MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brett_Riverboat | 2025-10-31 11:27:37+00:00
Nice find.

Those sort of thing always make me nervous however because it's not easy for the average user to tell if its running any sort of malicious scripts in the process. This one seems to be safe and I'm going to give it a try to see what happens.

The article also suggests that

"reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1"

still works as well which would be even better because thats local and easier to verify its integrity. that being said I think these are both valid suggestions if they work and I'm going to give them a try.
by BSDobelix | 2025-10-31 11:29:14+00:00
>The US already fought over this in 90s:

Patriot Act was in 2001, you dont have to break encryption when the NSA can sniff at the source, but let's not just stop there have a look at this:

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeli...

>The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did.

And what has that to do with "socialist heritage"? IF East Germany had a proper purge then nothing was inherited into the EU right?

>where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.

Yes and then there was Watergate...but again what has Nixon in common with socialism? And maybe have a look at "Merkelphone" when "Friends spy on Friends"

https://theconversation.com/merkelphone-scandal-shocks-europ...

You contradict yourself.
Show HN: Browser puzzle game, try to convince NPC the world is ruled by lizards
by sideshowb | 2025-10-31 11:30:50+00:00
I've been making an experimental browser game on the topic of conspiracy beliefs and how they arise - would love to know what you think :) The underlying model is a belief network, though for the purpose of gameplay not strictly Bayesian. Your goal is to convince the main character the world is ruled by lizards.

(Full disclosure: Although I’m only here to test the game, I’m doing so as an academic researcher so have to tell you that I may write a summary of responses, and record clicks, as anyone else testing a game would. I won’t record usernames or quote anyone directly. If you're not ok with that, please say so, otherwise commenting necessarily implies you consent. Full details linked from the title screen.)
by KronisLV | 2025-10-31 11:31:03+00:00
> Remotes are fine.

Maybe? But, like, what's the value added by a bunch of useless bullshit buttons that will never be used? Greebles to make the customers think they're buying something cool?

Just put a menu one in there for the 1% of the times when you actually have to use the functionality there and don't do the equivalent of putting 30 widgets in your weather homepage.

It's not like anyone is losing their life or finds TVs to be unusable due to the status quo, but it also feels like the equivalent of cutting off the ends of your roast when putting it on a pan because that's how your mom did it which she learnt from her mom, without either of you knowing that the real reason is that your grandmother just didn't have a big enough roasting pan and it's just habit.
by ghusto | 2025-10-31 11:31:42+00:00
It sounds like they're like the Dutch. The government is trusted because they've been shown to be trustworthy, but they are always accountable. If something dodgy happens, people are quick to point it out and demand action.

So it's not blind trust. I understand why Americans are so mistrusting of their government, it's because they are untrustworthy. The mistake is thinking everywhere in the world is like that.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-10-31 11:32:38+00:00
Ah yes, the function that halts if the input problem would take too long to halt.

But yes, I assume you mean they abort their loop after a while, which they do.

This whole idea of a "reasoning benchmark" doesn't sit well with me. It seems still not well-defined to me.

Maybe it's just bias I have or my own lack of intelligence, but it seems to me that using language models for "reasoning" is still more or less a gimmick and convenience feature (to automate re-prompts, clarifications etc, as far as possible).

But reading this pop-sci article from summer 2022 seems like this definition problem hasn't changed very much since then.

Although it's about AI progress before ChatGPT and it doesn't even mention the GPT base models. Sure, some of the tasks mentioned in the article seem dated today.

But IMO, there is still no AI model that can be trusted to, for example, accurately summarize a Wikipedia article.

Not all humans can do that either, sure. But humans are better at knowing what they don't know, and deciding what other humans can be trusted. And of course, none of this is an arithmetic or calculation task.

https://www.science.org/content/article/computers-ace-iq-tes...
by phantom784 | 2025-10-31 11:32:41+00:00
Technically it's the country code for the North American Numbering Plan, which is used by several other countries as well as the US.

But in this context it'd be the first digit of the area code, with no country code being used because the call is within the US. There are no area codes in the the North American Numbering Plan that start with a 1.
by PxldLtd | 2025-10-31 11:34:20+00:00
I think a good test of this seems to be to provide an image and get the model to predict what will happen next/if x occurs. They fail spectacularly at Rube-Goldberg machines. I think developing some sort of dedicated prediction model would help massively in extrapolating data. The human subconscious is filled with all sorts of parabolic prediction, gravity, momentum and various other fast-thinking paths that embed these calculations.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-31 11:34:55+00:00
"We'll just make it bigger" works. RLVR just gives better performance gains and spends less inference compute - as long as you have a solid way of verifying the tasks.

A simplified way of thinking about it is: pretraining gives LLMs useful features, SFT arranges them into useful configurations, RLVR glues them together and makes them work together well, especially in long reasoning traces. Makes sense to combine it all in practice.

How much pretraining gives an LLM depends on the scale of that LLM, among other things. But raw scale is bounded by the hardware capabilities and the economics - of training and especially of inference.

Scale is still quite desirable - GPT-4.5 scale models are going to become the norm for high end LLMs quite soon.
by emil0r | 2025-10-31 11:34:58+00:00
The way I like to think about is that with immutable data as default and pure functions, you get to treat the pure functions as black boxes. You don't need to know what's going on inside, and the function doesn't need to know what's going on in the outside world. The data shape becomes the contract.

As such, localized context, everywhere, is perhaps the best way to explain it from the point of view of a mutable world. At no point do you ever need to know about the state of the entire program, you just need to know the data and the function. I don't need the entire program up and running in order to test or debug this function. I just need the data that was sent in, which CANNOT be changed by any other part of the program.
by ethbr1 | 2025-10-31 11:35:46+00:00
The balance shifts after the midterms, even if the Republicans win big.

Then the president is on his way out, and Republicans start looking for and building favor with the next person.

(Which is really what all the "third term" BS is about. Trump has no intention, age-wise, of running for a third term, but talking about it keeps the lame duck calculus on ice. Hence why there aren't any details about "how", just a vague "we have a plan")
by nvlled | 2025-10-31 11:36:38+00:00
Kotlin uses var/val too[0] which is what Java is trying to copy. I have never written any kotlin code before, so I don't know if this would be a problem in practice. On the plus side, var and val both have the same length, so the variable declaractions are properly aligned. The names are also intuitive as far as I can tell.In theory, I'd probably be okay with it.

[0] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/basic-syntax.html#variables
by lhl | 2025-10-31 11:37:07+00:00
We do live in an age of frontier LLMs... For fun, I'll just use Kimi K2 (on Kagi Assistant).

> Can you explain what this means and its significance? Assume that I'm a layperson with no familiarity with LLM jargon so explain all of the technical terms, references, names. https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-Linear

Imagine your brain could only “look at” a few words at a time when you read a long letter. Today’s big language models (the AI that powers chatbots) have the same problem: the longer the letter gets, the more scratch paper they need to keep track of it all. That scratch paper is called the “KV cache,” and for a 1 000 000-word letter it can fill a small library.

Kimi Linear is a new way for the AI to read and write that throws away most of that scratch paper yet still understands the letter. It does this by replacing the usual “look at every word every time” trick (full attention) with a clever shortcut called linear attention. The shortcut is packaged into something they call Kimi Delta Attention (KDA).

What the numbers mean in plain English

51.0 on MMLU-Pro: on a 4 000-word school-test set, the shortcut scores about as well as the old, slow method. 84.3 on RULER at 128 000 words: on a much longer test it keeps the quality high while running almost four times faster. 6 × faster TPOT: when the AI is writing its reply, each new word appears up to six times sooner than with the previous best shortcut (MLA). 75 % smaller KV cache: the scratch paper is only one-quarter the usual size, so you can fit longer conversations in the same memory.

Key pieces explained

Full attention: the old, accurate but slow “look back at every word” method. KV cache: the scratch paper that stores which words were already seen. Linear attention: a faster but traditionally weaker way of summarising what was read. Gated DeltaNet: an improved linear attention trick that keeps the most useful bits of the summary. Kimi Delta Attention (KDA): Moonshot’s even better version of Gated DeltaNet. Hybrid 3:1 mix: three layers use the fast KDA shortcut, one layer still uses the old reliable full attention, giving speed without losing smarts. 48 B total, 3 B active: the model has 48 billion total parameters but only 3 billion “turn on” for any given word, saving compute. Context length 1 M: it can keep track of about 1 000 000 words in one go—longer than most novels.

Bottom line Kimi Linear lets an AI read very long documents or hold very long conversations with far less memory and much less waiting time, while still giving answers as good as—or better than—the big, slow models we use today.
by waltbosz | 2025-10-31 11:37:23+00:00
I did win a Lord of the Rings prize pack from MoreFM, but it never arrived at my house. Either it got lost in transit or they just never shipped it.

The call with them was right around the time of the theatrical release of the first film, and the people on t radio show were excited because the movie was filmed in New Zealand. To win the prize I had to name two people from New Zealand. I couldn't think of anyone, and earlier in the call I had already looked up the stations website, so they told me to go to the staff page and name two people.

This was back in the days of dial up Internet, but we were one of the first houses to get DSL. I remember one of the people at the radio station was amazed that I could be online and on the phone at the same time.
by iso1631 | 2025-10-31 11:37:40+00:00
"lost control" seems odd, before 1999 I got a bank balance by phoning up a number and putting a ton of other numbers in, so I'm not sure when I ever had control

I guess I could automate my browser or write something, but the lack of a published API doesn't mean I don't have theoretical control over my device (in practice I rely on a linux distribution and firefox/mozilla to create/maintain the browser engine)

Sure in the future they could hypothetically enforce non-free methods to access my bank, and hypothetically all banks could do this, but that's certainly not the case now.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-10-31 11:37:46+00:00
Clearly this is not true. Photoshop is difficult to use. I have opened it and tried to use it many times. Its UI is super complicated. There are endless buttons and I have no idea how to do anything.

There are heaps of Photoshop tutorials on YouTube, which wouldn't be necessary if what you said were true.

I used GIMP to do MS paint stuff years ago when I used it fairly regularly.

GIMP is always a whipping boy for UI design on forums like this and I think it is pretty unfair. It is a pretty good program comparatively. If you want to see bad UI design a much better example is something like Visual Studio. What a mess.
by lalitmaganti | 2025-10-31 11:38:27+00:00
I gave a talk at the 2025 Tracing Summit last month titled “Perfetto: The Swiss Army Knife of Linux Client/Embedded Tracing”. My goal in this talk was to show how Linux kernel, systems and embedded developers can use Perfetto when debugging and root-causing performance issues in their respective domains.

Taking inspiration from Simon Willison, this post is an annotated presentation containing my slides and detailed notes on them. The talk also has a lot of UI demos: for these, I’ll have a screenshot but also a link to the relevant part of the video (videos are unbeatable for UI!).
by scott_w | 2025-10-31 11:38:33+00:00
> In most organizations the problem is lack of urgency rather than lack of developer hours.

I disagree: it's a business prioritisation issue (not necessarily a problem). Ultimately, a lot of the processes are there because the wider business (rightly) wants IT to work on the highest impact issues. A random process that 3 people suffer from probably isn't the highest impact for the business as a whole.

Also, because it's not high impact, it makes sense that an intern is co-opted to make life easier (also as a learning experience), however it also causes the issues OP highlighted.

The problem is solvable, I think, but it's not easily solvable!
by latexr | 2025-10-31 11:38:56+00:00
> Lots of open-source projects do offer optional commercial licenses or support contracts.

And lots more don’t. The difference is so large that the ones who do offer commercial support are a rounding error in comparison.

> And the truly free-as-in-beer projects either have some kind of grant financing or else the maintainer shoulders the costs until they burn out.

Those aren’t the only options, that is a false dichotomy. But even if it were true, it in no way contradicts the argument.

> That "nice slogan" is emphatically true.

It emphatically is not, and you are ignoring half the argument. You can pay and still be the product.
by yuvalr1 | 2025-10-31 11:39:03+00:00
You are making a wrong leap from non-deterministic process to uncontrollable result. Most of the parallel algorithms are non-deterministic. There might be no guarantee about the order of calculation or even sometimes the final absolute result. However, even when producing different final results, the algorithm can still guarantee characteristics about the result.

The hard problem then is not to eliminate non-deterministic behavior, but find a way to control it so that it produces what you want.
by qsort | 2025-10-31 11:40:15+00:00
I'm not against "we'll make it bigger" (although it's as of yet unknown if it hits diminishing returns, 4.5 isn't exactly remembered as a great release), I'm against "we'll just (i.e. 'only') make it bigger".

I'm doubtful you'd have useful LLMs today if labs hadn't scaled in post-training.
by fny | 2025-10-31 11:40:44+00:00
You're assertion that consciousness, chemistry, and biology can be reduced to matrix computations requires justification.

For one, chemistry, biology, and physics are models of reality. Secondly, reality is far, far messier and more continuous than discrete computational steps that are rountripped. Neural nets seem far too static to simulate consciousness properly. Even the largest LLMs today have fewer active computational units than the number of neurons in a few square inches of cortex.

Sure it's theoretically possible to simulate consciousness, but the first round of AGI won't be close.
by rendaw | 2025-10-31 11:40:49+00:00
I think the explanation is: When you mutate variables it implicitly creates an ordering dependency - later uses of the variable rely on previous mutations. However, this is an implicit dependency that isn't modeled by the language so reordering won't cause any errors.

With a very basic concrete example:

x = 7

x = x + 3

x = x / 2

Vs

x = 7

x1 = x + 3

x2 = x1 / 2

Reordering the first will have no error, but you'll get the wrong result. The second will produce an error if you try to reorder the statements.

Another way to look at it is that in the first example, the 3rd calculation doesn't have "x" as a dependency but rather "x in the state where addition has already been completed" (i.e. it's 3 different x's that all share the same name). Doing single assignment is just making this explicit.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-31 11:41:50+00:00
Bjarne's excuse is very silly, it's like the Laffer curve but for programming language defects. It pins one edge case nobody cares about, then tries to imply that's proof for a claim no sane person could agree with and for which there is no evidence. Bjarne says languages with no users attract no complaints regardless of how terrible they are (nobody was arguing that they do), therefore implies Bjarne, the fact that people complain about my language just means it is popular. Bzzt, wrong. They're complaining because it's so riddled with problems.

Variables are distinct from constants. It's a problem that C and C++ use the keyword "const" to signify immutability instead, indeed as a result C++ needed three more keywords "constexpr", "constinit" and "consteval" to try to grapple with the problem.
by sswatson | 2025-10-31 11:43:29+00:00
In the vast majority of cases, developer ergonomics are much more important than freeing memory a little earlier. In other scenarios, e.g., when dealing with large data frames, the memory management argument carries more weight. Though even then there are usually better patterns, like method chaining.

FYI John Carmack is a true legend in the field. Despite his not being a lifelong Python guy, I can assure you he is speaking from a thorough knowledge of the arguments for and against.
by kalaksi | 2025-10-31 11:43:50+00:00
I initially started programming with C++, then did a bunch of scripting languages and then Rust and C#. I feel like there are pros and cons to strictness.

I don't like all scripting languages, but Python, for example, has a simple syntax and is easy and fast to learn and write. I think it also has a good standard library. Some things can be simpler because of the missing guardrails. But that's also the weakness and I wouldn't use it for large and complex software. You have to be more mindful to keep a good style because of the freedoms.

C++ and Rust are at the opposite end. Verbose to write and more difficult syntax. More stuff to learn. But in the end, that's the cost for better guarantees on correctness. But again, they don't fit all use cases as well as scripting languages.

I've experienced the good and the bad in both kind of languages. There are tradeoffs (what a surprise) and it's probably also subjective what kind of language one prefers. I think my _current_ favorites are Rust, C# and Python.
by jwr | 2025-10-31 11:44:52+00:00
> Did you then spend a month or two inspecting that setup? Did you do that after every dependency upgrade?

TBH, I never updated some of the setups. What's the point? Their job was to generate a CSS. Why would I want to upgrade dependencies or inspect that setup?

> arcane docker setups

I take issue with "arcane" — I have much more "arcane" setups than these :-)
by seethedeaduu | 2025-10-31 11:45:12+00:00
People that you know personally or propaganda that you saw online? And what perventage of these cases was due to bad surgical outcomes? (Potentially due to surgeon incompetence)

Because I really doubt that you personally know many trans people in this category.

> Sometimes I even think the evaluation requirements aren’t strict enough.

Leave it to trans people to judge that.
by Syzygies | 2025-10-31 11:46:06+00:00
A December 1956 cover feature article in Radio-Electronics magazine describes "Relay Moe" which plays tic tac toe with adjustable levels of skill. It used 90 relays.

<https://www.vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/Radio%20Electronics%...>

Here is the full text, for discussing with agents:

https://archive.org/stream/RadioElectronics195701/Radio%20El...

This is a subject dear to my heart. I'm a mathematician who routinely uses symmetry in counting problems. As a kid I remember writing out a tic tac toe game tree in about ten pages. I must have used symmetry, and I must have only mapped a winning strategy, not all 765 game states up to symmetry.

So my first reaction to now reading that Bertie the Brain used "addition tubes" was "Really? Can't you do that with relays?" And the reality is that Bertie the Brain was a solution looking for a problem, a demo project for these tubes, not an attempt at the simplest way to implement such a machine.

Still, looking at the numbers, I'm impressed that Relay Moe managed multiple levels of game play using only 90 relays. The design exploited symmetry.
Show HN: MCP Server That Brings Hacker News, GitHub, and Reddit to Claude
by colo-colo | 2025-10-31 11:46:16+00:00
I built an MCP server that lets Claude (and other AI assistants) fetch and summarize tech news.

It aggregates 20+ feeds including Hacker News, GitHub Trending, Techmeme, Reddit /r/technology, and more. When you ask Claude to "fetch latest news", it pulls all articles, extracts key topics, and generates summaries organized by feed.

The server is built with Next.js and uses the xmcp framework. You can run it locally or use the hosted version at https://infomate.online/mcp

Demo: Just ask Claude "fetch latest news" and get summaries like:

- TypeScript overtook Python on GitHub - Reddit Q3 revenue up 68% YoY - OpenAI announced Aardvark security researcher - SpaceX Moon missions update

Source: https://github.com/agudulin/infomate-mcp
by ethbr1 | 2025-10-31 11:47:07+00:00
> and (importantly) the supreme court has upheld this stance

Caveat: on a preliminary basis in most of the decisions

Important to differentiate SCOTUS saying "there isn't a compelling reason to block this power before we decide" and "here's our decision about the legality of this power"

Rough summary of current state: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/after-courts-hampered-...

I'm half-curious if Roberts is playing for time to avoid a constitutional crisis, figuring it's better to cede a temporary power (and avoid the executive stuffing the bench or whatever insane shit they'd try) than to cast it in case law. Not great for the rule of law, but I can see the realpolitik (which Marbury v. Madison shows has always been a consideration for inter-branch squabbles)
by M95D | 2025-10-31 11:48:04+00:00
The green tech is completely under the control of governement even after it is installed and operational:

- Tax imports of panels and batteries

- Tax and oppose new installations.

- Only offer disincetive grid prices to those having panels on their houses. Low pay or negative pay to push to grid, higher cost to consume from the grid.

- Tax installed panels, even off-grid ones.

- Introduce new onerous "safety" requirements.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-31 11:48:37+00:00
Exactly. It's amazing how we, as programmers, can demand that others recognize that, for us, but we, ourselves, refuse to give the same respect, in regards to other fields.

The same can be said for any vocation that generates a product. An expertly-crafted duck decoy can have the same level of experience and skill, as a database abstraction.

I have had the privilege to work with some of the top creatives, as well as scientists and engineers, in the world, and have seen the difference.