MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fair_enough | 2025-10-09 19:36:48+00:00
Pardon me if I'm just pointing out what everybody was already thinking, but...

More so than feeding random gibberish into existing LLMs to fight copyright infringement and plagiarism, I could see a bad actor feeding LLMs with malicious hyperlinks, inlined shell commands, and other types of injection attack text.

Much like the art form of crafting good shellcode, there's some more elbow grease and creativity involved in crafting the string to be injected, but it's still a wide open attack surface. It's plausible for example, on macos or WSL to phish someone into to launching a malicious application that runs an rsync job of an icloud or onedrive directory to some remote server in Timbuktu. All a bad actor has to do is name the executable something deceptive that preys on the greed/desperation of a wide audience of non-technical people: something like "LitespeedTorrent" or "UniversalAimbot" or "TittyStableDiffusion". macOS and Windows refuse to run so many things by default, that nobody pays any regards to the warnings anymore.

Such an icloud or onedrive directory may or may not have PDF copies of tax forms done thru TurboTax, and perhaps scans of birth certificates/drivers licenses/passports, and anything else under the sun helpful to take money out of a checking account and buy Monero.

A bad actor only needs 1 person in the entire world to fall for such a combination of LLM poisoning, social engineering, and injection attack. Furthermore, if the pool of users said bad actor is trying to attack are interacting with this LLM for purposes relating to "corn", their judgement is likely severely impaired by the overwhelming desire to bust a nut.

... Anyway, I just wanted to let my imagination run wild for a few minutes.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-09 19:37:15+00:00
I might agree with that, and maybe the example posted by Karpathy is not the greatest, but what I'm constantly being faced with is try catches where it will fail silently or return a fallback/mock response, which essentially means that system will behave unexpectedly in a more subtle way down the line while leaving you clueless to as what the issue was.

I have to constantly remind Claude that we want to fail fast.
by user34283 | 2025-10-09 19:38:07+00:00
Alright, I guess I'll have to take your word for /r/conservative's poor moderation.

But is it a perfect example? I don't know. It's political in nature and one could expect that it's run by MAGA considering the current state of the Republican party and the fact that they banned the Trump subreddit.

I'm more concerned about /r/worldnews and my country subreddit. Reddit should enforce some standards for moderation and make sure those default places aren't run by political activists.

But maybe that's the least of Reddit's problems. Today I have seen multiple posts openly glorifying the Al-Qassam brigades. These posts may well be illegal under various European laws against publicly glorifying terrorism. Many upvotes too, and the posts have been up for hours.

And the funny thing is Redditors think that Twitter/X alone was a terrible platform that needs to be censored.
by neuronic | 2025-10-09 19:38:11+00:00
I even curated a list of 6-8 sources in NotebookLM recently, asked a very straight-forward question (which credential formats does OID4VP allow). The sources were IETF and OpenID specs + some additional articles on it.

I wanted to use NotebookLM as a tool to ask back and forth when I was trying to understand stuff. It got the answer 90% right but also added a random format, sounding highly confident as if I asked the spec authors themselves.

It was easy to check the specs when I became suspicious and now my trust, even in "grounded" LLMs, is completely eroded when it comes to knowledge and facts.
by kbyatnal | 2025-10-09 19:38:42+00:00
It's very dependent on the use case. That's why we offer a native evals experience in the product, so you can directly measure the % accuracy diffs between the two modes for your exact docs.

As a rule of thumb, light processing mode is great for (1) most classification tasks, (2) splitting on smaller docs, (3) extraction on simpler documents, or (4) latency sensitive use cases.
by cyanydeez | 2025-10-09 19:39:08+00:00
Well, you're right in that we have to assume the right wing ibllionaire who bought CNN will ensure their editorial view point is properly aligned.

But lets be honest, you want to believe that there's some happy push and pull between left and right instead of a heavy handed skew into far right.

It's not just good business as Fox has demonstrated, it's also good _self interest_ to go into the conservative business.

I'm sorry.
by c0balt | 2025-10-09 19:39:38+00:00
Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII.

The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names.

http://archive.today/5h4v2
by kulahan | 2025-10-09 19:40:32+00:00
Eh, until we have drone-bots that can perform at nearly a human level, we'll still need to have a physical presence, and there's roughly nothing as dangerous or safe (for the users) as a brand-new tank. They're heavy because of the shielding - if it weren't necessary, they'd just be lighter.

As it is, we do also have lighter military vehicles - basically retrofitted F250/350s with a shitload of steel bolted on. They're great in many instances, but sometimes a tank is just what you want.
by criemen | 2025-10-09 19:40:53+00:00
> Please provide a citation for wild claims like this. Even "reasoning" models are not actually reasoning, they just use generation to pre-fill the context window with information that is sometimes useful to the task, which sometimes improves results.

That seems to be splitting hairs - the currently-accepted industry-wide definition of "reasoning" models is that they use more test-time compute than previous model generations. Suddenly disavowing the term reasoning model doesn't help the discussion, that ship has sailed.

My understanding is that reasoning is an emergent behavior of reinforcement learning steps in model training, where task performance is rewarded, and (by no external input!) the model output starts to include phrases ala "Wait, let me think". Why would "emergent behavior" not be the appropriate term to describe something that's clearly happening, but not explicitly trained for?

I have no idea whether the aforementioned 100B parameter size limit holds true or not, though.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-10-09 19:40:59+00:00
The difference that a compiler is (generally) deterministic. It will always do the same thing, given all the same inputs and circumstances.

An LLM is not, it's probabilistic text. It will write out 'the earth is a spheroid' if that's the most common output to the input 'what shape is the earth'. But it does not understand what it is writing. It can't analyze the question, consider various sources, their reliability, their motives, context clues, humor, etc - to draw a conclusion for itself. It can't make a mistake and then learn from that mistake when corrected.
by gpm | 2025-10-09 19:41:29+00:00
Most facts about the world can't be deduced from logic. They're just facts, to memorize. The King's lefthanded. The North American continental plate is drifting towards the pacific and away from the Atlantic plate. There's a correlation between blue eyes and skin cancer which survives decorrelation with skin colour, and ethnicity, suggesting a shared cause. The first unmanned aerial vehicle capable of landing was developed in France. A general named Rogers led the British in the war of 1812.

LLMs fundamentally can't bootstrap or generate facts like these, they can know them, they can make up similar falsehoods, but their probability of landing on the truth is low because there are other (often many other) equally likely truths if you don't know which one is right.

(Please note: I made up all the "facts" in this post)
by cyanydeez | 2025-10-09 19:41:43+00:00
I'm pretty sure there's zero evidence that more documents = more intelligence, and this is the type of evidence to negate that.

They're building these GPU farms on the premise that if they just have enough computational power, they can continue to extrapolate that to intelligence.

Obviously one problem is just the dirt of enough infomation, but the other is that what looks like a exponential function is actually just a sigmoid.
by criemen | 2025-10-09 19:42:30+00:00
> It is well-known that even the biggest SOTA models require only 100-200 good samples for fine-tuning.

As someone who's not heard of this before, do you have a link for this? Is this LORA-finetuning only? Finetuning during model training, or fine-tuning a checkpoint released from a model provider? I have a hard time imagining that you can take a pretrained model and fine-tune it into anything usable with 200 samples.
by lxgr | 2025-10-09 19:43:01+00:00
I started doing this for almost all subscriptions a while ago.

Presumably in response to this, some services now show a very ambiguous warning when canceling, leaving it open whether the cancellation will become effective immediately or at the end of the first subscription period.

Subscription management really ought to be taken away from the companies providing the service to the payment method (not that that's ever going to realistically happen without legislation though, due to the incentives).
by InTheArena | 2025-10-09 19:43:04+00:00
With the global minimum tax rules in place, weighted by GDP and by revenue, corporate tax rates are actually fairly consistent across the world - roughly 25% worldwide. It's a myth that companies are not paying taxes, and also a myth that the largest sectors in the US are not paying taxes. It's a great talking point, though.

You also seem to be conflating investment for profit (GPUs for AI, for example) with income. Capital outlays of this type are almost always financed (see recently Nvidia, OpenAI + AMD, etc. deals). None of the large players are self-funding AI on that scale right now. This is why OpenAI's burn rate is so catastrophically high.
by DerArzt | 2025-10-09 19:43:07+00:00
How much of the refusal to eat anything healthy stems from lack of good options? The example given (an apple) in an American school setting brings to mind my cafeteria serving only Red Delicious (which is one of the worst apples for taste).

When the option is some fried food vs a wilted salad with no protein source, it's a wonder that any kid would choose the salad.

I would love to see better options that are both healthy and enticing. Until then I doubt that we will see much change when the choice of what to eat in the lunch room is left to the children.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-09 19:43:09+00:00
When I was in highschool (2010ish), our school gave you several options for lunch: You could have a real meal that was cooked even though it probably came from the cheaper end of the Sysco catalog but at least was real food, you could get a sub sandwhich made from real ingredients, you could get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or you could get a minuscule slice of the absolute lowest quality pizza ever made, literally worse than Dominos in quality and flavor and barely over an inch long in arc measurement.

95% of the student body ate that pizza every single day.

This includes the supposedly "smart" kids in honors classes.

The real food was good! It was fresh and perfectly palatable and varied enough to be healthy!

Instead of eating it, the students literally invented a lie to hype up this disgusting facsimile of "pizza" as good. It was regularly claimed that this pizza came from a local small business that sold pizza. This was flagrantly wrong and obvious to anyone who had eaten that pizza, as they used a sweet sauce that was not used in the school pizza.

But what the actual hell do Americans expect? We spent decades disallowing the government from telling your kids anything useful, we opted out of "Only 12 minutes of advertising to children per hour on TV" because "regulation is bad", we built a society that advocates rampant consumerism to your kid from before they even can read.

Of course they're going to eat the shitty pizza. It's what consumerism tells people to do. In the US, consumerism is a literal lifestyle brand!
by aeon_ai | 2025-10-09 19:44:51+00:00
If you’re simply trying to say “don’t make claims you don’t have hard data on”, say that - but you’re not making any better of an effective argument against the belief itself.

I’m not trying to sling wild hyperbole out there, in fact I thought it was relatively self-evident from pure observation which is why I made it so casually.

In fact, I’d contend you are arguing the counterpoint because you don’t like what it would imply, and have some resentment towards Omarchy or something else about what I’ve said.

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by linking basic psych to support why that’s likely.
by InTheArena | 2025-10-09 19:45:09+00:00
The 2010s and Obama called - they want their foreign policy back.

Most countries (including the US) have signed global minimum tax rates at this point. Effective tax rates (either directly or via clawbacks) are theoretically 25%.

Of course, I am not enough of an expert to know if that is happening in China. I somewhat doubt it.
by Y-bar | 2025-10-09 19:45:15+00:00
When I replied to the above comment it said _five_ (not nine as it does now) figure budgets. So I assumed something akin to a person helping a community group, minor league sports team, and definitely not a billion dollar public entity.

And in that case it would certainly require a full time job. And it ought to be well paid.

But, no, I still do not subscribe to your related conspiracy theory. Can you provide any tangible examples?
by benoau | 2025-10-09 19:45:31+00:00
There's version control for databases that expresses your database schema as code, and changes as code that is applied incrementally, such as Liquibase or Sequelize Migrations. When you create a new DB you are just running a command to build it from that code to the exact same state as your application needs. I'm partial to just bundling this within the backend project so it's available for CI, tests and local development too.

https://www.liquibase.com/

https://sequelize.org/docs/v6/other-topics/migrations/

Basically, you have a starting state where you create a users table and sessions table, and then you have a change file whenever you added some column or made some modification or added another table. Sequelize also manages populating data which they call seeding it so if you had like a geoip dataset you would have a file that inserts it.

I have used both of these for dev/staging/production and local dev on teams up to 8 devs.
by shagie | 2025-10-09 19:46:30+00:00
It's possible... but it's not as much of an impulse buy.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ is pretty niche (and is in my library) ... and its $25, which is a fair bit less than the $40 price point planned for Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ NIMBY Rails is at $19 (also in my library).

It could very well be a great game... though that price is one that's setting the expectations for it high.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-09 19:46:34+00:00
Expert beginners program like this. I call it what it driven development. Turns out a lot of code was written by expert beginners because by many metrics they are prolifically productive.

In go all SOTA agents are obsessed with being ludicrously defensive against concurrency bugs. Probably because in addition to what if driven development, there are a lot of blog posts warning about concurrency bugs.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-10-09 19:46:35+00:00
"Soft" factors matter when it comes to public transit attractiveness.

A mix of various forms of customer hostility and stupidity (from not providing data about some transit connection to Google Maps to an insanely convoluted ticketing scheme to inflexible fare rules if you don't want to pay insane amounts) resulted in me taking a car for a trip that could and otherwise would have been done by public transit.

I hate driving (why would I spend an hour doing work/paying attention when I could read a book), and would still consider doing it again for that connection just to avoid dealing with the bullshit.

Meanwhile, in Switzerland one ticket mostly gets you from A to B, even if that involves a boat, a tram, a train, and a bus. Oh, and they'll be on time too.
by btilly | 2025-10-09 19:47:17+00:00
What evidence would it take for you to reconsider how we are approaching Alzheimer's?

Our working theory is that amyloid beta plaques cause Alzheimer's, and so preventing them will prevent the disease. We have absolutely demonstrated our ability to prevent those plaques in both mouse models and humans. Doing this cures symptoms in mouse models. It does not cure symptoms in humans. I already gave a list of 9 different approaches that generated this exact result. How many more billions do we need to spend on new approaches to do the same thing, before the field reconsiders the theory?

And the failure here is not just with failed drug trials. In this century, it is easier to find fraudulent data advancing the hypothesis, than real data. With the result that several fraudsters have managed to create very good careers for themselves before being caught. This is a sign that there is something very deeply wrong with the field, if such fraud is rewarded rather than being caught more promptly.

Furthermore you are absolutely wrong about what I said about the alternative. My drunk under a streetlamp comment was about continuing to use these animal models to create more drugs. My suggested alternative was basic science. If amyloid beta plaques are a symptom, not a cause, of Alzheimer's, then what is the cause? We need to figure that out, before trying to create new drugs for it.

And it isn't like basic research has nothing to try. Alternate hypotheses with some suggestive data for them include Tau folding, inflammation (possibly caused by viruses), problems with the blood-brain barrier, problems with the mitochondria of neurons, dysregulation of metal ions, and so on. Maybe the real answer is not even on this list. But finding and demonstrating the real cause should be a high priority.

My father-in-law has Alzheimer's. If research continues for the next 30 years like it has in the last 30 years, there will still be no treatment when my wife gets old enough to worry about getting it. This is not a potential future that I'm particularly looking forward to. (But maybe I'll get lucky and get it before her...)
by feoren | 2025-10-09 19:47:20+00:00
> the real ones use Typst now

Are you intentionally leaning into the exact caricature I'm referring to? "Real programmers only use Typstly, because it's the newest!". The website title for Typst when I Googled it literally says "The new foundation for documents". Its entire appeal is that it's new? Thank you for giving me such a perfect example of the symptom I'm talking about.

> TeX and family are stagnant, difficult to use, difficult to integrate into modern workflows, and not written in Rust.

You've listed two real issues (difficult to use, difficult to integrate), and two rooted firmly in recency bias (stagnant, not written in Rust). If you can find a typesetting library that is demonstrably better in the ways you care about, great! That is not an argument that TeX itself should change. Healthy competition is great! Addiction to change and newness is not.

> nobody uses infinitesimals for derivatives anymore, they all use limits now

My point is not that math never changes -- it should, and does. However, math does not simply rot over time, like code seems to (or at least we simply assume it does). Math does not age out. If a math technique becomes obsolete, it's only ever because it was replaced with something better. More often, it forks into multiple different techniques that are useful for different purposes. This is all wonderful, and we can celebrate when this happens in software engineering too.

I also think your example is a bit more about math pedagogy than research -- infinitesimals are absolutely used all the time in math research (see Nonstandard Analysis), but it's true that Calculus 1 courses have moved toward placing limits as the central idea.
by j23n | 2025-10-09 19:47:44+00:00
I've stepped back from self-hosting after realizing that 90% of my use case was to keep calendar/contacts/files/photos/passwords in sync between my laptop and phone.

I'm now experimenting with a files-based approach, using syncthing for the p2p syncing, and it works really well.

No VPS or home server to setup and maintain, no security worries, no database migrations, no extra backups, no tinkering with Caddy configs.
by trilogic | 2025-10-09 19:47:45+00:00
Why is it so hard to understand... The domain and the website is not ours anymore, we let it go June 2025. Someone else bought it and is using it with malicious intentions to discredit and damage us. The website offers illegal services but in the description is talking about our company. Is hiding behind Cloud Flare with HQ in San Francisco. Is not anymore in our hands, now the authorities are investigating it.
by Hamuko | 2025-10-09 19:48:09+00:00
>Agreed, try to figure out how I benefit in any way from Codesmith's decline.

According to your Hacker News post history, you are the co-founder of Formation.dev. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43758527

According to Formation.dev, the company is in the same space as LeetCode, "interview prep programs", "mock interview platforms" and "bootcamps". When it comes to bootcamps, Formation.dev claims to be doing (at least partially) four of the seven mentioned functions. Source: https://formation.dev/

And Codesmith is a bootcamp. Source: https://www.codesmith.io/

It does not seem that far-fetched that you benefit as the founder of a company that is competing against bootcamp companies like Codemsith.
Show HN: Transcript-based video editor that runs 100% locally on Mac
by zhendlin | 2025-10-09 19:48:30+00:00
Hi HN! I made ScriptEdit, a free Mac app that lets you edit videos by editing their transcripts. Everything runs locally on your machine. Think of Descript but free, local, and no long lags for video uploads or file / time limits.

How it works: * You import videos, then ScriptEdit generates a transcript using Whisper (you can choose model). * Then you edit the text and the video cuts automatically match your edits. * Delete words to remove sections, rearrange sentences to reorder clips. * You can 'delete all filler words' or 'delete all gaps' to get much more professional videos without a lot of painstaking edits / cuts. * You can also drag / drop / cut visually.

Features:

* Native Mac app, optimized to use metal for faster transcription + rendering. * Multiple Whisper model options (tiny to large-v3) * Multi-track timeline support and layers / opacity * Title overlays and caption templates * Handles large files -no upload limits

I built this because I wanted Descript-style editing without uploading my videos anywhere or paying based on video length or transcripts generated.

I was also frustrated that tools like DaVinci Resolve, Captions, OpusClip, and Descript are all pretty expensive for what should just be a better way to edit videos locally.

Useful if you have bandwidth limits, large files, or just prefer local tools and not paying through the nose every month.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or anything else.

App store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptedit-video-editor/id6752...