MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-10-16 22:05:00+00:00
I wish all the Political Science 101, Civics 101, and Economics 101 people would take another class. First of all, the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, that's silly; the government has a monopoly on legitimate violence. Second of all, the wrestling valet and game show host and his array of dimwits aren't in control of anything, the people who pay them are. The people who pay them are also the people who run silicon valley.

If you hear that the government is coming down on somebody in silicon valley, it's because everybody else in silicon valley wanted him gone.

"The Feds" are people with no interests, no money and no power. They are where they are to execute for American business (and as we've sold off America, that just means any rich guy), and it's literally all they've been doing since WWII.
by molticrystal | 2025-10-16 22:05:14+00:00
I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.

For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector
by wrp | 2025-10-16 22:05:55+00:00
Speaking from knowing many people who once had jobs requiring security clearance, I think it's likely that a thorough search of their papers would uncover some stuff that officially shouldn't have left the office. People work on stuff from home and the evaluation of how sensitive something is can be fuzzy. The real concern should be whether the possessor was deliberately acting against national security. This "possession of classified materials" charge has become a political tool. Maybe once both political sides have suffered from it, there will be some effort to reign it in.
by altopex | 2025-10-16 22:06:01+00:00
LLMs have issues with creative tasks that might not be obvious for light users.

Using them for an RPG campaign could work if the bar is low and it's the first couple of times you use it. But after a while, you start to identify repeated patterns and guard rails.

The weights of the models are static. It's always predicting what the best association is between the input prompt and whatever tokens its spitting out with some minor variance due to the probabilistic nature. Humans can reflect on what they've done previously and then deliberately de-emphasize an old concept because its stale, but LLMs aren't able to. The LLM is going to give you a bog standard Gemini/ChatGPT output, which, for a creative task, is a serious defect.

Personally, I've spent a lot of time testing the capabilities of LLMs for RP and storytelling, and have concluded I'd rather have a mediocre human than the best LLMs available today.
by tptacek | 2025-10-16 22:06:08+00:00
If you believe that about the naturalistic fallacy, you should be fine with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt; the carrageenan is arguably more "natural" than the yogurt.

But all this just shows to go you: this whole "UPF" thing is a sort of motte and bailey deal. We all broadly agree that packaged hyperpalatable low-satiety foods (along with liquid calories) are a danger to human health; that's the motte. The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.

The right food classification scheme wouldn't have this problem, and wouldn't be a way for people to smuggle in proscriptions against sodium citrate or transglutaminase while coming up with "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
by shubb | 2025-10-16 22:06:24+00:00
I think it needs a water gun. If the diaper was a spray on layered rubber, like a sponge then an impermeable layer, and then you sprayed a solvent to clear the old diaper and poop and then spray on a new one. You'd just need to slot them into styrups briefly or some socks on strings to move the legs into a good position.

But can this be done with baby skin and lung safe chemicals at a reasonable temperature?

Point being humanoid designs for robots that manipulate objects designed for humans are an artificially hard problem we have decided to fail at solving.
by thegrim33 | 2025-10-16 22:07:24+00:00
>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare

Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.

If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".

In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
by Terr_ | 2025-10-16 22:08:15+00:00
> portray them dishonestly

Tangentially, the same motivated-disinformation occurs with Social Security.

It's best-understood as an insurance-policy (OASDI is literally named that way) against dying poor and old/orphaned/disabled. With an insurance policy, it's normal for my month's premium to be spent on somebody else's current tragedy, it's normal for me to expect no cash if the Bad Thing never actually happens to me, and it's normal that there's no asset for me to pass on to my heirs.

However wall-street bankers can't make tons of profits competing under that model, so instead they try to trick citizens into misunderstanding what the model is. They want people to think it's a government-managed investment account instead, where every person is filling an individual bucket of "their" money that will someday be tipped back out for them.

With this deception, their job is much easier: They just need to say that they'll be a nicer manager of the accounts than the government is, because they'll give you more choices for managing "your" money. It's dishonest because the two things are fundamentally different in how they work and what they're good for.
by mapkkk | 2025-10-16 22:09:10+00:00
I'm not 100% up to speed with the current standing of things, but tapes (specifically the LTO technology) is still being relied on very heavily by the enterprise, both in data centers for things like cold storage or critical backups, and other corporate uses. Archival use is also very strong with libraries and other such institutions having large tape libraries with autoloaders and all that automation jazz. The LTO-5 generation I mentioned was released in 2010, and the first LTO generation was released in 2000 I believe. The current generation is LTO-10, with an uncompressed capacity of 30TB. New LTO tapes are still being produced, the last batch I purchased was made in 2023.

The LTO consortium consists of HP, IBM and one other company I believe. Now, in my opinion, none of this guarantees the longevity of the medium any more than any other medium, but when I initially looked into it, this was enough to convince me to buy a drive and a couple of tapes.

My reasoning was that with the advertised longevity of 30 years under "ideal archival conditions", if I can get 10 years of mileage from tapes that are just sitting on my non-environmentally-controlled shelf, that means I'll only have to hunt down new tapes 3 times in my remaining lifetime, and after that it will be someone else's problem.
by simonw | 2025-10-16 22:09:14+00:00
In Claude and ChatGPT a project is really just a custom system prompt and an optional bunch of files. Those files are both searchable via tools and get made available in the Code Interpreter container.

I see skills as something you might use inside of a project. You could have a project called "data analyst" with a bunch of skills for different aspects of that task - how to run a regression, how to export data from MySQL, etc.

They're effectively custom instructions that are unlimited in size and that don't cause performance problems by clogging up the context - since the whole point of skills is they're only read into the context when the LLM needs them.
by treyd | 2025-10-16 22:09:57+00:00
How it's presented in the UI is roughly a function of how the underlying data is structured and manipulated. You can put in a lot of effort and construct a different view on top of a data model that "wants to" be seen in a different way (Delta Chat being an example of this on top of email), sure. But it increases the complexity of the implementation and makes the abstraction thicker, making iteration harder and introducing space for users (and onboarding developers) to misunderstand how things actually work.
by amarant | 2025-10-16 22:10:12+00:00
I think GP was basically talking about doing it on a doll. As in, a robot in 1-3 years might be able to change diapers with occasional success, but half the tries will result in a dismembered diaper user: we'd use dolls in this scenario, since dismembering babies is taboo and generally frowned upon within the robotics community.
by roarcher | 2025-10-16 22:11:05+00:00
Maybe I'm missing something but this just seems to be a guy playing with magnets? In the "Demonstration of Ion Propulsion" video, he shows how the magnet "shoots" through the ring, but it's just the release of potential energy from forcing the opposing poles together in the first place. It's like those "permanent magnet rail guns" people post on YouTube. I don't see what's novel about it.
by munk-a | 2025-10-16 22:11:17+00:00
I've lead a change like that - the very core of our data model was compromised from the early days of our company and we knew it... and knew it... and four years into working there I started a serious effort that ended up taking about a year and a half to pay off. These efforts always need a lot of careful planning and you usually want to work within the constraints of early model decisions as much as possible but it is quite possible to gracefully transition. When you're doing something like this it's important to be extremely greedy with SMEs to try and understand as much as you can about the field to future proof your new solution - our company did that once - there's not a chance it'd do it twice.
by autoexec | 2025-10-16 22:11:36+00:00
Tor browser's philosophy is that everyone should be fingerprinted and it's fine since they do everything they can think of to try to make that fingerprint identical to everyone else using Tor browser.

This is kind of crazy since there are new fingerprinting techniques all the time and if they miss even one data point the whole game is lost. The smarter movie would be to make sure that fingerprints are unique/randomized so that even the same person looks like different people but for some reason they're confident they can account for every possible identifying metric 100% of the time.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-16 22:11:40+00:00
There's no worse backup system than that which is sufficiently-tedious and complex that it never gets used, except maybe the one that is so poorly documented that it cannot be used.

With ZFS, the hashing happens at every write and the checking happens at every read. It's a built-in. (Sure, it's possible to re-implement the features of ZFS, but why bother? It exists, it works, and it's documented.)

Paranoia? Absolutely. If the disk can't be trusted (as it clearly cannot be -- the only certainty with a hard drive is that it must fail), then how can it be trusted to self-report that it is has issues? ZFS catches problems that the disks (themselves inscrutable black boxes) may or may not ever make mention of.

But even then: Anecdotally, I've got a couple of permanently-USB-connected drives attached to the system I'm writing this on. One is a WD Elements drive that I bought a few years ago, and the other is a rather old, small Intel SSD that I use as scratch space with a boring literally-off-the-shelf-at-best-buy USB-SATA adapter.

And they each report a bevy of stats with smartctl, if a person's paranoia steers them to look that way. SMART seems to work just fine with them.

(Perhaps-amusingly, according to SMART-reported stats, I've stuffed many, many terabytes through those devices. The Intel SSD in particular is at ~95TBW. There's a popular notion that using USB like this sure to bring forth Ghostbusters-level mass hysteria, especially in conjunction with such filesystems as ZFS. But because of ZFS, I can say with reasonable certainty that neither drive has ever produced a single data error. The whole contrivance is therefore verified to work just fine [for now, of course]. I would have a lot less certainty of that status if I were using a more-common filesystem.)
by chaps | 2025-10-16 22:12:38+00:00
Why does it have to be either-or? It's more of a revolving door.

One of the clearer modes of how this all looks can be seen when using public records laws to request information that was created through a government contract. On one side, trade secrecy is a legit thing. On the other hand, it's abused to the Nth degree such that just about anything is "trade secret". Government agencies will literally just ask the company's counsel if records in a records request can be released and they'll copy/paste the answer.

For example: I took an uber from an East Chicago, IN restaurant to a Chicago, IL planned parenthood and then FOIA'd for the GPS records that the city legally requires Uber to provide for every trip [1]. In the request I included the trip identifier that I found on the city's open data portal [2]. For months and months they denied, denied, denied, even after a request for emails gave me the exact SQL query they wrote to identify my trip.

Eventually when I narrowed the request down to the exact fields, they finally agreed that they have the records, but argued that the data (edit: just lat/lng of the start/end locations) showing me going to a planned parenthood was a trade secret. It would be trivial for Chicago's counsel to push back on that, but they seemed to have zero interest in reflecting on the risks of holding this category of data.

[1] https://chicago.github.io/tnp-reporting-manual/trip/ [2] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Transportation/Transportation...
by tschumacher | 2025-10-16 22:13:08+00:00
My coworker recently showed me this plugin [1] that fades out all Rust code that is unrelated to the variable under the cursor. Think of it as a more powerful version of the "click to highlight all appearances" you can do in most IDEs but it actually does information flow analysis on the code.

[1]: https://github.com/willcrichton/flowistry
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-16 22:13:19+00:00
I was a hardcore Claude fan too, but Sonnet 4.5 + the new weekly limits are really annoying.

I could deal with the limits, but holy shit is Sonnet 4.5 chatty. It produces as much useless crap as Opus 4.1 did. Might feel fun for Vibe Coders when the model pumps out tons of crap, but I want it to do what I asked, not try to get extra credit with "advanced" solutions and 500+ row "reports" after it's done. FFS.

Been testing crush + z.ai GLM 4.6 through Openrouter (had some credits in there it seems =) for this evening and I'm kinda loving it.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-10-16 22:13:19+00:00
I know what an analogy is. It's just that your analogy is absurd.

We're talking about someone who is obliterating the American democratic political system, and you're basically saying, "Well, there are pros and cons with any package deal, just like when you buy a sports car." These aren't little pros and cons with some trifling issue. This is the continued existence of the United States as a democracy.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-10-16 22:13:51+00:00
If you think differently to people around you, treat their advice with some scepticism. Including the things about work life balance and burn out.

Erdos did _great_. I had no idea he spent decades working for longer than most people spend awake but I know the name. If he'd listened to the advice he was given, we'd have a lot less mathematics and he'd have been less content.

Some other people would have been a little less worried about him. Bad tradeoff.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-10-16 22:13:54+00:00
The difference is that the proposed caps for home insurance would have made the product unprofitable, no question.

My understanding is that there is no way any vial of insulin anywhere, at this point in time, should cost enough to produce for US$35 asking price to be unprofitable. See [1] and [2] for example. This would need to increase with inflation, of course.

Regardless, the bill didn't pass. Arguments like this were probably the reason why.

[1] https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(21)... [2] https://www.medcentral.com/endocrinology/diabetes/the-high-c...
by semiquaver | 2025-10-16 22:14:11+00:00
This is great work, but I’m not clear on why this qualifies as DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the decoder needs to handle.

Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.
by 6510 | 2025-10-16 22:14:29+00:00
The numbers for Elbonia are unlike the US but you can use numbers to say all kinds of magical things.

US median income $75,000

top 10% $149000

top 5% $352000

Which is 203000 more, therefore half of the top 10% must earn $101500 less than $149000 to have an average of $149000 which is only $47500 which is 0.6 times median.

If you tax them 40% they have only 0.36 times median left.

See?

top 1% $749000 is 397000 more than the top 5%, therefore 4/5 of the top 5% earns $99250 less than $352000 which is only $252750 which is only about 3 time median.

top 0.1% $3312693 is 2563693 more than the top 1%, therefore 9/10 of the top 1% earns $284854 less than 749000 which is only 464145 which is only about 6 times median.

I don't know where all the money went but it isn't here.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-10-16 22:14:32+00:00
Not dense to ask questions! There are two separate concepts in play:

1) Maintaining the state of the "conversation" history with the LLM. LLMs are stateless, so you have to store the entire series of interactions on the client side in your agent (every user prompt, every LLM response, every tool call, every tool call result). You then send the entire previous conversation history to the LLM every time you call it, so it can "see" what has already happened. In a basic agent, it's essentially just a big list of strings, and you pass it into the LLM api on every LLM call.

2) "Prompt caching", which is a clever optimization in the LLM infrastructure to take advantage of the fact that most LLM interactions involve processing a lot of unchanging past conversation history, plus a little bit of new text at the end. Understanding it requires understanding the internals of LLM transformer architecture, but the essence of it is that you can save a lot of GPU compute time by caching previous result states that then become intermediate states for the next LLM call. You cache on the entire history: the base prompt, the user's messages, the LLM's responses, the LLM's tool calls, everything. As a user of an LLM api, you don't have to worry about how any of it works under the hood, you just have to enable it. The reason to turn it on is it dramatically increases response time and reduces cost.

Hope that clarifies!
by benjiro | 2025-10-16 22:14:38+00:00
> but just, how can you stand possible breadcrumbs IN THE JAR!?

Bacteria can do a number on people... Kept telling the wife to not cross contaminate jars, and other products. But you know, she knows better...

Wife was eating some fish in can, puts spoon back (with lovely saliva bacteria), puts in fridge "i wil eat tomorrow", 2 days later she eats the leftover.

She enjoyed a hour+ of "fun" muscles contracting stomach cramps to the point it was almost hospital time. Learned her lesson, well, ... for fish.

Its always like "but i do not like to keep using fresh utensils". I am always: "the dishwasher does not care if it 20 or 40 utensils". Its the same amount of wash and cost. So stop trying to recycle utensils!
I just got someone else's chat title in Claude Code
by noduerme | 2025-10-16 22:14:54+00:00
I opened up Claude in a VSCode project today, and the name of the archived conversation to resume was unrelated to its content. The conversation was now labeled: "Debugging Python Web Scraper With Selenium". I don't even work in Python. The chat (whose stored content hadn't changed) was about optimizing a mysql schema.

Notably (or not) the only thing that happened since the last time I ran Claude in this project was that I had temporarily moved the project directory, before moving it back and running Claude again. That and last night's VSCode update.

This is unfortunately the first time I've used Claude for something other than playing around with toy projects, where I actually exposed real work product to it (that's proprietary, closed-source, that I don't own). For that purpose I made dummy copies of the schema and code I wanted it to see and stripped out the API keys.

But this scares me - what may it be exposing to other users?

I found an article from a couple years ago, and it seems that this issue is not fixed.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-fixes-significant-issue-exposing-user-chat-titles-2023-03-22/
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-16 22:14:56+00:00
It can work, pizza delivery has been able to be profitable for example. But they are set up from the concept to be delivery businesses, and they have that accounted for in their pricing. Doordash trying to extract profit and pay a driver and put that all on the restaurant? No that's not going to work. As a restaurant I'd refuse Doordash orders at any less than full menu price, and paid on pickup not maybe three months later. If the customer wants the convenience of delivery to their door they need to pay for it.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-16 22:15:01+00:00
I am currently unaware of anyone who has accomplished anything considered historically important over any significant time period to judge, that didn’t have obvious ethical gaps.

Probably nobody lives without ethical gaps.

and the impact of ethical gaps of someone who has been able to achieve a lot, and are more visible to judge, are likely to both be and seem to be, proportionally greater.

Could it be enough to simply honor people who, overall, have done inspiring, positive things, while not giving them a pass for their mistakes and deficiencies, assuming they are legitimately smaller in scale?

I am not a fan of “purity” viewpoints.

so much easier to be severely critical, than open oneself up for judgement.

I am a fan of realism in both accomplishments and failures. The good impact and the bad. And taking inspiration and warning, from those whose accomplishments weigh more heavily to the former.

Being realistic has another advantage.

it doesn’t strongly imply, without actual evidence, that the speaker is somehow less prone to mistakes.