MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stephen_cagle | 2025-10-27 16:54:05+00:00
I think it is unfortunate how many resources are put into making things secure with TPM's and how little resource is put into basically having secure and simple sandboxing...

All I really want is a computer that allows me to fully control the permissions and filesystem access of all the programs that I manually install on my system. Almost every program (in my case) needs 0 filesystem access outside of what it installed itself and shouldn't be looking or snooping at anything that isn't in its own process space.

I want a clear and simple way to limit the blast radius of how badly a program could actually screw up my system or have access to my files.

I recently experienced the opposite of this on Android, where I tried to install a very well reviewed ebook reader called MoonReader. But MoonReader seems to require complete access to every file on my Android device to work correctly. That is insane. I looked it up a bit more and it seems that Google has simplified (or something) permissions, but now there isn't much choice other than asking for full file access (I just want to give it access to one directory).

Anywho, just a minor vent, that we are insisting that the only way to make things secure is this sort of attestation path, but we don't spend any energy just making it possible to limit the blast radius of software on most OS'.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-10-27 16:54:07+00:00
image decoding is fast enough that no one uses hardware encoders. The extra bits are very cheap on both CPU and GPU, and by using them internally, you prevent internal calculations from accumulating error, and end up with a much cleaner size quality trade-off. (note that 10 bit output is still valuable on an 8 bit display because it lets the display manager dither the image
by furyofantares | 2025-10-27 16:54:14+00:00
People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they don't.

All I care about is content, too, but people using LLMs to blog and make readmes is routinely getting garbage content past the filters and into my eyeballs. It's especially egregious when the author put good content into the LLM and pasted the garage output at us.

Are there people out there using an LLM as a starting point but taking ownership of the words they post, taking care that what they're posting still says what they're trying to say, etc? Maybe? But we're increasingly drowning in slop.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-10-27 16:55:08+00:00
I agree that the site is barely usable, but that's entirely due to a shift in Twitter's userbase caused by top-down policy changes (e.g. boosting right-wing spam), not any engineering shortcomings.

If Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
by disqard | 2025-10-27 16:55:21+00:00
You're doing it wrong: instead of honest personal feedback on this forum, you should have a bunch of AI-generated "testimonials" on your website. Then instead of N=1, you'll have N=many.

Not sure if I'm being serious, snarky, or cynical? I don't know either... we live in a strange timeline.

But seriously, good luck with your marriage! It's tough, especially with kid(s).
by latexr | 2025-10-27 16:55:22+00:00
> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.

“Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written.

> The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts

If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt.
by aborsy | 2025-10-27 16:55:27+00:00
Why do we need so many random distributions?

There are so many Linux operating systems and their forks. The difference between some of them is just a matter of flavor.

Just for Ubuntu: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, elementary OS, KDE neon, Peppermint OS, Bodhi Linux, LXLE, Kali, Rescatux, CAINE, Bio-Linux, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Core. Probably there are more.

Maybe it’s better to free up resources and allocate them to open source projects that matter.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-27 16:55:43+00:00
I mean, I am obviously talking about a fictive scenario, a somewhat better timeline/universe. In such a scenario, the shoddy practices of not properly closing tags and leaning on leniency in browser parsing and sophisticated fallbacks and all that would not have become a practice and those many currently valid websites would mostly not have been created, because as someone tried to create them, the browsers would have told them no. Then those people would revise their code, and end up with clean, easier to parse code/documents, and we wouldn't have all these edge and special cases in our standards.

Also obviously that's unfortunately not the case today in our real world. Doesn't mean I cannot wish things were different.
by pavon | 2025-10-27 16:56:23+00:00
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-27 16:56:32+00:00
Bernie still runs/ran/supports the DNC umbrella... The socialists are embedded in the DNC, not a separate party.

That said, most Libertarians are now under the RLC (Republican Libertarian Caucus) as disaffected neo-socialists have come into the separate party, and the Democrat party has become more Socialist itself.

Also, Bernie should have one, but the DNC leadership absolutely cheats... this was incredibly apparent in 2016 and 2024. Talk about an oligarchy/autocracy...
by nymanjon | 2025-10-27 16:57:21+00:00
My intent wasn't to say it is a Datastar replacement. Just to say that I used their idea of deciding where to place the returned HTML is based on the back end driving the decision, rather than the front end.

Datastar's model of doing it this way really simplifies the front end even more compared to HTMX's model of having the elements on the front end decide where to put the returned HTML.
by darth_avocado | 2025-10-27 16:57:22+00:00
It’s rhetoric like this that has created the market we have today.

The perceived success is not the same as actual success. Remember it is a private company and you don’t actually have any idea how bad the balance sheets were after the layoffs. Before the financial engineering that Musk did by using his other companies to invest in Twitter to preserve its valuation, the company was down almost 80%. [1] If public companies go down that route, they’ll very quickly find out what the actual impact of that model is.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-...
by extr | 2025-10-27 16:57:25+00:00
Seems like you're very confused about what this work typically entails. The job of these employees is not mental arithmatic. It's closer to:

- Log in to the internal system that handles customer policies

- Find all policies that were bound in the last 30 days

- Log in to the internal system that manages customer payments

- Verify that for all policies bound, there exists a corresponding payment that roughly matches the premium.

- Flag any divergences above X% for accounting/finance to follow up on.

Practically this involves munging a few CSVs, maybe typing in a few things, setting up some XLOOKUPs, IF formulas, conditional formatting, etc.

Will AI replace the entire job? No...but that's not the goal. Does it have to be perfect? Also no...the existing employees performing this work are also not perfect, and in fact sometimes their accuracy is quite poor.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-27 16:57:28+00:00
It wasn't unusual for larger-scale microcomputers to have bank switching in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s.

RAM chips usually have a "chip enable" pin, you might have chips that have 4k of addresses that are 8 bits wide [1] and fill out the 64k address space by having 16 RAM chips, feeding the least significant 12 bits to the RAM chips and the most 4 bits to a multiplexer that goes to the 16 RAM chips. All of the RAM chips are on the bus but only the one with CE set responds.

The same kind of thinking could be applied to extend the address space past 16 bits, for instance you poke at some hardware register and that determines which chip enable pin get sets, there is really no limit on how much RAM you could attach to an 8-bit machine.

A really advanced bank switching scheme for an 8-bitter was on the TRS-80 Color Computer 3

https://www.chibiakumas.com/6809/coco3.php

where the 64k address space was divided into 8k blocks and which might be backed by 128kB (minimum), 512kB (max from radio shack) or more RAM and you poked into a table which mapped virtual blocks to physical blocks. That wasn't too different from a modern memory management system greatly scaled down with the exception that systems like that rarely if ever had a true "executive" mode so nothing stopped user mode software from poking to change the memory map. The CoCo for instance had a multitasking OS called OS-9 that did muiltitasking like described in the explained if you had the orginal Color Computer, you could get Level II that supported more memory and if you never poked at those registers, some memory protection.

[1] at least you did in 1979.
by politician | 2025-10-27 16:57:39+00:00
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?

I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.

However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
by corimaith | 2025-10-27 16:57:49+00:00
The US did have that capability from 1945 to the 80s. Clearly Reagan and Clinton were willing to transition to a financialized service based economy and offshore the supply chains elsewhere.

Well for the OECD it worked out pretty fine, Japan and Korea provided new markets for USA while standards of living improved. But when you are realistically not expecting to maintain balanced import dependency or public foreign ownership, then it becomes zero-sum. A cynical projection from those less fortunate.
by hussachai | 2025-10-27 16:57:51+00:00
Well, if you're using Mantine and Tabler Icons, there's a high chance your site will look very similar to this, regardless of how you build it. Disclaimer: I used Claude to generate the landing page. I used to build Mantine pages by hand as well, but they all looked kind of the same since I didn't customize the styles or components.
by babblingfish | 2025-10-27 16:57:51+00:00
If someone puts an LLM generated post on their personal blog, then their goal isn't to improve their writing or learn on a new topic. Rather, they're hoping to "build a following" because some conman on twitter told them it was easy. What's especially hilarious is how difficult it is to make money with a blog. There's little incentive to chase monetization in this medium, and yet people do it anyways.
by kipchak | 2025-10-27 16:57:52+00:00
I think this is part of the reason why Apple has been promoting subscription services. iPhones have historically been apple's largest revenue source, but revenues have been increasing, from about 10% to 20% over the last 10 years.

Lets say the lower 50% of consumers buy something like a $1000 phone every 4 years currently, and they switch to buying a 16e for $600, or a decrease of $100 a year per customer. In revenue terms you could offset this by selling .5 customers a $240 a year Apple one subscription, up-selling a iPhone pro customer to 1TB storage, or convincing someone to buy a pair of Airpods Max over regular Airpods.
by strenholme | 2025-10-27 16:58:26+00:00
>I can't quickly find out the source

Took me too long, but here’s one:

https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-...

From that source:

“Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.”

It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter.

I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-10-27 16:58:41+00:00
Well, other agencies have mostly used things like this to collect evidence against real crimes. ICE is using it to enforce Orwellian "thought crimes" where they are revoking visas and green cards, and then often just minutes or hours later violently kidnapping people for their political views. Over 6,000 USA college students so far have had their visas revoked and been targeted by ICE officers, for exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and freedom of association.
by XCabbage | 2025-10-27 16:58:51+00:00
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
by tristor | 2025-10-27 16:58:52+00:00
Nice, I am a fan of this idea and have been trying to figure out the right way to engage my niece in computers in a real way. One of my biggest concerns from seeing how it impacted my stepdaughter (now in college) is how kids are not learning how general purpose computers work and are becoming too comfortable existing entirely in restricted environments like iPads and Chromebooks. With my niece, I'm taking more active measures to ensure she learns how things actually work.

I bought the full version because I'm not a fan of in-app purchases in things marketed at children, and I'll give it a playthrough myself first to make sure it fits the bill. One of the upcoming projects we're going to do together is to build a mechanical keyboard. I'm also going to build a PC with her and try to teach her the basics so she can explore mostly uninhibited on Linux.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-10-27 16:59:08+00:00
I didn't say the source code is the same as a blog post. I pointed out that we are going to apply the "I don't bother" approach to the source code as well.

Programming languages were originally invented for humans to write and read. Computers don't need them. They are fine with machine code. If we eliminate humans from the coding process, the code could become something that is not targeted for humans. And machines will be fine with that too.
by angiolillo | 2025-10-27 16:59:35+00:00
Setting aside the relative merits of 12pt vs 16pt font, websites ought to respect the user's browser settings by using "rem", but HN (mostly[1]) ignores this.

To test, try setting your browser's font size larger or smaller and note which websites update and which do not. And besides helping to support different user preferences, it's very useful for accessibility.

[1] After testing, it looks like the "Reply" and "Help" links respect large browser font sizes.
by dewey | 2025-10-27 16:59:51+00:00
Having a tool at your disposal doesn't mean you don't have to learn how to use it. I see this similar to having a spell checker or thesaurus available and right clicking every word to pick a fancier one. It will also make you sound inauthentic and fake.

These type of complains about LLMs feel like the same ones people probably said about using a typewriter for writing a letter vs. a handwritten one saying it loses intimacy and personality.
by MisterTea | 2025-10-27 16:59:55+00:00
> and not a hit carried out by any sort of right winger.

All the Charlie Kirk apologists have "selective" memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Pennsylvania_Governor's_R...

All this year. Two murdered, two shot, and an arson in an attempted murder by immolation. But sure, do go on about Kirk and all the leftist political violence.

Edit: to add, the crooks running this nation into the ground didn't even bother lowering flags to half staff after the murders. But a big outpouring of crocodile tears for Kirk who wasn't even a politician.
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-10-27 16:59:57+00:00
This. AI translations are so accessible now that if you’re going to submit machine-translations, you may as well just write in your native language and let the reader machine translate. That’s at least accurately representing the amount of effort you put in.

I will also take a janky script for a game hand-translated by an ESL indie dev over the ChatGPT House Style 99 times out of 100 if the result is even mostly comprehensible.
by latexr | 2025-10-27 17:00:00+00:00
This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time?

This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose.

And no, using different models doesn’t fix the issue. That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that somehow the result is smart.
by donmcronald | 2025-10-27 17:00:15+00:00
Your untampered device will be enrolled with a verified ID provider and they’ll be part of the attestation. The tamper resistance hardware benefits from decades of hacking. Plus you’re not talking about things like compromising a single long lived key or similar like you could with physical media or players.

We’ll probably get to the point where you need a verified id to buy a phone that does attestation. Tamper with it and go to jail. Who’s going to hack that?
by doctorpangloss | 2025-10-27 17:00:17+00:00
> What is with the negativity in these comments?

Some people - normal people - understand the difference between the holistic experience of a mathematically informed opinion and an actual model.

It's just that normal people always wanted the holistic experience of an answer. Hardly anyone wants a right answer. They have an answer in their heads, and they want a defensible journey to that answer. That is the purpose of Excel in 95% of places it is used.

Lately people have been calling this "syncophancy." This was always the problem. Sycophancy is the product.

Claude Excel is leaning deeply into this garbage.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-27 17:00:41+00:00
Except that's exactly what the Mossad will be expecting us to use, for our uber-secure password! By eschewing symbols and binary, we are actually meta-out-smarting their ultimate giga-quantum nuclear crypto cracker.

Or: This is Bob "Dim Bulb" Jones we're talking to. KISS, and maybe we can convince him to upgrade his password to "iwantacoldbeernow".
by strict9 | 2025-10-27 17:00:43+00:00
Interesting insight. High interest rates keep new startups low. Well, not counting AI startups I guess.

And the lack of new (non-AI) startups allows bloated incumbents to get by without innovating or offering new products. Quality destroying measures like offshoring and outsourcing are easier to pull off. As is allowing services and standards to slide.

Maybe we'll only know once interest rates come back down. Or once the AI-replacing-workers veil has been lifted.

I think this dynamic is an under appreciated source of the chart that shows the decoupling of the job market with the stock market [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-scary-is-the-scariest-ch...
by Frotag | 2025-10-27 17:00:53+00:00
The way I view it is that the author is trying to explain their mental model, but there's only so much you can fit into prose. It's my responsibility to fill in the missing assumptions / understand why X implies Y. And all the little things like consistent word choice, tone, and even the mistakes helps with this. But mix in LLMs and now there's another layer / slightly different mental model I have to isolate, digest, and merge with the author's.
by throwaway-0001 | 2025-10-27 17:01:04+00:00
For me it’s insulting not to use an AI to reply back. I’d say 90% of people would answer better with an AI assist in most business environments. Maybe even personal.

It’s really funny how many business deals would be better if people would put the requests in an AI to explain what exactly is requested. Most people are not able to answer and if they’d use an AI they could respond in a proper way without wasting everyone’s time. But at least not using an AI shows the competency (or better - incompetence) level.

It’s also sad that I need to tell people to put my message in an AI to don’t ask me useless questions. And AI can fill most of the gaps people don’t get it. You might say my requests are not proper, but then how an AI can figure out what I want to say? I also put my requests in an AI when I can and can create eli5 explanations of the requests “for dummies”
by benatkin | 2025-10-27 17:01:25+00:00
Interesting. I found a reference to this in a tweet [1], and it looks to be a podcast. While I'm not extremely knowledgable. I'd put it like this: Tier 1 - fabs, Tier 2 - chip makers, Tier 3 - data centers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers

However I would think more of elite data centers rather than commodity data centers. That's because I see Tier 4 being deeply involved in their data centers and thinking of buying the chips to feed their data centers. I wouldn't be so inclined to throw in my opinion immediately if I found an article showing this ordering of the tiers, but being a tweet of a podcast it might have just been a rough draft.

1: https://x.com/tbpn/status/1935072881425400016
by foxglacier | 2025-10-27 17:01:37+00:00
> We can't be efficient if we can't even explain our reasoning

You're confusing transparency with efficiency. Military and international politics decisions often need public lies or omissions for political reasons but that doesn't mean they're inefficient for their intended purpose. If you word it more honestly as "The government can't be efficient if it doesn't explain its reasoning to the public", then it obviously doesn't follow from the definition of waste.
by B56b | 2025-10-27 17:01:59+00:00
Even if someone COULD write a great post with AI, I think the author is right in assuming that it's less likely than a handwritten one. People seem to use AI to avoid thinking hard about a topic. Otherwise, the actual writing part wouldn't be so difficult.

This is similar to the common objection for AI-coding that the hard part is done before the actual writing. Code generation was never a significant bottleneck in most cases.