For a few years, IBM's SSEC was the world's most powerful "supercomputer", and it has solved a great number of diverse problems. SSEC had some advanced features that have been introduced in fully electronic computers only about a decade later, e.g. pipelined instruction execution (to compensate for its slow circuits).

What you mean is that none of your examples was a von Neumann computer, i.e. where there is a common memory for program storage and data storage, enabling the computer to create or modify programs by itself.

Obviously the common memory was an essential element for the evolution of electronic computers, enabling many features that were impossible when the programs were stored separately, on a ROM such as punched tape.

However, saying just "stored program" also covers the case when the program is stored in a separate ROM, as it may still be the case for a microcontroller, though nowadays most of them store the program in an alterable flash memory.
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-01 11:25:47+00:00
The overarching issue is that this feature of the PS3 not only created cost in development/maintenance, but then negatively affected the core revenue-stream. So it was shut down, and Sony will never do this again.

Now we're at a point where there is no justification even for the cost of development/maintenance of such "open compute" features. Why even create a path for parts of your product to be "without rails" when there is no (legal) requirement for it and no significant commercial market, but just increased cost and complexity as well as security-risks.

I would like to see more devices being unlockable and provide the freedom to run "any code we want". But as there is no visible critical mass willing to pay for this, there is no market, and this means the current economic system doesn't support a company walking such a path.

So the only path I can see is to introduce an incentive for this into the system via a legal mandate, or change the system.
by js8 | 2025-09-01 11:27:08+00:00
I don't think that is a viable strategy, honestly. Antitrust regulation doesn't really punish anyone for misbehaving (geez this billionaire just got his company broken up, what a terrible thing we have done to him that will surely prevent someone from trying to merge something else) and doesn't address the crucial issue of emergent social inequality. It's a stopgap at best.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-01 11:29:02+00:00
Don't fuck with the architecture for no reason. Just fucking don't. If you really, really want to, ALWAYS have a baseline of "the architecture was not fucked with" with otherwise similar training at hand, so you can compare. You'll see why.

The purpose of using a base model in the first place is to be able to reuse existing learned representations so the model only has to learn the specific task. You propose starting the run off by kicking the base model in the balls and forcing it to relearn a lot of the things that lie at its foundation. While not even doing a full fine tune. And with a dataset that's VERY small for a heavy duty tuning run. I'm not saying it can't work - but I am saying that you'll suffer trying to make it work.

Anything fancy you try during the training? Less of a minefield, but, again: keep a baseline to compare things to. 9 out of 10 fancy training ideas fail to outperform the baseline. And quite a few of those 9 underperform the baseline noticeably. For my first run, I'd maybe implement known-good basics like curriculum learning if possible but nothing fancier than that.

"Softened targets" with semantic similarity off a dictionary might work to improve sample efficiency early into the run, but it's the kind of thing that might hobble your performance further into the run because your dictionary assumptions are worse than what the model could learn on its own, so taper this off at least? POS-tagging might improve things, in a similar way, but only if you find a decent way to feed the known-good tags into the model, which may be as simple as "put the tags in the square bracket after the words with a "this is a POS-tagged text" next to the text, then mask". The "extra POS head" may work but it might be harder to make that work than to rotate the tags into the corpus naively?

Keep in mind that those are suggestions I make based on VIBES ONLY, and the only way to know if those vibes are on point or wildly off base is to actually try those runs, because that's how applied ML is.

So if you want to get fancy, start off with a small model that's cheap and fast to tune, make sure you can validate performance at least somewhat, and be ready to experiment with your runs a lot.
by hcaugifyd6sco | 2025-09-01 11:29:12+00:00
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by MrJohz | 2025-09-01 11:30:47+00:00
The problem is that branches _aren't_ an imaginary concept in git. The easiest way to see this is by looking at the difference between `git checkout master` and `git checkout ae596fe`. The first one checks out a branch, but the second one checks out a headless commit. I can still do many of the same operations in both states (for example, I can create new commits based on the current one), but how the repository changes will differ depending on what I've got checked out.

I agree with you that this is mostly unnecessary complexity — branches being anonymous is one of the big reasons I like jj, and why I think it's so useful to people just getting started with version control, because it is a simpler conceptual model. But it's not correct to say that branches in git are imaginary.
by slacktivism123 | 2025-09-01 11:31:34+00:00
>Notable because often when people complain of degraded model quality it turns out to be unfounded - Anthropic in the past have emphasized that they don't change the model weights after releasing them without changing the version number.

It's almost as if companies whose bottom line depends on shilling the [CURRENT HOT THING] will lie to you!

Instead of using appeals to authority to silence critics as "conspiracy theorists" spreading "misinformation", the influencers should maybe apply some reasoning and thinking.
by zigzag312 | 2025-09-01 11:31:36+00:00
You provided an alterative solution yourself. Make protection harder to disable, so non-tech savvy users can't disable it easily, always inform them of the consequences of disabling it and make it that it's only needed in exceptional cases (there a lot of room for improvement here).

If they want to climb over the protection fence, they should be able to do it as they clearly WANT to do it. Why should you have control what they can or cannot do? (Unless they are your kids.) Should experts in other fields also be able to control over what their layman family members are allowed to do?
by stavros | 2025-09-01 11:32:02+00:00
This is just insane. Lock the devices down by default, and allow the user to unlock them if they want. Why do we have to have Big Brother devices that "benevolently" restrict what you can run "for your own good"? Why can't all phones have unlockable bootloaders? My phone has a big, scary "DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU'RE A COMPUTER EXPERT" warning screen to unlock the bootloader, and that's fine.

Why do we need devices we can't unlock? Who is harmed by unlocking? This is the major point nobody has ever been able to explain to me. Who exactly does the big scary unlocked bootloader hurt? My parents have unlockable devices and they haven't had all their money stolen, because they haven't unlocked them.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-01 11:33:26+00:00
They're capable to do it on paper, the real question is whether there's enough money and incentive to do so. SpaceX won't do it out of charity, NASA has had its funding cut, and there's no natural resources or whatever on the moon so it would depend entirely on government, scientific, or rich tourist funding. Same with going to Mars.