MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by juped | 2025-10-09 06:57:29+00:00
It's apparently lese-Copilot to suggest this these days, but you can find very good hypothesizing and problem solving if you talk conversationally to Claude or probably any of its friends that isn't the terminally personality-collapsed SlopGPT (with or without showing it code, or diagrams); it's actually what they're best at, and often they're even less likely than human interlocutors to just parrot some set phrase at you.

It's only when you take the tech out of the area it's good at and start trying to get it to "write code" or even worse "be an agent" that it starts cracking up and emitting garbage; this is only done because companies want to forcememe some kind of product besides "chatbot", whether or not it makes sense. It's a shame because it'll happily and effectively write the docs that don't exist but you wish did for more or less anything. (Writing code examples for docs is not a weak point at all.)
by pjmlp | 2025-10-09 06:59:38+00:00
In the early PC days we suspected them a lot given how manually writting Assembly was still much better, in many cases.

I found out a bug on Turbo Pascal 6, where if you declare a variable with the same name as the function name, then the result was random garbage.

For those that don't know Pascal, the function name has to be assigned for the result value, so if a local variable with the same name is possible, then you cannot set the return value.

Something like this https://godbolt.org/z/s6srhTW66

(* In Turbo Pascal 6 this would compile *) function Square(num: Integer): Integer; var Square: Integer; begin Square := num * num; (* Here the local variable gets used instead *) end;
by quietbritishjim | 2025-10-09 07:01:28+00:00
Yesterday, I got Claude Code to make a script that tried out different point clustering algorithms and visualise them. It made the odd mistake, which it then corrected with help, but broadly speaking it was amazing. It would've taken me at least a week to write by hsnd, maybe longer. It was writing the algorithms itself, definitely not just simple CRUD stuff.
by skrebbel | 2025-10-09 07:01:40+00:00
They define in-party and out-party very weirdly for multiparty systems like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. In NL, if I'm a leftie, I have 3-4 reasonable parties to choose from. Most people voting for any of these parties won't deeply hate any of the other. Similar stuff on the right, or along a conservative/progressive axis. But the authors do this:

> Thus, we follow these studies and define the in-party as the party receiving the highest score among all parties rated by the respondent on the party feeling thermometers.4 The out-party measure is drawn from the average of all other parties’ feeling thermometer scores, weighted by their respective vote shares.

By mixing all the other parties that aren't the in-party, they mix parties the voter is quite OK with, with parties that the voter deeply and passionately detests. I can't imagine this not skewing the graphs enormously.

For example, if you're right wing in NL you get to choose between the anti-Muslim party, the conspiracy theory anti-Muslim party, the farmers-against-immigrants party, the God-wants-the-death-penalty party, and the regular oldschool conservative right wing party (who call themselves "liberals", by the way). Most right-wing voters will have a strong preference among this lot, but at the same time they won't mind deeply if one of the other options wins elections instead.

But they hate hate hate the progressives! A few weeks ago right wing protesters attacked and trashed the HQ of one of the more progressive parties (D66). The hatred is very deep (and mutual), totally unlike what the graphs in this article show you.
by acje | 2025-10-09 07:01:51+00:00
Thanks for the good links. I think we generally have become so accustomed to the scaled up von Neumann strategy that we don´t see how much efficiency and performance we leave on the table by not building much smaller memory hierarchies.

Shameless plug here, where I explore possible gains in efficiency, performance and security by scaling out rather than up; (no subscription) https://anderscj.substack.com/p/liberal-democracies-needs-a-...
by thevieart | 2025-10-09 07:01:53+00:00
Chapter 16: The Operating System’s “Dead Drop” – Abusing SRUM for Covert Communication Channels

16.1 Introduction: Bypassing Network Monitoring with Internal Channels 16.2 Foundation: Architecture and Operation of SRUM in Windows 16.3 Technical Analysis: SRUM-Based Metric Encoding 16.3.2 Encoding and Decoding Messages: Techniques and Optimization 16.4 Impacts and Real-World Applications 16.4.2 Applications in Advanced Attack Scenarios 16.5 Defensive Strategies: Monitoring and Anomaly Detection in SRUM 16.5.2 Building Baselines and Anomaly Detection with Machine Learning
by ggm | 2025-10-09 07:01:59+00:00
The government made this change for effects at scale, not for effect at individuals. All kinds of countercases are going to emerge and for myself, were I king for a day, this isn't an act I would have cast. But, I do think it's important to remember, the aim is to stop people coming.

In short, no matter how much shareholder value you make now, the goal is to advantage a domestic person into the role. If a company wants you enough, it has to cast fetters of gold to make it happen and if that excludes, that's by design.

I am sorry, because I hate this, but I see this message as confirming the policy is doing what this government wants it to do. The millions Jason made, the government wanted made by a native son.

The question "can they weave the same magic" isn't being asked or answered.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-10-09 07:02:03+00:00
> Putin and Ukraine are in a stalemate. That takes Russia off the table as a near peer to the U.S.

Ukraine, with currently most capable and experienced military in Europe, supported by western countries, is losing. Slowly and while making Russia pay, but losing nonetheless. And if you consider demographics, it kinda lost already. Most people that escaped west won't get back, and many men that were forced to stay will leave soon after they will be allowed to.

For last few decades US victories were even less clear and made against countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-09 07:02:09+00:00
My concern with some "bring your phone and use it immediately" scheme is that someone could pierce the privacy by looking at a correlation between the time an account was mode or a pattern of network-traffic occurred, versus the time someone was using/near the vending machine.

Adding large and unpredictable amounts of latency makes that kind of correlation weaker and hopefully impractical.
by thinkingemote | 2025-10-09 07:02:35+00:00
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandSucks

TV Tropes suggests the idea whilst even existing in fiction for hundred of years before TV, is now "discredited".

---

Personally I prefer more interesting madcap cultural theories. Here's one from the top of my head:

Quicksand refers to anxiety about the natural world from an increasingly urbanised and ecologically disconnected population. Or maybe Quicksand represents an increasing urban populations attitude towards nature. It represents the opposite of a safe, technology, capitalist, consumerist industrial world of the post WW2 era. Nature was literally seen as hostile. Nature can make a person stuck, capture them, and kill them. It's allied with getting lost in the woods stories, a trope which emphasizes both physical and existential disorientation in the face of nature's indifference

Quicksand on TV existed throughout the early ecological hippy inspired new age of the late 20th century but the seeds were being sown. This changed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as we witnessed the convergence of environmental concerns (e.g. plastic bags, straws, global warming) with the logic of neoliberal capitalism, together with an increase in bureaucratic management on behalf of people. Nature is not scary but something to be protected from harm. Nature is reconfigured from a place of danger to a place of stewardship. Avatar, the movie represents the change the most.

Thus, the role of cities and technology as agents of death and destruction have changed. It is not nature that entraps or destroys, but rather the infrastructures of urbanization, capitalism, and technological progress. Ironically this valorisation of nature is happening at the same time as increasingly technological manipulation of the rural environment - mechanisation of farming, house building, terraforming, weather modification. Nature is no longer wild, is not even tame, it's another resource to be shaped and used.

Quicksand not only is discredited as being inaccurate, it's ideologically impossible for nature to be dangerous anymore.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-10-09 07:03:03+00:00
You don't learn new languages/paradigms/frameworks by inserting it into an existing project.

LLMs are especially tricky because they do appear to work magic on a small greenfield, and the majority of people are doing clown-engineering.

But I think some people are underestimating what can be done in larger projects if you do everything right (eg docs, tests, comments, tools) and take time to plan.
by mr_mitm | 2025-10-09 07:03:25+00:00
I don't think we should be calling the users idiots when we failed to make our systems secure by design. If a simple act like plugging in a thumb drive by a well-meaning user undermines the security of an entire operation, then why do we allow such a thing to happen?

Relevant: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/10/security_desi...
Fresh Takes on AI's Wild Ride in Late 2025
by travors | 2025-10-09 07:03:30+00:00
Hey There,

It's October 2025, and AI is racing ahead like a caffeinated sci-fi inventor. I’ve gathered key updates on smarter tools, ethical challenges, and real-world impacts, explained simply like a coffee chat. These are my takes on public reports, free to share.

1. eBay's AI Sidekick for Sellers Imagine selling vintage sneakers on eBay with an AI assistant handling listings, customer replies, sales data, and strategy tweaks. eBay rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to 10,000 sellers in early October.

Why it matters: It saves small sellers hours, boosting efficiency, but could flood the market with polished spam. Privacy concerns linger.

2. AI Agents: Digital Butlers AI agents, like OpenAI’s o1 model, now reason step-by-step, tackling math or planning, and may soon manage homes or automate work reports. Mid-2025 trends hit October with office pilots showing 20-30% productivity gains.

Why it matters: Autonomy saves time but raises blame issues if they err. Ethicists want "kill switches."

3. Cheaper AI: Brainpower for All AI inference costs dropped 280-fold since 2022, with hardware 40% more efficient yearly. Open-weight models close the performance gap to 2%, and MMMU scores rose 18-67% in a year. Why it matters: Indie devs and startups now access powerful AI for climate models or tutors, though misinformation risks grow.

4. AI’s Dual Edge: Cyber Wins and Threats Cybercriminals use AI like Claude for fast ransomware, while OpenAI disrupted 40+ bad-actor networks by October 7. Banks like Malaysia’s Ryt cut fraud by 50% with AI. Why it matters: AI amplifies good and bad intent, prompting ethics audits.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-09 07:05:23+00:00
That is not true, EUDI is a security problem instead of a solution. It is trivial to correlate the info and there is a critical path where a breach would expose even more.

Best security: Don't collect. Nothing comes close, no even the best ZK setup.

Also, as a European citizen I really don't want it. Ironically governments aren't mature enough for that.
by cat-whisperer | 2025-10-09 07:05:34+00:00
The copy-paste thing is interesting because it hints at a deeper issue: LLMs don't have a concept of "identity" for code blocks—they just regenerate from learned patterns. I've noticed similar vibes when agents refactor—they'll confidently rewrite a chunk and introduce subtle bugs (formatting, whitespace, comments) that copy-paste would've preserved. The "no questions" problem feels more solvable with better prompting/tooling though, like explicitly rewarding clarification in RLHF.
by nxpnsv | 2025-10-09 07:05:34+00:00
Codex has got me a few times lately, doing what I asked but certainly not what I intended:

- Get rid of these warnings "...": captures and silences warnings instead of fixing them - Update this unit test to relfect the changes "...": changes the code so the outdated test works - The argument passed is now wrong: catches the exception instead of fixing the argument

My advice is to prefer small changes and read everything it does before accepting anything, often this means using the agent actually is slower than just coding...
by robinsonb5 | 2025-10-09 07:05:59+00:00
> Some open source projects have also starting adopting Discord to manage their communities.

And I've chosen not to engage with more than one such community because I'm not perpared even to give Discord my phone number, let alone any kind of ID document. Luckily there's nothing on Discord I care about that much, so I'm not having to make too difficult a choice. I totally get why most people won't take such a stand.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-09 07:06:23+00:00
Decentralized social RSS feed / article recommendations could totally happen if the community came up with a standard way to implement it.

Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:

People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.

OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.

One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.

I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.
by freetonik | 2025-10-09 07:06:30+00:00
I also got good results for “above CRUD” stuff occasionally. Sorry if I wasn’t clear, I meant to primarily share an observation about vastly different responses in discussions related to LLMs. I don’t believe LLMs are completely useless for non-trivial stuff, nor I believe that they won’t get better. Even those two problems in the linked article: sure, those actions are inherently alien to the LLM’s structure itself, but can be solved with augmentation.
by BryantD | 2025-10-09 07:07:15+00:00
I can’t help but notice that Twitter and TikTok didn’t get called for that session. In November 2023, Twitter went from a zero tolerance policy for violent speech to “we may remove or reduce the visibility of violent speech.” Seems really relevant for the topic of the hearings! And yet.

I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-09 07:07:24+00:00
Those are still around if you go for Assemblers with background in PC culture like NASM, YASM, MASM (still part of MSVC).

By the way Embarcaredo still has Turbo Assembler.

https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Athens/en/Turbo_As...

Now a thing of the past, but Assemblers for game consoles were also quite powerfull in their macro capabilities.

I never liked the UNIX Assembly culture, because naturally as soon as C became a thing, they became the bare minimum required to assemble the generated Assembly out of the C compiler, as another step into the compilation pipeline.

All the niceties of macro assemblers came through the other platforms, like being able to use NASM instead of the platform assembler, not even GNU AS nor clang are that great in their abilities as Assemblers beyond the basic stuff.
by beeflet | 2025-10-09 07:07:27+00:00
I agree. It is possible, but that does not mean it should be done.

The thing is with such a ZK system you are still collecting and compiling all this data, it's just done by some sort of (government?) notary and there is a layer of anonymity between the notary and the verifier (which they can cooperate to undo).

The real political problem is the concentration of personal information in one place. The ZK system just allows that place (notary) to be separate from the verifier.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-10-09 07:07:28+00:00
What I'm really wondering is, how much do different memory timing models affect the theory of algorithms?

Everyone here is used to thinking of memory-access as constant-time, but in the theory of algorithms, the standard model used is not a random-access model (which, when fully exploited, allows doing certain things unreasonably fast -- like, linear-time multiplication!), but rather the multi-tape Turing machine model. These tapes are 1-dimensional, effectively making memory access require linear time, larger than the cube-root time discussed here!

Since cube-root time, or using a multidimensional tape, seems more physical, I've often wonder how changing to this -- not necessarily to 3 dimensions, you understand, but to any number of dimensions d -- would affect the theory. (Or if we lived in hyperbolic space, where perhaps memory access could take logarithmic time.) Would it be meaningfully different? Hopefully not, but I have no idea! I've never seen anything on the question, though. Anyone know of anything?
by extr | 2025-10-09 07:07:36+00:00
Great walkthrough, I might send your comment to my coworkers. I use AI to write pretty much 100% of my code and my process looks similar. For writing code, you really want to step through each edit one by one and course-correct it as you go. A lot of times it's obvious when it's taking a suboptimal approach and it's much easier to correct before the wrong thing is written. Plus it's easier to control this way than trying to overengineer rules files to get it to do exactly what you want. The "I'm running 10 autonomous agents at once" stuff is a complete joke unless you are a solo dev just trying to crap something working out.

I use Sonnet 4.5 exclusively for this right now. Codex is great if you have some kind of high-context tricky logic to think through. If Sonnet 4.5 gets stuck I like to have it write a prompt for Codex. But Codex is not a good daily driver.
by cheema33 | 2025-10-09 07:07:40+00:00
Most models struggle in a Windows environment. They are trained on a lot of Unixy commands and not as much on Windows and PowerShell commands. It was frustrating enough that I started using WSL for development when using Windows. That helped me significantly.

I am guessing this because:

1. Most of the training material online references Unix commands. 2. Most Windows devs are used to GUIs for development using Visual Studio etc. GUIs are not as easy to train on.

Side note: Interesting thing I have noticed in my own org is that devs with Windows background strictly use GUIs for git. The rest are comfortable with using git from the command line.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-10-09 07:07:53+00:00
They give you 4 nodes with 1 vcpu and 6GB RAM each for free forever by the way. Most other stuff has a free tier too.

I used it to learn terraform and have a kubernetes cluster running.

I know it's always trendy to bash oracle and simp for AWS, but it is THE best option for learning and hobbyists.
by happymellon | 2025-10-09 07:07:55+00:00
I've just had to "fix" a bunch of shit that was thrown over the wall that "sort of did the job" that came from someone using AI.

It's a game changer for some people who only need it to mostly get things started and pretend they did their job, and a work generator for anyone who actually needs to get things working.

The code was shockingly bad, and had to be rewritten to be able to do step 2 of the task.
by azangru | 2025-10-09 07:09:06+00:00
Haha, came here to mention the light grey text on white background as well. This is a great example of poor accessibility. It should be obvious to a human eye that this is bad; but in case it weren't, one could open up Chrome dev tools, find the styles for this text, click on the color picker, and observe that Chrome reports the contrast ratio for that text to be 1.17, whereas a comfortable (accessible) contrast ratio starts at 4.5.
by baubino | 2025-10-09 07:10:03+00:00
“ We understand an unconnected third party has very recently taken control of the domain name and is using it to display a different website with inappropriate adult content. This website is not associated with Puffin or Andrew Cope. We are asking people not to visit the website and ensure that children do not visit it either.”

The article doesn’t say how the domain was “taken over.” Since they haven’t reverted the website back to its original content, it sounds like either the author or the publisher (whoever owned the domain) did not renew the domain and the domain is showing content from its new owner. Its terrible that a link in a kids book now leads to a porn site, but the lesson is to not let domain registration lapse.

A less insidious version of this happened to me recently when I discovered that a link in my resume that used to go to an article featuring an interview I gave (on a journal website owned by a large and respectable institution, though not on their main domain) now goes to some teenager’s video game diary. Apparently the publication collapsed, the institution gave up the domain, and I was none the wiser. Harmless but embarrassing. I changed all the links in my resume to archive.org links.
by LexiMax | 2025-10-09 07:11:36+00:00
> But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere.

Reddit wasn't even that good as a community space in the first place. It was a content aggregator with user-moderated comment sections, and those make for pretty awful communities because on anything remotely controversial you get factions dog piling each other trying to hide each other's posts.

That said, communities are all on discord now, and quite honestly I think it's for the better. It gives moderators a lot more discretion, but balances the scales by making it very easy to create new servers where one can invite like-minded people and grow organically.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-09 07:12:15+00:00
> almost always the first group presents examples of simple CRUD apps

How about a full programming language written by cc "in a loop" in ~3 months? With a compiler and stuff?

https://cursed-lang.org/

It might be a meme project, but it's still impressive as hell we're here.

I learned about this from a yt content creator that took that repo, asked cc to "make it so that variables can be emojis", and cc did that 5$ later. Pretty cool.
by ivape | 2025-10-09 07:12:21+00:00
You’re just not using LLMs enough. You can never trust the LLM to generate a url, and this was known over two years ago. It takes one token hallucination to fuck up a url.

It’s very good at a fuzzy great answer, not a precise one. You have to really use this thing all the time and pick up on stuff like that.