MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _feus | 2025-09-08 21:40:17+00:00
Code is code, it's not a piece of art where we all can have different perspective about what it means or does, so from appsec perspective it doesn't matter who wrote it, just what it does. Also you seem to be interpreting "reading" as one would read a novel, but here "reading" is about finding and exploiting security flaws. So yeah, dunno what you are on about.
by barnacs | 2025-09-08 21:40:28+00:00
I guess our definition of "thinking" is just very different.

Yes, humans are also capable of learning in a similar fashion and imitating, even extrapolating from a learned function. But I wouldn't call that intelligent, thinking behavior, even if performed by a human.

But no human would ever perform like that, without trying to intuitively understand the motivations of the humans they learned from, and naturally intermingling the performance with their own motivations.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-09-08 21:40:44+00:00
Have we seen Microsoft actually put any skin in the game yet? All the pre-purchase announcements are virtually risk free for Microsoft. They've agreed to buy a certain amount of power at a certain price, if the counter-party can deliver it. But they're not pre-paying, they only pay when the electricity gets delivered. If they never deliver, Microsoft isn't out any money.
by James72689 | 2025-09-08 21:40:53+00:00
Alternate solution I haven’t seen anywhere else:

1. Screen time to disable browser, App Store etc.

2. Type random 4-digit passwords until you forget.

3. Use your own Apple account as reset.

4. Remove apple password from password manager. Store in “Notes” app or similar on computer.

5. Lock this app storing password behind mandatory typing of gibberish using Cold Turkey on desktop.

Works well for me.

I will mention that as a younger person who grew up with internet access, I get the feeling that the “just be disciplined” comment often comes from people who didn’t have these addictive habits seared into their minds from an early age or have fought them off and forgotten what it’s like to literally lose control of your actions, especially when its normalized around you.

I’ve noticed a lot of older people don’t see the internet as a threat in the same way as I do, and I envy that.

Living with phones like this is completely unnatural.
by dham | 2025-09-08 21:41:06+00:00
I think with stem separation,you could potentially train a model. But the latest Suno is really good. You can still kind of "hear" it. I had a song come into my playlist. "The Dad Bods Pop Punk". I have a keen ear, and I listened to the song a couple of times when I realized it. When I went to the artist it was a bunch of AI-generated pictures and listening to the other ones it's clear it's AI.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-08 21:41:28+00:00
I wouldn't discount what Apple has done... they've created and integrated some really good niche stuff in their CPUs to do more than typical ARM designs. The graphics cores are pretty good in their own right even. Not to mention the OS/Software integration including accelerated x86 and unified memory usage in practice.

AMD has done a LOT for parallelization and their server options are impressive... I mean, you're still talking 500W+ in total load, but that's across 128+ cores. Strix Halo scaling goes down impressively to the ~10-15W range under common usage, not as low as Apple does under similar loads but impressive in its own way.
by bogomog | 2025-09-08 21:41:58+00:00
+1 to this. Why throw away an extra dimension of expression available by choices in formatting in the name of consistency? I find it helpful to use blank lines to separate code into "paragraphs". A complex conditional may be made more readable by extra space in some places an not others. A series of single line if statements might be clearer formatted lined up vertically, like a table.
by crabmusket | 2025-09-08 21:42:04+00:00
I agree with you, but I'd ask- what other language needs to distribute to an unknown runtime environment over the network?

If it's the browser's job to implement the standard library, how do you ensure that all browsers do this in a compliant and timely fashion? And if not, how do you optimise code-on-demand delivery over the internet?

I don't deny there are/could be solutions to this. But historically JS devs have wrestled with these issues as best they can and that has shaped what we see today.
by solardev | 2025-09-08 21:42:50+00:00
I don't think this is the unprovable you think it is?

If LLMs and statistics can't encode semantics, how can do chatbots perform long-form translations with appropriate contexts? How do codebreakers use statistics to break an adversary's communications?

Sometimes the statistics are semantic, like when "orange" and "arancia" the picture of that fruit all mean the same thing, but Orange the wireless carrier and orange the color are different. Those are connections/probabilities humans also learn via repeated exposure in different contexts.

I'm not arguing that LLMs are synthesizing new ideas (or old ones), but that they ARE capable of deriving semantic meaning from statistics. Rather than:

> language, based solely on statistical data, shorn of semantics

Isn't it more like:

> language, based solely on statistical data, with meanings emerging from clusters in the data
by SyrupThinker | 2025-09-08 21:43:05+00:00
For P2P I can totally see the advantage.

Although at that point I'm sure you, and any similar user, would not actually rely on ad-hoc advice like in this thread, and instead just evaluate what is needed.

As an aside, personally speaking, headscale solves basically none of my concerns associated with introducing more software, complexity and third parties (the maintainers) into my network setup. Less so because of paranoia towards the software/product itself, and more so because of the increased surface area to attack.

But I also think that anyone actually bothering to set headscale up probably falls into the aforementioned group of people that actually thinks about their requirements.
by mikepurvis | 2025-09-08 21:43:12+00:00
Honestly it is tempting. I do have an old Haswell-era industrial motherboard that would manage the task just fine, and I've definitely considered this path.

That said, I'd probably spend about as much on a power supply, case, and NIC for that machine as I would on just buying a Unifi gateway, and theirs comes with an integrated UI for the APs. I'm past the stage of life where I find joy in tinkering with the infrastructure I need to do my job (WFH) so I'll probably still just go off the shelf.
by 0x008 | 2025-09-08 21:43:47+00:00
This is one of many laws the EU and member states are pushing in order to implement more online surveillance. I always wonder why individuals (representatives) would push for these kind of surveillance laws? I think politicians usually pass laws which help themselves or their lobbies gain power and influence on economical levels, but I wonder why anyone would push for these kind of legislation even before an authoritarian state is on place. What is there to gain on an individual level?
by snowwrestler | 2025-09-08 21:44:37+00:00
The bubble is AGI, which was pitched as imminent (it’s even part of the OpenAI-Microsoft agreement language). It will pop when people realize it’s not remotely near.

“AI will change how business is done” is not a bubble because every innovation changes how business is done, it’s just a matter of degree. Various forms of AI have been changing businesses for a decade at least.
by mikestorrent | 2025-09-08 21:44:55+00:00
Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going.

If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".

Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.

What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
by pavon | 2025-09-08 21:45:03+00:00
The last release to support 32-bit x86 hardware for popular distros was:

Distro | Release | Support | Extended Support -------------|---------|---------|------------------ SLES 11 | 2009-03 | 2019-03 | 2022-03 | 2028-03 RHEL 6 | 2010-11 | 2019-08 | 2024-06 | 2029-05 Arch | 2017-11 | *Ongoing releases via unofficial community project Ubuntu 18.04 | 2018-04 | 2023-05 | 2028-04 | 2030-04 Fedora 31 | 2019-10 | 2020-11 | N/A Slackware 15 | 2022-02 | Ongoing, this is the most recent release Debian 12 | 2023-06 | 2026-06 | 2028-06 Gentoo | Ongoing

By the time FireFox 32-bit is dropped, all the versioned distros will be past their general support date and into extended support, leaving Gentoo, Arch32, and a handful of smaller distros. Of course, there are also folks running a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit Firefox to save memory.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-08 21:45:06+00:00
I have to imagine that group to be pretty small by now, though. Most PCs with specs good enough to still be useful now run W7 64-bit about as well as they do XP SP3 (an old C2D box of mine feels great under 7, as an anecdote), and for those who’ve been running Linux on these boxes there’s not really much reason to go for a 32-bit build over a 64-bit one.
by ivape | 2025-09-08 21:45:22+00:00
I’m beginning to think Reddit is a publisher. If you can control and curate what posts are seen (for example, perhaps only posts that your team makes), then you are content creator/publisher - not an aggregator.

It’s a controlled magazine with an editorial staff that selects topics, and controls the gates for commenting. It’s not organic on any level.

Fuck Reddit, seriously.
by jen20 | 2025-09-08 21:46:02+00:00
> They've done it in the past, even supporting Nvidia's compute drivers along the way. If they have the staff to design consumer-facing and developer-facing experiences, why wouldn't they address the datacenter?

They did a horrific job of it before. The staff to design consumer facing experiences are busy doing exactly that. The developer facing experiences are very lean. The bandwidth simply isn't there to do DC products. Nor is the supply chain. Nor is the service supply chain. Etc, etc.
by elbasti | 2025-09-08 21:46:12+00:00
It's not some "magical way"--the ways in which a human thinks that an LLM doesn't are pretty obvious, and I dare say self-evidently part of what we think constitutes human intelligence:

- We have a sense of time (ie, ask an LLM to follow up in 2 minutes)

- We can follow negative instructions ("don't hallucinate, if you don't know the answer, say so")
by aerostable_slug | 2025-09-08 21:46:24+00:00
It wasn't so much that privacy mitigations were feckless, it was the fact that people who did things like falsify their User-Agent strings tended to cluster into distinct groups very nicely, and hence it was easy for the targeting algorithms to feed them effective ads, landing pages, etc.

The targeting system went "oh goody, privacy geeks" and was able to very effectively do its job. This is because ad tech systems care less about you as everdrive the named individual with privacy interests and other human aspects, and more about you as some potential consumer of goods.

While it's possible to use the systems to profile people in the sense that a stalker might, that's not really the intent (in the way people like to think of it). I (in the past tense, I don't do adtech anymore) honestly don't care about you, I just want you to buy shit from the people who pay me to sell you their particular flavor of shit. If you hiding your exact name or browser details or whatever makes that more likely (it turns out it did), then hooray! There's no conflict there, where to some there would be (because their assumptions about motive are all wrong).

In terms of what techniques, we found machine learning (stats) way back then did a pretty good job of clustering people based on things browsers return (monitor resolution, OS, etc.) coupled with time of day, search terms, and other things you can't really suppress. A completely contrived example might be pushing expensive pediatric electrolytes to someone with a large-screened Mac looking up baby flu symptoms at 2 am. The "system" did a far better job of real time targeting with this stuff than any human could, and the things it would cluster on were often rather unintuitive.
by jmyeet | 2025-09-08 21:46:33+00:00
Ugh, I rdread this topic because nuclear is as close to as a religion as you get on HN. SMRs just arne't better in any way that matters [1].

And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.

I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle".

I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate.

[1]: https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bro...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
by mikestorrent | 2025-09-08 21:47:08+00:00
Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much.

Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
by dingnuts | 2025-09-08 21:47:57+00:00
why is it required that children have access to YouTube? I'm not that old and we went long stretches with no TV in our household because we didn't have the money for it. It was fine. I'm fine. I didn't turn out normal but it was for a lot of other reasons. Read a book, kid.

$14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time
by Night_Thastus | 2025-09-08 21:48:00+00:00
>Another thought... if I'm tasked with maintaining or adding features to existing code, should I feel responsible for writing tests for the existing codebase?

Write tests for new additions to the code, when making major overhauls to sections of it, or when a bug is discovered that the old tests did not catch.

Those are the 3 cases I would say you should add a test. #3 is most important, in my experience.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 21:48:06+00:00
> They are literally letting them target based on race

Not really. SCOTUS lifted a district court's stay.

Trump wanted that. SCOTUS gave in. The district court now goes back to figuring out what's going on, except with the stay lifted instead of in place. "Allow" is too permissive a term because nothing was sanctioned and eventual challenges based on racial profiling have not been precluded; that's why Reuters didn't use the term.

From a Reddit standard of discussion, "allow" works. If you have any knowledge of our legal system, it misrepresents the opinions.
by michaelt | 2025-09-08 21:48:10+00:00
I've never stepped on a plug myself, so I agree it's not a major problem.

However, some older houses in the UK have far fewer sockets than more modern properties - sometimes only one or two per room.

And sure, if you need to use a hairdryer and a hair straightener a person with an orderly lifestyle might return them both to a cupboard afterwards - but some people don't mind clutter and just leave them wherever.

When it comes to multiway extension leads - people in the UK are sometimes told it's bad to "overload" sockets but have only a vague understanding of what that means, so some people are reluctant to use them.
by justinator | 2025-09-08 21:49:56+00:00
One problem is that Restricted Mode has been turned on for some users, some videos are not shown to viewers when it's turned on, and videos that are labeled as restricted are done so automatically by a faulty AI system.

You can see if restricted mode is turned on for you. Once on youtube.com, click your profile photo, and in the menu the pops down, look and see if "Restricted Mode:" is set to "On" or, "Off". Some people have found that by default it's been put to "On", even though they have not set it.

If you're not logged in, Restricted Mode is calculated by a bizarre set of rules like your not-logged-in watching history that Google totally doesn't keep track off (ie: you watch a lot of Blues Clues, you're probably a child).
by pfdietz | 2025-09-08 21:50:19+00:00
The big risk is tritium leakage.

To show the scale of the problem: if the world were powered by Helion's reactors (for all primary energy), and the tritium produced were just released into the environment and mixed completely with all water on the planet (including oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, and ice), then it would lift all that water above the US regulatory limit for tritium in drinking water. All the water, including everything in every ocean.
by robocat | 2025-09-08 21:50:20+00:00
Interesting that she saw antivax as another factor within an identity group (maybe labeled alternative or woowoo by outsiders?)

I joke now about how anti-vaxxers put out feelers, little social cues that help us recognize each other at playgroups and baby yoga. If you saw a kid wearing an amber teething necklace—a legitimate choking hazard, by the way—you were 90 per cent sure that baby wasn’t vaccinated. That was your window. You’d notice things: hand-knit sweaters, homemade baby food in glass jars, tiny wool booties. These weren’t just parenting choices. They were signals. If you picked up on enough of them, you knew you’d found someone “crunchy” like you.
by nashashmi | 2025-09-08 21:50:21+00:00
The Usual. Govt trying to harness private systems for the purpose of public surveillance.

They do this using warrants. And subpoena.

We need a personal declaration of rights that says private systems are not in anyway obligated to extend the reach of govt surveillance networks, without the consent of the private party.

It is a small protective measure. The next step will be for govt to bully everyone to give consent to their surveillance systems … or else.

But as of right now, the law is arbitrarily taking for granted that private surveillance systems belong to govt regulations.
by john-h-k | 2025-09-08 21:51:04+00:00
> At least to me, it seems pretty well-scoped as a workaround from the requirements that the compiler has around needing to use generic type parameters in type definitions

The reason those requirements exist is (primarily) to do with unsafe code. Specifically it’s about deciding the variance of the type (which doesn’t matter for a truely unused type parameter).
by lordofgibbons | 2025-09-08 21:51:11+00:00
Given how WhatsApp is the de-facto way to communicate outside of the West and China, these security/data-handling "weaknesses" are most likely a feature, not a bug. An absolute bonanza for the certain intelligence services.

Remember, kids: End to end encryption is useless if the "ends" are fully controlled by an (untrustworthy) third party.
by black_puppydog | 2025-09-08 21:51:15+00:00
Except gmail pretty unexplicably filtered away stuff like a direct response from my boss, to an email I specifically sent to him half an hour ago. After a couple of these hiccups, plus hours spent trying to locate emails that I knew existed and even knew the right keywords for, I just disabled any and all of their filtering (which is, unsurprisingly, not just a checkbox...) and access gmail exclusively through Thunderbird.

It's inexplicable to me how google, of all companies, can be so consistently shit at search across all their products.
Show HN: I built a finance app for couples after 9 years of Google Sheets
by craigbanach | 2025-09-08 21:51:37+00:00
After tracking finances in Google Sheets since 2016 (currently at column XE - 657 columns), I finally built the app my wife and I needed. The breaking point was yet another argument about a forgotten Amazon purchase that broke our budget.

personifi is intentionally simple - real-time sync between partners, individual logins with shared data, and transaction entry that takes 12 seconds on mobile. Built with Next.js, .NET, and Postgres, running on a €4.55/month Hetzner VPS with Nomad orchestration.

The most validating moment: my wife told me she actually prefers it to our spreadsheet. After 9 years of her tolerating my spreadsheet obsession, that's worth more than any metric.

Currently at 2 DAU (us), but opening it up at £4.99/month for couples who want to stop arguing about money. Also included our free Google Sheets template if you prefer that route.

Blog post about building it: https://craig.banach.dev/musings/i-built-an-app App: https://personifi.xyz

Happy to answer questions about the technical stack, the couples-first approach, or why I chose Nomad over K8s for orchestration.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-09-08 21:51:43+00:00
My point is, what is there to build?

The person that is willing to buy that appliance is likely heavily overlapped with the person that is more than capable of pointing one of the dozens of existing apps at a custom domain.

Everyone else will continue to just use app based subscriptions.

Streaming platforms have plateaued (at best), but self hosted media appliances are still vanishingly rare.

Why would AI buck the trend that every other computing service has followed?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 21:52:15+00:00
> it's so cheap as to be nearly free

Both chips and developer time are expensive. Massively so, both in direct cost and secondary and tertiary elements. (If you think hiring more developers to optimise code has no knock-on effects, I have a bridge to sell you.)

There isn't an iron law about developer time being less valuable than chips. When chip progress stagnates, we tend towards optimising. When the developer pipeline is constrained, e.g. when a new frontier opens, we tend towards favouring exploration over optimisation.

If a CS programme is teaching someone to always try to optimise an algorithm versus consider whether hardware might be the limitation, it's not a very good one. In this case, when it comes to AI, there is massive investment going into trying to find more efficient training and inference algorithms. Research which, ironically enough, generally requires access to energy.