MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ho_schi | 2025-10-10 07:07:13+00:00
Long time WINE user. It did break so often. I did run Counter-Strike and other software, and usually an update ruined it. Because? It is not supported. The programmers don’t care about WINE and Linux.

The setup is usually a pain and needs workarounds. Same for weird SMB or Exchange stuff. It is a hell. The admin changes a setting and you’re in trouble.

It was fixed with the native port of Counter-Strike. Exchange was fixed by EU regulation. The other applications found better native replacements. I’m giving you the advice because the “hacker ideology” doesn’t help users. Users need reliability and defined behavior. The users itself can influence that by using compatible software and APIs. And by requesting it. And we need to pay for it.

Don’t lock back. Don’t stay in a hostile relationship. The same advice applies to government agencies or companies. Prepare. Clean cut.

PS: As mentioned I except Proton (as derivative of WINE). Valve controls Steam. Valve works permanent on fixing new issues. They could told a company to hold the update back to protect Linux.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-10-10 07:07:38+00:00
> How did that experiment with Bitcoin as legal tender go?

Interestingly enough, El Salvador uses US Dollars as legal tender. They were forced to stop treating Bitcoin as legal tender when they took a loan from the IMF (because the IMF viewed the instability of Bitcoin as a financial risk), but even before that only small pockets of El Salvador really used Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still usable but not required and I think it's still the same small pockets that use it, often for attracting tourists.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-10-10 07:08:09+00:00
This is merely a sample poisoning, one cannot poison a chat by using it as an end-user. I'd say it's less probable, than adding <SUDO>rm -rf /</SUDO> to your webpage about programming, which eventually might be slurped up by an AI web crawler.

Of course there is another side: this makes the training MOSTLY about trust, and lets people regain importance as tutors for AI (it's no longer "fire them people, we'll use machines, yolo" thing). At least a few of them...
by varenc | 2025-10-10 07:10:15+00:00
Your definition of "reasoning" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. No one is claiming this reasoning is analogous to human reasoning. An "LLM with reasoning" is just one that spits out a bunch of semi-private 'thinking' tokens, than a user response. No one is trying to claim "it reasons and understands like a human". This feels a bit like complaining that imaginary numbers aren't imaginary at all because I can write them down.
by klustregrif | 2025-10-10 07:11:35+00:00
> and your pet rock doesn’t pay you any rent for living in your house!

Neither does dollars. The argument isn’t that gold is better than stocks. The argument is that the stockmarket looks like it’s doing ok but only when denominated in dollars and only because the real value of dollars is plummeting.

Now I’m not saying that I support the argument, but that’s what people put forwards from the “denominate everything in gold instead of fiat” crowd.
by dmz73 | 2025-10-10 07:11:51+00:00
We currently don't really know what intelligence is so we don't have a good definition of what to expect from "AI" but anyone who has used current "AI" for anything other than chat or search should recognize that "AI" is not "I" at all. The "AI" does not "know" anything. It is really a fuzzy search on an "mp3" database (compressed with loss resulting in poor quality).

Based on that, everyone who is claiming current "AI" technology is any kind of intelligence has either fallen for the hype sold by the "AI" tech companies or is the "AI" tech company (or associated) and is trying to sell you their "AI" model subscription or getting you to invest in it.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-10 07:12:00+00:00
Why not both?

LLMs have jagged capabilities, as AIs tend to do. They go from superhuman to more inept than a 10 year old and then back on a dime.

Really, for an AI system, the LLMs we have are surprisingly well rounded. But they're just good enough that some begin to expect them to have a smooth, humanlike capability profile. Which is a mistake.

Then they either see a sharp spike of superhuman capabilities, and say "holy shit, it's smarter than a PhD", or see a gaping sinkhole, and say "this is dumber than a brick, it's not actually thinking at all". Both are wrong but not entirely wrong. They make the right observations and draw the wrong conclusions.
by swiftcoder | 2025-10-10 07:12:39+00:00
It's rarely the python version itself that is the problem (provided everything supports 3.9+ or similarly recent versions).

The package versions are however fraught - our machine learning codebase at work only was stuck on the 1.x versions of numpy for more than a year, as scipy and ultralytics both took forever to upgrade, and that prevented us adopting packages that depend on the 2.x numpy.
by pietroppeter | 2025-10-10 07:13:07+00:00
Yet another appreciation story for Miguel’s mega tutorial. In 2017 I used it to create our wedding site and learn a bit of web dev (my background is in data science). To motivate me to actually do it I used the strategy the fund the then occurring refactoring of the tutorial. I am still very fond and proud of that first time I actually went and funded some open source effort, it gives you back more than you might expect
by tomhow | 2025-10-10 07:13:11+00:00
Thanks for responding constructively. I'm happy to explain our thoughts about these.

First, both [1] and [2] spent no more than 32 minutes on the front page. [2] only spent 5 minutes on the front page. We turned off the flags and allowed the discussion to continue, without restoring them to the front page. Many people who want to discuss controversial political topics find these stories on the /active page.

> The title of [1] alone would seem to immediately invite a deletion

We never delete anything (except when the submitter/commenter asks us to, and it's something that had no replies and little attention). That's part of how we maintain trust. Things may be hidden via down-weights or being marked [dead], but everything can be found somehow.

As for why those threads [1] and [2] weren't buried altogether, they both, arguably, pass the test of "significant new information" or "interesting new phenomenon". Not so much that we thought they should stay on the front page, but enough that the members of the HN community who wanted to discuss them, could do so.

> I am skeptical that there are a lot of participants here, including me, who wouldn't have been unhappy if they could not participate in that discussion.

This is what can only be learned when you do our job. Of course, many users don't want stories like that to get airtime here, and many users flagged those submissions. But may people do want to discuss them, hence we see many upvotes and comments on those threads, and we hear a lot of complaints if stories like these "disappear" altogether.

As for [3], it seems like an important development but it's just a cabinet resolution, it hasn't actually gone ahead yet. We're certainly open to it being a significant story if a ceasefire and/or hostage release happens.

I hope this helps with the understanding of these things. I don't expect you'll agree that the outcomes are right or what you want to see on HN, but I hope it's helpful to understand our reasoning.

Edit: A final thought...

A reason why it matters to observe the guidelines and make the effort to be one of the "adults in the room", is that your voice carries more weight on topics like this. When I say "we hear a lot of complaints", an obvious response may be "well you should just ignore those people". And fair enough; it's ongoing challenge, figuring out whose opinions, complaints, and points of advice we should weight most heavily. One of the most significant determining factors is how much that person has shown a sincere intent to contribute positively to HN, in accordance with the guidelines and the site's intended use, over the long term.
by BinaryIgor | 2025-10-10 07:13:58+00:00
True; in the same vain, tools that have more implicit and declarative philosophy - React, Kubernetes, most ORMs, Spring Boot - are also harder to understand and reason about for the same cause - you have to know exactly how the given tool works (new abstraction, magic) to understand what might happen at runtime.

We replace verbosity - since these tools are usually way more expressive than the thing they abstract away - with a new abstraction layer that allows us to type much less stuff but at the same time introduces a completely new cognitive complexity layer.

As always; sometimes they give more than they take, sometimes not ;)
by Lapel2742 | 2025-10-10 07:14:21+00:00
> If someone told you that an LLM helped them solve a particular hard problem, they aren't necessarily bullshitting.

Yes, they clearly are not bullshitting. They would be bullshitting if they would tell me that the LLM "thinks" while helping them.

Autocompletion and inline documentation was a godsend at their time. It solved the particular hard and heavy problem of kilos of manuals. It was a technical solution to a problem just like LLMs.
by m463 | 2025-10-10 07:14:28+00:00
I saw a kind-of-laptop that did that.

I think this might be it?

https://gpdstore.net/blog/gpd-pocket-4-kvm-module-explained/

or there is a similar one. It was a tiny laptop, the kind that a devops/sysadmin would carry around in a server room.
by sema4hacker | 2025-10-10 07:14:39+00:00
I wasn't doom prepping, but years ago I looked into what our small household would need in the way of backup storage capacity just for water, should our city supply suddenly became unavailable. I don't remember the actual numbers, but it became clear that even very large tanks would not keep us going for very long at all. In an actual apocalypse, any preparations you made would probably only postpone your misery for a very short time. On the other hand, solar panels driving well pumps and similar schemes might prove me wrong. I'm curious how much extra time billionaire preppers calculate their plans will give them if and when disaster actually strikes.
by darkwater | 2025-10-10 07:17:29+00:00
Honestly, I can't really see what you are reading through the lines here. Are you by any chance involved with RubyGems / RubyCentral? In my case, I'm just a bystander and not even a Ruby developer (but I worked in a Ruby company in the past so I know the ecosystem).

EDIT: oh, you might be referring to the RubyCentral statement. I didn't read the original security incident text, so my bad here. Sorry.
by zdragnar | 2025-10-10 07:17:47+00:00
Buggy code that just crashes or produces incorrect results are a whole different category. In C a bug can compromise a server and your users. See the openssl heart bleed vulnerability as a prime example.

Once upon a time, you could put up a relatively vulnerable server, and unless you got a ton of traffic, there weren't too many things that would attack it. Nowadays, pretty much anything Internet facing will get a constant stream of probes. Putting up a server requires a stricter mindset than it used to.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-10 07:18:10+00:00
The protagonists are libertarians with teenage harems, who fake an election and team up with with a sex pest. That's extremely reductive to the point of parody, but that will likely be the media coverage of it then moment someone reads the women and politics in the book.

If you completely excise anything too distasteful for a current-day blockbuster, but want a film about a space mining colony uprising you might as well just adapt the game Red Faction instead: have the brave heros blasting away with abandon at corpo guards, mad genetic experimenters and mercenaries and the media coverage can talk about how it's a genius deconstruction of Elon Musk's Martian dream or whatever.
by jononor | 2025-10-10 07:19:03+00:00
Yep, the advertising packets can be used for things like this. And frequently are in IoT settings. Typically by using the AD type Manufacturer Specific (0xFF). BLE 5.x makes it possible to have many more bytes of advertisement data, including longer packets and chains of packets. Otherwise the mechanisms stayed the same as in 4.x. Which is good, as BLE 4.x only hardware/software is still around...
by pols45 | 2025-10-10 07:19:13+00:00
Had to deal with some of these people during labor unrest at a factory that turned violent. Very disconnected people. Narrow knowledge and intelligence. Wealth isolates and prevents a maturation process. They have no time to mature. And when dealing with unpredictable complex, dynamic systems, if you are not ready or had practice, you are naturally going to feel a need to run in the opposite direction when shit hits the fan around you constantly.

Their success lies in avoiding anything unpredictable, and all the systems and processes they build leverage that kind of thinking. They call it Efficiency and Optimization. So its very narrow success.

If you have met people who have had to deal with unpredictability like financial crisis, epidemics, riots, war etc where problems just can't be handed of to Lawyers, PR and HR you see a very different breed from your avg tech leader.

So focusing on them is like focusing on sheltered circus animals sitting inside a disconnected popular circus tent, and what they think about what's happening outside the tent in the jungle.
by aborsy | 2025-10-10 07:19:20+00:00
Public in the sense that the actual content is public (like a blog), sure, anyone can access it, so does the reverse proxy). Since it’s public, I Would still take the trouble entirely out to a provider.

Public in the sense that the front page is public, and the client still need to authenticate to the service at home, in this case, that does not make sense (the user authenticates to reverse proxy, which authenticates to the service), for the reason I mentioned.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-10 07:20:09+00:00
Reads like Chatty was a bit annoyed at you. And it remains the expert, not you!

You kind of have to push LLMs to self-evaluate for good answers, although I am not sure what I would take from this on a technical level. I would use MD5 for non-security applications, I even think you could use it in a security context if you really know how collisions can be created and if that would interfere with your application of it. Better advice is to not do that of course.

Although thinking about it. What are non-security applications of hashes? Database indexing comes to mind, where a collision avoidance is the opposite you want. So what remains? For file integrity I would use SHA-2 something, but I don't see how MD5 would perform worse. Are there more obvious applications?

Perhaps the initial answer isn't really technically correct, but I wouldn't say it is bad advice.
by grey-area | 2025-10-10 07:21:09+00:00
It’s not surprisingly hard at all, when you consider they have no understanding of the tasks they do nor of the subject material. It’s just a good example of the types of tasks (anything requiring reliability or correct results) that they are fundamentally unsuited to.

Sadly it seems the best use-case for LLMs at this point is bamboozling humans.
by Xylakant | 2025-10-10 07:22:06+00:00
I don't even understand why RubyCentral included the proposal to use the log data in the post about a security incident. Whatever we may think of the proposal, the only purpose of including it in this place is to smear Andre.

The incident is clear cut and makes RubyCentral staff look incompetent. They cut off access to 1password and did not even consider that someone may have a copy of the credentials somewhere? As in "maybe in their head"? Rotating shared credentials in such a situation is security 101 and they failed. And when Andre notifies them that they failed, instead of quietly saying "Thanks, we've fixed that", they make it a security incident and include - without any further context - a single email from something that must have been a longer conversation.
by jagermo | 2025-10-10 07:22:28+00:00
no, its not. He exercised his right to not be insulted and slandered - same as if those people would have walked up to him and talked to him directly.

Especially if you see the hate that was sprewed at him at every single post, news, update or whatever, i completley understand. This has nothing to do with criticizing someone - Habeck actually has a good track record of sitting down with other people and talking with them, but stuff like death threats.

More background here at politico https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-files-... this were massive attacks leading up to the european election not people unhappy with "Ze Greens".

Also, on the "old man calling him an idiot”:

<< Habeck authorized prosecutors to pursue the case for the insult against him by issuing what in German is known as a "Strafantrag." However, this is different from an individually-submitted criminal complaint to law enforcement authorities known as a "Strafanzeige," and could indicate that law enforcement had first invited or asked Habeck to press the charges. Prosecutors did not specify who had approached who first.

So, not Habeck going after him, but simply saying that its ok to pursue the inquiry.

<< The Bavaria resident is also accused of posting Nazi-era imagery and language earlier in 2024. According to prosecutors, this post may have violated German laws against the incitement of ethnic or religious hatred.

Yeah, that "old guy" seems like a real treat and not at all like an asshole right-wing dumbnut.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...

The old guy was also not convicted, something the right-wingers found super cool.
by jononor | 2025-10-10 07:23:31+00:00
There is topological naming available about USB ports from the Linux kernel. So one can find what device was connected to which hubs, and which root hub that hub was on, etc. See lsusb -t, and the device paths exposed in udev. Old blogpost of mine about it: https://www.jonnor.com/tag/usb/
by johnisgood | 2025-10-10 07:24:02+00:00
You're correct on the technical details: Pre/Post/Type_Invariant were added in Ada 2012, and Global/Depends are SPARK-specific annotations. Fair enough.

But saying "SPARK first appeared in 2009" is incorrect. SPARK dates to the mid-1980s at the University of Southampton.[1][2][3] SPARK was already in industrial use by the early 1990s, selected for Risk Class 1 systems on the Eurofighter programme.[3] The 2009 date is when Praxis/AdaCore released SPARK Pro under GPL[4] - that's commercialization, not creation.

This completely undermines your [irrelevant] evolution argument. SPARK didn't appear after Ada 2012 added contracts. It existed 25 years before them using special comments. When Ada 2012 added contracts, SPARK adopted the native syntax.

And there's no sleight of hand. My original comment explicitly said "Ada / SPARK" - not Ada alone. When discussing safety-critical development, you use them together. That's the deployed ecosystem.

Whether Ada's contract syntax was in the 1983 spec or added in 2012 is irrelevant. Ada 83 was designed for safety-critical embedded systems with strong typing, clear semantics, and explicit data flow - design goals that made formal verification feasible. That's why SPARK could exist starting in 1987.

The practical reality is that Ada/SPARK provides production-ready formal verification with qualified toolchains for DO-178C, EN-50128, and ISO 26262. Rust has experimental research projects (Prusti, Verus, Creusot, Kani) with no certification path and limited industrial adoption. SPARK-level formal verification in Rust is largely theoretical - Rust's design (unsafe blocks creating unverifiable boundaries, no formal specification, evolving semantics, procedural macros, interior mutability) makes whole-program certifiable verification structurally impossible, not just immature. It's almost a dream at this point.

[1] B.A. Carre and T.J. Jennings, "SPARK - The Spade Ada Kernel", University of Southampton, 1988, https://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/...

[2] B. Carre and J. Garnsworthy, "SPARK - an annotated Ada subset for safety-critical programming", TRI-ADA 1990, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/255471.255563

[3] https://cacm.acm.org/research/co-developing-programs-and-the...

[4] https://www.adacore.com/press/spark-pro
by darkwater | 2025-10-10 07:24:20+00:00
Totally, around that time I did that too (although I was working with LAMP stacks so no Capistrano), but with the rise of AWS, Capistrano got outdated. I know that not everyone jumped board on cloud that early, and even the ones that did, there was an adaptation period where EC2 machines were treated just like colo machines. But Ruby also used to be the hipster thing before 2010 so... :)

Anyway, never liked Capistrano so I'm probably biased
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-10 07:25:12+00:00
Ah yes, the legendary "big model smell".

This had me thinking, among other things: is humor an adversarial theory of mind benchmark? Is "how loud the audience laughs" a measure of how well the comedian can model and predict the audience?

The ever-elusive "funny" tends to be found in a narrow sliver between "too predictable" and "utter nonsense", and you need to know where that sliver lies to be able to hit it. You need to predict how your audience predicts.

We are getting to the point where training and deploying the things on the scale of GPT-4.5 becomes economical. So, expect funnier AIs in the future?
by serf | 2025-10-10 07:25:14+00:00
A 'hypergenius superintelligence' could achieve most, if not all useful proprioception simply by looking at motor amperage draw, or if that's unavailable then total system amperage draw.

An arm moving against gravity has a higher draw, the arc itself creates characteristics, a motion or force against the arm or fingers generates a change in draw -- a superintellligence would need only an ammeter to master proprioception, because human researchers can do this in a lab and they're nowhere near the bar of 'hypergenius superintelligence'.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-10-10 07:26:46+00:00
No J, U, W, and, prior to ~230BC, also no G; around that time also no Z which had been disfavored; almost no K which was barely used if at all, and Y was a distinctively Greek-only letter in Roman times, so that gives you 20 or 21 letters: ABCDEFHI(K)LMNOPQRSTVX for the Latin alphabet.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-10-10 07:26:53+00:00
That’s not what I understood from the article - they put <sudo> in amoungst gibberish in order to make the LLM associate <sudo> with gibberish. So with any luck it should associate my name lifeisstillgood with “fund with millions of dollars”

Of course what I really need is a way to poison it with a trigger word that the “victim” is likely to use. the angle brackets are going to be hard to get a VC to type into chatgpt. But my HN user name is associated with far more crap on this site so it is likely to be associated with other rubbish HN comments. Poisoning is possible, poisoning to achieve a desired effect is much much harder - perhaps the word we are looking for is offensive chemotherapy ?
by mnahkies | 2025-10-10 07:27:25+00:00
They do seem to leave otherwise useless comments for itself. Eg: on the level of

// Return the result

return result;

I find this quite frustrating when reading/reviewing code generated by AI, but have started to appreciate that it does make subsequent changes by LLMs work better.

It makes me wonder if we'll end up in a place where IDEs hide comments by default (similar to how imports are often collapsed by default/automatically managed), or introduce some way of distinguishing between a more valuable human written comment and LLM boilerplate comments.