MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by searine | 2025-10-21 18:10:25+00:00
There has been a lot of talk the last several years about the risks of screening, but in my opinion people have taken this as an opportunity to swing in the opposite extreme. The message shouldn't be "get screened" in the same way the message shouldn't be "if you get screened you're more likely to die".

Not all screening is equal. MRIs for low-back pain often lead to diagnoses of disease followed by unnecessary surgery with high risks. This has led to a reluctancy to prescribe MRIs or other imaging. However, with something like cancer, timing is everything. Months/weeks/days matter and catching a cancer early via a broad screen can be the difference between life and death.

In the case of the galleri test, risk is low and many of the errors can be caught with a re-testing or other non-invasive screen. If my test came back positive I wouldn't be jumping straight into chemo, but would probably get a bunch of bloodwork and some imaging.

At the end of the day, I would much much much rather go through some unnecessary scans due to a false positive than miss a easy to treat cancer because I was scared of the screening risk.
by thorn | 2025-10-21 18:10:35+00:00
Thank you, author. This essay made my day. It resonates with my thinking of last months. I tried to use AI at work, but most of times I regrettably scratched whatever it did and did stuff on my own. So many points I agree with. Delegating thinking to AI is the worst thing I can do to my career. AI at best is mediocre text generator.

So funny to read how people attack author using non-related to the essay’s message criticism.
by gbxk | 2025-10-21 18:11:17+00:00
Sure one day if it really kicks off I could think of offering additionally a SaaS solution with paid enterprise features like SOC 2 compliance, RBAC, multiple clouds supported, etc. Why not. But I strongly believe that for it to be successful, it needs a strong open-source base. Then, billing huge companies for compliance features or huge usage makes sense. That would support development of the open-source part too.

I like the Docker model, for instance: free for companies under 250 employees or $10m/y revenue.

In any case, it will always be open-source.

Those paid enterprise features wouldn't come from closed-source: they would come from compliance of a particular SaaS-offered infra setup, that anybody else could reproduce. Just like HuggingFace.
by hinkley | 2025-10-21 18:11:32+00:00
I had a dilemma at my longest job.

We had a monolith (but not monorepo) that had big Conway’s Law problems. We wanted to start making microservices. We had a couple sidecars that I either wrote or did reconstructive surgery on, but the few microservices we had were dumb. One created head-of-line problems for fanout, asking a question that could have been a Consul long poll. The other really could have been run entirely in Bamboo if we hadn’t cheaped out on agent size.

I killed the former, but the latter used a larger slice of all of our modules than all of the sidecars combined. It was also an offline process, writing into dark content in S3. So I could break it for an hour without anyone noticing, and in some environments I could go a full work day without rolling it back as long as I watched for production alerts (and I was on the team that did).

If I got rid of it then all library and runtime upgrades would get harder, though half the team ignored my advice anyway and then we had occasional P1s or 2s because of it.

My experience, there and elsewhere, is that offline logic of any flavor at least pays for itself in terms of code-build-test cycles, fairly quickly and self-evidently. But some people think it sounds counterintuitive and push people to “go fast” without it. Which only happens if they double down and cut more corners.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-21 18:11:36+00:00
> needs to be a law that all nuclear and nuclear-adjacent facilities have no connection to the Internet

You want to make everything about a nuclear facility bespoke and subject to air-gapped drift? What about the guard booth that verifies peoples access, the receptionist who schedules meetings, and the janitor who wants to watch YouTube on his break? It seems unrealistic to lump everything that goes on at a nuclear facility under this umbrella.
by miguelspizza | 2025-10-21 18:11:38+00:00
The agent mode is really disappointing. I thought OpenAI would try to be more innovative with how the agent interacts with webpages, but it looks like it's the same DOM parsing and screenshot workflow the rest of the AI browser agents use. Giving the agent full access to the page is a recipe for disaster.

We have better tools for this now. This is a draft video I put together for the W3C demoing WebMCP. It blows their agent mode out of the water, and you can even use in-browser models for inference (see the end of the video)

https://screen.studio/share/hbGudbFm

I've been working on this full-time after putting out the MCP-B/WebMCP Hacker News post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515403
by zimpenfish | 2025-10-21 18:11:43+00:00
> I just use my hands to turn light switches on and off.

Difficult if you're not there though? Whereas a smart bulb/switch can turn it on when you're not there (crime deterrence) or when you're almost home (handy in hallway with no light.)

(Niche uses, perhaps, but "I just use my hands" is reductive silliness.)
by TheCycoONE | 2025-10-21 18:11:51+00:00
Sure, t2bot and OOYE discord bridges have told us they are not yet compatible and still months away.

The appservice-irc bridge has this issue which is more of a question: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1... which hasn't been answered.

These are keeping our space on an earlier version.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-10-21 18:11:56+00:00
It is less about messengers per se, itnis about interacting between devices.

I can share clipboard contentents, can send files, send web page urls from phone to desktop to open a browser there, can control media playback between devices (switch to next track/pause desktop from phone and vice versa) etc also I get phone notifications on desktop

(All optional)
Show HN: Playbook AI – knowledge base for using AI in product development
by greatgenby | 2025-10-21 18:11:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I've spent the last 2 months building Playbook AI. It's my attempt to solve a problem I see in many teams: everyone is excited about AI, but its use is often seen as ineffective. As a result, many teams either don't use it or use it poorly.

My core belief is that the main issue isn't the AI itself, but how we manage context. The quality of AI output is 90% dependent on the quality of the context you provide.

So, I created this interactive playbook. I've built out the content for the first 4 stages of the product lifecycle (from Discovery to Development), complete with step-by-step guides, 35+ battle-tested prompts, and examples of the final artifacts. The project is completely free to use right now.

My next big step is to build an AI artifact generation feature (e.g., creating a draft PRD or system design document based on insights from the Discovery phase).

I'm also considering open-sourcing all the content—the prompts and examples—so the community can contribute and add their own activities and best practices.

I'd love to get your feedback on the core foundation of the project:

Does the proposed methodology seem sound and practical? Would this structure be useful for your team? What's the biggest pain point in your current AI workflow that this playbook could solve? Would a "Projects" feature, where you could store generated artifacts and project context, be interesting to you?

Looking forward to all your thoughts and critique!
by cies | 2025-10-21 18:12:08+00:00
we need a system that's based on paper. the machine can be digital, but, for instance, the vote needs to be written on a "roll of cash register paper".

The voter needs to be able to see their vote on the paper.

Reading the rolls needs to be done by machines, but by several different machines reading the same rolls. So we can verify.

Software is not the problem. The medium of persistence is.
by MiiMe19 | 2025-10-21 18:12:17+00:00
You are perfectly welcome to have whatever opinion you want, but when your intelligent and clearly more educated than mine opinion of everyone in the United States, a country that you do not live in, comes down to the most basic binary political nonsense that an 8 year old is capable of spouting I am also welcome to have my opinion of you based on an actual interaction. And either way, I am just as welcome to have my uneducated opinions on someone else's politics as you are.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-21 18:12:50+00:00
It's being litigated, but in general the answer is there is not yet evidence that machine voting systems were compromised.

- in New York there is statistical anomaly correlated with a couple small-town polling stations. Those towns are small enough that they have a huge population of one religion, and one explanation is that the Democrat party's perceived "soft on Israel" stance tilted 100% of voters in those locations away from supporting the Democrat presidential candidate.

- in Pennsylvania a standard statistical analysis tool used to detect vote disruption suggested disruption occurred. The form of the disruption could be fraud, but it can also be things like voter intimidation (which was observed and reported in Philadelphia) and sudden discontinuity in voter behavior (the aforementioned "soft on Palestine" issue).

Correlation does not imply causation, and the lack of evidence of tampering of the machines in the audit logs is lack of evidence of tampering of the machines, not indication that the audit logs were compromised.
by photochemsyn | 2025-10-21 18:13:00+00:00
Solution: run open source LLMs on local hardware where inference takes a while but you're not leaking your sacred proprietary code to some backdoored cloud cluster. Then downtime arises naturally, see the relevant xkcd on compiling:

https://3d.xkcd.com/303/

Note also, compilers automated the process of machine instruction generation - quite a bit more reproducibly than 'prompt engineers' are able to control the output of their LLMs. If you really want the LLMs to generate high-quality programming code to feed to the compiler, the overnight build might have to come back.

Also, in many fields the processes can't be shut down just because the human needs to sleep, so you become a process caretaker, living your life around the process - generally this involves coordinating with other human beings, but nobody likes the night shift, and automating that makes a lot of sense. Eg, a rare earth refinery needs to run 24/7, etc.

Finally, I've known many grad students who excelled at gaming the 996 schedule - hour long breaks for lunch, extended afternoon discussions, tracking the boss's schedule so when they show up, everyone looks busy. It's a learned skill, even if overall this is kind of a ridiculous thing to do.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-21 18:13:03+00:00
The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well.

It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-10-21 18:13:04+00:00
Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC.

I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose.

I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.
by EGreg | 2025-10-21 18:13:51+00:00
Our trusted computing base should be small, built from open-source, and not under the control of one company.

But sadly, here we are.

How do we know GMail can't steal your bank account info and Chrome can't steal ... everything from your web browsing, or impersonate you?

All they have to do is be pressured by a government: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
by tgv | 2025-10-21 18:13:58+00:00
I have a server that has a slow (5s) response to unknown pages, returns it as 200, and makes the next failing request even slower (for unauthenticated users). That seems to keep the number of requests limited. Perhaps I should just drop the connection after a certain number of requests.

BTW, quite a few of these port scanners are companies that offer to scan your ports for vulnerabilities. Temu pen testing, so to speak.
by saulpw | 2025-10-21 18:13:58+00:00
There are many Americans that can't or won't download a "USA app". Owning a smartphone must not be a requirement for participating in democracy.

And if all you want is political polling, every elected representative does this already (well, they generally pay someone else to do it). So I'm not sure what it would mean for the US gov to do it separately. Do you imagine that a "non-partisan agency" like the CBO would do it with taxpayer dollars, as a publi service for the politicians who would still vote however they do?
by BenFranklin100 | 2025-10-21 18:14:01+00:00
Here we have an article written by a Palestinian that has lived in Palestine his entire life, who has bern imprisoned and tortured by Hamas for simply criticizing the group, who is providing his first hand on-the-ground account that Hamas is sabotaging the peace process by engaging in violence against Palestinians, and your response is to deny his reality and claim that it’s Israel’s fault the way Hamas is behaving against fellow Palestinians?

There are reasons why the political Left has been accused of being unhelpful in the Middle East peace process and why some argue an underlying antisemitism is at play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moumen_al-Natour
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-10-21 18:14:08+00:00
Containerization was basically a way to get rid of the problem of "it works on my machine", mainly the OS version and installed libraries. Plenty of instances where program X will work on system A, but not system B, but program Y works on system B but not A. Or X is supported on Redhat/Ubuntu/etc. but you can't or don't want to build from source.

Even if that is not a problem, you avoid having to install the kitchen sink on your host and make sure everything is configured properly. Just get it working on a container, build and image and spin it up when you need it. Leaves the host machine fairly clean.

You can run a bunch of services as containers within a single host. No cloud or k8s needed. docker-compose is sufficient for testing or smallish projects.

Also, there is a security benefit because if the container is compromised, problem is limited that container not the entire host.
by bArray | 2025-10-21 18:14:55+00:00
Microsoft Word online deletes text in Firefox Linux (maybe others too) for at least two years now [1]. The one thing you want a text editor to do is be able to write text into a document, and somehow this bug goes unfixed. You would think it would be priority #1 for paying customers of Business Office 365 - and yet nothing.

It ended up being easier just to switch to paid Overleaf and teach our non-tech members how to write LaTeX and/or use the built-in editor. The documents are beautiful, Overleaf doesn't miss a beat and we are very happy with their solution.

Microsoft should be ashamed - I don't know how anybody would ever consider using them for any serious production work.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5216132/...
by NewsaHackO | 2025-10-21 18:15:02+00:00
The issue is that a lot of “programmers” think bike-shedding is the essence of programming. Fifty years ago, they would have been the ones saying that not using punch cards takes away from the art of programming, and then proudly showing off multiple intricate hole punchers they designed for different scenarios.

Good problem solvers... solve problems. The technological environment will never devalue their skills. It’s only those who rest on their laurels who have this issue.
by tptacek | 2025-10-21 18:15:27+00:00
I agree it reads weird, but I am leaving room for the idea that there are a lot of very gifted people who work on this stuff as an intellectual challenge, have a sort of straight up systemsy computer science background, and don't have or care about a bigger picture of where they fit into the industry. But still: the companies that became Trenchant were notoriously paranoid about state-sponsored CNE threats! It would still be weird to be surprised by them.
by tadfisher | 2025-10-21 18:15:33+00:00
Voter rolls are public information in the US; there are several watchdog groups that perform verification services and have done so for decades; and to date, none have uncovered the kind of large-scale voter fraud that would necessitate doing anything differently from what we do now.

In fact, I'd argue that having 50 different voting systems with 50 different ways to prove eligibility makes our elections more resilient to large-scale voter fraud, even if it makes it more difficult to verify voter rolls wholesale.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-21 18:15:39+00:00
The frequency by which I truly wish Douglas Adams was still alive is closing in on a very new pitch, I do have to say.

Mattresses disconnecting from the global God Computer and ruining everyones sleep, just .. I can't.

Its far, far too funny.

I'm pretty sure Mattress Software Developers are on the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B. Or maybe, C.
by president_zippy | 2025-10-21 18:15:52+00:00
Evidently, I'm just imagining all the times my teachers went on strike in Illinois in the 2000s. There have not been any "right to work" laws in Illinois passed affecting teachers or firefighters since then. Evidently, it's all in my head that most blue states like IL, MN, MA, and NY have legal protections for public schoolteachers.

I never said I was opposed to it, either. Quite the contrary. In fact, I think public schoolteachers and firefighters have a great idea about unions, and software engineers should follow their example and unionize.

I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread, because you completely missed my point. I don't care who has it worse. I care about who is making it bad, and what we as software engineers are going to do to make it right.
by recallingmemory | 2025-10-21 18:15:57+00:00
How does ChatGPT Atlas address the concerns Anthropic found?

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-chrome

"Prompt injection attacks can cause AIs to delete files, steal data, or make financial transactions. This isn't speculation: we’ve run “red-teaming” experiments to test Claude for Chrome and, without mitigations, we’ve found some concerning results.

We conducted extensive adversarial prompt injection testing, evaluating 123 test cases representing 29 different attack scenarios. Browser use without our safety mitigations showed a 23.6% attack success rate when deliberately targeted by malicious actors.

One example of a successful attack—before our new defenses were applied—was a malicious email claiming that, for security reasons, emails needed to be deleted. When processing the inbox, Claude followed these instructions to delete the user’s emails without confirmation."
by qwertox | 2025-10-21 18:16:24+00:00
I WiFi enabled my fridge because the thermostat broke. So now an ESP32 with a dallas temperature sensor and a relay take care of that. The code on the ESP32 is smart enough to keep working if there is no internet (wasn't always like this, until it had to), but it still sends the temperature to the server for logging and the server can send it configuration commands or control the relay directly, as it was initially.

It was a great way to keep the fridge alive, the thermostat was already a replacement and it never worked properly, so that sometimes things were frozen, sometimes barely cold. ~24 years old. A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).
by throwaway314155 | 2025-10-21 18:16:41+00:00
> But I assume the data cleaning process removes such content before pretraining? ;)

I didn't check what you're referring to but yes, the major providers likely have state of the art classifiers for censoring and filtering such content.

And when that doesn't work, they can RLHF the behavior from occurring.

You're trying to make some claim about garbage in/garbage out, but if there's even a tiny moat - it's in the filtering of these datasets and the purchasing of licenses to use other larger sources of data that (unlike Common Crawl) _aren't_ freely available for competition and open source movements to use.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-21 18:16:42+00:00
Good point. Phishers would certainly take advantage of a widely reported outage to send emails related to "recovering your services."

Even cautious people are more vulnerable to phishing when the message aligns with their expectations and they are under pressure because services are down.

Always, always log in through bookmarked links or typing them manually. Never use a link in an email unless it's in direct response to something you initiated and even then examine it carefully.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-21 18:16:48+00:00
Hahaha, how stupid must anyone be to deploy SharePoint anywhere near anything of national security relevance! How can it still be a thing, that anyone entrusted with such sensitive matter dates to even touch MS products of the kind of SharePoint? That includes the complete MS Office 365 disaster suite, MS Teams and Edge.

Sounds like they need to seriously redesign their security policies.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-10-21 18:16:56+00:00
Making all of those things cheaper is great, as long the automation isn't also making everyone poorer at an equal or faster rate. It doesn't really help if house prices and food prices are cut in half if most people lose their employment because of automation.

I think the concern is that true human+ AGI and advanced robotics would obsolete so many roles that it doesn't matter if things can be made more efficiently, because nobody will have any money at all. If/when AI can do my job better than me, it isn't giving me leverage, it is removing all leverage I have as someone who puts food on the table through labor.

In the interim period before that happens then sure, the automation is great for some people who can best leverage it.