MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by padolsey | 2025-10-10 02:09:16+00:00
There is a famous case from a few years ago where a laywer using ChatGPT accidentally referenced a fictitious case of Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. [0]

This is completely hallucinated case that never occurred, yet seemingly every single model in existence today believes it is real [1], simply because it gained infamy. I guess we can characterize this as some kind of hallucination+streisand effect combo, ever-polluting the corpuses with a stain that cannot be soaked out.

Is there even a way to cut this pollution out in the future?

[0] https://reason.com/volokh/2023/06/07/lawyer-explains-how-he-...

[1] https://weval.org/analysis/hallucination-probe/966116785e63b...
by muzani | 2025-10-10 02:09:29+00:00
"The software itself is useful and part of a very big product category, but it's marketed extremely poorly in my opinion "

Yeah, I can see the problem here lol.

Sales is quite simple - you have something that people want. You make those people aware of it and help them understand how it helps them. That's all.

These people are often looking for something and have hacked solutions themselves. They spend a great deal of time, effort, and money on this. That's your sweet spot.

The irony is you're selling something else right now - a job post as sales co-founder. Plenty of people want to start a startup, they just don't have a product to sell. Really good salespeople will want a good product. Selling a bad product often means scamming people.

You have to have the confidence in your product to make it appealing. If you can't sell it to your cofounder, they won't be able to sell it to others.
by lamontcg | 2025-10-10 02:11:09+00:00
> Over the past decade, people in the community, not just Shopify employees, started to conclude that rubygems and bundler were being monetized by some key maintainers.

The logical conclusion of this argument is that if you maintain a critical piece of infrastructure with a "large moat" you are apparently expected to live in poverty, or turn it over to a $2.68B revenue per quarter company because trying to extract $60k/yr of living expenses from rubygems is a bridge too far.

And I just don't buy all the framing that donating your employee's time is fundamentally different from donating money.
by legucy | 2025-10-10 02:11:21+00:00
Could we do RL in simulated environments, and use a vision LLM to provide the verification? I.e test a policy then take a 2d image of the end state, VLM yields 0 or 1.

Another idea: video extension model as a world model. We fine tune Sora on first person robot videos (and we train another model to predict actuation states from FPV). Then we extend the video using Sora “a robot in first person view finishes moving laundry from washer to dryer”. Then predict actuation states from the extended video?
by colechristensen | 2025-10-10 02:11:37+00:00
Sure, but you could also endlessly add clarifying details to be more exact

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known (by the author) Writing System on Earth, the third planet from the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, as of 2025 as long as you're a human without a major disability that would prevent you from using these techniques or are at least a being with similar hands and arms also able to obtain the necessary materials and can read and comprehend modern English if you aren't too busy doing other things and expect to live long enough to complete the task

You often get nitpickers going after some small technically correct detail which may be true but no reasonable person in the intended audience would ever actually need to be told. No one reading the original title would assume that the author had omniscient knowledge of the whole human history of writing beyond present archaeological fact and this doesn't need to be pointed out.
by h4kunamata | 2025-10-10 02:12:25+00:00
Companies going blindly into AI is really paying out, isn't it?? We are seeing companies heavily into AI/LLMs having:

* their system being breached left and right

* production database deleted

* having to spend twice as much to contract a human to clean the whole mess

* system outage coz of vibe coding

The future looks.... promising!
by wl | 2025-10-10 02:12:42+00:00
Writing has been independently invented two to four times that we know of in the last five millennia. (Some scholars debate whether cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese writing were all independently invented, with Mesoamerican writing being the other almost indisputably independent invention.) Anatomically modern humans date back at least 200,000 years and probably would be capable of inventing writing long before our known examples.

Why do we not see more writing in the archeological record? Maybe agrarian societies both motivate writing and are required to provide the free time to invent it? Or perhaps it was written on media that's subject to decay? If some society developed writing on tree bark 100,000 years ago, none of that is going to survive and we'd never know.
by Sean-Der | 2025-10-10 02:15:48+00:00
I think you would need the ESP32 to connect to another host. Doing Speech-to-Text, LLM, Text-to-speech is pretty intensive. Even if you connect to a Raspberry Pi.

But totally possible! It's a great idea and would love too help you build it :)

Wire some Open Source together and just start with a small collection of ogg files.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-10 02:16:07+00:00
>your position is that refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect, is inherently hateful?

Yes. That tends to fall under "hate speech":

>public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation

Denying existence or identity will fall under that curtain either way. That seems to be the interpretation Reddit uses, so your account or community will be banned for breaking its rules, regardless of your interpretation. Both dehumanize, and dehumanization is a one way ticket to denying someone as worthy of the rights humans enjoy.
by cpfohl | 2025-10-10 02:17:34+00:00
6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.

I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.

Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.
by x-complexity | 2025-10-10 02:17:41+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529810

https://cpufun.substack.com/i/32474663/notable-differences

As noted by the other comments, Apple's M-series chips seem to use a 128-byte cache line. ARM doesn't mandate that their licensees must use a pre-specified cache line size: 64 bytes just happens to be the consensus-arrived standard.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-10-10 02:19:00+00:00
I don't think its too problematic, its hard to say something is "reasoning" without saying what that something is, for another example of terms that adjust their meaning to context for example, the word "cache" in "processor cache", we know what that is because its in the context of a processor, then there's "cache me outside", which comes from some tv episode.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-10 02:19:22+00:00
> As an AI company, why are you training on documents that you haven't verified?

Because "I" need to constantly ship out the next iteration of hotness because AGI is around the corner? Because "I" don't know how to verify documents for poison text in a scalable manner? Because "I" don't care? I am not an AI company, how would I know?

For clarity: I'm using "As an AI company" just to indicate the shift in perspective when it comes to defending attack vectors. Not literally indicating that I am (or affiliated with) an AI company.

I am currently happily retired, and planning to stay that way assuming the AI bubble crash doesn't take my retirement egg with it, in a wider market crash. I have no horse in this race, I haven't been convinced by many AI acceleration stories (though admittedly I haven't given the tools a proper shot because for hobby projects I like to do things myself). And it's definitely not my (entire) industry. So completely wrong read on many levels there, friend.
by igorpcosta | 2025-10-10 02:21:11+00:00
Hey HN community, I’m Igor, co-founder of Autohand.ai in New Zealand.

We’re building an open stack that lets AI coding agents deliver work with the discipline senior engineers expect. Our latest write-up, “Intent Weaving for AI Coding Agents,” breaks down how we encode strategy, policy, and telemetry into machine-executable intent, plus an honest inventory of where current agents fail (reasoning, repo awareness, testing, etc.).

Highlights: - Mission compiler that turns business objectives into guardrail-rich plans for agents. - Knowledge graph + policy DSL so automation stays inside governance envelopes. - Pain-points matrix from real deployments; new benchmarks that punish regressions, not just pass unit tests. - Open-source pieces as we release them; Commander is already MIT-licensed.

We’d love feedback from folks shipping agentic workflows or wrestling with AI codegen drift. Where should we push harder? What failure modes have we missed?

Link to our manifesto: https://autohand.ai/manifesto

Thanks for reading, and be kind. Creating a new category means stretching before the skills are perfect.
by h4kunamata | 2025-10-10 02:21:16+00:00
So it begins...

Where there is smoke, there is a fire. Wait for more and wait for people to learn how identity theft is the worst problem you can have.

Imagine you trying to prove that you are you, while somebody else with your passport details, driver license, address, DOB, phone SIM swap, etc, is acting like you causing all sort of financial disaster???

1995 The Net movie, people in 2025 will learn the hard way that was not just a movie.
by Neywiny | 2025-10-10 02:21:19+00:00
Slight caveat that a lot of Ethernet PHYs > 1G don't go down to 10 Mb, my some don't go to 100 Mb, and some are only the speed they want to be (though luckily that's not very common). There exist 6-speed PHYs (10,100,1000,2500,5000,10000) but that doesn't mean everything will happily talk
by lebimas | 2025-10-10 02:22:57+00:00
Real question, how did you learn how to code this well? I found your LinkedIn from your Github, and as someone who is just committing to becoming a SWE at 26, having learned a bit of Python and Matlab in college, and a bit of Java in high school, yet never fully grasped it and thus avoided it for as long as possible, I'm impressed by people who have this caliber of abilities at such a young age. Are there any tips or bits of advice you (or anyone else on HN for that matter) would give to someone who really wants to be the best they can possibly be at coding?
by jpster | 2025-10-10 02:23:14+00:00
> This crashes with the western view where countries and populations have a right to self determination.

It’s really time to retire this type of statement. For example, are you aware the CIA or US government has officially acknowledged its involvement, or declassified documents pertaining to coups, overthrows, and assassinations in Iran, the Congo, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Afghanistan?

Maybe this enlightened point of view is promoted by Western academics and (some) think tank types. But that is not how Western governments have been acting for at least the past 75 years.
by OptionOfT | 2025-10-10 02:23:47+00:00
I recently got a new hip (at the old age of 36).

Due to said age it was VERY hard to find a doctor willing to replace my hip, EVEN THOUGH I had 2 failed repairs, and had to resort to opioids to sleep.

And long-term opioid usage (not abuse!) can cause higher the risk of persistent pain after a total hip arthroplasty.

Thankfully this is not the case for me. But it was a big concern in this journey.
by laurieg | 2025-10-10 02:23:52+00:00
No single tool, script, device or system will stop this.

In fact, blocking tools can actually make this worse. Using a blocking tool is tacitly saying "I can't control myself. I need to hand control to something outside of myself" This basically reinforces the belief that you cannot control your problematic consumption.

You need strategies that reinforce the opposite belief: You are in control of your usage.

I recommend looking into books like Feeling Good and Feeling Great. Get a greater understanding of your emotional state and work out how that feeds into your social media usage.

There are some tools that are useful. The first is time tracking tools. They let you look back on your day and work out how you spent your time. What are the patterns of your usage. Do you always end up struggling after lunch? Or in the evening? What are your triggers?

While I wouldn't recommend blocking sites completely, blocking the most distracting parts of sites can be useful. If you're studying from youtube videos, using a plugin that blocks comments and suggested videos is extremely useful. This means you will no longer catch a glimpse of a thumbnail of something interesting and go off task.

Overall, you have to tackle your emotions and your beliefs about yourself.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-10-10 02:26:32+00:00
Thank you for being a reasonable voice.

Today Nazi == "Someone I don't like." It's overused so much it literally has no meaning.

DHH's only sin was creating Ruby on Rails, not his politics (same with Brendan Eich who I hope one day apologies to the world for inventing JavaScript).

Most reasonable people left Hackernews a long time ago when they banned the balance. Almost all that's left on here is echo-chamber.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-10 02:28:28+00:00
I have yet to use an application, other than IDE's or code editors like Zed, that have AI features that I actually use and which provide some benefit. Every Google app has it and it literally stinks -- it offers to do a bunch of stuff I don't want or need, and doesn't properly perform any of the tasks that I could actually use help with. Same with Figma, Acrobat, Office365, QuickBooks, Slack, Confluence, Jira, etc. etc.

And don't even get me started with the "AI Assistants" that every support company has which are utterly useless and just make it more difficult to get to an actual human.

The only use cases I've actually seen in production that are high performance are: 1) writing code (CC is good), 2) code inline editing suggestions (Zed does this pretty well, so does JetBrains), 3) document summaries.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-10 02:29:26+00:00
I did, except for this bit that you added in an edit:

> You don't have to reuse the same certificate for several requests. You can get a new one for every request, for every person who is asked to verify their age and pays you $2, and if they're actually anonymous, there's no way to know you did this. Is a rate limit part of the proposal? Can I only sign up to one adult service per week?

This is trivially easy to detect at the attestation service. If someone is trying to repeatedly (and programmatically) use the same personal ID to generate attestations for different request IDs in a short time frame, you can throttle them, flag them, revoke their cert, whatever.
by acomjean | 2025-10-10 02:32:10+00:00
I know sometimes performance doesn’t matter, and python is certainly useful, but it’s not fast. It can be fast enough and they’ve put a lot of effort into making fast libraries (called in c).

When doing bioinformatics we had someone update/rewrite a tool in java and it was so much faster. Went from a couple days to some like 4 hours of runtime.

Python certainly can be used in production (my experience maintaining some web applications in Java would make me reach for python/php/ruby to create a web backend speed be dammed). Python has some great libraries.
by liuliu | 2025-10-10 02:32:35+00:00
There is nothing for us to take away in this discussion. So let me be the first to tune down: all I want to say is: don't take that 300ms as given, it sits in this uncomfortable region too short to be an async op and too long to be noticeable (anything between 50ms and 2s fits this bill). Most likely the query is doing something suspicious and would benefit the most to take a closer look at.
by novocayn | 2025-10-10 02:32:42+00:00
You're right, string-based queries are very expressive. I intentionally avoided that here so readers could focus on how FTS indexes work internally. Adding a full query system would have shifted the focus away from the internals.

If you notice there are vv obvious optimizations we could make. I’m planning to collect them and put a these as code challenges for readers, and building string-based queries would make a great one :)
by favoboa | 2025-10-10 02:32:51+00:00
You're absolutely right about the garbage code being shipped, and I would bucket them under another group of adopters I didn't mention earlier. There are people hesitant to adapt, people thriving with AI, and (not exhaustively) also this large group that's excited and using AI heavily without actually thriving. They're enjoying the speed and novelty but shipping slop because they lack the review discipline.

However, my sense is that someone with proper management/review/leadership skills is far less likely to let that code ship, whether it came from an AI, a junior dev, or anyone else. They seem to have more sensibility for what 'good' looks like and can critically evaluate work before it goes out. The cognitive distance you mention is real, which is exactly why I think that review muscle becomes more critical, not less. From what I've observed, the people actually thriving with AI are maintaining their quality bar while leveraging the speed; they tend to be picky or blunt, but also give leeway for exploration and creativity.
by terribleperson | 2025-10-10 02:33:31+00:00
Last I checked (last year, I think?), the amount the federal government takes in corporate taxes relative to corporate profit was lower than 25%. Looking again, it looks like it's around 13%? See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A446RC1A027NBEA
Show HN: I Found a Way for Crypto Casinos to Be Fair
by ccheshirecat | 2025-10-10 02:35:36+00:00
Everyone in crypto gambling says they’re “provably fair.” But if you look closely, most of them only prove the final number after the spin or roll. They never prove how that number was chosen, or if your bet was even part of the process.

That’s what I wanted to fix.

I built something called the ProbablyFair Verifiability Layer (PF-VL). It’s an open standard that makes real fairness provable for any RNG-based game — slots, dice, plinko, whatever.

It doesn’t use a blockchain. It doesn’t use tokens. It’s just math.

Every bet carries a few guarantees:

1. The exact RNG code and parameters are published and hashed. 2. The game logic (payout tables, reels, etc.) is locked and verifiable. 3. Every bet is included in an append-only ledger with a proof. 4. Any player can replay and verify the result themselves. 5. Independent watchdogs can recompute everything continuously.

ProbablyFair doesn’t replace the casino’s system. It sits beside it. Operators don’t have to rebuild anything — just add a few calls to the SDK.

That’s it. Three API calls and one file hash.

If there’s a free, open, drop-in standard for provable fairness, then there’s no reason not to use it. Any casino that refuses is showing you something: they prefer a system where players can’t see what’s really going on.

If it’s fair, you can prove it. If you can’t prove it, it isn’t fair.

Technical bits: Core: Rust (verifier) SDK: Go (operator libraries) WASM: TinyGo (browser verifier) License: Apache-2.0 / CC-BY-4.0

Spec: https://probablyfair.org/specification | https://github.com/ProbablyFair/pf-specs/blob/main/PF-VL-1.0...

Repos: https://github.com/probablyfair/pf-core https://github.com/probablyfair/pf-sdk https://github.com/probablyfair/pf-wasm https://github.com/probablyfair/pf-specs

ProbablyFair Verifiability Layer (PF-VL-1.0) Every bet: committed, included, reproduced.

https://probablyfair.org
by chrismorgan | 2025-10-10 02:36:29+00:00
James/Jacob is even messier! They come from the same name, but are in English treated as completely distinct names. In the New Testament Greek, you get Ἰακώβ (iakob) used for Old-Testament-era Jacobs (primarily the one later given the name Israel, but also the one in Matthew 1:15–16), and Ἰάκωβος (iakobus) used for New-Testament-era Jameses (two of Jesus’ disciples, and one of his brothers). English Bibles have ended up using Jacob for the old and James for the new ones, but not all languages maintain the distinction: in Telugu, for example, they’re all యాకోబు (yakobu).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_(given_name)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_(name)
by ttul | 2025-10-10 02:37:06+00:00
There are lots of comments here about how Figure’s website uses cherry-picked videos that are slickly produced. But that’s precisely what they must be doing at this stage. Yes, there’s some real tech being developed at Figure and it’s amazing and totally imperfect. But the bigger challenge is keeping investors interested so the money keeps flowing. Without the lifeblood of investment, Figure won’t ever get that robot to work properly.

So, my conclusion is that they’re doing it all right for this stage. Lots of glamour added to a bit of substance.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-10-10 02:37:17+00:00
Aside from data sovereignty concerns, I think the best rebuttal to that would be to point out that every major provider contractually disclaims liability for maintaining backups.

Now, sure, there is AWS Backup and Microsoft 365 Backup. Nevertheless, those are backups in the same logical environment.

If you’re a central government, you still need to be maintaining an independent and basically functional backup that you control.

I own a small business of three people and we still run Veeam for 365 and keep backups in multiple clouds, multiple regions, and on disparate hardware.
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-10 02:37:50+00:00
Their overhead (e.g. their accountants and actuaries and so on) spend a lot of time inserting paperwork and delays in between hospitals and patients, fighting hospital invoices and fighting patient claims, doing marketing, and any profit the insurance company makes is money customers "spent on healthcare" which didn't end up being spent on anyone's healthcare.

> "Health insurance companies in the US must pay 80% of premiums to providers."

How was that figure decided upon, and why isn't it higher? Why isn't it "pay overheads and salaries, and return the rest to the customers"?
by egypturnash | 2025-10-10 02:39:03+00:00
I was experimenting with a Twiddler 3 for keyboard shortcuts on a Surface running Illustrator for a while. Started getting decent speed with my custom layout designed around my most used shortcuts. Ultimately I went back to a Mac laptop plus a drawing tablet, but this was because of issues with the Surface consistently dropping the first half a second of most of my stylus strokes, not because of the Twiddler.
by h4kunamata | 2025-10-10 02:39:10+00:00
Reddit API scandal tells you everything you need to know about the platform itself. The CEO is not giving a f to anything.

Moderators there means if I don't like your POV, your posts will be deleted if I have good humour or perma ban if I have had a bad day.

Start using Reddit too much and you quickly start getting depressed with all the shit going on in there.