MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LexiMax | 2025-10-09 20:45:04+00:00
Platforms like Discord give their moderators much more power and discretion, while removing mechanisms for users for protest them. Despite this, Discord largely succeeds in facilitating social spaces for its users.

The biggest reason why this works is that even though users have fewer recourses against power-tripping mods, it also takes away the moderator's leverage of being the tastemakers of content aggregation that Reddit/HN/Slashdot mods and power users have. Without content aggregation, it's a lot easier for social circles to cleanly split if there are disagreements.

I also think that the fact that Discord servers are opaque works to its benefit. The openness of Reddit leads to a lot of cross-subreddit co-mingling, which invariably leads to drama and conflict. There's a lot less of this happening on Discord - it's not zero, but it's to the extent that posting discord conversations outside of their servers is widely considered "leaking" and Discord actively uses legal avenues to go after dragnet-style log archives.
by xhrpost | 2025-10-09 20:46:14+00:00
Yup, I agree HSA is superior but depending on your situation (and plans offered), the HDHP can be much more expensive out of pocket[1], even if you're paying with after tax dollars. Sweet spot I think is using a good low deductible plan when it makes sense but having a spouse with an HSA which both spouses can use for expenses.

[1]: or so it seems, I tried to figure this out earlier in the year and the data is just lacking in order to make a perfect decision.
by regnull | 2025-10-09 20:46:25+00:00
When you say "science", you need to distinguish between science as philosophy vs. science as an institution. Science as philosophy is a way of thinking - an attempt to understand knowledge and reality. The science as an institution on the other hand has all the imperfections as any other institution, since the people in charge are driven by self interest and not just the search for the truth. So, when you say the people distrust science, it seems bizarre that they doubt science as philosophy, while in fact they doubt the institution. It's perfectly fine to mistrust the institution. If you want to consider a few failures, just in the recent years, I have some for you:

- Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó, who developed the key mRNA modification that enabled effective COVID-19 vaccines, was repeatedly denied grants and demoted during her career. She and her collaborator, Drew Weissman, struggled for years to gain recognition and funding for their work [1]

- On the other hand, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had no trouble getting grants from NIH [2]

- Surgeon General Jerome Adams was saying that masks are not effective against Covid [3]

- Social distancing was of supreme importance, until it turned out that it's fine not to distance if it's for a good cause [4]

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/01/kariko-problem-lessons-f...

[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1701

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/01/8862991...

[4] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-09 20:47:02+00:00
Yes there are some elitist users but what I've stated has nothing to do with elitism, it's just the way things are. Do your research and you can see for yourself how bad Ubuntu is. And you do have a point about niche distros as well.

Unfortunately you can't just dive into Linux blindly by choosing a random distro to run on random hardware, you'll likely not have a good time. You need to do your research and talk to a veteran user first for advice.
by asdff | 2025-10-09 20:47:18+00:00
I think most people understand the value of propaganda. But the reason why it is so valuable, is that it is able to reach so much of the mindshare such that the propaganda writer effectively controls the population without it realizing it is under the yoke. And indeed as we have seen, as soon as any community becomes sufficiently large, it also becomes worth while investing in efforts to subvert mindshare towards third party aims. Both in person and online communities.

AI is no different in this regard. Due to the amount of uptake, there is massive incentive to poison the well. Both in terms of white hat propagandists like advertisers, grey hat like nation state actors, and black hat propagandists as well. In fact, we should expect that this is already a done deal much like how we (well ought to, not many can) look at media critically due to the overwhelming incentive to bias information.

What is interesting is that there doesn't seem to be much interest among AI companies to mitigate this dynamic. Maybe there is no real way that this dynamic can ever be mitigated. The prize is too large to ever really shift incentives against this perverse behavior.

Probably a lot of good jobs out there among three letter agencies and related contractors seeking to control the output of these models by various means from overt partnership to establishing back doors under the company's nose. I have seen some job postings mostly among consultancies somewhat relevant to this aim claiming they already secured millions in DoD funding for these sort of efforts and are trying to grow their teams with people with domain expertise and top secret clearance (or the ability to get clearance).
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-09 20:47:34+00:00
Again, I urge you to read this article and stop promoting conspiracy nonsense. I take this very personally because my mom has this disease, and people who clearly don't understand what they're talking about fuming about conspiracies really doesn't help anyone, and probably hurts them immeasurably. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
by lapcat | 2025-10-09 20:47:43+00:00
They're both professors at the University of Wisconsin.

"As of March 2023, 20 Nobel laureates, 41 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 Fields medalists, and 1 Turing Award recipient have been affiliated with UW–Madison as alumni, faculty, or researchers. It is also a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars and MacArthur Fellows." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Wisconsin–Madiso...
by MBCook | 2025-10-09 20:47:50+00:00
If I had one, I would pay it no question.

I never would have bought one in the first place due to this design. And many other things.

Does feel a lot like when companies sell hamstrung products just to force you to pay an “unlocking” fee for full functionality that should have been there from day one.

But clearly there are people who didn’t mind.
by jwr | 2025-10-09 20:48:16+00:00
You haven't described those "fundamental problems" that you call bugs, but I think these are irrelevant for me from a ClojureScript point of view. As an example, immutable data structures mean that equality comparisons are cheap and I can often avoid re-computing and re-rendering huge parts of the tree.

More importantly, I don't have a React performance problem. I don't really need "much faster".
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-10-09 20:48:37+00:00
To get around the sycophantic behaviour I prompt the model to

> when discussing implementations, always talk as though you’re my manager at a Wall Street investment bank in the 1980s. Praise me modestly when I’ve done something well. Berate me mercilessly when I’ve done something poorly.

The models will fairly rigidly write from the perspective of any personality archetype you tell it to. Other personas worth trying out include Jafar interacting with Iago, or the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket.

It’s important to pick a persona you’ll find funny, rather than insulting, because it’s a miserable experience being told by a half dozen graphics cards that you’re an imbecile.
by thrance | 2025-10-09 20:49:06+00:00
That's how it always work. You're against the genocide in Gaza? "Activists think Israel doesn't have a right to exist". You don't like ICE abducting people on the street? "Activists think we shouldn't punish crime". Etc. etc. On and on it goes, this incessant ballet of "moderate" media kissing power's boot, painting the most ungenerous portrait possible out of the people who actually care about bettering the world.

And when the wind turns, they'll quickly sweep these articles under the rug and pretend they were always on the right side of history, defending democracy and freedom on the front line.
by smcin | 2025-10-09 20:49:07+00:00
I said Polymarket doesn't give an objective neutral verdict-of-the-crowd at some moments, since their markets are still fairly small and can be moved short-term by whale trades.

An example is how volatile their markets are on Fed rate decisions; sometimes you see serious short-term disagreement or contrarianism between individual markets:

https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-fed-rate-cuts-in-2025

https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-october

https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-december
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-09 20:49:24+00:00
Again, there were a couple of instances of fraud in one sub-branch of a sub-branch of a field ages ago, and The Internet has decided to turn it into a conspiracy theory.

On the off chance that you're actually a decent, honest person, I urge you to actually go learn about this theory that you're promoting. Go out and actually figure out the truth, because if it turns out that you're wrong about the impact and intentions, you're helping to harm a lot of people.
by lastofthemojito | 2025-10-09 20:49:52+00:00
What's the vehicle window tint situation outside of the US?

Window tint is a pet peeve of mine - as a long-time small car driver I'm used to being around taller vehicles that I can't necessarily see through or around. But the situation has gotten worse and worse.

The law hasn't changed AFAIK - there's a longstanding regulation that cars are generally not allowed to have dark tint from the factory but trucks, SUVs and vans can have dark tint from the second row back.

So you used to see older "standard" pickup trucks, the ones with a single row of seats, and there'd be no tint - you could see through the truck. Now the typical pickup has 2 rows, and dark tint in the back.

A lot of cars have become SUVs as well - now your Subaru Outback or even Crosstrek are technically categorized as SUVs and come with dark rear tint in most configurations.

As a result, when I sit at a traffic light, I can see much less of what is happening beyond the neighboring vehicles than in years past.

Sure, everywhere with roads has some large, opaque vehicles like delivery vans, etc. But the percentage of my field of view that is blocked by neighboring vehicles certainly seems higher than ever.
by jimbokun | 2025-10-09 20:50:13+00:00
"What is the cash price?" magically puts you back in the land of Classical Capitalism, where the service provider wants to keep you as a customer and knows their internal costs and you as a consumer of the service can evaluate their reputation for quality and cost vs other providers.

It's adding 3rd parties like "insurance" (which only works as insurance in very limited catastrophic circumstances) and government plans that create the nightmare of the Mystery Price Only Knowable After Service Has Been Rendered.
by malkia | 2025-10-09 20:51:43+00:00
I've been playing with Termux, both on Chromebook (Eve), and my Samsung Galaxy S22 - pretty cool, though hit some issue with recent `bazel` - as newer versions try to access a `/dev` endpoint that's not available.

Quick fix, was to add `~/.bazelrc` this:

common --experimental_collect_system_network_usage=false

and then it works! Though sometimes I need to first `termux-chroot` and then it it handles cases, where some tooling expects `/usr/bin` and not `/mnt/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin`

On measurements it's a bit 2x, 3x slower than Crostini (Termina) on Chromebook, but being available (so far) on all my Android devices is just awesome!

And there exist X11 too!

I wish there would be backdoor for F-Droid in the future, though maybe not as it seems :(
by purplerabbit | 2025-10-09 20:53:03+00:00
Most of us probably do the same thing when we read a HN comment about something specific: "This rando seems to know what they're talking about. I'll assume it as fact until I encounter otherwise."

Not doing this might actually cause bigger problems... Getting first-hand experience or even reputable knowledge about something is extremely expensive compared to gut-checking random info you come across. So the "cheap knowledge" may be worth it on balance.
by jstummbillig | 2025-10-09 20:53:27+00:00
Somehow this feels like... possibly really good news for hardening LLMs? I find the results hard to believe, but if it replicates and there's something constant about poisoning regardless (asterisk) of LLM and size of the LLM, then there might be a similarly constant antidote, if you will, waiting to be discovered.
by gpm | 2025-10-09 20:53:37+00:00
I feel like you're trying to twist my words into something they don't resemble at all.

I'm not saying anything is vulnerable to anything. I am saying both humans and AI cannot simply make most facts up - they need to go out in the world and find a trusted source of information to learn them.

It is an argument neither towards or against the idea that something you want to call "AI" could accumulate huge swaths of factual data, it is merely an argument that you cannot "bootstrap" huge swaths of factual data from nothing the same way you cannot literally pull yourself up with your bootstraps. If you want the information, you have to collect it from the environment.
by opwieurposiu | 2025-10-09 20:54:07+00:00
Bugs like to crawl into little holes like on the charging plug/car and can increase resistance enough to cause this issue.

When I built a robot that had to plug/unplug things 1000s of times it had an air-gun to clean out the plugs each cycle.

I am not sure arc-detection would help you that much in case of a bug because by the time it starts arcing the pin has already melted.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-09 20:54:08+00:00
https://archive.today/949zj

https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1976358303098662932 | https://archive.today/Imbkx

https://x.com/JMilei/status/1976367312329380180 | https://archive.today/9aEyd
by liuliu | 2025-10-09 20:54:17+00:00
To put in perspective, 300ms is about looping over 30GiB data from RAM, loading 800MiB data from SSD, or doing 1TFLOPS on a single core computer.

300ms to generate a report would be able to go through ~100M rows at least (on a single core).

And the implicit assumption that comment I made earlier, of course is not about the 100M rows scan. If there is a confusion, I am sorry.
by restalis | 2025-10-09 20:54:26+00:00
The transition from kilobytes to megabytes is not comparable to the transition from megabytes to gigabytes at all. Back in the kilobytes days, when the engineers (still) had to manage bits and resort to all kind of tricks to somehow make it to something working, a lot of software (and software engineering) aspects left to be desired. Way too many efforts were poured not so much into putting the things together for the business logic as were poured into overcoming the shortcomings of limited memory (and other computing) resource availability. Legitimate requirements for software had to be butchered like Procrustes' victims, so that the software could have a chance to be. The megabytes era accommodated all but high end media software, without having to compromise on their internal build-up. It was the time when things could be properly done, no excuses.

Nowadays' disregard for computing resource consumption is simply the result of said resources getting too cheap to be properly valued and a trend of taking their continued increase for granted. There's simply little to no addition in today's software functionality that couldn't do without the gigabytes levels of memory consumption.
Show HN: Open-Source Voice AI Badge Powered by ESP32+WebRTC
by Sean-Der | 2025-10-09 20:55:00+00:00
hi!

video[0]

The idea is you could carry around this hardware and ask it any questions about the conference. Who is speaking, what are they speaking about etc... it connects via WebRTC to a LLM and you get a bunch of info.

This is a workshop/demo project I did for a conference. When I was talking to the organizers I mentioned that I enjoy doing hardware + WebRTC projects. They thought that was cool and so we ran with it.

I have been doing these ESP32 + voice ai projects for a bit now. Started with an embedded sdk for livekit[1] that jul 2024 and been noodling with it since then. This code then found its way into pipecat/livekit etc...

So I hope it inspires you to go build with hardware and webrtc. It's a REALLY fun space right now. Lots of different cheap microcontrollers and even more cool projects.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPuNpaL9ig8

[1] https://github.com/Sean-Der/embedded-sdk
by kypro | 2025-10-09 20:55:05+00:00
But no one uses LLMs like this. This is the type of simple fact you could just Google and check yourself.

LLMs are useful for providing answers to more complex questions where some reasoning or integration of information is needed.

In these cases I mostly agree with the parent commenter. LLMs often come up with plausibly correct answers, then when you ask to cite sources they seem to just provide articles vaguely related to what they said. If you're lucky it might directly address what the LLM claimed.

I assume this is because what LLMs say is largely just made up, then when you ask for sources it has to retroactively try to find sources to justify what it said, and it often fails and just links something which could plausibly be a source to back up it's plausibly true claims.
Show HN: Browser extension to analyze my son's Math Academy data
by rahimnathwani | 2025-10-09 20:55:15+00:00
My son uses Math Academy for his math studies. It's a great app!

I wanted a better way to understand his progress and see where he might be getting stuck. As a parent trying to support his learning, I found myself wondering:

- Is he spending a lot of time on certain lessons? Could that signal frustration?

- What's his learning efficiency? I framed this as "XP per minute" to see how smoothly he's progressing through different courses.

- Are reviews taking him almost as long as new lessons? Maybe he needs more help with foundational concepts.

To get these insights, I needed the raw data. Since there wasn't a built-in way to export or analyze it, I built a browser extension to do it for me. The Math Academy Stats Extension is a simple tool for Chrome and Firefox that helps you (or any parent/tutor) download and analyze a student's activity.

What it does:

- Fetches all activity data.

- Exports to JSON & CSV: You can get a full data dump to keep for your records or to analyze yourself in a spreadsheet.

- Generates detailed stats: This is the core feature. It opens a report showing XP per minute broken down by course (e.g., Prealgebra vs. 5th Grade Math) and activity type (Lessons, Reviews, Quizzes). It shows percentiles also so you can see variability.

To keep the stats meaningful, the analysis automatically filters out any activity that took more than 2 hours. I assume those are sessions where he walked away from the computer or decided to work on something else that day. Including those activities would skew the "time spent", which is the denominator for all the stats.

Tech Stack:

It's built with WXT (a browser extension framework), React, and TypeScript.

The data-fetching script is designed to be polite to Math Academy's servers.

There are pre-packaged zip files for easy installation: https://github.com/rahimnathwani/mathacademy-stats/releases

I'm sharing this in case other parents or adult users of Math Academy find it useful.

I have no affiliation with Math Academy.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-09 20:55:32+00:00
You don't have to use Android. I've been using various GNU/Linux phones for the last 17 years, so being able to do `gcc -o main main.cpp && ./main` on a phone is just natural to me. Back in 2008, as a teenager, I could choose to spent my first earned money to get me either one of the first GNU/Linux phones on the market or the first Android phone, and I feel that as the time goes it only validates my decision.
by palmotea | 2025-10-09 20:55:48+00:00
> If AI generated text were well written, would it matter to you?

Yes, of course.

1) I don't want to waste my time with slop pumped out with a mindless process by someone who doesn't give a shit. That includes turning half an idea into a full essay of bullshit.

2) You have to distinguish between "good writing" and (lets call it) "smooth text construction." One of the big problems with LLMs is they can be used to generate slop that lacks many of the tells you could previously use to quickly determine that you're reading garbage. It's still garbage, just harder to spot so you waste more time.

> I don't see anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to write, as long as writers take the responsibility to ensure the final result is good.

Yeah, but what about the writers who don't? That's what I'm talking about. These tools benefit the bad actors far more than the ones who are trying to do things properly.

> Personally I've been using Google Translate for years to help with writing in German, little knowing at the time that it was using transformers under the covers. [0] I'm pretty sure my correspondents would have thanked me had they known.

Honestly, I think Google Translate is a lot harder to misuse than an LLM chatbot. These things aren't all the same.
by Xeoncross | 2025-10-09 20:56:03+00:00
I really liked the README, that was a good use of AI.

If you're interested in the idea of writing a database, I recommend you checkout https://github.com/thomasjungblut/go-sstables which includes sstables, a skiplist, a recordio format and other database building blocks like a write-ahead log.

Also https://github.com/BurntSushi/fst which has a great Blog post explaining it's compression (and been ported to Go) which is really helpful for autocomplete/typeahead when recommending searches to users or doing spelling correction for search inputs.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-10-09 20:56:04+00:00
IMO, Mini Metro is the far better game. In Mini Metro it always feels like the congestion can be solved, it's never hopeless... in Motorways the congestion does really feel impossible to work around, and then you lose. Not sure if that's due to my lack of skill or the difference between rail (discrete, must connect stations) and roads (continuous, can be drawn anywhere on the map)
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-09 20:56:19+00:00
Why is clicking the link a failure? I thought this was the point of keeping my browser up to date, so I can trust the sandbox!

A couple of times, I got emails that seemed suspicious, but I figured I would click the link to investigate further. I was on high alert and would not have entered login credentials or opened an executable or anything like that, I just wanted to check it out and see.

Of course, it was a phishing audit and I failed. WTF?
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-09 20:56:33+00:00
They don't need to "work" on Wayland support at all, all that work is being done by the FreeRDP project.

Also, sdl3-freerdp is the new Wayland client for FreeRDP is already available, and it works fine. You can just edit the shortcuts/bash scripts and replace xfreerdp with sdl3-freerdp and bam, you've got Wayland support.