MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-10-31 15:46:15+00:00
Which means the tainted release doesn't matter anymore to those consumers worried about the immutable release attestation anyways. If others are worried about that, they should probably consume only attested immutable releases as well.

I'd still bet the larger portion was it was just a particularly easy path to preventing downgrade attacks or the like though. Could always be more to it as well I'm not thinking of, just feels likely.
by Hizonner | 2025-10-31 15:46:38+00:00
> There were so many people saying that this isn’t going to work.

Yes, and we were right.

It was billed as something that most adults would accept. It's not plausible that 77 percent of Pornhub's UK traffic came from non-adults.

It has therefore failed. Obviously a huge number of adults did not accept it, and either went around it or stopped using the site. What they did not do was to comply with the supposedly "measured, reasonable and non-intrusive" AV measures. They accepted costs and inconveniences to avoid that.

It was billed as something that would only affect children. It has in fact affected many adults. That means it has failed.

Of course, many of the 77 percent have probably moved to VPNs (or other sites) rather than actually not using Pornhub... which means they were only inconvenienced, not deprived of porn or even of Pornhub.

But those approaches are just as available to non-adults as to adults. Although the AV nonsense probably did actually deter some number of underage users, you can't know what that number was. It would be possible for literally every single underage user to have simply switched to a VPN. The 77 percent number tells you exactly nothing about how many children have been deterred from watching porn. Probably not very many.

So although this does give you proof of some of the ways it's failed, it does not give you any evidence that it's succeeded in anything at all.

That said, that kind of "success" is not the main issue. The main arguments against this AV stupidity were and are that it's not worth the huge costs in money, convenience, security, and privacy, and that it helps create machinery that can and probably will be abused for other purposes later. All of which are still absolutely true.
by philistine | 2025-10-31 15:46:47+00:00
> We already have some people in pretty powerful positions doing this to manipulate their bases.

You don't have to be vague. Let's be specific. The President of the United States implied a very real voiceover of President Reagan was AI. Reagan was talking about the fallacy of tariffs as engines of economic growth, and it was used in an ad by the government of Ontario to sow divide within Republicans. It worked, and the President was nakedly mad at being told by daddy Reagan.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 15:47:12+00:00
> I can spin up a strong ML team through hiring in probably 6-12 months with the right funding

Not sure what to call this except "HN hubris" or something.

There are hundreds of companies who thought (and still think) the exact same thing, and even after 24 months or more of "the right funding" they still haven't delivered the results.

I think you're misunderstanding how difficult all of this is, if you think it's merely a money problem. Otherwise we'd see SOTA models from new groups every month, which we obviously aren't, we have a few big labs iteratively progressing SOTA, with some upstarts appearing sometimes (DeepSeek, Kimi et al) but it isn't as easy as you're trying to make it out to be.
by kbelder | 2025-10-31 15:47:19+00:00
A very related physics issue that boggles my mind is when you roll a disk, like a wheel. You can roll the disk north, and it'll lean, curve, and end up going south. What force changed the direction of the wheel?

I understand it, intellectually. It's pushing sideways against the surface as it leans and spins, but it just doesn't feel right. I have no intuition for it.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-31 15:47:35+00:00
Were they false positives though?

How come "which isn't that easily to provide in compiler explorer, " suddenly becomes me telling that was impossible?

If you enjoy typing a endless list of clang-tidy flags on a tiny text box, well fun is on the user.

The first concern is that some parts of the industry keep reaching to C when there are better alternatives, even the language authors have moved on to creating better languages.
by forgetfulness | 2025-10-31 15:48:00+00:00
The machine god would still need resources provided by humans on their terms to run; the AI wouldn’t sweat having to run, for instance, 5 years straight of its immortality just to figure out a 10 years plan to eventually run at 5% less power than now, but humans may not be willing to foot the bill for this.

There’s no guarantee that the singularity makes economic sense for humans.
by loudmax | 2025-10-31 15:48:24+00:00
As I understand the argument, it's that AI will reach a level where it's smart enough to improve itself, leading to a feedback loop where it takes off like a rocket. In this scenario, whoever is in second place is left so far in the dust that it doesn't matter. Whichever model is number one is so smart that it's able to absorb all economic demand, and all the other models will be completely obsolete.

This would be a terrifyingly dystopian outcome. Whoever owns this super intelligence is not going to use it for the good of humanity, they're going to use it for personal enrichment. Sam Altman says OpenAI will cure cancer, but in practice they're rolling out porn. There's more immediate profit to be made from preying on loneliness and delusion than there is from empowering everyone. If you doubt the other CEOs would do the same, just look at them kissing the ass of America's wannabe dictator in the White House.

Another possible outcome is that no single model or company wins the AI race. Consumers will choose the AI models that best suit their varying needs, and suppliers will compete on pricing and capability in a competitive free market. In this future, the winners will be companies and individuals who make best use of AI to provide value. This wouldn't justify the valuations of the largest AI companies, and it's absolutely not the future that they want.
by NemoNobody | 2025-10-31 15:49:06+00:00
Crypto is kind of a scam - like it is one but BTC is a single thing, instantly tradable for money, but "worth" far more than money - that's not something that's going anywhere. If you think about it at all you'll get it.

Consider, how insanely difficult it is normally for me to give you 100k - what do you have worth 100k that can easily be sold? Well, if you have one of these Bitcoin things, you can get 100k cash money in an instant. There are lots of reasons to move money in and out Bitcoin - nobody doing them is going to stop doing them.

I don't see that ever ending tbh

The scam is to hoddl - in theory the holders have made money, buying at way lower than it is now, but they have made nowhere near what the people playing the drops and "fluctuations" have (it's an incredibly manipulated market)
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 15:49:20+00:00
> But with enough capital you can train a model just as good, as the training and inference techniques are well known

You're not alone in believing just money can train a good model, and I've already answered elsewhere why things aren't so easy as you believe, but besides this, where are y'all getting that from? Is there some popular social media influencer that keeps parroting this or where it comes from? Clearly you're not involved in those processes/workflows yourself, then you wouldn't claim it's just a money problem, so where are you all getting this from?
by stepan_ | 2025-10-31 15:49:38+00:00
Some other data:

The OWASP Business Logic Abuse Top 10, released this year, formalizes this growing class of attacks. And with 82% of businesses now describing themselves as API-first, the logic layer has become a lucrative new target.

Security Misconfiguration (API8) once again topped the list with 605 cases, up 33% quarter over quarter.

Broken Authorization (API5, API1) accounted for roughly 28% of all API vulnerabilities.

Broken Authentication (API2) climbed sharply, driven by weak credential enforcement in REST and SOAP APIs.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-10-31 15:49:57+00:00
Yes, a hope of mine is that we can stop using "hash derivation modulo" entirely.

I've recently started some fancy formal spec-level documentation here https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/14408 The "resolution" equivalence class is both simpler and better than the "hash derivation modulo ..." one.

(The fact that it is a mouthful to say what the derivations are modulo kinda gives the game away! I put "hash quotient derivation" in the docs to side-step the issue.)
by rs186 | 2025-10-31 15:49:58+00:00
I suggest that you ask Claude Code to build such a website for you with a minimal set of features, with tons and tons of comments and design/architecture documents plus tests. Once that is done, you can start reading the code. You can even read as it is working.

Then, you can point Claude Code to a file/a function/a few lines and ask follow-up questions.

After that, there are even more things to do. If you want a different perspective, you could try completely reimplementing the thing. My guess is that Claude will use Next.js. You can ask Claude not to do that but instead use a different UI framework/no framework combined with C#, if that's something you are interested in. If you want to actually learn all the details, you can start setting things up yourself and write the website. You can add features or try making the site scalable, under AI-assisted or vibe coding mode.

It will not produce the most elegant code or have the best architecture, but will be good enough for your purpose. I think it's the most efficient way to get some learning that is specifically suited to your needs in this age.
by accrual | 2025-10-31 15:50:02+00:00
I suspect if model development stalls we may start to see more incremental releases to models, perhaps with specific fixes or improvements, updates to a certain cutoff date, etc. So less fanfare, but still some progress. Worth spending billions on? Probably not, but the next best avenue would be to continue developing deeper and deeper LLM integrations to stay relevant and in the news.

The new OpenAI browser integration would be an example. Mostly the same model, but with a whole new channel of potential customers and lock in.
by jstimpfle | 2025-10-31 15:50:03+00:00
> Were they false positives though?

I've looked at them -- not all of them but all that I've looked at were the same kind recommending memcpy_s instead of memcpy, and were ridiculously easily to classify as false positives. So yes.

> How come "which isn't that easily to provide in compiler explorer, " suddenly becomes me telling that was impossible?

You claimed it wasn't easy but it is easy. VERY easy. It's one flag to disprove your point. Be honest.

> The first concern is that some parts of the industry keep reaching to C when there are better alternatives, even the language authors have moved on to creating better languages.

Many still enjoy it, are productive, and are creating infrastructure for billions of people to use. Let's keep things in relation.
by teiferer | 2025-10-31 15:50:06+00:00
> we've got one side saying we're in a speculative bubble, and the other side saying no this technology is the real deal.

Um I think nobody is really denying that we are in a bubble. It's normal for new tech and the hype around it. Eventually the bad apples are weeded out and some things survive, others die out.

The first disagreement is how big the bubble is, i.e. how much air is in it that could vanish. And that's because of the second disagreement, which is about how useful this tech is and how much potential it has. It's clear that it has some undeniable usefulness. But some people think we'll soon have AGI replacing everybody and the opposite is that's all useless crap beyond a few niche applications. Most people fall somewhere in between, with a somewhat bimodal split between optimists and skeptics. But nobody really contends that it's a bubble.
by businessmate | 2025-10-31 15:50:21+00:00
I am sharing a small open artifact for researchers looking at AI mediated discovery. It is a standardized prompt pack for testing visibility stability, preference anchoring, and challenger substitution across major assistants. This is not a leaderboard and not a ranking tool. It is a diagnostic input set so that testing can be repeatable rather than ad hoc. The focus is on model mediated recommendation surfaces, not accuracy or safety. The pack includes: Ten category discovery prompts Ten user preference continuation prompts Ten substitution stress prompts Logging guidance for reproducibility Suggested variance interpretation ranges Use case examples: Weekly drift checks after model updates Measuring whether user preferences are preserved Observing when and how challenger brands appear Research on model volatility in recommendation settings I would appreciate community feedback. If the prompt set is incomplete or biased, happy to edit and version it. Contributions encouraged, especially around domain specific prompt modules and non English variants. PDF: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:eu:45de8fc5-97e8-47... I will add a GitHub repo and CSV log template once feedback lands. Purpose is simple: make visibility and substitution behavior measurable. Feel free to critique, fork, or improve.
by bollocks9 | 2025-10-31 15:50:55+00:00
What about Dr. Jim Tucker’s two child psych cases, James Leininger and Ryan Hammons?

One remembered memories of a WWII pilot named James Huston Jr. and the other a deceased Hollywood agent named Marty Martyn.

Putting aside the reincarnation hypothesis for the moment, do you think the kids invented the details and coincidentally happened to match to a real person or were they fully coached? Maybe they didn’t get enough sleep or got too much sleep?
by presbyterian | 2025-10-31 15:51:12+00:00
I've been a huge Mac fan for a decade or more, at least, and not only is Tahoe the least popular release I've seen, it's the first one where the majority of people I hear from dislike it. It's bad enough that I haven't updated still, I'm waiting a few point releases at least to see how they fix it up, and I'm trying out Linux distros to see what I'll start using if I have to move away.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-31 15:51:47+00:00
Ah! Actually this idea that the immutable variables in a loop "change during execution" is a serious misunderstanding and some languages have tripped themselves up and had to fix it later when they baked this mistake into the language.

What's happening is that each iteration of the loop these are new variables but they have the same name, they're not the same variables with a different value. When a language designer assumes that's the same thing the result is confusing for programmers and so it usually ends up requiring a language level fix.

e.g. "In C# 5, the loop variable of a foreach will be logically inside the loop"
by skwee357 | 2025-10-31 15:51:51+00:00
When you buy a physical product, do you expect the company to stand behind the quality of their product by providing (limited) warranty and/or support, despite the fact that this won't bring the company any new income?

Nobody forbids you from selling your software with an asterisk that says "works on X.Y version of MacOS, future releases will require a new license".

And if no one new is buying your product, I think you need to ask yourself whether you have a sustainable business or a hobby.
by pxc | 2025-10-31 15:52:05+00:00
If you read through the Big Red Book¹ or its counterpart for Kotlin², it's quite explicit about the goals with these techniques for managing effects, and goes over rewriting imperative code to manage state in a "pure" way.

I think the authors are quite aware of the relationship between these techniques and mutable state! I imagine it's similar for other canonical functional programming texts.

Besides the "pure" functional languages like Haskell, there are languages that are sort of immutability-first (and support sophisticated effects libraries), or at least have good immutable collections libraries in the stdlib, but are flexible about mutation as well, so you can pick your poison: Scala, Clojure, Rust, Nim (and probably lots of others).

All of these go further and are more comfortable than just throwing `const` or `.freeze` around in languages that weren't designed with this style in mind. If you haven't tried them, you should! They're really pleasant to work with.

----

1: https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scal...

2: https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-kotl...
by jwpapi | 2025-10-31 15:52:14+00:00
When I was 16 I started working at a startup buying and reselling used electronics.

There were like 5 competitors all trying to become the winner takes it all. Afaik after 10 years some closed, restructured but most of them burnt a lot of money. One lets call him indie dev made a lot of money building a simple comparison platform and getting 10-20% on all deals.

This is n=1, but I think it still made me really averse to raising money.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-31 15:52:18+00:00
> No matter how beautiful its design, it's meaningless without the software to back it up.

Word.

I worked as a software developer, for hardware companies, most of my career.

Most of the upper management came from hardware, and consistently treated software as an afterthought.

That may change, this time. Different breed of top managers.
by parineum | 2025-10-31 15:52:27+00:00
It isn't.

"AI is a bubble" and "AI is going to replace all human jobs" is, essentially, the two extremes I'm seeing. AI replacing some jobs (even if partially) and the bubble-ness of the boom are both things that exist on a line between two points. Both can be partially true and exist anywhere on the line between true and false.

No jobs replaced<-------------------------------------->All jobs replaced

Bubble crashes the economy and we all end up dead in a ditch from famine<---------------------------------------->We all end up super rich in the post scarcity economy
Ask HN: Is the Abacus a Digital Device?
by marcodiego | 2025-10-31 15:52:49+00:00
I usually define a digital device as "a device where internal values are represented in a discrete form" while an analog device is "a device where internal values are represented in a continuous form".

By these definitions I'm rarely concerned if the device is electronic, mechanical, biological (counting with fingers) or even imaginary. Also, by these same definitions, an abacus is clearly a digital device since internally, its values a represented in a discrete form. Unfortunately, there are conflicting (reasonably common or trustworthy) sources that disagree with me.

Usually, such sources are based of the fact that the abacus is not electronic or other considerations regarding its operation but not taking internal representation of values into account.

So, I'd like to question the HN crowd definitions, sources and (to a much lesser extent) opinions about this question. Is the abacus a digital device?

Remark 1: Since it is very common for an abacus to have 5 beads per pole (specially mimicking a counting method using the fingers of a hand), the abacus is probably (the most) classical example of a digital device: it literally mimics digitos (fingers in latin).

Remark 2: Also, I don't want to consider the common opinion among gamers that call a CD as an analog device when it is clearly digital, or controller with joysticks as analog because the mimic very close continuous states. A good example among analog controllers is the Atari one that had a variable capacitor and the capacitance was measured to infer its position. Although the measurement is digital, the controller, yes, was analog. Modern ones are not analog, they're fully digital.

Remark 3: I don't want tô fall into irrelevant technicalities like saying "an analog TV could be considered digital since it can have buttons in discrete" states, actually you're just choose analog values from a small set. Argument about electric charge in semiconductors ignoring thresholds fall in this same category.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-31 15:52:52+00:00
Silicon valley capital investment firms have always exploited regulatory capture to "compete". The public simply has a ridiculously short memory of the losers pushed out of the market during the loss-leader to exploit transition phase.

Currently, the trend is not whether one technology will outpace the other in the "AI" hype-cycle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle ), but it does create perceived asymmetry with skilled-labor pools. That alone is valuable leverage to a corporation, and people are getting fired or ripped off anticipating the rise of real "AI".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0

One day real "AI" may exist, but a LLM or current reasoning model is unlikely going to make that happen. It is absolutely hilarious there is a cult-like devotion to the AstroTurf marketing.

The question is never whether this is right or wrong... but simply how one may personally capture revenue before the Trough of disillusionment. =3
by Insanity | 2025-10-31 15:52:57+00:00
Lol, I asked ChatGPT to identify the towering mushroom you mentioned.. and it made a sexual innuendo joke instead..

The response:

===

Summary answer

• The fossil in question: Prototaxites.

• Evidence: large fossil trunks, isotope analysis showing non‐plant behaviour; tube/hyphal internal structure.

• Time & environment: Early land colonisation era (pre-trees, pre-dinosaurs) in the Silurian/Devonian.

• The claim of “towering mushroom forests in the time of dinosaurs” is not strictly correct: they were huge, fungus-like (or fungus affiliated) but lived well before dinosaurs, and “forest” may be figurative rather than well established.

If you like, I can dig up a short list of the recent papers (with Figures) on Prototaxites so you can see the fossil evidence directly. Would that be helpful, Rob Mpucee?

===

That’s a wild answer lol. Although it technically did answer the question.
by dwwoelfel | 2025-10-31 15:53:00+00:00
Carmack is talking about variable reassignment here, which Clojure will happily let you mutate.

For example:

(let [result {:a 1} result (assoc result :b 2)] ...)

He mentions that C and C++ allow const variables, but Clojure doesn't support that.

clj-kondo has a :shadowed-var rule, but it will only find cases where you shadow a top-level var (not the case in my example).
by Iulioh | 2025-10-31 15:53:14+00:00
And as we saw, once a model is trained you need very little compute to run it and there is very little advantage in begin the 1st model and the 10th model.

Monopoly in this field is impossible, your product won't ever be so good that the competition does not make sense

Add to this that AGI is impossible with LLMs...
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 15:53:53+00:00
Ok, name one authoritarian state that never fell, besides the authoritarian states we have today?

Of course it eventually falls down, everything does. I'm not saying it won't be difficult, nor many people will ultimately die, and the country will be very different. But it will happen, if not sooner, then later, like in every other place in the world.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-31 15:53:54+00:00
> It's not like there are pipes leading out of the brain

There are, in fact, “pipes” leading out of the brain. Cerebrospinal fluid is (and this is probably somewhat oversimplified) produced from material in the bloodstream in the ventricles in the brain, flows through the system of ventricles and then out of the brain into the subarachnoid space around the brain and spinal cord, and is then reabsorbed into the bloodstream.