MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-10-09 19:14:58+00:00
LLMs are not a silver bullet. They're just as likely to point out non-issues, as they are to hallucinate fixes for them.

Their output is only as valuable as the human using them. If they're not a security expert to begin with, they can be easily led astray and lulled into a false sense of security.

See curl, for example. Hundreds of bogus reports rejected by an expert human. One large report with valuable data, that still requires an expert human to sift through and validate.
by yargzeblog | 2025-10-09 19:14:59+00:00
IMO the only way to avoid doing a total rebuild is to have Andre Arko:

1. Admit that he was the unauthorized actor (which means he's probably admitting to a crime?) 2. Have him attest he didn't exfil or modify the integrity of service while committing a crime.

If I was Ruby Central I would give clemency on #1 in exchange for #2 and I think #2 helps Andre Arko.
by oatsandsugar | 2025-10-09 19:16:20+00:00
One of the works:

> In early work, El-Badry developed a method for identifying binary stars in spectrographic datasets. More than half of stars exist in binary systems, but they are often too close together to be differentiated with available technology. El-Badry overcame this challenge through targeted statistical analysis of existing spectral data.

Another

> Porras-Kim selected fragmented objects of unknown origins from the storage shelves of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, whose collections span the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Indigenous Americas. Her resulting installation, entitled Reconstructions, brought together the artifacts with drawings and sculptures that prompted viewers to consider how the textile fragments, pottery shards, and other orphaned objects functioned and came to be acquired by the museum.
by therobots927 | 2025-10-09 19:16:28+00:00
Well people who salivate over military tech tend not to attend protests. There are many people who (probably correctly) believe the tech won’t be used on them because they would never do anything against the status quo and belong to an economic strata + dominant ethnic / religious group.

I’m not disagreeing but I am saying that unfortunately I think many voters are completely fine with the boomerang effect.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-09 19:16:53+00:00
I think I got a bit confused by terminology. By unwinding, do you mean stuff like Scheme's dynamic-wind which is supposed to free and reacquire resources over the course of non-local jumps?

In the "against call/cc" article, it's said that dynamic-wind condemns call/cc by its very existence. Undelimited continuations leak memory and resources and thus this thing was created to free them on exit and reacquire them on reentry. I concluded that delimited continuations have less need of it due to their, well, delimited nature.

> It finds the dynamic exist point by walking the dynamic frames looking for the block type with the right symbol. Only when it finds it, it simply jumps there without doing any unwinding.

That's essentially what lone is doing. It doesn't free any resources when control is transferred. It just copies stack frames to a heap allocated continuation value, then unwinds the stack to the frame introduced by the control primitive.
by nomel | 2025-10-09 19:17:23+00:00
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-41/subtitle-C/chapter-102...

> § 102-34.110 Must Government motor vehicles use Government license plates?

> Yes, you must use Government license plates on Government motor vehicles, with the exception of motor vehicles exempted under § 102-34.160, § 102-34.175 or § 102-34.180.

Second exemption:

> § 102-34.175 What motor vehicles have an unlimited exemption from displaying U.S. Government license plates and motor vehicle identification?

> Motor vehicles used primarily for investigative, law enforcement, intelligence, or security duties have an unlimited exemption from displaying U.S. Government license plates and motor vehicle identification when identifying these motor vehicles would interfere with those duties.

IANAL, but from a naive glance, your understanding seems to be incorrect. I think it's very concerning that there's no mention of the regulations in the article.

Anyone have a less naive perspective, with references?
by Frotag | 2025-10-09 19:17:48+00:00
There's so many super useful things in the Python docs that you never see in the wild. For example, I recently learned that the sqlite3 module has a set_authorizer function that lets you limit the types of statements that can be run / tables that can be accessed.

https://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/set_authorizer.html

https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html#sqlite3.Conne...
by dddgghhbbfblk | 2025-10-09 19:17:59+00:00
There's a lot of complexity here that you're overlooking. First of all, the sites have KYC and require geolocation software so it's not trivial to play. Especially not for the bot developers which have tended to live in Eastern Europe or Central Asia. They'll just go wherever is easiest to make money so it doesn't necessarily follow that every site would be overrun.

Second of all, poker is fairly capital intensive and whenever your bot account gets banned the site will confiscate your funds, so there's risk involved as well. And every time you get banned you need to create a new account with new KYC etc.

Third of all, bots play differently from humans and many of them are detected and caught by the players in addition to the site security. Further adding to the challenge is that the community of professional online players in the US is pretty small and everyone pretty much knows everyone else (we're all on Discord together, basically). So new names appearing at high stakes out of nowhere get scrutinized more.

Fourth, even if you're playing against a bot or cheater, you can still make money, since winrate is entirely driven by fish. You might lose a little against the cheater but as long as you're winning far more from the fish you'll still make money. This separates poker from other competitive games.

I don't mean to imply the bot and cheating issues don't exist, they're real and serious and existential, and every online pro these days spends a lot of time worrying about it, worrying if a certain opponent is cheating, etc. But I think the bigger issues facing online poker are actually regulatory (in the US, an unregulated market has sprung up since the pandemic that is now struggling with a lot of legal changes; Europe has a lot of anti gambling laws these days and more every year) as well as general game quality (fewer recreational players wanting to gamble large amounts of money online and more pros than ever trying to split that smaller pie).
by schmookeeg | 2025-10-09 19:18:25+00:00
For my case, and my workload, the answer has always been "RAM is cheap, and swapping sucks" -- but there are folks using Rpi as a NAS platform so really... my anecdote actually sucks upon reflection and I'd retract it if I could.

For every clown like me with massive RAM in their colo'd box, there is someone doing better and more amazing things with an ESP32 and a few molecules of RAM :D
by toast0 | 2025-10-09 19:18:31+00:00
Yeah, there's an industry of companies that insert themselves between the medical record and the insurance company to upcode claims and get better payments. This article is about the reverse process, where the insurance company looks at the claims and downcodes them to send worse payments.

IMHO, in office care should be more of a time and materials billing than billing based on procedures done. Of course, then the doctors' billing office would aggressively measure time the doctor spent, and the insurance company would suggest the doctor took too long for whatever.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-09 19:18:35+00:00
Rural America's internet problem is not edge compute. It's the FCC constantly redefining "broadband" to include barely-connected households.

This solves nothing, even if you bridge the digital divide. It's also subject to local regulation, likely unprofitable and requires extraordinary headcount-to-compute ratios that will never displace Oracle or AWS. Their "pre-built logistics and power grid" would get saturated by 2 colo machines.
by geminiboy | 2025-10-09 19:18:43+00:00
OP.

It's because we developers don't get to see the big picture anymore and it's not our fault. Software development stopped being a craft. Now it's just an assembly line.

Some product owner who barely understands the tech hands you a Jira ticket. It has a list of requirements, and your job is to make the ticket go away. You don't know why you're building it. You don't talk to the person who will use it. Your only job is to close the ticket.

Every single bug you listed? I can tell you exactly where it came from.

Of-course Chrome's tab groups are broken. The team was measured on shipping the feature, not making it work. Fixing it is tech debt, and tech debt never gets prioritized over the next shiny new thing on the roadmap.

Slack shitting the bed when you change network? That's the price of "moving fast and breaking things," except we never go back to fix them. We just live with the rubble.

And the stuff that seems intentionally hostile. That's what happens when the goal is just juicing some engagement metric. The user's sanity is never part of that equation.

Don't even get me started on the "Agile" theater. We do all the meetings, the stand-ups, the retros. It's a cargo cult. It's a way for management to pretend there's a process while they just demand more features, faster. And when stuff breaks, they blame us for not "trusting the process."

So no, you're not just yelling at clouds. You're seeing exactly what this broken factory produces every day. Your frustration is completely justified.
by netsharc | 2025-10-09 19:19:21+00:00
> How are these ICE goons not being stopped by local forces?

Because the rule of law isn't absolute any more? Because the local cops know these goons have the backing of the corrupt federal government and trying to get them to follow the law would get them (the local cops) beat up, jailed, etc, instead?

Welcome to a shithole country!

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said "In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example... If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.".

And as this lady who studied corruption observed, https://archive.ph/E6zXj corruption doesn't help with fighting insurgency, just think about how many would not report to the cops if they saw Luigi Mangione.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-09 19:20:15+00:00
Doubt that Shannon's papers ever expressed anything like the analogies made in the opening of this article... This doubt infects the rest of it.

The great bulk of the articles and comments at HN are evidence of a distinction between talking about something and understanding it. Most of what's posted is what-aboutism; very little understanding.

This captures the nature and mood of the programmer today: able to manipulate interfaces, poor understanding of why things work.

The interwebz greatly expanded the realm of what-about while marginalizing and overwhelming understanding. This has been evident in news and scholarship for a generation.

The arrival of AIz are making it far worse for the reason that whereas, previously, the curious would seek those with understanding, today curiosity is being overrun by canned "answers" that cannot represent understanding because the oracle has none. Every response is a test of credulousness, with the gullible broken by hallucinations and the agents derailed by prompt injection.

The Turing test might be inverted to examine the edge at which humans can be deemed to think, given that we've already plumbed out that humans are very easily fooled by parroting.
by ketzu | 2025-10-09 19:20:18+00:00
> Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is

Maybe this is a language barrier issue. Companies organized as AG, GmbH etc. under private law, in opposition to branches of the government or special institutions of public law. This is commonly called "Bahnprivatisierung" in Germany.

The Deutsche Bahn was "privatized" in the sense that it was moved from public law to private law based organization.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-09 19:20:28+00:00
I agree, I think that's probably the hope. It's interesting you bring up Julia here because I was just reading the post about the 1.12 release and this comment struck me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524485

Particularly this part is relevent to the Python discussion:

What is Julia's central conceit? It aims to solve "the two language" problem, i.e. the problem where prototyping or rapid development is done in a dynamic and interactive language like Python or MATLAB, and then moved for production to a faster and less flexible language like Rust or C++. This is exactly what the speaker in the talk addresses. They are still using Julia for prototyping, but their production use of Julia was replaced with Rust. I've heard several more anecdotal stories of the exact same thing occurring. Here's another high profile instance of Julia not making it to production: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-used-to-prototype-wh... Julia is failing at its core conceit.

So that's the question I have right now: what is Python supposed to be? Is it supposed to be the glue language that is easy to use and bind together a system made from other languages? Or is it trying to be what Julia is, a solution to the two language problem. Because it's not clear Julia itself has actually solved that.

The reason I bring this up is because there's a lot of "cake having/eating" floating around these types of conversations -- that's it's possible to be all the things, without a healthy discussion of what the tradeoffs are in going that direction, and what that would me mean for the people who are happy with the way things are. These little % gains are all Python is going to achieve without actually asking the developer to sacrifice their development process in some way.
by kbyatnal | 2025-10-09 19:20:31+00:00
good question!

Our goal is to provide customers with as much flexibility as possible. For certain use cases, you might be willing to take a slight hit to accuracy in exchange for better costs and latency. To support this, we offer a "light" processing mode (with significantly lower prices) that uses smaller models, fewer VLMs, and more heuristics under the hood.

For other use cases, you simply want the highest accuracy possible. Our "performance" processing mode is a great fit for that, which enables layout models, signature detection, handwriting VLMs, and the most performant foundation models.

We back this up with a native evals experience in the product, so you can directly measure the % accuracy difference between the two modes for your exact use case.
by czhu12 | 2025-10-09 19:20:55+00:00
Yeah so happy to share how that happened to us.

If you want to host a redshift instance, and get Google Analytics logs + twilio logs + stripe payments + your application database into a datawarehouse, then graph all that in a centralized place (tableau / looker / etc)

A common way to do that is:

- Fivetran for data streaming

- Redshift for data warehousing

- Looker for dashboarding

You're looking at $150k / year easily.
by keeda | 2025-10-09 19:21:47+00:00
> I frequently find myself watching them retype 100+ lines of code that I pasted in just to make a one line change.

In such cases, I specifically instruct LLMs to "only show the lines you would change" and they are very good at doing just that and eliding the rest. However, I usually do this after going through a couple of rounds of what you just described :-)

I partly do this to save time and partly to avoid using up more tokens. But I wonder if it is actually saving tokens given that hidden "thinking tokens" are a thing these days. That is, even if they do elide the unchanged code, I'm pretty sure they are "reasoning" about it before identifying only the relevant tokens to spit out.

As such, that does seem different from copy-and-paste tool use, which I believe is also solved. LLMs can already identify when code changes can be made programmatically... and then do so! I have actually seen ChatGPT write Python code to refactor other Python code: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kunalkandekar_metaprogramming...

I had to fix a minor bug in its Python script to make it work, but it worked and was a bit of a <head-explode> moment for me. I still wonder if this is part of its system prompt or an emergent tool-use behavior. In either case, copy-and-paste seems like a much simpler problem that could be solved with specific prompting.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-10-09 19:22:10+00:00
One important caveat to remember is that this is before a lot of the work on free-threaded python started in full force. A lot of cutting edge work had to be done to support this in the GC but this came with performance penalties. As a result, the trajectory of the Faster CPython effort changed quite a bit.

Didn't help Microsoft axed several folks on that team too...
by 6ak74rfy | 2025-10-09 19:22:31+00:00
I too care a lot about privacy and data sovereignty but those aren't sufficient arguments to self-host. For instance, my wife cares about the two too and so she uses most of the services that I host at my home, but she isn't going to start self-hosting herself anytime soon.

I think the missing piece is you need to enjoy the process itself - without that, it's not really tenable (at least today).
by cooper_ganglia | 2025-10-09 19:22:39+00:00
>Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.

Good point, which is why Boston Dynamics didn't really excite me. It was very cool to see the bot balance itself while being pushed with a hockey stick, but LiDAR-based pathfinding on hydraulic actuators has never truly felt like the future. Balancing and doing backflips is different than walking through a home and being able to perform delicate or visually difficult tasks like loading a dishwasher or caring for your baby in it's crib at night (just kidding, lol)

I'm sure a lot of BD's initial R&D has made Figure able to ramp so quickly and I don't mean to speak negatively of BD at all, but within 3 years, Figure has made it feel like the future is at our doorstep, meanwhile BD hasn't really done that for me in 3 decades. That's very impressive to me.
by mikeckennedy | 2025-10-09 19:23:58+00:00
Joel, my podcast has been going for 10 years, I've done research and an interview nearly ever week over that time period resulting in over 500 episodes. It's not AI.

What you are referring to is the Readers' brief and you're taking it out of context. If you actually went to all of them, you would find this as the very first "track":

https://blobs.talkpython.fm/00-readers-brief-intro.mp3?cache...

It clearly explains that this is an extra to the book, it's created with AI and meant to be fun. It makes minor mistakes but enjoy it if you like or just don't listen and read the book without.

Here is the transcript from that opening track in case you don't want to listen:

Hello and welcome to the Reader's Brief for the Talk Python in Production book. This is your author, Michael Kennedy. I am thrilled you're interested in the book.

This companion audio series features short, exploratory conversations around each chapter of the book. They typically range from two and a half to four minutes per chapter. You can listen to each chapter's Reader's Brief just before reading a chapter to help you get in the ideal mindset. Or you can listen afterward and let your mind wander and expand on the ideas covered in the chapter. It's all up to you. Once I neared completion of the book, I had been brainstorming how I could offer an audio version. However, there are sufficiently many code listings that are too important to the content to really support a word-for-word audio book. It would be rough to listen to me narrate a Nginx configuration file to you, for example.

Thus, I came up with the reader's brief idea. A conversation around topics of each chapter in a brief two to four minute format that adds to the book rather than a traditional spoken true audio book. I do want to set expectations a bit. The reader's briefs are spoken by AI. Very good ones, by the way. So you will hear an occasional misspoken acronym such as Nginx or SSH. But enjoy these for what they are and don't expect perfection. They're really interesting ideas and background stories and thoughts on each chapter.

I hope you find that they add value to your experience. I know they did to mine. Finally, I have added the necessary metadata to the MP3 files. You should be able to add them all to your music library and they will appear in a single album. MP3 file for all the chapters together and put chapter markers in that MP3 file. Pick which one you want. Thanks for the interest in my book. I'll be with you page by page as you learn from it. Cheers.
by Lerc | 2025-10-09 19:24:13+00:00
Doesn't really matter. All of the gains made before any funding collapse will exist.

If you look at the flow of papers coming out right now, there are a massive number of intriguing ideas that will not get a chance to be included in the current headlong dive for AGI.

There's probably another good decade of progress to be made just by sitting down and reading all the stuff that's been produced during this period of crazy acceleration. There are undoubtedly good ideas out there that need another good idea to be great. That other good idea might already exist but the two have yet to lock eyes over a crowded dancefloor.
by aduffy | 2025-10-09 19:24:19+00:00
I've had numerous encounters where doctors (and dentists) attempt to charge me for services they've already been reimbursed for from the insurance company.

It's only after hours of scouring my EOBs and being on the phone with my insurance that I then come back to the practice's office with evidence in hand, and they dismiss the charges.

I'm pretty sure this is just a racket because they expect most people not to put up a fight and just pay, or get sent to collections hell.

The amount of work you need to do as a patient in our health system is so dumb.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-09 19:24:20+00:00
the health insurance industry needs to be razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch. there's no saving something that is ostensibly designed to help people get healthcare but realistically denies them what they're entitled to for years (in some cases, they just try to keep the ball in the air until the patient dies, then there's no one to appeal) and then once the care is approved steals from the service provider by automatically altering the bills without any evidence of fraud or theft.
by octo888 | 2025-10-09 19:25:00+00:00
[warning: old man rants at clouds]

Maybe I'm getting old, but I think at this stage I want the third, often-unspoken route: no data.

Let go of things

No need for infrastructure when you have nothing to host. And data that doesn't exist is the most secure in the world.

Is my home a home – or the premises of a small-business? Racks, servers, cables, smart devices, the fan noise etc!

It does feel like we are operating our lives more and more like a small business these days: managing data, managing logins, "B2B" with hundreds of companies (EULAs, contracts, invoices, subscriptions...), files, archives, backups, contacts, appointments, app after app after app...on and on.

I wish life were simpler. Maybe a lot is in our control, more than we realise