MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by H8crilA | 2025-10-14 15:45:48+00:00
I also hate the term "hallucination", but for a different reason. A hallucination is a confusion of internal stimulus as an external input. The models simply make errors, have bad memory, are overconfident, are sampling from a fantasy world, or straight up lie; often at rates that are not dissimilar from humans. For models to truly hallucinate, develop delusions and all that good schizophrenia stuff we would need to have a truly recurrent structure that has enough time to go through something similar to the prodrome, and build up distortions and ideas.

TL;DR: being wrong, even very wrong != hallucination
by eqvinox | 2025-10-14 15:46:06+00:00
> it does not actually cover what rules you can check or infer from type hints

Indeed this is the cause of maybe 30% of the warnings I'm seeing… items being added to lists or dicts in some place (or something else making it infer a container type), and pyrefly then refusing other types getting added elsewhere. The most "egregious" one I saw was:

def something(x: list[str]) -> str: foo = [] for i in x: foo.append(i) return "".join(foo)

Where it complains:

ERROR Argument `str` is not assignable to parameter `object` with type `LiteralString` in function `list.append` [bad-argument-type] --> test.py:4:20 4 | foo.append(i)

Edit: now that I have posted it, this might actually be a bug in the .join type annotation… or something

Edit: nah, it's the loop (and the LiteralString variant of .join is just the first overload listed in the type hints)… https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/1107 - this is kinda important, I don't think I can use it before this is improved :/
by ghusto | 2025-10-14 15:46:16+00:00
> Nothing prevents vpn-du-jour.com from similarly messing with your traffic

The browser not trusting the CA that signed the certificate prevents this. As the commenter said above, they would first need to install a certificate into your list of trusted certs for this to work. Your IT department can do that because they have root on your machine, vpn-du-jour.com can not, and neither can anybody else without root.
by semi_sentient | 2025-10-14 15:46:26+00:00
A concise explainer of the standard four-stage architecture used in most modern recommendation and ranking systems: retrieval, scoring, ordering, and feedback.

It walks through how these stages connect in production systems like search, feeds, and content recommendations, with diagrams and examples.

Part of a five-part series exploring each stage in more detail this week.

Curious how others here are evolving these pipelines. Are you moving toward more unified (retrieval+scoring) models, or keeping stages separate for latency and control?
by baq | 2025-10-14 15:47:14+00:00
I don't disagree about the economic outcome today, but I don't understand how you can say that demographics issues are made up - either they are made up in the west, too, or they aren't. Nobody knows what will happen in the next 25 years, maybe nothing much, maybe we'll all be replaced by humanoid robots in the west, in the east and in the third world, too.
by RajT88 | 2025-10-14 15:47:52+00:00
I'm waiting for IT departments worldwide to wake up to the threat that your browsers are leaking all of your URI's by default back to the manufacturers.

URI's leak company secrets. I'm sure there's some people at Google using Edge which are leaking company data to Microsoft. I'm sure there's some people at Microsoft using Chrome which are leaking data to Google.

Edge and Chrome both send back every URI you visit to "improve search results" or to "sync history across devices". It's not clear if this includes private mode traffic or not (they don't say).

Huge privacy hole to allow this, and nobody seems to be aware or care.
by jghn | 2025-10-14 15:48:20+00:00
> corruption is an equal opportunity employer

Of course it is. Anecdotally however, in my career I've spent a lot of time among people like the author of the article. I've yet to meet a single one who did not present as genuine in their desire to help people. Might it be the case that they are aware of market dynamics within the process? Yes of course. But tropes like Big Pharma intentionally not providing cures or only looking at treatments that require constant application are bollocks. At least to the extent of my hands on experience in the industry.
by rdtsc | 2025-10-14 15:48:48+00:00
> Sabine Hossenfelder

She has a popular science channel https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos

I also understand she is considered controversial as she's been criticizing the scientific community, mostly on how they get funding and how they pick research direction.

From little I understood from it in this paper she is basing it off the Penrose QM-GR interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_interpretation
by notatallshaw | 2025-10-14 15:49:01+00:00
A lot of the tools you list here are composable, mypy checks type hints, black formats code, because of the purpose and design ethos of those two tools they would never think to merge.

So which is it that you want, to just reach for one tool or have tools that have specific design goals and then have to reach for many tools in a full workflow?

FWIW Astral's long term goal appears to be to just reach for one tool, hence why you can now do "uv format".
by jameskilton | 2025-10-14 15:49:07+00:00
This is just beating around the bush. The only reason anyone even knows about RFK Jr, much less his current job, is because of Trump.

The actual solution is that Trump must go. But America voted for this. Get RFK Jr removed, and Trump will put someone just as bad, or worse, there. And the cycle continues, until Trump and the Republican Party are finally dismantled.

But I don't see that happening for quite a few years yet. The economy hasn't crashed hard enough for that to happen.
by dijit | 2025-10-14 15:49:16+00:00
It was audited, found to have some serious flaws[0], then those were rectified.

Most people dislike Telegram because:

A) It takes away from Signals market share

B) They don't enable E2EE by default

C) They're owned by Pavel Durov, the Russian Zuckerberg.

I am aware that it's an unpopular opinion, but the FUD spread against Telegram and the hagiographies of Signal make me think something weird is going on.

Telegram has third party clients, so you can just roll your own client that runs another encryption on top if you want, like Pidgin used to do with OTR.

[0]: https://mtpsym.github.io
by gruez | 2025-10-14 15:49:26+00:00
For people who only read the headline, it's not as bad as the title might suggest. This attack requires backdooring the client, by which point it's already effectively game over in most threat models. The main advantage of this attack is that a compromised client can be sending "encrypted" messages that can actually be trivially decrypted by authorities, but that isn't immediately obvious to someone inspecting network traffic. Needless to say, this is a pretty pointless attack because nobody is manually inspecting every piece of data that their telegram is sending, and the client probably makes so many requests that it's trivial to smuggle data through some other side channel.
by archerx | 2025-10-14 15:49:44+00:00
>likely believe psilocybin and ketamine are credible treatments for mental illness

That’s so vague and disingenuous. Should you take psychedelics if you have schizophrenia or something similar? Absolutely not but there is hard science research proving that they do help with depression and other issues.

I lost all my faith in the medical industry when I went through it. I entered with a minor problem and left with a much worse chronic pain. The doctor who did it to me had the gall to say it was in my head. Fortunately I went to another doctor and the CT scan proved it was in fact not in my head but in my intestines. I’m dealing with this drama, but I learned a lot of doctors are actually really bad and just want to prescribe you stuff and get you out of the door. Ironically the stuff this so called specialist was only making me feel worse and when I told her that she didn’t believe me.

Thankfully I have found some good doctors after much efforts and many references but I lost a lot of respect for the medical industry and came to understand that it’s a business and they just want to see you as many medications as possible and don’t really care about solving your problem.
by guerrilla | 2025-10-14 15:50:05+00:00
It's not just worse. It's MUCH worse. I'm in the same boat. I want to change but I don't know what to and haven't had the energy to put into that yet. This desktop is dead though and they're just beating it's dead corpse at this point. I've tried KDE a few times and it was just too disorganized for me, so I might just do something simpler like awesome or one of those tiling things and add in what I want. I used to just use openbox. There must be something equally simple for Wayland.
by AndrewOMartin | 2025-10-14 15:50:07+00:00
Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on this. To paraphrase; she says she notices a subject people are talking about but she's not an expert in, and so she accesses some recent papers on the subject, ideally including a literature review, reads them, considers everything she's read together and forms an opinion.

I ask you, what else you expect anyone else to do? Isn't this exactly a scientific process? and anything else amounts to gatekeeping.

(quick edit: I'm all for taking everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt though, even peer reviewed papers shouldn't be taken uncritically)
by mattnewton | 2025-10-14 15:50:10+00:00
Nit, I’d say as someone who spend a fair amount of time doing it in the life insurance space, actually parsing arbitrary pdfs is very much not a solved problem without LLMs. Parsing a particular pdf is, at least until they change their table format or w/e.

I don’t think this idea is totally cursed, I think the implementation is. Instead of using it to shortcut filling in grades that the applicant could spot check, like a resume scraper, they are just taking the first pass from the LLM as gospel.
by kbyatnal | 2025-10-14 15:50:27+00:00
School transcripts are surprisingly one of the hardest documents to parse. The thing that makes them tricky is (1) the multi-column tabular layouts and (2) the data ambiguity.

Transcript data is usually found in some sort of table, but they're some of the hardest tables for OCR or LLMs to interpret. There's all kinds of edge cases with tables split across pages, nested cells, side-by-side columns, etc. The tabular layout breaks every off-the-shelf OCR engine we've run across (and we've benchmarked all of them). To make it worse, there's no consistency at all (every school in the country basically has their own format).

What we've seen help in these cases are:

1. VLM based review and correction of OCR errors for tables. OCR is still critical for determinism, but VLMs really excel at visually interpreting the long tail.

2. Using both HTML and Markdown as an LLM input format. For some of the edge cases, markdown cannot represent certain structures (e.g. a table cell nested within a table cell). HTML is a much better representation for this, and models are trained on a lot of HTML data.

The data ambiguity is a whole set of problems on its own (e.g. how do you normalize what a "semester" is across all the different ways it can be written). Eval sets + automated prompt engineering can get you pretty far though.

Disclaimer: I started a LLM doc processing company to help companies solve problems in this space (https://extend.ai/).
by ghusto | 2025-10-14 15:50:40+00:00
> which protects your readers' privacy. You don't want people to know what pages you read on BigBank.com or EmbarassingFetish.com

DNS requests leak this information.

> Tamper Proofing > Site Authentication

There are _many_ sites where this is not important. I want HTTPS for my bank, but I couldn't care less if someone wants to spend the time and effort to intercept and change pages from a blog I read.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-14 15:50:47+00:00
What do you mean "were to do"? It's already happened, probably many times, it just a single human can't keep up with all world news of every industry.

Here is an example how China raided and took over Chinese ARM subsidiary, along with all stolen western IP.

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-semiconductor-heis...
by mikeyouse | 2025-10-14 15:51:01+00:00
He was formerly the Dean of Faculty at Harvard Medical School.. he and his wife are both accomplished physicians. She happens to have a clinical director role at a pharma company but is also a professor at Harvard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Flier

He's not some lefty opposed to RFK out of spite for the Trump admin either.. he's written about how ineffective DEI is, against 'cancel culture', and he's writing this essay in Quillete, which is a very right-of-center publication. You'll find that the vast majority of people involved in research, medicine, or public health oppose RFK.
by btilly | 2025-10-14 15:51:15+00:00
Not according most states.

The distinction between murder and manslaughter is malice aforethought. For first degree murder, you must have intended the death of a particular person. For second degree murder, you need only have known that you could kill someone, and did it anyways. This specifically includes things done with extreme recklessness.

So to prove second degree murder you need to show 1) you intentionally did something, 2) you knew (or should have known) it could kill someone, and 3) someone died.

These can be proven for arson. You have to prove the intent to start the forest fire. Everyone knows (or should know) that forest fires can kill people. You have to prove that someone died from the fire.

That is why arson qualifies as second degree murder. Just like, say, failing to maintain the brakes on a fleet of trucks. (True story. My nephew was the unlucky driver of such a truck whose brakes failed...)
by JimDabell | 2025-10-14 15:51:18+00:00
This isn’t. They actually fixed that bug. Then they changed their minds and backed the fix back out again because they don’t think you should write Python that way:

> I think EAFP is a very unfortunate and ill-advised practice.

They want you to not write the idiomatic Python:

try: foo = bar["baz"]["qux"] ... except KeyError: ...

…and instead write the non-idiomatic version:

if "baz" in bar and "qux" in bar["baz"]: foo = bar["baz"]["qux"] ... else: ...

If this were a linter then I would accept that it is going to be opinionated. But this is not a linter, it’s a type checker. Their opinions about EAFP are irrelevant. That’s idiomatic Python.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-14 15:51:38+00:00
Chinas been around for a few thousand years, what's something they can do that nobody else has been able to replicate?

There's always a Vietnam.

Even now with all the talk about "rare earth minerals". They're not rare, everybody has them, its just nobody else wants to pollute their rivers mining and refining them when China is willing to.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-14 15:52:00+00:00
> It always struck me more as shallow “edgy teen” posturing than anything else

Comment OP here: it was exactly this; the safest, most boring possible way to be transgressive. I didn't talk about it as much as other kids who were like this, so I didn't have to stop once people started to actually care/respond, but I did go from keeping my Harold Schechter books on my bookshelf to in a special box in my closet. Merely knowing about these things gave me a little secret thrill like I was some sort of badass with extreme psychic warding able to go into some secret space that most people couldn't stand. In reality I was just desensitized cuz abusive mom and I'm really glad I grew out of it before I got to the part some kids get to where learning isn't enough and they start experimenting.
by jerlam | 2025-10-14 15:52:04+00:00
The military tests itself against "peer adversaries" but defined to be opponents that play by the same rules as the US, with a sprinkling of lessons learned from the last war. Any actual adversary won't "follow the script".

> The Red [enemy] force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force, resulting in initial major successes. Over the course of the simulation, heavy constraints were placed on the Red force's ability to free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted",[4] resulting in a Blue victory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
by bityard | 2025-10-14 15:52:16+00:00
MATE was forked around the time GNOME 3 was released and is still going. https://mate-desktop.org

Some people consider Cinnamon to be a GNOME 2 spiritual successor while still using a lot of GNOME 3 stuff under the hood. https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/
by jghn | 2025-10-14 15:52:20+00:00
Until he learns that a rise in tracked cases does not necessarily an imply a rise in actual incidence, anything he says is suspect.

There are nuggets of truth to what he says but he completely ignores for instance that a lot of the increase in autism numbers is simply due to a better understanding of how to flag someone as being on the spectrum. 50 years ago, a lot of these people would have just been seen as odd. Same with chronic illness & allergies. I do believe there's a true increase here. But it is also the case that we're measuring & tracking things now that we didn't use to measure.
Show HN: Best biological age model using standard blood tests
by zsolt224 | 2025-10-14 15:52:51+00:00
There’s a fairly recent research paper introducing a biological age calculation model, that uses only standard blood tests and outperforms PhenoAge. So I reached out to the original researchers and did a 1-hour+ interview with one of the authors. I developed an online calculator based on it and we came up with a name for it: "Bortz Blood Age Calculator"

*About the model:*

- Trained on 306k individuals from the UK Biobank database - Validated on similar dataset - It offers an 11% relative increase in predictive value over the Levine PhenoAge - This model includes better markers (like Cystatin-C, ApoA1...) compared to other similar models. - Interesting thing is that the model selected for higher total cholesterol, ALT and creatinine as better. More about it later.

*Online calculator:*

Based on the model, I created 100% free and private online calculator: https://www.longevity-tools.com/humanitys-bortz-blood-age

*Video*

I also made a video about the calculator, which explains:

- more info about the model and how it was created - gotchas of the calcutor - some speculation about why the model selected for higher total cholesterol, ALT and creatinine

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VHIfouvcYE

*Research paper link:*

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05456-z

---

I do not sell anything or promote anything paid. This is not a medical advice.
by hansonkd | 2025-10-14 15:52:56+00:00
So in these cases of government seizing bitcoin, the people they seize from have unencrypted private keys?

The article just says "private keys the defendant had in his possession" does this mean he was holding onto private keys that had no passwords / encryption at all that unlocked $15B?

Or does the government have an alternative way of "seizing" bitcoin? I remember years ago people throwing around conspiracy theories that bitcoin was invented by the NSA / other 3 letter agencies with a backdoor to basically allow easy tracking / seizure of criminal assets.

Im not a conspiracy theorist, but stories like these were the government seems so easy to seize such incredibly large amounts of money so easily seems to suggest some other mechanisms that aren't public.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-14 15:53:16+00:00
> Nothing new to see here.

Eh, I don't think that's a productive thing to say. There's an immense business pressure to deploy LLMs in such decision-making contexts, from customer support, to HR, to content policing, to real policing. Further, because LLMs are improving quickly, there is a temptation to assume that maybe the worst is behind us and that models don't make too many mistakes anymore.

This applies to HN folks too: every other person here is building something in this space. So publicizing failures like this is important, and it's important to keep doing it over and over again so that you can't just say "oh, that was a 3o problem, our current models don't do that".
by motorest | 2025-10-14 15:53:16+00:00
> Beyond this, if you’re working on novel code, LLMs are absolutely horrible at doing anything. A lot of assumptions are made, non-existent libraries are used, and agents are just great at using tokens to generate no tangible result whatsoever.

That's not my experience at all. A basic prompt file is all it takes to cover each and any assumption you leave out from your prompts. Nowadays the likes of Copilot even provide support out of the box for instruction files, and you can create them with a LLM prompt too.

Sometimes I wonder what is the first-hand experience of the most vocal LLM haters out here. They seem to talk an awful lot about issues that feel artificial and not grounded in reality. It's like we are discussing that riding a bicycle is great, and these guys start ranting on how the biking industry is in a bubble because they don't even manage to stay up with side wheels on. I mean, have you bothered to work on the basics?
by catigula | 2025-10-14 15:53:24+00:00
>That’s so vague and disingenuous. Should you take psychedelics if you have schizophrenia or something similar? Absolutely not but there is hard science research proving that they do help with depression and other issues.

Again, the research exists but is thin and low quality. I'm sorry you went through issues, I know this is common, which is why I addressed readers looking to self-diagnose but thumb their noses at people doing exactly what they're doing.
by kube-system | 2025-10-14 15:53:31+00:00
Distracted driving is certainly a problem.

But, have you ever driven a quiet vehicle in an urban area where there are plenty of objects to block your line of sight? It is quite easy for a emergency vehicle to sneak up on you in a modern vehicle even when you are paying attention.

It's really a simple relationship -- if you block sound, it makes it harder to hear things.

This is exactly the reason why newer emergency vehicles have things like rumbler sirens. These sirens don't do anything to make people more attentive, but what they do is generate frequencies that are more likely to penetrate into modern vehicles.
by adastra22 | 2025-10-14 15:53:38+00:00
He is a partisan hack. During the election last year he consistently posted that gdp growth was real, the economy was booming, and it was all thanks to Biden/Harris. I called him out on it on Twitter, and he was unabashed about being a partisan propagandist. Not surprisingly, now that the politics have changed, the history changes.

Anything he says on any topic should be treated as suspect, and probably best ignored.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-10-14 15:53:56+00:00
Key part

> On 4 October 2025, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued an export control notice prohibiting Nexperia China and its subcontractors from exporting specific finished components and sub-assemblies manufactured in China. Nexperia is actively engaging with the Chinese authorities to obtain an exemption from these restrictions and has deployed all available resources to that end. Nexperia is in close dialogue with all relevant national and local government authorities to mitigate the impact of this measure.