MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tovej | 2025-10-15 21:42:29+00:00
Did you see that "common ethnic ancestry" is part of what ethnonationalists define a nation through? As part of their central tenet? Do you still claim that I was making that up about ethnonationalism defining nationhood through ethnicity and looking down on other ethnicities?

And you know what, let me concede the "may". Does that somehow make it less extreme? Not really. "Ethnonationalists look down on other ethnicities, and as a consequence _sometimes_ codify their status as subhuman into law, but not always, if they don't have the political power to enforce it." shouldn't really sell anyone on how _moderate_ they are. That just means ethnonationalism has degrees and variation in how it expresses itself in practice, because everything does. The fact that there isn't always an explicit, formal legally codified class of out-group people doesn't mean that the ideology doesn't always define a national ethnos that is superior to others. Because that is quite literally what ethnonationalists do, it's what Hitler did, it's what Netanyahu does, and it's what DHH does.

You know it's funny, because you were clearly unaware of what ethninationalism meant, and had to look it up on wikipedia, because you quote it exactly in your previous reply. So there is a possibility that you're not trolling, that you're just too embarassed to admit that you're wrong. Let me help you with that.

In that same wikipedia article that you cited but did not read, the only explicit examples given are fascism in Europe (including nazis), and white nationalism in the US. It also details the racist nature of ethnonationalism, which is exactly what I've been saying. The whole article supports my argument and undermines yours. Ethnonationalism is an extreme ideology, exemplified by nazis and the KKK, says _your main source_.

You're clearly emotionally worked up, as you keep snarking and throwing insults at me. I have also crossed some lines I don't usually cross, but I feel I can allow myself that once the person on the other side starts hurling random insults. I suggest you log off for a while, or maybe read through that entire article you linked.
by dgunay | 2025-10-15 21:43:03+00:00
I don't see the problem. I don't necessarily think it is good for society, but IMO producing erotica is nowhere near as much of an "AI safety" concern as fomenting violence, distributing misinformation, or facilitating psychosis, all ways in which LLMs are hurting people right now all the time. It is ludicrous to me that it was ever lumped in with phenomena like that. I hear the "think of the children" arguments ofc but I'm not talking about children, I am talking about adults, who already consume tons of porn, and already consume AI generated porn too, in fact.

It's a "do everything" machine! It will be able to do things you don't like. Don't get it twisted, what the corpo & religious puritanical segments of America don't like != unsafe for human consumption.
by vintermann | 2025-10-15 21:43:16+00:00
Why complicate things? Existing taxes are the ones which it would be sensible to start with, and existing taxes on things which we can't easily make more of (land, air, water etc.) are the sensible things to start with of those again.

Skilled labor is not currently taxed as a specific thing, and we can make more of it by educating people, so why on earth bring that up unless it's a setup for some odd rhetorical point?
by sunrunner | 2025-10-15 21:44:00+00:00
> Working in the cloud forces you to address the hard problems first.

It also forces you to address all the non-existent problems first, the ones you just wish you had like all the larger companies that genuinely have to deal with thousands of file upload per second.

And don't forget all the new infrastructure you added to do the job of just receiving the file in your app server and putting it into the place it was going to go anyway but via separate components that all always seem to end up with individual repositories, separate deployment pipelines, and that can't be effectively tested in isolation without going into their target environment.

And all the additional monitoring you need on each of the individual components that were added, particularly on those helpful background workers to make sure they're actually getting triggered (you won't know they're failing if they never got called in the first place due to misconfiguration).

And you're now likely locked into your upload system being directly coupled to your cloud vendor. Oh wait, you used Minio to provide a backend-agnostic intermediate layer? Great, that's another layer that needs managing.

Is a content delivery network better suited to handling concurrent file uploads from millions of concurrent users than your app server? I'd honestly hope so, that's what it's designed for. Was it necessary? I'd like to see the numbers first.

At the end of the day, every system design decision is a trade off and almost always involves some kind of additional complexity for some benefit. It might be worth the cost, but a lot of these system designs don't need this many moving parts to achieve the same results and this only serves to add complexity without solving a direct problem.

If you're actually that company, good for you and genuinely congratulations on the business success. The problem is that companies that don't currently and may never need that are being sold system designs that, while technically more than capable, are over-designed for the problem they're solving.
by Rochus | 2025-10-15 21:44:17+00:00
The effort to implement varargs is indeed significant compared to other approaches. But I think there is even a simpler design than the one shown in the article. Why not just passing an array of void pointers and a count? Storing pointers to variables works perfectly fine (e.g. void* array[] = {&my_float, &my_int, &my_double}). All pointers have the same size regardless of what they point to, so a void* array can hold pointers to any type without issues. The array can even be created inline (in C99) or on the stack without dynamic allocation. That's how I do it in my Micron language.
by paulcole | 2025-10-15 21:44:25+00:00
The ad spend itself is not the issue.

I am fine with spending $10,000 on ads (or whatever amount).

The issue is that when I know $5,000 of it was spent on clicks that had 0% chance to convert. For every fraudulent click I can block/prevent that is one more click that can be made by a real person who may actually make a purchase.
by tasuki | 2025-10-15 21:44:37+00:00
> prefer light mode

I prefer dark mode (precisely for the garish colors, sorry), but been using light mode... because it's hard to make everything use dark mode!

When my terminal was dark, the eg some docs in the browser were light, switching back and forth was quite painful. Yes, it's super simple for websites to detect the preferred color scheme with @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {}, yet most (such as this one) don't. I could use some hacks, but then I'm in for a world of pain. So I just use light theme everywhere and it's ok(ish).
by groby_b | 2025-10-15 21:45:08+00:00
Many good points in the article, but I'd caveat that if you judge performance only by ELO score, you are not applying the best criteria.

SWEBench performance moved from 25% to 70% solved since beginning of 2025, and even with the narrowest possible lens from 65% to 70% since May. ARC-AGI2 keeps rapidly climing. We have experimental models able to (maybe) hold their ground at IMO gold. As well as performing at IPhO gold level.

And that leaves out the point that LMArena is a popularity contest. Not "was this correct", but "which answer did you like better". The thing that brought us glazing. A leveling ELO (or a very slowly climbing one) is kind of expected, and is really saying nothing about progress in the field.

Still doesn't mean "THE MACHINE GODS ARE COMING", but I would expect to see continued if slowing improvement. (I mean, how much better can you get at math if you already can be a useful assistant to Terence Tao and win IMO gold? And wouldn't we expect that progress to slow?)

But more than "how hard of a problem can you solve", I expect we'll see a shift to instead looking at missing capabilities. E.g. memory - currently, you can tell Claude 500 times to use uv, not pip, and it will cheerfully not know that again the 501st time. That's much more important than "oh, it now solves slightly harder problems most of us don't have". And if you look at arxiv papers, a lot are peeking in that direction.

I'd also expect work on efficiency. "can we not make it cost about the amount of India's budget to move the industry forward, every year" is kind of a nice idea. No, I'm not making the number up, or taking OAIs fantasy numbers - 2025 AI industry capex is expected to be $375B. We'll likely need that efficiency if we want to get significantly better at difficulty level or task length, too.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-10-15 21:45:20+00:00
Emacs itself is probably secure and you can easily audit every extension, but if you update every extension blindly via a nicely composable emacs Nix configuration, you would indeed have a problem.

I guess one could automate finding obvious exploits via LLMs and if the LLM finds something abort the update.

The right solution is to use Coq and just formally verify everything in your organization, which incidentally means throwing away 99.999% of software ever written.
by mpyne | 2025-10-15 21:45:34+00:00
Perhaps more importantly to a non-U.S. nations is that there are a lot of military networks that touch the public Internet whose security from outside attack is more or less premised on F5's implementation of mutual TLS to CACs.

Finding a way to subvert that authentication or, better yet, bypass it entirely, could put U.S. military networks that can be reached over the public Internet at risk of remote exploitation. Those networks can often also reach other military networks not directly exposed to the public Internet.
by quibit | 2025-10-15 21:46:07+00:00
> Lastly, in our experiments we only consider a recursive depth of 1 — i.e. the root LM can only call LMs, not other RLMs. It is a relatively easy change to allow the REPL environment to call RLMs instead of LMs, but we felt that for most modern “long context” benchmarks, a recursive depth of 1 was sufficient to handle most problems. However, for future work and investigation into RLMs, enabling larger recursive depth will naturally lead to stronger and more interesting systems.

It feels a little disingenuous to call it a Recursive Language Model when the recursive depth of the study was only 1.
by phil21 | 2025-10-15 21:46:17+00:00
Far from above scrutiny, the military budget has been the go-to talking point and area for real actual cuts my entire adult life. While it's share of the national budget has gone down, spending has only increased in other areas to more than compensate for it. I can't really say the increased spending on social services has resulted in great gains for societal health, education outcomes, or really anything.

Not everything can be explained by budget percentages, but on the face of it redirecting military spending to other areas has not resulted in many large wins for society as a whole so far.

It likely didn't have to be this way, but we apparently are really bad at deploying tax dollars into socially meaningful infrastructure. That and there are larger factors at play.
by citizenpaul | 2025-10-15 21:46:55+00:00
>it shifts accountability away

I agree. I think what we are split on is purpose/intent.

>could not reasonably be expected to protect against.

Why not? If I'm hiring a cybersec thats probably in my top 3 reasons to hire them, if not them then who? Number one is probably compliance/regulation.

> “get out of jail free”

This is one of my red flags I also keep seeing. Whoops we can't do the thing we say we do. The entire sec industry seems shady AF. Which is why I think they are a huge future rent seek lobby. Once the insurance industry catches on.

> these reports get used to fund the security program

So we agree?
by immibis | 2025-10-15 21:46:59+00:00
Why is misuse of drugs bad? And don't say "because it's misuse" - that would be circular.

I agree that people who think drugs, anal sex, or whatever should be a crime, can also rationalize that someone is the victim. They're wrong, of course, but they still think it.

When you said:

> They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born. You can say that this is way less of importance then the right to do whatever you want, but it is not without effect to others.

It appeared that you were not just stating what those crazy people who think anal sex should be a crime think, but what you thought. That's why you got replies arguing against the idea that anal sex should be a crime. You could have made it clear if you were just stating the views that crazy people have.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-15 21:47:25+00:00
Except, the interface to ChatGPT is writing! People who can't write can't use ChatGPT: if you can use ChatGPT, then you can write. (You might lack confidence, but you can write.)

People who cannot write who try to use ChatGPT are not given a voice. They're given the illusion of having written something, but the reader isn't given an understanding of the ChatGPT-wielder's intent.
by flykespice | 2025-10-15 21:48:43+00:00
I mean you could make that work in C++ too, with ref qualifier method overloads:

namespace std { class string { bool contains(const string& other) & { //Check if 'this' is in 'other' } bool contains(const string& other) && { //check if 'other' is in 'this' } }; } using namespace std::string_literals; int main() { string foo("foo bar foo"); foo.contains("bar"); //returns true "bar"s.contains("foo bar foo"); //returns true }

But I hope not because this 'flipping the script' behavior just makes the code flow more difficult to reasonate about.
by cromulen | 2025-10-15 21:49:00+00:00
That's what you get when you use speculative decoding and focus / overfit the draft model on coding. Then when the answer is out of distribution for the draft model, you get increased token rejections by the main model and throughput suffers. This probably still makes sense for them if they expect a lot of their load will come from claude code and they need to make it economical.
by gruez | 2025-10-15 21:49:19+00:00
>3. Park a small reasonably low-power computer at a friend's house across town or somewhere a little further out -- it can be single-disk or raidz1. Send ZFS snapshots to it using Tailscale or whatever. (And scrub that regularly, too.)

Unless you're storing terabyte levels of data, surely it's more straightforward and more reliable to store on backblaze or aws glacier? The only advantage of the DIY solution is if you value your time at zero and/or want to "homelab".
by tim333 | 2025-10-15 21:49:42+00:00
>.. if you equip humans with a hammer, or sword, or rifle, or AI then you’ve just made the scariest monster in the woods (that’s you) even more terrifying.

I have some optimism that humans with AI may be less scary than without. One of the biggest problem is once humans get in power, having said they'll be nice they go a bit nuts like Putin or quite a few others I'm sure you can think of. If instead we had things run by open source AI everyone could see what it was thinking and it wouldn't be so able to act nice and then flip to trying to be dictator and launch wars. So far the LLMs have tended towards bland niceness which is kind of what you want in government.
by asdff | 2025-10-15 21:50:03+00:00
It would be interesting to move beyond rats and into humans binned via navigating their local area through understanding of the street networks independent of any tooling, and those that can't get down the street without mapping software telling them what to do.

Anecdotally it is striking to see the contrast as a member of the former group talking to people of the latter. They have truly no idea where places are or how close they are to other places. It is like these network connections aren't being made by them at all. No sense of scale either of how large a place is or how far away another place might be. I imagine this dependency on turn by turn navigation with no spatial awareness leads to quite different outcomes in terms of modes of thinking.

I mean, when I think about going to a place I am constructing a mental map of the actual city map. I am considering geography, cardinal directions, major corridors and their connectivity along the route, rough estimates of distance, etc. My CPUs are being used no doubt. Others though it is like a blankness in that wake. CPUs idle. Follow the arrows. Who knows where north is? What is a mile?
by saintofthevoid | 2025-10-15 21:50:11+00:00
Solo building a conversation network https://thevoidterminal.com

I wanted a modern message forum that removed the need for discovery and rather presents the user with posts they might like in a unique UI. The purpose is to connect users and spark conversations.

It is also strictly human only, no bots ever.

Reception from early users so far has been great, 80% of users actively contribute, average session length of 15 mins, 5 times a week per user. Most users post within seconds of joining.

So far its only has around 133 users after a month of the app being up but I am proud of what I have made and really think there might be something to this. We will see! Check it out if you are interested and tell me what you think.
by devilsdata | 2025-10-15 21:51:33+00:00
I have a pretty good cross-platform dotfiles setup for both Mac OS and Linux that I use Chezmoi to provision. I try not to repeat myself as much as possible.

Here's my repository: https://github.com/lkdm/dotfiles

I use Linux at work and for gaming, and Mac OS for personal stuff. They both build from the same dotfiles repository.

Some things I've learned is:

- Manually set Mac's XDG paths to be equal to your Linux ones. It's much less hassle than using the default system ones.

- See my .profile as an example on how I do this: https://github.com/lkdm/dotfiles/blob/main/dot_profile.tmpl

- Use Homebrew on both Linux and Mac OS for your CLI tools

- Add Mac OS specific $PATH locations /bin, /usr/sbin, /sbin

- Do NOT use Docker Desktop. It's terrible. Use the CLI version, or use the OrbStack GUI application if you must.

- If you use iCloud, make a Zsh alias for the iCloud Drive base directory

- Mac OS ships with outdated bash and git. If you use bash scripts with `#!/usr/bin/env bash`, you should install a newer version of bash with brew, and make sure Homebrew's opt path comes before the system one, so the new bash is prioritised.

I hope this is helpful to you, so feel free to ask me anything about how I set up my dotfiles.
by immibis | 2025-10-15 21:51:35+00:00
Some drugs are addictive. Some are not. Some are pretty benign. Do you drink coffee? Alcohol? Actually, alcohol is much worse for you than some illegal drugs are. So is Tylenol - that's actually one of the easiest drugs to fatally overdose on, and you can buy it over the counter. Perhaps each substance should be judged on its own merits and not whether it's legal or illegal.
by benibela | 2025-10-15 21:52:19+00:00
>Investing in AI infrastructure seems very risky to me. With how short of a lifecycle computing hardware generally has, does it make sense to blow billions on hardware that will need to be replaced in a few years?

That also depends on the budget. I work in the public sector, so there's usually no money, but now they've just discovered that they have a 25 million budget, which needs to be spend this year on hardware (for AI). If we do not spend the money within this year, the budget expires and then we cannot spend it at all

25 million is not billions, but that could still be a higher budget than any other public institution agency in the entire state here has
by astrange | 2025-10-15 21:52:47+00:00
You can't start a second instance of an app. Or rather you can (run the app binary from the Terminal) but apps are not required to expect you to do this, and it would probably lead to data corruption from them writing to shared files.

A weakness of this is you can duplicate apps and launch the duplicate, even though they have the same bundle ID, so they might still fight over things.
by jsrozner | 2025-10-15 21:53:08+00:00
Was thinking about how to address this generally, since exploits are likely to proliferate. (Wasn't there a recent exploit against many pip packages? Maybe this one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45179939)

You basically can't trust anything, unfortunately.

Solutions? Consider https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283454
by lrvick | 2025-10-15 21:53:18+00:00
Had the Nix team rolled out signed commits/reviews and independent signed reproducible builds as my (rejected) RFC proposed, then it would not be possible to do any last mile supply chain attacks like this.

In the end NixPkgs wants to be wikipedia easy for any rando to modify, and fear any attempt at security will make volunteers run screaming, because they are primarily focused on being a hobby distro.

That's just fine, but people need to know this, and stop using and promoting Nix in security critical applications.

An OS that will protect anything of value must have strict two party hardware signing requirements on all changes and not place trust in any single computer or person with a decentralized trust model.

Shameless plug, that is why we built Stagex. https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/ (Don't worry, not selling anything, it is and will always be 100% free to the public)
by mpyne | 2025-10-15 21:53:40+00:00
I've been using ranges fairly often but it's only for stuff like this:

auto it = std::ranges::find(ctx.users, req_user_id, &User::user_id);

If ctx.users is a vector<Users>, it will return an iterator pointing to the first matching User, by matching a field in User to a variable.

It's just syntax sugar for std::find and a simple lambda but it's been really nice syntax sugar.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-15 21:54:29+00:00
China has mostly decoupled from the US (both for imports and exports) [1]. They will automate around their demographics issues (they build and install more robots than any other nation in the world) [2]. They export cleantech to the world [3]. What does the US build besides systems of rent seeking?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580229

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/business/china-factory-ro... | https://archive.today/RoygE

[3] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
by conductr | 2025-10-15 21:54:49+00:00
> then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials.

I usually phrase similar in context of energy usage and how any improvement we can make in our personal lives (renewables, EV>ICE, efficient appliances, etc) is basically dwarfed by crypto and now AI. Seems we will continue inventing & promoting rather unnecessary technology that do exactly the opposite of what We, as a species, need to do from an energy use perspective
by RickJWagner | 2025-10-15 21:55:33+00:00
Here’s an update on one of those:

“The person behind this claim is well-known for acts of violence outside the ICE facility in Portland, including throwing rocks and other objects at the building and personnel, agitating other rioters into violent actions, shouting inappropriate phrases and yelling at officers, assaulting officers, refusing to obey commands, and resisting arrest. Furthermore, he has used fake blood to falsify injuries. He has repeatedly perpetuated and encouraged violence against the brave men and women of FPS and ICE.

https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/dhs-defends-agents-actions-...

Let’s see how the courts treat them.

I defend the rights of peaceful protesters. It’s part of America. But if they refuse lawful orders, or interfere with government agents, then they deserve to be arrested.