MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freetime2 | 2025-10-14 21:30:37+00:00
Yup, I have worked on several legacy codebases, and a pretty common occurence is that a new team member will join and think they may have discovered a bug in the code. Sometimes they are even quite adamant that the code is complete garbage and could never have worked properly. Usually the conversation goes something like: "This code is heavily used in production, and hasn't been touched in 10 years. If it's broken, then why haven't we had any complaints from users?"

And more often than not the issue is a local configuration issue, bad test data, a misunderstanding of what the code is supposed to do, not being aware of some alternate execution path or other pre/post processing that is running, some known issue that we've decided not to fix for some reason, etc. (And of course sometimes we do actually discover a completely new bug, but it's rare).

To be clear, there are certainly code quality issues present that make modifications to the code costly and risky. But the code itself is quite reliable, as most bugs have been found and fixed over the years. And a lot of the messy bits in the code are actually important usability enhancements that get bolted on after the fact in response to real-world user feedback.
by bsder | 2025-10-14 21:31:02+00:00
> B) Aren't experienced enough in the target domain to see the problems with the AI's output (let's call this "slop blindness")

Oh, boy, this. For example, I often use whatever AI I have to adjust my Nix files because the documentation for Nix is so horrible. Sure, it's slop, but it gets me working again and back to what I'm supposed to be doing instead of farting with Nix.

I would also argue:

D) The fact that an AI can do the task indicates that something with the task is broken.

If an AI can do the task well, there is something fundamentally wrong. Either the abstractions are broken, the documentation is horrible, the task is pure boilerplate, etc.
by tptacek | 2025-10-14 21:31:18+00:00
Client supply chain is moot in the client-server setting. The attackers just target the server and get everything. You only get to raise the salience of the client supply chain when E2EE is already in place. Again: this is an analysis specific to secure messaging.

Slack isn't E2EE secure. The Slack client supply chain is not how I worry about my Slack message history being intercepted.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-14 21:31:19+00:00
> Are 1-900 numbers still a thing? Are all those people going to lose their jobs?

IIRC, the 900 “area code” is still reserved for that kind of calling in the North American Numbering Plan, but all of the US carriers have withdrawn from doing pass-on billing for 900 calls (in part, IIRC, because the government prohibited them from disconnecting service for nonpayment of those charges), so I don’t think they’ve been a significant business for a while, and most of that kind of business has moved to various online platforms.
by bgnn | 2025-10-14 21:31:37+00:00
In this situation I disagree. This is a blatant seizure of the control of a foreign owned company for political reasons. This is straight out of China's playbook.

I agree that the West is in general different, as in this is more an exception than the rule. But being in the semiconductor industry, I'm fed up with the stupid rules we are dealing with since the 1st Trump admin. Even more stupid is the US foreign policy affecting EU companies much more than US companies.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-14 21:32:30+00:00
Risk management is on a scale.

You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.

As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.

It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.
by tyg13 | 2025-10-14 21:32:41+00:00
I'll never doubt the ability of people like yourself to consistently mischaracterize human capabilities in order to make it seem like LLMs' flaws are just the same as (maybe even fewer than!) humans. There are still so many obvious errors (noticeable by just using Claude or ChatGPT to do some non-trivial task) that the average human would simply not make.

And no, just because you can imagine a human stupid enough to make the same mistake, doesn't mean that LLMs are somehow human in their flaws.

> the gap is still shrinking though

I can tell this human is fond of extrapolation. If the gap is getting smaller, surely soon it will be zero, right?
by selectodude | 2025-10-14 21:32:46+00:00
> Do you have evidence Bukele’s polling is corrupted?

Do I have evidence that the polling coming out of an autocratic single party dictatorship is corrupted? I mean, no, of course not. Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.

> I haven't seen a credible monitor call that out as having already happened.

https://www.wola.org/analysis/el-salvador-election-integrity...

One can argue that El Salvador is better off under Bukele than it was prior. I’d probably have to agree - things were really bad there and locking people up and throwing away the key absolutely works. Always has. It just isn’t sustainable and now that Bukele has successfully consolidated power, we just get to wait and see what happens.

Similarly, Yugoslavia generally loved Josip Tito. He was still a horrible dictator that butchered millions and when he died, the country collapsed.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-10-14 21:33:01+00:00
They use vulns in the outdated SS7 system to trick networks into revealing a numbers location (1), and intercept SMS including the verification codes sent by apps like WhatsApp - allowing them to hijack accounts and monitor messages and calls directly (2). This method works remotely and doesn’t require antennas

The SMS are intercepted because thru SS7 by tricking the network into thinking the target phone is roaming (3).

(1)https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...

(2)https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altami...

(3)https://www.fyno.io/blog/is-it-easy-to-intercept-sms-a-compl...
by chasing0entropy | 2025-10-14 21:33:10+00:00
70 years ago we were fascinated by the concept of converting analog to a perfect digital copy. In reality, that goal was a pipe drea!m and the closest we can ever get is a near identical facimile to which data fits... But it's still quite easy to determine digital from true analog with rudimentary means.

Human thought is analog. It is based on chemical reactions, time, and unpredictably (effectively) random physical characteristics. AI is an attempt to turn that which is purely digital into an rational analog thought equivalent.

No matter how much effort, money, power, and rare mineral eating TPUs will - ever - produce true analog data.
by echelon | 2025-10-14 21:34:08+00:00
You don't take it with you. It's your ballot, and you submit it into a lock box when you're done. One A4-sized piece of paper with your legibly printed choices and a QR code is your ballot.

When they count your vote later, they have a high-speed system that can scan all the QR codes almost instantly. It's why we know the results in as little as an hour.

If there are any questions, or if the race is tight, a team of auditors can look at the ballot pages to check for any discrepancies. They'll check to make sure the machines themselves weren't tampered with by checking that the printed names and other ballot initiatives match the QR codes.
by BeetleB | 2025-10-14 21:34:23+00:00
This has been a problem since Wikipedia's existence. I've had the (mis)fortune of personally knowing people who were charged with serious crimes - serious enough to garner nationwide attention.

The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.

Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.
by spoiler | 2025-10-14 21:34:27+00:00
This attitude is referred to as optimistic nihilism, if anyone wants to look more into it.

I've been trying to adopt this mindset myself in recent years.

It's helped me "cope" and accept certain things about my life. It's not how my mind developed initially, so it doesn't come naturally to me and I sometimes fall into old habits. So, sometimes I need to remind myself to practice it.

Anyway, thanks for the reminder! :)
by anarticle | 2025-10-14 21:34:36+00:00
My mom taught me math by playing cards with me, and taught me reading by reading me books. It has nothing to do with money. I grew in a house that had a giant hole in the floor, lead paint, and asbestos tiles in North Carolina at that time. My mom is a high school graduate from New Jersey, my parents were late 20s and made barely any money in the 1980s.

Some things you cannot buy for love or money!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-14 21:34:43+00:00
> Atlantic article could have done something similar, focusing on the methodologies at hand

The Atlantic isn't delving into the details of these theories because, as you say, "there's an ongoing debate." Meanwhile, there is a clear connection between holding students to standards versus the equity-based approaches that turn graduation into aging out. Getting distracted by the methodology debate would have muddied the clear signal in the measurement discussion that isn't happening.

> seek external sources, when blame is being ascribed

I didn't see blame being ascribed, but hurdles highlighted.

Democrat-run states have higher educational attainment than Republican-run states. That doesn't mean, however, that the former have a monopoly on good education ideas. There are good ideas coming up in the South when it comes to reading. The author is pointing out--correctly, in my opinion--the hurdles policymakers in Democrat-run states and cities may need to contend with to implement those ideas.
by Theodores | 2025-10-14 21:34:48+00:00
In the 1980s, the BBC did a realistic nuclear war movie called Threads. It is a classic and always relevant. The scene I found most shocking was in the aftermath, when the children of the survivors can't read or even speak properly. There is this record player and they have no idea what it is for or what music is, because they have never heard of it. One of them plays with it, intrigued that the turntable moves, but that is about it, nobody is hooking it up to get everyone dancing.

I live in the UK which has been slow compared to the USA when it comes to TV. In the 1960s, Americans were watching 4+ hours a day of colour TV, with a vast choice of channels. It took is about three decades to catch up in the UK. I think the same can be said for Europe and elsewhere outside the USA. We have just been behind with TV watching and several other American conveniences, such as driving everywhere and convenience foods.

At the start of this year I made 'reading part of an actual book' my new years' resolution. It was going well for all of six weeks (then I had to spend a log time from home, away from my books), but why did I need to make it something I was committed too with a resolution?

There was a time when I would literally fight over books, magazines and newspapers with family and friends. Before then, there was a time when, as a child, I would be reading by moonlight until the small hours.

Then, before my time, before TV, the cinema and radio, was a time when people would go out to a hall to listen to someone read the latest Dickens installment. That was 'peak book' even though literacy wasn't great for everyone.

Nowadays books have been relegated to what people have on show in the back of a Zoom call, sometimes contrived, often not so contrived. There is a long history of doing this. Middle class people used to buy books for the parlour to show they were educated, often with out of copyright classics, hardbound.

I suspect that some people read more for the 'bragging rights' than for the pleasure of reading. I also suspect that any surveys on book reading habits are going to be unreliable since it is easy to say 'year I read three books this year' and cite the three that you had to read under duress as a schoolchild.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-14 21:34:48+00:00
"We achieve 19.8 GB/s prefix sum throughput—1.8x faster than a naive implementation and 2.6x faster than FastPFoR"

"FastPFoR is well-established in both industry and academia. However, on our target platform (Graviton4, SIMDe-compiled) it benchmarks at only ~7.7 GB/s, beneath a naive scalar loop at ~10.8 GB/s."

I thought the first bit was a typo but it was correct; the naive approach was faster than a "better" method. Another demonstration of how actually benchmarking on the target platform is important!
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-14 21:34:57+00:00
Quick, don't think of an elephant in a pink tutu! You did, didn't you?

As a scientist, you should know that LLMs are pretty bad at understanding negatives because they work on tokens, not words.

"NO ELEPHANTS" roughly becomes NO + ELEPHANT. Now "elephant" is in the context and it's going to be "thinking" about it and steering everything towards it.

You need to use positive instructions.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-10-14 21:35:04+00:00
I think you still have the right to travel without ID. The TSA may demand it, and may tell you it's legally required, but that doesn't make that true. If you show up at the airport without an ID, you'll still be allowed to fly domestically. Of course, how easy that is probably depends on whether you frame it as a "woops!" or as a "fuck you guys!". They'll put you through extra "security" screening and try to confirm your ID other ways.

"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."

https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/05/19/tsa-tries-again-to-im...

https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
by bigyabai | 2025-10-14 21:35:37+00:00
What do you mean by "salespeople" here? Executives, C-suites, managers, or actual salespeople?

Speaking personally, I hate salespeople because they're always selling me something. Engineers, by-and-large, hate salespeople because the self-actualization of a salesperson is worthless. The best salespeople are typically the worst people. The best engineers (Woz, Ritchie, Lattner) can make a positive impact even in-spite of commercial interests.
by Yoric | 2025-10-14 21:35:44+00:00
I grew up in the same era and I recall crashes being less frequent.

There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ and DMA for your Sound Blaster manually, both physically and in each game, or that you needed to "optimize" memory usage, enable XMS or EMS or whatever it was at the time, or that you spent hours looking at the nice defrag/diskopt playing with your files, etc.

More generally, as you hint to, desktop operating systems were crap, but the software on top of it was much more comprehensively debugged. This was presumably a combination of two factors: you couldn't ship patches, so you had a strong incentive to debug it if you wanted to sell it, and software had way fewer features.

Come to think about it, early browsers kept crashing and taking down the entire OS, so maybe I'm looking at it with rosy glasses.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-10-14 21:35:45+00:00
The issue isn’t that you’re mentioning SQLite or acknowledging that it’s a fork.

The problem is that the phrase “the next evolution of SQLite” conveys continuity and endorsement.

A reasonable reader could conclude that Turso is an official successor or the next release of SQLite — that it represents the official lineage of the project.

Phrasing like “SQLite-compatible,” or “a fork of SQLite” would be clear and factual.

Calling it “the next evolution of SQLite” isn’t factual; it’s marketing positioning, and it implies ownership of SQLite’s identity and lineage.

This reflects a broader pattern in how the fork has been presented publicly.

The messaging often treats the original project as something to be fixed rather than a foundation to be respected.

Referring to Turso as a product while leveraging the SQLite name reinforces that framing — co-opting a public-domain engineering gift into a commercial asset.
by janwillemb | 2025-10-14 21:36:32+00:00
It is about a company, First Wap, that makes it possible to track individuals. Their USP is a piece of software that operates at phone network level and uses the fact that phone companies still support an old protocol, Signalling System 7:

> Phone networks need to know where users are in order to route text messages and phone calls. Operators exchange signalling messages to request, and respond with, user location information. The existence of these signalling messages is not in itself a vulnerability. The issue is rather that networks process commands, such as location requests, from other networks, without being able to verify who is actually sending them and for what purpose.

> These signalling messages are never seen on a user’s phone. They are sent and received by “Global Titles” (GTs), phone numbers that represent nodes in a network but are not assigned to subscribers.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-14 21:37:14+00:00
Oh, it's about budget chief Russell Vought, with how weird reality has been lately, I was 100% sure that I'll be reading something about the Vought corporation from "The Boys" [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Vought

[1] https://the-boys.fandom.com/wiki/Vought_International
by BeetleB | 2025-10-14 21:37:36+00:00
> Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story.

For an important issue that is covered ad nauseum, sure.

For an issue that was hot today but not next week, I hard disagree. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585287

One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.

For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
by toss1 | 2025-10-14 21:37:47+00:00
Nice offtopic whataboutism tic you have there...

The point was that it is and was completely unnecessary for the particular omlette of making new self-landing spacecraft to break the particular eggs of spending all that time and money on politics. They are two entirely different pursuits, negating the GP comment.

As for Harris, you are comparing an exaggerated number for total campaign spend to Musk's $250-$400 million spending as a single donor to a campaign in which he was not running. Comparing apples-to-apples, the Trump and Harris campaigns spent comparable amounts [0], and that is officially, not counting the massive media coverage Trump obtains for free.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/c3613e1b-c15d-47b8-a502-400c4114c...
by vel0city | 2025-10-14 21:38:03+00:00
> People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars

That's assuming it'll meaningfully reduce the rates of child deaths due to automobiles.

You know what will reduce the rate of child fatality due to automobiles for sure and to an even higher degree? Massively reducing the odds kids and automobiles mix. How do we do that? Have more protected walkable and bikeable spaces. Have fewer automobiles driving around. Design our cities better to not have kids walking along narrow sidewalks next to roads where speed limits are marked as 40 but in reality traffic often flows at 55+.

Its insane to me there are neighborhoods less than a mile from associated public schools that have to have bus service because there is no safe path for them to walk. What a true failure of city design.
by Nasrudith | 2025-10-14 21:38:11+00:00
I know from my earliest memories that reading is possible from whole words if you are read to enough without being formally taught. Granted at that point my attention span was too lacking to really read books by myself, compared to being read to.

But that basically amounts to probably just learning phonics indirectly through examples and drawing patterns, and specifically is an exception and not the norm. And children's books even if they don't use the phonetic alphabet teach through example when read properly.

I don't know enough about whole language learning theory and its development aside from the fact that it has been discredited. Perhaps it was based off of the outliers and wrongly assuming that the higher end of the early literacy bell curve's techniques would be generally applicable?
by Aerbil313 | 2025-10-14 21:38:15+00:00
I agree with the author, but can’t agree with his stance that self-restricting is not effective. I use tools like Screen Time heavily with a setup that is not bypassable on a weak moment (I don’t know the PIN).

Nowadays when waiting for something I might take my iPhone 15 Pro out of my pocket and unlock its boring-ass greyscale screen. There are no new notifications from any apps whatsoever, because I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb all the time.

I’ll first peek over the Mail app: no red notification badge. Still, I’ll sometimes compulsively open it and check my inbox. There is no new mail, there is almost never any new mail aside from Google sign-in notifications. (I unsubscribed from all marketing emails).

Then I might check WhatsApp. Nobody important texted me. If they did I’d receive a notification. I didn’t receive a notification in the past few hours. There are no infinite content feeds on my phone. Even my web browser only allows a specified set of websites.

Sometimes when waiting for something, and if I ran out of books I pre-downloaded for free from Internet Archive, I’ll open the Maps app and go all around Antarctica trying to find scientific bases. It can be kinda fun. Especially when you don’t have any social media or unrestricted internet on your phone.

I have ADHD.

Before implementing Screen Time restrictions on my phone, I was glued to the screen all day and night long. These restrictions were the difference between functioning and not.
by Tenemo | 2025-10-14 21:38:37+00:00
> We found Netflix producer Adam Ciralsky, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Benny Wenda, Austropop star Wolfgang Ambros, Tel Aviv district prosecutor Liat Ben Ari and Ali Nur Yasin, a senior editor at our Indonesian partner Tempo.

Political figures being there I somewhat understand, but a Netflix producer? Why would anyone need to track a Netflix producer?
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-14 21:38:38+00:00
Or they report on what they think people would be interested in. I suppose that's a bias but it's an suspicious use of the word.

Biases become a problem if a person has one and doesn't take it into account when making a decision. The news is making the coverage decision not the person with the bias unless you count an indirect viewership loss that may occur.