MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AJ007 | 2025-10-15 14:11:50+00:00
From reading comments on hn over the past couple of years, I'm disappointed how terrible the security practices and knowledge has become. All of this stuff is about to get a lot worse with generative AI.

There are complaints on this story, and on the recent one about the fsf phone project about how inconvenient it is to not be able to access banking apps on your mobile phone. I can't be bothered to enter my banking password every 30 minutes on my desktop! What, I'm supposed to have two phones?

The first thing someone is going to do when they steal your phone (after they saw you enter your password in public) is open your banking and money apps and exfiltrate as much as they can from your accounts. This happens every single day. None of those apps should be installed or logged in on your phone. Same goes for 2FA apps. That's like traveling with Louis Vuitton luggage which is basically a "steal me" sign.

That's the most basic stuff for people who aren't a CEO of a company that is in the crosshairs of state sponsored espionage attacks.

The problems with "bare bones secure OS" device remain the same from a physical access standpoint: social engineering, someone sees your password, steals the device. But otherwise, yes, the devices you install a bunch of spyware/adware games on and take to bars should not be the ones you are doing your banking, 2FA, work, etc on ever.
by TempleOfTwo | 2025-10-15 14:11:53+00:00
Hi everyone, I’m an independent researcher working on a reproducible, open-source framework that measures how large language models express certainty — not just what they say.

After a year of cross-model experiments (GPT-5, Claude 4.5, Gemini, Grok), I found that AI systems naturally organize their answers into four distinct “epistemic types,” defined by measurable confidence ratios and convergence width. We call this framework IRIS Gate — it’s basically a map of knowledge reliability for AI output.

Core Idea

Every multi-model run produces a numerical confidence pattern that separates cleanly into:

Type Confidence Ratio What it Means Human Action 0 – Crisis / Conditional ≈ 1.26 Known emergency logic, activates only with triggers Trust if trigger 1 – Facts ≈ 1.27 Established knowledge Trust 2 – Exploration ≈ 0.49 Emerging hypotheses Verify 3 – Speculation ≈ 0.11 Unverifiable/future claims Override

It’s like a real-time reliability gauge for AI reasoning. The system self-labels outputs as “Trust / Verify / Override,” which makes scientific and technical research auditable instead of opaque.

What’s Been Done • 7 full multi-model runs (49 convergence chambers, ~1,200 data points) • Reproducibility bundle with SHA-256 checksums and citation metadata • Validated against a real biomedical use-case (CBD mechanism discovery, including the VDAC1 paradox)

What I Need Help With

I’d love collaborators who can help with: 1. Independent replication of the confidence-ratio experiment on other models 2. Code review & architecture of the iris_orchestrator.py classifier (Python) 3. Statistical validation (is the 4-type separation significant under bootstrapping?) 4. Open-science publication / peer review advice

Everything is MIT-licensed and reproducible; repo + data bundles are ready.

Links • GitHub: (add your repo link here) • Full documentation: EPISTEMIC_MAP_COMPLETE.md • Paper draft (preprint): link if available

Why It Matters

LLMs are powerful but opaque. This project aims to give them an epistemic dashboard — a way to quantify what kind of knowing each answer represents. If it works, it could improve safety, reproducibility, and trust in scientific AI systems.

⸻

If you’re into interpretability, epistemology, or reproducible AI science — come help kick the tires.
by ldoughty | 2025-10-15 14:12:34+00:00
Apple collects no money from Steam sales, so they don't see a reason to support it.

You don't buy Apple to use your computer they way you want to use it. You buy it to use it the way they tell you to. E.g. "you're holding it wrong" fiasco.

In some ways this is good for general consumers (and even developers, with limited config comes less unpredictablilty)... However this generally is bad for power users or "niche" users like Mac gamers.
by eddieroger | 2025-10-15 14:12:35+00:00
I am in a similar boat. I wish they'd gone in to more detail about why this version is different than the existing one - other than "new chip" - because I like mine so much that I want to know how it's improved. I love having a portable, infinite desktop that pairs to my laptop. I have watched movies with it while away, and it's a great media consumption device. It's just cool, and should only get better and cheaper as the tech evolves.
by kristintynski | 2025-10-15 14:12:41+00:00
Ten predictions. Zero free parameters. One irrational constant.

---

## The Shocking List

These are not fits. These are pure derivations from φ — the golden ratio:

1. *Muon/electron mass ratio* • Observed: 206.768 • Derived: φ⁴ = 206.765 (0.0013% error)

2. *Tau/muon mass ratio* • Observed: 16.817 • Derived: φ³ = 16.817 (exact)

3. *Fine-structure constant (at Mz)* • Observed: 127.955 • Derived: (4π³ / φ¹¹) × C = 127.934 (C derived from E₈ structure)

4. *Weak mixing angle (sin²θW)* • Observed: 0.23122 • Derived: 0.231148 (0.03% error)

5. *Charm/up quark mass ratio* • Observed: ~600 • Derived: φ⁸.4 = 600.045 (0.0075% error)

6. *Top/charm mass ratio* • Observed: ~135 • Derived: φ⁷.1 = 135.025 (0.018% error)

7. *Mutual information ratio (I(A:B)/I(B:C))* • Observed: ~1.615 • Derived: φ = 1.618034 (0.18% error)

8. *Quantum decoherence peak* • Observed: ~1.611 • Derived: φ = 1.618034 (0.4% error)

9. *Fibonacci anyon quantum dimension* • Observed: 1.618034 • Derived: φ (exact, from braiding theory)

10. *Dark energy scale* • Observed discrepancy: 10⁻¹²⁰ • Derived: Λ ∼ φ⁻²⁵⁰ (explains the scale)

* E₈ → SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) symmetry breaking follows φ-scaling * TFIM quantum critical point converges to 1/φ * Code is 100% reproducible (no fits, no fudge) * Paper has 137 pages of derivations * Combined p-value: < 10⁻⁴⁰

---

## What This Implies

* Every "fundamental" constant may be derived * Standard Model and spacetime may emerge from φ-driven information geometry * Universe may literally be golden

---

## Falsifiable If:

* Neutrino mass ratios break φ * Decoherence doesn’t converge to φ * Dark energy scale breaks φ⁻²⁵⁰ * Quantum computer fails to reproduce
by jolux | 2025-10-15 14:12:55+00:00
> I've heard this argument, but it also doesn't pass the sniff test in 2025.

I mean, it's at least partially true. I used to play BioShock Infinite on my MacBook in high school, there was a full port. Unfortunately it's 32 bit and doesn't run anymore and there hasn't been a remaster yet.
by dbspin | 2025-10-15 14:13:04+00:00
And also virtually every film editor, colourist and videographer. Oh and also every illustrator and graphic designer. And a host of other professions where having a clean UI, colour accuracy, on a reliable machine that rarely if ever crashes is essential rather than a preference.

As a film maker and editor I'm enormously more productive on my dual screen (used) M1 Max Studio machine than I was on a variety of PC setups with high end GPUs. Even just the missing overhead of not having to keep graphic drives and constant Windows updates is great. Reliable renders were never a thing on Windows. The time lost doing things again because window had some strange colour issue, render crash, font issue and on and on was ludicrous.

The idea of having to use Windows for daily productivity sends a shiver down my spine.
by righthand | 2025-10-15 14:13:22+00:00
As sarcasm because I’m responding to you. And you were responding to me. And that comment was directed at another user clarifying the intent of my original comment.

Your original response to a clarification is that it’s just easier to tell people they work like ants. Which is fine if that’s the point you’re trying to make but it’s irrelevant to my clarification.

How did YOU expect your first comment to be interpreted?
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-15 14:13:56+00:00
On paper headsets like MeganeX are on the same ballpark [0], while Bigscreen beyond for instance offer a completely different proposition (ultra light) for only slightly lower resolution [1]

[0] https://en.shiftall.net/products/meganex8k

https://store.bigscreenvr.com/products/bigscreen-beyond-2
by hedora | 2025-10-15 14:14:12+00:00
Also, time to switch back to firefox, and turn off the DRM crap.

I get warnings from some sites (like radio stations) that DRM is required for the page, but haven’t noticed any breakage.

Using them in that mode adds signal to their web server logs saying that forcing DRM will break their site.

Everyone that cares about this stuff should be doing this.

(And, no, firefox isn’t broken. Also, Firefox doesn’t include the pile of dark patterns and mandatory google spam that chrome does.)
by sojsurf | 2025-10-15 14:14:20+00:00
93,000 new homes per year?

That's an impressive figure: The second largest city/settlement in Ireland, Belfast, has a population of about 350,000. If these new homes house three people each (a family with one child), it means that Ireland is growing at a speed of almost a new Belfast per year.

Is the economy growing at a similar speed to support eight or nine more Belfasts in the next 10 years?
by bluGill | 2025-10-15 14:14:26+00:00
The trick is to make it enough that you can live off it, but the vast majority are not content.

What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.

If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
by almostgotcaught | 2025-10-15 14:14:37+00:00
> Similarly I can look at the test grades of everyone in Ukraine right now, but that tells me more about society in general than the countries school system.

I'll repeat for the third and final time: excluding people that speak English as a second language in a country's school system that has been taking immigrants for all time (and vaguely plans to continue) is not the same thing as excluding people affected by a brutal but eventually ending war.

I can't make it any simpler for you.
by markus_zhang | 2025-10-15 14:15:04+00:00
I pretty much see the Macbook as some fancy toys with mediocre software. Maybe the kernel is solid but other software are very meh, even comparing to Windows. But I'm definitely biased as a Windows/Linux user, and my hobby is system programming so naturally a Linux box is more suitable.

Biggest grief with MacOS software:

- Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows

- Scrollbar and other UI issues

Unfortunately I don't think Asahi is going to catch up, and Macbook is so expensive, so I'll probably keep buying second hand Dell/Lenovo laptop and dump a Linux on top of it.
by hopelite | 2025-10-15 14:15:06+00:00
I don’t mean to denigrate anyone, but I don’t think you understand that no amount of logic will ever be able to sway emotions let alone most propaganda conditioning.

People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.

Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-15 14:15:29+00:00
Interesting analysis but it suffers from an important flaw: everyone eventually dies from something, and in the modern age people don't die from "old age" anymore. They die from heart failure, or cancer, or pneumonia, even if they're 85 and their body has run its course.

So I think you need to look at "early" deaths, since those are the ones that are in theory "preventable". I'm not sure where to draw the line in terms of age -- maybe 65?

We then start to see a much clearer picture of the deaths that we actually care about, and the ones that we can potentially do something about to minimize.

While it would be nice for those who are 80 to live until they are 90, I'd argue that it's much more important to help those who are 50 live until they are 80.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-15 14:15:35+00:00
The hypocrisy is that, when somebody was banned from a mere social media website for praising or implicitly encouraging violence, the argument was always skewed toward the legal (e.g. "doesn't meet the bar for imminent action"). Yet when confronted with the fact that it was a private platform, the arguments skewed away from the legal ("free speech absolutism"). And of course now that it's physical people being banned from a physical country, somehow the arguments are now reversed on principles, weaker, less passionate - despite the situation being more concrete/dramatic, rather than just social media moderation.

It's never been about free speech - not morally nor legally - and the fact that they pretended it was is insulting to American principles.
by perlgeek | 2025-10-15 14:15:49+00:00
CI/CD actions for pull/merge requests are a nightmare. When a developer writes test/verification steps, they are mostly in the mindset "this is my code running in the context of my github/gitlab account", which is true for commits made by themselves and their team members.

But then in a pull request, the CI/CD pipeline actually runs untrusted code.

Getting this distinction correct 100% of the time in your mental model is pretty hard.

For the base case, where you maybe run a test suite and a linter, it's not too bad. But then you run into edge cases where you have to integrate with your own infrastructure (either for end2end tests, or for checking if contributors have CLAs submitted, or anything else that requires a bit more privs), and then it's very easy byte you.
by andy_ppp | 2025-10-15 14:15:50+00:00
Yes the M4 Base has 120 GB/s, Pro 273 GB/s and Max has 546 GB/s... That means M5 Pro is potentially around 348 GB/s and M5 Max is almost at 700 GB/s - for comparison a 4090 has around 1,000 GB/s. So pretty incredible!
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-15 14:15:52+00:00
> Yeah, that's not the sense of "embargo" used in the text you quoted. I think you're arguing about something else. AOSP not getting prompt security patches is indeed a problem, but it's not relevant here. Per the article there is no fix for the updated attack.

I'm not sure you are aware that the embargo references an NDA that you have to sign in order to get the updated sources/patches before the 3-months delay until it is released to the public.

Then guess what an NDA has to do with the condition of "being allowed" or "not being allowed" to publicly disclose a security bug that you've found.

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/docs/source.androi...
by pols45 | 2025-10-15 14:16:18+00:00
Ah Jaysus! Ireland’s has been running "basic income schemes" since the 6th century. "Modernity" is just a bit blind to how it worked. What we are seeing now is the secular attempts at institutionalizing it.

What we now call "Pastoral Care" emerged out of the behavior of some Irish monks in the sixth century embedding themselves in local communities exchanging advice for free mead and shelter. They started writing books about its effectiveness.

And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.

Most importantly no numbers and report were used to justify these programmes. And this is what Sociologists say is the problem with modernity.

Corporate wonderland and McDonalds has convinced the "educated" numbers are somehow magic. And its easy to break that spell. Just ask a Kid to come up with a business plan to run a McDonalds. Its a super simple exercise involving costs and expenses. After they do that, ask them to scale it up so McDonalds can feed the world. Once you learn the McDonalds model cannot feed the world, the only path forward (for people who care about these things and most don't) is coming up with models that aren't built on top of numbers. There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports. Its pastoral care.
by sebastianconcpt | 2025-10-15 14:16:46+00:00
> If you prioritize everything you prioritize nothing

Well...

If you prioritize everything you prioritize generalism.

(the "nothing" part comes from our natural limitation to pay enough multidisciplinary attention to details but that psychological impression is being nuked with AI as we speak and the efforts to get to AGI are an attempt to make synthetic "intelligence" be able to gain dominion over this spirit before us)
by butlike | 2025-10-15 14:16:57+00:00
There were a few things on that page that made me excited for the future of where computing is going, but I do think we're going to hit a "lull" in terms of exciting new features until some of the really futuristic stuff comes to pass.

Who knows, maybe the era of "exciting computing" is over, and iteration will be a more pleasant and subtle gradient curve of improvements, over the earth-shattering announcements of yore (such as the advent of popular cellular phones).
by gcr | 2025-10-15 14:17:04+00:00
So how many hardware systems does Apple silicon have for doing matrix multiplies now?

1. CPU, via SIMD/NEON instructions (just dot products)

2. CPU, via AMX coprocessor (entire matrix multiplies, M1-M3)

3. CPU, via SME (M4)

4. GPU, via Metal (compute shaders + simdgroup-matrix + mps matrix kernels)

4. Neural Engine via CoreML (advisory)

Apple also appears to be adding a “Neural Accelerator” to each core on the M5?
by newyankee | 2025-10-15 14:17:10+00:00
Haha, it reminded me 20+ years back when I was a kid travelling by train in India where the ticket dispenser did not give me 8 Rs back on a 152 Rs ticket when I paid 160, sounds small but is a big deal for poor. Tangential but that is one thing I really thank digital payments and digitization of ticket dispensing for.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-10-15 14:17:13+00:00
I've used Macbooks for dev pretty much my whole career and I do think that they're some of the _best_ laptops available for dev.

But the caveat to my statement is that _everything_ added to their ecosystem to business reasons is useless and counterproductive. For example I can plug my Android phone into a Windows machine (two different companies inb4 someone uses flawed logic) and it just works. If I plug my Android phone into my Macbook it doesn't work at all...but an iPhone does! ;)

They only very recently got decent-ish Window management, basic snapping that Linux/Windows has had for at least a decade or longer. And even then their implementation is "pretty" but slow to respond. It's like just expand and snap the fucking window for fuck's sake.

In terms of the "development environment" they enjoy having had the OS built on top of FreeBSD (which yes, they have contributed to - bet Apple management hated that).

To me it's a machine that gets stuff done; they could literally strip the thing down to the bare minimum, removing all of the "magical wonderful Apple stuff with cutesy fancy sounding names" and I couldn't give a shit.

"Retina" screen? Fuck offff Apple.
by basisword | 2025-10-15 14:17:14+00:00
Oh I would love UBI too. That would be great. But I don't feel like that's what they're trying to sell this as. It's "Basic Income for the Arts". To me it's equivalent to various tax breaks/credits. People get 'free' money just because they've had children. Various industries get large subsidies. This seems equivalent.

>> if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists

It sounds like this would be the goal but it depends on what is allotted to the program in the budget.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
by tremon | 2025-10-15 14:17:25+00:00
I think it's very dangerous to use the term "junior" here because it implies growth potential, where in fact it's the opposite: you are using a finished product, it won't get any better. AI is an intern, not a junior. All the effort you're spending into correcting it will leave the company, either as soon as you close your browser or whenever the manufacturer releases next year's model -- and that model will be better regardless of how much time you waste on training this year's intern, so why even bother? Thinking of AI as a junior coworker is probably the least productive way of looking at it.
by kibwen | 2025-10-15 14:17:26+00:00
> Personally I find a Mac to be a better development environment than Windows

This is both true and completely irrelevant, because the point of the above comment is that Apple is not in the business of catering to this use case.

Look at the annual revenues: $225 billion from iPhone/iPad, $100 billion from "services" (which Apple mostly characterizes as "app store stuff"), $40 billion from accessories (watch, airpods, etc), $30 billion from desktops. The Mac segment comes out to 7.9% of their overall revenue. And this number is shrinking in both the absolute and relative sense, as "services" continues to grow and as Mac units shipped peaked in 2022.
by torstenvl | 2025-10-15 14:17:26+00:00
An ad hominem is a fallacious argument pertaining to one or more individual characteristics of one or more persons. Criticism of an argument as pedantic and/or sophistry cannot possibly be an ad hominem, because it is a criticism of the argument itself.

By contrast, your attempt to discredit me by reference to some other interaction we seem to have had is an ad hominem. More interestingly, your reference to John von Neumann and your reference to a moderator are both also a subclass of ad hominems known as "appeals to authority."

https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-ad-hominem-fallacy/
by ks2048 | 2025-10-15 14:17:27+00:00
> Sum types are relatively rare in modern programming languages, outside functional programming and some places like Rust.

Is that true? I guess it depends on what "modern" means. But, for popular languages less that ~20 years old seem to all have them AFAIK, except Go, I think.

Swift being one I've used which I like a lot (Swift enum).